In recent years, it had been starting to feel as if the Kennedys’ sun was finally beginning to set. However, 2024 marked 15 years since a Kennedy was in the Senate and almost five years since a Kennedy was in the House. The most recent Kennedy to run for Congress, Joseph Kennedy III, lost — in Massachusetts, of all places! It was as if the Harlem Globetrotters had finally dropped a game to the Washington Generals, and on their home court, no less. It seemed as if the Lord Himself (to paraphrase President Joe Biden) was telling the Kennedys to step down.
This year, however, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. looked up to the heavens and said, “Not so fast.” During his now-suspended presidential run, U.S. News & World Report estimated that, in a three-way matchup with Biden and former President Donald Trump, RFK Jr. drew 27% of the youth vote in the seven most critical swing states. His strong numbers, especially in the face of consistently negative legacy media coverage and a Democratic Party that did everything in its power to prevent him from challenging Biden in a free and fair manner in what passed for the party’s primary, signaled that the Kennedys’ time in the arena had still not quite run out.
This past week, the Kennedys reunited at their family compound in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, to commemorate the life of one of their leading lights, who did as much as any Kennedy to ensure the family would have a preeminent place in American public life. Ethel Kennedy, who died on Oct. 10, 2024, in Boston at the age of 96, not only married Robert “Bobby” F. Kennedy and gave birth to RFK Jr., but she also had a significant hand in her husband’s rise to political prominence and, along with it, the elevation of Robert’s side of the family to the rarified plane that Jackie Kennedy and John F. Kennedy occupied.
Ethel Kennedy (né Skakel) was born in Chicago on April 11, 1928. Her family was large, wealthy, and Irish Catholic — in short, a Midwestern version of the Kennedys. When the Skakels moved east during her youth, the groundwork was laid for Ethel to come into the orbit of the Kennedys. Ethel attended the kinds of exclusive East Coast private schools that families such as the Kennedys sent their children to, and she ran in similar social circles. Although there was no parent behind the scenes engineering his or her daughter’s match with a member of the American royal family, à la Kate Middleton’s mother’s maneuvering of her daughter toward Prince William, one could be forgiven of suspecting that there was, especially when Ethel happened to wind up as Jean Kennedy’s college roommate.
Jean first introduced Ethel to the rest of her family during a ski trip, with designs of setting up her roommate with her brother Bobby. What happened next was something out of a soap opera. Ethel developed a crush on John, not Bobby. When Ethel realized that her affection for John wasn’t being reciprocated, she set her eyes on Bobby. However, Bobby had already fallen in love with Ethel’s sister Patricia and ended up dating her for two years. It was only after their relationship ended (it was Patricia who broke it off) that Bobby turned toward Ethel. It was a twist of fate that proved to be very fortunate for Bobby, as Ethel’s outgoing nature and her enthusiasm for politics would help propel him to the Senate. After Ethel campaigned vigorously for John’s congressional (and later presidential) candidacies, Ethel urged the reluctant Bobby to run for the Senate in 1964.
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After her husband was assassinated while running for president in 1968, Ethel turned her attention to raising her children, all 11 of them. (Seinfeld’s J. Peterman, Ethel Kennedy’s fictional golf partner, described her as “a woman whose triumph in the face of tragedy is exceeded only by her proclivity to procreate.”) She also continued to fight for the same causes that Robert had been championing: civil rights, human rights, and the safeguarding of democracy at home and abroad. In 2014, she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in recognition of her lifelong advocacy of these vital objectives.
RFK Jr.’s endorsement of Trump has a chance to be the most consequential political move a Kennedy has made since Ted Kennedy’s surprise endorsement of former President Barack Obama over Hillary Clinton in the 2008 Democratic primary. If Trump returns to the presidency and gives RFK Jr. a position in his administration, especially in a role that would allow him to tackle our obesity epidemic and make America healthy again, the Kennedys could once again become as significant in our collective lives as they were 60 years ago. That, more than anything, would be a fitting tribute to the woman who had always wanted it to be that way.
Daniel Ross Goodman is a Washington Examiner contributing writer and the author, most recently, of Soloveitchik’s Children: Irving Greenberg, David Hartman, Jonathan Sacks, and the Future of Jewish Theology in America.