Ep. 120 | The TERRIFYING Kennedy Curse

Find your forever cookware @hexclad and get 10% off at https://hexclad.com/CCCM! #hexcladpartner One of America's most iconic families has endured an almost unimaginable number of tragedies, leaving many to wonder if bad luck alone can explain it. Join in as we unravel the chilling history of the Kennedy Curse and the haunting pattern that's fuelled decades of speculation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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  One family, three generations. Nine children raised on competition, ambition, and the expectation that losing wasn't an option. And they put a president in the White House, two brothers in the Senate, and a name on nearly every building that mattered. They were considered royalty. But right there, beside the successes, there were tragedies. Assassinations, plane crashes, overdoses, drownings. A son lost to war, a daughter lost to a surgery she never agreed to. The list goes on. And at some point, someone in the family said the word out loud: curse. And once it had a name, the country never let it go. But is it truly a curse?

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  Or is this just what tragedy looks like when it happens to the most watched family in America? This is the story and conspiracies of the Kennedys. Crime, conspiracy, cults, serial killers, and murder. All things that I love to consume, and I know you do too, you sick, twisted, beautiful, intellectually-minded freak. And today, we are talking about one of the most well-known conspiracy curse tragedy cases ever, and that's... All the Kennedys. I've been going down the rabbit hole of the Kennedys and what I've found is pretty shocking. And I don't really know what to make of it, but that's what we're getting into today. So without further ado, let's unbuckle our seatbelts, go muck-finding the highway, slam on the brakes and bust through this windshield into this Kennedy curse together.

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  So the story starts with Joseph Patrick Kennedy, Sr. Born in 1888 in East Boston to a family that was already climbing. And his father, PJ Kennedy, was a Bay State politician and the grandson of an Irish immigrant during the famine years. And Joe graduated from Harvard in 1912 and became president of a small East Boston bank at 25. And he was a millionaire by the time he turned 30. And his appetite for business touched everything he entered. He ran shipyard operations at Bethlehem Steel during the war, produced movies in Hollywood and built an extended portfolio in finance and real estate. And by 1957, Fortune estimated his wealth somewhere between $200 and $400 million.

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  And that landed him on a list of the 16 richest people in America. And before his children were old enough to understand money, he'd already set up million-dollar trust funds for each of them. Must be nice. So Washington came calling in 1934 when President Roosevelt tapped him to lead the brand-new Securities and Exchange Commission as its first chairman. And once in charge, He turned around and outlawed the same Wall Street tricks he'd used to get rich himself. Classic. And in 1937, he became the first Irish-American to serve as US ambassador to Great Britain. And Joe used the position to argue for peace with Nazi Germany and against American involvement overseas.

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  And Roosevelt would cut ties with him over it, and by 1940, Joe was out. But Joe's real ambition had always centered on his children. So going back in time a bit, in 1914, he married Rose Fitzgerald, the daughter of John F. Fitzgerald, the former mayor of Boston. And her father disapproved, but that hadn't stopped them. And the two carried on a quiet romance for seven years before the wedding. And Rose, at this point, had been immersed in politics since her younger years, filling in for her shy mother at official events by 16 years old and shaking hands with two presidents before she finished school. And she was devoutly Catholic, educated at Manhattanville College at the Sacred Heart,

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  and would spend the next eight decades as the family's emotional and spiritual center. Until pneumonia took her in 1995 at the age of 104. And by then, the Kennedy family tree had grown to 28 grandchildren and 41 great-grandchildren. So between 1915 and 1932, Rose and Joe had nine children. And in birth order, they were Joseph Jr., John, JFK, also called Jack, Rosemary, Kathleen, Eunice, Patricia, Robert, RFK, also called Bobby, Gene, and Edward, or Ted. And a 1931 family photograph taken at Hyannis Port shows all of them gathered together, with Rose pregnant with the youngest Ted, because he wouldn't be born until the following year.

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  So as we said in the intro, the Kennedy family household ran on competition, ambition, and high expectations. Joe pushed political debate at the dinner table and banned small talk entirely. Sounds riveting, super fun. And reading the New York Times was a household expectation, even for the youngest. And outside, they raced sailboats, played brutal games of touch football. ...tennis rackets and through punches and fights that blurred the line between playing and proving yourself. You know, good childhood fun. Yet despite all the rivalry, they were fiercely loyal to one another. Years later, Robert would write that his father, quote, "called on the best that was in us. There was no such thing as half trying," unquote.

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  And Joe had a specific design in mind for each of them. The boys were built for political careers and the girls were expected to marry powerful men who would be absorbed into the Kennedy orbit, if you will. And the eldest, Joe Jr., was groomed for the presidency. And when that path was cut short, John stepped forward, setting aside his plans for a career in writing or academia. And JFK even joked about his father's financial influence during the 1960 race. And the night before the election took place, he wanted to know exactly how many votes it would take to win, because he wasn't paying, quote unquote, "for a landslide." But John would become the 35th president of the United States, and Robert and Edward both won seats in the US Senate.

• 7:34Speaker 02

  And Eunice Kennedy Shriver launched the Special Olympics. And Gene Kennedy Smith built an organization that brought people with intellectual disabilities into the world of arts. So the Kennedys just projected loyalty, glamour, and shared purpose unlike anything in American politics. And their wealth predated the children's births, and their Catholic faith shaped everything from Rosa's daily devotion to JFK's historic election as the first Catholic president. And the family's political reach extended from the Senate floor to the Oval Office. And America called them royalty, and the label stuck. So the idea of this curse didn't come from a journalist or a historian, but from a Kennedy.

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  And on July 25, 1969, Ted Kennedy sat before television cameras inside his father's home and addressed the nation about an incident on Chappaquiddick Island one week earlier. And Ted told the country he'd been hit by, quote, "a jumble of emotions, grief, fear, doubt, exhaustion, panic, confusion, and shock," unquote. And somewhere in the chaos, he said, "One..." Question kept surfacing, quote, "whether some awful curse did actually hang over all the Kennedys," unquote. And that was the first time anyone in the family had said the word out loud, on the record, to an audience of millions. But the feeling had surfaced

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  before. And five years earlier, in 1964, Ted's small plane had crashed in a Massachusetts orchard, breaking his back and killing two people on board. And Bobby Kennedy reportedly said to an aide named Ed Guthman, quote, "Somebody up there doesn't like us," unquote. While Bobby's words were private, Ted's were broadcast to the entire country. And between the two, the idea of a Kennedy curse found its language in stock. Because the Kennedys were one of the most visible families in the world, spread across generations, drawn to risk, and constantly in public eye. So any family that large and that exposed, tracked by cameras and tabloids for over a century, will accumulate tragedy naturally. And the

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  question is whether what happened to the Kennedys is a pattern that demands an explanation, or just life at a scale most families never reach, amplified by fame until it looks like something more.

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  So Rosemary Marie Kennedy was born on September 13, 1918, the third child and first daughter to Joseph Patrick Kennedy and Rose Elizabeth Fitzgerald. And the obstetrician wasn't there yet when Rose went into labor, so a nurse physically held the baby inside the birth canal until he arrived. And this delay starved Rosemary of oxygen, and the damage was permanent. So every milestone took her longer than it had her brothers, like crawling, walking, and just fine motor skills. And Rose and Joe didn't grasp the full picture until the younger girl started passing her in developmental terms. And in an era where intellectual disability carried deep stigma and almost no support infrastructure, most families in their position

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  would have sent her to an institution sadly. And Joe refused, though, saying the family could do better for her at home than any facility could, which is really nice. Really good. And Rose described her daughter as, quote, "an affectionate, warmly responsive and loving girl," unquote, eager to earn the compliments she worked so hard to deserve. And Joe's ambassadorship brought the family to England and Rosemary was placed in a Catholic school operated by nuns. And for the first time, she actually really thrived, and the nuns were preparing her to work as a teacher's aide. But the start of World War II ultimately brought the Kennedy family back to America, and everything Rosemary had gained in England kind of fell apart.

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  So she was an adult now, and she wanted the same freedom her brothers and sisters had. And when she didn't get it, she pushed back, and she started sneaking out at night. And in Eunice's words, quote, "Rosemary was not making progress, but seemed instead to be going backward," unquote. So Joe and Rose were worried that she'd be taken advantage of, or that her behavior could jeopardize the family's political ambitions. And that's when Joe heard about a prefrontal lobotomy. It was experimental, and the American Medical Association hadn't endorsed it, but its pioneers assured him it could help. And Rose knew nothing about it. And in November of 1941, Joe scheduled the lobotomy. And at this point, she was 23 years old, and the surgeons were Dr.

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  Walter Freeman and Dr. James Watts. And if you don't know what a lobotomy is, essentially, they bored two openings into Rosemary's skull and fed small metal spatulas through to cut the connections between her prefrontal cortex and the rest of her brain. And she was conscious for all of it, carrying on conversations and reciting poems while they cut. And her silence at the end told them the cutting had gone far enough, and the surgery actually destroyed her. She could barely walk, could barely speak, so the person she had been was completely gone now. And she was moved to a private psychiatric facility near New York City. Just devastating.

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  And in 1949, they moved her to the St. Coletta School in Jefferson, Wisconsin, and she would never leave. And the family told the public she was reclusive, then later that she was mentally ill, which makes me ill, to be honest, because... It was their fault that she was like this. It took Joe Senior, having a massive stroke in 1961, to change things. And only after he was incapacitated did Rose finally visit, Rosemary. And the rest of the siblings only then learned where Rosemary had been all those years, because they didn't know, which is horrifying. Your sister just goes missing, and you don't know why, because your dad gave her a lobotomy that she shouldn't have even gotten in the first place, just awful.

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  And when they saw each other again, Rosemary lashed out at Rose, and she had no other way to say what she felt. And nobody outside the family knew what had happened to Rosemary until 1987, when historian Doris Kearns Goodwin published the details in The Fitzgerald and the Kennedys. And the family had kept the secret for 46 years. And her sister, Eunice Kennedy Schreiber, driven by what she'd witnessed, founded the Special Olympics in 1968, which is wonderful. And JFK became the first president to propose and sign major legislation for people with intellectual disabilities, and Ted carried that mission forward in the Senate. And on January 7, 2005, Rosemary passed away from natural causes at 86 years old.

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  And Jean, Eunice, Patricia, and Ted were all there at the end. She now rests buried beside her parents.

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  Now, Joe Junior was the firstborn Kennedy, and the one his father had chosen for the White House. And in her memoir, Rose said he had shown, quote, "a certain forcefulness of character that marked him as a natural leader," unquote, "from the time he was young." And before the war, he'd represented the family at the 1940 Democratic National Convention, and a congressional campaign was supposed to come next. But he enlisted in the Navy as a pilot in June 1941. And he would hit 25 combat missions by May 1944, and actually qualified to go home. But he refused and flew another 25. Guy was a war hero. And Louis Papa, as a fellow pilot, recalled that Joe Junior volunteered for every mission that carried,

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  quote, unquote, "extra hazard," earning, quote,

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  ...everybody's unlimited admiration and respect, unquote. And then, he signed up for Operation Anvil. It was classified, and the target was Nazi fortified bunkers on French soil. And the plan was to load a bomber with around 22,000 pounds of explosives. And two pilots would take it up, switch on autopilot, and jump out over England. And from there, a trailing aircraft would fly the unmanned plane by remote control straight into the target. The technology was fairly functional, that's like the early 1940s at this point, and the program's risks were enormous. And Joe Junior wrote home telling his parents he'd been doing, quote, "something different

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  for the next three weeks," unquote, but assured them it wasn't dangerous. And his father wrote back advising him not to force his luck too much. But on August 12th, 1944, Joe Junior climbed into the cockpit alongside co-pilot Lieutenant Wilford Willey for the Navy's first Anvil mission. But they never made it to the bailout point. At around 6:20 PM, the aircraft blew apart in two massive explosions. And one of the pilots watching from the mothership called it, quote, "the biggest explosion I ever saw until the pictures of the atom bomb," unquote. And the bodies, naturally, were never recovered. And Joe Junior was 29 years old at the time. And both he and Willey received the Navy Cross posthumously.

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  Though, Tallboys, a new generation of British heavy bombs, could destroy those same targets, the drone program failed to achieve a single successful strike. And when the news reached home, JFK reportedly said, quote, unquote, "now the burden falls on me." Kathleen Kick Kennedy was the family's rebel, the one sibling who insisted on charting her own course. And she was 18 when her father's ambassadorship brought her to London, where she was crowned Debutante of the Year. And that's where she met William, or Billy, Cavendish, Marquise of Harrington, and the two fell Hard for each other.

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  And he was Protestant and her mother was horrified because they're Catholic. And he was also in the British Army. Now, Rose fought it, but Kick went through with a civil ceremony in May 1944 and married Billy anyway. And Joe Jr. showed up for the wedding before his passing. And he was the only one in the family who did. And unfortunately, the marriage would only last four months because a German sniper killed Billy on the Belgian front. And Joe Jr. had died less than a month earlier. And in a letter, Kick told a friend, quote, "Life holds no fears for someone who has faced love, marriage, and death before the age of 25," unquote. And Kick went back to England carrying the title Lady Harrington.

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  And eventually, she would fall for Peter Fitzwilliam, another wealthy Protestant who was trying to get out of his marriage. And her parents severely disliked the idea and threatened to cut her off entirely. But in May of 1948, Kick and Fitzwilliam flew out to visit Joe in France, but before they could make it, storms drove the aircraft into the mountains, killing everyone on board. And she was 28 years old. And just like the wedding, Joe Kennedy Sr. was the only family member at the funeral. Kathleen Cavendish-Marsoness of Harrington was laid to rest in a small churchyard in Enzer, England. And the Kennedys barely acknowledged what happened because Kick had been involved with

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  a married man at that point, and JFK was trying to build a political career, so the family couldn't afford a scandal.

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  So even before Dallas, John and Jackie Kennedy faced tragedy within their own home. And they buried two children. Jackie's first pregnancy ended in a miscarriage in 1955, and the following year, she delivered a stillborn daughter by C-section. And the couple never officially named her, though Jackie would later call her Arabella. And their daughter was buried in a Catholic cemetery in Rhode Island in a grave marked "daughter." And years later, the first family had two healthy children. Caroline and John Junior. Then, on August 7th, 1963, Jackie gave birth to Patrick Bouvier Kennedy at Otis Air Force

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  Base on Cape Cod roughly five weeks earlier, weighing four pounds and 10 and a half ounces. But within hours, Patrick developed symptoms of Hyaline Membrane Disease, now called Respiratory Distress Syndrome, or RDS. And his lungs were too underdeveloped to manufacture surfactant, the substance that stops a newborn's air sacs from sealing shut. And at the time, the disease was killing roughly 25,000 babies a year. And he was rushed to the Children's Hospital in Boston and placed inside a hyperbaric chamber. And he lived 39 hours. And many say his death transformed neonatal medicine, giving rise to the modern NICU and driving new research funding from the National Institutes of Health.

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  So millions of babies were able to live in no small thanks to that research. And today, roughly 95% of infants diagnosed with RDS survive. So all four of them, John, Jackie, Arabella, and Patrick, are buried together now at Arlington National Cemetery. Now, John Fitzgerald Kennedy was born May 29th, 1917, in Brooklyn, Massachusetts. And he became the 35th President of the United States on January 20th, 1961, serving 1,036 days before his death at the age of 46. And he was the first Catholic to hold the office and was beloved during his time in the White House. And his family's influence ignited a whole generation's idealism, referenced through

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  journalist Theodore White's comparison to Arthur's Camelot. And he championed the US space program, navigated the Cuban Missile Crisis without a nuclear exchange, and signed the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and the Equal Pay Act. And though his presidency only bore the weight of the Bay of Pigs invasion, the standoff over Berlin, and the early escalation in Vietnam, before politics, he'd been a Navy officer in the Pacific during World War II. And a Japanese destroyer sank his patrol torpedo boat in the Solomon Islands, and Kennedy led his surviving Crew to safety, earning the Navy and Marine Corps Medal. And Anchorman Walter Cronkite later reflected on the Kennedy era, saying, quote, "Kennedy

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  seemed to be leading us into a new era of youthful exuberance over the fun of life, the fun a country could have being itself being important to the world. We were dancing on clouds," unquote. And Bob Schiefer with CBS News called him, quote, "The Technicolor President," unquote, saying America had, quote, "Sort of seen the presidency in black and white up until that point," unquote. So on November 21st, 1963, the President and the First Lady flew to Texas and met up with Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson to motorcade through cities. And the trip doubled as a political mission. And Texas Democrats were feuding, and Kennedy needed the state for reelection in 1964.

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  And his first stops in San Antonio, Houston, and Fort Worth drew warm crowds. And Kennedy gave a speech in Fort Worth that morning, then the group flew the short hop to Dallas Love Field, one of the airports there. And former KRLD reporter Bob Huffaker recalled that day began gray and cold with a misting rain, and then the skies opened into a beautiful blue morning. And with clear skies overhead, the bubble top came off the presidential limousine. And the crowd of Love Field was enthusiastic. And Kennedy and Jackie worked the fence line, then settled into the back of an open convertible. And Texas Governor John Connally and his wife Nellie sat on the jump seats in front of them.

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  And the route to the Trademark, where Kennedy was due to give a speech, ran roughly 10 miles, and an estimated 200,000 people packed both sides of it. Now, the motorcade swung into downtown Dallas, and Nellie Connally turned to Kennedy from the jump seat. Quote, "Well, Mr. President, you can't say Dallas doesn't love you," unquote. And then at around 12:30 PM, the limousine continued on Elm Street, heading toward the Triple Underpass. And that's when shots rang out. And a round hit the base of Kennedy's neck and tore out through his throat. And the Warren Report held that the Same bullet then hit Governor Connally in the rib, wrist, and thigh. And a second bullet struck the president in the back of the head.

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  And Connally, a lifelong hunter, knew the sound instantly, quote, unquote, "the crack of a hunting rifle." And the motorcade proceeded to Parkland Memorial Hospital. And Dr. Kenneth Salyer, on neurosurgery call, recalled a large jagged wound on the right side of the president's skull with pieces missing. And Jackie was at the back of the room the entire time with her dress still covered in blood. And at 1:00 PM, John F. Kennedy was declared dead. And Walter Cronkite broke the news, though the network didn't have a live camera running. The audience got nothing but his voice laid over a static card on screen.

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  Here is a bulletin from CBS News. In Dallas, Texas, three shots were fired at President Kennedy's motorcade in downtown Dallas.

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  And once the death was confirmed, Cronkite addressed the nation.

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  From Dallas, Texas, the flash, apparently official, President Kennedy died at 1:00 PM Central Standard Time, 2 o'clock Eastern Standard Time, some 38 minutes ago.

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  And his producer, Sandy Sacalo, described, quote, "There were so many questions to be answered. Who was the murderer and why did he do it?" Unquote. And once everyone stepped out, Jackie went back to her husband, and she rested on his chest, removed a ring, and placed it on his finger. Now, Vice President Lyndon Johnson had been riding three cars behind Kennedy in the motorcade. And he went back to Air Force One at Love Field, bringing the former president's body with him in a bronze casket. Johnson would take the presidential oath at 2:38 PM, becoming the 36th President of the United States. And Jackie stood beside him, still wearing her pink suit, still covered in her husband's blood.

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  And his first public statement as president was, quote, "We have suffered a loss that cannot be weighed. For me, it is a deep, personal tragedy. I know that the world shares the sorrow that Mrs. Kennedy and her family bear. I will do my best." That is all I can do. I ask for your help and gods. Unquote. And Johnson established November 25th as a day of national mourning. And more than 800,000 mourners stowed along Pennsylvania Avenue as a horse-drawn caisson bore Kennedy's flag-draped coffin from the Capitol Rotunda to St. Matthew's Catholic Cathedral. And alongside the procession walked a riderless horse named Black Jack, boots reversed in an empty saddle, a military tribute to the fallen.

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  And outside the cathedral, 3-year-old John F. Kennedy Jr. raised his hand and saluted his father's casket. And they laid Kennedy to rest at Arlington National Cemetery with full military honors. And leaders from many different nations attended. And Jackie lit the eternal flame that has burned at his gravesite ever since. And by 2:15 that afternoon, before the country had even absorbed what happened, Dallas Police had already arrested a man named Lee Harvey Oswald. Now Oswald was a new employee at the Texas School Book Depository. And he had been charged with Kennedy's assassination and with the fatal shooting of Dallas Patrolman J.D. Tippit, who was killed roughly 45 minutes after his president was hit.

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  And Oswald denied any involvement during police questioning, telling reporters, quote, "I didn't shoot anybody. No, sir. I'm just a patsy." Unquote. And two days later, on Sunday morning, November 24th, police were transferring Oswald to the county jail when a Dallas nightclub owner named Jack Ruby shot Oswald point-blank in the stomach on live television in front of the press. And Oswald died at Parkland Memorial Hospital. And it was the same building where, 48 hours earlier, the president had died. So with Oswald dead, there would be no trial, no public cross-examination of the evidence, and no definitive resolution to the questions surrounding November 22nd. And a jury convicted Ruby of murder and gave him the death penalty,

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  though an appeals court later threw out the verdict. But still, he died on January 3rd, 1967, from a blood clot complicated by cancer, before any retrial could begin. And a special presidential commission led by Chief Justice Earl Warren spent months investigating the assassination. And its conclusion was that Oswald acted alone, firing every shot that killed the president. And the commission saw nothing tying either him or Ruby to a larger plot. But most Americans never fully accepted the commission's conclusion. And when FiveThirtyEight polled the public in 2017, just one in three Americans said they believed Oswald acted alone. Not me. I'm not one of those, and that's why this is a conspiracy podcast.

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  And an onlooker named Abraham Zapruder had captured the assassination on film, and its frames raised questions the official account struggled to answer. And the commission's account held that three rounds left Oswald's rifle in 8.6 seconds. And one bullet supposedly passed through Kennedy and then struck Governor Connally, as we know. The critics called it the "magic bullet" theory, arguing a single round could not cause that much damage and remain nearly intact. And others pointed to a grassy knoll ahead and to the right of the motorcade as the position of a second shooter. And broader theories implicated the CIA, organized crime, and Cuban exiles.

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  And in 1979, a House Select Committee on Assassinations concluded after a two-year investigation that a second gunman had probably fired and that Kennedy was "probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy." And the committee also found that the Soviet government, the Cuban government, the CIA, the FBI, and the Secret Service were not involved, though it could not rule out individual members of organized crime or anti-Castro groups acting independently. And the committee faulted the Warren Commission for not digging deep enough into whether a conspiracy existed. And the files stayed partly sealed for decades despite a 1992 law requiring full release

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  within 25 years. And President Biden delayed disclosure on three separate occasions. And on January 23, 2025, President Trump signed an executive order directing officials to present plans for the release of assassinations. ...assassination records for JFK, Robert F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr. And the National Archives released more than 77,000 pages on March 18, 2025. And historians noted the documents did not change the lone gunman finding, though they shed new light on CIA covert programs from the early 1960s, including the recruitment of agents within Fidel Castro's government. And biographer Frederick Logvall flagged one hole: the new documents still hadn't closed.

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  "Weeks before the assassination, Oswald traveled to Mexico City and sat down with diplomats from both Cuba and the Soviet Union. And when the signing was finished, Trump passed the pen to an aide, quote-unquote, 'Give that to RFK Jr.' And Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the slain president's nephew, told NBC News he was, quote, 'very grateful to President Trump,' unquote." So seven months after the events in Dallas, Ted Kennedy nearly died in a plane crash. And on the evening of June 19, 1964, the 32-year-old senator left Washington for the Massachusetts State Democratic Convention, where he'd be renominated by acclamation.

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  And he had stayed in the Capitol all day for the final vote on the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and it was dark by the time he could fly out. And the twin-engine aero commander carried five people: Ted, Indiana Senator Birch By and his wife Marvella, and legislative aide Edward Moss and pilot Edwin Zimny. And fog and drizzle had closed in by the time they neared Barnes Municipal Airport in Westfield, Massachusetts, just before 11:00 p.m. And the plane slammed into an apple orchard just three miles short of the runway. And Ted watched the altimeter plunge from 1,100 feet to 600, and he compared it to a toboggan ride along the treetops, followed by a violent collision with a tree.

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  And Zimny and Moss both died overnight from their injuries. And Birch and Marvella By walked away with minor injuries from their seats at the back of the plane. And Ted broke three vertebrae and two ribs and suffered a collapsed lung and Birch Bay actually pulled him from the wreckage and Ted was hospitalized for five months after that immobilized in a frame that held his broken vertebrae in place and Harvard professors came to his hospital room and lectured at his bedside and he tore through stacks of books between visits and this is the crash that spurred Bobby to say his quote unquote somebody up there doesn't like us line and

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  though Ted recovered Bobby would meet a similar fate to JFK. So Robert Francis Kennedy or RFK had served as Attorney General in his brother's administration from 1961 to 1964 and won a US senate seat from New York in 1965 but before politics he'd enlisted in the Navy during World War II serving from 1944 to 1946 and Bobby declared his run for the Democratic presidential nomination on March 16th 1968 standing in the senate caucus room in Washington and his brother JFK had stood in that same room

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  eight years earlier to launch his own White House bid and Vietnam had defined his candidacy because he campaigned to end the war while openly admitting that he had helped extend it during his years as JFK's top advisor and fighting poverty and racial inequality became the foundation of his platform and he won primaries in Indiana Nebraska South Dakota and Washington DC and on the night of June 4th 1968 Bobby won the California primary beating Minnesota Senator Eugene McCarthy 46% to 42% and around midnight he delivered a victory speech at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles and his wife Ethel was next to him three months pregnant with their 11th child and he closed with a line to the

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  crowd saying quote so my thanks to all of you and now it's on to Chicago and let's win there unquote and at 12:15 AM Bobby left the stage and was led through a service door and he leaned over the counter to shake hands with a 17 year old busboy named Juan Romero and just then a man named Sirhan Sirhan Armed with a 22 caliber revolver rushed forward and opened fire and three bullets struck Bobby, one graced his forehead and another went through his neck and the third went through his right ear, killing him. And five bystanders were also wounded from this attack. And Sirhan was tackled at the scene. And Robert Kennedy died at 1:44 a.m.

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  on June 6, 1968 at the age of 42. And his wife Ethel, his sisters Jean and Patricia and his sister-in-law Jackie were at his bedside. And a funeral mass was held two days later at St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York and Ted delivered the eulogy. Quote, "My brother need not be idealized or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life. To be remembered simply as a good and decent man who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it." Unquote. And his casket rode a funeral train 225 miles from Penn Station in Manhattan to Union Station in Washington while tens of thousands of mourners lined the tracks along the road.

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  And Bobby was buried at Arlington National Cemetery 50 feet from his brother JFK. And his assassination led to the extension of Secret Service protection of all major presidential candidates. Now Sirhan Sirhan had grown up in Pasadena, California after his family immigrated from Jerusalem in the 1950s. And the Six Day War in June 1967 stirred something within him and he focused his frustration on Kennedy after hearing the Senator voice support for Israel during the presidential race. And on the eve of the assassination, he reportedly said, quote, "I did it for my country." And it happened on the one-year anniversary of the Six Day War. And he was convicted of murder on April 17, 1969 and sentenced to death.

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  And California Supreme Court later struck down the state's death penalty and his sentence was reduced to life in prison. And Sirhan faced years of parole battles and appeals and his lawyer in 2011, William F. Pepper, filed an appeal for a retrial using a second gunman theory and a brainwashing plot to make Sirhan the And questions about a second gunman have persisted for decades because the kill shot hit Bobby behind the right ear from inches away. Yet every witness who saw the shooting put Sirhan face to face with Kennedy when he pulled the trigger. And an audio analysis of the shooting detected 13 shots, though Sirhan's revolver held only eight rounds. And Paul Schrad, one of the five bystanders wounded that night, had testified against

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  Sirhan at the original trial. And by 2016, he had reversed his position, and he told the parole board that he no longer believed Sirhan was the one who killed Kennedy, pointing to what he called "clear evidence of a second gunman." So just more conspiracy. And whether the case should be open is a question that has fractured the Kennedy family down the middle. RFK Jr. went to see Sirhan behind bars and came away believing the conviction may have landed on the wrong person. And his sister Kathleen Kennedy Townsend shares that view and has called for the investigation to be reopened. But their siblings, Joseph Kennedy II and Carrie Kennedy, oppose it.

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  Mary Jo Kopecky was 28 years old and had worked for the Kennedys. New Jersey-born and raised, she campaigned for JFK as a college student, spent time teaching at a Catholic mission school in Alabama, and landed a position in Robert Kennedy's Senate office. And when Bobby launched his 1968 presidential bid, she was one of the people writing his speeches. And on the night of July 18, 1969, she was on Chappaquiddick Island for a cookout that Ted Kennedy had helped organize. And the guest list included Kennedy, five other men, and six women from Bobby's campaign staff, a group known as the Boiler Room Girls. At around 11:15 PM, Kennedy left the party with Kopecky. And Kennedy's account was that Kopecky wasn't feeling well, and the two of them left to

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  catch the ferry to Edgartown, where they were staying at separate hotels. And the car, a black Oldsmobile, left the deck bridge and flipped into Poucha Pond, coming to rest upside down in the tidal water. And Kennedy got out of the submerged car, but Kopecky remained. trapped inside and he said he dove repeatedly into what he described as a strong and murky current trying to reach her until exhaustion forced him to stop and he made his way to the cottage and brought back two friends Joseph Gargan and Phil Markham and they dove in after Kapekni too but neither one could reach her but at this point Kennedy still didn't call the police and he told Gargan and Markham to drive him to the ferry landing

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  and the ferry had stopped running for that night so Kennedy jumped in and swam the channel to Edgartown making it back to his hotel by about 2am and morning came before Kennedy contacted police finally reaching them at around 10am on July 19th more than 10 hours after the crash and by then her body had already been found and diver John Farrar found Kapekni still inside the vehicle and she was positioned with her face against the footwell both hands clutching the rear of the front seat and it looked like she had been lifting her head into a pocket of air near the floorboard which meant she likely survived for some time after the car sank and by the time Kennedy finally reported

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  what happened any chance to test his blood alcohol level was gone and without that evidence prosecutors couldn't build an involuntary manslaughter case but he entered a guilty plea for leaving the scene of an accident and Judge James Boyle gave him the lightest punishment available which was only two months in jail and then he suspended every day of it and his license was suspended for 16 months and a grand jury convened the following April and returned no further indictments and Mary Jo Kapekni's mother Gwen later said quote this is the big hurt the nightmare we have to live with for the rest of our lives that Mary Jo was left in the water for nine hours she didn't belong there unquote

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  and one week after the accident on July 25th Ted addressed the nation and he called his failure to report the crash immediately indefensible and he denied any romantic involvement with Kapekni and he asked aloud whether quote some awful curse did actually hang "Over all the Kennedys," unquote. And the speech ended with a question to the people of Massachusetts. Should he give up his senate seat? But, he never did. And before the accident, many supporters had expected him to run for president in 1972. And Kennedy announced he would sit out the race, and he passed on 1976 as well. And he finally entered the race in 1980 as the early favorite, leading the incumbent

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  Jim B. Carter 2 to 1 in polls of Democratic voters. And his campaign believed the bridge had faded from public memory, but it had not. And Carter defeated him for the nomination. And in the end, brain cancer would take Kennedy in 2009. And he had spent every year since Chappaquiddick, and few legislators in the country carried more respect. But the White House was never his. Now, until this point, the tragedies had primarily befallen on the generations that built the family dynasty. Starting in the 1970s, the pattern shifted to their children. Ted Kennedy Jr. was 12 years old and in 7th grade when he noticed a lump below his knee.

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  And he assumed it was a bruise from football or something. But then the diagnosis came, and it came back as bone cancer. And at the time, survival rates for it were grim. And Ted Sr. brought oncologists to the family's Virginia home for a meeting to weigh on how to treat his son. And the science of chemotherapy was still pretty primitive at this point, and no one could guarantee that putting a 12-year-old on an experimental regimen would help more than it hurt. So, they chose amputation. And surgeons would take his right leg above the knee. And after that, came two years of methotrexate, a drug designed to destroy cancer cells, with vitamin injections administered after each round. And the trips from Virginia to Boston for treatment happened on a three-week cycle,

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  with either his mother or his father making the drive. And his father figured out how to give the injections himself, actually, which meant shorter hospital stays. And whenever Boston had a Bruins or Celtics game during those visits, the two of them would go. And there are people who believe the senator sat out- The 1976 presidential race for one reason, and that was to stay at his son's side until the cancer was beaten. And Ted Jr. Survived, and the cancer never came back. And by his teenage years, he was competing with the US Handicap Ski Team and brought home several national medals. And he served as an advocate pushing for the Americans with Disabilities Act, which President George H. W. Bush signed into law in 1990.

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  And he went on to practice healthcare law, win a Connecticut State Senate seat, and serve on the boards of organizations, including Special Olympics International. Now, his story is a rare hopeful note peeking through the timeline.

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  And then there was David Anthony Kennedy, who was Robert and Ethel's fourth child. And when he was little, his father pulled him out of the water after he came close to drowning. And the very next day, he sat in front of the television and watched his father get shot to death in a hotel kitchen. And he was around 12 years old. And unfortunately, he turned to drugs to quiet it. And a 1973 car accident started him on painkillers, and addiction took hold. And rehab after rehab failed to break it. And in April of 1984, the family gathered in Palm Beach for Easter, and David was staying at the Brazilian Court Hotel, and the people around him could see he was just falling apart. And his brother Douglas saw the deterioration firsthand.

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  And on April 19th, he saw David swallowing what looked like sleeping pills. And by the 22nd, David was drinking through the day, visibly paranoid and jumpy, which Douglas blamed on cocaine. And David stopped by his grandmother Rose's villa by the ocean on April 23rd while she was in declining health. And authorities suspected he walked out of that visit with some of Rose's prescription medication. And on April 25th, 1984, David was unfortunately found dead in his hotel room at the age of 28. And a woman named Marion Niemann joined David for dinner two nights before he died, and she told police he couldn't stop crying and was in obvious despair. And according to Niemann, he put away about seven vodkas that night.

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  and told her he'd already used cocaine earlier. And back in his hotel room, he pulled out a plastic bag of powder out and snorted it, saying the bellboy had supplied it. And the cause of David's death, according to the medical examiner, was combined as an overdose: cocaine, demerol, and a sedative. And two hotel bellhops were later charged with supplying him cocaine. And then there's Michael Kennedy, who grew up as one of Bobby and Ethel's 11 kids. And he was 10 when his father was assassinated. And by adulthood, he was running Citizen Energy Corporation, which provided heating fuel to families who couldn't afford it. And he had managed Ted Kennedy's 1994 Senate reelection bid.

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  And on New Year's Eve, 1997, the family was on a vacation in Aspen, Colorado. And they were playing football on the ski slopes, tossing a snow-packed water bottle back and forth while skiing, which was a tradition the ski patrol had warned them about before. And Michael went out for a pass on an immediate slope called Copper Bowl, and he caught the bottle and slammed headfirst into a tree. And he had a camera in his hands the whole time, trying to capture the game while skiing. And at this point, it was dusk, so the mountain was pretty dark, and that meant icy surface, which is really dangerous when you're going really fast down a mountain on skis. And ski patrol reached him within four minutes, and he was taken to Aspen Valley Hospital

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  and pronounced dead from head injuries at 5:50 p.m. at the age of 39. And a witness named Corey Hay described it all, saying, quote, "There was blood all over the snow. Several of the Kennedys were on their knees, saying the Lord's Prayer," unquote. And then there was John Fitzgerald Kennedy Jr., who was born on November 25, 1960, less than three weeks after his father won the presidency. And he was the first infant to live in the White House since 1893. And he was widely referred to as John John, a nickname that started when a reporter misheard his father calling John twice in a row. And the family never used But the country did.

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  And he was three days short of his third birthday when his father was killed. And his mother told him to salute the casket. And the photograph of that moment became one of the most recognized images of the 20th century. So the whole country watched him grow up in its living room. And in 1988, People Magazine named the 27-year-old now law student, "The Sexiest Man Alive." And tabloids tracked his every move, calling him "America's Most Eligible Bachelor." And he graduated from NYU's law school in 1989, failed the bar exam twice, then passed on his third attempt. And as a Manhattan Assistant District Attorney now, he tried six cases and won every single one. And in 1995, he launched George, a glossy political magazine that covered Washington

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  through a pop culture lens, with celebrities posing as the founding fathers on its cover. And in 1996, he married Carolyn Basett, a Calvin Klein public relations professional, in a private ceremony held at Cumberland Island, Georgia. And Christopher Anderson, who wrote "The Day John Died," put it this way, saying, "If the Kennedys were American royalty, John Jr. was their crown prince." And on the evening of July 16, 1999, John Jr. climbed into a single-engine Piper Saratoga at airfield in Fairfield, New Jersey. And his wife Carolyn, who was 33, and her sister Lauren Basett, who was 34, were with him. And the plane was to drop Lauren at Martha's Vineyard, then fly on the Hyannis Port for

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  his cousin Rory's wedding the next day. But they were late before they started. And traffic in Manhattan delayed all three of them, and they didn't reach the airfield until around 8:00 PM. And the plane lifted off at 8:38 PM, roughly 24 minutes after sunset. And John Jr. held a private pilot's license, like no instrument rating, meaning he was certified to fly only when he could see the horizon. And he'd logged about 310 total hours in the air, but only around three of those were solo time in this particular aircraft. And he was also still recovering from a broken left ankle fractured in a hang gliding accident that June. So the cast was off. The injury had forced flight instructors to step in twice already to handle the rudder

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  pedals and bring the plane down during lessons. So why he thought this was a good idea is beyond me. And one of his instructors volunteered to come along for the flight, but John Jr. turned him down, saying, quote, "He wanted to do it alone." And the same instructor later admitted the combination of that route at night, the haze and John Jr.'s experience level, would have kept him from signing off on the flight. So about 34 miles from Martha's Vineyard, the plane began descending from 5,500 feet, and thick haze hung over the water, erasing any line between sky and ocean. And another pilot, who covered that stretch of sky the same evening, described looking towards Martha's Vineyard and seeing

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  nothing, saying, quote, "There was nothing to see. There was no horizon and no light." Unquote. And at approximately 9:38 PM, the radar track turned erratic. Sharp turns, sudden climbs, steep drops, and John Jr. had lost to spatial reference and couldn't tell which way was up. And the plane, locked into a tightening right turn, nose falling and speed starting to build. A pattern aviators call a graveyard spiral. And by 9:41, the aircraft hit the Atlantic at a descent rate exceeding 4,700 feet per minute. And he had filed no flight plan, made no radio contact the entire trip, and sent no distress call.

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  And there were no survivors. And by 10:00 PM, the plane had not reached Martha's Vineyard, and Lawrence's friends called the airport looking for answers. And a Kennedy family friend reached the Coast Guard at 2:15 AM. And the Air National Guard, NOAA, and the Navy joined the effort, with five states contributing resources. And wreckage began washing ashore on Martha's Vineyard the next day. And on July 20th, searchers deployed a remote operated vehicle and found the wreckage on the ocean floor, eight miles out and 120 feet down. And divers recovered the bodies the following afternoon on July 21st. And all three remained in their seats, belts fastened. And autopsies confirmed they died on impact.

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  And on July 22nd, a Navy destroyer returned the ashes to the waters where the plane went down. And the family held a short service and the ashes were scattered at sea. And a memorial service was held in the Church of St. Thomas More in New York the next day. And Ted spoke, saying, quote, "We dared to think, in that other Irish phrase, that this John Kennedy would live to comb gray hair with his beloved Carolyn by his side. But, like his father, he had every gift but length of years." And John was only 38 when he died, younger than his father had been in Dallas. And the National Transportation Safety Board released its findings a year later, and the cause was spatial disorientation during a descent over water at night, compounded by haze and darkness.

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  And investigators found no mechanical failure, no engine trouble, and no sign of foul play. And when investigators pulled the altitude indicator from the wreckage, it read 125 degrees of right bank and 30 degrees nose down, consistent with a classic graveyard spiral. And obviously, conspiracy theories surfaced, as they always do when a Kennedy dies. But the physical evidence seems to leave no room for them in this case. So Kara Kennedy was a television producer and the eldest of Ted Kennedy's three children. And doctors found lung cancer in 2002 and said the tumor couldn't be removed. And her father tracked down a surgeon at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, willing to operate.

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  And the team cut away part of her right lung and put her through chemotherapy and radiation. And according to her mother, Joan Bennet Kennedy, the cancer was behind her. And Kara swam, walked the beach, and lived without restrictions. "She was very healthy," Joan would tell the Associated Press, and go on to say, quote, "That's why this is such a shock." But on September 16th, 2011, Kara collapsed during a workout at her Washington DC gym. She was 51 years old, and her brother Patrick told the press that the years of aggressive treatment had weakened her heart, saying, quote, "Her heart gave out." End quote, "She's with Dad." And her father had died of brain cancer two years earlier.

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  So Saoirse Kennedy Hill was 22 and a Boston College Communications major and the granddaughter of Robert F. Kennedy through his daughter Courtney. And she spent time in Mexico constructing schools for indigenous communities and her family said she was "moved by the causes of human rights and women's empowerment." And in 2016, she published a piece in the Deerfield Academy School paper laying out her years-long fight with depression, saying, "My depression took root in the beginning of my middle school years and will be with me for the rest of my life." And she would continue to say, "Although I was mostly a happy child, I suffered bouts of deep sadness that felt like a heavy boulder on my chest."

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  So on the evening of July 31, 2019, Saoirse ate dinner at the family home in Hyannis Port with her 91-year-old grandmother Ethel. And afterwards, she headed to embargo a nearby bar and sang karaoke with friends. And later that morning, she made it back to the compound, walked down to the ocean for a sunrise swim, and finally crawled into bed around 6:30 a.m. And when she still hadn't gotten up by early afternoon, the family grew worried. And paramedics arrived around 2 p.m. And Saoirse lay unconscious and unresponsive still in her bed. And she was pronounced dead at Cape Cod Hospital at 3:14 p.m.

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  And her official cause of death was an accidental combination of methadone, diazepam, and fluoxetine, and alcohol. And the death kind of echoed Davids from the years prior. So Maeve Kennedy McKean had built a career in public health and human rights law, running Georgetown University's Global Health Initiative as its executive director. And her mother was former Maryland Lieutenant Governor Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, making Maeve a granddaughter of Robert F. Kennedy. And during the early weeks of COVID in April of 2020, Maeve's family had moved into her mother's waterfront property in Shady Side, Maryland, where the kids could spread out more than their cramped D.C. home.

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  And on the afternoon of April 2, Maeve, who was 40 years old, and her eight-year-old son Gideon paddled the canoe into the water to retrieve a kickball that had blown off the yard. And that afternoon winds ran fifteen to twenty miles per hour with gusts hitting thirty five miles per hour, but trees and houses along the shore shielded the backyard and kept conditions feeling calm. But once they cleared the cove, the full wind hit, pushing them into the water on Chesapeake Bay. And they capsized roughly two and a half miles out in water that measured fifty-one degrees. And crews searched for five days, scanning the bay floor with underwater sonar. And divers pulled Maeve from the water on April

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  sixth. And two days later, on April eighth, they located Gideon in roughly twenty-five feet of water, more than two miles south of his grandmother's property. And in a public statement, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend said her daughter had, quote, "dedicated her life to society's most vulnerable," unquote. And she remembered Gideon as a loving big brother with a gift for sports, riddles, math, and chess. So this was just a tragic loss of two generations in one accident. So Tatiana Schlossberg's parents were diplomat Carolyn Kennedy and artist Edwin Scholesberg. And she was one of JFK's three grandchildren. And she graduated from Yale

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  and Oxford, reported on science for the New York Times, and wrote a book called Inconspicuous Consumption about hidden environmental costs. And on May twenty-fifth, two thousand and twenty-four, she gave birth to her second child. But a routine blood panel during delivery came back wrong, and her white cell count was far too high, and doctors ordered additional testing. And results showed acute myeloid leukemia marked by a rare inversion three mutation. And doctors admitted her to Columbia Presbyterian Hospital for five weeks, then transferred her to chemotherapy at home. And her sister donated a stem cell transplant, and Tatiana went into remission. But the cancer would unfortunately return. In a

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  New Yorker essay published November twenty-second, two thousand and twenty-five, she would write, quote, "My doctor told me that he could keep me alive for a year, maybe. My first thought was that my kids, whose faces live permanently on the inside of my eyelids, wouldn't remember me," unquote. And in the same essay, she called her cousin Robert F. Kennedy Jr., quote unquote, "an embarrassment to me and the rest of my family." And she described lying in her hospital bed, watching his cabinet confirmation go through, despite a resume with no experience in medicine, public health, or government. And Tatiana died on December 30th, 2025, at the age of 35, the most recent loss in the long line of Kennedy deaths, showing that even in present day, the curse

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  stays relevant. And she's left behind her husband, George Moran, and their two children. And the tragedies didn't just stop at blood relatives. They kind of rippled outward through marriages, in-laws, and extended family. Now, of course, there's a rational explanation for all of this. Edward Kennedy Jr., who lost his life to cancer at 12 and watched his family absorb loss after loss, said, quote, "The Kennedy family has had to endure these things in a very open way, but our family is just like every other family in America in many ways," unquote. And his Aunt Eunice dismissed the whole idea. And the real problem, she said, was the nonstop tabloid coverage and a family that was never allowed to grieve

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  in private. And J. Randy Tereborally, who wrote The Kennedy Heirs, told people that the family itself largely rejected the idea of a curse, noting that Ted's speech after Chappaquiddick was the lone exception. An author, Les Williams, went further, arguing the pattern traces back to a single source, Joe Kennedy Sr. And in the Kennedy curse shattered, he wrote that Joe, quote, "raised his children to believe that they were better than anyone else and that they had to win every time and at any cost," unquote. And that his obsessive ambition, quote, "would have disastrous consequences for the family over the years," unquote. And Patrick Kennedy framed it differently in his 2015 book, A Common Struggle, pointing to untreated mental illness and addiction as the thread running

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  through decades of loss, from Rosemary's lobotomy to David's overdose. And it's not hard to see the skeptics' view here. A sprawling, wealthy, competitive family that flew private planes, held public office, and lived under constant scrutiny for over Century was always going to accumulate grief at a visible scale. And probability alone can account for every single one of these tragedies. But even the rational mind can start to associate patterns. And not all of the Kennedys fully dismissed the idea. Ted stood before those cameras in 1969 and wondered aloud whether some awful curse hung over his family. And after RFK's death, Jackie told those around her, quote, "If they're killing Kennedys, then my children are targets.

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  I want to get out of this country," unquote. And she married Onassis before the year was over. And in November of 2025, Tatiana Schlossberg, JFK's granddaughter, wrote, quote, "Now I have added a new tragedy to her life, to our family's life, and there's nothing I can do to stop it," unquote. And five weeks later, she was gone. Three generations apart, and the language barely changed. And after her husband was killed, Jackie sat down with Life magazine, and she invoked the musical Camelot and quoted the line JFK had loved most, saying, quote, "Don't let it be forgot that once there was a spot for one brief shining moment that was known as Camelot," unquote.

• 1:01:54Speaker 02

  And she wanted the country to remember what it had lost, and the country obliged. And every tragedy that followed added another verse to the same story. So whether you call it a curse, a consequence, or just, you know, the weight of living in the public eye for that long, the result is the same. One family just absorbed more grief than most people can catalog from memory, and America watched every minute of it. And this, you know, curse may just be the word we reach for when the facts stop feeling like coincidence, but never quite prove anything more. So do I believe it's a curse? I don't think so. I think, you know, every family has its tragedies.

• 1:02:36Speaker 02

  Do I think there is 100% conspiracy behind some of the assassinations? Yeah, definitely, definitely. What do you think, though? Let me know down below. And if you have any other topics you want me to dive into, please let me know in the comments. I always read the comments, and I will see your beautiful face in the next one. All right? Bye.

• 1:02:54Speaker 00

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