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We just didn't know; we were very scared really. It was very, very frightening because they were likely to do the reverse of anything that the Democrats had done.

The new officials seemed to be very cautious.

Yes, they were very cautious.

At the Z Triangle Ranch, where I was resting with Anna and Florence, we phoned Leonard Sheely, the Surgeon General of the Public Health Service, about April 1st. He had no information about the Eisenhower budget. They were revising the Truman budget completely.

Finally, on April 10th, I phoned Dr. Van Slike, now the head of the Research Grants Division of all the Institutes of Health, who had done a superb job until a few months ago as the Director of the Heart Institute. I asked him if he knew anything about the budget. He said, “Well, it's still confidential, but next Monday it will be out, and I will tell you. There are no construction funds in the Eisenhower budget of '53, and the 10 million dollars you got in the Truman budget has been lost. So we are back where we were with fiscal '53.”

No attention paid to the requests of the deans from the medical schools?

Oh, nothing.