Historians differ on how to weight these motivations. Biographer Kate Clifford Larson acknowledges all of them while being cautious about asserting which dominated. Bertram S. Brown, a former aide to President Kennedy, was quoted in reporting by Ronald Kessler as saying that Joe Sr. used the term “mentally retarded” to protect John’s political reputation. Rosemary’s nurse, a woman named Luella, reportedly said that Joe Kennedy “could talk anyone into anything” and had framed the situation as a problem that needed to be closed.
What is documented is that in 1941, Joseph Kennedy Sr. began consulting with physicians about options.
The Medical Landscape: Freeman, Watts, and the Lobotomy Moment
To understand what happened to Rosemary Kennedy in November 1941, it is necessary to understand what the medical world believed about lobotomy at that moment — and to be honest about what those beliefs were built on.
The procedure that would be performed on Rosemary had its origins in work done by Portuguese neurologist António Egas Moniz, who in November 1935 performed what he called a “leucotomy” — a cutting of the white matter connections in the frontal lobes. Moniz was working from the theory that mental illness involved pathological patterns of connection in the brain, and that severing those connections might break the cycle. His early results, reported in papers that claimed improvement in a majority of patients, attracted interest from neurologists in Europe and the United States.
Walter Jackson Freeman II was a neurologist at George Washington University who became one of the procedure’s most aggressive American advocates. Freeman was brilliant, energetic, and profoundly convinced that he had found a solution to the enormous problem of mental illness — a problem that filled the wards of state hospitals across the country with patients for whom medicine had almost nothing to offer.