Washington (United States) (AFP) – American environmental journalist Tatiana Schlossberg, the granddaughter of late president John F. Kennedy, has died from cancer at the age of 35, her family announced Tuesday.
“Our beautiful Tatiana passed away this morning. She will always be in our hearts,” the family wrote in a statement posted on the JFK Library Foundation’s Instagram account. Schlossberg, a science and climate reporter for the New York Times, wrote movingly about her diagnosis with acute myeloid leukemia in an essay for The New Yorker published in November.
Doctors were first alerted to the condition—mostly seen in older patients and among first responders to the 9/11 attacks in New York—after detecting an unusually high white blood cell count following the birth of her second child in May 2024. “During the latest clinical trial, my doctor told me that he could keep me alive for a year, maybe,” she wrote. “My first thought was that my kids, whose faces live permanently on the inside of my eyelids, wouldn’t remember me.”
She was also deeply critical of her relative Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who now serves as health secretary in President Donald Trump’s cabinet and has curtailed access to vaccines while slashing spending on government medical research. “I watched from my hospital bed as Bobby, in the face of logic and common sense, was confirmed for the position, despite never having worked in medicine, public health, or the government,” she wrote.
Schlossberg published widely in leading outlets including The Atlantic and Vanity Fair, and in 2019 authored the prize-winning book “Inconspicuous Consumption: The Environmental Impact You Don’t Know You Have.” The daughter of designer Edwin Schlossberg and diplomat Caroline Kennedy, she is survived by her husband, George Moran, a physician, and their two children.
© 2024 AFP
