Rose Kennedy

Rose Kennedy was the daughter of a Boston mayor and the mother of a president, and outlived four of her nine children by violence and a fifth by an operation she was not told about until afterwards. She was born Rose Fitzgerald, daughter of John F. Fitzgerald, mayor of Boston; she was accepted by Wellesley and sent instead to a convent school at her father's insistence, which she called the greatest regret of her life. She married Joseph Kennedy in 1914 and had nine children in seventeen years, keeping index cards on each of them recording illnesses, weights and dental work. Joseph Jr was killed flying a bomb-laden aircraft in 1944; Kathleen died in a plane crash in 1948; John was assassinated in 1963 and Robert in 1968. Her eldest daughter Rosemary was lobotomised in 1941 on Joseph's authority and without Rose's knowledge, and was institutionalised for the rest of her life; Rose did not see her for twenty years. She campaigned actively for her sons, spoke fluent French and German on the stump, and lived to a hundred and four. Her memoir Times to Remember is careful about almost everything. She went to daily mass for most of her life and was made a papal countess by Pius XII in 1951, a title she used. She lived through her youngest son's accident at Chappaquiddick in 1969 and the collapse of his presidential prospects. The foundation the family set up in Joseph Jr's name turned, at her insistence and Eunice's, to intellectual disability, and is part of what led to the Special Olympics. A stroke in 1984 left her unable to speak for the last eleven years of her life. She died at Hyannis Port in 1995 with the surviving children present.

• Lived: 1890 CE – 1995 CE
• Nationality: American
• Roles: other