This is an I-Heart podcast.

This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, the show where America is the star

and the American people.

And to share your stories with us, send them to Our American Stories.com, our listeners' stories,

your stories. They're some of our favorites.

Joe and Rose Kennedy's strikingly beautiful daughter, Rosemary Kennedy,

the younger sister of President

John F. Kennedy, was intellectually disabled, a secret fiercely guarded by her powerful and

glamorous family. Here to tell the story is Kate Clifford Larson, author of Rosemary,

the Hidden Kennedy Daughter. Let's take a listen.

Back in 2005, Rosemary Kennedy died.

It was January, and there was a beautiful obituary of her in the Boston Globe,

and it was like two or three paragraphs, a lovely picture,

and I read it, and it just touched me.

And of course, as a New Englander, I knew about the Kennedy family and, you know, they're like

New England royalty. And I knew about Rosemary, but I didn't know much. And at the time, I was

starting work on another book. So I knew that I didn't have

much time, but I felt that I needed to go to the Kennedy Library and see if there was

material that I could write an article for like the Boston Globe magazine section or something.

But in 2008, I finally went to the JFK library thinking, you know, again,

I would just write an article because nothing had been written about her in the three years

between 2005 and 2008. And I happened to arrive at a time when they were opening up

...