Tatiana Schlossberg, granddaughter of JFK, dies after rare leukemia diagnosis | US news
Tatiana Schlossberg, the granddaughter of John F. Kennedy, the 35th president of the United States, died Tuesday after announcing in November that she had been diagnosed with a rare form of leukemia. He was 35 years old.
His death was announced via a social media post by the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum. “Our beautiful Tatiana passed away this morning. She will always be in our hearts” article said. It was signed “George, Edwin and Josephine Moran, Ed, Carolina, Jack, Rose and Rory.”
In a New Yorker article published in November, Schlossberg said he had been diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia, a blood and bone marrow cancer with a rare mutation, and had less than a year to live.
Schlossberg, who graduated from Yale and has a master’s degree from Oxford, was previously a climate reporter for the New York Times and a contributor to the Atlantic, Washington Post and Vanity Fair.
The daughter of 67-year-old Caroline Kennedy and 80-year-old Edwin Schlossberg said she learned of her diagnosis and received treatment shortly after giving birth to her second child with husband George Moran in May 2024.
“I couldn’t believe what they were talking about me, I couldn’t believe it,” Schlossberg wrote in his essay titled A Battle With My Blood. “I swam a mile in the pool the day before when I was nine months pregnant. I wasn’t sick. I didn’t feel sick. In fact, I was one of the healthiest people I know.”
In the article, the environmental writer addressed his cousin Robert F. Kennedy Jr., criticizing the impact of his own policies as secretary of health and human services on his experience with the disease.
Schlossberg wrote that he strongly disapproves of anti-vaccine stances and decisions to cut funding for medical research, highlighting the harm such actions cause patients like himself.
“As I spent more and more of my life under the watchful eye of doctors, nurses, and researchers trying to improve the lives of others, I watched Bobby cut nearly half a billion dollars for research into mRNA vaccines, technology that could be used against certain cancers,” he wrote.
He said Kennedy “withheld billions of dollars in funding from the National Institutes of Health, the world’s largest sponsor of medical research, and threatened to oust the panel of medical experts tasked with recommending preventive cancer screenings.”
Schlossberg added that doctors at NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia University Irving Medical Center, where he was treated, were uncertain about their future after funding cuts initiated by the Trump administration.
“Suddenly, the healthcare system I relied on felt strained and shaky,” Schlossberg wrote. The university later reached an agreement with the Trump administration to restore funding.
He concluded his essay by reflecting on his focus when he left, writing that he hoped to “fill my brain with memories” of his children: “I try to live now and be with them. But being in the now is harder than it seems, so I let the memories come and go… I’ll keep trying to remember.”
Schlossberg leaves behind her three-year-old son and one-year-old daughter, whom she shares with her husband.
