and here's the latest. it just came out in may. the guns of last light, a rick atkinson as always we appreciate your time. up next on booktv "after words" with guest vincent bzdek. the presidential historian explores rose kennedy's

contributions to and influence over her famed family dynasty. this program is about an hour. >> host: barbara perry it's good to be here with you talking about the kennedys. but that is having grown up catholic i think the kennedys have the particular resonance for us but i wanted to start right off in ask you, you're a supreme court presidential scholar. how did you get interested in rose? >> guest: i've been interested in the kennedy family since i was a little tyke read when i was four years old my mother to me and my brothers to downtown louisville. she piled the center 56 chevrolet and drove us downtown to the courthouse. she was completely drawn to this new candidate on the scene in the presidential race senator john f. kennedy. >> host: do you think because he was catholic a little bit? >> guest: i have to think i that was a major part of it in addition to which he was about her age so she was the new

generation to which the torch was being passed that i point out what she loved history and politics she wasn't as active in grassroots politics and didn't particularly like driving downtown on a very busy streets, so i know that it was his charisma and probably as catholicism and let's face it is handsome looks. >> host: he was a pretty good-looking guy. >> guest: i think she was drawn to that too so she got there asked her earlier with bsf 4-year-old and my two older brothers and put us right at the podium so we would be sure to see him. >> host: oh my gosh. that's great. he did a lot of research at the jfk library after they opened up some records. tell me about that because that gives you something new, some new insights into rows. >> guest: this book is the one that is fully based on her papers that opened up in the fall of 2006 and it's a cute story the way that happen in terms of my finding out about it. i've been teaching at the college for many years and had published of oakland jacqueline

kennedy and her first ladyship. my students knew that i was interested in all things kennedy and i happened to be at the university of louisville which is my alma mater and i got this e-mail from a former student and alum of sweet writer college and she said did you see that rose kennedy's papers have just been open? i said i hadn't seen it so i went to the article and started devouring it. then i decided this has to be my next project in between the supreme court scholarship. >> host: in those boxes there were letters to her children and some of them were quite scalding. i even enjoyed the fact that she was after john kennedy when he was in office to shape up a little bit in how he presented himself and his manners. tell me about those letters. >> guest: first of all these boxes, there were 250 archival boxes and then i went to another 50 of her family photographs in the book contains a number of

photographs that are rare and that it never been seen before. i was just amazed at the letterwriting prodigiousness of rose kennedy. from the time she was a young woman and in addition to the 250 boxes of her official papers i came across on the internet private letters that were held in private collections and i have been able to gather some of those together as well. >> host: that no one has written about? >> guest: that no one has written about. there are at least a half-dozen that she wrote over the time she was a teenager through her childhood friend including about how she wanted to go to wellesley college which was a plan afforded by her father honey fitz all the way to middle age when she talks about her husband's time in hollywood and even mentions gloria swanson. so the letters in addition to the ones i found, the ones that are officially opened at the kennedy library yes, rose was a

typical victorian mother always interested in how her children looked and behaved in their manners and she never gave up until she literally could no longer write sadly in the later part of for years. she had strokes and she became an invalid but up until that point for all of her motherhood she was constantly after the children to be better and in fact to be in a victorian kind of way as perfect as they could be. >> host: so that word taurean, she very much tried to to fit herself into that mold even though all around her things were changing. she was born in 1890, bright? the suffrage movement was going on in her 20s and early teens but she didn't didn't step into those roles. she kept a very victorian role. why do you think that is? >> guest: i think because she was raised in such a conservative household and a conservative catholicism at that

time, conservative society. she was a woman. she was a girl so there was no way she was going to be trained to be the kind of public officeholder that her father was in that her sons would become. having said that, you think your life is filled with paradoxes and that is one of them. while she was not a feminist and did not again as a suffrage act, she pushed the boundaries as far she could within those parameters her family and society and her religion and push them as far she could to become the focal spokesperson for the kennedy family whenever possible. and she was trained to do that by her father honey fitz so she would go out on the campaign trail with him when she was a teenager. she in some ways was pushing the envelope as they say but in other she was certainly not a suffragette or a feminist by any stretch of imagination. >> host: before we talk about the role she played in forming that incredible family that may go to something you said about wellesley.

what do you think was important about her father not letting. there? >> guest: the story was she had her heart set on going to wellesley. she was an a student coming from high school. she went to the dorchester high school. there was definitely intellect. she was a very bright woman and she herself strove for perfection in all things so she looked trying to be the perfect student and usually lived up to her own high standards. she thought she was ready to go wellesley and probably was. the story is that the archbishop of austin encountered her father the mayor austin and said this wouldn't be a very good idea politically for you, the catholic mayor, the average catholic mayor of boston to send your eldest child to a non-catholic institution so that afforded her plan and she expressed to doris kearns goodwin later in life that was one of the saddest moments of her life when she found that out and that she regretted it for the rest of her life. >> host: this is a woman who did not expressed much regret.

>> guest: i often point out the picture on the front of the book, at first i was distracted by the goblet in the forefront that i decided it was the perfect metaphor for rose kennedy kennedy. folks will notice its exact a half-full with water and that was how rose usually viewed life. she was the eternal optimist. that doesn't mean in private she didn't have sad moments but generally speaking she tried to keep this optimistic up beat approach to life and try to have her children do that as well. in addition not being able to go to wellesley her father to add insult to injury center away to it crushing combat abroad. >> host: a convent? >> guest: not that she was going to be, nun because she had fallen in love with her future husband as teenagers. you think that's part of the reason that honey fitz sent her abroad to get her away from joe

kennedy. the kennedys and fitzgeralds were not always political allies in boston politics so honey fitz was not completely approving of joe kennedy. >> host: they were rivals at one point. >> guest: this was a problem for rose's father two-seater fall in love with joe kennedy and he picked out a suitor for her and wanted her to marry a neighbor boy who was also catholic and irish and was doing well in the business world. his parents were in construction so honey fitz thought that would be the perfect match but rose was not to be deterred even by what started as two years at a convent and she persuaded her father to send it back to the united states after one year. >> host: in her own way it's an independent spirit expressing itself already. >> guest: i find it ironic because when her daughter kathleen decide she's going to marry billy hartington during world war ii -- this is kids the effervescent

child of rose and i think in many ways like her mother but oftentimes that creates conflicts between parents and children. so i think it was ironic that rose didn't seem to remember how in a sense she thwarted her parents wishes by marrying joe kennedy and kid was not to be denied and of course she did very billy hartington. sadly the marriage only lasted for four months and he was killed in europe after the invasion of 1944. >> host: lets talk about joe. joe gets a lot of credit for his family and he is at page or go figure and larger than life and even some of the sons gave him credit for spurring his family on to greatness but how did that marriage work because your book makes the point and you see a lot of it in the research you have done that rose was a partner and was a significant player especially in joe's

absences informing the family. >> guest: i would say their marriage was built on love. there's no doubt about that. i think they both loved each other very much him and by looking at rose's letters as well as nine children, there is definitely definitely love fair and joe's letters to his wife are very expressive and very warm at times and very loving, in some way more than rose's to him. you have to start with her teenage romance that i don't think of her laughter. the concept of a first love and teenage that the puppy love that did mature into adult loved. i think rose kept that with her always. we know that her husband was unfaithful to her and so that was a cross to bear as rose would have said. it was not a dealbreaker though. we think that in 1920 after rose had her fourth child, that she left home and went back to her home, her father's home and said

i can't do this anymore. we don't know all of the details. we don't know if she was just overwhelmed by having four children in five years or was it that she was having some postpartum depression? was it that she worried about her husband? he was building a business career so it even if he had not been unfaithful he was gone a lot so she was just frustrated and supposedly her father honey fitz said to her you are a catholic woman, you are in a catholic marriage. you must go home and make this marriage work. certainly she did for over 40 years. >> host: it was not an option for her. >> guest: it was not enough for her and i've checked with catholic clergy today and i asked what if some of -- came today and we would say what a priest would have center in the 1920s. it's not that different. you are married and you have made this choice and now you must go home and make this

marriage work and bring up your children in the faith. roasted that but that caveat. we must say she absented herself a lot times from the household. sometimes staying within the same bounds of the household so when the family spent his summers in hyannis she had a little cottage, a prefab cottage. >> host: her own sort of space. >> guest: her own space so she could get away from what she describes as the boisterous miss of her own children that she couldn't air. the famous football games that she said i went to harvard for all games and i interested real foot wall but she said i didn't know what they were playing. all i know was it was loud and noisy and she would retreat to this cottage on the beach. then a hurricane came and swept it away so they put another one up and so another hurricane came. she joked about it and said after two hurricanes i decided this was not meant to be and i was not going to have my cottage

on the beach anymore so she savages went to paris. >> host: she traveled a lot. >> guest: she traveled a lot. she loves company to her so she couldn't wait every year to get to paris to see the latest fashions so she would go three and four times a year before the war to get new fashions, ring them home and she just love travel. she had done this with her father. she had gone on political trips with him in the united states and to south in latin america. which was very an in usual for women in her generation. she had the wanderlust from the time she was a young girl. she was very proud of the fact that she spoke fluent french and german which he perfected washoe is the the prussian convent making the best of a bad situation which would become her mantra in life. once she married this was a way to escape the boisterous miss of the children and perhaps some of the upset over some of the weaknesses in her marriage. and in some ways perhaps also a form of birth control because of

course the catholic church would would not allow it artificial contracepcontracep tion. >> host: she thought mine was enough trouble play. >> guest: she thought mine was enough and she maintained her humor about that. she was on the show in the 1970s and he brought up that that -- had 11. she said if i would have known it was a competition i would have had more than nine. >> host: there was one trip he wrote about that they went to russia and that was unusual for women. did rose have a daughter? >> guest: rouson kit in 1937. >> host: was that rose just wanting to see russia? >> guest: her son in the app lover i joe junior had gone to england and joe's seniors requests and planning job wanted both of his eldest sons joe junior and jack to go study with a socialist at the london school of economics because even though joe senior was the ultimate

epitome of a capitalist he said to his sons you need to know what are the ways of the future and social is maybe one of them. absolutely. the year between prep school and when joe junior went to harvard, he went to london to study at lse and then spent some time in the soviet fact-finding and would report back to his dad what he saw there. rose was so taken with joe junior's reports that she decided that she would go. her daughter kitts said why can we go to italy like all the other well-heeled mothers and daughters. she said will we have been to italy. off they went in 1937 imagine at the height of the stalinist era to the soviet union. she was a very venturesome woman. >> host: you mentioned she'd like to paris and going to see fashion and that reminded me that she was quite the image maker and stage manager of the family.

i love how honest you are book is about that and how important was to her. can you talk about that a about that a little bit? >> guest: as i often say i don't mean to indicate that rose had a more significant role than she did. you've mentioned it was a patriarchal family to be sure sober husband ruled the roost and of all things they had two sons to begin with so when the sons came of age and the sons ruled the roost as well and they went into their careers first in the military and joe junior was killed in the war in 1944 but jack and bobby and teddy it was the man always who were running the show. i would say if you ran credits for the kennedy family and the kennedy legacy it would be joe quite appropriately you had a career in hollywood as a producer. joe kennedy senior would be listed as the executive reducer and rose would have almost all of the other duties. she would need the stage manage.

she would have been the best girl and the dialogue coach and certainly the wardrobe mistress. she would have would have had all of the other roles. the argument that i make in the book is that as the men began to disappear from the stage, rose's roll gets larger and larger in what she had done but that point is taken all the typically female roles and work them to the hilt and was ready to take over and become if you will the executive producer when necessary. >> host: with that sense of creating an image, that came from rose a lot, with the "life" magazine cover stories and i remember a tv show that put on talking with the kennedys. it seemed like that, creating an

image of the family was important to her but also important to the family, the legend of the family. >> guest: it's so true. it starts in 1937 as joe senior so they are billed as a new deal family and newspapers began to show joe and rose and their nine children or however many are on the scene at the time wind up in stairstep. >> host: they were just captivated. >> guest: i say as if it you would have had john and kate plus eight. the kennedys were the first reality show and joe senior because he had his hollywood career and he wanted the family to have this public image, he was pushing as well but this is where joe and rose are on the same page. they are on the same script and rose who is attempting to make the family looked perfect is the perfect person to follow the lead of joe senior and to the point where when they first

appear in 1937 and newspapers put the children in stairstep fashion just simply lined up one of the major photographers on broadway hal fife is his name, he writes to mrs. kennedy and he is noted for taking beautiful portraits of stars. he says you have a beautiful family but i don't think this is the best way to present them. he said ring them into my studio he said i will put them in a way that is much more becoming. rose was on that immediately and one of the most famous photographs of her was a portrait taken by mr. fife that jack kennedy been put in his room in his harvard dormitory when he was in the dormitory. this could even then they were shooting pictures of the family. >> guest: as they went to london and joe becomes the u.s. ambassador, than they were huge celebrities and now not only on the american stage but on the

world stage. you mention the sheer number of children. that made them stand out and that made them different but such beautiful children and handsome children, also active at all different age ranges and rose herself who prompted someone to say they believed in the stork once they first met her knowing she had nine children and cat this svelte girlish petite figure that she worked hard on. i seen the book she may have had some body image issues because she was very careful about what she ate and it was important for her to maintain this girlish figure. she liked nothing better when she got over to be confused with her daughters. >> host: you mentioned the index card she kept where she kept a record of their weights and adjusted what they were fed. according to how much weight they had gained? >> guest: she had gone out when they were children and bought an index card locks. this was the other thing she was

devoted to us their health. if you think of it she's only two generations removed from the great potato famine of the 1840s when people were dying in droves and her father was worn in the tenements of a north end. rose obviously gets to move out of there with her father and for her children it's all about health and fresh air. from the time these children are born she is pushing them in strollers and taking toppers out with her. i'm one of these walks she famously goes into a stationery store and buys an index card box and buys the index cards and begins to keep by hand much his parents would keep material now on a computer, she is writing down their weight. every weekend she would weigh each child and keep tabs tabs on the waiting she would also record their religious milestones, first communion and their confirmations, any kind of shots. there weren't any vaccines then and she worried so much about

their health at any medical procedure she would write down. she wouldn't just keep a record of it. she was constantly trying to as you say gauge their way. if someone was perhaps gaining weight she would cut down on their calories. if someone is in jack's case as a boy was always very ill and tends to be painfully thin in this worried herself. she would say i would give him cream instead of something less fatty in terms of milk. she would give him the juice of the roast beef because she thought that would tell that this body. when he was chronically late for dinners and she had this very victorian rule. the meal would start without the light child and that child would have to start in whatever course was being served but she said he would sneak back into the kitchen and charm the cooks to give him the part of the mail that he missed. >> host: that's funny. i remember reading stories that

they used to have a map they pulled down sometimes in the dining room to get the kids g. of political lessons. was rose part of that or was that all of joe? did rose try to stimulate them and get them a interested in politics? >> guest: she did that as we discussed before about the page are key. if joe senior was there and he was home for business then he ran the dinner discussions. but if rose was there and he was gone as he often was, then she would run the show and she would run the dinner conversations. she tended not to focus as much on geopolitical issues for theories of international relations. she tended to us the kids and quiz them about church issues and if they had gone to mass that sunday, if it was a sunday, what was the celebration that sunday. ..

she is first and foremost a roman catholic. she was red as a staunch iris cash that woman. she would tell stories in later life about her of her own mother who was six children during the yearly celebration and commemoration for 40 days, the six children would be brought into the living room and misses

it cherub would have to kneel on the hardwood floor and say the rosary. brose said while that was somewhat painful to be kneeling for the times it took for the rosary, every night that was somewhat of a punishment she thought as well and that was appropriate. but she said in later life, she would tell her children if europe's fact, if there's a tragedy, she said i was so rather they are the rosary rather than turning her head through cigarette and a jury. the children were claiming that help to keep their weight in check, which he also taught them to do. i heard that as well purchase it if only they would pray the rosary, that would be much better. there are stories that her daughter pat had an emergency appendectomy, was not home an infection set in.

before they pressure back for another surgery, roses parade the rosary over pat. and away it sounds a bit unsophisticated i think to us today, but i can remember my own mother. when i was about six i had a fever and my mother and religious models to my pajamas as a means of helping to get beyond the illness. this is something that clearly was indoctrinated in my own other in the same generation of kids. i know my grandmother, who would've been in the generation of rows. much of it is thus on weekends, she would remove herself from the family, whatever we were doing. she would disappear you wonder, where's grandma? would find her in the quiet living room praying the rosary. so this is a great source of comfort. attack killed the rosary center

had gave her comfort. >> host: do you think that catholicism, because john kennedy was our first catholic president. do you think that helped create the east coast, the kennedy ethos of taking care of others, a contributory life and how that might have expressed itself their politics? >> guest: i think it did hear it certainly kennedy, the only brother to live to write a memoir culture compost that came out literally the day he died and you've written about teddy and the impact of religion on him. he specifically said in true compass, his memoir that the gospel of matthew, chapter 25, about corporal works of mercy, closing the, tending to the sick, on a non-but that is what brose was committed to. i have to say i don't find a lot of examples in her early life where she is taking her children to examples of how they can

partake corporal works of mercy. i think she taught that he does. we also have to remember that she raised her children in peru eradicated catholicism which was more about self-denial than reaching out to others. by giving her children that core of catholicism, we see a particularly in bobby and teddy and their policies, which were post-vatican ii about reaching out to the underprivileged. >> host: taking care of themselves who cannot take care of others. that's really interesting. throughout her life, she experienced a lot of tragedies. i wonder how her faith helped her through those. can he say more about that? we are going to take a break pretty soon. >> guest: well, rose return immediately to religion and to her faith that rosary. i cynosure get word that one of her children had been injured as in the case of bobby when she heard he had been shot, she was off to church to pray.

and when he passed away the next day, first thing she did was go off to mass and matsushita electric chat with killed as well. she went to mass every day, but she found great comfort they are, particularly because the altar had been dedicated to joe junior when he was killed in the war. >> host: let's take a break there and come back and talk about the kennedys more. just go okay. >> host: we are back with barbara perry. thanks for being here. i wanted to jump into what a great campaigner rose was. teddy, when i was researching says rose was the best campaigner in the family. i wonder what you thought about

that. she helps out with john's campaign and bobby's campaign. they considered her kind of a secret weapon, to make? >> guest: they surely did. for good reason. she was the best campaigner and they were all very good at it. she had started this as she liked to point out when she was a little girl, five or six years old. in the 1890s, her dad had been in the u.s. congress, u.s. house of representatives. she liked to say she'd been this population see was a little girl and loved it. as she went into teenage head, mentioned earlier she would go out with her father when he was campaigning. >> host: sometimes taken the place of her mother. just go she did. who is really introverted. first embraced the limelight. she had the interesting combination of her parents, that there is a certain side that wanted to be solitary and that's when she would go to work out a chunk of each. she did when traveling alone. and help her cope.

it helped to remove herself from a situation painful to her. it helped remove herself from unlimited childbirth. but she also loved the smell of the crowd. she looked to be on stage. so from the time jack ran in 1946 for the u.s. house of representatives, they would begin to bring rose out. she could tell the story about how he had been limited in the war and was a war hero, how she had lost a son in the war, that she was a gold star mother and jack to tell people that, too, so rose could really reach out to women. remember that jack was not married until much later in life. he started his campaign in 1946. he didn't marry until 1963. there is no spouse for him to bring out. so we also have to keep in mind that her husband, joe senior, had become politically toxic when he said i'm undiplomatic

angst about the united state and britain possibly losing the war. >> host: do you think joe had political ambitions? >> guest: i do, i do. there was tories who want to be the first irish catholic president of the united states is moving in that direction with his contacts in the new joe administration and certainly having been ambassador. that is not viewed as having been highly successful tenure there. he ended it on this very sour note as saying things that were very undiplomatic about the u.s. and britain. he really had to a behind-the-scenes and obviously he worked behind the scenes for the remaining sons and put his money into their campaigns. he transferred his ambition to them and he was the case cottages. most of the time behind the scenes, rose could be brought out. she had the added unfitted pete rose fitzgerald kennedy. in boston, and campaign bahnsen,

she could link to her popular father and the namesake for her son. joe was not up on this sounds very much. if you look through the photos, you will very rarely the. indeed, when jack is nominated in 1960, joe was in los angeles, where the convention was. he has to stay hidden from view in a rented home they were a living. when kennedy goes to the convention hall to accept the nomination, he brings his mother and she goes out onto the podium with him and she waves to the crowd. jack and his dad only appear the day after the election when all is said and done and all is over. joe comes out and there is the famous portrait of the whole family at hyannisport, all of pro and a close victory of jack. >> host: he threw the screen parties when jack was first running. didn't rose and her daughters

inserted these people they feel like they could come meet royalty. was it not part of their appeal? >> guest: it was. they were called tea parties. they started in 1946, the very first one for the congressional campaign. and then they just kept doing these two senate campaigns. when jack defeated henry cabot lodge, which was an upset in 1952, lodge was quoted as saying it was those tea parties that did me in. you are right to say first of all, women love to come to those because they could meet bypasses were royalty in the united states and the fact the kennedy family had rubbed elbows during their time in prewar england. so women would be giving these engraved invitations. come meet the kennedys that this tea. women were known to go buy dresses. some of them even formal. wonderful photographs at the

penalty library lineup in the day ballrooms of the finest hotels in town and cities are on it. they would be rose and the receiving line, one or two of her daughters and jack sometimes hazardous that tacking it onto crutches, which at this mothers that, only helped his image because older women wanted -- john women wanted to marry him before he married jackie. >> host: the kennedys used their celebrity to further their political career. >> guest: they were the epitome of the modern era of the merging of celebrity and politics and charisma appeared in media for that matter. >> host: jacks candidacy for president he was at a time when it was a course in the country and its effect on, life magazine was a real key to their popularity early on. about the time they were becoming popular.

>> guest: it literally begins as they come into the roosevelt administration that chose first positions in the new deal and off to england they go. you and i talked about the fact that teddy is to say life magazine with her family scrapbook. life magazine just love the kennedys. and why not. they were in a handsome, beautiful family. they were doing interesting cavities and interesting things that have privatized. obviously we didn't know everything going on, but certainly in the public eye, the sport and figure and the celebrity hood at all that would be a part of hollywood at various times but the president interest in the rat pack, the better comment better. there is always disclosed that the kennedys is a very slick, glossy, big page newsstand magazine just love to follow them around. as you say, you had television

on that. i point to the fact that in 1952, when eisenhower was elected the first time, the statistics i read showed 20% of american households had televisions. by the time kennedy was elected in 1960, then it got up to 80%. the kennedys, with her beautiful look and charisma have been to merge onto the scene with modern media and modern television. >> host: images are more important. >> guest: app so they were. the first debate with richard nixon proved that historically. >> host: segued off that, you think rose gave growth to camelot for serta created that mythology. >> guest: i think you have to give rose quite a bit of credit. we know jackie coined the term the week after president kennedy's assassination in the

famous interview. but it's rose who has that kind of loyalty conflict going with the family and making them such a beautiful presence on the world stage in the american stage. she helped jackie had the material to work with it seems to me. i would call her perhaps the mother of camelot and jackie was the queen. >> host: when john kennedy was assassinated and not whole image system kind of came crashing down, how did she handle that? >> guest: anyone can imagine just how horrible that would eat to lose a child to that kind of violence. >> host: after losing show. >> guest: the apple of her eye, joe junior. cake has been taken in a plane crash in 1948. so rose is literally seen her

children almost in earth order disappeared from the scene. not only that, but 1964, rose wrote in her journal, and this is unusual for her because she usually try to be positive and optimistic. this would've been in the summer of 64, just after his assassination. she writes about what it's like that summer and she says, gone are the presidential helicopters it was so look forward to every weekend, bringing my son, the president and his children run out to him. gone are those days. she missed that and she says wistfully gone are the days -- when we were set to be the most powerful family in the world. it's very revealing. it's both human and public as well. she even mentions that they'll try to get together and are most irish wake style that summer.

john kennedy, joan bennett kennedy, his first wife was a very good pns. so she would sit and play at the hyannisport home and they would all sing the old tunes they loved, the old irish songs. rosato on point, we started singing one of jack's favorites. she said afterward dissolved in tears and ran from the room. i thought that was the most -- kind of a pre-opera culture, where everyone goes on television and talks about their pain and grief and not curtail is there to help them. again, very thick tour in for this family to hide his grief. >> host: kennedys don't cry. rose tried to follow that as well. so it was a hard time for her that she gets through by her faith and by trying to be with family but sometimes going up to europe in trying to get away

from things. and yet she was in europe going around and trying to raise money for the kennedy library. she was still remembering her son in a positive way. she told the story about how the manager of the ritz hotel in paris where she always stayed came up to her and burst into tears. she would try to be strong for everyone, reassuring and people would break down because of their sadness over the loss of kennedy, her son. >> host: you point out she was fairly humanistic research of medication to help her get through it. that gives you a more three-dimensional picture of her. in public, she was very stoic and somehow saw the country through their grief with her nerve and ability to carry on. in private she did have elements where she really was in a great deal of pain. >> host: >> guest: she was a lifelong omni- atkin is very sensitive to noise. she always had trouble sleeping

and she told the story when jack was in the south pacific in the pacific theater of world war ii, that she would wake up in a sweat when her heart palpitating in the middle of the night because she would have these nightmares about his speed loss. this is before joe was lost in the european theater and before jack was sunken almost lost. she was anticipating what could happen if a mother would. after all the things she feared would happen begin happening, it had an even greater impact on her ability to sleep that she would have nightmares. so she returned to farmers verticals and sleeping pills to help her get through that. >> host: as your portrait documents the human moment, it seems to me, you said this to me that makes you think she was even more courageous than we realize because she did have to deal with a great deal of misery

and pain. it wasn't that she just pushed it away, that she tried to get past it. >> guest: she did. but the combination having to turn to pharmaceuticals, i do think that shows to me how courageous she was because i was in grade school and high school at that time and my mother gave me as a gift of the memoir, times to remember. i remember my mother using rose kennedy as an example and role model for all of us that here's this woman who has this deep faith and even when that didn't happen, i'm not going to say she does have lots of money and that helps, but only gives her more time to worry about the things. of course at that time, rose doesn't talk about taking pharmaceuticals, but now that i see that is a complete portrait of her, and makes her seem more human, it more courageous than

in public she was able to put on the stoic person, help the country along with her daughters in law, as they would encounter tragedies to make the country strong and then go on. i she would always say, we mourn the dead, but we go on the living. >> host: one of the things the kennedys did quite well i thought was took a personal tragedy and then try to do something about it in a public way on a national scale. i wonder if you could talk a little bit about how rose towards the later part of her life got involved in trying to do something about mental retardation and speak out about it, but that it took a while and that came from, i assume, her experience with her daughter, rosemary. >> guest: indeed, her daughter, rosemary, porticos described at the time she got older and is manifesting

developmental disabilities and lower i.q., experts told rose this would have been in the 1920s that rosemary was mentally. >> host: developmental disabilities? >> guest: they manifested themselves to her mother a very basic ways, that she learned to walk at a later age than her two older brothers. she was the oldest girl or in, we should add, at the height of the spanish flu epidemic in 1918. but she didn't learn to talk as rapidly as the boys. she didn't learn to read and write. but she did right, and a larger mother she was writing from the right side of the page to the left. in modern times, we might think it was simply a learning disability of some sort. but the combination of these things, and you can see photographs, for example, of toddler rose mary with her sibling and kathleen is perhaps one years old and she is being held up and walking, but her sister, two years older is also held up and walking.

so her physical slowness as well as mental slowness and the kennedys were told he she had this mental retardation. the kennedys were way ahead of the game in attempting to mainstream her because they were told, you have to send her off to an institution. they did not institutionalize her in so many come in many years later when many people know she had a lobotomy that joe kennedy senior had ordered for her in 1941 without consulting rose. >> host: she didn't tell rose? >> guest: is hard to know, he didn't tell rosie was going to do this. >> host: was she upset to that? >> guest: rose did not leave a record of her feelings about that with a couple of exceptions, that she does explain how she felt about it and that she did regret it for the rest of her life and was angry at her house and because of it. and then, and he came upon a little interview she did with alicia brogan, who was at one

time married to fdr junior. new rose kennedy and the kennedy family. in the early 70s, felicia went down to palm beach and stayed with rose a day or two and interviewed her for a book she was doing call doers and dowagers. about great matriarchs in america. she asked -- felicia asked arose about rosemary and said you don't talk much about her in rose burst into tears and became choked up. this would have been 30 years after the procedure at which point rosemary did have to be institutionalized because the lobotomy went terribly wrong. we should say two things. one is this was thought to be in 1941 the procedure that try to minimize anxiety and depression, which rosemary also suffered from. so joe, who was always up on the medical procedures and the

kennedys can always go and get the best medical procedures. they always talk to the best people in the field. the people in the field were telling them at the time they thought a lobotomy might be appropriate for rosemary. we know now of course it was not. it was disastrous. the other thing is the kennedys, rose and joe had vowed practically to each other that they rarely told each other back is. in fact, rose asked that show not be told of the president's assassination until the day after. she wanted to give him one more night of what she hoped would be restful sleep. by that time he suffered his own stroke in december of 61 and was an invalid himself. they had this lifelong pact as a married couple that when they were apart, and if they had bad news in the other was the way they wouldn't tell each other. but they also try to keep that is from each other so the other wouldn't worry. in some ways it was part and parcel of their marital bond.

>> host: so how did they get from that to her actually being an activist for helping none? >> guest: as you say, the kennedy family will take these tragedies and turn them into good for others. >> host: special olympics. >> guest: special olympics in the 60s. before that, joe junior was killed in the war in 1944, his father in the family founded the joseph p. kennedy junior foundation. at the time for disadvantaged children it was called. they then moved that foundation towards hope helping and that became the number one in the special olympics grow out of that. the family couldn't say anything about rosemary because it was hidden from public view, particularly since this is a family wanting to move ahead in politics. only in the late 50s and as president kennedy gets close to running for office does the word

begin to filter out from the family about rosemary. and only in interviews in the late 50s and early 60s this rose began to utter the words, my daughter was mentally. otherwise the family would not talk about it prior to that. with that, kennedy shriver, the sister runs with that mission very much involved with her mother and they go out and raise millions and millions of dollars for the charity. they had the power to do it. and there is the cause of rose's life. she was very much more traditional first lady's, but a first lady will take one policy area to focus on. rose kennedy did that in her policy area was a personal one for her. both try to help those already born with it in fact can, trying to prevent it by, for example,

encouraging women to have measles vaccination so they wouldn't contract german measles while pregnant and pass along a mental disability. >> host: would ask you a question. rose is carefully calibrating the image, but there's also this panorama of pathology in the family. there's drinking. later their suicide and philandering. how do you reconcile those? some people have tried to make the case that rose contributed to that in some way. did you find that in your research? what do you think? >> guest: well, i'm a political scientist, not a psychologist. i won't go too far down that road. i will say rose herself wreck dives in her own way, in the zone writings, the story about wishing in her journal that her children would pray the rosary rather than turning to pills and alcohol.

but it became clear in the 1970s, because the very public arrests of her older grandchildren for pot possession, some of them were putting the high and hyannisport. they address that inconvenient truth and she said how disappointed she was that she had hoped her grandchildren with all of the vantage is in the name is elaborately status may have stood up against drug use. she said, i realize it is very widespread. the private schools and homes. i know they're exposed to it, but i hope the older grandchildren would stand up against it. ..

it was an opiate based drugs and a lot of over-the-counter drugs were for many years that was in a household medicine cabinet as you can imagine and given for upset stomachs and it would be given to teething children. it would be given to hysterical menopausal women and rose had us on a travel list well into the 1970s when it began to be

listed in massachusetts as a controlled substance, so it appears to me that even she may have had some issues. i don't want to go to the point of saying an addiction but she certainly indicated by the drugs that she was taking with her on trips that she had quite an array of medicatiomedicatio ns. sometimes perhaps even what people do today they end up taking medications for the symptoms that are caused by the other medications that they are taking. i don't want to say that she contributed to the addiction problems but it could be some sort of -- some sort of genetic issue within the family that rose may have had as well. >> host: there on the dark side of camelot here for a minute. what about chappaquiddick and her reaction to that and how she handled back? >> guest: again she doesn't have -- a lot of her personal papers but she does write to people about it at the time and is has a little bit of a journal about it