Rose Kennedy did not visit Rosemary for approximately twenty years. This is one of the most striking facts in Rosemary’s story, and it is also one of the hardest to interpret. It could reflect guilt, shame, deliberate avoidance, or the particular form of denial that grief sometimes takes. Rose left no candid explanation in the sources available for this article. What she did leave was a record of absence from her daughter’s life during the years when that daughter most needed a mother.
Rosemary’s siblings did not know where she was until approximately 1961. This fact — that her brothers and sisters were kept ignorant of their sister’s location for approximately twenty years — is documented across multiple accounts and is consistent with the broader pattern of concealment that surrounded Rosemary’s situation from 1941 onward.
In 1961, Joseph Kennedy Sr. suffered a severe stroke. He spent the last eight years of his life largely incapacitated, unable to speak clearly. The stroke did not end his life but it ended his capacity to control the family’s information and to maintain the wall of silence around Rosemary’s location and condition.
It was in the aftermath of Joe’s stroke that Eunice Kennedy Shriver learned definitively where her sister was, what her condition was, and what had been done to her. Her siblings learned around the same time. The revelation, by all accounts, was devastating.
The Siblings Learn the Truth
When Eunice Kennedy Shriver and her siblings discovered the full circumstances of Rosemary’s situation around 1961, they were adults in their thirties and forties. John was President of the United States. Eunice was a mother and a private citizen beginning to channel her considerable energy into disability advocacy. They had grown up knowing their sister was different, knowing she had been sent away, but apparently not knowing the specific nature of what had happened to her.