Her Children Her Life

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 32005, 4 June 1969, Page 3

Her Children Her Life

(BU

JOHN J. LINDSAY)

WASHINGTON, D.C. The long year of mourning is ending, and Mrs Ethel Kennedy emerges as she entered, one of the least widow-like people imaginable—vital, involved, an eager, glowing woman with a present and a future.

The big old house on Hickory Hill bulges as it always did with noise and laughter, children and dogs and over-exercised guests. Only the father is missing; but the widow carries on exactly as he would have expected. “Sometimes people think that because you have money and position you are immune from the human experience,” Robert Kennedy told a friend shortly befbre his assassination. “But I can feel as lonesome and lost as the next man, when I turn the key in the door and go into an empty house that is usually full of kids and dogs.” Ethel Kennedy still feels that way. That is why the house is so seldom empty. The unchanging quality of life in the Robert Kennedy family bewilders some guests. Remembrance is always present, but grief is never paraded. No Sadness Seen

People don’t always know what to do when they first arrive,” says one family friend. “They come to the house with long faces and are surprised to find that the gayest one there is Ethel. She is upbeat. She doesn’t like sadness around.”

There is not any. Though the three eldest of the 11 children are away at boarding school, eight are still at home on the 55-acre Virginia estate, and Ethel’s life is enveloped by them. She gets up at 7 to breakfast with them, supervises their departures in various car-pools for school, then tends to the younger children, especially Rory who was born last December, six months after her father’s death. "Her kids have not been raised by surrogates,” says a friend. “She has really raised those children. She has been with them, played their games, worried through their problems with them. She has always managed to spend an enormous amount of time with them, and even more so now. And she likes it—as much as any woman can like it constantly.” Always Guests The guests are as frequent as ever. The 19-room, white Georgian manor always has a spare bed for the widest possible variety of friends. Unknown poverty-programme workers might sit down to dinner with former Cabinet members, such as Robert McNamara. The former astronaut, Colonel John Glenn, and the pop singer, Andy Williams, find themselves playing touch football against one-time professionals. Ethel Kennedy herself is bustling about, listening, talking, coping, doing. Only on rare occasions, when suddenly there is a lull in the action, the talk, the games, does her face suddenly sag and an empty look come into her eyes. Humour rejuvenates her as much as anything. Like her husband, like her late brother-in-law, she can turn a joke upon herself. Recently a Gallup poll found that she was “the most. admired

woman” in the United State?. Ever since, whenever she was wearing a miniskirt, say, or housebreaking a puppy, she would stop and demand aloud: “Is this what a most admired woman would do?” Consolation Another consolation is the church. She attends Mass almost daily at nearby St Luke’s and reads the Bible to the children several evenings a week. “Ethel Kennedy actually has fun in religion,” says a friend. “She takes it very,

very seriously, but she gets something else from it.” For the year after her husband’s death, she rarely was seen at public functions. There was an occasional sortie to dedicate a memorial or to ski with the children, but mostly she remained at home, answering—with the help of three secretaries and occasional volunteers the 100 letters that pour in every day.

Lately, however, she has begun to go out a little more, but mostly the occasions have something to do with her husband’s interests. In May, she appeared at her first social outing—a party in New York given by the “Newsweek”“Washington Post” owner, Kay Graham, for the BedfordStuyvesant restoration project, in the ghetto area that occupied so much of Robert Kennedy’s interest. Kennedy View In the end, she remains more than ever her husband’s wife, “more Kennedy than the Kennedys,” says a friend, “more Irish (though part German), more Catholic, more athletic than the Kennedys.” The head of the clan agrees.

“Ethel has no idea how much her strength and her warmth and good will have meant to others, how much these things have meant to her children, how much she has help me and the Kennedy family,” Senator Edward Kennedy said recently.— “Newsweek” Feature Service.

C.W.L Hostesses.—Members of the Canterbury East Federation of Country Women’s Institutes will work as hostesses at the Country Girls’ Club and Young Farmers’ Club Conference in Christchurch this month.