(11 children
in total, 2
deceased)Kathleen
Kennedy
Townsend
(b.1951)PatrickJ.
Kennedy
(b.1967)JosephJr
(1915-1944)John
(1917-1963)Robert
(1925-1968)Te d
(1932-2009)Rosemary
(1918-2005)Kathleen
(1920-1948)Eunice
(1921-2009)Patricia
(1924-2006)Jean
(b.1928)Christina
Schwarzenegger
(b.1991)Chris
Schwarzenegger
(b.1997)Patrick
Schwarzenegger
(b.1993)Katherine
Schwarzenegger
(b.1989)Saoirse
Kennedy
Hill
(1997-2019)Courtney
KennedyHill
(b.1956)JohnF.
KennedyJr.
(1960-1999)Caroline
Kennedy
Schlossberg
(b.1957)Joseph
Patrick
KennedyII
(b.1952)Maria
Shriver
(b.1955)Making of a dynasty
→OCTOBER 2019 | The Australian Women’s Weekly 39
New World was Patrick, a struggling
smallholder from County Wexford, who
worked hard and lived blamelessly, but it
wasn’t until the 1920s, with the rise to
wealth and power of his grandson,
Joseph Patrick (‘Joe’) Kennedy, founder
of the modern dynasty, that the Kennedy
name began to assume a fateful grandeur.A cold, clinically minded man, Joe
amassed an immense fortune on Wall
Street, but in the process made many
enemies, and when he realised that his
own path to high political office was
blocked, he poured his ambitions into
his four sons. A thirst for power was
not all the boys inherited from theirmy middle school years
and will be with me for
the rest of my life.
Although I was mostly a
happy child, I suffered
bouts of deep sadness
that felt like a heavy
boulder on my chest.”
In the piece she claimed
to have been sexually
assaulted by “someone I
knew and loved”, and to
have attempted suicide
before leaving the school
to seek specialist treatment.
On the last night of her
life, she went with a friend
to Embargo, a local music
bar, described as “a haven
for the young and chic
set”, returning home in
the early hours of the
morning. She had planned
to leave Hyannis Port
later in the day to fly to
Los Angeles. Instead, as
her uncle, Robert F.
Kennedy Jr put it in his
funeral oration: “She
woke up with God.”
A tragic history
The Kennedys deride the
notion of a curse. Another
of Saoirse’s uncles, former
congressman Patrick
Kennedy, calls the idea
“offensive”, arguing that
the family’s misfortunes
simply get more coverage
than others’. “Our illnesses
are no different than
anyone else’s,” he wrote
after Saoirse’s death,
“and our tragic losses to
them have not been so
out of the ordinary. We
have a big family. A lot of
kids had a lot more kids.
But mostly we are a more public family
than most, under the eye of the media.
Consequently, we are less able to hide
these struggles than others.”
Yet the catalogue of tragedy is long
and harrowing, and reaches back to the
Kennedys’ beginnings as an immigrant
family in America. The first to reach the