Laura Wright 
Few American families have experienced the combination of extraordinary success and extraordinary tragedy associated with the Kennedys.
They produced a president, senators, ambassadors, military heroes, activists, and public servants. Their wealth and political influence led journalists to describe them as something approaching American royalty.
But alongside the privilege came an astonishing succession of premature deaths, assassinations, accidents, illnesses, scandals, and personal tragedies.
Two brothers were assassinated.
Two members of the next generation died in airplane crashes.
Another died in a skiing accident.
Others died from drug overdoses or suicide.
Still more survived catastrophic accidents that killed or permanently injured others.
Eventually, people began speaking of a Kennedy curse.
There is no reason to believe that a supernatural force follows the Kennedy family. But when the tragedies are placed together, it is easy to understand why the legend developed. The history is remarkable enough without inventing a curse.
1941: Rosemary Kennedy
Rose Marie “Rosemary” Kennedy was the eldest daughter of Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. and Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy.
Rosemary experienced intellectual and developmental difficulties as well as behavioral problems. In 1941, when she was 23, her father authorized a prefrontal lobotomy.
The procedure was disastrous.
Rather than improving Rosemary’s condition, the operation left her profoundly disabled. She lost much of her ability to speak and walk and required extensive care for the remainder of her life.
She was eventually placed at St. Coletta in Wisconsin.
Rosemary outlived most of her siblings, dying in 2005 at the age of 86.
Her story is sometimes included among examples of the Kennedy curse, although there was nothing supernatural about what happened to her. It was a human tragedy resulting from a controversial medical procedure.
1944: Joseph P. Kennedy Jr.
The family’s first great premature death came during World War II.
Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. was the eldest Kennedy son and the one his father initially expected to pursue the family’s political ambitions.
Joe Jr. became a naval aviator.
On August 12, 1944, he participated in Operation Aphrodite, a dangerous experimental mission involving an aircraft loaded with explosives. The plane exploded prematurely over England.
Kennedy and his fellow crewman were killed instantly.
He was 29 years old.
The family’s political expectations increasingly shifted toward his younger brother.
John Fitzgerald Kennedy.
1944: Kathleen Loses Her Husband
Only weeks after Joe Jr.’s death, another tragedy struck.
His sister Kathleen “Kick” Kennedy had married William Cavendish, Marquess of Hartington, earlier that year.
Their marriage lasted only a few months.
Cavendish was serving with the British Army when he was killed by a sniper in Belgium in September 1944.
Kathleen was a widow at 24.
Her own life would be nearly as short.
1948: Kathleen Kennedy Dies
On May 13, 1948, Kathleen Kennedy was traveling by airplane in France.
The aircraft encountered severe weather.
It crashed, killing everyone aboard.
Kathleen was 28.
Her father attended her funeral, but most of the Kennedy family did not.
Within four years, Joseph and Rose Kennedy had lost two children to violent deaths.
More would follow.
1955: Jacqueline Kennedy Suffers a Miscarriage
John F. Kennedy married Jacqueline Bouvier in 1953.
Their marriage would eventually produce two surviving children, Caroline and John Jr., but the couple experienced considerable reproductive tragedy.
Jacqueline suffered a miscarriage in 1955.
The following year brought another loss.
1956: Arabella Kennedy
In August 1956, Jacqueline Kennedy gave birth to a stillborn daughter.
The baby was later commonly referred to as Arabella, although she was not formally named at the time.
The loss was devastating.
Seven years later, John and Jacqueline would lose another child.
1961: Joseph Kennedy Sr.’s Stroke
By 1961, the ambitions Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. had held for his family had reached an extraordinary height.
His son was president of the United States.
Then, in December, the family patriarch suffered a massive stroke.
Kennedy survived, but the stroke left him severely disabled and unable to speak normally. He spent much of the remainder of his life confined to a wheelchair.
He would live long enough to witness two of his sons assassinated.
1963: Patrick Bouvier Kennedy
On August 7, 1963, Jacqueline Kennedy gave birth prematurely to Patrick Bouvier Kennedy.
The infant suffered from respiratory distress syndrome.
Despite intensive efforts to save him, Patrick died on August 9.
He was only two days old.
The president and first lady had barely begun grieving their son when an incomparably larger public tragedy struck.
1963: The Assassination of John F. Kennedy
On November 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy was traveling through Dallas, Texas, in a presidential motorcade.
Shots were fired as the motorcade passed through Dealey Plaza.
Kennedy was struck and mortally wounded.
He was 46 years old.
The assassination became one of the defining events of twentieth-century American history.
Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested and accused of killing the president.
Two days later, before Oswald could stand trial, nightclub owner Jack Ruby shot and killed him while television cameras were broadcasting live.
The murder of the suspected assassin helped generate decades of controversy and conspiracy theories surrounding Kennedy’s death.
For the Kennedy family, however, another son and brother was simply gone.
1964: Ted Kennedy Survives a Plane Crash
Less than a year after JFK’s assassination, Edward “Ted” Kennedy nearly died.
On June 19, 1964, Kennedy was aboard a small airplane that crashed in Massachusetts.
Two people were killed.
Kennedy survived but suffered severe injuries, including a broken back, broken ribs, a punctured lung, and internal bleeding. He spent months recovering.
The youngest Kennedy brother had survived.
Four years later, another brother would not.
1968: Robert F. Kennedy Is Assassinated
Robert F. Kennedy had served as attorney general during his brother’s presidency and later became a United States senator from New York.
In 1968, he sought the Democratic nomination for president.
On June 5, Kennedy celebrated his victory in the California Democratic primary at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.
Shortly after midnight, he was shot.
Kennedy died the following day.
He was 42.
Within less than five years, two Kennedy brothers had been assassinated.
The idea that something terrible followed the family became increasingly difficult for the public to ignore.
1969: Chappaquiddick
On July 18, 1969, Ted Kennedy drove his automobile off a narrow bridge on Chappaquiddick Island, Massachusetts.
His passenger, 28-year-old Mary Jo Kopechne, was trapped inside the submerged vehicle and died.
Kennedy escaped.
He did not report the accident to police until the following morning.
The incident became one of the greatest scandals of his political career and generated decades of argument over exactly what happened that night and whether Kopechne might have survived had authorities been contacted immediately.
Calling the incident part of a Kennedy “curse” creates an uncomfortable problem.
Not every tragedy associated with the family happened to a Kennedy.
Sometimes another person paid the terrible price.
1969: Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. Dies
Joseph Kennedy Sr. died on November 18, 1969, at the age of 81.
Of his four sons, only Ted survived him.
Joe Jr. had died during World War II.
John had been assassinated in Dallas.
Robert had been assassinated in Los Angeles.
The enormous political dynasty Joseph Kennedy had spent decades building had exacted an equally enormous human cost.
1973: Another Kennedy Automobile Crash
On August 13, 1973, Joseph P. Kennedy II, Robert Kennedy’s eldest son, was driving a Jeep when it overturned.
Kennedy survived.
His passenger Pam Kelley was permanently paralyzed.
Again, the tragedy demonstrates one of the problems with framing every terrible event involving the family as a curse upon the Kennedys.
The most devastating consequence sometimes fell upon someone else.
1973: Ted Kennedy Jr. Loses a Leg
The same year brought another crisis.
Ted Kennedy’s 12-year-old son, Edward Kennedy Jr., was diagnosed with bone cancer.
Doctors amputated his right leg above the knee in November 1973.
The treatment saved his life.
Unlike many events associated with the Kennedy curse, this story ultimately became one of survival rather than tragedy.
Kennedy later became an attorney and disability-rights advocate.
1975: The Murder of Martha Moxley
The murder of Martha Moxley is sometimes included in lists of Kennedy-related tragedies, although Martha was not a member of the Kennedy family.
The 15-year-old was murdered in Greenwich, Connecticut, in October 1975.
Years later, Michael Skakel, a nephew of Ethel Kennedy, was prosecuted for the crime.
He was convicted in 2002.
That conviction was subsequently overturned, and prosecutors announced in 2020 that they would not retry him.
Moxley’s murder belongs primarily to her own story rather than to a catalog of misfortune suffered by the Kennedys.
But the family’s connection to the case added another dark chapter to its public mythology.
1984: David Kennedy Dies
Robert and Ethel Kennedy’s son David Anthony Kennedy struggled with substance abuse.
On April 25, 1984, he was found dead in a hotel room in Palm Beach, Florida.
He was 28.
His death was caused by a drug overdose involving multiple substances.
David had been 12 when his father was assassinated.
Another generation of the family was now experiencing its own premature deaths.
1991: William Kennedy Smith
In 1991, William Kennedy Smith, a nephew of John, Robert, and Ted Kennedy, was accused of rape following an encounter at the Kennedy family’s Palm Beach estate.
The case received enormous national attention.
Smith maintained that the sexual encounter had been consensual.
He was tried and acquitted.
The scandal again reinforced a less supernatural interpretation of the supposed Kennedy curse: some events associated with the family’s dark reputation were not random catastrophes but controversies involving human choices and allegations of misconduct.
1994: Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Dies
Former first lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma in early 1994.
Her illness progressed rapidly.
She died at her Manhattan home on May 19, 1994.
She was 64.
Her death was not especially mysterious, but because of her central place in Kennedy history, it became another event frequently incorporated into broad accounts of the family’s tragedies.
1997: Michael Kennedy Dies
Michael LeMoyne Kennedy, another son of Robert and Ethel Kennedy, died in a skiing accident in Aspen, Colorado, on December 31, 1997.
He was 39.
Kennedy had been playing football on skis when he collided with a tree.
His death came during a difficult period in his personal life. He had faced allegations involving an affair with the family’s teenage babysitter.
Less than two years later, the family suffered another internationally publicized accident.
1999: John F. Kennedy Jr.
John F. Kennedy Jr. had been only three years old when his father was assassinated.
Images of the small boy saluting his father’s coffin became some of the most famous photographs associated with the Kennedy presidency.
As an adult, John Jr. became an attorney and magazine publisher.
On July 16, 1999, he piloted a small airplane toward Martha’s Vineyard.
His wife, Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, and her sister Lauren Bessette were aboard.
The aircraft crashed into the Atlantic Ocean.
All three died.
John was 38.
For many Americans, his death seemed almost impossible to separate from the idea of a Kennedy curse.
The little boy who had lost his father to assassination had himself died young.
2006: Patricia Kennedy Lawford
Patricia Kennedy Lawford, one of Joseph and Rose Kennedy’s daughters, died in 2006 at the age of 82.
Her death was from natural causes.
Her life nevertheless contained its share of personal difficulties.
Her marriage to actor Peter Lawford ended in divorce in 1966. Alcoholism and infidelity troubled the marriage, and Patricia herself struggled with alcohol.
Not every unhappy Kennedy story ended violently.
Sometimes the damage accumulated quietly over decades.
2009: Ted Kennedy Dies
Ted Kennedy survived the airplane crash that nearly killed him in 1964 and lived through decades of political triumph, scandal, family tragedy, and personal controversy.
In 2008, he was diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor.
He died on August 25, 2009.
He was 77.
The last surviving Kennedy brother had outlived John by almost 46 years and Robert by more than 41.
2009: Eunice Kennedy Shriver
Only two weeks before Ted’s death, their sister Eunice Kennedy Shriver died at the age of 88.
Eunice had founded the Special Olympics, creating one of the Kennedy family’s most enduring humanitarian legacies.
Her death was natural and at an advanced age.
Including it as evidence of a supernatural curse stretches the concept considerably.
Death itself is not evidence of a curse.
Eventually, every family experiences it.
2011: Kara Kennedy
Ted Kennedy’s daughter Kara Kennedy had survived lung cancer diagnosed in 2002.
On September 16, 2011, she suffered a heart attack after exercising at a health club.
She was 51.
Once again, a Kennedy had died unexpectedly and comparatively young.
2011: Maria Shriver and Arnold Schwarzenegger
Another Kennedy descendant experienced a very different kind of public upheaval.
Maria Shriver, daughter of Eunice Kennedy Shriver, separated from her husband, Arnold Schwarzenegger.
It was subsequently revealed that Schwarzenegger had fathered a child with a longtime member of the family’s household staff.
The revelation ended one of America’s most prominent political and celebrity marriages.
It was painful and humiliating, but calling marital infidelity evidence of a supernatural Kennedy curse again raises the question of what the word curse actually means.
2012: Mary Richardson Kennedy
In May 2012, Mary Richardson Kennedy, the estranged wife of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., died by suicide at her home in New York.
She was 52.
Her death added another tragedy to the extended Kennedy story.
But as with Mary Jo Kopechne, Pam Kelley, Martha Moxley, Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, and Lauren Bessette, Mary Richardson Kennedy’s life and death should not disappear behind a mythology centered on the famous family to which she was connected.
Why Do People Believe in the Kennedy Curse?
Place all of these events together and the pattern appears extraordinary.
Assassination.
War.
Airplane crashes.
Automobile accidents.
Cancer.
Drug addiction.
Suicide.
Scandal.
The deaths of children.
The deaths of spouses.
The deaths of siblings.
But the Kennedy family is also enormous.
Joseph and Rose Kennedy had nine children. Those children produced dozens of grandchildren, followed by still more great-grandchildren.
The family has also lived much of its life under intense public scrutiny.
A tragedy that might remain a private matter in an ordinary family becomes national news when it happens to a Kennedy.
That creates a powerful statistical and psychological effect.
We remember the tragedies because the name is familiar.
Then each new tragedy appears to confirm the pattern established by those that came before.
Wealth Could Not Protect Them
There is another reason the Kennedy curse has endured.
The family seemed to possess everything Americans traditionally associate with security.
Money.
Education.
Political influence.
Prestigious marriages.
Powerful friends.
Beautiful homes.
Access to excellent medical care.
Yet none of those things could protect them from the ordinary vulnerabilities of human existence.
An assassin’s bullet did not care that John Kennedy was president.
A plane crash did not care that Kathleen was the daughter of an ambassador.
Cancer did not care about Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat.
The ocean did not care whose son was flying above it.
The Kennedy story repeatedly demonstrates a truth people have understood for thousands of years:
Fortune can give enormously.
And fortune can take everything back.
Is There Really a Kennedy Curse?
There is no evidence that the Kennedy family is afflicted by a supernatural curse.
Some events attributed to it were natural deaths at advanced ages. Others resulted from illnesses, dangerous occupations, risky behavior, addiction, accidents, or the actions of other people.
Some were genuine historical catastrophes.
And some should not really be described as Kennedy tragedies at all because the primary victims were other people.
Yet the legend persists because the concentration of highly publicized misfortune remains remarkable.
Joseph Kennedy Sr. lived to see one son killed in wartime and two others assassinated.
Jacqueline Kennedy lost two children and then watched her husband murdered beside her.
Robert Kennedy’s children lost their father when they were young, and two of his sons later died prematurely.
John Kennedy Jr. survived the assassination that defined his childhood only to die in an airplane crash at 38.
No curse is required to make any of that tragic.
The Kennedy Curse
Perhaps the most unsettling aspect of the Kennedy story is that it doesn’t need a supernatural explanation.
The family achieved a level of wealth, political power, celebrity, and influence reached by very few American families.
But none of it provided immunity from grief.
The Kennedys could win elections.
They could accumulate fortunes.
They could enter the White House.
They could become one of the most recognizable families in the world.
They could not bargain with chance.
Whether the Kennedy curse exists depends upon what someone means by a curse.
If it means a supernatural force deliberately destroying one generation after another, there is no evidence for it.
If it means a family whose history contains an extraordinary succession of triumphs shadowed by equally extraordinary tragedies, then the legend is easy to understand.
The Kennedys didn’t need to be cursed.
Their history was tragic enough.
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