Today the notion of destroying a vital part of a person’s brain sounds barbaric. It’s difficult to imagine that once upon a time there were doctors who actually specialized in this field, but in fact there were quite a few in the 1940s. During a lobotomy operation, an ice-pick-like device—in some cases, an actual gold-plated ice pick!—or a device resembling a blunt knife was usually inserted under a patient’s eyelid and above the tear duct, then hammered into the brain through the thin bone of the eye socket. With that instrument firmly in place, the doctor then simply swished it about, thereby destroying the brain’s frontal lobes. Unfortunately, there were no cameras or other kinds of monitoring devices at the time to determine what was actually happening in or to the patient’s brain. Instead, the patient was simply put under a local anesthetic and, as the doctor slowly did his work, asked certain questions. When the answers became vague and the patient seemed more distant and detached than previously, the operation was considered over and successful. Horrifying… yet true.
In 1941, Joseph Kennedy consulted with some of the more avant-garde doctors of the time, who told him that a lobotomy was a new and exciting solution to an old problem of mental illness. Other doctors disagreed, and vehemently so. When Joseph eventually discussed the operation with Rose, she asked her daughter Kathleen to look into it. Kathleen came back and told her mother that it was most certainly not the way to go where Rosemary was concerned. It was by no means a solution to mental retardation and was only used on patients with severe psychiatric or emotional illnesses that could otherwise not be treated, and even then it was far from widely accepted. Only about sixty of these operations had been performed up until that time, and with mixed results. Most of the patients were severely brain damaged, though. There was no getting around it. Rose was satisfied to hear as much and told Joseph what Kathleen had learned. As far as she was concerned, the case was closed.
For Joseph, though, it wasn’t closed at all.
While Rose was out of town, Joseph took it upon himself to take his daughter to a hospital to have the terrible operation performed on her—apparently without telling a single person in his family about it.
In Rosemary’s case, rather than go through the eye as usual, doctors drilled right through the top of her skull. One doctor then inserted the surgical instrument and moved it around, destroying brain matter in the process. Meanwhile, another doctor asked certain questions of Rosemary: Could she recite certain prayers? Sing certain songs? Count backward from ten? They made an estimate about how far to continue “swishing” based on how she responded. Finally, when Rosemary couldn’t make sense of the questions, it was decided that the operation was over. Afterward, everyone agreed that it hadn’t gone very well. Maybe not surprisingly, Rosemary Kennedy came out of the surgery completely retarded, with virtually no sign of her former personality left in her. She could barely speak and was for all intents and purposes perhaps no more than five years old in her mind. Her head was tilted, she was incontinent, severely brain damaged, and could no longer speak or reason. At just twenty-three, her life was all but ruined.
By some accounts, Joseph was horrified by what had happened to his daughter. By other accounts, he was, if not wholly pleased, at least somewhat satisfied. Rosemary was at first hospitalized, but then Joseph shipped her off to an institution, where she would spend the next seven years.
“When Rose returned home from her trip, Joseph told her and the rest of the family that while she was gone he had taken Rosemary in for a doctor’s examination,” said Sancy Newman. “It was decided then and there—or so Joseph had lied, anyway—that it was no longer possible for the family to care for her at home. He maintained that Rosemary—like thousands of others at the time—had to be just locked away. And that was the end of it.”
One can only wonder about the psychological impact such an event may have had on the Kennedy siblings. After all, one day they had a sister, and the next day they didn’t. Once, Ted Kennedy’s longtime friend and former Harvard classmate, the writer Burton Hersh, asked him what he as a youngster thought when his sister suddenly disappeared from sight. Ted mulled the question over for a moment before answering, “I thought that I’d better do what Dad wanted, or the same thing could happen to me.”
New information now reveals that Rose Kennedy and some of her children began visiting Rosemary in 1949—eight years after she was committed.
Apparently, the private institution in which Rosemary had first been ensconced was no place Joseph wanted his wife and older siblings to visit. Therefore, at the advice of his close friend Cardinal Richard Cushing of Boston—who would for decades be the spiritual adviser for the entire family—Joseph had Rosemary moved to a Catholic community in Jefferson, Wisconsin, then called St. Coletta School for Exceptional Children, today known simply as St. Coletta’s. There, Joseph oversaw the construction of a private home for his daughter on the grounds of the Alverno Nursing Home, a facility that was owned by St. Coletta’s, which would become known by the staff as the Kennedy Cottage.* It would be here that Rosemary would spend the next sixty years of her life until her death in 2006 at the age of eighty-six, under the care of St. Coletta’s staff, always in the company of two caretakers from that community, both of them sisters of the order of St. Francis of Assisi.
It is certainly difficult to believe that Rose Kennedy and the rest of her family were not aware of Rosemary’s lobotomy during all the years that they visited her at St. Coletta’s, especially since Rose and Kathleen had once discussed the pros and cons of just such an operation. Could Rose have not put two and two together to figure out what had happened to her daughter? However, the story that’s been handed down in the family over the years is that no one knew about the awful operation until well after Joseph was gone and some of the family members began asking questions.
What cannot be disputed is that the Kennedys kept secret the fact that Rosemary was retarded and living in a home, certainly not an unusual thing to hide back in those days. In fact, during JFK’s campaign it was said by the family that Rosemary was off leading a private life as a teacher in a convent in Tarrytown, New York. The first time the public had a clue that something was wrong with her was in the July 1960 issue of Time when Joseph was quoted as saying she had been suffering from spinal meningitis and convalescing in a Wisconsin nursing home. “I think it’s best to bring these things out into the open,” he said.
Two years later, in an essay Eunice Kennedy Shriver wrote for the Saturday Evening Post in September 1962, she provided a revisionist version of what had actually occurred—with no mention of the lobotomy, of course:
“In 1941… my mother took Rosemary to psychologists and to dozens of doctors. All of them said her condition would not get better and that she would be far happier in an institution, where competition was far less and where our numerous activities would not endanger her health. It fills me with sadness to think this change might not have been necessary if we’d known then what we know today. My mother found an excellent Catholic institution that specialized in the care of retarded children and adults. Rosemary is there now, living with others of her capacity. She has found peace in a new home where there is no need for ‘keeping up,’ or for brooding over why she can’t join in activities as others do. This, coupled with the understanding of the sisters in charge, makes life agreeable for her. Like diabetes, deafness, polio or any other misfortune, mental retardation can happen in any family. It has happened in the families of the poor and the rich, of governors, senators, Nobel prizewinners, doctors, lawyers, writers, men of genius, presidents of Corporations—the President of the United States.”
In 1977, Rose Kennedy’s secretary, Barbara Gibson, made a startling discovery in the attic of Rose’s home—Rosemary’s leather-bound diaries, going all the way back to the late 1930s when she was in England with her family while her father was ambassador there. They are fascinating to read in that Rosemary’s words paint a vivid picture of a very normal young girl concerned about her nut
rition, her schooling, her interest in fashion and in sporting events, and her social life. “Have a fitting at 10:15 Elizabeth Arden’s,” reads one entry. “Appointment dress fitting again. Home for lunch. Royal tournament in the afternoon.” On board the ship taking the family to England, she wrote, “Up late for breakfast. Had it on the deck. Played ping pong with Ralph’s sister, also with another man. Had lunch at 1:15. Walked with Peggy. Also went to horse races with her, and bet and won a dollar and a half. Went to English movie at five. Had dinner at 8:45. Went to the lounge with Miss Cahill and Eunice and retired early.”
From Rosemary’s writings, she seemed carefree and well-adjusted, not at all troubled. She seemed to have had a learning disability, that much is clear from some of the writings in which she writes of trouble in school, and also she seemed dyslexic in her writing, just as Rose had suggested. These diaries, though, were not written by anyone who was severely retarded—they were too concise, too clear, too specific in nature. Rose Kennedy was not happy about their discovery, however. “More than thirty years had passed since her daughter had been institutionalized and Rose and the rest of the family had long ago settled it in their minds as something they could have done nothing about,” observed Barbara Gibson. “They didn’t even want to think about how things might have been different if Joseph had not acted on his own to solve what he viewed as a problem. Indeed, as far as they were concerned, all of it was just better left in the past.”
“Throw them out,” Rose told Gibson of the journals. “We don’t need them now. Just get rid of them.” Barbara Gibson didn’t throw them out, though. She kept them.
Joseph Patrick Kennedy
What can one make of the fact that Joseph P. Kennedy was so beloved and revered not only by his own children but by their spouses as well, despite his responsibility for what had happened to his daughter Rosemary? It doesn’t overstate it to say that Sargent Shriver, for instance, hero-worshipped the man, as did Stephen Smith. And the love that Ethel, Joan, and Jackie felt for him was boundless. “Dear Grandpa, you brought all the joy into my life, more than one should dare hope to have. And because of that—all the pain,” Jackie once wrote in what appeared to be musings jotted down for a possible memoir, the pages ultimately being sold at auction. “I will remember you. And I will love you until I die.”
Though Joseph could be extremely tough and unyielding, there was a paradoxical loving quality to him that was difficult for his children and their spouses to resist—especially given that Rose was by nature so removed and even icy. Not only was she rarely demonstrative, but she also became extremely uncomfortable when anyone around her displayed raw emotion. For instance, even during the darkest of times when Jackie and Ethel grieved their slain husbands, Rose—by her own admission—would have preferred they do so in private, not in front of her or any of the other family members. It was Joseph who openly showed the most love—tough love, yes, but love just the same. It was Joseph who made the Kennedys feel they were a family, and so it was he to whom everyone was most loyal.
Admittedly, trying to reconcile Joseph the good father with Joseph the man who did what he did to Rosemary Kennedy presents a conundrum, but grappling with such contradictions is essential when trying to understand him. Before setting his sights on politics, he’d made a fortune in the stock market, a huge impact on the film industry in Hollywood (during which time he famously had an affair with Gloria Swanson). He’d also been ambassador to Great Britain under Roosevelt, a tenure that ended very badly. Eleven days after Kennedy’s arrival in Great Britain, Adolf Hitler’s Nazi forces pushed their way into Austria. In a shortsighted assessment of the situation based on discussions with Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, Kennedy maintained that the action in Europe had “no long range implications,” quoting Chamberlain as likening Germany to “a boa constrictor that had eaten a great deal and was trying to digest the meal before taking on anything else.” This would be the first of many miscalculations for Joseph. His efforts to promote U.S. isolationism and his continued antiwar stance, it now seems, were based in a large measure on his fear that his three older sons—Joe Jr., Jack, and Bobby—would be placed in harm’s way, fighting a war that he insisted would be our Armageddon. After making a number of speeches that were at odds with U.S. policy concerning Hitler’s aggressive march through Europe, Kennedy was asked by FDR for his resignation in 1940.
It was Joseph’s zest for politics and for seeing his sons in powerful government positions that became the focus of his life when he returned from England. His firstborn, Joseph Patrick Jr., had come thirteen months after Joseph’s and Rose’s wedding. It was quickly decided by Joseph that his namesake would be the tyro who would anchor his dreamed-of political dynasty. Two years later John arrived. More children would follow in quick succession over the next six years: Rosemary; Kathleen, known as “Kick”; Eunice; Pat; Robert; Jean; and, finally, another son, Ted. These children would be brought up with a strict and unflinching code of ethics, determination, and the fiercest of all desires—to win. Their dining room would become a lecture hall with constant discussions about current events and politics. “I don’t think much of people who have it in them to be first but who finish second,” Joseph told his offspring. It was nothing if not a deeply competitive life for all of the young Kennedys.
When Joe Jr. was killed in the war, Joseph focused on his son Jack, who, while not as immediately sharp and charismatic as Joe, was still the best thing the family had going for them—at least as far as Joseph was concerned. “Joseph wheeled and dealed his way into politics,” said Hugh Sidey. “Maybe buying elections, maybe not, but definitely at the forefront of the family’s ascension into high government. None of it would have happened if not for Joseph’s dogged determination. The family owed everything to Joseph, to the way he pulled strings for them, the way he supported them financially and emotionally, the way he pushed them when, frankly, they didn’t want to be pushed. It was all because of Joseph.”
In 1961, Joseph Kennedy was felled by a debilitating stroke while golfing in Palm Beach, Florida, leaving him unable to speak and walk. This was just the beginning of another series of tragedies in the family. In another two years the vibrant young president, JFK, would be assassinated in Dallas. Next would be Ted’s near loss of his life in a 1964 airplane crash. Then, before the decade was over, Joseph’s third son, Bobby, would be killed in Los Angeles following a rousing victory speech made after winning the California Democratic primary for l968’s presidential election.
Either overlooking the tragedy that had befallen Rosemary Kennedy or chalking it up to Joseph having done the best he could in a difficult situation, the Kennedy family firmly maintained then—as they do today—that everything they were in terms of strength and resilience was because of the character and example of their patriarch, Joseph P. Kennedy. They would also always acknowledge that their great wealth and political power were the direct result of his hard work and business acumen. Everything they were, in fact, was connected to who he had been in their lives, even their spirituality, for Joseph was extremely religious and passed on that ideology to his family members, most of whom would also be very devout in their faith.
“Everything we have, we owe to Grandpa,” is how Ethel Kennedy would put it to her children before a visit to the Big House. “So when you go in to see him,” she would say—and at this time Joseph was an invalid as a result of his stroke—“remember that everything you have, every toy, every pet, the house we live in, everything we owe to Grandpa.”
PART THREE
Sarge
Sargent Shriver
President Barack Obama perhaps said it best when, following Sargent Shriver’s death in 2011, he referred to him as “one of the brightest lights of the greatest generation.” Many historians feel Sargent would have—should have—made a great president, that he would have made a significant impact on this country’s landscape in the turbulent 1960s and 1970s had he had the opportunity to do so. Not only did he have the e
nergy, the imagination, the magnetism and sense of purpose and duty, but he also possessed what seemed like an organic need to be of service. He cared about society, and he cared deeply. However, one significant stumbling block kept him from advancing his political career: the ambition of the Kennedy family.
First, though, a little history about the man his friends and family called simply “Sarge”:
Robert Sargent Shriver Jr. was born in Westminster, Maryland, in 1915, his German forebears among the early settlers of Baltimore. The Shriver family is descended from David Shriver, who signed the Maryland Constitution and Bill of Rights at Maryland’s Constitutional Convention of 1776. Sargent’s father, Robert, was a banker who had married his second cousin, Hilda Shriver. The Shrivers were hardworking, though not affluent. Following admission on full scholarship to Canterbury, a private school in New Milford, Connecticut, Sarge graduated in 1934 and spent the next seven years at Yale, where he earned both his undergraduate degree in 1938 and his law degree in 1941. As a member of America First, an antiwar organization, Shriver opposed the country’s entrance into World War II. But as a patriotic American, he volunteered anyway, serving in the Navy for five years, rising through the ranks to lieutenant and earning a number of commendations for valor. He later recanted his opposition to the war.
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