In the autumn of 1941, a twenty-three-year-old woman was brought to George Washington University Hospital in Washington, D.C., and strapped to an operating table. She was given a local anesthetic to numb her scalp. Two holes were drilled into her skull, one on each side. A surgical instrument was inserted into her brain, and the white matter of her frontal lobes was severed while she remained conscious, responding to questions from the doctors who were cutting.
The woman’s name was Rose Marie Kennedy — known to her family as Rosemary. She was the third child and eldest daughter of Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. and his wife Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, one of the most prominent Catholic families in the United States. Her father had arranged the surgery without telling her mother until afterward. Rosemary herself, by all available accounts, was not asked for her consent and may not have been told what was about to happen to her.
She did not recover. The procedure left her without the ability to walk steadily or speak clearly. She was incontinent. The warm, sociable young woman who had learned to swim and sail and dance — who had written cheerful letters home from England, who had curtsied before King George VI and Queen Elizabeth at Buckingham Palace — was gone in the most literal sense. What remained required around-the-clock care for the rest of her life.
Her father moved her out of the public eye almost immediately. For nearly two decades, most of her siblings did not know where she was. The American public knew nothing of her existence in any meaningful sense. She lived in institutional care in Wisconsin until her death in 2005, at age eighty-six. She outlived her father, her mother, three of her brothers, and a sister. She did not attend a single funeral.