The fact in regards to the Kennedy curse: Four deadly aircraft crashes, two assassinations and numerous overdoses. JAMES PATTERSON’S blockbuster reveals the sociopathic vanity and privilege accountable

As Senator Ted Kennedy hobbled out of hospital, recovering from three crushed vertebrae, a punctured lung and broken ribs after a plane crash, a reporter called out to him. ‘Is it ever going to end for you people?’ yelled New York journalist Jimmy Breslin.

Kennedy, whose brother JFK had been assassinated in Dallas a year earlier, turned and delivered a brutal reply: ‘If my mother hadn’t had any more children after her first four, she would have nothing now. I guess the only reason we’ve survived is that there are more of us than there is trouble.’

The Kennedy Curse is America’s most powerful legend. No other dynasty has endured more bad luck. The press has talked of it for more than 60 years… and even the family believed in it.

‘It is a curse,’ Ted Kennedy’s wife Joan told her sister-in-law Jackie, the widowed First Lady, after her husband’s plane crash. ‘Look at the things that have happened. Can we just chalk it up to coincidence?’

Ted was not the first of the Kennedys to be involved in a fatal plane wreck, and he would not be the last.

In Ted’s case, he had boarded, at 8pm on the night of June 19 1964, an Aero Commander 680 twin-engine aircraft at Washington National Airport, in Arlington County, Virginia.

Back at Hyannis Port, site of the six-acre family retreat in Cape Cod, known as the Kennedy Compound, a family employee called to warn that the flight – to Westfield, Massachusetts, where Kennedy was due to speak at a convention – was too risky.

‘It’s bad weather,’ he told Ted. ‘The fog is really rolling in.’

But Ted was insistent. He even joked with his aide, Ed Moss, that crashing a plane would make quite a publicity stunt. ‘Nope,’ retorted Moss, ‘just parachute out of it into the convention.’

That exchange haunted Ted Kennedy for the rest of his life. As the plane approached Barnes Airport in Westfield, in pitch darkness and heavy fog, pilot Ed Zimny radioed the control tower to say he had zero visibility. Then they hit turbulence.

‘I was watching the altimeter and I saw it drop from eleven hundred to six hundred feet,’ Ted said later. ‘It was just like a toboggan ride, right along the tops of the trees for a few seconds.

‘Then there was a terrific impact into a tree.’

Zimny and Moss died instantly. Ted was trapped in the wreckage. Another passenger, his friend and fellow senator Birch Bayh, dragged him clear. ‘We’ve all heard adrenaline stories about how a mother can lift a car off a trapped infant,’ Bayh said. ‘Well, Kennedy was no small guy, and I was able to lug him out of there like a sack of corn under my arm.’

He spent the next five months strapped into a Stryker frame bed at Boston’s New England Baptist hospital. The bed revolved and flipped upside-down, to help his broken back mend.

While Ted Kennedy was hanging head-down in hospital, his wife – who had recently suffered a miscarriage – hit the political circuit, campaigning for his re-election in the November polls. He won, taking 75 per cent of the vote.

His older brother Robert, newly elected to the Senate himself, quipped, ‘He’s getting awful fresh since he’s been in bed and his wife won the campaign for him.’

And, as so often was the case with cold-blooded Kennedy descriptions of their own bad luck, Ted’s claim that his mother Rose had lost her first four children was not the whole truth. Bestselling author James Patterson tells this story, and provides numerous other revealing insights, in his sweeping history of the family, The Kennedy Curse, co-written with Cynthia Fagen.

It is attracting renewed interest as a new generation discovers the Kennedy story courtesy of the Disney+ global hit Love Story: John F Kennedy Jr & Carolyn Bessette, which tells the story of the glamorous couple’s whirlwind romance and tragic deaths.

The oldest Kennedy son Joe, heir apparent to the family throne, died in a plane accident during the Second World War.

Pilot Joseph Patrick Kennedy Jr was the favourite of his father, Joe, who made his fortune gambling on the stock market.

By 1932, Joe and Rose had nine children. A multimillionaire, he branched into Hollywood, running three studios – gossip columnist Louella Parsons called him ‘the Napoleon of the movies’ – and indulging an insatiable appetite for seducing actresses. He called them ‘wild meat’.

After making a killing through insider share dealing before the Wall Street Crash, Joe Kennedy was appointed chairman of the government’s anti-fraud squad. President Franklin D Roosevelt commented, ‘It takes a thief to catch a thief.’

By the outbreak of war, Joe Kennedy was the American ambassador to the UK.

A virulent anti-Semite, he supported Hitler’s persecution of the Jews (‘They brought it on themselves’) and opposed war: ‘For the life of me I cannot see anything which could be remotely considered worth shedding blood for.’

By D-Day 1944, Joe Jr had flown more than 25 missions, before volunteering to pilot a flying mega-bomb. Launched from RAF Fersfield in Norfolk, the American B-24 Liberator was packed with high explosives: 11 tons of Torpex, a mixture of TNT and cyclonite blended with powdered aluminium, crammed into 374 boxes along the length of the plane.

Lt Joe Kennedy Jr, aged 29, and his co-pilot were tasked with getting the Liberator airborne and on course for its target, the French supergun fortress of Mimoyecques, between Calais and Boulogne. They were to arm the detonators, switch to auto-pilot and bail out over the English Channel at 20,000ft.

On the tarmac, a fellow flier joked with Joe Jr, asking if his life insurance was paid up. The Kennedy golden boy grinned: ‘I’ve got twice as much as I need.’

Eighteen minutes into the flight, Joe Jr sent his last radio message, a coded signal that the explosives were now primed and the auto-pilot was locked in. ‘Spade Flush,’ he transmitted, over East Anglia, four miles from the North Sea coast. The double explosion that followed was audible in London, 100 miles away. Aircraft debris was scattered for more than a mile in all directions.

Kennedy and his co-pilot, Lt Bud Willy, were posthumously honoured with the Air Medal, the Distinguished Flying Cross and the Navy Cross.

The future president Jack Kennedy, two years younger than Joe, was also a war hero, and was badly injured in a torpedo boat raid in the Pacific. But their father made no secret of where his real affections lay. Even in death, he said, Joe Jr won more medals.

Joe Jr was the favourite son, but Kathleen, the fourth of the children, was the best-loved daughter. Nicknamed ‘Kick’, she burst onto English society with her father’s appointment as ambassador – causing a sensation in aristocratic circles by her habit of chewing gum and referring to members of the peerage as ‘Dookie-Wookie’.

She outraged her staunchly Catholic parents in 1944 by falling in love with an English milord and Anglican, the future Duke of Devonshire – and shocked Fleet Street with the efficiency of her wooing. ‘Miss Kennedy A Marchioness!’ blazed one weekend newspaper. ‘Thursday – Engaged: Today – Married’. Five weeks later, her husband Billy Cavendish was sent to France with the Coldstream Guards. Kathleen returned to America, to attend her brother’s memorial mass, and while there was informed by her father that she was already a widow. Billy had been killed by a sniper’s bullet.

Kick became Kathleen, Dowager Marchioness of Hartington. Wracked for years by shock and grief, she fell for another titled Englishman five years later. The eighth Earl Fitzwilliam was a notorious womaniser who, Kick claimed, was a lookalike of Clark Gable. He was also Church of England, and this time her mother threatened to disown her if she married a Protestant.

Confident she could win her father’s approval, she arranged for her and Fitzwilliam to fly to the South of France for a meeting with Joe Sr. They stopped in Paris to refuel their chartered De Havilland Dove and to indulge in a long lunch with friends.

By the time they returned to the airstrip, bad weather had set in. The pilot warned conditions were too dangerous but Kick, imperious as always and somewhat the worse for drink, insisted. Next day, the wreckage of their plane was discovered in the Rhone-Alpes. All on board were killed. Kick’s barefoot body was taken down the mountainside to the nearest village on an ox-cart.

The assassination of Jack Kennedy, shot through the head as he rode beside wife Jackie in an open-top motorcade in Dallas in 1963, meant the clan’s parents Joe Sr and Rose had lost their first four children, Ted Kennedy told a reporter that day, on the hospital steps.

But the truth was, their oldest daughter Rose Marie (known to all as Rosemary or Rosie) was not dead. A difficult birth left her with brain injuries and learning difficulties. Joe Sr and his wife saw her as ‘a defective child’ and kept her at home.

By 1940, when she was 22, her behaviour had become wilful, and Rose was afraid she would become sexually active, perhaps even pregnant. To prevent this, she was sent to a convent school in Washington DC. When she began sneaking out at night, Joe Kennedy took drastic measures.

He had Rosemary admitted to George Washington University hospital, to undergo the latest neurological treatment in mental disorders – a lobotomy. Strapped to an operating table, she was given a tranquiliser and instructed to recite prayers and song lyrics while a local anaesthetic was applied to the sides of her head.

A hole was drilled in both temples, and a metal rod inserted, all the way through. The surgeons twisted the rod, severing part of the frontal lobe.

‘They knew right away that it wasn’t successful,’ said her cousin, Ann Gargan. ‘You could see by looking at her that something was wrong, for her head was tilted and her capacity to speak was almost entirely gone.’

For the rest of her life, until her death in 2005, Rosemary had the mental capacity of a toddler. She was cared for by nuns at St Coletta’s school for ‘exceptional children’ in Wisconsin. With a staggering lack of insight, Joe Kennedy Sr remarked, ‘I don’t know what it is that makes eight children shine like a dollar and another one dull. I guess it’s the hand of God.’

The Kennedy curse seemed to peak in the 1960s. JFK and his brother Robert were both killed by gunmen; Ted’s career ended after a drunken car crash on Chappaquiddick island – more of which later.

But the family’s next generation seemed destined to be equally doomed or self-destructive. Ted’s son, Ted Jr, suffered childhood bone cancer and lost a leg.

Robert’s son David became addicted to opiates following a car crash in which his 18-year-old girlfriend, Pamela Kelley, was paralysed from the waist down. David later drank and drugged himself to death.

Another of Robert’s 11 children, Bobby Jr, became a heroin addict and suffered at least one overdose. He is now the US Secretary of Health and Human Services.

Michael Kennedy, the brother of David and Bobby, died in a skiing accident in Aspen, Colorado, in 1997. An expert skier, he was playing a favourite Kennedy game, ‘ski football’ – racing downhill with friends, throwing a ball back and forth – when he hit a tree.

Earlier that year, Michael had been accused of having sex with his children’s 15-year-old babysitter. He blamed his alcohol use.

‘We don’t know what to make of another Kennedy death,’ political analyst Kevin Sowyrda told the Washington Post. ‘We almost expect it now.’

It would not be the last tragedy, of course. JFK’s son, John F Kennedy Jr, was known as the Prince, sometimes the Hunk and the ‘Sexiest Man Alive’ according to People magazine. In 1996, he married Carolyn Bessette, head of PR at Calvin Klein and once voted ‘Ultimate Beautiful Person’ at her Catholic school in Connecticut. Their relationship was tempestuous: paparazzi photos snapped in Central Park once caught her tearing off her engagement ring and throwing it at him.

JFK Jr was a keen but inexperienced aviator, who earned his pilot’s licence in 1998, but Carolyn, then aged 32, didn’t like to accompany him: ‘I don’t trust him,’ she told a friend. But in July 1999, she joined him for a short flight from New Jersey to the Massachusetts island of Martha’s Vineyard, one of the Kennedy family’s playgrounds, for a friend’s cocktail party. John Jr, who was 38, was on crutches after breaking his ankle in a paragliding accident, and was using the painkiller Vicodin.

He was also on Ritalin to treat his attention deficit disorder.

Two experienced pilots warned him that weather conditions were bad – just as they had been on the night 35 years earlier when his uncle Ted almost died in a plane crash.

Within 11 minutes of take-off, with his wife and her older sister Lauren beside him, John Jr had made a serious piloting error. As his Piper Saratoga single-engine aircraft gained height, he crossed the path of an American Airlines passenger jet with 134 people on board. Unable to make contact with the Kennedy plane, air traffic controllers scrambled to redirect the airliner.

Less than an hour later, about seven miles out from Martha’s Vineyard, the Piper went into a spin – known to fliers as a ‘graveyard spiral’. Out of control for up to 30 seconds, it fell from 2,200ft.

A day later, crash debris began washing up along the shore.

Eunice Kennedy Shriver, the fifth of Joe and Rose Kennedy’s children, and sister of Jack, Robert and Ted, said: ‘I’ve come to believe that it’s not what has happened to our family that has been cursed, as much as it’s the fact that we’ve never been able to deal with it privately. If there’s a curse, surely it’s that.’

But another interpretation is possible. Perhaps the so-called curse was a direct and inescapable consequence of the family’s sociopathic degree of arrogance and privilege. That attitude, fostered by Joe Snr’s belief that ordinary rules did not apply to his flesh-and-blood, invited its own punishment – over and over again.

Nowhere is that more clearly illustrated than in the implosion of Ted Kennedy’s career. After surviving his plane crash, and seeing both his brothers assassinated, he seemed a certainty for the highest public office – the Presidency.

All that disappeared on a night in July, 1969, two days before the first moon landing. Senator Ted Kennedy joined a party at a friend’s house on Chappaquiddick island, with six men (five of them married) and six women – all of them single ‘Boiler Room Girls’, the nickname for secretaries who had worked on Kennedy political campaigns.

Ted Kennedy left the party with one of the Boiler Room Girls, 28-year-old Mary Jo Kopechne. Despite being very drunk, he insisted on driving. The car crashed through a bridge and into 8ft of water. Kennedy dragged himself clear, leaving Mary Jo to drown. Police were not informed for several hours.

‘I shouldn’t have been in a car when I’ve had a few drinks,’ Kennedy admitted. ‘I tried to save her but I couldn’t. I tried to dive down and I couldn’t.’

But challenged about ‘the morality of her death’, he could not see that he’d done anything truly wrong. ‘I don’t feel guilty,’ he insisted. ‘Obviously, I can be faulted terribly from a judgment point of view, but from the point of view of, “Was it a killing”?

‘Absolutely not. It was an accident.’

The shadow of misfortune still lingers over the family. Last December, one of President Kennedy’s granddaughters, Tatiana Schlossberg, died from acute myeloid leukaemia.

The daughter of Caroline Kennedy and her husband Ed Schlossberg, Tatiana was just 35 years old and her cancer diagnosis followed a routine blood test after having her second child. She left two children, Edwin, aged three, and one-year-old Josephine, as well as her physician husband, Dr George Moran.

Writing about the Kennedy Curse in the weeks before her death and how it had shaped her life – she was just nine years old when her beloved uncle JFK Jr died – Tatiana said: ‘For my whole life, I have tried to be good, to be a good student and a good sister and a good daughter, and to protect my mother and never make her upset or angry.

‘Now I have added a new tragedy to her life, to our family’s life, and there’s nothing I can do to stop it.’

Indeed, there seems to be nothing this family can do to break the curse.

Adapted from The Kennedy Curse by James Patterson and Cynthia Fagan (Arrow, £10.99 © James Patterson and Cynthia Fagan 2020. To order a copy for £9.89 (offer valid to May 2; P&P free on orders over £25) go to mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937.