The Kennedy Curse

The Story

Few American families have been as famous, or have suffered as many public losses, as the Kennedys. Joseph P. Kennedy Jr., the eldest son, was killed on 12 August 1944 when the drone aircraft he was piloting on a wartime mission exploded. The Kennedy Library says no final conclusion about the cause of the explosions was ever reached. Four years later his sister Kathleen died in a plane crash in France. In the 1960s, President John F. Kennedy and his brother Sen. Robert F. Kennedy were both assassinated.

In July 1969, after a car he was driving went off a bridge on Chappaquiddick Island and his passenger, Mary Jo Kopechne, drowned, Sen. Edward Kennedy went on television. He wondered whether 'some awful curse did actually hang over all the Kennedys.' The idea stuck. Later tragedies in the next generation, including the 1999 plane crash that killed John F. Kennedy Jr. and two passengers, renewed the talk.

One biographer calls the curse 'an absurd and deeply offensive myth.'

Some writers have offered supernatural explanations. According to the National Post, author Edward Klein relayed a rumor that a rabbi had hexed Joseph Kennedy in the 1930s, though the article notes that Klein's book 'offered little evidence' of any curse.

Others see no mystery. Biographer Thomas Maier told Al Jazeera the curse is 'an absurd and deeply offensive myth,' and said that, apart from the assassinations, the deaths resulted from actions that endangered their lives. Official investigations found ordinary causes. The NTSB, for example, attributed the 1999 crash to spatial disorientation during a night descent over water, with haze and the dark night as factors. A large, prominent family that took risks and lived in public view suffered more than its share of tragedy, but there is no evidence of a curse.