Jean Kennedy Smith, Last Surviving Sibling of JFK, Is Dead at 92
Jean Kennedy Smith, the last surviving sibling of slain President John F. Kennedy, who as U.S. ambassador to Ireland in the 1990s played a pivotal role in the Northern Irish peace process, died on Wednesday at age 92…
Jean Kennedy Smith, the last surviving sibling of slain President John F. Kennedy, who as U.S. ambassador to Ireland in the 1990s played a pivotal role in the Northern Irish peace process, died on Wednesday at age 92.
Kennedy Smith died at her home in Manhattan, her daughter Kym told Reuters, declining give a cause of death “to keep it private.”
The eighth of nine children born to Joseph and Rose Kennedy, Kennedy Smith was labeled “the shy Kennedy,” long finding herself in the shadow of her famous father and brothers, including U.S. Senators Robert and Edward Kennedy.
Her husband, Stephen Smith, was himself a trusted adviser who helped run the Kennedy family’s business interests, played a senior role in John F. Kennedy’s 1960 presidential campaign and managed the presidential runs of her other brothers, Robert and Edward.
Kennedy Smith also played family matchmaker, introducing Robert in 1945 to her Manhattanville College classmate Ethel Skakel, whom he later married.
She got her introduction to politics helping with John’s 1946 campaign for Congress. In 1960, by then a wife and mother, Kennedy Smith traveled the country campaigning for him ahead of his narrow victory over Republican Vice President Richard Nixon to become America’s first Catholic president.
John F. Kennedy’s presidency ended tragically with his assassination on Nov. 22, 1963, in Dallas. Five years later, Kennedy Smith and her husband were at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles when Bobby, two years her senior, was gunned down after winning the California Democratic presidential primary.
Like the rest of her family, Kennedy Smith had already been no stranger to tragedy. Born on Feb. 20, 1928, in Brookline, Massachusetts, she was just 16 when her oldest brother, Joseph Kennedy Jr., was killed in World War Two. Four years later, her older sister Kathleen “Kick” Kennedy died in a plane crash.
She married Smith in 1956 and they settled in New York, where they raised four children. Her husband died of lung cancer in 1990 at age 63. A year later, she was in attendance in Florida at the rape trial of her son William Kennedy Smith, who was acquitted in a heavily publicized case that cast a darker light on the family once considered American royalty.