Another One From Sandwich Shop
I haven't even had a chance to add this to my link list; I've been too busy reading it. First, an excerpt from tne Sandwich Shop blog post entitled "Rosemary":
But it is in matter familial that the true brutality of the Kennedy character becomes apparent. This is where Rosemary Kennedy, who died yesterday at 86, comes in. Rosemary, the eldest sibling, was born mildly retarded. For this, she was shunted away during her childhood so as not to embarrass her demented father.And things were to get much worse as she reached maturity.
But as she got older, her father worried his daughter's mild condition would lead her into situations that could damage the family's reputation.
"Rosemary was a woman, and there was a dread fear of pregnancy, disease and disgrace," author Laurence Leamer wrote in an unauthorized Kennedy biography called The Kennedy Women: The Saga of an American Family.
There is no documentary evidence that Rosemary was involved in the kind of behavior that her father and brothers seemingly invented. But that was entirely beside the point. Rosemary was a broad and 'tard to boot. Therefore, she had to go....
The family released this statement upon Rosemary's death yesterday.
"Rosemary was a lifelong jewel to every member of our family," the statement said. "From her earliest years, her mental retardation was a continuing inspiration to each of us and a powerful source of our family's commitment to do all we can to help all persons with disabilities live full and productive lives."
This is, to put it mildly, patent bullshit. Other than paying her bills, the family had nothing at all to do with Rosemary until Joe suffered a debilitating stroke in 1962. There is no record of President Kennedy visiting his sister while in the White House. For over twenty years, until she could no longer be considered a political liability, Rosemary was the invisible Kennedy.
Other than being the inspiration for the Special Olympics, Rosemary's ultimate legacy was as a living reminder of the savage cruelty of her family. I sincerely wish that she has finally found the peace that was so viciously denied her.
May she rest in peace.
Sandwich Shop links to a USA Today article:
Kennedy, the oldest sister of President John F. Kennedy and the inspiration for the Special Olympics, died Friday. She was 86.
Kennedy, the third child of Rose and Joseph Kennedy, was born mentally retarded and underwent a lobotomy when she was 23. She lived most of her life in a Jefferson, Wis., institution, the St. Coletta School for Exceptional Children.
She died at Fort Atkinson Memorial Health Hospital in Wisconsin with her brother Sen. Edward Kennedy and her sisters by her side....
Rosemary Kennedy's condition became an inspiration to her younger sister, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, who founded the Special Olympics for mentally disabled athletes, and in 1984 she took over her sister's care after their mother had a stroke.
Rosemary's retardation became public in 1960, just after her brother John was elected president. The National Association for Retarded Children mentioned in a publication that the president-elect "has a mentally retarded sister who is in an institution in Wisconsin."
The following year, Eunice revealed more about her sister's story in an article for The Saturday Evening Post.
Born Rose Marie Kennedy on Sept. 13, 1918, in Boston, she was known as Rosemary or Rosie to friends and family. In her own diaries before the lobotomy, she chronicled a life of tea dances, dress fittings, trips to Europe and a visit to the Roosevelt White House....
Doctors told Joseph Kennedy that a lobotomy, a medical procedure in which the frontal lobes of a patient's brain are scraped away, would help his daughter and calm her mood swings that the family found difficult to handle at home.
Rosemary lived in several private institutions before her father placed her in St. Coletta, an hour west of Milwaukee.
During the 1980s, Eunice involved Rosemary more in the lives of her siblings and their children. She attended family gatherings more frequently.
The San Bernardino Sun discussed the lobotomy procedure a year ago, with a local twist:
When the confines of a convent weren't enough to contain restive Rosemary Kennedy, the patriarch of that Massachusetts dynasty had his beautiful, soft-spoken but slow eldest daughter lobotomized to gain control.
But the operation, performed in Washington, D.C., by a famed neurologist with strong ties to San Bernardino, went terribly awry. At about the age of 23, her ability to care for herself had been hacked away.
This woman who had been presented at court to the king and queen of England remains today in a cottage built for her at a school for exceptional children in Wisconsin, an infant of 85 in the care of nuns....
In lobotomy, the surgeon slips an ice pick-shaped instrument behind the patient's eye and with a sweeping motion severs the frontal lobe, where emotion, personality and will are believed to reside, from the rest of the brain. It is then repeated behind the other eye.
Once in vogue and widely practiced, including many times at Patton State Hospital in San Bernardino, it has fallen from favor and has been largely discredited.
It was introduced at Patton in 1951 by the theatrical and flamboyant neurologist who developed the procedure, Dr. Walter J. Freeman Jr., the same man, who with his partner, James Watts, lobotomized Rosemary Kennedy....
In 1936, Freeman and Watts operated on their first patient, a 63-year-old woman who, Freeman noted, dominated her husband....
After the procedure, the woman, who had refused to undergo the surgery if it meant losing her hair, "reported that she felt better and that she was no longer sad. She expressed no concern that Freeman had lied to her (about shaving her head), and that her hair was now gone," Whitaker wrote, adding, "Her husband found her `more normal than she had ever been.'‚"
The pair considered the operation a success and published their results. Encouraged by the outcome, they operated on an additional 19 patients, mostly women.
Whitaker wrote: "The one negative, Freeman and Watts wrote, was that `every patient probably loses something by this operation, some spontaneity, some sparkle, some flavor of the personality, if it may be so described.' But that loss seemed acceptable in patients who 'have an otherwise hopeless prognosis,' they said."...
El-Hai and Leamer found convincing evidence that Freeman was the surgeon responsible for lobotomizing Rosemary Kennedy.
"She was living in Washington at the time (and) Freeman and Watts were the only doctors in Washington, D.C., doing lobotomies," El-Hai said. "It seems that there is ample evidence in Kennedy papers that Freeman and Watts did the procedure."
Though Freeman's reportedly thorough records fail to mention Rosemary Kennedy, El-Hai theorized that it could be because the operation left her incapable of caring for herself.
"She lost her ability to live independently" and was institutionalized for the rest of her life, said El-Hai.
In "The Kennedy Men, 1901-1963" Leamer puts Freeman in the picture in 1941, when he met with Joseph Kennedy to discuss his daughter.
Born "Rose Marie" in 1918, Rosemary was the third Kennedy child, after John Fitzgerald, who was born a year earlier. She was the eldest of the Kennedy girls. It wasn't long before it became apparent that Rosemary was a "slow" child - a great disappointment in the Kennedy family.
"It was a devastating realization to both her (mother Rose Kennedy) and Joe, and it forever changed the family," Leamer wrote.
As the years passed, Rose Kennedy grew afraid that she tended to her eldest daughter at the expense of her other children, especially John.
"When his sister was born after him, it was such a shock," Leamer quotes Rose Kennedy in his book, "and I was frustrated and confused as to what I should do with her or where I could send her or where I could get advice about her."
As a young woman, Rosemary's beauty and quiet nature began to attract attention from suitors, which worried her father. Though her brothers tried to protect her, Rosemary had the mental capacity of an 11- or 12-year-old and was an easy target.
"She could not keep up with the quick banter around the family dinner table, but to most people she looked like just another young Kennedy," wrote Leamer.
In 1941, while living at the convent school in Washington, Rosemary's erratic behavior began to test the nuns. Sometimes she disappeared overnight and returned disheveled the next morning.
She also suffered unexplained outbursts and emotional mood swings, prompting her father to seek a way to control and protect her.
It was then that Joseph Kennedy Sr. consulted with the nation's leading lobotomists - Freeman and Watts.
However, the two had a strict policy against operating on the mentally retarded, preferring to work on schizophrenics, the obsessive compulsive and the depressed.
Freeman's son contends that Rosemary was not retarded - a point he made in a letter to The Washington Post in answer to a story El-Hai wrote for the paper.
"Ms. Kennedy suffered brain damage from encephalitis," he wrote.
Encephalitis can inflame the brain when the body tries to fight off the illness. Young children and the elderly are most vulnerable to the risk of brain damage or death.
"Freeman must have believed that there was a psychological illness at work in her," which in his mind, would have made her a candidate for a lobotomy, said El-Hai.
Joseph Kennedy Sr. gave the go-ahead to Freeman and Watts. Rosemary still lives in the small cottage near Alverno House - a lifelong residential facility at St. Coletta School for Exceptional Children in Jefferson, Wis....
Comments