On a September day in 1918, Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy gave birth to her third child in a house that already ran less like a home and more like a political campaign. Her husband, Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. , wanted wealth and a dynasty that would dominate American politics.
The birth was difficult. The doctor arrived late, and the nurse held the baby’s head in the birth canal for nearly two hours, depriving the infant of oxygen. The child, named Rosemary, would live with a mild intellectual disability, her cognitive ability stopping at roughly a fourth-grade level, slower than her siblings in nearly everything their father considered important. Yet Rosemary was not without a life.
People who knew her then described a beautiful, cheerful girl full of energy. She attended social events, was presented to the King of England while her father served as US ambassador in London in the 1930s, and appeared in every family photograph with the brightest smile of all nine siblings. In a house where every child was expected to win, from afternoon boat races to the dinner table where their father questioned them about current events as if interviewing candidates, Rosemary was the only one who could never keep up. In Joseph Kennedy Sr.
’s eyes, that was not pitiable. It was a risk. Entering her early twenties, Rosemary began to show behavioral changes the family did not know how to handle. She grew unusually angry, her mood shifted suddenly, and she started sneaking out at night from the convent where she was living.
The nuns feared she might become pregnant or catch a disease. But the person most afraid was her father. What he feared was not his daughter’s safety but scandal, the kind that could destroy the political future he was building for his eldest son, Joe Jr. , the one he had chosen from childhood to one day walk into the White House.
In 1941, Joseph Kennedy Sr. secretly arranged a lobotomy for his daughter. He did not tell his wife. He did not ask anyone’s opinion.
Doctors Walter Freeman and James Watts performed the surgery at George Washington Hospital. Rosemary was awake throughout the procedure. They asked her to recite poetry, sing, and count while they used an instrument inserted through the skull into the brain, cutting the neural connections in the frontal lobe. When Rosemary could no longer speak, they stopped.
She was 23 years old. The surgery destroyed who she was. Rosemary lost the ability to walk, to speak coherently, and to care for herself. She was sent to St.
Coletta School for Exceptional Children in Jefferson, Wisconsin, thousands of miles from the family. Then the family vanished. Rosemary had eight siblings, all belonging to one of the wealthiest families in America. For more than 20 years, not one of them came to visit her.
While she lay alone in Wisconsin, the outside world kept turning and grinding her family down. Her eldest brother, Joe Jr. , the carrier of their father’s presidential dream, volunteered to fly a plane packed with explosives on a secret mission and blew up over the sky of Suffolk, England, in August 1944. He was 29.
His body was never found. Four years later, her sister Kathleen, called Kick, the only rebellious daughter, who had married a Protestant despite her mother’s threats to disown her, crashed in an airplane in the south of France with a married lover. She was 28. Her father was the only family member to attend the funeral.
Then her brother John became the 35th president in 1960 and was assassinated in Dallas in 1963. Three siblings dead, one brother into the White House and then shot. Rosemary did not know any of it, or if she knew, she no longer had the ability to understand. It was not until 1962 that Rosemary’s sister Eunice Kennedy Shriver first wrote publicly about her in the Saturday Evening Post, still hiding the lobotomy.
The full truth of what their father had done only became known to the public decades later. But the darkest chapter in Kennedy family history gave rise to one of its most beautiful legacies. Eunice, inspired directly by her sister, founded the Special Olympics in 1968, beginning with a small summer camp in the backyard of her home in Maryland. Today that movement has spread to more than 190 countries with millions of athletes with intellectual disabilities.
Rosemary died on January 7, 2005, in Wisconsin at the age of 86, with her brother Ted and her sisters sitting beside the bed. After more than six decades, the family had come back to her. Robert Francis Kennedy was the easiest of the nine to overlook. Born in 1925, ten years younger than Joe Jr.
and eight years younger than John, Bobby grew up in the shadow of two older brothers whose futures their father had already chosen before Bobby could walk. Those close to the family described him as the smallest person in the room, literally and figuratively, thin and quiet. But his silence held something none of his siblings possessed: a quiet anger at injustice. It did not erupt into shouting.
It sank inward and turned into action. Bobby graduated from Harvard, earned a law degree at the University of Virginia, and managed John’s presidential campaign in 1960. When John won, Bobby became attorney general at 35, the youngest in nearly a century. At the Justice Department, he went after organized crime, confronted mafia bosses head-on, and became one of the strongest voices in the administration supporting the civil rights movement at a time when doing so inside the White House was not easy.
Then, in November 1963, John was assassinated in Dallas. According to those closest to Bobby, he changed completely. He became a senator from New York in 1965, and in 1968 he decided to run for the White House like his brother eight years earlier. Bobby’s campaign drew millions of people, especially the working class, Black Americans, and communities other politicians rarely set foot in.
On the night of June 5, 1968, he had just won the California primary and was walking through the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles when Sirhan Sirhan shot him at close range. Ethel, his wife, was standing right beside him. She was pregnant with their 11th child. Bobby died the next day, June 6, at the age of 42.
The last child, Rory, was born six months after her father was buried. The night their father was shot, Bobby’s son David, 12 years old, was at home watching television. He saw his father lying on the kitchen floor through the TV screen, live, with no one in time to turn it off. That image haunted David for the rest of his life.
He fell into drugs from his teenage years and went through many failed attempts at rehab. In April 1984, at 28, David Kennedy was found dead in a hotel in Palm Beach, Florida, from an overdose. He was the same age at which Kick had died in the mountains of France 36 years earlier. Bobby’s branch of the family would lose at least seven people over the decades to bullets, drugs, accidents, suicide, and drowning.
Edward Moore Kennedy was the youngest of nine siblings, born in 1932. He grew up not as a rival inside the family but almost as a spectator, the child sitting at the end of the table watching the adults discuss the future of America. At Harvard, Ted was expelled for cheating on an exam after hiring a friend to take a Spanish test for him. He joined the army for two years before he was allowed to return and finish his degree.
In 1962, at age 30, Ted became a senator from Massachusetts, succeeding the very seat his brother John had left when he entered the White House. Critics said he got that seat because of the Kennedy name. He would hold it for nearly 47 years. First he nearly died.
In June 1964, the small plane carrying Ted crashed in Southampton, Massachusetts. The pilot and an aide were killed. Ted survived but broke his back, broke ribs, punctured a lung, and spent months in the hospital. The broken back caused him chronic pain for the rest of his life.
Then came Chappaquiddick, and everything changed forever. On the night of July 18, 1969, just over a year after Bobby was shot, Ted drove away from a party on Chappaquiddick Island, Massachusetts, with Mary Jo Kopechne, 28, a former staffer on Bobby’s campaign. The car went off Dike Bridge and plunged into the pond below. Ted got out.
Kopechne did not. She drowned in the car sunk under black water. Ted did not call the police. He swam across the channel back to the hotel, changed clothes, and, according to what was later reconstructed in court, called a lawyer and political advisers before calling anyone who might have been able to save Kopechne.
Nearly 10 hours passed before he reported it to the police. Ted pleaded guilty to leaving the scene of an accident, received a two-month suspended sentence, and never faced a more serious charge. The presidential dream died at that bridge. In 1980, he ran for president but lost to Jimmy Carter in the Democratic primaries.
But Ted did not leave. He stayed in the Senate for nearly 47 years, becoming one of the longest-serving and most influential senators in all of American history. People called him the Lion of the Senate. He was the architect behind the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, pushed the Children’s Health Insurance Program, and wrote or co-sponsored hundreds of bills on education, immigration, labor rights, and healthcare.
His legislative legacy surpassed that of any other Kennedy, including the president. He was the most tragic victim in the family, having lost the most relatives, and at the same time, the one who caused tragedy for someone else. That contradiction was never resolved. Ted Kennedy died on August 25, 2009, of brain cancer in Hyannisport, Massachusetts, at the age of 77.
Only two weeks earlier, his sister Eunice had also died. When Ted was laid to rest, of the nine Kennedy siblings, only Jean remained. Jean Kennedy Smith, born February 20, 1928, was the eighth of nine and the quietest. While her siblings stepped onto the national stage and one by one fell, Jean contributed in ways few noticed.
In 1974, she founded Very Special Arts, an international organization providing creative arts opportunities for people with disabilities. In 1993, President Bill Clinton appointed her US ambassador to Ireland, and there the quietest sibling did something none of her famous brothers had ever done. Jean played a key role in the Northern Ireland peace process, helping end the 30-year conflict known as the Troubles, a conflict that had taken more than 3,600 lives. In 1998, she was granted honorary Irish citizenship.
In 2011, President Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Count what Jean had to endure. In 1944, she was 16 when her eldest brother Joe Jr. exploded in the sky over England.
In 1948, her sister Kick crashed in France. In 1963, her brother John was assassinated in Dallas. In 1968, her brother Bobby was assassinated in Los Angeles. In 1990, her husband Steven died.
In 2005, her sister Rosemary died. In 2006, her sister Patricia died. In August 2009, she lost both Eunice and Ted in the same month. When asked about the losses, Jean delivered a sentence in a tone so calm it made the listener fall silent.
Our family philosophy is that you have to keep walking. Jean Kennedy Smith died on June 17, 2020, in Manhattan at the age of 92. With her passing, none of the nine Kennedy siblings of the presidential generation remained. In October 2024, Ethel Kennedy, Bobby’s wife and the woman standing beside him when he was shot, also died at 96.
The last matriarch of that generation was gone as well. Americans called it the Kennedy curse. But perhaps it was simply the price of a family living its entire life under the brightest spotlight in the world, where every loss was magnified, every mistake was recorded, and every child grew up under the weight of a name they never chose.
The next generation carries that name into the new century, along with everything it contains, both the glory and the darkness.