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Journalism, in the spring, and I said to him,” It would be such a wonderful thing if the President would do this,” but he made a very non-commital answer and I realized that he wasn't sold at all yet.

However, this was now the apring of '63. I returned to visit the President on July 12th to ask him if we couldn't really get this going, this cancer, heart and stroke commission, and that there'd been a long lag of time, and the Public Health Service naturally didn't want it because any new suggestions that were brought up would mean new work and seeming criticism of them, but that people were in desperate need and it needed to be expedited. He said, “I'm certainly for it and I think we should do it, and go and tell Feldman so, and tell him to speak to me.”

Then we fell to talking about his interest in Greek sculpture. He had just been in Italy with a friend of his and mine, LeMoyne Billings, who had found a group of interesting, small Greek sculptures of which the Presidant had bought some and I had bought the rest. He was about to show me everything he had when he remembered that he had 40 governors for lunch and he left me with a snappy wave, and that was the interview.

I immediately went to Mike Feldman to tell him that we were going to go through with it. Mike Feldman was all steamed up again and said he'd speak to the President. He did speak to him and he told him, yes, he should do it. The truth was that they were always afraid that if they created a commission, I would cause the commission to find that we needed another billion