The Kennedy Curse: A Study in Generational Fate

Lately I’ve been watching the new series about John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, Love Story. I find the show enjoyable and the music excellent. 

But what started as curiosity slowly turned into something else. To this day, I still remember when I heard the terrible news about JFK Jr and Carolyn, who married in 1996 and died tragically in a plane crash just a few years later.

They were so beautiful, so magnetic, so doomed. 

The Kennedy story is still unfolding: new tragedies seem to appear around the family. The passing of Tatiana Schlossberg, Caroline Kennedy’s daughter, at age 35, after an aggressive form of leukemia, brought the question back again.

How can so much tragedy orbit one bloodline?

This is a sensitive topic for those who refuse to embrace the things that cannot be proved. However, the number of calamities the Kennedys have experienced can hardly be seen as a matter of chance, even for the most rational minds.

Why do tragedies happen to the Kennedys?

Is there a Kennedy curse? Who hexed them and why?

 

The Ill Fated House of Kennedy

Across ancient cultures, generational curses were understood as conditions imposed on bloodlines, lasting for a fixed number of generations, or perpetually, like a sentence with no recourse.

Was this the case with the Kennedy family?

There are only a handful of curses that have reached similar mythic status, perhaps the legend of the Hope Diamond or the curse of Tutankhamun. But in reality, most of these deaths were medically explainable and ordinary for the time. 

The Kennedys are a different kind of tragedy. So many members died young in terrible, violent ways: assassinations, plane crashes, overdoses, and accidents. The most famous, of course, was the killing of John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963.

Interestingly enough, following the assassination of his brother, Robert Kennedy developed an interest in Greeks tragedies centered on dynasties marked by glory, power, and repeated catastrophe. "Somebody up there doesn't like us", he said. 

Robert Kennedy could not have imagined how literal that sentiment would later sound. Not long after, he too would meet the same fate.

 

Ted Kennedy shared a similar view. “I wonder whether some awful curse did actually hang over all the Kennedys”, he said in 1969. 

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis was another member of the family who seemed to interpret the lineage’s tragedies in almost mystical terms. “If I had known Jack was going to be killed, I would never have named our son John F. Kennedy Jr.”

If the Kennedys themselves spoke about a curse, the next question becomes obvious: where could it have begun?

 

Joseph Kennedy and the Jewish Malediction

According to Edward Klein, author of The Kennedy Curse, a Jewish man putted a pulsa denura, a Kabbalistic death malediction, on Joseph P. Kennedy Sr., JFK's father. The incident took place during a boat ride, when Kennedy complained about the noise of a group of Jewish passengers praying and asked the captain to stop them, allegedly using not-so-kind words.

The Jewish travelers, who were literally fleeing Nazi persecution, did not take the insult lightly. In retaliation, one of them, Israel Jacobson, laid a curse upon Kennedy.

The consequences plagued his descendants for decades.

 

Kennedy’s virulent antisemitism has been widely documented: he was once described as “Germany’s best friend” by the Nazi ambassador in London, he admired Adolf Hitler, and he believed that the hostility toward Jews at the time was well-founded. These dubious precedents lead us to believe that an aggressive argument with Jewish men may have occurred. 

A rabbi, in fact, told The Palm Beach Post, “Somebody in the [Kennedy] family did something to open the family to this negative energy, and that has been plaguing the Kennedys for decades.”

Although other clerics denied the incident, claiming that Jews do not practice curses, evidence proves otherwise. Discoveries from the Second Temple period include curse tablets and incantation bowls intended to invoke misfortune upon enemies. 

What is true is that a dynastic curse is traced back to the patriarch who first amassed power. For the Kennedys, that man was Joseph Kennedy.

JFK's father was ambitious, opportunistic, and politically strategic, the kind of qualities that make an enemy or two. Driven by a need for control, he raised his children in a way that many observers believe left them incapable of truly loving others, a dynamic often seen in the offspring of dictatorial or narcissistic parents.

Joseph Kennedy outlived four of his children, witnessing two of them assassinated and two others killed in plane crashes.

Rosemary Kennedy's Forced Lobotomy

Traditionally, curses originated from women who were treated unfairly. A woman who possess natural spiritual sensitivity could curse simply through words spoken in anger or deep emotional pain. Not every hex requires a formal ritual - the force of the injustice gives power to the malediction.

We know the Kennedy men broke a few women, Marilyn Monroe included. Marilyn had the irresistible charm attributed to dark magic. She felt used by both John and Robert Kennedy. Could she have been the one who placed the curse?

 

There are multiple ways to brutalize a woman. The tragedy of Rosemary Kennedy, who suffered a fate worse than death, is one of the darkest chapters of the family's story. 

The daughter of Joseph and Rose Kennedy, Rosemary struggled with even the simplest elementary studies and experienced mood swings. Her parents, clearly not prepared to deal with a child who was different, refused to send Rosemary to a school appropriate for her needs.

Her diaries reveal the normal life of a young woman who enjoyed social events, dancing, and the opera.

When her behavior became more troubling, or, as her mother said, when “disquieting symptoms began to develop,” Rosemary was placed in a convent school, where the nuns found her unpredictable and at risk of becoming sexually involved with men who would undoubtedly take advantage of her.

This was a problem for her father’s political ambitions. In 1941, he arranged a lobotomy, a medical atrocity presented at the time as a revolutionary treatment for the most difficult cases.

Although to judge the actions of a previous era by the standards of today can be anachronistic, the practice was clearly rooted in misogyny and offered like candy when a young woman was rebel, sexual promiscuous or defiant. 

Rosemary had a mild tranquilizer, and after the surgical incision, was asked to recite the Lord's Prayer. During the operation, surgeons drilled holes into her skull and severed connections in the frontal lobes of her brain while she was kept conscious. The outcome was disastrous: Rosemary was left incontinent and unable to speak coherently and care for herself. The doctors admitted later that, in their view, the girl was just depressed and the family in denial about her mental health. 

Either way, the lobotomy stole her future at only 23 years old.Joseph Kennedy quietly placed his daughter in an institution, where she remained for decades, hidden from the public. 

Did Rosemary possess the gift and unknowingly bring a curse upon her father?

 

The Irish Curse

What if the seeds of the family’s misfortune were planted even earlier? If we look further back, we can find more Kennedy tragedies in the 19th century: drownings, death from heat exhaustion, fatal alcoholism. 

Perhaps everything started with Patrick Kennedy, born in 1823 in Dunganstown, Ireland. 

After the Irish famine, or because of a shady debt, he decided to emigrate to the United States. The decision made him restless: like many Irish, he believed that exile by sea meant destruction. Patrick Kennedy was a superstitious man and his terrified mind was a fertile soil to make the prediction self-fulfilled. 

The night before his departure, the village organized a farewell ritual common in that time: the American Wake. The ceremony symbolized the death of the emigrant to the land, due to the slim to none chances of return. Neighbors and family members gathered for a melancholic night of reflection, music, and illegal alcohol.

To wish him luck, his fiancée Bridget gave him a good luck talisman that was, in reality, "a small piece of line containing menstrual blood", meant to ensure that he would remain faithful to her. This information has been dismissed as "unsupported" by evidence. No wonder, as a peace of line with period blood could hardly have been preserved as a family relic.

But, according to Edward Klein, Patrick Kennedy was already married. He abandoned the young woman after discovering that her parents were not as prosperous as he had believed.

Patrick Kennedy died of cholera only eight years after arriving in America. His death occurred exactly 105 years before his great-grandson, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, was assassinated.

What was the origin of the curse? The Irish prediction, or the fiancée who used blood to bind him, probably unaware of the consequences? Or, as suggested above, the original scorned woman - his discarded first wife left in Ireland?

These types of curses often originate from a marriage oath broken by an ancestor. My personal theory is that the discarded first wife of Patrick Kennedy may be the true origin of the Kennedy curse.

 

 

Hubris and the Kennedy Dynasty

To admit belief in the actuality of generational curses is to risk being laughed at. Some people feel they are too sophisticated to believe in them. The Kennedy curse is just hubris and natural consequences of actions. It is a large family and people have things happen to them. 

Okay, I'll bite. The Kennedys were arrogant, irresponsible, and risk-taking, with an over exuberant sense of self worth. Jackie Onassis believed them to be genetically self-destructive men, dopamine seekers with a low tolerance for boredom. 

Several members of the family struggled with addiction and overdoses, particularly in later generations, but drug issues are common in trust fund young people. When you mix entitlement with privilege and add a dose of boredom, you get individuals living in the edge. Decadence and wealth are not good together.

In particular, John Kennedy Jr. was a reckless man with a constant need for physical excitement. America's prince suffered from ADHD and, like his father, had to take stimulants to function. The syndrome affects emotional regulation and impulse control. Danger was a thrill for him. 

Carolyn Bessette saw the warning signs. 

On the evening of July 16, 1999, John Kennedy Jr, Caroly,  and her sister Lauren Bessette boarded a plane to Hyannis Port to attend his cousin wedding the next day. Carolyn was terrified of her husband's piloting, and she didn't want to go to the wedding, but she had to: her absence would look like another sign of trouble in paradise to the outside world. 

What happened exactly? The NTSB ruled the cause of the plane crash as "the pilot's failure to maintain control" after a "graveyard spiral". Truth be told, the accident was a disaster waiting to happen. John Kennedy Jr was only visual flight rated. He turned down an instructor's offer to come with them. He was recovering from a recent ankle injury that could have affected his piloting ability.

He overestimated his skill level and the chance he took cost him his life and his wife's, who really did not want to get on that plane.

 

 

As an occultist with decades of experience, I am used to dealing with people who falsely believe they are cursed. I often tell them that what sometimes appears to be a hex is simply a series of unfortunate circumstances.

Still, no matter how hard I try to rationalize the Kennedy's tragedies, I'm unable to see how can someone define this spectacularly strange collection of deaths as logical. 

 

The Truth About Generational Curses

Generational curses are real and they do exist. They are a form of misfortune that passes from one generation of a family to the next. It begins when one person, usually after being wronged, places a curse on another individual. Instead of affecting only the person who was originally cursed, the consequences continue to appear in the lives of their descendants.

Why an ancestors mistake can determine their descendants future? Well, no one said ever that curses are fair. 

The most common consequences of a generational curse are odd deaths at a young age, a huge collapse after a financial rise, dying alone alone and detached from everyone, or having disastrous marriages that lead up to descendants who will share the same fate. 

Is it true that the majority of generational hex focus on the male descendants? Yes, it is. Those curses were created when the continuation of a family name depended entirely on sons. Yet even older patriarchal societies recognized the value of daughters in developing networks of influence, like royalty. The curses made sure that the female issue were miserable, unhappy, and trapped in disastrous marriages. Do you know a family of beautiful daughters with terrible luck with men? A generational curse is the reason. 

Generational curses are also relatively vague. When an angry person curses someone, there is rarely time to be specific. No one could possibly have the creativity or the ability to foresee the future well enough to say that one son will die in an assassination, another in a plane crash, or a daughter by drowning, especially in a time when tragedies were simpler and rudimentary.

It is usually enough to declare that the descendants will not prosper, will not find peace, and that their line will never flourish.

The therm generational curse is also used to describe various negative conditions members of a family always seem to find themselves in. When this is not healed, the unhealthy patterns get passed on to the next generation until it reaches the cycle breaker, the intelligent person who recognizes what is happening, makes a conscious effort not to repeat the mistakes of their ancestors, and focuses on their own healing. Sometimes this process also involves creating distance from family members whose behavior continues to reinforce the same destructive dynamics.

Read this article about family sabotage for more information.  

When one responsible individual does things differently, the next generation benefits, and the lineage begins to recover. 

But this is generational trauma, something entirely different than a proper bloodline malediction. 

 

How to Remove a Generational Curse 

There are two ways to remove a generational curse.

The first option is through deliberate and advanced spell work. When a family malediction has been present for decades, the ritual required to break it must be equally powerful. The depth of the suffering often determines the complexity of the work needed to restore balance. The generational curse removal ritual breaks inherited dark enchantments and restores balance, also protecting the descendants who would otherwise inherit its consequences.

Depending on the magnitude of the hex, time weakens the chain. Generacional curses are like generational wealth: they rarely last more than four or five generations. A conscious action can naturally dissolve the malediction, often, when a firstborn son or daughter refuses to procreate. 

Whether one believes in supernatural forces or not, the idea of a generational curse ultimately points to something very human: the way actions echo through families long after the original actors are gone.

And sometimes, the only thing required to break the curse is for someone in the bloodline to finally choose a different path.