The accounts available suggest that Freeman and Watts promoted the lobotomy with considerable confidence. Freeman in particular was an energetic advocate who presented the procedure’s benefits while minimizing its risks and who had a personality that multiple sources describe as intensely persuasive. If Freeman sat across from Joseph Kennedy Sr. and told him that the procedure would calm Rosemary’s behavior, reduce her volatility, and allow her to live more comfortably — without clearly communicating that it might also eliminate her ability to walk and speak — then Joe Kennedy’s decision to proceed, while still wrong in several important respects, looks somewhat different than it does if he was clearly told of the severity of possible outcomes and chose to proceed anyway.
The evidence does not resolve this question. The conversation between Joe Kennedy and Freeman and Watts is not documented in any source accessible for this article. What can be said is that Freeman was known, in retrospect, to have presented lobotomy’s benefits in a way that overstated the evidence and that the informed consent process in 1941 medicine was far below what would now be considered acceptable.
What can also be said is that the warning arrived through another channel. Kathleen’s research, John White’s assessment that the results were bad, Rose’s relief at that assessment — all of this happened before Joe Kennedy made the final decision. He had been warned that the procedure’s results were not good. He chose to proceed.
Whether that choice was motivated primarily by hope for Rosemary, primarily by impatience with her situation, primarily by fear of scandal, or by some combination that he could not himself have fully articulated, is a question that the available evidence does not answer and that historical analysis must approach with appropriate humility.