 Well, I remember, of course, going to Texas for President Johnson's funeral. We were all singing hymns on the way down. I remember George Mayhans leading the hymn singing. And I was at the time the Chief Deputy Majority Whip of the House of Representatives, so I was part of the official leadership of the House. Of course, I haven't said anything about the burning issue of Vietnam, which was a horrendous issue, obviously, and marked the biggest tragedy of the Johnson presidency. And at first, I think, like most of the Democrats in Congress, I supported the war. And then as time went on, I became part of that group that said, no, we've got to do something differently here. And I remember in 1968 being a delegate to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. And in some ways, that was the worst week of my life. I remember, for example, even before, and I'll come back to that, when Bobby Kennedy came to South Bend to my district to speak. I think that Ted Sorensen and Larry O'Brien, my memory tells me, had come to talk to me about the campaign. I had said, because there was some time that Kennedy had to come and speak, and they wanted to know what suggestion in Indiana, because there was a presidential primary in May. And I said, well, bringing to Northern Indiana to Gary, Hammond, East Chicago, and South Bend on the Monday after Easter, that's Dingus Day, D-Y-N-G-U-S Day, which is an important Polish feast day. And there are a lot of Polish Americans in our part of the state. And there are picnics that day, and they're always political and democratic politics. Republicans have recently, I understand, found out about Dingus Day, but not at that stage. And Bobby came to South Bend with Ethel and Green Carpenter and Fred Dutton. And I said, bringing him to the West Side Civic and Democratic Club, that's the Polish Democratic Club, corner of Ford and Warren Streets. And I think the place could have held maybe a couple hundred people. We were violating every fire rule in town. The place was jammed. And I remember taking Ethel by the hand up front. And by that time, President Johnson had withdrawn. And Hubert Humphrey, in effect, was the alternate candidate. And Governor Roger Branigan, a conservative Democrat, was the governor of Indiana, in effect, taking the Humphrey position, and certainly not for Kennedy. I was in charge of the, I was the master of ceremonies, and Vance Hartke was there. Rodseyville and the Kennedy family had been brought all the way back from Europe because he was a Polish origin to be on hand for this campaigning. And we were at a table with wax paper on it and folding chairs. And I introduced Senator Kennedy. And I said that, as a member of Congress, I'd had the privilege of introducing a young senator from the East who had gone on to the highest office in the land. And today, and I had to walk a careful line myself, today I have the privilege of introducing another great young senator from the East who also has the qualifications for holding the highest office in our land. That's about as close as I came to a flat-out endorsement. And then Senator Kennedy rose to speak. And he said, well, let's sing Stolat. Stolat is a Polish hymn meaning, may you live a thousand years. How many here know Stolat? Oh, look, your hand. A few hands struggled up. Kennedy taunted them. He said, I thought I was with a lot of Poles here. He said, doesn't anybody know Stolat? And there were three little Polish American children dressed in Polish costumes behind us who had come to honor him. And they said, we know it. He said, well, we'll sing it. Then he sang the whole thing through in Polish. And he turned to the Third District Democratic Chairman, Ideal Baldoni, who was in his heart for Kennedy, but as the district chairman had to be careful. And Kennedy said, how do you like that, Mr. Baldoni? And Ideal Baldoni said, plaintively, Senator, I can't even sing the Italian national anthem in Italian. Kennedy said, well, I can. It was a remarkable performance. Then, of course, was the assassination. There were two assassinations. So we met in 1968 in a week of turmoil in Chicago. And I remember the Indiana delegation being split on this matter. And Governor Brandigan, as the titular leader of the party, was chairman. And Andy Jacobs, a Democratic Congress from Indianapolis and a Vietnam veteran, wanted to speak. And he wanted to speak against the plank in the platform that dealt with Vietnam. And it was supportive of the war in Vietnam. And Brandigan was going to prevent his speaking. And I then got up. I was the senior, I guess, congressman at that time. And I just raised hell about that. And I said, you're going to let a member of the Congress of the United States speak, Governor. It was that kind of a tense situation. We were aware that, at least my recollection, is that we were aware that President Johnson was keeping a tight reign on Hubert Humphrey at the time, in respect of the plank on Vietnam. And Clark Kerr, then the president of the University of California, was roaming the floor of the convention with a modification of the Vietnam plank. In my judgment, if there had been any change whatsoever in the plank as recommended by the platform committee, even putting it in italics, any change whatsoever, that would have made an enormous difference. I speak metaphorically when I say that. And it was only later when Hubert Humphrey, I think in Utah, in Salt Lake City, my memory tells me, made a speech in effect of breaking with the Johnson position on Vietnam that Hubert began to move ahead in the polls. And I always felt that that was a mistake on the part of Lyndon Johnson in not allowing Humphrey to be liberated to say what he wanted to say on Vietnam. So like many people, like many Democrats and my political views, I was a strong champion of President Johnson on domestic policy and education and the war on poverty and civil rights and health. I just felt that the war in Vietnam was a mistake. And it's nothing new for me to say that, because most of the historians who analyze the Johnson presidency talk about his career as a combination of triumph and tragedy. But I think he was one of the great political leaders of our country and a man of such extraordinary intelligence married to such political skills as not often to be found in the life of our country. Let me ask you a question. It has nothing to do with this at all. Sure. But it might be useful. Should I take this running? Yeah. Do you miss the Congress? Yes. And I'll tell you why. There are a couple of reasons I say that. I wouldn't have got into politics had I not had a zest for it. My view is the great glory of the life political is the opportunity to marry values to ideas and translate them into action. That to me is the gratification of it. And I've said often in describing the difference between our constitutional separation of powers system with relatively undisciplined parties by comparison to a parliamentary system that it's much more gratifying to be a member of Congress than to be a member of parliament. John Major, the former British prime minister, whom I greatly admire, and I have become friends. And I told him a year ago that having served in the Congress of the United States, I could never be a member of the House of Commons. I'd feel like a eunuch. Because in our system, if you're a member of Congress and you know what you're doing and the political forces at least make it possible, you can write the laws of the land. I'm not going to make a speech about legislation that I have written. But if you were a member of the House of Commons, unless you were a leadership type who was in the government, the executive branch, you don't have the opportunity to be as creative and as influential. Second point, when I lost my seat in 1980 in the Reagan landslide over President Carter, I was the majority whip of the House, number three in the hierarchy of leadership, by appointment of Speaker O'Neill, Tip O'Neill, because the whip at that point was appointed by the speaker in effect. Then shortly after 1980, Tip O'Neill retired voluntarily. And Jim Wright of Texas, the majority leader, was pushed out, pushed into resignation by Gingrich. Accordingly, had I continued to be re-elected, I was in line to become the Speaker of the House of Representatives, which if you know what you're doing, can be the second most powerful position in the government of the United States. And that would have been fascinating to have been the speaker if your career is in politics. And beyond that sense of personal ambition, the opportunity to make an impact on the life of one's country afforded by service in Congress is, I think, a noble vocation. I've always been proud to say I'm a politician. John, when you get your setter for the study of the Congress, we're gonna make this latter part of it available to that setter. Okay. Well, as you know, I want to create at New York University a center for the study of Congress. The fact of the matter is, as we meet in early 2002, there is no major scholar of Congress at any university in New York City. There's only one other place of which I know where attention is given to the role, academic attention is given to the role of Congress as a policy-making institution. And that's the Carl Albert Center at the University of Oklahoma where I have lectured. But as Ron Peters, the founding director of the center, once told me, but John, we're in Oklahoma and you have a great advantage in being in New York City. Senators and congressmen come to New York City to raise money and then normally turn around and go back. What I want to do is create a center at New York University and this is the largest private university in the United States, after all, to which senators and congressmen, current and former, can come as well as congressional staffers, others from the executive branch, people who worked in the White House, presidents, federal judges, governors, scholars, journalists, parliamentarians from other countries, to talk about how Congress works, to talk about how Congress shapes policy. I think this could be an enormously valuable instrument for understanding the processes of making the policy for our country and not enough American political scientists to pay attention to the role of Congress. As one of my colleagues here said, a professor of history, but John, there's so many of you and it's true. It's not easy to understand Congress, not only for scholars, it's not easy for presidents of the United States to understand Congress. It takes time, after all, there are 435 members of the House of Representatives and 100 United States Senators. And in my time in Congress in 22 years, I served with three Republicans, Eisenhower, his last two years, Nixon and Ford, and three Democrats, Kennedy, Johnson, and Carter. And I had a continuing relationship with President Clinton because President Clinton appointed me in 1994 Chairman of the President's Committee on the Arts and the Humanities position, which I served until 2001 with Hillary Clinton, then the first lady as the honorary chair of the committee. And I also served for several years as chairman of the National Endowment for Democracy, which is a federally financed non-governmental organization to champion democracy through grants to private organizations in countries that are struggling to build democracy. There's one other dimension of my experience in politics that has a scholarly link to it, of which maybe I should say a word in night, and it's back in the news again, as you know. In 1974, when Nixon resigned, and President Ford became the president, Jerry Ford became the president. Shortly after President Ford made his famous speech in which he, pardon Nixon of any crimes he may have committed, the White House announced, or the General Service Administration, announced an arrangement under which Nixon would be given all of the papers, records of his presidency and the tape recordings under circumstances that required after a few years their destruction. I was outraged by this. In the first place, I remembered as a graduate student at Harvard having read Confessions of a Conversement by Jerry Voorhees, the first person against whom Richard Nixon ran I think in 1946 and conducted the first of his many scurrilous campaigns. I had worked for Adlai Stevenson, so I remembered Nixon from those campaigns. And then in 1974, I was a member of the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, a little-known federal agency, very interesting. The only agency that I know where all three branches of the government meet, not for lunch, but to make decisions because on the commission at this time were Claiborne Pell, Senator Claiborne Pell of Rhode Island representing the Senate, Justice William Brennan himself, the great Supreme Court Justice from the Judicial and Bradimus of Indiana representing the House by appointment of Speaker Albert. The chairman of the commission was Bert Rhodes, the then archivist of the United States, and there were two or three eminent American historians on the commission and we would meet every quarter in the archives building to make grants to scholars for publishing materials about American history. It was a little like being on an appropriation subcommittee. So I had that experience. I had written a little history myself. I'd done my PhD at Oxford on the anarchist movement in Spain from the mid-1920s through the first year of the Spanish Civil War. But most important of all, I thought, Nazis burn books, Americans don't burn books. So I went to Jack Brooks of Texas, the chairman of the House Government Operations Committee, which had jurisdiction at the time over general services administration, and GSA had charge of the National Archives at that time. And I said, Jack, what are you gonna do about this? He said, John, this is September of an election year. I don't have time to do anything about it. I said, I chair the most unimportant subcommittee in the House of Representatives, a subcommittee on printing of House administration. That subcommittee told members how many Capitol Hill calendars they could send to their constituents, but it gave me a color of jurisdiction. And Jack said, you've got it. So I organized hearings in the printing subcommittee in late September, early October of 1974, and I brought in archivists, historians, scholars. Ed Koch, later mayor of New York City was a member of my subcommittee. And we worked with Senator Sam Irvin in the other body, as we say. And the result of all these activities was the Presidential Recordings and Materials Preservation Act of 1974. That statute nullified the Ford arrangement with Nixon, said all these materials belong to the people of the United States. And is the statute that makes possible the occasional publication of transcripts of the Nixon tapes. Indeed, as we speak now, we are doing so a day after another batch of Nixon transcripts have been released, a great contribution to American history. Just as you, as the founding director of the LBJ Library, and my judgment have made a great contribution to American history by making possible the release of transcripts and the tapes of President Johnson. The 74 statute also created a commission to examine issues involved in the handling and disposition of records of federal officials, chaired by former Attorney General Herbert Brownell. And the major result of the work of the Brownell Commission was the Presidential Records Act of 1978. That law says that presidential records belong to the people and not to presidents. No longer have title to their records. And that after 12 years out of office, the President's papers must be, records must be made publicly available with certain restrictions. It is that mandate of release of records that President George Bush II seeks now to circumvent by refusing to release the papers of President Reagan, or George Bush I. So this issue of transparency and the availability of records of federal officials is again with us. Now, as I said in my talk with you at the LBJ Library last November, we still do not have a rational public policy for dealing with the papers of former congressmen and senators. So that every senator and congressman still has title to his own papers. Some of the papers of congressmen and senators have been deposited in universities in their states. My friend Lee Hamilton, for example, a great member of Congress from Indiana, who is now the director of the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars in Washington, has placed his papers at Indiana University, and there's a center there the purpose of which is to encourage popular understanding of Congress. I believe that Claude Pepper's papers are, I think at the University of Miami, if I'm not mistaken, or a university in Florida, where the focus is the study of problems of the elderly with respect to which Claude Pepper was a great leader in Congress. As I've told you, there is, with the exception of the Albert Center, no place in the country where there is focus on the policy-making role of Congress as an institution. My papers of 22 years having just arrived at New York University, I hope will become the seed for the creation of such a center here, as I've said. This recommendation was strongly made to meet by my close friend and Oxford classmate, a great Russian historian, a historian of Russian culture, James Billington, the librarian of Congress. So that's my next big project. And I insist that such a center would be wholly bipartisan. I've talked to people like Senator Howard Baker, Congress, former congressman, Finn Weber of Minnesota, as well as my fellow Democrats. And I think this could be a very exciting venture. For example, I'd like to have, to give you one idea of what such a center could sponsor here in New York, a symposium on leadership in Congress, bringing in former speakers, like Newt Gingrich, like Jim Wright, the present speaker, Dennis Hastert, bringing in leaders like Trent Lott, with whom I served in the House of Representatives. And he knows that I spent a year at Ole Miss. And on Tom Daschle, with whom I also served in the House, and Dick Gephardt, the Democratic leader, Nancy Pelosi, who has just been elected to the position I once held as Democratic whip, except I was the majority whip, and bring in Tom DeLay of Texas. You don't have to be very imaginative to think that having Nancy Pelosi, David Bonnier, Tom DeLay, and Trent Lott, and others sitting around talking about leadership, the role of the whips, and I might have something to say about that myself, could make a very exciting contribution to understanding of how we make the laws of the land in our country. I think, I wish you will, John, you've been very, this has been very, very rewarding. Well, I hope so. I just start telling sea stories, that's it. I marvel at your, it's a wonderful story. About it, and continue to make speeches. For example, I came in last night from a meeting at the Council on Foreign Relations where Dick Holbrook and Gene Kirkpatrick and Don McHenry, all former U.S. ambassadors of the United Nations, were talking about the U.N. And I realized that I was going to be doing this conversation with you this morning. But Monday morning, I shall be opening a conference here at NYU, sponsored by the U.S. Conference on Religions for Peace, where religious leaders, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, will be meeting to talk about issues of race and religion. And so I sat down last night at about 9.30 and started writing a speech, which early this morning in my office, I dictated on the machine. So I hope I'll have something, but that I'm able to do that is because I've talked about these matters before, and I can pick up speeches that I've made and go back and take a look at them and well, you know how that works. Now the other thing I didn't tell you that I should have told you, of which is also important in my own mind, in my last four years as in Congress, as the majority whip of the house, I would go every other Tuesday or so with Speaker O'Neill, with Majority Leader Jim Wright, with Senate Majority Leader Bob Byrd, while he was still living, Hubert Humphrey, who was the honorary president pro tem of the Senate. And we'd have breakfast at the White House with President Carter and Vice President Mondale, and we'd talk about legislation and we'd talk politics. And I remember the first such meeting in January of 1977 when we were all seated there. We didn't know President Carter very well. He didn't know us very well. And he said, referring to the Director of Office of Management and Budget, who was with us, Bert Lance, he said, I'll ask Bert Lance to say grace, and head sort of snapped up and we weren't used to that, so Lance, Methodist layman, did so. We all hopped in our cars and went back to the hill when by chance on that same day was the first meeting of the year of the session of the House Democratic Steering and Policy Committee in the Speaker's dining room, chaired by the Speaker. And as the whip, I was a member of that. There were about 20 of us. And Tip said, as we sat down, well, you all know we had our first breakfast with our new President this morning and since we began with a prayer there, that's what we're gonna do here, whereupon he entoned the Roman Catholic grace, breast of soul lords and so on, and finished. And then his right eye looked up and crawled around the horseshoe at the table. He said, that'll last us the rest of the session. But later on, President Carter would say, I'll ask John Bradham to say grace this morning. Well, if you grew up, as I say in the Methodist Church, you're accustomed to that. And so I offered my prayer and Tip said later, you Protestant sure know how to pray. But my point is that I would sit there at those meetings and I would take notes, rather detailed notes. I'm not gonna tell you that President Carter appreciated that very much, but as a member of Congress, he couldn't tell me not to take notes. And then I'd hightail it back to the hill. We were all parked in the White House lawn and I would say to my staff, leave me alone and I'd take the machine and I'd dictate my notes. And in an hour and a half or so, I'd have usually about a 15, 16 page double space transcript that would read like a Hollywood script. And I'd try to put all the wisecracks in and all the asides and so on. And what I'd like to do at some point is use those transcripts to do a case study of how a president deals with leaders of his own party in Congress. That's fascinating. You've done that to the Johnson administration, I'd be camping on your door. Well, yesterday, yesterday I had a telephone call from Frank Sullivan, Jr. who had been my administrative assistant and is now by appointment of Governor Evan By, a member of the Supreme Court of the State of Indiana, one of the youngest justices in the country, very able person. And he knows I have these papers and he said, I have a suggestion for your consideration. If you are willing to send me a set of those tapes, I have equipment here with which I can scan them into a computer and help ease the transition into making a book. So I'm going to do that. And I also told him that last fall we were being visited here by an Oxford Don who teaches American politics at Oxford and was interested in looking at these transcripts and did a, with his laptop, did a kind of summary of them, making comments as to questions that he had and so on. So I'll put that stuff together. I've been rather cautious about letting them out. I've had them in my own office and I've not sent them elsewhere because I really wanted to use them first. My problem is that when I came back from Oxford I immediately plunged into politics, became a congressman for 22 years. Then I became a university president and then I chaired the president's committee on the arts and humanities and I continued to chair the American Ditchley Foundation and a lot of other pro bono activities. And as president emeritus of NYU, I have a tiny staff. I'm still making speeches and writing them myself and trying to do too many things. So my problem here is I have a low threshold of boredom. Well, John, I can't tell you how grateful I am for doing this. United States representative in Congress from South Bend, Indiana, the third district of Indiana for 22 years. I had finished my PhD at Oxford with a study of the anarchist movement in Spain. In 1953, came back home, started law school at the University of Michigan, decided I didn't like it very much and so went back home to South Bend and within six months I was the Democratic nominee for Congress. I was just old enough under the Constitution to run. My political godfather was the late Paul M. Butler who in 1954 was the Democratic National Committeeman for Indiana and later that year became the Democratic National Chairman and that is not unrelated to my relationship to Lyndon Johnson. I lost my first race in 1954 by 49 and a half percent of the vote, 2000 votes. There were three candidates in the race, the incumbent Republican Shepherd J. Crumpacker and Bradamus the Democrat. There was a third party candidate, Everett Michler who got 700 votes. Everett was the candidate of the Prohibition Party and we became friends and I made a Democrat out of him and he was later elected to a local office on the Democratic ticket and only a year ago I was in Vietnam in Saigon where I saw his daughter Grace who was as a schoolgirl working in my campaigns as a volunteer and is now with the Church of the Brethren and the Mennonites, both important in my congressional district, teaching social work for people to work with disabled persons and she's blind and I'm trying to help her with her program and I spoke over there. After losing my first race, I still thought I could win losing by only half a percent, being 26 as I recall and I worked in 1955 for a few weeks in Washington for Congressman Thomas Ledlow Ashley of Ohio and the late Senator Patrick McNamara of Michigan and while doing that, while on the House side, I met a young Texas congressman named Jim Wright and met somebody who worked for him named Bill Gibbons. Bill Gibbons was a political scientist and when I was elected finally to Congress in 1958 and came to Washington, Bill said do me a favor, let me speak to you every couple of days and you tell me everybody you've been talking to while you're getting into the system. So I did and he gave me a transcript of his notes which are interesting for me to read because they involved relationships with the people like Gene McCarthy and George McGovern and a lot of people who later became very consequential. In 1955, 56, I was on the staff of Adley Stevenson in charge of his brain trust working with people like Arthur Schlesinger, John Kenneth Galbraith, Paul Samuelson and that was of course very exciting and proved helpful later on when I was elected. Well I lost a second time in 56, Indiana's a tough state. As a matter of fact, Harry, I ran for Congress 14 times, five of them in presidential years. There was only one time when the Democratic nominee for president carried my district and that was Lyndon Johnson in 1964. Otherwise every four years I had an anvil on my back whether it was Stevenson, Kennedy, Humphrey, Muskie, Carter, whoever. In 1958, I ran a third time thinking I could still win because after all, at first I thought, well, Bradimus, here you are, not yet 30, twice defeated for Congress, your has been before you got started. But thinking I could, still thinking I could win, I ran a third time in 1958. I was first elected and re-elected 10 times. In 1960, I was a delegate to the Democratic National Convention as a member of Congress and I remember very well how John Connolly was working for Lyndon Johnson at that time. And as my political godfather was Paul Butler, who was a strong liberal Democrat, mass every morning, Roman Catholic, graduate of the University of Notre Dame Law School, Notre Dame being in my district, I was not very sympathetic to Lyndon Johnson. After all, I'd worked for Adley Stevenson. So I was for Kennedy in California at the Los Angeles Convention, although there was a little tension at that time because my administrative assistant, my first year was Mike Minroni Jr., the son of the Oklahoma Senator, who was for Stevenson. And though I had great affection and respect for Governor Stevenson, I felt that in effect his time had passed and that Kennedy was the person. And I remember then having been elected to Congress, going out to Detroit to make a speech to the young Democrats. And I was asked for, I was told my news conference would be at such and such a time. I'd never had a news conference outside my own district. And I went and there were Bill White of the New York Times and Ed Fowler of the Washington Post. And Fowler had said, Congressman, you represent Paul Butler. He's your constituent. You've worked for Adley Stevenson, so you've been engaged in presidential politics. What person could be president of the United States? What Democrat do you think could be elected president of the United States? I said Humphrey Kennedy Stevenson or Simington. And Fowler had said, you didn't mention Lyndon Johnson. I said, brashly, that's because I don't think he could be elected. Joe Barr, at this point, Johnson, this may have been 1959, I can't remember. Joe Barr, a freshman Democratic congressman from Indianapolis and a friend of Senator Johnson, called me that morning and said, John, Lyndon Johnson just called me and said, who is that young so and so from Indiana? I would say something like that because Fowler had wrote in the post, Congressman John Radimus of Indiana said here today in Detroit that any Democrat could be elected president of the United States except Lyndon J. Johnson. You can imagine the reaction. Well, time went on. I brashly then wrote to Vice President Johnson and said, and by the way, at the Democratic Convention in Los Angeles, I remember when LBJ was chosen for Vice President because the Indiana delegation was seated in front of the Michigan delegation led by then Governor G. Mennon Williams, Sophie Williams, a strongly liberal delegation and they were apoplectic with anger at this. I was delighted. I thought, I think we have a good chance now to win the election. I was very practical minded politician, but I wrote a letter to Vice President Johnson inviting him to come to South Bend to Notre Dame to kick off my reelection campaign in 1962 and had a telephone call from Mary Margaret Wiley, the Vice President's secretary with whom I had had a couple of dates and she called me and said John, the Vice President is very impressed with you. He's very sorry that he cannot come to South Bend because of a conflict, but you made a very favorable impression on him. I think I went over to see him. But she said, I want to know why you were against us in Los Angeles to which I replied, Mary Margaret, I was. I was for Kennedy, but I must tell you I have been immensely impressed by the way in which Vice President Johnson has been carrying out his duties and by his obvious loyalty to President Kennedy and I could tell you something now that I never thought I could say. I could be for Lyndon Johnson for President. Well, I don't know if it was long after that, but I then had a telephone call in my office. My secretary is quite excited. She said, Vice President Johnson is on the phone. So I got on the phone, Mr. Vice President. Johnny, the only person in my life who ever called me Johnny. Lady Bird and I are going up to Camp David for the weekend. First time we'll go there and be very glad if you'd join us, come along. And then he said, I got a little gal working for me. I think you'd like. And I thought the Vice President of the United States is fixing me up. And I thought it was gonna be Mary Margaret. Well, I went up. I remember being picked up by a car from the White House and driven up there on a Sunday morning. And I remember the Vice President's standing there on the telephone in his pajamas and telling me some sea stories, some of which are not printable in a family newspaper, but we're very amusing. But Jack Valenti was there. And I realized that it was not Mary Margaret that the Vice President had in mind, but it was Geraldine Williams, who is, as you may know, Mrs. Robert Novak. I don't think I've ever told Novak that story, but he might be amused. I was then, I think, in touch with the Vice President most significantly in terms of my own experience following the assassination of President Kennedy. In August of 1963, Senators Vance Hartke and Birch Bay of my state and I, all Democrats, went to the Oval Office to call on President Kennedy to say, Mr. President, unless you do something, sir, Studebaker, which was born in South Bend and is not only nationally famed, but internationally famed, is going to collapse. And the President said, John, I wish I could do something about it, but I can't. This was in a period before Penn Central, Chrysler, New York City, Lockheed bailouts. And Studebaker did collapse. My memory is that President Kennedy was worried about Senator McClellan of Arkansas and some TFX problem that had come along and that made him apprehensive about coming to the rescue. Studebaker collapsed. This was after, shortly after the assassination. I thought I was finished politically. On the contrary, now President Johnson, in effect, came to the rescue. And the President named a cabinet-level committee co-chaired by Luther Hodges, Secretary of Commerce, and Willard Wertz, the Secretary of Labor. Willard Wertz and I had become friends because when I went to work for Adelaide Stevenson in 1955, the other members of Stevenson's law office were Willard Wertz, Newt Minow, who later became chairman of the FCC, and Bill Blair, William McCormick Blair, who was Stevenson's right-hand man and later became ambassador to the Philippines and Denmark. And the President had this cabinet-level committee with whom I would meet from time to time in Washington with three of the top leaders from my community, including the newspaper editor, the top labor leader, and the top, a top business leader. And the people who sat on that committee came from General Services Administration, the Department of Agriculture, HUD, and so on. And their job was, let's cut through the red tape and try to get something done. So much so was the President involved, that he came in from Chicago on a helicopter with the two cabinet secretaries and with Frank Keppel, the commissioner of education, who was a great friend of mine. And they landed in back of Washington High School in South Bend, and the President said, I'm here to help. And that was very significant, not only politically, of course, that the President of the United States would do that, but he appointed a federal official to be on the ground to work with me, the late Harold Shepard. And that is, that Studebaker experience comes back again because of Enron, because a lot of the Studebaker workers lost their pensions. And that's where the Federal Pension Protection Program was born, which is coming into play again. It's also where part of the, as I recall, Adult Basic Education Program, part of the Man Part Retraining Act was born because surveys were taken, were made of the unemployed Studebaker workers by Harold Shepard and his colleagues. And it was found that many of them were not functionally literate. And so part of the Man Part Program, Retraining Program provides for Adult Basic Education, literacy programs. But beyond that, President Johnson really was very helpful in making it possible for the Army to put some defense contracts, truck contracts, into the most advanced, most modern of the Studebaker plants, which was taken over by another plant that that ultimately became AM General. And when I was with you in late November of 2001 at the 30th anniversary celebration of the dedication of the LBJ Library, one of your colleagues at the library was kind enough when I asked, do you have papers on members of Congress during the Johnson years? She said, yes, could I see anything you may have on me? And she brought back a memorandum with my name on it, Congressman John Bradimus, Indiana, and the memo was entitled, favors granted. And it had a whole list of defense contracts among other matters that were listed there, including some that went to the former Studebaker plant later to I think Curtis Wright and AM General. And now the Hummer is still made in my old congressional district as a result of that. And when I was asked by the South Bend Tribune for commentary on my involvement in the aftermath of the Studebaker collapse, I called the LBJ Library and received some tapes of President Johnson's conversations about that issue. There were, among others, Jack Valetti's talking to Roswell Gilpatrick, the deputy secretary of defense, trying to figure out how to channel some business to South Bend to help put people back to work. And President Johnson was talking to Secretary of Defense McNamara, saying the by and Bradimus needs some help out there. And it was really quite remarkable that the president of the United States was so well informed about a local situation like that and got himself personally involved. And it's very clear when you listen to the tapes that his concern was there are a lot of unemployed people out there. We've got to get these people back to work. Now that involvement on the part of President Johnson in my Studebaker situation came back to mind later when I read Michael Beschloss' first book of LBJ transcript tapes that your leadership made possible, Harry. In April of 64, President Johnson is talking to Larry O'Brien. And the subject is why can't we get Bradimus to vote with us on this farm subsidy bill? Well, I was still shaken by the Kennedy assassination and I thought, I'll be damned if I'm gonna vote for a subsidy for those people down there. That was my emotional feeling. And O'Brien, who was a good friend of mine, said, well sure, it wouldn't do Bradimus any harm to vote with us on that. And LBJ says, Rhodes Scholar, Phi Beta Kappa, all that stuff. I sent him to see the Queen of Greece. Now what that meant is that because I was the first native born American of Greek origin elected to Congress and the only member of Congress at that time of Greek origin, I went on Air Force One with Lady Bird Johnson with Liz Carpenter and with Margaret Truman and her husband and President Truman to Greece for the funeral of King Paul of Greece. We wore top hats and swallowtail coats and marched down the main avenue of Greece. It was a very dramatic experience. I think the only time President Truman had ever gone to Greece, and of course, because he was in effect the savior of Greece with the Truman doctrine, that was a very moving experience. And the President also said in this conversation with O'Brien in April of 64, I was gonna go out to Southman and put my arm around him and give him some help, clearly alluding to the Studebaker question. Well, in that same context, I recall having gone to Blair House where President Johnson gave a reception in honor of the then Prime Minister of Greece, George Papandreou, who was the grandfather of the present foreign minister of Greece, young George Papandreou and was the father of Andreas Papandreou, who had been the Prime Minister of Greece. And as I was the only Greek American in Congress, I was invited to this reception, and I greeted the President and the President said, good to see you or something like that, and he said, I was glad to see you got that defense contract in your district this week, pause, and I'm sorry you couldn't be with me on the farm bill. It's almost breathtaking to appreciate the degree to which he was informed on such matters. Another time that the President came to my district was after a Palm Sunday tornado hit the Midwest, including a small town in my district in Elkhart County, a little town called Dunlap, where a lot of people lived in mobile homes. And I remember going to a White House reception on a Sunday and the President said, I'm going to Indiana tomorrow and I want you to come with me. So I went with him out there, and I think we went to Illinois also. I remember Colonel Sanders appearing at some point on that expedition because I think Southern Illinois, the Cairo, the little Egypt part of Illinois had been similarly afflicted. In legislative terms, President Johnson was a phenomenon and I had the good fortune to serve throughout my entire years on the Committee on Education and Labor of the House of Representatives. I remember after I was first elected to Congress in 1958, and I was on a little holiday out in California talking to another Texan, D.B. Hardiman, who was a great friend of mine, and an assistant to Speaker McCormick, Speaker Raeburn. And D.B. said, you ought to call on Speaker Raeburn, John. So I called the Speaker from California, Mr. Speaker. This is one of your new students, John Bradimus. And I wonder if I could stop by and call on you on my return to Washington. Come on out, John, when can you come? So I flew to Dallas and rented a car and went up to the speakers hometown of Bonham. And we had lunch together and he took me to his library of legislation of which he was very proud. And he said after lunch, suppose you wanna talk about your committee. He went right to the point because as many people do not appreciate, the committee on which you serve in Congress is absolutely crucial to the kind of career that you build. And I wanted, I said, yes, Mr. Speaker, I'd like to be on education and labor. I had already been aware of the passage of the National Defense Education Act under Eisenhower. And I was keenly interested in education and I thought the time had come for a more important role for the federal government in support of education. And I had been fortunate enough to have had an opportunity for a fine education at Harvard and Oxford and so on. So I wanted to go on. And also because I represented a district for manufacturing, Studebaker, Bendix, Miles Laboratories were all very important. So, and it was a strongly united auto workers district and I thought it would be good politically to serve on a committee that dealt with labor matters. I later found in 1959 that I was deeply involved in the labor reform fight that was very hot, very contentious, but that's maybe another story. In any event, the Education and Labor Committee was the cockpit of much of the great society. That's where we wrote most of the war on poverty. And I ate a lot of scrambled eggs with Sergeant Shriver in the old congressional building across the way from the house office building. I remember particularly the battles that we had over higher education legislation. I was the second ranking Democrat on the subcommittee with jurisdiction over higher education. The chairman of that committee was Edith Green of Oregon. Highly intelligent woman who had started her career in Congress as a strong liberal but moved steadily to the right to the point where she had become the darling of the Dixie Crats in the House of Representatives. And she, her attitude was I'm the chairman of this committee and subcommittee and in effect you follow my leadership. Well, there were five newly elected members of the House in 1958 who went to her committee. And all of us I think had been well educated and had our own views and we were not about to sit still and be told what to do. We wanted to take a role also. And at that stage of the game, the chairman of the full committee had become the redoubtable Adam Clayton Powell, congressman from Harlem, a remarkable figure. Highly intelligent, not terribly well disciplined. At one point I was given after I left Congress a memorandum that Douglas Cater had sent to President Johnson. Now at Harvard I was at Adams House and the librarian in Adams House at the time, a student senior to me was Doug Cater. So I had known Doug Cater a long time and we were friends. And the Cater memo to President Johnson said in effect, Adam Powell reports that Edith Green is giving us a bad time on your higher education bill and Adam suggests three alternative courses of action. One, fire Edith's sister from the staff of the committee. Two, strip her subcommittee of jurisdiction over vocational rehabilitation, which is politically a very attractive subject. Three, give responsibility for handling the bill to John Bradimus who if it will serve the cause will agree and at the bottom there is the notation all three LBJ. So I remember another time coming to the White House for a meeting with President Johnson and I was late and I said Mr. President please forgive my tiredness but I was busy defending your higher education bill against a member of our party, that's all I said. And President Johnson said how is Edith instantly understanding the politics of it? I remember going through a reception at the White House once I think that we were working at that point on the elementary and secondary education act, a measure of which I always felt he was most proud. The first major piece of federal legislation of legislation to provide federal help to elementary and secondary schools and I was deeply involved in the politics of that because we had the traditional opposition from Republicans on the grounds that the federal government doesn't have any business in this field and then you had the problem with segregation and the famous or infamous Powell amendment that Adam would offer saying none of the money in this bill can go to any school that's segregated, well if that Powell amendment had been adopted then many of the Southern Democrats who were in favor of federal aid to schools would have had politically to vote against the bill on final passage and so in committee I opposed the Powell amendment and I'm a strong civil rights champion as you know and Adam criticized me and some of the other liberals on the committee from his pulpit in the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem but I just felt that was the right thing to do and the other issue with which we had problem was religion and it's come back again today as we talk in 2002 and the issue here was whether or not federal funds should go to church related schools to parochial schools and I remember a debate in April of 1965 on the floor of the House of Representatives the first debate we had on the elementary, secondary education bill. The bill was being managed by the chairman of the full committee, Carl Perkins of Kentucky and the late Charlie Goodell who at the time was a very conservative Republican upstate New York congressman who later became an anti-Vietnam War Republican Senator from New York attacked the bill, attacked the bill on grounds that we did not permit any of the money to go to parochial schools, to church schools and Carl Perkins said, John answer him. I said, Mr. Chairman, because we were in the committee of the whole I am the best qualified member of this body to address this issue. My father is Greek Orthodox. My mother belongs to the disciples of Christ Church. I'm a Methodist. Before coming to Congress, I taught at a Roman Catholic college and as one of the remaining bachelors in this place which I then was. If I can just find myself a nice Jewish girl, I'll be the finest flowering of the ecumenical movement. Well, the place exploded into laughter. We beat the Goodell amendment and a week later I had a letter on Saks Fifth Avenue Stationery here in New York City saying, dear sir, I have read with interest your advertisement in the congressional record. I am five feet four blonde, green eyed, single and Jewish. Your attention will be appreciated. So I took her to dinner. She was a very nice young lady and of course from that point on, whenever I would talk to a Hadassah group I would always tell that story. But going to a reception at the White House one evening, walking through the line, the president had me pause and he said, I know what you're doing to help me on my education bill and I just want you to know I appreciate it. That's a very significant thing for a president to say to a senator or a congressman, as you know. I say this because I remember still what, as I have Berlin, the great political philosopher at Oxford whom I came to know slightly and to whom I gave an honorary degree, once said to me in trying to explain what makes politics and politicians work, recognition. People like to be recognized. And when I came to New York University as president in 1981, one of my colleagues who succeeded me later as president of the university, J. Oliva, and was my number one man, said John, after I'd been here a few months, you do something that I've never seen any of your predecessors do. You give credit to other people. I said, well, in the first place, one person doesn't do everything, other people deserve credit. And in the second place I said, you have to understand I was a congressman for a long time. So if I'm speaking to the local Rotary Club, I start off by saying, Al, it's so good to see you and you did a great job in running the Red Cross this year and Nick, you did a wonderful job with the United Way. It's just in the instinct of the race. Well, President Johnson understood that. As a matter of fact, and I think you've heard me say this before, Harry, I remember on one occasion, I was not married at the time, I was leaving my apartment in Georgetown and the phone rang and it was about seven o'clock, I was going out and the woman said, Mr. Bradimus, yeah, it's just a minute, this is the White Harris, here's the president. So that familiar voice came on. Johnny, sort of low conspiratorial voice. Mr. President, I see it's your birthday. If I had a thought about it, I spent 50 cents on it. He said, I know that young fellows like you could be out making a lot of money, but you prefer to serve your country and I want you to know I appreciate it. That's a nice birthday present, isn't it? Terrific. I also remember going out to Ellis Island with President Johnson for the signing of the bill that eliminated the national origins quota system. Now, that was a very hot political issue when I first ran for Congress because basically what the law then said, the McCarran-Walter Act, said that if you're an immigrant from Germany or Scandinavia or the UK, you won't have any trouble coming into the United States but if you come from Italy or Spain or Greece or the Mediterranean countries, there's a quota system on you. It was a blatantly discriminatory law and we worked hard and given my Greek background, understandably, I felt very strongly about that and I remember going out on the Honey Fits on one occasion, well I remember being at Ellis Island when the President, with the Statue of Liberty there and so on, signed the law that repealed that but I remember on another occasion discussing this issue before I think Congress had acted on it and I was on the Honey Fits with the President and with a member of his, my date was a member of his staff, I don't know what's happened to her, a very nice young lady named Vicki McCammon, you remember Vicki? And George Mahon was there, the Chairman of the House of Appropriations Committee and a wonderful man, fellow Methodist. We were talking about this issue and George, as you know, is rather conservative in such matters and he was not very enthusiastic about repealing this system and Vicki, whose background I think was Hungarian, agreed with me and I remember LBJ saying, George, there are two votes against you. He could count. I think a particularly significant in my recollection of President Johnson was his leadership on civil rights. Now, this was also a subject of great significance to me and I'll tell you why. My late father told me when I was a child how the Ku Klux Klan, which was very powerful in Indiana at the time, boycotted his restaurant in Northern Indiana because he was not a wasp, he was not a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant, he was Greek Orthodox. And then my freshman year of college, I was in the United States Navy. After graduating from high school in South Bend in early 45, I enrolled at Notre Dame and was there for a few weeks and then I joined the Navy, the war was still on. And I did my boot camp in near Memphis at the Naval Air Training Station there and was told greatly to my surprise that I was going to be sent to Naval Officers Training School at the University of Mississippi. So I went to Oxford, Mississippi and in a sailor suit and I, of course, a completely segregated society. And I went over being a political junkie even then with a half a dozen other Northerners all in our sailor suits to the little town of Pontotocke. The scene was right out of William Faulkner novel. The, there was a political rally on the town green. The main speaker was Senator Theodore Gilmore Bilbo. This was the opening address of his last campaign. And a young state senator in a white linen suit that was right out of Robert Penn Warren, if you will, standing on a soundtrack with the Mississippi peckerwood farmers all around as they call them. And their felt hats and gallouses and overalls said, let the Yankees come down here with all their money and all their unions. And again, we'll spill their filthy blood on our sacred soil. I made a burning impression on me. I thought we're at war still with the Japanese. But what is this? And then he introduced Bilbo way down in the pines of Southern Mississippi in such a year a baby was born. And that baby, he was Theodore Gilmore Bilbo. You thought he was about to introduce Abraham Lincoln. Bilbo got up, short, stocky, physically not attractive, very intelligent. He said, alluding, I believe, to his having spent a short time in jail because he'd been convicted of embezzling funds or something when he was governor of Mississippi. That's my memory. Said, now my opponent, because this was a Democratic primary, there was no Republican Party then, Jim Collins, I remember still, says that I've been in jail. That's true. He said, John Bunyan knew chains. Socrates knew iron bars. St. Paul, I mean, it was an extraordinary piece of oratory. And he went on to attack Clair Booth-Lews, a Roman Catholic convert, and those other communists up north who want to mongrelize the white race. And half a century ago in this country, in the Deep South, that was the operative verb. Well, that made a powerful impression on me. And coupled with my having been brought up in the Methodist Church, which has a strong tradition of campaigning for social justice, you will not be surprised that I was pleased to be standing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial behind Martin Luther King in the summer of 1963. And then, when President Johnson became president, to be one of the hard, working hard champions of the Voting Rights Act and of the Civil Rights Act. And only a few days ago, I sent to Mrs. Johnson a copy of a beautiful letter sent to me by my most famous constituent, Father Theodore Hesburgh, the president of the University of Notre Dame for many years, who had been the chairman of the Civil Rights Commission, fired by Richard Nixon. Just telling me, because I told him of my visit with you, the library, of the great leadership of President Johnson for Civil Rights. I think also of my having gone back for the funeral on the plane, because I think by that time, what year was it that the president died? 70 years. Yes. Sir, I don't know if this is the kind of thing you want. This is wonderful.