The death of John F. Kennedy’s granddaughter, Tatiana Schlossberg, at 35 on Tuesday, has reignited speculation about the so-called “Kennedy curse”—the rumored explanation for the tragedies that have long plagued America’s most famous political dynasty.
The young mother of two drew a global outpouring of grief after revealing last month in an emotional New Yorker essay that she had been diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia and was given just one year to live.
Schlossberg, an environmental journalist, wrote that her grief was compounded by her sympathy for her mother, Caroline Kennedy. “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 wrote on Nov. 22, 62 years to the day of her grandfather’s assassination in 1963.
But former President Kennedy’s killing was not the family’s first devastation.
1944: On Aug. 12, John F. Kennedy’s eldest sibling, Joseph P. Kennedy Jr., was killed at 29 in a plane crash while carrying out a secret bombing mission for the United States Navy during World War II. “His worldly success was so assured and inevitable that his death seems to have cut into the natural order of things,” JFK wrote of his older brother after his passing.
1948: Four years later, another Kennedy child, Kathleen “Kick” Kennedy, 28, was killed in a plane crash en route from Paris to the French Riviera. The second daughter and fourth child of Joseph and Rose Kennedy reportedly died alongside her married lover, as well as the plane’s pilot and navigator.
Additionally, patriarch Joseph Kennedy was responsible for another devastation that loomed over the family after he ordered his eldest daughter, Rosemary Kennedy, to undergo a lobotomy at age 23. The procedure left her permanently disabled, and she was quietly institutionalized in the 1940s.
1963: JFK and Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy’s youngest child, Patrick Bouvier Kennedy, was born prematurely and died two days later from what is now known as respiratory distress syndrome (RDS). Patrick was the first baby born to a sitting president in more than a century, The New York Times reported.
1963: That same year, the Kennedys’ most notorious tragedy struck, shaking the world along with them: JFK was fatally shot in the neck and head while riding in a presidential motorcade in Dallas, Texas.
1968: JFK’s younger brother, Robert F. Kennedy, met a similarly violent fate. The former senator and attorney general, who had announced his presidential campaign on March 16, was fatally shot in Los Angeles less than three months later, after delivering a victory speech following his win in the California primary.
1969: Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy, the youngest of the nine Kennedy siblings, drove his black Oldsmobile off a bridge on Chappaquiddick Island in his home state, killing political aide Mary Jo Kopechne, 28, whose body was found in the submerged car the following day. Kennedy waited roughly 10 hours before alerting authorities and ultimately received what critics described as a slap on the wrist. He pleaded guilty to “leaving the scene of an accident after causing personal injury without making himself known,” and was given a two-month suspended sentence.
1984: David Kennedy, RFK’s son and brother of current Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., died of a drug overdose at a hotel in Palm Beach, Florida—just months after RFK Jr. reportedly got clean. David was 28.
1997: RFK and Ethel Kennedy’s sixth child, Michael Kennedy, died on Dec. 31 at age 39 in a skiing accident in Aspen, Colorado.
1999: On July 16, John F. Kennedy Jr., the son of JFK and Jacqueline Kennedy, died at 38 when the plane he was piloting crashed, killing him, his wife Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, and her older sister, Lauren Bessette. The couple was en route to Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, to attend the wedding of JFK Jr.’s cousin Rory Kennedy.
2011: Ted Kennedy’s oldest child, Kara Kennedy, died on Sept. 17 at age 51 after suffering a heart attack following a workout class at a Washington, D.C.–area health club, the New York Times reported.
2012: Mary Richardson Kennedy, RFK Jr.’s estranged wife, died by suicide on May 16 in her home in Bedford, New York, amid the fallout from their contentious divorce.
2019: Saoirse Kennedy Hill, RFK’s granddaughter, died from an accidental drug overdose at the family’s compound in Hyannis Port on Aug. 1. She was 22.
2020: RFK’s granddaughter, Maeve Kennedy McKean, 40, and her 8-year-old son, Gideon, died in a canoeing accident on April 2.
