Rosemary: The Hidden Kennedy Daughter (16 page)

The rest of the family may have been happier with this arrangement for Rosemary, too. Eunice later revealed that her parents were not the only ones concerned about Rosemary. “No one could watch out for Rose[mary] all the time, and now she was a grown-up girl,” Eunice later remembered. She and her brothers and sisters all had worried that Rosemary might “accidently do something dangerous while mother was occupied with some unavoidable official function. Would she get confused taking a bus and get lost among London’s intricate streets? Would someone attack her? Could she protect herself if she were out of the eye of the governess?”
Even seven-year-old Teddy had observed Rosemary’s intellectual shortcomings and called her an “empty head.”
But he “looked out for her, too,” he later wrote in his memoir, “when I could, though I was fourteen years younger.”

Joe wrote that Mary Moore “had never seen such a change in her life” after Rosemary had spent just a few weeks at Belmont House. Joe, revealing a profound sense of relief, told Rose that it was “apparent now that this is the ideal life for Rose[mary].”
Perhaps finally they had been successful in finding a good placement for her.
Dorothy Gibbs felt hopeful as well. “Please God,” she prayed, “that some day he will grant [the Kennedys] the joy of a perfect healing for her.”
What had started out as a wartime accommodation—a move safely away from the cacophony of air-raid sirens and drills in London—had become a blessing for Rosemary. The particularly beautiful, pastoral landscapes of Belmont House’s extensive estate holdings, the Assumption Sisters’ and Dorothy Gibbs’s devotion to her, and the Montessori educational methods all worked in tandem to make Rosemary’s day-to-day life brighter and happier.

A passionate and innovative educator, Mother Isabel seemed to hold “a magical key to learning.” She believed that the Montessori method built “confidence not undermined by the wrong set of competition which often promotes envy and feelings of inferiority.”
The day-to-day operations of the school in Hertfordshire—now a full-time boarding school made necessary by the evacuation from London—required more of Mother Isabel’s attention. Noted for her selfless devotion by those who trained with her, Mother Isabel possessed a warm yet assertive demeanor that smoothed the potentially disruptive transition for all the school’s children, not just Rosemary.
“She [Rosemary] is contented completely to be teaching with Mother Isabel. She is happy, looks better than she ever did in her life, is not the slightest bit lonesome, and loves to get letters from [her siblings] telling her how lucky she is to be over here, (tell them to keep writing that way),” Joe wrote enthusiastically to Rose that October.
“She loves being the boss here and is no bother or strain at all . . . I’m not sure she isn’t better staying over here indefinitely with all of us making our regular trips, as we will be doing, and seeing her then. I have given her
a lot of time and thought and I’m convinced that’s the answer.” And then, a rather stark statement: “She must never be at home for her sake as well as everyone else’s.”

There was another accommodation Joe found necessary. Censors read every letter sent back and forth between the United States and Great Britain. Joe worried that Rosemary’s childlike penmanship and the content of her letters might be leaked, causing embarrassment for the family. To avoid gossip, he began forwarding her letters to the family via his legally protected diplomatic pouch of official government correspondence. “I don’t see any point in having any of her letters go to America and be talked about,” he wrote. “Over here it doesn’t make any difference.”

The first test of whether it was better to keep Rosemary separated from the rest of her family would come at Christmas. Joe had received permission to travel back to the States for the holiday to meet with the president and other State Department officials. Writing to Rose before he set sail for America, Joe explained why Rosemary should stay in England:

Now as to Rosie for Christmas. I think she should stay here, by all means. First she would not be able to come back once she got over there. No passports being granted. Second she is so much happier here than she could possibly be in the United States that it would be doing her a disservice rather than helping her. She had another nice girl with her yesterday for the weekend. The girls are very nice and fit in with her limitations without anyone being the wiser. In the meantime she is “cock of the walk” by being by herself so that builds up her self-confidence. She is no bother when she is away from the other children. She gets along very well with Mary Moore and they have lots of fun
together . . . So I think everything is getting along OK . . . Pray that everything stays quiet for me to get home.

“The calm [and] sameness of her life is just what she needs,” Mother Isabel assured Rose in a letter just before Christmas. “I am so glad Mr. Kennedy gave you good news of our dear Rosemary, [and] that he is pleased, with her. We, too, are very satisfied with the result of this term. Rosemary is very well, [and] obviously happy, [and] she has made much progress in many ways.” Rose had sent Mother Isabel a “little book on writing” and suggested that the sisters get Rosemary to use it by convincing her “to use it in view of teaching others.” Writing remained a constant problem for Rosemary, and though she “welcomed” the book “with joy,” Mother Isabel had a more practical request. She had asked Eddie Moore to get Rosemary “a black double-lined page to put
under
her note-paper. The lines can be seen through it [and] this should make her writing straight, [and] more even in size . . . I told her I always had to have one to keep
my
lines straight!”

Rosemary was now completing tasks she had been unable to do before: “She has some supervision of the children in the garden, she has also a stated time for reading to them; she prepares [and] gives them their lunch in the middle of the morning; [and] has many other occupations of a domestic kind which she is able to do
alone
—not the least of which is putting away the dining room things (china [and] silver) in the cupboard.”

Mother Isabel was well aware of Rosemary’s anxiety over her parents’ praise. “She thinks of you very specially [and] loves you
heaps,
[and] loves to hear from you, [and] to get your approval [and] her father’s too,” she reminded Rose.

Rosemary still struggled with her anger and frustration. “Rosemary is making great efforts on her character, too,” Mother
Isabel reported. “She asked me one day to tell her what faults she had, as faults spoil people. This struck me, showing me how much she thinks things out. We have had more talks, [and] she has been trying hard to ‘think of what pleases others
before
what pleases herself,’
and
‘to be
nice
to people even when
she
thinks they are not nice to her.’ She comes to me whenever anything upsets her, [and] we ‘have it out’—along these lines.”
The Kennedys had been blessed with the near “perfect healing” Dorothy Gibbs had been praying for.

Joe would not return to England for more than three months after the holidays. Confident that Rosemary was well cared for, he scheduled a few days with his latest lover, writer and journalist Clare Boothe Luce, in Italy before returning to his post in London in early March.
The British had, by now, soured dramatically on the ambassador. They felt betrayed by the United States for its not entering the war or providing more substantial material support, and Joe was increasingly marginalized because of his pacifist views and accommodating attitude toward Hitler. Roosevelt was tiring of Kennedy as well, and when he sent Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles to Europe to discuss possible peace settlements, Kennedy understood it as a stinging sign of his disfavor.

When Joe returned to London, he started working with Mother Isabel to keep Rosemary at Belmont House for the foreseeable future. “Rose[mary] met me when I came home and I had dinner with her. She has got a little fatter but her disposition is still great and Mother Isabel tells me she shows improvement all the time,” Joe wrote Rose at home in Bronxville on the fourteenth of March. “I’m riding out to see them both tomorrow. I’m thinking about her future plans. Of course a lot depends on what is going to happen in England in the war.”
Two days later, German bombers attacked Scapa Flow in Scotland, forcing the tem
porary relocation of the British naval fleet. Within three weeks, Germany was invading Norway and Denmark on a seemingly unstoppable course across western Europe. Joe’s plans for Rosemary were now being threatened.

Joe’s visit to Belmont House went well: “I had a talk with Mother Isabel about [Rosemary] staying here and Mother Isabel says she is already working on it and she is selling Rose[mary] the idea to stay.” He had taken Rosemary to lunch when she went to London for a doctor’s appointment, and he claimed that he did not “have any trouble with her when she is alone. She’s not 100% of course, but no real difficulty.” He sent Rosemary back to school, along with sugar, a rationed wartime luxury, and other supplies.
He spent Easter not with her, as she had hoped, but rather with Clare Luce at his new residence, Saint Leonard’s in Windsor, while the rest of his family gathered at Palm Beach.

Rosemary seemed to like the idea of staying in England. Her appeals reassured Joe. “Darling Daddy,” she wrote in March 1940, “Mother [Isabel] says I am such a comfort to you, never to leave you. Daddy, I feel honour because you chose me to stay. And the others I suppose are wild . . . P.S. I am so fond of you. And love you very much.”
The following month, Joe wrote Rose to reassure her that Rosemary was still thriving: “Her disposition is great and there is no question she is getting along very well. She has gotten fat again and I am trying to get her to go on a diet. I am not hopeful, but at least I can try.”
Rosemary’s father and mother’s fixation on their children’s weight remained a constant theme in correspondence. Rosemary knew her father disapproved of the few pounds she had put on over the winter months, after having done so well the year before with her Elizabeth Arden diet. “I am so fond of you,” Rosemary wrote again to her father after a weekend visit in the spring, concluding in her awkward, misspelled
wording, “Sorry. to think that I am fat you. think.”
Joe wrote to Dorothy Gibbs in a rather harsh tone, urging her to help Rosemary lose more weight: “I was more than pleased to see Rosemary Sunday. She was looking very well and seemed to be in excellent humor. I do feel that she is getting altogether too fat and I told her in no uncertain words. So I wish, if you could, you would try to build up the idea that she should lose weight. I told her that her mother would be very disappointed and also that I could not have her picture taken for America if she remains as stout as she is.”
Gibbs responded immediately, assuring Joe that Rosemary had indeed understood perfectly what he meant. “You must have made a big impression on Sunday,” Gibbs told him. “She remarked, yes my figure does look fat doesn’t it? . . . What do you suggest I can do about it?”
Later that month, Rosemary wrote hurriedly to her father, “Everybody thinks I am thinner.”

Kennedy was increasingly frustrated with his work and his standing in Britain and wanted to head home. His political future seemed more uncertain as war was looming closer to British shores. Throughout the winter, German armed forces had advanced across Europe, preparing for invasion of western European nations in the spring. During May, the German military marched through the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg, and into France. Joe and Rose knew they would be uprooting Rosemary from the supportive and comfortable environment of Belmont House, but it was too risky, they believed, to leave her there without the assurance that her father could be nearby. The decision as to when, exactly, to send her home was left open, but she was told it would be in the coming months. Rosemary did not want to leave and pleaded with her father to let her stay another year at the Montessori school. By the end of May 1940, the Germans were rapidly advancing on Paris, so Joe wrote quickly to Rose, in
forming her that the situation had gotten so bad that he had decided to “get Rose and the Moores out to either Ireland or Lisbon. We will be in for a terrific bombing pretty soon and I’ll do better if I just have myself to look after.”

Rosemary received her end-of-year diploma from the sisters and then, much to her disappointment, flew to America at the beginning of June with the Moores. The separation from her friends and the nuns at Belmont House was extremely difficult for her. “Everybody here is so sorry that I have to leave,” Rosemary wrote to her father in April. “All of the nuns are especially nice to me . . . I always get such a great welcome here . . . I am dreadfully sorry about leaving. I will cry a lot.”

The Germans marched into Paris on June 14; any lingering doubts about bringing Rosemary home were erased with German bombers’ arrival in the skies above England. By September, Roehampton, the convent school that Eunice, Pat, and Jean had attended near London, had been bombed twice, and the embassy had become a prime target for the German Luftwaffe. Rosemary’s haven in Britain was over.

6

T
HE PLAN TO
have Rosemary sail on the American liner USS
President Roosevelt
in late May was changed at the last minute. German U-boat attacks had made sailing, even on a passenger ship, too risky.
On May 28, 1940, the day Belgium surrendered, as many French residents living near the Belgian border were trying to flee to England, Eddie and Mary Moore escorted Rosemary aboard a flight from London to Lisbon, where they waited, no doubt impatiently, for a scheduled Pan Am flight to New York. Though Joe Kennedy needed Moore at his side during this tumultuous time in Europe, getting Rosemary safely home was her father’s priority.

The Moores’ anxiety over the last-minute departure as western European nations were succumbing to Germany’s advancing army was exacerbated by bad weather and heavy fog. Their flight out of Portugal to the United States was unexpectedly detoured to Bermuda because of the poor weather conditions, but the three landed safely in New York on Saturday, June 1, a day later than scheduled.
When Rosemary wrote her father a few days later, she
did not mention anything about their adventurous flight home, except that Eddie Moore told her that he wasn’t “forgetting our trip back.”
By the middle of June, Paris would see German tanks and soldiers march down the Champs-Élysées, beginning a four-year occupation. Within weeks, the Luftwaffe bombing of Great Britain had started.