ROSEMARY Kennedy, the mentally disabled oldest sister of the late US president John F Kennedy, has died at the age of 86.
She was often described as the shame of the Kennedy clan, having spent more than 60 years in an institution after a lobotomy operation went wrong.
Kennedy was born with mild learning difficulties, but her father, the fiercely ambitious patriarch
Joseph Kennedy, had ordered the operation at the age of 23 because he feared she would become pregnant.
The operation left the young woman severely disabled and institutionalised. She lived most of her life in an institution in Jefferson, Wisconsin - the St Coletta School for Exceptional Children.
A family statement said: "Rosemary was a lifelong jewel to every member of our family. From her earliest years, her mental retardation was a continuing inspiration to each of us and a powerful source of our family’s commitment to do all we can to help all persons with disabilities live full and productive lives."
Rosemary’s condition became an inspiration to her younger sister, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, who founded the Special Olympics for mentally disabled athletes, and in 1984 she took over her sister’s care after their mother had a stroke.
Rosemary’s disability became public in 1960, just after her brother John was elected US president. The National Association for Retarded Children mentioned in a publication that the president-elect "has a mentally retarded sister who is in an institution in Wisconsin".
Born Rose Marie Kennedy on September 13, 1918, in Boston, she was known as Rosemary or Rosie to friends and family. In her own diaries before the lobotomy, she chronicled a life of tea dances, dress fittings, trips to Europe and a visit to the Roosevelt White House.
But as she got older, her father worried his daughter’s mild condition would lead her into situations that could damage the family’s reputation.
Author Laurence Leamer wrote in an unauthorised Kennedy biography, The Kennedy Women: The Saga of an American Family: "Rosemary was a woman, and there was a dread fear of pregnancy, disease and disgrace."
Doctors told Joseph Kennedy that a lobotomy, a medical procedure in which the frontal lobes of a patient’s brain are scraped away, would help his daughter and calm her mood swings that the family found difficult to handle at home.
Psychosurgery was in its infancy at the time, and only a few hundred lobotomies had been performed. The procedure was believed to be a way to relieve serious mental disorders. Leamer wrote that Rosemary was "probably the first person with mental retardation in America to receive a prefrontal lobotomy".
During the 1980s, Eunice involved Rosemary more in the lives of her siblings and their children. She attended family gatherings more frequently.
America’s first political family has been dogged by tragedy over the decades. Joseph Kennedy Jr, the eldest son of Joseph and Rose Kennedy, died in a plane crash in 1944 during the Second World War at the age of 29.
President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas on November 22, 1963, at the age of 46.
His son Patrick was born prematurely in August 1963 and died two days later, three months before his father’s assassination.
Robert Kennedy was assassinated in June 1968 as he campaigned for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination. He was 42. His son David died in 1984 of a drug overdose in a hotel after being ousted from the family vacation home at Palm Beach.
His son Joseph (Joe) was involved in a 1973 car accident that left a female passenger paralysed for life.
Joe’s son Michael was killed on December 31, 1997, in a skiing accident in Aspen, Colorado. He was 39.
The clan’s surviving patriarch, Edward Kennedy, drove a car off a bridge on Massachusetts’ Chappaquiddick Island in 1969 after a party. The accident killed aide Mary Jo Kopechne, and controversy over the incident effectively ended the Massachusetts senator’s presidential aspirations.
His son Edward Jr had his right leg amputated in 1973 because of cancer; his son Patrick, now a congressman, sought treatment for cocaine addiction as a teenager in 1986.
In 1999 John Kennedy Jr and his wife Carolyn died when their light aircraft crashed into Long Island Sound as they made their way from New York to the family home at Martha’s Vineyard.
