Rosemary Kennedy

In 1918, Joe and Rose Kennedy had their first daughter, Rosemary. She experienced developmental difficulties as a child and had trouble keeping up in school. When she was 23, her father arranged for her to undergo a lobotomy, which left her profoundly handicapped for the rest of her life. The truth about Rosemary was kept hidden for decades. We’re joined by historian Kate Clifford Larson, author of the New York Times bestseller ‘Rosemary: The Hidden Kennedy Daughter,’ to discuss Rosemary’s life and legacy.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:09):
What do you know about Rosemary Kennedy.

Speaker 2 (00:11):
Well, I associate her with lobotomies.

Speaker 3 (00:14):
That is unfortunately the most top of mine thoughts, which
is of itself very tragic. And I honestly I also
think of RFK Junior in sort of their family's relationship
or lack thereof, with modern medicine, and sort of I
see him as a legacy of you know, I was
raised in a Catholic family.

Speaker 2 (00:35):
You know, we all know that there are families that
have mental illness or different mental and physical disabilities that
instead of dealing with it historically, we've you know, forced
these people into institutions or into treatment.

Speaker 3 (00:47):
And again, I don't know as much.

Speaker 2 (00:49):
About her as a person, but I guess i'd think
of her story as part of the many tragedies of
the Kennedy family.

Speaker 4 (01:03):
I'm George Saveres, I'm Lyra Smith, and this is United
States of Kennedy, a podcast about our cultural fascination with
the Kennedy dynasty. Every week we go into one aspect
of the Kennedy story, and today we're talking about Rosemary Kennedy.

Speaker 1 (01:19):
She was the first daughter born to Joe and Rose.
Her fate was one of the great shames of the
Kennedy family, although it's not as well known today as
we thought.

Speaker 4 (01:28):
Yeah, her story was originally hidden by the family, and
it took years for even her siblings to know the
truth about what really happened to her.

Speaker 1 (01:36):
In short, Rosemary experienced developmental difficulties as a child. She
had trouble keeping up in school. The exact nature of
her disabilities is contested and obviously tied up with the
biases of her time. But when she was twenty three
years old, her father arranged to have her lobotomized.

Speaker 4 (01:55):
Now we're going to explain what a lobotomy entailed at
the time in some detail, and it is pretty gruesome,
so fair warning.

Speaker 1 (02:03):
So in a lobotomy, the patient is sedated but awake.
Surgeons cut through their skull to the brain tissue and
using an instrument, and this is the most common description
of the instrument, an ice pick like tool is used
to cut connections between the prefrontal cortex and the rest

(02:25):
of the brain. While this is happening, the patient is
asked to recite something memorized or count backwards. In Rosemary's case,
they cut until she could no longer speak.

Speaker 4 (02:36):
So after the lobotomy. Rosemary was left pretty much incapacitated,
and she was institutionalized almost immediately and lived in various
psychiatric facilities for decades.

Speaker 1 (02:47):
Today, to discuss Rosemary and her life and the Kennedy family,
were joined by historian Kate Clifford Larson, author of Rosemary
the Hidden Kennedy Daughter. Kate, thanks for being here, Thank
you for having me. It's great to be here. So
we're going to talk about Rosemary Kennedy today. We were wondering, like,

(03:08):
what was it about Rosemary or about her story that
got you interested.

Speaker 5 (03:14):
Well, I grew up in New England and grew up
knowing about the Kennedys and everything they did and didn't
do and things like that. And when I became a
historian and started writing about women, American women, I was
always kind of hyper alert for women that we didn't
know much about. And in two thousand and five, Rosemary died.

(03:36):
Two thousand and six, Rosemary died, and there was a
beautiful little obituary in the Boston Globe. I live in Massachusetts,
and I read the obituary, and of course I had
known about Rosemary, but I didn't really know her. And
it was a beautiful picture, and I thought, Oh, such
a sad story. You know. I wondered what really happened
to her. I was working on another book at the time,

(03:58):
but I thought to myself, well, the JFK Library is
right here. When I'm done with this book project, I
will go to the library and see what I can find.
Maybe I'll write an article for the Boston Globe magazine
about her. Because I didn't imagine there would be much.
So in two thousand and eight, I was finally ready

(04:18):
to go and look, and lo and behold, when I arrived,
the library had started opening up Rose Kennedy's diaries and
journals and letters. Rose was the mother, the matriarch of
the family, and so I was shocked and surprised and
deeply moved. And I decided then that I would try

(04:41):
to write a book. I knew that there was enough
materials there to do it, and it took me six years.
There were bumps along the way, but over those six years,
more information, more archival material was opened up with the library,
which opened up more of the story for me. And
so finally the book came out in twenty fifteen, and

(05:04):
it was quite a journey, and I Rosemary was very
special and I have lots of feelings and opinions about
the family, and maybe we can get into that. But
she was a lovely, lovely young woman born at the
wrong time, and this is what happened to her because
of when she was.

Speaker 4 (05:23):
Born when you started doing the research. Obviously there are
archival things that were helpful, and there's primary sources, but
what was the general public's view of who Rosemary Kennedy
was and what was the general public knowledge about her?
I mean, it's one of the things that is very
fascinating about this whole thing is despite people's obsession with

(05:43):
the Kennedy family, there is this or there was, I
think until you know your book, and until some things
that have come out since then, there was this real
kind of denial about this specific element of the Kennedy story. So,
you know, growing up in New England, knowing people that
were in that milieu, what was the general knowledge in

(06:03):
the public.

Speaker 5 (06:04):
Like, So it was knowledge that had evolved over time
because the family kept its secret for twenty years and
then when Jack Kennedy became president, Eunice pushed him to
make it more public that Rosemary they didn't talk about
the lobotomy, but they made her story a little bit
more public and that she was living in an institution

(06:25):
in Wisconsin, and then that evolved. In the nineteen seventies
and nineteen eighties, more of the story was exposed. I
think Darris Kerns Goodwin actually really exposed a lot of
the story about Rosemary having the lobotomy. Part of the
issue was that rose and Joe kept it a secret

(06:45):
from the kids for twenty years or in almost twenty years,
so they didn't even know the details themselves until finally
they made the effort to find out what happened to her,
and that was an emotional, I would imagine, a mootional
journey for many of them. And because they were public
people and they were into politics and social work, they

(07:08):
needed to find a way forward to make a difference
in the world because of what happened to their sister.
So for me, that was the part of the story
that I was not aware of. The family's journey above
and beyond telling stories about Rosemary as a little girl,
et cetera, but the journey of the family to come
to the point where they knew they had to tell

(07:30):
the truth and make a difference for Rosemary.

Speaker 1 (07:33):
And for people like her and other families, that's something
that I'm very confused about how that worked. You know
that they spent twenty years, really I guess not communicating
with her. I assume the siblings, and I think my
understanding of it is that their family dynamics were that

(07:55):
if Joe said this is so, then that's it, and
nobody was question him or pushing him. But twenty years
is such a long time, and they're growing up, they
are adults. It's just I don't know if you know,
if there was communication or the siblings thought they were
communicating with her, so.

Speaker 5 (08:13):
They were not communicating with her. I know that the
three oldest Joe, Junior, Jack, and Kick, were aware of
something had happened to Rosemary. I'm not sure. Well. I
think Kick must have figured out that it was a
lobotomy because her mother had asked her to look into
these two doctors in Washington, d c. Who ended up

(08:35):
performing the surgery, and Kick was against anything that those
doctors were doing. So once Rosemary had surgery and then
she disappears from the family, I'm sure that Kick figured out, oh,
this is what happened. She must have told her older brothers.
There are a couple of letters in the Kennedy Library
where Joe is communicating with the three of them and

(08:56):
reporting that Rosemary's doing very well. At that point she
was at a different facility outside of New York City
and that she was swimming every day and doing fine,
which was a complete lie, which made me realize that
they did not actually physically see her. And then there's
World War Two, the boys go off to Ward, Joe
is killed, Kick has a break with the family anyway,

(09:17):
because she stays in England and marries an Englishman. He dies,
and she stays there in England, a strange from her family,
and then she dies in the late nineteen forties. So
there's a lot of trauma in the family at the time,
and so I think that Rosemary sort of took a
back seat to anything that the kids were thinking about

(09:40):
and doing. I believe it was Eunice who probably really
pushed because she was the closest to Rosemary growing up.
She sort of was the younger sister who kind of
helped Rosemary do everything and helped guide her. So I
think Eunice figured it out and did see her. We
don't have the record from the institution in Wisconsin where

(10:02):
she was kept. But I think that Eunice knew, and
eventually she became confident enough to tell her siblings. I
know that Jack visited her when he was thinking of
running for the president in nineteen fifty eight, and he
visited her, and from what I saw in the archives,
he was shocked and profoundly affected by what he saw.

(10:22):
So he was easy for Eunice to kind of work
with once he got elected to pass legislation to make
a difference for mothers and children and mental health issues, etc.
So the kids were activated because of what happened to
their sister.

Speaker 4 (10:38):
Just to back up for a second and take it
like from the very beginning, I'm wondering if you can
tell us a little bit about Rosemary's childhood and sort
of when the family became aware that she might have
special needs, that she might have intellectual disabilities, and how
Rose and Joe, her mother and father, reacted to that
and how that affected their relationship with her.

Speaker 5 (11:00):
So it's really an interesting timeline, and it also reflects
the time period in which Rose and Joe started their
family and were having children.

Speaker 4 (11:10):
So she was.

Speaker 5 (11:11):
Born in nineteen eighteen in September, and according to Rose
an interview with Rose, her birth was very difficult, not
the birth itself. It was at home and there was
a doctor, Frederick Good, who was supposed to arrive to
deliver Rosemary, but he was delayed at nearby hospitals because

(11:35):
the Spanish flu was sweeping through Boston at the time,
and he was delayed taking care of other patients. And
a nurse that had been hired by the family was
there to comfort Rose and keep her comfortable until the
doctor could arrive, and she had been trained as a
nurse to not deliver the baby, that her role was
to wait till the doctor arrived, and so she did

(11:59):
everything she could prevent the birth of the baby, including
holding the baby back in the birth canal for two
hours so that the doctor could arrive and deliver little Rosemary,
which of course we know today is incredibly dangerous, and
it appears that Rosemary likely suffered with some sort of

(12:20):
brain damage or lack of oxygen that have impaired her
intellectual life in the future. And Rose reported that at
first they were so happy to have a little girl.
They had the two older boys, Jack and his brother Joe,
and she had sisters. So Rose was so excited to
have her own little girl, and they didn't suspect that

(12:41):
anything was wrong until a little over a year later
they had Kick, and then a year after that they
had Eunice. And those two girls developed very quickly. And
I laugh and I write this in the book that Eunice,
who was always filled with the energy and just out
there all the time, you know, Kick developed a long
you know, she started walking at a year old and

(13:02):
talking and blah blah blah. And Eunice she's up walking
around at ten months. She's talking and telling everybody what
to do, is like a year old. Whereas Rosemary she
didn't start walking till, you know, a year and a
half old. She didn't really talk till she was older
than that. And then they noticed that she had difficulty
riding a tricycle or sledding on a hill. She had

(13:26):
difficulty determining right and left, whereas the younger siblings were
all on schedule. So they began to suspect that something

(13:52):
was not quite right. Interestingly, Rose said in one of
her interviews that when Rosemary was a baby and she
wasn't developed as quickly as the two older boys, she
thought it was because girls didn't develop as quickly as boys.
Did you know that was kind of typical for the
time period at any rate. Rosemary eventually goes to kindergarten

(14:12):
in Brookline, Massachusetts, and the teachers recognize immediately that she's
delayed compared to her five year old friends and other
students in the classroom, and she's held back a couple
of times in kindergarten. Kick in Eunice go to kindergarten
with her, and then go to first grade. Eventually they
completely bypass her because Rosemary just cannot get the lessons.

(14:34):
She can't read, and she has difficulty with her letters, etc.
And then that's when Rose and Joe figure out something
is not quite right in their view of Rosemary, and
they didn't know what to do because back in the
nineteen twenties, they didn't have special needs classes. They didn't
have teachers in the classroom to help kids who were

(14:55):
struggling with their lessons that were more developmentally delayed. They
didn't have any of that. So by the time she was,
you know, ten years old, they had to send her
away to different institutions that claimed that they would help
her develop intellectually et cetera. And the quality of those institutions,
of course, we questioned today because their methodologies were flawed

(15:17):
and not necessarily healthy and helpful.

Speaker 4 (15:19):
And obviously there wasn't the medical knowledge and the language
we have today to describe what was happening. But was
there some consensus with their flawed knowledge of what was
going on where they could Did the family say, Rosemary
has this affliction? Rosemary is you know, has this disease
or something? Or was it just like a vague discomfort with.

Speaker 5 (15:43):
So they were told that she was and I'm using
the words from that time period, that she was a moron,
that she was mentally retarded, and that she should be
put in an institution and left there and separated from society.
To Joe and Rose's credit, they would not accept that
and they would not say those words. So they kind

(16:06):
of pretended that there was really nothing wrong with her,
and they kept sending her to different schools, mostly Catholic
run schools, because they were deeply, deeply Catholic and very
tied into the Catholic structure, the archbishop, the bishop, the nuns,
and the different orders of nuns. So they always found
a school in sympathetic people within the church and in

(16:28):
those institutions who would help Rosemary and take care of her.
But it was a struggle, but they were bound and
determined to keep her to be part of the family.
And that's part of that ethic in the family, which
I still see today with the younger generations, is that
family is first. Family is everything, and you are your siblings'

(16:48):
best friends, and the older kids take care of the
younger kids, and that is it. Nobody interferes with that
bond and that commitment and that family ethic. And so
her siblings were there to protect her all the time.
They played tennis with her, they swam with her, they
sailed with her. They told her she was a great sailor,

(17:10):
even though she couldn't sail very well, but they congratulated
her anyway. And she always felt valued and loved in
that family setting, which I give them so much credit
for and they still do that today through their work
with nonprofits, etc. But that's how they were raised and
that's what Rosemary felt at home. Also, rose had a

(17:32):
strategy with Rosemary. It seemed like she really focused on
helping her develop the skills that she thought were the
skills that were going to enable her to be able
to join her siblings. Yeah, she would spend an amazing
amount of time with her school lessons, you know, working

(17:52):
with her after school. So later on, when she grew
much older, they would hire tutors, but when she was
a young child, it was Rose that would sit with
her and do the wrote reading and letters and the
math problems and things like that. She just knew that
Rosemary would respond to her better than some tutor. So

(18:12):
I just I admire that about Rose, that she did that,
and they really really tried to help her, and they
just thought it was a maturity thing. They wanted to
deny that it was an intellectual disability. They really wanted
it to be a maturity thing because she was immature
as well. But of course Rose also because of their

(18:33):
financial resources, she had beautiful clothing, so she always looked beautiful,
and she had makeup, and she would always make sure
that Rosemary looked beautiful and acted beautiful. So that's what
within Rose's world, that's what she saw she could do
for her daughter.

Speaker 4 (18:52):
There's this sort of not paradox, but there are two
sides to Rose, from what I understand and from the book.
On the one hand, as you're saying she spent so
much time and energy and what we would now call,
you know, emotional labor to really spend time with Rosemary
and figure out how she can best self actualize in

(19:12):
the world. And then on the other hand, she did
have this reputation of being such a cold political operative
and wanting the family to have a good reputation. And
even compared to Joe, I think you're right that the
kids almost had more of an intimacy with their father
and would always you know, address their letters to Daddy,
whereas with Rose it would be much more formal. So

(19:35):
what is that tension about? I mean, what is like
where does Rose's kind of like empathy and maternal instincts,
you know, and and her sort of identity as this
like madetriarch of this great American dynasty begin.

Speaker 5 (19:48):
So that's a great question, and it's really complicated. I
think part of it goes back to Rose's own relationship
with her father, who was Honey Fitzgerald. He was the
mayor of Boss Famous, famous, kind of a wild character,
and she was his right hand man in many ways.
She always was out in public with him. Her father

(20:08):
was everything, her mother was shy, retired, stayed at home,
didn't like the public. So Rose was that person. So
she knew that image was everything. And while she loved
her children, she just wanted them to grow up to
be independent and to focus on their father because it
was a man's world and he was the one that

(20:29):
was going to give them access to this world. And
when Rosemary became a teenager, that's when things really got
dicey for Rose. Her stern kind of rigidness didn't work
with Rosemary. She didn't obey her mother anymore. She just,
you know, between hormones for a teenage girl and her

(20:51):
disabilities and all this other stuff that was going on,
she just did not listen to her mother. She listened
to her father sort of because he seemed to be
more patient with her. But of course he was very
controlling too, but she didn't see it the same way
she saw her mother as controlling. So Rose bears the
brunt of that kind of stern mother image. But that's

(21:16):
how she saw that she could raise those nine children
and keep them in line and have the family reputation
maintained and blossomed.

Speaker 1 (21:24):
It seems like there was a lot of conflict around
Rosemary developing at that time, like becoming a young woman
and the concern about her weight. I mean, rose had
the Saturday morning weigh ins with the kids, and I
can also see Rosemary feeling very frustrated by that, although
like from her letters, it seems like she does still

(21:46):
really want to please her parents and be the appropriate
weight that they have decided is write for her. But
I mean, maybe this is just a very personal take
on it. But when I read about that, I think
about how gospel it is to control your body's size
and development and growth at that time, and how frustrating

(22:07):
that would be and how hurtful it would be. And
do we know how what Rosemary felt about that.

Speaker 5 (22:16):
So from her letters, you can see that it is
a concern for her that she is gaining weight off
and on. She's losing weight, gaining weight, you know, like
teenagers do. But the control by the mother demanding that
everybody get weight in that's horrifying today. That's like child
abuse today. She just was fixated on how everyone should

(22:37):
look and the athletic and Rosemary struggled with all of that.
So she did feel the pressure, definitely felt the pressure.
But in a way when she was at the boarding schools.
She kind of was liberated a little bit from that
because it wasn't constant pressure like the other kids were feeling.
And so you know, Rosemary was not intellectually emotional able

(23:00):
to manage that. And if the dress didn't fit, then
get her size larger. I think that's just what she
was thinking. And you can see from the different photographs
at the Kennedy Library over the years, Rosemary's physique changes.
Sometimes she's heavier, sometimes she's thinner. All within a year
or two years or three years, you can see that

(23:22):
that transformation. So it's tough when you think about how
she struggled with that along with everything else she had
to struggle with too. It's really it's sad. It's very sad.
Perhaps that's the only thing that rose thought she could
control in her children's lives, other than their faith, making
sure that they went to church and that they upheld
the family reputation. It was Joe that kind of guided

(23:44):
them into their future. So yeah, it's tragic, it's really tragic.

Speaker 4 (23:49):
And how did this compare to how her sisters were treated.
Was she at some point especially singled out in terms
of issues about her weight and about her body or
did the Unice and Kick also experience this kind of
a very strict, intense oversight.

Speaker 5 (24:09):
So they did experience the same strict oversight, although their
bodies were not the same as Rosemary's, and they were
very athletic. And Rosemary, even if she wanted to be
an athlete, she could not because she was not coordinated.
She couldn't figure out how to be athletic. So they
were able to manage their weight and whatever. And Unice

(24:32):
actually struggled with intestinal issues, so she was always very
very thin anyway. And Kick was just a very athletic,
outgoing young woman who had confidence. She had these two
older brothers that admired her and took her everywhere, so
she was good. The other children, I'm not so clear on.
I didn't spend as much time on their childhoods as

(24:52):
I did on Rosemary. But of course I know as
adults they got letters from their mother criticizing their look
of that they were at some wedding or some event
and some public thing and she would criticize their dress
or whatever. It was like, really, mom, but that's who

(25:14):
rose was. That's who she was.

Speaker 1 (25:16):
I want to set up a little bit of the
social context at this time, so they're sending Rosemary away,
but they're not really acknowledging exactly what her disabilities are.
And the thing that we've come across a lot at
this period of time. One there is of course, like

(25:38):
they're concerned about political future and the public facing element
of the family. But also this is I mean, correct
me if I'm wrong, but the height of eugenics. So
could you just explain a little bit what the thought
process was around eugenics and like how that would have
impacted Joe and Rose's, you know, presentation of Rosemary.

Speaker 5 (26:00):
So, genics was big in the nineteen teens, in the
twenties and going into the nineteen thirties, and that was
a system that believed in people who were intellectually disabled
should be shut away. Some people took it as far
as experimented on and Rose and Joe were in that environment,
so they knew what the culture was saying and they

(26:23):
did not want to go along with that. They're admirable
in that they resisted those calls. Not the people were
calling them out specifically, but they knew that the world
was looking at people with intellectual disabilities and saying they
should be put away. They are useless to society. They
shouldn't get married, they shouldn't have children, etc. So they

(26:45):
tried to disguise it as well as possible and as
much as possible, And I know it hurt them because
they wanted her to be as successful and exciting and
jubilant as her siblings. It just wasn't possible. So it
was easy to send her away to these schools, and
because they were very wealthy, they could pay a lot

(27:06):
of money for very expensive schools. They failed when they
sent her to schools that were not They didn't know
how to accommodate young people with intellectual disabilities, so they
kept shifting around. So in the meantime, however, when they
were out in public, they had trained Rosemary, which is
remarkable they were able to do this to not talk

(27:28):
in public. So people thought she was just shy and demure,
and the older she got, the taller, more beautiful. They
just found her mysterious because she didn't talk in public.
She would smile and the whole thing, but she and
maybe she might say hello, nice to meet you, but
that was it. So of course they're just like, who

(27:51):
is this mysterious, beautiful Kennedy girl? And Rose and Joe
were just nervous all the time that someone might discover
the truth about her. And so when they went to
England and they're in the public eye every single day,
they managed her fairly well, but it was hard. Someone
had to be with her constantly, and they wanted the

(28:12):
other siblings to enjoy themselves and learn and be with
diplomats and kings and queens, and it was hard with Rosemary.

(28:38):
So when they put her in the Assumption Convent school
and the sisters there were remarkable and wonderful, and they
gave her confidence and they made her feel needed and helpful,
and they told her, you know, they had her working
with little three year old children and she told they

(28:59):
told her that she was a junior teacher. She was,
so she felt valued and Worthwhile that was a magical
time in Rosemary's life, it's too bad that it couldn't
last for the rest of her life.

Speaker 1 (29:12):
And that was a totally different structure of schooling than
anything that she'd experienced before. That was a Montossori school.

Speaker 5 (29:20):
Yeah, so in Montessori, each child learns along their own
path and they're given the tools and they're encouraged in
this wonderful environment to learn at their own pace, with encouragement,
of course, and this is what happened. These nuns were
using the Montessori method. They had been trained by Maria

(29:42):
Montessori in Italy, and so they were like among the
first few to start doing this and it worked beautifully
with Rosemary. And so I remember one of the nuns
gave an interview and she talked about lessons for Rosemary
were every day, all day long, and she didn't realize
they were lessons. They would set the table and Rosemary

(30:05):
would count the silverware and the dishes and the glasses,
and then she would do the dishes and dry them
and count them again and then count them as she
put them away. And it was just joy rather than
a chore. It was something fun. And she could by
that time, by the late nineteen thirties, she could read
a little bit, probably on a second grade third grade level,

(30:28):
so she could read little books to three year olds
and that made her feel successful. So you know, it
was it was perfect for Rosemary. It was just a
great path for her, and I know, a great relief
to Rose and Joe.

Speaker 4 (30:42):
Just so we can have the timeline. This is in
her teens, This is like high school years.

Speaker 5 (30:45):
This is so they went to England in nineteen thirty
eight because Joe had been appointed ambassador to Great Britain
by Franklin Delmer Roosevelt, our president at the time, and
so they moved to the ambassador's residence in England, and
this is when that took place. So she was twenty
years old at the time. Yeah, so it was perfect.

Speaker 4 (31:07):
And then did the breaking point, so to speak, happen
when she then moved back home and she did not
have the structure that she had with the sisters exactly.

Speaker 5 (31:17):
The family in nineteen forty had moved back except for Joe,
to the United States nineteen thirty nine, heading into nineteen forty,
but World War two started and it was dangerous in England,
so Joe decided Rosemary had to go back home. And
rose was really upset because she was not used to

(31:38):
taking care of Rosemary and didn't know what to do.
So it sort of began the downfall for Rosemary. She
just was drifting from one place to the next. And
the Assumption schools in the United States were not as
advanced as the Assumption schools in Europe. They weren't teaching
Montessori at the time, so it was a very difficult

(31:59):
time transition for everybody. And that began the downfall for
Rosemary because they could not control her anymore.

Speaker 4 (32:08):
And there was a summer camp that she went to
to be a camp counselor, if I'm remembering correctly, because
you know, she had the training or experience working with
young kids, and they thought maybe that could be a
place where she could feel productive and feel useful.

Speaker 1 (32:23):
Right.

Speaker 5 (32:24):
The Sullivan's sisters had a camp in western Massachusetts, and
their family had known the Kennedys. So when rose reached
out to them, the two young Sullivan's sisters said, oh,
of course, missus Kennedy, we'd be happy to give a
junior counselor job to Rosemary. She did not tell them
about Rosemary, and when they arrived it was within a

(32:45):
matter of days they realized, oh, this is going to
be a problem. And within two weeks they said, you
have to come get Rosemary. You know, she's wandering off
in the middle of the night, she doesn't know what
she's doing. It's we can't do this. And rose was furious.
So this is confusing to me, why she would do
that to these two young women. She went off to

(33:06):
Maine to Elizabeth Arden Spa and the family. Joe's right
hand man Eddie Moore had to go out to Western
Massachusett's pick up Rosemary and take her to Philadelphia where
Assumption sisters were willing to take her on, but they
had no idea what they were taking on. And then

(33:27):
she was moved again to New Jersey and then moved
to Washington, d C. It was just Rose had washed
her hands. Sadly, it was really tragic that she did that.

Speaker 1 (33:39):
Not only just Rose and Job, but at the time,
there's this there's so much concerned about sexuality and a
woman or a young woman and using the label of
the time of being labeled a moron or being feeble minded.
Like I don't know if was based in real events

(34:03):
specific to Rosemary, but there was just this kind of
overwhelming concern about her having sex.

Speaker 5 (34:09):
So part of that is the Catholicism. You know, Rose
worried about that with her other daughters too, particularly Kick,
who fell in love with the Englishman and Rose freaked
out and said, Okay, he's a Protestant, you can't marry him,
and cut off all of relationship with Kick, who you know,
was like I love this guy. I'm going to get

(34:29):
married him and have sex with him. I don't know
if they did before they got married, but anyway, that
was a concern of Roses. But I think Rosemary, according
to a couple of letters, she was very flirtatious and
very outgoing when she had the opportunity to be outgoing,
and she wanted to date boys. And there was a

(34:50):
note that she wrote complaining about how when her brothers
took her to dances, that they were boys that she
wanted to dance with, but her brothers kept her dance
car full, so she wasn't allowed to dance with them.
And so partly that was a concern that these young
men might figure out she was intellectually disabled, and that
they might tell other people. But also, you know, she

(35:13):
was a beautiful young girl and men were coming up
to her, and rose was worried about those men. Would
they push her into a compromising situation and she'd have
sex with them, and that would be Yike's you know. Oh,
And when she was in Washington, d c. In the
fall of nineteen forty into nineteen forty one, she was

(35:34):
at a convent school, another convent school, and she would
escape at night and go into the city, and the
nuns would be out at two o'clock in the morning
trying to find her, and they'd find her and her
clothes would be wrinkled and have leaves stuck to them,
and her hair would have leaves in it and grass,
and so they were very worried something was going on.

(35:57):
And I'm sure it was. You know, there were young
servicemen in Washington, d c. Waiting to ship off, and
they the nuns noted that she'd been drinking, so you know,
she was having an independent moment in her life, having
some fun, and rose and Joe were worried.

Speaker 4 (36:15):
So of course this is all leading to this, you know,
really great shame in the Kennedy family, which is that
Joe ultimately had Rosemary lobotomized. And I'm wondering if you
can talk a little bit about the various different people
involved in this decision. You know, there was so much
secrecy involved. So at what point did Joe decide to
go rogue? Who knew?

Speaker 5 (36:36):
What?

Speaker 4 (36:37):
Was he aware of all the risks to what extent
was it sort of earnestly something he did for Rosemary's benefit,
as he claimed, versus you know, for the family, his reputation, etc.
Like what was the decision making process like.

Speaker 5 (36:54):
So for Joe, And I'm coming down hard on Joe
on this. I think he wanted the problem on and
I know that Rose wanted the problem taken care of
but not gone in that sense. And she did investigate
some psychiatric hospitals that she was not pleased with their setting,
so she didn't want to put Rosemary in those settings.

(37:16):
But then Joe was friends with the priest that ran
this convent school, and he was associated with these two doctors,
Walter Freeman and James Watts, a neuro psychologist and a neurosurgeon,
and they were experimenting with lobotomies, and I think that

(37:37):
was the connection that Joe needed to move ahead and
have Rosemary lobotomized. I think Rose was against the idea,
and as I mentioned earlier, she reached out to Kick,
who was a journalist at the time in Washington, DC,
and she asked Kick to investigate these two doctors and
what they were doing. And Kick came back with the

(37:58):
report that it's not good, the outcomes are not good.
You can't do this to rose Mary. And so I'm
sure that Rose conveyed that to Joe, and later on
Rose alluded to the fact that she did not know
that Joe was going to go ahead and do this.
I don't know if I believe her or not. Possibly
he just went ahead and did it, and then Rose

(38:19):
just accepted it and that was it. But the two
men operated on her, and the surgery was a complete failure,
and she came out of it completely and totally disabled.

Speaker 4 (38:31):
Famously, the siblings did not know about this for a
very long time. I mean, just purely logistically, how is
it possible that the people closest to her did not
know the truth?

Speaker 5 (38:43):
Well, Kick knew, and obviously the two older brothers knew
to tell the younger siblings. Probably they understood why involved them,
and it was easy to tell them that she had
been sent to a psychiatric kind of place where she
would be happy and taken care of and we wouldn't
have to worry about her anymore. I'm sure the siblings

(39:05):
could understand that, like it was just another facility, another school,
and that's good. But the older ones they knew, but
they didn't challenge their parents because they never challenged their parents. Really,
and that first letter I remember, I was shocked, and
I write about this in my book. It was done

(39:25):
sometime in November of nineteen forty one. And I remember
the first letter that Rose wrote to all the kids.
She had this habit of writing one letter to all
of them, and the letter was copied and sent around
to all of them. It was the same letter, and
it was the first letter where Rosemary's name was not

(39:47):
added to the list of all the other children's names,
and that shocked me. And her name was not on
any of the letters after that. So that's creepy and
sad and confusing and regretful.

Speaker 1 (40:01):
Clearly, do we know how soon after the lobotomi Rose
would have seen Rosemary.

Speaker 5 (40:08):
I actually don't think she saw Rosemary again. I don't
think she did. Did Joe, Yes, Joe did, but not
many times. I think he saw her in the hospital
in Washington, d C. Once she was sent to the
facility outside of New York City. I don't think he went.
It was too risky for him to be spotted. That's
when Eddie Moore and his wife Mary, they were the assistants.

(40:32):
They were like aunt and uncle to all the kids.
They went and visited Rosemary all the time.

Speaker 4 (40:38):
And did any other family members visit.

Speaker 5 (40:40):
Not until the nineteen fifties, not until the nineteen fifties.
So it is very, very sad. And as I said,
Jack went to see Rosemary. She was transferred to Wisconsin
in a nineteen forty nine to a Catholic institution in Jefferson, Wisconsin,
and she was taken care of there beautifully. And that's

(41:01):
where Jack saw her for the first time and was shocked,
and it stunned him. So it did change him. And
once the other siblings learned of it, it changed them too,
and they once they had the power to make a difference,
they started to make a difference.

Speaker 4 (41:34):
I think what you're describing as you know, they were
too young and too you know, obedient to their parents
when this all went down, and then you sort of
grow up. You are concerned with your own life, and
obviously all of them had incredibly successful careers, and then
at some point you're looking this thing in the face
and you are you can't believe that this is part

(41:54):
of your family's legacy. So what was it that changed
when they wanted to kind of, you know, do right
by their sister.

Speaker 5 (42:02):
So I think Unice is the source of this transformation.
With the siblings she started in social work. She was
that empathetic person. She had been the closest to Rosemary.
It mattered to her that she not be forgotten, and
she basically was forgotten. So through her efforts, I think

(42:23):
she clearly convinced her brother Jack to go visit Rosemary,
and that kept things rolling. So once he was elected president,
Eunice's passion in her work to convince people to take
care of people with disabilities could blossom. And she had
a nation behind her, you know, a federal government with

(42:43):
funding so that she could start not only the Special Olympics,
which was an organization that began before she got involved,
but she pushed Jack to create a new part of
the National Institute of Health that was dedicated to women
and children and women's health in particular and pregnancy because
everything at the National Institute of Health up until that

(43:05):
point was all about men. Experiments on men, testing drugs
on men, procedures, everything was about men. Women were and
children were second rate, third rate. And she made that
change because Jack was willing to pass the legislation to
make that difference. And she continued to be an advocate
for change and moving things forward for the rest of

(43:28):
her life. And her children have done the same thing.
And other Kennedy family members have done that. They have
been devoted to that. And when I was doing the
book and I interviewed the Shriver kids, I remember hearing
Anthony Shriver's voice. He was so passionate about Rosemary. He
said that they lived in Chicago, you know, when he
was a young man. I'm not sure how old he

(43:50):
is now, but maybe in the seventies, and he would
go to Jefferson, Wisconsin and stay with Rosemary, you know,
sleep on her floor, just to get to know her.
You know, Eunice raised her kids to be empathetic too.
And then he told me that, so he established Best Buddies,
which is a program where college children kids are paired

(44:11):
with intellectually disabled college age kids, so the Best Buddies.
And so he moved to Miami, and he built an
addition on his house so that Rosemary could come and
stay with him and get to know his children and
his family, and two nuns would accompany her and stay
and vacation with them.

Speaker 4 (44:30):
You know.

Speaker 5 (44:31):
It was just like, she's part of our family. I
don't want her to be hidden this whole time. And
after Joe died in nineteen sixteen nine, Rose started having
Rosemary come to Hyannas for two weeks and then the
same amount of time in Palm Beach, so the public
god a view of Rosemary for the first time. You know,

(44:51):
those paparazzi would be hiding behind bushes and they would
see Rosemary with the nuns, or she would be going
swimming because she could swim. She was a great swimmer.
And then you know, she started being out in the
open and people could see her. So those kids, they
made that difference, They made that happen.

Speaker 1 (45:08):
Sorry, I got a little confused there. Who was bringing
her to Hyannas.

Speaker 5 (45:13):
Rose eventually, after Joe died, she decided, at the children's
encouragement to bring Rosemary to Hyannas to spend time with
the family. Because Rose did not have a relationship with her.
She did go and see Rosemary in nineteen sixty two, Okay,

(45:34):
when Eunice said to her, I'm writing an article for
the Saturday Evening Post about Rosemary, and you know, basically
you can't stop me. And I think it would be
a good idea, basically if you went and visited Rosemary.
So the nuns who were taking care of her. They
mentioned when rose arrived for the first time, and this

(45:54):
is a little over twenty years, she hadn't seen her daughter.
The nuns reported that when Rosemary saw her mother, she
screamed and hit her. She hadn't seen her mother in
twenty years. She was angry. She knew who her mother was,
she knew who her father was, she knew who her
siblings were. They hadn't come to visit her, or not

(46:15):
all of them anyway. So yeah, that changed rose It
changed her.

Speaker 1 (46:20):
That is something that we didn't really hit on, which
is the description of Rosemary's physical tantrums or that she
could be physical with her siblings or with caretakers. And
I guess I never really understood how serious that was,
or if it was, how serious that issue was, if

(46:42):
you have any thoughts on the level of difficulty with her,
like physical lashing out right.

Speaker 5 (46:51):
It was Eunice that mentioned this In a couple of
her interviews that are at the John F. Kennedy Library
here in Boston. She relays stories of Rosemary getting angry
and striking out at people and hitting them and screaming
and yelling and kicking, and she remembers sometimes they would
call a doctor to come and the doctor would give

(47:11):
Rosemary little red pills, which I looked up what are
little red pills in the nineteen twenties and thirties, and
they're barbituates, So they would calm her down. The grandfather,
Honey Fitzgerald, she would attack him sometimes and just beat
on him. So they were very nervous about Rosemary striking

(47:32):
out at people. And there were other times where her
behavior did unsettle the family, like during the nineteen thirties
if they were at Hyanna's together. This is before you know,
in the summertime, there wasn't school for Rosemary to go to,
so she'd be at home and visitors would comment on
how you know, she just seemed odd and off, and

(47:53):
she would say and do weird things, and you know,
there would be tension in the house around her. So
there were issues. There were problems, clearly no one knew
how to deal with except the barbituates seemed to help
at some point with her raging anger.

Speaker 1 (48:11):
Were there examples of her odd behavior that people discussed her.

Speaker 5 (48:16):
There was one person that talked about how she would
come down stares at any time of the day, like
in a nightgown, which back in the thirties no women
did that ever, you know, be lunchtime or whenever, and
she just would not seem to care or notice what
was going on. There was another report of when they

(48:37):
would have events at the house, or they would have
a lot of guests at the house, they would send
Rosemary off with somebody else, like a caretaker of some sort,
and sometimes they would send her with relatives who could
be her companion, and it would be too much for Rosemary,
and sometimes she would come back from these excursions while

(48:59):
everyone else's partying at the house. She would come back
and be frustrated and angry and exhausted and freak out
on everybody and start screaming and hitting people. So it
was hard for her to control her emotions, her anger, frustration,
her sense of you know, I'm not a doctor, so
I don't know. But she clearly was not happy, and
they just thought sending her away for the day would help,

(49:22):
and it didn't because she would explode once she got home.
She stayed good until she got home and then she
let it go.

Speaker 4 (49:29):
So she as you said, she died in two thousand
and five. She lived a very long life. She was
I think eighty six when she passed. So what were
those years like between you know, her family getting back
in touch basically, and her seeing her mother again and
you know, through the final years of her life.

Speaker 5 (49:47):
So the caretakers that I spoke with told me that
she was very happy there in Wisconsin. She had her
own little house and the two caregivers would live with her.
But also she was part of the community, the disabled
community at the facility Saint Coletta's in Jefferson, Wisconsin, and
she had friends. So she would play cards with her

(50:08):
friends every day or sit with them every day. She
felt like she had a community and family. Her parents
paid for an Olympic sized pool to be built at
the facility, so she swam every day. That's how she
became a strong, good swimmer despite her disabilities. She walked
with a significant limp and her left side was damaged

(50:30):
from the lobotomy, and they worked with her. They hired
physical therapists to work with her who helped her move
better and get around, and they made her feel loved
and cared for. They became the substitute family for her,
and she was very well taken care of, very well.
Hence she lived to be eighty six years old.

Speaker 1 (50:51):
Yeah, and I think I my understanding of her abilities
after the lobotomy were that she couldn't speak and she
was paralyzed, But it sounds like she over time was
able to bring back some of those skills.

Speaker 5 (51:08):
Right, So when she was lobotomized, she actually could not
walk or talk, She couldn't do any of that. And
the first facility she was sent to outside of New
York City, they didn't give her any physical therapy or
occupational therapy or anything. So she still couldn't do any
of that until she got to Wisconsin, and slowly they
started adding physical therapy work with her. In the nineteen eighties,

(51:31):
the profession had changed and the institution brought in some
very well qualified, sophisticated physical therapists that worked with Rosemary
and got her. She could speak a few words, but
she couldn't carry on a conversation with anybody. So she
could speak a little bit better over the years, and

(51:51):
certainly her mobility improved dramatically under the care of these
physical therapists.

Speaker 1 (51:56):
So by the end, you know, she's playing cards with friends,
is she able to how well is she able to communicate?

Speaker 5 (52:02):
So I'm not sure how well they all communicated with
each other, but enough so that she felt happy and heard.
I don't know what the card games were. I'm not
sure if that even mattered. Whatever it was made her happy.
She loved routine. According to her caregivers, she got up
at like I'm going to just say seven o'clock. I
can't remember the exact time, but she would get up

(52:25):
and her slippers would be right there next to her bed.
So she'd get up, swing around, put her feet right
into her slippers, stand up, put her robe on. It
was a routine that she kept to every single day
because that's what she needed. Eventually, because of her aging,
she needed to be in a wheelchair. So she did
move to that, probably in the nineteen nineties at some point.

(52:48):
And I know that Eunice. After the book came out,
there were people that reached out to me to tell
me more things about her that I did not know.
And Eunice started bringing her to Boston for healthcare to
make sure she was getting the best healthcare she thought
in the country. And so she had doctors here in Boston,

(53:08):
and you know, she just had different things done here
in different parts of the country that Eunice felt were
better treatment than she was getting in Jefferson, Wisconsin.

Speaker 4 (53:17):
So as we wrap up, I wanted to ask, you know,
you have obviously spent years and thousands of hours of
research studying Rosemary and the Kennedy's more broadly, was there
anything you found, whether it was a letter or a
first person account, or something that was surprising that really
like shed light on a part of the story that

(53:38):
you weren't expecting.

Speaker 5 (53:40):
It's hard to say that there was one letter or
one story that really shed light on things. It was
a series of letters and people, interviews with people that
actually made me sympathetic to Rose and Joe at some
point and then other times to get really angry with them.

(54:00):
And then letters from caregivers that described trying to take
care of Rosemary and how complicated it was at a
time and period where there were no resources, there were
no guidelines for these teachers or these nuns and how
to take care of her. And then her letters to
her father, you know, when she was so unhappy because

(54:21):
she couldn't come home because the deal was she had
to do good in school, and so she would get
c's and d's and f's, and she's like, Daddy, I
love you so much. Please, Daddy, I want to come home.
I promise I'll get better grades. I promise, I promise,
I promise. She would lie in her letters and saying
she's getting a's in her classes she was getting there's
a letter right the next day from the teacher saying

(54:43):
she's flunking this class, you know, and how at the
camp that she was sent to in Massachusetts as an adult,
and she's crying, how sad she is that she has
to leave. Daddy, Please, I don't want to leave. And oh,
but I'll go if you want me to. Who I
want to please you so much, Daddy. I don't want
to disappoint you. I mean, my heart was breaking for

(55:04):
her because she was confused, she didn't quite understand and
it just was not working for her.

Speaker 1 (55:11):
Yeah, I was thinking of that. I love you, Daddy.
I never want to disappoint you. And the fact that
she did have the cognitive ability to lie is that
is a I mean to me, that is a sign
of development and understanding. And I don't know, it's a
very heartbreaking subject.

Speaker 5 (55:32):
It is very heartbreaking.

Speaker 1 (55:33):
You know. It's interesting looking at that time period, but
it is also just heartbreaking because.

Speaker 5 (55:40):
Yeah, but the way that I look at it now
is that it is a very sad story. But in
my view, Rosemary has changed the world for all of us.
It's because of her that her siblings went on to
pass legislation to create institutions and organizations and insist on
better treatment and better technology and better everything for people

(56:04):
with intellectual and physical disabilities. So Rosemary is really the
person that deserves the credit for this. So if she
could know that today, that would be great. We should
all recognize that she's the one that is a.

Speaker 4 (56:18):
Great note to end on, thank you so much. This
was incredibly enlightening, and thank you so much for taking
the time.

Speaker 5 (56:24):
Thank you for doing this. I appreciate it.

Speaker 1 (56:26):
That's it for this week's episode.

Speaker 4 (56:28):
Next week, for a slightly lighter topic, we are talking
about Jackie O's dating life.

Speaker 1 (56:33):
So subscribe and follow United States of Kennedy for all
Things Kennedy every week.