Eunice Kennedy Shriver dies at 88

Eunice Kennedy Shriver, who emerged from the Kennedy dynasty to become a great American matriarch in her own right, died today at the age of 88. She was the sister of John F Kennedy and Robert Kennedy, both assassinated. Her husband Robert Sargent Shriver was a long-time public servant who, among other things, started the Peace Corps. Her son-in-law is the California 'governator' Arnold Schwarzenegger. Most important, she was a remarkable champion for the mentally disabled, founding the Special Olympics.

Shriver (pictured in 1963 with her youngest brother, Senator Edward Kennedy after JFK's assassination) died in hospital in Hayannis, the town on Cape Cod that is synonymous with the Kennedy dynasty. The cause of her death was not given, but it is known she had suffered more than one stroke in recent years.

Her husband, her five children and their spouses and all of her 19 grandchildren were reportedly at her bedside when she died. "Her work transformed the lives of hundreds of millions of people across the globe and they in turn are her living legacy," the family said in a statement.

Eunice was the middle child of Joseph P Kennedy and his wife Rose's nine children. Born in July 1921, she was a teenager - and a deb - when her father was the American ambassador to London at the outbreak of World War Two.

Her concern for the mentally disabled dates from her close relationship to her older sister Rosemary, who spent the majority of her life institutionalised following a lobotomy in 1941.

"I had enormous affection for Rosie," Shriver said in a National Public Radio interview in 2007. "If I never met Rosemary, never known anything about handicapped children, how would I have ever found out? Because nobody accepted them anyplace."

The Special Olympics, founded in 1968, grew from a summer day camp held in her own garden in 1962. Today, more than three million people with mental disabilities across 170 countries participate.

Although she belonged to a family of Democrats, her charity work won her friends on both sides of the political divide. In 1984 Republican President Ronald Reagan awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honour. He praised her "enormous conviction and unrelenting effort... on behalf of America's least powerful people". ·