The 'curse' of the Kennedys: Tatiana's illness reopens the wounds of the 'American royal family'

The first drama to mark the Kennedy dynasty came long before the world called them "the American royal family" or "the broken Camelot". It dates back to 1918, when Rosemary Kennedy, Joseph and Rose's third daughter, was born with a mild intellectual disability. She is a lively young woman, sensitive and intolerant of family rigidity.

During the years when the family was climbing the political and social establishment of the United States, Rosemary began to show signs of emotional instability, fits of rage, and sudden escapes. Joseph Kennedy then decided to intervene with the extreme and ruthless medicine of the time: a prefrontal lobotomy.

Rosemary entered the operating room at 23 and came out forever a child, unable to speak with fluency, unable to move independently and destined to live in a Wisconsin institution. This wound, hidden, removed and never publicly elaborated upon, would become the long shadow that droveEunice Kennedy Shriver to dedicate her life to the rights of people with disabilities and to found the 'Special Olympics', an international organisation dedicated to promoting sport for people with intellectual disabilities, in 1968.

In the 1940s two more deaths shook the family: Joseph P. Kennedy Jr., the son predestined for a political career, exploded in flight during a secret naval mission. Kathleen "Kick" Kennedy, the brightest of the sisters, died in a plane crash in 1948. By the time John Fitzgerald entered politics, the family had already seen two of its most promising members succumb to fate. But they were private tragedies, not yet part of the myth.

History changed in 1963, when the President of the United States was assassinated live on national television. In this trauma the whole country is paralysed because it loses not only a leader, but the very image of the future. Jacqueline Kennedy, in her bloodstained pink suit, walks beside the coffin as a living symbol of dignity and loss.

Caroline, five years old, and John Jr., three, appeared on the stage of history for the first time. A few months earlier, the death of Patrick Bouvier Kennedy, who was born prematurely and lived only two days. A family grief immediately swallowed up by the tragedy that was to come in the autumn.

The assassination of Robert Kennedy, John's younger brother, in 1968, reinforces the feeling of fate turning against the family. As America faces the most turbulent years of its history - from the Vietnam War to the civil rights movement driven by figures like Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X - another Kennedy is killed in front of the cameras. Wearing the hope of national reconciliation and falling instead on the kitchen floor of the Ambassador Hotel, assassinated just hours after winning the California Democratic primary. Eleven children remain fatherless.

In later years the tragedy took on less spectacular forms. Ted Kennedy, the last surviving brother of John and Robert, survives a plane crash in 1964, but in 1969 the accident at Chappaquiddick, near Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts - with the young and brilliant Democratic political activist Mary Jo Kopechne dead in the car that crashed into the water - leaves a political and moral scar on him that will follow him forever. Many other Kennedys live in a zone of psychological vulnerability where depression, addiction and public pressure are inextricably intertwined. David Kennedy dies of a drug overdose in 1984.

Michael Kennedy dies skiing in 1997. The accusation of rape against William Kennedy Smith in 1991, even if it ends in an acquittal, explodes as a media scandal that reveals how the family lives constantly in the balance between glory and ruin.

The last momentous tragedy of the 20th century came in 1999, when John F. Kennedy Jr., his elegant wife Carolyn Bessette and his sister-in-law Lauren died in a plane crash off Martha's Vineyard. John Jr, the child who greeted his father's casket and grew up in the orbit of the myth, becomes, in turn, another image of loss for the country.

The new millennium brings with it another wave of lesser-known but no less painful tragedies. Kara Kennedy, Ted's daughter, dies in 2011 after post-operative complications. In 2019 Saoirse Kennedy Hill, granddaughter of Robert, dies at the age of 22 from a drug overdose, after years of battling depression and anxiety. In 2020 Maeve Kennedy Townsend McKean and her son Gideon disappear in the waters of Maryland during a canoe trip. All these events, spread over time but similar in their ferocity, periodically renew the collective perception of a'Kennedy curse', a concept the family has always dismissed as superstitious, but which reappears with each new loss.

And so we come to Tatiana Schlossberg, not in a political theatre, not on a stage, not in an airport, but in a hospital room. And to a mother, Caroline, who finds herself reliving the pain of her childhood with the lucidity of adulthood.