Ethel Kennedy Was the Mother of a Political Dynasty: Here's a Who's Who of Her Children (2025)

Today, the Kennedy family announced the passing of Ethel Kennedy, the wife of the late Robert F. Kennedy. The news was revealed by her grandson, Joe Kennedy III, who emphasized her love and commitment to her family, writing on behalf of his relatives, "Along with a lifetime's work in social justice and human rights, our mother leaves behind nine children, 34 grandchildren, and 24 great-grandchildren, along with numerous nieces and nephews, all of whom love her dearly."

Born in 1928, Ethel spent her 96 years on Earth becoming a highly respected humanitarian—she established the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights charity and even received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2014—as well as the matriarch of one of America's most famous political families. Together with Robert F. Kennedy, she had eleven children, many of whom have gone on to carry on the family legacy of activism and political involvement.

Here's everything you need to know about her kids.

Kathleen Kennedy Townsend

Ethel and RFK's first child, Kathleen was only a teenager when her father was tragically killed in 1968. Like many of the Kennedy siblings, she earned her undergraduate degree at Harvard University, then went on to receive a law degree. In 1973, she married David Townsend and took to using his last name rather than her own famous moniker—a move that some suggested may have hurt her in her first political run; in 1986, she infamously became the first Kennedy to lose an election when she ran for the Maryland congressional seat under the name Kathleen Townsend.

Her political dreams were far from dashed, though. She spent two years as a Deputy Assistant Attorney General of the U.S. and in 1995 became the first female lieutenant governor of Maryland, which also made her the first Kennedy woman to hold office. In 2002, she made a failed bid for the governorship of Maryland. From 2013-2017, she served as the US Ambassador to Japan. Since then, she has served as a professor at multiple prestigious universities, including Georgetown and the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, as well as authoring books and articles on politics and faith, and serving on boards including the board of directors for the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation.

With her husband David, she had four daughters; Meaghan, Maeve, Kate, and Kerry. In April 2020, Maeve and her 8-year-old son Gideon tragically died after a boating accident on the Chesapeake Bay.

Joseph P. Kennedy II

Just a year younger than Kathleen, Ethel and RFK's oldest son has been in and out of the spotlight over the years for both political ambitions and personal scandals. In 1972, when he was 19, he was briefly held hostage on a hijacked Lufthansa flight from New Delhi, but released safely along with the other passengers later that day. A year later, he overturned his vehicle, injuring several of the six passengers, including his brother David and David's girlfriend Pam Kelley, who was paralyzed in the incident—he was found guilty of negligence at the time and paid a fine.

In 1979 he founded the non-profit Citizens Energy Corporation, using funds from oil ventures to subsidize heating and energy for those in need. That same year, he also married Sheila Rauch, with whom he had twins sons, Matthew and Joe Kennedy III, the latter of whom served in Congress from 2013-2021. Kennedy and Rauch divorced in 1991, kicking off a protracted and controversial battle in which Kennedy attempted to have the marriage annulled by the Catholic church, while Rauch vehemently argued against it. The annulment was ultimately granted in 1993—Rauch would go on to write the book Shattered Faith about the experience—and he shortly thereafter married Anne Elizabeth Kelly.

From 1987 to 1999 he served as a member of the House of Representatives for Massachusetts. He campaigned to become the state's governor in 1997, but ultimately dropped out of the race when the campaign became engulfed in family controversies. Since that time he has refocussed on the private sector with his Citizens Energy Corporation.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

RFK Jr. has had his own fair share of successes and controversies in the public eye. Born 1954, he was educated at Harvard and the London School of Economics, later earning law degrees from the University of Virginia and Pace University. In the early '80s, he served as an assistant district attorney for New York, but his career changed gears when he was discovered in possession of heroine at a South Dakota airport and pleaded guilty to a felony possession charge in 1983.

As part of his sentencing, he began doing community service for the charity program that would become Riverkeeper, a nonprofit environmental organization dedicated to preserving the Hudson River. He became passionate about the project and after finishing his mandated community service was hired on as its chief attorney.

Over the years, RFK Jr. has come to be at odds with his family in the public eye. In the late 2010s, he rose to notoriety again over his vocal anti-vaccination stance. His siblings Joseph and Kathleen publicly decried him, saying that he had "helped to spread dangerous misinformation over social media and is complicit in sowing distrust of the science behind vaccines."

In 2023, he announced he would be running for president as a third party candidate, leading numerous members of the family, including his siblings Rory Kennedy, Kerry Kennedy, Joseph P. Kennedy II, and Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, as well as and his cousin, Jack Schlossberg to denounce his plans. Schlossberg called the run an "embarrassment" and a "vanity project," while RKF Jr.'s siblings released a statement saying his decision was "dangerous to our country." They added, "Bobby might share the same name as our father, but he does not share the same values, vision or judgment. Today’s announcement is deeply saddening for us. We denounce his candidacy and believe it to be perilous for our country."

His campaign was marked by a number of other controversies, including an ad that ran during the 2024 Super Bowl—a close copy of an iconic John F. Kennedy campaign ad from 1960—which was roundly denounced by his family, news of a parasite which he stated had eaten a portion of his brain, his admission to dumping the body of a dead bear in Central Park, and an investigation into whether he once removed the head from a dead whale.

In April 2024, numerous members of the Kennedy family endorsed Joe Biden instead of RFK Jr., including his siblings Kerry, Rory, Joe II, Kathleen, Christopher, and Max. RFK Jr. ultimately suspended his campaign in August of this year, endorsing forming president Donald Trump.

Kennedy has been married three times, including to his current wife actress Cheryl Hines, and is the father of six children.

David A. Kennedy

All of the Kennedy siblings were deeply impacted by the assassination of their father on June 5, 1968, but the tragedy was especially close for David, who was in California with his father. Just hours before RFK's death, he had saved David when the 12-year-old got trapped in the undertow while swimming at the beach, and David stayed up late that night to watch his father on television winning the California Democratic presidential primary, only to witness, instead, his fatal shooting by Sirhan Sirhan.

Throughout much of his teens and 20s, David struggled with drug use. In 1973, a car driven by his brother Joseph overturned, paralyzing his then-girlfriend Pam Kelley and injuring David, which some have suggested may have played a role in his increasing addictions. He spent two years as a student at Harvard, before ultimately dropping out. Over the years, he worked in a variety of fields, rarely staying anywhere for long, and on several occasions received treatment for drug addiction. In 1984, on a visit to Palm Beach, Florida to visit his grandmother Rose Kennedy, David was found dead of an overdose in his hotel room. He was 28.

Courtney Kennedy Hill

The Kennedy family's Irish roots have always held a special connections for Ethel's second daughter. As a young woman she studied Irish history at Trinity College in Dublin before returning to the U.S. to work as a producer for the Children's Television Network. She married Jospeh Ruhe, himself a broadcaster, in 1980, but that Irish thread would return to her life after the two divorced ten years later and she began seeing Paul Hill, one of the Guilford Four, who spent 15 years in prison on charges of IRA terrorism and murder before his sentencing was overturned under evidence that his confession had been coerced. The couple married in 1993, but later divorced. At the age of 40, Courtney gave birth to her only child, Saoirse Roisin, who tragically died at age 22 at the family's Hyannis Port compound in August 2019 of what was later determined to be an accidental overdose.

Michael Lemoyne Kennedy

Like many of his siblings, Michael Kennedy attended Harvard and had an avid interest in politics—he ran his uncle Ted Kennedy's 1994 senate re-election campaign and reportedly even considered running for office himself. In 1981, he married Victoria Gifford, with whom he had three children.

When his older brother Joseph decided to step away from the Citizens Energy Corporation, Michael took over operations for the non-profit, and also helped found the organization Stop Handgun Violence. In the late '90s, he was involved in a highly-publicized scandal over his longterm affair with his family's underaged babysitter, though the babysitter's family ultimately declined to press charges. On New Years Eve 1997, at the age of 39, Michael was killed in a skiing accident in Aspen, Colorado.

Mary Kerry Kennedy

Better known as Kerry, the seventh of RFK and Ethel's children, went to Brown University and Boston College for law school. Kerry took the lead on furthering the work of the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Human Rights from the time she was a young adult, and is now president of the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights nonprofit. In 1990, she married Andrew Cuomo, the son of another prominent political family and the future governor of New York. Though the tabloids dubbed the union "Cuomolot" it ultimately ended in divorce in 2005, and produced their three daughters, twins Cara and Mariah, and Michaela. Like several of her siblings, Kerry is also a published author and has written books on both politics and faith.

Christopher G. Kennedy

The eighth of the Kennedy children, Christopher has spent most of his career focussed on the family's business interests rather than their political leanings. In 1986, he received his undergraduate degree in political science from Boston College and later a masters from the J.L. Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University, where he later served on the advisory board. A longtime Chicagoan, he founded the non-profit Top Box Foods which helps provide hunger-relief in the Chicago area, as well as New England and the Gulf Coast. He and his wife Sheila have four children: Katherine, Christopher Jr., Sarah, and Clare.

In 2018, Christopher made an unsuccessful bid for the governor's seat in Illinois. He's currently the chairman of Joseph P. Kennedy Enterprises, an investment firm that handles the Kennedy family holdings.

In 2024, Christopher was one of several members of the Kennedy family to appear in a campaign ad endorsing Joe Biden for his second presidential bid. In the ad, he referred to Biden as, "the RFK of his generation."

Matthew "Max" Kennedy

Carrying on his family's legal tradition, Max attended Harvard and later the University of Virginia School of Law. He started his career in the district attorney's office of Philadelphia, working in juvenile crime, but later transitioned his focus to humanitarian and environmental causes. In 1991, he married Victoria Strauss, with whom he has three children. In the early 2000s, he worked on political campaigns, including the 2000 re-election campaign for his uncle, Senator Ted Kennedy, as well as Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign.

In 2017, he caused a stir when he was arrested alongside his 22-year-old daughter, Caroline Rose Summer Kennedy, for disorderly conduct in Cape Cod.

Douglas Harriman Kennedy

The Kennedy clan has a famously contentious relationship with the media, which makes the choice for Douglas, the tenth of Ethel and RFK's children, to become a journalist all the more surprising. In particular, he has worked for several companies under the umbrella of the Murdock media empire, whom his uncle Ted Kennedy often opposed. Having served as a reporter at both the Boston Herald and the New York Post, Douglas made the move to Fox News in 1996.

Though he has worked to remain behind the scenes, he did briefly become the focus of media attention himself in a 2012 legal dispute after allegedly assaulting two nurses while attempting to remove his newborn son from the hospital.

Rory Kennedy

The youngest of RFK and Ethel's children, Rory is also the only one of the brood who never met her father—Ethel was pregnant at the time Bobby Kennedy was killed and Rory was born six months after her father's death. Rather than policy-making Rory has turned her activist streak toward the screen as a documentary film maker. After graduating from Brown University, Rory started her own film company, having directed nearly two dozen films and television specials, including the Academy Award nominated Last Days in Vietnam and an Emmy-nominated feature on her mother, aptly titled Ethel.

In 1999, she married writer Mark Bailey, with whom she has two daughters.