Rosemary Kennedy (September 13, 1918 – January 7, 2005) was the third child and first daughter of Joseph Patrick Kennedy, Sr. and Rose Elizabeth Kennedy née Fitzgerald, born a year after her brother, future U.S. President John F. Kennedy. She underwent a lobotomy at age 23, which left her permanently incapacitated.
Childhood
She was born at her parents' home in Brookline, Massachusetts, and christened Rose Marie Kennedy but commonly called Rosemary. To her family and friends, she was known as Rosie.
Kennedy has been described as being a shy child whose I.Q. tests reportedly indicated a moderate mental retardation, but this is a question of some controversy.[citation needed] Diaries written by her in the late 1930s, and published in the 1980s, reveal a young woman whose life was filled with outings to the opera, tea dances, dress fittings, and other social interests:
- "Went to luncheon in the ballroom in the White House. James Roosevelt took us in to see his father, President Roosevelt. He said, 'It's about time you came. How can I put my arm around all of you? Which is the oldest? You are all so big."
- "Have a fitting at 10:15 Elizabeth Arden. Appointment dress fitting again. Home for lunch. Royal tournament in the afternoon."
- "Up too late for breakfast. Had it on deck. Played Ping-Pong with Ralph's sister, also with another man. Had lunch at 1:15. Walked with Peggy. also went to horse races with her, and bet and won a dollar and a half. Went to the English Movie at five. Had dinner at 8:45. Went to the lounge with Miss Cahill and Eunice and retired early."[1]
She also was presented to King George VI and Queen Elizabeth during her father's service as the American Ambassador to the United Kingdom.
Placid and easygoing as a child and teenager, the maturing Kennedy became increasingly assertive in her personality. She was reportedly subject to violent mood swings. Some observers have since attributed this behavior to her difficulties in keeping up with her active siblings, as well as the hormonal surges associated with puberty. In any case, the family had difficulty dealing with the often-stormy Rosemary, who had begun to sneak out at night from the convent where she was being educated and cared for.[2]
Lobotomy
In 1941, when Rosemary was 23, doctors told her father that a new procedure, lobotomy, would help calm her mood swings.[citation needed] At the time, relatively few lobotomies had been performed; James W. Watts, who carried out the procedure with Walter Freeman, described what happened:
"We went through the top of the head, I think she was awake. She had a mild tranquilizer. I made a surgical incision in the brain through the skull. It was near the front. It was on both sides. We just made a small incision, no more than an inch." The instrument Dr. Watts used looked like a butter knife. He swung it up and down to cut brain tissue. "We put an instrument inside," he said. As Dr. Watts cut, Dr. Freeman put questions to Rosemary. For example, he asked her to recite the Lord's Prayer or sing "God Bless America" or count backwards. ... "We made an estimate on how far to cut based on how she responded." ... When she began to become incoherent, they stopped.
[3]
Instead of the hoped-for result, Rosemary was left with urinary incontinence and an infantile mentality — staring blankly at walls for hours. Her speech became unintelligible. "Rose was devastated; she considered it the first of the Kennedy family tragedies."[4]
Aftermath
In 1949, Rosemary moved to the St. Coletta School for Exceptional Children (formerly known as St. Coletta's Institute for Backward Children) in Jefferson, Wisconsin, an institution for people with disabilities. Because of the severity of her condition, Rosemary became largely detached from her family, but was visited on regularly by her sister Eunice Kennedy Shriver. Occasionally, Rosemary was taken to visit relatives in Florida and Washington, D.C. and to her childhood home on Cape Cod.
Publicly, Rosemary was declared to be mentally handicapped. "Only a few doctors who worked for the Kennedys knew the truth about Rosemary's condition, as did the FBI," because of a background check of Joe. Joe's attorney told them she had a "mental illness".[5] Perhaps because of the episode, Eunice later founded the Special Olympics, and Joe founded and endowed philanthropies for people with developmental disabilities.
Death
Rosemary died from natural causes on January 7, 2005, at the Fort Memorial Hospital in Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin, age 86, with her sister, Jean Kennedy Smith, and her brother U.S. Senator Ted Kennedy by her side. She was the fifth of the Kennedy children to die, but the first to die from natural causes. Although a genealogical site indicates that she was buried in Holyhood Cemetery in Brookline, Massachusetts,[6] the cemetery will not confirm burial.[citation needed] There is no discernible grave marker.[citation needed]
Mental retardation or mental illness?
Researchers disagree over Rosemary's preoperative condition. According to author Laurence Leamer, Rosemary was "probably the first person with mental retardation in America to receive a prefrontal lobotomy"; but Ronald Kessler, author of The Sins of the Father: Joseph P. Kennedy and the Dynasty He Founded, believes that Rosemary's problem was instead mental illness. He says that while Rosemary was slower than the other children, as a teenager she was able to write endearing letters, dance, and do arithmetic.
Her father's aide, Edward Moore, with whom Rosemary lived for years before her family moved to London for her father's ambassadorship, said, "She's not quite right", tapping his head. Returning from London at age 22, Rosemary apparently regressed in mental skills, became "tense and irritable, upset easily and unpredictably … tantrums … rages … convulsive episodes".[7]
Kathleen Kennedy's former boyfriend, John White, claimed that Kathleen admitted to him the secret that Rosemary had learning problems, but what really concerned her father were "mood changes" and a "new neurological disturbance." She added that "the family considered Rosemary a disgrace and failure'".[8]
Kessler conducted the only interview with Watts, who "told the author that, in his opinion, Kennedy had suffered not from mental retardation, but from a form of depression. … 'It may have been agitated depression, you're agitated, you're shaky. You talk in an agitated way.'" Kessler writes, "A review of all records by the two doctors confirmed Dr. Watt's [sic] declaration. … None of the papers listed any of the patients as being mentally retarded. … According to a review in the American Journal of Psychiatry, of all reports of lobotomies ever done, the procedure was only used for psychiatric illness."[9]
"One of the doctors who knew the truth was Dr. Bertram S. Brown, … executive director of the President's Panel on Mental Retardation," Kessler writes. "According to Dr. Brown, the fact that Rosemary could do arithmetic meant that her IQ was well above 75, the cutoff used by most states for purposes of classification in schools to define mental retardation." At the age of nine, she did problems like 428 × 32 = 13696, 3924 / 6 = 654.[10] At age 16 she wrote to her father, "I would do anything to make you so happy. I hate to disapoint [sic] you in anyway [sic]." Her diary reveals an ability to write about and understand various situations around her.
Kessler quotes Dr. Brown, a former director of the National Institute of Mental Health, as saying, "If she did division and multiplication, she was over an IQ of 75. She was not mentally retarded. … It could be she had an IQ of 90 in a family where everyone was 130, so it looked like retardation, but she did not fall into IQ 75 and below, which is the definition of mental retardation. … There is no way I can picture her at less than a 90 IQ, but in that family, 90 would be considered retarded."
Kessler adds that in Dr. Brown's opinion, the family's treatment of Rosemary led to her mental illness. "I think it's likely she was somewhat slower than the others. Then she was treated as if she was retarded. Then it becomes reactive depression, including rages and loss of control. That is mental illness. … The reason she got depressed was that she reacted to being treated as a lesser member of the family." While the children tried to include her in their activities, "given the highly competitive environment of the Kennedy family, they could not help but to communicate to her that she was not up to their standards." The fact that Joe banished Rosemary to live with his aide demonstrated his rejection of her. "The stigma of mental illness in those days was like tuberculosis or cancer or worse. Mental retardation is more benignly not your fault. … Even in [Dr. Watts'] day, performing a lobotomy on someone who was mentally retarded would have been medical malpractice."
See also
Notes
- ^ Gibson, Rose Kennedy and Her Family, includes Rosemary's diaries from 1936–1938.
- ^ Laurence Leamer, The Kennedy Women: The Saga of an American Family, referenced in Associated Press article, Retarded Kennedy Sister Dies at 86, (Saturday, January 8, 2005
- ^ Kessler, The Sins of the Father, p. 226
- ^ Kessler, p. 237
- ^ Kessler, p. 233
- ^ Rose Marie Kennedy at FindAGrave.Com
- ^ Rose Kennedy, A Time to Remember, quoted by Kessler.
- ^ Kessler, p. 224
- ^ Kessler, p. 227
- ^ Kessler, p. 246
References
- Burns, James MacGregor. John Kennedy: A Political Profile. Harcourt Brace, 1960.
- El-Hai, Jack. The Lobotomist: A Maverick Medical Genius and His Tragic Quest to Rid the World of Mental Illness. Wiley, 2004. ISBN 0-471-23292-0.
- Gibson, Barbara. Rose Kennedy and Her Family: The Best and Worst of Their Lives and Times. Birch Lane Press. ISBN 1-55972-299-1.
- Kennedy, Rose, Times to Remember. Doubleday, 1974. ISBN 0-385-47657-4.
- Kessler, Ronald. The Sins of the Father: Joseph P. Kennedy and the Dynasty He Founded. Warner Books, 1996. ISBN 0-446-60384-8.
- Leamer, Laurence, The Kennedy Women: The Saga of an American Family. Ballantine Books, 1996.
- McCarthy, Joe. The Remarkable Kennedys
- McTaggart, Lynne. Kathleen Kennedy. Doubleday, 1983.
- Valenstein, Elliot S. Great and Desperate Cures: The Rise and Decline of Psychosurgery and Other Radical Treatments for Mental Illness. Basic Books, 1986).
External links
