Look What Happened to Rose's Baby

Rosemary Kennedy, the “lifelong jewel” of the Kennedy clan who was not publicly acknowledged for 40 years, and then spent the last half century in a home half a continent away from the family compound, has died at the age of 86. Family patriarch and former bootlegger Joe Kennedy, feared that mentally retarded Rosemary might besmirch the good family name, and ordered that she undergo a lobotomy, a then new procedure that had never been attempted in a patient with mental retardation. Seems like Teddy got off easy for his driving incident. Rosemary’s mood swings were replaced by long periods where she would stare into space, and she spent most of her life in a home in Wisconsin. To assuage familial guilt, in 1968 sister Eunice founded the Special Olympics for mentally retarded children.