Rascal
Ethel Kennedy’s Cavalier King Charles Spaniel
The human rights activist Ethel Kennedy was truly a child of nature. At Hickory Hill, the grand 19th-century Virginia estate that she shared with her husband, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, animals would often roam wild — dogs and chickens and gerbils, but also more unorthodox pets like Komodo dragons, skunks, a tortoise from Kenya, a donkey named Peter Piper, a red-tailed hawk, a peregrine falcon, a seal that swam in the backyard pool and a coati-mundi that once, while Kennedy was giving an interview to a group of journalists, clawed out of its cage and sank its teeth deep into her leg. “She was seven months pregnant,” recalls Kennedy’s daughter Kerry. “And off she went to the hospital, with a coati-mundi attached to her!” This happened on the day Robert was preparing to publicly criticize President Lyndon B. Johnson and call for an end to the Vietnam War; Kerry remembers her mother lightheartedly proclaiming, when she returned from the hospital, that “if this is the worst attack on a Kennedy today, everything’s going to be just fine.”
Kennedy paired the grace and tact that she honed as a politician’s wife with zany charm in her personal life: Once, for a costume party at her brother-in-law Ted Kennedy’s house, she dressed up as Lady Godiva and rode a horse into his living room.
She never remarried after her husband’s assassination in 1968 but instead devoted herself to her children, grandchildren and animals. 
“Wherever she went,” Kerry says, “she’d always have a dog.” This summer, Kennedy and Rascal, her latest and final companion, spent hours every day swimming and walking along the pier in Hyannis Port, Mass. — the very place where she first got to know Robert and his family. “She loved that beach; she loved that sand,” Kerry says. “She knew that water backward and forward. She knew every path that a boat could get in and out of and exactly where all the rocks were, and she swam there every afternoon of her life.”
Reprint from New York Times 12/30/2024
Amy Wang