Kerry Kennedy On The Extraordinary Life Of Her Mother, Ethel

Source: Town & Country, Caroline Hallemann
Photo: Kerry Kennedy with her mother, Ethel, on the red carpet of the 2014 RFK Ripple Of Hope Gala. (Mike Coppola/Getty Images)

Kerry Kennedy’s new book about the late Kennedy family matriarch offers an intimate portrait of a woman recognized by many but truly known by few.

There’s no shortage of books about the Kennedys. It’s practically a subgenre of non-fiction at this point. But rarely is one written by someone in the family.

Kerry Kennedy’s new biography about her mother offers an insider’s perspective on a woman recognized by many but truly known by few, and it paints a poignant portrait of joy and endurance in the face of enormous tragedy.

Here, Kerry speaks with T&C’s Caroline Hallemann about her mother’s friendship with Taylor Swift, what Love Story got wrong in its portrayal of her family, and the importance of Ethel’s bold legacy.

To start, tell me about this cover.

The cover is of my parents at their engagement party in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts. This was a picture that was floating around the internet and seen by Taylor Swift. She saw this young couple with so much joy, and she wrote a song about them called “Starlight.” And it was only later that she learned the names of the two people in the photograph.

And then she met my sister, Rory, who was making a film about my mom. And Rory introduced Taylor to mom, and mom invited her to Hyannis Port, and there was a gaggle of fabulous women with her, swimming and dancing and then sailing. And there was a gaggle of nephews following them around, and Conor won. And then Taylor bought a house across the street from us in the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port. But alas, the stars were not aligned, and she got married, and he got married this weekend to a fabulous woman.

How would you describe your mother’s relationship to celebrity?

Well, she was born into poverty. She spent her first five years in an Irish tenement on the south side of Chicago, and then her family moved. Her father struck it rich, and they moved to Greenwich, Connecticut, but it really was kind of like the Beverly Hillbillies. They never quite fit in with the crowd there. So, she was not really interested in the country club like. She was interested in people who, like her father, were self-made, and that might be through business, but mostly she was really interested in sports and actors, but mostly sports, people like Rafer Johnson, who was the first Black man to win the decathlon for the United States in 1960, Jim Whittaker, who was the first American to summit Mount Everest, Sonny Jurgensen, the great football player, Roosevelt Grier, the great Los Angeles Rams football player, and then singers, entertainers, people like Andy Williams and Sammy Davis Jr. And others who through their own moxie, their own self-discipline, their own extraordinary strengths had excelled.

You mentioned your sister’s documentary. How do you see this book in conversation with that film?

I love that question. It is almost that they’re sisters. They’re not telling the same stories, but they’re describing the same person. I love that documentary that Rory made. It’s absolutely fantastic. And for anyone who doesn’t want to read a book, watch the documentary.

But you do different things in a book and you can tell longer stories. You can reflect more in a book than you can in a documentary. So they’re two different art forms, but they’re describing the same person.

Why do you think she didn’t finish that project or publish it, and how valuable was the memoir for you in writing this story?

It was extremely valuable because I wanted people… In writing this book, I wanted people to hear her voice and understand the way she saw her life and articulated it. So I quote liberally from her writing. As for why she didn’t finish it, I think she had 11 children and she was deeply involved with Kennedy Human Rights, what was then called Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights, now is called Robert and Ethel Kennedy Human Rights. So she had her hands full.

Why did you want to publish this book now?

My mother has an extraordinary story of rags to riches, an enduring and full-hearted love romance with my father, a fairytale romance that is a source of tremendous hope and faith and belief in true love that I think people are always yearning for. All of us are always yearning for that. And then she had this series of horrific tragedies and traumas.

She had 10 children, and she was holding her husband’s hand when he was killed by a mad man, who also shot five people that night. It was a miracle that she wasn’t killed, and she was pregnant with her 11th child, so she not only was raising 11 traumatized children, she was traumatized herself, and she was doing it on her own.

And I think people feel traumatized since COVID. I think this presidency is throwing people’s minds for a loop. I think there’s a lot of fear because of financial disruption and the very real threat of the AI.

We’re going to lose a hundred million jobs in the United States over the next four years. It’s a lot of disruption. People are scared, and I think she gives us a path forward. And at the end of that—losing her husband, losing her two sons, losing her parents at the age of 27 in a plane crash—she forges ahead. She doesn’t go under the covers. She forges ahead with appreciation for life, no bitterness. And I think that people are yearning for a model of how is it that this woman could spend the last five years of her life repeating again and again, “Aren’t we lucky?” Looking at the American flag, flying over Nantucket Sound and saying, “Oh, it’s so beautiful. Aren’t we lucky?”

President Trump is fixated on the Kennedy legacy. Why is it important for you to continue to speak out against what he is doing, specifically regarding the Kennedy Center?

Well, he is focused on our family, and I don’t know why that is. And you think about the Rose Garden and you think about plowing over the Rose Garden and the work that my Aunt Jackie did, the tribute to my grandmother, Rose Kennedy, and then this destruction of the Kennedy Center. In the first place, it was created by Congress as the tribute to a slain president. So putting Trump’s name on it would be like making it the Trump Washington Monument or the Trump Lincoln Memorial or the Trump tomb of the unknown soldier. That is what he was trying to do. Secondly, the claim is that there is no funds for rehabilitating place, but that’s not true because in the Big Beautiful Bill, $256 million was reserved in order to make repairs to the Kennedy Center, which was more than enough to do everything that one could possibly fund.

And then the source of income for the Kennedy Center is government, which the Trump administration controls, and then philanthropy and ticket sales. And in philanthropy and ticket sales, they made in excess of $40 million the year before he put his name on it. It wasn’t until he put his name on it that those failed. So just focus, Mr. President on ending the war, on relieving the extraordinary inflation that you’ve caused, and protecting our allies in Ukraine and not aligning yourself with Putin, and we’ll be okay.

One thing that comes through in Ethel is how your mother was not a politician, but she was a master political strategist. I thought a lot about how when she passed, she basically had a state funeral.

She did. She was quite extraordinary because she was not a senator, she was not a diplomat. She was never elected or appointed to any position of power.

In the end, she was the widow of a man who died in 1968, who was a United States Senator. So where did she get the power to attract three living senators, not three presidents to her funeral, along with Stevie Wonder, Sting, and Kenny Chesney, three great musicians, and then a group of farm workers, and the Speaker of the House of Representatives.

Where does that come from? How does one do that? And you asked earlier why is this book important now? Because people feel overwhelmed and they feel that there’s nothing I can do about it. And that was a thought that never entered my mother’s head, never.

She kept doing it. She would show up to protests. She would confront leaders. She would talk to anybody. She would call the CEOs of companies and say, “You need to give the farm workers an extra penny per pound.”

I think so many of us say to ourselves, “I can’t. I don’t have the power. I don’t have the knowledge. I don’t have the connections.” We tell ourselves all the reasons that we can’t, and she didn’t have that poison. We need to get rid of that voice in our head and go out there and protect our country at this time of extreme danger and say, “I can, I can, I can.”

In a previous interview for this book, you mentioned that you don’t like watching TV shows about your family.

I don’t like fictionalized shows about my family. I love documentaries.

Why do you think popular culture and specifically Hollywood continues to be interested in your family?

Well, I think there are values in our story that people are yearning for. President Kennedy said, “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.” People are yearning to make our community stronger, make our country better. They’re looking for ways of doing that. And I think that sense of challenge, of we can put a man on the moon when it seemed impossible. The sense of love of our country, true love of protecting our country and its greatest values while also seeing its faults, while also saying we need to address racism in our country, we need to address the poverty in our country, we need to address the divisions between Black and white, young and old. We need to heal our divisions. Those were all a part of the messages of the Kennedys. And I think people are yearning for that hope and that challenge and that sense that we can make a difference.

Sometimes with fictionalized depictions of history, people can assume that what they see on TV is the true story, which is not always the case. Do you see your book as kind of a response or a rebuttal to dramatized portrayals of your family?

Well, I do think that this (picks up a copy of the book) is definitely the truth.

I think the main show that I was referring to is called Love Story about my cousin John and his wife Carolyn. I didn’t see it. I heard things about it, this ridiculous scene where my mother was saying, “You can’t have a meal if you didn’t sign up,” which 100% could never, ever have happened in her entire life because as soon as she met somebody, she was saying, “How can I feed you? What can I get you to drink? If you’ve eaten lunch, let me give you dessert. If you’ve had dessert, let me get you some chocolates like that.”

But I think in the end, that show, weighing the positive and negative, it was probably a valentine to our families, so I appreciate that. I just don’t want to personally watch.

Are there things you had to leave out of this book?

Yes, yes, yes. So upsetting. Should I tell you one story?

Please!

I had it in there, and then I cut it out because I said, “It’s too long”

But anyway, she was in New York with her best friend called Bobbie Smith, and they had to be in Washington for lunch. So my mother said, “We have to just go by Ferragamo, because I have a pair of shoes waiting for me.” So they go to Ferragamo at 9:30, because they have to get to the airport, and the store is closed. So somebody comes by selling Dove bars, and so they’re eating Dove bars at 9:30 in the morning, waiting for Ferragamo to open. And finally it opens, they go in, and the saleswoman says, “You can’t come in there with drippy ice cream.” So out they go to finish the ice cream, and this man walks out of Ferragamo in a very nice suit, pulled together, carrying a briefcase.

Just that moment, wind comes up, opens the briefcase. The briefcase is full of cash, and it starts floating down Fifth Avenue. So they go running. My mother goes running down Fifth Avenue, grabbing the cash, and bringing it back, and she gives it to him. He says, “Thank you so much.” And he shuts his suitcase and goes walking down the street, and then she walks into Ferragamo, and the saleswoman is white as a sheet, and she says, “What’s wrong? We’ve just been robbed.”

How funny is that story? There’s always something. There’s a lot more, that’s for volume two.

We’re at an interesting point in history where fewer and fewer people have memories of your mother and her life. When you were writing this book, how did you think about her legacy and what you’d like future generations to know about Ethel?

It’s interesting. When Uncle Jack died, people used to say to my father, “There’s no hope,” and that was the end of it. And my father would always say, “That would be a terrible way to have learned the lessons of his life. That’s not what you do. You learn the lessons of his life then you carry them forward. That’s how you pay tribute to him. And so in the end, I think my mother was an extraordinary role model and had a lot to teach us about how to conduct ourselves, with humor and grace and faith, how to survive trauma. But in the end, I would rather generations ahead not know her name, but have learned those lessons, have embraced the lessons. They don’t have to know her, but lessons are what’s important. And I think that’s the takeaway. I hope these stories illuminate who she was and her sense of joy and a sense of humor and her comfort level with harmless naughtiness and fun and hijinks. That’s what I’m hoping for.

Caroline Hallemann

Caroline Hallemann is the Digital Director at Town & Country, where she covers culture, society, and entertainment, as well as the British royal family, among a variety of other topics. Caroline is also the author of The Kennedys and the Windsors. Prior to leading the digital team at T&C, she served as the brand’s Senior News Editor and Digital News Director, and has previously held positions at Travel + Leisure, DailyCandy, and Parenting Magazine. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee with her husband and their son, Tommy. You can find her on Instagram at the handle @challemann and on TikTok at @carolinehallemann.

https://www.townandcountrymag.com/society/tradition/a74163147/kerry-kennedy-interview-ethel-book