How Rosemary Kennedy became the most dangerous member of the famous family

Much is known about the Kennedy women — Jackie, Caroline, Carolyn — but for many, Rosemary Kennedy remains an enigma. And for good reason. Headstrong and carefree — but plagued by mental health challenges — Rosemary remains the least known (if not forgotten) Kennedy. And in her new book Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women they Destroyed, author Maureen Callahan explores the shocking reasons why.

She no longer had the word for it, but she knew the feeling: lonely.

She had her nuns and her nurses, and they were lovely, but this wasn’t her real home and they weren’t her siblings.

She saw the news footage of Jack that terrible day and knew something bad had happened to him, but she couldn’t understand what.

Sometimes she got a glimpse of her sisters or her mother and daddy on TV, but none of them ever came to visit.

What had Rosemary done?

She had been such a good girl.

September 1939: England had declared war on Germany.

Joe, as United States ambassador to the United Kingdom, sent all the other Kennedy sons and daughters back to the States with their mother.

But he was happy to leave Rosemary behind at the Belmont School, which specialized in cases like hers.

Did Joe have a death wish for his daughter?

Joe was on record as supporting Hitler’s forced sterilization plan, its number one target those with “congenital mental deficiency.”

Joe called it “a great thing. I don’t know how the Church feels about it, but it will do away with many of the disgusting specimens . . . which inhabit this earth.”

Rosie didn’t feel left behind or less cared for. In fact, Joe had told her the opposite: he had chosen her to stay in England because she was special.

“You are going to be the one to keep me company,” he told Rosie. She was 20 years old.

Things came much harder for her, reading and writing especially.

She was the only Kennedy sibling who wasn’t athletic.

She struggled with her weight, while all the others knew to stay thin and tanned.

Even disheveled, they all looked so athletic and stylish.

Not Rosie.

She would never be that carefree girl on a Kennedy sail, windswept hair and white sweaters, weightlessly bobbing on ocean swells while the men smoked cigars and looked important.

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The Kennedys were a family of winners — and Rosie, well, she was beginning to look like a loser.

Even more reason for Joe, who was raising future American presidents, to keep Rosemary hidden away in England.

On those times Joe came to visit, Rosie glowed.

She had officially become the ambassador’s companion in England, something of a surrogate wife.

The combination of her father’s intense attention, his longed-for approval and a new realization — that what made Rosie different also made her special — made for her happiest moments.

Whenever Joe left, he was never far from her mind, as she expressed so poignantly in a March 1940 letter to him:

“Darling Daddy, I feel honour because you chose me to stay. And the others I suppose are wild . . . P.S. I am so fond of you. And love you very much.”

In the English countryside, alone at her new school with the nuns, Rosie thought only of Joe.

She took every criticism to heart.

“You are getting altogether too fat,” Old Joe had told her.

Rosie was mortified.

“I would do anything to make you so happy,” she wrote to him.

She went on a strict diet and took the three-times-per-week injections that Joe said were their secret.

Rosie didn’t know why she needed them; the same doctor had given Rosie her physical and declared her to be “in perfect condition.”

Her father, who couldn’t abide Rosie’s intellectual failings, felt differently.

Joe Kennedy had heard of an experimental new procedure for the hardest cases, for women who were moody or sad or sexually promiscuous — Rosie fit all three — and asked another daughter, Kick, to look into it.

Kick quickly came back to her mother.

“Oh, no,” Kick said. “It’s nothing we want done for Rosie.”

Rose was relieved.

The idea had never sat well with her.

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Joe kept his thoughts to himself.

Either way, Rosie couldn’t live with the family.

We don’t tolerate losers.

One day in November of 1941, Joe told Rosie he wanted her to meet someone new, a Dr. Freeman over at George Washington Hospital.

It would be their secret, not even for Rose to know.

Freeman was famous and brilliant, and he was working on a revolutionary treatment for people like Rosie.

I would do anything to make you so happy.

One of Jack’s friends found something sinister in Joe’s dynamic with Rosemary.

This friend wondered, and she wasn’t alone, if Joe was sexually abusing her. Leaving Rosie alone in England, using her as his “companion,” keeping her away and apart from her siblings — it made sense, she thought.

The day after Thanksgiving, Nov. 28, 1941, Rosie walked into the appointment Joe had set for her.

The doctors wanted to shave her head.

If Rosie wanted to be like her siblings, if she wanted to be a real Kennedy — well, this was the first step in fixing her.

Rosie was given a hospital gown.

Her hair fell to the floor in soft chunks.

A sedative, a stretcher, an operating room, a stainless steel table.

Restraints. Her head strapped down.

White towels and sheets swathed around her.

Bright white lights.

She couldn’t see what was happening.

There was a whirr, powerful and loud, followed by the scent of metal upon bone, sharp and smoky.

The doctors told Rosie not to worry.

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She didn’t even need anesthesia — that’s how simple and painless this was.

Pressure above her eye now, on the side.

Rosie’s head was vibrating, the side of her head pulsating.

The doctor talking to her seemed pleased.

The way they once did this was so much less pleasant.

Those other patients he had had to knock out — not with anesthesia but with electroshock through the brain, even though it could take five or six tries and the patients convulsed and cried.

Sometimes they would beg to die.

Rosie didn’t have to suffer that.

Nor did she have to endure Dr. Freeman’s earlier method, ice picks from his kitchen drawer hammered through the eye socket straight to the brain, moving the pick back and forth like a metronome till he heard the pop pop pop! of nerves being sliced apart, like the sound of a soda can opening and decompressing.

Then he knew his work was done.

All those patients would emerge with two black eyes.

Rosie wouldn’t have to worry about that. Her looks would be untouched.

The drill went quiet.

The heavy tool went down.

Clattering on a tray, like silverware.

Something slim slid into one of the holes in her skull.

When it was finally over, Rosie wasn’t Rosie anymore.

She would never be able to do anything again: talk, walk, swim, dance, flirt with boys.

Or take a shower, comb her hair, feed herself, use the toilet.

Her brain’s circuitry, like a string of Christmas lights crushed one by one, had gone dark.

Rosie was now functionally a 2-year-old.

Whenever reporters asked what happened to Rosemary, Joe had a ready explanation: she was following her life’s calling in another state, teaching children who were, as they were called back then, mentally retarded.

Excerpted from “ Ask Not “ by Maureen Callahan. Copyright © 2024 by Maureen Callahan. Used with permission of Little, Brown and Company. New York, NY. All rights reserved.

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