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Mary LaskerMary Lasker
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recommendations by the panel. In December of 1970. He unfortunately had not been re-elected to the Congress in the fall, so he was going out, and when Congress returned Senator Edward Kennedy was the chairman of the subcommittee on health in the Senate. Senator Kennedy and Senator Javits introduced the same bill, S-1828, -- I have a copy of it here for your files. It would be associated with this part of oral history.

Q:

Surely. Had you had conversations with these two Senators after Yarborough went out? in connection with the bill?

Lasker:

No, I did not say anything to them, and actually the minute they got back after the recess they introduced the bill. I am a friend of Kennedy's and Javits' and I probably talked to Kennedy about it but I took it for granted that he would introduce the bill and hear it.

However, there was very little talk about the bill as far as I could detect, and this made me rather nervous, because it sounded as if the NIH was going to accept the provisions of the bill, a Cancer Institute having independent status and reporting to the President, getting its funds independently from the Bureau of the Budgetand the President directly -- this was all going to be accepted without much of a fight. This made me nervous and I decided to get Anna Hoffman and Laurance Rockefeller to go to see Senator Mansfield with me and to ask Mansfield if he would give a lunch at the Senate to explain the proposals of the bill before the bill came up, because we felt that the hearings would be quite pro forma and we wanted to be sure that the Senate was in sympathy and would pass the bill overwhelmingly.





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