The Kennedy curse: The tragedy of America’s royal family

In less than a century, the Kennedys have lived through more public misfortune, scandal, and sudden death than seems plausible for any one family. Plane crashes. Assassinations. Overdoses. Suicides. Their story, full of promise and pain, is one America cannot stop telling.

In 1969, Senator Ted Kennedy – who had already lost four siblings by then – asked aloud whether “some awful curse did actually hang over all the Kennedys.” Fifty-five years later, that question still lingers.

The golden child

The Kennedy saga begins with Joseph Kennedy Sr., a wealthy businessman who dreamed of political greatness for his children. His eldest son, Joseph Kennedy Jr., was the golden child, groomed to become America’s first Catholic president.

A Harvard graduate and Navy pilot, Joe Jr. volunteered for a dangerous World War II mission in 1944, piloting a bomb-laden plane over Nazi-occupied France. The plane exploded, killing him at the age of 29.

“Now the burden falls on me,” his younger brother John F. Kennedy told a friend, as the family’s political hopes shifted to the sickly second son.

Joe Kennedy and his children (Richard Sears/JFK Library)

That burden would define the rest of his life.

John was not supposed to be president. He suffered from a chronic illness, lived much of his childhood in hospitals, and was given the last rites more than once. But he was also fiercely resilient. The historian Robert Dallek described Kennedy’s decision to hide his condition from the public as “the quiet stoicism of a man struggling to endure extraordinary pain and distress and performing his presidential (and pre-presidential) duties largely undeterred.”

John made it to the White House as the youngest President in American history. A little over one thousand days later, he became the youngest President to die.

Dual assassinations

On November 22, 1963, Kennedy was travelling through Dallas, Texas in an open air car with his wife Jacqueline, Texas governor John Connally, and Connally’s wife Nellie, when he was fatally shot  by Lee Harvey Oswald, a former US Marine.

The images are seared into American memory: Jackie’s pink suit stained with blood, the frantic rush to Parkland Memorial Hospital, the nation watching in stunned silence as Walter Cronkite announced that the President was dead.

Robert Kennedy and his sister-in-law Jackie, still covered in her husband’s blood (AP)

Five years later, history struck again with cruel precision. In 1968, third son and Presidential hopeful, Robert F. Kennedy was shot in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, just after winning the California primary. His wife, Ethel, pregnant with their eleventh child, watched as he collapsed to the ground. He died the next day.

Joe, John and Robert are perhaps the most famous of the Kennedys to succumb to early and shocking deaths, but they are far from the only ones.

Robert Kennedy moments after he was shot (AP)

Kathleen Kennedy, Joe’s daughter, lost her husband in World War II, then died herself in a plane crash four years later. John and Jackie lost two children in infancy—one in 1956 and another in 1963. Robert’s son David died of a drug overdose in 1984. Another son, Michael, died in a skiing accident in 1997. More recently, the deaths have come in cruel succession: Kara Kennedy (heart attack), Mary Kennedy (suicide), Saoirse Kennedy Hill (overdose), Maeve Kennedy McKean and her young son (drowned during a canoe trip).

Each death has its own story. Each has added to the myth.

The Kennedy curse

To some, the Kennedy curse has a point of origin. In 1941, Joe Sr.’s daughter Rosemary, whose mood swings and rumoured scandals threatened the family’s image, was subjected to a lobotomy at her father’s insistence. The procedure went horribly wrong, leaving her with the intellectual capabilities of a 2-year-old, unable to walk or talk. Rosemary spent decades in private institutions, hidden from public view.

For those who believe in curses, this act—an ambitious father silencing his daughter to protect his legacy—is the Kennedy family’s original sin. Others look to Joe Sr.’s financial dealings and wartime flirtations with fascist regimes. Still others believe the curse stems from the family’s unrelenting pursuit of power, at whatever cost.

But maybe it isn’t a curse at all.

“Virtually every family has its own silent tragedy. Large families are likely to have a larger number of tragedies. Highly publicized families have more highly publicized tragedies,” Theodore C. Sorensen wrote in the New York Times after John Jr.’s death. With Joe Sr.’s nine children producing 29 grandchildren—Robert alone had 11—the Kennedys’ size makes their losses statistically less surprising.

On August 3, 1963, President Kennedy posed with his children and their cousins. (JFK Library)

Others point to recklessness. “They fly their own single-engine planes when they could afford a crew of airmen. They ski without poles on the hardest hills of Aspen on the last run of a December afternoon. They coax their way into the military in hopes of facing combat. It is and always has been the Kennedy way,” Boston Globe reporter Brian McGrory wrote in 1999

There is another theory, one rarely explored by the family themselves. In Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed, journalist Maureen Callahan argues that the curse is not myth or misfortune – it’s misogyny. Across generations, Kennedy women and the women who married into the family have faced early death, psychological torment, and silence. “Whatever grievous harm a Kennedy man may have done to her,” she writes, “the message remains clear: She was asking for it. It was her fault.”

In some ways, the Kennedys are not unique. In India, the Nehru-Gandhi family has endured three major assassinations. In Pakistan, the Bhuttos, father and daughter, both died violently. In Bangladesh, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was murdered along with most of his family. Around the world, political dynasties often end in blood.

Ultimately, the Kennedys faced their own share of joy and sadness. And while they have undoubtably suffered devastating loss, as Sorensen writes, “they have also been endowed with good genes, good brains, good looks, good health and good fortune, with both instincts and opportunities for serving their country and helping those who are less fortunate.”