Tatiana Schlossbergjournalist and environmentalist, daughter of Caroline Kennedy and granddaughter of President John F. Kennedy, died at age 35 from terminal leukemia. The news comes just over a month after she herself made the illness public, describing it in a long and intense essay published in the New Yorker last November. Schlossberg had announced that she was suffering from a rare form of acute myeloid leukemia, a cancer of the blood and bone marrow that mainly affects elderly people. In the text, together with the story of the diagnosis and treatments, he reflected on mortality, on the history of his family and on the symbolic weight of a surname that has been present in American public life for decades.
The choice to make the illness public took place on a highly symbolic date: on November 22, the 62nd anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s assassination. On that occasion, Tatiana Schlossberg had intertwined her personal story with a clear political stance, harshly criticizing her cousin Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Secretary of Health, defining him as “an embarrassment” for his positions against state-funded medical research and vaccines.
The diagnosis came in May 2024, immediately after the birth of her second child, when a medical check-up revealed an abnormal number of white blood cells. From that moment on, his life had turned into one sequence of aggressive treatments: cycles of chemotherapy, two stem cell transplants – the first from his sister, the second from an unrelated donor – and participation in clinical trials. According to doctors, one of these could have prolonged her life “for a year, perhaps”.
In the essay, Schlossberg also recounted the sense of guilt and helplessness in the face of the pain inflicted on her mother and family: “All my life I have tried to be good, to be a good student, a good sister and a good daughter, to protect my mother and never make her angry or upset. Now I have added a new tragedy to his life, to the life of our familyand there is nothing I can do to stop it.”
Engaged above all in environmental issues and climate change, Tatiana Schlossberg had built a journalistic career far from the spotlight of the Kennedys’ dynastic politics, choosing to use writing as a tool for civil commitment. Her death closes a story that she herself had wanted to tell to the end, transforming the illness into a public act of testimony, criticism and awareness.
