Rosemary
The last of many nails in Joe’s political coffin were the comments he made—off the record, he thought—to Boston Globe reporter Louis M. Lyon in November of 1940, shortly after tendering his resignation as ambassador.
“Democracy is finished in England,” he said. “It may be here, too.” Given Joe’s aspirations to higher office and the patriotic sensitivities of the body politic as the United States stood at the brink of war, it was a mind-bogglingly reckless thing for Joe to say to a reporter, on the record or not.
Over the next several months, Joe tried to back off these remarks and paint himself as a supporter of the president and neither an appeaser nor defeatist with regard to England’s troubles—through radio addresses, interviews, and, most importantly, in disastrously muddled congressional testimony in ambivalent favor of Roosevelt’s Lend-Lease proposal. Lend-Lease sought to arm our allies in their fight against Hitler—to provide planes, tanks, guns, and freighters—without committing a single American troop. Kennedy agreed to support the proposal in a radio address and congressional testimony but did so, according to David Nasaw, “in such a desultory, confused, conflicted manner that it was near impossible to know whether he opposed or supported it.” The press savaged him, and when they were done, stopped covering what he said and did. His public life was over.
He and Rose settled into their version of a retirement. Not wanting to worry about three estates, Joe put the Bronxville mansion on the market in late 1941. Ever after, he and Rose would split their time between Hyannis Port and Palm Beach. Rose allowed herself a moment of wistfulness, remembering the happy locus of her children’s childhoods, before her pragmatic side took over. “I am relieved too to have one less house to worry about,” she wrote in a round-robin letter to the kids. “With none of you there, the house was no longer a necessity.” The round-robin letters were one of Rose’s signatures: she’d write a letter and send it to one of the children; he or she would add a response and send it on to one of the others until it made its way back to Rose.
All of the children were either away at school, working, or in the service. Despite his strong antiwar sentiment, Joe accepted his two eldest sons’ desire to join the military. Joe Jr., just finishing his second year of Harvard Law School, enlisted in a special unit of the US Naval Air Corps that recruited straight from Harvard. Knowing that Jack wanted to follow his brother, the perennial golden boy, into the service, Joe pulled strings with a military contact to see that Jack would pass the physical. Given Jack’s raft of ailments, from his incipient back trouble to his stomach problems to his yet undiagnosed Addison’s disease, passing the physical would have been an impossibility without his father’s intervention. Jack was ordered to report to the Office of Naval Intelligence, in Washington, that fall.
Rose, now an empty nester and seemingly uninterested in sitting around in Palm Beach while Joe played golf, planned another trip. In the late spring of 1941, she and Eunice took a five-week trip through South America, including Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Peru, and Ecuador.
With Rose away, Joe continued as the primary parent of Rosemary. Unfortunately, the gains she had made in England seemed to be evaporating, and the war prevented her return to Mother Isabel’s convent. She was placed in St. Gertrude’s School of Arts and Crafts, in Washington, DC, a school for “retarded” girls that was staffed by Benedictine nuns.
“In the year or so following her return from England,” Rose later wrote in her memoirs,
disquieting symptoms began to develop. Not only was there noticeable retrogression in the mental skills she had worked so hard to attain, but her customary good nature gave way increasingly to tension and irritability. She was upset easily and unpredictable. Some of these upsets became tantrums, or rages, during which she broke things or hit out at people. Since she was quite strong, her blows were hard. Also there were convulsive episodes.
Further, Rosemary was frequently wandering away from St. Gertrude’s, which was located in the heart of urban Washington. The nuns had trouble keeping track of her, especially at night, and the Kennedys were terrified that she would make an easy target for predators. Both Joe and Rose were becoming convinced that Rosemary’s problems went beyond simple cognitive deficits; they feared that her behavior was being affected by some other neurological degeneration.
Joe consulted with experts in the field about a promising new procedure, developed by Portuguese physician António Egas Moniz and performed in the United States at George Washington University Hospital by Dr. Walter Freeman and Dr. James Watts. The procedure was never promoted as a cure for cognitive disabilities or even mental illness; it was seen as a last resort that would relieve the agitating symptoms of certain psychiatric disorders by severing neural connections between the brain’s prefrontal lobes. It was seen as groundbreaking, and would be for years to come: In fact, Moniz received a Nobel Prize for its invention in 1949. For Joe Kennedy, it promised to flatten Rosemary’s affect, take away the anger and frustration that tormented her, and offer her some hope of contentment.
Sometime in November, apparently without the approval of Rose, Joe had the procedure—commonly known as a prefrontal lobotomy—performed on Rosemary. She emerged from the operation unable to walk or speak and was moved to Craig House, a private psychiatric hospital in New York, to recuperate. She recovered some of her motor skills at Craig House, but never her ability to speak or her memory. In 1948 Joe moved her to the St. Coletta School in Jefferson, Wisconsin, and never saw her again. Rose and the children wouldn’t visit her there either, until after Joe’s 1961 stroke left him confined to a wheelchair; even then, they visited without his knowledge.
It’s unknown what Joe told Rose or the other children, but it would be twenty years before Rose again used Rosemary’s name in a letter to the kids. Reflecting on the time in undated diary notes, Rose wrote of Rosemary’s “deteriorating”: “It was then we decided that she would be better off for her own sake and for ours if she went to a home where she would be with people of her own mental capacity.”
She makes no mention there of the botched lobotomy, but by the time she wrote her memoirs in the 1970s, she was able to speak less euphemistically about what happened to her daughter. She would write:
The operation eliminated the violence and seizures, but it also had the effect of leaving Rosemary permanently incapacitated. She lost everything that had been gained during the years by her own gallant efforts and our loving efforts for her. She had no possibility of ever again being able to function in a viable way in the world at large.
Sometime after Joe’s death, Rose addressed the other major issue regarding Rosemary: Joe’s unilateral decision to have her lobomotized. “I will never forgive Joe for that awful operation he had performed on Rosemary,” Rose confided to historian Doris Kearns Goodwin. “It is the only thing I have ever felt bitter toward him about.”
While Rose was the undisputed ruler of her domestic domain, Joe had always made the larger medical decisions for the children, starting with Jack’s hospitalization for scarlet fever at age two. His sense of responsibility for Rosemary in particular had only increased since the fall of 1938, when she had been the only child to remain in England with her father. Rose took his single-minded decision as a betrayal, but it was not out of character with their marriage’s already established division of labor.
The betrayal, for Rose, was not that Joe acted without letting her weigh in. It was that he had acted, as he had so many times before, on one of their children’s behalf, and for the first time the results had been disastrous.
It was only the first tragedy in what would be a very tragic decade.