Former President Bill Clinton stunned listeners Wednesday by claiming at the funeral of Ethel Kennedy that the recently deceased widow of Robert F. Kennedy “would flirt with me.”
“I thought your mother was the cat’s meow. She would flirt with me in the most innocent ways,” Clinton, 78, said in his eulogy at the Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle in downtown Washington.
The famously philanderous former president, who was impeached in 1998 over his affair with 22-year-old White House intern Monica Lewinsky, recalled Valentine’s Day cards and conversations with the Kennedy matriarch, who died Oct. 10 at age 96.
“She was an amazing fireball of continuous energy. It was wonderful to be around her,” Clinton recounted of Ethel Kennedy, a mother of 11 children who was widowed in 1968 when her husband, then a New York senator, was assassinated while running for the Democratic presidential nomination.
“I remember one of the — I loved all these Valentine’s cards and there’s a bunch of them downstairs, and they’re very political,” Clinton went on, reading a poem from one of them.
“Roses are red, violets are blue, I’m surrounded by love, but there’s still room for you,” the poem read.
“I think that’s the way she let us all feel,” Clinton said.
The ex-president’s eulogy was well-received and one of Ethel’s daughters, Kerry Kennedy, who eulogized her mother later in the marathon three-hour funeral, which featured performances by Sting and Stevie Wonder, offered some corroboration of her mother’s alleged flirtiness.
“President Clinton said that mummy flirted with him and you know she loved each of you,” Kerry Kennedy told Clinton, former President Barack Obama and retiring President Biden, who were seated in the front row of the church, which also hosted former President John F. Kennedy’s funeral in 1963.
“A few weeks ago I called her from Italy and I said, ‘Mummy, I’m in Italy. Is there anything I can bring you?’ And she said, ‘An Italian would be nice.'”
Biden, speaking last at the funeral, shared that he, too, had received Valentine’s cards from Ethel Kennedy, including one with “a picture of me and Ethel surrounded by hearts” and a poem reading, “I’m not Bide’n my time waiting for you valentine because he’s no ordinary Joe.”
“I don’t know how many you got that damned Valentine, but I tell you what, it meant a lot to me,” said the outgoing president.
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