Ethel Kennedy

Ethel Kennedy was born Ethel Skakel in Chicago, Illinois, on April 11, 1928. She met Robert F. Kennedy, known as Bobby, in 1946 and the two married in 1950. The Kennedys ultimately had eleven children. John F. Kennedy was elected president in 1960, appointing his brother Bobby Attorney General. Bobby was assassinated eight years later. Her father, along with some co-workers, built a small coal and coke business into a diversified privately owned enterprise called The Great Lakes Coal & Coke Co. The business eventually became Great Lakes Carbon Corporation. She went to the elite Manhattanville College of the Sacred Heart, where she befriended fellow classmate Jean Kennedy of Massachusetts. Skakel and Jean Kennedy became fast friends, and eventually roommates at Manhattanville. As an English major with a minor in history, Ethel based her college thesis on his John's college-thesis-turned-book, Why England Slept. The couple became engaged in February 1950, and were married on June 17, 1950. As newlyweds they moved to Charlottesville, Virginia, where they lived until Bobby finished his last year at the University of Virginia Law School. After her husband passed the bar, the family settled in Washington D.C., where Robert began work for the Department of Justice. Their first child, Kathleen, arrived shortly thereafter on July 4, 1951. Joseph II would come the next year, followed by their third child, Robert, in 1954. Both her parents were killed in the 1955 mid-air explosion of their private plane. In 1984, her son David was found in a local hotel room, where he fatally overdosed on drugs. Her grief was compounded in 1997 when another son, Michael, died in a skiing accident. And in 2002, her nephew Michael Skakel was tried and convicted for the 1975 murder of his then-neighbor, Martha Moxley. Her survivors include nine children, 34 grandchildren and 24 great-grandchildren.