Rosemary left Belmont House. She would never have an educational experience as successful again.
The Deteriorating Situation
The return to the United States in 1940 brought Rosemary back into an environment less suited to her needs than the one she had just left. Belmont House had given her structure, purpose, and a methodology that matched her learning style. The American institutions to which she now returned did not.
She was placed in a convent school in Washington, D.C. — some sources identify it as Saint Gertrude’s School of Arts and Crafts. The circumstances there were harder than they had been in England. Her behaviors, which had been relatively well-managed at Belmont House, began to be more pronounced.
What exactly happened in this period is a matter of some dispute in the historical record, and the accounts carry the weight of retrospective telling. By multiple reports, she was leaving the convent at night — slipping out after dark and making her way to bars and public places without supervision. The nuns at the school reported this to her parents. The accounts, filtered through decades of family recollection and biographers’ interpretations, suggest that she met men during these nocturnal excursions, though what those encounters consisted of is not established.
Her sister Eunice later wrote that at twenty-two, Rosemary was becoming “increasingly irritable and difficult.” Her moods were described as volatile. She was expelled from a summer program. The situation at the convent was, by the accounts available, becoming untenable.
The family’s fear, in this period, had multiple dimensions. There was genuine concern for Rosemary’s safety and wellbeing — a young woman with an intellectual disability leaving a supervised setting alone at night was in real danger, in 1940 Washington, D.C. and anywhere else. There was also fear about what might happen to the family’s public reputation if Rosemary’s condition became widely known or if she became involved in a scandal. And there was the looming presence of Joseph Kennedy’s political ambitions for his sons, particularly for Joe Jr. and Jack, ambitions that a family scandal could damage.