Ethel Kennedy’s death in October at 96 was the end of a trying few years. Her health had been in decline, and she had confined herself to living full time in Hyannis, the longtime family compound on Cape Cod. In the summer of 2024, her immune system was so compromised that she couldn’t attend the wedding of her granddaughter Mariah Kennedy Cuomo, even though it was being held at her home. “Normally, Ethel would be a part of everything,” one attendee said. “But all she could do was sit on this enclosed balcony and wave at people.”
Ethel’s son Bobby was there, too, although many of the other wedding guests weren’t in a mood to talk to him. Ethel’s relationship with her third child, named for her beloved husband, had always been tempestuous. When Bobby was a young man, she regularly threw him out of the house for drug use and other chaotic behavior; when he was 13, a coatimundi he kept as a pet attacked Ethel and sent her into premature labor with his brother Douglas. In high school, after Ethel excoriated him for getting arrested for marijuana possession in Hyannis, he packed up and drove west without telling anyone in his family where he was going, eventually selling his car and hopping freight trains. Bobby seemed to relish the chance to break away from his family and ride the rails with the other vagabonds. “I could be one of them,” he said later. “And not be a Kennedy.”
Bobby and Ethel eventually made amends. He got sober, and Ethel became a booster of his environmental work. Bobby similarly came to appreciate his mother, writing in his 2018 memoir, American Values: Lessons I Learned From My Family, that her “sharp rebukes no longer trouble me.” That comment goes some way to explaining why Bobby was undaunted by any reservations Ethel had to his plans, announced in the spring of 2023, to challenge Joe Biden for the Democratic presidential nomination...
The family’s place in American politics had been in a natural state of decline for years, and the Kennedys seemed destined to fade into history like the Roosevelts and the Adamses before them — until Bobby hijacked his family name and made the Kennedys newly relevant in ways that mortified pretty much all of them. After becoming America’s leading vaccine skeptic and working to elect Trump, Bobby was appointed to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, where he has halted hundreds of millions of dollars in funding for vaccine and cancer research, overseen the worst measles outbreak in decades, eliminated jobs for tens of thousands of public-health officials, and supported the GOP’s legislative efforts to gut Medicaid. And he may just be getting started: While he has publicly denied it, Bobby now appears to be feeling out the possibility of a run for president in 2028.
