Rosemary Kennedy

Family and early life

Rose Marie Kennedy was born at her parents' home in Brookline, Massachusetts, on September 13, 1918, the third child and first daughter of Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. and Rose Fitzgerald. During her birth, a nurse ordered Rose Kennedy to keep her legs closed due to a doctor's delay caused by the Spanish influenza epidemic, forcing the baby's head to stay in the birth canal for two hours and resulting in a harmful loss of oxygen. As she grew, her parents noticed she was not reaching basic developmental steps; at two years old she had difficulty sitting up, crawling, and learning to walk.

Accounts indicate she had an intellectual disability, though some have questioned the family's accounts of its nature and scope. Her mother did not confide in friends and pretended her daughter was developing typically, with relatives outside the immediate family unaware of the disability. Despite tutors, Rosemary had trouble learning to read and write. At age 11 she was sent to a Pennsylvania boarding school for people with intellectual disabilities.

At 16 she attended the Sacred Heart Convent in Elmhurst, Providence, Rhode Island, where she was educated separately by two nuns and a special teacher; her skills were reported at a fourth-grade level. Her mother arranged for her older brother John to accompany her to a tea dance, where she appeared "not different at all."

Lobotomy

Rosemary Kennedy’s sister Eunice recalled that after Rosemary came back from the United Kingdom in 1940, the 22-year-old grew increasingly difficult and irritable. She suffered convulsions and had violent outbursts where she struck and hurt others. After being kicked out of a summer camp in western Massachusetts and spending just a few months at a boarding school in Philadelphia, she was sent to a convent school in Washington, D.C. There, she began slipping out at night.

The nuns worried she might be meeting sexual partners and could catch a sexually transmitted disease or become pregnant. Her unpredictable behavior upset her parents, and her father feared it would bring shame on the family and hurt his and his children’s political futures. When Rosemary was 23, doctors told her father that a lobotomy could ease her mood swings and stop her violent episodes. Joe Sr. chose to have the surgery done, but he did not tell his wife about it until afterward.

The procedure happened in November 1941, carried out by James W. Watts and Walter Freeman. Watts later said that, in his view, Rosemary did not have mental retardation but rather a form of depression. A check of the doctors’ records showed that all their lobotomy patients had been diagnosed with some mental disorder. Bertram S. Brown, a former director of the National Institute of Mental Health who had worked for President Kennedy, told a biographer that Joe Kennedy called his daughter mentally retarded instead of mentally ill to protect John’s chances for the presidency, and that the family’s refusal to acknowledge mental illness was part of a long-standing denial.

The lobotomy caused severe damage. Rosemary’s mental capacity dropped to that of a two-year-old. She could not walk or speak clearly, and she lost control of her bladder and bowels.

Later life and death

After their father passed away in 1969, the Kennedy family slowly brought Rosemary back into their lives. She would sometimes visit relatives in Florida and Washington, D.C., and also traveled to the family’s old home on Cape Cod. By then, she could walk again, though she had a limp. She still could not speak clearly, and her arm remained paralyzed.

Some people believe her disability inspired her sister Eunice to start the Special Olympics in 1968, but Eunice said in a 1995 interview that Rosemary was just one of many disabled people she invited to swim, and that the games should not focus on a single person. Rosemary died of natural causes on January 7, 2005, at age 86, in Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin. Her siblings Jean, Eunice, Patricia, and Ted were with her. She was buried next to her parents in Brookline, Massachusetts.

Did You Know?

• In 1938, she was presented as a debutante to King George VI and Queen Elizabeth at Buckingham Palace, where she tripped and nearly fell.
• Her mother did not visit her for 20 years after the lobotomy, and her father never visited her at the institution.