Tatiana Schlossberg, environmental journalist and granddaughter of JFK, dies at 35

Environmental journalist Tatiana Schlossberg, one of the late President John F. Kennedy’s three grandchildren, has died. She was 35 years old.

Schlossberg, the daughter of Kennedy’s daughter, Caroline Kennedy, and Edwin Schlossberg, revealed that she had terminal cancer in a November 2025 article in The New Yorker. A family statement revealing her death was posted on social media on Tuesday by the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation.

The statement read: “Beautiful Tatiana passed away this morning. She will always be in our hearts.” The cause of death was not revealed or the place of her death mentioned.

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Schlossberg was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia in May 2024 when she was 34 years old. After the birth of her second child, her doctor noticed an increase in her white blood cell count. It turned out to be acute myeloid leukemia with a rare mutation, which occurs mostly in older people.

In an essay titled “A Battle with My Blood,” Schlossberg recounted undergoing rounds of chemotherapy, two stem cell transplants, and participating in clinical trials. She wrote that during the last trial, her doctor told her he would “probably keep me alive for a year.”

Schlossberg also criticized policies pushed by her mother’s cousin, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., in the article, saying the policies he supports could harm 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 Bobby carve out nearly half a billion dollars for research into mRNA vaccines, technology that could be used against some cancers,” the article said.

Schlossberg worked as a reporter covering climate change and the environment in the Science section of The New York Times. Her 2019 book Blunt Consumption: The Environmental Impact You Don’t Know You Have won the Society of Environmental Journalists’ Rachel Carson Environmental Book Award in 2020.

Schlossberg wrote in the New Yorker article that she feared her and her son would not remember her. She felt cheated and sad that she would not be able to continue living the “wonderful life” she had with her husband, George Moran.

While her parents and siblings tried to hide their pain from her, she said she felt it every day. Her siblings, Rose and Jack Schlossberg, are JFK’s other grandchildren.

She said: “All my life I have tried to be good, to be a good student, a good sister and a good daughter, and to protect my mother and never make her angry or upset.” “I have now added a new tragedy to her life, to our family’s life, and there is nothing I can do to stop it.”

Edwin Schlossberg, husband of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’ daughter Caroline, leads his daughters Rose (left) and Tatiana (right) from their grandmother’s apartment building in 1994. Photo by Reuters

Schlossberg’s mother, Caroline, was 5 years old when her father, President Kennedy, was assassinated in Dallas in 1963. She was 10 years old when her uncle, Robert F. Kennedy, was assassinated. Kennedy in Los Angeles in 1968 while running for president.

Caroline’s brother, John Kennedy Jr., died in 1999 when the single-engine plane he was piloting fell into the Atlantic Ocean, near Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts. His wife, Caroline, and her sister, Lauren Bessette, also died in the accident.

Levy reported from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and Broomfield from Cockeysville, Maryland.