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Mary LaskerMary Lasker
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Lasker:

Well, Mrs. Rosenberg had been a friend of Eisenhower's, and I met himseveral times before he was President, including one time, which I think I told you about, in 1948, when he asked Albert Lasker and me for lunch at Columbia. He was then the President of Columbia University. He asked us then for a million dollars of matching money for the money they were going to get for the research building at Columbia University.

But the White House was really closed to us, or perhaps we didn't try hard enough to get into it. But we felt that basically Eisenhower was unsympathetic to money for health and medical research and to health legislation, and we really knew nobody around him who was sympathetic.

Well, our activities were largely with people in the Congress between '52 and '55. Stevenson I don't recall encountering again until early in '55, when Bill Blair talked to me about a health speech that Stevenson wanted to make at New York University-- that was in the spring of '55--and I suggested that I get some doctors to brief him on what the status of medical research was in cancer and heart. I did ask Dr. C. P. Rhoads and Dr. Irving Wright to come and talk to him, Rhoads about cancer research and Wright about heart research. I asked Emerson Foote to meet him at that time in order to try to interpret the doctors' views in lay language. It wasn't particularly successful, but Stevenson did make a speech in the spring of '55 at the opening of a new section of the medical school of New York University, which was written largely by Mike Gorman, and maybe edited a little bit by





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