Joan Bennett Kennedy - Marriage and Divorce

Marriage and Divorce

In October 1957, at the dedication of a gymnasium at Manhattanville College in memory of another Kennedy sister, Kathleen Cavendish, Marchioness of Hartington — who had died in a plane crash in 1948 — Jean Kennedy introduced Joan to her brother Ted, then a student at the University of Virginia School of Law in Charlottesville.

They were married on November 29, 1958, in Bronxville, New York. They had three children: Kara Anne Kennedy Allen (born February 27, 1960, in Bronxville, died September 16, 2011 in Washington, DC), Edward Moore Kennedy, Jr. (born September 26, 1961), and Patrick Joseph Kennedy II (born July 14, 1967).

Two of their children had cancer. Edward developed bone cancer that resulted in the removal of a portion of a leg in 1973 and Kara was treated for lung cancer in 2003.

Her husband suffered a severe back injury in an airplane crash while campaigning for his first full term in the U.S. Senate. She assumed the full campaign-appearance schedule for his successful re-election in 1964. He had earlier won a special election in November 1962 to serve the final two years of his brother John's U.S. Senate term; John had resigned from the U.S. Senate upon his 1960 election as U.S. President.

In July 1969, her husband was involved in a car accident off Chappaquiddick Island in Massachusetts that killed his passenger, Mary Jo Kopechne. Although pregnant and confined to bed in the wake of two previous miscarriages, she attended Kopechne's funeral. Three days later she stood beside her husband in court when he pleaded guilty to having left the scene of an accident. She suffered a third miscarriage shortly thereafter.

In early 1978, the couple separated. She subsequently gave interviews with People and McCall's confirming her alcoholism and her work to stay sober. The couple remained together during his failed 1980 U.S. presidential campaign, announcing plans to divorce in 1981; the divorce was finalized in 1982.