Why JFK's Parents Hated Their Daughter Rosemary So Much

You have seen the photographs. The Kennedys at Hyannis Port, the children lined up on the lawn. The eldest daughter is in them, and for nearly half a century the public was not told what had been done to her. In November 1941, Rosemary Kennedy was twenty-three. Her father authorised an operation that had existed in the United States for five years. Walter Freeman and James Watts went in through the top of the skull. While the surgeon cut, the neurologist asked her to recite the Lord's Prayer, sing God Bless America and count backwards. They stopped when she stopped making sense. By the standard account her mother was not told it was going to happen, although Rosemary's fullest biographer disputes that. Her father never visited her afterwards. Her mother did not visit for twenty years. And while she was in that institution, her parents were telling American magazines that she was studying to be a kindergarten teacher and had a secret longing to go on the stage. What had been done to her was not public knowledge until 1987. Forty-six years. *Sources* John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, biography of Rosemary Kennedy Kate Clifford Larson, Rosemary: The Hidden Kennedy Daughter, 2015 Ronald Kessler, The Sins of the Father, 1996, including his interview with Dr. James W. Watts Eunice Kennedy Shriver, "Hope for Retarded Children," The Saturday Evening Post, 22 September 1962 Doris Kearns Goodwin, The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys, Simon and Schuster, 1987 NPR, lobotomy timeline, on the first American prefrontal lobotomy of 14 September 1936 and on Walter Freeman's later practice