The Kennedys are the wealthy family descending from the marriage of the Irish-Americans Joseph P. and Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, and prominent in American politics and government. Their political involvement has revolved around the Democratic Party and its liberal side. Harvard educations have been frequent among them, and they have contributed heavily to that university's Kennedy School of Government.

With the election of President John F. Kennedy, he and his two then surviving brothers all had prominent positions in the Federal government, and received intensive publicity, often emphasizing their youth (relative to comparably influential politicians), glamor, and education, and their collective future in politics was often discussed, often heightening (or ironizing) the romantic element by making a metaphor for the Kennedys out of the name of Camelot, the then current musical comedy involving King Arthur.

The family has undergone (then, before, and since) a series of deaths and other reverses that could not be fully remedied by wealth, sometimes called "the Kennedy curse"; it has included the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy, three aircraft crashes, a case of mental retardation treated by prefrontal lobotomy, and at least three sets of allegations against individual family members and their relatives by marriage, including a murder conviction and a controversial fatal single-car crash. Just how severely these events restricted the family's influence is unknowable, but the assumption that even the last surviving brother's role was drastically diminished is popular. On the other hand, a number of Kennedy family members have since held high office, and the idea that the family's influence was snuffed out in the 1960s is an exaggeration.