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staff to provide speeches and ideas that he might be interested or not, but at any rate would provide him with material. And he said, “You want to help me?” and I said, “Yes.” He said, “I accept.”

Well, we gave him this material. He looked at it. He used some of it in a speech, not at all in the way that we had wanted him to do it, in other words, as a big speech on the floor of the Senate. He used it in a speech someplace. The speech was really given to Johnson in the form of an outline for a program fort the 86th Congress, and it covered points like the danger to our national security and safety, the national defense, agriculture, education, health and medical care, housing and urban problems, the eradication of poverty, which is now a Johnson and was Kennedy theme, the equality of opportunity, and conclusion.

Mrs. Lasker, how much of your thinking went into this?

I would say that the section on health and medical care was my thinking, and I was interested in the story on the eradication of poverty. I had been interested in the '56 campaign as I think I told you, and we had done a picture book on it, which I'm thinking of updating now. I knew very little about national defense, foreign affairs, agriculture, but I really learned a great deal from David Lloyd and I learned a great deal in the doing of this. Lloyd was extremely intelligent, very bland in his manner, and very industrious, and he really taught me a great deal.