As the Kennedy family’s public profile begins to rise, Rose oversees the upkeep of appearances among her photogenic family. “Mother is a perfectionist,” Ted Kennedy says. She monitors the children’s food intake and weighs them regularly. She also invests in cosmetic dentistry, encouraging the display of the toothy trademark Kennedy smile in all family portraits. A Choate School classmate noting, “When Jack flashed his smile, he could charm a bird off a tree,” rates Rose’s regimen a success.
Each summer, the Kennedys gather at Hyannis Port, where the siblings share time and activities. Sailing is a family favorite. In 1935, calculates biographer Laurence Leamer in The Kennedy Women, “the young Kennedys, led by Eunice, Kathleen, and Pat…plus Rosemary, Jack and Joe Jr., came away with fourteen first prizes, thirteen seconds and thirteen thirds in seventy-six starts” from the Hyannis Port Yacht Club.
The Kennedy children are largely educated at boarding schools—convents for the girls, secular schools for the boys. For a time, Rosemary is homeschooled, but when she is in her early teens, Joe and Rose decide that Rosemary, too, is ready to live and study away from home. She does well academically, but she writes to Joe, “I get lonesome everyday,” asking him, “Come to see me very soon.”
The physical act of writing is difficult for Rosemary, but she perseveres, penning in blocky print affectionate letters to her father. “I would do anything to make you so happy. I hate to Disapoint [sic] you in anyway.” But Rose and Joe’s feelings go deeper than disappointment in Rosemary. They are fearful of being shunned in elite social circles for having a “defective child.”
Yet Rosemary is easy to please. “She loved compliments,” Eunice recalls. “Every time I would say, ‘Rosemary, you have the best teeth and smile in the family,’ she would smile for hours. She liked to dress up, wear pretty clothes, have her hair fixed and her fingernails polished. When she was asked out by a friend of the family, she would be thrilled.”
Rosemary’s happiest years may be those the family spends in England during Joe’s service as ambassador. On May 11, 1938, she is presented to King George VI and Queen Elizabeth at Buckingham Palace, looking radiant in a white gown embellished with silver piping alongside her parents and sister Kathleen.
But the timing of the family’s return to America upon Joe’s abrupt resignation and the eruption of World War II unfortunately parallels an inner conflict in Rosemary, whose behavior noticeably regresses at age twenty-one.
Back in the States by 1940, Rose and Joe are concerned that a “neurological disturbance” is the cause of their daughter’s emotional state, depression punctuated by violent verbal and physical outbursts. Eunice tells of the family being “terribly serious about the problem,” yet at the same time her parents continue to wonder whether Rosemary might simply try harder to assimilate into mainstream society.
With Joe Jr. departing for naval training, “the summer of 1941 would be the last one our family would ever have together,” Rose Kennedy poignantly recalls.
That autumn, Rosemary’s two closest-in-age siblings, Jack and Kick, are both living in Washington, DC. Kick is assisting an editor for the Washington Times-Herald, and Jack is a new ensign in the Naval Reserve, assigned to stateside intelligence work.
Rosemary is enrolled at Saint Gertrude’s School of Arts and Crafts, a convent school in DC catering to girls with developmental delays. She is known to sneak out at night, often for hours.
“I was always worried,” Rose explains, “that she would run away from home someday or that she would go off with someone who would flatter her or kidnap her.” Though past the typical pubescent age range, some doctors attribute Rosemary’s behavior to delayed hormonal changes. The real, unspoken fear is that she may have a sexual encounter with a man and become unwittingly pregnant.
“My great ambition was to have my children morally, physically, and mentally as perfect as possible,” Rose states. But Rosemary’s uncontrolled behavior could publicly topple that lofty standard.
Joe Sr. learns of a treatment he thinks can cure Rosemary: a lobotomy.
* * *
On June 5, 1941, the American Medical Association holds its annual session in Cleveland, Ohio. A panel discussion by the Section on Nervous and Mental Diseases examines lobotomy, warning against the imprecise surgical procedure intended to treat disruptive behavior. Separating the frontal lobe from the rest of the brain, in effect destroying it, cannot “restore the person to a wholly normal state.”
Through her connections at the Washington Times-Herald, Kick investigates the procedure and alerts her parents to its dangers. “Oh, Mother, no, it’s nothing we want done for Rosie,” Kick reports.
Even so, in the fall of 1941, as Ronald Kessler recounts in The Sins of the Father, Joe authorizes twenty-three-year-old Rosemary’s admission to George Washington University Hospital, where Dr. Walter J. Freeman is a professor of neurology.
Freeman and his partner, neurosurgeon Dr. James Watts, are American pioneers of lobotomy.
Rosemary will be strapped to the operating table and anesthetized—just enough to numb the entry site at her temples, where her skull will be pierced by two holes, through which a blunt metal rod will be inserted.
As Dr. Watts performs the surgery, the supervising Dr. Freeman interacts with their patient to chart the changes in her condition. Rosemary performs simple recitations of prayers and songs. “We went through the top of the head. I think she was awake. She had a mild tranquilizer,” Watts recounts to Kessler. “We made an estimate on how far to cut based on how she responded,” he explains.
When she stops talking, the operation is complete.
“They knew right away that it wasn’t successful. You could see by looking at her that something was wrong, for her head was tilted and her capacity to speak was almost entirely gone,” Kennedy cousin Ann Gargan tells Doris Kearns Goodwin.
From that point on, Rosemary’s mental capacity is irreversibly reduced to that of a preschooler. She will live out most of her life watched over by the nuns at St. Coletta’s School for Exceptional Children in Wisconsin.
“I don’t know what it is that makes eight children shine like a dollar [coin] and another one dull,” Joe later tells John Siegenthaler, a journalist who joins the presidential campaign of 1960. “I guess it’s the hand of God.”
Rose would never forget the preventable tragedy that Joe brings on their eldest daughter. She dedicates her memoir, “To my daughter Rosemary and others like her—retarded in mind but blessed in spirit.”
There are two Roses, but only one continues to bloom.
PART THREE
The Favorites
Joseph Patrick Kennedy Jr. and
Kathleen “Kick” Agnes Kennedy
Chapter 7
On August 12, 1944, the roar of propellers cuts through the silence in the English countryside surrounding Royal Air Force (RAF) Fersfield air base in Norwich. The airfield is newly constructed to Class-A bomber specifications for the Eighth US Army Air Force, commanded by Lieutenant General James Doolittle. It’s a remote site intended to shield the operations of highly secret missions.