Rosemary Kennedy


Rose Marie "Rosemary" Kennedy was the oldest daughter born to Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. and Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy. She was a sister of President of the United States John F. Kennedy and Senators Robert F. Kennedy and Ted Kennedy.
Kennedy was presented to King George VI and Queen Elizabeth at Buckingham Palace in 1938. In her early young adult years, Kennedy experienced seizures and violent mood swings. In response to these issues, Kennedy's father arranged a prefrontal lobotomy for Kennedy in 1941 when she was 23 years of age. The procedure failed, leaving Kennedy permanently incapacitated and rendering her unable to speak intelligibly. Kennedy spent most of the rest of her life being cared for at St. Coletta, an institution in Jefferson, Wisconsin. The truth about her situation and whereabouts was kept secret for decades. While she was initially isolated from her relatives following her lobotomy, Kennedy visited with her family during her later life.

Family and early life

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 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. 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.
Accounts of Rosemary's life indicated that she was intellectually disabled, although some have raised questions about the Kennedys' accounts of the nature and scope of her disability. 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. 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.
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.
Rosemary read few books but could read Winnie-the-Pooh. 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. Kennedy accompanied her family to the coronation of Pope Pius XII in Rome in 1939. She also visited the White House. 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.

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. 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.

Lobotomy

According to Eunice Kennedy Shriver, when Rosemary returned to the United States from England in 1940, she regressed; Shriver later stated that Rosemary became "'increasingly irritable and difficult'" at age 22. Rosemary would often experience convulsions and fly into violent rages in which she would hit and injure others 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. Rosemary began sneaking out of the convent school at night. The nuns at the convent thought that Rosemary might be involved with men, and that she could contract a sexually transmitted disease or become pregnant. 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.
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. 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. Because Rosemary had been diagnosed as "mentally retarded", only her father's consent was necessary. The procedure took place in November 1941. James W. Watts, who carried out the procedure with Walter Freeman, described the procedure as follows:
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.

Aftermath

After the lobotomy, Rosemary was immediately institutionalized. She initially lived for several years at Craig House, a private psychiatric hospital an hour and 30 minutes north of New York City. In 1949, she was relocated to Jefferson, Wisconsin, where she lived for the rest of her life on the grounds of the St. Coletta School for Exceptional Children. Archbishop Richard Cushing had told her father about St. Coletta's, an institution for more than three hundred people with disabilities, and her father traveled to and built a private house for her about a mile outside St. Coletta's main campus near Alverno House, which was designed for adults who needed lifelong care. The nuns called the house "the Kennedy cottage". Two Catholic nuns, Sister Margaret Ann and Sister Leona, provided her care along with a student and a woman who worked on ceramics with Rosemary three nights a week. Rosemary had a car that could be used to take her for rides and a dog whom she could take on walks.
In response to her condition, Rosemary's parents separated her from her family. Rose Kennedy did not visit her for 20 years. Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. did not visit his daughter at the institution. In Rosemary: The Hidden Kennedy Daughter, author Kate Clifford Larson stated that Rosemary's lobotomy was hidden from the family for twenty years. While her older brother John was campaigning for re-election for the Senate in 1958, the Kennedy family explained away her absence by claiming she was reclusive. The Kennedy family did not publicly explain her absence until 1961, after John had been elected President. The Kennedys did not reveal that she was institutionalized because of a failed lobotomy, but instead said that she was deemed "mentally retarded". In 1961, after Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr. suffered a stroke that left him unable to speak, Rosemary's siblings were made aware of her location. Her lobotomy did not become public knowledge until 1987.

Later life

Following Rosemary's father's death in 1969, the Kennedys gradually involved Rosemary in family life again. Rosemary was occasionally taken to visit relatives 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. Her condition is sometimes credited as the inspiration for Eunice Kennedy Shriver to later found the Special Olympics, although Shriver told The New York Times in 1995 that this was not entirely the case.
Rosemary Kennedy died from natural causes on January 7, 2005, at the age of 86. Kennedy died at the Fort Atkinson Memorial Hospital in Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin with her surviving siblings by her side. She was buried beside her parents in Holyhood Cemetery in Brookline, Massachusetts.