In the early 1960s, a rumor circulated that Rosemary was somewhere in the Midwest, teaching disabled children. This story may have originated from wishful family framing or from a misunderstanding of her actual situation. She was not teaching anyone. She was living in institutional care, having lost most of the abilities that had taken her a lifetime to develop.
In 1949, she was transferred from Craig House to Saint Coletta School for Exceptional Children in Jefferson, Wisconsin — a Catholic institution run by the Sisters of Saint Francis of Assisi. Archbishop Richard Cushing of Boston, a close Kennedy family associate who would later officiate at John Kennedy’s wedding to Jacqueline Bouvier, recommended the placement. Saint Coletta had a reputation for providing humane, individualized care within a religious framework that the Kennedy family would have found appropriate.
Joe Kennedy arranged for a private cottage to be built on the Saint Coletta grounds, about a mile from the main campus, specifically for Rosemary. The nuns called it “the Kennedy cottage.” Two sisters — Sister Margaret Ann and Sister Leona — were assigned as her primary caregivers.
Rosemary would live at Saint Coletta for the rest of her life.
Saint Coletta: Fifty-Six Years
The details of Rosemary Kennedy’s daily life at Saint Coletta from 1949 until her death in 2005 are not fully documented in publicly accessible sources, and it is important to be honest about what is established and what is not.
What is known is that she received regular, individualized care from the Sisters of Saint Francis, who ran Saint Coletta with a mission of dignity and personhood for people with intellectual disabilities. The institution was not the kind of warehouse that gave state psychiatric hospitals of the era their reputation for neglect and abuse. It was a residential school and care community with a religious mission, and by available accounts Rosemary was treated as a person deserving of care and attention.