What happened to rosemary Kennedy?
She was Joe and Rose Kennedy’s third child, their first
daughter. She was born in September 1918, two months before the end
of World War I, during the Spanish influenza epidemic. Her name was
Rose Marie Kennedy, but she became known as “Rosemary.” Later the
Kennedys speculated that she was retarded because the nurse had
prevented her birth until the arrival of the obstetrician, so that
he could collect his full feee. In his book, “The Kennedy Women,”
Lawrence Leamer describes her as “painfully slow… a pretty child
with green eyes that peered out on life directly.” Leamer: “As
Rosemary grew into a teenager she desperately wanted praise. She
was happy for hours with a mere scrap of approval, and forlorn and
discouraged at the hint of criticism…. Rosemary was slow, but she
was not stupid and sometimes she would erupt in an inexplicable
fury, the rage pouring out of her like a tempest from a cloudless
sky.” Perhaps she was angry at being treated as if she were somehow
inferior to her siblings. At most, Rosemary was “mildly retarded,”
as her obituaries would one day describe her, as well as the
inspiration for her sister Eunice’s “Special Olympics.” Shortly
before World War II broke out in Europe, FDR appointed Joe Kennedy
as ambassador to the Court of St. James – at the time the most
important diplomatic post any American could hold. Joe of course
moved to London, along with Rose and his two oldest daughters –
Rosemary and Kathleen. As the American ambassador, Joe and his
family would move in the highest circles of British society. And a
decision was made: both daughters, the charming and brilliant
Kathleen, and the “slow” Rosemary, would be “presented” to the King
and Queen at Buckingham Palace. Rosemary spent endless hours
practicing her curtseying – the bow she would have to make to the
King and Queen. On the appointed evening, with the cream of British
nobility (and the press) watching, Kathleen and Rosemary were
presented. Everything went off without a hitch, until the very end.
“Suddenly,” Leamer wrote, “just as Rosemary was attempting to glide
off, she tripped, nearly falling. It was a debutante’s worst
horror, at the most important social moment of her life, in front
of the king and queen, to make a public spectacle of her
awkwardness, her ineptness. The kind and queen smiled as if nothing
had happened, and there was not even a murmur from the assembly,
and indeed, it was all over in a few seconds. Rosemary recovered
and followed Kathleen out the door.” But although no one ever
mentioned Rosemary’s faux pas, it reinforced what everyone (at
least in the family) understood: that Rosemary was somehow
different. Increasingly, the problem was simply that Rosemary was
too good-looking, even more striking than Kathleen, who was herself
a knock-out. As long as older brothers Joe Jr. and Jack had been
around, to arrange her dance card and to scare off the potential
suitors “who took her cryptic silences and deliberate speech as
feminine demureness,” she was okay. Later, in London she was often
squired to social events by a young Embassy employee named, of all
things, “Jack Kennedy,” who became known as “London Jack,” to
distinguish him from JFK. But as war clouds gathered, and Joe was
recalled to the U.S. after his disastrous pro-Hitler remarks to the
Boston Herald, Joe, Jr. and Jack joined the Navy. There was no one
left to escort Rosemary. She was packed off to a Washington
convent, which she quickly figured out how to escape from. “At
night she walked out into the dark streets looking for the light
and life of the city… The family feared that she was going out into
the streets to do what Kathleen called ‘the thing the priest says
not to do.’… There was a dread fear of pregnancy, disease and
disgrace.” Joe Kennedy began talking to a quack physician from
George Washington University named Walter Freeman, who was
experimenting with a new form of brain surgery that would come to
be known as a pre-frontal lobotomy. He sold Joe Kennedy a bill of
goods – the biggest drawback for a female patient, Freeman wrote,
was the fact that her head would have to be partially shaved,
preventing her from going out socially for several weeks. Not
everything in the family was convinced, though. Kathleen Kennedy
sought out a reporter friend of hers who had done research into the
new procedure. The reporter told Kathleen that the whole procedure
was “just not good” and that post-lobotomy, the patients “don’t
worry so much, but they’re gone as a person, just gone.” Which may
have been what Joe really wanted all along. Soon thereafter,
Rosemary was wheeled into the operating room. She received a shot
of Novocain and when she regained consciousness, her head was on a
sandbag. Freeman and his associate drilled a hole in her skull and
inserted a sort of spatula into her brain and began digging. They
asked her to sing simple songs and perform basic addition and
subtraction. As long as she could recite the doggerel, and handle
third-grade arithmetic, they kept digging. Finally, though,
Rosemary Kennedy fell silent, and the operation was over. And so,
for all practical purposes, was Rosemary Kennedy’s life. “She had
regressed into an infantlike state,” Leamer wrote, “mumbling a few
words, sitting for hours staring at the walls, only traces left of
the young woman she had been, still with flashes of rage. This was
a horror beyond horror, an unthinkable, unspeakable disaster. Rose
and her children had repressed so much, and now they repressed what
Joe had done to his daughter, repressed it all and pretended that
it had never happened and that Rosemary no longer existed.” She
lived in a series of private institutions, including years in the
Craig House, a private hospital north of New York City. No one from
the family ever visited her. In the 1970’s, she somehow escaped
once more, from a Midwestern psychiatric home, into the streets of
Chicago. The wire services carried photos of her in a wheelchair,
being hustled into an ambulance by Chicago cops. But Rosemary’s
story, so horrifying in its casual, callous brutality, was never
forgotten by millions of Americans, and certainly not by any
members of the Kennedy family. In the late 1970s, Bobby’s doomed
son, David, was reading a copy of the pro-drug magazine High Times
when he came across a story on lobotomies. Naturally enough, one of
the illustrations was a photo of his beautiful aunt Rosemary,
pre-lobotomy. “She had a new pair of white shoes on,” David
recalled later for the authors Peter Collier and David Horowitz.
“The thought crossed my mind that if my grandfather was alive the
same thing could have happened to me that happened to her. She was
an embarrassment; I am an embarrassment. She was a hindrance; I am
a hindrance. As I looked at this picture, I began to hate my
grandfather and all of them for having done the thing they had done
to her and for doing the thing they were doing to me.” David died
of a drug overdose in 1984. His aunt outlived him by almost 21
years, finally dying in January 2005 in Fort Atkinson, WI, where
she had been institutionalized for more than a quarter century. She
was 86.
