![Robert F Kennedy](https://www.aclu.org/sites/default/files/styles/content_area_full_width/public/field_media_media_image/rfk_opt_2.jpg?itok=_EGiKNCK)
Conditions inside the buildings at Willowbrook, however, were not wholly unknown. In 1965, Robert F. Kennedy, then a U.S. senator from New York, had paid an unannounced visit to the institution and denounced its conditions. Kennedy had an interest in such institutions because his sister, Rosemary, on whom a frontal lobotomy was performed at the initiative of her parents, was thought to be developmentally disabled. After visiting Willowbrook, Kennedy described the facility as a “situation that borders on a snake pit.”