Rose Kennedy's Perfect Family Had a Daughter America Never Saw

On January 12, 1942, Rose Kennedy typed a letter to her children about rain, golf and a dog. It does not mention her eldest daughter. Rosemary Kennedy was twenty-three, and that autumn something had been done to her. The National Archives holds that letter and six more from the following five years. Two of them name all eight of her other children. None of the seven mentions Rosemary. So what did Rose Kennedy know, and when? This film follows Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy from the North End of Boston to Hyannis Port: the mayor's daughter who was not allowed to go to Wellesley, the marriage to Joseph P. Kennedy, the house on Beals Street where Rosemary was born, the index cards and the household system, the years of Joe's absences, London and the embassy, the operation of 1941 and the twenty years that followed, the deaths of four of her children, the public matriarch of the Kennedy campaigns, the 1962 magazine article that told the family's version, and the papers she saved for the rest of her life. Built from the record: Rose Kennedy's round-robin letters to her children (National Archives), the JFK Library's finding aids and White House photographs, Eunice Kennedy Shriver's 1962 Saturday Evening Post article, the federal transcript of President Johnson's call to Rose on November 22, 1963, contemporary newspaper reports, and the biographers and historians who have read her papers, each named where they are used. Where accounts of what Rose knew disagree, the narration gives each one and says whose it is. ⏱ CHAPTERS 0:00 Introduction 1:23 Saved Everything 6:48 Father Says 16:06 Where No One Would Look 25:25 The Thirteenth of September 34:48 At the Reach of a Fingertip 43:35 Willed Out of Her Mind 53:51 Miss Kennedy, Please 1:07:35 The Advice, Finally 1:20:35 A Teacher in the Midwest 1:30:47 Joy She Gave 1:40:25 Those Tea Parties 1:50:15 My Mother Found 2:02:47 Yes, Yes, Yes, Mr. President 2:12:56 Throw Them in the Trash Subscribe for more full-length documentaries on America's first families and the people who really knew them. A note on this film: the photographs and documents come from public-domain and openly licensed archives, chiefly the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library (White House photographs by Cecil Stoughton, Robert Knudsen and Abbie Rowe; Kennedy family portrait photographs released into the public domain), the National Archives, the Library of Congress (Harris & Ewing, Bain News Service), the Historic American Buildings Survey (the Beals Street house), and Wikimedia Commons. Thumbnail portraits are real photographs, restored and colourised. On-screen document cards reproduce public records and short quotations for commentary. This video is educational commentary and storytelling. #RoseKennedy #RosemaryKennedy #Kennedy #KennedyFamily #JFK #AmericanHistory #Documentary