Rosemary: The Hidden Kennedy Daughter (10 page)

Joe Sr. responded to Joe Jr.’s letter quickly, praising his oldest son’s powers of observation. He cautioned his son, though, arguing that Hitler had gone “far beyond his necessary requirements in his attitudes towards [the Jews], the evidence of which may
be very well covered up from the observer who goes there at this time.”
Joe Sr. would later advocate for appeasement instead of war with Hitler, an argument that would eventually ruin his own political career aspirations. At this particular moment, however, he was eager to teach his son to be curious and to judge fairly when given all the facts. Interestingly, Joe Sr. did not address young Joe’s comments about Hitler’s sterilization program, nor did he explore his son’s anti-Semitism. The fact of Rosemary’s disability and the struggles the family had faced for years over her care did not prompt either man to draw a connection to the persecution of the mentally ill and the disabled in Germany. The plight of Catholics, also under attack by the Nazis, drew Joe Sr.’s interest instead.

In mid-October 1934, Joe Sr. traveled to Boston to visit with Rosemary. They attended a Harvard football game together and then visited with Joe Jr. While Rosemary craved and was excited by her father’s attention, she remained vigilant against incurring his disapproval. She campaigned hard for his esteem. After her father’s visit, Rosemary wrote to reassure him of her devotion and commitment to doing well at school:

October 15, 1934

Dear Daddy

I had a lovely time on Saturday.

Thank you ever so much for coming down to see me.

Sunday I also had a good time.

I would do anything to make you so happy.

I hate to Disppoint [
sic
] you in anyway.

Come to see me very soon. I get very lonesome everyday.

See you soon I hope. It was raining to-day. So We could not play hockey. So we went to Franklin Park. We had
lots of Fun. I bought a New Hockey Stick for $4.35. Most Sticks cost $6.00. I got a very good one.

. . . looking forward to seeing you again some time soon. lots of love kisses, your loving daughter,

Rosemary

Rosemary’s father would continually encourage her, using a softly chiding style to urge her on. “Mother sent me your letter and I was delighted to hear from you,” Joe wrote in early December. “It showed a lovely spirit for you to write and pleased both Mother and me very much to think you are so appreciative and also that you feel that you are studying as hard as I know you can and are doing.” He noted her efforts to learn skating—a difficult endeavor considering Rosemary’s problems with complex coordination and athletic activities—with positive humor, a hallmark of Joe’s parenting style. “I hope skating turns out to be lots of fun . . . Be sure to wear a big pillow where you sit down so that when you sit on the ice (and I know you will) you won’t get too black and blue.”

Jack, whose own boarding-school antics and lack of attention to his studies generated more than a few patient but scolding letters from his father, was encouraged by Joe Sr. to cheer Rosemary on, too: “It would do Rose[mary] good if you would write her . . . You know it is very important that we have a good job done up there this year.”
Jack, like his brother Joe, could be counted on to help Rosemary feel important. At one point, Rose wrote the headmaster of Choate, asking him to let Jack leave school briefly to attend a dance that Rosemary had asked him to: “The reason I am making this seemingly absurd request is because the young lady who is inviting him is his sister, and she has an inferiority complex. I know it would help if he went with her.”

Rosemary’s best friend in Brookline, Mary O’Keefe, is mentioned frequently in Rosemary’s letters to her parents. The two went to dances, movies, and plays together. They played badminton, hockey, and other sports. They did other things that teenage girls did: go shopping, have their hair and nails done, compare tips on girdles, dresses, and shoes. Rosemary reported that she played bridge with Mary and her family.
Her degree of success at the complicated game is unknown, but clearly the O’Keefes were offering her a variety of challenges she seemed to enjoy outside of the classroom. Her family paid for extra lessons in badminton, and private companions accompanied her to museums and other outside events, enhancing her academic lessons. And yet Rosemary attended Girl Scout meetings where “learning the names of trees,” she reported to her mother, was a task she was finding a bit difficult.

Rosemary’s persistent chatter about social activities caused her parents great concern. She reported in January that she had purchased a cosmetic compact for $1.50, and had had her hair waved and her nails manicured for an upcoming dance that Jack and Mary’s brother John O’Keefe were accompanying the girls to. She delighted in her “blue evening dress, silver slippers,” and a silver hair clip. No matter what event she reported to her parents, she was sure to describe what she wore.
Rosemary cherished clothes and pretty things, encouraged, perhaps, by her mother and others. Even as a small child she was drawn to the latest fashions featured in shop windows at Coolidge Corner, near the Kennedy home in Brookline. Eddie Moore, as her godfather, delighted in buying her a new dress every year. “My dear Rosemary,” Moore wrote during the spring of 1923, when Rosemary was four years old, “This season they are showing such wonderful and pretty little frocks for little women that I regretted not having you along
with me to help me choose. I feel if you had been along we both would have decided on this little party dress so I am sending it to you with love and Easter greeting.”

If Rosemary exhibited her mother’s fashion consciousness and attention to her looks, she also shared her father’s love of socializing. In a typical letter, her animation over social news overshadows any reporting of academic achievements:

Darling Mother and Daddy,

The Chauffer drove Mary O Keefe and I to Adams House on Friday night. thats Where we met Joe [Kennedy] and John O Keefe at ten past eight. Then Mary went with Joe in his car to the dance. I went with John O Keefe. He told the Chauffer how to go. It was a Costume party. but we diddn’t know it. I wore my red evening dress, red shoes, 2 red bows on my hair, black evening coat. Mary wore her red evening dress, red evening coat. And we both had our nails polished . . .

[John] O Keefe did a backward Somersault at the dance . . . Saturday, Babe Kaughlin, a friend of Mary went down on the Beach and cooked sausages and put it in a sandwich, cooked steak and bacon, and brought gingerbread to eat. We made a fire, and got wood for it. Paper too. And we came home . . . I played Christine in ping pong, and Mary and babe also. We also played three handered bridge. At night Mary and I played Monopoly with Christine. Sunday, Aunt Agnas envite Joe and I to lunch. I stayed overnight . . .

. . . I am going to study Napoleon, Mary O Keefe has a new red and white bathing suit, new white shorts, new blue evening dress. I tried the bathing suit on me, also the
new silk dress she bought. I tried it on me. I get 3 dollars allowance a week. I have had my hair waved and my eyebrows plucked . . .

lots of love and kisses to the best Mother and father in the world. Your loving daughter.

Rosemary

Loving new clothes or a pretty haircut and watching her weight made Rosemary no different from other teenage girls. “Every time I would say, ‘Rosemary, you have the best teeth and smile in the family,’” Eunice reported, “she would smile for hours.”
During an interview for
Catholic Digest
in 1976, Rose remembered that even the slightest attention or compliment directed toward Rosemary resulted in hours of happiness: “If I said to her no more than ‘Rosemary, that’s the most beautiful hair ribbon,’ she would be thrilled.”

But there were other aspects to Rosemary’s life that did underscore her difference. In letters she wrote while still at Miss Newton’s, she several times mentioned “Dr. Lawrence” giving her “injections” and “red pills.” This was Charles Lawrence, a new doctor engaged by the Kennedys to treat Rosemary. The injections were part of an experimental regimen developed by Dr. Lawrence to treat perceived hormonal or “gland” imbalances. Lawrence, a renowned endocrinologist in Boston and chief of endocrinology at the New England Medical Center, believed that disruptions in sexual development due to dysfunctional hormonal levels produced by the pituitary gland were at the root of many developmental and emotional problems in teenagers and adults. Dysfunction of the pituitary gland was already linked to dwarfism and gigantism, arrested or slow development of sexual organs, poor sperm production, and irregular or nonexistent menstrual peri
ods. But Lawrence, who was not a psychologist or a psychiatrist, focused exclusively on the endocrine system and the functioning of the pituitary gland in the normal and abnormal function of the human body and its effects on “nervous impulses” and intellectual development.
Rosemary may have been treated for allergies as well, an ailment affecting young Jack and Kick most severely but afflicting almost all of the Kennedy children. It’s possible that the “red pills” that Rosemary took may have been some type of antihistamine. Interestingly, Luminal, dispensed in a red-pill form, was a highly touted and newly developed phenobarbital-based barbiturate used at that time to relieve anxiety, to sedate violent patients, and in some cases to alleviate epileptic convulsions. Without further information, however, the specific purpose of Rosemary’s red pills remains a mystery.

Helen Newton had recommended Dr. Lawrence to the Kennedys within the first few weeks of Rosemary’s enrollment, in the fall of 1934. Joe was receptive; on October 15—the same day Rosemary wrote to him to thank him for coming to see her and to say, “I would do anything to make you so happy”
—he wrote Frederick Good, Rose’s obstetrician and the children’s pediatrician when they lived in Brookline:

Some years ago when you came down to Hyannis Port we discussed the gland theory as affecting Rosemary. She is . . . still suffering from backwardness. Miss Newton told me yesterday that Dr. Charles H. Lawrence . . . had done wonders for a couple of her pupils, and I wondered if it would be too much trouble to . . . check up to see whether her suggestion is of any value and whether Dr. Lawrence is the one to start with . . . We do not want to leave a stone unturned if there is anything possible to be done.

Three days later, Good cabled Joe that he had “spent [a] very pleasant visit with Rosemary and Miss Newton.” He thought Rosemary was “in excellent hands” with Miss Newton, and that the idea to refer her to Dr. Lawrence was an “excellent” idea. Good reported that Dr. Lawrence’s “standing is one hundred percent” and that he was a “very capable man.” Joe cabled back, directing Good to make an appointment with Lawrence as soon as possible.
Dr. Good’s assistance in helping Joe and Rose find a solution to Rosemary’s “backwardness” suggests his culpability in Rosemary’s delayed birth, though its consequences remained unmentioned.

Good and Lawrence met with Rosemary at Miss Newton’s on October 20. They found her “in pretty good spirits” and kept the visit a “social one.” The doctors and Miss Newton may have felt that a casual introductory visit with Rosemary was the right tack. “We had a very pleasant chat about football, school work, etc.,” Good reported to Joe. Within a couple of days, Rosemary met with Lawrence in his office for a “complete physical examination and was found to be in perfect condition.” Good continued to be impressed by Lawrence. “I am quite hopeful that a systematic treatment with Endocrines will do considerable good,” Good reported, “[and] in fact, I will make it even stronger and say that I am very, very hopeful that within a few years, as a result of these Endocrine treatments, Rosemary will be 100% all right.” He promised to see Rosemary on a regular basis, “to help her to keep up her spirits.”
Joe was thrilled, and after a later visit with Rosemary, in mid-November, he believed he was already seeing “considerable improvement,” though he tempered his enthusiasm by noting it may have been his “imagination.”

Given the state of medical science concerning women’s health at the time, it is not surprising that Lawrence’s methods were
welcomed as potentially pathbreaking insights into the role of the endocrine system and its relation to human developmental abnormalities. But his medications, supplements, and injections proved ineffective, in spite of Joe’s sense that Rosemary was better. No hormone injections were going to “cure” Rosemary of her intellectual disabilities. More important, the injections would not have helped even if she had suffered from more serious mental health problems, like depression or other mood disorders.

Joe was managing the situation himself that fall of 1934. Rose was away in Europe, celebrating her twentieth wedding anniversary alone, enjoying an extended vacation. Joe wanted Rosemary treated before Rose returned home, and Rosemary, always eager to please her father and to do as he asked, submitted to the thrice-weekly injections without complaint. By late January 1935, Good reported that he had seen Rosemary and that “she is 100% O.K. I am pleased to report, too, that I noticed marked improvement . . . and am quite hopeful that within the next eight to ten months everything will be perfect.”

During the spring of 1935, with no significant improvement in sight, Rose—focused on educational rather than medical intervention for Rosemary—engaged Walter F. Dearborn, a specialist at the Psycho-Educational Clinic at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education, to work with her daughter. Dr. Dearborn’s pioneering work on reading disabilities and human development was helping advance society’s understanding of different learning styles and abilities in children. Dearborn had conducted decades of important research on learning disabilities, specifically on children with average and above-average intelligence. He proved that some children, even highly intelligent ones, could have difficulty learning to read, and that new alternative methods were available to teach these children. Dearborn was a strong ad
vocate of intelligence testing and had written extensively on its useful application in schools and work environments as a basis for developing varied curriculum materials for disabled students and workers. He strongly advocated individualized teaching for most students. His chief complaint focused on the one-size-fits-all method of teaching groups of students in American classrooms; it was a serious obstacle to individual success, he believed.