She Was a Rose by Any Description

The Boston Herald

In all the words written about the death of Rosemary Kennedy last week, no one has said what is most important. That she changed everything. The slow one. The one the father tried to hide and the mother tried to protect. This woman, whom the world wrote off, changed the mindset of the world.

Rose Kennedy called Rosemary ``the first of the tragedies that were to befall us.'' Her third child and first daughter was slow - slow to crawl, walk, talk, learn. ``We went from doctor to doctor. From all we heard the same answer: `I'm sorry, but we can do nothing.' ‘'

Intellectual disability, for centuries, was regarded as shameful, a stigma, something to be hidden. All the doctors the Kennedys met with recommended institutionalizing Rosemary. But they refused. They hired a governess and tutors and worked with Rosemary but always kept “the nature of Rosemary's `condition' within the family,'' Doris Kearns Goodwin wrote in ``The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys.'' The world said they should be ashamed of their child.

Rosemary was happy when she was young. She could read and write and dance and play tennis. Her mother worked hard teaching her. But in her early 20s, frustrated by her limitations, Rosemary began acting up and acting out. In 1941, Joe Kennedy arranged for her to have a lobotomy, the surgical removal of the frontal lobes of the brain, a simple procedure, which doctors assured him would calm his daughter and make her happier. He never told his wife or his children about his plans. Rosemary's operation was his secret.

And when the operation failed and took away everything that Rosemary had ever learned, rendering her an infant again? He kept this secret, too.

This must have seemed the tragic ending of a tragic story.  But Rosemary taught not by doing, but simply by being. ``Rose maintained that the key to her children's compassion for the poor and the underprivileged was unlocked by their sister's struggle for the smallest victory,'' Kearns Goodwin wrote.

In 1960 when John Kennedy was president, Rosemary was a sentence in a story. He had a retarded sister. Charles DeGaulle had a retarded daughter. No one back then talked of these things.

They do now because of the Kennedy family. Because of Eunice, Rosemary's sister, who in 1962 started a summer day camp in her own back yard for children and adults with intellectual disabilities, a camp that evolved into Special Olympics, now a global competition that involves 1.4 million athletes from 150 countries. 

Rosemary Kennedy changed her family. And her family changed the world. She is the reason for Special Olympics and Special Olympics is the reason that after centuries of stigma and shame, there is inclusion today of the intellectually challenged and an understanding and appreciation of differences.

Her mother worried the most about her. But she lived a long life, loved and protected. And she did what most of us hope to do: She left the world a better place for having been here.