Jean Kennedy Smith
Diplomat
JEAN KENNEDY Smith, who has died at 92, was the last surviving sibling of President John F Kennedy. Later, as a US ambassador, she played a key role in guiding the peace process in Northern Ireland.
The eighth of nine children born to Joseph and Rose Kennedy, she outlived several of them by decades.
Her siblings included her older brother Joseph Kennedy Jr, killed in action during the Second World War; Kathleen ‘Kick’ Kennedy, who died in a 1948 plane crash; the president, assassinated in 1963; and Senator
Robert Kennedy, murdered in 1968.
For much of her life, Mrs Smith was viewed as the quiet sister who largely shunned the spotlight. However, in 1963 she accompanied her brother – America’s first Irish Catholic president – on his historic visit to Ireland, from where their great-grandfather Patrick Kennedy, had hailed. She later recalled the trip as “one of the most moving experiences of my own life”.
Three decades later, in 1993, Mrs Smith was appointed ambassador to Ireland by President Bill Clinton.
Diplomacy, like politics, ran in the Kennedy family. Mrs Smith’s father was ambassador to the UK at the beginning of the Second World War, and her niece, Caroline Kennedy, served as ambassador to Japan during the Obama administration.
In 1994, Mrs Smith helped persuade Mr Clinton to grant a controversial visa to the IRA’s Gerry Adams, in defiance of the British Government, which considered him a terrorist.
She also risked controversy in 1998 by taking communion in a Protestant cathedral in Dublin, going against the bishops of her Roman Catholic church.
She later received Irish citizenship for “distinguished service to the nation”.
Mrs Smith was married to Stephen Edward Smith, a financial and political advisor to the Kennedys, who died in 1990.
They married in 1956 and had four children.