THE TRUTH ABOUT THE KENNEDY CURSE

Is the Kennedy family unlucky or cursed? Neither, says author James Patterson, whose new book unlocks the truth. In a revealing interview he tells Juliet Rieden the answer is much closer to home.

- Juliet Rieden

There’s something celestial about the Kennedy family. They are America’s royalty, a clan of seductive, beautiful people whose impeccably styled technicolour daily lives are shrouded in myth, rumour and simultaneous deification and condemnation. The most tumultuous moments in the family’s life changed the course of history, while the seeming bad luck – which began 105 years before John F. Kennedy’s assassination when his great-grandfather was felled by cholera, age 35, and continues to this day with his grand-niece and her eight-year-old son tragically losing their lives in a canoeing accident only three months ago – has been mythologised into a curse.

It’s no wonder then that thriller writer James Patterson, one of the best-selling authors of all time, decided to examine the rise and fall of the dynasty in his new book, The Kennedy Curse. Patterson mostly writes fiction and has transferred those skills to this non-fiction pageturner which boasts the pace and lustre of a gripping epic. “I have written it with a novelist’s tone: it’s just story after story after story, there’s drama to it,” he opines.

Before reading the book, I thought there was nothing more to be said about the Kennedys – no stone unturned, no conspiracy theory untapped – but the intimate detail Patterson reveals revives the family for a new generation to pore over. “It’s just an unbelievable tale. I thought that nobody had told the whole family’s story,” he explains.