Rosemary: The Hidden Kennedy Daughter

Summary (from the publisher): Joe and Rose Kennedy’s strikingly beautiful daughter Rosemary attended exclusive schools, was presented as a debutante to the Queen of England, and traveled the world with her high-spirited sisters. And yet, Rosemary was intellectually disabled — a secret fiercely guarded by her powerful and glamorous family. 

 

Major new sources — Rose Kennedy’s diaries and correspondence, school and doctors' letters, and exclusive family interviews — bring Rosemary alive as a girl adored but left far behind by her competitive siblings. Kate Larson reveals both the sensitive care Rose and Joe gave to Rosemary and then — as the family’s standing reached an apex — the often desperate and duplicitous arrangements the Kennedys made to keep her away from home as she became increasingly intractable in her early twenties. Finally, Larson illuminates Joe’s decision to have Rosemary lobotomized at age twenty-three, and the family's complicity in keeping the secret. 

 

Rosemary delivers a profoundly moving coda: JFK visited Rosemary for the first time while campaigning in the Midwest; she had been living isolated in a Wisconsin institution for nearly twenty years. Only then did the siblings understand what had happened to Rosemary and bring her home for loving family visits. It was a reckoning that inspired them to direct attention to the plight of the disabled, transforming the lives of millions.

 

Review: Rosemary was the third child and oldest (and arguably most beautiful) daughter of Joe and Rose Kennedy. Daughter of the British ambassador and sister to the President, her wealthy and prosperous family hid Rosemary away for years to cover up the truth - Rosemary was intellectually disabled and later greatly impaired by a lobotomy she received in her early twenties. After her failed surgery, Rosemary was hidden away so as not to embarrass the family and was largely forgotten for many years. Yet as the cultural climate towards those with mental differences began to change, the Kennedy family slowly began to publicly reveal Rosemary's health condition and siblings Jack and Eunice helped champion the cause of the mentally disabled.

 

Although I have read several histories covering the Kennedy family before, most notably The Kennedy Women by Laurence Leamer, little comprehensive details were given to Rosemary, as her family deliberated hid her away for fear that she would negatively influence the family's political and social aspirations. In a family that prized intellect, physical agility, and ambition, Rosemary was ultimately a hopeless misfit.

 

So much of Rosemary's story is a tragedy. The suspected cause of her developmental delays was lack of oxygen during her birth in 1918; the doctor's arrival was delayed and the nurse held the baby's head and forced it "back into the birth canal for two excruciating hours." Although a seemingly healthy baby, she began to show signs of delay, crawling and talking late and struggling to hold a baby spoon in ways her two older brothers had not. However, Rose feared that if Rosemary was sent to a school for other slow children she would not be challenged to meet her full potential and Rosemary was enrolled in regular school. However, she quickly fell behind, even when placed in a class two grades below where she should have been given her age. She seems to never have progressed beyond a fourth grade level. Her parents eventually removed her from school and attempted to educate her at home for a while, although this was difficult for Rosemary, who didn't understand why she was treated differently from her siblings. Rosemary soon began a dizzying few years of being shunted from one school to another. She was removed from many of them because educators were deceived by her parents of the true nature of her disability before arrival, she reached a plateau in her progress, or her parents grew frustrated and moved her in their continual search for a cure for her delays.

 

Despite her difficulties, Rosemary seemed eager to please and worked hard at her various schools. Her letters home are heartbreakingly full of attempts to please her parents, telling them of her schoolwork and attempts to lose weight to meet her mother's exacting physical requirements. Rosemary loved being complimented and delighted in clothes and fashion; she was poised and sociable and was becoming a beautiful young woman. Yet she had a temper and would become easily frustrated. She struggled to adjust to new situations and her anxieties emerged as "moodiness, uncooperativeness, and emotional instability." 

 

In many ways, Rosemary was lucky to have been born in such a well to do family, given the cultural and social treatment of the mentally disabled of the time. "The Roman Catholic Church routinely refused the sacraments of Holy Communion and Confirmation to intellectually disabled children." Rose and Joe used their wealth and influence to hide the true extent of their daughter's disability and tried to shield her from the critical eyes of the world. Her family was so skillful at hiding her true condition that Rosemary was presented at court along with her mother and sister Kick while her father was ambassador to England. If this had been known, it would have caused a scandal; "a debutante with intellectual disabilities would have stirred long-held prejudices about passing along 'defective' traits to the next generation." Yet years of training and supervision were able to mask her challenges from the world.

 

As Rosemary grew older, she developed a worrying condition of wandering off alone at night. Her father Joe worried that she would fall pregnant, be kidnapped, or somehow embarrass the family and ruin his sons' political chances and thus arranged for her lobotomy when Rosemary was twenty-three, an operation that her mother Rose denied being aware of. After her surgery, which left her unable to talk or walk normally, her family would not see her for years. For two decades, her mother never referred to her in her letters or visited her. For more than sixty years, Rosemary lived in a sequestered facility under the care of specially trained nuns. In 1960, Jack finally visited his sister. What he found had a profound effect on him and his attitude towards disabilities legislation. Her sister Eunice, ever devoted to Rosemary, was primarily responsible for the creation of the Special Olympics, in her sister Rosemary's honor. Rosemary died at the age of 86 in 2005.

 

Larson did a great job unveiling the sad story of Rosemary's life. Much of her story was difficult to uncover because of the family's deliberate obscuring of the truth. This biography also does a great job of revealing both the injustices and the many benefits Rosemary received being part of the wealthy and politically ambitious Kennedy family. I did feel as if the last sixty years of Rosemary's life were barely skimmed over in this biography. However, this book finally gives voice to the Kennedy sister who was hidden and in the shadows for decades.

 

Stars: 4