By Susan Heavey
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. President Joe Biden will honor longtime human rights advocate and Kennedy family matriarch Ethel Kennedy at a memorial service in Washington on Wednesday following her death last week at age 96.
The widow of Robert F. Kennedy, a former U.S. attorney general and U.S. senator who was assassinated while seeking the Democratic presidential nomination in 1968, founded a human rights center to carry on her husband’s work.
She never remarried and went on to raise her 11 children, enduring a host of other family tragedies along the way, including separate plane crashes that killed her parents, brother and nephew as well as the untimely deaths of several of her children, grandchildren and a great-grandchild.
She and her husband had also been crushed by the assassination of his brother, President John F. Kennedy, in Dallas in 1963.
“Ethel Kennedy was an American icon — a matriarch of optimism and moral courage, an emblem of resilience and service. Devoted to family and country, she had a spine of steel and a heart of gold that inspired millions of Americans,” Biden said in an Oct. 10 statement following her death from complications of a stroke.
The Democratic president, a fellow Irish Catholic who has leaned on his faith amid his own losses, including the death of his son Beau, will deliver remarks at the Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle in Washington, just blocks from the White House.
A devout Roman Catholic, Kennedy took up many causes championed by her late husband, including fighting poverty, working for social justice, and protecting the environment. She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2014.
Her daughter Kathleen Kennedy Townsend served as Maryland’s lieutenant governor, while her son Joseph P. Kennedy II served six terms representing Massachusetts in the U.S. House of Representatives. Her grandson, Joseph P. Kennedy III, is serving as special envoy to Northern Ireland after four two-year terms in the U.S. House.
Her son Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a former independent presidential candidate and anti-vaccine advocate, recently broke from his family’s long Democratic ties to endorse Donald Trump.
Many members of the Kennedy clan have denounced his election politics and thrown their support behind the Democratic ticket, now led by U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris after Biden stepped aside in July.
(Reporting by Susan Heavey; editing by Jonathan Oatis)
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