True story: I’d like to be a more confrontational person than I am, but sometimes when I find myself in an unpleasant situation in which I want to speak my mind, I chicken out at the last minute because I become convinced that the offending person is going to put some kind of curse on me. Obviously, I’m more superstitious than some people, but I know for a fact that there are plenty of similar folks out there. Otherwise, why would so many Red Sox fans have been convinced that the team couldn’t win a World Series because Babe Ruth got traded to the Yankees, and why would storytellers have passed along the cautionary tale of the thief who stole the Hope Diamond and met his demise shortly after he sold the pilfered jewel? Whether you’re in the true-believer camp or are one of the naysayers who pooh-pooh the notion that hexes are anything but a bunch of hocus-pocus, you’re probably familiar with the names of some of the most famous curses in history. But do you know all the details?
The Kennedy Curse
We Americans love our celebrities any old time, but when one of them experiences a tragedy, it’s all we can talk about—we huddle around our office water coolers, our televisions, and our copies of US Weekly to analyze it to death. That tendency, combined with the vast number of members of the Kennedy family who’ve fallen prey to the infamous Kennedy Curse, has cemented our feverish infatuation with this multigenerational dynasty for decades.
Perhaps the best-known victims of the Kennedy Curse were former U.S. president John F. Kennedy, who was assassinated in 1963, and his son, John F. Kennedy Jr., who crashed his private plane over the Atlantic Ocean in 1999 while flying to Martha’s Vineyard with his wife, Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, and her sister. But believers in the curse claim it began much earlier; Edward Klein, author of the 2003 book The Kennedy Curse, says it originated with JFK’s great-grandfather Patrick Kennedy, who died of consumption in Boston in 1858—eerily, exactly 105 years to the day before Lee Harvey Oswald gunned down his great-grandson in Dallas.
Thus began a long series of fatalities that continued to plague the Kennedys for another century and a half. JFK Jr. wasn’t the only family member to meet his death in a plane—the same fate also befell his brother Joe and his aunt Kathleen. Other relatives were involved in treacherous accidents on land, including a skiing collision that killed JFK’s nephew Michael and the notorious incident in which the car of JFK’s brother Ted careened off a bridge, drowning the other passenger. Even JFK’s wife, Jacqueline Kennedy, seemed to inherit the Kennedy Curse through marriage: she delivered one stillborn daughter and one son who died two weeks after his birth. Since the turn of the millennium, the Kennedy Curse seems to have been dormant, but who knows when it may rear its ugly head again?
