On November 22, 1963, in Dallas, Texas, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the 35th President of the United States, was assassinated. To this day, various conspiracy theories surround this event.
On June 6, 1968, Robert Kennedy, John Kennedy’s younger brother, was fatally wounded. It was after his death that people began to speak of the Kennedy family curse.
In the decades since, many Kennedy family members have died or suffered greatly from sudden illnesses or accidents. The family has historically been large, with women often giving birth to several children.
It was discovered that the probable “curse” began long before John Kennedy’s death. In 1944, John Kennedy’s older brother, Joe Kennedy Jr., died in a plane crash at the age of 29. Then, in 1948, another Kennedy sister, Kathleen Kennedy, also died in a plane crash while on vacation in France.
In that tragic year of 1963, just two months before the shots in Dallas, John Kennedy and Jacqueline’s younger son, Patrick, died at only 2 days old. Jacqueline had previously lost two other children, one stillborn and one miscarried.
In 1969, Senator Ted Kennedy, John Kennedy’s younger brother, survived a serious car accident in which a female passenger in his car died. Until his death in 2009 at the age of 77 from an aggressive form of brain cancer, Ted Kennedy seemed to have avoided further serious incidents.
In 1973, Ted Kennedy Jr., the son of Senator Ted Kennedy and nephew of John Kennedy, was diagnosed with bone cancer and underwent the amputation of his right leg. Later, he narrowly escaped death in the Air Florida Flight 90 crash in 1982, arriving just ten minutes late for the flight.
In 1984, Robert Kennedy’s son David died at the age of 28 from a drug overdose. In 1997, another of Robert Kennedy’s sons, Michael, died in a skiing accident at the age of 39.
In 1999, John F. Kennedy Jr., the eldest son of John Kennedy, piloted a small private plane that crashed into the ocean, killing him, his wife, and her sister who were on board with him.
In 2011, Senator Ted Kennedy’s daughter Kara died of a heart attack during a workout session at the age of 51.
In 2012, Mary Richardson Kennedy, the wife of Robert Kennedy Jr., died by suicide at the age of 52.
In 2019, Robert Kennedy’s granddaughter, Saoirse, died at the age of 22 from a drug overdose.
In 2020, another of Robert Kennedy’s granddaughters, Maeve, and her 8-year-old son Gideon drowned in a canoeing accident.
While some of these events may be considered coincidences, together they do appear to resemble a family curse. Who could have angered the Kennedys so deeply?
The Curse of Rosemary?
Since it is believed that the “curse” began in the 1940s, there is a version that attributes it to the terrible treatment of Rosemary Kennedy, President John Kennedy’s sister. Her fate was truly tragic.
Rosemary was one of nine children of Joseph Patrick Kennedy Sr. and Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy. From early childhood, she was markedly different from her brothers and sisters. She was beautiful, well-educated, and knew all the manners; she was admired at social events, but she also suffered from uncontrollable fits of hysteria and anger, leading to disputes with her family and even running away from home.
In 1941, when Rosemary was 23 years old, her father suddenly claimed that she was mentally ill and that the fashionable remedy at the time was a lobotomy. He found Dr. Walter Freeman, who assured him that after the lobotomy, Rosemary would become calm, obedient, and affectionate. Her father agreed to the operation.
The operation was carried out by Freeman with the assistance of James Watts. Records of the procedure exist:
“We went through the top of the head, I think she was awake. She had a mild tranquilizer. I made a surgical incision in the brain through the skull. It was near the front. We just made a small incision, no more than an inch. The instrument Dr. Watts used looked like a butter knife. He swung it up and down to cut brain tissue.
“We put an instrument inside,” he said. After Dr. Watts made the incision, Dr. Freeman began to ask Rosemary questions. For example, he asked her to recite a prayer or sing “God Bless America” or count backwards… We evaluated how strongly to make the incision based on how she responded. … When she began to talk incoherently, they stopped.”
Contrary to the doctors’ assurances, the operation instantly turned Rosemary into a severe mental and physical invalid. She could no longer speak or walk, care for herself, and her intellect degraded to that of a 2-year-old.
At that time, the Kennedy family simply decided to hide her under supervision as far away from society as possible. At first, they kept her in a private psychiatric clinic, then moved her to a private girls’ school in Wisconsin, where she spent the rest of her years.
Many thought she would not live long, but against all odds, Rosemary lived a very long life, passing away at the age of 86 in 2015. It was only many years later that the Kennedys decided to tell the public about Rosemary’s sad fate.
