The Kennedy compound in Hyannisport, Massachusetts, appears peaceful from the shore. Three white clapboard houses sit on six acres of manicured lawn rolling down to Nantucket Sound. Sailboats drift on the water.
But the property carries a weight that no amount of coastal beauty can hide. For nearly a century, this was the gathering place of America’s most famous political family, and it became the backdrop for a string of tragedies so relentless that many came to call it cursed.
The story begins with a rejection. In 1926, Joseph P. Kennedy Sr.
was already one of the wealthiest men in America. He had made millions in banking, stocks, real estate, and Hollywood. But when he applied for membership at the exclusive Cohasset Country Club, he was turned down flat.
The reason was simple: Irish Catholics were not welcome among the Protestant elite of Boston.
Kennedy did not accept the snub quietly. He looked south to Cape Cod, where the Hyannisport Golf Club welcomed Irish Catholics. In 1926, he rented a cottage at 50 Marchant Avenue.
Two years later, he bought it for $25,000 and expanded it. That act of defiance created the stage for some of the most pivotal moments in 20th-century American history.
The Kennedy children loved Hyannisport from the start. There were nine of them: Joe Jr. , John, Rosemary, Kathleen, Eunice, Patricia, Robert, Jean, and Edward.
They spent summers sailing, swimming, and playing touch football on the lawn. Their father encouraged fierce competition. He wanted them tough.
He wanted them to win. At the dinner table, he expected them to debate current events. Rose Kennedy kept index cards on each child, tracking their weights, grades, and accomplishments.
The compound was not just a summer home. It was a training ground for a dynasty. But some things cannot be calculated or controlled, no matter how much money or planning is involved.
The first great tragedy struck in a way the family never fully recovered from. Rosemary Kennedy was born in September 1918. From the beginning, she was slower to crawl, walk, and speak than her siblings.
As she grew older, it became clear that she had an intellectual disability. In an era when such conditions were deeply stigmatized, the family did what they could. She attended special schools and had private tutors.
During the family’s time in London, when Joseph Kennedy was ambassador to Great Britain, Rosemary thrived in a structured convent school.
But after the family returned to America, Rosemary struggled. Now in her early twenties, she grew frustrated and rebellious. She began sneaking out at night.
Her father worried less about her well-being than about the family’s political ambitions. What if she embarrassed them publicly? What if the press discovered the truth?
In 1941, Joseph Kennedy learned about a new experimental procedure called a lobotomy. Doctors claimed it could calm violent outbursts. The American Medical Association had warned that the procedure was too experimental and its side effects too severe.
Kennedy ignored those warnings. In November 1941, when Rosemary was 23, he arranged for her to undergo the surgery. He did not tell his wife until after it was done.
He never told his other children.
The operation was a catastrophic failure. When Rosemary woke up, she could not walk or speak intelligibly. Her personality was gone.
Her mental capacity was reduced to that of a two-year-old. Joseph Kennedy had her institutionalized immediately. She spent the rest of her life in facilities, first in New York, then in rural Wisconsin.
Her mother did not visit for 20 years. Her father never visited at all.
For decades, the family hid the truth. When John Kennedy ran for president, the family said Rosemary was reclusive. Only after Joseph Kennedy suffered a stroke in 1961 did the siblings learn what had happened.
Rosemary lived until 2005, spending 64 years in institutions.
The next tragedy came during World War II. Joseph Kennedy Jr. was the golden son, groomed from birth to be the first Catholic president of the United States.
He was handsome, athletic, and brilliant. When war came, he enlisted in the Navy and became a bomber pilot. By August 1944, he had completed enough missions to return home.
His father begged him to come back.
But Joe Jr. had a younger brother who had become a war hero after his PT boat was sunk in the Pacific. John Kennedy had saved most of his crew and received medals for his courage.
The competition between the brothers had not ended just because they were at war. When the Navy asked for a volunteer for a near-suicide mission involving a plane packed with explosives, Joe Jr. stepped forward.
On August 12, 1944, Joe Jr. took off from England in a bomber loaded with 21,000 pounds of explosives. The plane was barely airborne when the explosives detonated early.
The aircraft disintegrated in a massive fireball. Joe Jr. and his co-pilot were killed instantly.
There was not enough left to bury.
The weight of expectation now fell to the second son, a young man who had never planned to enter politics.
That same year brought another loss. Kathleen Kennedy, known as Kick, was the family’s brightest spirit. During the family’s time in London, she fell in love with William Cavendish, the Marquis of Hartington and heir to the Duke of Devonshire.
He was titled, wealthy, and Protestant. The Kennedy family was devoutly Catholic. Rose Kennedy found the match unthinkable.
In May 1944, Kick married Cavendish in a civil ceremony. Her mother did not attend. Four months later, less than a month after Joe Jr.
died, Cavendish was killed by a German sniper in Belgium. Kick was a widow at 24.
She eventually returned to England and fell in love again, this time with a divorced aristocrat. Once again, her family was horrified. In May 1948, Kick was flying from Paris to the French Riviera to see her father and convince him to accept the relationship.
A storm came up. The pilot became disoriented and flew the plane straight into a mountain. Kathleen Kennedy was 28 years old.
Her mother did not attend her funeral either.
Three of Joseph and Rose Kennedy’s nine children were now dead or permanently institutionalized. The family’s greatest triumphs were still ahead, which meant their greatest tragedies were too.
John F. Kennedy bought his own house at the compound in 1956. He married Jacqueline Bouvier in 1953, and they took their engagement photos at Hyannisport.
When he ran for president in 1960, the compound became campaign headquarters. On election night, the family gathered at the big house as returns came in. The next morning, Caroline ran into her father’s room and woke him with the words, “Good morning, Mr.
President.”
For the next three years, the compound became known as the summer White House. Kennedy held press conferences on the lawn and met with world leaders on the porch. Journalists came to interview him there.
The compound became a symbol of Camelot, the idealized Kennedy presidency.
But even during those golden years, tragedy shadowed the family. In August 1963, Jackie gave birth prematurely to a son named Patrick Bouvier Kennedy. The baby was born with underdeveloped lungs.
Despite the best medical care, Patrick lived for only 39 hours. President Kennedy stayed at his son’s bedside until the baby stopped breathing.
Three months later, on November 22, 1963, President Kennedy was shot and killed in Dallas, Texas. The news reached Hyannisport in the middle of the afternoon. Rose Kennedy was walking on the beach when someone came running to tell her.
She fell to her knees in the sand.
Jackie Kennedy came to Hyannisport after the funeral. She sat with the family and gave an interview to Theodore White of Life magazine, where she created the lasting image of JFK’s presidency as Camelot. She spoke of her husband’s favorite song from the musical, with its line about one brief shining moment.
The brief shining moment was over.
By 1968, only three of Joseph and Rose Kennedy’s sons were still alive. Robert, who had become attorney general under his brother and was now a senator from New York, decided to run for president. The country was being torn apart by the Vietnam War and civil rights struggles.
Bobby thought he could heal the divisions.
He won the California primary on June 5, 1968. That night, he gave a victory speech at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. As he walked through the kitchen leaving the ballroom, a gunman stepped forward and shot him.
Bobby died 26 hours later.
Edward Kennedy, the youngest brother, was now the last Kennedy brother standing. He was barely 36 years old. One year later, in July 1969, Ted Kennedy attended a party on Chappaquiddick Island just off Martha’s Vineyard.
The party was a reunion for women who had worked on Bobby’s presidential campaign. One of them was 28-year-old Mary Jo Kopechne.
Late that night, Kennedy left the party with Kopechne in his car. He would later claim he was driving her to catch a ferry. What happened next has been debated for over 50 years.
Kennedy’s car missed a turn and went off a narrow wooden bridge called Dyke Bridge. The car flipped and landed upside down in a tidal pond. Kennedy escaped.
Kopechne did not.
Instead of immediately calling for help, Kennedy walked back to the cottage where the party had been held. He got his cousin Joe Gargan and his friend Paul Markham, both lawyers, and brought them back to the pond. The three men tried to dive down and retrieve Kopechne from the submerged car, but they could not reach her.
Kennedy then swam across a channel back to Edgartown, changed his clothes at his hotel, and went to bed.
He did not call the police until the next morning, nearly 10 hours after the accident. By then, a fisherman had already spotted the overturned car and called authorities. Divers had already recovered Kopechne’s body.
The delay never made sense to most people. It looked like Kennedy was more concerned with protecting himself than with trying to save her. He pleaded guilty to leaving the scene of an accident and received a two-month suspended sentence.
He gave a televised speech asking the people of Massachusetts whether he should resign. They told him to stay.
He remained in the Senate for another 40 years, but Chappaquiddick destroyed his presidential ambitions. When he finally ran for president in 1980, he lost the Democratic nomination to Jimmy Carter. The last Kennedy brother would never be president.
The tragedies did not stop with the brothers. They followed the next generation with relentless cruelty.
David Kennedy, one of Bobby’s sons, was in his hotel room watching television when his father was shot in Los Angeles. He was 12 years old. He saw his father murdered live on television.
The trauma never left him. David turned to drugs. In April 1984, he was found dead in a Palm Beach hotel room.
He had overdosed on a combination of cocaine and prescription medication. He was 28 years old.
Michael Kennedy, another of Bobby’s sons, died in a skiing accident in Aspen, Colorado on New Year’s Eve 1997. He was 39. He had been playing football on skis with family members when he crashed into a tree.
Then came the death that seemed to prove once and for all that the Kennedy family was cursed. John F. Kennedy Jr.
, the son who had been born in the White House, who had saluted his father’s casket at age three, died in a plane crash on July 16, 1999. He was piloting a small plane from New Jersey to Martha’s Vineyard. His wife Carolyn Bessette Kennedy and her sister Lauren Bessette were passengers.
They were flying to Hyannisport for a family wedding.
It was night. The weather was hazy. John Jr.
was not an experienced pilot and was not rated to fly using instruments alone. Somewhere over the Atlantic, he became disoriented. The plane went into a spiral.
All three people aboard were killed when the plane crashed into the ocean.
At Hyannisport, the wedding tent was still set up when the news came. The family gathered for a vigil. For five days they waited, hoping for a miracle that never came.
John Jr. had wanted to be buried at sea. His ashes were scattered in the Atlantic waters he had loved.
He was 38 years old.
The tragedies continued into the 21st century. In 2012, Mary Richardson Kennedy, the wife of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
, was found dead in her home in Bedford, New York. She had taken her own life. In 2019, Saoirse Kennedy Hill, Bobby’s granddaughter, died of an accidental drug overdose at the compound itself.
She was 22 years old. In 2020, Maeve Kennedy McKean, another of Bobby’s granddaughters, and her 8-year-old son Gideon died in a canoeing accident.
Rose Kennedy lived until 1995, dying at the compound at age 104. She outlived four of her children and saw tragedies befall her grandchildren. In her final years, she would sometimes wander the house at night, confused by age and dementia, looking for her children, looking for everyone she had lost.
After Chappaquiddick, Ted Kennedy himself wondered aloud if some awful curse hung over all the Kennedys. Skeptics point out that the family is large, that tragic events are statistically more likely, and that the family has always been drawn to risky behavior. The visibility of their wealth and prominence amplified every loss into a national story.
But when you list the tragedies chronologically, when you see how they compound and echo across generations, it becomes harder to dismiss the pattern. A failed lobotomy. A bomber explosion.
Two plane crashes in four years. Two assassinations five years apart. A drowning.
Drug overdoses. Skiing accidents. Canoeing accidents.
Death after death, loss after loss.
The compound is still there. Some Kennedy family members still summer there. The three white houses stand on their perfect lawns, looking exactly as they did in the photographs from the 1960s, when Camelot was real and Jack Kennedy was alive and everything seemed possible.
But the compound stands as a monument to American ambition and American tragedy. It holds too many memories of children who died too young, of potential never realized, of dreams that turned to nightmares. It is beautiful, and it should be happy.
But it never quite can be. Not with all those ghosts walking the beach. Not with all those what-ifs haunting every Kennedy who has ever stood on that shore and looked out at the water, wondering if they will be next.