What did emerge in the years following the public revelation was a series of interviews and memoir passages from surviving family members — Eunice, Rose, Ted, Jean — in which the lobotomy was discussed with varying degrees of candor. None of these accounts resolved the central historical question of Joe Kennedy’s exact motivation and reasoning. They confirmed the basic facts, they expressed grief and regret, and they acknowledged that the secrecy around Rosemary’s situation had been wrong.
Eunice, in her later years, spoke about Rosemary with a combination of love and sorrow that seemed genuine in the ways that genuineness is legible in the accounts available. She did not frame the story as something that had eventually worked out well. She framed it as something real that had happened to someone she loved, with consequences that lasted a lifetime.
For Rosemary herself — and this is both the obvious and the most difficult point — the 1987 revelation changed nothing about her circumstances. She was sixty-eight years old in 1987. She had been at Saint Coletta for thirty-eight years. The frontal lobe connections severed in 1941 were not restored by the publication of a book or the correction of the historical record. What the public learned in 1987 was what Rosemary had lived since 1941.
Rosemary Kennedy in the 1990s and Early 2000s
The Kennedy family’s engagement with Rosemary continued through the 1990s. Her visits to Palm Beach and Hyannis Port maintained the pattern established after Joe’s stroke. Eunice visited her at Saint Coletta as well as receiving her at the family compounds.