RFK Jr. Praises Ethel Kennedy’s ‘Tough Love’ On Social Media

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. took to social media on Thursday to honor his mother, Ethel Kennedy, with a lengthy post praising her, in part, for inventing “tough love.”

Ethel Kennedy died Thursday at the age of 96, a week after she was hospitalized after suffering a stroke.

RFK Jr.’s post came hours after his estranged wife, Cheryl Hines, and various members of the Kennedy family posted their own social media tributes.

Still, he made up for the delay by making it lengthier than other tributes to his mom.

In the post, Kennedy said God blessed his mom with “a rich and eventful life,” and said “even as she declined in recent months, she never lost her sense of fun, her humor, her spark, her spunk, and her joie de vivre.”

Kennedy said that while his mom “wrung joy from every moment,” he admitted she spent the last 56 years “yearning of the day she would reunite with her beloved husband [Robert F. Kennedy Sr.].”

He continued:

“She is with him now, with my brothers David and Michael, with her parents, her six siblings, all of whom predeceased her, and her ‘adopted’ Kennedy siblings Jack, Kick, Joe, Teddy, Eunice, Jean, Rosemary, and Patricia.

“From the day she met my father, her new family observed that she was ‘more Kennedy than the Kennedys.’ She was never more enthusiastic about the afterlife than when she considered that she would also be reunited with her many dogs, including 16 Irish setters — all conveniently named ‘Rusty.’”

Kennedy also remembered her “deep — nearly blind — reverence for the Catholic Church and irreverence toward its clerics” and the way she was “starstruck by America’s presidents,” despite knowing them personally.

“She balanced her contempt for pretension and hypocrisy with a boundless tolerance for error and mistakes in others,” he said, adding that “her sunny optimism eventually brought my shattered father back to life following the assassination of his brother and then helped her children to thrive after her husband’s assassination five years later.”

In the post, Kennedy claimed his mother “invented tough love,” and “could be hard on her children when we didn’t live up to her expectations.”

Still, he said she “was also intensely loyal, and we always knew that she would stand fiercely behind us when we came under attack by others.”

Kennedy finished the post by saying he credits his mother “for all my virtues” and is “grateful for her generosity in overlooking my faults.”