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because Reagan was trying to cut it. Then we started strengthening the board, getting in people with real clout. Now we have the chairman of Manufacturer's Hanover, and the chairman of Solomon Brothers, and a whole bunch of people whose names are really quite meaningful, and who have taken their jobs quite seriously.

In the third year, we created a committee of the board to make what we called a needs assessment study. What were the needs of the entire system? That was a year long study. Practically everybody--every curator, practically everybody in the whole place--played a part in making the study. We totaled up the figures, and it came to a billion dollars. Well, we knew we couldn't get a billion, so we rather arbitrarily cut this back to 475 million. Then we went to an outside firm that advises on drives, and got them to do an evaluation of what could be done. As a practical matter, what could you aim for? They would interview people who had shown some interest in the Library, both public officials and private. They came up with an estimate that we could raise 300 million dollars, half in public funds and half in private funds. These days 300 million doesn't sound like so much, because Harvard raised 350 [million] in this drive, and so on. But there's one very big difference, and that is we got only colonels and no foot soldiers. We don't have any alumni. Harvard had 220,000 alumni from which it managed to get 5,000 workers. I mean people who really went out and worked! We had the trustees, and some of them don't like to ask for money, don't know how to ask for money. So it was a hell of a big jump.

In the meantime we were spending money that we didn't even have