What the accounts that exist suggest is that the discovery of Rosemary’s location and condition around 1961 produced something like shock and grief in the Kennedy siblings. These were adults who had grown up knowing their sister as a real person — had danced with her, had accompanied her to events, had received letters from her — and who had then spent twenty years being given explanations that were either vague or false. Learning that the vagueness had concealed something this significant, and that the concealment had been maintained by their father and, apparently, their mother, was a confrontation with the limits of the family’s claim to honesty and trust.
The emotional processing that followed this discovery is not well-documented. The Kennedys were not a family given to public emotional expression or, by available accounts, to sustained private emotional processing of uncomfortable truths. They were a family that moved forward, that channeled energy into action, that converted grief into work.
Eunice’s channeling of her feelings about Rosemary into disability advocacy is the most visible example of this pattern. It was productive channeling — it produced real good in the world — but it was also, possibly, a way of managing grief that was too large to sit with directly.
What Rosemary herself made of the family’s eventual return to her life cannot be known. The account of her attacking Rose Kennedy at their first reunion is one of the most emotionally charged details in her story, and it has been interpreted by some as a direct expression of anger at abandonment. Whether that interpretation is accurate or whether it projects more coherent intention onto a behavioral response than the evidence supports is a judgment call that should be made with humility.