Rosemary, the forgotten sister
The first drama to mark the Kennedy dynasty came long before the world called them “the American royal family” or “the broken Camelot”. It dates back to 1918, when Rosemary Kennedy, Joseph and Rose’s third daughter, was born with a mild intellectual disability. She is a lively young woman, sensitive and intolerant of family rigidity.
During the years when the family was climbing the political and social establishment of the United States, Rosemary began to show signs of emotional instability, fits of rage, and sudden escapes. Joseph Kennedy then decided to intervene with the extreme and ruthless medicine of the time: a prefrontal lobotomy.
Rosemary entered the operating room at 23 and came out forever a child, unable to speak with fluency, unable to move independently and destined to live in a Wisconsin institution. This wound, hidden, removed and never publicly elaborated upon, would become the long shadow that droveEunice Kennedy Shriver to dedicate her life to the rights of people with disabilities and to found the ‘Special Olympics’, an international organisation dedicated to promoting sport for people with intellectual disabilities, in 1968.
In the 1940s two more deaths shook the family: Joseph P. Kennedy Jr., the son predestined for a political career, exploded in flight during a secret naval mission. Kathleen “Kick” Kennedy, the brightest of the sisters, died in a plane crash in 1948. By the time John Fitzgerald entered politics, the family had already seen two of its most promising members succumb to fate. But they were private tragedies, not yet part of the myth.
Dallas, the fall of Camelot
History changed in 1963, when the President of the United States was assassinated live on national television. In this trauma the whole country is paralysed because it loses not only a leader, but the very image of the future. Jacqueline Kennedy, in her bloodstained pink suit, walks beside the coffin as a living symbol of dignity and loss.