Jean Kennedy Smith, the last surviving sister of President John F. Kennedy and a former ambassador to Ireland, died on Wednesday, her daughter confirmed to The New York Times . Smith died at her Manhattan home and was 92 years old.
Smith was the eighth of the nine children of Joseph and Rose Kennedy. Among her brothers were Joseph Kennedy Jr., the eldest, killed in action during World War II; the president, assassinated in 1963; Senator Robert F. Kennedy, killed in 1968, and Senator Edward Kennedy, the youngest, who died of brain cancer in 2009.
Smith, married to the family’s financial adviser and future head of the presidential office Stephen Edward Smith in 1956, was considered for much of her life as the discreet sister who avoided the lights. He wrote a memoir, The Nine of Us , in 2016.
She was never a candidate, but campaigned for her brother, then-Senator John F. Kennedy, by running for the presidency in 1960. In 1963, she supplanted Jacqueline Kennedy, who was traveling, as a hostess at a state reception for the president. from Ireland. She also accompanied her brother, the first Catholic president, on her famous visit to Ireland, from where her great-grandfather Patrick Kennedy had emigrated.
Three decades later, President Bill Clinton appointed her ambassador to Ireland, saying she was “as Irish as an American can be.”
As ambassador, she played a role in the Northern Ireland peace process. She helped convince Clinton to grant a visa to Gerry Adams, the head of the Sinn Feinn party, linked to the Irish Republican Army. The British government considered Adams a terrorist.
Smith and her husband had four children, Stephen Jr., William, Amanda, and Kym. Her husband died in 1990.
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