The Most Lasting Kennedy Legacy  How Eunice Shriver and her
family changed the world for the mentally retarded  November 7,
1993 RSS Feed Print   • Comment (1)  By Harrison Rainie and
Katia Hetter  Not long after John Kennedy entered the White
House in 1961, his sister Eunice Kennedy Shriver began one of
the most heartfelt campaigns any Kennedy ever undertook. She
argued to family members that it would be immensely helpful if
they revealed one of their most closely guarded secrets: that
one of their own, the president's sister Rosemary, was mentally
retarded. It took more than a year to bring the idea to
fruition, and it finally won sanction after the clan's two
central figures blessed it: Patriarch Joseph Kennedy made clear
he could live with the disclosure as long as President Kennedy
supported it. In the spring of 1962, Eunice told JFK she wanted
to write a piece for the Saturday Evening Post about Rosemary,
and he responded: "That's fine. Let me see it first." The
article appeared in the September 22 issu