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John F. Kennedy Jr.'s Eerie Final Words to Flight Instructor Before Fatal Crash Revealed
Jacqueline Kennedy believed in the Kennedy curse.
When first her husband, President John F. Kennedy, and then five years later her brother-in-law Robert F. Kennedy, were assassinated, she thought no one in the family was safe, least of all her own two children, Caroline Kennedy and John F. Kennedy Jr.
Yet the iconic former first lady, who was only 64 when she died of non-Hodgkins lymphoma in 1994, took comfort toward the end of her life in believing her children had crossed some invisible threshold, that they were out of the woods.
But one crushing blow after another—not least John's shocking death in 1999 and, more recently, Caroline's 35-year-old daughter Tatiana Schlossberg's death from cancer—has kept talk alive of the Kennedys being plagued by, not just periodic misfortune, but the specter of death.
And members of the family have processed the ongoing conversation in their own ways.
"I've come to believe that it's not what has happened to our family that has been cursed," JFK's sister Eunice Kennedy Shriver once said, "as much as it's the fact that we've never been able to deal with it privately."
"There's little dignity found in living your life in so public a fashion," she continued, per J. Randy Taraborrelli's 2019 book The Kennedy Heirs: John, Caroline and the New Generation, "and that's especially true of our children. However, this burden is one we Kennedys have carried for generations. If there's a curse, surely it's that."
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And yet tragedy continues to run rampant.
Saoirse Kennedy Hill, the only child of Robert Kennedy's daughter Courtney Kennedy Hill, died on Aug. 1, 2019 of a drug overdose at the age of 22. Not the first in the family to battle substance abuse or mental health troubles, she was found unresponsive at the family compound in Hyannis Port, Mass., the dynasty's longtime roost on Cape Cod.
Then, on April 2, 2020, mother of three Maeve Kennedy Townsend McKean, a daughter of RFK's eldest child, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, and her 8-year-old son Gideon disappeared while canoeing on Chesapeake Bay. Their bodies were found days later.
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Maybe it's normal odds when a family is that big, but it can feel as though the Kennedys have more than their fair share of untimely loss.
Two of Joseph Kennedy and Rose Kennedy's nine children didn't make it to 30—Joseph Jr., upon whose shoulders their father's grand designs first rested, and Kathleen "Kick" Kennedy both died in plane crashes in the 1940s—and eldest daughter Rose Marie was lobotomized at 23 and remained institutionalized until her death in 2005.
Jackie lost her husband in the most shattering way, and the debate over the circumstances of JFK's assassination will outlive us all, let alone his widow. But in what is generally looked at as a small mercy, she died five years before her 38-year-old son and his 33-year-old wife Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy were killed in a plane crash.
Ethel Kennedy, Robert's widow, lost her parents and a brother in plane crashes. She was pregnant with her 11th child when her husband was murdered in 1968. Son David Kennedy died of a drug overdose in 1984 and son Michael Kennedy was killed in a skiing accident in 1997.
The fact that Ethel persisted in living her life thinking that the world still had good things to offer is actually quite remarkable.
"It's difficult when your most private moments are also your most public moments, but it's interesting, too, because we have never really felt alone in any of it," daughter Kerry Kennedy told Taraborrelli. "We have always felt at one with the American public, and I think they have felt the same dynamic with us."
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It's true, no matter how old you are, you have never lived in a world without Kennedy influence.
"When you've been handed incredible privilege, access and power, it's hard not to take advantage of that," documentary filmmaker Rory Kennedy, Robert and Ethel's youngest child, told the New York Times in 1997. "You have to constantly police yourself. Human beings are fallible. Some of us have made bad decisions. Others of us have learned from them, painfully."
Two years later, her cousin John and Carolyn crashed en route to her wedding in Hyannis Port.
Meanwhile, the youngest of Rose and Joe's kids, Edward "Ted" Kennedy, had his own presidential aspirations, but then he was behind the wheel when 28-year-old Mary Jo Kopechne was killed in a July 1969 car accident on Chappaquiddick Island.
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Ted pleaded guilty to one count of leaving the scene of an accident without negligence involved and received a suspended two-month jail sentence. In a televised address, he told his constituents he would step down if they wanted him to.
Instead, he was re-elected seven more times and remained a U.S. senator until his death from brain cancer in 2009 at the age of 77.
"Yes, we have had some hard knocks," Ted said of the Kennedy family. "But we have survived because we have heart. And heart matters."
His daughter Kara Kennedy, who survived lung cancer in her 40s, recalled something one of her cousins once said: "We don't have to worry about s--t. We're the f--kin' Kennedys."
She added, per Taraborrelli: "I refuse to allow myself to end up just another casualty of the so-called Kennedy curse. The Kennedy curse ends here, with me."
Kara died of a heart attack in 2011 when she was 51.
After William Kennedy Smith—son of JFK sister Jean Kennedy Smith and Stephen E. Smith—was acquitted of sexual battery in 1991, having been accused of raping a woman at the Kennedy family's Palm Beach estate, he told reporters, per the New York Times, "I have an enormous debt to the system and to God and I have a terrific faith in both of them."
In a roundabout way, William's trial ended up leading authorities to re-examine the unsolved 1975 murder of 15-year-old Martha Moxley in Greenwich, Conn. It was floated (and proved unfounded) that William spent time at teh home of his cousins Thomas Skakel and Michael Skakel—nephews of Ethel Kennedy (née Skakel)—the night Martha was beaten to death with a golf club outside her family's house nearby.
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According to Connecticut's Hartford Courant, in a proposal for a never-published book about his own family, Michael described the Skakels as being plagued by "chronic illness, alcoholism and a repressive Catholic moral and sexual outlook," resulting in "systemic dysfunction, at times surfacing as extreme pathology."
He wrote, "I have come to see this dysfunction as a price of wealth and power in a society that worships romantic myth at the expense of truth."
Their relationship with the Kennedys, cemented when Michael's aunt Ethel married Robert, was "love-hate," he continued. And after Martha was killed, "an even more intense level of chaos came to rule our household."
While he and Tommy were questioned during the initial investigation into Martha's death, Michael ended up being charged with murder in 2000.
"Michael is one of the most honest and open people I know," his cousin Douglas Kennedy, Robert Kennedy's 10th child, told People at the time. "He cares about people more than anybody I've ever met, and there is no possible way he's involved in this."
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Michael, then 41, was found guilty of murder in 2002 and sentenced to 20 years to life in prison.
"Like nearly everyone else who knows him well, I love Michael," Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who credited his cousin with helping him get sober in 1983, wrote in The Atlantic in 2003. "If he were guilty, I would have testified against him. He is not."
He continued, "Many people asked me why I would publicly defend him—a cause unlikely to enhance my own credibility. I support him not out of misguided family loyalty but because I am certain he is innocent."
Appealing on the grounds of inadequate legal counsel, Michael was granted a new trial in 2013 and freed on a $1.2 million bond. But the paperwork outlived the case: The Connecticut Supreme Court voted 4-3 to reinstate his conviction in 2016, then vacated it in 2018.
"Martha was killed when I was 43, and in just a few weeks, a couple of weeks, I'm going to be 86," Dorthy Moxley, Martha's mother, told NBC News in 2018. "That means half of my life I have lived with this. So I think I can live the rest of my life with it also."
Prosecutors announced in 2020 that they would not retry the case.
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Not one to shy away from the most controversial of personal convictions, RFK Jr. also argued his cousin's innocence in his 2016 book Framed: Why Michael Skakel Spent a Decade in Prison for a Murder He Didn't Commit.
And as the 50th anniversary of his father's assassination approached in 2018, he called for a new investigation, explaining that he suspected Sirhan Sirhan—who is serving a life sentence for murder—didn't pull the trigger. "I got to a place where I had to see Sirhan," Robert Jr. told the Washington Post in May 2018. "I went there because I was curious and disturbed by what I had seen in the evidence."
After looking at the autopsy report, he said, "I didn't feel it was something I could dismiss. I was disturbed that the wrong person might have been convicted of killing my father."
His sister Rory told The Guardian in 2018 that she still felt "pain, sorrow and sadness" over their father's death.
"That's part of the process, over these many years," she explained. "I think that I've also, over the years, gotten tools to help me work through it in a positive way, turning those experiences into a deeper understanding of others. You see somebody else suffer and you feel that suffering."
As for Robert Jr., who's now married to Cheryl Hines, his second wife, Mary Richardson Kennedy, died by suicide in May 2012, a day after she was charged with drunken driving—which had occurred three days after Robert filed for divorce.
Her friend Alyssa Chapman shared with Taraborelli that Mary told her, "You've heard about this Kennedy curse? I finally figured out what it is: The men are dogs. The women, fools."
And the headlines continue, with Caroline's son Jack Schlossberg now running for congress in New York.
Robert's sister Kerry, who in 2014 was found not guilty of driving while impaired stemming from a 2012 accident, told Taraborrelli, "There's this special, symbiotic relationship Americans have with my family…and while I think a lot of it has to do with basic empathy, I also think it has to do with a collective human experience."
"All people have troubles in their lives," she explained. "If understanding how we have dealt with our own problems can in some way help people cope with their own, well, then I think that's good. In fact, I think that's very good, and I know my family members would agree."
Or, as JFK Jr. said when he launched his magazine George back in 1995, "Family is family. You can pick the Kennedys apart, and I'm sure you will. But at the end of the day, we're just people trying to understand each other as we share this incredible life we've all been blessed with. It's nothing more than just that, if you really want to know the truth."
Read on for a guide to all the Kennedy siblings and kids:
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Joseph P. Kennedy and Rose Kennedy
Joseph Patrick "Joe" Kennedy married Rose Elizabeth Fitzgerald on Oct. 7, 1914.
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By 1932, they had nine children together: Joseph P. Kennedy Jr., John F. Kennedy, Rosemary Kennedy, Kathleen Kennedy, Eunice Kennedy, Patricia Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, Jean Kennedy and Edward Kennedy.
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Joseph P. Kennedy Jr.
Born July 25, 1915, Joe Jr. was going to be president, as far as his father was concerned.
He was a delegate to the 1940 Democratic National Convention and planned to run for Congress after he got out of the Navy. But the 29-year-old and his co-pilot Wilford John Willy were killed Aug. 12, 1944, when explosives they were carrying detonated prematurely while on a bombing run that was part of Operation Aphrodite.
Neither pilot's body was ever recovered and their names are among those on the Tablets of the Missing at the Cambridge American Cemetery and Memorial honoring casualties of World War II.
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John F. Kennedy
It was John, born May 29, 1917, who made it to Congress, then became a U.S. senator and ultimately was elected president in 1960.
He married Jacqueline Bouvier on Sept. 12, 1953, and they welcomed daughter Caroline Kennedy on Nov. 27, 1957, and son John F. Kennedy Jr. on Nov. 25, 1960.
A daughter, Arabella, was stillborn in 1956 and son Patrick, born prematurely on Aug. 7, 1963, lived for only 39 hours.
JFK was assassinated on Nov. 22, 1963, one of the defining events of the 20th century.
Tatiana, Jack, Rose, Edwin, Caroline (Clodagh Kilcoyne/Getty Images)
Caroline Kennedy
Caroline, the U.S. ambassador to Japan during the Obama administration and to Australia for the Biden administration, married Edwin "Ed" Schlossberg in 1986.
They share daughters Rose Kennedy Schlossberg (born June 25, 1988) and Tatiana Kennedy Schlossberg (May 5, 1990) and son John "Jack" Bouvier Kennedy Schlossberg (Jan. 19, 1993).
TV producer Rose went to Harvard like her mom and married restaurateur Rory McAuliffe in 2022.
Tatiana—a journalist who didn't know at the time that her 2014 New York Times article about a dead bear being found in Central Park involved her cousin RFK Jr.—graduated from Yale and married college sweetheart George Moran in 2017. They welcomed a son, Edwin Jr., in 2022, and a daughter in 2024.
In November 2025, Tatiana shared in an essay for The New Yorker that she was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia, a rare blood cancer, which her doctors have said is terminal. She died on Dec. 30. She was 35.
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Jack Schlossberg
Jack—a Yale alum, graduate of Harvard's JD/MBA program and quite the hoot on social media—spoke at the 2024 Democratic National Convention and was a political correspondent for Vogue covering the most recent presidential election.
"I am inspired by my family’s legacy of public service,” he told Vogue in 2024. "I take that very seriously, and I want to contribute in my own way. I have big dreams, but I also know that I’m trying to make a positive impact today."
That starts with a run for congress, Jack announcing in November 2025 he would seek a seat representing New York’s 12th congressional district.
Justin Ide
John F. Kennedy Jr.
The former first son, named People's Sexiest Man Alive in 1988, was considered one of the most eligible bachelors on the planet before he married Calvin Klein publicist Carolyn Bessette on Sept. 21, 1996.
In a shattering twist of fate for his oft-grieving family, JFK Jr. died young like his father, his potential snuffed out when he was killed, along with Carolyn and her sister Lauren Bessette, in a plane crash on July 16, 1999.
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Rosemary Kennedy
Rosemary (at right, with sister Kathleen and mom Rose) was born Sept. 13, 1918.
While she attended a special boarding school for students with learning difficulties, Rosemary had behavioral issues that led to her father's decision to have her undergo a prefrontal lobotomy when she was 23.
Rosemary emerged from the experimental procedure—which was touted as a potential cure for mental illness and Joe did hope it would help her—severely disabled and spent the rest of her life (she lived till Jan. 7, 2005) institutionalized.
"All along I had continued to believe that she could have lived her life as a Kennedy girl, just a little slower," Rose told historian Doris Kearns Goodwin years later. "But then it was all gone in a matter of minutes."
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Kathleen "Kick" Kennedy
Born Feb. 20, 1920, Kathleen got a kick out of life, hence her jaunty nickname.
She married William Cavendish, the Marquess of Hartington, in a civil ceremony in London on May 6, 1944—against her mother's wishes, as her beloved wasn't Catholic, so the bride's big brother Joe Jr. was the only member of her family who attended the wedding.
A month later, William, a major in the British Army, was killed by a sniper in Belgium.
She remained in England and fell for still-married William Wentworth-Fitzwilliam, 8th Earl Fitzwilliam. Before he could secure a divorce, they both died when the plane carrying them to the French Riviera crashed on May 13, 1948.
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Eunice Kennedy Shriver
Eunice was born July 10, 1921.
The devoted philanthropist and founder of the Special Olympics married Robert Sargent Shriver Jr. on May 23, 1953.
They had five children—Robert "Bobby" Shriver III (born April 28, 1954), Maria Shriver (Nov. 6, 1955), Timothy (Aug. 29, 1959), Mark (Feb. 17, 1964) and Anthony (July 20, 1965).
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Maria Shriver
Maria wed Arnold Schwarzenegger on April 26, 1986, at the Kennedy family compound in Hyannis Port, Mass.
The power couple reigned as governor and first lady of California from November 2003 until January 2011, but they split up not long after once Arnold confessed to fathering a son, Joseph Baena, with the family's longtime housekeeper.
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Katherine Schwarzenegger
When she died at 88, Eunice had 19 grandchildren, including Maria's four kids with her now-ex-husband: Katherine Schwarzenegger (born Dec. 13, 1989), Patrick Schwarzenegger (Sept. 18, 1993), Christina Schwarzenegger (July 23, 1991) and Christopher Schwarzenegger (Sept. 27, 1997).
Katherine wed Chris Pratt on June 8, 2019, and they share three children, Lyla (Aug. 6, 2020), Eloise (May 21, 2022) and Ford (Nov. 8, 2024). The actor is also dad to son Jack (born Aug. 17, 2012) with ex-wife Anna Faris.
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Patricia Kennedy Lawford
Patricia, born May 6, 1924, brought the Rat Pack into the family when she married Peter Lawford on April 24, 1954.
Her marriage to the British actor produced sons Christopher Lawford (born in 1955), Sydney Maleia Lawford (1956), Victoria Francis Lawford (1958), and Robin Elizabeth Lawford before they divorced in 1966.
Peter, who died in 1984, was a close confidante of his brother-in-law JFK and is generally credited with introducing the future president to Marilyn Monroe during a visit to the Lawfords' Malibu home.
Patricia passed away in 2006. Her thrice-married son Christopher died after suffering a heart attack in 2018.
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Robert F. Kennedy
The son known familiarly to the whole country as Bobby Kennedy married Ethel Skakel on June 17, 1950.
They went on to have 11 children: Kathleen, Joseph II, Robert Jr., David, Courtney, Michael, Kerry, Christopher, Maxwell, Douglas and Rory.
Ethel was pregnant with Rory when Bobby was fatally shot on June 6, 1968, shortly after winning the California Democratic primary.
David Kennedy died of a drug overdose on April 25, 1984, at the age of 28. Michael Kennedy was killed on Dec. 31, 1997, when he slammed into a tree while on skis and simultaneously tossing a football around during a family trip to Aspen, Colo. The 37-year-old shared three children with wife Victoria Gifford.
Her husband died when their eldest child was only 16, but Ethel Kennedy went on to be a grandmother of 34. Two of her grandchildren have died: Courtney and husband Paul Hill's daughter Saoirse Hill, 22, in 2019 of an accidental drug overdose and Kathleen and husband David Townsend's daughter Maeve Kennedy McKean, 40, in a 2020 canoeing accident.
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Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
RFK Jr., born Jan. 17, 1954, is a thrice-married father of six.
He shares son Robert Francis "Bobby" Kennedy III (born 1984) and daughter Kathleen "Kick" Kennedy (born 1988) with first wife Emily Black.
They divorced in 1994 after 12 years of marriage.
Amaryllis Fox/Instagram
Robert F. Kennedy III
RFK III has been married to CIA analyst turned author and TV host Amaryllis Fox since 2017.
They share daughter Bobby (born Jan. 7, 2019) and son Cassius Watts Thoreau Kennedy (Aug. 30, 2021), as well as Amaryllis' daughter Zoë from a previous relationship.
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Kick Kennedy
"I like to say life is just a collection of experiences—some good, some bad—and the more you have the better," the Stanford grad told Town & Country in 2012.
And merely knowing Ben Affleck "in passing," as a source put it, brought Kick Kennedy to the top of the trending bar in August 2024 days after Jennifer Lopez filed for divorce from the actor.
Affleck's rep was quick to shut down romance speculation, telling E! News, "Everything about him and Kick is untrue."
So nothing about being a Kennedy had really changed in a decade. Or a century.
"People ask me, 'What's it like to be a Kennedy?'" she told T&C. "Maybe it's just the temperature of the water, but I'm just like, 'I have no idea.' When I see my face or name in the tabloids, I get a knot in my stomach. It's just not me—it's reading something that's not real."
But she did feel a kinship with the great aunt she was named for, who died two years before her father was born.
"It's funny how similar we are," Kick mused. "She was fun and social and a performer in many ways."
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RFK Jr. married Mary Richardson in 1994 and they went on to have four children: Conor Richardson Kennedy (born July 25 ,1994), Kyra LeMoyne Kennedy (Aug. 22, 1995), William Finbar "Finn" Kennedy (Nov. 8, 1997) and Aidan Caohman Vieques Kennedy (July 13, 2001).
The couple were legally separated when Mary died by suicide in 2012.
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Father and sons: Conor, Aidan and RFK III.
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Conor Kennedy
Conor has maintained a fairly low profile, high-profile activism and other exploits aside, since rocketing to fame as an 18-year-old Harvard student and happened to bring Taylor Swift home to meet the family.
Their romance only lasted a few months, and Conor went on to grow up and graduate from Georgetown Law School. But, the headlines were made.
"Taylor Swift's ex Conor Kennedy" is now engaged to singer Giulia Be.
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Kyra Kennedy
Kyra, a regular among the high-fashion set, lives in Milan.
She said in an Aug. 27, 2024, video posted in partnership with Elle and Bvlgari that she's working on a project in memory of her late mother.
"Have I experienced a rebirth in my life?" she asks in the clip. "Yes, I definitely have. As a little girl, I was one person. And when I became a young adult, I did a complete 180."
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RFK Jr. married Curb Your Enthusiasm star Cheryl Hines in 2014.
The actress shares daughter Catherine Young (born March 8, 2004) with ex-husband Paul Young.
Kick Kennedy/Instagram
In wishing her dad a happy Father's Day in 2018, Kick wrote on Instagram, "Thanks for giving me all these wacky brothers and sisters!"
Mike Coppola/Getty Images for 2022 Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Ripple of Hope Gala
Kerry Kennedy
Ethel and RFK's seventh child shares three daughters—twins Mariah Kennedy-Cuomo and Cara Kennedy Cuomo (born in 1995) and Michaela Kennedy-Cuomo (born in 1997)—with ex-husband Andrew Cuomo.
Kerry and Andrew, who was governor of New York from 2011 to 2021, married in 1990 and separated in 2003 before divorcing in 2005.
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Jean Kennedy Smith
Born Feb. 20, 1928, the eighth of Joe and Rose's nine kids, Jean founded the VSA Kennedy Arts Center and served as U.S. Ambassador to Ireland during the Clinton administration.
She married Stephen Edward Smith, a strategist on JFK's presidential campaign, on May 19, 1956. They shared sons Stephen Smith Jr. and William Smith and daughters Amanda Smith and Kym Smith.
Jean died June 17, 2020, having outlived all of her siblings.
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Edward "Ted" Kennedy
Sen. Ted Kennedy, more scandalous than 90 percent of his family put together, shared three children with first wife Joan Bennett: Kara Kennedy (born Feb. 27, 1960), Edward Kennedy Jr. (Sept. 26, 1961) and Patrick Kennedy II (July 14, 1967).
He and Joan divorced in 1982 after 24 years of marriage and he wed Victoria Reggie in 1992.
Kara suffered a fatal heart attack on Sept. 16, 2011, two years after her father died. Joan died on Oct. 8, 2025.
(Original story published June 6, 2019, at 3 a.m. PT; updated on Aug. 2, 2019, at 12:40 p.m.; Nov. 1, 2019, at 12:55 p.m. PT)
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