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Mary LaskerMary Lasker
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Lasker:

Actually Florence Mahoney had introduced me to him when he was a Congressman, and we would once in a while see him in the corridors of Congress, and Florence would always says” He's a wonderful man; he's going to go far.” She had tremendous affection and enthusiasm for him. He looked extremely young, very thin, and not overwhelmingly impressive to me in those days, in the mid-'40s and late '40s, but Florence had unlimited confidence in him. Florence was always trying to interest him in things we were interested in, but I had very, very little contact with him. She would sometimes talk to him about birth control, a subject that seemed to entertain him, but he didn't espouse it until he became President at all. But he did make the first statement that any President made on the subject that was favorable.

However, I did not know him nearly as well as the other people who wanted to be candidates in this year of 1960. Hubert Humphrey I knew well. I knew Symington, and I knew Johnson. I was afraid of Kennedy as a Catholic because I was afraid he would never do anything on planned parenthood or birth control and that it would make it impossible to get anything done, that the attitudes of the Public Health Service and the Federal Government in relation to planned parenthood and any aid would be even more rigid under Kennedy than they had been under Eisenhower and Truman. And I considered that planned parenthood and birth control were the most crucial issue in the world in the past and now, and that it would be in the future, and that you could get no permanent good done or no permanent peace arranged on the





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