The Silent Patient
The Silent Patient
The Horrifying Fate of JFK's older sister, Rosemary.
During its inception, the United States proudly cast off its shackles of subjugation - and severed its bonds to the British Crown.
But over the next two hundred years, by means of wealth, media and influence, American has ended up electing its very own aristocracy.
Be it the Bushes, the Kardashians, the Vanderbilts or the Roosevelts, certain families have firmly asserted themselves at the upper echelons of American society.
But perhaps none more so – than the Kennedys.
The Kennedy family are one of the most prominent and influential political dynasties in American history.
Having originated in Ireland, the family’s American story began with Patrick Kennedy, an immigrant from County Wexford who settled in Boston in 1849.
His son, P.J. Kennedy, became a successful businessman and politician, setting the stage for the family’s meteoric rise.
However, it was his grandson, Joseph P. Kennedy Sr., who propelled the family to wealth and influence.
Joe Kennedy Sr was a savvy businessman who amassed a fortune through banking, real estate, the stock market, and the liquor business; most notably during the decade of alcohol prohibition that gave rise to gangsters and bootleggers alike.
But despite dipping his toes into the criminal underworld, Joe Sr later married Rose Fitzgerald, daughter of Boston mayor John Fitzgerald, which solidified the family's political ambitions.
Joe Sr. served as the U.S. Ambassador to the United Kingdom during the late 1930s, but soon turned his ambitions toward his children, and began preparing them for leadership and public service.
Perhaps the most famous of Joe Kennedy’s children was his second son, John.
More commonly known by his initials, JFK, John went on to serve as the 35th President of the United States; and is known for his leadership during the Cuban Missile Crisis, his role in advancing civil rights, and his assassination in 1963, which shocked the world.
John’s younger brother, Robert, would serve as U.S. Attorney General, and later represented the state of New York as a United States Senator.
He too was a prominent advocate for civil rights and anti-poverty programs. But his assassination in 1968, during his campaign for the presidency, was another devastating blow to the family.
The youngest Kennedy brother, Ted, also served as a U.S. Senator, while his older sister, Jean, served as the seventeenth US ambassador to the nation of Ireland. Yet there is another Kennedy sister, and for the longest time, her story remained a closely guarded family secret.
This is the tale – of Rosemary Kennedy.
Rose Marie Kennedy, or Rosemary as she came to be known, was born at her parents’ Brookline, Massachusetts home on September 13th of 1918.
Named for her mother, Rose Fitzgerald, her birth was a difficult one, exacerbated by the shortage of doctors due to the outbreak of Spanish Flu.
In order prevent the birth from commencing in earnest before the arrival of a doctor, the Kennedy’s nurse ordered Rosemary’s mother to keep her legs closed.
Yet this did nothing but ensure that young Rosemary's head stayed in the birth canal for two hours longer than it should have, starving her of oxygen in the process.
As Rosemary began to grow, her parents noticed she was missing major developmental milestones.
By the age of two, she had a great deal of difficulty in just sitting up and crawling, let alone learning to walk. Actions that other children her age were accomplishing with ease.
Yet instead of being open and honest regarding Rosemary’s intellectual disability, her parents hid them from their friends and the wider public, and allowed only a small group of close family members to know the truth.
The Kennedy’s entrusted the family tutor with getting Rosemary up to speed with her intellectual peers.
But when it became increasingly obvious that the girl required sustained and specialist help, she was sent to a Pennsylvania boarding school that focused on educating those with intellectual disabilities.
At age sixteen, Rosemary relocated to the Sacred Heart Convent in Elmhurst, Providence, Rhode Island, where she was educated separately from the other students in order to keep her condition a secret.
Her reading, writing, spelling, and counting skills were reported to be at a fourth-grade level.
Two nuns and a specialist teacher, supposedly named Miss Newton, worked with Rosemary on a specialist curriculum, in a separate classroom, far from the eyes of her fellow students.
Administrators changed their policies to allowed Rosemary’s older brother, and future president, John, to accompany her to a school dance. There, he acted as a kind of buffer between Rosemary and the other girls, and in the words of one classmate, made her seem “no different at all”.
In exchange for the school’s cooperation, the Kennedys paid for the construction of a brand-new tennis court.
During the late nineteen thirties, once Rosemary had blossomed into a young woman in her late teens, she led an active social life, read books, and occasionally accompanied her family on state visits to far flung nations.
She was by no means an invalid, and although her intellect was dwarfed by that of her younger siblings, she could at worst be described as “childish” by those unaware of her condition.
In an interview with Woman’s Day magazine, a young Rosemary told journalists that she was studying to become a kindergarten teacher, had an interest in social work, and even harbored longings to grace the silver screen.
She presented herself as a shy, articulate, but carefully spoken young woman. But in reality, Rosemary presented nothing more than a carefully rehearsed facade.
When reporters from The Boston Globe requested an interview with Rosemary, her father's assistant tailored the responses, which she then committed to memory in what amounted to hours of intensive study.
The statement read:
“I have always had serious tastes and understand life is not given to us just for enjoyment. For some time past, I have been studying the well-known psychological method of Dr. Maria Montessori and I got my degree in teaching last year.”
Around the same time, Rosemary flew over to the United Kingdom, and met King George VI at Buckingham Palace during an official state ceremony.
Rosemary practiced the complicated royal curtsy for hours, but at the event itself, she tripped and almost fell in front of hundreds of onlookers.
With characteristic British grace, the crowd completely ignored Rosemary’s near-miss, except of course for the Royal aide who offered his assistance.
Then, when she presented herself to His Royal Highness, King George merely smiled, and bid her the warmest of welcomes to his court.
Rosemary’s mother never discussed the incident, and treated the debut as a triumph. Which, for all intent and purpose, is exactly what it was.
A young woman with learning difficulties had conquered both her disability and her anxiety, and had met the King of England in the process.
Yet unfortunately, this period in her life marked something of a highpoint, as following her return to the US in early 1940, a twenty-two-old Rosemary would become, and I quote, “increasingly irritable and difficult”
As she approached her mid-twenties, Rosemary began randomly flying into violent rages.
She would destroy property, attack friends and family, with the episodes occasionally ending in convulsions, or even full-blown seizures.
After being expelled from a summer camp in western Massachusetts, Rosemary was sent to a convent school in Washington, D.C.
Gripped by a kind of late-blooming teenage rebellion, Rosemary began sneaking out of the convent at night, with many of the convent’s nuns suspecting her of carnal activity.
They warned her of STDs, and the risk of pregnancy, and while it’s not clear if Rosemary really was searching for romance, it’s clear that she yearned for her freedom.
Yet such reckless behavior frightened her frustrated parents, and when it continued unabated, the family became concerned it might affect their political prestige.
During the fall of 1941, when Rosemary was just twenty-three, her parents approached some of the most acclaimed psychologists in America, seeking solutions to their daughter’s problems.
They consulted with some of the most highly qualified medical professionals in the entire world, men who had dedicated their lives to the pursuit of medical excellence.
Back then, their solution constituted the cutting edge of psychotherapeutic treatment. Yet less than a hundred years later, their barbarism is considered nothing short of a crime against humanity.
Young Rosemary Kennedy – was to be given a lobotomy.
Developed in the nineteen-thirties and forties, a lobotomy is a surgical procedure that involves severing connections in the brain’s frontal lobe and thalamus.
They were used to treat mental illnesses that didn't respond to other treatments, and gained popularity due to alternatives (such as straitjackets, padded cells, and physical violence) being considered inhuman.
The procedure involved drilling holes in the skull, then inserting a sharp instrument into the grey matter. This way, a surgeon could essentially scramble the part of a person’s brain that accounts for their personality.
While the procedure certainly made some patients much calmer, it obviously caused significant personality changes, which more often than not, manifested as apathy, as well as a chilling kind of desocialization, whereby the patient acted beyond the confines of regular human behavior.
As you can imagine, lobotomies could also have some serious, and sometimes deadly side effects. So much so, that when replacement drugs such as Thorazine were introduced, the number of procedures dropped off dramatically.
Yet incredibly, lobotomies still remain legal within the United States.
This is the procedure that Rosemary was subjected to, and even at the time, those outside the medical profession considered it a dystopian solution to a tragic, and deeply upsetting problem.
Joe Kennedy Sr knew his wife would never consent to it.
Yet instead of discussing it with her, Joe had the procedure performed in secret, and only informed Rosemary’s mother when it was completed.
Rosemary’s lobotomy took place sometime in November of 1941.
Dr James W. Watts, of George Washington University School of Medicine, carried out the procedure with the assistance of Dr Walter Freeman.
It was described in the notes of an observer as follows:
After Rosemary was mildly sedated, “We went through the top of the head”, Dr. Watts recalled. "I think she was awake. She had a mild tranquilizer. I made a surgical incision in the brain through the skull, near the front. We just made a small incision, no more than an inch. After that, we placed an instrument inside”.
The instrument Dr. Watts used looked like a butter knife. He swung it up and down to cut brain tissue.
As Dr. Watts cut, Dr. Freeman asked Rosemary to recite the Lord's Prayer, sing "God Bless America" or count backwards. “We tried to estimate how far to further cut, based on how Rosemary responded”
Only when Rosemary became incoherent, did the doctors cease scrambling her brains.
Dr Watts later stated that, in his opinion, Rosemary wasn’t dealing with learning difficulties, but rather a deep form of depression that stifled her development and education.
All the patients the two doctors lobotomized were diagnosed as having some form of mental disorder, yet following the analysis of a written review, authored by the two doctors, multiple medical professionals backed their opinion that Rosemary was suffering from undiagnosed depression, and not advanced learning difficulties.
Bertram S. Brown, a former aide to the Kennedys (who also went on to serve as the director of the National Institute of Mental Health under JFK), stated that the push to declare Rosemary mentally disabled, instead of mentally ill, was intended to protect JFK’s reputation during his future runs for presidency.
He also added that the “lack of support for mental illness is part of a lifelong family denial of what was really so”.
Yet in lobotomizing Rosemary, her parents had changed her condition from one they could hide, into something no one could ignore any longer.
Following the procedure, it swiftly became apparent that the lobotomy had severely damaged Rosemary’s mental capacity.
Her intellect and social skills had been reduced to that of a two-year-old. She could not walk, or talk, and she was severely incontinent.
Rosemary was subsequently institutionalized, living first at Craig House, a private psychiatric hospital around an hour and a half’s drive north of New York City.
She was then relocated to Jefferson, Wisconsin, where she lived for the rest of her life on the grounds of the St. Coletta School for Exceptional Children.
The Archbishop of Boston, Richard Cushing, had discussed St. Coletta's with Rosemary’s father, and explained it was an exceptional facility, with the capacity to house just over three hundred vulnerable young adults.
In order to properly inspect the school, Joe Senior travelled there in person, but was still unhappy with his daughter’s prospective living arrangements.
Then, instead of allowing Rosemary to live among the school’s student body, Joe had a private house built for her about a mile outside St. Coletta's main campus.
Situated near Alverno House, which specialized in dealing with adults who needed lifelong care, the nuns began calling the house ‘Kennedy Cottage’, after the home’s only permanent resident.
At Kennedy Cottage, Rosemary was tended to by two nuns, Sister Margaret Ann and Sister Leona, who provided her with round the clock care. The cottage was also frequented by a ceramics teacher, who attempted to teach Rosemary pottery around three times a week.
Rosemary also had access to a car and driver, ensuring she could travel at will, and a dog, to ensure she was never truly alone.
Rosemary’s parents might’ve ensured she was perfectly well looked after, and had no material wants or needs. But that lifelong care came at a price.
And that price – was almost complete severance from the family’s affairs.
It took twenty years for Rosemary’s mother to visit her at the Kennedy Cottage, while her father failed to visit her even once.
Author Kate Clifford Larson has stated that Rosemary’s parents hid the truth of her condition from the wider family – for just over twenty years; and that none of her siblings were ever informed of her true whereabouts.
During JFK’s 1958 senate re-election campaign, the Kennedy family explained away Rosemary’s absence by claiming she was a reclusive, and deeply private person.
It was only in 1961, once John had secured the presidency, that the family finally revealed the truth behind Rosemary’s condition. But even then, it was only a partial truth.
The Kennedys explained that Rosemary was mentally disabled, but only mildly so, and completely neglected to mention that she’d been brutally lobotomized at the hands of some of the finest doctors available.
Ironically, Rosemary’s father (Joe Sr), had a catastrophic stroke not long after the partial truth of his daughter’s condition was made public.
He too was rendered unable to speak, and unable to walk, but unlike Rosemary, his location was shared with the wider family, and he was not denied visitation in his hour of need.
Following Joe Sr’s death in 1969, and without his patriarchal influence over the family, the Kennedys began reintroducing Rosemary into their collective affairs.
She was taken to visit relatives in Florida and DC, and was even taken back to one of her childhood homes on Cape Cod.
Having love and familial attention in her life proved the best medicine imaginable, and it was during this time that Rosemary went from being an immobile invalid, to being able to walk again, albeit with a pronounced limp.
She never regained the ability to talk, and one of her arms remained permanently palsied.
But the quality-of-life Rosemary enjoyed in her final years was a huge improvement on what she’d experienced before.
It wasn’t until 1987 that knowledge of Rosemary’s lobotomy became fully public.
In her book ‘The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys’, Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin divulged details of several candid conversations she’d conducted with the family. One of which was a full and frank account of Rosemary’s lobotomy.
The general public was horrified by what they read, and the fact it had been kept secret for more than forty-five years was something even the most cynical of political insiders found hard to stomach.
By the late eighties, lobotomies had been fully exposed as a cruel, unnecessary treatment that verged on medical malpractice and pseudoscience.
So, the discovery that a member of American Royalty had been subjected to one, especially via such a callous and calculated means, was deeply shocking to the American public.
Ultimately, on January 7th of 2005, Rosemary Kennedy passed away from natural causes at Wisconsin's Fort Atkinson Memorial Hospital. She was eighty-six years old.
Sisters Jean, Eunice, and Patricia were at her bedside as she passed, along with her younger brother, Ted.
She was laid to rest beside her parents, at Holyhood Cemetery in Brookline, Massachusetts. Excluded in life, but united in death.
Some credit her status and condition with being the inspiration for Eunice Kennedy Shriver to later found the Special Olympics. Meaning that although her life was characterized by loneliness and familial exile, Rosemary’s legacy is one of inclusion and opportunity...
...for the most vulnerable members of our great society.