Rosemary: The Hidden Kennedy Daughter (22 page)

The family was together at Palm Beach for Christmas, without Rosemary. It was a subdued holiday for the Kennedys—and for most Americans. The Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor in a surprise attack on December 7. The United States declared war on Japan the next day, and by December 11, Congress had issued a declaration of war on Italy and Germany, Japan’s allies. Much to Joe Kennedy’s dismay, America had finally entered the war.

Kick and Pat left right after Christmas to spend New Year’s with friends, and Eunice headed off to California to enroll at Stanford University. Joe Jr. returned to his air base in Jacksonville, Florida, where he had been training, and Jack left for Washington and his job at the naval intelligence office, leaving Rose in Palm Beach with Jean, Bobby, and Teddy. Joe Sr.—now firmly out of politics—was turning his attention to his sons’ futures. He schemed to make Joe and Jack Massachusetts residents, even though their legal residence was now Florida, in the hopes that his eldest sons would soon enter politics.
Rose’s frequent family
letters continued throughout the rest of the winter and spring of 1942, updating the siblings on what each of them was doing, in addition to supplying news and gossip about friends and acquaintances. Only one of the many letters written among the family members during the first year after Rosemary’s surgery mentions her: Joe told Rose, who was living with Eunice in California, that he had “stopped off to see Rosemary and she is getting along very well nicely. She looks very well.”
To the family, Joe kept up a positive front about the whole matter. Joe’s news about Rosemary was infrequent and vague and was directed specifically to Joe Jr., Jack, and Kick. Only six letters between the four of them with any reference to Rosemary survive from 1942 to 1944.
No mention of the surgery or where she was living was reported in Joe’s personal correspondence.

There is no record of Rose visiting her eldest daughter for more than twenty years. Certainly, there is no record of visits in the early postsurgery years.
Ann Gargan later recalled that the lobotomy “was an absolute devastating thing, but once it was done [Joe] decided that he had to protect Rose from the heartbreak, believing it would shatter her to see her daughter that way while it would do Rosemary no good at all, since she no longer realized who she was.”
But Rosemary had not lost all cognitive ability, and the lack of contact with her siblings and parents on an ongoing basis probably made for a lonely and difficult recovery.

If Rose did not visit Rosemary, this does not mean Rosemary was cast out of her heart and mind. She chose to carry her pain privately. In her 1974 memoir, Rose wrote only that Rosemary had undergone an undisclosed type of neurosurgery.
In a candid moment with Doris Kearns Goodwin years afterward, Rose bitterly explained that Joe “thought [the lobotomy] would help her, but it made her go all the way back. It erased all those years of ef
fort I had put into her. All along I had continued to believe that she could have lived her life as a Kennedy girl, just a little slower. But then it was all gone in a matter of minutes.”
Rose’s frankness is revealing: the lobotomy had injured her as much as it had Rosemary.

What Rosemary’s siblings were told about the surgery and its outcome has not been fully recorded, but clearly it was little. Youngest sister Jean, then only thirteen years old, was told that Rosemary “had moved to the Midwest and had become a teacher—or maybe a teacher’s assistant.”
Young Teddy was particularly troubled by Rosemary’s sudden and unspoken disappearance from the family circle. At nine, Teddy feared that he “had better do what Dad wanted or the same thing could happen to me.”
There “will be no crying in the house,” Joe told Teddy and his siblings, so whatever fears Teddy harbored, he kept to himself. The power of their father’s commands carried tremendous weight with all the children. “Never violate people’s privacy,” he cautioned them in a powerful, unqualified directive.

Eunice’s son Timothy noted in his memoir that for an untold number of years, “members of [Eunice’s] family were in the midst of such a flurry of activity at that time that they apparently never questioned one sister’s absence until much later.”
Jean concurred: “That was the way things were going then. We all just kept moving.”

Remembering the struggles and tension the family endured when Rosemary was home on vacations, her siblings may have accepted that she was better off not seeing them. Or, perhaps, Joe told them some version of the truth. Certainly, Kick knew what her father had done, and Joe Jr. and Jack must have had a sense, if not outright knowledge.

Kick’s surviving letters and diary reveal little. In one letter,
however, she comes close to crossing a line. “Dear Daddy,” she wrote sometime in the spring, four or five months after Rosemary’s lobotomy, “the latest joke I meant to tell you last night about Washington is: A man is having terrible headaches so he went to a doctor who had a cure. The cure consisted of taking out the patient’s brain, dusting it off every day for a week and then returning it. A week passed and the patient didn’t come back for his brain. About two weeks later the doctor met him on the street and said, ‘What about your brain. I’ve dusted it off consistently every day this week and you shouldn’t be bothered with headaches any longer.’ The man answered, ‘oh that’s alright, I won’t need a brain any more, I have just gotten a job in Washington.’”

Eunice seems to have suffered particularly from Rosemary’s suddenly vanishing, suggesting that perhaps Kathleen had confided what she knew their father had been thinking in the months before Rosemary’s surgery and disappearance. Two months before the lobotomy, Eunice had enrolled at Sacred Heart in Manhattanville, now offering a full-fledged college program for women. Classmates observed that over the 1941 fall semester, Eunice became sick, depressed, and distant. They were stunned to discover when they returned from Christmas break that Eunice’s room was empty and that she would not be returning for the spring semester. Rose, according to Eunice, had wanted her to go to Stanford instead, so Eunice obliged, but, she later said, she “did not have a good time [at Stanford] . . . I just didn’t click.”
Rose claimed she preferred the location for Eunice’s health. Perhaps Rose felt Eunice needed to be at a physical distance in order to accommodate the loss of Rosemary. Yet at Stanford, classmates remembered how very thin and unkempt Eunice was. Rose was so concerned about Eunice’s health that she moved to Stanford during the spring of 1942 to stay with her daughter and even to attend classes with
her.
Photographs of Eunice from 1942 and 1943 show a terribly thin, frail young woman. Eunice later claimed she did not know where Rosemary was for at least a decade.
Though Eunice would later be diagnosed with Addison’s disease, it is probable that the stress of losing her sister only compounded her ill health.

R
OSEMARY REMAINED FOR
a short time at George Washington University Hospital, but was soon transferred to a private psychiatric facility called Craig House, located on the Hudson River fifty miles north of New York City, where the wealthy hid away their disabled, addicted, and seriously mentally ill family members. Its close proximity to New York made the facility the preferred hospital for the city’s and the nation’s business, entertainment, political, and artistic elite. Zelda Fitzgerald, the deeply troubled and depressed wife of American literary giant F. Scott Fitzgerald, spent months at Craig House in 1934, and actor Henry Fonda’s second wife, Frances Seymour Brokaw, would spend several months there in early 1950, before committing suicide in her room.

Craig House offered the mentally ill or disabled loved ones of wealthy families a discreet rehabilitative environment that provided what psychiatrists of the day believed to be the best treatments available, including intensive, daily talk therapy, recreational activities, healthy food, and a serene atmosphere. Craig House boasted a high ratio of nurses and trained staff to patients—there were about thirty other patients when Rosemary arrived—and all the amenities associated with upper-class social and recreational pursuits, such as swimming, tennis, golf, and an assortment of indoor activities. Yet, in spite of its 350 acres of gardens, lawns, woods, and walking paths, its well-trained staff and comfortable surroundings, there would be no curative treat
ment for Rosemary. Her physical disabilities were as profound as her now-diminished intellectual abilities.

For Rosemary, learning to regain movement and control of her body—to eat, drink, communicate, walk, and interact with other people again—would take physical therapy and treatment beyond the capabilities or treatment options available at Craig House. It seems likely that Craig House was chosen for Rosemary as a temporary measure—yet she was to remain there for the next seven years.

There is evidence that Joe—but not Rose or any of the Kennedy children—visited Rosemary during her early years at Craig House, but he did so only a handful of times over a seven-year period.
Rosemary’s reaction to Joe during this time has not been recorded. Mary Moore saw her more frequently, and she probably played the role of Joe’s confidante and informant about Rosemary’s needs and the care she was receiving.
Rosemary’s personal and medical care continued to be extensive. Joe provided Rosemary with extra nurses and personal attendants—“private duty nurses, laundry, hairdresser, druggist, stationer, tailor”—to care exclusively for her at Craig House.
These extra private benefits and resources, costing nearly $2,400 per month, were in addition to the nearly $50,000-per-year cost for treatment at Craig House, an exorbitant amount only the rich could afford at a time when medical-insurance coverage was in its infancy.

Joe communicated with the doctors and staff at Craig House, mostly through his secretaries, who took care of the monthly expenses and directed Craig House staff according to Joe’s wishes.
In a couple of letters written to Jack in 1942 and 1943, Joe briefly reported that Rosemary was swimming in the pool every day—a lifelong practice, as it was with her mother—and that she was “getting along quite happily,” “looks very good,” and “is feel
ing better.”
In letters to Joe Jr. and Kick written on February 21, 1944, Joe noted that “Rosemary is feeling quite well,” a fact, he remarked, that rounded out the family news that “everyone is getting along quite happily.”
By the summer of 1944, Rosemary is no longer mentioned in letters to family members, a pattern that persisted for more than two decades.

M
ANY YEARS LATER
, Rose was to call Rosemary’s fate the first Kennedy tragedy. But the 1940s, the years Rosemary spent hidden at Craig House, brought yet more danger, death, and sorrow to the Kennedy household. During the fall of 1941, Jack joined the U.S. Navy. Earning the rank of lieutenant, he later became commander of a patrol torpedo boat, the
PT-109
. During the dark early hours of August 2, 1943, Kennedy and his crew were conducting patrols around the Solomon Islands when a Japanese destroyer rammed their relatively small wooden boat. The strike killed two crew members, but Kennedy and a number of other wounded men survived. They swam for hours to get to the closest island, with Kennedy pulling one of his wounded men along with him. With the help of local islanders, Kennedy and the men were rescued. Joe Kennedy kept his family in the dark about Jack’s missing-in-action status; he decided to wait until he could confirm one way or another what had happened before telling Rose and the rest of the family. Before they could be told, however, the
Boston Globe
broke the news that Jack had been rescued, stunning Rose and the rest of the children and robbing Joe of his secret. After a short recovery, Jack returned to the South Pacific.

The war would soon take a deeper toll on the family. In August 1944, Joe Jr., a naval aviation officer stationed in England, knowing the extreme danger he faced, accepted a secret assign
ment to fly over the English Channel to northern France. The covert mission, Operation Aphrodite, entailed flying a BQ-8, a stripped-down B-24 bomber heavily laden with more than ten tons of explosives. The plan required Kennedy and another pilot, Lieutenant Wilford Thomas Willey, to eject as they approached their target—a Nazi military complex near Mimoyecques, in northern France—at which time their fellow airmen in two B-17s flying with them would remotely trigger the explosives over the target. But the remote trigger activated ten minutes too early, killing Kennedy and Willey instantly and nearly destroying the B-17s escorting them.

Kathleen was living in London when Joe Jr. was killed. It is difficult not to read Kick’s war as shadowed by what she knew and felt about Rosemary’s tragedy. Kick had remained in Washington, still writing society notes for the
Times-Herald,
but she missed her friends, nearly all of whom were vitally engaged in the war effort in England. Kick felt desperate to join them, but her parents objected. To get around their opposition, she signed on with the Red Cross. Her parents finally understood that they could not stand in the way of Kick’s serving the war effort, like her brothers, and allowed her to set sail for England in June 1943.

Soon, Kick reunited with a former beau, William “Billy” Hartington, the son of the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire. Hartington had joined the British Army and was stationed near London, allowing the two to see each other frequently. The issue of marriage surfaced rather quickly, but Billy would not give up his Protestant faith, nor would Kathleen abandon her Catholic upbringing. The rift hurt them both. Over the months, however, their love deepened and, after much discussion with friends and a local Jesuit priest whom Kick had befriended in London, she agreed to marry Hartington and to raise their children as Prot
estants. The negative effect on her parents and family, however, would be more than she expected. Rose and Joe refused to give their approval. Just days before the wedding, Joe acquiesced, sending Kick a telegram: “With your faith in God you can’t make a mistake. Remember you are still and always will be tops with me.”

Even a noble title—Kick would become Lady Hartington, the future Duchess of Devonshire, on her marriage to Billy—could not sway Rose. On the advice of family friend Joseph Patterson, publisher of the
New York Daily News,
Rose checked into the New England Baptist Hospital in Boston, where, it was reported, she was “too ill to discuss the marriage.”
To Rose, Catholic doctrine was clear: marrying a non-Catholic was a mortal sin, and the church would neither recognize nor sanctify Kick’s marriage. Kick’s sisters, especially Eunice, rallied behind their mother, and nineteen-year-old Bobby lashed out at Kick, too. He felt personally challenged by her rejection; he imagined that her flagrant behavior was an unforgivable breach of their Catholic faith.