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And the thing that the Lasker Foundation provided were the fact books, the facts on all the major killing and crippling diseases: what was being spent, what the incidence of the diseases were, how many deaths, what pay-offs there had been due to research. Our factual material provided the background for witnesses to testify with. That's the way it was tied in.
At our meeting with the President, this late June day, we asked the President point blank, “Will you write a letter, to Laughton, the then Director of the Budget, asking for these figures?” He got up and said smiling, “You will see. There will be an improvement.”
This we took to mean that he would actually do something about it. In the next instance, Matt Connolly was in his office and asked us to wait until the President went out to make a speech in the rose garden to a visiting group. He said we could sit under the portico near him. It was a touching little scene of Americans who had come from all over to listen to their President, full of young faces against a white background in the pretty rose garden between the White House and the Executive Offices.
We left the next morning. At the Statler Hotel Florence and I decided that we'd better call up General Wallace Graham, the President's personal physician, in order to tell him of our request to the President and to be sure that, he, Graham, understood about it and would remind the President of his promise to do something.
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