“The weary fatalism of those days is no longer justified,” she wrote in the Post article, referring to the long era in which intellectual disability was treated as a permanent, unanageable condition. She described starting a day camp the previous summer at her Maryland farm, Timberlawn, with thirty-four children with intellectual disabilities and twenty-six volunteer counselors. She wrote about what the counselors expected — helplessness, unpredictability — and what they found instead: children capable of friendship, of swimming, of baseball, of all the ordinary things of childhood.
The article had a quality of personal conviction that went beyond policy argument. Eunice Kennedy Shriver was not writing as an academic or an administrator. She was writing as someone for whom this had been real and specific and close.
Camp Shriver, as the Timberlawn experiment became known, ran for four summers in the early 1960s. It became a model for similar camps around the country. And it became, gradually, the conceptual foundation for something larger.
Meanwhile, her brother the President was moving on the policy front. John F. Kennedy delivered a message to Congress in February 1963 specifically on the subject of mental illness and intellectual disability — a presidential message that explicitly called for a national commitment to these issues. It was the first presidential message of its kind in American history. Kennedy convened a panel of scientific, medical, legal, and educational experts to assess the federal role and make recommendations. He spoke of those with intellectual disabilities as people who “need no longer be alien to our affections or beyond the help of our communities.”