Rosemary learned them. She practiced. And when the moment came, she performed the ceremony correctly, in front of the royal family and a crowd of several hundred people. One account notes that she stumbled slightly during the presentation but recovered before anyone beyond a few observers could register what had happened. The king and queen gave no sign. The press coverage afterward praised the Kennedy daughters’ appearances and deportment.
The significance of that moment is worth pausing on. A young woman with a documented intellectual disability, who had struggled for most of her life with the formal demands of institutional learning, had just curtsied before the monarchs of Great Britain and received no visible distinction from anyone around her. Whatever limits the academic world had imposed on Rosemary Kennedy, they were not the limits of her whole self.
She also attended the coronation of Pope Pius XII in Rome with her family in March 1939 — a ceremony of immense importance to the intensely Catholic Kennedy household. She traveled widely with her family during the ambassadorial years, appearing at events and engaging in the social life of an American diplomatic family in pre-war Europe.
The war was coming. The Kennedy family could feel it. Joseph Kennedy’s assessment of Britain’s prospects was deeply pessimistic — he believed Germany would prevail and that American involvement would be disastrous — and his communications to Washington reflected that view in ways that eventually destroyed his diplomatic career. In November 1940 he resigned as ambassador, and the family prepared to return to the United States.