Rosemary: The Hidden Kennedy Daughter (31 page)

A
S ROSEMARY AGED
, her angry flashes of temper diminished dramatically. As she learned to soothe herself and communicate her needs more effectively, Rosemary settled into a comfortable routine, fostering a sense of happiness and peacefulness that had often eluded her as a younger woman. Every transition continued to be difficult, but the sensitivity of the nuns and the awareness on the part of the Kennedys to this consideration, honed over decades, helped smooth anxious moments. At one point Rosemary needed surgery for an injured knee. Aware that a hospital setting could generate tremendous fear and apprehension, the family arranged for her to spend several days in the hospital beforehand, to become acclimated. With a Saint Coletta aide at her side at all times, the surgery and recovery proceeded with minimal trauma.
The Kennedy wealth and Rosemary’s personal trust fund could pay for such attentive care.

Sister Margaret Ann became Rosemary’s consistent companion at Saint Coletta for the last two decades of her life. Rosemary’s daily routine varied little—she liked it that way—with the exception of intermittent doctors’ appointments or trips into Jefferson to go shopping or to have dinner. At six thirty every morning, Sister Margaret Ann would turn on the lights in Rosemary’s bedroom. “Rosemary’s very cooperative. She helps you turn her out of bed. Usually I put her shoes on right away,” Sister Margaret Ann told historian Laurence Leamer, “and she will push her foot into the shoe . . . She’s been putting her foot out for shoes all these years.” After taking her to the bathroom to wash up, Sister Margaret Ann helped Rosemary get dressed. “Her arms go out and her feet go out, and she will button her buttons. I will take out a couple things and make sure they match, and I’ll let her choose. I know that when I buy something new she will choose the new thing.”

Daily activities included a simple volleyball game with a balloon or some other manual play to challenge Rosemary physically and mentally. A swim therapist would work with her in the pool, funded with $300,000 from Rosemary’s trust fund, and often Rosemary did not want to leave the water. She generally ate lunch in her own cottage, though sometimes she shared a meal with other residents and staff in the communal cafeteria. There were certain people with whom Rosemary preferred to spend time. They would hold hands, play games, and look at pictures together. Sister Margaret Ann noted that people were drawn to Rosemary even with her limited speech and mobility. She had “a magnetic personality. I go to the mother house and everybody
asks ‘Where’s Rosemary?’” Evenings were spent quietly in her cottage, sometimes watching television.

Rosemary loved music and dance, though sometimes it was a challenge to get her to participate, and gentle persuasion was employed. She attended daily Mass. “She knows her prayers by heart, like ‘Hail Mary’ and the meal prayer,” Sister Margaret Ann told Leamer. “I think mass means a lot to her. The word ‘Jesus’ means a lot to her.” The sister believed these were indelible memories etched into her mind from the years before her surgery.
Her presurgery life remained a mystery to her, however, Sister Margaret Ann believed. “There’s a picture on the wall of Rosemary in a long dress with her mother waiting to be presented to the king. I think she remembers, but it’s hard to tell because she can’t tell you. But if you have a program like the Academy Awards with long dresses, she loves it, and she sits there watching so happy.”
That picture, from the debutante ball in London in 1938, also included Kathleen in her beautiful gown.

Rosemary Kennedy died at the age of eighty-six on January 7, 2005, at Fort Atkinson Memorial Hospital in Wisconsin, near Saint Coletta. She had outlived her mother by ten years. News of Rosemary’s death noted that her sisters Eunice, Jean, and Pat and her brother Ted were at her side.

I
N A SPEECH
Rose gave around the time of her memoir’s publication, for the first time she credited Rosemary with making a contribution of value: “I cannot attempt to judge that which has been given to me nor that which has been taken away. I could not begin to measure the pride, the pain, the enduring love, but I do sense and I do believe that Rosemary’s gift to me is equal to the gifts of my other children. By her presence I feel that she, too, has
asked something terribly important of us. With her life itself she too has shown us direction, given us purpose and a way to serve. That has been her gift.”
By the time Rose died, in January 1995, at the age of 104, she may actually have come to believe those words.

Eunice did. In a speech she gave in 2007, Eunice revealed that

my life [has been] lucky in the adversity I encountered. I am lucky that I experienced the sting of rejection as a woman who was told that the real power was not for me. I am lucky that I saw my mother and my sister, Rosemary, treated with the most unbearable rejection. I am lucky that I have had to confront political and social injustice all over the world throughout my career.

You might say, “Why are you lucky to have had such difficult experiences?” The answer is quite simple: the combination of the love of my family and the awful sting of rejection helped me develop the confidence I needed to believe that I could make a difference in a positive direction. It’s really that simple: love gave me confidence and adversity gave me purpose.

You will not be surprised to know that I believe that those were also the experiences that shaped President Kennedy. Truthfully, I believe Rosemary’s rejection had far more to do with the brilliance of his Presidency than anyone understands. Yes, he was our country’s greatest champion of what we used to call “mental retardation.” To this day, his legacy of innovation in creating NICHD, The University Affiliated programs, and the President’s Council remain unmatched in American History. But beyond the specific work he did for people with intellectual disabilities, I
believe it was Rosemary’s influence that sensitized him . . . Remarkably, I think I can say that not one author among the thousands who have written about him has understood what it was really like to be a brother of a person with intellectual disability. And tonight, I want to say what I have never said before: more than any one single individual, Rosemary made the difference.

Through the loving, indomitable spirit of Rosemary, the Kennedy family found one of its greatest missions, and in doing so changed millions of lives.

I
VIVIDLY REMEMBER
reading Rosemary’s obituary in the
Boston Globe
in early January 2005. I knew who she was, but I was quite surprised that she had lived so long and in such obscurity. I was struck by the barely essential facts presented in the obituary and sensed that there was much more to her story. What had happened to Rosemary, and why didn’t we know more? Surely, in the twenty-first century, the fact of intellectual disability and mental illness in families was no longer something to hide. I would soon discover otherwise.

I would not have the opportunity to begin researching Rosemary’s life until 2008, after I had finished another book project. Fortunately, I live near Boston, with easy access to the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, where Rose and Joe Kennedy’s personal papers had been deposited. Only recently had Rose Kennedy’s diaries and scrapbooks been opened to the public, so I was among the first people to see many of these intimate records for the first time.

Within a year, however, my work would be suddenly derailed.
My then nineteen-year-old son was diagnosed with schizophrenia. Suddenly, our family was faced with how to provide a safe, therapeutic environment where we hoped he could be “cured.” Options were few and extraordinarily expensive. We sent him far away to highly recommended residential treatment programs, and we were convinced he would get better. We missed him terribly, and he missed us. Compounding our pain was the realization that the stigma of mental illness is still alive and well. Many people we knew—some family members, friends, associates—stumbled in conversations with us about his diagnosis. Some blamed us for his condition. We felt inadequate and, at times, hopeless.

Once my son stabilized—with the aid of good clinicians and thoughtful caregivers—I was able to return to Rosemary. It was with a new, more personal understanding that I now viewed Rosemary’s experience and her family’s reactions.

Scores of biographies have been published about the Kennedy family and its individual members during the past sixty years; many of these have been invaluable sources for my writing on the Kennedys and are found in the notes for this book. In these accounts, though, Rosemary is treated as a peripheral member of the family, an outlier whose contributions mattered little to the larger story of her famous parents and siblings. Early biographers relied on what the Kennedy family told them about Rosemary or on what they could uncover through press coverage; both of these sources were tightly controlled versions of the truth. During the 1980s, Doris Kearns Goodwin was given unprecedented access to Joseph P. Kennedy’s personal papers, held by the family foundation in New York City, for her biography
The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys.
Goodwin interviewed dozens of family members, business associates, and friends of the family, who supplied her with new information about the Kennedy lives. Goodwin delivered the
clearest understanding up until then of Rosemary’s disabilities. Most important, she was the first to reveal that Rosemary had undergone a lobotomy. But Rosemary was one of scores of characters in Goodwin’s book. I knew there was more to be found in the newly opened Rose Kennedy collection at the John F. Kennedy Library.

I
N THE YEARS
since Goodwin’s work, numerous biographers have retold the same snippets of stories about Rosemary, positioning her as a minor figure in the lives of the Kennedys and revealing little more than what Goodwin had already uncovered. I believed that if I could put Rosemary at the center of this dynamic family story, where she belongs, it would open a new chapter on the roles of the Kennedy women and the powerful impact one sibling had on her entire extended family.

During the 1990s, the Kennedy family foundation gifted the Joseph P. Kennedy Papers to the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston, at the same time placing severe restrictions on access to them by researchers. Over the past two decades, the deed of gift has allowed for the periodic release of previously closed material, offering fresh resources for biographers. Rose’s collection of papers complemented the larger and less accessible Joseph P. Kennedy Papers, and the two collections together revealed more deeply the personal thoughts and deeds of not only Rose and Joe but their children as well. While Rosemary’s personal paper trail had been quite thin—a few letters were scattered through both collections—the most recent and broadest unveiling of both collections offered a whole new chapter in the quest to understand Rosemary’s life. Unlike other Kennedy biographers, I have had access to all of Rosemary’s known letters, and some of them are seen here for the first time.

Letters from some of Rosemary’s teachers and caregivers illuminate for the first time the array of educational and therapeutic settings Rosemary experienced. I was intrigued by Mother Eugenie Isabel’s success with Rosemary at the Assumption School in England. That led me to research Dr. Maria Montessori and to meet with the Assumption Sisters in Worcester, Massachusetts. They shared recollections and their personal file on Mother Isabel, who had been taught personally by Montessori. Mother Isabel possessed remarkable gifts as a teacher and spiritual guide, and her influence is still felt today in Montessori classrooms across this country and abroad.

I viewed these newly available sources within the context of their times. I was able to paint a disturbing portrait of the societal attitudes toward the intellectually disabled—attitudes that informed Rose and Joe’s flawed decisions in their desperate search to find medical and psychiatric “cures” for Rosemary’s disabilities. They faced a fragmented and indifferent medical, social, and cultural environment—an environment hauntingly revealed in many letters from psychiatrists, educators, pediatricians, and other physicians that spanned decades of Kennedy frustration, desperation, and profound denial. However, dozens and dozens of letters that Rose and Joe wrote to and received from Rosemary’s governesses, doctors, guardians, and teachers, as well as business associates, lawyers, and Catholic priests and nuns, among others, reveal near-constant attention to Rosemary’s needs. This correspondence allowed me to piece together an accurate progression of the events that led to Rosemary’s tragedy.

In addition to the letters from so many of those employed by Rose and Joe to care for Rosemary, the Kennedy bills and receipts and other items related to Rosemary’s education, housing, health, and social life were revealing. Much of this material remains inac
cessible to the public and researchers; pink sheets marked “Withdrawal” are sprinkled throughout the collections.
In subject files labeled as correspondence related to Rosemary Kennedy, withdrawal sheets indicate the removal of hundreds of documents dating between 1923 and the 1970s. This leaves significant gaps in the historical record. A large amount of the withdrawn material is associated with Rosemary’s treatment and care after her lobotomy. Because of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), sponsored by Rosemary’s brother Senator Edward M. Kennedy and passed by Congress in 1996, the medical records related to Rosemary’s surgery, performed in the fall of 1941 by Drs. Freeman and Watts, are permanently inaccessible. That act, combined with the fact that Rosemary could not tell anyone what happened that November 1941 day at George Washington University Hospital, ensures that her medical information will remain inaccessible in perpetuity.

Nevertheless, contemporary medical journals, scientific research, and popular articles of the day informed my understanding of the thinking and methods of health-care professionals who were deeply misguided by their own prejudices. My research into the state of treatment for people with disabilities and mental illness in prewar America reveals a profoundly ignorant medical establishment and educational community. And my discovery that Freeman and Watts’s lobotomy research, including detailed case studies, appeared within months of Rosemary’s lobotomy brings us chillingly close to her tragic experience.