The Chappaquiddick accident was awful, and unfortunately it fits among the Kennedy family's equally awful history . The Kennedy Family Curse, as it's called, features four plane crashes, two assassinations, and an alarming number of young deaths. While this is an eerie string of unfortunate events, the so-called pattern may realistically be chalked up to the fact that the Kennedys are all so firmly in the public eye — we're paying attention and cataloguing every turn for the dramatic. “Certainly those tragedies have equally affected other families, but [the Kennedys] are the people who are in the public eye. Other people are not known," psychotherapist Melody Masi told the Cape Cod Times.