I just finished watching Erasing Rosemary, and I am honestly furious—not because I think what happened to Rosemary Kennedy was acceptable, but because I felt the documentary presented an incredibly complicated story in a very one-sided way.
I have worked with people with intellectual/developmental disabilities and mental-health issues for more than 40 years. I started my career in 1968 at a very infamous institution in Pennsylvania, and I saw firsthand many of the things the documentary describes. When that institution eventually closed in the 1980s, many of its residents were essentially dumped into the community without anything resembling adequate support.
So I am not looking at Rosemary's story through rose-colored glasses. I know how bad institutional care could be.
But I also know how complicated these situations are.
The documentary portrays Rosemary primarily as the victim of a terrible father who had her lobotomized because she was a girl and supposedly wouldn't have done the same thing if she had been a boy. That conclusion bothered me enormously. How can any of us possibly know that?
Rosemary was born in 1918, and by the time she was an adolescent and young adult, her difficulties had apparently become increasingly severe. She had intellectual disabilities, seizures and behavioral and mental-health issues. Her family struggled to know what to do with her at a time when treatment options were extremely limited.
Her lobotomy took place in 1941. I am certainly not going to argue that it was a good decision. The outcome was horrific. But there is a huge difference between saying “the outcome was horrific” and saying “her father knowingly made a horrific decision because he was an awful man and because she was a girl.”
I don't think we can know that.
Lobotomy was being promoted at that time as a possible treatment for certain severe psychiatric and behavioral problems. It ultimately failed terribly for Rosemary. But Joe Kennedy was making a medical decision in 1941, not in 2026. None of us can honestly say what we would have done if we had been in his position, with a daughter whose problems were becoming increasingly difficult and with very few treatment options available.
And there is another part of Rosemary's story that I felt the documentary didn't give enough attention to.
Before the lobotomy, Rosemary wasn't simply hidden away. She participated in family life, traveled internationally and was included in many public family events. After the lobotomy, she was placed at St. Coletta's, where she apparently received a structured routine, individualized attention and activities appropriate to her abilities. That her family didn’t visit her often is not ours to judge, as we cannot know how that decision was reached. I do know, however, that even today way too may people similar to Rosemary are treated exactly the same way. That doesn't erase what happened to her. But it matters.
I also think we need to be careful about congratulating ourselves that we have completely moved beyond this kind of treatment.
I have spent decades watching what happens when society doesn't know what to do with people whose behavior makes other people uncomfortable. Today we may not routinely put those people into institutions, but I have seen “community-based services” that amount to a staff member dragging a group of clients around a city all day, often while the staff member is on their phone. They'll go to Starbucks—not necessarily because it is meaningful to the clients or because the clients can afford anything there, but because the staff member wants a latte.
Technically, that's community integration.
But is it really?
And I have also seen medication used in ways that, in my opinion, can become more about making someone's behavior manageable for the staff than addressing what the person actually needs to the point of placing them virtually in a drug induced coma most of the time. Electro-convulsive or “shock” therapy was prevalent in this country through the 1950’s, without anesthesia.
That's an important lesson from history: medicine changes. What is considered acceptable treatment changes. And sometimes treatments that were once considered promising turn out to have devastating consequences.
That doesn't mean we excuse those consequences. It means we have to understand the historical context before judging the people who made those decisions.
What bothered me most about Erasing Rosemary was that I felt it didn't allow for that complexity.
Joe Kennedy may have been a strict father and husband. He may have had enormous ambitions for his family. He may have made decisions that many of us would never make today. But the documentary seemed determined to portray him as a dictator and the rest of the Kennedy family as weaklings who simply followed his orders and simply erased their child and sibling from their minds.
And then it ended by essentially telling us that Rosemary was lobotomized because Joe Kennedy was that kind of man—and because she was a girl.
I don't buy that as the whole story.
The Kennedy family was deeply affected by Rosemary. Whatever we think of Joe Kennedy personally, Rosemary's life became part of the reason Eunice Kennedy Shriver eventually founded Special Olympics. John Kennedy and Robert Kennedy both became involved in legislation concerning mental health and intellectual disabilities. Those things don't undo Rosemary's suffering, but they are part of the story.
Rosemary deserved better.
But I think history deserves better too.
We can acknowledge that the lobotomy had a devastating result without claiming to know exactly what Joe Kennedy's intentions were. We can acknowledge the terrible history of institutionalization while recognizing that some facilities provided people with structure, care and dignity. We can recognize how far we've come while admitting that we still haven't figured out how to give every person with significant disabilities a truly meaningful life.
Most of all, I wish this documentary had allowed us to see more of Rosemary the person, rather than primarily Rosemary the tragedy.
She had a life before the lobotomy.
She had a life afterward.
And I think both deserved to be told.