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Mary LaskerMary Lasker
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Part:         Session:         Page of 1143

of people, maybe thousands, I forget just how many.

Q:

It must have cost you a great deal of money.

Lasker:

Yes, but it was a very small compared with what the stakes were, or what we thought the stakes were. And I think our interests and fears were justified, because, finally, Patterson, who was Secretary of War, met Seversky totally by chance, who having been totally against him and his ideas, near the end of the war became a convert of his ideas and sent him to Europe to estimate the bombing that had been done by the American bombers after the war, and they became very friendly. Seversky received the Harmon Trophy from Truman, and in the citation it read that Seversky had made a measurable contribution towards the winning of the war. And this was handed to him by the then President of the United States who had been Vice President from '40 on, and I think that this is really a fair statement about Seversky's heroic personal effort to get a point of view across that amounted to a weapons change in the history of warfare.

The concepts of war have changed so much in the meantime that it seems almost as long ago as the change from bows and arrows to muskets. But the idea of the control of the skies being the major factor in any war situation is still being carried out because of our determination to have tellites and to control the moon, which is the largest thing in our near universe.





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