American Psychosis (3 page)

FIG
1.3 Rosemary and her father in London in 1938. (Copyright Bettmann/Corbis/AP Images)

Joe Kennedy traveled to the States on November 29 to join his family for Christmas, Rosemary remained at the Hertfordshire convent. The people who were increasingly in charge of Rosemary’s life were Edward M. Moore and his wife, Mary. Moore had begun working for Joe Kennedy in 1915. He was not only Kennedy’s most trusted assistant but also Rosemary’s godfather and the namesake of the youngest of the Kennedy children, Edward (Ted) Moore Kennedy. During the 3 months when Joe Kennedy was absent from England, from December 1939 through February 1940, the Moores remained there and looked after Rosemary’s needs. The distance between Rosemary and her family at that point can be measured by the fact that she only learned of her father’s return to England when she read about it in the newspaper.
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Throughout the spring of 1940, the Nazis marched inexorably across Europe. Norway and Denmark fell, then Belgium and the Netherlands. It seemed just a matter of time before German bombs would fall on England, and Joe Kennedy predicted that the country would fall by July. Having the Nazis overrun England and capture Rosemary was not a welcome idea, so finally, in May of 1940, the Moores escorted Rosemary back to the States by way of Lisbon. Reporters were told that she had remained in England “to continue her art studies” (
Figure 1.4
).
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FIG
1.4 Rosemary, Jack, and younger sister Jean in 1940, shortly after Rosemary had returned from England. At that time, she had begun showing symptoms of mental illness, in addition to her mild mental retardation. (AP Photo)

Joe Kennedy remained in London for five additional months, returning on October 22, just prior to the election. Wendell Wilkie, the Republican nominee, was proving to be a tougher foe than Roosevelt had anticipated. Kennedy represented a significant block of American voters who wanted American to stay out of Europe’s war, so Roosevelt strongly urged him to publicly endorse his reelection. Although Kennedy suspected that Roosevelt would bring America into the war if given the chance, he endorsed him. When later asked why he had done so, Kennedy replied: “I simply made a deal with Roosevelt. We agreed that if I endorsed him for President in 1940, then he would support my son Joe for governor of Massachusetts in 1942.” Although he had not yet finished law school, Joe Jr. was regarded as the most promising of the Kennedy children and “had made no secret of his ultimate intention to become president of the United States.” Because Joe Sr.’s own political career was by then “in ruins,” he was ready to pass his mantle of aspiration to his oldest son. As historian Alonzo Hamby noted, “he expected his children to achieve his frustrated ambitions for social acceptance and political recognition and deliberately guided them along that path.”
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What limited information is available suggests that things did not go well for Rosemary after she returned from England. According to Peter Collier and David Horowitz’s
The Kennedys
, “the basic skills she had labored so hard to master in her special schools were deteriorating.” She lived with the Moores, at a convent in Boston, at a “special camp” in Massachusetts, and with her family for various periods. One Kennedy guest recalled that “it was embarrassing to be around Rosemary. . . . She would behave in strange ways at the table. . . . She would appear there standing in her nightgown when everyone else was moving ahead so rapidly.” For one dinner party, Rose “didn’t feel comfortable having Rosemary around” and asked her governess to take her to her home for the weekend.
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By the summer of 1941, Rosemary’s behavior had become increasingly alarming. According to Doris Kearns Goodwin’s
The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys
, Rosemary’s “customary good nature had given way to tantrums, rages and violent behavior. Pacing up and down the halls of her home, she was like a wild animal, given to screaming, cursing, and thrashing out at anyone who tried to thwart her will.” For no apparent reason, “she would erupt in an inexplicable fury, the rage pouring out of her like a tempest from a cloudless sky.” One significant episode that summer involved her 78-year-old grandfather, John F. Fitzgerald. “Rosemary, who was sitting on the porch at Hyannis, suddenly attacked Honey Fitz, hitting and kicking her tiny, white-haired grandfather until she was pulled away.” Fitzgerald had been a three-term member of Congress and three-term mayor of Boston and was still regarded as one of the most powerful men in the city.
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Shortly after the attack on her grandfather, Rosemary was sent to live at St. Gertrude’s School for Arts and Crafts, one of the first schools in the United States
offering academic training for retarded children. It was part of a Benedictine convent in northeast Washington, D.C., located on Sargent Road, adjacent to the campus of Catholic University. Rosemary’s sister Kathleen had already moved to Washington in August to take a job with the
Washington Times-Herald
. In October, Jack also moved to Washington to work at the Office of Naval Intelligence and lived at Dorchester House, on 16th Street. Kathleen and Jack could both, therefore, keep an eye on their increasingly unpredictable sibling.

What had become painfully clear was that something had to be done. Joe and Rose were afraid that their daughter would become pregnant, a potentially disgraceful situation for a Catholic family with political ambitions in an era when abortions were not a realistic option. Their fears only increased when Rosemary figured out how to escape from the convent and wander the streets of northeast Washington at night. In Goodwin’s
The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys
, Ann Gargan, Rosemary’s cousin on her mother’s side, recalled the Kennedy dilemma:

She was the most beautiful of all the Kennedys. . . . She had the body of a twenty-one-year-old yearning for fulfillment with the mentality of a four-year-old. She was in a convent in Washington at the time, and many nights the school would call to say she was missing, only to find her out walking the streets at 2 a.m. Can you imagine what it must have been like to know your daughter was walking the streets in the darkness of the night, the perfect prey for an unsuspecting male?

In
The Kennedy Women
, Laurence Leamer added that “the nuns would find her wandering in the streets, her story disconnected and vague, and they would bring her back to the convent, ask her to bathe, and warn her never again to walk into those nighttime streets. Soon she would be off again. . . . The family worried there were men who wanted her and men she may have wanted. . . . The family feared that Rosemary had lost all control. . . . They feared that she was going out into the streets to do what Kathleen called ‘the thing the priest says not to do.’ “Edward Shorter, who had access to the Kennedy archives for his book on them, claims that “apparently in the course of these wanderings [Rosemary] was having sexual contact with men.”
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It is not possible to give a definitive diagnosis of Rosemary’s illness without access to her files. The Kennedy Foundation has kept them closed and rejected applications to view them, including my own request in October 2010, despite the fact that all the principals had died. According to FBI files, Joseph Kennedy’s attorney confirmed that Rosemary had suffered from a “mental illness” for “many years.” In her autobiography, Rose Kennedy herself acknowledged that “there were other factors at work besides retardation” and added: “A neurological disturbance or disease of some sort seemingly had overtaken her, and it was becoming progressively worse.” Dr. Bertram S. Brown,
former director of the National Institute of Mental Health, indicated in a 1968 interview that Rosemary “may well have had a schizophrenic illness,” based on his discussion with psychiatrists who had been involved with the Kennedy family. What can be said with reasonable certainty is that Rosemary had developed a severe psychiatric disorder with psychotic features that fit somewhere in the clinical spectrum of schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, and bipolar disorder with psychotic features. This development should not have been completely unexpected; several studies have reported that between 4% and 8% of children who have mild mental retardation subsequently develop schizophrenia or other psychosis when they reach maturity. And, as noted previously, individuals exposed to the influenza virus prior to birth have an increased chance of later developing schizophrenia.
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THE LOBOTOMY

One of Joe Kennedy’s goals in life was to achieve respectability for himself and his family. As an Irish American in Boston, he had grown up in an era when “Paddy” and “Mick” occupied the lowest rungs on the social ladder. At college, according to Beschloss, “Kennedy seemed to seek out wellborn Harvard men, one of whom told him that he was being watched for signs of the behavior commonly thought of as Irish. Perhaps to escape the Irish stereotype, Kennedy neither smoked, drank or gambled.” In 1922, when Kennedy applied for membership in the Cohasset Country Club, his wife “was snubbed by the Cohasset matrons and Joe was blackballed.” Years later, he remembered it clearly: “Those narrow-minded bigoted sons of bitches barred me because I was an Irish Catholic and son of a barkeep.” On another occasion, after having been referred to in the newspaper as an “Irishman,” Kennedy exploded: “Goddam it! I was born in this country! My children were born in this country! What the hell does someone have to do to become an American?”
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Joe Kennedy’s Irish roots and Catholic faith were thus significant impediments to respectability. Rosemary’s mental retardation was yet another barrier, given beliefs about the genetic origins of mental retardation that were prevalent early in the twentieth century. But to have a daughter who was seriously mentally ill and in danger of becoming pregnant out of wedlock was perhaps the greatest impediment of all. In 1941 Freudian theories regarding the cause of mental illness were prominent, and standard textbooks of psychiatry, such as Aaron J. Rosanoff’s
Manual of Psychiatry and Mental Hygiene
, claimed that schizophrenia and related diseases were caused by “chaotic sexuality” resulting from “inborn psychosexual ill-balance . . . mainly between the factors within the individual which makes for maleness and those which make for femaleness.” Joe and Rose Kennedy had grown up in an era when the epithet “crazy Irish” was commonly directed at families like their own. As early as 1854, a Massachusetts
Commission on Lunacy had reported that Irish immigrants were disproportionately represented in the state’s asylums. In the Boston Lunatic Hospital, for example, 80% of the inmates were Irish, compared with 31% of Boston’s population. For a socially and politically ambitious Irish family like the Kennedys, having an insane family member was the definitive disgrace.
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The decision of Joe Kennedy to seek a lobotomy for Rosemary should be viewed in this historical light. The operation, which involves surgically severing the connections between the frontal lobe and the rest of the brain, had been pioneered by Dr. Edgar Moniz in Portugal in 1935. It had subsequently been introduced in the United States in 1936 by Drs. Walter J. Freeman, a neurologist, and James W. Watts, a neurosurgeon, in Washington. By 1941 Freeman and Watts had done lobotomies on almost 100 mentally ill patients and were claiming good results for many of them, especially those with symptoms of agitated depression and obsessive-compulsive symptoms. As Freeman later described it: “Disturbed patients often become friendly, quiet and cooperative. . . . The results are usually quite good, especially from an administrative point of view.” However, “patients . . . with schizophrenia fared poorly by comparison,” according to Freeman’s biographer, who examined his records.
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