Rosemary: The Hidden Kennedy Daughter (6 page)

Photographs from that time show Rosemary as a happy little girl seemingly as alert and able as her siblings. Yet soon after Kathleen, affectionately called “Kick,” was born, when Rosemary was a year and a half old, her development became a serious cause of concern for her parents.
First Kick and then Eunice quickly surpassed Rosemary in every measure of intellectual and physical skill. Rose noticed that Rosemary “could not steer a sled” nor easily master childhood sports nor write on paper easily.
Rose could see that Rosemary was struggling when other children were not. “I realized,” Rose reflected, “at an early age, that Rosemary was not like the others.”
Though Rosemary was still very young and a diagnosis had not yet been confirmed, the specter of having a child with disabilities was overwhelming for her parents.

In Rose’s diaries of those early years, her sporadic entries are dominated by comments on the children and their activities. Busy with the everyday responsibilities of running her household, Rose could find only a few moments a month to record some of these childhood antics. Some years are missing entirely; either those diaries are lost or Rose failed to keep one. The pranks of the two oldest boys, Joe and Jack, litter her early entries, alongside notes about the children’s health and vacations. Sickness overshadows entries for 1923, for example. One member or more of the family always seemed to have a cold, bronchitis, or worse. She also
noted some of the precocious things the children did. Eunice, a toddler, was walking and talking in 1923, “the best little talker of all,” Rose remarked.
Rosemary is rarely mentioned, though Rose noted with some humor that four-year-old Rosemary stuck her tongue out during Easter dinner at her Kennedy grandparents’ home in Winthrop.
The lack of diary entries belies Rose’s special attention to Rosemary’s needs—attention, Rose later revealed, that she felt may have been a detriment to the other children. “I often wondered if Jack felt neglected . . . because when he was young, and of course, Rosemary was a year and a half younger than he was, I gave her a great deal of attention, thinking that I could circumvent this affliction she had, or I could have her so educated that it wouldn’t be noticed at all or she could still go on with the other children in a normal way.”
A neighbor and a friend of the boys remembered that Rose “wasn’t a bring-them-to-the-bosom kind of mother. There was a reserve between Mrs. Kennedy and her children, except for the case of Rosemary, who received most of her affection.”

Rosemary could not compete, physically or intellectually, in the active Kennedy family. “When we have a number of children, we cannot understand why they are all not alike,” Rose would later muse, “especially if the oldest ones are brilliant scholastically or outstanding in athletics. Then when the younger ones come along, we naturally expect the same thing and we become critical and impatient if this is not the case.”
But Rosemary’s limitations were far more complicated than mere personality differences, and the pressure to mold her to expectations wore heavily on her parents. To Joe, being “different” meant being excluded from clubs, parties, and business deals. He had spent his life battling the discrimination that kept him from the inner sanctums
dominated by the Protestant moneyed elite. He had felt the sting of rejection because of his ethnic and religious heritage, and he had long vowed never again to be subjected to outsider status—nor would his children be. They would excel in everything. He would spend his life grooming them to be accepted into those inner circles, and he would not risk having any of them falter.

3

I
N THE FALL
of 1923, when Rosemary was five, she was enrolled in kindergarten in Brookline, at the Edward Devotion School, just as her brothers had been. Rosemary appeared “deficient,” a label teachers and school systems were beginning to use to describe children who were lagging behind their peers in school.
At that young age, there really were no other educational or therapeutic options for Rosemary, and Joe and Rose did what most other parents of intellectually disabled children did: they hoped that her teachers could help Rosemary catch up to the achievement levels of her classmates.

“I had never heard of a retarded child,” Rose wrote. She had not been prepared to mother a child who was different or less than capable.
In fact, Rose did not like people who lagged behind or who were different. Now she had a child who did not meet her standards, or Joe’s, and who was indeed “different.” Rose would reflect that “mental retardation was not a current expression in those days,” though a growing body of research into mental and intellectual disabilities was beginning to use the term.
On her
own and with a passion that characterized her inner drive and determination, Rose began reading whatever she could find on the subject of retardation, trying to come to terms with its meaning and its implications for Rosemary’s future.

Rose was determined to keep Rosemary enrolled in public school with her peers, augmenting daily school lessons with her own additional instruction. She feared that if Rosemary “went away to school where other children were slow,” she would not be challenged to meet her greatest potential.
In this, Rose was ahead of her time; there was little thought during that era that there could be any positive educational reason to include an intellectually delayed child in a public-school classroom. Rose would have to meet that challenge herself. Her later statement that “one [child] may be smart in studies, one dull—one may be overconfident, another shy—and so a different approach must be made” gives a sense perhaps of Rose’s determination to transform disability into achievement.

Specialized and individualized instructional plans and activities in reading and writing, occupational therapy, and other therapeutic services supporting children’s and adults’ emotional, social, and intellectual needs, which are routinely offered today, were not available to Rosemary. Furthermore, Rose’s own education had focused on classical literature, history, and languages, not, of course, on the latest educational methods for children with disabilities. Finding time to work with Rosemary at home, with many other small children demanding her attention, was not easy.

In the spring of 1924, Rosemary’s kindergarten teachers Betsy Beau and Cordelia Gould refused to promote her to first grade. “I did not know . . . how to cope with the situation,” Rose would write years later.
“I talked to our family doctor, to the head of the psychology department at Harvard, to a Catholic psychol
ogist who was head of a school in Washington. Each of them told me she was retarded.”
Mental “retardation” and “arrested growth” were not well-defined diagnostic terms then, and were used broadly and carelessly by doctors and other educational professionals to describe a variety of intellectual and physical conditions.
The diagnosis provided little direction for educational or therapeutic options, and it offered scant hope for what Rosemary’s future would hold. “What to do about her, where to send her, how to help her seemed to be an unanswered question.” Rosemary would repeat kindergarten the following year.

While the particular needs and requirements of children like Rosemary were not yet considered worthy of specialized treatment in public-school systems, the Brookline schools did deliver a determination of Rosemary’s impairments in the form of an IQ test.
IQ, or intelligence quotient, testing was in its infancy when Rosemary was evaluated in school, probably when she was six or seven years old. Brookline was one of the first school systems in the country to adopt intelligence testing for its students, in the form of the Otis Intelligence Test, developed for young children by psychologist and statistician Arthur Sinton Otis.
Though Rosemary’s specific results are unknown, Rose wrote, “I was told that her IQ was low,” meaning that Rosemary’s mental age was lower than expected for her chronological age as compared to other children.
How low the actual score was remains an important question. Today, an IQ test score of 70 or below denotes significant intellectual impairment, although we now know that with specialized therapy, education, and stimulation, some individuals may improve their scores and achieve the skills important for leading independent, productive lives. Since the test was so new in the 1920s, however, what Rosemary’s score meant for her future was unknowable. Even with test scores in hand, few school
systems were equipped to deal with the information, leaving parents to struggle at home either to provide resources for their children so that they might reach their full potential or to choose institutionalization, where the child could be housed with other physically and mentally disabled children and adults.

The family endured other unhappy times during Rosemary’s early childhood. In May 1923, Joe’s mother, Mary, died at the age of sixty-five from cancer. The following fall, on September 19, just as Rosemary had started kindergarten, Rose’s sister Eunice finally succumbed to tuberculosis. It was a devastating loss to the entire family.
Rose spent months formally mourning her sister’s passing, declining invitations to the theater, events, and dinners with friends well into the new year.

The time of deep mourning ended in May 1924, when Rose gave birth to the Kennedys’ fourth daughter and sixth child, Patricia. Baby Pat arrived just as Joe, who had left the successful brokerage firm Hayden and Stone in 1923 to form his own investment partnership, was embarking on a career path that would ensure a new level of financial achievement. A smart, detail-oriented analyst, Kennedy parlayed his skills and tolerance for risk into extraordinarily profitable investments. Investing advantageously, and using insider information and shrewd exploitation of the unregulated markets in certain stocks—all legal in the 1920s—Kennedy made an enormous amount of money. In fact, as Rose was going into labor with Pat, Joe was engaged in a ruthless plan to repel corporate raiders who were driving down the stock price of Yellow Cab, a company in which a Kennedy associate had invested heavily, in an attempt to ruin Yellow Cab’s plan to enter the New York City taxi business. Holed up in the city’s Waldorf Hotel, in a room transformed into an office, Joe successfully thwarted the raiders’ attempts through clever ma
nipulation of the company’s stock during April and May, saving his friend and other investors millions of dollars. Rewarded well with cash and stocks, Joe had finally earned a reputation as a bold and brilliant market strategist on the biggest financial stage in the world. It would be nearly a month, Joe later recalled, before he met his newest baby. Such hard-driving work habits brought Joe to exhaustion—a common occurrence that worried Rose and Joe both—but his success in New York demanded that he spend ever more time there.

Traveling to Wall Street from Brookline every week started to take its toll on Joe. He and Eddie Moore, whose role as Kennedy’s closest adviser carried him to New York as well, would leave their homes on Sunday night and take the five-hour or longer train ride to New York City, then return home on Friday or Saturday night, leaving few hours for family time. It was during this stressful period that Joe set up trust funds for all the children so that, should his health fail him, they would be provided for.

Rose would occasionally travel to New York to spend the weekend with Joe, but she preferred to have him come home to spend some time with the children. The arrangement was not ideal, so discussions about leaving Boston, and the family home in Brookline, began in earnest. As the couple debated the family’s move to New York, a process that played out over two years, Joe became interested in the movie business. He believed that Hollywood, on the eve of technological advances that would soon give rise to talking films, promised to be a gold mine of remarkable returns. When Bobby, the couple’s seventh child, was born, in November 1925, Joe was on the verge of embarking on his first big Hollywood venture with the purchase of a film production company called FBO, or Film Booking Office. As the owner of a chain of movie houses in New England, Joe had been trying for years
to engage in the business of financing films. His offer for FBO, in the summer of 1925, was at first rebuffed, and Kennedy returned his attention to the world of stocks and bonds. In a surprising change of direction, however, FBO executives abruptly and eagerly accepted Joe’s months-old offer early in the winter of 1926. The Kennedys were now in the film business.

The new venture required Joe to travel not only to New York but to California as well. Joe and Rose had come to the definite realization that they could no longer live in Boston. Access to New York City, physically and financially, improved Joe’s prospects for success. The family must move to New York so Joe could have his business and family closer together, at least some of the time.

Moving for business was not the sole driving force behind the Kennedys’ departure from Boston. By 1927 Joe was fed up with the old Yankee elite’s denying him membership in the leading social clubs that would prove he had finally succeeded in New England’s Protestant-controlled society. As difficult as it was to leave extended family behind, business and social success trumped familial comfort. New York was a more diverse and tolerant place, full of brilliant, successful people on the move. The older children could still attend choice private high schools and, later, college, and the younger ones could attend high-quality local public and private schools. The family, Joe believed, would thrive in New York amid greater diversity and less prejudice.

On September 26, 1927, the Kennedys boarded a private railroad car that Joe had hired to transport his large family to Riverdale, an affluent neighborhood situated on the Hudson River in the northwest corner of the Bronx. The Kennedys settled into a rented, thirteen-room stucco home that could accommodate the family of nine and an expanding number of nurses, governesses, housekeepers, and other staff. The large Riverdale estates
and smaller mansions of the city’s business and professional elite benefited from the highest elevation in New York City, featuring rolling hills, fields, and forests, with spectacular views of the river and the skyscrapers of Manhattan, ten miles away.
The Kennedys’ new home in Riverdale was larger than the family’s suburban home in Brookline, and their new neighborhood was less densely populated, featuring large lawns and abundant green spaces. Rose had decided on Riverdale because there was an “excellent boys school there with supervised play” for Joe and Jack, then twelve and ten years old, respectively, one of her few requirements in a new community. Riverdale Country School offered programs for girls, too, and the children could take the bus every day together. The youngest children enrolled in the local elementary school; they could walk back and forth to school and “get some fresh air and exercise.”
They would be home every day, where Rose would continue to contribute to their early development.