Those with intellectual and developmental disabilities, Kennedy said, “need no longer be alien to our affections or beyond the help of our communities.”
More than anything, the president’s efforts changed the national conversation. Their efforts yielded some progress, but real change did not arrive until Kennedy’s task force assessed the needs of this population and mapped a strategy to meet them. It proved disastrous for Rosemary, who spent the remainder of her life in the care of the Sisters of Saint Francis at a private Catholic facility in Wisconsin.įor the decade before JFK’s election as president, activist parents had been leading efforts in the states and on Capitol Hill to win funding for special educators to teach their children and for support at home for parents who did not want to institutionalize their children. She had lived at home and at boarding schools or with tutors until, at age 23, she underwent a prefrontal lobotomy, surgery that her father had hoped would relieve the mental illness that compounded her disabilities. and Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, had been born with mild intellectual disabilities. Rosemary, the oldest daughter of Joseph P. The Kennedys’ interest in this issue was personal as well as political. It was Eunice who urged the president to convene the presidential panel, Eunice who recruited its members, and Eunice who goaded them to complete their work within a year. The 27-member task force had begun its work, only a year before it issued its report, under the relentless gaze of Eunice Kennedy Shriver, who had won a commitment from her brother even before he took the oath of office to place what was then called mental retardation at the top of his legislative agenda.
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