Tatiana Schlossberg, a journalist and granddaughter of John F. Kennedy, said Saturday that she has been diagnosed with terminal cancer, saying her doctor told her she has less than a year to live.
The environmental writer also addressed her cousin: Robert F. Kennedy Jr.criticizing the impact of his policies as Secretary of Health and Human Services on her experience with the disease.
In an essay for New Yorker published Saturday, the 35-year-old daughter of Caroline Kennedy and Edwin Schlossberg said she has acute myeloid leukemia.
Schlossberg learned of her diagnosis shortly after giving birth to her second child with husband George Moran in May 2024 and has been undergoing treatment ever since.
“I couldn’t—couldn’t—believe what they were saying about me,” Schlossberg wrote. “I swam a mile in the pool the day before, nine months pregnant. I wasn't sick. I didn't feel sick. In fact, I was one of the healthiest people I knew.”
Later in the essay, describing her ongoing treatment, Schlossberg criticized Kennedy's policies as health secretary. She expressed strong disapproval of his anti-vaccination stance and his decision to cut funding for medical research, highlighting the harm such actions cause to patients like her.
“As I spent more and more of my life under the care of doctors, nurses and researchers committed to improving the lives of others, I watched as Bobby cut almost half a billion dollars for research into mRNA vaccines, a technology that could be used against some types of cancer,” she wrote.
She continued that Kennedy “cut billions in funding to the National Institutes of Health, the world's largest funder of medical research, and threatened to fire a panel of medical experts tasked with recommending preventive cancer screenings.”
Schlossberg added that doctors at NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia University Irving Medical Center, where she received care, were uncertain about their future after the Trump administration cut off federal funding for the university.
“Suddenly, the health care system I relied on felt strained and shaky,” Schlossberg wrote. The university later reached an agreement with the Trump administration that restored funding.
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Schlossberg was previously a climate reporter for the New York Times and has written for the Atlantic, Washington Post and Vanity Fair. She and Moran have a three-year-old son and a one-year-old daughter.
She concluded her essay by reflecting on what she is focused on in the time she has left, writing that she hopes to “fill my brain with memories” of her children: “I try to live and be with them now. But being in the present is harder than it seems, so I let the memories come and go… I will continue to try to remember.”
