Rosemary: The Hidden Kennedy Daughter

00:00:10
Speaker 1: This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people. And to share your stories, whether us send them to OurAmericanStories.com, our listeners’ stories, your stories. They’re some of our favorites. Joe and Rose Kennedy’s strikingly beautiful daughter, Rosemary Kennedy, the younger sister of President John F. Kennedy, was intellectually disabled, a secret fiercely guarded by her powerful and glamorous family. Here to tell the story is Kate Clifford Larson, author of Rosemary, the Hidden Kennedy Daughter. Let’s take a listen.

00:00:52
Speaker 2: Back in 2005, Rosemary Kennedy died. It was January, and there was a beautiful obituary of her in The Boston Globe, and it was like two or three paragraphs, lovely picture, and I read it and it just touched me. And of course, as a New Englander, I knew about the Kennedy family, and you know, they’re like New England royalty, and I knew about Rosemary, but I didn’t know much. And at the time, I was starting work on another book, so I knew that I didn’t have much time, but I felt that I needed to go to the Kennedy Library and see if there was material that I could write an article for, like The Boston Globe magazine section or something. But in 2008, I finally went to the JFK Library, thinking, you know, again, I would just write an article because nothing had been written about her in the three years between 2005 and 2008. And I happened to arrive at a time when they were opening up Rose Kennedy’s, some of her collection of diaries, letters, and journals, and things like that. They were part of the Joseph P. Kennedy Papers. The Kennedy father and the family had gifted his voluminous papers back in the 1990s, but the gift came with restrictions that certain portions of the archive would be opened on a timetable, and that timetable goes out to like 2030. Well, this was the time that it was okay to open up Rose’s papers, and so I started going through them. And there was Rosemary in Rose’s diary entries, in letters back and forth between she and her husband, with the other children, and Rosemary’s own letters that she had written as a young girl and adult woman. And I knew then that I could write a biography, not just an article, because I had a little bit of Rosemary’s voice, and because I was so focused on Rosemary, it appeared to me fairly quickly that by putting Rosemary at the center of the Kennedy story, that family looks a little different. Actually, it looks a lot different. And so I just knew that her story was important to tell because no one had really told it before. I felt so lucky to be able to do that. So I started the project going through those voluminous papers, and as I would go to the library over the years, more and more papers were being opened up, which just kind of extended the length of the project. At the same time, as I was trying to figure out how to write this biography and learning about Joe and Rose and what they were doing to try to help and treat Rosemary’s disabilities, which I will talk about in a minute, my son, who was a freshman in college, developed schizophrenia, very serious, debilitating schizophrenia, and that put our world on hold and turned it upside down. And so my book project had to go on hold while we sought treatment for him, and fortunately he’s doing very well today, but it was quite a long, painful journey for us. So going through that made me look at Joe and Rose a little differently, and the way they sought to take care of Rosemary, I decided I couldn’t be quite as harsh as I was going to be, so to give you an idea of what they did and what Rosemary’s life was like. She was born in September of 1918, in the middle of the Spanish Influenza epidemic that was sweeping across the country. Millions of people were dying, millions were sick and surviving, and it was hitting Boston for the second time, and thousands of people were dying, thousands were in the hospital and sick. Rose was blessed that their family was not touched by it at the time, but she went into labor on September 13th, and Joe was already becoming a successful businessman. They had two little boys at home, Joe Jr. and Jack, who would go on to become our president. They had arranged for a nurse to be living with them at the time, knowing that Rose would go into labor at any minute. Sure enough, Rose went into labor, and the nurse who was staying them called the doctor, Dr. Frederick Good, to come and assist in the birth, but he couldn’t come quickly because he was at the hospital treating patients with influenza. So the nurse did what she could to make Rose comfortable, and nurses at the time were trained to make the mother comfortable and actually to help forestall the birth until the doctor could rive to deliver the baby. That was the protocol. Even though the nurses were trained how to deliver a baby in an emergency, they were taught also how to keep things going slowly, which is what she did for Rose. But this is Rose’s third berth, and the baby’s coming quickly, so she wants to push, and the nurse’s like, ‘Don’t push! Don’t push!’ Well, any woman who has gone through childbirth knows that you can’t help but push. It’s just that biological thing. So the nurse told her to cross her legs, and it was like, ‘That doesn’t work!’ So she held Rose’s legs together. That didn’t work. The baby is crowning, and the nurse held the baby back in the birth canal until the doctor could arrive two hours later.

00:06:45
Speaker 1: And you’ve been listening to author Kate Clifford Larson tell the story of Rosemary Kennedy. And as she said, by putting Rosemary at the center of the Kennedy family, the family looked a lot different. Of the story of Rosemary Kennedy, but Kennedy no one knew much about. When we return here on Our American Stories, Lee Habib here, as we approach our nation’s 250th anniversary, I’d like to remind you that all the history stories you hear on this show are brought to you by the great folks at Hillsdale College. And Hillsdale isn’t just a great school for your kids or grandkids to attend, but for you as well. Go to Hillsdale.edu to find out about their terrific free online courses. Their series on Communism is one of the finest I’ve ever seen. Again, go to Hillsdale.edu and sign up for their free and terrific online courses. And we returned to Our American Stories on September 13th, 1918. While Rose Kennedy went into labor with baby Rosemary, her doctor, Dr. Good, was busy attending patients stricken with the deadly Spanish Flu. Although the nurse was trained to deliver babies, she nonetheless tried to halt the birth to await the doctor’s arrival by forcing the baby’s head to stay in the birth canal for two hours. The nurse’s actions resulted in a harmful loss of oxygen to Rosemary’s brain. Let’s return to Kate Clifford Larson.

00:08:47
Speaker 2: He delivers little Rosemary, who seems to be the perfect little child. She barely fussed; she barely cried. She was just—Joe and Rose thought it was a gift from Heaven. And Rose was so happy because she had this little girl. She had sisters who she loved, and she had these two little boys, but she really wanted a girl. And here’s beautiful baby Rosemary, the sweetest baby. So this lovely little family in Brookline, Massachusetts, they’re very happy. And as Rosemary ages as an infant, they begin to notice that her development is different than it was for the boys. She rolled over much later; she sat up much later; she crawled much later, and stood up much later, and walked much later than the boys. She had difficulty feeding herself as the other boys had learned, you know, when they were toddlers. So they just assumed that, ‘Well, boys are faster and developed faster and smarter, and it’s okay, little girls do things slower,’ which I don’t know where they got that idea, but that’s what they thought. In the meantime, Rose gets pregnant again. She delivers Kathleen, her Kick, in 1920, and then immediately after that, Eunice is born in 1921, and they noticed that Rosemary still seems developmentally slow, but then Kick comes along and she develops just like the boys did, and Eunice advances even faster. She’s like, you know, talking, and she’s a year old, you know, typical Eunice. As we came to know, she was quite a powerful woman. So Rose and Joe started to become concerned. Rosemary was having a difficult time learning how to ride a tricycle; she couldn’t figure out how to steer and pedal. And then they enrolled her at the local elementary school, and the teachers recognized, even in the early 1920s, that there was something different about Rosemary, that she was not at the same place as her five-year-old cohort, and so they kept Rosemary back at least once, possibly twice in kindergarten. So Rose and she were frustrated, but they kept moving along and having more children, and Rosemary just was part of it. And Joe was becoming more and more successful, and eventually they moved to New York, and so his career on Wall Street would blossom more. And they enrolled Rosemary and all the children in local public schools, and the older boys in private schools. But it was just becoming more and more of a struggle for Rosemary. She was frustrated. Kick went to kindergarten and first grade, and eventually she advanced beyond Rosemary in grades, and then Eunice, and Rosemary was noticing this. It was like, ‘You know, hey, what’s going on here?’ And one thing I have to say about the Kennedys is they raised their children to be each other’s best friend, that their siblings came first and foremost, and that they were to look out for each other, and the older ones especially were charged with looking out for the younger ones. But they were a community, they were a family unit, and they came first, and so the kids learned to accommodate Rosemary. You know, she was slow on the tennis court. Well, they congratulated her for whatever she could do on the tennis court. When they’d go sailing, she did know how to sail, but she would be their sailing partner, and when they won a race, they would congratulate her too. They were really good about that. And I credit Joe and Rose for making sure that Rosemary was always included. And of course, that speaks to Eunice as an adult becoming this head of Special Olympics and the issue of inclusion and accommodating people with different abilities. So that was like the magic of what the Kennedys did. But Joe was becoming very frustrated, and so was Rose, and they were concerned because they wanted their children to excel at everything, and Rosemary just wasn’t. And by the time she was eleven years old, they decided that they would send her to a special school outside of Philadelphia called the Devereux School, and it was like one of a kind in the country. It was developed by Helen Devereux, who had devised this program for children with intellectual disabilities in Philadelphia, and she created private school out of it. So it was a boarding school, unfortunately, and eleven-year-old Rosemary was sent to this boarding school, away from this family cocoon that loved her and nurtured her and accommodated her and made her feel whole, to this school far away, and she fell apart. Another issue that the Kennedys had to confront and deal with is because they were devout Catholics, particularly Rose, who was deeply, profoundly invested in her faith. The Catholic Church had a very—it was not a very enlightened view of people with disabilities, particularly intellectual disabilities, and they had a policy to not give First Communion to Confirmation to young people with intellectual disabilities. They argued that they were not cognitively aware enough to accept Jesus into their lives and understand what being a good Catholic was all about. So they routinely refused to give the sacraments to children with Down Syndrome and other people with different intellectual disabilities, and they—that practice continued through the twentieth century. So Joe and Rose, whatever they did, they made sure that Rosemary was able to ‘quote unquote’ past those tests. And she did. I mean, she could — as a young girl could. She was giggly; she could talk, but as she aged, you know, she probably was like an eight-year-old, but she was twenty years old, so she could do those Catholic requirements and those sacraments given her a particular intellectual level. But it certainly must have been a concern for Rose and Joe at the time. For many children with intellectual disabilities, they’re also emotionally immature as well. So she really could not handle being in the school. But the school had these rules, and two of them were: they had to behave and they had to do well in school, and if they didn’t, they would not be able to go home for Thanksgiving. For Rosemary, that was an impossible requirement. And so her letters in the library are so touching. She’s writing her letters, so she’s eleven years old, and there’s lots of punctuation errors, spelling errors, but she gets the message across a particularly to her father. ‘Oh, Daddy, guess what? I’m getting A’s in all my classes, and I’m doing really well. You know, I basically can’t wait to come home for Thanksgiving.’ In the meantime, the teachers and the administrators are writing him and telling him she’s getting C’s and D’s; she doesn’t understand that. Of course, they’re going to tell her parents what the truth is. I do not know if she went home for Thanksgiving. I would imagine that she did, knowing Rose would have wanted her to come home anyway, until she was eighteen. For the next seven years, she went to five different boarding schools. The goal of the parents was to get her educated, and they felt that all these different schools were failing her. Well, of course, they weren’t equipped because they didn’t know how to do that and Rosemary. They didn’t want to accept that Rosemary was intellectually disabled. And Joe went on this campaign, interviewing doctor after doctor, taking Rosemary to so many different doctors to cure her.

00:16:44
Speaker 1: And you’re listening to the story of Rosemary Kennedy as told by Kate Clifford Larson, author of Rosemary, The Hidden Kennedy Daughter. And Rosemary is clearly having troubles learning and by almost any standard as cognitive disabilities, but Joe and Rose simply refuse to accept that, and they keep pushing her to excel like her siblings, and that’s just not possible. Five more boarding schools after the first in Philadelphia, and of course, this had to create tremendous emotional discord for the girl who—well, her real family that took care of her and loved her like none else, while she was separated for them. Added to that, the burden of her cognitive disabilities and the burden of having to be what she couldn’t be. When we come back, more of this remarkable story, the story of Rosemary Kennedy, and the story of so much more, particularly how the world and the Catholic Church viewed cognitive disabilities. Here on Our American Story. And we returned to Our American Stories and the story of Rosemary Kennedy and her father’s unwillingness to accept his daughter’s intellectual disability. Let’s return to Kate Clifford Larson.

00:18:24
Speaker 2: I recall notes from one particular doctor in Boston. He was a specialist in endocrinology. He was famous at the time, and he wrote Joe that he was thinking he would give Rosemary hormone injections every week for like a year, and he guaranteed that she would be one hundred percent okay. So here’s this fourteen-year-old girl already going through puberty, and this doctor in the early 1930s is injecting her with hormones, and Rosemary starts becoming emotionally unstable. It’s sort of like she’s developing by or. She has these tremendous highs and lows. She lashes out at people; she has these rageful events where she hits people and screams and kicks, and life is very difficult for Rosemary and for the people around her. In the meantime, all the other kids are growing up and they’re doing well in school, and they’re the pride and joy of their parents. Rosemary is now twenty years old. The family moves to Great Britain because Joe, who’s been involved in FDR’s administration during the Great Depression, and he has been appointed to several positions in the government, and for a reward for doing so well, he is appointed the ambassador in Great Britain. And they go, and Rose is just thrilled to be on the world stage, and she’s such a political human being. She just loved all that attention and the politics and the pomp and circumstance. But they decided to bring all the children. They do everything as a family, so everyone goes over, including Rosemary. But they have to protect Rosemary. They don’t want her out in public because they realize that if people or reporters talk to her, within a few minutes, you figure out there’s something different about Rosemary. So they protect her and they hide her. They have her presented to the King and Queen of England during the Debutante season, along with her sister Kick. She’s the rave of London newspapers because Rosemary is so beautiful. They just can’t get over how beautiful she is, and because she has been taught by her parents not to say much in public, she appears coy and shy, but her smile is so captivating. The press just can’t get enough of her. And interestingly, Rose was disappointed in this. She wanted them to pay attention to Kick. But Kick was outgoing and friendly and all of that, but she wasn’t quite as beautiful as Rosemary. But they struggle and how to keep her busy and learning, and it was up against Rosemary wanting independence. She sees Joe and Jack, her older brothers, going out and partying; her sister Kick going out with them and party.