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 mentally incapacitated for the rest of her life.

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Biography

Childhood

She was christened Rose Marie Kennedy and commonly called Rosemary. To her family and friends, she was known as "Rosie". Her mother was Rose Elizabeth Fitzgerald, her father Joseph Patrick Kennedy.

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, unsophisticated young woman whose life was filled with outings to the opera, tea dances, dress fittings, and other social interests:^{[citation needed]}

• "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."^[1]

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.

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 sneak out at night from the convent where she was being educated and cared for.^{[citation needed]}

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". ^[2] Joseph Kennedy had the procedure performed by neurosurgeon 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 performed 65 previous lobotomies. Freeman had no formal training in surgery and did not believe in the practice of aseptic surgical procedures^{[citation needed]}. Dr. Watts, who performed the surgery while Dr. Freeman supervised, 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.

—James W. Watts ^[3]

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" ^[4].

Although Freeman performed more than 3,000 lobotomies on individuals with mental illness during his career, [1] today, his lobotomy treatments are viewed as discredited by the mental health community.

Aftermath

In 1949, Rosemary moved to the St. Coletta School for Exceptional Children (formerly known as St. Coletta's Institute for Backward Children) in Jefferson, Wisconsin, a residential institution for people with disabilities. Due to the severity of her mental condition, Rosemary became largely detached from the Kennedy clan, but she was visited on regular occasions by her sister Eunice Kennedy Shriver, the founder of the Special Olympics and an advocate for the disabled on Rosemary's behalf. Joe Kennedy also made donations to philanthropic agencies that he founded to help people with developmental disabilities.

Occasionally, Rosemary was taken to visit relatives in Florida and Washington, D.C, and visited her childhood home on Cape Cod.

Publicly, she was declared to be mentally handicapped. This was more socially acceptable in a political family than a failed lobotomy. "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 a "mental illness". ^[5]

Death

Rosemary died from natural causes on January 7, 2005 at Fort Atkinson Memorial Hospital in Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin at the age of 86, with her three surviving sisters Eunice Kennedy Shriver, Patricia Kennedy Lawford and Jean Kennedy Smith, and her only surviving brother Senator Ted Kennedy by her side. Rosemary's death was the only natural death among the deceased children of Joseph and Rose Kennedy until the death of Patricia Kennedy Lawford from pneumonia on September 17 2006. She is buried in Holyhood Cemetery in Brookline, Massachusetts.

Mental retardation or mental illness?

Researchers disagree over the initial assessment of Rosemary's condition. 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 children, 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.^[6] 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". ^[7]

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 disturbance." She added that "the family considered Rosemary a disgrace and failure'". ^[8]

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 [sic] 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" ^[9]

"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 [sic] 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 [Dr. Watts's] day, performing a lobotomy on someone who was mentally ill 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 …" ^[10]

In popular culture

The band Rasputina released a song about Rose Marie Kennedy entitled Rose K.

Notes

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 0-471-23292-0
• Gibson, Barbara, Rose Kennedy and Her Family: The Best and Worst of Their Lives and Times, Birch Lane Press, ISBN 1-55972-299-1.
• Kennedy, Rose, Times to Remember, 1974, Doubleday, ISBN 0-385-47657-4
• Kessler, Ronald, The Sins of the Father: Joseph P. Kennedy and the Dynasty He Founded, Warner, 1996, ISBN 0-446-60384-8
• 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).

See also

• List of well-known U.S. presidential relatives
• Kennedy Curse