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Mary LaskerMary Lasker
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was a very unusual attitude for anybody in the Public Health Service to take because mostly they didn't make any suggestions about doing anything and if we got it done, they administered it, but they usually weren't supplying us with any ideas.

Q:

This was a sign of conversion on his part.

Lasker:

Yes, absolutely, and he was very helpful and constructive all along.

I, as a result of being rested on the ranch, bestirred myself and made a few telephone calls, especially one to Senator Pepper. I remember also phoning Walter Winchell, urging him to ask for more cancer research funds from Congress, but in vain; Winchell was interested only in the funds he raised himself for cancer research and not in the total funds to attack the problem. It seemed curious to me, but it was true.

Albert, Florence, Anna Rosenberg and I left the ranch about the 14th of April and arrived in New York three days later by train. About the 27th of April I flew to Washington with Florence, as the appropriation bill for the National Institutes of Health was presumed to be coming up on the floor the next day. We phoned Pepper, Senator Murray, Senator Matthew Neeley of West Virginia, and asked them to dine with us at the Carleton Hotel that night. Then and there, that evening, we organized so that Pepper would bring up an amendment on the floor for the Heart Institute bill; that Magnusson of Washington would bring up one for the Cancer





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