1/7 | U.S. President Joe Biden (left) and Barack Obama attend Wednesday’s memorial service for Robert F. Kennedy’s widow Ethel Kennedy at the Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle in Washington. President (center) and Bill Clinton (Republican). D.C. Photo by Jim Lo Scalzo/UPI | License photo
Oct. 16 (UPI) — The life of Ethel Kennedy, the widow of murdered U.S. Attorney General and New York Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, was shared Wednesday by two former and current U.S. presidents. A rare gathering was held to commemorate him.
President Joe Biden delivered a eulogy at the Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle in Washington, D.C., and Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama also gave speeches.
Ethel Kennedy, 96, was a prominent human rights activist and the mother of many Kennedy descendants, including former independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, Maryland’s first female lieutenant governor. Ta.
Her grandson and US special envoy to Northern Ireland, Joe Kennedy III, announced that she suffered a stroke and was hospitalized on October 8, and died in her sleep on October 10. She is survived by nine children, 34 grandchildren, and dozens of great-grandchildren.
She will be buried atop Arlington National Cemetery alongside her late husband, near the John F. Kennedy Eternal Flame.
“We are a better country and a better world because of Ethel Kennedy,” Biden said in his presidential remarks. She played an “indispensable role in my life,” he said.
Biden spoke about the death of his first wife and daughter in a 1973 car accident and how Ethel Kennedy supported him when he was elected president in late 2020. Ta.
“She was there,” Biden, 81, said Wednesday. Biden said he and his late brother-in-law, Sen. Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts, encouraged him to keep his Senate seat when he considered resigning after a family tragedy.
“She got me through a period where I didn’t want to stay here,” Biden said. She was full of honesty, empathy, light and joy, he added.
President Obama, who awarded Ethel Kennedy the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2014, also gave a speech.
President Obama on Wednesday highlighted her many passions, from civil rights to juvenile justice.
From left to right, President Joe Biden and former President Barack Obama attend a memorial service for Ethel Kennedy, widow of Robert F. Kennedy, at the Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle in Washington on October 16, 2024. Former President Bill Clinton. Photo by Jim Roe Scalzo/UPI | License photo
“As serious as Ethel was about righting wrongs, she didn’t seem to take herself very seriously,” President Obama said, calling Ethel “a lot of medicine in a small package” and a “young woman.” “It’s a poisonous tongue that’s been around for a long time.”
Born April 11, 1928, Ethel Skakel Kennedy was a young student in Arkansas when President Clinton, who had met her other late brother-in-law, former President John F. It was called “an amazing fireball with continuous energy.”
“Your mother thought it was a cat’s meow,” he added, with a nod to Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
On Monday, the Kennedys gathered at Our Lady of Victory in Centerville, Mass., to say goodbye at a private funeral on Cape Cod near the family’s famous Hyannis Port estate.
Wednesday’s rally was the first time Biden and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., publicly appealed to Biden to withdraw from the presidential race and support Vice President Kamala Harris, now the Democratic nominee. It was the first time he was said to have spoken. .
“What a perfect thing for Ethel to have three great American presidents speak at her funeral,” Pelosi said in her remarks.
RFK Jr., the latest Kennedy to seek re-election to the White House, said his mother died in Boston surrounded by several children and friends.
She founded the Robert F. Kennedy Foundation for Human Rights shortly after her husband was assassinated in October 1968.
Renowned Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer and former UPI photojournalist David Hume Kennerly captures Ethel Kennedy on the day she was with her husband before he was assassinated in Los Angeles on the presidential campaign trail in June 1968. I paid attention to that.
Fifty-six years ago, Ethel Kennedy was pregnant when Robert F. Kennedy died. She gave birth to Rory, the last of the couple’s 11 children, six months after her husband’s death.
