Watch: John F. Kennedy Jr.’s Eerie Final Words to Flight Instructor Before Fatal Crash Revealed
Jacqueline Kennedy believed in the Kennedy curse.
When first her husband, President John F. Kennedy, and then five years later her brother-in-law Robert F. Kennedy, were assassinated, she thought no one in the family was safe, least of all her own two children, Caroline Kennedy and John F. Kennedy Jr.
Yet the iconic former first lady, who was only 64 when she died of non-Hodgkins lymphoma in 1994, took comfort toward the end of her life in believing her children had crossed some invisible threshold, that they were out of the woods.
But one crushing blow after another—not least John’s shocking death in 1999 and, more recently, Caroline’s 35-year-old daughter Tatiana Schlossberg‘s death from cancer—has kept talk alive of the Kennedys being plagued by, not just periodic misfortune, but the specter of death.
And members of the family have processed the ongoing conversation in their own ways.
“I’ve come to believe that it’s not what has happened to our family that has been cursed,” JFK’s sister Eunice Kennedy Shriver once said, “as much as it’s the fact that we’ve never been able to deal with it privately.”
“There’s little dignity found in living your life in so public a fashion,” she continued, per J. Randy Taraborrelli‘s 2019 book The Kennedy Heirs: John, Caroline and the New Generation, “and that’s especially true of our children. However, this burden is one we Kennedys have carried for generations. If there’s a curse, surely it’s that.”
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And yet tragedy continues to run rampant.
Saoirse Kennedy Hill, the only child of Robert Kennedy’s daughter Courtney Kennedy Hill, died on Aug. 1, 2019 of a drug overdose at the age of 22. Not the first in the family to battle substance abuse or mental health troubles, she was found unresponsive at the family compound in Hyannis Port, Mass., the dynasty’s longtime roost on Cape Cod.
Then, on April 2, 2020, mother of three Maeve Kennedy Townsend McKean, a daughter of RFK’s eldest child, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, and her 8-year-old son Gideon disappeared while canoeing on Chesapeake Bay. Their bodies were found days later.
Mike Pont/Getty Images for Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights
Maybe it’s normal odds when a family is that big, but it can feel as though the Kennedys have more than their fair share of untimely loss.
Two of Joseph Kennedy and Rose Kennedy‘s nine children didn’t make it to 30—Joseph Jr., upon whose shoulders their father’s grand designs first rested, and Kathleen “Kick” Kennedy both died in plane crashes in the 1940s—and eldest daughter Rose Marie was lobotomized at 23 and remained institutionalized until her death in 2005.
Jackie lost her husband in the most shattering way, and the debate over the circumstances of JFK’s assassination will outlive us all, let alone his widow. But in what is generally looked at as a small mercy, she died five years before her 38-year-old son and his 33-year-old wife Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy were killed in a plane crash.
Ethel Kennedy, Robert’s widow, lost her parents and a brother in plane crashes. She was pregnant with her 11th child when her husband was murdered in 1968. Son David Kennedy died of a drug overdose in 1984 and son Michael Kennedy was killed in a skiing accident in 1997.
The fact that Ethel persisted in living her life thinking that the world still had good things to offer is actually quite remarkable.
“It’s difficult when your most private moments are also your most public moments, but it’s interesting, too, because we have never really felt alone in any of it,” daughter Kerry Kennedy told Taraborrelli. “We have always felt at one with the American public, and I think they have felt the same dynamic with us.”
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It’s true, no matter how old you are, you have never lived in a world without Kennedy influence.
“When you’ve been handed incredible privilege, access and power, it’s hard not to take advantage of that,” documentary filmmaker Rory Kennedy, Robert and Ethel’s youngest child, told the New York Times in 1997. “You have to constantly police yourself. Human beings are fallible. Some of us have made bad decisions. Others of us have learned from them, painfully.”
Two years later, her cousin John and Carolyn crashed en route to her wedding in Hyannis Port.
Meanwhile, the youngest of Rose and Joe’s kids, Edward “Ted” Kennedy, had his own presidential aspirations, but then he was behind the wheel when 28-year-old Mary Jo Kopechne was killed in a July 1969 car accident on Chappaquiddick Island.
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Ted pleaded guilty to one count of leaving the scene of an accident without negligence involved and received a suspended two-month jail sentence. In a televised address, he told his constituents he would step down if they wanted him to.
Instead, he was re-elected seven more times and remained a U.S. senator until his death from brain cancer in 2009 at the age of 77.
“Yes, we have had some hard knocks,” Ted said of the Kennedy family. “But we have survived because we have heart. And heart matters.”
His daughter Kara Kennedy, who survived lung cancer in her 40s, recalled something one of her cousins once said: “We don’t have to worry about s–t. We’re the f–kin’ Kennedys.”
She added, per Taraborrelli: “I refuse to allow myself to end up just another casualty of the so-called Kennedy curse. The Kennedy curse ends here, with me.”
Kara died of a heart attack in 2011 when she was 51.
After William Kennedy Smith—son of JFK sister Jean Kennedy Smith and Stephen E. Smith—was acquitted of sexual battery in 1991, having been accused of raping a woman at the Kennedy family’s Palm Beach estate, he told reporters, per the New York Times, “I have an enormous debt to the system and to God and I have a terrific faith in both of them.”
In a roundabout way, William’s trial ended up leading authorities to re-examine the unsolved 1975 murder of 15-year-old Martha Moxley in Greenwich, Conn. It was floated (and proved unfounded) that William spent time at teh home of his cousins Thomas Skakel and Michael Skakel—nephews of Ethel Kennedy (née Skakel)—the night Martha was beaten to death with a golf club outside her family’s house nearby.
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According to Connecticut’s Hartford Courant, in a proposal for a never-published book about his own family, Michael described the Skakels as being plagued by “chronic illness, alcoholism and a repressive Catholic moral and sexual outlook,” resulting in “systemic dysfunction, at times surfacing as extreme pathology.”
He wrote, “I have come to see this dysfunction as a price of wealth and power in a society that worships romantic myth at the expense of truth.”
Their relationship with the Kennedys, cemented when Michael’s aunt Ethel married Robert, was “love-hate,” he continued. And after Martha was killed, “an even more intense level of chaos came to rule our household.”
While he and Tommy were questioned during the initial investigation into Martha’s death, Michael ended up being charged with murder in 2000.
“Michael is one of the most honest and open people I know,” his cousin Douglas Kennedy, Robert Kennedy’s 10th child, told People at the time. “He cares about people more than anybody I’ve ever met, and there is no possible way he’s involved in this.”
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Michael, then 41, was found guilty of murder in 2002 and sentenced to 20 years to life in prison.
“Like nearly everyone else who knows him well, I love Michael,” Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who credited his cousin with helping him get sober in 1983, wrote in The Atlantic in 2003. “If he were guilty, I would have testified against him. He is not.”
He continued, “Many people asked me why I would publicly defend him—a cause unlikely to enhance my own credibility. I support him not out of misguided family loyalty but because I am certain he is innocent.”
Appealing on the grounds of inadequate legal counsel, Michael was granted a new trial in 2013 and freed on a $1.2 million bond. But the paperwork outlived the case: The Connecticut Supreme Court voted 4-3 to reinstate his conviction in 2016, then vacated it in 2018.
“Martha was killed when I was 43, and in just a few weeks, a couple of weeks, I’m going to be 86,” Dorthy Moxley, Martha’s mother, told NBC News in 2018. “That means half of my life I have lived with this. So I think I can live the rest of my life with it also.”
Prosecutors announced in 2020 that they would not retry the case.
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Not one to shy away from the most controversial of personal convictions, RFK Jr. also argued his cousin’s innocence in his 2016 book Framed: Why Michael Skakel Spent a Decade in Prison for a Murder He Didn’t Commit.
And as the 50th anniversary of his father’s assassination approached in 2018, he called for a new investigation, explaining that he suspected Sirhan Sirhan—who is serving a life sentence for murder—didn’t pull the trigger. “I got to a place where I had to see Sirhan,” Robert Jr. told the Washington Post in May 2018. “I went there because I was curious and disturbed by what I had seen in the evidence.”
After looking at the autopsy report, he said, “I didn’t feel it was something I could dismiss. I was disturbed that the wrong person might have been convicted of killing my father.”
His sister Rory told The Guardian in 2018 that she still felt “pain, sorrow and sadness” over their father’s death.
“That’s part of the process, over these many years,” she explained. “I think that I’ve also, over the years, gotten tools to help me work through it in a positive way, turning those experiences into a deeper understanding of others. You see somebody else suffer and you feel that suffering.”
As for Robert Jr., who’s now married to Cheryl Hines, his second wife, Mary Richardson Kennedy, died by suicide in May 2012, a day after she was charged with drunken driving—which had occurred three days after Robert filed for divorce.
Her friend Alyssa Chapman shared with Taraborelli that Mary told her, “You’ve heard about this Kennedy curse? I finally figured out what it is: The men are dogs. The women, fools.”
And the headlines continue, with Caroline’s son Jack Schlossberg now running for congress in New York.
Robert’s sister Kerry, who in 2014 was found not guilty of driving while impaired stemming from a 2012 accident, told Taraborrelli, “There’s this special, symbiotic relationship Americans have with my family…and while I think a lot of it has to do with basic empathy, I also think it has to do with a collective human experience.”
“All people have troubles in their lives,” she explained. “If understanding how we have dealt with our own problems can in some way help people cope with their own, well, then I think that’s good. In fact, I think that’s very good, and I know my family members would agree.”
Or, as JFK Jr. said when he launched his magazine George back in 1995, “Family is family. You can pick the Kennedys apart, and I’m sure you will. But at the end of the day, we’re just people trying to understand each other as we share this incredible life we’ve all been blessed with. It’s nothing more than just that, if you really want to know the truth.”
Read on for a guide to all the Kennedy siblings and kids:
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Bachrach/Getty Images
Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images
Mikki Ansin/Getty Images
Tatiana, Jack, Rose, Edwin, Caroline (Clodagh Kilcoyne/Getty Images)
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Justin Ide
Keystone/Getty Images
Bettmann Archive/Getty Images
Bettmann
Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images
Charley Gallay/Getty Images for Netfix
Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Everett/Shutterstock
Ron Galella, Ltd./Ron Galella Collection via Getty Images
Amaryllis Fox/Instagram
Andrew Toth/Getty Images
Stewart Cook/Shutterstock
Rob Latour/Variety/Penske Media via Getty Images
Axelle/Bauer-Griffin/FilmMagic
Thomas Razzano/BFA.com/Shutterstock
Matt Baron/BEI/Shutterstock
Kick Kennedy/Instagram
Mike Coppola/Getty Images for 2022 Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Ripple of Hope Gala
Ron Galella/Ron Galella Collection via Getty Images
Ron Galella/Ron Galella Collection via Getty Images
(Original story published June 6, 2019, at 3 a.m. PT; updated on Aug. 2, 2019, at 12:40 p.m.; Nov. 1, 2019, at 12:55 p.m. PT)
