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doctors' wives said that these people were Socialists or attributed all kinds of left-wing ideas to them, and said that they were espousing a mischievous and dangerous thing and that national health insurance was a dreadful, dreadful thing that would hurt the care and the medicine for people of the United States. They told all kinds of lies about what had happened in England. And really their efforts on a local level contributed to the defeat of these two men.

They chose men who represented rural areas.

Well, in these two cases. They also organized very strongly against Pepper in Florida. Now, there were other things against Pepper because he had been very controversial in his attitudes about other things, but the AMA took a lead in trying to defeat him and he was defeated.

This, of course, gave the AMA feelings of delusions of grandeur to have been so successful in the 1950 campaign, and they rejoined about their victories. Now, I realized that if this went on, our pushing of the President into espousing national health insurance could be very dangerous to the Democratic campaign in '52 or that it might be, and I was worried about this.

Did you notice that it in any way dampened the enthusiasm