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have liked to have taken the most?
Probably HEW.
Really? Why is that?
[Long pause] Well, it was very broad in scope. At the time it had the largest budget of any department in government. It was on the cutting edge of a lot of things that hadn't been done before. The Great Society and that whole program--the White House really didn't know what it was getting into. I didn't know either, but that I found attractive. Commerce didn't hold any interest for me. I would not have stepped into anything in the Pentagon, because I hadn't been a soldier in World War II and I didn't believe that being Secretary of Defense made any sense unless you had experience as a foot soldier, in some form or another. The State Department held a fascination for me, but I didn't believe I was qualified for that. Maybe I wasn't qualified for HEW, but I think the combination of my experience in the new technologies and in education--I had been close to education, I had a graduate degree so I would have been accepted by the professional educators (or at least I think so). I think I could have made that go, you know. Treasury, Attorney General--important posts, but I was totally unqualified for either one of them. I wouldn't step into those under any circumstance. I think of the big opportunities at that time, HEW represented something that I would have found very attractive and I would probably have worked harder there than I did at CBS.
I had robbed Ruth of so much time when I was coming up in the organization, and even after I became president, that in the years when these offers were coming I felt that I owed everything consideration to her wish. I don't think I responded totally to her wishes, and she
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