She Was Awake When They Cut Into Her Brain
This is Rosemary Kennedy. She's about twenty years old in this photo. Three years before this picture was taken, she attended her first formal dance. Three years after it was taken, a neurologist who had never held a scalpel in his life sat beside her in an operating room and asked her to sing "God Bless America" while a surgeon pushed a blade into her brain.
She sang it.
Then she stopped singing. She stopped talking. She stopped being Rosemary.
She was twenty-three.
Her name was Rose Marie Kennedy. Third child of Joseph and Rose Kennedy. Sister to a future president, a future senator, and the future founder of the Special Olympics. She had a mild intellectual disability. She could read and write at about a fourth-grade level, keep a diary, do multiplication, hold conversations, and travel across Europe. In May 1938 she curtsied before King George VI at Buckingham Palace. She tripped slightly. The family called it a triumph.
She wrote to her father in 1940: "Darling Daddy... I am so fond of you. And I love you so very much."
By her early twenties, Rosemary was having seizures and mood swings. Rages that scared the nuns at her convent school. She was sneaking out at night. Her father, Joe Kennedy, wasn't worried about her health. He was worried about headlines. He had sons to put in office. A daughter who might get pregnant or cause a scandal was a threat to the brand he was building.
So Joe found Walter Freeman.
Freeman was the most famous lobotomy advocate in America. Yale-trained neurologist. No surgical credentials. He'd read about a Portuguese doctor named Egas Moniz who was cutting nerve fibers in patients' brains, and Freeman had decided to bring the technique to America and turn it into a mass operation. He renamed it "lobotomy." By 1941, he and his partner Dr. James Watts had performed about two hundred of them.
In November 1941, Joe Kennedy brought Rosemary to George Washington University Hospital. He didn't tell his wife.
Here is what happened next, according to Watts's own account given to journalist Ronald Kessler and published in The Sins of the Father (1996).
Rosemary was awake. Mildly sedated but conscious. Watts cut through the top of her skull. Small incisions, about an inch on each side. He pushed an instrument into her frontal lobes. He described it later as looking like a butter knife. He swept it back and forth, severing white matter.
While Watts cut, Freeman talked to her. He asked her to recite the Lord's Prayer. She recited it. He asked her to sing. She sang. He asked her to count backward.
They decided how deep to cut based on how she responded.
When her words turned to mumbling, they kept going. When the mumbling collapsed into silence, they stopped. That was the endpoint. The moment her voice disappeared was the moment they decided they'd cut enough.
She came out of that room unable to speak. Unable to walk without help. Incontinent. Her left arm paralyzed. The cognitive capacity of a two-year-old. She was twenty-three years old and she would stay that way for sixty-three more years.
The family told people she'd gone to become a kindergarten teacher.
Her father built a private cottage on the grounds of a Catholic care facility in Jefferson, Wisconsin, called St. Coletta. Two nuns, Sister Margaret Ann and Sister Leona, became her world. They cared for her every single day for decades while the Kennedy dynasty played out on television screens across America.
Joe Kennedy never visited her. Not once. He died in 1969 without ever going to Wisconsin.
Rose Kennedy didn't see her daughter for twenty years.
The family kept the lobotomy secret for forty-six years. In 1962, Rosemary's sister Eunice published an article admitting Rosemary had an intellectual disability. She didn't mention the surgery. That didn't come out until 1987, when historian Doris Kearns Goodwin published The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys.
But Eunice didn't just break the silence. She built something.
Camp Shriver, 1962. Her Maryland farm. Kids with intellectual disabilities swimming and running and competing because Eunice remembered what her sister was like before that operating room.
July 20, 1968. Soldier Field. Chicago. One thousand athletes. The first Special Olympics.
Today it serves six million athletes in over 200 countries.
JFK signed the Community Mental Health Act on October 31, 1963. It was the last law he ever signed. Twenty-two days later he was dead.
Walter Freeman performed about 3,500 lobotomies across 23 states. An estimated 490 of his patients died. He was banned from operating in 1967 after a woman died during her third lobotomy at his hands. Egas Moniz still has his Nobel Prize. Every petition to revoke it has been denied.
Rosemary Kennedy died on January 7, 2005. She was eighty-six. She spent sixty-three years in that cottage in Wisconsin because her father wanted a quiet daughter and a doctor promised him one.
Nobody asked her. The Sick History. Medicine. Monsters. Death. Full story with complete sourcing
The instrument looked like a butter knife. That’s not a metaphor or a storytelling flourish that’s the description the surgeon himself…
