his sister actually did have a lobotomy...

Rose Marie Kennedy (September 13, 1918 – January 7, 2005) was the third child and first daughter of Joseph Patrick Kennedy and Rose Elizabeth Kennedy née Fitzgerald, born a year after her brother, future U.S. President John F. Kennedy. Under medical advice, she underwent a lobotomy at the age of 23, after which she was mentally incapacitated for the rest of her life.

Biography
Childhood
She was born at her parent's home and christened Rose Marie Kennedy and commonly called Rosemary. To her family and friends, she was known as "Rosie".

Rosemary has been described as being a shy child whose I.Q. tests reportedly indicated a moderate mental retardation. But this is a question of some controversy. Diaries written by Rosemary in the late 1930s and published in the 1980s, reveal a happy, sophisticated young woman whose life was filled with outings to the opera, tea dances, dress fittings, and other social interests.

"Went to luncheon in the ballroom in the White House. James Roosevelt took us in to see his father, President Roosevelt. He said, 'It's about time you came. How can I put my arm around all of you? Which is the oldest? You are all so big." [By this, he meant "big" as grown-up children, rather than the babies he remembered.]
"Have a fitting at 10:15 Elizabeth Arden. Appointment dress fitting again. Home for lunch. Royal tournament in the afternoon."
"Up too late for breakfast. Had it on deck. Played Ping-Pong with Ralph's sister, also with another man. Had lunch at 1:15. Walked with Peggy. also went to horse races with her, and bet and won a dollar and a half. Went to the English Movie at five. Had dinner at 8:45. Went to the lounge with Miss Cahill and Eunice and retired early."
She also was presented to King George VI and Queen Elizabeth during her father's service as the American Ambassador to the United Kingdom.

Placid and easygoing as a child and teenager, the maturing Rosemary became increasingly assertive in her personality. She was reportedly subject to violent mood swings. Some observers have since attributed this behavior to her difficulties in keeping up with her active siblings, as well as the hormonal surges associated with sexual maturation (puberty). In any case, the family had difficulty dealing with the often-stormy Rosemary, who had begun to sneak out at night from the convent where she was being educated and cared for.[citation needed]


Lobotomy
In 1941, when Rosemary was 23, her father was told by her doctors that a lobotomy would help calm her "mood swings that the family found difficult to handle at home". Joseph Kennedy gave permission for the procedure performed by Dr. Walter Freeman, the director of the laboratories at St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C., together with his partner, James W. Watts, MD, from the University of Virginia. Watts performed his neurosurgical training at the Massachusetts General Hospital, and later he became the Chief of Neurosurgery at the George Washington University Hospital. Highly regarded, Dr. Watts later became the 91st president of the Medical Society of the District of Columbia.

At the time of the surgery, the procedure was relatively new: Freeman and Watts had only performed 65 previous lobotomies. Dr. Watts, who performed the surgery while Dr. Freeman supervised/observed, described the procedure:

We went through the top of the head, I think she was awake. She had a mild tranquilizer. I made a surgical incision in the brain through the skull. It was near the front. It was on both sides. We just made a small incision, no more than an inch." The instrument Dr. Watts used looked like a butter knife. He swung it up and down to cut brain tissue. "We put an instrument inside," he said. As Dr. Watts cut, Dr. Freeman put questions to Rosemary. For example, he asked her to recite the Lord's Prayer or sing "God Bless America" or count backwards. ... "We made an estimate on how far to cut based on how she responded." ... When she began to become incoherent, they stopped.—James W. Watts
Instead of producing the hoped-for result, however, the lobotomy reduced Rosemary to an infantile mentality that left her incontinent and staring blankly at walls for hours. Her verbal skills were reduced to unintelligible babble. Her mother, Mrs. Rose Kennedy, remarked that although the lobotomy stopped her daughter's violent behavior, it left her completely incapacitated. "Rose was devastated; she considered it the first of the Kennedy family tragedies."

Although Freeman went on to perform more than 3,000 lobotomies on individuals with mental illness during his career, such lobotomy treatments are now discredited by the mental health and medical communities, and the procedure has not been used for decades.

Aftermath
In 1949, Rosemary moved to the St. Coletta School for Exceptional Children (formerly known as St. Coletta's Institute for Backward Children) in Jefferson, Wisconsin, a residential institution for people with disabilities. Due to the severity of her mental condition, Rosemary became largely detached from the Kennedy clan, but she was visited on regular occasions by her sister Eunice Kennedy Shriver, the founder of the Special Olympics and an advocate for the disabled on Rosemary's behalf. Joe Kennedy also made monetary donations to philanthropic agencies that he founded to help people with developmental disabilities.

Occasionally, Rosemary was taken to visit relatives in Florida and Washington, D.C and to visit her childhood home on Cape Cod, Massachusetts.

Publicly, she was declared to be mentally handicapped. This was more socially-acceptable in a political family than a failed lobotomy. "Only a few doctors who worked for the Kennedys knew the truth about Rosemary's condition, as did the FBI", due to a background check of Joe. Joe's attorney told them she had a "mental illness".

Death
Rosemary died from natural causes on January 7, 2005, at the Atkinson Memorial Hospital in Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin, at the age of 86, with her three surviving sisters Eunice Kennedy Shriver, Patricia Kennedy Lawford, and Jean Kennedy Smith, and her only surviving brother Senator Ted Kennedy by her side. She was the fifth of the Kennedy children to die, but the first to die from natural causes. She is buried in Holyhood Cemetery in Brookline, Massachusetts.

That would make sense. It doesn't affect zoantropy's typing. I don't know why he has to act like a baby about it.

my grandma has this and she was gone 4 months after she was diagnosed.

Let's all have Ted in our prayers and/or wish Sen. Ted Kennedy a successful Brain Surgery for his brain tumor. He will undergo surgery to treat a malignant brain tumor.

Kennedy to undergo brain surgery - CNN.com

I was hoping he would not need surgery but I guess the doctors have other plans.. They are the experts...

The doctor reports Ted Kennendy made a full recover and feels like a million Bucks.

Kennedy out of 'successful' brain surgery and he feels like a million dollars- Yahoo! News

This so called operation sounds AwFuLLy suspicious... because Ted recovered from a serious Brain Surgery and made a full recovery in less than four hours... Either the doctors know of secret new treatment or there was nothing wrong with the Senator and this is just another way of taking more money from the Senator...

Anyhow... The bottom line is Sen. Ted Kennendy is going to be OK...

After the doctors finished tinking with Sen. Ted Kennendy brain... Ted reports he feels smarter and wished they did this procedure long ago.

Ted is thinking about requiring everyone in New England area to go throught this brain surgery procedure.

What do you think? Please elaborate....

Now that Ted Kennendy made a full recovery... Ted now wants the rest of the Senate, Congress etc... to have their thinking cap fixed...

Good plan.

why is it that i get the impression that zoanthropy is the one who has had the lobotomy and not ted kennedy?

All he has to do is come here and read your posts. Then he will be instantly healed.

This is just Zo's schtick. No one is really that stupid.