The nurse orders Rose to squeeze her legs tightly together to delay the birth, and, incredibly, goes so far as to push the baby’s partially exposed head back into the birth canal for two excruciating hours—depriving the baby’s fragile system of oxygen—until Dr. Good arrives. When the doctor finally arrives, he delivers a baby girl and pronounces her healthy.
Rosemary was “a beautiful child,” Eunice Kennedy Shriver later writes in an essay published in September 1962 by the Saturday Evening Post, “resembling my mother in physical appearance.”
Rose will also share her own name, Rose Marie, with this newest arrival. The family calls her Rosemary.
Though Rose employs a full household staff—baby nurse, housekeeper, cook (she never learned how to feed a family)—she insists, “It’s a good idea to be around quite often so that you know what’s going on,” and she soon observes that baby Rosemary lacks the coordination her two older brothers readily displayed as toddlers, struggling with tasks as basic as walking or holding objects.
Joe desperately consults doctors and psychologists for a “cure,” but medicine has yet to make sufficient pharmacological or therapeutic advancements. “I had never heard of a retarded child,” Rose confesses. Specialists advise that Rosemary be confined to a mental institution.
“What can they do for her that her family can’t do better?” Eunice recalls her father saying. “We will keep her at home.”
Eunice underscores Joe’s words: “And we did.”
Rosemary’s delays are cause for much dismay, especially as a reflection on her parents.
“I would much rather be the mother of a great son or daughter than be the author of a great book or the painter of a great painting,” Rose famously says.
Rosemary does not seem destined to meet the Kennedy standard of greatness.
Chapter 6
Rose can count on her husband, Joe Kennedy Sr., to provide for the family, but she cannot rely on his day-to-day presence. He travels frequently for business—and pleasure. She confides in her diary (today stored at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston) a torrent of feeling. She is at once certain of her husband’s infidelities (“I had heard that chorus girls were gay, but evil, and worst of all, husband snatchers”)—and dismissive of the idea (“But nothing shocking happened”).
In 1920, while pregnant with her fourth child, Kathleen, Rose makes a bold break. She flees Beals Street for her presumed safe haven, the Fitzgerald residence. But Honey Fitz turns his daughter away, insisting that a wife must stand by her husband—as Rose’s mother, Josie, has done.
Though the incident is never discussed outside the family, Rose’s youthful determination that her married life would be different, freer, than her mother’s, has faltered.
While Rose extends her absence at a religious retreat, two-year-old Jack falls ill with scarlet fever. Though Boston City Hospital is already past capacity, Joe applies his negotiation skills to enlist the influence of Mayor Andrew Peters, and Jack is admitted for treatment. The worried father keeps a two-month bedside vigil. “During the darkest days,” Joe would write to Jack’s doctor once the rash and fever have subsided, “I felt that nothing mattered except his recovery.”
In 1921, Rose is pregnant once again, this time with Eunice. Joe buys a new house for the family, at 131 Naples Road in Brookline. Rose describes the place as “bigger and better,” much like the “special presents” Joe bestows on her after the birth of each child. For instance, to celebrate Jean’s arrival in 1928, she has her choice among three diamond bracelets.
At some point along the way, Rose decides to change her perspective.
“I used to say, ‘Why did I spend time learning to read Goethe or Voltaire if I have to spend my life telling children why they should drink their milk or why they should only eat one piece of candy each day and then after meals.’ But then I thought raising a family is a new challenge and I am going to meet it.”
Rose is a strict disciplinarian. She insists the children attend Sunday Mass (she attends daily), and as Proverbs 13:24 instructs, she does not spare the rod. Actually, she uses a ruler from her desk, or a wooden coat hanger, an object she reasons “didn’t hurt any more—probably less—than a ruler” to administer spankings “just hard enough to receive the message.”
Besides, the Kennedy children are a rough-and-tumble brood, prone to intense physical rivalries. When the siblings “would play, they would knock each other down and gouge each other’s eyes out with toys.”