In one of the most meaningful decisions of their lives, my grandparents resisted that advice and kept Rosemary at home throughout her childhood. There she stayed to be raised like the other children, sleeping in the same house, eating the same food, hosting the same guests, and playing the same games. “My parents always told us,” my mother recalled, “remember, Rosemary is your sister and you always look out for your sister. Never leave her out!” Jean and Teddy included her in tennis. Joe and Jack brought her to the dances. Eunice and Pat and Bobby sailed with her and played touch football. Each of them was responsible for making sure she wasn’t left behind.
And so they included her. Rosemary lived with the same sibling rivalries and games and laughter and expectations as the other children. Her presence forever imprinted them, just as she herself was forever imprinted by their lives and adventures. All eight Kennedy children grew up with a sister who was called “mentally retarded.” All eight were little children and then school-age children and then teenagers with a sister called “mentally retarded” who they needed to understand and explain to their friends and integrate and hide. All eight were confused and conflicted about their sister—they had to be. She was accepted but sometimes rejected; a part of the family but sometimes apart. She was different, and all the children had to learn what to make of difference. Had Rosemary left for an institution and lived her life away from her brothers and sisters, they would never have known the meaning of difference in quite the same way.
In the early years, Rosemary attended the same schools as her brothers and sisters, but her performance never improved. My grandparents began to seek out help in the form of experts and services, but these were scant. Finally, in 1929, when she was eleven years old and her older brother Joe was sent off to boarding school at Choate, it seemed more normal for Rosemary, too, to begin to attend a residential program. So she left home at the same time as her older brother for an experimental boarding school in Pennsylvania: the Devereux School, designed for the education of the “feebleminded.” The school’s founder, Helena Devereux, had briefly studied under the prominent eugenicist Henry Goddard, but fortunately she did not share his enthusiasms.
Rosemary stayed for two years at Devereux, where she took courses that had been newly adapted to meet the needs of slow children: not only reading, arithmetic, spelling, and social studies but also arts and crafts, music, and drama. She came home once or twice a year and struggled with this first separation from her family. “Dear Mother, I miss you very much,” she wrote in careful block letters on November 17, 1930. “Did you ask Miss Devereux if I could go home on Thanksgiving? You said you were going to do it. Please do.” And to her sister Eunice, my mother, in April: “I miss you very much. Didn’t we have fun together when I was home? I was so sorry I had to leave all of you … I feel very upset when I don’t hear from Mother. Tell her that. Write me a long long letter and make it as long as you can, darling.”
Despite Rosemary’s loneliness, Devereux seemed to be helping. “She has developed enough mental control to attend to a task or piece of work long enough to really accomplish worthwhile results,” a teacher wrote in June 1930. At age eleven, with patient and encouraging teachers, she was successfully doing schoolwork at more or less a fourth-grade level. She struggled with math and reading, especially vocabulary, but she did “exceptionally well in dramatics,” noted the teacher, where she “takes the initiative.” Rosemary was a fierce child, eager to do well, to please her family and teachers and make them proud. She was also persistently insecure about her ability to do so, which sometimes hindered her learning. The teacher’s remarks on that subject are telling:
Due to the fact that her reactions are as a rule quick, she jumps to conclusions and is therefore often inaccurate, but on the other hand, she has a real desire for her work and results to come up to a high standard. Since her work often falls short of her standards for accomplishment, we feel that this may partially account for her lack of confidence in her own abilities.
Rosemary completed two years of schooling at Devereux but went no further. She returned home to live with her family but was not enrolled in any school. There, at the cusp of her teenage years, she passed her time helping with housework and caring for her younger brothers and sisters. The family strove to give her as much of a sense of normalcy as possible. In fact, they tried to hide Rosemary’s condition not only from the public but from their own close friends, and even from Rosemary herself. The public stigma of having a “feebleminded” child in the age of eugenics was certainly a consideration. There would have been people in their social circles who might have whispered about “bad blood” in the family had the fact become known. But they also believed that Rosemary would be happier if kept unaware of how different she was from her siblings. “Joe and I, knowing we wanted her to be brought up and treated in the most normal way possible … did not indicate either within the family (except as necessary, and then casually and indirectly) or outside that there was anything extraordinary about her,” my grandmother wrote.
In principle, the idea of not treating her differently even within the family was a generous impulse: a “conspiracy of kindness,” my grandmother called it. (She even went so far as to begin printing all her correspondence so Rosemary wouldn’t know that her inability to master cursive writing wasn’t “normal.”) In practice, however, the strict code of silence led Rosemary to become confused and frustrated when she could not keep up. “She resented having someone always go with her to the station when she took the train to her school. Because, she said, other girls went to the station alone. Sometimes she would run away from the person accompanying her.” Rosemary had been told she was just like the others, so she didn’t understand why she was not allowed to do everything they were allowed to do—why she was constantly moved from school to school. Yet the family remained convinced that the disaster of disasters would be for her to understand that she had a disability, so they averted that at all costs. For countless reasons, they wanted to keep the secret.
After being homeschooled for two years following Devereux, Rosemary briefly attended a convent school in Providence, after which she was placed with a private tutor in Brookline, near Boston. She fared poorly there and began to become bad-tempered and to put on weight. Her tutor suggested consulting an endocrinologist about a new hormone-injection therapy. The family doctor concurred with this course of treatment: “I am hopeful that a systematic treatment with endocrines will do considerable good—in fact, I will make it even stronger and say that I am very, very hopeful that within a few years, as a result of these endocrine treatments, Rosemary will be 100% all right.” There it was again: the hope that Rosemary might be fixed, that she might be “all right,” if only the correct therapy could be found. It’s the hope countless parents hold somewhere deep within: Something or someone will make my child all right. Somehow, she will be fixed.
The endocrine treatments did nothing to help Rosemary’s learning difficulties, though they may have improved her mood for a time. The family moved Rosemary to yet another special school, this time in New York—where she could once again learn in a group setting and where the endocrine treatments could be administered more conveniently. It was the fall of 1936. Rosemary was eighteen and still achieving at the level of a fourth-grader. In effect, she had been repeating the fourth grade over and over for seven years, and she was responding with increasing frustration. My grandmother was still trying to protect Rosemary from full knowledge of the situation, even instructing her teachers to remove worksheets from the textbooks and then cut the tops off, “that she may not know what grade work it is.” But after seven years this could not have fooled her entirely.
Her tutor in New York, Amanda Rohde, was a strict teacher who wasn’t prepared to handle the fits of temper Rosemary displayed when frustrated. “After I have been able to change Rosemary’s attitude toward her work, and consequently toward me, I feel that much can be done to improve her education,” Rohde wrote to my gra
ndmother. “Little by little she must be brought to face reality. It will be a long seige [sic], but it can be done for I think I shall have your cooperation.” Rohde soldiered on for a year and a half attempting to make Rosemary “face reality,” but then Mollie Hourigan, the director of the boarding school where Rosemary attended classes, notified the family that the girl simply could not continue there. Rosemary required constant supervision, and Miss Hourigan had found the responsibility too great.
Despite her continuing scholastic struggles, outside of school Rosemary remained an integral part of the family. Family letters and photo albums show her sailing to Europe with my mother in the summer of 1936. Together they saw the sights, attended parties, and shopped in exclusive boutiques. Rosemary enjoyed herself immensely and wrote cheerful letters to her family back in the States. On June 11, on a postcard bearing pictures of the stately Hotel Richemond in Geneva: “Dear Mother and Dad, We had a lovely time on the train to Switzerland. The Train left at 815, and we had breakfast and lunch on the train. We go sight seening [sic] to-morrow.” On July 6, on a postcard from Paris: “Dear Bobby, The Lafayette was glorious.” On July 19, from the Hotel Excelsior München: “Dear Pat, Jean, and Bobby also Ted. We are now in Germany having a good time. Yesterday we went to the largest Museum and saw ships of Natural History…” Her disability was not obvious to strangers, especially when there was a language barrier, so like her sisters she received her share of attention from young men. “The boys over here are not bad,” she wrote to Kathleen on July 15. “We saw some Swiss boys. A boy from the Lafayette was going to take me out at the Contineal [sic]. He was 24 years old.” Back at home, too, she was included in most if not all of the family’s activities. Away from the stress of school, she could be charming, sweet, and playful, especially at Cape Cod, though she still had outbursts of temper.
I remember my mother talking years later of sailing with Rosemary and racing sailboats with her, too. “Pull in the jib, Rosemary!” my mother would command. Often there was no response until my mother would repeat the order louder, more emphatically: “For God’s sake, Rosie, pull in the jib!” Then Rosemary would comply. The sisters raced together, and my mother spoke of the races and the games of Cape Cod often. It was at Cape Cod, in these activities, that the anxiety of Rosemary’s differences would sometimes yield to an elusive intimacy, a place where caring for her yielded to being happy with her. Although these races were serious business in a family that prized winning, and although Rosemary was not as strong a sailor as her other brothers and sisters, she was a part of the team. The message from my grandparents was clear: Rosemary is your sister. Include her. And by including her, let the heartbreak yield to heart. My mother and her siblings were learning to care from the heart.
But all the same, the vise grip of anxiety and fear was tightening all around them. At times my grandparents had followed the advice of the experts who said that Rosemary’s life was a distraction, that she would never keep up, that she needed to be removed from her family. While some miracle cure might come along to make her “all right,” she was, in the meantime, “retarded.” They sought someplace where they could send her, but at the same time, they resisted. They kept her at home when she was between schools, seeking ever-better places for her to learn, insisting that her brothers and sisters include her, doing whatever they could to help her fit. My grandmother’s word rings out across the decades: “heartbroken.” Like so many other mothers, she fought back the despair with her faith and her perseverance—with the resolve to help her daughter, to be relentless in defending her against the threats around her, to do whatever was humanly possible to help her be successful and happy. But with Rosemary now entering young adulthood, there was no clear place for her to go outside the home, and her future seemed all the more confused. In her darker moods she was difficult, stubborn, and comfortable only in the easiest tasks. The emotional roller coaster her parents and siblings had been experiencing would only intensify.
In 1938, my grandfather was named ambassador to Great Britain, so his large and boisterous Irish family—Rosemary included—set sail for London. There, to everyone’s surprise and great relief, Rosemary thrived. She was allowed to make her debut in London society, was presented before the king and queen at Buckingham Palace, and attended the most fashionable parties. It was a dazzling life; she felt dazzling and adored rather than slow and lonely, and she loved every minute of it. She began attending a school for Montessori teachers at the Convent of the Assumption in Kensington Square, where she flourished under the guidance of Mother Isabel. Taking care of very young children was a task in which Rosemary felt confident and capable. She read simple books to the children in her care, prepared their lunch, and helped monitor their recess, in addition to “many other occupations of a domestic kind which she is able to do alone.” Mother Isabel wrote that Rosemary was “very well & obviously happy,” and her father reported the same in his letters of the time, with a buoyant warmth and hopefulness that does not occur anywhere else in the family’s correspondence about Rosemary. “It really makes me very happy to see the great improvement she has shown,” he wrote to Rosemary’s attendant, Miss Gibbs, in April 1940. “I can never thank you and Mother Isabel enough for all you have done.”
Rosemary might have remained in England indefinitely had history not intervened. When World War II broke out, London was no longer a refuge. Joseph Kennedy had already sent most of his family back to the United States, but Rosemary was doing so well at the Montessori school, and she had suffered so many upheavals already in her life, that she was the only one of her siblings allowed to stay. With war encroaching, her school was evacuated to the countryside, where she continued her Montessori studies while enjoying her new place at the center of her father’s attention—a place she had never occupied when her brothers and sisters were around.
As the intensity of the war increased, though, her father at last decided it was no longer safe for her to remain in Europe. Reluctantly, he sent her back to the United States with family friends in May 1940. The flight itself was harrowing, with inclement weather forcing an emergency landing in Bermuda. When Rosemary finally made it home, she found it was no longer the haven she remembered. Even her younger sister Kathleen had found her old home surprisingly shabby in comparison with the sparkling life of London and had difficulty adjusting. Rosemary, who had made her debut in London society right alongside Kathleen, was coming back to a considerably more limited and frustrating existence. Her siblings were growing up and beginning their lives out in the world, but nobody seemed to know where she belonged. The family, occupied with wartime concerns, had no time to search for elaborate solutions. She got a job as a summer camp counselor, but she was unable to cope with the work. Everyone hoped that the war would end and she would soon be able to return to London. Rosemary herself wrote to my grandfather on June 4: “I am sorry I did not talk to you on Sunday. But I felt a bit lonesome for you. But thanks for all the good-times in England. But I will be glad to get back to you when the war is over.” And he wrote to a nun at Rosemary’s school in England: “I appreciate more than I can say all that you and Mother Isabel have done. You won Rosemary’s heart and she is tremendously fond of you both. I, too, pray for peace and hope that, with the end of the war, Rosemary may soon return to be with you.”
In the meantime, my grandfather found a school for her in Washington, DC: St. Gertrude’s School of Arts and Crafts. The nuns at St. Gertrude’s did their best, but the school was a terrible fit for Rosemary, and compared with her situation in England it must have felt like a prison. The school normally took students only up to high school age, but she was already a woman in her twenties. She had no reasonable occupation there, no social life, and no companions her own age. The possibility of returning to Mother Isabel’s became increasingly remote as the war dragged on. The glittering parties at Buckingham Palace had faded to a distant dream, and Rosemary did not fully understand why. Fierce and impatient when frustrated, she began to act
out again. She repeatedly ran away from the school in the middle of the night. She was often angry and sometimes violent. “She was upset easily and unpredictably,” wrote my grandmother in her memoir. “Some of these upsets became tantrums, or rages, during which she broke things or hit out at people. Since she was quite strong, her blows were hard. Also, there were convulsive episodes.” The nuns at St. Gertrude’s were frantic.
At the time, yet another new possibility for “fixing” Rosemary was gaining adherents: the lobotomy. Developed by the Portuguese psychiatrist António Egas Moniz in the 1930s, the procedure was popularized in the United States by the psychiatrist Walter Freeman and his colleague the neurosurgeon James Watts. Freeman and Watts advertised the lobotomy as a miracle cure for crippling mood disorders, especially severe anxiety and depression. Even during its heyday as a treatment for these conditions, though, it was never indicated for people with intellectual disabilities. My grandfather must have emphasized Rosemary’s rages, tantrums, and rebellious wanderings when he consulted with Dr. Freeman. To the end of her life, my grandmother would maintain that this assessment was correct: “Manifestly there were other factors at work besides mental retardation. A neurological disturbance or disease of some sort seemingly had overtaken her, and it was becoming progressively worse.” My grandfather, fatefully, chose to listen to the advice of experts. He went ahead and scheduled a lobotomy for Rosemary—without telling my grandmother or any of his other children.
The procedure itself was chilling. The surgeons drilled holes in either side of a patient’s skull, through which they inserted an instrument shaped like a butter knife. They then swung the knife up and down, severing the frontal lobe’s connection to the rest of the brain. A substantial part of deciding where to cut was guesswork. Patients were kept mostly conscious during the operation, so the surgeons could gauge how deeply to cut based on the patient’s ability to answer questions. When a patient’s responses became disoriented and incoherent, they normally stopped cutting. Despite the enthusiastic attention the procedure had received in the press, their results had been variable at best. Some patients’ brains successfully rewired themselves and they regained their coherence during the recovery period; others had lasting deficits. Most of them suffered profound and permanent personality changes. A later, more “advanced” form of the surgery would involve accessing the brain tissue by inserting an ice pick through the eye socket. Patients were also conscious during that version of the procedure. Dr. Freeman’s son remembers that the instruments his father often used for the operation were stored in the family icebox. Some forty thousand people would undergo a lobotomy in the United States between 1936 and 1960, when the practice all but ended. António Egas Moniz was awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1949 for pioneering the procedure.
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