A Tragic Experiment, Undertaken To Protect The Kennedy Name

First of two excepts from "The Kennedy Women," by Laurence Leamer. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Rosemary was a bystander to the family drama. Rose had sent her eldest daughter off to kindergarten in the fall of 1923 to the same school she sent the rest of her children, Edward Devotion School, a few blocks from the house. Rosemary was the most beautiful of the Kennedy children, with the kind of open innocence that made adults stop and wonder. Her teacher, Margaret McQuaid, was impressed by her grace and manners. That was Rose's teaching, all those hours of chiding attention. At school politeness was not enough, and at the end of the year McQuaid could not pass her on to the first grade.

So Rosemary stayed on, and in what would become a common pattern spent her days with children who were younger. She tried hard. She always tried hard. At the end of the next school year McQuaid gave her a passing C, a passing C for effort, a passing C because it did not matter, a passing C because Rosemary wouldn't be going on to first grade with the rest of the children.

This was usually the moment when a child would be labeled "feebleminded" and parents would be confronted with what they already knew.

Until recent years, Rosemary would have been considered slow or backward but not medically defined as subnormal. But Henry Herbert Goddard, the director of the research laboratory of the training school for Feeble-Minded Girls and Boys at Vineland, N.J., had contributed to science the concept of the "moron." These were individuals with IQs between 60 and 70, or a mental age between 8 and 12. They were less retarded than the two other standard categories: those with the mental age up to 2 years old, called "idiots," and the next higher category "imbeciles," who had mental ages from 3 to 7. The three terms were supposedly morally neutral words of science, but they soon become epithets hurled on the playground and the street.

Rosemary was a moron.

Selflessness - and deadly pride

Rose's relationship to her eldest daughter was a complicated matrix. Though there was nobility and selflessness in her actions, there was also self-delusion and deadly pride as well. Like many parents of children with mild retardation, Rose could not fully admit that her Rosemary was different.

She did whatever she could to maintain the illusion. She even had the maid cut Rosemary's meat before setting the plate before her at dinner. Rose could have put Rosemary into a special class in the Brookline public schools, but she would not put that stigma on her daughter and on her family.

An array of attendants

Instead, the Kennedys hired a special governess or nurse, with whom Rosemary lived part of the time. Although Rose herself devoted endless hours to Rosemary, the main burden fell on an array of tutors, nurses, maids and nuns.

When Rosemary reached adulthood the Kennedys were confronted with a far different kind of dilemma. For years Rose and Joe had been putting Rosemary in schools and situations where she did not quite belong. She had just had her 23rd birthday in September 1941, and here in this new school she was so much older, so different from the other students. Always before her father or mother had come to visit, always before she had been part of her brothers' and sisters' world.

Kathleen was only a few minutes away, but Rosemary was not much of a part of her life. Jack was nearby, too, but he was no longer taking her to dances the way he always had in Hyannis Port. She had no invitations to Georgetown parties, no adventures on Capitol Hill, no walks with a young man in Rock Creek amid the brilliant autumn foliage, no polite teas with her sister and her friends.

Sometimes all the emotions burst out of Rosemary, a great rage of inchoate feeling. In the convent the nuns had been charged to control and contain Rosemary's life, and control and contain it they did, with days of endless routine that stretched on and on. Joe had sometimes raged against Rosemary for failing at her studies, but Rosemary was not stupid, not stupid in the way some demeaned her, not stupid at all. She knew that life was not here within these walls, but outside, out where Kathleen and Jack lived.

Rosemary figured out how to escape from the convent, and at night she walked out into the dark streets looking for the light and life of the city. The nuns would find her wandering in the streets, her story disconnected and vague, and they would bring her back to the convent, ask her to bathe, and warn her never again to walk into those nighttime streets. Soon she would be off again, another evening, another adventure, out there in the streets where the family worried there were men who wanted her and men she may have wanted.

When Rose and Joe talked about Rosemary's situation, he told his wife about the possibility of curing their daughter with a new surgical technique. Rose had never heard about the surgery, and she asked Kathleen to learn what she could about this new procedure. John White, Kathleen's friend and colleague at the Times-Herald newspaper, happened to be writing a six-part series on St. Elizabeth's Hospital, Washington's federal mental hospital, and Kathleen quizzed him about new approaches without ever telling him why she was so interested.

White detailed for Kathleen an experimental surgery on severely mentally disturbed patients in which the surgeon cut the fibers at the front of the brain. White told Kathleen that the results were "just not good" and that afterward the patients "don't worry so much, but they're gone as a person, just gone."

Kathleen discussed the surgery with Rose. "Oh, Mother, no, it's nothing we want done for Rosie," Kathleen said.

"Well, I'm glad to hear that," Rose replied. Rose had always said no to the doctors who had wanted to institutionalize Rosemary.

For years, Joe had left Rosemary's problems largely to Rose, but this was a matter too important to leave to his wife. This was Joe's problem, affecting the family reputation.

In the fall of 1941 when Joe was contemplating what to do with Rosemary, the era of psychosurgery was in its infancy. In the entire world only 350 to 500 lobotomies had taken place, about 80 of them performed by Dr. Walter Freeman and Dr. James Watts. Their surgical techniques were primitive. It would not be until half a dozen years later that Freeman would develop the well-known "ice pick operation" usually associated with lobotomies. "The doctors told my father it was a good idea," Eunice reflected. "I have reviewed it since that time with a number of doctors, and they said it wasn't successful in any case."

Freeman kept meticulous records of the 80 patients upon whom he and Watts had operated. These were all seriously disturbed human beings, chronically depressed, schizophrenics, or chronic alcoholics, suffering from the most acute mental problems facing medical science at that time.

Almost all of these patients were far older than Rosemary, and only one was younger. They had often been brought to Freeman after years of treatment, distress and disappointment, seeing the neurologist's technique as a last desperate hope. None of these patients was retarded. Freeman had his own caveats about lobotomies and knew that the patients had to be chosen with great care.

Having such an operation performed on Rosemary, a mildly retarded young woman with ill-defined emotional problems, was by any definition an extreme measure, but Joe was a pragmatic man who saw life as a series of problems waiting to be solved. He decided to go ahead, convincing the doctors that his daughter was a perfect candidate. Thus Rosemary became probably the first person with mental retardation in America to receive a prefrontal lobotomy.

"Mr. Kennedy was a powerful man who could talk anyone into anything," Rosemary's nurse Luella said. "I think Mr. Kennedy decided it would be better for Rosemary not to be exposed any longer to the general public in case she ran away. It would be better to almost `close the case.' Then there wouldn't be any more trouble and it would be easier to have her in a home somewhere."

Freeman and Watts performed their operation at 8 o'clock in the morning, and at the appointed hour the patient was wheeled into the operating room. Although mildly sedated, she was very much aware of her surroundings. She was given local anesthetic, Novocain, and was awake lying on the operating table, her head placed on a sandbag.

Watts drilled two burr holes in each side of the cranium and inserted the tubing from a large hypodermic needle about 2 1/2 inches into the brain. Then the doctor took a spatula that looked like "a blunt butter knife," pushed it into the cavity left by the tubing, and twisted upward, destroying the white matter of the frontal lobe. The surgeon made three other cuts, reinserting the spatula each time.

Although the doctors called this Freeman-Watts standard lobotomy a "precision operation," it was a matter of art as well as science. Each operation was different. The more serious the condition, the more likely the doctors would cut into the posterior regions of the brain, and the more likely the patient would end up tragically changed. The doctors kept talking to Rosemary, getting her to sing or count. When the patient became sleepy and disoriented, the two doctors could tell that the operation was working. As long as she continued to sing out and to add and subtract, the doctors kept cutting away, destroying a larger and larger area of the brain.

When the doctors were finished, they closed the incision with black silk sutures, and she was wheeled out of operating room.

An infantlike state

Rosemary had been Rose's child, Rose's burden, and her daughter was now like a painting that had been brutally slashed so it was scarcely recognizable. She had regressed into an infantlike state, mumbling a few words, sitting for hours staring at the walls, only traces left of the young woman she had been, still with those flashes of rage. This was a horror beyond horror, an unthinkable, unspeakable disaster. Rose and her children had repressed so much, and now they repressed what Joe had done to his daughter, repressed it all and pretended that it had never happened and that Rosemary no longer existed.

Rosemary was shipped off to several private institutions and spent years largely by herself, without a glimmer of awareness of what had happened to her and her life as a Kennedy woman.

Almost no one outside the family knew Rosemary's whereabouts. From that day on, in all the letters that Rose wrote the family in the next few years, she began "My darlings" or "Dear Children." Then she mentioned Joe and each of her children in turn, Joe Jr., Jack, Kathleen, Eunice, Pat, Jean, Bobby and Ted, everyone but Rosie, her namesake. Rosemary was gone, gone from the family letters, gone from discussions, gone.

It wasn't until after Joe died in November 1969 that Rose started flying out to Wisconsin to visit Rosemary at St. Coletta's. Her eldest daughter was the great unrelieved tragedy of Rose's life.

In Rose's mind, her departed sons never grew old. Joe Jr. would always be a brave young lad; Jack his witty, vital self; and Bobby, impassioned, brimful of life. Rose had youthful images of Rosemary, too, teaching her tennis on the courts at Hyannis Port, standing with her as she and Kathleen prepared to be presented to the King and Queen, watching as Jack and Joe Jr. took their pretty sister with them off to a dance at the Wianno Yacht Club.

As Rose entered the little house at St. Coletta's, she was confronted with a Rosemary who was not anything like these memories. Although the operation had severely limited Rosemary's intelligence, she was not a simple, gentle child eternally destined to be 5 or 6 years old. She was not a child at all but a tall, hulking woman of emotional complexity far beyond whatever formal intelligence was left with her.

For those who had known her before the operation, her face could be a haunting vision, her eyes deep set, her once glorious smile looking more like a grimace, her hair thick and black, with the unlined skin of a woman half her 50-some years. She still had remnants of the Kennedy physiognomy, a prominent chin and sharply etched features, but at first glance no one would have recognized her as a Kennedy.

Harrowing visits

As Rose grew older it was easier by far to have Rosemary make annual trips to Palm Beach and Hyannis Port than for Rose to travel to Wisconsin. For Rose these visits were the most emotionally harrowing of times. Days before, she became nervous, unable to relax or settle into her routine. During her oldest daughter's stay, Rose appeared perpetually on edge.

One evening at Hyannis Port Rose went up to her bedroom, leaving Rosemary sitting in a replica of Jack's White House rocking chair. She turned back a last time to look at her daughter sitting in the darkness, the room lit only by the light of the television screen. Near Rosemary sat a nun from St. Coletta's and Kerry McCarthy, Rose's great-niece.

A while later Rose came down the stairs. "I couldn't sleep without giving Rosie an extra hug," Rose said. Rosemary did not even look up. Rose walked behind the rocking chair, ran her fingers through Rosemary's black hair, and kissed her on the back of the neck. Rose slowly walked up the stairs and a few minutes later returned to stand behind Rosemary, who was rocking and shuffling cards.

"Kerry, look at Rosie's hair," Rose said, as she ran her fingers through the hair of her eldest daughter. "She doesn't have any gray in it. Rosie? . . . Rosie? . . . Rosie, do you remember Aunt Loretta, Kerry's grandmother?" Rosemary stirred with some vague sense of recognition. "Rosie . . . Rosie . . . Rosie . . . Remember when you learned to write and you wrote Aunt Loretta from England? Remember that, Rosie? Remember?"

Rose began to sob uncontrollably. Kerry led her back upstairs and Rosemary sat there in the shadows shuffling and rocking, shuffling and rocking.

Today, Rosemary is well into her 70s. She is in such good health and lived such a sound life that she might well outlive all her siblings.

(From the book "The Kennedy Women" by Laurence Leamer. Copyright 1994 by Laurence Leamer. Reprinted by permission of the Publisher, Villard Books, a division of Random House Inc. Distributed by Los Angeles Times Syndicate.)

Tomorrow in The Seattle Times: Why Joan Kennedy crashed into a bottle.