Rosemary The hidden Kennedy daughter

Review by New York Times Review

THE TRAGIC LIFE of Rosemary Kennedy, the intellectually disabled member of the Kennedy clan, has been well documented in many histories of this famous family. But she has often been treated as an afterthought, a secondary character kept out of sight during the pivotal 1960s. Now the third child of Joseph and Rose Kennedy takes center stage in "Rosemary: The Hidden Kennedy Daughter," by Kate Clifford Larson, a biography that chronicles her life with fresh details and tells how her famous siblings were affected by - and reacted to - Rosemary's struggles. Setting her story against the backdrop of the stigma attached to mental illness in the first half of the 20th century, Larson describes the hubris of ambitious and conflicted parents who cared for their daughter but feared that her limitations, if publicly known, would damage their other children's brilliant careers. Unwilling to accept that anything could be truly wrong with his own flesh and blood, Joe Kennedy, with his wife's complicity, subjected 23-year-old Rosemary to an experimental treatment that left her severely debilitated and institutionalized for the remaining six decades of her life. What makes this story especially haunting are the might-have-beens. Rosemary's problems began at her birth, on Sept. 13, 1918. Her mother's first two children, Joe Jr. and Jack, had been safely delivered at home by the same obstetrician. But when Rose went into labor with Rosemary, the doctor was not immediately available. Although the nurse was trained to deliver babies, she nonetheless tried to halt the birth to await the doctor's arrival. By ordering Rose to keep her legs closed and forcing the baby's head to stay in the birth canal for two hours, the nurse took actions that resulted in a harmful loss of oxygen. As a child, Rosemary suffered development delays, yet had enough mental acuity to be frustrated when she was unable to keep up with her bright and athletic siblings. Even with private tutors, she had difficulty mastering the basics of reading and writing. At age 11, she was sent to a Pennsylvania boarding school for intellectually challenged students. From then on, Rosemary changed schools every few years, either because the educators were unable to deal with her disabilities and mood swings or because her parents hoped a change of scene might prove beneficial. The first biographer to have access to all of Rosemary's known letters, replete with typos and lopsided sentence structure, Larson deploys excerpts in heart-rending fashion, showing a sweet, insecure girl who was desperate to please. "I would do anything to make you so happy," a teenage Rosemary wrote to her father. Although at 15 she had the writing skill of a 10-year-old, that didn't prevent her from expressing joy in her life and appearing poised and sociable. But at her parents' behest, Rosemary endured experimental injections meant to treat hormonal imbalances. Her father described her as suffering from "backwardness." Her siblings, often charged with keeping an eye on her during vacations and school breaks, were supportive but at times impatient. Her older brother Joe Jr. appeared to dote on Rosemary, but during a post-Harvard trip to Germany in 1934, he showed little sympathy for others with disabilities. In a chilling letter to his father, he praised Hitler's sterilization policy as "a great thing" that "will do away with many of the disgusting specimens of men." After Joseph Kennedy became the United States ambassador to Great Britain in 1938, Rosemary blossomed, entering the most satisfying period of her life. Now a flirtatious beauty who reveled in male attention, the well-rehearsed Rosemary made a stunning debut at Buckingham Palace and attended a convent school where she thrived, training to be a Montessori teacher's aide. But the outbreak of war in the autumn of 1939 sent her mother and siblings fleeing to New York, and Rosemary joined them in June 1940. Joseph Kennedy, whose isolationist views had irked President Roosevelt, resigned from his post after the November election. 'I would do anything to make you so happy,' a teenage Rosemary wrote to her father. Rosemary's return to the family home in Bronxville was disastrous. She regressed, experiencing seizures and violent tantrums, hitting and hurting those in the vicinity. Her frantic parents sent her to a summer camp in western Massachusetts (she was kicked out after a few weeks), a Philadelphia boarding school (she lasted a few months) and then a convent school in Washington, D.C., where a rebellious Rosemary wandered off at night. Fearing that men might sexually prey on their vulnerable daughter, her parents worried that a scandal would diminish the family's political prospects. Deciding that something drastic needed to be done, Joseph Kennedy chose a surgical solution that the American Medical Association had already warned was risky: a prefrontal lobotomy. In November 1941, at George Washington University Hospital, a wide-awake Rosemary followed a doctor's instructions to recite songs and stories as he drilled two holes in her head and cut nerve endings in her brain until she became incoherent, then silent. The brutal surgery left her permanently disabled and unable to care for herself. Even after months of physical therapy, Rosemary never regained the full use of one arm and walked with a limp. Initially, she could speak only a few words. Sent to a private psychiatric institution in New York, then to a church-run facility in Wisconsin, Rosemary was abandoned by her parents. Joe appears to have stopped seeing her in 1948 although he was vigorous until 1961, when he suffered a catastrophic stroke. Rose, who blamed her husband for authorizing the lobotomy, couldn't face her damaged child. "There is no record of Rose visiting her eldest daughter for more than 20 years," Larson writes. In the early 1960s, when Rose finally did turn up, Rosemary reportedly recoiled. The heroine of this story is Eunice Kennedy Shriver, now best known as one of the founders of the Special Olympics. Horrified by what had been done to her sister, Eunice became a passionate champion for people with disabilities. She persuaded her father to use his fortune to fund research, and after John F. Kennedy was elected president she successfully lobbied him to establish such government entities as the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. She later assumed responsibility for Rosemary's care. The family's youngest member, Ted, was only 9 years old when Rosemary vanished from family life with minimal explanation, a frightening and puzzling loss. As a senator, he also took up her cause, citing Rosemary as his inspiration when he sponsored bills like the groundbreaking Americans With Disabilities Act. In 1974, more than 30 years after the lobotomy, Rose arranged for Rosemary to briefly leave the Wisconsin institution and visit her surviving family members in Hyannis Port. The trip went sufficiently well that more reunions followed. In 1995, at the age of 104, Rose Kennedy died. A decade later, when Rosemary succumbed, at age 86, four of her siblings - Eunice, Jean, Pat and Ted - were by her side. Many of Larson's best anecdotes and quotations are mined from previous books, notably Doris Kearns Goodwin's "The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys"; David Nasaw's "The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy"; and Lawrence Learner's two volumes, "The Kennedy Men" and "The Kennedy Women." But she has amplified this well-told tale with newly released material from the John F. Kennedy Library and a few interviews. By making Rosemary the central character, she has produced a valuable account of a mental health tragedy, and an influential family's belated efforts to make amends. MERYL GORDON, director of magazine writing at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, is the author of "Mrs. Astor Regrets: The Hidden Betrayals of a Family Beyond Reproach." She is working on a biography of Bunny Mellon.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 11, 2015]

---

Review by Booklist Review

Born in September 1918, Rose and Joe Kennedy's daughter Rosemary was deemed slow and was thus a disappointment to her parents as well as a mystery. Words, from idiots to morons, for intellectually disabled humans as well as treatments were often lacking, disputed, and not much help, even for those with ample money, such as the Kennedys. By 16, in her third special school in five years, Rosemary could write home (charming, simplistic letters, many reproduced here), but despite the individualized help she was given, as Larson notes, the truth was she couldn't really do any better. Larson's well-researched and fascinating history includes Kennedy anecdotes as well as major developments in American life (e.g., Spanish influenza, the Great Depression, the beginning of the divide between the haves and the have-nots) in a depiction of one family's decisions regarding a special daughter, whose ill-advised lobotomy rendered her nearly broken, physically and mentally. Heartbreaking and illuminating, this will serve not only Kennedy fans but also those curious about the history of disabilities in the U.S.--Kinney, Eloise Copyright 2015 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

---

Review by Library Journal Review

Historian Larson (The Assassin's Accomplice) provides an engrossing biography of the firstborn of the Kennedy daughters, -Rosemary (1918-2005). This younger sister of John F. Kennedy exhibited developmental delays from an early age. The author makes it evident that an understanding of special needs, especially those of children, was sorely lacking in the early 20th century. Using new sources, such as private diaries and letters, Larson conveys the challenges the family faced in caring for Rosemary and proceeds to detail how the Kennedy family chose to hide her condition and present her to the world as an intellectual peer of their other children. Also described is the decision to have Rosemary lobotomized in her early twenties, how the family concealed the procedure's devastating effects from the public, and family patriarch Joseph P. Kennedy Sr.'s decision to institutionalize Rosemary and keep her separated from the family for more than 20 years. Elizabeth Koehler-Pentacoff's The Missing Kennedy (reviewed above) provides greater detail on these latter years. VERDICT This expertly researched work offers a candid examination of a once-forgotten member of one of America's most famous families. It will appeal to Kennedy devotees and readers interested in society's evolving understanding of the intellectually and physically disabled. [See Prepub Alert, 5/17/15.]-Mary Jennings, Camano Island Lib., WA © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

---

Review by Kirkus Book Review

In-depth coverage of one Kennedy daughter who never gained the spotlight like her siblings. Born the third child to Joseph and Rose Kennedy, Rosemary was slower to develop mentally than her siblings, thanks to an unnecessarily prolonged birth. Throughout her early childhood and adolescence, her mental disabilities were kept hidden from the press and those outside the family, enabling Rosemary to attend prestigious private schools, to be presented to the king and queen of England, and to enjoy a life full of social events. However, as she entered her early 20s, her inability to function like others her age and her unruly behavior presented increasing difficulties for her family, all of whom were in the limelight in one form or another. In order to suppress Rosemary's mental health issues, her father ordered her to undergo a prefrontal lobotomy, an experimental operation at the time that had little conclusive evidence of its effectiveness. The results were drastic and completely damaging. Larson does an excellent job of portraying the Kennedy family, providing ample background on the political and economic rise of Joe Sr., the obsessions with weight and the need for solitude of Rose, the role the parents played in Rosemary's life and the effect this had on her, and the interactions among Rosemary and her siblings. The author presents a well-rounded portrait of Rosemary before the lobotomy, a beautiful young woman full of spunk and love, and the destruction of that vibrant person as a result of the operation. Larson goes on to discuss how Rosemary's younger sister, Eunice, used the family's considerable wealth to fund research and services for the mentally disabled, a cause she avidly supported because of her sister. A well-researched, entertaining, and illuminating biography that should take pride of place over another recent Rosemary bio, Elizabeth Koehler-Pentacoff's The Missing Kennedy. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

---

1 A Home Birth ROSE KENNEDY, PREGNANT with her third child, felt her contractions beginning on Friday, September 13. The nurse hired to attend her during the last days of her pregnancy quickly sent for Dr. Frederick L. Good, Rose's personal obstetrician, to come to the Kennedy home at 83 Beals Street in the Boston suburb of Brookline. The first two Kennedy children, Joseph Jr., now three years old, and sixteen-month-old "Jack," had both been born at home, and Rose was electing to do the same with this baby. It had been an uneventful third pregnancy. The deeply devout Rose would have been acutely aware of the gift of such a healthy pregnancy in the midst of great danger. During the war years of 1917 and 1918, Spanish influenza swept the globe, killing tens of millions worldwide and debilitating millions more. By the fall of 1918, the flu's deadly march was taking its toll on the citizens of Boston. By mid-September there were more than five thousand diagnosed cases of the Spanish flu in the city alone. Deaths mounted daily as the pandemic made its second of three deadly passes across the nation in less than a year. The closing of theaters, lyceums, halls, and churches became mandatory, and public gatherings were discouraged to avoid the spread of the disease. Local hospitals, clinics, and doctors' offices around Boston and its suburbs were overwhelmed. Unlike other flu epidemics, which claimed mostly the lives of the very young and the very old, this viral infection took the lives of healthy young men and women in the prime of their lives as well. Young soldiers who had survived the trenches and battlefields of Europe during World War I and returned home triumphant began dying by the thousands from pneumonia and respiratory failure. According to one nurse who worked day and night during the worst of the epidemic in Boston, "All the city was dying, in the homes serious illness, on the streets funeral processions." Nearly seven thousand residents died within a six-month period. But the lethal virus did not infect the home of Joseph and Rose Kennedy and their young family. The nurse had been checking the unborn baby's and Rose's health daily, listening to both baby's and mother's heart rates, monitoring the baby's position vis-à-vis the birth canal and its in utero activity, noting the details in a ledger for the doctor to review when he arrived. With Rose's labor begun and Dr. Good sent for, she transformed Rose's room into a modified antiseptic hospital labor room, ordered the general maid or hired girl to heat water, and made sure that all instruments and equipment the doctor might need were within reach. Trained in the latest obstetrical nursing practices, the nurse was responsible for two patients, as her nursing manual would have reminded her: the mother and the unborn child. "If during the absence of the doctor the mother should die," the Obstetrical Nursing guide warned ominously, "upon the physician's return the nurse . . . could hardly excuse herself to the physician or to the family." This directive put the nurse in an untenable position: she had been trained to deliver babies but also to wait for the doctor to arrive to deliver the baby. She could not give Rose an anesthetic as labor became more intense and painful, because only the physician and his anesthetist, in this case probably a Dr. Edward J. O'Brien, could administer anesthesia as a matter of course when they arrived. But on this day, the doctor had not arrived once the baby began entering the birth canal, and Rose could not resist the need to push the baby with each more forceful contraction. The nurse tried to keep her calm, encouraging her to endure each contraction and to fight back the urge to push. Yet Rose's baby started crowning, a crucial point in the birthing process. It was well understood that preventing the movement of the baby through the birth canal could cause a lack of oxygen, exposing the baby to possible brain damage and physical disability. The doctor was delayed, caught up in attending his many patients stricken by the deadly flu. The nurse demanded that Rose hold her legs together tightly in the hope of delaying the baby's birth. Despite her training as an obstetrical nurse, she opted not to deliver the baby herself. "I had such confidence in my obstetrician," Rose wrote as a much older woman. "I put my faith in God . . . and tried to sublimate my discomfort in expectation of the happiness" she expected to feel once the baby was born. Dr. Good and his colleagues, however, may not have been driven wholly by the desire to provide the best care for their patients. Fees derived from supplying health services to Boston's social and economic elite provided a steady, and hefty, income in the days before medical insurance. If Dr. Good missed the birth of the baby, he could not charge his extremely high fee of $125 for prenatal care and delivery. When holding Rose's legs together failed to keep the baby from coming, the nurse resorted to another, more dangerous practice: holding the baby's head and forcing it back into the birth canal for two excruciating hours. The doctor did finally appear at the Kennedys' home, and at seven in the evening he delivered Rose's seemingly healthy third child. The Boston Globe announced the birth: "A dainty girl was added to the nursery which previously sheltered two sturdy sons." Flowers and cards of congratulations poured in. The baby would be named for her mother. Little Rose Marie Kennedy--"Rosie" to the family, and later called Rosemary--would be loved and nurtured by both of her parents. Rosemary was "sweet and peaceable and cried less than the first two," Rose would recall more than fifty years later. Rose spent several weeks "lying in," the length of time middle- and upper-class women took to recover from childbirth. New mothers, it was recommended, should rest and remain in bed for at least nine days and slowly begin daily activities, like walking, over a period of many more days, increasing activity gradually over several weeks. Six weeks was considered ideal. Rose enjoyed this time alone, nursing and doting on baby Rosemary. Full-time and part-time nursemaids and other household help took care of the boys, cleaned, and cooked. "The quiet and peace surrounding the mother and child at this period is good for both," Rose later wrote about this time alone with her newborn baby. JOSEPH "JOE" P. KENNEDY SR., as the new assistant general manager of the Fore River Shipbuilding Company, a subsidiary of Bethlehem Steel in nearby Quincy, could afford such luxuries for his wife. Most men of his age--Joe was thirty years old when his first daughter was born--were now required to register for the wartime draft. But he was exempt from military service because of his role working for the shipyard and managing its multimillion-dollar government contracts and thousands of workers now building naval vessels destined for the war in Europe. Joe was brilliant at his job, and his business and management acumen spurred the expansion of not only the shipyard and its workforce but also the support systems required to shelter, feed, and transport the thousands of workers at the plant. Joe's workload increased "exponentially" at this time, keeping him working lengthy days and often not returning home for the night, establishing a work ethic that would persist for the rest of his life. This pace, however, earned Joe an ulcer, and just a month after Rosemary was born he checked himself into a sanitarium to recuperate. Persistent ulcers and other intestinal issues, too, would plague him until his death. Excerpted from Rosemary: The Hidden Kennedy Daughter by Kate Clifford Larson All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

---