Fully Alive

by Timothy Shriver

  My aunt Rosemary Kennedy underwent this operation in 1941 at George Washington University Hospital in Washington, DC. Following the standard procedure, her surgeons—possibly Freeman and Watts themselves—inserted their instruments into her brain while she remained conscious. The outcome, in Rosemary’s case, was devastating. If Rosemary’s disabilities had indeed been the result of hypoxic brain injury during birth, then lobotomy, which fundamentally consisted of more brain damage, could only compound the problem. So it happened. After a few weeks, it became apparent that she had been robbed of her speech and of significant cognitive capacity. She became severely limited in her ability to process and recall information. Her mobility was damaged. She lost her independence for the rest of her life.

  Without warning or explanation, she disappeared from the lives of her brothers and sisters. She would never live at home again. My grandfather found a safe and comfortable Catholic institution in Wisconsin, St. Coletta’s, where he placed his eldest daughter in long-term care. Stoic but shattered by the results of his decision, he would never visit her there or—as far as I can tell—ever see her again for the rest of his life. For years, her siblings did not even know what had happened to her. Members of her family were in the midst of such a flurry of activity at that time that they apparently never questioned one sister’s absence until much later. The code of secrecy kicked in and Rosemary disappeared without a word from anyone. My grandmother found it almost unbearably painful to write about the ordeal even decades later: “Rosemary’s was the first of the tragedies that were to befall us. In writing as I have, I have felt grief and pain hardly lessened despite the years.”

  I knew Rosemary only after her operation. She spoke only a few words—“baby,” “Eunice,” “something to eat,” “Teddy.” She smiled occasionally, walked tentatively, and could catch a soft foam ball. Her long-serving companion at the convent in Wisconsin, Sister Margaret Ann, loved being with her and told me that Rosemary’s affection had changed her life. “I suppose I never felt worthy of anyone’s love before,” she said when we were together shortly after Rosemary died, “but Rosemary changed that. Some people tell me that she doesn’t understand things, but I think she understands me. I loved her very much.” Sister Margaret Ann’s letters to my mother during Rosemary’s life support the depth of their relationship. “Rosemary,” she wrote, could be at times “very talkative” in her own way—“I love seeing her that way,” Sister Margaret Ann wrote in 1988. One summer, they took a trip to a Norbertine abbey near Green Bay; “at one point even Rosemary said ‘Ohooo, beautiful’” of the scenery. In 1997, she wrote: “Rosie is finding walking more difficult but she always still has that pleasing, lovely smile yet. Loves seeing people stop by to say ‘hi.’ Rosemary is a people person.” When the small cottage where Rosemary had lived most of her life was being remodeled in 1999, Sister Ann wrote that she was perturbed and kept remarking: “What’s going on here anyhow?” She expressed opinions on her meals—“No diet food!”—and whether she might like to travel. But whether she had any inkling of how much her life had changed from what it might have been had a series of fateful decisions not been made in the 1940s, we will never know. She lived to the age of eighty-six and died peacefully at St. Coletta’s in Wisconsin, where she had been cared for and loved for six decades.

  The ultimate effect of Rosemary’s life on those of her parents and siblings remains a mystery. As I reflect on the painful history of how society treated people with intellectual disabilities and their families, it seems that Rosemary’s life was not unlike many others. She was born to a family who tried to raise her well. Her parents struggled to help her, to cure her, and to protect her in a society that had no place for people like her. Her siblings did the same. They had many moments of joy, happiness, and love. But despite their intentions and in part because of them, she suffered terribly.

  Years after her childhood, when I was in my forties, I began to wonder more and more about the impact Rosemary had on her parents and siblings. By that time, hundreds of books had been written about my family, but almost no one had written about Rosemary or her role in their lives. Rarely was she treated as anything more than a sad footnote in an otherwise dynamic and controversial family epic. I wondered whether she’d played a more powerful role. Unlike almost any other group of historical figures in America, my mother’s family had become distinguished by precisely that label: “family.” Even after President Kennedy’s singular success in politics and global leadership, he was often referred to as a “member” of the Kennedy “family.” Rosemary was a member, too, but one who seemed to have played little or no part in the great achievements of the family. I wondered: Was that the whole story?

  For my entire life, people have been coming up to me and my siblings and cousins to tell us what a unique brand of leadership the “Kennedy family” has brought to the world. I always couldn’t help but wonder what distinguished my parents’ generation from countless other charismatic leaders and passionate catalysts for change. Why had their brand of politics had such a profound impact on people around the world? What accounted for their ability to inspire so many people to join in campaigns for justice, equality, and human dignity? Was it some aspect of their personality? Was it their religion? Was it the era in which they were raised—an era dominated by massive struggles against economic depression, against fascism, against racism, against communism? Or was it something—or someone—else? What was their secret?

  I knew that my mother had loved Rosemary, as any sister would. There could hardly be a doubt about siblings loving one another in my mother’s family. There were nine of them, and, like most children from huge families, they raised and depended on one another. Children from large families learn one of life’s important lessons early: you can count on your parents for only so much. For the rest, you’d better hope your brother or sister is around. So my mother was surely crushed to see her sister struggle so in childhood, crushed to see her own mother distraught and lonely as she endured the repeated rejection of her child.

  My mother spoke rarely but with a controlled ferocity about her childhood with Rosemary. Even in her eighties, she still remembered the frustration. “When we were young, there was nothing for Rosie,” she would mutter. “I can remember my mother picking up the phone and calling and calling—one person after another. She called schools, doctors, anyone she thought might help. And everyone told her there was nothing for Rosemary. Nothing.” Her voice would trail off. “Nothing…”

  The stories would spring up from time to time like the memories of war that soldiers hide as best they can, only to have them explode into consciousness with unforgiving vividness. “Sometimes, we would all be at dinner and Dad would ask us each questions about the events of the day and I would see Rosie sitting there knowing she wouldn’t be able to answer like the rest of us. And…” Her voice would trail off again; her shoulders would drop; her head would shift almost imperceptibly from side to side in resignation. Rosie couldn’t keep up, didn’t fit in.

  Pascal wrote that “the heart has its reasons that reason doesn’t know.” I’ve often thought of my mother in the context of that expression. She had reasons—a kind of knowledge born not of information or study but of the experience of loving Rosemary. Perhaps not surprisingly, my mother came to loathe “experts,” disdain “analysts,” avoid bureaucrats—all people who stake their claim to value on the power of thought, the triumph of science, the routines of efficiency. She trusted none of that, and for good reason: most of those “experts” were part of the system that had devalued her sister. She trusted more in the knowledge of the heart, in the love born of faith. Do you care? Do you see the goodness that lies within? Will you trust the elusive intimacy that comes from learning to see another person—any person—from the inside out, beneath the superficial distractions of labels and assumptions? Rosemary’s disability may have interfered with the family culture of competing to be valued, but it opened that same family to the idea that value is
not earned, only given and accepted.

  Just once did I ask my mother and my uncle Ted directly about Rosemary’s influence. Only a few years before they died, the topic was still rarely mentioned, even within the family, but if I were ever going to understand, I had to ask these two people who had grown up with Rosemary about the effect she’d had on her parents and siblings during their childhoods. As we sat at my parents’ home in Maryland for a typical Sunday-night dinner, I mustered the courage to broach the subject. “Have either of you ever thought about Rosemary’s role in shaping you as people?” I asked. “Not in shaping your commitment to disability policy or programs, I mean, but in shaping your emotional life and your identities. You have such a distinctive style of leadership, such a remarkable concern for the vulnerable, for the importance of service. Do you think it’s possible that an important source of all that might have been Rosemary?”

  My uncle Ted gave me one of his long, pensive looks. As was often the case, I couldn’t tell whether he was thinking that I had asked a ridiculous question that he was going to ignore, or whether he was deep in thought, or whether he was even paying attention. After what seemed like an interminable pause, he finally spoke up. “I remember when we were young in Palm Beach, we would go to big parties with all the young people. And I remember one time I was at one of those parties during the daytime and it was outside—I can’t remember if you were there, Eunie,” he said with a laugh, looking at my mother. She shook her head at him and rolled her eyes playfully. “But Jack was there and of course Mother and Dad made sure that we took Rosemary with us. And I remember looking up at one point in the party, and I saw that Rosemary was off by herself, sitting at one end of the swimming pool. She was all alone.”

  There was a long silence. I didn’t know if he was going to continue the story, but then he drew in a big breath and went on. “I saw Jack leave the people he was talking to and slip away from all of us and walk over to Rosemary. He just sat down with her—just the two of them at the other end of the pool together. I remember that just like it was yesterday, Jack and Rosemary sitting alone but together while the party went on.” He said nothing more. The conversation shifted and was done.

  I never asked either him or my mother about it again—where that party had taken place, or when. But I know that in the years that followed that party, loss would devastate my mother and uncle’s family. In 1941, Rosemary had her surgery and then disappeared. Three years after that disaster, a lone black military car arrived at my grandparents’ home and the officer asked to speak privately to my grandfather. Moments later, my grandfather emerged and announced to his children the news: “Your brother Joe is dead.” He had been killed at the age of twenty-nine on a secret mission in World War II. Just a few months later, Jack narrowly escaped death in the Pacific. And in 1948, my mother’s sister Kathleen Kennedy Hartington—herself already a widow whose husband had been killed in combat just three months after their wedding in 1944—died in a plane crash in France. In the span of seven short years, my mother’s family was battered again and again by loss.

  But twenty years after Rosemary’s lobotomy, the same brother who had sat with her alone at the pool was sworn in as the thirty-fifth president of the United States. He, too, would be lost in the blink of an eye. But his call to serve the nation, his drive to heal the wounds of the forgotten around the world, his hunger for peace, and his resolute conviction that freedom was the destiny of every human being—all that still echoes today, and all that was embodied by his surviving brothers and sisters for decades longer. Not surprisingly, those values that stirred the world also fueled his administration’s commitment to become the first in history to place intellectual disability on the public policy agenda.

  I will never know the date or the location of the party Teddy remembered, but the moment I heard his story, I could tell it was a powerful clue. Whatever shame he and his siblings might have felt about Rosemary when they were growing up had found its counter in an empathy that took root deep in their souls, an empathy not learned in school or politics but triggered by countless moments when their sister was alone and the only response that made sense was to sit by her side. They were asked over and over again to look out for their sister, but in being asked to give, they had received something, too: hundreds of moments when they were alone with her, sitting with someone they loved, by the pool, legs dangling in the water together, saying nothing. At some level, they must have known how wonderful it was to be with her. At some level, they must have realized that in their sister Rosemary, they had received something far greater than they had ever been asked to give: a person whose love they didn’t have to earn. With Rosemary, they needed only to give love in order to receive it back.

  Today, I believe that Rosemary was a major source of the political genius that my uncles brought to public life, an energy that would change the course of a nation. “Ask not” wasn’t borrowed from Roosevelt or Churchill or Lincoln or Jefferson. It did not spring solely from President Kennedy’s service in the navy or the lessons he learned at Harvard. I will never be able to prove it, but I think it also sprang from the family and the faith that taught him to give himself to Rosemary and the unspoken happiness that he received from her in return. I believe it was from caring for her that they all gained the confidence to believe that they could ask others to give, knowing the joys of giving. I believe it was from playing with her that they learned the meaning of the faith in which they were raised—of being a part of something bigger and more mysterious than any book can teach. I believe it was from feeling her frustration and loneliness that they felt the terrifying fear of being left out and from her that they learned to fight it. I believe it was from loving her that they learned to believe that peoples and nations could cross boundaries of fear and intolerance to join together in peace and friendship. I believe it was from her that they learned to believe that everyone has a gift. I believe it was from her that they learned to care from within.

  That is a hunch, an intuition. What I know for sure, though, is that the unique combination of love and loyalty and anger and empathy that Rosemary inspired in her family would also give rise to a global movement. That movement would attempt to fulfill the high expectations that St. Luke demanded of believers and the promise of service that “ask not” had awakened in millions. It would attempt to satisfy the thirst for belonging that Rosemary had taught her family and to re-create the delight that they had experienced sailing the waters of Cape Cod with her.

  The accomplishment of all this, however, would require one more step from my mother. It could happen only if the family secret was broken. And so it would have to be.

  FIVE

  The Greatest Effort

  All families are alike in one way: they have secrets.

  In 1941, Rosemary Kennedy became a family secret. After the war ended in 1945, her siblings began to pursue their various lives and careers while a peculiar silence enveloped her whereabouts. “We didn’t know where she was,” recalled her sister Jean Smith. “I was told that she had moved to the Midwest and had become a teacher—or maybe a teacher’s assistant. That was the way things were going then. We all just kept moving.”

  And move they did. Twenty-nine-year-old John Kennedy, the war hero and Purple Heart recipient, returned from the Pacific theater and entered politics, running for Congress in the 11th district of Massachusetts in 1946. The campaign marshaled the full energy of both his parents and all his siblings, except Rosemary. His sisters Eunice, Pat, and Jean campaigned vigorously across the district, holding “teas” to introduce their brother to the voters. His mother, a “gold star mother,” spoke over and over again of her son’s heroism, using the political voice she’d honed from childhood as the daughter of the mayor of Boston. His brothers Bobby and Ted were close advisors. He won in 1946 and was reelected in ’48 and ’50. Then he ran for the Senate in 1952, against the establishment candidate Henry Cabot Lodge, who by all accounts should have prevailed due to his age, experience,
and prestige. The upstart, however, surged to victory. John Kennedy entered the Senate in 1953, full of potential and charm and the glow of a winner.

  Meanwhile, my mother graduated from Stanford in 1943 and shortly thereafter headed to Washington, DC, where she moved into a Georgetown house to live with her congressman brother. The two were enormously close—peculiarly close, some would say. “Jack” was not only her brother but also her best friend. Years later, my aunt Jackie would often smile when talking about the two of them. “Your mother and Jack loved each other sooooo much,” she said in her inimitable, lilting voice. “I mean, no one could separate them.” My mother once challenged Jackie to a wrestling match in their brownstone kitchen, throwing the unsuspecting girlfriend to the kitchen floor in a matter of seconds. To say that Jackie was surprised at being pinned to the ground by her boyfriend’s sister would be an understatement. “I never saw a brother and sister like those two, but I also never knew a woman like your mother,” Jackie would say. “That was my first and last wrestling match. Thank goodness.”