It began with a party and ended, decades later, beside a sickbed. In 1953, Ethel Kennedy brought Jackie Bouvier into the Kennedy orbit at a St. Patrick's Day gathering, and the two women quickly formed a bond that would outlast marriages, children and the long strain of family life.
The reason the story still draws readers is the contrast at its center. Jackie Kennedy was understated and reserved; Ethel Kennedy was outgoing and exuberant. Yet the friendship held. At that first party, Ethel Kennedy asked John F. Kennedy to bring Jackie, told the women to dress in black, arrived in a green chiffon dress and used live bullfrogs in the centerpieces. A week later, the two went out to lunch, and Jackie answered with a green four-leaf clover pin, each leaf set with a small diamond.
That exchange captured something the Kennedys valued: social warmth, quick wit and the ability to turn family ritual into something memorable. Ethel Kennedy said she liked Jackie a lot and described her as funny, with a wonderful wit. Soon after, John F. Kennedy and Jacqueline Bouvier were engaged, and the family moved through a run of events that kept the two women close, from the engagement party in Hyannis Port to the wedding in Newport, Rhode Island, on September 12, 1953, where Ethel Kennedy served as a bridesmaid.
The friendship was not built on sameness. It endured because each woman seemed to understand the other’s place in the family without needing to mirror it. Jackie Kennedy later sent Ethel Kennedy a lingerie case after Ethel's tenth child was born, a small gift that fits the pattern of their relationship: personal, private and rooted in attention to detail rather than public display. That is also why the bond stands out in a family story often told through power and politics. Here, the lasting connection was carried by gestures that did not need an audience.
By 1994, that closeness had become something more solemn. Ethel Kennedy was there to comfort Jacqueline Kennedy as she was dying of cancer, closing the arc on a relationship that began in Georgetown and lasted more than four decades. The unanswered part is not whether the friendship survived. It did. The question is how two women so different managed to make that kind of loyalty feel natural for so long.
