Eunice Kennedy Shriver, a champion for the rights of the mentally disabled and founder of the Special Olympics, has died at age 88.
The cause of her death was not given, but Shriver had suffered a series of strokes in recent years.
Her family said she died at Cape Cod Hospital in Hyannis, Mass. early Tuesday. The hospital is near the Kennedy compound, where her brother, Sen. Edward Kennedy, has been battling brain cancer.
Sen. Kennedy released a statement, remembering his sister as a "young girl with great humour, sharp wit, and a boundless passion to make a difference."
"She understood deeply the lesson our mother and father taught us -- much is expected of those to whom much has been given. Throughout her extraordinary life, she touched the lives of millions, and for Eunice that was never enough."
The wife of former Peace Corps director Sargent Shriver, Eunice was credited with transforming America's view of the mentally disabled, inspired by the struggles of her sister, Rosemary, who suffered from the devastating effects of a failed 1941 lobotomy. Rosemary lived most of her life in an institution and died in 2005 at age 86.
While her brother John was in office, Shriver became a key founder of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), a part of the National Institutes of Health. In 2008, the U.S. Congress changed the institute's name to the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.
In 1962, Eunice started a summer day camp for children and adults with intellectual disabilities on the ground of her home in Maryland, and the seeds for the idea of the Special Olympics were sown.
The camps became an annual event -- continuing to this day -- and by 1968 they spurred the international event, the Special Olympic Games.
At that first Games, about 1,000 athletes from across the United States and Canada participated in track and field and swimming events. These days, more than one million athletes in more than 160 countries are involved, making it the world's largest athletic competition for mentally disabled children and adults.
Shriver was the fifth of nine children to Joseph P. Kennedy and Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy. She went to a British boarding school while her father served as ambassador to England and earned a sociology degree from Stanford University in 1943.
She was a social worker at a women's prison in Alderson, W.Va., and worked with the juvenile court in Chicago in the 1950s before taking over the Joseph P. Kennedy Foundation, named for her oldest brother, who was killed in the Second World War.
In 1953, she married Shriver, who became JFK's first director of the Peace Corps. Later, he was George McGovern's vice-presidential running mate in 1972, and ran for president briefly in 1976.
In 1984, U.S. President Reagan awarded Shriver the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian award, for her work on behalf of persons with intellectual disabilities.
As well as John F. Kennedy, Eunice was also sister to Sen. Robert Kennedy, mother to Maria Shriver, and mother-in-law of California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.
She is survived by her husband, who was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease in 2003, and her five children: Maria; Robert, a city councilman in Santa Monica, Calif.; Timothy, chairman of Special Olympics; Mark, an executive at the charity Save the Children; and Anthony Paul, founder and chairman of Best Buddies International, a volunteer organization for the mentally disabled.
With Eunice's death, Jean Kennedy Smith becomes the last surviving Kennedy daughter.
With files from The Associated Press
