A Family’s Reckoning
The Kennedy family’s public reckoning with Rosemary’s situation unfolded over decades and was never fully completed in the sense of producing a frank, comprehensive public accounting.
Joe Kennedy died in November 1969, eight years after his stroke, without ever having spoken publicly about the lobotomy. He had been the decision-maker, and he took the specifics of whatever calculation he had made to his grave.
Rose Kennedy, who outlived her husband by twenty-six years and died in 1995 at the age of 104, gave interviews over the decades in which she described Rosemary with evident love and obvious pain. She said she had not been told about the lobotomy until after it happened. Whether this was accurate or was a self-exculpatory account that she had told so many times she believed it fully is a question the available evidence cannot resolve.
What Rose did, in the years after Joe’s death, was visit Rosemary regularly and advocate publicly for people with intellectual disabilities. She gave speeches on the subject. She attended Special Olympics events. She wrote about Rosemary with what appears to be genuine remorse for the years of distance. Whether that remorse was sufficient to the magnitude of what had happened is not a question with an objective answer.
For the siblings who had not known where Rosemary was for twenty years, the discovery of her location and condition produced responses that ranged, by available accounts, from anger to grief to guilt to determination. Eunice channeled what she felt into action — the camp, the advocacy, the Special Olympics, the public writing. Others did so in different ways. Ted Kennedy became one of the Senate’s most persistent champions of disability rights, working toward the Americans with Disabilities Act, which was signed into law in 1990. Jean Kennedy Smith founded Very Special Arts, an organization supporting arts participation for people with disabilities.