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Environmental journalist Tatiana Schlossberg, one of three grandchildren of the late U.S. president John F. Kennedy, has died. She was 35.
Schlossberg, the daughter of Kennedy’s daughter, Caroline Kennedy, and Edwin Schlossberg, revealed she had terminal cancer in a November 2025 essay in The New Yorker. A family statement disclosing her death was released Tuesday on social media by the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation.
“Our beautiful Tatiana passed away this morning. She will always be in our hearts,” the family’s statement said. It did not disclose a cause of death or say where she died.
Leukemia diagnosis
Schlossberg was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia in May 2024 at the age of 34. After the birth of her second child, her doctor noticed her white blood cell count was high. It turned out to be acute myeloid leukemia with a rare mutation, mostly seen in older people.
In the New Yorker essay, “A Battle With My Blood,” Schlossberg recounted going through rounds of chemotherapy and two stem cell transplants and participating in clinical trials. During the most recent trial, she wrote, her doctor told her “he could keep me alive for a year, maybe.”
Schlossberg also criticized policies pushed by her mother’s cousin, U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., in the essay, saying they could hurt cancer patients like her. Her mother had urged senators to reject his confirmation.
“As I spent more and more of my life under the care of doctors, nurses, and researchers striving to improve the lives of others, I watched as Bobby cut nearly a half billion dollars for research into mRNA vaccines, technology that could be used against certain cancers,” the essay said.
Schlossberg had worked as a reporter covering climate change and the environment for the New York Times’ science section. Her 2019 book Inconspicuous Consumption: The Environmental Impact You Don’t Know You Have won the Society of Environmental Journalists’ Rachel Carson environment book award in 2020.
Schlossberg wrote in the New Yorker essay that she feared her daughter and son wouldn’t remember her. She said she felt cheated and sad that she wouldn’t get to keep living “the wonderful life” she had with her husband, George Moran.
While her parents and siblings, Rose and Jack, tried to hide their pain from her, she said she felt it every day.
Schlossberg, centre right, with her parents Caroline Kennedy, left, and Edwin Schlossberg, centre left, and her brother, Jack. (Steven Senne/The Associated Press )
“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 said. “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.”
Schlossberg’s mother Caroline was five years old when her father was assassinated in Dallas in 1963. She was 10 when her uncle, Robert F. Kennedy, was assassinated in Los Angeles in 1968 while he was running for president.
Caroline’s brother, John F. Kennedy Jr., died in 1999 when the single-engine plane he was piloting plunged into the Atlantic Ocean, near Martha’s Vineyard, Mass. His wife, Carolyn, and her sister, Lauren Bessette, also died in the crash.
