Ethel Kennedy

Ethel Kennedy ( Skakel ; born April 11, 1928) is an American human rights advocate. She is the widow of U.S. senator Robert F. Kennedy, a sister-in-law of President John F. Kennedy, and the sixth child of George and Ann (Brannack) Skakel. Shortly after her husband's 1968 assassination, Kennedy founded the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights, a non-profit charity working to reach his goal of a just and peaceful world. In 2014, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama. Early life and education Ethel Skakel was born in Chicago, Illinois to businessman George Skakel and his former secretary Ann Brannack. Her parents were killed in a 1955 plane crash. She is the third of four Skakel daughters and the sixth-born of seven. Her five older siblings are Georgeann, James, George Jr., Rushton, and Patricia, and her younger sister is Ann. George was a Protestant of Dutch descent while Ann was a Catholic of Irish ancestry. Her nephew is Ciarán Cuffe, an Irish politician who serves as a Member of the European Parliament. Ethel and her siblings were raised Catholic in Greenwich, Connecticut. George Skakel was the founder of Great Lakes Carbon Corporation, now a division of SGLCarbon. Ethel attended the all-girls Greenwich Academy, and graduated from the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Manhattan in 1945. In September 1945, Ethel began her college education at Manhattanville College, where she was a classmate of her future sister-in-law Jean Kennedy. Ethel first met Jean's brother, Robert F. Kennedy, during a ski trip to Mont Tremblant Resort in Quebec in December 1945. During this trip, Robert Kennedy began dating Ethel's older sister Patricia, but after that relationship ended he began to date Ethel. She campaigned for Robert's older brother John F. Kennedy in his 1946 campaign for the United States Congress in Boston, and she wrote her college thesis on his book Why England Slept. She received a bachelor's degree from Manhattanville in 1949.