Their care does not excuse the family’s abandonment or the surgery that preceded it. But it is part of the truth of Rosemary’s life, and an account that leaves them out is an account that leaves out some of the most important human presence in her story.
What Changed — And What Did Not — After Eunice’s Advocacy
The decades of disability advocacy that followed the Kennedy family’s reconnection with Rosemary’s situation produced real and significant changes in how American society treated people with intellectual disabilities. The Mental Retardation Facilities and Community Mental Health Centers Act of 1963 created the first federal framework for addressing these conditions. The Community Services Act and subsequent legislation continued to develop federal investment in disability services. The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, for which Ted Kennedy was a key Senate champion, created comprehensive civil rights protections for people with disabilities of all kinds.
Special Olympics, by the time of Rosemary’s death in 2005, was serving more than five million athletes globally and had become one of the most visible disability inclusion programs in the world. The organization had shaped public consciousness about the capabilities of people with intellectual disabilities in ways that would have been nearly unimaginable in the shame-driven world of 1918 or 1941.
The normative understanding of intellectual disability had shifted profoundly over the same period. The eugenics framework that had dominated thinking about disability in the early twentieth century had been discredited — partly by the Holocaust, which demonstrated where eugenic logic led when combined with state power, and partly by scientific advances that revealed the enormous complexity and diversity of intellectual and developmental conditions. The single category of “feeblemindedness” had been replaced by detailed classification systems that distinguished among many different conditions with different causes, presentations, and trajectories.