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Truman took office, he inquired of Sam Rosenman, “What items on President Roosevelt's agenda still remain undone?” Sam Rosenman mentioned that a health message to Congress was one of them. President Truman then said to him, “Please prepare it and go ahead with it. I want to do everything President Roosevelt had planned.”

In May of '45 Sam Rosenman asked me to come to see him at the Wardman Park Hotel one evening and showed me a rough outline of the President's message which he was preparing. It was very good, except that it contained no recommendations about more facilities for research in the field of mental illness, and I suggested this to him. It covered the need for more hospital construction, medical education, nursing and research and national health insurance in general terms. In other words, it was the first time any comprehensive message on the health needs of the people had ever been even thought about as a message to any Congress in the United States by any President.

How terribly important it was at that time for the whole cause.

Well, I don't know. I hope it was. We still haven't got health insurance. We did get hospital construction and we did get medical research but we did an awful lot of other things to get it. But this is what we tried to do; it didn't all succeed and we had to do an awful lot else to get what did