On Saturday, the anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s assassination, the New Yorker published a viral essay by his 35-year-old granddaughter, environmental journalist Tatiana Schlossberg, who revealed that she is dying from a rare and aggressive blood cancer, acute myeloid leukemia. Many online praised Schlossberg for her “courageous” and “heartbreaking” essay about living with a terminal diagnosis and leaving behind a husband, two small children and a loving family, including her mother, Caroline Kennedy, who she said must live “with another tragedy in her life.” One famous cousin, Maria Shriver, praised Schlossberg on X as “a beautiful writer, journalist, wife, mother, daughter, sister, and friend,” whose “extraordinary piece of writing” painstakingly details what she has been going through the past year and a half. But fans of another famous cousin, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., are not happy that Schlossberg uses several paragraphs in her essay to lash out at him for policy decisions and budget cuts he has made as Donald Trump’s Health and Human Services secretary. Schlossberg said that Kennedy had become “an embarrassment” to her and her immediate family for his campaign against vaccines, and she denounced him for slashing federally funded research into cancer treatments and for encouraging vaccine skepticism, putting her own health and that of millions of other Americans at risk. But in response to Shriver’s X post, one person wrote: “My heart breaks for her. However there was absolutely no reason to bring up RFK!! He has nothing to do with any of this and the fact she felt the need at this time to call him out just seemed petty.” “No thank you,” another person said. “I wish her miracles, but understanding that she allowed herself to also be used for political smears is just too sad.” But when still others called her out for “bringing politics” into the conversation, or for making “nasty comments” about her second cousin, people replied, “She brought politics into it because it’s affecting her directly” and “I think it was the perfect opportunity to call out his idiocy and cruelty.” Kennedy has yet to publicly respond to Schlossberg’s essay. Some prominent media personalities weighed in. Blogger and political pundit Meghan McCain kept her comments apolitical as she called Schlossberg’s piece “absolutely devastating and heartbreaking.” But novelist Joyce Carol Oates observed that Schlossberg was sounding the alarm about the “growing medical catastrophe” created by “the anti-science forces.” Oates also said it was “astonishing” that Schlossberg was able to pen something so “beautiful,” given how ill she must be. “These treatments leave patients exhausted,” she said. In her essay, Schlossberg said she diagnosed at age 34, after a routine blood draw performed following the May 2024 birth of her daughter revealed unusual results, leading to her leukemia diagnosis. In the months since, Schlossberg said she has undergone chemotherapy, two bone-marrow transplants, stem cell treatment, and a clinical trial for a new form of immunotherapy. “I did not could not believe that they were talking about me,” Schlossberg wrote about her diagnosis. “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 know.” “I had a son whom I loved more than anything and a newborn I needed to take care of,” she continued. “This could not possibly be my life.” Schlossberg described going in and out of remission, almost winding up in the ICU after her lungs filled with fluid, suffering graft-versus-host disease and “being downed by a form of Epstein-Barr virus that blasted my kidneys.” During her latest clinical trial, she said her doctor told her he could keep her alive “for a year, maybe.” Schlossberg then addressed her cousin, who had been on the national stage throughout her treatment. The former Democrat ran for president as an Independent, then suspended his campaign and endorsed Trump in 2024. Following Trump’s election, Caroline Kennedy, who had long shied away from public discussion of family matters, wrote a damning letter to the Senate opposing his confirmation as Health and Human Services secretary. Schlossberg also said her brother, Jack Schlossberg, who recently announced he is running for Congress, “had been speaking out against his lies for months.” Schlossberg said she began her clinical trial for the immunotherapy last January, just as Kennedy was in the process of being confirmed. “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 said, noting that her treatment had been developed over many decades with millions of dollars of government funding. She said she worried that his attacks on vaccines could leave her “to spend the rest of my life immunocompromised,” and described her horror as he cut hundreds of millions of dollars for research into mRNA vaccines, technology that could be used against certain cancers. She also said he slashed billions in funding from the National Institutes of Health and threatened to oust the panel of medical experts charged with recommending preventive cancer screenings. Schlossberg also said that she had suffered a postpartum hemorrhage, shortly after she gave birth to her daughter and early in her illness. To stop the bleeding, she was given misoprostol, which she said is part of medication abortion and which, at her cousin’s urging, is currently “under review” by the Food and Drug Administration. “I freeze when I think about what would have happened if it had not been immediately available to me and to millions of other women who need it to save their lives or to get the care they deserve,” she wrote. While Schlossberg doesn’t hold back in expressing her anger and frustration about her cousin, her essay mostly focuses on how she’s trying to live “in the present, which is harder than it sounds.” She acknowledged the long history of tragedy in her family the assassinations of both her grandfather and of Kennedy’s father, Robert F. Kennedy; the death of her grandmother, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis; and of her mother’s brother, John F. Kennedy Jr. She also said she feels “so cheated and so sad” that she won’t get to keep living “the wonderful life” she had with her husband, George Moran. Most poignantly, she said she’s grieving the fact that she won’t be able to be a mother to her children. “My son might have a few memories, but he’ll probably start confusing them with pictures he sees or stories he hears,” Schlossberg wrote. “I didn’t ever really get to take care of my daughter. I was gone for almost half of her first year of life. I don’t know who, really, she thinks I am, and whether she will feel or remember, when I am gone, that I am her mother.”.
https://www.eastbaytimes.com/2025/11/24/rfk-jr-fans-dying-cousin-tatiana-schlossberg-slams-him/
