The accounts of that family discovery vary in their details, and none of the principals left a contemporaneous written record that is publicly accessible. What can be said is that after the discovery, the family’s relationship with Rosemary changed, and Eunice in particular appears to have made the reconnection with her sister and the advocacy for people with intellectual disabilities into a central project of her life.
One documented, vivid detail comes from the early 1962 period, when Rose Kennedy finally visited Rosemary again. Koehler-Pentacoff’s account, derived from her aunt’s caregiving memories, describes Rosemary attacking her mother during that first visit — a physical expression of something that had built up over twenty years of abandonment. Whether the interpretation of the attack as directed anger toward Rose specifically, rather than general behavioral volatility, can be drawn from the available evidence is uncertain. What seems clear is that the reunion was not gentle or immediately warm.
The emotional reckoning that the Kennedy family underwent in this period — the confrontation with what Joe Kennedy had done, with what Rose had allowed, with what all of them had missed — is not fully documented in publicly accessible primary sources. What is documented are the actions that followed.
Eunice Kennedy Shriver and the Public Turn
In September 1962, a long article appeared in the Saturday Evening Post, one of America’s most widely read magazines. Its author was Eunice Kennedy Shriver. Its subject was intellectual disability — what it was, what it was not, what American society could do about it. Eunice did not name Rosemary in the article, and she did not describe the lobotomy. But she wrote openly about having a family member with intellectual disability, and she wrote about what the family had seen and learned from that experience.