Ethel Kennedy, the widow of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy and a popular and vital force in the Kennedy political dynasty, died Thursday. She was 96.

Her grandson Joe Kennedy III announced the death on the social platform X, giving the cause as complications of a stroke she had last week. He did not say where she died.

Her death came a little more than six weeks after her third eldest child, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., ended his long-shot independent presidential campaign and endorsed Republican former President Donald Trump in his bid for reelection.

Ethel Kennedy’s passion for politics was so consuming that she was often said to be “more Kennedy than the Kennedys.” Displaying energy and humor, she campaigned tirelessly for her husband and other Kennedys, much of the time while pregnant.

Yet Robert Kennedy Jr.’s decision to support the Republican nominee and his earlier choice to challenge Trump’s Democratic rivals, initially President Joe Biden and then Vice President Kamala Harris, caused a painful breach in the Kennedy family, compelling some of his many siblings, cousins, nieces and nephews — heirs to a staunchly Democratic lineage — to speak out in dismay and anger and originally endorse Biden, a friend of the family, over Robert Kennedy Jr.

Biden on Thursday called her “an American icon — a matriarch of optimism and moral courage, an emblem of resilience and service.”

“For over 50 years, Ethel traveled, marched, boycotted, and stood up for human rights around the world with her signature iron will and grace,” Biden said.

Family tragedies

Ethel Kennedy’s 11th and last child was born after her husband’s assassination in 1968 in Los Angeles, as he campaigned for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Kennedy never remarried, and her subsequent life was devoted to rearing her children, keeping alive the memory of her husband and working on behalf of the causes he had championed.

But if Kennedy’s life was robust, it was also, like the larger story of the Kennedy clan, punctuated by tragedy. In her late 20s, she lost her parents in a plane crash. Eleven years later, another plane crash took the life of a brother; soon after that, the brother’s wife choked to death. There was her husband’s assassination and that of her brother-in-law, President John F. Kennedy, five years earlier; two of her sons, David and Michael, later died young.

Leaning hard on her Roman Catholic faith, Kennedy was often the one who strove to make sense of terrible things.

After her brother-in-law Sen. Ted Kennedy had a car accident in 1969 in Chappaquiddick, Mass., in which Mary Jo Kopechne, a former campaign worker for Robert Kennedy, drowned, Ethel Kennedy wrote a letter of condolence to the Kopechne family.

On the plane that carried her husband’s body to New York from Los Angeles, Kennedy walked the aisle making sure everyone had a blanket or pillow. On the long train ride to Washington for the burial, she spoke to many of the 1,100 passengers and waved to thousands of onlookers along the route from a window next to the coffin. One passenger was Coretta Scott King, whose own husband, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., had been assassinated only two months earlier.

“I don’t see how she has been able to go through this awful experience with so much dignity,” King said on the train.

Political activism

Kennedy never had a formal career; her devotion to her husband, their children and his political ambitions was full time. When he was chief counsel for the Senate rackets committee in the 1950s, she attended almost every hearing.

When her husband wrestled with the idea of running for the Senate from New York in 1964, Kennedy pressed him to do so. She told The Daily News that he was being held back only by the worry that his candidacy would divide the Democratic Party. He did run, and he won.

Ethel Kennedy founded the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights soon after her husband’s death and advocated for causes including gun control and human rights.

Two weeks after his death, she sent a telegram to Coretta Scott King supporting the Poor People’s March on Washington. King read it to the crowd from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

In 2008, she joined Ted Kennedy and niece Caroline Kennedy in endorsing Illinois Sen. Barack Obama for president, likening him to her late husband. She later went to the Obama White House to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom and meet Pope Francis. Obama called her “a dear friend with a passion for justice, an irrepressible spirit, and a great sense of humor.”

“She touched the lives of countless people around the world with her generosity and grace, and was an emblem of enduring faith and hope, even in the face of unimaginable grief,” Obama said on social media, one of many high-profile eulogies.

The center she founded still advances human rights through litigation, advocacy, education and inspiration, giving annual awards to journalists, authors and others who have made significant contributions to human rights.

She also was active in the Coalition of Gun Control, Special Olympics, and the Earth Conservation Corps. And she showed up in person, participating in a 2016 demonstration in support of higher pay for farmworkers in Florida and a 2018 hunger strike against the Trump administration’s immigration policies.

“She could be found anywhere human dignity was at stake, from picket lines to prisons, on every corner of the map,” former President Bill Clinton said. “She was fearless and indefatigable, a true force of nature, guided by the teachings of her faith that call upon all of us to serve others.”

Her humanitarianism had long been imbued in her. The day after her husband was killed, she said, “We’re placed on the earth and somehow given a sense of responsibility to give life and love and help to others.”

Chicago wealth

Ethel Skakel was born on April 11, 1928, in Chicago, the sixth of seven children of George and Ann (Brannack) Skakel.

George Skakel came out on top in a roller-coaster business career, losing three fortunes along the way but ultimately becoming very rich. Robert Kennedy called him a “tough, moral, self-made man.”

The Skakels rivaled the Kennedys of Massachusetts in wealth. They moved to the East Coast in 1934, when Ethel was 5, because more and more of Skakel’s business was there.

Though Skakel remained a Protestant, the children were brought up in his wife’s Catholic religion. Their family resembled the Kennedys — not only in size, but also in exuberance.

Ethel entered Manhattanville College of the Sacred Heart, which was then in Manhattan. Her roommate was Jean Kennedy, Robert’s younger sister. Ethel was formally introduced to Robert Kennedy during a ski weekend at Mont Tremblant in Quebec. Her sister Patricia Skakel was dating him at the time.

Ethel also met Robert’s brother John on that ski trip, and she quickly developed a crush on him. But John was not romantically interested in Ethel, and she began dating Robert after he and her sister had ended their relationship.

Ethel seriously considered becoming a nun, but after her graduation in 1949 she accepted Kennedy’s proposal. They were married at St. Mary Roman Catholic Church in Greenwich on June 17, 1950. She was 22. At the reception, all the bridesmaids were thrown into a pool.

The Boston Globe called the wedding “the prettiest of the year” and noted that the marriage “unites two large fortunes.” The couple honeymooned in Hawaii before settling in Charlottesville, Va., where Robert Kennedy attended the University of Virginia School of Law.

The family moved into its Hickory Hill estate in McLean, Va., in 1956, when Robert Kennedy worked as a counsel for Senate Democrats. He had bought it from his brother John, who was then a U.S. senator from Massachusetts.

The assassination

Robert Kennedy was shot on June 5, 1968, by Sirhan B. Sirhan just after midnight at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles following Kennedy’s victory in the 1968 California primary. He died in a hospital at 1:44 a.m. on June 6, his wife at his side.

She rarely spoke about her husband’s assassination. When her filmmaker daughter Rory brought it up in the 2012 HBO documentary, “Ethel,” she couldn’t share her grief.

“When we lost Daddy ...” she began, then teared up and asked that her youngest daughter “talk about something else.”

In 2021, in a rare public statement, Kennedy voiced her opposition to releasing Sirhan from prison after he had been recommended for parole by a California parole committee.

“Our family and our country suffered an unspeakable loss due to the inhumanity of one man,” she wrote.

Parole was denied then and again this August.

Raising the family

During his campaign, Robert Kennedy told reporters that if he lost the race he would spend more time with his family. “I’ll go home and raise the next generation of Kennedys,” he said.

But Ethel Kennedy had to do it herself. At first, it was hard to control her rambunctious brood. Later there were divorces, drug arrests and sex scandals — all in the public eye.

There were the deaths of two sons: David died of a drug overdose in 1984, and Michael was killed in 1997 when he crashed into a tree while playing ball with family members as he skied down a slope on Aspen Mountain in Colorado. And a granddaughter, Saoirse Kennedy Hill, died at 22 after an apparent overdose at the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port, Mass., in 2019.

But most of her children found success — in politics, business, filmmaking, environmental advocacy and other fields. Robert Jr., an environmental lawyer, announced his presidential bid, initially for the Democratic nomination, in April 2023 and was later condemned, including by members of his family, for suggesting that the coronavirus had been “ethnically targeted” to spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people. Abandoning his try for the nomination, he announced his independent run that October.

Ethel Kennedy never commented publicly on her son’s actions.

In addition to him and her grandson Joseph, Ethel Kennedy is survived by four daughters, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, a former lieutenant governor of Maryland; Courtney Kennedy Hill; Kerry Kennedy, a human rights advocate and the author of “Speak Truth to Power,” who was previously married to Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York; and Rory Kennedy, the youngest child, a documentary filmmaker; four other sons, Joe Kennedy II, a former U.S. representative from Massachusetts; Christopher, the chair of Joseph P. Kennedy Enterprises Inc.; Max, an author and a founder of an urban ecology program in Boston; and Douglas, a Fox News Channel correspondent; and dozens of other grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

This report contains material from the Associated Press.