CONCORD, N.H. (AP) — The sun was shining in June 1979 as Rosalynn Carter made her way through an enthusiastic crowd in Laconia, New Hampshire.
“She shook my hand!” yelled one delighted participant.
The first lady was in the state for her husband’s re-election campaign, but this was no political rally. Instead, she was at a sprawling 75-year-old institution founded for “feebleminded” children that the U.S. Justice Department had deemed “a classic example of warehousing.” She was joined by Gov. Hugh Gallen, a kindred spirit who had been pushing to correct the deplorable conditions there and at the state’s psychiatric hospital.
“Going to a place like the Laconia State School and talking not to voters but to people dealing with a very acute issue — well, it doesn’t happen very often. It didn’t then, and it certainly doesn’t at all now,” recalled Dayton Duncan, who was there as Gallen’s press secretary.
“She could have just given a good speech about what the administration was hoping to do and left it at that,” Duncan said. “But the fact that she would go to the Laconia State School and meet with the people who work there, the children who were warehoused there and the parents, was special.”
After leaving the White House, Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter launched programs that have, among other things, monitored elections in at least 113 countries and nearly eradicated the Guinea worm parasite in the developing world. But the former president has said that The Carter Center would have been a success had it accomplished nothing but his wife’s mental health work.
That’s according to Kathy Cade, vice chair of Atlanta-based center and a longtime aide to Rosalynn Carter, and others who know the couple. They spoke to The Associated Press in the months leading up to Rosalynn Carter’s death Sunday at age 96.
“I do not think there has ever been another sort of leader in the mental health field who has had as much of an impact on…
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