Rosemary: The Hidden Kennedy Daughter

Historian Larson (The Assassin's Accomplice) provides an engrossing biography of the firstborn of the Kennedy daughters, Rosemary (1918–2005). This younger sister of John F. Kennedy exhibited developmental delays from an early age. The author makes it evident that an understanding of special needs, especially those of children, was sorely lacking in the early 20th century. Using new sources, such as private diaries and letters, Larson conveys the challenges the family faced in caring for Rosemary and proceeds to detail how the Kennedy family chose to hide her condition and present her to the world as an intellectual peer of their other children. Also described is the decision to have Rosemary lobotomized in her early twenties, how the family concealed the procedure's devastating effects from the public, and family patriarch Joseph P. Kennedy Sr.'s decision to institutionalize Rosemary and keep her separated from the family for more than 20 years. Elizabeth Koehler-Pentacoff's The Missing Kennedy (reviewed above) provides greater detail on these latter years.