Least Like the Other review: Rosemary Kennedy’s story told with provocative boldness

The subject of Least Like the Other is Rosemary Kennedy, the older sister of JFK whose existence was kept a closely guarded secret for most of her long life. At birth, she was the victim of a scandalous piece of incompetence in the operating theatre which starved her brain of oxygen and left her with lifelong learning difficulties.

She grew up to be an “affectionate, warmly responsive, and loving” girl, but her impulsive behaviour in her teens worried the nuns at the convent where she was sent to study, and it worried her father even more. Beautiful, she took to sneaking out at night and meeting boys: patriarch Joseph Kennedy dreaded what a family pregnancy scandal would do to his carefully laid political plans.

In 1941 he secretly arranged for her to have a pre-frontal lobotomy. That was an operation in which the links between the frontal lobes and the rest of the brain were physically severed, as two holes were drilled into the skull: this was a short-lived craze for curing “difficult” people, but it often went disastrously wrong.