JFK Granddaughter, 35, Reveals She Has Terminal Cancer on the Anniversary of His Assassination
Tragedy struck the Kennedy family again when Tatiana Schlossberg, 35-year-old granddaughter of assassinated President John F. Kennedy, revealed Saturday that she had less than a year to live after being diagnosed with blood cancer.
She revealed the prognosis in a New Yorkers essay titled “A Battle With My Blood,” poignantly published on November 22, the anniversary of his grandfather’s 1963 assassination in Dallas, 62 years ago.
The mother of two wrote that she suffered from myeloid leukemia with a rare mutation. The first paragraph directly echoes his experience in what can only be described as powerful prose:
When you die, at least in my limited experience, you start to remember everything. The images come in flashes – of people, places and stray conversations – and refuse to stop. I see my best friend from grade school as we make a mud pie in her backyard, garnish it with candles and a small American flag, and watch in panic as the flag catches fire. I see my college boyfriend, wearing boat shoes a few days after a record snowstorm, slip and fall in a puddle of slush. I want to break up with him, so I laugh until I can’t breathe.
She continues, “Maybe my brain is replaying my life now because I have a terminal diagnosis, and all those memories will be lost. Maybe it’s because I don’t have much time to create new ones, and part of me is digging in the sand.”
Schlossberg reports that doctors discovered an elevated white blood cell count in her blood tests just hours after she gave birth to her second child in May 2024 at Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital in New York. Doctors thought it might be related to childbirth or “it could be leukemia,” she wrote.
“It’s not leukemia,” she told her husband George Moran, then a urology resident at the hospital. “What are they talking about?”
But it was.
Since then, she and oncologists have been fighting the disease with chemotherapy, blood transfusions and a bone marrow transplant. The mutation that afflicts Schlossberg is called “Inversion 3” and is usually only seen in older patients.
In January, she participated in a clinical trial for a new cell therapy. But she writes that she was told she had less than 12 months to live.
Schlossberg, the daughter of President Kennedy’s daughter Carolyn, graduated from Yale and received a master’s degree from Oxford. She previously worked as a journalist at New York Times and published his first book in 2019 on the daily impact of humans on the environment.
The Kennedy family – descendants of New Deal-era ambassador and businessman Joseph P. Kennedy – is often accused of having an inordinate share of unforeseen deaths and tragedies, with tabloid media even using the phrase “the Kennedy curse” over the years.
Family tragedies long predated the president’s assassination in 1963. Joseph Kennedy’s eldest son Joe died in a plane crash during World War II in 1944. Kathleen “Kick” Kennedy, JFK’s sister, died in a plane crash in bad weather in France in 1948.
Premature deaths continued. Schlossberg’s great-uncle, former Attorney General Robert Kennedy, was felled by an assassin’s bullet while campaigning for the presidency in Los Angeles in 1968.
His uncle, his mother’s brother, John F. Kennedy, Jr., crashed a small plane into Atlantic waters during an ill-advised flight he attempted to pilot to Martha’s Vineyard on a foggy night in 1999. His wife and sister-in-law also perished in that accident.
Other deaths in the Kennedy clan over the decades include a suicide, two drug overdoses, a skiing accident and two drownings.
Schlossberg is the second of three children of Caroline Kennedy and Edwin Schlossberg. His brother Jack, 32, is running for Congress in the 12th Congressional District vacated by Manhattan Representative Jerold Nadler (Democrat of New York).
Schlossberg has been married to urologist George Moran, whom she met while a student at Yale, since 2017. The couple have two children: son Edwin, 3, and a daughter, now 18 months old.
She writes inside New Yorkers a share of the possible loss that his children could suffer.
“My first thought was that my children, whose faces live permanently inside my eyelids, would not remember me,” she wrote.
Contributor Lowell Cauffiel is the author of the New York Times bestseller House of secrets and nine other mystery novels and non-fiction titles. See lowellcauffiel.com to find out more.
