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I had gone up to see them -- and that these are not lines that are drawn on the basis of anything other than political lines.

That night I pick up the papers, the New York Times, which will come out the following day, and on page one is J. Raymond Jones denouncing me as having asked him to cut the Italians out of my district, as though I had made some anti-Italian remarks to him. You can't imagine how devastating that was; I hadn't done it, just the other way. J. Raymond Jones is an absolute liar. But how do you catch up with a headline on the front page of the New York Times? My recollection is they had even called me and my denial appeared on page 82.

Well, I thought, “That's the end of my political career.” So I consulted with my closest advisers -- Mickie Welter, a young woman who works for J. Goldin now, very bright, a good friend. She said, “Well, what you have to do: you've got to go down to the South Village every night and just show the flag, show them you're not afraid of them, talk to them, try to convince them. So I go down every night, and the first night I go down she went with me. And I don't know whether it was in my mind or not, but everybody stopped to stare -- all the windows went up on Thompson and MacDougal and Sullivan. A woman came over and said, “Why do you hate Italians? Why do you want to put us on box cars and ship us to concentration camps?” I mean it was insane what they were saying. This woman that I just