After Joe Kennedy’s stroke in 1961 and the family’s reconnection with Rosemary, she began making annual visits to the Kennedy family compounds. She went to Palm Beach in the winter. She went to Hyannis Port in the summer. She was photographed with nieces and nephews who had grown up without knowing her and who, by the accounts of those who were there, embraced her as a presence in the family rather than a ghost.
Her arm remained palsied. Her walking remained uneven. Her speech remained limited to words and short phrases. But she swam in the family pools. She sat at family meals. She was in the photographs. She was present in a way she had not been for the first twenty years after the surgery.
The Revelation of 1987 and What Followed
When Doris Kearns Goodwin’s The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys was published in 1987 and brought the lobotomy into public knowledge with a documented account, the family’s response was notably muted. There was no large-scale Kennedy family statement, no press conference, no formal acknowledgment beyond what reporters managed to elicit in individual interviews.
This muted response may reflect several things simultaneously. The family members most implicated in the decision — Joe Sr. and, to some extent, Rose — were either dead (Joe had died in 1969) or in advanced old age (Rose was eighty-six in 1987 and died in 1995). The siblings who had not known of the lobotomy had been living with its consequences for twenty-plus years by 1987 and had processed their feelings in whatever private ways they had. Public statements about the lobotomy would necessarily have involved attributing blame to their father, to their mother, to dead men named Freeman and Watts — and the Kennedys, as a family culture, tended toward forward motion rather than public accounting.