Washington  - California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and his wife Maria Shriver were at the bedside of Eunice Kennedy Shriver, 88, on Friday at a hospital in Massachusetts, a newspaper reported Friday.

Eunice Shriver, the mother of Maria Shriver, is the sister of the assassinated president John F Kennedy and Senator Edward "Ted" Kennedy, who is suffering from brain cancer.

She was hospitalized on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, near the Kennedy family compound.

Her daughter, Maria, a member of the country's most prestigious family of Democrats, the Kennedys, was a well-known television reporter who married the Republican Schwarzenegger. Eunice Shriver campaigned for her son-in-law in the gubernatorial race.

Shriver is best known for her work in founding the Special Olympics for handicapped athletes. Her influence on her brother, the former president, is credited with the push in 1963 to pass the first law in US history to protect and support the rights of the mentally disabled.

Shriver, a trained sociologist and lawyer, was inspired to become an advocate for children and adults who suffered mental handicaps by the experiences of her own older sister, Rosemary Kennedy.

Although the sister's history of mental illness is unclear, her father, Joseph Kennedy, sent her for the relatively new and since discontinued procedure of a prefrontal lobotomy when she was only 23, in 1941. The cutting away of part of her brain reduced her to severe retardation.

Shriver's sister Rosemary was kept in an institution and out of the public eye until her situation became public in 1960, as her brother John was running for president. She died in 2005 at age 86. (dpa)