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At the JFK Library today
By adamg on Thu, 10/10/2024 - 3:20pm
Aline Boucher Kaplan photographed the flowers, photo and condolences book the JFK Library and Museum put out to honor Ethel Kennedy, Robert Kennedy's wife and a human-rights activist, who died today at 96.
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Comments
Nice Tribute
RIP Ethel
Condolences Book
Can they put one out for the dozens of women the Kennedy men left broken, tortured, raped, murdered and left for dead?
Death
What does the death of Ethel Kennedy have to do with this? She didn't commit the crimes.
Why should she be snubbed for being the mother of children or related to people who did? She is not her children or relatives.
Sheesh.
She didn’t commit the crimes
Maybe not, but at best she looked the other way at JFK and RFK’ abhorrent behavior. I would say she actively enabled them.
Not only that but she was instrumental in the wrongful overturning of Michael Skakel’s conviction for murdering Martha Moxley, as was her son.
I have not read it, but
I have not read it, but apparently Jerry Oppenheimer's tabloid-style book on RFKjr "The Dark Side of the Dream" really calls out his mom for negligence. He wrote an earlier book on her (which I also haven't read) called "The Other Mrs. Kennedy".
she had a tough life
Years ago I was acquainted with a local guy, now deceased, who was in the JFK White House and a family insider.
He described the scene at the Hickory Hill house after 1968 as chaotic, with 11 kids running around and Ethel overwhelmed with grief.
More and more it seems like the tragic circumstances of the Kennedys are overlooked, and they aren't given the benefit of basic human compassion because the family had risen to such heights before being cut down.
You have to be kidding
Won't someone think of those poor Kennedy's!?
Envy, a deadly sin
Although what is there to envy in having three brothers and a sister die way before their time, two of them murdered at the pinnacle?
If a family on your street had one son die in war, a daughter die in a plane crash and two sons murdered, would you acknowledge some generational trauma? The fact they're more wealthy is irrelevant.
But Kennedy haters were around in the 1960s too.
And ...
What could she have done about any of it?
She got married in 1950, not 2010.
She also had 11 children in less than 20 years, and heavy expectations of managing them, the household, and all the social occasions that went with them.
She was also raised to think this was normal. Patriarchy grinds down all women, not just poor women.
There were a lot of reasons that women didn't speak up. Just because she was wealthy didn't mean she had much of any control over the situation. Had she spoken out, she would have been put in an asylum "to rest" then barred from seeing her children or family because of "crazy" or cut loose in a world where she couldn't even get a credit card. Her sister-in-law was treated to a lobotomy for non-compliance/non-conformity!
Great Question
It's clear you know nothing about the Kennedy family, or their misdeeds, so I'll help you out here.
Let's talk about those 11 children, or rather, her entitled brood of brats that terrorized Hyannisport. Look up the name Pamela Kelly, and the treatment she received from Ol' Ethel and the rest of the Kennedy family. More recently, look up Mary Richardson Kennedy and Ethel's green light to dig up her corpse from the family plot and moved to an unmarked plot on the other side of the cemetary.
By most accounts, she was a terrible mother who had rotten children. She never managed a household, she wasn't scrubbing the floors at Hickory Hill and other than being Bobby's baby factory she did next to nothing in terms of raising her children. This is all well documented outside of pro-Kennedy books written by sentimental Greatest Gen's and Boomers.
Now, what could she have done? Well, she could have been a little more like her sister in law, Joan. While Joan didn't officially divorce Ted until the early 80's, she at least saw through the Kennedy charade and stopped putting up with the bullshit after Mary Jo.
What did Ethel do? Well, her M.O. was to look the other way. Look the other way when Bobby was raping a 14 year old babysitter, look the other way when Bobby was tag teaming Marilyn Monroe with Jack, and in the end, looking the other way when Bobby started banging Jackie before the blood and brains were dry on her Chanel suit. But, hey, the money was good and the prestige of being a Kennedy in the 60's was just too rich.
I will say your asylum comment probably isn't too far from the truth considering that's what Joe did to his own daughter after having her lobotomized against her will and then stashing her in Wisconsin to live out a lonely existence separated from her family.
I'm sure you want to believe in Camelot and football on the beach in khakis, but the reality is the entire Kennedy family and extended familes are and were repugnant people with no shame or guilt. They should not be glorified or revered in any form or fashion. I'm glad we mostly never hear from these people outside of that goofy ginger in Newton losing elections.
Murdered?
Murdered?
She was in charge of all the men, apparently
Including her brother-in-law and sister-in-law's children.
Pretty goddamn sexist to believe that women of any era are responsible for controlling the men around them.