Kennedy curse

• 1. Introduction

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  The Kennedy curse got its name from a question asked on television. A week after an accident on Chappaquiddick Island, Senator Ted Kennedy gave a televised statement. In it he said he wondered whether some awful curse did actually hang over all the Kennedys.

  He was speaking about one family, but the idea has since grown far beyond him. The phrase now gathers up assassinations, plane crashes, drownings, illnesses and scandals. Most of it clusters around the descendants of the businessman Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. Some of it touches in-laws, family friends and associates.

  The list is long, and it runs across more than eighty years. Which events truly belong on it? What do the entries have in common, and what do they not? And is a curse the right word for any of it?

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• 2. Wings and Wreckage

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  On the 12th of August 1944, Joseph P. Kennedy Jr., brother of John F. Kennedy, was flying a military aircraft when it exploded over East Suffolk, England. It was the first of many deaths in the air.

  Four years later, on the 13th of May 1948, his sister Kathleen, known as Kick, died in a crash near Saint-Bauzile, France. Her lover Peter Wentworth-Fitzwilliam, the 8th Earl Fitzwilliam, died with her. So did the pilot Peter Townsend and the navigator Arthur Freeman.

  The marriage connections suffered too. On the 3rd of October 1955, George and Ann Skakel, the parents of Ethel Kennedy, were both killed in a crash in Union City, Oklahoma. Their daughter's fourth child, David, had been born only three months earlier. Ethel's brother George Skakel Jr. died in a single-engine plane crash in Idaho on the 23rd of September 1966. He was 46.

  Ted Kennedy survived his own crash on the 19th of June 1964. His plane was heading to a Democratic State Convention in Springfield when it came down in an apple orchard near Southampton, Massachusetts. The pilot and one of the senator's aides were killed. Fellow senator Birch Bayh, a passenger, pulled Kennedy from the wreckage. Kennedy then spent five months in hospital with a broken back, a punctured lung, broken ribs and internal bleeding. Robert F. Kennedy told his aide Ed Guthman: "Somebody up there doesn't like us."

  On the 23rd of January 1973, Alexander Onassis, stepson of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, died in hospital. He was 24, and he had been injured in an air crash at Hellinikon International Airport.

  The most widely remembered crash came on the 16th of July 1999. John F. Kennedy Jr. was at the controls of a plane that went down off the coast of Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts. His wife, Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, and her sister Lauren Bessette died with him.

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• 3. Gunfire and Bombs

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  In Dallas, Texas, on the 22nd of November 1963, John F. Kennedy, the 35th president of the United States, was assassinated while riding in a presidential limousine.

  Less than five years later, his brother Robert F. Kennedy was a U.S. senator and a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination. He had just won the California primary when he was shot in Los Angeles that night. He died of his wounds on the 6th of June 1968.

  Violence also reached people close to the family. Athalia Ponsell Lindsley had dated Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. until his death. She was murdered at her home on the 23rd of January 1974.

  On the 23rd of October 1975, a bomb went off under a car in London. The car belonged to the member of Parliament Hugh Fraser, who was hosting Caroline Kennedy. The two were about to drive to her art class but had not yet stepped outside. The blast killed a passerby instead. Gordon Hamilton Fairley, a prominent cancer scientist, died along with his dog as they walked nearby.

  Decades later, on the 25th of April 2026, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. attended the White House correspondents dinner as Health and Human Services secretary. His wife, Cheryl Hines, was with him. A shooting took place at the event, and everyone present, including the couple, was unharmed.

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• 4. Scandal and Crashes

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  A bridge on Chappaquiddick Island, Massachusetts, was the scene on the 18th of July 1969 of an accident that Ted Kennedy caused by driving his car off it. His passenger, 28-year-old Mary Jo Kopechne, drowned. Kennedy did not tell the police until the next morning. He later pleaded guilty to leaving the scene of an accident.

  In Nantucket on the 13th of August 1973, Joseph P. Kennedy II was driving a Jeep when it crashed. His passenger Pam Kelley was left paralyzed. His brother David A. Kennedy, also aboard, was injured.

  On the 1st of April 1991, William Kennedy Smith was arrested at the family estate in Palm Beach, Florida. He was charged with raping a young woman. The trial drew extensive media coverage, and Smith was acquitted.

  At 2:45 a.m. on the 4th of May 2006, Congressman Patrick J. Kennedy crashed his car into a barricade on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. He was intoxicated. He afterward disclosed an addiction to the prescription drugs Ambien and Phenergan. He pleaded guilty to driving under the influence of prescription drugs, and received one year of probation and a $350 fine.

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• 5. Rosemary's Story

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  By November 1941, Rosemary Kennedy was 23 and struggled to read and write. She also had mood swings, seizures and violent outbursts. At her birth, oxygen had been cut off while her mother and a nurse waited for the doctor to arrive.

  As she grew older she became more rebellious, and the family feared she would do something to damage the Kennedy reputation. Her father, Joseph Kennedy, took matters into his own hands. He secretly arranged for her to undergo a prefrontal lobotomy. Some people then considered the procedure a promising treatment for mental illness. It has since been discredited.

  The operation did not help her. It left Rosemary mentally and physically incapacitated. This entry stands apart from the rest of the list, because the harm came from a decision her father made.

  She lived in seclusion, institutionalized in rural Wisconsin, until she died in 2005. For most of that time her family kept their distance. Her sister Eunice Kennedy Shriver grew close to her later in life. Eunice went on to found the Special Olympics and the Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Foundation, which supports research into developmental and intellectual disabilities.

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• 6. Illness and Early Loss

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  On the 23rd of August 1956, Arabella Kennedy, daughter of John F. Kennedy, died at birth. Seven years later, her brother Patrick Bouvier Kennedy was born prematurely at Otis Air Force Base, Massachusetts, on the 7th of August 1963. He died of infant respiratory distress syndrome on the 9th of August.

  Cancer struck the next generation on the 17th of November 1973. Edward M. Kennedy Jr. was 12 when surgeons amputated his right leg because of bone cancer. He then went through an experimental drug treatment that lasted two years.

  Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, the widow of John F. Kennedy, died on the 19th of May 1994. Doctors had found her lymphoma during a hospital visit after she fell from a horse.

  Heart attacks took two more. Kara Anne Kennedy, daughter of Ted Kennedy, died at a health club in Washington, DC, on the 16th of September 2011. She was 51. Christopher Kennedy Lawford, son of Patricia Kennedy Lawford, had a medical emergency at a yoga studio in Vancouver, Canada. He died on the 4th of September 2018, aged 63.

  Tatiana Schlossberg, a granddaughter of John F. Kennedy, announced her acute myeloid leukemia diagnosis in the New Yorker. She wrote: "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 died on the 30th of December 2025, at 35, a month after that essay appeared.

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• 7. Sudden Losses

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  A hotel room in Palm Beach, Florida, was where David A. Kennedy, son of Robert F. Kennedy, died of a drug overdose on the 25th of April 1984.

  On the 31st of December 1997, another of Robert's sons, Michael LeMoyne Kennedy, died in Aspen, Colorado. He was skiing when he hit a tree.

  Mary Richardson Kennedy, wife of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., died by suicide on the grounds of her home in Bedford, New York, on the 16th of May 2012.

  The Kennedy Compound in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, was where Saoirse Kennedy Hill, a granddaughter of Robert F. Kennedy, died of an accidental drug overdose on the 1st of August 2019.

  On the 2nd of April 2020, another of Robert's granddaughters, Maeve Kennedy McKean, set out on a short canoe trip in Chesapeake Bay. With her was her eight-year-old son, Gideon Joseph Kennedy McKean. They disappeared, and their bodies were recovered later that week. Autopsies found that both had drowned accidentally in the turbulent, cold water.

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• 8. Beyond the Bloodline

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  Within a month of Joseph P. Kennedy Jr.'s death, another loss reached the family by marriage. On the 9th of September 1944, William Cavendish, the Marquess of Hartington, was shot by a German sniper near Heppen, Belgium. He was leading his company, and he was Kathleen Kennedy's newlywed husband.

  The Skakel family, Ethel Kennedy's relatives, appear again and again. John Joseph Dowdle III, husband of Ethel's sister Georgeann, died at 39 on the 11th of November 1957. The cause is unknown. Less than a year after George Skakel Jr. died, his widow Joan Patricia Skakel choked on a piece of meat at dinner at home in Greenwich, Connecticut. She was 39. Anne Elizabeth Reynolds Skakel, wife of Ethel's brother Rushton, died of cancer at 41 on the 4th of March 1973.

  Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis's sister Lee Radziwiłł lost people too. Her ex-husband Michael Temple Canfield died of a heart attack on a BOAC flight from New York to London on the 20th of December 1969. He was 43. Her son Anthony Radziwiłł died at 40 on the 10th of August 1999, after a ten-year fight with cancer.

  Skeptics point to the size of this circle. They argue that a large extended family can easily experience this many similar events across several generations.

  The widest edge of the list is the 11th of September 2001. Robert Speisman, son-in-law of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis's longtime companion Maurice Tempelsman, was a passenger on American Airlines Flight 77 when it crashed into the Pentagon.

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