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The Skakel and Kennedy families first came together around 1940, when the children met at schools. Thereafter, their lives progressively intertwined, as they dated one another, visited back and forth, and went on outings together. Seventeen-year-old Ethel and 20-year-old Bobby met in 1945, at Mont Tremblant, a Canadian ski resort near Montreal. They liked each other ("He was so handsome!" Ethel recalls) and began to date, until Bobby turned his attentions to Ethel's quiet, bookish sister Pat. This lasted a few months by most accounts, but to Ethel it seemed "two years at least." Finally Pat developed other romantic interests. "Then Mama," says Ethel, referring to herself, "went right to work."
Keeping in Touch
Not only was Ethel the right girl to draw the shy Bobby out of his shell, but also she had the proper temperament and family background to suit the tightly knit, boisterous and opinionated Kennedy circle. At Bobby's behest, Ethel threw herself with abandon into older brother Jack's 1946 campaign for a House seat from Massachusetts. The year after her graduation from Manhattanville College of the Sacred Heart in 1949, Ethel and Bobby—then a law student at the University of Virginia—were married in Greenwich, with Representative John F. Kennedy (D., Mass.) as best man.
From the beginning, theirs was "an extraordinary relationship," says Ted Kennedy. "With Ethel and Bobby, everything just clicked all the way." In a forthcoming memorial volume, Bobby's sister Eunice Shriver writes: "I hear him on the beach, in his home, on his boat, on the front lawn playing football, at the tennis court—always with the same question: 'Where is Ethel?' He grew out slowly. He was a lonely, very sensitive and unfulfilled youngster. He met Ethel, and all the love and appreciation for which she seemed to have an infinite capacity came pouring down on him. How he blossomed."
They moved through a succession of homes—first in Charlottesville, then in the Georgetown section of Washington, and finally Hickory Hill in 1956—Bobby rising through the capital hierarchy, Ethel raising his children and presenting him with a new one almost every year. No matter how busy either of them became, they were never out of touch during the day. If Bobby was conducting hearings as a congressional committee counsel, Ethel would arrive in the morning, attend the hearings, drive home for lunch with the children, return for the afternoon hearings, then go back home and call her friends to say how brilliantly Bobby had performed. Later, when Bobby was Attorney General, she and a clutch of children often showed up on working evenings at the Justice Department with trays of hamburgers, milk and ice cream.
No Neutrality
For Ethel, says Eunice Shriver, "Bobby was everything: the best sailor, the best skier—a hero who could easily climb Mount Everest if he wanted to." To keep up with him Ethel went to some pretty heroic lengths herself. Art Buchwald recalls a camping trip on which Ethel hiked seven miles out of the Grand Canyon in 119° heat: "I didn't think any woman could do that. Maybe no woman but Ethel could."