The House of Kennedy(11)
With Joe Jr. departing for naval training, “the summer of 1941 would be the last one our family would ever have together,” Rose Kennedy poignantly recalls.
That autumn, Rosemary’s two closest-in-age siblings, Jack and Kick, are both living in Washington, DC. Kick is assisting an editor for the Washington Times-Herald, and Jack is a new ensign in the Naval Reserve, assigned to stateside intelligence work.
Rosemary is enrolled at Saint Gertrude’s School of Arts and Crafts, a convent school in DC catering to girls with developmental delays. She is known to sneak out at night, often for hours.
“I was always worried,” Rose explains, “that she would run away from home someday or that she would go off with someone who would flatter her or kidnap her.” Though past the typical pubescent age range, some doctors attribute Rosemary’s behavior to delayed hormonal changes. The real, unspoken fear is that she may have a sexual encounter with a man and become unwittingly pregnant.
“My great ambition was to have my children morally, physically, and mentally as perfect as possible,” Rose states. But Rosemary’s uncontrolled behavior could publicly topple that lofty standard.
Joe Sr. learns of a treatment he thinks can cure Rosemary: a lobotomy.
*
On June 5, 1941, the American Medical Association holds its annual session in Cleveland, Ohio. A panel discussion by the Section on Nervous and Mental Diseases examines lobotomy, warning against the imprecise surgical procedure intended to treat disruptive behavior. Separating the frontal lobe from the rest of the brain, in effect destroying it, cannot “restore the person to a wholly normal state.”
Through her connections at the Washington Times-Herald, Kick investigates the procedure and alerts her parents to its dangers. “Oh, Mother, no, it’s nothing we want done for Rosie,” Kick reports.
Even so, in the fall of 1941, as Ronald Kessler recounts in The Sins of the Father, Joe authorizes twenty-three-year-old Rosemary’s admission to George Washington University Hospital, where Dr. Walter J. Freeman is a professor of neurology.
Freeman and his partner, neurosurgeon Dr. James Watts, are American pioneers of lobotomy.
Rosemary will be strapped to the operating table and anesthetized—just enough to numb the entry site at her temples, where her skull will be pierced by two holes, through which a blunt metal rod will be inserted.
As Dr. Watts performs the surgery, the supervising Dr. Freeman interacts with their patient to chart the changes in her condition. Rosemary performs simple recitations of prayers and songs. “We went through the top of the head. I think she was awake. She had a mild tranquilizer,” Watts recounts to Kessler. “We made an estimate on how far to cut based on how she responded,” he explains.
When she stops talking, the operation is complete.
“They knew right away that it wasn’t successful. You could see by looking at her that something was wrong, for her head was tilted and her capacity to speak was almost entirely gone,” Kennedy cousin Ann Gargan tells Doris Kearns Goodwin.
From that point on, Rosemary’s mental capacity is irreversibly reduced to that of a preschooler. She will live out most of her life watched over by the nuns at St. Coletta’s School for Exceptional Children in Wisconsin.
“I don’t know what it is that makes eight children shine like a dollar [coin] and another one dull,” Joe later tells John Siegenthaler, a journalist who joins the presidential campaign of 1960. “I guess it’s the hand of God.”
Rose would never forget the preventable tragedy that Joe brings on their eldest daughter. She dedicates her memoir, “To my daughter Rosemary and others like her—retarded in mind but blessed in spirit.”
There are two Roses, but only one continues to bloom.
PART THREE
The Favorites
Joseph Patrick Kennedy Jr. and
Kathleen “Kick” Agnes Kennedy
Chapter 7
On August 12, 1944, the roar of propellers cuts through the silence in the English countryside surrounding Royal Air Force (RAF) Fersfield air base in Norwich. The airfield is newly constructed to Class-A bomber specifications for the Eighth US Army Air Force, commanded by Lieutenant General James Doolittle. It’s a remote site intended to shield the operations of highly secret missions.
This one is just days old. On August 4, the combined operations “Aphrodite” (Army Air Force) and “Anvil” (Navy) had begun a series of planned attacks on German-controlled weapon complexes. With the program’s reliance on the earliest stages of autopilot technology, the risk factor is high and the pressure to succeed higher still.
The first six Aphrodite missions have already failed.
Now Anvil makes its first attempt.
Navy lieutenant Joseph Patrick Kennedy Jr. looks through the caged cockpit of his battle-weary PB4Y-1—the navy designation of the Army Air Force’s B-24 Liberator. The cargo load totals 374 fifty-five-pound boxes distributed throughout the plane. Together, they contain eleven tons of Torpex, or “torpedo explosive,” a powerful combination of RDX, TNT, and powdered aluminum.
On board with the twenty-nine-year-old pilot is radio operator and copilot Lieutenant Wilford John “Bud” Willy. He is new to Joe Jr.’s second seat, outranking and replacing Ensign James Simpson, who sends Joe off with a handshake and parting words, “So long and good luck, Joe. I only wish I were going with you.”