Jean Kennedy Smith, diplomat and last surviving sibling of JFK, dead at 92: reports

Jean Kennedy Smith, a diplomat and the youngest sister of President John F. Kennedy, died Wednesday in her Manhattan home at 92, her daughter Kym confirmed to The New York Times and NBC News. 

“She lived an amazing life,” Kym told NBC News in a statement Thursday. Smith’s cause of death remains unclear.

Smith was the eighth of nine children born to Joseph P. and Rose Kennedy, and was the last surviving sibling. She tragically outlived several of the others by decades. Her siblings included older brother Joseph Kennedy Jr., killed in action during World War II; Kathleen “Kick’ Kennedy, who died in a 1948 plane crash; the president, assassinated in 1963; and Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, slain in 1968. Sen. Edward Kennedy, the youngest of the Kennedy siblings, died of brain cancer in August 2009, the same month their sister Eunice Kennedy Shriver died.

Smith, who married Kennedy family financial adviser and future White House chief of staff Stephen Edward Smith in 1956, was viewed for much of her life as a quiet sister who shunned the spotlight. In her memoir “The Nine of Us,” published in 2016, she wrote that for much of the time her childhood seemed “unexceptional.”

“It is hard for me to fully comprehend that I was growing up with brothers who eventually occupy the highest offices of our nation, including president of the United States,” she explained. “At the time, they were simply my playmates. They were the source of my amusement and the objects of my admiration.”

Though she never ran for office, she campaigned for her brothers, traveling the country for then-Sen. John F. Kennedy as he sought the presidency in 1960. In 1963, she stepped in for a traveling Jacqueline Kennedy and co-hosted a state dinner for Ireland’s president. The same year, she accompanied her brother — the first Irish Catholic president — on his famous visit to Ireland. Their great-grandfather, Patrick Kennedy, was from Dunganstown in County Wexford in southeastern Ireland.

Three decades later, she was appointed ambassador to Ireland by President Bill Clinton, who called her “as Irish as an American can be.”

She also founded an arts education program that supports artists with physical or mental disabilities.

Smith, whose husband died in 1990, is survived by her four children: Kym, 47, William, 59, Amanda, 53, and Stephen Jr., 62.

USA TODAY has reached out to Smith’s reps for comment.

This story is developing. 

Contributing: The Associated Press

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