Tatiana Schlossberg, JFK’s granddaughter, reveals terminal cancer diagnosis

Tatiana Schlossberg, daughter of Caroline Kennedy, ambassador of the United States to Australia, addresses an audience during John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award ceremonies, Sunday, Oct. 29, 2023, at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, in Boston. (AP Photo/Steven Senne)

Tatiana Schlossberg, the granddaughter of former President John F. Kennedy, revealed on Saturday she has been diagnosed with terminal cancer, with a doctor telling her she has less than a year to live.

In an essay in The New Yorker, the 35-year-old wrote that she was diagnosed last year with acute myeloid leukemia with a rare mutation known as Inversion 3, a genetic anomaly found in less than 2 per cent of AML cases.

Doctors discovered the cancer shortly after Schlossberg gave birth to her daughter in May 2024.

“I did not — could not — believe that they were talking about me,” Schlossberg wrote. “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 knew.”

In the essay, Schlossberg documents the grueling treatment process, which included several rounds of chemotherapy, two bone-marrow transplants and participation in two clinical trials. Schlossberg said she was also diagnosed with a form of Epstein-Barr virus in September, which “blasted my kidneys,” and had to learn to walk again.

“During the latest clinical trial, my doctor told me that he could keep me alive for a year, maybe,” she wrote.

Schlossberg, an environmental journalist, is the second daughter of former US Ambassador Caroline Kennedy and designer Edwin Schlossberg. Tatiana Schlossberg and her husband, George Moran, have a 3-year-old son and 1-year-old daughter.

Schlossberg said her siblings — Rose, a filmmaker, and Jack, who earlier this month announced a run for Congress — have been helping raise her children and “have held my hand unflinchingly while I have suffered, trying not to show their pain and sadness in order to protect me from it.”

Schlossberg described going through treatment as her cousin, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., was confirmed as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, after “running for President as an Independent, but mostly as an embarrassment to me and the rest of my immediate family.”

She said the doctors at NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia University Irving Medical Center, where she was treated, didn’t know whether they would be affected after the Trump administration stripped Columbia University of federal funding. “Suddenly, the health-care system on which I relied felt strained, shaky,” Schlossberg wrote. The university later agreed a deal with the Trump administration to restore the funding.

Schlossberg said she regrets adding to her family’s history of tragedy, which includes John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963 and the assassination of her great-uncle, former Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, in 1968.

“For my whole life, I have tried to be good, to be a good student and a good sister and a good daughter, and to protect my mother and never make her upset or angry,” she writes. “Now I have added a new tragedy to her life, to our family’s life, and there’s nothing I can do to stop it.”

Veronica Stracqualursi, CNN