Rosemary Kennedy's day off

Today marks the 30th anniversary of a little-known, near- Kennedy tragedy, when President Kennedy’s developmentally-disabled sister, Rosemary, got lost in Chicago. Rosie – as she was known to her immediate family and the nuns who cared for her at St. Coletta’s in Jefferson, Wis., for 57 years until her death last January – was an anomaly to her family.

To hear the Kennedy family spin, they embraced Rosie as a child, kept at her at home singin’ Irish drinking songs like “Sweet Rosie O’Grady” and “Pretty Maid Milking the Cow” and competing in sailing races off the Cape, against the advice of Harvard University doctors who encouraged Joe and Rose to put her in an institution. In actuality, the family considered Rosemary “a disgrace.” Joe Kennedy could not tolerate losers and banned Rosie from the house.

Up until his appointment as ambassador to King James’ Court in 1939, Rosemary lived with Joe’s closest aide – Edward Moore for whom Teddy is named – afraid that Rosie would jeopardize his presidential ambitions for his oldest, anti-Semitic son, Joe, Jr., who once wrote in a letter to his father that “Hitler has some good ideas about the Jews.”

This is the first of what I hope to be many fascinating blogs about America’s Royal Family – the Kennedys.

The fall of 1975 was a season of little girls lost. The nation was still reeling from two assassination attempts in as many weeks on President Gerald Ford. The first would-be assassin, Manson family member Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, stepped out from a crowd gathered to hear the president speak at Capitol Park in Sacramento, Calif. Wearing a red cape and white turban, Squeaky pointed an unloaded Colt .45 at the president’s genitals and demanded that he stop the “man-made desecration of the environment.”

A few weeks later, Sara Jane Moore, a double agent for the FBI and Berkley radical underground, fired the first shots at a sitting U.S. president since Nov. 22, 1963. Patricia Campbell Hearst, kidnapped heiress turned alleged bank robber, was apprehended after 18 months on the lam with her Symbionese Liberation Army comrades-in-arms. The Hearst family proclaimed Patty’s mind to be almost gone after Patty raised her clenched, handcuffed fist in a Black Panther salute in the back of police squad car and declared her occupation to FBI agents as “urban guerilla.” Meanwhile, in Chicago, another little girl was getting lost: the beautiful and the damned Rosemary Kennedy.

Rosemary was the prettiest of Joe and Rose Kennedy’s five daughters. Her Sacred Heart-shaped face stands apart from those of her sisters in old Kennedy family photos: dazzling Kick, gawky Eunice, smoldering Pat and sulky Jean. Rosemary was the oldest Kennedy daughter and had been diagnosed as “feeble minded” by Harvard University doctors’ definition of the highest functioning level of mental retardation in the 1920s. (The other classifications were "moron" and "imbecile.")

When Rosemary was a year old, her mother observed that the freckle-faced toddler had problems managing her silver baby spoon and “porringer.” Rosemary’s natural beauty hid any outward symptoms of mental deficiencies. Outwardly, she did not appear retarded, but strangers and casual acquaintances of the Kennedys noticed that she was slow in the company of her overachieving siblings, sealing her fate as the first Kennedy tragedy.

Throughout her childhood, her family fiercely sheltered Rosemary. She was included in games, sailing races and tutored to the point of torture, learning the Catechism and how to dance, and developing an almost idiot savant acumen for sums and fractions. Eunice who always held a special fondness for her oldest sister, ensured that Rosemary enjoyed some measure of success in games such as “Duck, Duck, Goose.”

In 1939, the family left on three separate voyages across the perilous Atlantic where German U-boats had been torpedoing Allie passenger ships, to join Joe in England following his appointment as U.S. ambassador. Rosemary made her debut into society with younger sister Kick, when both were presented to King George VI and Queen Elizabeth. Rosemary tripped on her curtsey.

Eventually, 19-year-old Rosemary was enrolled in a Montessori school in the English countryside. For the first time in her life, Rosemary began to blossom away from her hyperkinetic family and the overwhelming pressure to succeed. After England declared war on Germany in September 1939, Rose and the rest of the Kennedy children left for home in Bronxville, N.Y., leaving Rosemary to fend for herself in war-torn Europe. Occasionally her father, between fulfilling his duties as ambassador and cutting deals of appeasement with Hitler, visited Rosemary in her country school as an excuse to escape the German Blitz in London. Joe spent most of those visits haranguing Rosemary about being fat.

In 1940, much to the protestations of her Montessori teachers, Rosemary returned to America with her brother Jack. Back in the Kennedy pressure-cooker, Rosemary’s frustration reached a boiling point, driving her to the brink of despair. She began lashing out angrily at family members, her mother bearing the brunt of Rosemary’s wild swipes to the face when she wasn’t in Paris shopping for six months out of the year. Throwing tantrums, storming the streets alone at night, and reeling from the hormonal rages of an unrequited, sexual maturation, Rosemary fulfilled her destiny as a liability to her father and his presidential dreams for Joe, Jr., the oldest Kennedy child and golden son.

Home from England in 1941 following his disastrous appointment as an ambassador, Joe made the darkest of his many Faustian deals, planting the seeds of bad karma that would haunt his children and his children’s children in the decades to come. Rosemary was quietly lobotomized while Rose vacationed in California with Jack and Kick, becoming the first mentally retarded person in the United States to receive a state-of-the-art frontal lobotomy. Joe consulted no one, and the results of the experimental operation were catastrophic. Rosemary was worse than before, and was exiled to a convent in Jefferson, Wis., where no one in the family was allowed to contact her.

For the next several decades, Rosemary remained an enigma. Her oldest brother, who she adored, perished when his experimental plane blew up during a top secret mission at the lingering end of World War II. Kick, who replaced Rosemary as the eldest Kennedy daughter long ago, was also killed in a plane crash along with her married Protestant lover in France during a thunderstorm.

During Jack’s early political career, who had stepped in to fill his dead brother’s shoes, the press was told that Rosemary lived a quiet life in Wisconsin doing religious work. Finally, in 1960, during Jack’s presidential campaign, Joe publicly admited in a carefully staged press conference, that the democratic presidential candidate had a sister with mental retardation.

Through the years, Rosemary was slowly drawn back into the family. The annual visits to Hyannis Port and West Palm Beach began with her nun caretakers from St. Coletta’s, the convent where Rosie lived and was ministered to. She was a strong muscular woman, almost topping out at six feet tall, dwarfing the diminutive Rose. She was barely cognizant of her family and could not be left alone. Rosemary beared an unspeakable rage to Rose, whom she saw as abandoning her some 30 years ago. In 1968, Eunice founded the Special Olympics in Rosemary’s honor.

October 5, 1975 was to have been a reunion of sorts for Rosemary and Eunice, who was in Chicago attending a fundraiser for her husband, democratic presidential candidate R. Sargeant Shriver. The Sisters of St. Francis of Assisi brought Rosemary to Chicago to meet Eunice. Eunice had a full Sunday of activities planned for Rosemary – morning mass at St. Peter’s Catholic Church on Madison Street, lunch at the Palmer House, and then a long frenetic walk along the glorious Lake Michigan lakefront.

After the 11 o’clock mass, Rosemary was at Eunice’s side in the church vestibule when Eunice stopped to examine some religious booklets. When she looked up into the crowded vestibule, Eunice told police, Rosemary was gone. Eunice, along with the priest and two other women searched the church for a half hour. Eunice went into the street and flagged down a passing squad car. The police woman drove Eunice slowly up and down the surrounding streets, not realizing she was the wife of the 1976 democratic presidential candidate or that the person they were searching for was the retarded sister of the late President Kennedy.

Eunice finally identified herself and the policewoman notified Lt. Joseph Locallo, watch commander for the Chicago Police Department’s Central District. Fearful that Rosemary might be found by a person who could hold her for ransom or harm her, Lt. Locallo ordered 50 police officers to ride or walk the Loop streets looking for her.

Meanwhile Rosemary, dressed in a belted, puffy white coat and red pants, strolled the streets. She carried no money or identification, and because of the lobotomy that her father ordered for her decades before, she was unable to talk except to identify herself. For the first time in 24 years Rosemary was free, away from the scrutiny of the Sisters of St. Francis of Assisi, who never gave her a moment’s peace. Downtown Chicago was unusually crowded that Sunday. Rosemary was swept away in the crowd hurrying down the sidewalks, joining the flow of life like a seasoned urbanite.

For the next five hours Rosemary was lost while a frantic Eunice rode in the back of a squad car searching for a glimpse of her sister’s red pants. Police radios broadcasted Rosemary’s description at regular intervals. Soon, the Chicago media also heard of Rosemary’s disappearance. They, too, combed the streets looking for her, not so much to find her, but to be the first to get fresh photos of President Kennedy’s retarded sister.

WGN radio reported that Sen. Ted Kennedy, the lone surviving son of Joe and Rose, had also been contacted. One can only imagine his conversation with Eunice. (“GODDAMIT, EUNICE, HOW COULD YOU LOSE HER!”) Police searched public buildings, restaurants and alleys, but no Rosemary.

Finally, Peter Nolan, a reporter for WBBM-TV, spotted Rosemary as she walked north on Michigan Avenue, looking at display windows in the Monroe Building at 104 S. Michigan Ave., about five blocks from where she disappeared. Nolan asked if she was looking Eunice. “Yes,” Rosemary replied, quickly turning back to her window shopping. Two policemen observed the encounter and took Rosemary away.

After Rosemary was reunited with Eunice at 800 S. Michigan Ave., Eunice cried, “Rosie, are you all right?” The two sisters were interviewed at the Central District station. Security was tightened to keep away the swarm of reporters, but still they managed to get pictures of Rosemary leaving the station in her snowsuit jacket with her nun caretakers and Eunice looking sheepish and embarrassed.

“Goodbye, thank you very much. You were marvelous, your whole force was,” Eunice told the district commander, clutching his hand. Eunice left with Ald. Edward Burke, a friend of the Kennedy family who was active in fundraising for the mentally retarded. Rosemary was returned to St. Coletta’s.

Investigative reports in recent years have questioned Rosemary’s diagnosis of mental retardation. The fact that she could do math problems indicated that she had an I.Q. of at least 75. Diary entries written in the late 1930s also indicate Rosemary’s ability to write, filled with sunny descriptions of teas, visits to the opera and dress fittings at Elizabeth Arden’s. At most, Rosemary had an IQ of 90 – which incidentally happens to be my own IQ and I’m writing a fucking blog – in a family where the average IQ was 130, well above the cutoff point for mental retardation, which is 75.

By 1960, however, mental retardation had become much more socially acceptable than to admit a family member suffered from mental illness or dyslexia, the latter of which plagued may third generation Kennedys, including several of Bobby’s children and John F. Kennedy, Jr., which explains that whole plane thing. Even Joe’s attorney, after an FBI background check when Jack announced his presidential candidacy, admitted to the feds that Rosemary suffered from mental illness, not retardation.

Still, I can understand the Kennedys’ denial. It must be horrible to know that your father lobotomized your sister when a little Prozac or Lithium would have cleared up her problems nicely. It’s much easier to tell the world that your sister is mentally retarded and hold yourselves up as saints of the retarded, than to admit the truth.

In her later years, Rose admitted to Kennedy family biographer Doris Kearns Goodwin, that she could forgive Joe anything – even bringing his mistress Gloria Swanson home to have dinner with the wife and kiddies – but she could never forgive him for “what he did to Rosie.” Until her death, Rosemary’s brother and sisters tried to make it up to her. They brought her to the Cape, where Timothy Shriver, Eunice’s son and CEO of the Special Olympics, regaled the press with feats of Rosemary’s swimming in the frigid Atlantic waters in the middle of winter, proclaiming his aunt to be “strong as an ox.”

Today Rosemary remains my favorite Kennedy. Even though her life was trashed through no fault of her own, it stood for something. I think of her every time a retarded person bags my groceries in the supermarket, even that retarded guy at Jewel’s who dips his fingers into the sample taco dip. I like to carry the mental image of Rosemary walking the streets of Chicago on a sunny, Sunday afternoon 30 years ago, carefree and without a gray hair on her head, checking out the fall fashions on Michigan Avenue.

So let's all turn to our booklets and sing a chorus of "Sweet Rosie O'Grady" in her honor.