Rosemary: The Hidden Kennedy Daughter (28 page)

Elizabeth Boggs later credited Eunice’s
Saturday Evening Post
article with helping to pave the way for public acceptance of the many recommendations made in the report. The Kennedys followed the release of the panel’s report with a gala dinner, hosted by the Kennedy Foundation, in Washington, D.C., in December 1962. Seven hundred and fifty guests filled the ballroom of the Statler Hotel, including members of Congress, the Supreme Court, the cabinet, and leaders in the realm of science and medicine. The president presented the Kennedy Foundation’s first International Awards in Mental Retardation, recognizing outstanding achievements in the scientific and medical field of intellectual disabilities, advocacy, and outreach. Five doctors, chosen from a worldwide list of more than four hundred scientists and practicing physicians, and NARC were the inaugural recipients, and they received cash prizes and grants to support their individual
research projects and programs. The event also set the stage for the president to deliver his “Special Message on Mental Illness and Mental Retardation” to Congress on February 5, 1963.

In the fall of 1963, President Kennedy signed two important pieces of legislation. The Maternal and Child Health and Mental Retardation Planning Amendments of 1963 encouraged states to update and improve programs for the intellectually disabled, and authorized funding for pre- and postnatal care linking families to resources and services to help prevent disabilities.
Also, in October, Kennedy signed the Mental Retardation Facilities and Community Mental Health Centers Construction Act, which provided funding for research centers—several of which were connected to large university-hospital networks—as well as community inpatient centers.

The legislation marked a turning point in the government’s commitment to providing resources for the disabled. President Kennedy was assassinated, however, within weeks of signing the bills, and, with his loss, the power of the Kennedys on Capitol Hill diminished quickly and considerably.

The loss of access to the White House forced Eunice to refocus the energy she had spent marshaling the resources of enormously influential contacts in Washington and across the country. By 1968, her Camp Shriver had matured into a professional charitable organization dedicated to addressing the needs of intellectually and physically disabled youth through similar camps in a few cities across the nation. But Eunice yearned for more national acceptance of the program. In a joint venture with Chicago’s Park District and the Kennedy Foundation, the first Special Olympics, originally conceived by Anne Burke, a phys-ed instructor and a Chicago parks employee with experience working with the intel
lectually disabled, took place in the eighty-thousand-seat Soldier Field stadium in Chicago that July. The event featured Olympic-style summer games for one thousand disabled young people from across the country and Canada. Though fewer than one hundred spectators showed up to watch the first games, Eunice—still mourning the death of her brother Bobby, assassinated during a presidential-campaign event in Los Angeles in early June—welcomed the athletes and announced both the Kennedy Foundation’s commitment to funding Special Olympics training programs and a promise to host another international event every two years. The games, Eunice had quickly come to realize, showed not only how important athletics were in the lives of disabled children but also that the Special Olympics was the way to promote the foundation’s vision.
The Special Olympics today reaches more than four million disabled athletes in year-round programs in nearly two hundred nations around the globe.

D
URING THIS TUMULTUOUS
decade for her family and the nation, and reflecting her ongoing public commitment to the disabled, Eunice, more privately, after her father’s stroke, took over responsibility for Rosemary’s care. She monitored Saint Coletta’s educational, physical, and mental-health services. She conferred with Rosemary’s doctors, companions, and nurses, making sure Rosemary received the best and most advanced care. This was during the period when Joe’s stroke required round-the-clock nursing care at home, and Rose was preoccupied with managing his care. Rita Dallas, one of Joe’s nurses, recalled that Rose “was nervous and uncomfortable around illness of any kind and she had gone through severe shock in trying to cope with her husband’s condition.”
Though Eunice started visiting Rosemary when she
took over the management of Rosemary’s care at Saint Coletta once Joe became an invalid, it is not known when the rest of the family began visiting her.

With the partial truth about Rosemary having been revealed, especially by Eunice’s
Saturday Evening Post
article, in 1962, and with Joe still a burden but no longer a controlling force, Rose was liberated enough to travel across the country giving speeches about “mental retardation.” Her effectiveness at bringing attention to the issue of intellectual disabilities and her personal relationship to the cause made her a powerfully effective spokesperson. Yet even while dismantling the shroud of shame and secrecy surrounding intellectual disabilities, she kept a very important detail of Rosemary’s life—the lobotomy—a secret. A
National Enquirer
article in the late fall of 1967, titled “The Tragic Story of . . .
THE DAUGHTER JFK’S MOTHER HAD TO GIVE UP
,” revealed some of the family’s trials caring for Rosemary within the fabric of such a high-energy, competitive family. Quoting liberally from Eunice’s
Saturday Evening Post
article and from some of the speeches Rose had been making on behalf of the intellectually handicapped since 1963, the story recounted how Rosemary’s limitations slowly emerged, and how, after years of effort and searching for a medical cure, Rose and Joe realized that Rosemary was permanently disabled. When the family returned from England, the article reported, “Rosemary showed disturbing signs of going backward.” The family had no choice but to “accept the unanimous verdict.” Rosemary “would be better off in an institution, away from the pressures and complexities of the world.”

Rose received hundreds of letters from parents across the nation, thanking her for being a beacon of hope. Grieving, burdened parents expressed tremendous relief and feelings of fellow
ship with the mother of a president and a family of high achievers. They felt encouraged as they struggled at home to care and provide for their disabled children. Most did not have the financial resources the Kennedys had to provide for their loved ones. Rose knew this, and it moved her.

Rose’s faith was one thing she could honestly share with others. Her letters to other parents of disabled children, following a common format using a few variations to suit particular cases, held up her faith as a source of strength, while highlighting her own exceptional loss. Noticeable, too, was Rose’s belief—which she shared widely in these letters—that Rosemary’s life could mean little.

Thank you very much for your letter . . . None of us can understand the ways of Almighty God—the crosses which he sends us, the sacrifices which he demands of us. But he loves us and He has a particular plan in this life for each of us.

He has sent you a retarded [son or daughter], He took away my three stalwart sons—young men, well equipped and eager to devote their time and talents to His work on earth. And He left me my handicapped daughter, mentally and physically unable to help herself or anyone else.

Life is not easy for any of us, but it is a challenge and it is up to us to pray, to resolve to be strong and not be a burden to our family and our friends. If we keep busy mentally and physically, we do not have time to dwell on what might have been but we are filled with a desire to accomplish something worthwhile for the future.

My prayers and best wishes are with you.

After Bobby’s assassination, in June 1968, Joe’s health deteriorated rapidly. He died, from complications of his stroke, in November 1969.

According to Barbara Gibson, who joined the Kennedy household staff as a secretary in 1968, Rose first visited Rosemary at Saint Coletta at some point in the early 1960s, after Joe had suffered his stroke.
There is no indication from Rose’s personal papers that she made any trips to visit Rosemary before then, even though she campaigned for Jack in Milwaukee, a few miles from Saint Coletta, during his presidential run in 1960. Once Joe had become disabled, and Eunice’s article in the
Saturday Evening Post
had appeared and received a warm reception by readers, Rose may have felt the time had come to see her daughter.

Whenever it was, Rose’s visit upset Rosemary; Sister Margaret Ann recalled being told by the sisters who cared for her at that time that Rosemary recoiled from her mother. Though she was unable to speak many words, Rosemary’s anger toward Rose was apparent to everyone around her. The nun felt, “in the back of my mind,” that Rosemary remembered having the surgery and that “her mother didn’t show up.” Sister Margaret Ann learned from other caregivers that Rosemary “was taking it out on her mother” during Rose’s initial visits. “The way I understand it,” the sister revealed, “Mrs. Kennedy would come out [to Saint Coletta] and would go back [home] very upset. I wasn’t here when Mrs. Kennedy was here, but they said that Rosemary never accepted her.”

Perhaps such a reaction kept Rose from visiting frequently. Rose’s surviving correspondence reveals no contact with Saint Coletta until 1969. “Sometime I should like St. Coletta to have a swimming pool as a gift from Rosemary,” Rose wrote to Father Thomas J. Walsh at the school in February, nearly nine months before Joe died. “I know she has enough money to finance one,
but . . . if it is possible . . . I prefer to have a large swimming pool which all the children could use, not a small one like they have now, and which is used only during the summer.” Clearly, Rose had been to Saint Coletta and was aware of its facilities. “I know swimming is important to Rosemary and these children. At home she swam well and enjoyed it a good deal, and it is of course of untold advantage to her health.”
The swimming pool would be built and funded by the trust fund Joe had established for Rosemary nearly four decades earlier.

In March 1970, four months after Joe died, Rose was still in mourning, but she ordered games from a Hyannis toy store to be sent to Rosemary for Easter. She visited Saint Coletta early the following December, flying to Milwaukee to spend a couple of hours with Rosemary before returning to New York in a short, fifteen-hour round trip.
On December 17, Rose directed her secretary, Diane Winter, to write Sister Charitas—one of the nuns then caring for Rosemary—and ask her to buy “some little gifts for Rosemary for Christmas from her mother.” Rose, Winter wrote to the nun, “really did not know Rosemary’s sizes,” nor what Rosemary needed.
“I wish,” Rose wrote in a round-robin letter to the rest of her children on the same day, “you would send [Rosemary] a little gift for Christmas. Any little novelty would probably do, or a cute painting for her room.”

Rosemary’s longtime physician at Saint Coletta, Dr. Harry A. Waisman, died in March 1971. Waisman, a specialist in pediatric developmental disabilities, had been the director of a research center established at the University of Wisconsin during President Kennedy’s administration and funded by the Kennedy Foundation. “I am sure we are all very grateful to him for the advice and treatment he recommended for Rosemary, as her health during the past years has been excellent,” Rose wrote to Sister Sheila,
the administrator at Saint Coletta. This news, however, left a void in Rosemary’s care that Rose was unprepared to accommodate. So she abdicated the responsibility: “I am forwarding your letter to Mrs. Shriver, since I believe she talked over the idea of a physician with her Father when Rosemary first went to St. Coletta. I am sure she will be able to advise you.”
Eunice had only recently returned to the States after her husband, Sarge, had completed a two-year appointment as ambassador to France. She told Sister Sheila to choose a new doctor for Rosemary, “as you know the best doctors in the area.”
Dr. Raymond W. M. Chun, a pediatric neurologist and researcher at the University of Wisconsin and a colleague of Waisman’s, was recruited by Saint Coletta to take Rosemary as a patient.

The assignment of a new doctor to Rosemary brought changes to her care. New speech, occupational, and physical therapists began working with her. Sister Charitas wrote to report that their efforts seemed to be helping Rosemary, but, she pondered, “if [only] this could have been done twenty some years ago right after the operation . . . of course at that time not much was known of scientific therapy.”
The elimination of some medication also brought out a talkative Rosemary. “It seems the longer she is off medication the more vocal and expressive she becomes,” Sister Mary Charles wrote to Rose. “She at times amazes us with a complete and correct sentence.”

More changes were on the horizon. Sister Charitas, who had been caring for Rosemary almost exclusively since 1963, was nearing retirement. Finding her replacement would be easier than transitioning Rosemary to a new caregiver. “Because we feel that Rosemary needs a younger person, one with greater physical vigor and vitality to pursue the program recommended by the professional personnel on our staff, we have accepted Sr. Charitas’ retire
ment,” Sister Sheila wrote tactfully. “Sr. Paulus, who has also been with Rosemary for the past several years will assume the major responsibility for her . . . We are pleased with the progress that she made within the year and are hopeful that it will continue.”
Sister Charitas was not quite ready to retire, however. “My doctor . . . said that organically I am fine for my age,” Sister Charitas wrote to Rose. “He thinks if I just took care of Rosemary and nothing else this would be ideal.” She told Rose also that “Rosemary responds to me better than to [the other nuns]. So . . . I am happy to do all I can for her.”
It would be several more months before Sister Paulus and several other nuns would transition to caring for Rosemary full-time and Sister Charitas would move on to a retirement home.