A few years ago Boston honored Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy—the mother of President John F. Kennedy as well as Senators (and presidential candidates) Teddy and Robert Kennedy—by naming its newly reclaimed Greenway after her. Two of her daughters also achieved great success in public service: Eunice Kennedy Shriver helped found the Special Olympics and Jean Kennedy Smith served as Ambassador to Ireland, where she played a critical role in the Irish peace process.
While their offspring may have made genuine contributions to American society, Rose and Joseph Kennedy had other children as well, and their treatment of one of them, a daughter named Rosemary, puts lie to any notion that Rose was an exemplar of motherhood. Honoring her name with the Greenway is an outrage.
Rosemary was developmentally delayed and struggled to keep up with her siblings. At the age of 15 she read and wrote at the level of a ten-year-old and she apparently did not progress much further. As she matured, her mental deficiencies became difficult to hide, and Joe Kennedy—insanely ambitious for his children—worried that her deficiencies might harm the careers of her brothers, not to mention that her behavior was socially embarrassing to himself and Rose.
To deal with their inconvenient daughter, Joseph and Rose Kennedy had her lobotomized. The surgery went dreadfully wrong, which was not a small risk since at the time this was highly experimental surgery. Indeed, the American Medical Assocation decried such procedures.
After the surgery left her mentally and physically crippled, her parents shipped her to a home in upstate New York—and a few years later rural Wisconsin—essentially abandoning her. Her siblings were not told of her whereabouts and could not visit her, and the parents didn’t see her either. Joe Kennedy last saw her in 1948, despite living 20 more years, and Rose didn’t bother to visit her for two decades. When Rose did finally show up, Rosemary recoiled upon seeing her, having just enough awareness to realize what her mother had done to her.
Teddy was a child when Rosemary disappeared, and her absence was understandably traumatic for him.
The grotesque way Rose Kennedy treated her daughter invites a question: What, precisely, is the reason that Boston has chosen to honor Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy? If it was for her motherly duties, is anyone, save perhaps Susan Smith, less deserving of an honor than she?
Various excuses have been furnished for this appalling, unspeakably cruel decision by various Kennedy family hagiographers: Mental illness was viewed as being shameful at the time, and the eugenics movement that swept across Europe and the U.S. in the 1930s seems to have enthralled the Kennedy family. Some have averred that Rose Kennedy did not know the surgery was to be performed. Others have argued that the good things that the Kennedys did for the mentally Ill—the creation of the Special Olympics and efforts by the Kennedy politicians to fund research on mental disabilities—have made up for the parents’ mistake.
This is nonsense. Rose knew perfectly well about her daughter’s surgery. What’s more, there’s no evidence she ever expressed remorse over the decision: In a private interview late in life she merely commented that Rosemary was a tragedy, she lived elsewhere, and that it was family policy not to talk about it. And while the Special Olympics is a worthy endeavor, Eunice Kennedy explicitly said it was not motivated by her sister’s predicament. What’s more, there is no moral calculus that says good deeds by one’s children allay the cruelty inflicted upon one of their siblings by a parent.
The United States is in the midst of a debate about the extent to which historical figures should be held accountable for the prejudices of their time.
Our society has apparently concluded that holding the prejudices of one’s era is no excuse for not conforming to today’s norms, and activists have agitated to have schools and buildings honoring racists and homophobes remove their names. In many places this is indeed occurring.
Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy was a terrible mother who abetted in the destruction of the life of one of her daughters simply because her mental deficiencies were socially inconvenient for the rest of the family. Today we would consider such an action to be criminal. To honor her specifically for her motherhood is outrageous.
Why haven’t we stricken her name from the Rose Kennedy Greenway?
