While he was in Congress, my mother started her career in the Department of Justice as part of a task force on juvenile delinquency. Her work was focused on getting programs in place to keep at-risk kids from falling through the cracks. She busied herself with the problem in what would become a lifelong pattern—working on it not just at the office but at home, too. She wrote to her father to ask for his help in placing adjudicated kids in jobs. She invited “delinquents” to her home to meet her brother, the congressman. Enthusiastic and idealistic, she wanted the young people who were struggling to see possibility, to have dinner, to become hopeful that with friendship and advice, they could live safe and productive lives. If it was possible to make the world a better place by sheer force of will, she was determined to try.
But something else happened during those years that would soon take her away from Washington for almost a decade: she met my father, Sargent Shriver. In 1946, my dad was a Yale Law School graduate and, like John Kennedy, a recently returned navy combat veteran. My grandfather hired him to assist with managing an enormous new real estate investment, Chicago’s Merchandise Mart. When it was built, the gargantuan art deco office building was the largest building in the world, spanning two city blocks, rising twenty-five stories, and boasting 4.2 million square feet of interior space. My dad always spoke of his pride at being hired by “Mr. Kennedy” for such a responsibility. He moved right away to Chicago, where he joined the management team that my grandfather was assembling to turn the distressed monstrosity into a profitable asset.
By all accounts, my father loved his new boss and the affection was returned. My dad was smart, handsome, bubbling over with earnest enthusiasm, and eager to be an impact player. He’d gone to college on a scholarship, played baseball for Yale, become the editor in chief of the Yale Daily News, graduated from the country’s most prestigious law school, and been discharged as a lieutenant from the navy after serving in the submarine force and on the battleship USS South Dakota. He saw extensive combat at the Battles of Santa Cruz and Guadalcanal. Upon returning to civilian life, he’d been hired at Newsweek magazine as an assistant editor before he was spotted by my grandfather.
“Sarge,” my grandfather had told him, “get yourself out to Chicago and find out what’s going on.”
“What exactly do you want me to do, Mr. Kennedy?” my father replied.
“Get into everything and give me a report on what it’s going to take to make the place a success. Just get yourself out there and figure it out.”
My dad moved to Chicago and loved it. And apparently, he impressed my grandfather enough to earn himself a new assignment. In 1947, my grandfather asked my father to move back to the East Coast, this time to Washington, DC.
“I’d like you to go to Washington, Sarge, to join my daughter Eunice in an important effort. She’s working on juvenile delinquency and I’d like you to help her study the problem and find the right solutions.”
My dad, ever the enthusiast for anything new and important, didn’t pause. “Okay, Mr. Kennedy. If that’s what you want me to do, I’ll do it.”
Within days of arriving at the Department of Justice to assist Eunice Kennedy, my dad was immersed in the problems of disengaged teenagers and equally immersed in the challenge of courting his new boss. “I used to tell your mother that I would do anything she asked me to do, but only if she gave me a kiss.” Whenever my father would relate his version of their first working relationship, my mother would roll her eyes and protest, “Sargent. Now, that’s not true. Don’t tell the children that.” He continued undeterred. “One time, I refused to work until she gave me a kiss. She rejected me of course, so I chased her around her desk until finally she stopped and closed her eyes and stuck out her cheek and let me kiss her. And you know your mother: the next thing she did was say, ‘Now for goodness’ sakes, let’s get back to work!’ I just loved chasing her and was always hoping for action!”
Over the next six years, the two of them worked together, dated, and finally married in 1953 in a New York wedding to which my grandparents invited almost two thousand guests. My dad used to joke that he knew almost no one at his own wedding but had the time of his life. My mother remembered being introduced to hundreds of people whom she’d never met before and laughing all night long. They took their vows at the great altar of St. Patrick’s Cathedral and danced for hours and hours at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel. They were surrounded by family on all sides—Kennedys, Fitzgeralds, and Shrivers. Only one close relative was missing from the gala: Rosemary.
When my parents returned from their honeymoon, they settled in Chicago and my dad returned to work at the Merchandise Mart, while my mother embarked on a new project my grandfather had asked her to lead: the Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr. Foundation. The foundation had been established in 1946 as a memorial for my mother’s eldest brother, Joe, whose death had crushed his father and mother, a loss from which some suggest they never recovered. Decades later, my siblings and cousins and I would still hear the stories of Joe and how he had been the brother most likely to succeed. “Joe was so handsome,” my mother would always remind us, “and he always did whatever Mother told him, so now why don’t you be like Joe and do what I’m asking you to do?” My grandmother, too, would interrupt conversations over and over again to tell us how devout Joe had been: “You know, he would always come with me to mass, and on New Year’s Eve one year, he left the biggest party in Palm Beach to go to serve mass at St. Edward’s and then came back without any fuss later that same night. Jack and all the boys were so impressed by Joe, and that’s why I always tell you children that the example of the oldest is so important. Joe set the example for Jack and the others.” Her voice would often fade off as she described Joe and his larger-than-life gifts. But equally as often, a smile would creep onto her face when she’d remember his next brother. “Jack, of course, was always laughing and not as serious as Joe. You know, your grandfather always insisted that all the children be on time for meals, but if Jack was late, he’d just slip into the kitchen and smile at the cook and have a beautiful dinner in the back and never think a thing of it. Joe would never do that…”
In the wake of Joe’s death in World War II, my grandparents created the Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr. Foundation without any clear focus for its work. Before long, it would become devoted to the problem of intellectual disability, but for all intents and purposes, it backed into its mission. My mother later recalled:
In 1948, my father had given a few grants to Cardinal Cushing and Cardinal Spellman—the former to set up a hospital for cerebral palsy children, and the latter to set up some school for mentally retarded children and to name them after my brother, Joe, who had been killed in the war. He had no specific [purpose in mind] at the time, but my father was anxious to commemorate something to my brother Joe. He asked Sarge and myself to take steps to find out what the great needs in the youth fields were.
That request, to “find out what the great needs” were, came in 1958. By then, most of the foundation’s work did center on intellectual disability, but my mother had been complaining behind the scenes that my grandfather was going about it all wrong. If the foundation was going to help people with intellectual disabilities, it shouldn’t turn for advice to mental health professionals with no prior experience in the field. Psychiatrists knew about mental illness, not mental retardation. “You think you can do a better job getting the money to the programs that will make a difference?” said my grandfather. “Well, then do it.”
So she and my father visited universities, special schools, and hospitals all around the country, met with the top researchers in the field, and came home with recommendations by the bushel. What they found in their travels was, in retrospect, predictable: hardly anyone had done any systematic research in the field of intellectual disability. Not even the basic financial problems involved in warehousing tens of thousands of people in institutions—the cost would be estimated at well over a billion dollars a year by 1970—had motivated scientis
ts to study intellectual disability. The issue languished in a strange limbo between a medical problem and a social problem, with neither doctors nor social scientists doing much about it. My parents discovered that “there were literally [only] a handful of doctors interested in the field. Practically no medical schools. No foundations at all.” Before 1960, “the federal presence in intellectual disability was … so modest that a grant of $1.25 million from the Kennedy Foundation in 1952 to establish a private school in Illinois exceeded the entire federal services budget for intellectual disability at the time.” That, they felt strongly, was where the Kennedy Foundation could have a real and lasting impact.
My grandfather handed the reins of the foundation to my parents. From then on, when friends wrote him asking for money, he declined, making it clear that the foundation would henceforth be singular in its focus. Gone were the grants to causes of political allies, and to the Catholic Church’s needs in greater Boston; gone, too, were the occasional gifts to schools. For the first time in more than a decade, my grandfather began to mention Rosemary in his correspondence. “The solution of Rosemary’s problem,” he wrote in 1958 to Sister Anastasia, a nun at St. Coletta’s in Wisconsin where Rosemary still resided, “has been a major factor in the ability of all the Kennedys to go about their life’s work.” The secret of Rosemary had been well kept, but it must never have been far from the mind of the father who had raised her with such love and yet unintentionally sentenced her to such isolation. The Kennedy Foundation would become his way of fulfilling his devotion to her and, perhaps, of alleviating the pain he must have carried. In the first four years that my parents oversaw the direction of the foundation, it donated more than $17 million to a variety of universities, religious organizations, and caregivers who had only one thing in common: an interest in the treatment and care of people with intellectual disabilities.
During those same years, the other family business, politics, remained center stage. Senator John Kennedy was quietly preparing to seize opportunities for national office, and of course, his political career was the much more prominent Kennedy family work.
During his time in Congress, John Kennedy showed little interest in advocating for people with intellectual disabilities—perhaps to keep the family secret, or perhaps because it seemed so unlikely that the government would do anything to help such people. Elizabeth Boggs, a legendary advocate at the time, had hoped for more. A mathematician and chemist with a doctorate from Cambridge, she had begun advocating for people with disabilities after struggling to find any help for her own son who had severe disabilities, David. She’d heard about the sister the Kennedys never talked about and had assumed that the experience of growing up with Rosemary would make Senator John Kennedy a strong ally. But in 1957, as Boggs struggled to win attention for a neglected piece of legislation—it would have expanded support for special-ed teacher training—Senator Kennedy seemed uninterested. At one point in a subcommittee hearing on the topic, the senator left early and never returned or expressed support. Boggs had been hoping to capitalize on his private understanding of the need, but instead felt ignored.
The bill eventually did become law, but a decade later, Boggs recalled her disappointment:
I have to say that this was an incident that was associated in my mind with some resentment because I felt that even if they [the Kennedys] did not wish to admit publicly that this was a problem in their family, the least that the Senator could have done would have been to attend to the [committee] business as any other sympathetic senator might have done … I couldn’t help feeling that he was leaving to others a task which he could have very well lent his support to at that time.
Would things change when John Kennedy was elected president in 1960 and his historic inaugural address challenged the nation to service? Boggs and other activists didn’t see any reason to expect much help.
At the time of the election, Boggs’s grassroots organization was called the National Association for Retarded Children—today it’s the Arc. The group’s members were mostly the parents of children with intellectual challenges. They had all experienced the same anguish Joe and Rose Kennedy had in the face of medical pressure to institutionalize their children; the same frustration at the lack of community resources; the same isolation and shame. They had banded together to stand up for themselves. Our children can be helped, they insisted. They are not hopeless. The secretary of the organization, Woodhull Hay, wrote that what these parents held in common was a commitment to challenge “the validity of the finality implicit in the words: ‘Nothing can be done for your child.’” Over time the members of the Arc had gotten used to fighting tooth and nail for every legislative victory they gained. What they expected from a Kennedy administration was the same thing they had gotten from previous administrations: nothing. It was “a non-expectation,” Boggs would later recall.
What Boggs didn’t know, however, was that my mother’s research and work in leading the Kennedy Foundation had rendered her increasingly frustrated and zealous, too. I can only imagine the anger in her face when she met doctors who were still recommending institutionalization, or her bottled outrage upon encountering hospitals whose protocols allowed for children born with intellectual disabilities to starve to death rather than receive care.
Years later, she described her research with words that barely contained her rage: “I have seen sights that will haunt me all my life. If I had not seen them myself, I would never have believed that such conditions could exist in modern America … adults and children … in barrack-like wards, their unwashed clothes and blankets in rags.”
With the election of President Kennedy, he and his siblings had their chance to make a difference on the world stage, and Rosemary’s influence would finally break through. She had been the teacher who’d first taught the lesson that everyone has a gift. She had been the person who’d first taught the lesson that value isn’t determined by social or political or intellectual rank. In retrospect, I can see her influence in the president’s campaign call to ask young people to serve the cause of peace around the world in what would become the Peace Corps. And I can see her influence in his inaugural address, when caring, serving, and peace moved to the center of his politics. And I am sure that my mother was imbued with that same influence as she, too, decided that the time had come to press for a breakthrough in the field of intellectual disability.
Within weeks of the inauguration, she began to work the levers of government. Whether out of respect or out of dread, the staff surrounding the president tended to give my mother what she needed, and the president knew her well enough to want to accommodate her agenda as well. Right at the outset, he asked one of his most politically effective advisors, Myer “Mike” Feldman, to be my mother’s point of contact within the administration. Feldman was assigned to smooth over diplomatic wrinkles between her and other White House staff who sometimes chafed at her influence. He was also tasked with making sure things got done. No one had better access to the president, and no one had a more razor-sharp sense of how to deliver on Capitol Hill, than Feldman. He and my mother became a team.
My mother began by assessing the federal government’s capacity to change the quality of life for people with intellectual disabilities. Various offices of the federal government had perceived themselves to be responsible for action in the field, but from my mother’s point of view, none had done enough. The National Institutes of Health might have been expected to lead the charge, but the few projects they’d undertaken were housed in the National Institute of Mental Health and had almost no relevance to the needs of individuals and families. When the head of pediatrics at Johns Hopkins University, Dr. Robert Cooke, joined my mother to lobby the NIH for more attention to the needs of children, the organization’s leader, Dr. James Shannon, pushed back with a memorable dust-off. Cooke had proposed the idea of a new center dedicated to research in child development; Shannon responded that there was no need for such an institute at NIH. After all, he smirked:
“There aren’t any major problems in children.” Shannon’s perspective, as shocking as it seems today, was probably the norm at the time. No agency of government was focused on child development, and certainly none focused on the challenges of development for atypical children.
Cooke joined my mother as a “scientific advisor” to the Kennedy Foundation, and together with my dad, they began to explore how to fight. Perhaps because there were so many complex social problems involved, my mother spurned efforts to focus on a single solution. The multifaceted problem needed a multifaceted response. The team searched for historical models and found one in the “Hoover Commission.” Years earlier, in 1947, President Truman had appointed Herbert Hoover to chair a Commission on the Organization of the Executive Branch of the Government, a panel of experts whose mandate was to recommend administrative changes in the federal government of the United States. The Hoover Commission included distinguished leaders from Capitol Hill, from the executive branch, and from the business world. Among them was my grandfather Joseph P. Kennedy. Over the course of two years, the commission developed more than a hundred recommendations, the majority of which were adopted and put into action. On my grandfather’s advice, my mother and Dr. Cooke held a meeting with former president Hoover, at which they explored whether the idea of a new commission focused on intellectual disability made sense. Hoover was encouraging enough, and my mother brought the idea to the president, who responded decisively. “Call Mike Feldman,” he told his sister, “and let’s get a meeting set for next week at the White House.”
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