The Tragic Kennedy Family History Behind the “Kennedy Curse”

“Tragedy revisits the Kennedys,” declared The New York Times, reflecting on a family marked by “unfinished journeys” and “magnetic personalities” whose lives ended far too soon.

The editorial appeared in July 1999, after John F Kennedy Jr, his wife Carolyn Bessette, and her sister Lauren died when the small plane Kennedy was piloting plunged into the Atlantic Ocean near Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts.

Coming from the famously restrained “Gray Lady,” the language was striking. It also fed a question that has followed the Kennedy family for generations: could the repeated tragedies surrounding America’s most prominent political dynasty really amount to a curse?

The Kennedys have endured an extraordinary succession of loss. Plane crashes, fatal accidents, drug overdoses and political assassinations have repeatedly cut short the lives of family members and left an indelible mark on the dynasty’s history.

The Times’ tribute to President John F Kennedy’s only son and his wife came before several more devastating episodes. In 2011, Kara Kennedy, the daughter of Ted Kennedy, died of a heart attack. A year later, Mary Richardson Kennedy, the former wife of Robert F Kennedy Jr, died by suicide.

Further grief followed in 2019, when Saoirse Kennedy Hill, Robert F Kennedy’s granddaughter, died from an accidental drug overdose. The following year, another RFK grandchild, Maeve Kennedy McKean, and her eight-year-old son, Gideon, drowned during a brief canoe trip on Chesapeake Bay.

Late last year, Tatiana Schlossberg, the granddaughter of JFK, died from cancer at the age of 35.

Now the family is mourning another loss. Kyle Kennedy, 42, died at her home in Westwood, Massachusetts, on September 21.

The Kennedy family is enormous. Robert and Ethel Kennedy had 11 children and 34 grandchildren, but the sheer number of premature deaths has been so unsettling that some relatives have reportedly wondered whether coincidence alone can explain the pattern.

After Ted Kennedy survived a 1964 plane crash, his wife Joan reportedly told her sister-in-law Jackie, the widowed former First Lady, that the family was cursed. Ted suffered three crushed vertebrae, broken ribs and a punctured lung in the accident, which occurred a year after the assassination of his brother, President John F Kennedy.

“Look at everything that has happened. Can we really dismiss it all as coincidence?” Joan was reported to have asked Jackie.

The circumstances surrounding Kyle’s death have not been disclosed, and authorities are still investigating. A local funeral home’s online obituary said only that the mother of two had died “peacefully.”

Kyle was the daughter of Michael Kennedy and Denise Gifford, whose father was NFL great Frank Gifford. She was also the niece of Robert F Kennedy Jr, the Health and Human Services Secretary. Kyle is survived by her two children, Conor, 12, and Declan, ten, whom she had with her former husband, Liam Kerr. Conor’s twin sister, Josie, died two days after birth.

Kyle was just 13 when her father, Michael, died in 1997. He struck a tree while taking part in a family game of “ski football” in Aspen, Colorado, in which participants tossed a ball between them as they skied.

She later became a teacher and generally avoided the intense public attention often associated with the Kennedy name. One unusual moment in the spotlight came in 2012, when her cousin Conor Kennedy reportedly arrived at her wedding with his then-girlfriend, Taylor Swift. Swift maintained that she had been invited and said Kyle had thanked her for attending.

Kyle, a committed long-distance runner, suffered a serious spinal cord injury in 2020 that left her with permanent paralysis. Although the cause was never made public, she went on to advocate for people living with disabilities.

According to her obituary, ‘the years that followed [her injury] brought struggles but Kyle fought to maintain her dry wit and determination through it all, trying to be the best possible mother to her sons and caring for her two beloved, ill-behaved Wheaten terriers.’ 

Having big families has long been a strong tradition within the Roman Catholic family, inevitably increasing the odds that some of them will meet with fatal mishaps.

However, the trend in the Kennedy family surely goes way beyond the laws of probability.

Family patriarch, businessman, ambassador and serial philanderer Joseph Kennedy, had nine children with wife Rose.

The eldest, Joseph Jr, died in 1944 when his B-24 Liberator bomber plane, packed with high explosives, blew up over East Anglia in the UK while flying towards a target in Nazi-occupied France during World War II.

Kathleen, nicknamed ‘Kick,’ was the favorite daughter of Joseph Sr and Rose although she certainly tested their love in 1944 when she married a Protestant, albeit a British aristocrat – William ‘Billy’ Cavendish, the Marquess of Hartington.

Just five weeks later, he was killed by a sniper’s bullet while serving in the British Army in France.

Five years on, the Dowager Marchioness of Hartington – as she was titled – fell for another British nobleman, the womanizing Earl Fitzwilliam.

He was another Anglican but, confident she could win over her staunchly Catholic parents, Kick, then 28, arranged to fly with Fitzwilliam to see her father in France in 1948. Their plane, a chartered De Havilland Dove, stopped to refuel in Paris but, after a long lunch, the couple discovered that bad weather had set in.

Their pilot warned it was too dangerous to fly but Kick – used to getting her own way and, on this occasion, also a little drunk – insisted they go on.

The following day, the wreckage of their plane was found in France’s Rhone-Alpes region. Everyone on board was dead and Kick’s body had to be taken down a mountainside to the nearest village on an ox cart.

In 1955, George and Ann Skakel – the parents of Ethel, wife of Robert F Kennedy – were both killed in a plane crash in Oklahoma. The following year, John F Kennedy’s daughter, Arabella, died at birth. Her baby brother, Patrick, died from breathing difficulties two days after his premature birth in 1963.

JFK himself was the next family casualty just three months later. Jack, who had been injured during the war during a torpedo boat raid in the Pacific, was shot in 1963 by Lee Harvey Oswald as he was riding in a presidential motorcade in Dallas, an assassination that shocked the world and is still furiously debated by armchair detectives and conspiracy theorists. 

Outside the hospital where JFK was taken, brother Ted announced that his parents had now lost their first four children.

That, however, was not true. Their oldest daughter, Rose Marie, known to everyone as Rosemary or Rosie, was not dead as her family claimed.

Born in 1918, she had been a difficult birth which left her with brain damage and learning difficulties. Her parents, intent on producing a family of glamorous, high-achievers, saw her as ‘defective’ and kept her at home.

By 1940, when she was 22, her behavior had become irritable, sometimes violent, while her signs of unsatisfied sexual desire made her parents worry she might end up becoming pregnant.

When she started sneaking out at night from the convent school she attended in Washington DC, her father, terrified of family scandal, resorted to drastic measures and, in late 1941, had her lobotomized. The operation was botched, leaving Rosemary speechless and crippled. With therapy, she eventually learned to walk and use one arm.

Rosemary, who had the mental capacity of a toddler, was hidden out of sight from the public for the rest of her life, until her death at the age of 86 in 2005.

Fifty-seven of those years were spent being cared for by nuns at St Coletta’s convent, a school for ‘exceptional children’ in Jefferson, Wisconsin.

The Hitler-admiring Joe Kennedy Sr once remarked with the cold-heartedness for which he was infamous: ‘I don’t know what it is that makes eight children shine like a dollar and another one dull. I guess it’s the hand of God.’

In 1968, a year before his death, the hand of God, or more precisely Palestinian Sirhan Sirhan, deprived Joe of yet another child by shooting dead Senator Robert F Kennedy, aged 42, as he was campaigning for the US presidency in a Los Angeles hotel.

If there was a Kennedy ‘curse,’ it didn’t only doom members of the family but sometimes those who were unlucky enough to cross their path. 

The most famous of these was surely Mary Jo Kopechne, a 28-year-old worker in RFK’s campaign team who made the fatal mistake of accepting a lift from her boss’s brother, Ted, after a party on Chappaquiddick Island, Massachusetts, in July 1969.

Insisting on driving despite being drunk, Ted lost control of his car as he was driving over a bridge and pitched it into a tidal channel. He managed to escape from the overturned car and says he dived repeatedly to try to save his passenger.

However, he swam to shore and left the scene, only reporting the accident the following morning, by which time Kopechne’s body had already been recovered from the car. Critics believe Ted delayed reporting the crash, possibly condemning her to drown, because he needed to sober up before he called the police.

Although he won re-election to the Senate and kept his seat until 2009, Kennedy’s political career was permanently besmirched – he gave up trying to run for the presidency – by the controversy.

In 1974, another woman associated with the Kennedys – Athalia Lindsley, a model and dancer who had dated Joseph Jr until his death in 1944 – was murdered in her home in Florida. A neighbor with whom she had feuded was charged with her killing but acquitted, leaving the case officially unsolved.

The next Kennedy to pass prematurely was David, son of RFK, who died of a drug overdose in Palm Beach, Florida, in 1984. He was 28 and had led a troubled life since his father’s assassination, becoming addicted to heroin and alcohol.

At the age of 13, he had been watching television alone in a Los Angeles hotel room and saw his father being fatally shot as he celebrated his victory in the California Democratic Presidential primary.

At a family outing in Malibu the previous day, the boy had got into trouble while swimming in the sea but was rescued from an undertow by his father.

But it was in 1999 that the catastrophe which well and truly put the Kennedy curse back in the headlines occurred.

Fifty one years after his great aunt, Kick, the dowager marchioness, defied a pilot’s advice that the weather was too bad to fly, 38-year-old JFK’s only son John F Kennedy Jr did the same and ignored two experienced flyers who warned him against trying to fly his single-engine Piper Saratoga plane on a short flight from New Jersey to Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts so he, his wife Carolyn Bessette and her sister Lauren could attend a friend’s cocktail party.

John Jr, a keen but inexperienced aviator who didn’t help matters by being on crutches after breaking his ankle in a paragliding accident (he was using the painkiller Vicodin) made a serious piloting error within 11 minutes of take-off when he crossed the path of a passenger jet. 

Less than an hour later, about seven miles out from Martha’s Vineyard, the Piper went into a spin which pilots call a ‘graveyard spiral.’ Out of control for up to 30 seconds, the small aircraft fell from 2,200ft and crashed into the sea, killing all three on board.

Many of the Kennedy deaths have clearly been down to nothing more than terribly bad luck but others follow a tradition of dangerously risky behavior.

According to biographer Edward Klein, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, widow of JFK, believed that thrill-seeking behavior may have owed more to genetics than the supernatural and after her attention was drawn to a ground-breaking 1993 report by molecular geneticists.

The scientists announced that they had discovered a variant of the gene that makes the protein receptor for dopamine, the brain’s chemical messenger, in the portion of the brain that controls personality.

Klein said Jackie told him that several things interested her about the discovery. Fifty percent of people with Attention Deficit Disorder, like her son John, were found to have the rare variant of the DRD4 7R gene.

People who abuse alcohol and drugs, of whom the Kennedy family has had more than its share, are also more likely to possess the gene than those who are not addicted to alcohol and drugs. 

Most important of all, Jackie was fascinated by the nickname the scientists gave to the gene. They called it the ‘thrill-seeking gene.’

Dr Robert Moyzis, professor of molecular genetics at the University of California at Irvine, told Klein: ‘The best evidence that the gene DRD4 7R probably runs in the Kennedy family is in the consistent thrill-seeking behavior of its members.

‘Individuals with this gene are always out on the edge, taking more chances than most other people… And since, over the years, they’ve enjoyed uncommon success, that behavior has become reinforced and part of their family culture.

‘That is why so many spectacular things happen to them. But it’s also why they are always setting themselves up for a big fall.’