Remembering Rosalynn Carter: Generous, Global Servant Leader

Rosalynn Carter, a close political and policy adviser to her husband, President?Jimmy Carter, who created the modern Office of the First Lady and advocated for better treatment of the mentally ill during her years in the White House and for four decades afterward, died Nov. 19 at her home in Plains, Ga. She was 96.

Determined not to be relegated to a ceremonial role, she worked in the tradition of former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt to make herself an extension of the president and his policies. She was the first first lady to maintain an office in the East Wing of the White House and only the second, after Roosevelt, to testify in Congress.

The historic high point of the Carter administration was the signing of the Camp David Accords between Egypt and Israel in 1978. Mrs. Carter recalled that she and her husband expected to stay at Camp David for three or four days as hosts of Begin and Sadat. They stayed 12 days, pushing past dejection, disappointment, and dashed hopes to an agreement that outlined a framework for a comprehensive Middle East peace.

She was proud of her husband. “Begin and Sadat shared the Nobel Peace Prize that year,” she wrote in her memoir, “but it was Jimmy who had made it possible.”?Jimmy Carter received?a Nobel Peace Prize 24 years later for his post-presidential work on global conflict resolution and human rights advocacy.

As first lady, Mrs. Carter continued working on strategies for helping the mentally ill. “I wanted to take mental illnesses and emotional disorders out of the closet, to let people know it is all right to admit having a problem without the fear of being called crazy,” she wrote in her autobiography. “If only we could consider mental illnesses as straightforwardly as we do physical illnesses, those affected could seek help and be treated in an open and effective way.”

Her efforts were instrumental in congressional approval and funding for the Mental Health Systems Act of September 1980, the first major reform of federal, publicly funded mental health programs in nearly two decades.

“Our celebration was brief,” Mrs. Carter recalled in her book. “Within a month Ronald Reagan was elected president, and with the change of administration, many of our dreams and the bulk of the funding for our program were gone. It was a bitter loss.”

In 1982, they founded the Carter Center, where Mrs. Carter continued her involvement with mental health issues as chairwoman of the center’s Mental Health Task Force. She wrote or co-wrote five books, mainly about caregiving and mental health.

She traveled around the world for the Carter Center on trips to promote human rights and peace initiatives and to monitor elections. She and her husband spent a week a year building homes for low-income people with Habitat for Humanity, and they built or remodeled more than 4,300 homes in 14 countries.?She was in every way we define leadership, service and impact- GlobalMindED.?We will miss her bright light in the world.