Roy Exum
Almost 100 years ago, World War I was still in full swing and the Spanish flu was making things fairly miserable in Boston but the baby in Rose Kennedy’s belly was oblivious to all of that. The time had come for her to be born and her mother’s contractions grew closer. The nurse ordered the mother to keep her legs together until the family doctor could arrive but, when that didn’t work, the nurse held the baby for over an hour inside her mother’s womb until the physician could deliver a girl named Rosemary.
As you may guess, it was soon determined the girl was intellectually challenged in a family of children that would include a war hero, a president, an attorney general, a senator, the founder of the Special Olympics and many others on the A-list. But Rosemary would be none of those.
Instead, she is among America’s most horrible tragedies and, in my way of thinking, is a constant and vivid reminder we must never treat our weak the way Kennedy patriarch Joe Kennedy did to his own flesh-and-blood. Rosemary Kennedy’s story may be the greatest indignity to befall one of our nation’s greatest families that I have ever known. We must learn from it.
Let me tell you what America’s “Most Famous Family” did to the third of eight children – all in good intent – because I truly fear we as a nation, a state, and a city are in danger of doing much the same to the physically and mentally impaired in our society who we must zealously protect and provide their needs. In Tennessee we have closed centers across the state much like our Orange Grove and to demand a total overhaul of our commitment to our less fortunate is paramount.
Rosemary led an anguished life, her over-achieving parents certain that if they imposed the same rigid workload that Joe, Jack, Bobby and Teddy mastered surely she could be “healed.” She tried to please her parents, Lord knows she tried. At the time the Catholic Church was forbidding Holy Communion to the “disabled,” lest another parishioner get “infected” and the Kennedy parents sent Rosemary away a lot, saying she was studying abroad, on a lengthy holiday with distant relatives, whatever.
Her oldest brother Joe, visiting Germany in 1934, wrote his father that Hitler’s idea of “sterilization was a great thing …. I don’t know how the Church feels about it but it will do away with many of the disgusting species of men which inhabit the earth.” (Joe did not know how great his sister’s limitations truly were at the time.) His father actually agreed with his son.
In 1938 Franklin Roosevelt appointed Joe Sr. as Ambassador to the United Kingdom. Rosemary, quickly schooled in manners and “how to act right” over a torrid two weeks, passed opening muster with flying colors. It was as if she had come out of her shell and the British media immediately made the 20-year-old beauty their favorite. The British adored the oldest of the Kennedy girls and had the manners to overlook if she might stumble or seem confused.
Trouble was, the drums of war soon drove Rosemary and her parents back to the United States. Rosemary grew angry and was soon known to walk throughout D.C. on the streets alone. Worried about her safety but more wrought over their social standing, her parents began to seek desperate help – and found it.
Joe Sr. learned the new rage for “strange people” was a surgical procedure called a prefrontal lobotomy. They did this to people who were mentally ill, gay, criminals and such. So Joe arranged it and – according to an account by KQED website writer Emmanuel Hapsis – she was kept awake in surgery. Wrote Harris:
“Rosemary’s head was shaved. She was strapped to an operating table and kept awake for the surgery. The doctors asked her to sing songs like ‘God Bless America,’ recite the Lord’s Prayer and tell stories, as they cut into her brain, only stopping after she had gone quiet. ‘They knew right away that it wasn’t successful.’ The attending nurse is said to have been so traumatized by what she saw that she quit her profession.”
Am I going too fast with this, most especially when it is the Kennedy family proper?
The 23-year-old patient now had the mind of a two-year-old. Her father sent her to a psychiatric facility in upstate New York, telling his wife it would be best if she didn’t visit until Rosemary was “more comfortable” with her surroundings. Her siblings were told Rosemary was studying abroad. Fake letters informed them she was fine, gleefully happy and content but her closest sibling, Eunice, would later admit she didn’t know where Rosemary was for over 10 years. The letters quit coming in 1944.
Joe Sr. had set up the oldest son, Joe Jr., to someday run for president but the fighter plane he was flying on a secret mission in Europe exploded midair during the war. That made JFK the heir-apparent and Joe Sr., fearful of what it would do to Jack’s political career it were known his sister was incapacitated or “acted funny,” had Rosemary secretly moved to a “hospital” in Wisconsin where she would stay for 56 years until her death in 2005. This may be hard to imagine but her father, Joe Sr. never visited one time.
In 1958, while he was president, JFK secretly visited and was so traumatized he pressed for legislation to help the disabled and hasten research. But when Rose, her mother, went to visit some 30 years since she had last seen her daughter, it is said Rosemary recoiled in horror. Please, this was just 58 years ago and this happened inside America’s “Most Famous Family.”
Can you imagine treating our physically and mentally challenged that way today? Can you imagine that it will almost definitely happen if we don’t intercede on behalf of families with far less resources than the Kennedys.
This may sound harsh and I hope it does: I believe those in Tennessee are being subjected to emotional cruelty as they are split away from their friends as their centers are being closed, will now be at the mercy of “volunteers” rather than professionally-trained teachers, therapists and social workers, and will suffer in other ways because those who now must tend to them throughout each day much work two jobs in some cases to care for their disabled.
I think our entire approach in Tennessee is wrong. I believe it is being handled by a boorish bureaucracy. Our legislators have told me, to my face, that state employees entrusted with the car of the especially challenged cannot be trusted to tell the truth. Sweeping reforms by Governor Bill Haslam and his staff are long overdue.
Should our Department of Intellectual and Physical Disabilities be able to tuck those who cannot fend for themselves away in their parents’ attics, or in rooms that must be locked until caregivers can return? You can’t possibly do this to human beings without being cursed … yes, cursed.
Not until we get to heaven will any of us be able to explain “The Kennedy Curse,” a much ballyhooed phenomena that ironically began shortly after Joe Kennedy Sr. had his helpless daughter strapped to an operating table so she could recite the Lord’s Prayer while part of her brain was removed. While I agree that judgment belongs solely to the Lord, I don’t believe Joe Kennedy Sr. will be in the crowd when the heavenly explanation is delivered.
You don’t know of “The Curse?” Consider this list from Wikipedia:
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THE KENNEDY CURSE
* -- Sometime during 1941—Rosemary Kennedy was often believed to have been intellectually disabled, and due to her severe mood swings and the worry that she would damage the Kennedy reputation, her father, Joe Sr., arranged in secret for her to undergo a lobotomy. The lobotomy instead left her unable to walk or speak well, and as a result, Rosemary remained institutionalized until her death in 2005.
* -- August 12, 1944—Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. died when his plane exploded over East Suffolk, England, as part of Project Anvil during World War II.
* -- May 13, 1948—Kathleen (Kennedy, the fourth child) Cavendish, the Marchioness of Hartington died in a plane crash in France. Her first husband was killed in the war and she was in route to meet her new fiancée.
* -- August 23, 1956—Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy gave birth to a stillborn daughter and named her "Arabella." She is buried at Arlington National Cemetery next to her parents with a marker reading "Daughter."
* -- August 9, 1963—Patrick Bouvier Kennedy died 39 hours after his premature birth. He died of hyaline membrane disease, a lung ailment. He was buried in Brookline, Ma., which Jackie missed because she was still recovering from the C-section at Otis Air Force Base.
* -- November 22, 1963—U.S. President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas, by Lee Harvey Oswald.
* -- June 19, 1964—U.S. Senator Ted Kennedy was involved in a plane crash in which one of his aides and the pilot were killed. Ted was pulled from the wreckage by fellow senator Birch E. Bayh II and spent weeks in a hospital recovering from a broken back, a punctured lung, broken ribs, and internal bleeding.
* -- June 5, 1968—U.S. Senator Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated by Sirhan Sirhan in Los Angeles immediately following his victory in the California Democratic presidential primary. Sirhan Sirhan pleaded guilty to Robert's murder and is serving a life sentence at the Richard J. Donnovan Correctional Facility.
* -- July 18, 1969—In the Chappaquiddick incident, Ted Kennedy accidentally drove his car off a bridge on Chappaquiddick Island, fatally trapping his 28-year-old colleague, Mary Jo Kopechne, inside. Ted Kennedy later pleaded guilty to leaving the scene of a fatal accident. In his televised statement a week later, Ted stated that on the night of the incident he wondered "whether some awful curse did actually hang over all the Kennedys."
* -- August 13, 1973—Joseph P. Kennedy II (Bobby’s son) was the driver of a car that crashed and left his passenger, Pam Kelley, paralyzed.
* -- November 17, 1973 – Ted Kennedy Jr. had his right leg amputated because of bone cancer.
* -- October 30, 1975 - Martha Moxley was bludgeoned to death with a golf club in Greenwich, Conn.. In 2002, Michael Skakel (nephew of Ethel Skakel Kennedy) was convicted of murder, but a new trial was ordered in 2013.
* -- April 25, 1984 – David Kennedy (the fourth of 11 children born to Ethel and Bobby) died of a cocaine and pethidine overdose in a Palm Beach, Fla., hotel room.
* -- April 1, 1991—William Kennedy Smith (nephew of JFK) was arrested and charged with the rape of a young woman at the Kennedy estate in Palm Beach, Florida. The subsequent trial attracted extensive media coverage. Smith, now an MD, was acquitted.
* -- December 31, 1997—Michael LeMoyne Kennedy (the sixth of 11 children born to Ethel and Bobby) died in a skiing accident in Aspen, Colo.
* -- July 16, 1999—John F. Kennedy Jr. died when his plane, a Piper Saratoga, crashed into the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard due to pilot error and spatial disorientation. His wife and sister-in-law were also on board and died.
* -- September 16, 2011—Kara Kennedy (Teddy’s oldest daughter) died of a heart attack at age 51 while exercising in a Washington, D.C. health club. Kara had reportedly suffered from lung cancer nine years earlier, but she had recovered after the removal of part of her right lung.
* -- May 16, 2012—Mary Richardson Kennedy (Robert Jr. first of three wives) hanged herself on the grounds of her home in Bedford, Westchester County, N.Y.
* -- July 13, 2012 – Kerry Kennedy (the seventh of 11 children born to Ethel and Bobby) sideswiped a tractor trailer on Interstate 684 in Westchester County while under the influence of zolpidem (tradename Ambien), which Kennedy stated she had mistaken for her daily thyroid medication. She was acquitted on all charges on February 28, 2014.
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Could Rosemary’s tragic treatment be connected with all of this? We must take care of our most challenged.
royexum@aol.com