Rosemary Kennedy

Rose Marie Kennedy (September 13, 1918 – January 7, 2005) was the third child and first daughter of Joseph and Rose Kennedy, born a year after the U.S. President John F. Kennedy. She underwent a lobotomy at the age of 23, after which she was totally incapacitated for the rest of her life.

Childhood

Christened Rose Marie Kennedy and commonly called Rosemary. To her family and friends, she was known as "Rosie".

Rosemary has been described as being a shy child whose I.Q. tests reportedly indicated a mild retardation. Diaries written by Rosemary in the late 1930s and published in the 1980s, reveal a happy, slightly backward young woman whose life was filled with outings to the opera, tea dances, dress fittings, and other social interests:

"Went to luncheon in the ballroom in the White House. James Roosevelt took us in to see his father, President Roosevelt. He said, 'It's about time you came. How can I put my arm around all of you? Which is the oldest? You are all so big."
"Have a fitting at 10:15 Elizabeth Arden. Appointment dress fitting again. Home for lunch. Royal tournament in the afternoon."
"Up too late for breakfast. Had it on deck. Played Ping-Pong with Ralph's sister, also with another man. Had lunch at 1:15. Walked with Peggy. also went to horse races with her, and bet and won a dollar and a half. Went to the English Movie at five. Had dinner at 8:45. Went to the lounge with Miss Cahill and Eunice and retired early." (fair use quotation, see Gibson)

She also was "presented" to King George VI and Queen Elizabeth during her father's tenure as U.S. Ambassador to Britain. On her way out of the "presentation" she tripped and almost fell — an embarrassing faux pas.

Placid and easygoing as a child and teenager, the maturing Rosemary became increasingly assertive in her personality. She was subject to violent mood swings. Some observers have since attributed this behavior to her difficulties in keeping up with her active siblings as well as the hormonal surges associated with sexual maturation. In any case, the family had difficulty dealing with the often stormy Rosemary who had begun to engage in physical fights and to sneak out at night from the convent where she was being educated and cared for—and her family feared that without proper supervision she might become pregnant or worse.

Lobotomy

In 1941, when Rosemary was 23, her father was told by doctors that a lobotomy would help calm her "mood swings that the family found difficult to handle at home" ^*. Joseph Kennedy had the procedure performed by neurologist Walter Freeman, director of the laboratories at St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C., together with his partner, James W. Watts, MD, from the University of Virginia. Watts performed his neurosurgery training at Massachusetts General Hospital and later became chief of neurosurgery at George Washington University Hospital. Highly regarded, Dr. Watts became the 91st president of the Medical Society of the District of Columbia.

At the time of the surgery the procedure was in its infancy. Freeman and Watts had only perfomed 66 previous lobotomies.

The following are the details of this particular case:

Dr. Watts perfomed the surgery while Dr. Freeman supervised. In an interview with investigative reporter Ronald Kessler, Dr. Watts described the procedure:

"We went through the top of the head, I think she was awake. She had a mild tranquilizer. I made a surgical incision in the brain through the skull. It was near the front. It was on both sides. We just made a small incision, no more than an inch." The instrument Dr. Watts used looked like a butter knife. He swung it up and down to cut brain tissue. "We put an instrument inside," he said. As Dr. Watts cut, Dr. Freeman put questions to Rosemary. For example, he asked her to recite the Lord's Prayer or sing "God Bless America" or count backwards. … "We made an estimate on how far to cut based on how she responded." … When she began to become incoherent, they stopped (Kessler, 226).

Instead of producing the desired result, however, the lobotomy reduced Rosemary to an infantile mentality that left her incontinent and staring blankly at walls for hours. Her verbal skills were reduced to unintelligible babble. Rose Kennedy remarked that although the lobotomy stopped her daughter's violent behavior, it left her completely incapacitated. "Rose was devastated; she considered it the first of the Kennedy family tragedies" (Kessler, 237).

Although Freeman performed more than 3,000 lobotomies on individuals with mental illness during his career, ^* today, his lobotomy treatments are viewed as discredited by the mental health community.

Was Rosemary retarded or mentally ill?

Researchers disagree over whether the initial assessment of Rosemary's condition called for this radical procedure. According to author Laurence Leamer, Rosemary Kennedy was "probably the first person with mental retardation in America to receive a prefrontal lobotomy"^*.

Kessler disagrees with this assessment; he believes that Rosemary's problem was instead mental illness. To prove this theory, he points out that Rosemary was slower than the other childen, spoke late, had reading problems, and could not keep up with schoolwork. Joseph's aide, Edward Moore, with whom Rosemary lived for many years before the Kennedy family moved to London for Joe's ambassadorship, said, "She's not quite right," tapping his head (Kessler, 69). Returning from London at the age of 22, Rosemary regressed in mental skills, became "tense and irritable, upset easily and unpredictably … tantrums … rages … convulsive episodes" (Rose Kennedy, A Time to Remember, quoted by Kessler).

Kathleen Kennedy's boyfriend, John White, claimed that Kathleen admitted to him the secret that Rosemary had learning problems—but what really concerned her father were "mood changes" and a "new neurological distubance." She added that "the family considered Rosemary 'a disgrace and failure'" (McTaggart, quoted by Kessler, 224).

Kessler also conducted an interview with the discredited Watts who: "told the author that, in his opinion, Rosemary had suffered not from mental retardation but from a form of depression. … 'It may have been agitated depression, You're agitated, you're shaky. You talk in an agitated way.'"

"A review of all records by the two doctors confirmed Dr. Watt's ^* declaration. … None of the papers listed any of the patient as being mentally retarded. … According to a review in the American Journal of Psychiatry, of all reports of lobotomies ever done, the procedure was only used for psychiatric illness" (Kessler, 227).

"One of the doctors who knew the truth was Dr. Bertram S. Brown, … executive director of the President's Panel on Mental Retardation," Kessler writes. "According to Dr. Brown, the fact that Rosemary could do arithmetic meant that her IQ was well above 75, the cutoff used by most states for purposes of classification in schools to define mental retardation." At age nine she did problems like 428 x 32 = 13696, 3924 / 6 = 654. At age 16 she wrote to her father "I would do anything to make you so happy. I hate to disapoint you in anyway [sic." Her diary reveals an ability to write about and understand various situations around her.

"If she did division and multiplication, she was over an IQ of 75. She was not mentally retarded. … It could be she had an IQ of 90 in a family where everyone was 130, so it looked like retardation, but she did not fall into IQ 75 and below, which is the definition of mental retardation. … There is no way I can picture her at less that a 90 IQ, but in that family, 90 would be considered retarded."

Kessler adds that in Dr. Brown's opinion, the family's treatment of Rosemary led to her mental illness. "I think it's likely she was somewhat slower than the others. Then she was treated as if she was retarded. Then it becomes reactive depression, including rages and loss of control. That is mental illness. … The reason she got depressed was that she reacted to being treated as lesser member of the family." While the children tried to include her in their activities, "given the highly competitive environment of the Kennedy family, they could not help but to communicate to her that she was not up to their standards." The fact that Joe banished Rosemary to live with his aide demonstrated his rejection of her. … "The stigma of mental illness in those days was like tuberculosis or cancer or worse. Mental retardation is more benignly not your fault. … Even in Watts's day, performing a lobotomy on someone who was mentally retarded would have been medical malpractice."

According to Kessler, Dr. Brown called the suppression of the truth "the biggest mental health cover-up in history." Since the "public story" is still that Rosemary was retarded, the "lack of support for mental illness is part of a total lifelong family denial of what was really so. … Some of us knew the secret and kept it secret …" (Kessler, 232–235).

Aftermath

Rosemary was sent to St. Coletta School for Exceptional Children in Jefferson, Wisconsin, a residential institution for people with disabilities. Occasionally she was taken to visit relatives in Florida and Washington, D.C., and visited her childhood home in Cape Cod. Publicly, she was declared to be mentally handicapped. This was more socially acceptable in a political family than mental illness.

"Only a few doctors who worked for the Kennedys knew the truth about Rosemary's condition, as did the FBI", due to a background check of Joe. Joe's attorney told them she had "mental illness" (Kessler, 233).

Rosemary's experience inspired her sister, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, to found the Special Olympics. Joseph Kennedy also made donations to philanthropic agencies which he founded to help mentally-handicapped people.

Rosemary died on January 7, 2005 at a hospital in Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin at the age of 86, with her surviving sisters and brother, Senator Ted Kennedy, by her side. Hers was, and currently is, the only natural death among the deceased children of Joseph and Rose Kennedy.

References

Burns, James MacGregor, John Kennedy: A Political Profile, Harcourt Brace, 1960
El-Hai, Jack, The Lobotomist: A Maverick Medical Genius and His Tragic Quest to Rid the World of Mental Illness (Wiley, 2004). ISBN 0471232920
Gibson, Barbara, Rose Kennedy and Her Family: The Best and Worst of Their Lives and Times, Birch Lane Press, ISBN 1559722991. This book includes Rose Marie's diary from 1936-38. Gibson was Rose Kennedy's secretary. ^*
Kennedy, Rose, Times to Remember, 1974, Doubleday, ISBN 0385476574
Kessler, Ronald, The Sins of the Father: Joseph P. Kennedy and the Dynasty He Founded, Warner, 1996, ISBN 0446603848
Leamer, Laurence, The Kennedy Women: The Saga of an American Family (Ballantine, 1996).
McCarthy, Joe, The Remarkable Kennedys
McTaggart, Lynne, Kathleen Kennedy, Doubleday, 1983
Valenstein, Elliot S. Great and Desperate Cures: The Rise and Decline of Psychosurgery and Other Radical Treatments for Mental Illness (Basic Books, 1986).

External links

Washington Post obituary January 8, 2005

1918 births | 2005 deaths | Kennedy family

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