Epi 36: The Kennedy Curse

Are the Kennedy's cursed? - probably.  This family’s string of untimely deaths from assassinations, freak accidents, plane crashes, suicides and overdoses is just so crazy.  So.  Much.  Death.

Here's just a quick run down of some of the major tragic events that happened to the Kennedy’s from 1941-2019:

• In 1941 Rosemary Kennedy had a lobotomy that went drastically wrong.  This left her unable to walk or speak well, and as a result, Rosemary remained institutionalized until her death in 2005.
• Joe Kennedy Jr. died in 1944 when he volunteered to pilot a secret World War II bombing mission in France. Two in-flight explosions hit the aircraft, killing him and another pilot. He was 29 years old.
• Only four years later, JFK’s sister Kathleen Kennedy died when a small plane crashed during a storm in France. She was only 28.
• In 1963, President Kennedy and wife Jacqueline gave birth to their third child, Patrick, nearly six weeks early. He survived for less than two days. 
• Later that year, President JFK, 46 years old, was assassinated in Dallas.
• June 19, 1964 – Senator Ted Kennedy was involved in a plane crash in which one of his aides and the pilot were killed. Ted spent weeks in a hospital recovering from a broken back, a punctured lung, broken ribs, and internal bleeding.
• On June 5th 1968, Robert F. Kennedy was shot dead in Los Angeles in 1968, just as he was gaining Democratic support for his own presidential run.
• July 18, 1969 – In the Chappaquiddick incident, Ted Kennedy accidentally drove his car off a bridge on Chappaquiddick Island, which killed his 28-year-old passenger, Mary Jo Kopechne.
• In 1973, Edward M. Kennedy Jr., then aged 12, had to have his right leg surgically amputated due to bone cancer; he underwent a long, difficult, experimental two-year drug treatment to cure the cancer
• JFK’s son, John F. Kennedy Jr., his wife, Carolyn Kennedy, and sister-in-law Lauren Bessette died in a plane crash in 1999. JFK Jr. was piloting the plane at night when he apparently lost his bearings — and the aircraft plummeted into the Atlantic.
• Meanwhile, one of Robert F. Kennedy’s sons, David Kennedy, died in 1984 of a drug overdose in a Florida hotel. He was 28.
• Another son of RFK, Michael Kennedy, died in a Colorado ski accident on New Year’s Eve 1997. He was 39.
• In 2011, Ted Kennedy’s daughter Kara Kennedy died at age 51 of a heart attack during a workout at a health club.
• Earlier this month, Saoirse Roisin Kennedy Hill, 22-year-old granddaughter of Robert F. Kennedy, was found dead of a suspected drug overdose at the Kennedy Compound in Hyannis Port, Cape Cod, Massachusetts.

 



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