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I think I forgot to tell you that in the spring of '64 we had a meeting with Bob Kennedy and I said when they asked would we withhold our campaign on the Kennedy Center so that the Library could get underway, I said, “I'm afraid that the Library will take all the money that we could hope for.” This is done very much in the emotion at the time of the death of someone. “He may be too late.” And the whispered to me, “We'll do the Kennedy Center if we have to do it ourselves.”

I said, “All right, I'll take your word for this.”

Well, when I got over being angry at him for this remark about withdrawing the name in early December at the time of the ground-breaking, I got the idea that what they really should do was to give a sizable amount of money themselves and I talked to Mrs. Smith and said how impossible it had been for Lem or Roger or me to do anything with the hostility of the Kennedy family working against us as far as fund-raising had been concerned. Well, she finally understood from my conversation with her that they had made things extremely difficult. I said that I thought they should give a substantial amount of money if they really were interested, and by this time she seemed to be. And with the help of Lem Billings, she persuaded her family to give a half a million dollars