Early Life and Family Life
Born Jean Ann Kennedy in Boston, Massachusetts, on her elder sister Kathleen's eighth birthday, she has been described as the shyest and most guarded of the Kennedy children. Her mother said of her youngest daughter, "She was born so late, that she only was able to enjoy the tragedies, and not the triumphs." She attended Manhattanville College (at the time a Sacred Heart school, and still located in Manhattanville), where she met and befriended her two future sisters-in-law: Ethel Skakel (who married Robert F. Kennedy in 1950) and Joan Bennett (who married Edward M. Kennedy in 1958).
On May 19, 1956, she married Stephen Edward Smith in a small chapel of the Roman Catholic Saint Patrick's Cathedral in New York City. The Smiths maintained a lower profile than some other members of the extended Kennedy family. During the early 1960s, they settled in New York City. Smith gave birth to two sons, Stephen Edward Smith, Jr. (born 1957) and William Kennedy Smith (born 1960), and adopted two daughters, Amanda Mary Smith (born 1967) and Kym Maria Smith (born 1972 in Vietnam).
Smith and her husband were present at The Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles on June 5, 1968, when Sirhan Sirhan shot and fatally wounded her brother U.S. Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, D-N.Y., after he had won the Democratic 1968 California U.S. presidential primary.
Read more about this topic: Jean Kennedy Smith
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