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college facilities. It's a broad, comprehensive bill. The loans to students was part of the overall construction bill, and I'm hoping that this clears the way for a general aid to education bill which we failed to get out of the House in '59.
Birkhead worked very hard on this. I was very interested in it. We had numerous meetings with Carl Elliott, who was on the House Education Committee with Stuart Udall, who was then in the Congress, and with Edith Green, who was in the Congress and deeply interesting, and with John B. At that moment there was some hope and since then the bill has been entangled in all kinds of hostilities, and the National Education Association has done nothing to aid it. They have made a great deal of trouble and the general attitude of many people has been that you could do nothing to aid Catholic schools. Well, actually, there are about four million children in Catholic schools and there's no reason to have two grades of education in the United States. Some accommodation must be made for aiding Catholic schools. I'm sure no bill will come out unless there is some such accommodation because there are too many Irish-Catholic members of the Rules Committee to let a bill out unless they get a bill that will give some aid to Catholic schools. If the Catholic schools were shut and we had four million more children to take care of in the public schools, the situation would be worse than it is. And I agree with Delaney that something has to be done about it, that some accommodation has to be made about Catholic schools, and probably should be made in the form
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