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after a few conversations with leading publishers, including Dewitt Wallace of the Reader's Digest, I soon realized that it was going to be impossible to get across the need for universal health insurance at all unless we had a spokesman of supreme importance. This made me anxious to interest President Roosevelt in the subject. He had never been interested in the field of health insurance. His doctor, Ross McIntyre, had always been said to warn him that the American Medical Association would be hostile to the idea and that the idea would be defeated in Congress because the doctors would be so actively against it.

Was this why he failed to develop interest in this?

Yes. Nobody pushed him and McIntyre always put the dampers on him. Actually, Roosevelt did not like to hear about sickness and was not at all preoccupied with the problem of illness although he had been the victim of a severe illness, polio, himself. He did sponsor the Warm Springs Foundation and the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, but he took no interest in other health problems, and the work in connection with these two organizations was done by Basil O'Connor and he just lent his name to it and was sometimes at a meeting at the White House. But he had no comprehensive idea about people's needs in this area, nor was he at all interested in medical research.

Do you think this was because he was cushioned by his own