The plane crash in which John Kennedy's son, along with his wife and sister-in-law, lost his life. All the misfortunes of the family.
On November 22, 1963, one of the most memorable assassinations in history occurred: John Fitzgerald Kennedy, then president of the United States, was murdered by two shots while traveling in a convertible car with his wife in a caravan in Dallas. . Far from being an isolated episode, it was one more case in the “Kennedy curse”, a family immersed in misfortunes and tragedies.
The last event of this type occurred on April 2, 2020, when Meave Kennedy McKeande (40), the former president's great-niece, and her eight-year-old son Goeden, went canoeing in the Chesapeake Bay, near Washington, DC. , to go look for a ball that had fallen into the water. They both disappeared and, days later, their lifeless bodies were found.
Further back in time, many other fatal events befell the Kennedy family. Among them, one of the most remembered is the death of John John, the charismatic son of John Fitzgerald Kennedy.
The tragic death of John John, JFK's charismatic son
John John was the only son of John Fitzgerald Kennedy and Jacqueline Bouvier, who had another son who died two days after being born. The young man, as handsome as he was charismatic, and heir to the political aspirations of his family, died on July 16, 1999, at the age of 38, in the middle of a plane crash.
The tragedy occurred 12 kilometers from the coast of Martha's Vineyard, in the state of Massachusetts, where the small plane he was piloting crashed. Also traveling on the aircraft were his wife, Carolyn Bessete, 33, and his sister-in-law, Laureen Bessette, 34, who also lost their lives.
For years, several conspiracy theories were shared around that plane crash. Many of them claimed that everything had been sabotage. However, the results of the investigation were simpler: heading to Hyannis Port, where he was going to spend a family summer, John John entered an area of fog and had to pilot almost blind. Completely disoriented, he lost control and rushed at full speed into the sea.
The Kennedy curse: one by one, the family tragedies
Born in 1918, Rosemary Kennedy was the third of nine children born to the couple Joseph P. Kennedy and Rose Elizabeth Fitzgerald. To combat some mental problems that she had suffered since her birth, her father silently subjected her at the age of 23 to a lobotomy, the extinct and brutal surgical practice that consisted of removing part of the frontal lobes of the brain.
The truth is that the operation was a disaster: she was left totally disabled, unable to walk and with the mental age of a two-year-old child. Since then, she passed through several psychiatric centers and asylums, until she died of natural causes in 2007, at the age of 86. Her father lied about what had happened after the operation and kept the secret until he died in 1960.
The next tragedy occurred on August 12, 1944, in the middle of World War II, when Joseph Patrick “Joe” Kennedy Jr., JFK's older brother, died while piloting a plane during a secret operation against Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany in the French port of Calais.
The 29-year-old was on board a plane packed with explosives from which he had to parachute before it hit the target. However, he burst into the air before reaching the destination. They never found his remains.
Shortly after, another plane claimed the life of one of John F. Kennedy's brothers. The victim was Kathleen Kennedy, who died on May 13, 1948 during a commercial flight to Saint-Bauzile, France. Her partner, Count William Wentworth-Fitzwilliam, a British aristocrat, also died in that plane crash.
On August 9, 1963, Patrick Bouvier Kennedy, the youngest of JFK and Jacqueline Bouvier's children, died. He had been born prematurely just two days earlier, on August 7, and suffered from Neonatal Respiratory Distress Syndrome.
A month and a half later, on November 22, 1963, the assassination of John F. Kennedy occurred. He was shot in the head and another in the neck while traveling in a convertible in the middle of a caravan in Dallas, Texas.
They blamed former US Marine Lee Harvey Oswald, who was shot dead two days later by Jack Ruby while being transported through the underground parking lots of the police headquarters.
