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then the man who was writing all the inside stuff. We were all very careful of where we kept any records or what we said to anybody. I don't think Ruth [Stanton] knew about my activity, because I had to be away. I'm not sure Winnie [Williams] knew. Yes, I think she did. But, it's one of those things that you sort of put out of your mind, and it never came back in. I don't have many recollections of meetings. We had these meetings, sometimes at night, sometimes during the day, at the White House.

What period was this? Do you remember the years?

Well, it had to be between '52 and '60. So, I don't recall, I don't remember the years.

What was the precipitating event for calling the stand-by cabinet? What was the precipitating event, in Eisenhower's mind, for creating the cabinet?

At that time there was concern about attacks from Russia. There wasn't anything other than that. When I say “anything other than that,” there could have been a real problem. New York was a vulnerable target; there was no way you could keep people out of New York. Bombs could be carried -- I know one thing we talked about was trying to understand the things that could be done that would demoralize the City of New York. One thing was to take all the radio stations off the air, because that was the only way anybody knew what was going on. Not a difficult thing to do. You wouldn't have to take all of them off. You could take the main ones off very easily. Later, on another occasion, there was a question of taking television off the air, and at that time there was one piece of coaxial cable that ran up through the elevator shaft of the Empire State Building, from an underground