Rosemary Kennedy

The Kennedy family at Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, in 1931 with Rosemary on the far right.

Rose Marie Kennedy was born at her parents' home in Brookline, Massachusetts. She was the third child and first daughter of Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. and Rose Fitzgerald. She was named after her mother[1] and was commonly called Rosemary or Rosie. During her birth, the doctor was not immediately available and the nurse ordered Rose Kennedy to keep her legs closed, forcing the baby's head to stay in the birth canal for two hours. The action resulted in a harmful loss of oxygen.[2] As Rosemary began to grow, her parents noticed she was not reaching the basic development steps an infant or a toddler normally reaches at a certain month or year. At two years old, she had a hard time sitting up, crawling, and learning to walk.[3]

Accounts of Rosemary's life indicated that she was intellectually disabled,[4][5] although some have raised questions about the Kennedys' accounts of the nature and scope of her disability.[6] A biographer wrote that Rose Kennedy did not confide in her friends and that she pretended her daughter was developing typically, with relatives other than the immediate family knowing nothing of Rosemary's reported low IQ.[7][8] Despite the help of tutors, Rosemary had trouble learning to read and write. At age 11, she was sent to a Pennsylvania boarding school for the intellectually disabled.[5]

At age 15, Rosemary was sent to the Sacred Heart Convent in Elmhurst, Providence, Rhode Island, where she was educated separately from the other students. Two nuns and a special teacher, Miss Newton, worked with her all day in a separate classroom. The Kennedys gave the school a new tennis court for their efforts. Her reading, writing, spelling, and counting skills were reported to be at a fourth-grade level. During this period, her mother arranged for her older brother John to accompany her to a tea-dance. Thanks to him, she appeared "not different at all" during the dance.[9]

Rosemary read few books but could read Winnie-the-Pooh.[10] 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.[11] Kennedy accompanied her family to the coronation of Pope Pius XII in Rome in 1939. She also visited the White House.[6] Kennedy's parents told Woman's Day that she was "studying to be a kindergarten teacher," and Parents was told that while she had "an interest in social welfare work, she is said to harbor a secret longing to go on the stage." When The Boston Globe requested an interview with Rosemary, her father's assistant prepared a response which Rosemary copied out laboriously:

I have always had serious tastes and understand life is not given us just for enjoyment. For some time past, I have been studying the well known psychological method of Dr. Maria Montessori and I got my degree in teaching last year.[12]

In 1938, Kennedy was presented to King George VI and Queen Elizabeth at Buckingham Palace during her father's service as the United States Ambassador to the United Kingdom.[13] Kennedy practiced the complicated royal curtsy for hours. At the event, she tripped and nearly fell. Rose Kennedy never discussed the incident and treated the debut as a triumph. The crowd made no sign, and the King and the Queen smiled as if nothing had happened.[14]

According to Eunice Kennedy Shriver, when Rosemary returned to the United States from the United Kingdom in 1940, she regressed; Shriver later stated that Rosemary became "'increasingly irritable and difficult'" at age 22.[15] Rosemary would often experience convulsions[16] and fly into violent rages in which she would hit and injure others[5] during this period. After being expelled from a summer camp in western Massachusetts and staying only a few months at a Philadelphia boarding school, Rosemary was sent to a convent school in Washington, D.C.[5] Rosemary began sneaking out of the convent school at night.[17] The nuns at the convent thought that Rosemary might be involved with men, and that she could contract a sexually transmitted disease[6] or become pregnant.[18] Her occasionally erratic behavior frustrated her parents; her father was especially worried that Rosemary's behavior would shame and embarrass the family and damage his and his children's political careers.[19][5]

When Rosemary was 23 years of age, doctors told her father that a form of psychosurgery known as a lobotomy would help calm her mood swings and stop her occasional violent outbursts.[20][21] Joseph Kennedy decided that Rosemary should have a lobotomy; however, he did not inform his wife of this decision until after the procedure was completed.[19][22] The procedure took place in November 1941.[23][24] James W. Watts, who carried out the procedure with Walter Freeman (both of George Washington University School of Medicine), described the procedure to author Ronald Kessler as follows:

We went through the top of the head, I think Rosemary 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 asked Rosemary some questions. For example, he asked her to recite the Lord's Prayer or sing "God Bless America" or count backward. "We made an estimate on how far to cut based on how she responded." When Rosemary began to become incoherent, they stopped.[25]

Dr. Watts told Kessler that in his opinion, Rosemary had suffered not from mental retardation but rather from a form of depression. A review of all of the papers written by the two doctors confirmed Dr. Watts' declaration. All of the patients the two doctors lobotomized were diagnosed as having some form of mental disorder.[26] Dr. Bertram S. Brown, director of the National Institute of Mental Health who was previously an aide to President Kennedy, told Kessler that Joe Kennedy referred to his daughter Rosemary as mentally retarded rather than mentally ill in order to protect John's reputation for a presidential run, and that the family's "lack of support for mental illness is part of a lifelong family denial of what was really so".[27][28]

It quickly became apparent that the procedure had not been successful. Kennedy's mental capacity diminished to that of a two-year-old child. She could not walk or speak intelligibly and was incontinent.[29]

Following her father's death in 1969, the Kennedys gradually involved Rosemary in family life again.[6] Rosemary was occasionally taken to visit relatives[36] in Florida and Washington, D.C., and to her childhood home on Cape Cod. By that time, Rosemary had learned to walk again, but did so with a limp. She never regained the ability to speak clearly, and her arm was palsied.[19] Her condition is sometimes credited as the inspiration for Eunice Kennedy Shriver to later found the Special Olympics,[19] although Shriver told The New York Times in 1995 that this was not entirely the case.[39]

Rosemary Kennedy died from natural causes[40] on January 7, 2005, aged 86,[41] at the Fort Atkinson Memorial Hospital in Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin[42] with her siblings (sisters Jean, Eunice, and Patricia and brother Ted) by her side.[41] She was buried beside her parents in Holyhood Cemetery in Brookline, Massachusetts.[43][44]

• Kennedy family
• Kennedy family tree

• Burns, James MacGregor. John Kennedy: A Political Profile. Harcourt Brace, 1960.
• Collier, Peter and Horowitz, David. The Kennedys. Summit Books, New York, 1984. ISBN 0-671-44793-9.
• 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. Villard Books, 1994. ISBN 0-679-42860-7.
• 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).

• Shriver, Timothy (2014). Fully Alive: Discovering What Matters Most. New York, NY: Sarah Crichton Books-Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
• Larson, Kate. Rosemary: The Hidden Kennedy Daughter.

• Rosemary Kennedy at IMDb
• "Rosemary Kennedy, JFK's sister, dies at 86 – Born Mentally Disabled, She Was Inspiration for Special Olympics" obituary by The Associated Press at MSNBC, January 8, 2005