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They felt it bitterly. Billings was a great friend of everybody in the Kennedy family, especially Bobby's and Jean's, and he came to a feeling of great humiliation and distress about it almost because they pretended that they'd never heard about this idea for a Kennedy Center or any interest in a cultural center on their brother's part, as if he were making up something almost.

Also, Walton, who had been a friend of the President and of Jackie's, disapproved of the location of the center on the Potomac River. He was only interested in it if it were going to be on Pennsylvania Avenue, which he wanted to improve, and he constantly criticized it and was constantly working against it and kind of poisoning the mind of Jackie Kennedy and everybody around them about how it would be impossible to fill it, there was no interest in it, it was in the wrong location, it was the wrong architect--everything was wrong with it. So this was a terrible atmosphere in which to try to raise this remaining $4$1/2 million.

We finally decided that the way to get over this was to ask the President last November in '64 to have a ground-breaking ceremony. So we had a ground-breaking ceremony at the end of November. We hoped to get some help from two