“Go up the steps of fame,” she exhorted him in a letter on January 26. “But—pause now and then to make sure that you are accompanied by happiness. Stop and ask yourself, ‘Does it sing inside me today.’…Look around and don’t take another step till you are certain life is as you will and want it.” Elsewhere, she bemoaned his reluctance to reveal his innermost feelings: “Maybe your gravest mistake, handsome, is that you admire brains more than heart, but then that is necessary to arrive.” And she was motherly, concerned about his bad back: “It is because you are dearer to me than anybody else that I want to be with you when you are sick. Maybe it is my maternal instinct.”30
“To you I need not pretend,” Jack told her. “You know me too well.” She agreed: “I do, not because I have put you on a pedestal—you don’t belong there, nobody does—but because I know where you are weak, and that is what I like.” But she saw greatness in his future: “I can’t wait to see you on top of the world. That is a very good reason why war should stop, so that it may give you a chance to show the world and yourself that here is a man of the future….Should I die before you reach to the top step of the golden ladder, then Jack dear—if there is life after death, as you believe in—be I in heaven or hell, that is the moment when I shall stretch out a hand and try to keep you balancing on that—the most precarious of all steps.”31
When she was not with Kennedy in Charleston, Inga was restless, counting the hours until she could see him again. When her husband asked her if she was in love with Jack, she admitted she was. She spent much of her free time with Kick and Kick’s friends, who now included Torbert Macdonald, newly arrived in Washington and looking for a job, his marriage plans having fallen through. Torby continued to be anti-war and anti-Roosevelt, and to express mild resentment about Jack’s successes. He felt some relief when Jack got banished to South Carolina, as it showed “I am not the only confusion maker in the country.” On meeting Inga, Torby found she only wanted to talk about the love of her life, and, he wrote to Jack, “[I] controlled my nausea long enough to do a good journeyman job—she is either crazy about you or is fooling a lot of people.”32
Later, Torby visited Jack in Charleston. Upon his return to Washington, he called Inga on the evening of February 3. The conversation was picked up by the FBI.
“Big Jack is very good and looking well,” Torby said, and living in a house “right up the street from the Fort Sumter Hotel. It’s a brick house on Murray Boulevard about ten [buildings] up from Sumter.”
“Does he like it?”
“He is not crazy about the people whose house it is but I guess he likes it. He misses you, Inga.” Together the two friends had attended the President’s Ball on Friday evening, and “I discovered a new Kennedy,” Torby went on. “It seems to me that he has a sort of different attitude towards girls now.”
“Oh you’re just kidding,” she answered, though grateful for the compliment. “You’re just the sweetest thing in the world.”
“Does he say anything about going to sea?” she asked later in the call. “I can feel it in my bones that he is going to sea.”
“If he does it will surprise him,” Torby replied.33
Late that same night, Jack phoned Inga.
“Why don’t you come here?” he said.
“I may,” she replied teasingly.
“Don’t say you may. I know I shouldn’t ask you to come here twice in a row but I’ll be up there as soon as I get permission.”
“Isn’t that sweet. I’ll come maybe.”
“I hate for you to come all this way just to see me.”
“Darling, I would go around the world three times just to see you.”
On they prattled, until Inga suddenly revealed what she had learned through her husband’s “spies”: that Jack had assured his father that he would never marry her and didn’t care about her all that much. Taken aback, Jack did not deny the claim but asked what else Fejos had said.
“Why, he said I could do what I wanted. He said he was sad to see me doing things like this. I’ll tell you about it and I swear that he is not bothering us and that you needn’t be afraid of him. He’s not going to sue you though he is aware what he could do by suing you.”
“He would be a big guy if he doesn’t sue me.”
“He’s a gentlemen,” Inga stressed. “I don’t care what happens, he wouldn’t do things like that. He’s perfectly all right.”
“I didn’t intend to make you mad,” Jack said.
“I’m not mad. Do you want me to come this weekend very much?”
“I would like for you to.”
“I’ll think it over and let you know. So long, my love.”
“So long.”34
Inga did come for the weekend, and agents followed the pair’s every move: “At 5:35 P.M. [on February 6], John Kennedy arrived at the Fort Sumter Hotel, driving a 1940 black Buick convertible Coupe, 1941 Florida license #6D4951, and went up to Mrs. Fejos’ room. He stayed there with her until 8:40 P.M., at which time subject and Kennedy went to the mezzanine floor of the Fort Sumter Hotel for dinner. No contacts were made by the party while at dinner. At 10:03 P.M., the subject and Kennedy took a walk down Murray Boulevard framing the harbor, and returned to her room by 10:35 P.M. without making any contacts. At 1:10 A.M. the subject and Kennedy were in bed and apparently asleep.”35
Though Hoover’s agents didn’t pick up on it, an air of uncertainty permeated the visit, less on account of Fejos than of Joe Kennedy, who had kept on pressuring his son to end the affair. The lovers’ feelings for each other had not dissipated, but each wondered if the end was nigh. Adding to the stress was their growing certainty that they were under at least partial surveillance when they were together. In late February, following another weekend rendezvous in Charleston, Jack asked for, and received, special permission to fly briefly to Washington. There he and Inga met and talked and agreed to separate. (Unbeknownst to Jack, she had resumed contact with a Danish ex-boyfriend, Nils Blok, and, according to the FBI, spent a night with him.)36
In the days thereafter Jack was tormented, second-guessing his action. He called her.
“Surprised to hear from me?”
“A little, maybe.”
“It’s about time.”
“Kathleen says every day that you will call me.”
“I’ve been in bed with a bad back….Why didn’t you come [to Charleston]?”
“What a question. Don’t you remember that we talked it over on Sunday?”
“I know it.”
“Oh, you don’t think it’s going to stay?”
“Life’s too short.”
“Oh Kennedy!” Inga exclaimed. Was Jack going back on their agreement to split up?
“No,” he replied, “not till next time I see you. I’m not too good, am I?”
“Did you think I was coming to Charleston?” she asked a little later.
“I had big hopes.”
They moved to other topics, turning finally to Inga’s planned divorce.
“I know that I will never go back to him.”
“I just wanted to be sure that this is what you want to do. From what you have said, I didn’t have anything to do with you getting the divorce.”
“You pushed the last stone under my foot but that doesn’t hold you responsible for anything. Meeting you two and a half months ago was the chief thing that made up my mind. As far as I’m concerned, you don’t exist anymore. That’s how I felt an hour ago. I still love you as much as always and always will. But you don’t figure in my plans whatsoever.”
“O.K.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Yes.”
“I’m still going to [divorce him].”
“O.K.”
“Drop me a line.”
“I will and I’ll call you next week.”37
IV
Jack Kennedy’s desk job in Charleston proved no more stimulating than the one he’d had in Washington. “Jack finds his present post rather irksome,” his mother said in a round-robin letter to her children in February, “as he does not seem to have enough to do and I think will be glad to transfer.” Billings would later recall that his friend found the work “a waste of time. He was very frustrated and unhappy.”38
News from home may have added to his disaffection, though to what degree we cannot know. A few months before, in November 1941, Joe Kennedy had made a decision that would haunt him to the end of his days, and shadow his wife and children to the end of theirs. Eldest daughter Rosemary, now twenty-three, was increasingly frustrated and aggressive, feeling marooned at St. Gertrude’s as she fell further and further behind her hard-driving siblings. “In the year or so following her return from England,” Rose Kennedy wrote in her memoirs, “disquieting symptoms began to develop. Not only was there noticeable retrogression in the mental skills she had worked so hard to attain, but her customary good nature gave increasingly to tension and irritability. She was upset easily and unpredictable. 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.” At St. Gertrude’s that fall there occurred troubling episodes in which Rosemary wandered out of the urban school after midnight on her own. Nuns would fan out to find her and bring her back and put her to bed, but all worried about what would happen the next time if a male stranger happened upon her and got ideas.39
Distraught at these developments, her parents suspected that, as Rose put it much later, “there were other factors at work besides retardation. A neurological disturbance or disease of some sort seemingly had overtaken her, and it was becoming progressively worse.” Joe, always impressed by innovations in healthcare, consulted with prominent practitioners, among them Dr. Walter Freeman, the chair of the department of neurology at the George Washington University Medical School and a leading figure in the new field of psychosurgery. Following in the path of Portuguese psychiatrist Egas Moniz, who in 1935 performed the first lobotomy for relief of complex mental disorders (and in 1949 won a Nobel Prize for his work), Freeman helped pioneer the practice in the United States, performing hundreds of lobotomies with his associate, the surgeon James Watts. A charismatic and articulate self-promoter, Freeman was the subject of fawning profiles in the press—one early story, in The New York Times on June 7, 1937, gushed about his “new surgical technique, known as ‘psycho-surgery,’ which, it is claimed, cuts away sick parts of the human personality, and transforms wild animals into gentle creatures in the course of a few hours.” By 1941 Freeman had convinced many experts that the lobotomy procedure was relatively harmless, with only minor side effects, and highly beneficial in many cases.40
The favorable coverage continued. “Few surgical events can top the dramatic simplicity of a typical frontal lobotomy as performed in an up to date hospital,” enthused Marguerite Clark in The American Mercury in 1941. Top scientists in the field had determined that the frontal lobes were responsible for the frustration, depression, and worry experienced by some people, and further that “these unfortunates may, in some cases, be brought back to useful life by the surgical removal of the frontal lobes of the brain.” An article in the May 1941 issue of The Saturday Evening Post that Joe and Rose may well have read highlighted the work of Freeman and Watts and praised the “sensational procedure” for transforming patients who were “problems to their families and nuisances to themselves…into useful members of society,” even as it also noted that some neurologists denounced the operation. It’s less likely Joe and Rose read another, more specialized article, this one in the August 1941 issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association, that warned against the use of lobotomies until more research could be done.41
The nature of the communication between Kennedy and Freeman is unknown—Joe never wrote or talked about what was said, and no other records have come to light. But one can guess that Freeman impressed upon him the progressive nature of the procedure, the positive results he had seen in cases like Rosemary’s, and the likelihood that the operation would alleviate the young Kennedy’s depression and control her tantrums and emerging sexual drive, thus permitting her to remain with the family for the remainder of her life. Perhaps he also articulated to Joe the astonishing thesis of the book he and Watts had just completed and were about to publish: “In the past, it’s been considered that if a person does not think clearly and correctly, it is because he doesn’t have ‘brains enough.’ It is our intention to show that under certain circumstances, an individual can think more clearly and more productively with less brain in actual operation.” The results, they claimed, backed them up: 63 percent of their patients had improved, 23 percent had not changed, and 14 percent were in poorer condition.42
Kennedy evidently liked what he heard, or at least thought the risk worth taking—in his mind, it seems, the procedure was a kind of silver bullet that could simultaneously help his daughter and spare his family the embarrassments that could result from her violent outbursts and nocturnal wanderings. And so, on a cold day in mid- or late November 1941, Rosemary was transported to the hospital and the operation was performed: Watts drilled two holes into her skull, inserted a surgical instrument, and cut the tissue connecting the frontal lobes to the rest of her brain.43
“The doctors told my father it was a good idea,” Eunice later told an interviewer.44
The results were disastrous. Rosemary came out far worse than she had been before. Though in time she recovered some of her motor skills, she lost much of her memory and her speech, and her cognitive disabilities went from mild to severe. The surgery had destroyed a vital part of her brain, obliterating years of emotional and intellectual development and leaving her completely unable to care for herself. Thenceforth she walked with her foot turned in awkwardly, and her vocabulary would be limited to a few words. Not all of these results were known right away, but certainly the hospital staff understood immediately that things had gone horribly awry. The attending nurse was so distraught by the outcome that she left the profession, never to return.45
How soon Jack and his siblings came to understand the extent of the calamity that had befallen their sister is not clear. The Kennedys were a family that fetishized the appearance of unbounded success, and they were fiercely protective of one another; they could be masters of opacity and denial when the situation called for it. They had years of practice in concealing the nature of Rosemary’s condition; this now continued. Soon after the operation, she was moved to Craig House, in Beacon, New York, an exclusive facility where the wealthy hid away their disabled or mentally ill family members. Joe determined that only he should have contact with the Craig House staff, and only he should visit Rosemary. Such was his authority that the rest of the family complied, even if, as Doris Kearns Goodwin suggests, “her sudden disappearance must have been met by dozens of questions that were never fully answered, surrounding the incident with an aura of forbidden mystery….[Why] after all these years, did she have to be institutionalized now? And why couldn’t any of the family see her? And most ominously, why wouldn’t anyone really talk about what was happening?” Or, as family biographer Laurence Leamer hauntingly puts it, “In this family where all the important events of the day were discussed over the dinner table, surely it was time to confront Joe with what he had done, to have it out, to discuss, to cry, to ask God’s mercy and forgiveness, and then go on. But it did not happen.”46
Instead, a kind of erasure occurred, made possible by Joe’s iron grip on the flow of information. Jean and Teddy, ages thirteen and nine, accepted their father’s explanation that Rosemary had gone to teach at a school for disabled kids in the Midwest and that the doctors felt it best that she not visit her fa
mily. Eunice, her closest sibling (they had played tennis and swum as kids, hiked the Swiss Alps together, toured Notre-Dame in Paris), later said she did not know where Rosemary was for at least ten years after November 1941. Patricia and Bobby likewise seemed to be in the dark. The older trio of Joe Junior, Jack, and Kick surely knew more (Kick had helped investigate the psychosurgical options beforehand), though perhaps not much more, as their father withheld a lot of details prior to the operation and forbade visits to Rosemary afterwards. In the months to come he continued to conceal the truth—in letters to Jack in 1942 and 1943 he reported that Rosemary was “swimming every day,” “looking good,” “getting along quite happily,” and “feeling better.” In early 1944 he wrote to Joe Junior and Kick along the same circumspect lines, in almost identical language.47
Rose, for her part, went silent on the matter, at least as far as the family record is concerned. In an upbeat round-robin letter to her other children in December 1941, mere weeks after the operation, she chronicled the various activities of the rest of the brood but did not mention Rosemary, which was unusual. The silence continued in 1942 and 1943 and 1944—in her many group letters from these years, which averaged one or two per month, one finds not a single mention of her eldest daughter.48
Had Rose agreed to her daughter’s operation in advance? The record is murky. In her memoirs she suggested she had, but there is fragmentary evidence that she expressed opposition to her husband beforehand and urged him not to proceed. In an interview late in life, conducted long after she wrote her memoirs, she claimed she had learned about the operation and its devastating consequences only when she visited Rosemary (in Jefferson, Wisconsin, where she had been moved in 1949) sometime after Joe suffered a stroke in 1961. Now ninety, she recalled that the operation “erased all those years of effort I had put into her. All along I had continued to believe that she could have lived her life as a Kennedy girl, just a little slower. But then it was all gone in a matter of minutes.” Yet even then Rose could swiftly pivot, rationalizing that the nuns in Jefferson were “marvelous” and that “at least there was always the knowledge that she was well cared for.”49
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