I interviewed Ethel Kennedy at her historic home in the Kennedy Compound on Cape Cod in 2005. I was a staff writer for the now defunct Inside Cape Cod magazine and was chosen by my editor to discuss Ethel’s upcoming golf benefit that funds the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Center, an organization created by the matriarch in 1968 to carry on Senator Kennedy’s legacy.

On a blustery fall day, I pulled up to the white clapboard house, aware that I had driven past the boundary where legend was made, where the storied characters of Camelot had tossed footballs, sailed mythical schooners, and hunkered down on cold winter nights, burning the midnight oil to run campaigns, or to come to grips with tragedies.

When I got out of my car, Ethel’s assistant was chasing a puppy across the green lawn. The puppy had been bitten by a rabid raccoon and had a plastic cone around its neck to prevent him from licking his wound. The chaotic scene reminded me of quips I had read about Ethel in young motherhood: the Kennedy home in Virginia was a place of frenetic activity, with eleven kids running around unsupervised, sea lions swimming in the family pool, and Robert Kennedy’s sons pitching eggs off the roof at important visitors coming up the walk. History has made it clear that Ethel is a unique individual, one that ran her home as she saw fit and without pressure to acquiesce to the more conventional standards of motherhood.

We spent several hours together in the Cape Cod cottage where she lives in the summers months, one of six cottages that make up the Compound along the shores of the Atlantic Ocean in Hyannis Port. The Kennedy Compound is forever woven into the tapestry of the American Boomer memory, but when I asked my nineteen-year old nephew about it, he said he’d never heard of it.

My conversation with Ethel swam on the surface of polite conversation. I had been given a list from my editor of subjects to avoid, and the resulting interview was more about her upcoming golf event, the pride she felt for her children, and the role of the grandmother in a child’s life. We did not speak of her husband’s tragic death, or the deaths of two of her children. We did not speak of politics, although it would have made for a much safer conversation in 2005. Still, I had respect for the interview process she had cultivated over the course of her life and was intimately aware that she was a woman who changed history and I was a woman who simply lived it. I did not serve hardball questions. I did not stray from the script. But neither was I a star struck journalist, intimidated by her place in history. What I left with that day was the feeling of Ethel’s warm generosity. She had treated me with kindness and respect because I was a woman and a mother sitting next to her on the couch in her living room.

My understanding of how the world works was in the soft stage of its evolution at the time of the interview. I had come to believe that some of the stories repeated about politics and history throughout my lifetime deserved much more rigorous discourse. In 1997, in my work as a reporter and news broadcaster at a small but iconic southeastern Massachusetts radio station, I had felt the first inkling of great change on the horizon. The tone of the news coming off the wire was noticeably different–much more liberal leaning. Local governments seemed to be flexing their muscles more on environmental policy–like cancelling the Fourth of July fireworks to accommodate one pair of nesting piping plover birds on a Cape Cod beach. There was a rumbling in the distance, hard to identify, but I heard it, as did a small group of others, including my news director, who brought years of experience, and a finely-honed intuition to his work.

I’m enamored with Robert Kennedy Jr, and not because I sat and chatted with his mother one day long ago, but because for the first time in my life a Kennedy is saying the hard things out loud. He’s talking about the increasing ill health of Americans, our concerns over childhood vaccinations, and yes, he’s even discussing his doubts about the official story handed to us in regard to the assassinations of his father and uncle.

The reward from his family has been a stonewall of silence. But that’s what happens to the brave. History has always treated the brave this way.