Rosemary: The Hidden Kennedy Daughter (26 page)

Rosemary’s transition home from England was a difficult one. She was happy, though, to be a “junior counselor” at Camp Fernwood, in western Massachusetts, in 1940. The situation lasted less than a month, however, as the camp owners could not cope with her disabilities.

Courtesy Terry Marotta

Deeply saddened by her sudden removal from Camp Fernwood, Rosemary pours her heart out in a handwritten letter to Caroline and Grace Sullivan, July 1940.

Courtesy Terry Marotta

Drs. Walter Freeman and James Watts popularized the prefrontal lobotomy in the United States. This photo accompanied a May 1941
Saturday Evening Post
article that claimed, “The psychosurgeon usually succeeds in turning an ingrowing and a harassed mind outward and in transforming a personality.” This was six months before Rosemary’s operation.

©
SEPS, licensed by Curtis Licensing, Indianapolis, IN. All rights reserved.

President John F. Kennedy presenting his pen to Eunice after signing the Maternal and Child Health and Mental Retardation bill in October 1963, less than a month before his assassination.

Courtesy John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum

In this August 21, 1964, photo, Eunice Kennedy Shriver is shown swimming with youngsters in a pool at a day camp for mentally challenged children in Fairmount Park, Philadelphia.

Associated Press

Saint Coletta School, in Jefferson, Wisconsin, as it looked when Rosemary was moved there in the late 1940s. Her father would build a small cottage on the Saint Coletta campus for Rosemary and the several nuns who took care of her.

Hot Pepper Dave, Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin

Rosemary, a caregiver from Saint Coletta, and nephew Anthony Shriver, who was deeply inspired by Rosemary.

Courtesy Anthony Shriver

A rare press photograph of Rosemary in her later years, Hyannis Port, 1998. Still able to walk with assistance from two aides, Rosemary would soon require a wheelchair.

©
Globe Photos/ZUMA Press/Corbis

Rosemary

Courtesy Anthony Shriver

9

A
S JACK’S POLITICAL
career took form and the White House looked like more than merely a dream, the Kennedys’ allure as newspaper fodder for both the society and news pages only grew. Family weddings, social and charitable events, and political campaigns kept the Kennedy name in the public eye. Jack was elected to the Senate in 1952, beating Massachusetts’s longtime Republican senator, Henry Cabot Lodge. The following year he married Jacqueline Bouvier of Newport, Rhode Island, four months after Eunice’s marriage to Sargent “Sarge” Shriver, a lawyer hired by Joe to manage one of the family’s largest real estate investments, the Merchandise Mart in Chicago. Bobby, while still a law student at the University of Virginia, had married Ethel Skakel in 1950, and Patricia followed in 1954 when she wed actor Peter Lawford. As this wealthy, glamorous, and now politically powerful Kennedy generation’s influence was growing, Rosemary’s whereabouts and activities posed a special challenge, one
that was met with the oft-repeated false claim that she was teaching at a school for handicapped children in the Midwest and preferred her privacy.

The fact of Rosemary’s intellectual disabilities—but not the lobotomy—was known to the small circle of advocates, many of them parents and siblings of the disabled, who belonged to the Massachusetts chapter of the National Association for Retarded Children. In 1955, according to Elizabeth Boggs, the parent of an intellectually disabled child and the president of NARC, the Massachusetts chapter contacted Cardinal Cushing about the possibility of approaching the Kennedy family to ask for its support for NARC programs and advocacy efforts. “We have tried to reach the Kennedy family through our channels in Boston, and we haven’t gotten any response,” Boggs remembered being told by John Fettinger, the president of Massachusetts NARC. “The Senator was, after all, the Senator from Massachusetts,” Boggs stressed, “so that would have been the natural approach.” Boggs recalled being frustrated two years later as well, when Jack did not endorse the first “mental-retardation bill”—which provided for rehabilitation and education programs—and did not attend the Senate hearings where testimony, including Boggs’s, was given in support of the legislation.
“He didn’t have to tell the world that he had a retarded sister in order to support that legislation, and yet he didn’t [support] it.”

While campaigning in 1958 for a second term as senator from Massachusetts—and, under the guidance and encouragement of his father, preparing for a presidential run in 1960—Jack made a secret side trip to Jefferson, Wisconsin, to visit Rosemary for the first time since her institutionalization. What he knew about Rosemary’s lobotomy and its outcome is unknown—but what he found shocked him. Confronted with the firsthand knowledge of
Rosemary’s condition, Jack experienced a transformed sense of responsibility toward disabilities legislation.

In 1958, during the frenetic excitement of Jack’s fledgling presidential campaign, Eunice approached her father about channeling more of the Kennedy Foundation’s resources into researching the causes of, and treatment for, intellectual disabilities.
Up to that point, the foundation had devoted more than eighty percent of its charitable giving to alleviating the suffering of the poor and needy through mostly Catholic and some Protestant institutions and programs, with the remainder funding construction projects related to facilities for children with intellectual disabilities. Eunice had been appointed to the foundation’s board of trustees when it was established in 1947. Though her name does not appear often in the annual reports, she did take an active role in the foundation’s administration. But now she made it clear that she wanted the foundation to focus on intellectual disabilities, and particularly on funding research into the biological causes of developmental and intellectual disabilities.