In 1969, Ted Kennedy speaks on television of the “curse” hanging over his family. The phrase stuck — but it doesn't hold up against the family's own record. What remains is legible in the genogram.

A Phrase That Stuck

On July 25, 1969, Ted Kennedy appears before the television cameras. A week earlier, on the night of July 18 to 19, his car had plunged off a narrow bridge on Chappaquiddick Island into a tidal channel. His passenger, Mary Jo Kopechne, 28 years old, drowned; the accident was not reported to police until roughly ten hours later. In this speech, in which he must account for his conduct on the night of the accident, Ted Kennedy says he had asked himself “whether some awful curse did actually hang over all the Kennedys.” The phrase has been part of the public narrative about this family ever since.

It falls on fertile ground. An assassinated president, an assassinated senator, plane crashes, an early childhood death, a woman who disappears from view for the rest of her life after a medical procedure — for decades, the Kennedys have supplied material for the notion that something larger than chance is at work here. The term “Kennedy curse” has become so deeply ingrained that it is now often used without quotation marks, as if it were a diagnosis rather than a phrase uttered by a grieving man under pressure in a single television address.

For therapists and counselors who work with genograms, this is exactly the point of interest: What happens when a family history is read not as a curse but as a system? What becomes visible when the nine children of Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. and Rose Kennedy are viewed not as a community bound by fate, but as what a genogram makes of them: a structure of generations, roles, mandates, and patterns?

The Reality Check the Myth Doesn't Survive

Before examining this structure, a simple look at the numbers is worthwhile — because the myth of the curse fails on its own evidence. Joseph Sr. and Rose Kennedy had nine children. Five of them lived to between 77 and 92 years of age: Eunice Kennedy Shriver died at 88, Patricia Kennedy Lawford at 82, Jean Kennedy Smith at 92, Rosemary Kennedy at 86, Ted Kennedy at 77. Measured against any notion of a curse, that is a remarkably normal age.

Four of the nine siblings did die prematurely or unnaturally: Joseph Jr. at 29 in the war, John F. Kennedy at 46 by assassination, Kathleen at 28 in a plane crash, Robert F. Kennedy at 42 by assassination. These are four grave, public, often violent deaths in one family — enough to sustain a narrative. But four out of nine, not nine out of nine. The widespread notion that in this family “everyone died young” is simply wrong. A curse that spares the majority of those it supposedly touches is no longer a curse. It is something else — and it is precisely that something else a genogram can examine.

The Mandate: How a Firstborn Becomes an Institution

In a genogram, birth order is never just a number. Joseph P. Kennedy Jr., born in July 1915 as the eldest, was groomed from childhood to be the family's political firstborn. His maternal grandfather, former Boston mayor John “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald, publicly prophesied that same year that this child would one day become the first Catholic president of the United States. A mandate formulated before the child could walk.

Joe Jr. died in 1944 in World War II during “Operation Aphrodite” — an early, risky drone concept: an aircraft loaded with explosives was to be remotely guided to its target, but the plane exploded prematurely, before Joe Jr. and his co-pilot Wilford Willy could bail out. Both died.

This left the position of designated first-born vacant — and it did not stay vacant for long. John F. Kennedy, the second-oldest son, who had previously been regarded as a bookish, sickly young man, took on the mandate. His own words on this have been preserved: “Now the burden falls on me.” Anyone who works with delegations in a genogram knows this moment: a mandate does not vanish with the person who first carried it. It moves on, to the next available child.

The father who had formulated this mandate lived to see it fulfilled — and to pay its price. In December 1961, barely a year after his son's inauguration, Joseph Sr. suffered a severe stroke: paralyzed on the right side, his speech severely impaired, his intellect intact. In this condition, fully conscious and unable to express himself, he lived through the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963 and the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy in 1968. He died in 1969 at the age of 81, outliving four of his nine children. In a genogram, this is one of the constellations one does not overlook: the generation that issued the mandate ends up standing over the graves of those who carried it out.

Rosemary: What Secrecy Does to a System

This family history contains one chapter that demands particular care, because it concerns a real person to whom something irreversible was done. Rosemary Kennedy, the third-oldest child, had documented developmental delays as early as before 1941. In November of that year, at the age of 23, her father Joseph Sr. had her undergo a lobotomy, performed by the physicians Walter Freeman and James W. Watts. Rosemary was conscious during the procedure. The result was not relief but drastic worsening: she became permanently and severely disabled and spent the rest of her life institutionalized at St. Coletta's in Jefferson, Wisconsin.

Precision matters here: the lobotomy did not cause Rosemary's disability — it catastrophically worsened an already existing impairment. Holding both facts together, without playing one off against the other, is exactly the kind of differentiation a genogram forces.

What matters to professionals working with families at least as much as the procedure itself is what happened afterward. Rosemary's fate remained hidden from the public for decades. It was not until 1987, through historian Doris Kearns Goodwin's book about the Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys, that it became known to a wider audience — more than forty years after the procedure. A daughter disappears from a family's public narrative without the family itself disappearing. This is a pattern that appears in many genograms, even outside famous families: there is the child no one talks about, whose name comes up less often, whose photo is missing. In a genogram, this absence itself becomes information.

Secrecy as a Family Style

Rosemary's story does not stand alone. John F. Kennedy's health, too, was deliberately concealed for years. In 1947, he was diagnosed in London with Addison's disease, a rare adrenal insufficiency. Publicly, the explanation circulated instead that he occasionally suffered from malaria relapses. During the 1960 election campaign, the concealment continued: his physician Dr. Janet Travell publicly stated that he never had the “classic,” tuberculosis-related form of Addison's disease — which was technically true but concealed the more common autoimmune form he actually had. Full disclosure of the nature and extent of his illness did not come until 2002, through historian Robert Dallek, based on released medical records.

Two secrets, two siblings of the same generation, one recurring pattern: not the outright lie, but the technically true half-truth that conceals just enough to preserve the image. Anyone working with families in therapeutic practice knows this form of secrecy well — it is often harder to address than an outright lie, because it evades any simple confrontation.

The State of the Sources Is Part of the Phenomenon

At this point, a brief detour is worthwhile — one that at first looks like a footnote but actually belongs at the core: few families have had as much written about them as the Kennedys — and for few is it as laborious to separate established facts from well-told ones.

One example: Joseph Kennedy Sr. is credited with a line that appears in countless texts, to the effect that in this family there were no losers, only winners. It fits perfectly with everything known about him. Yet no source can be found that documents it with a date and context. It is too good to be verified. Or a detail that looks more harmless: a news archive from 1984 states that David Kennedy was thirteen when his father was shot. Calculating his birth date against the night of the crime, he was twelve. A one-year discrepancy, passed along for forty years.

Even the curse has a hazy origin. That Ted Kennedy spoke of a “curse” in 1969 is documented. Whether he coined the term or merely voiced something that had long been circulating cannot be said with certainty. And the obvious counter-question — is this clustering, for a large family over half a century, involving war, politics, and aviation, even statistically remarkable at all? — has to this day not been seriously calculated by anyone. There is no result one could set against the myth. Only plausibility.

This is no coincidence, but the continuation of the pattern by other means. A family that withheld Rosemary's fate for 46 years and JFK's illness for over half a century created precisely the vacuum in which legends grow. Where facts are missing, narrative fills the space — and it fills it reliably with whatever sounds best.

And with that we are in the middle of genogram work itself. At the practice table, too, archives are rarely on hand. What lies there are memories, family narratives, omissions. The task is not to play one against the other, but to keep the two cleanly separated: What do we know? And what is being told? Both belong in the genogram — but they belong marked differently.

Risk as a Family Style

A third pattern runs through the generations: a deliberate, repeated relationship with risk. Joe Jr. volunteered for the dangerous Aphrodite mission. Ted Kennedy survived a plane crash in 1964, in which the pilot and his aide Edward Moss died, suffering three broken vertebrae, broken ribs, and a collapsed lung — he spent almost five months in clinical treatment afterward. Michael Kennedy, son of Robert F. Kennedy, died in 1997 in a skiing accident in Aspen: playing football on skis, without a helmet, colliding with a tree. In 1999, John F. Kennedy Jr. himself was at the controls of the Piper Saratoga in which he, his wife Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, and his sister-in-law Lauren Bessette crashed off Martha's Vineyard — he did not hold an instrument rating; the investigating authority, the NTSB, named spatial disorientation at night and in haze as the cause.

Historian Steve Gillon has offered a pointed assessment on this: there is no such thing as a Kennedy curse — what looks like fate in this family is better explained by a deliberate, cross-generational pattern of risk-taking: volunteering for war, dangerous sports, refusing personal security. This, too, as noted above, is an interpretation, not proof. But this is exactly how a genogram works: not with proof, but with patterns made visible that a family repeats across generations.

What Only Becomes Visible in the Genogram

Some details of this family history barely register in a chronological telling — in a genogram, where generations sit side by side and one above another, they leap out. Four plane crashes across two generations: Joe Jr. in 1944, Kathleen in 1948, Ted in 1964 (survived), John F. Kennedy Jr. in 1999. Reading this as a list, one sees four events spread across 55 years. Drawing it as a genogram, one sees a line running from the siblings through to their children.

Biographical coincidences that get lost in running prose also stand out in a genogram: Kathleen Kennedy, born 1920, and her younger sister Jean, born 1928, share the same birthday, February 20 — a detail with no causal significance, but an example of how a genogram exposes relationships between data points that a text would simply list side by side.

And there are the quiet, often overlooked connections between generations: David Kennedy, son of Robert F. Kennedy, was twelve years old when his father was shot dead in the night of June 5, 1968. He watched it on television, alone in a hotel room in Los Angeles — ten days before his thirteenth birthday. David died in 1984 at the age of 28 from a mixed intoxication. A genogram shows not only that a child lost his father to violence — it also shows at what age, at what developmental stage, and leaves room for the question that follows from it, without answering it prematurely.

What Practitioners Can Take From This

Clients bring their own curse narratives into the practice room. “In our family every man dies young.” “No marriage lasts in our family.” Such statements almost always carry a biographical truth within them — they are not pulled out of thin air, but condense a family's real, often painful experiences into a formula. Honoring that truth is the first step. Letting it stand unchallenged as fate would be the second, unnecessary one.

The genogram offers a third way. It takes the narrative seriously without taking it at face value. It asks: Who carried which mandate? What was concealed, and what did that silence do to the following generations? Which risk behavior repeats itself, and who modeled it first? These are exactly the questions that turn a curse narrative into a pattern — and turn a pattern into something that, unlike a curse, can be understood and changed. The Kennedys are no special case in this regard. In their public thoroughness, they are simply an especially well-documented example of something that happens, on a smaller scale, in many families as well.