JFK’s granddaughter dies after rare cancer diagnosis

Tatiana Schlossberg, granddaughter of former US president John F. Kennedy, died on Tuesday after revealing in November she had been diagnosed with a rare form of leukaemia. She was 35.

The environmental journalist’s death was announced by her family in a social media post from the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum.

“Our beautiful Tatiana passed away this morning. She will always be in our hearts,” the family wrote.

In a New Yorker essay published in November, Schlossberg said she had been diagnosed with acute myeloid leukaemia with a rare mutation – a cancer of the blood and bone marrow – and had less than a year to live.

The diagnosis came shortly after she gave birth to her second child with husband George Moran in May last year. Doctors noticed after delivery that she had an abnormally high white blood cell count.

Further tests revealed a diagnosis of leukaemia with a rare mutation known as Inversion 3, a genetic anomaly found in less than 2 per cent of cases and more commonly seen in older patients or September 11 first responders at Ground Zero.

“I did not – could not – believe that they were talking about me,” Schlossberg wrote in the essay.

“I had swum a mile in the pool the day before, nine months pregnant. I wasn’t sick. I didn’t feel sick. I was actually one of the healthiest people I knew.”

Schlossberg is the second daughter of Edwin Schlossberg and Caroline Kennedy, who served as the US ambassador to Australia from 2022 to 2024.

In her New Yorker essay titled A Battle With My Blood, Schlossberg criticised the appointment of her cousin Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as US secretary of health and human services in the Trump administration for being a vaccine sceptic and cutting funding for cancer research.

“I watched from my hospital bed as Bobby, in the face of logic and common sense, was confirmed for the position, despite never having worked in medicine, public health, or the government,” she wrote.

Schlossberg wrote that his decisions threatened her own survival and that of “millions of cancer survivors, small children, and the elderly”.

“I watched as Bobby cut nearly half a billion dollars for research into mRNA vaccines, technology that could be used against certain cancers; slashed billions in funding from the National Institutes of Health, the world’s largest sponsor of medical research,” she wrote.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had previously run for US president as an independent, which Schlossberg called “an embarrassment to me and the rest of my immediate family”.

Tragedy has followed the Kennedy family since John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963. His brother, Bobby, was shot while campaigning in 1968. JFK’s son, John F. Kennedy Jr, died in a plane crash in 1999 that also killed his wife, Carolyn Bessette Kennedy.

At 6, Schlossberg scattered rose petals down the aisle at the wedding of her uncle, John F. Kennedy Jr., and Bessette. Not even three years later, she and her two siblings helped her mother light candles at St. Patrick’s Cathedral as they were laid to rest after the plane crash.

Schlossberg was an enterprising journalist who wrote for the metro and science desks of the New York Times – with some stories published by this masthead – before transitioning into freelance writing.

As a young reporter, she produced quirky city stories crackling with vivid verbs and nods to classic literature as well as emotional portraits of city violence and a city shifting under gentrification.

On the science desk, she wrote about a typical person’s everyday energy usage in an attempt to demystify climate science. Her 2019 book – Inconspicuous Consumption: The Environmental Impact You Don’t Know You Have – examined the environmental toll of streaming video, fast fashion and industrial agriculture.

Schlossberg attended Yale, where she served as editor-in-chief of the weekly Yale Herald, writing humorous dispatches about spending spring break watching Revolutionary War re-enactments and ranking the best of New Haven’s donuts. She interned at the Martha’s Vineyard Gazette and worked for one year at the Record in northern New Jersey.

After leaving the Record, she earned a master’s degree in history from Oxford University in 2014.

She married Moran, a urologist, in 2017. The couple had two children.

Reuters, Bloomberg

Get a note directly from our foreign correspondents on what’s making headlines around the world. Sign up for our weekly What in the World newsletter.