Rosemary: The Hidden Kennedy Daughter Read Online Free

loss. Seventy years later, Rose still harbored the painful memory of her dreams of a college education dashed because her father had placed his own politics before her aspirations. “My greatest regret,” she told Doris Kearns Goodwin, “is not having gone to Wellesley College. It is something I have felt a little sad about my whole life.”
    Established in 1880 by Mother Randall, one of the Sisters of Saint Joseph, the Convent of the Sacred Heart was a day school providing a classical education for girls and young women from the elementary level through two years of postgraduate work. Of French origin, Sacred Heart schools had been spreading across Europe and the United States for decades, their object “the propagation of the devotion to the Sacred Heart [of Jesus] and the education of the upper classes.”A classical course of study similar to what Rose had experienced at Dorchester High School was augmented by intense religious instruction, medieval church history, and French, of which Rose was not very fond. “I knew Latin, Roman and Greek history and grammatical French,” Rose told Goodwin, “but knew nothing of medieval history and literature, nor could I understand spoken French.”Her public-school preparation had not readied her for the particular instructional demands familiar to students who had attended Sacred Heart during their formative years. These included “ethics, metaphysics and psychology, history . . . close reading of English classics and general history of foreign literatures; mathematics . . . Latin . . . [and] experimental study of the natural sciences.” Modern languages other than French were optional.The lack of advanced classes in math, science, and modern literature prevented national accreditation, however. Rose’s course of study also included a heavy dose of domestic science, preparing those young women not destined for a religious order to be model wives and mothers.
    Religion and faith stood at the core of the Sacred Heart studies. “Let religion be at once the foundation and the crowning point of the education [that the Sacred Heart schools] intend to give and consequently the chief subject taught,” the early constitution of the schools declared.At the time Rose entered the convent school in Boston, its curriculum had not changed materially since 1869. “Under such training,” one sister Sacred Heart school boasted, “were formed those women who are now doing credit to their Alma Mater, as consecrated virgins, modest wives, consorts to whom are entrusted the mightiest cares of State, and the queenly mothers whom the Catholic Church delights to call her daughters.”Archbishop O’Connell’s demand that Fitzgerald and his daughter demonstrate their devotion to their faith as upper-class Irish Americans, and their fidelity to him as a rising power among Catholics in Massachusetts, would forever change Rose’s future.
    Joe would become Rose’s touchstone over those years of disappointment. As she achieved the higher education available to her, whether at the convent school on Commonwealth Avenue or at the New England Conservatory in Boston, where she studied piano, her time with Joe soothed her wounded soul—and, given Honey Fitz’s disapproval, was perhaps an outlet for rebellion. The young couple managed to see each other through subterfuge and clandestine meetings, often helped along by their friends. “It took teamwork and conspiracy,” Rose remembered many years later.Her father pushed other suitors, but to no avail.Even Fitzgerald’s chauffeur, who had a soft spot for Joe, would drive Rose to some of their rendezvous, without the mayor’s knowledge.
    Honey Fitz’s specific objections to Joe aren’t clear; certainly his background and drive would have felt familiar to the older man. The grandson of immigrants from County Wexford in Ireland, Joe grew up in East Boston, an urban center dominated by Irish immigrants across the harbor from Boston. A large