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he said, “Okay, if you will send a letter from Davis' and send me a copy, I'll see if it can get in.”
The long and short of it, I call him and he says, “It takes time,” and finally the letter was published, and I said, “That's fantastic.” And I showed everybody the letter, and nothing happened. I didn't think anything would happen anyway. I called him up and I said, “I want to thank you for the letter. This is good. But nothing's happened.”
He said, “Well, what did you expect to happen?”
I said, “I thought the hospitals would read it and they would understand that there's a logical moral case here and it appears in the New York Times, that they would react to it.”
He says, “Well, that's not exactly going to happen.”
So I said, “Is it possible that we could have an editorial?”
He said, “No. The Times does not write editorials on Montefiore Hospital. We might have an editorial on the steel industry if there's a steel negotiation, or on the auto industry, railroads, but not this.”
A week later I called him. “Are you sure?” I told him some more stories.
He said, “No, no, no.”
A week later I called him again. “Look, I've got some other things I want to tell you about what's happening here.” And he always listens to the stories. I said, “You know, the things that are happening here are going to end up, I can see down the line, there's going to be a strike here. Because we want an election, they won't give us an election, they won't react to us, the workers.” He listens.
And finally one day he calls me and says, “Can you get me a little bit more information on this?”
And one day, lo and behold, there's an editorial in The New York Times on Montefiore, on the problems of the voluntary hospitals, written very, very carefully. Its conclusions: Is it wise? Is it fair? Is it just? We understand that the hospitals have problems. And I say, “Gee whiz, this is wonderful. This is magnificent.”
In the meanwhile, Jimmy is doing things, and I'm beginning to start to feel my oats and start calling people in other papers, and I'm beginning to get certain reactions already to stories, because Jimmy's things are beginning to be known. After a while, he's writing two
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