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Sibling of JFK forged key role as a diplomat
Jean Kennedy Smith, who was the last surviving sibling of President John F. Kennedy and who as a U.S. ambassador played a key role in the peace process in Northern Ireland, has died, relatives said Thursday. She was 92.
Former U.S. Rep. Patrick Kennedy, Smith’s nephew, confirmed her death. She died Wednesday at her home in Manhattan, her daughter Kym told The New York Times.
Smith was the eighth of nine children born to Joseph and Rose Kennedy, and tragically several of them preceded her in death by decades. Her siblings included older brother Joseph Kennedy Jr., killed during World War II; Kathleen “Kick” Kennedy, who died in a 1948 plane crash; the president, assassinated in 1963; and Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, slain in 1968. Sen. Edward Kennedy, the youngest of the Kennedy siblings, died of brain cancer in August 2009, the same month their sister Eunice Kennedy Shriver died.
Smith, who married Kennedy family financial adviser and future White House chief of staff Stephen Edward Smith in 1956, was viewed for much of her life as a quiet sister who shunned the spotlight. In her 2016 memoir “The Nine of Us,” she wrote that for much of the time her childhood seemed “unexceptional.”
“It is hard for me to fully comprehend that I was growing up with brothers who eventually occupy the highest offices of our nation, including president of the United States,” she explained. “At the time, they were simply my playmates.” Though she never ran for office, Smith campaigned for her brothers, traveling the country for then-Sen. John F. Kennedy as he sought the presidency in 1960.
In 1963, she stepped in for a traveling Jacqueline Kennedy and co-hosted a state dinner for Ireland’s president. The same year, she accompanied her brother — the first Irish Catholic president — on his famous visit to Ireland.
Three decades later, Smith was appointed ambassador to Ireland by President Bill Clinton.
Diplomacy, like politics, ran in the Kennedy family. Smith’s father was ambassador to the United Kingdom from 1938 to 1940. Niece Caroline Kennedy served as ambassador to Japan during the Obama administration.
As ambassador, Smith played a “pivotal role” in the Northern Ireland peace process, Irish President Michael Higgins said Thursday.
“An activist diplomat, she was not afraid to break with convention or explore the limits of her mandate,” Higgins said in a statement. “She will be forever remembered as the diplomat who had a sense of Irish history and of what had influenced the Irish in the United States.”
Simon Coveney, the country’s Deputy Prime Minister, said her work in “reaching across political divides” was “invaluable” in Ireland’s hard-won peace.
Smith helped persuade Clinton to grant a controversial visa in 1994 to Gerry Adams, chief of the Irish Republican Army-linked Sinn Fein party. The move defied the British government, which branded Adams as a terrorist.
Smith, who received Irish citizenship for “distinguished service to the nation” after stepping down as ambassador in 1998, worked tirelessly to strengthen the “enduring links” between the two nations, the U.S. Embassy in Dublin said Thursday.
Samantha Power, who served as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations under President Barack Obama, recalled Smith as a “generous mentor” to young women who was always brimming with energy, savvy and wit.
“This is an immense loss,” she tweeted Thursday.
Smith and her husband had four children, Stephen Jr., William, Amanda and Kym. Her husband died in 1990.