The Patriarch (68 page)

Ten days after the invasion, Herbert Hoover invited Kennedy to join former governor Alf Landon of Kansas, President Maynard Hutchins of the University of Chicago, and “some ten or fifteen men . . . outside of the Congress and outside of the America First group” in putting his name to an anti-intervention statement. Kennedy declined. When he was asked a second time, he declined again. “As I have said to you before I much prefer to go my way alone. I can then take my position on any subject and at any time as the occasion demands without consultation with anyone. I am well aware of the magnificent work you have done to keep us out of war. . . . Nevertheless I feel so strongly about pursuing my course alone that I feel that I would like to stick to this decision.”
¹⁴

—

H
e visited Washington that fall to see Jack, who was working for naval intelligence, and Kick, whom he had gotten a job at the
Washington Times-Herald
as secretary to associate editor Frank Waldrop. Kick enjoyed the work, the social life in the nation’s capital, and the opportunity to spend time with her brother, but what she wanted more than anything else was to return to London and her friends there, especially Billy Hartington. In October 1941, she wrote her father with a plan she had worked out with Carmel Offie, Bullitt’s former assistant in France and Kennedy’s friend. Offie would ask Tony Biddle, whom Roosevelt had dispatched to London as ambassador to the European governments in exile, “to give me a passport. . . . Tony will do anything for him. The only thing that remains is your consent. . . . I have a lot of great friends that I should really like to see and even if the British feel a little embittered about your opinion in the present struggle I don’t think any real friends such as I have would let that bother them. And even if it does as Offie says ‘the hell with them.’” She knew bombs were still falling in London but figured her chance of being hit by one was about the same as her getting hit by a car in Washington. Two weeks later, not having been given the go-ahead, she wrote her father again. “I am so anxious to go back that I can hardly sit still. I received a letter from Andrew and Debo [Billy’s brother and his wife, Deborah, the future Duchess of Devonshire] pleading with me to come back and save Billy from Sally Norton who apparently has got him in the bag. No one wants him to marry her and all told [me] to come back and save him. Apparently they are going to announce it in Jan. I haven’t heard from him for simply ages and that no doubt is the reason.”
¹⁵

Kick never did get to London that fall. It would be another year and a half before she was able to return to London and to Billy Hartington.

—

T
he continuing war in Europe made it impossible for Rosemary as well to return to England and Mother Isabel’s Convent of the Assumption. She was marooned at St. Gertrude’s and terribly discontent there. “In the year or so following her return from England,” Rose wrote in her memoirs, “disquieting symptoms began to develop. Not only was there noticeable retrogression in the mental skills she had worked so hard to attain, but her customary good nature gave way increasingly to tension and irritability. She was upset easily and unpredictable. Some of these upsets became tantrums, or rages, during which she broke things or hit out at people. Since she was quite strong, her blows were hard. Also there were convulsive episodes.”
¹⁶

In July 1941, Kennedy contacted Monsignor Casey at St. Patrick’s in New York with a list of convents, hoping that the monsignor would “institute inquiries through the channels we talked about.” The monsignor failed to find an alternative institution, and Rosemary was enrolled at St. Gertrude’s for a second year. Kennedy kept in touch with her by telephone and mail.

“Well, how is my old darling today?” he wrote on October 10, 1941. “I just got an idea I thought you might think about. Do you think Dr. Moore and the Nuns would like to have a picture show sometime this fall and also do you think the children would like it? If they would, what kind of a picture do you think they’d like. . . . Incidentally, Mother and I will be down there in a couple of weeks or so and Eddie and Mary [Moore] are coming down and they were thinking perhaps that they might take you for a trip up to Philadelphia to look the situation [and a possible place for her to live] over up there.” In late October, Kennedy asked Father John Cavanaugh, his friend and now a vice president at Notre Dame, for tickets to the November 8 Notre Dame–Navy game at Municipal Park in Baltimore for himself and his “three children in Washington,” Jack, Kick, and Rosemary.
¹⁷

The change in Rosemary’s behavior, which Rose had noticed on her daughter’s return from Europe, got worse that fall, not better. At twenty-three, Rosemary was frustrated, angry, and disturbed at being confined at St. Gertrude’s. Father Moore, worried about her welfare and the effect of her behavior on others at St. Gertrude’s, brought in a Miss Slavin to assist. “I trust,” he reported to Kennedy, “that she will be able to help a great deal.” He then asked Kennedy for a loan or gift of $25,000 for a new building.
¹⁸

The problem at St. Gertrude’s was much the same, if more aggravated than it had been at the Residence School in Manhattan. These schools were not shuttered cloisters with closed gates. St. Gertrude’s was located in the heart of Washington. There was no way short of locking her in at night to keep Rosemary from wandering the streets. “She was a beautiful girl,” remembered her cousin Ann Gargan, who had spent most summers and vacations with the Kennedys since 1936. The thought that she was incapable of making the proper judgments or protecting herself from strangers was simply “horrifying.” “Many nights,” Ann Gargan told Doris Kearns Goodwin, “the school would call to say she was missing, only to find her out walking around the streets at 2
A.M
. Can you imagine what it must have been like to know your daughter was walking the streets in the darkness of the night, the perfect prey for an unsuspecting male?”
¹⁹

Her father, Jean Kennedy Smith recalled, believed that Rosemary’s irritability, which her teachers and tutors had been commenting on for years now, might have had something to do with her “mind.” Her mother also was beginning to believe, as she put it in her memoirs, that “there were other factors at work besides retardation. A neurological disturbance or disease of some sort seemingly had overtaken her, and it was becoming progressively worse.”
²⁰

As he did whenever there was a medical problem to be diagnosed and solved, Kennedy consulted the leading practitioners. He probably did so alone, though Rose, in her memoirs, claimed that she took part. The children’s medical problems had always been his responsibility, not his wife’s. In the case of their daughter Rosemary, there was an additional reason he may have proceeded to seek a medical solution without involving his wife. As historian Janice Brockley has written, mental health professionals in midcentury “urged parents to be ‘realistic’ about their disabled children” and believed that in the final analysis, only fathers had the capacity to do so. “The job of maintaining objectivity was often given to fathers, who supposedly had the skills, emotional detachment, and rational judgment that mothers lacked. Mothers were the caregivers, however flawed; fathers were the ultimate decision makers about major issues such as institutionalization. . . . Fathers were often expected to take the burden of decision making from their wives.”
²¹

This was precisely what Kennedy did. At some point in the late fall of 1941, he met with Dr. Walter Freeman, the chair of the Department of Neurology at George Washington University Medical School, and perhaps with his colleague James Watts, a Yale-trained neurosurgeon. Freeman and Watts had five years earlier performed their first psychosurgery at George Washington University, borrowing from the techniques of and with instruments invented by a Portuguese doctor, Egas Moniz, who in 1949 would be awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for “his invention of a surgical treatment for mental illness.”
²²

By 1941, Freeman and Watts had performed hundreds of lobotomies. The operation was relatively simple. A tubelike surgical instrument with a sharp blade was inserted into the frontal lobe of the brain through two entry holes at the top of the skull and then used to cut away brain tissue. The intent was to sever the connections between the frontal lobes, the cognitive regions of the brain, and the thalamus, the emotional center, the hypothesis being that after the operation, lobotomized patients would no longer experience emotional distress, depression, anxiety, or tension. The operation was controversial and not indicated for patients with mental retardation. Freeman, a master salesman who had written and lectured widely on the procedure, had by 1941 succeeded in convincing large numbers of well-placed medical experts that it was relatively harmless, with few side effects, and of great benefit to depressed and agitated patients, especially women. “Between 1937 and the end of World War II,” medical historian Jack D. Pressman had written, “a consensus emerged among many American physicians that psychosurgery was a treatment that indeed offered certain benefit.”
²³

Because Joseph P. Kennedy never wrote or talked about his communications with Dr. Freeman, we can only speculate what he asked or what the doctor told him. It is likely that Freeman repeated what he had said to others in consultations, that the operation, if successful—and there was no reason to believe it would not be—would treat Rosemary’s agitated depression and reduce, if not eliminate, the tantrums, irritation, and violence. In the book on psychosurgery he published in 1941, Freeman claimed that follow-up data on the operations he had performed with Watts demonstrated that “63% of their patients had improved, 23 percent had not changed, and 14 percent were in poorer condition.” He no doubt shared these results with Kennedy.
²⁴

If there was a 63 percent chance that Dr. Freeman could solve Rosemary’s emotional problems without causing any additional deterioration of her already diminished mental capacities, that was a chance Kennedy thought worth taking. The operation was performed between November 12, when Father Moore last wrote to Kennedy, and November 28, 1941, when Kennedy, in a letter to a friend, mentioned that he was coming to Washington to see an eye doctor and “visit with my two [not three] youngsters who are there.”
²⁵

Like many (but not all) lobotomy patients, Rosemary came out of the operation inert, unable to speak or walk. She was moved to Craig House, a private psychiatric hospital in Beacon, New York, to recuperate. With its 380 acres, an indoor swimming pool, golf course, stables and horseback riding trails, arts and crafts center, and trained medical personnel, Craig House offered its patients the best possible custodial care as well as discretion and secrecy. Zelda Fitzgerald had been a patient, as had Alfred Stieglitz’s daughter, Kitty. Henry Fonda’s wife, Frances Ford Seymour, would arrive in early 1950 and commit suicide that same spring. There was as yet no indication of when or to what extent Rosemary would regain her mobility and speech.

In a January 1942 round-robin letter to the children, Rose did not refer to Rosemary, which was highly unusual. She would not mention her again in a letter for the next twenty years.

Kennedy kept the rest of the family informed about Rosemary’s recovery. A year after the operation, Kennedy wrote Rose, who was vacationing in California, that he had “stopped off to see Rosemary and she was getting along very nicely. She looks very well.” The following July, in a letter to Jack, he reported that “Rosemary is feeling much better and is swimming in the pool every day.” In February 1944, he wrote Joe Jr. that Rosemary was “feeling quite well, so everybody is getting along quite happily,” and in March, he wrote Kick that her older sister was “about the same, but seems quite cheerful.”
²⁶

Rosemary regained some of her motor skills at Craig House, but she did not recover her memory or her speech. She had been mildly retarded, but after her failed lobotomy she was severely so. There was nothing the staff at Craig House could do for her save make her comfortable. The 1948 bills “for care and treatment of Miss Rosemary Kennedy” included not just the usual fees for room, board, and custodial care, but additional amounts for three extra private-duty nurses, laundry, hairdresser, druggist, stationer, tailor, and cash, for a monthly total of $2,385.85, which in purchasing power today would be equivalent to more than a quarter of a million dollars annually.
²⁷

Kennedy was the only one in the family who visited Rosemary or consulted with her doctors at Craig House. We don’t know what he told Rose or the children about Rosemary after February 1944, the last letter in which he referred to her. Nor do we know what they inquired of him. In her memoirs, Rose did not raise the possibility that Kennedy might have made an error in allowing Dr. Freeman to operate on Rosemary. She simply recorded the outcome: “The operation eliminated the violence and the convulsive seizures, but it also had the effect of leaving Rosemary permanently incapacitated. She lost everything that had been gained during the years by her own gallant efforts and our loving efforts for her. She had no possibility of ever again being able to function in a viable way in the world at large.”
²⁸

What Kennedy himself thought about his decision to have his daughter lobotomized we do not know. There is in his correspondence only one reference to her, from May 29, 1958, when, in answering a letter from Sister Anastasia at the St. Coletta school in Jefferson, Wisconsin, where Rosemary had been moved years before, he expressed his gratitude for the sister’s “persevering kindness” in making a home for Rosemary. He added that “the solution of Rosemary’s problem has been a major factor in the ability of all the Kennedys to go about their life’s work and to try and do it as well as they can.”
²⁹