A nurse who was present during the procedure or its immediate aftermath reportedly left nursing shortly afterward. She is described in some accounts as having been deeply disturbed by what she had witnessed, though her direct statements are not available in sources accessible for this article.
Joe Kennedy visited Rosemary in the weeks following the surgery. He saw what had happened. And then, by the available evidence, he made the decision to remove her from his life and from the family’s visible existence entirely.
The Disappearance
In the immediate aftermath of the operation, Rosemary was placed at Craig House, a private psychiatric facility in Beacon, New York — a Hudson Valley institution that had also housed Zelda Fitzgerald among other notable patients. It was a high-end facility that offered privacy and professional care.
Joe Kennedy continued to visit for a time. Rose Kennedy, by her own account and by the account of multiple biographers, did not visit for approximately twenty years after the operation. The exact timing of when Rose’s visits ceased and when they resumed is difficult to pin down precisely from available sources, but the broad outline — decades of absence — is consistent across multiple accounts.
The family’s absence from Rosemary’s life in the years following the lobotomy was accompanied by a wall of silence and, eventually, of active misdirection. Her absence from the family was first explained publicly as reclusiveness. During John Kennedy’s 1958 Senate re-election campaign, the family described Rosemary as reclusive and private, without further elaboration. During the 1960 presidential campaign, she was not mentioned prominently. After Kennedy’s election, a family representative acknowledged in 1961 that she was “mentally retarded” — but the lobotomy was not mentioned. It would not be publicly revealed until 1987, when historian Doris Kearns Goodwin included an account of it in her book The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys.