HIJACKING the KENNEDYS

Only one cousin has amassed enough power to reshape the country—and his family can only watch helplessly as he destroys much that they stood for.

- REEVES WIEDEMAN

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.