The Kennedy agonies

By Barbara A. Perry

My heart broke as I read the news of Tatiana Schlossberg’s passing at age 35. Yes, she had written last month about her terminal cancer diagnosis, but I hoped that somehow she would have more time with her two small children and husband George. I met Tatiana and her spouse just once, three years ago, at a Martha’s Vineyard reception for the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library Foundation Advisory Board on which I serve.

That beautiful summer evening, overlooking the ocean, I introduced myself to Tatiana, who kindly responded, “Are you writing a book about President Kennedy and Eleanor Roosevelt?” “How did you know?” I asked. The youthful Ms. Schlossberg told me that she was friends with Eleanor’s granddaughter and had heard through the Roosevelt grapevine about my forthcoming study of JFK and ER, two giants of America’s most powerful political dynasties. Tatiana introduced me to her husband, who was equally charming. What a lovely couple, I thought to myself as I circulated to meet her mother, Ambassador Caroline Kennedy, father Ed Schlossberg, and brother Jack, who is so reminiscent of his late uncle John F. Kennedy Jr. in his handsome looks and sparkling personality. After losing JFK Jr. in 1999, when a plane he was piloting crashed off the Vineyard, no wonder Caroline seems especially close to her only son. She and John Jr. belonged to a tight-knit trio with their mother Jacqueline Kennedy after President Kennedy’s death, and they bolstered each other when the former First Lady succumbed to cancer in 1994.

For this lifelong admirer of the Kennedys (ever since my mother took me to see JFK campaigning in our hometown of Louisville, KY), and scholar of the president and his family, the Camelot experience was magical. I was continuing to process my evening with the Kennedy/Schlossbergs, while searching for a chowder eatery, when I literally backed into young Jack while waiting for my meal at a rustic seafood counter. We had another delightful conversation, and then his order was up, and we bid adieu. As I claimed my dinner, the clerk commented that Jack had left behind part of his meal. I offered to take it to him. Running through the darkened streets of Edgartown, calling “Jack!” but trying not to draw attention to the famous grandson of President Kennedy, I discovered him with his parents, sister, and brother-in-law. I explained that Jack had left part of his dinner, and they all burst out laughing, “He always does that!” I couldn’t help thinking about JFK’s mother, Rose Kennedy, who, even on his inauguration day, remembered how the future president frequently misplaced his boyhood possessions.

It was Rose who first labeled the Kennedy family’s experiences as “agony and ecstasy.” She cited the birth of her first child, Joe Jr., as the most memorable moment in her long and illustrious life. Yet his death in World War II was among the first in a long line of tragedies that would befall her nine children. Just four years later, her beloved daughter, Kathleen, whose husband had been the victim of a Nazi sniper, perished in a plane crash.

By 1963, the family had reached the apogee of its power, with JFK as president, brother Robert (Bobby) as attorney general, and youngest sibling Edward (Teddy) as a U.S. senator. That year, on November 22, Teddy was presiding over the Senate when an aide rushed in with news that the president had been shot. Even four decades later, Senator Kennedy became tearful and halting during his Miller Center oral history in remembering that Bobby reported that their brother Jack “was not going to—it was a hopeless situation.” It fell to the senator to fly to Hyannis Port, MA, and tell his stroke-ridden father that the president had been assassinated.

Five years later, history repeated itself with Bobby’s assassination while running for the 1968 Democratic presidential nomination. His devastated mother Rose wrote, “It seemed impossible that the same kind of disaster could befall our family twice in five years.” She continued, “If I had read it in fiction, I would have said it was impossible.” Her steadfast Catholic faith sustained her. As she viewed Bobby’s casket at New York’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral, she took courage from picturing Jesus’ mother Mary standing at the foot of the cross as he died from crucifixion.

Senator Kennedy managed to deliver a moving eulogy for the second of his brothers to die by assassination, with only a poignant quaver in his voice when he mentioned his departed siblings, “Joe, Kathleen, and Jack.” He admitted to the Miller Center decades later, “Whatever the meaning of life in terms of spirituality and resilience and source of strength that would come from my faith—I found it was pretty empty, pretty empty. I mean . . . the losses, his loss. All these children [Jack’s two and Robert’s 11] growing up without the kind of extraordinary human beings that both of my brothers were.”

“The bottom just dropped out, and I just sort of checked out,” Teddy recalled, but he felt obliged as the last Kennedy brother to bolster his parents’ spirits the best he could.

He sat with them on camera a few days later as Rose read an explanation of her religious faith: “We cannot always understand the ways of Almighty God. The crosses which He sends us, the sacrifices which He demands of us. . . . But we accept with faith and resignation His Holy Will, with no looking back to what might have been, and we are at peace. We have courage, we are undaunted and steadfast, and we shall carry on the principles for which Bobby stood. . . .”

But she was only human, and she wrote for a family tribute to Bobby, “What joy he brought us. What an aching void he has left behind, which nothing in the world can ever fill. We admired him, we loved him, and our lives are indeed bleak without him.”

Tragedy also haunts her nearly 30 grandchildren who have lost three of their own offspring. Bobby’s daughter Courtney’s only child, Saoirse, died of a drug overdose in 2019. At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic shutdown in 2020, Bobby’s eldest child, Kathleen, endured the loss of her daughter, Maeve, and her eight-year-old son, Gideon, when they drowned in a canoe accident on the Chesapeake Bay. Now Caroline’s daughter Tatiana has succumbed to a rare form of blood cancer, diagnosed just after the birth of her second child in 2024.

I had looked forward to sending Tatiana a copy of my book on her grandfather and Eleanor Roosevelt when it is published this summer. Instead, I will be writing a heartfelt condolence message to Caroline and hoping that Rose Kennedy’s legacy of faith and fortitude can bolster the family once more.

Barbara A. Perry, J. Wilson Newman Professor and co-chair of the Miller Center’s Presidential Oral History Program, is the author Edward Kennedy: An Oral History, Rose Kennedy: The Life and Times of a Political Matriarch, and Jacqueline Kennedy: First Lady of the New Frontier. Barbara also serves on the Board of Friends of the JFK Birthplace.