The Kennedy family has long occupied a unique place in American public life, and with that prominence has come intense scrutiny. Yet for all the coverage, several episodes remained carefully guarded by the family itself.
Some of those secrets concerned the very people the Kennedys were supposed to protect. Others involved the image of a dynasty that worked hard to appear flawless.
Perhaps the most painful secret involved Rosemary Kennedy, born in 1918. Her birth in Brookline, Massachusetts, contained early warning signs: the family doctor could not reach the home in time, and a midwife reportedly told Rose Kennedy to delay pushing for two hours. That delay may have caused oxygen deprivation and the developmental delays that followed.
Rosemary was included in many family activities, including a 1938 presentation to King George VI and the future Queen Elizabeth. But as the family's political ambitions grew, her intellectual delays and occasional violent behavior were treated as liabilities.
Joseph Kennedy's ambition cannot be underestimated. In 1938, the question of whether voters would support a Kennedy who appeared to carry a hidden genetic flaw weighed heavily on the family. Even decades later, Rose would only vaguely describe her daughter's condition, once telling an interviewer that Rosemary's mind was gone completely because of an accident she did not discuss.
That so-called accident came in 1941, when Joseph Kennedy arranged for Rosemary to undergo a lobotomy. The procedure, which cut into the frontal lobe of her brain, was intended to make her easier for the family, and specifically her father, to control. Instead, it robbed the 23-year-old Rosemary of her ability to walk and communicate.
Until her death in 2005, Rosemary was confined to institutions and largely ignored by her family until her final years. The extent of her intellectual disabilities remains a matter of debate, but at the very least, a lobotomy was an extreme measure.
When Jacqueline Bouvier married John F. Kennedy in September 1953, it looked like a fairy tale. The reality was more complicated. Numerous accounts indicate that JFK was routinely unfaithful, and that Jackie was keenly aware of it.
Both the Bouvier and Kennedy families moved in powerful social circles where a husband's infidelity was often treated as a given. In that world, maintaining privacy and dignity was considered more important than confronting the issue.
Author J. Randy Taraborrelli told People magazine that Jackie considered divorcing JFK on at least two occasions, including after he stayed away following her traumatic stillbirth. Her own family dissuaded her. Another unconfirmed rumor holds that Joseph Kennedy offered Jackie $1 million to stay married, and that she replied the amount would have to reach $20 million after JFK brought home a sexually transmitted disease from a mistress.
While being descended from immigrants and working-class people is nothing to be ashamed of, that was not the world in which the Kennedys moved. That may explain why Jackie's paternal family, the Bouviers, engaged in some creative genealogy.
Her grandfather, Major John Vernou Bouvier Jr., published a 1940 family history titled "Our Forebears," claiming the Bouviers descended from French aristocrats. He appears to have confused his Bouviers. The family's true progenitors, also named Bouvier, were working-class business people. Ancestor Michel Bouvier arrived in Philadelphia in 1815 and made good money as an importer and cabinet maker, bringing cash if not ancient prestige.
Members of Jackie's maternal line, the Lees, reportedly claimed descent from the high-class Lees of Virginia. They were actually descended from Irish immigrants who arrived considerably later than the Colonial-era Lees.
As the press portrayed the Bouvier-Kennedy marriage as a union of aristocrats, writer Gore Vidal dismissed it: "They were somehow Plantagenets and Tudors. It was just nonsense. They were pretty lowly born."
More than 50 years later, the reality of what happened in Ted Kennedy's car on Chappaquiddick Island remains muddled, partly because the family tried to keep it under wraps. On the night of July 18, 1969, the senator's car went off the Dike Bridge. Inside were Kennedy and aide Mary Jo Kopechne, one of the most devoted members of Senator Robert Kennedy's staff, who had worked for him for four years.
Kennedy did not contact authorities until around 10 a.m. the next day. There was no way to test his blood alcohol level at the time of the accident, so he was only charged with leaving the scene. He received a two-month suspended sentence and was briefly banned from driving.
The accident effectively ended his immediate presidential ambitions, but public support for him eventually grew, thanks to the Kennedy legal and public relations teams. He came very close to unseating sitting President Jimmy Carter in the 1980 Democratic primary.
For people like Rose and Jackie Kennedy, it was understood that their spouses would be unfaithful, and that dignity and the family image had to be maintained. Everything had to be kept private for the good of the Kennedy name.
If Jackie did not know she was marrying a family as much as a person before the wedding, she certainly learned during the planning process. That did not mean she always played by the rules. While in France, Jackie is said to have bluntly introduced White House staffer Priscilla Wear to a reporter as "the girl that's sleeping with my husband."
Where sex was concerned, John F. Kennedy thought he was untouchable. In a 1964 oral history interview at the JFK Library, longtime friend Kirk LeMoyne Billings recalled pulling Jackie aside at President Eisenhower's first inaugural ball. He told her he felt he should prepare her for some of the problems Jack might have in marrying at 35, and that she would have to be very understanding at the beginning because he had never really settled down with one girl. Billings concluded that Jackie had understood, though plausible deniability meant he did not have to outright admit JFK was having affairs.
JFK's assignations later allegedly included Marilyn Monroe, Marlene Dietrich, the possibly mob-connected Judith Exner, and White House intern Mimi Alford.
Though he presented himself as a vibrant young president, JFK dealt with health issues for many years. As a child he experienced the first symptoms of lifelong digestive problems, along with other ailments including a duodenal ulcer. At age 2 he contracted scarlet fever and was basically sick for the rest of his life, as one account put it.
His back was so painful that he underwent four back surgeries between 1944 and 1957. Far from helping, the procedures introduced more problems, including bone infections and abscesses.
More serious still was Addison's disease. The adrenal condition meant JFK could not produce stress-managing hormones and had difficulty managing his sodium, potassium, and glucose. He was so ill that his father placed cortisone treatments in safe deposit boxes around the country in case he ever needed them.
Treatment for adrenal issues at the time included steroids, which may have given JFK osteoporosis and worsened his back problems. He was, in effect, a walking pharmacy, taking painkillers, sleeping pills, amphetamines, antibiotics, hormones, and more.
As one account put it, if the public knew how many medical problems he had, it would have destroyed his presidential ambitions. Yet Kennedy managed to hide most of it, presenting himself as physically active. He was a smiling, suntanned young father who established the President's Council on Physical Fitness. Exercise actually helped manage some symptoms, further building his vital image.
On occasion he outright denied having Addison's disease, such as when rival Lyndon Johnson raised it on the 1960 campaign trail.
When Jackie gave birth to a stillborn daughter in 1956, JFK may well have been on a yacht with a mistress. As Jackie's friend Carly Simon suggested to NBC News, Jack couldn't be reached for a couple of days, and it was Bobby who went to the hospital.
JFK learned from his father how to treat women, and that was poorly. Joe infamously carried on with actress Gloria Swanson while his wife Rose appeared to look the other way. The Kennedy boys were taking after their father.
Author Maureen Callahan told The Guardian that women who proved inconvenient to the family were often dismissed or publicly ridiculed to keep up the Kennedy image. These included former White House intern Mimi Alford Beardsley, who wrote a 2011 account of her alleged affair with JFK and was scorned by some book critics, though her books sold well.
This carried into the next generation. Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, wife of JFK Jr., was often painted as a troubled and unreliable woman who tarnished her husband's image. As one observer put it, he was the crown prince and the sexiest man alive, so she was expected to do everything he said. Her family later sued the Kennedy estate for damages over her and her sister's deaths in the 1999 plane crash that also killed JFK Jr.
The legacy of Robert Kennedy's children is something of a tragedy, marked by premature deaths and substance abuse. The most prominent Kennedy in the spotlight today is Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
It is no secret that RFK Jr. dealt with 14 years of substance use issues beginning when he was just 15, including an arrest for heroin possession in the 1980s. He has said he was an addict for 14 years, from shortly after his father died until he was 28.
His subsequent recovery has inspired many. But if anyone thought his powerful family would support his presidential aspirations, they misunderstand politics. Critics accused him of trading on Camelot, celebrity, conspiracy theories, and conflict for personal gain and fame.
Kennedy himself posted an admission on X in August 2024 that he had left the remains of a bear cub in New York City's Central Park in October 2014. RFK Jr. claimed he had witnessed another car strike the animal upstate and intended to use the fur and meat he retrieved. But with a busy day and a pending flight, he did not have time to go home first to drop off his roadkill.
That was when it got weird. As he described it, he said, "Let's go put the bear in Central Park and we'll make it look like he got hit by a bike." Egged on by drunk friends, Kennedy dumped the dead cub beneath a bush in Central Park and went nearly 10 years before confessing. If anything, RFK Jr. missed out on capitalizing on the "cocaine bear" craze of 2023 to reveal his own dead bear prank. In politics, timing is everything.