Joan Bennett Kennedy, the previous spouse of the late Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy, died Wednesday morning in her sleep at her house in Boston, based on her household. She was 89 years previous.
The couple had three kids collectively, Kara, Ted Jr., and former Rhode Island Congressman Patrick Kennedy.
Her tumultuous marriage to Kennedy, which started in 1958 and led to 1982, made her a global movie star. Her life post-divorce as a music scholar and performer and advocate on problems with habit and psychological well being cemented her standing as an vital determine in American life.
She was open and eloquent about her battles with alcoholism and melancholy in an period when movie star confessionals had been uncommon, and impressed the impactful post-politics profession of her son Patrick, one of many nation’s premiere crusaders for psychological well being companies.
“Moreover being a loving mom, gifted musician, and instrumental companion to my father as he launched his profitable political profession, Mother was a strong instance to tens of millions of individuals with psychological well being circumstances,” mentioned Patrick in an announcement Wednesday. “She will probably be missed not simply by your entire Kennedy Household, however by the humanities neighborhood within the Metropolis of Boston and the many individuals whose lives that she touched.”
The Kennedy household legacy
And for these to whom the story of the Kennedy household, for higher or worse, stays an indelible a part of American and Bostonian historical past, it’s yet one more reminder of what the Kennedy legacy was and the way it has advanced over time.
The defeat of her late brother-in-law’s grandson Joe Kennedy III in his 2020 major problem to Sen. Ed Markey was the primary time a Kennedy had ever misplaced an election in Massachusetts. Many elements performed into that final result, together with voters’ judgment that Markey deserved re-election. However it was additionally an announcement that many citizens both not remembered the golden period of the Kennedy brothers’ rise to energy and/or not valued the centrist progressivism espoused by younger Joe. As Markey put it in a marketing campaign video: “We requested what we may do for our nation. We went out, we did it. With all due respect, it is time to begin asking what your nation can do for you.”
And extra just lately, the bitter opposition of Joe, Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg, and different relations to the anti-vaccine advocacy and Trump embrace of Well being and Human Providers Sec. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. demonstrated the impermanence of the household’s ideas.
Bettmann through Getty Photographs
Joan Kennedy was extensively admired for her private braveness {and professional} accomplishments. Her passing is the newest reminder of the Kennedy household’s trajectory over the previous 75 years or so, its ups and downs so intently tied to these of our nation’s politics and tradition.
And it is a reminder, too, of the knowledge of the Irish poet William Butler Yeats’s 106-year-old commentary in “The Second Coming”: “Issues collapse; the centre can’t maintain.”
