Is There a Kennedy Curse?
The Kennedy family has known great privilege and power. Often referred to as American political royalty, the name Kennedy is associated with presidents, senators, and ambassadors. It is also associated with tragic loss, including the assassinations of U.S. Pres. John F. Kennedy and his brother Sen. Robert F. Kennedy; the three separate plane crashes that killed JFK’s older brother, younger sister, and son; and in 2025, the death of JFK’s granddaughter Tatiana Schlossberg from cancer at age 35.
It was the youngest Kennedy brother, Sen. Edward (Ted) M. Kennedy, who voiced the idea of a curse in the wake of a tragedy of his own making. A week after Kennedy left the scene of a car accident in which an Robert F. Kennedy campaign aide, Mary Jo Kopechne, died, Ted Kennedy addressed his actions and wondered aloud “whether some awful curse did actually hang over all the Kennedys.”
Are the Kennedys just a large family to whom normal life sadnesses have occurred but have been amplified because of their fame? Or are the tragedies in scope and number worthy of being considered a curse? Here is a look at some of them.
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1944: Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr.
The first son of Joseph P. Kennedy and Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy was born to politics, privilege, and high expectations. His grandfather, John (“Honey Fitz”) Fitzgerald, the former mayor of Boston, told newspapers that his grandson would be the first Roman Catholic president of the United States.
Athletic, intelligent, and handsome, Joe, as he was called, was a natural leader who graduated from Harvard University in 1938. By that time his father was serving as ambassador to Great Britain. Young Joe Kennedy was a delegate to the Democratic National Convention in 1940, in what he hoped would be the beginning of his political career. Although his father did not want his sons entering the military, Joe Kennedy saw military service as a way to burnish a political resume and became a naval aviator in 1942. He flew missions in Europe in 1943 and 1944 and earned the respect of his squadron for what one member would describe as “his courage, zeal and willingness to undertake the most dangerous mission.”
On August 12, 1944, while piloting a B-17 bomber on one such mission, the explosives he was supposed to drop exploded prematurely, killing him and his copilot. He was 29 years old. Upon hearing of his older brother’s death, John F. Kennedy, himself a wounded war hero, said, “Now the burden falls on me.”
Rosemary Kennedy
The eldest daughter of Joseph P. Kennedy and Rose Kennedy, Rosemary Kennedy was born with intellectual disabilities that were never fully diagnosed. Although she could not keep up physically or intellectually with her high-achieving siblings, she was described by her mother as “an affectionate, warmly responsive, and loving girl” who was an integral part of the family for the first decades of her life.
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In 1941, in an attempt to cure Kennedy of her disability, Joseph Kennedy learned of a new, experimental, controversial surgery, and in November Rosemary Kennedy underwent a lobotomy. The surgery was a tragic failure, depriving Kennedy of her ability to speak or walk and leaving her without her vibrant personality. She lived the rest of her life at a Roman Catholic institution in Wisconsin, largely separated from her family. However, when she died in 2005, her sisters Jean, Eunice, and Patricia and brother Ted were with her.
1948: Kathleen Kennedy
Kathleen Kennedy was JFK’s younger sister and displayed such energy and enthusiasm for life, sports, and academics that she was nicknamed “Kick.” While in England with the family during her father’s ambassadorship, she met a young British aristocrat, Billy Cavendish. Despite his family’s anti-Catholic fervor and her family’s deep Roman Catholic roots, the couple married in a civil ceremony in May 1944. Four months later, less than a month after Joe Kennedy, Jr.’s death, Cavendish was killed in action. Four years later, when it appeared that Kathleen Kennedy had again found love, with Peter Wentworth-Fitzwilliam, the pair was killed in a plane crash. She was 28 years old.
1963: Baby Patrick
On August 7, 1963, first lady Jacqueline Kennedy gave birth prematurely to a son named Patrick Bouvier Kennedy. The baby developed a common complication of prematurity, hyaline membrane disease, which made breathing difficult. The president and first lady’s second son died 39 hours after being born with his father at his side. When the first lady left the hospital a week later, she and the president held hands, a rare public sign of affection from the first couple. A little more than three months later, JFK would be dead, and Jackie Kennedy would be the world’s most famous widow.
1963: Assassination of John F. Kennedy
The murder of John F. Kennedy while he rode beside his wife in a motorcade in Dallas on November 22, 1963, remains one of the most stunning moments of the 20th century. The violent death of the vital 46-year-old American president shocked the world, and over the course of the next four days, leaders would descend on Washington, D.C., for a state funeral, meticulously planned by Jackie Kennedy and modeled on that of another slain president, Abraham Lincoln.
The images of a blood-stained Jackie Kennedy standing next to Lyndon Johnson as he took the oath of office, of five-year-old Caroline Kennedy kneeling at her father’s flag-draped coffin, and of John F. Kennedy, Jr., saluting his father’s casket on his third birthday would be forever seared into the country’s collective memory.
1968: Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy
Five years after his brother’s death, in a country divided by the Vietnam War and the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., Robert F. Kennedy seemed the heir apparent to his brother’s legacy and the salve the country needed. Instead, just minutes after claiming victory in the California primary, a win that significantly boosted his chances to win the Democratic nomination for president, he was shot in the head and died the next day. He was 42 years old.
At the time of his death, his wife, Ethel Kennedy, was three months pregnant with the couple’s 11th child. Daughter Rory never knew her father. In the wake of Robert F. Kennedy’s death, Jacqueline Kennedy remarked, “If they’re killing Kennedys, then my children are targets. I want to get out of this country.” Later that year, she married Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis.
1969: Chappaquiddick
Chappaquiddick is the name of a Massachusetts island, but it has become synonymous with a scandal that left a young woman dead and Ted Kennedy’s presidential ambitions in tatters. On the evening of July 18, 1969, the U.S. senator from Massachusetts attended a cookout with workers and volunteers for Robert F. Kennedy’s campaign. One of those workers was 28-year-old Mary Jo Kopechne. Before midnight, Ted Kennedy left the party with Kopechne, offering her a ride to the ferry back to the mainland. But Kennedy crashed his car into the water; he survived but Kopechne drowned, and Kennedy failed to report the crash for some 10 hours. It was in describing his deeply controversial actions on that night that Kennedy referenced the Kennedy curse. He would continue to serve in the Senate until his death in 2009. In 1980 Kennedy ran for president but lost the Democratic nomination to Jimmy Carter.
1984, 1997: Deaths of Robert F. Kennedy’s sons
Ethel Kennedy lost two of her children after the death of Robert F. Kennedy. In 1984 David Kennedy, who was 13 at the time of his father’s assassination, died of a drug overdose after having been treated for heroin and alcohol addiction. He was 28 years old.
On New Year’s Eve 1997, Michael Kennedy died after he hit a tree while skiing in Colorado on a family trip. He was 39 years old.
1999: John F. Kennedy, Jr.
On the night of July 16, 1999, John F. Kennedy, Jr., his wife, Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, and her sister Lauren Bessette were killed off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, when the plane that John F. Kennedy, Jr., was piloting crashed. In the wake of the accident, questions were raised about whether Kennedy’s relative inexperience as a pilot played a role in the crash. The official National Transportation Safety Board investigation found that Kennedy became disoriented because of haze and darkness. Kennedy was 38 at the time of his death; his wife was 33; and her sister was 34.
Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis had died of cancer in 1994 at the age of 64, sparing her the loss of her only son.
2020: Maeve Kennedy Townsend McKean and her son Gideon
The 40-year-old granddaughter of Robert F. Kennedy and her eight-year-old son drowned in a canoeing accident on the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland when the pair went after a ball that had landed in the water and were swept away.
2025: Tatiana Schlossberg
In 2025 Tatiana Schlossberg, the daughter of Caroline Kennedy and JFK’s granddaughter, announced in an essay in The New Yorker that she had terminal cancer. The 35-year-old was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia, a rare blood cancer, hours after giving birth to her second child in 2024. In the essay, she wrote, “For my whole life, I have tried to be good,” because of all the pain her mother had endured. “Now I have added a new tragedy to her life, to our family’s life, and there’s nothing I can do to stop it.”
Schlossberg’s essay was published on November 22, 2025, the 62nd anniversary of JFK’s assassination. She died five weeks later, on December 30, 2025. She was married and the mother of two children.