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rate, I suspect that Dirksen knew me better than I thought he knew me, in the sense that I was a guy he wanted to be sure to pay attention to. Because there were only three of us at that time. ABC and NBC and CBS. Now there are hundreds of us out there.

Now it's a jungle.

Yes. But Dirksen was very friendly. Was amused that Johnson had asked me to do it. Knew exactly what Johnson was up to. Played the game. Did what Johnson wanted him to do.

I went back and reported to Johnson that I thought that we'd made some progress. Johnson thanked me, and I got on the plane and came back to New York.

Now he used his friends to pull a lot of chestnuts out of the fire for him, on a very constructive basis. Carter, in the limited experience I had with him, was a straight-line man. He saw point A and point B, and a straight line was the way to go. Johnson would say: “If I have to go to point C and point D in order to get to point B, I'll do it.” And he knew what those points were.

I had a lot of respect for him, or for anybody who understands the political scene. Because it isn't straight administration, and it isn't that way in business. I have a friend who is in a sensitive position, where a black male confidant was being hired by another company, and the frontal approach would have been to go to the black's supervisor and say, “You've got to save this man.” It probably would have rubbed the supervisor wrong, and it might not have saved the black. But by doing the kind of thing that Johnson did the black was