The distance between November 1941 and the present is visible in that ethical framework. Rosemary Kennedy was operated on before patient rights existed in any formal sense, before informed consent was a legal requirement, before the systematic regulation of human research that followed the post-war revelations of experimental abuse. She was operated on when a prominent neurologist and a wealthy man could agree that something should be done to a young woman and simply do it.
That is the historical context. It explains something. It does not excuse anything.
The People Rosemary Kennedy Left Behind
When Rosemary Kennedy died in January 2005, she was survived by three of her siblings: Jean Kennedy Smith, who had been the U.S. Ambassador to Ireland in the 1990s; Patricia Kennedy Lawford, the mother of actor Christopher Lawford; and Ted Kennedy, the senior Senator from Massachusetts. Eunice Kennedy Shriver was still living — she died in 2009. Her mother Rose had died in 1995 at 104. Her father Joe had died in 1969.
She had outlived Joe Jr., who died in 1944. She had outlived Kathleen, who died in 1948. She had outlived Jack, who was assassinated in 1963. She had outlived Bobby, who was assassinated in 1968.
This is one of the quietly remarkable facts of Rosemary Kennedy’s life: that the sibling the family had tried to manage and conceal, who had spent most of her adult life in a cottage in Wisconsin, who had no public career and produced no political legacy of her own, outlived three of the brothers who carried the Kennedy political ambitions into the world. She outlived the President and the Senators. She was still swimming in Wisconsin when most of the people who had made the decisions about her life were already dead.