Inside the Kennedy 'Curse': Why This Family Has Been Touched by So Much Tragedy and How the Dynasty Endures
https://www.eonline.com/news/1046837/how-the-kennedy-dynasty-has-endured-in-the-wake-of-so-much-scandal-and-tragedy
Jacqueline Kennedy believed in the Kennedy curse.
When first her husband, President John F. Kennedy, and then five years later his brother Robert F. Kennedy, were assassinated, she thought no one in the family was safe, least of all her own two children, John F. Kennedy Jr. and Caroline Kennedy.
Yet when she was dying in 1994, the iconic former first lady took comfort in her belief that her son and daughter had crossed some invisible threshold, that they were out of the woods. JFK Jr. thought the same.
But while one crushing blow after another has kept talk of the most blatant of curses—not just periodic misfortune, but the specter of death—alive, different members of the family have processed the ongoing conversation in their own ways.
John F. Kennedy, Joe's second-eldest son, was elected president at 43 and assassinated at 46, plunging a nation into grief and birthing a cynicism that it may never have quite recovered from. Then his brother, senator, former attorney general and Democratic presidential candidate Bobby Kennedy, was assassinated at 42 in June 1968, six months before his 11th child, Rory, was born. His oldest son, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., was 14 when it happened.