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Last Kennedy Sibling's Death Ends Era

Associated Press

   BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS - Camelot's inner circle is just about gone --
   though its spirit, some say, is very much alive.

   Wednesday's death of Jean Kennedy Smith, an acclaimed former U.S.
   ambassador to Ireland and the last surviving sibling of President John
   F. Kennedy, virtually erases those who were closest to the assassinated
   35th U.S. president.

   "This is sort of bringing down the curtain on one of America's three
   political dynasties -- the Adamses, the Roosevelts and now the
   Kennedys," said Patrick Maney, a Kennedy scholar and retired professor
   of history at Boston College.

   Only Ethel Kennedy, the 92-year-old wife of JFK's brother, Robert F.
   Kennedy -- himself felled by an assassin's bullet five years later amid
   a mighty struggle for civil rights with echoes reverberating now in
   2020 -- remains with us.

   "The world seems less bright today," said Victoria Reggie Kennedy,
   whose husband, former U.S. Senator Edward Kennedy, another JFK brother,
   died in 2009.

   Kennedy Smith, who died Wednesday at age 92 at her Manhattan home, is
   being hailed for playing a pivotal role in the peace process in
   Northern Ireland.

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