What a bastard.

And I thought MY family is a bunch of arses!! I can not beleive that any parent would do this to his own child. Sending my kids for their appendixes was a huge deal to me. But having your childs BRAIN scrapped. There is NO WAY he did it out of love for his child!! How does one person become so obssesed with themselves and their image??

Greyhat, (January 12) has it wrong. Whatever other fault's Joe Sr. had, getting his oldest Son killed wasen't his fault. Joe Jr. VOLUNTEERED for his suicide mission in 1944 which resulted in his death. True, he did it to please his Father, but the old man was not there in England twisting the Son's arm. Joe Jr. VOLUNTEERED!

Secondly, Joe Jr. did not get (nor even aspire to) a "Distinguished Flying Cross", nor did his younger brother (the late President) get a "Navy Cross". Joe Jr's Parent's received the "Navy Cross" on his behalf, after his being Killed-In-Action. The Navy Cross is the second highest Decoration ANY American Serviceman can receive after the "Congressional Medal Of Honor". President Kennedy received the "Navy-Marine Corps Medal" (A high Decoration), for the PT-109 incident, NOT the Navy Cross.

And going to War looking for a Medal does not always get you a Pine Box. Bud Day of the US Air Force flew Combat Missions in Vietnam, Korea, WWII and received over 70 Medals, Decorations, Ribbons, Foreign Decorations....over 50 of them for Combat. Bud is still around as far as I know.

The late Chesty Puller, Lieutenant General, (USMC) received 53 Medals, Decorations, Ribbons, Foreign Decorations for his actions in FOUR Wars, including FIVE NAVY CROSSES. No other Marine in American History ever received that number of Navy Crosses. None ever will! Chesty enlisted in the USMC in 1918, but WWI ended before he had a chance to enter Combat. After graduating from Marine Corps Training, "Chesty" was heard by an MP to exclaim: "NOW, all I need is a War".

He didn't come back in a Pine Box. Wounded numerous times in Four Wars maybe, but he never returned in a Pine Box.

What is more sick is that they ship her off to Wisconsin to be warehoused. When, with all their vast wealth they could easily have afforded to provide her with the best care in the world in their own home or, at least, nearby. But, again, they were too worried about their reputation and the inconvenience of having a "retard" (of their own creation) around to bother them. And they can't blame it on their father because he died in 1969 and they could have easily brought her home to be near her family for the last 35+ years. And people look up to and respect the Kennedy family...I just don't get it.

Look, none of us were there. None of us were in the room. We don't know what happened. However, doctors had dianosed Rosemary as being "retarded." Whether she was or not, a MEDICAL DOCTOR made a "PROFESSIONAL Diagnosis" What I mean to say was that at a time when doctors were promoting lobotamies, and when dylexia was confused with "retardation" you cannot simply blame a family, or a man. Sure, he ruled his family with an iron fist, however, none of us were there, so we don't know. Don't tell me you all are biographers, because chances are, you are conservative leaning, hate all Kennedys, or even anti-Catholic. (Yeah, I said it.)

Bottom Line: Stop creating your own legend about the Kennedys. We weren't there. You aren't experts. Why the mud-flinging? Stop speculating.

i agree- i said negative things about joe b/c of some of the several other things i read. but like 1 of you said, we were not there. there are only so many conclusions we can come to. however, his treatment of rosemary was unfair. joe WAS warned that the lobotomy would not work. but HE insisted on it. if there was a even slight chance of hurting his own kid, why would he take that risk. this is not a criticism but an observation. probably getting her help would have been more beneficial for the family and for her. she was not a disgrace, but someone to be proud of and someone whom we should all learn from.

You know, some of you people really should read a history book now and then, and stop relying on Rush Limbaugh or Al Franken or any of the other right OR left wing howlers. Do your own research, and read both sides of the issue.

Joe Kennedy might have been a lot of things, but a tyrannical, iron-fisted father he was not. True, he set high standards for his kids. But he did this because when he was growing up in Boston, the discrimination he faced because of his religious beliefs (sound familiar, Christian Coalition voters?) and his ethnic background. He decided to become more American than the WASPs that kept him out of their country clubs and banks and businesses by working harder and beating them at their own game. This work ethic is what he tried to instill in his children. His wife Rose instilled in them the idea that because they had been given so much by God, they were obligated to give back. I challenge any of you people to find one instance where one of his nine children described Joe Sr. as a tyrant. You can say a lot of things about that particular Kennedy family good and bad. But you can't say, if you've actually read an honest history about them, that they were a family that didn't love one another deeply and felt an intense loyalty to toward one another. They were an extremely tightly-knit family. Don't we wish families these days could be as close and loyal to one another as the Kennedy family? Their father pushed them to be successful and their mother pushed them to be people of strong faith.

As for the charge that Joe Jr. died trying to please his father, Joe Sr. had been encouraging his son to take advantage of the fact that he had far exceeded his required number of missions and that he should return to the states. His crew had already returned. Joe Jr. chose to stay. Joe Sr. had come close to losing one son, Jack, and had another, Bobby, that was 17 and eager to enlist. Joe Jr. made his own decision, and part of that decision was based on the fact that he did indeed dream of being the first Irish Catholic President. It had been a dream of the Kennedy and Fitzgerald families since the bad old days in Boston when Irish Catholics were consigned to ghettos and treated worse than the slaves in the South. Joe wanted to be President, but because of the anti-Catholic bigotry of the time that kept Al Smith from the office, he backed off and let the dream pass to his sons.

Regarding Rosemary, please don't make the error of taking the hard-won scientific knowledge of today for granted and wondering why people didn't know any better 60 years ago. The other day my 83-year old mother was telling me she had the planter's warts in her feet treated with X-rays back in the early 50's. Everybody did! Now think about that for a minute before you condemn old Joe Kennedy for listening to his doctors and following their advice back in the 30s. This is back in a time when MDs were on the radio pitching Camel cigarettes, for crying out loud.

The claim that Rosemary was just a little slow and most likely suffering from dyslexia is hindsight with a vengeance and it is most likely inaccurate. Among Rosemary's bizarre, unpredictable, and sometimes aggressive behavior was a tendency to, as her sister described it "do the thing the priest says not to do." In other words, Rosemary's budding sexuality was getting harder and harder for her to understand and thereby control. She was becoming a compulsive masturbator, and was not always discrete about it. Would not you and the members of your family be a bit concerned if your sister was playing hide and seek with the turkey baster at a table of relatives and friends during Thanksgiving dinner, and when caught started running through the house screaming and throwing food?

No, that didn't happen at a Kennedy Thanksgiving. But similar incidents did likely occur, and given the conservative religious convictions of the Kennedys, such behavior would have been of deep concern and worry. And yes, embarrassment. So how would your family handle it? Yes, I know. You'd call the booking agent for the Springer Show.

We should all know enough about dyslexia and its causes and effects to know that one of the warning signs that Johnny might not be able to read isn't that he can't keep his hands out of his pants in the school library. That sort of compulsive behavior indicates a more serious disorder, and Rosemary's disorder was, I imagine, a bit more serious than dyslexia.

An honest review of Rosemary's behavioral dysfunctions, and I don't mean a picture from 1938, would be a better way of understand Joe's, admittedly, flawed decision. Somewhere there's probably a picture of younger Charles Manson with a crew cut and a three-piece suit that belies the truth of the man's mental health.

As for Joe Sir's decision, I find it horrible and I certainly wouldn't do what he did -- Today! Hate to be the bearer of bad new for all you hind-sighted Kennedy haters out there, but what old Joe did back then was the norm for dealing with mental health issues, and not just for the rich people who could afford it. The rich people put their loved ones into better facilities, of course. But the brothers and sisters of middle class and poor people ended up in state institutions. And failing that, they were usually locked up for the night somewhere in the house and not allowed to go out during the day. That was the norm back in those days when dealing with mental health issues. Think "Boo Radley" of "To Kill a Mockingbird.

Better yet, just Think. Read a book. Better yet, read two books; one on each side of the argument. It's amazing what's you'll learn by hearing conflicting opinions. That's where the cool part comes in. You can then form your own opinions. Only this time they will be a cogent, well-formed, and educated opinions, quite unlike those expressed by the myopic, ill-informed windbags that precede this man's words.

Anyway, here's a book that's got to be better than whatever the heck ya'll read to come up with what I just read. It seems to be a fairly honest, warts, and all, study of the Kennedy and Fitzgerald families that starts with them in Ireland and works its way up to the recent present. I am almost 50 years old, and I've read all that crap from one side about Camelot and the goody-goody Kennedys all the way through the hateful crap that claims outrageous claims like Bobby killed Monroe with the leash that belonged to his family's pet Labrador. This book seems to poke a lot of holes in both extremes. It runs right down the middle, where the truth is most often found. But I'll probably read another one later on, just to make sure.

The Kennedys, by Robert Maier.

I don't totally agree with Mike. As far as I am concerned, Old Joe Kennedy was an arrogant and unscrupulous man who was a tyrant. Yes, this man set high standards for his kids to the extent that he told them all that he didn't want any losers, or that finishing second in anything was tantamount to failure(If the Old Man had been alive when Grand Daughter Kathleen Kennedy Townsend had lost her bid for Congress in 86, and the Maryland Gubanatorial election in 02, he would have disowned her without a qualm!). Somehow, I don't consider that the act of a loving Father. On the contrary, I consider it the act of a cold-hearted SOB who could not give his kids credit for doing their best no matter how they fared. As for Kennedy's decision to authorize surgeons (They were actually butchers as far as I am concerned) to perform a lobotomy on Rosemary, it was an unmitigated DISASTER. Tell me Mike, did the Old Man ever visit Rosemary after the operation? No, he just washed his hands of her after locking her up in an institution, or was it a convent? And Rosemary's siblings also ignored her and did not visit her until after the Old Man kicked the bucket and deserved a well earned dirt nap. There was nothing admirable about a man who cheated on his wife, made a fortune as a bootlegger and said in so many words while serving as the American Ambassador to the Court of St. James that Nazi Germany would ultimately defeat Britain. For his many sins (Including the virtual destruction of his Daughter Rosemanry), The Old Man paid the price, AND WITH INTEREST WHEN HE SUFFERED A STROKE IN DEC61, and spent the rest of his life confined to a wheelchair, half-paralyzed and unable to speak. And before this sorry excuse for a human being died, he endured the deaths of not only Joe, Jr., but Kathleen, Jack and Bobby. May that old SOB rot in hell!

Rich, as bold as your comments are, I must agree...Karma!

It seems to be the case as often seen! Dirt poor families who strike it rich gain power through money to control what goes on around them. They still lack class. They tried to maintain their stance as up-and-standing conservative christians. The consciousness of true christians would not have allow them to live as liars...the Kennedys lied for years about Rosemary's whereabouts after they sent her away.

After they lobotomized her brain, leaving her with a flat affect, they were too ashamed to risk the public's knowledge of the truth...They had a guilty conscious...they knew they had done something that the public would recognize as very unethical. Otherwise, they would not have hid the truth. If they had honestly believed that having the lobotomy was a genuine medical procedure for true retardation, they would not have played it off the way they did. It does not take a rocket scientist to figure that out.

Someone had the audacity to say that the Kennedys were a very close knit family...By the time JFKs kids were just old enough to drink beer they all flew off in separate directions. Next thing the Kennedy dynasty petered out. If they would have actually been that close knit, they would not have risen to aristocrat status and fallen from their pedestal within 2 generations. They blew the fortune their ancestors had made off the liquor still. By the time the stigma of the new money family was about to dissipate, they'd gone through their fortune, and their true colors were revealed.

It's ironic, considering how inhumane they mangled a beautiful healthy girl, who could have had a husband, family, home, and, yes, a job of her own...They robbed of her of that. She might not have had a high IQ. She might not have become a lawyer; of course John, Jr. got into law school because of who he was. Of course, he flunked the bar 3 times. They certainly didn't ostracize him because he was too "retarded" to pass the bar exam.

I'd have put money on it, had they not have removed part of her mind, she could have passed a driver's test and driven herself to a job of her own. She could have made a good wife and mother. She could have lived a life of livelihood. They stole that from her. God gave her a mind. It was not their place to take that from her. The philosophy I learned as a nurse is to focus on maintaining a person's health to their optimum potential, not stripping one's body and mind of what they have maintain their mental, social and emotional well-being. Back in the mid 1800s aristocratic families kept their perfectly normal kids at home and showed them off. Their not-so-perfect kids were sent off to a sanatorium, away from society because they regarded it as a social stigma. The Kennedy's were no different by Rosemary than the Puritans were back in the earlier century.

Ironically, look what they've all gone through. Not one of them has come out smelling like a rose, except "Classy Jackie"...and I'm certain she felt like kicking herself in her own butt many times for having married into that bunch of sophistocated redneck idiots.

It breaks my heart to know that man imposed such a deranged, twisted and inhuman cruelty on his own daughter.

It is also ironic that Rosemary lived well into their 80's, and the rest of them died young.

What Joe Kennedy did was at the least callous and unfeeling. I will give him the benefit of the doubt on following the advice of 'doctors' who urged the surgery, but not on his treatment of his daughter after the operation.

In my opinion, he so wanted to have a son become President of the United States that he was willing to sacrifice his oldest daughter to save the family image. So what if she was mildly retarded, dyslexic, or mentally unstable? Lots of us are, and still manage to live productive lives. I suspect depression, perhaps bipolar disorder. Maybe she just opted out of Joe's ambitions.

I also condemn Rose, who could have stood up to him on the institutionalization, and certainly could have brought her daughter home after his death. Rose often gets a pass on this and other issues, but she chose to marry and stay with Joe because she had similar ambitions for her children, and she sacrificed her daughter to the Presidency too.