PROFILE

The Kennedy Family when Rosemary was 19. From back left: Rosemary, Robert, John, Rose (mother) and Joseph Jr. From front left: Eunice, Jean, Edward on the lap of his father Joseph, Patricia and Kathleen.

The third child and first daughter of U.S. Ambassador to the United Kingdom, Joseph Kennedy, died last January at the age of 86 years and was buried beside her parents in Boston. Rosemary, sister of the popular US president John F. Kennedy was born with mild mental retardation. Some mentioned that she was been born into a world gripped by Spanish flu, and doctors believed that her condition was somehow related to this epidemic.

While Rosemary remained largely outside the public eye for 40 years, her retardation was first announced in 1960, just after her brother was elected president. The National Association for Retarded Children made this news public in a publication stating that the president-elect had a mentally retarded sister who was in an institution in Wisconsin.

When the family returned to the U.S. in 1941, "Rosemary was not making progress, but seemed instead to be going backwards. At 22, she was becoming increasingly irritable and difficult." Her father, who was worried about her condition, arranged lobotomy for her when she was 23, as a medical procedure whereby the frontal lobes of her brain were scraped away to calm mood swings that the family had found difficult to handle. The operation reduced her to an infant-like state.

It was years before her mother, Mrs. Rose Kennedy, learnt the truth. In her 1974 book entitled, Times to Remember, she mentioned that, "the lobotomy eliminated the violence and convulsive seizures but it also had the effect of leaving Rosemary permanently incapacitated. It was soon quite evident she had lost all possibility of ever again being able to function in a viable way in the world at large. She would hence forth need custodial care. She lost everything that had been gained during the years by her own gallant efforts and our loving efforts for her."

Rosemary had eight sibs, many whom died tragically before her eyes. Her brother Joseph was killed during the Second World War and her sister Kathleen in a plane crash in France in 1948. When her brother, President JFK was assassinated, Rosemary was watching TV and knew that her brother was dead.

In 1995, three illuminating diaries written between 1936 and 1938 became available to the public, telling the story of a fairly normal young woman. The memoirs were published in Rosemary's Diary: Her Life Before the Lobotomy, written by Barbara Gibson and Ted Schwarz, showing that Rosemary was not mentally retarded as the family had maintained, but rather suffered from a learning disability.

Doris Kearns Godwin notes in her book, The Fitzgeralds and Kennedys (1995), "I remember earlier observing in some of the letters that Rosemary had written and some of her school work that it seemed she was doing somewhat sophisticated work, but I did not know how to calibrate it. But Rose (her mother) talked to me about the fact that she had to give Rosemary 100 tennis lessons so she could learn to hit the ball or 100 dancing lessons." More importantly, Godwin's book asserts that Rosemary's condition was far less drastic than previously reported, thereby questioning the severity of Rosemary's retardation. While the Kennedys offered $1 million for mental retardation institutes and founded the Special Olympics for mentally-disabled athletes, Godwin's observation raises questions and speculations about Rosemary's life and the way her family may have treated her.