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Mary LaskerMary Lasker
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LASKER:

He's Senator Hill's man, but unfortunately Mike Monroney and I were the ones who recommended him to Hill four years ago, and we sold Hill on the idea that he would be a good man, and fortuitously his name was Luther, after Lister's own father, and he comes from Alabama. Now, he's a very pleasant man and I have nothing against him personally, but he's just not anyone with sufficient vision or freedom or executive ability to get large programs such as the cancer, heart, and stroke program to get going fast enough so that the death rates will drop due to any research or applied research that he would have anything to do with. These are the main causes of death in the United States, and he has no energy to bring any of this to any fruition of decline in the death rate.

And that's what we want. We want somebody who cares and who wants to see that there's a drop in the death rate from these things. But I think Hill realized that we were going to be against it and that he called Johnson up to be sure that he got there first. And Johnson finally said to me, “Well, Hill has the money,” which is the truth. He has the appropriations and this is more or less his patronage. Johnson didn't say that, but that's the fact.

So I dropped that and said, “Listen, here's something I wanted to show you.” This is it. It's a memo on Industrial Design in the Federal Government. This is a memo which





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