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In October he got a heart attack and after that contracted pneumonia. Now, in these days the heart attack could probably have been taken care of much more effectively with anti-coagulants, and certainly pneumonia would have been taken care of in a man his age by penicillin or one of the antibiotics, so if it had happened even a few years later, in '46 say, he'd probably be alive. But he was ill just at the moment when medicine wasn't ready to help him adequately.

This, undoubtedly, made its impact on you, too.

Oh, it made a great impact on me, and I remember going to his funeral and feeling very bitter about it. I felt that he probably hadn't been well enough taken care of, but I didn't know specifically what could have been done. Now I know that maybe the knowledge wasn't in hand but that had he just lived a little longer he probably could have been saved.

Well, Franklin Roosevelt was, of course, overwhelmingly elected in '44, and by this time, as I recall, I voted for him in '44. Between the election in '40 and the one in '44, I'd become a friend of Anna Rosenberg and Judge and Mrs. Rosenman and Mrs. Roosevelt, and my whole knowledge and feeling about politics were incredibly more educated and had changed completely.

How did Mr. Lasker feel about this shift of allegiance?

Oh, he didn't mind because he really agreed, and had he