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accomplished yet, and I'm boning it will still happen. It's really very, very hard to do against the total opposition of doctors, and the doctors who are for it are not really very articulate and certainly are not organized.

Well, after this first message, President Truman didn't suffer any political disadvantage, did he?

No, but wait. Later on, for '52, the AMA started to organize because they felt that it was going to be part of the Democratic Party platform, and as Truman had said he was for it in '48 and he won and continued to say every once in a while that he was for health insurance, in '52 it might be dangerous. And they did everything--I'll tell this later in the story--to prevent it from being an issue in the campaign, and we found that they were so well organized that we took some steps which I'll describe. It was very dangerous politically.

But in the early stage then after this first message or with the first message they weren't really fully alerted?

They weren't really worried in '45 because they, in the first place, didn't think that Truman would be reelected and they didn't think the bill was going to pass because they thought they had it bottled up, and indeed they did. But they saw after he was elected and continued to be interested in it--and Albert came down and made a speech in 1949, just before he got ill,