The Kennedy Curse: America’s Most Haunted Family Struck by Tragedy Once Again

For more than eight decades, America’s most glamorous political dynasty has been shadowed by death, scandal, and heartbreak. Now, with the passing of Tatiana Schlossberg—the 35-year-old granddaughter of President John F. Kennedy—the so-called “Kennedy curse” has once again reared its head.

Tatiana, the daughter of Caroline Kennedy and environmental journalist for The New York Times, died Tuesday following a battle with acute myeloid leukemia. Her death comes just five weeks after revealing in a gut-wrenching New Yorker essay that she had been given a year to live.

“I have added a new tragedy to my mother’s life, to our family’s life, and there’s nothing I can do to stop it,” she wrote in the piece—published on November 22, the anniversary of her grandfather’s assassination.

Family friends described her as “brilliant and kind,” adding that she carried the “burden of the Kennedy name with grace.”

The Kennedy saga is one of power, privilege, and repeated devastation—so much so that Americans have long whispered about a family curse.

It began in 1944, when Joseph P. Kennedy Jr., the family’s golden boy and heir apparent, died at 29 in a World War II plane explosion over England. “His worldly success was so assured that his death seemed to violate nature itself,” his younger brother John later wrote.

Just four years later, Kathleen “Kick” Kennedy, 28, was killed when her private plane crashed in the French countryside. Her lover, the married Earl Fitzwilliam, perished beside her.

In a quieter but equally haunting family tragedy, patriarch Joseph Sr. ordered a lobotomy for his daughter Rosemary in 1941. The surgery left her incapacitated for life—a dark secret that haunted the Kennedys for decades.

The world still remembers November 22, 1963, when President John F. Kennedy was gunned down in Dallas. Millions watched as his 3-year-old son, John Jr., saluted his father’s coffin in what became one of the most iconic images of American grief.

Only five years later, the curse struck again. Senator Robert F. Kennedy, who had launched his own presidential campaign, was assassinated in Los Angeles moments after celebrating his California primary victory. His funeral train to Washington, D.C., was lined with thousands of mourners sobbing and waving farewell signs that read “Goodbye Bobby.”

Ted Kennedy, the last surviving brother, nearly joined the list in 1969 when his car plunged off a bridge at Chappaquiddick Island, killing 28-year-old campaign aide Mary Jo Kopechne. Ted escaped but failed to report the crash for hours, derailing his own presidential ambitions.

The tragedies didn’t end with the brothers.

David Kennedy, one of Robert’s 11 children, died of a drug overdose at 28 in a Palm Beach hotel in 1984. Michael Kennedy died in a freak skiing accident in Aspen on New Year’s Eve 1997. Two years later, America’s prince, John F. Kennedy Jr., perished in a plane crash off Martha’s Vineyard alongside his wife Carolyn and her sister Lauren.

In 2011, Ted Kennedy’s daughter, Kara, collapsed and died after a workout. A year later, Robert Kennedy Jr.’s estranged wife, Mary, took her own life amid their bitter divorce.

By 2019, tragedy had come for yet another generation. Saoirse Kennedy Hill, Robert’s granddaughter, died from an accidental overdose at the family’s fabled Hyannis Port compound—the same seaside estate that once symbolized Camelot.

And in 2020, Robert’s granddaughter Maeve Kennedy McKean and her 8-year-old son Gideon drowned in a canoeing accident in Maryland.

From warplanes to assassinations, overdoses to drownings, the Kennedy family’s story reads like a Greek tragedy—a dynasty touched by greatness and undone by grief.

“The Kennedys were never ordinary,” said historian Larry Sabato. “They embodied the best and worst of the American dream—ambition, loss, and the terrible price of fame.”

Now, with Tatiana’s death, another young life has been added to the long list of Kennedy souls lost too soon.

Whether cursed or simply human, the family that once defined American hope continues to remind the world how fragile even Camelot can be.