Rosemary Kennedy’s ‘Love Child’ Wants Answers About Mom

Mary Claire Konner is desperate to learn if she’s the secret love child of tragic Rosemary Kennedy, the slain president’s troubled sister, who was cruelly lobotomized in 1941 and then hidden away until her death in 2005!

Konner wonders if ruthlessly ambitious patriarch Joe Kennedy (in spectacles) ordered his oldest daughter's lobotomy because Rosemary (2nd from right) had brought shame on the family by getting pregnant. “I’ve lived a wonderful life,” said the New Jersey grandma. “But I still want to know the truth about what happened.”

Mary Claire suspects she’s “the victim of the kind of cover-up that occurs when money, power or both cooperate to conceal the facts.” She was born on Feb. 24, 1942, at St. Mary’s Infant & Maternity Asylum in Buffalo, N.Y. — three months after Rosemary underwent a lobotomy.

The National ENQUIRER has learned that her adoption was shrouded in secrecy — but she was told her real parents were from a “well-known Irish-Catholic family.”

In the explosive book "Rosemary: The Hidden Kennedy Daughter," author Kate Clifford Larson writes Rosemary’s parents “found her sexuality dangerous” and moneybags Joe feared a scandal or an unwanted pregnancy could wreck the budding political futures of his sons.

“The family tried to protect her,” writes Larson. “But the situation was a ticking time bomb.” In November 1941, Joe had Dr. James Watts perform a frontal lobotomy on the brain of his 23-year-old daughter (shown here in 1937 with mother Rose Kennedy), at an Upstate New York facility.

After that, Rosemary could barely walk, knew only a few words and had the mental capacity of a toddler. She was housed at a psych ward in Upstate New York for seven years. Then in 1949, Joe sent her to St. Coletta School for Exceptional Children in Jefferson, Wis. She died at Fort Atkinson Memorial Health Hospital in 2005.

Meanwhile, Mary Claire has been searching for her birth mother for 35 years. “I was baptized a Roman Catholic on March 8,” she learned, and “a social worker picked me up in Buffalo and brought me all the way” to the St. Joseph’s orphanage in Scranton, Pa., “which is certainly not normal procedure.”

In 1984, Mary Claire’s now ex-husband spoke with Dave Phillips, the director of St. Joseph’s at the time, “who said my birth mother was from a ‘very, very, very well-known Irish Catholic family on the Northeast coast.’ My hospital bill was paid in cash,” he was told, and there was no record of who paid it. (Ambassador Joseph Kennedy shown in London, 1938.)

An aunt signed her out, which in 1942, meant one of two things — her birth mother was underage or developmentally disabled, she says. Her birth certificate says her mother was 23 — Rosemary Kennedy's age at the time. (Rosemary, left, with youngest sister Jean Kennedy-Smith, her last surviving sibling.)

Konner spent 18 months in the orphanage before being adopted by Peggy and Bill Moran of Livingston, N.J. A former orphanage nurse told her it was strange for a healthy baby girl to remain there for so long. (Rosemary, right, with younger sister Eunice Kennedy-Shriver.)

She later learned her secret birth family had arranged to find the right Catholic family to adopt her. “I knew I was adopted but I never asked them about it because I didn’t want to hurt them,” she said. “Now after all these years, I’d still like to know the absolute truth.”