Patrick Joseph Kennedy II

Patrick Joseph Kennedy, known as P. J., was a Boston businessman and Democratic ward leader who established the family's place in Massachusetts politics. Born in East Boston in 1858, he was the son of Irish immigrants from Dunganstown, County Wexford, and worked the docks before building interests in the liquor trade and later in banking. He was elected to the Massachusetts House of Representatives and afterwards to the state Senate, and as one of the ward bosses who ran Democratic Boston at the turn of the century he was both colleague and rival of John F. Fitzgerald. With his wife, Mary Augusta Hickey, he was the father of Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. and the grandfather of President John F. Kennedy.

John Francis Fitzgerald, universally known as Honey Fitz, was a congressman and twice Mayor of Boston, and the maternal grandfather of President John F. Kennedy. Born in the North End of Boston in 1863 to Irish immigrant parents, he rose through the city's Democratic organisation, served in the Massachusetts Senate and the United States House of Representatives, and was elected mayor in 1905 and again in 1910. A famously gregarious campaigner and singer of "Sweet Adeline", he was the rival and eventual in-law of P. J. Kennedy. His daughter Rose married Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. in 1914. He lived to see his grandson elected to Congress in 1946.

John F. Kennedy was the 35th President of the United States, serving from January 1961 until his death in November 1963. The second son of Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. and Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, he was born in Brookline, Massachusetts, in 1917, graduated from Harvard in 1940, and commanded the patrol torpedo boat PT-109 in the Pacific, receiving the Navy and Marine Corps Medal after its sinking. He represented Massachusetts in the House of Representatives from 1947 and in the Senate from 1953, won the Pulitzer Prize for "Profiles in Courage", and married Jacqueline Bouvier in 1953. As president he faced the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis, founded the Peace Corps, committed the nation to the Moon landing and sent Congress the civil rights bill enacted in 1964. He was assassinated in Dallas, Texas, at the age of forty-six.

Eunice Kennedy Shriver was an American philanthropist and the founder of the Special Olympics, the international sports movement for people with intellectual disabilities. The fifth child of Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. and Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, she was born in Brookline, Massachusetts, in 1921 and educated at Stanford. She worked for the State Department and in juvenile justice before taking over the Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Foundation, where she pressed her brother's administration to create the President's Panel on Mental Retardation. In 1962 she opened Camp Shriver at her Maryland home, which grew into the first International Special Olympics Games in Chicago in 1968. She married Sargent Shriver in 1953, had five children including Maria Shriver, and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1984.

Jean Kennedy Smith was United States Ambassador to Ireland from 1993 to 1998 and the founder of the arts and disability organisation VSA. The eighth child of Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. and Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, she was born in Brookline, Massachusetts, in 1928 and educated at Manhattanville College. She married the businessman and campaign manager Stephen Edward Smith in 1956 and in 1974 founded Very Special Arts, which created arts programmes for people with disabilities in dozens of countries. Appointed ambassador by President Bill Clinton, she played a public part in the diplomacy surrounding the Northern Ireland peace process and was later granted honorary Irish citizenship. She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2011 and was the last surviving sibling of President John F. Kennedy.

Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. was the eldest of the nine children of Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. and Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, and the brother on whom the family's political hopes first rested. Born in Hull, Massachusetts, in 1915, he was educated at Choate, Harvard and briefly the London School of Economics, served as a Massachusetts delegate to the 1940 Democratic National Convention, and entered Harvard Law School before enlisting as a naval aviator after the outbreak of the Second World War. He flew anti-submarine patrols from England and volunteered for a hazardous experimental bombing mission over the Channel in August 1944, on which he was killed at the age of twenty-nine. The Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Foundation was established in his memory.

Kathleen Kennedy Townsend is an American politician and author who served as Lieutenant Governor of Maryland from 1995 to 2003, the first woman to hold the office. The eldest child of Senator Robert F. Kennedy and Ethel Skakel Kennedy, she was born in Greenwich, Connecticut, in 1951, graduated from Harvard and the University of New Mexico School of Law, and taught before entering public life. As lieutenant governor she led Maryland's crime prevention and juvenile justice work and created one of the first state requirements for student community service. She was the Democratic nominee for governor of Maryland in 2002 and has since worked on retirement security policy and written "Failing America's Faithful". She is a sister of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Rory Kennedy.

Joseph P. Kennedy II is an American businessman and former congressman who represented Massachusetts in the United States House of Representatives from 1987 to 1999, holding the Boston seat once occupied by his uncle President John F. Kennedy. The eldest son of Senator Robert F. Kennedy and Ethel Skakel Kennedy, he was born in Boston in 1952 and educated at the University of Massachusetts Boston. In 1979 he founded Citizens Energy Corporation, a non-profit that used the proceeds of oil trading to supply discounted heating fuel to low income households, and he returned to lead it after leaving Congress. He is the father of the congressman Joseph P. Kennedy III.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is an American lawyer and politician who became United States Secretary of Health and Human Services in 2025. The third child of Senator Robert F. Kennedy and Ethel Skakel Kennedy, he was born in Washington in 1954 and educated at Harvard, the London School of Economics, the University of Virginia School of Law and Pace University, where he later taught environmental law. For decades he practised as an environmental lawyer, serving as chief prosecuting attorney for Riverkeeper and founding the Waterkeeper Alliance, and he wrote books including "Crimes Against Nature". He entered the 2024 presidential race as a Democrat and then as an independent before ending his campaign, and was subsequently nominated and confirmed to the federal cabinet. He is the father of Conor Kennedy.

Joe Kennedy III is an American politician and diplomat who represented Massachusetts in the United States House of Representatives from 2013 to 2021. Born in Boston in 1980, the son of the congressman Joseph P. Kennedy II and a grandson of Senator Robert F. Kennedy, he graduated from Stanford and Harvard Law School and served in the Peace Corps in the Dominican Republic before working as an assistant district attorney in Massachusetts. In Congress he focused on health care, mental health parity and manufacturing, and he delivered the Democratic response to the State of the Union address in 2018. He ran for the Senate in 2020 and was later appointed United States Special Envoy to Northern Ireland for Economic Affairs.

Katherine Schwarzenegger is an American author, the eldest child of the journalist Maria Shriver and the actor and former governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, and a great-granddaughter of Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. and Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy. Born in Los Angeles in 1989, she graduated from the University of Southern California and published her first book, "Rock What You've Got", on body image while still a student. She has since written "I Just Graduated, Now What?" and "The Gift of Forgiveness", a collection of interviews about forgiveness, as well as children's books, and she is a longtime advocate for animal rescue and adoption. She married the actor Chris Pratt in 2019.