The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [110]
In the United States, the medical kings of lobotomy were Dr. Walter Freeman, a neurologist, and James Watts, a surgeon, who had their practice in Washington, not far from Rosemary’s convent. Joe liked to cut away at a problem, and then move on. Thus, it was perhaps understandable why Joe took Rosemary to Freeman and Watts’s office. What is less understandable is why he was not immediately shown the door.
Dr. Freeman, a showboating self-promoter, had repeatedly stated that he performed the operation only when all other approaches had failed. The doctors operated on tragically sick individuals, the long-term depressed, lifelong alcoholics, and hopeless schizophrenics. They had performed only one of their eighty operations on a patient younger than Rosemary, and never on an individual with mental retardation.
It may be that Freeman was drawn to the idea of operating on the daughter of one of the most famous men in America, thereby raising his stature dramatically. It may be that Joe pushed the doctors to do what they knew they should not have done. In any event, Joe gave the go-ahead without getting his wife’s approval, surely knowing what Rose’s opinion would have been.
On the morning of the operation, Rosemary was wheeled into the operating room fully cognizant of her surroundings. The doctors gave her Novocain, a local anesthetic, and with her fully awake, Dr. Watts drilled two small holes into her cranium. While Dr. Watts employed a tiny spatula to dig out the white matter of the frontal lobe, Dr. Freeman kept up a conversation with Rosemary.
Dr. Freeman was a charming, outgoing man, and he was good at his job, which was to keep the patient talking, getting her to sing if possible. Rosemary viewed the world around her with trust. The more Rosemary cooperated with the doctor, the more she talked, and the more she sang, the more Dr. Watts cut.
When Rosemary finally grew quiet, the surgeon knew that he had cut enough. Dr. Watts put in sutures, and she was wheeled back out of the operating room. When she woke up, the doctors found that Rosemary had talked too much and sung too long and that Dr. Watts had cut too deep. She was like an infant, capable of speaking only a few words, staring out into a world she did not know or understand.
Rosemary loved and trusted her father. She had been isolated, shut off away from her family in a convent. She had good reasons to suffer from what Watts called “agitated depression,” but that was woefully little reason for the radical operation that destroyed everything but her soul.
There was one other person in the operating room that morning, the nurse who worked for the two doctors. The nurse was so horrified by what she saw happening that she left nursing and never returned to the profession. There were other operations, so many others, but it was Rosemary she mostly remembered.
Over half a century later it was a horror that still kept coming into her consciousness. She might be sitting in a restaurant with her daughter talking about her childhood, and it would come back to her again, and she would talk about the guilt and sadness that never fully left her.
The nurse was not the only person haunted by Rosemary’s operation. The lobotomy is the emotional divide in the history of the Kennedy family, an event of transcendent psychological importance. This was the first family tragedy. Unlike all the subsequent deaths and accidents, no mark of patriotism, heroism, daring, or even dread circumstance could be attached to this act.
In this family where all the important events of the day were discussed over the dinner table, surely it was time to confront Joe with what he had done, to have it out, to discuss, to cry, to ask God’s mercy and forgiveness, and then go on. But it did not happen. And it is here that the Kennedy pattern of denial is implanted in the psyches of the