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Mary LaskerMary Lasker
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he didn't pay much attention to what Jones said to him or could help him with, and I have a feeling that Jones has been possibly more useful since Ribicoff has retired, which was eight or nine months ago. He's a very energetic and attractive man but he was always shocked by our attitude that there was not enough money for medical research.

The job that he gave Bo Jones was the highest job in the bureaucracy of the health services because it actually came between him and the Surgeon General of the Public Health Service.

A new appointment for the Surgeon General was also to be made and we were in a great quandry about whom to recommend. We had decided initially to recommend Jim Watt of the Heart Institute because to recommend an outsider is very difficult, that is, it could be made very difficult to whoever from the outside came in. However, strong opposition developed against him, which we felt was going to give us another man who would be totally without any particular competence and with whom we would have no influence.

Q:

Why was there opposition to him?

Lasker:

Well, just because some people who had access to Ribicoff wanted somebody else that we thought was very incompetent.

So, we finally decided to urge Lister Hill to suggest Luther Terry, who was, I think, the Assistant Director of the Heart Institute and a clinician at the National Institutes of Health's laboratory and hospital at Bethesda. Lister Hill knew Luther Terry well, or he knew him because Terry had been named





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