“Tragedy revisits the Kennedys,” declared The New York Times in an editorial mourning “a family of unfinished journeys, of magnetic personalities cut down far too early.”
The editorial appeared in July 1999, after John F Kennedy Jr and his wife, Carolyn Bessette, were killed alongside her sister, Lauren, when the light aircraft Kennedy was piloting crashed into the Atlantic Ocean off Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts.
When even the normally restrained “Gray Lady” used such stark language, it was easy to understand why some people wondered whether there was truth behind the long-running belief that the Kennedy family was cursed. Each new tragedy appeared to deepen that impression.
America’s most prominent political dynasty has endured a staggering series of losses. Plane crashes, drug overdoses, road accidents and assassinations have cut short the lives of numerous family members.
The Times’ words followed the deaths of JFK’s celebrated only son and his wife, but further heartbreak came in the years that followed. Kara Kennedy, daughter of Ted Kennedy, died of a heart attack in 2011, while Mary Richardson Kennedy, the former wife of current Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr, died by suicide in 2012.
In 2019, Robert F Kennedy’s granddaughter Saoirse Kennedy Hill died from an accidental drug overdose. The following year, another of his grandchildren, Maeve Kennedy McKean, drowned with her eight-year-old son, Gideon, during a brief canoe trip on Chesapeake Bay.
Late last year, Tatiana Schlossberg, JFK’s granddaughter, died from cancer at the age of 35.
Now the family is mourning another devastating loss. Kyle Kennedy, 42, died at her home in Westwood, Massachusetts, on September 21.
“Tragedy revisits the Kennedys,” The New York Times declared after John F Kennedy Jr and his wife, Carolyn Bessette, died
Kyle Kennedy, 42, died at her home in Westwood, Massachusetts, on September 21, adding to the Kennedy family’s long list of tragic deaths
JFK’s granddaughter Tatiana Schlossberg died from cancer at the age of 35 late last year
Saoirse Kennedy Hill, Robert F Kennedy’s granddaughter, died from an accidental overdose in 2019
The Kennedys are a large family: Robert and Ethel Kennedy had 11 children and 34 grandchildren. Yet the scale of the losses has been so extraordinary that relatives have reportedly questioned whether something supernatural could be involved.
“It is a curse,” Senator Ted Kennedy’s wife, Joan, reportedly told her sister-in-law Jackie, the widowed former First Lady, after Ted survived a plane crash in 1964. He suffered three crushed vertebrae, broken ribs and a punctured lung, just one year after the assassination of his brother.
“Look at the things that have happened. Can we just chalk it up to coincidence?” Joan reportedly asked Jackie.
Kyle’s cause of death has not been disclosed, and the circumstances remain under investigation. An online obituary published by a local funeral home said the mother of two had died “peacefully.”
Kyle was the daughter of Michael Kennedy and Denise Gifford, whose father was NFL star Frank Gifford. She was also the niece of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr. Kyle leaves behind two children, Conor, 12, and Declan, ten, whom she had with her former husband, Liam Kerr. Conor’s twin, Josie, died two days after birth.
Kyle was 13 when her father, Michael, died in 1997 after skiing into a tree during a game of “ski football” with other Kennedy family members in Aspen, Colorado. The group had been throwing a ball to one another while skiing.
She became a teacher and, unlike many members of the Kennedy family, largely avoided public attention. One unusual moment in the spotlight came in 2012, when her cousin Conor Kennedy reportedly turned up at her wedding with his then-girlfriend, Taylor Swift. The pop star later insisted she had been invited and that Kyle had thanked her for attending.
Kyle, an enthusiastic long-distance runner, suffered a serious spinal cord injury in 2020 that left her permanently paralyzed. The cause of the injury was never made public, but she went on to become an advocate for people 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.’
Ethel Kennedy and her husband Robert had 11 children and 34 grandchildren, but so many tragedies have reportedly led family members to wonder about a supernatural explanation
‘It is a curse,’ Senator Ted Kennedy’s wife Joan reportedly told her sister-in-law Jackie, the widowed First Lady, after her husband escaped a 1964 plane crash
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.
Michael Kennedy, Kyle’s father, died in 1997 after skiing into a tree in Aspen
JFK himself was the next family casualty just three months after his son Patrick died from breathing difficulties two days after his premature birth in 1963
The tragic deaths in the Kennedy family surely goes way beyond the laws of probability
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.
Rosemary, pictured right, who had the mental capacity of a toddler, was hidden from the public after her 1941 lobotomy until her death at the age of 86 in 2005
The Hitler-admiring Joe Kennedy Sr lost his third son, Robert F Kennedy, in 1968
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.
The next Kennedy to pass prematurely was David, son of RFK, who died of a drug overdose in Palm Beach, Florida, in 1984
JFK Jr’s serious piloting error within 11 minutes of take-off killed him, his wife Carolyn, and her sister Lauren Bessette
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.’
