WASHINGTON — Kara Kennedy, the oldest child of the late Sen. Edward Kennedy, died at a Washington, D.C.-area health club, her brother said Saturday. She was 51.
Patrick Kennedy, a former congressman from Rhode Island, said his sister died Friday.
"She's with Dad," Patrick Kennedy said. Their father died in 2009 at age 77 after battling a brain tumor.
Kara Kennedy had herself battled lung cancer: In 2003, doctors removed a malignant tumor. Patrick Kennedy said his sister loved to exercise, but he thinks her cancer treatment "took quite a toll on her and weakened her physically."
"Her heart gave out," he said.
The Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate said in a news release that Ms. Kennedy, a board member for the institute, was a filmmaker and television producer who produced several videos for Very Special Arts, an organization founded by her aunt Jean Kennedy Smith.
She also served as a director emeritus and national trustee of the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation.
Kara Kennedy was the oldest of three children. She and her brother Edward Kennedy Jr. helped run their father's U.S. Senate campaign in 1988.
In 1990, Ms. Kennedy married Michael Allen. The couple had a son and daughter, both now in their teens.
She was born in 1960 as her father campaigned for his brother, John F. Kennedy, during the presidential primaries.
In an April article she wrote for The Boston Globe Magazine, Ms. Kennedy recalled the lessons her father taught his children.
She wrote of family trips in the summer when the late senator would lead his children on explorations of historic battlefields and buildings, trips she said taught her that one person can make a difference.
"What mattered to my father was not the scale of an accomplishment, but that we did our share to make the world better," she wrote. "That we learned we were part of something larger than ourselves."
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