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of some of the other supporters of the idea?

Yes, certainly it did. Murray and the other people who had put the bills in didn't really press for their hearing. The Murray-Wagner-Dingle bill and the interest in hearings or any possibility of it coming out of committee were stopped.

Senator Lucas of Illinois was defeated with the AMA getting Dirksen to make an attack on him, as the Majority Leader, in favor of so-called socialized medicine, a subject which Lucas had always denied any interest in. So that even people who had denied any interest, just because they were Democrats, and somebody attributed the idea of socialized medicine to them through the activity of doctors who always have some influence in a community, and if a community isn't well informed and if the other side isn't fighting on a national level hard to explain what the truth is, the situation is very dangerous.

Now, Truman never spent a lot of time on the air; he never had fought for health insurance the way Kennedy has fought for Medicare, and as you see Medicare has not been successful yet, although I hope it will be next year. So, the AMA was virtually unanswered and the only people who had any capacity for answering was this little group of the Committee for the Nation's Health which was inept-- and my husband who at this time was not wellenough to undertake any