The Age Question and the Historical Record
The prompt for this article raised the question of Rosemary’s age at the time of the lobotomy, and it is worth addressing directly because the answer turns out to be both clear and somewhat complicated by the way it has been reported.
Rosemary Kennedy was born on September 13, 1918. The lobotomy was performed in November 1941. That means she was twenty-three years old when the procedure was performed — she had passed her twenty-third birthday in September 1941, approximately two months before the surgery.
The NPS article confirms the birth date and places the lobotomy in November 1941, making the age twenty-three accurate. A JFK archives blog is cited as giving the age twenty-two, but that would require the lobotomy to have been performed before September 13, 1941, and the available evidence places it in November. The NPS figure of twenty-three, derived from the standard birth date and the established month of the surgery, is the more supportable number, and it is the figure used in the article’s headline.
This is not a trivial point. Part of what gives Rosemary’s story its particular character is that she was a fully formed adult at the time of the surgery — not a child, not an adolescent, but a twenty-three-year-old woman who had lived through the England years, the Buckingham Palace presentation, the Montessori school at Belmont House, the letters home, the swimming and sailing and dancing. What was taken from her was not a future waiting to be built; it was a present that was already, in its own imperfect and constrained way, real.