What happened to JFK’s sister? JFK’s sister, Rosemary Kennedy, was permanently incapacitated by a failed lobotomy in 1941, leaving her with the mental age of a two-year-old.
Rosemary Kennedy was the third of nine children born to Joseph P. Kennedy and his wife Rose Fitzgerald. They are known as the Kennedy family, and Rosemary was the only one of the children who their father Joe didn’t push into the limelight. The oldest child, Joe, was meant for great things, but was unfortunately killed in World War 2 in 1944. The second child, John, was the 35th President of the United States, unfortunately assassinated in 1963. Rosemary was the third child. The fourth child, Kathleen, was also unfortunately killed in a plane crash in 1948. The fifth child, Eunice, set up the Special Olympics for persons with intellectual disabilities. The sixth child, Patricia, was a TV producer and socialite. The seventh child, Robert, was the U.S. attorney general and was running for president when he was unfortunately assassinated in 1968. The eighth child, Jean, was the United States ambassador to Ireland and played a role in the Good Friday Agreement. And the ninth child, Ted, was a senator from Massachusetts for 47 years. A very influential family. Sadly, their father died in 1969, so he suffered the deaths of four of his children. This is known as the “Kennedy curse”.
So, what happened to Rosemary Kennedy? What happened is simple to explain. Why it happened is less so. From birth, Rosemary Kennedy appears to have been developmentally slower than her brothers and sisters. She had learning difficulties, mood swings, and social difficulties. A modern diagnosis might be autism, but such a diagnosis was not available at the time. Her mother blamed it on a lack of oxygen at birth. Apparently, when she was born, the doctor was late, and Rose Kennedy was told to keep her legs closed to delay the birth until the doctor arrived, which ended up taking two hours. Whether that is the actual reason is not verified. Joseph Kennedy was very protective of the image he had created for his family, and he kept her out of the spotlight as much as possible. Rosemary’s mother told friends she was developing normally. They sent Rosemary to several different schools, and it appeared that she was intellectually disabled, and she had difficulty learning to read and write. Joseph Kennedy paid for her to have private tutors, and they said that Rosemary was studying to be a kindergarten teacher. How true that was is anyone’s guess.
From the age of 18 to 20, Joseph Kennedy became ambassador to the UK, and he took Rosemary, along with four of his other children, with him. Rosemary loved England and enjoyed her school. By 1940, Joseph Kennedy had to resign as ambassador, and he moved his family back to America. Rosemary was in her early twenties, and, according to her family, she became very difficult to deal with. She flew into rages, had convulsions, and was expelled from several schools. She was placed in a convent but escaped at night. Joseph Kennedy was told by a neurologist called Dr. Walter Freeman that a lobotomy would cure his daughter. There is no way of knowing if her father hoped this would be a way of curing his daughter, or if he hoped it would be a way of keeping her quiet so that she wouldn’t derail his political ambitions for his family. Whatever the reason, and without telling his wife, he ordered the doctor to perform a lobotomy in November 1941.
A lobotomy is the process of cutting the connections between the prefrontal cortex and the rest of the brain. Lobotomies had first been performed in the USA in 1936, and in the 1940s, they were very much in vogue among neurosurgeons. 20,000 lobotomies were performed in the US during the 1940s, 60% of them on women. The idea was that severing the connections to the frontal cortex would remove most of the person’s personality and intellect, reducing self-awareness, which would reduce the patient to the mental age of a child and halt whatever symptoms they were demonstrating that made a lobotomy seem like a good idea. Actual follow up studies on patients who underwent lobotomies showed that in most cases, the patient was worse off, and often significantly worse. As a medical procedure, the lobotomy was first made illegal in the Soviet Union, and in the U.S., it declined sharply in the mid-1950s, and later regulation was mostly handled through state laws and consent rules rather than a single federal ban. The procedure may have reduced symptoms of mental illness in some patients, but there are no parts of our brains that we can do without, and all of the lobes work in line with all the others. The frontal lobe is responsible for goal-directed behavior and abstract mental thinking, and controls the voluntary movement of several body parts, amongst other things. There is no way that removing this part of the brain can ever be a good thing.
After her lobotomy, Rosemary Kennedy had several problems. Her father said that the lobotomy “failed”, but I would argue that there is no such thing as a successful lobotomy. After the lobotomy, she could not speak or walk properly, was incontinent, and had the mental age of a two-year-old. Joseph Kennedy could see that public knowledge of the lobotomy would be even worse than people knowing she was mentally ill, so he put her in an institution. Later, he built a house for her in an institution in Wisconsin, and appears to have written her out of his life. He doesn’t appear to have visited her, and his wife didn’t visit her until her husband had died. The other Kennedys didn’t even know where Rosemary was until 1961 and had no idea what had happened to her. In 1961, their father had a stroke and informed everyone. Rosemary lived in the same institution until she died at the age of 86 in 2005. This is a pretty dark story, but, on the positive side, it pushed JFK to be a more liberal president, and he signed several laws for people with intellectual disabilities, and it pushed her sister, Eunice, to start the Special Olympics. And this is what I learned today.
Sources
https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/history/walter-freeman-neurosurgeon
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosemary_Kennedy
https://people.com/books/rosemary-kennedy-the-truth-about-her-lobotomy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lobotomy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frontal_lobe
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kennedy_family
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_P._Kennedy_Sr.
https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/rosemary-kennedy-the-eldest-kennedy-daughter.htm
Image By Angus McBean – London, Rosemary Kennedy, portrait photographs, 1938: June | JFK Library, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=162594848