Tatiana Schlossberg, Journalist and Granddaughter of JFK, Has Died

Tatiana Schlossberg has died at the age of 35, after a battle with acute myeloid leukemia. She is survived by her husband, George Moran, their son, Edwin, a daughter whose name has not been publicly revealed, her parents Edwin Schlossberg and Caroline Kennedy, and her siblings Rose and Jack.

Schlossberg was a noted climate change and environmental journalist for The New York Times. Her work was also featured in outlets including The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, The Boston Globe, and Bloomberg. She also published a Substack, News from a Changing Planet, dedicated to climate-change reporting. Schlossberg publicly announced her terminal diagnosis in a moving essay, “A Battle with My Blood,” published in the November 22, 2025, issue of The New Yorker.

Tatiana Celia Kennedy Schlossberg was born on May 5, 1990, in New York City, to designer and artist Edwin Schlossberg and philanthropist, writer and diplomat Caroline Kennedy, the only daughter of slain President John F. Kennedy and first lady Jacqueline Kennedy. She was named after the Russian-American printmaker and publisher Tatyana Grosman.

Although she was born into the Kennedy dynasty, Schlossberg and her siblings enjoyed a private, carefully guarded childhood in Manhattan. She was only four when her grandmother, Jackie Kennedy, died of non-Hodgkin lymphoma in 1994. In 1996, she and her older sister, Rose, were flower girls at their uncle John F. Kennedy Jr.’s wedding to Carolyn Bessette. Her little brother, Jack, was ring bearer. In 1999, the couple, along with Bessette’s sister, Lauren, died in a plane crash off Martha’s Vineyard.

Their deaths were yet another tragedy in the Kennedy family, leaving Caroline Kennedy the last remaining member of her immediate family. As a result, Schlossberg felt protective of her mother. “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 wrote in The New Yorker.

Schlossberg found other ways to connect with her late family members. “My grandparents, both of them, from what I understand, because I didn’t really know them, loved history and reading about history,” she told Vanity Fair in 2019. “And that’s kind of how I’ve connected with them, by studying them and their time, but also the eras and patterns that fascinated them, and imagining where we would disagree. That’s an important way for me personally to connect with my family legacy.”

An excellent student with a wry sense of humor, Schlossberg attended the exclusive Brearley School and graduated from the Trinity School in 2008. She then attended Yale University, where she met her future husband, George Moran. As an undergraduate student, Schlossberg served as editor in chief of the Yale Herald and was a member of the secret society Mace and Chain. In 2014, she graduated from Oxford University with a master’s degree in American History.

An avid swimmer, Schlossberg and her mother swam three miles across the Hudson River to raise funds for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society in 2013.

Schlossberg joined the Metro section of The New York Times in 2014. That year, she reported on a dead bear that had been dumped in Central Park. Years later, her cousin Robert F. Kennedy Jr. admitted he was the person who had put the bear there. Schlossberg soon pivoted her work to environmental and climate change issues. At the Times, Schlossberg reported on everything from seagrass restoration and the environmental benefits of fungal networks to the problematic coffee trade.

In 2019, Schlossberg’s first critically acclaimed book, Inconspicuous Consumption: The Environmental Impact You Don’t Know You Have, was published by Grand Central Publishing, an imprint of Hachette Book Group. In 2020, it won the prestigious Society of Environmental Journalists Rachel Carson Environment Book Award.

“What the book is really trying to do is talk about how this is really a collective issue,” she told Today in 2019. “There are things that all of us can do, but it’s not about feeling individually guilty. It’s about feeling collectively responsible. And I think [people] have really responded to that kind of call to action, about voting and about being engaged with the issue, and that that’s the most powerful way to make a difference.”

Often asked if she planned on running for office, Schlossberg explained she was contributing to the family legacy in a different way. “I’m very proud of my family's political legacy, but I'm also very proud to come from a family of writers, because my grandfather was an amazing speech writer but also wrote books,” she told Today. “My grandmother was an editor, and both of my parents are writers as well. And so I feel very proud to be serving in that way. And I’m very proud to be a member of the press.”

Although not as visible as other next-generation Kennedys, including her outspoken brother, Jack, Schlossberg occasionally attended events honoring her family. At the opening of the “JFK Homecoming” exhibition at the National Library of Ireland in 2013, she joked about her family’s “good looks, our humor, intelligence, and of course, our humility.”

In 2017, Schlossberg married her college boyfriend, George Moran, a physician, at her grandmother Jackie’s compound on Martha’s Vineyard. “My husband is a doctor, and hearing about what he does every day really puts things in perspective for me,” she told Vanity Fair. “I am trying to take things and help people over the long term, but he’s doing it every single day, real life-and-death decisions.”

In 2022, the couple welcomed their son, Edwin. Their daughter arrived in May 2024. But there was little room for joy, because while Schlossberg was still in the hospital, a doctor noticed her blood count was off, leading to the devastating diagnosis of acute myeloid leukemia.

“I did not—could not—believe that they were talking about me,” she wrote in The New Yorker. “ I had swum a mile in the pool the day before, nine months pregnant. I wasn’t sick. I didn’t feel sick. I was actually one of the healthiest people I knew… I loved to have people over for dinner and to make cakes for my friends’ birthdays. I went to museums and plays and got to jump in a cranberry bog for my job. I had a son whom I loved more than anything and a newborn I needed to take care of. This could not possibly be my life.”

Schlossberg also wrote searingly of her knowledge that her mother would have to endure yet another heartbreaking trauma. “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,” she wrote.

But Schlossberg also used the essay to pointedly criticize the destructive policies of her cousin Robert F. Kennedy Jr., currently the secretary of Health and Human Services in the Trump administration. “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; slashed billions in funding from the National Institutes of Health, the world’s largest sponsor of medical research; and threatened to oust the panel of medical experts charged with recommending preventive cancer screenings.”

Tatiana Schlossberg spent the last months of her life in her parents’ New York City home, surrounded by her siblings, husband, and beloved children, whose faces, she noted in her New Yorker essay, “live permanently on the inside of my eyelids.” Although she is yet another Kennedy to die tragically young, she leaves behind a profound body of work, and a beautiful testament to dying with courage and grace, cherishing her young children with the time she had left.

“I try to live and be with them now,” Schlossberg wrote in The New Yorker. “But being in the present is harder than it sounds, so I let the memories come and go. So many of them are from my childhood that I feel as if I’m watching myself and my kids grow up at the same time. Sometimes I trick myself into thinking I’ll remember this forever, I’ll remember this when I’m dead. Obviously, I won’t. But since I don’t know what death is like and there’s no one to tell me what comes after it, I’ll keep pretending. I will keep trying to remember.”