By Kate Clifford Larson Illustrated. 302 pp. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $27. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/11/books/review/rosemary-the-hidden-kennedy-daughter-by-kate-clifford-larson.html?_r=0 The tragic life of Rosemary Kennedy, the intellectually disabled member of the Kennedy clan, has been well documented in many histories of this famous family. But she has often been treated as an afterthought, a secondary character kept out of sight during the pivotal 1960s. Now the third child of Joseph and Rose Kennedy takes center stage in “Rosemary: The Hidden Kennedy Daughter,” by Kate Clifford Larson, a biography that chronicles her life with fresh details and tells how her famous siblings were affected by — and reacted to — Rosemary’s struggles.
Setting her story against the backdrop of the stigma attached to mental illness in the first half of the 20th century, Larson describes the hubris of ambitious and conflicted parents who cared for their daughter but feared that her limitations, if publicly known, would damage their other children’s brilliant careers. What makes this story especially haunting are the might-have-beens. Rosemary’s problems began at her birth, on Sept. 13, 1918. Her mother’s first two children, Joe Jr. and Jack, had been safely delivered at home by the same obstetrician. But when Rose went into labor with Rosemary, the doctor was not immediately available. Although the nurse was trained to deliver babies, she nonetheless tried to halt the birth to await the doctor’s arrival. By ordering Rose to keep her legs closed and forcing the baby’s head to stay in the birth canal for two hours, the nurse took actions that resulted in a harmful loss of oxygen. As a child, Rosemary suffered development delays, yet had enough mental acuity to be frustrated when she was unable to keep up with her bright and athletic siblings. Even with private tutors, she had difficulty mastering the basics of reading and writing. At age 11, she was sent to a Pennsylvania boarding school for intellectually challenged students. From then on, Rosemary changed schools every few years, either because the educators were unable to deal with her disabilities and mood swings or because her parents hoped a change of scene might prove beneficial. The first biographer to have access to all of Rosemary’s known letters, replete with typos and lopsided sentence structure, Larson deploys excerpts in heart-rending fashion, showing a sweet, insecure girl who was desperate to please. “I would do anything to make you so happy,” a teenage Rosemary wrote to her father. Although at 15 she had the writing skill of a 10-year-old, that didn’t prevent her from expressing joy in her life and appearing poised and sociable. But at her parents’ behest, Rosemary endured experimental injections meant to treat hormonal imbalances. Her father described her as suffering from “backwardness.” Her siblings, often charged with keeping an eye on her during vacations and school breaks, were supportive but at times impatient. Her older brother Joe Jr. appeared to dote on Rosemary, but during a post-Harvard trip to Germany in 1934, he showed little sympathy for others with disabilities. In a chilling letter to his father, he praised Hitler’s sterilization policy as “a great thing” that “will do away with many of the disgusting specimens of men.” After Joseph Kennedy became the United States ambassador to Great Britain in 1938, Rosemary blossomed, entering the most satisfying period of her life. Now a flirtatious beauty who reveled in male attention, the well-rehearsed Rosemary made a stunning debut at Buckingham Palace and attended a convent school where she thrived, training to be a Montessori teacher’s aide. But the outbreak of war in the autumn of 1939 sent her mother and siblings fleeing to New York, and Rosemary joined them in June 1940. Joseph Kennedy, whose isolationist views had irked President Roosevelt, resigned from his post after the November election. Rosemary’s return to the family home in Bronxville was disastrous. She regressed, experiencing seizures and violent tantrums, hitting and hurting those in the vicinity. Her frantic parents sent her to a summer camp in western Massachusetts (she was kicked out after a few weeks), a Philadelphia boarding school (she lasted a few months) and then a convent school in Washington, D.C., where a rebellious Rosemary wandered off at night. Fearing that men might sexually prey on their vulnerable daughter, her parents worried that a scandal would diminish the family’s political prospects. Deciding that something drastic needed to be done, Joseph Kennedy chose a surgical solution that the American Medical Association had already warned was risky: a prefrontal lobotomy. In November 1941, at George Washington University Hospital, a wide-awake Rosemary followed a doctor’s instructions to recite songs and stories as he drilled two holes in her head and cut nerve endings in her brain until she became incoherent, then silent. The brutal surgery left her permanently disabled and unable to care for herself. Even after months of physical therapy, Rosemary never regained the full use of one arm and walked with a limp. Initially, she could speak only a few words. Sent to a private psychiatric institution in New York, then to a church-run facility in Wisconsin, Rosemary was abandoned by her parents. Joe appears to have stopped seeing her in 1948 although he was vigorous until 1961, when he suffered a catastrophic stroke. Rose, who blamed her husband for authorizing the lobotomy, couldn’t face her damaged child. “There is no record of Rose visiting her eldest daughter for more than 20 years,” Larson writes. In the early 1960s, when Rose finally did turn up, Rosemary reportedly recoiled. The heroine of this story is Eunice Kennedy Shriver, now best known as one of the founders of the Special Olympics. Horrified by what had been done to her sister, Eunice became a passionate champion for people with disabilities. She persuaded her father to use his fortune to fund research, and after John F. Kennedy was elected president she successfully lobbied him to establish such government entities as the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. She later assumed responsibility for Rosemary’s care. The family’s youngest member, Ted, was only 9 years old when Rosemary vanished from family life with minimal explanation, a frightening and puzzling loss. As a senator, he also took up her cause, citing Rosemary as his inspiration when he sponsored bills like the groundbreaking Americans With Disabilities Act. In 1974, more than 30 years after the lobotomy, Rose arranged for Rosemary to briefly leave the Wisconsin institution and visit her surviving family members in Hyannis Port. The trip went sufficiently well that more reunions followed. In 1995, at the age of 104, Rose Kennedy died. A decade later, when Rosemary succumbed, at age 86, four of her siblings — Eunice, Jean, Pat and Ted — were by her side. Many of Larson’s best anecdotes and quotations are mined from previous books, notably Doris Kearns Goodwin’s “The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys”; David Nasaw’s “The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy”; and Lawrence Leamer’s two volumes, “The Kennedy Men” and “The Kennedy Women.” But she has amplified this well-told tale with newly released material from the John F. Kennedy Library and a few interviews. By making Rosemary the central character, she has produced a valuable account of a mental health tragedy, and an influential family’s belated efforts to make amends. -- Avinash Shahi Doctoral student at Centre for Law and Governance JNU Register at the dedicated AccessIndia list for discussing accessibility of mobile phones / Tabs on: http://mail.accessindia.org.in/mailman/listinfo/mobile.accessindia_accessindia.org.in Search for old postings at: http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/ To unsubscribe send a message to [email protected] with the subject unsubscribe. To change your subscription to digest mode or make any other changes, please visit the list home page at http://accessindia.org.in/mailman/listinfo/accessindia_accessindia.org.in Disclaimer: 1. 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