Joan Kennedy (1936-2025)

On Wednesday, Joan Bennett Kennedy passed away at the age of 89.  Kennedy's death wasn't just the end of the life of a longtime public figure, but also the unofficial end of Camelot, the nickname for the roughly 1000 days that John F. Kennedy, Joan's brother-in-law was in the White House.  President Kennedy is oftentimes evoked now, even nostalgically by Republicans (some of whom incorrectly state he'd be a Republican if he was alive today, which pretty much defies all sense of logic), as a time of impossible hope, optimism, and above-all-else glamour, in Washington, something that in the Trump Era feels like a completely different world, so it feels somewhat fitting that Camelot couldn't survive Trump's second term in office.

For me, the Kennedys really were an entry point into a certain type of politics-as-hobby, and so there's an odd sense of sadness over her death that I didn't quite expect.  I have always had a fascination with presidents.  When I was about seven-years-old, my mom bought a book about the presidents (which I still have-it's actually on a shelf in front of me as I'm typing this) from the supermarket, which sounds more rudimentary than it was as it was as it was a proper reference book (for those who are too young to know this, supermarkets in small towns used to have the opportunity to sell things like encyclopedias and reference books from Funk & Wagnalls during certain times of years that you now would find exclusively online, or online as far as you would buy reference books at all, and were why so many of your grandparents ended up owning encyclopedia sets despite them being overall quite expensive).  I poured over that thing, learning everything about the presidents, memorizing their names quickly and the years that they served.

But it was the Kennedys, with their aura of glamour, sophistication, and unspeakable tragedy that was the real entry point for me into thinking about politics the way I do now-not just through facts & dates, but as a rounded story, something with a lot of characters.  Every presidency, if you look at it objectively, comes with countless supporting players like a novel or a TV series, and the Kennedys, with their expansive family tree was something that I couldn't get enough of.  I collected (and still do) magazines about the family, complete with family trees & a look at what not just President Kennedy and his senator brothers accomplished, but their family history of service, scandal, & power.  In eighth grade I couldn't have told you the starting lineup for the Minnesota Timberwolves or the members of most rock bands, but I could name every single one of the Kennedy cousins, and their far more famous aunts & uncles.

All of those aunts & uncles are largely gone now.  While many of the Kennedy cousins still make news despite their age and depleting numbers (particularly First Daughter Caroline Kennedy and HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.), Joan Kennedy's death leaves only one of their aunts, Vicki Kennedy (Ted Kennedy's second wife) behind.  And while the former US Ambassador to Austria is accomplished and one of the family's most prominent members now, she only entered the family in 1992, and so had no real connection to the time when the family was the most powerful in America.

However, Joan did.  Married to Ted Kennedy after a whirlwind courtship, Joan Kennedy was the "loose cannon" of the Kennedy wives.  While Jackie and Ethel were placid, forever perfect in the public eye and in many ways a strange combination of intense formality and emerging modernity in the 1960's, Joan Kennedy always felt to me as far more willing to buck the norm.  You could see this with her fashion-there's a famous picture of Joan Kennedy meeting President and Mrs. Nixon a few months after they won the White House.  Pat Nixon looks regal in a mother-of-the-bride silk dress, but it's Joan in a mod, well-above-the-knee mini skirt with mountains of blonde hair & flashy pumps that steals focus.  As the 1960's were ending, the wife of the most prominent Republican in America looked like Loretta Young...the wife of the most prominent Democrat looked like the far hipper Julie Christie or Nancy Sinatra.

Joan Kennedy, unlike Pat Nixon, would never become First Lady, despite her husband's attempt at the office in 1980, and they would divorce not long after Ted's presidential ambitions clearly would never be realized.  She had endured mountains of tragedy by then.  Repeated miscarriages in the 1960's were coupled with her husband's very public infidelities, most notably involving the death of Mary Jo Kopechne (Sen. Kennedy has publicly denied having a romantic involvement with Kopechne, but many think this strains credulity given his acknowledged affairs at the time).  Joan would attend Kopechne's funeral despite doctor's warnings...and soon after suffer her third miscarriage.  She would have three children grow to adulthood, all of whom would suffer health problems, particularly her daughter Kara who died 14 years before her mother from a heart attack.

When people think of Joan outside of her connection with her marriage into the Kennedy clan, they likely associate her with her struggles with alcoholism.  Though it's de rigueur now, in the late 1970's and early 1980's it was incredibly unusual for famous people to talk about drug addiction publicly.  Kennedy, along with Betty Ford & Elizabeth Taylor, was one of the first really famous people to open up about their struggles with the disease, talking about it in national magazines while her husband was the most well-known man in Congress.  This showed an incredible bravery, though she doesn't always get credit for it given that, unlike Ford & Taylor, she frequently relapsed in the years that followed, with drunk driving arrests, probation, and medical issues following.  In 2005, at one point one of the most famous women in America was found lying in a street with a broken shoulder, eventually being put in the care of her children.

But anyone who knows the Kennedy Myth and has followed the family knows that it comes with equal parts fame and sorrow, and few embodied that quite like Joan Kennedy.  While the Kennedys continue to be a part of the national conversation, her death marks the end of a chapter for the family and America's obsession with it, the last of the major figures of Camelot to finally reach Avalon.