Rosemary: The Hidden Kennedy Daughter by Kate Clifford Larson

Author:Kate Clifford Larson [Larson, Kate Clifford]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw, azw3
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, JFK, Nonfiction, Retail
ISBN: 9780547250250
Amazon: 0547250258
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 2015-10-06T04:00:00+00:00

7

* * *

November 1941

JOE SR., if not other members of the family, felt Rosemary’s behavior had now become a menacing disgrace to the Kennedys’ political, financial, and social aspirations. Her late-night escapes from Saint Gertrude’s left her vulnerable to sexual exploitation and unsavory liaisons with unknown men. Joe, who had been mostly out of the political limelight since his return from London and his resignation as ambassador a year earlier, was focusing his energy on his businesses and investments and traveling frequently to New York and Washington, D.C. He was also beginning to chart his eldest sons’ political futures, and he could not risk the publicity from an unwanted pregnancy, venereal disease, or some other compromising situation. Family nurse Luella Hennessey believed that Joe “was so afraid of [Rosemary’s] getting into trouble or of [her] being kidnapped. It would be better for her not to be exposed to the general public in case she ran away.” But keeping her out of the public eye was proving impossible. “It would be better to almost ‘close the case,’” Hennessey recalled Joe Sr.’s attitude at the time. “Then there wouldn’t be any more trouble.” The latest reports from Saint Gertrude’s only further fanned Joe’s increasing anxiety over the family’s reputation and his deeply felt concerns about the mental and physical well-being of his daughter.

It has been suggested that Joe Sr. spoke with doctors about a very experimental brain operation for the treatment of serious mental-health conditions, leucotomy—popularly known as prefrontal lobotomy—while he was still in England. But in fact the procedure was not performed there until after he had left his ambassadorship, so it is unlikely he met with anyone there who had expertise. It is more likely that it was through his many connections in Washington—possibly Thomas Moore at Saint Gertrude’s—that he learned about the pioneering psychosurgery then being performed at George Washington University Hospital by Dr. Walter Freeman and his associate Dr. James Watts, then the leading researchers in the field in the United States. Freeman and Watts were on the faculty of the George Washington University Medical School and were well known to the psychiatric and neurosurgical community in Washington. Moore had been collaborating on innovative approaches to the treatment of mentally ill children with psychiatrists from Saint Elizabeths Hospital, the city’s federal psychiatric facility and one of the leading mental-health institutions in the country. Both Freeman and Watts conducted research and observed patients at Saint Elizabeths, so a connection through Moore seems highly probable.

Joe approached Rose about the option as a potential “cure” for Rosemary’s disabilities and increasingly moody and unpredictable behavior. Rose and Joe may have read an article on lobotomies in the Saturday Evening Post in May 1941. Highlighting the work of Freeman and Watts, among others, the article mostly praised the potential of the surgery to make mentally ill patients who were “problems to their families and nuisances to themselves . . . into useful members of society.” But the article also noted that some specialists in neurological disorders responded with “outright denunciation” of the technique.

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