Over the years, America’s favorite family has grown even bigger. Here’s who to watch out for.
Were you obsessed with the Kennedy family as a child or are you normal? For me, the obsession started after JFK Jr’s death.
READ ALSO: The Cult Of The Romanovs: Romanticizing Reality
I couldn’t fathom how such a handsome guy was suddenly dead. I was too young to understand the hysteria when Princess Diana died, but JFK Jr’s plane crash was my first brush with how people can react when someone in the zeitgeist can just suddenly die in awful circumstances.
After that, nothing stopped me from getting into the mythical and tragic Kennedys. Sunday lunches with my dad’s family culminated in me hiding in my Lolo’s library, cracking open The Kennedy Women: The Saga of an American Family.
My favorite part was the family tree: the fact that Rose Kennedy had so many children (and then Ethel, her daughter-in-law, had even more progeny) boggled my mind. I also enjoyed looking at the photos: the first half of happy Kennedys, posing in sailboats in Hyannis Port, playing football on the Kennedy Compound, decked out in East coast rugged prep, the second the family beset with tragedy, funeral after funeral, scandal after scandal.
Reading about them was like serotonin to my brain. Kathleen, commonly known as Kick, was my favorite of JFK’s sisters. Kicked out of the family for marrying the Protestant heir to the dukedom of Devonshire, she died in a plane crash.
I learned about tragic Rosemary (who I thought was the prettiest), of how their father’s hubris in that mistake influenced Eunice to give back by founding the Special Olympics, how Patricia thought she found her knight in shining armor in Peter Lawford and how that ended miserably, and Jean tagging along with everyone else. My favorite section of the book was the England years, with Kick and Rosemary being presented to the King and Queen, like a scene out of Downton Abbey.
If you can’t tell, I preferred reading about the sisters (even if they were all kind of mean to Jackie when she married JFK).
I did decide that Ted was my favorite of the brothers (mostly because I thought he was the best looking, and also, I felt bad for him), although this was before I realized exactly what he did in Chappaquiddick (this did not stop me from pre-ordering his book while in college. Massachusetts is Kennedy country but I was the youngest person in the bookstore that day). I wondered, how could one family survive all this tragedy?
Survive they did. Today the Kennedys are all hale and healthy (as far as I can tell). Since JFK Jr.’s 1999 plane crash, no actual Kennedy (as in, born to the family) has died before they were meant to, or been arrested (although cheating on a wife is probably a given). They haven’t reached the promising heyday of the 60s in the last century, but I don’t think that’s what anyone is aiming for at this point.
Below, a list of young Kennedys to follow on Instagram, and to obsess yourselves with (if you’re like me).
The Schlossberg Siblings
Rose, Tatiana, and Jack Schlossberg are the children of Caroline Kennedy and Edwin Schlossberg, which make them the grandchildren of JFK and Jackie.
All three graduated from the Ivy League: Rose at Harvard while Tatiana and Jack went to Yale. Rose, named after the Kennedy matriarch, launched a Youtube Web series, Tatiana writes for the New York Times on the environmental science beat, while Jack has said that he would like to continue the Kennedy tradition in American politics.
Both Rose and Jack look very much like the Bouvier side of the family, while Tatiana (who I once tried friending on Facebook), looks very Kennedy. In 2017, Tatiana married George Moran in Martha’s Vineyard.
Kick Kennedy
Named after the aforementioned Kathleen and given the same nickname, Kick is the daughter of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (RFK and Ethel’s son).
If Kick Sr. was named England’s debutante of the year in 1938 (when her father was the American ambassador to the UK), Kick Jr. got her coming-out moment in the 2007 Le Bal in Paris (co-debutantes that year included Lady Tatiana Mountbatten, Lily Collins and Beatrice Bradlee).
Kick graduated from Stanford University and has occasionally dipped her toes in acting (her brother, Conor, was the Kennedy that Taylor Swift was dating). Of her large extended family, Kick once said on Instagram: “It’s not a celebration until there [is] a cousin count that frightens statisticians.”
Katherine Schwarzenegger-Pratt
The daughter of Maria Shriver and Arnold Schwarzenegger (which makes her grandmother Eunice), Katherine graduated from the University of Southern California with a degree in communications and has written books on varied topics on like positive body image, life after graduation, and forgiveness.
She is now the wife of actor Chris Pratt, and in August 2020 gave birth to a daughter.
The Cuomo Sisters
Cara, Mariah, and Michaela Cuomo are the daughters of Kerry (an RFK daughter) and newly-in-need-of-a-job (to say the least) Andrew Cuomo.
Cara went to Harvard and works at the Robert F Kennedy Human Rights non-profit (and also may have had a relationship with her father’s bodyguard). Mariah matriculated at Brown and works at communications firm Teneo. Michaela also went to Brown and is now the CMO for a podcast.
All three of them were recently popular at the height of the pandemic in New York, for their pro-masking visibility but that all seems to have changed. Like all Kennedys though, they’ll probably land on their feet again. They always do.
