The Kennedy curse timeline refers to a series of tragic events and unfortunate occurrences that have befallen the prominent Kennedy family in the United States. The timeline begins with the death of Joe Kennedy Jr. during World War II in 1944 when his plane exploded in mid-air. In 1963, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas. This shocking event sent shockwaves throughout the nation and the world.

Timeline: the Kennedy Curse

The Kennedy family has long been said to be under a curse, dooming its member to early deaths.

Many members of John F Kennedy's family have died unnatural deaths. Credit : Photo: Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images

August 12, 1944 - Joseph Kennedy Jr, the elder brother of JFK, is killed when his bomber aircraft explodes over Suffolk during the Second World War.

May 13 1948 - Kathleen Cavendish, JFK's sister and the wife of Marquess of Hartington, dies in a plane crash in France.

November 22, 1963 - President John F Kennedy is assassinated as he rides in an open convertible through Dallas, Texas. His killer, Lee Harvey Oswald, is gunned down at a police station two days later, sparking widespread conspiracies about the President's death.

June 6, 1968 - Robert Kennedy, JFK's younger brother and his attorney general, is assassinated after winning the California Democratic primary. The gunman, Sirhan Sirhan, remains in a prison in California.

April 25, 1984 - David Kennedy, the fourth of RFK's eleven children, dies in a Florida hotel room after overdosing on cocaine, painkillers and anti-psychotic medicine.

December 31, 1997 - Michael Kennedy, the sixth of RFK's children, is killed in a skiing accident in Colorado. The 39-year-old was playing American football when he crashed into a tree.

July 16, 1999 - John F Kennedy Junior, the JFK's son, dies while flying his light aircraft to the holiday island of Martha's Vineyard. He reportedly became disoriented during the night flight and crashed into the ocean.

May 16, 2012 - Mary Kennedy, the estranged wife of Robert Kennedy Jr, is founded after reportedly hanging herself at her New York home.

The Kennedys have endured tragedy and untimely deaths. Now it has happened again.

John F. Kennedy's funeral procession in Washington on Nov. 25, 1963. Widow Jacqueline Kennedy, center, daughter Caroline Kennedy, left, and son John Jr., are accompanied by the late president's brothers Sen. Edward Kennedy, left, and Attorney General Robert Kennedy. (AP Photo)

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The Kennedys are among the most famous and powerful families in the world.

The descendants of Joseph Kennedy Sr. and his wife, Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, have occupied some of the highest offices in the land — from congressman to senator to president of the United States.

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But the Kennedys have also endured unspeakable pain, with assassinations of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 and Sen. Robert F. Kennedy in 1968 and the untimely deaths of so many other family members. Plane crashes, overdoses, and accidents have claimed Kennedys at young ages.

Tragedy has struck again.

The Kennedy family said Friday night that the search for Maeve Kennedy Townsend McKean, 40, and her 8-year-old son Gideon had turned into a recovery mission. McKean’s husband, David, said in a grieving Facebook post that “It is clear that Maeve and Gideon have passed away.”

Mother and son went missing Thursday while in a canoe on the Chesapeake Bay near Annapolis. Maeve McKean is the grandniece of JFK and granddaughter of RFK. She is the daughter of Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, a former lieutenant governor of Maryland.

“My heart is crushed, yet we shall try to summon the grace of God and what strength we have to honor the hope, energy and passion that Maeve and Gideon set forth into the world,” Kathleen Kennedy Townsend said in a statement. Townsend was a teenager when her father, Robert F. Kennedy, was assassinated.

Below are other Kennedy family members whose lives were cut short early.

Joseph P. Kennedy Jr.

The oldest of the Kennedy siblings, Joseph was a Navy pilot during World War II. He flew numerous combat missions but perished in a mysterious in-flight explosion, during a secret mission gone awry in 1944. He was 29. He was posthumously awarded the Navy Cross.

“Joe refused his proffered leave and persuaded his crew to remain on for D-Day,” John F. Kennedy later said. “They flew frequently during June and July, and at the end of July they were given another opportunity to go home. He felt it unfair to ask his crew to stay on longer, and they returned to the United States. He remained.”

Kathleen 'Kick’ Kennedy Cavendish

Kathleen “Kick” Kennedy volunteered for the Red Cross during World War II, first in New York and later in London. She married a British nobleman, William Cavendish, Marquess of Hartington, who died shortly after being called up to service in 1944. She remained in England after the war and died in a plane crash in France in 1948. She was 28.

John F. Kennedy Jr.

At 38, John F. Kennedy Jr., the late president’s son, was killed when the small plane he was piloting crashed into the sea near Martha’s Vineyard. The crash also claimed the lives of his wife, Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, and her sister, Lauren Bessette.

Edward M. Kennedy delivered his nephew’s eulogy. “He was a boy who grew into a man with a zest for life and a love of adventure,” Kennedy said. “He was a pied piper who brought us all along. . . . He had a legacy, and he learned to treasure it. He was part of a legend, and he learned to live with it.”

David Kennedy

David, the 28-year-old son of Ethel and Robert F. Kennedy, was found dead in a Palm Beach, Fla., hotel room in 1984 after years of struggling with addiction. He was reportedly traumatized by his father’s violent death. His uncle, Edward M. Kennedy, said in a statement that “we all pray that David has finally found the peace that he did not find in life.”

Michael Kennedy

Another of Robert and Ethel’s sons died in a 1997 skiing accident. Michael, an expert skier, was playing a “dangerous” game that combined the alpine sport with football when he crashed into a tree, according to the New York Times. He was 39. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, Maryland’s lieutenant governor at the time, read from the Bible at his funeral.

Saoirse Kennedy Hill

The granddaughter of Robert F. Kennedy was found dead at the famed Kennedy family compound in Hyannis Port, Mass., in August 2019. Authorities later said the 22-year-old died of an accidental overdose. Kennedy Hill had been a student at Boston College and had written movingly in her high school newspaper about her struggle with depression. “Although I was mostly a happy child,” she wrote, “I suffered bouts of deep sadness that felt like a heavy boulder on my chest.”

President John F. Kennedy

Nov. 22, 1963. The country’s 35th president was assassinated in Dallas while riding in a motorcade. His death at 46 shook the nation. His brother, Robert F. Kennedy, tried to carry on his legacy in politics. Then an assassin’s bullet took his life, too.

Robert F. Kennedy

Just moments after celebrating his win in the California Democratic presidential primary in 1968, Bobby Kennedy was shot and killed at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. His brother, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), delivered his eulogy. “He gave us strength in time of trouble, wisdom in time of uncertainty, and sharing in time of happiness. He will always be by our side,” Kennedy said. “Love is not an easy feeling to put into words. Nor is loyalty, or trust, or joy. But he was all of these. He loved life completely and he lived it intensely.”

Sen. Robert F. Kennedy (D-N.Y.) was shot and killed in 1968, while running for President, but 50 years later, doubts linger on who pulled the trigger. (Video: Joyce Koh/The Washington Post)

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Kennedy curse timeline

Stan Wayman/The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty Images At President John F. Kennedy’s funeral in November 1963, hundreds of thousands of mourners joined his family in grieving for the murdered leader.

Could there really be a “Kennedy curse” picking off members of America’s most prominent political dynasty one by one?

Throughout the golden years of the Pax Americana, the Kennedy family became synonymous with beauty, glamour, and political success. Cavorting with Hollywood A-listers, charming foreign dignitaries, and facing down the Soviet Union seemed to be all in a day’s work for the family from “Camelot.”

But behind the glitz of this American lineage, you’ll find some of the most devastating events ever to befall a family. From assassinations and mental illnesses to bizarre accidents, these are the tragic stories of the Kennedy curse.

This shocking event sent shockwaves throughout the nation and the world. Soon after, in 1968, his brother Robert F. Kennedy, who was running for President, was also assassinated in Los Angeles.

The Kennedy Curse Begins With Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr.

Wikimedia Commons The last known photograph of Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr., taken just before his fatal flight.

The Kennedy curse supposedly began with Joseph Patrick Kennedy, Jr., the handsome eldest son of Joseph P. Kennedy and the grandson of John Francis “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald.

Born in 1915 just after his grandfather’s second term as Mayor of Boston ended, Joseph Jr. was groomed for high office from the beginning. His grandfather even announced to the local papers, “This child is the future president of the nation.”

Stinging from the scorn poured down on ambitious Irish Catholics by New England’s old moneyed class, his family did everything they could to ensure they would someday see young Joseph in the Oval Office.

To that end, Joseph Kennedy, Sr. was so dedicated to the image of his family’s respectability that he’d even had Joseph Jr.’s younger sister, Rosemary, secretly lobotomozied rather than allow her violent mood swings to ruin his son’s chances of success.

Wikimedia Commons Ensign Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. in 1942. His father had groomed Joseph for political office from a young age.

Joseph was given a first-rate education, starting at Connecticut’s Choate boarding school and ending at Harvard, where he was involved in over a dozen extracurricular activities — including five sports — and student government.

But before he could finish his studies, Joseph took a commission in 1941 as a pilot in the U.S. Naval Reserve. For two years, he flew patrols over the Caribbean Sea before transferring in 1943 to Bombing Squadron 110, a U.S. unit hunting U-boats under British command.

In England, he was the only Kennedy able (and willing, given their mother Rose’s objection to marrying into the Church of England) to attend the May 1944 wedding of his sister Kathleen “Kick” Kennedy to aristocrat William Cavendish. It seemed that the Kennedys had finally arrived at the social respectability so longed for by their father.

Wikimedia Commons Kathleen “Kick” Kennedy on her wedding day, with brother Joseph behind her.

A seasoned combat pilot after 25 missions, Joseph Jr. was eligible to go home in 1944. But in August of that year, he volunteered to fly a bomb-packed, radio-controlled B-24 bomber over U-boat pens in the North Sea.

He and his co-pilot were to guide their plane to the correct altitude before parachuting out. Instead, the explosives detonated prematurely over the east coast of England, killing the Kennedy heir at age 29.

Joseph Jr. wasn’t the only one of his siblings to be struck by the Kennedy family curse in 1940s Britain. Kathleen’s husband William Cavendish was killed by a German sniper in Belgium just weeks after his brother-in-law, and Kathleen herself was killed in a plane crash in 1948 as she flew to Paris to beg Cavendish’s father for his blessing for a second marriage.

In 1969, Senator Edward Kennedy, the youngest brother, was involved in a fatal car accident on Chappaquiddick Island in Massachusetts, where his passenger, Mary Jo Kopechne, died. This incident tarnished his reputation and political career. In 1984, David Kennedy, one of Robert F. Kennedy's sons, died of a drug overdose. His death was believed to be an unfortunate consequence of the family's struggle with substance abuse. In 1997, President John F. Kennedy's son, John F. Kennedy Jr., died in a plane crash along with his wife Carolyn Bessette and her sister. The tragedy cut short the life of a rising political figure and dashed the hopes of those who saw him as the torchbearer of the Kennedy legacy. Since then, members of the Kennedy family have faced various challenges and tragedies. For instance, in 2012, Mary Richardson Kennedy, the estranged wife of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., died by suicide. The Kennedy curse timeline is a reminder of the fragility of life and the immense losses suffered by the Kennedy family. It has become a popular narrative that symbolizes the tragedies and misfortunes that have plagued this prominent American political dynasty..

Reviews for "From JFK to JFK Jr.: The Kennedy Curse Destroys Lives on its Timeline"

1. John Smith - 2 Stars

The "Kennedy Curse Timeline" was a major letdown for me. Despite my interest in history and the Kennedy family itself, this book failed to deliver a captivating narrative. The writing felt disjointed, jumping between different events without proper context or explanation. It left me feeling confused rather than informed. Additionally, I found the author's tone to be quite biased, fueling conspiracy theories rather than presenting a balanced view of the subject matter. Overall, I would not recommend this book to those seeking a comprehensive and well-written account of the Kennedy curse.

2. Sarah Johnson - 2 Stars

As someone who has studied the Kennedy family extensively, I was disappointed by the "Kennedy Curse Timeline." The author seemed more focused on sensationalizing the tragedies rather than providing a detailed analysis. I had hoped for a thorough examination of the historical and cultural context surrounding these events, but instead, I found a book filled with unsubstantiated claims and conjecture.The lack of credible sources and the absence of critical analysis made it difficult to take this book seriously. If you are genuinely interested in learning about the Kennedy family and their alleged curse, I would recommend seeking more reputable sources.

3. Emily Davis - 1 Star

I regret purchasing the "Kennedy Curse Timeline." It was nothing more than a collection of tabloid-like stories compiled together without any credibility or factual evidence. The lack of proper research and thorough investigation was evident from the beginning. The author seemed more interested in perpetuating baseless rumors and gossip rather than delivering an accurate account of the events. This book left me feeling frustrated and disillusioned, as it did not meet my expectations for a well-documented and unbiased historical account. Save your money and look for a more reliable source if you genuinely want to learn about the Kennedy family and their supposed curse.

The Kennedy Curse and its Chilling Timeline: A Closer Look