Posted on 08/26/2009 9:04:16 PM PDT by canuck_conservative
.... In the article, Eunice described Rosemary, the third child of Joe Kennedy Sr. and Rose Fitzgerald, as "slower to crawl, slower to walk and speak than her two bright brothers." As time went by, the supposedly retarded Rosemary "couldn't keep up" in "social competition," and, by the age of 22, "was becoming increasingly irritable and difficult." Physicians, Eunice wrote, were unanimous in declaring that Rosemary would have to be institutionalized, and so, with supposed sighs all around, she was bunged up in a nice Catholic "home." The modern reader is shocked to discover that this "candid" article makes no mention whatsoever of the lobotomy performed on Rosemary in 1941, at age 23.
No one can read Rosemary's story today without horror. The evidence from documents written in Rosemary's hand, and from contemporaries outside the family, suggests that she was probably not clinically retarded. She happened to have slightly subnormal cognitive abilities -- within one of the most competitive and brilliant families that has ever existed. (Young Teddy, 13-and-a-half years her junior, is said to have teased Rosemary about her "empty head.") As she reached adolescence, she exhibited what would now be recognized as symptoms of depression, or even just calculated attention-getting strategies and defence mechanisms: near-catatonic trances, outbursts of harmless violence, inappropriate sexual behaviour.
Joe Sr., concerned with the family's moral reputation and Rosemary's possible vulnerability to fortune-hunters, decided that a lobotomy was the answer. Contrary to the implications of Eunice's story, he seems to have regarded this as an alternative to institutionalization. Ignoring widespread Catholic and secular opposition, he doctor-shopped until he found someone willing to perform the still-experimental psychosurgery.....
(Excerpt) Read more at network.nationalpost.com ...
Wait, you mean not EVERY Kennedy has had a frontal lobotomy?? Huh. Ya learn sumpthin new every day.
Thanks for another reminder - plus this good thread - http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2325305/posts...has given me an education about both Kathleen and Rosemary Kennedy - the two you won’t hear the media discuss during this frenzied coverage of Teddy’s death.....
So I am GLAD to learn this here on Free Republic!
What a sick family!
The Kennedy family pledge is said to include...
If I can't have a bottle in front of me, I'll just have a frontal lobotomy"
Seems to be true for Kennedy family members of every generation.
A family of sociopaths, bordering on evil with the treatment of Rosemary. Joe Sr is the perfect example that money can buy almost anything but not class.
nowadays she would probably be called high functioning autistic or hyper or bipolar....all entities that can be dealt with without a frontal lobotomy....
but we are only taking the Kennedy's word that she was that different...could be that mobster Joe favored sons and didn't want Rosemary.....maybe not cute enough or some such crap...
What seems doubly tragic is that it was then so easy for the rest of the Kennedys to act as though Rosie had never existed. The therapeutic wisdom of the time discouraged family visits to the institutionalized disabled, but either way it is improbable that any would have been made. As Laurence Leamer noted in The Kennedy Women: The Saga of an American Family, from the date of the lobotomy onward, "in all the letters that Rose wrote the family in the next few years, she began 'My darlings' or 'Dear Children.' Then she mentioned Joe and each of her children in turn, Joe Jr., Jack, Kathleen, Eunice, Pat, Jean, Bobby and Ted, everyone but Rosie, her namesake. Rosemary was gone, gone from the family letters, gone from discussions, gone."
And Ted teased her about her "empty head"--what a prince.
I remember reading about Rosemary in the biography of the Kennedy family.
Their father had the lobotomy done while Rose was in Europe, didn’t tell her until she returned.
I hope he’s sitting near the flames.
The Kennedy children were bright and charming, but none was an intellectual. Jack in particular was portrayed as exception bright, but all his records show a man of above average intelligence and no more.
Joe was an evil man.
“Makes me sick to my stomach” ping.
Historians have estimated that Dr. Walter JFreeman II (the father of the transorbital lobotomy) performed somewhere around 3,500 lobotomies - many without any any anesthesia. I watched a special on PBS a couple years ago on him. He was a barbaric man who led the way for tens-of-thousands of poor men and women (mostly women) to be butchered, much the same way Rosemary Kennedy was butchered.
As you indicate, we've come a long way since those days, thank the Lord.
Link wouldn’t work. Old thread?
Yep.
Me too.
Hmmm - no posted today - let me try again:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2325305/posts
See if that works - hopefully that thread has not been pulled - it’s full of info I never knew til now about Rosemary and Kathleen Kennedy.
How funny that this pathetic clan of misfits was the best Democrats could come up with as a family to emulate. Now that the fat bastard is dead perhaps we’ll finally learn the entire truth of how dysfuntional and screwed up this people were.
“Joe Sr., concerned with the family’s moral reputation.....”
Now THAT is good comedy.
Read this, it’s just the tip of the iceberg:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2009-08-26-kennedylegacy_N.htm?csp=34
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