Rosemary: The Hidden Kennedy Daughter Read Online Free PDF Page A

maid.
    Baby Rosemary was christened in the Catholic Church within a week after her birth. Joe’s sister Margaret Kennedy was the godmother, and Eddie Moore was chosen to be Rosemary’s godfather. Moore had been a trusted friend and adviser to Rose’s father, serving as Fitzgerald’s secretary when he was mayor of Boston. In time, Moore became one of Joe’s most relied-upon business associates, and he and his wife, Mary, became close friends to Joe and Rose both. As a devout Catholic, Eddie Moore took his role as godfather to Rosemary very seriously. As cosponsor, with Rosemary’s parents, for the sacred Catholic rite of baptism, Moore made a commitment to the Catholic Church that he would remain devoted to Rosemary his entire life and be available to her whenever she needed him. His role, along with that of Rosemary’s godmother, Margaret Kennedy, required that through his words and actions he would guide Rosemary’s spiritual growth in the Catholic faith.
    “We owe them so much for their unswerving devotion, their affection, their care and solicitude for our children,” Rose later wrote of the Moores.Childless themselves, Eddie and Mary shared in almost daily interactions with all of Joe and Rose’s children. “They derived vicarious pleasure from ours,” Rose later remembered of the Moores’ love for the Kennedy children, “rejoicing with us on the birth of a new son or daughter and later in life weeping and mourning over the poignant tragedies of war and death which came to us.”The Moores were present at holidays, birthdays, and religious ceremonies. Mary Moore helped the children learn to shop for presents at Christmas and birthdays, often acting as godmother without the official title.Rose would later write that she and Joe trusted and loved them like cherished, older family members.Eddie would become even more than that to Joe. Gloria Swanson, who was to become one of Joe’s more famous mistresses, remarked that Eddie was Joe’s “shadow, his stand-in, his all-around private secretary and aide-de-camp,” and his “chief brain, his auxiliary memory. He kept track of everything that went on.”Wherever the Kennedys went, Eddie and Mary followed, nurturing special bonds with all of the Kennedy children. Their love and devotion to “Rosie” would be the most important bond of all.

2
----
The Making of a Mother
    B Y THE TIME the Kennedys were celebrating Rosemary’s first birthday, Rose was pregnant again. “There were no signs,” Rose observed, “that anything might be wrong.” But as the months went by and she found herself closer to the birth of her fourth child, in February 1920, Rose started noticing that Rosemary’s development was markedly different from her boys’. “She crawled, stood, took her first steps, said her first words late . . . She had problems managing a baby spoon.” Rose tried to excuse the differences as being due to gender and temperament. Rosemary’s failure to reach typical developmental milestones made her mother slightly anxious. Rose dismissed those concerns, however, “because of wishful thinking.”
    There were other serious strains. Rose was now a stay-at-home mother of three, soon to be four, children. It was a far different role from being Joe Kennedy’s fiancée or Honey Fitz’s escort and confidante. Rose’s relative isolation compared to her premarriage life affected her sense of self and her youthful needs for independence and attention. The dreams she and Joe had talked about allthose years while they were courting and he was having his first business success were playing out in a way she had not imagined.
    Rose was deeply committed to the vows she had made as a Child of Mary at Blumenthal, vows she understood carried enormous expectations and requirements of selflessness. A Child of Mary would “bear with submission, humiliations, such as advice, reprehensions, punishments which she may deserve, but she will be glad to have occasion to practice