1 ,...,Dr. Jerry Carter ' EAR And what I really want to ask you to do, and don't feel constrained in any way to try to organize this any particular way, but maybe the rlace to beginl if you will, but do it any way you like, but just' let me suggest that you might like to talk about how you first got involved with NI:MH and what you recall about those early days, and then pick up from there into the kind of circumstances that you think worthwhile recalling. JC Well, the way I first became acquainted with the effort, the move­ ment, I guess was about 1946, with the National Mental Health Act which was proposed by Senator Taft and Claude Pepper, and of course Claude Pepper had been an old friend of mine for many many years and it was out of joint responsibility, there were two ends of the Senate, one the Liberal and one the Conservative end of the Senate, and I was at Wichita, Kansas, Director of the Wichita Guidance Center, so I was particularly attuned to anything like this that might develop, so I got interested in the National Mental Health Act and I had on my Board of Directors a former Governor and a former Senator, and a former Governor who later became a Senator, and I persuaded them to endorse the, they were both Republicans, you know, and with Taft on it they didn't have much alternative but to endorse it, particularly in light of my interest and the interest of their fellow Board Members. So I remember they wrote Senator Taft and I wrote Claude Pepper and egged them on and I was invited to testify by Claude Pepper but it wasn't possible for me to do that, so at about the same time I had been asked to serve as a consultant or to accept an ~ppointment as a consultant serving as Branch Chief in the VA Regional Office in st. Louis and with the permission of my Board I agreed to work seven days a week, two days for VA, with their permission, and that brought me to Washington. We had a meeting with General Bradley and General Hawley, I remember, and that was when llim Miller was first man there, and I recall that they had maps of where psycho­ logists were in the country and they weren't in the southeast, no training centers in clinical psychology or anything like that, and General Bradley wanted to know how come, so they all looked around and said, well, Jerry Carter is the only southerner here, maybe he can tell you. Well I undertook to say a few words. Anyway I got involved. The VA program was a kind of evangelical type of program as you may recall, in that period, and then I ran into Joe Bobbitt 2 JC cont. somewhere and at one meeting of the VA personnel from the Regional offices he invited :'m~,, out te the NIJ'.vlH. In fact, I think I went out there, that was it, when they were at T6, out at NIH (EAR­ this was in 1946) because I had gotten interested in this and had this correspondence with Claude Pepper, so I went out to visit and I met Joe Bobbitt and I met Bob Felix and Dale Cameron, and I remember having a meeting with Felix at which I asked him a lot of questinns about the scope of this, he had just gotten his hunting license, so to speak, so then at the next meeting I arrived at Joe Bobbitt said that Felix would like to meet with me and he invited me to lunch at the Cosmos Club on Jackson Square. He and Dale Cameron and a thin young fellow who looked like he had had indigestion, Jim Lowry and Joe Bobbitt. So when I got there, Felix gave me quite a sales talk I remember, he told me that he had gone all over the country trying to find a psychologist who knew something about community mental health and I remember he said he talked with Bill Hunt and George Kelly and Lowell Kelly and I believe Dave Shakow, who were all tied in with the VA. Of course I had known Lowell since I was a graduate student at Indiana and he was at Purdue as a young faculty member. So anyway it seemed they had suggested me and he was convinced I was the person to do this, and of course I was very appreciative of his good opinion and so on, I had lived on out in ·isolation out in Kansas and it's true that the Wichita Guidance Center was one of the few of its kind and Bob Yerkes had written a lot of letters about the center and written my Board and then later I found out from Don Marquis that he had used that as a model for setting up a demonstration clinic at Yale, so I was a little flattered by that. But anyway, I said of course I would think about it and I remember I talked it over with Jim Miller and he took it very seriously, so I came back and talked to my Board about it, and they very reluctantly gave me a year's leave of absence if I decided I wanted to do it. I had brought in, a year or so ago, a very good man, with the idea that he would become my successor, so I didn't have that problem, because I had succeeded someone who really hadn't provided for their successor, and so I had quite a little local accomplishment there in Wich±.ta and I didn't want to see it go down the drain. I guess I got a latter from Felix about the middle of 47, an offer so to speak, in writing confirming our conversation or something of the sort, And I was to have gone in January, I believe of 48, but something happened and 3 JC cont. I couldn't do that and I think I was about a month late. Bmt I arrived in early 48 and we had moved downtown by that time in the newDHEW building south, we had a kind of a loft, wing, you know, there was Jim Lowry and Pearl Shalit, Esther was either there at that time or had arrived about that time in training, Warren hadn't arrived yet, Dan o•Keefe was on board. Then there was a hospital consultation service which was connected with us and I'm trying to remember the name of the man who was there at that time. Anyway I got there and of course nobody really knew what to do with me and of course they didn't know what to do with themselves, and I did 1 nt know what to do with myself, so we read over all the things that gave us our liunting license and job descriptions and billet descriptions and read the National Mental Health Act and looked at the chart and my mission in life as I was explained to Felix, he expected me to get from psychology what we needed to develop a com­ munity service program in mental health. I had been to Washington before that several times helping when our APA moved to Washington, I had been something of a resource person for Dale Wolfle, they were up in the top floor of the old AAAS building, so I h~d had some acquaintance with Washington. Also, I was the son of a prominent Florida politician and before I was grown, I was almost a semi- pro politician myself, and I about the state governor, having been raised here in a town of about 5,000 or 6,000 people, so I had been a close friend of one governor, and an acquaintance of two others and I knew all the state officials and the way they operated, I knew all the members of the legislature, I had a roster of all the members of the legislature who had belonged to the Ku Klux Klan, and one thing or another, I was a kind of resource person to a Florida newspaper man on how you got along with them, in Tallahassee I was a kind of a consultant to them, so I knew a lot about how states operate, and I had a local experience in Wichita, and then before that I had been at the Indiana Medical Center several years. That was kind of the background that I brought to the job and I didn't know anything about regional offices, except what I had learned in the VA. But we had all these psychiatrists in the regional office there was Murray Diamond in New York and Curtis Southard in Richmond, Henry Schumacher in San Francisco, and I might say at the time that Training and Research had a little hard time getting off the ground, you see, most of the money was going into the His program, because it was put out on a grant basis to states, well, I was trying to think 4 JC cont. of all the other people who were psychiatrists in the regional offices. We had a meeting of regional office psychiatrists and Jim Lowry introduced me and Murray Diamond sat there for a time, he's a real mercurial individual, and so Jim had asked me to say what I thought I might do, and I stumbled along and said a few things, and I said I wouid like to meet with them and talk to them about what they needed in the way of psychologists in each one of the regional offices, and so Murray exploded first. He said, I don't know what in the hell I would do with a psychologist in the New York office and I don't think I have any use for them, and Jim was embarrassed a littl~ bit and the others were, and I maintained my cool and sat there and in­ vited reactions from other people, and they didn't come on that strong, but the man in Chicago said, well, he'd like to think about it, well, after two or three days, when it came time for them to go, guess who came around to bid me a farewell, it was Murray, of course. Guess you asked for the first psychologist, Murray Diamond. So, in looking around, I had been a school psychologist, a consultant meeting at the School Board, and one of the things I had learned along the way that people in school systems and state hospitals hired psychologists, what they called psychol~gists, they were usually graduate students, if they had any graduate work at all, had dropped out or had been let out, so that they only lasted one or two years, then they spoiled the situation and it took about five to. ten years before anyone wanted a psychologist again. So I had gotten rather fed up with that. So I paid attention to standards of psychologists. Do you want me to stop and talk about the other branches now? EAR I think it will be useful since you're kind of going up chronologically to make some comment about those, as you saw them at that time. JC Well, of course in Training, there was Vesty and Esther Garrison and Milt Whittman, I believe was there at the time, he either was there at the time or he came very shortly within the same time period. Then there was John Eberhardt and the world was very small then, so when they had the first meeting of the Training Committee, I also attended shm(imeetings of the Training Committee, some of which lasted till 3 or 4 o'clock in the morning. I participated pretty much along with everybody else, and then in Research there was young Larry Cobb, who was head of Research as I recall, and Phil Sapir came along as kind of his assistant, and of course the Research Grants didn't move too rapidly, nor did Training. Of course VA had led the way-\ 5 JC cont. in psychology and in the other mental health disciplines, stimulating the development in Training, so that it's my recollection that Training got more of a bid for its funds than probably Research got at that time. Research was kind of just getting off the ground, there weren't too many psychologists that came in, and then there were a few psychiatrists who fancied that they ought to be doing Research or something like that, and so there was the business of trying to accommodate anybody who looked like they had anything at all, and of course we had a Council, I remember Leo Bartemeyer and John Romano and Bill Menninger and, but you got all that, and then on the Council they had a psychologist who came from Vineland, Edgar Doll, so I thought well, the fisst thing, I ran across a young fellow in Personnel who knew something about personnel standards, who later became Assistant Secretary for Administration, Simpson, and I com­ municated my concern to him and wanted to know what he had, and he though I was on the right track. I got quite a little help from him and began to develop recommended personnel standards for psychologists to state mental health authorities, in o~her words, if they were going to use federal funds, then here were the recommended standards of NIMH. Well, the first thing to do is to get Council approval. Well, I ran into Edgar Doll. Now the Council all listened very res­ pectfully, I was a new psychologist there and they were sympathetic and interested, and seemed to think it was a step in the right direction, but the psychologists of all persons were the ones who attacked me, and he gave me quite a hard time, I rmmember he was staying down at the Dodge Hotel downtown, and Iwent to him and said I'd like to talk to him more about this. I went down to his room at the hotel and he opened a fresh box of chocolates and he got high as a kite on chocolates. If he had opened a bottle of liquor, I wouldn't have been surprised, But to get high on chocolates, he really got out of his head on chocolates, and he gave me all kinds of arguments. We had a lot of mutual friends, and I had known him fairly well before, but I thought he was utterly irrational about this, but he became adamant, he wouldn't budge and the more he talked about it and the more chocolates he ate, the more he got against the whole idea. I think he had been the first president of the AAAP and I had been rather prominent in that as a very young guy so I douldn't figure how the hell his position came about, I attributed it to what­ ever influence chocolates had on him. Anyway, I was a little beside 6 JC cont. myself because to me this was a key issue, if you couldn't have this, if you couldn't offer the states standards for personnel, and of course the other disciplines didn't have them either, and I knew that if I did it for psychology, they would have to do it. And I thought that if we at least had some standards that we could hope to hire people, that would command salaries, that would attract competent people, you could have a program. And if you didn't have good people there was no way on God's green earth that you could have a good service program, so I knew it was a key issue. Well, John Eberhardt was very sympathetic and so was Joe Bobbitt, and I went over things with John and he also sensed that Leo Bartemeyer was very sympathetic and suggested that we talk with him. We had a long session with Leo in which I confided my experiences of the night before and how these damn chocolates had operated. Anyway, Leo agreed to champion our cause. The problem was that since the psychologists had objected to it, there was nobody to move the approval of these things, so Leo agreed to stick his neck out and move the adoption, I think he was President of the little APA at the time, and he said enough about the importance of standards and he thought it was good that PliSYChology was taking the lead in this and it would help psychiatry and it would help all the other mental health disciplines. Then the crippled fellow from Louisville, I can't remember his name, I had talked to him and visited him once :in his facility before I came to NIMH, I think he may have seconded it, I'm not sure, Carl Menninger and the others went along. Since it was seconded, Edgar didn't say any more and it was passed. I had consulted with Dale Wolfle and had him go over my draft of things and he made suggestions, and I had asked the APA :to approve it. They had no committee, nor a mandate to do anything like this, so I got an informal opinion and I believe Carl I. Jacobson, he was the man who was later on the Council from New York State, the head of the Medical School, had looked this over and of course I had had a hand with Carl in setting up ABEPP earlier and had visited him in Iowa City when he was dean of the graduate school, so anyway they had reacted to it and thought it was satisfactory and gave me a kind of informal approval, as much as they could. I didn't have anything in writing. We got this out, and it was sent out to the states, and of course nobody bought it and I knew they wouldn't right away, it took about ten or twelve years before it finally got started, but it 7 JC cont. gave everybody something, and it gave me something when I went around I always enquired about the progress they were making and it did get established pretty well, but later on it kind of got hit by people like Nick Hobbs and a few others who thought it was terrible to have any formal requirements to be a psychologist, but it followed pretty much. I also borrowed quite a few things from VA which you appreciate too, in fact I had worked in terms of a branch chief, I had the job of getting, was it Milton Wexler, and another fellow, who hadn't finished their degrees and I got them sent back to school and got that cleaned up, so I had a little experience in the short time I was at VA and had the same problem and did work across the board here. Anyway we got that done, that was one of the earlier things that was accomplished, I thi~, and the I got out and travelled as much as possible and tried to visit the commissioners of mental health, and inquire about and ask questinns because we had kind of an interdisciplinary administration of that branch in which when the state plans and budgets came in, we all reviewed them and indicated our approval or raised questions so we all had a chance to do that. The end result, of course, of all this recommendations of standards for psychologists were of course that General R. had to get busy and do the same thing for psychiatrists and Pearl Shalit for nurses and by that time Daniel Keefe and I had gotten Warren Lamson in, so Warren had the job of doing something about it for them,~ I believ~, so we got that accomplished, which I thought was a kind of :fb~ stone kind of thing for the kind of program we were in. I might stop at this point and talk about the other branches, or I can talk about how we tied in with the other branches. Because at that time, we did a little more tieing in than we did later on, things became kind of more compartmentalized. EAR Yes, I think that's better to talk about it, how you tied in with them rather than to talk about them individually. I wonder if you would also interject a comment or two about lhow your own branch really func­ tioned, that is, here you were, four or five people a free stone, each with a somewhat different responsibility, with Jim Lowry osten­ sibly in charge of the whole thing, how did you ~eally interact, or was it just a series of fairly individual operations ju; t nominally tied together? JC Well, of course, it was a new program, we didn't have any guidance Cl'.4·" and Felix was smart enough and wise we had to all feel our wei'°g:M:t 8 JC co~t. enough to kind of give us a hunting license. I remember the things he told me and briefed me about what he expected out of me was, for instance, he wanted me to bring everything I could from psychology into the mental health program, particularly the community aspects of things, and that was a kind of a mission, in other words of course I had a job description too, he said a few other things. Then I had to feel my own way in terms of what I could do. The next big tming of course was to get psychologists in all the regional offices. The first person who was already more or less on the line that Joe Bobbitt had been working on was Carl Anderson. Then Harry McNeil came on the scene from New York. I had a hell of a job getting anybody to go to New York because it was so expensive to live in New York. Of course New Yorkers don't like to leave New York, so I finally got Harry McNeil on board with the understanding that we wouldn't ask him to leave New York. We tried to make everybody as transferrable as possible. Then after about two years I recruited Clair Calhoun who knew a great deal about state and local programs from Ohio, and Harold Skeeles, whom I had met at a AAAS meeting at Indianapolis where he read his paper on his work with Skeeles, Skodak and Wellman. I remember he had finished his doctorate, he was a little older than I, when I was a graduate student, and my major professor was J:.R.Kantor, I don't know if you know anything about Kantor 1 s background, but of course Skeeles' work was right down my alley, so to speak, so when I heard him I went up and shook hands with him but of course he was defying the whole world, he was attacking the great god Terman and defying the whole psychological world. When I went up to shake hands with him I remember how wet his palm was, and a little limp, he later became ill, you told me. Anyway, he was with the VA in the Denver regional office and I was in the st. Louis office, so I renewed my acquaintance with him, so he was one of the first persons I tried to recruit. He agreed to come if he could go to San Francisco, with Harry Schumacher. I can't recall the other people. In Atlanta, Calhoun was the first one in Atlanta and Bill Hales went to Dallas, a hard office to recruit someone for then I finally got Sam Buker, of course this was some time later, to Kansas City, in fact one of the persons I tried to get and almost recruited was Lou Cohen, and I worked on Lou Cohen who i had known when I was a graduate student in Indianapolis, he dropped out and worked in one of the prismns, and used to attend the Indiana Psycho- 9 JC cont. logical Association, we were on the program committee and I developed a liking and a great respect for him, he had been in the OSS during the war, so I tried to get Lou Cohen to go to Kansas City. He went out there and came back~oomplaining about anti­ semitism and of course we had a little problem in those days which Bob Felix can tell you about with the Murray Diamonds and of course Bob was pretty evangelical. albout such matters, the service was not the most hospitable place in the world. So I was pretty much riled up with KansasCity and left it alone for a while. Several years later I got Sam Buker, though, to go out there and later there was Allen Hodges in Denver and eventually I got them all staffed but it took, I was looking for the persons, I just didnt want to fill it with any bodies, in :fact I got into some difficulty because there was some :fellow, one o:f the psychiatrists in the regional office who d_ecided he wanted the job and I believe he had worked in the New York VA office, I've :forgotten his name now, I asked him to send me a CV and a bibliography, and all I got was a bibliography o:f other people he had worked up_:, so I wasn't about to recommend him. Anyhow I was under rather heavy attack because he came back and told people that I had virtually promised him the job. I had listened to him and asked him what he had to offer and was polite to him, but that's all. So I had problems· as I went about recruiting and then I had a gal who was something of a problem, I didn't think I could recommend her. Anyway, I tried to be very selective in terms o:f people who knew something and had some background :fnr doing the job and I, looking back, I think almost without exception, they all gave a very good account o:f themselves in the regional o:f:fices. In fact, many o:f them became heads of regional offices and they lasted longer than anybody else and were responsible for more developments in one thing or another. That took up a lot o:f time, I guess I was more concerned with standards and personnel than anything else. Then as I visited the regional offices and got acquainted with state mental health authorities and a :few local people whom we had. I remember once I went to Atlanta and Bill Hollister, who was in the regional office then as a psychiatrist, later on I got Will Edgerton in the Palo Alto Conference, I recruited him in the stadium. He was doing graduate work in Florida at the time. Bill Holliseer had somebody he wanted me to see in the Southern Regional Education Board, Bill McLaughlin and John Ivey. I had related to him my concern about 10 JC cont. training mental health personnel in the south, they were just a desert in the southeast, there were very few departments of psychiatry and they were pretty sticky and conventional and they had no training in clinical psychology I believe, little or none, and here we had all these queries about where the staff was going to come from, so he told me to talk with the people in the Southern Regional Education Board and he explained that this was set up by the fourteen southeastern southern governors to make it possible to utilize each others' train­ ing facilities, say Florida had no Veterinary Medicine, so they could send them to Georgia, and Dentistry, and they had no Medical School either, and they could send them, the Florida students as if they were Georgia students, and Tennessee, North Carolina, etc. And it was a rather exciting and imaginative program. I met with them and gave them my spiel, talking about General Bradley and this desert the thing I mentinned before, and about our needs and our program and the VA•s current needs, they still had the problem of how you did things, got personnel, they were trying to staff facilities in this part of the country, and that there was a crying need for mental health personnel, particularly in psychology which I knew more about. So they got interestligyand said they would like to do something about it, wherewould/get the money, were there any funds available and I remember Bill McLaughlin and John Ivey were a little cagey, they didh 1 t want to say anything, but there was some young fellow there who blurted things out, where the hell is the money going to come from? Have you got any money? and they looked at him like he was a bad boy, he later became Director, he succeeded, I believe, John Ivey. Anyway, I said that when I got back I would be glad to talk to Bob Felix and see what it was possible with the people in the Training Branch. I was pretty excited about it and went to see Vesty and John Eberhardt, no I guess, John had gone to the Research Branch by that time and Max Levin was there. I got Felix to call a meeting between the Training Branch, I don't remember whether Jim Lowry came, I guess I was the only one. By that time Training had gotten a little suspicious of community services, I think Vesty and Jim Lowry had a falling out, and Jim demanded action now, you see, and Vesty was holding on to the idea, particularly in psychology, of training people the way you ought to do as a seminal people, and Lowry wanted them so they could be used now, and I kind of sided with Vest-y but even so they became a little suspicious of me. I came 11 JC cont. in with this proposal and we had this meeting. Felix tried to get a reaction and from everybody there was a dead silence. So Felix wrestled with himself. I said we have to come up with $50,000 wherever it was, Southern Governor's Conference on Training Psychologists for mental health programs or something like that. He invited applications, so I got hold of Ivey and McLaughlin & Co. and they put in an application and got special handling all the way through and they got the grant and they invited psychiatrists, nurses, all mental health personnel, particularly psychologists. They had the university people and they also had the program people, that is the mental health program state people and the university people, the trainers and the users of psychologists and they did the same thing pretty much, at least the ~rainers of psychologists and the commis­ sioners of mental health and Governor Clements of Tennessee opened the meeting, Dale Wolfle was there, Fillmore Sanford (I don't know if Dale Wolfle was therel Nick Hobbs, in other words, we had quite a roster, Who's Who in Psychology, there, I think it was about 53, at Emory University, five hundred and some odd people. Anyway it reaulted in quite a bit of activity. Of course this all funneled up to the governors of the fourteen states and they made recommen­ dations to legislatures, and this is where the power was. I believe Hal Hildreth was there, representative, everybody who was interested and we had black psychologists there, even had a committee on it, and one of the problems I raised was that the blacks weren't· carrying their fair share of the load in the southeast, we didn't have any, you could count on one hand all the qualified psychologists in the country who were black. That ended up with my being on the committee for severalJyears, doing something about it for the SREB,with Nick Hobbs and Bill McLaughlin. Anyway we had a successful conference and it ended up with SREB making quite a committment in mental health. They set up a division and later on the Western Interstate Commission on Higher Educatinn stimulated by SREB's success, set up something and then we had Northeastern State Governor's Conference, which I never heard much about, and then we had one in the midwest. I remember the Wichie man came to town, he was a sociologist, I can't recall his name now, I think he came from Texas or New Mexico, or sonewhere, he came to see Vesty and Vesty still wasn't altogether sold on this so Vesty deposited it on my desk, since I was the one who knew all about SREB and had followed it with the most interest. So I went 12 JC cont. over and he wanted to know how he cuuld get some information about the experience. I told him it was easy and if he had time to go to Atlanta I would call and set up an appointment for him. I told him they were pretty nice Joes and if he had a problem, to visit him and to become his consultants. I also sug~ested a Canadian who had been a consultant to SREB, a very resourceful guy, an Englishman but I can't remember his name. He was a psychologist at the University of when I first met him, then he moved to Chicago. Anyway I made some suggestions, of Nick Hobbs I believe, whom they might retain and I was sure that if they paid their expenses they would be glad to do it. It happened that way. Wichie set up something comparable, at least they stood on SREB's shoulders and I told them SREB would be glad to have them do that, and they did. They made everything available to them. I mention this because to me this is one of the significant developments in NIMH and in light of the kind of stony silence we were met with, I was a little nervous because I didn't know whether Felix was going to stick his neck out, but he did. He was still sticking his neck out for me at that time. Later on he didn't always stick his neck out for me, but he did that time and I think it paid off. EAR Jerry, reflect a minute. I don't mean to interrupt you because this is going very well, but reflect a minute. You're kind of alluding to the fact that a number of things were done in those early days which really had very very significant consequences, small efforts kind of grew, I mean the original idea for SREB and SREB grew, and then Wichie takes off from that, and you have some very important •••••• JC And then you had some in the midwest, they also developed, but they weren't as strong ••••• EAR No, the other two were really the most dominant, but could you now in retrospect say what you tha.nk it was that permitted this kind of innovations, kind of growth and development, you alluded to the fact that Bob was very good and would give everybody his head, so to speak, and let them use their own initiative and you have hunting license, and you all came in earlt onwithout any clear tight guidelines which allowed you then to innovate that way, is there anything else that you feel played a part in allowing the early days of NIMH to be so creative? What was it? JC Well, I think that we had a very creative staff. Felix was wise enough. He had the mission from Congress, so to speak, and was 13 JC cont. entrusted with this by the Surgeon General and we knew what the goals were, he kept those pretty clear and then as we came in trying to implement these goals, we usually got a very good strong support from him, and sometimes it worked out well, and sometimes it didn't. One of the things that didn 1 ·t work out so well in the early days, he had resources, I think five or six demonstration centers and he set one up in Prince George's County and he had all this money for it and one of the problems, our branch was responsible for them at the time, since I was the only one who knew anything about operating in the community and had the direct community experience, it was clear that I was supposed to do something about it. I remember Dale Cameron and I talked about things and then I got hold of some of the regional people and Henry Schumacher got all excited about something out in Arizona, at Phoenix, I went out and visited with Schumacher and we got a center going, the second, I recruited a fellow from Akron, Keith Perkins, and we got Bob Hewitt. At first there was a young psychia­ trist named White who later went to St. Petersburg, I suppose he is still there, and then there was the daughter of the man who had been the Federal Se,curity Administrator when we were still part of the FSA she was a kind of upperclass gal who had all this energy, just catching mountains around everybody, and then we had a young social worker who was a Mormon, I remember, I don't recall his name either. We got all this crowd out there and of course in terms of writing up the mission for the whole thing, that fell on me. Henry had one notion about doing it and I had a different one, we had a bit meeting in Phoenix, Jim and I went out there, and had this kind of a showdown on how it was to operate and I prevailed. It seemed that Henry had promised the local people one thing, but our mission and what we had authority to do was another thing, and I could only operate along these lines, so we went out and fPt all this straightened out, more or less. Henry kind of withdrew, he had sold it locally and gotten all the permission, but had promised things that we couldn't deliver. That was a big problem. We didn't do so well then. The staff was a little disorganized with all this conflict, it was responsible to the regional office and responsible to us, one thing or another, so finally we got all this settled and Felix proceeded to take it away from us and gave it to John Clausen, and the Program Planning Branch, and I went out with John once or twice and kind of kept with it for a time, I believe that was the last. In other words, that was one 14 of the things in the earlier plan. I had nothing to do with the earlier plan to have these centers and of course I had to wrestle with Mabel Ross. We were always good friends, we became good friends over the years, but we had it nick and tuck in terms of how to get the Prince George's County center off the grounds. Now Mabel I don't think had worked in a community and I had, and finally Alan Miller came on the scene and business picked up. Alan and I got along wonderfully well and I always thought highly of Alan and we sang the same songs and he was a little younger than I was and in terms of the way I formulated things and I went over my rationale for him and he bought a lot of it, in fact he not only bought it but went way beyond it. He got on his staff some young fellows like Yolles, Bert Brown and so on and I supported Charlie Ullman who wanted to get out and I urged him to get out into the community as a resource person, and the importance of remedial reading I pointed out that 8096 plus of juvenile delinquents had serious subject defi­ ciencies and if psychotherapy didn't work you could give them remedial reading, that did more to handle juvenile delinquents as referred by a court than anything else, that you could turn them around. I had had that experience in Wichita. Well, he listened to all that and he proceeded to do it with lids two hot hands. Of Course I raised hell about that because I said you can only do this on a demonstra­ tion basis because you can't take several hundred remedial reading cases needs in Prince George's County. Now you take them on a demon­ stration basis and you use that as an entree to the schools and then you persuade the schools, the teachers to go off and learn how to do it and you help them to do it. So he did and he worked out beautifully. He had a superintendent out there that supported him and he took him on a demonstration basis. He found teachers who could do this and were interested and responsive and kids that you couldn'd do anything with and parents that you couldn't do anything with, why this turned everything around. I met with the superintendent and with Charlie and you sent people off to places where they really could teach remedial reading, which isn't the same thing as most teachers know, you have to do it on an entirely different basis. So then Charlie made a study, you remember his famous study 0£ Prince George's County kids, this worked so well that the superin= tendent wanted him to conduct the study with youngsters who weren't doing well and of course they found the malnutrition and all the variois things, and they wanted to publish 1500 copies of the report. 15 JC cont. I insisted on 5000and the last I heard it was over 50,000 because it was a seminal type of thing to do. This gradually got Mabel, she was trained in public health and of course this was public health, in a sense public mental health, and not on a clinical one to one basis, but on how you use yourself, and Alan, of course, bought the idea of accepting referrals only on a demonstration, the oppor­ tunities for demonstration, in other words, they went out and Alan followed up on the thing I had done in Wichita and had tried to get done in Phoenix. When a case was referred you would accept it and go out and provide consultation and get an entree in the school, then you go out and talk to them about cases and then suggest that they do certain things. Otherwise you impoverish the school system or the juvenile court and actually less gets done if you do it that way than if you try to do it on a high-powered clinic staff basis. Then if you use your expertise to equip other people to do it this handles most of that type of thing. Alan did a beautiful job on that, in fact as I say he went far beyond anything I was able to do. I think I may have been of some help in shoving him in that direction. EAR Let me take you back to the Phoenix situation because obviously the Prince George's County demonstration center was the only really suc­ cessful one (JC yeah, one of the two) you started to say something about Phoenix but you didn't say why it seemed to have fallen flat on its face. JC Well, one thing was I think the basic difficulty as I recall it was that Henry promised the local people one thing, in other words, they would put in a facility that would handle all their mental health problems apparently, and of course the formala I had sold to Da1e Cameron and also to Felix, Da1e was the assistant director and the one who was trying to do something about this. He and I were working pretty close together. Jim Lowry supported us and Jim was a very good person to have at the time. He was a little bit on the cynical side but he was a very good administrator and a very smart guy, a very discerning person. And when Jim bought something, he didn't buy half. He always supported you, you always had him backing you and he never double-crossed you and anything like that. All you had to do was keep him informed, let him know how things were going and what was happening, and if he had any questions about things he wasn't slow about raising them, but then once you had a meeting of the minds, you had him with you. They began to have some staff problems 16 JC cont. I don't know all the things. It kind<f' got out of my purview, Johnny Clausen was going to try to make it work and I don't know that Jolm did any better job than we did. He was going to try to make it a community research facility, they were going to do a lot of research there. In the first place, they weren't staffed to do research. The psychologist we had there knew a great deal about school systems and local communities and as the idea of having a demonstration where people from this country and abroad could go and see how a local community mental health facility ought to work in terms of not only with his little hot hands of seeing a few hundred cases a year but how it permeated out in the community, so in Wichita we could say the Wichita Guidance Center served as many people as the telephone company did, because indirectly to personnel managers, to school teachers, to superintendents, to physicians, to lawyers and so on, we were that pervasive in the cominunity in terms of the local orphanage and so on, we went out there and in the juvenile court we always accepted cases beyond a certain point. I was stuck the first several years and I had to turn this around with my predecessor, then I sold my Board on the idea we would hole our case load constant in terms of obligatory services, and then thereafter all other services we accepted on the basis of the opportunity it gave us to help school teachers do a bebter job in handling their mental health problems, of helping pediatricians, of helping orthopedic surgeons, of even helping lawyers, welfare workers and everybody in the Police Depart­ ment. In fact we had a lot of demands from the Police Department over there to help their policemen handle mental health problems. So we had permeated out in the community. This was the thing that had excited Bob ~erkes earlier, because it wasn't where a person presents themselves to the clinic and you see them, and then when they leave, you don't know anything that happens to them. In other words, we were out there and this was what I was trying to sell. Because there was no way on God's green earth at I could see at that time and I don't know how you could yet, of just trying to hire people to handle the mental health problems of a community. Actually by trying to do this, they stop trying to cope, they dump it all on you, you become a dumping ground for onlya few hundred cases a year. That was the thing I had now gotten, with Bob Hewitt's help and so on, and I had recruited the pSYsfhologists on that basis, because Hewitt wasn't a research man, we didn't have any research people out 17 JC cont. there. I think that was a mistake. It's true we were having our troubles, but I think to have turned it over to a man who was primarily interested in research was something of a mistake, since they hadn't really reached the point where they might have done that and added to the staff, they hadn't gotten to the point where that was indicated. Anyway it petered out after a few years and was closed down. That's my notion of it. EAR Well, that's fine. I~ need that kind of perspective. That was the next step I wanted to deal with. You have just given one example of something that didn't go as well as it might and it is in contrast to a lot of instances in which NIMH programs were eminently success­ ful, the counterpart to that perhaps is where people got involved in activities that weren't very successful and became disappointed themselves, and you just mentioned Johnny Clausen, and I think his feelings about the early years at NI:MH are not as positive as a lot of other individuals. Did you have enough interaction with him to be able to comment on why he might have felt the NIMH wasn't very successful·from his viewpoint? JC Let's see, there was Bobbitt and Clausen and Daniel O"Keefe in this Program Planning Branch. Well the Program Planning Branch had a pretty rough time, they had responsibility for planning but they didn't have responsibility for implementing any of it, so the operating pro­ grams like Training, Research, Community Services, they were the original three, and of course then you had Biometrics, Charlie Limberg was earlier there in Biomeurics and then Mort Cramer came in, and I guess Dale Cameron was in there, wasn't he? EAR Let me stop about Dale, because I want to aSK you one more question and I don't want to derail you on what you were about to say. You mentioned a few moments ago that Dale w~s the Assistant Director~ Did you have the feeling that Dale was in some sense considered to be the heir ap~arent, should Bob Felix ever move on or something like that, or was that not anywhere near in the wind yet? JC I think it was kind of assumed that he would be. He was a very ener­ getic, resourceful person, he was right up front, and then something happened, I don't know what. I never heard of any difficulty between him and Felix, but apparently something happened and he went downtown. EAR Yes, I know the story. I just wanted to get your perspective on it. JC But I think in the beginning, I just assumed he was a very competent person and he and Felix seemed to work very close together in the 18 JC c:&niL., earlier days, and I wasn't aware o:f any ri:ft between them, i:f there was one, was there a ri:ft between them? EAR Well, what happened, Bob dee.±ded he really wasn't the guy to succeed him but anyway, the other person is very important here, and just let me say parenthetically that one o:f my very great disappointments in trying to do this is that Joe Bobbitt wasn't available to me be:fore he died (JC - yeah, because he was there :from the day 1) and in :fact I asked him i:f he would do it shortly before he died and he wasn't up to it at that time. What were your recollections about Joe? He was never to be considered as heir apparent, because he wasn't an MD, but more than that, he also was much more a thinker and a talker than a doer, isn't that so? I'm not saying that in a disparaging sense, but I believe one o:f Bob's strengths was his ability to recog­ nize people's strengths and weaknesses and assess them correctly, and I think he used Joe Bobbitt :for exactly what Joe could be used :for and had no intention o:f putting him in a place that he couldn't handle, but tell me a little bit about your perceptions about Joe Bobbitt and then I want you to get back to the Program Planning. JC Well, Joe I guess was one o:f the :first persons, and Dale Cameron and by the way, you know, Sid Newman was on in the early days. Sid is still around and he was there before I was •••• EAR Yes, o:f course, I really should talk to Sid •••• JC I would think so. And he is still in Bethesda, I saw him about a year ago. EAR Yes, that's a very good suggestion. I really should speak with him. JC and he was with Joe Bobbitt in the Coast Guard, and they came :from there to set this up. Well about Joe. My relations with Joe were very uncomplicated. As you say, Joe was a very bright guy, he was a planner rather than a doer, I would agree with you, in :fact I don't recall that Joe ever did anything in the sense o:f a program wise, he had a very :facile mind and I was more o:f a doer type o:f thing, and also I had some imagination too and I became aware a:fter a time that Joe and I got along very well at :first and I was aware that Joe perceived me as something o:f a menace. He was threatened by me someway o:f another. And in the earlier days I saw a great deal of Joe personally and socially, in my home and so on, and then with this Program Planning, I think that's what it was called, in the :first place Jim Lowry took exceptions to this, an:i I think Vesty did I don't remember who was in research but at that time, I don't know i:f John Eberhardt was there, but this didn't bother John too much, 19 JC cont. but they wrote papers and so on. They took a little bit 0£ the air of overseeing what we were doing, which didn't bother me at all, but it really bothered some other people, £or instance, Jim Lowry didn't like this a damn bit. Jim was smar,t enough to know that whoever had control of the dollars and who controlled the dollars were the ones who ran the program, no matter what the planners said. He was pretty explicit about that with me. 0£ course I thought in general it was a good idea, I wanted my input, but for some reason my input wasn't welcome. There was a little lit of the business without telling us anything, of looking over our shoulder and we weren't really brought in as I thought we ought, but I was a very busy guy, and I thought it was too bad, but I~ couldn't be helped, and I got along very well personally with Johnny Clausen, even when Lowry was up in the air about the Phoenix business, I tried to make a graceful transition, be helpful, 0£ course I got along very well with Johnny, Danny 0 1 Keefe didn't stay very long and I believe Dale was in it, wasn't he the head chief 0£ that branch? (EAR - for a while) yeah, that's right. I think he started off that way and then Joe took it over. In later years Joe and I kind of came back together, in fact right at the height of the upset I was having, maybe I shouldn't tell you this, I was on Joe's promotion board and only one person cuuld be promoted in the commissioned corps and two other people who had institute directors champing them was the competition. They tried to snowjob and one thing and another and I wouldn't go along, and Joe became the first 4-striper in psychologists, probably the second in the cuuntry. I remember the time, since Joe is dead I can tell you this aid it's no viola­ tion 0£ confidence, John was in the commissioned corps at the time, and I said to him that this was a terrible time for me to be having a bitter struggle with Joe, I forget about what but we were really pissed of£at each other, here I'm on this and I have to be fair with him, and all I have to do is just keep my mouth shut and he would be sunk because I had to out-maneuver two institute directors and there were £ive of us on the committee, and if the other two sat back and didn't say anything and I did my smartest poker playing, it was really nerve wracking, because to try to out-maneuver these two other guys who hadg>ne way out on a limb for their man and both of them were world famous, one of them I shared a hospital room with later, and he was a whizz in terms of developing new drugs 20 JC cont. but anyway, Joe got to be a 4-striper,o~;c~urseI never told Joe this, I kept right on feeling with him for several months after that, ••••• EAR That was something aside again. What do you think Joe's relationship with Bob Felix was over the years, we've already alluded to it that I think Bob Felix used him well, but understood and recognized his weaknesses too, but as you well know, when Stan Yolles came along, late in the 1950s and 1 1 11 just refresh your memory, because I dont think you were as close to it then, but Joe Bobbitt went on the so-called Funny School study, do you remember that incident? And Joe Bobbitt was on leave for about six months and Stan Yolles came in to be Assistant Director on a temporary basis, and in a sense that was the beginning of the end for Joe Bobbitt. He never did get back into Bob Felix's inner circle operation anymore and Stan very quickly then took over as the heir apparent in a real sense, although earlier on, in the mid 1950s there was the real thought that perhaps Alan Miller would become the Assistant Director. JC Yes, I always thought Alan, but then Alan •••••• EAR Went to England and got into trouble. JC And he really got on that divorce business. EAR Most everybddy on the inside knew about that? JC I don't know. I knew about it from Alan and Alan and I were very close friends, in fact when .Alan was being kind of ostracized I was one of the few, and Stan, I remember several parties, we used to have get togethers at the Institute, in terms of personally receiving the new Mrs. Miller and so on, they were in the doghouse. I think that the Yolles' and ourselves were the only ones to publicly embrace them, so to speak, as friends and so on. I always had a lot of questions about Stan, but one good thing I remember about Stan was that he was loyal to Alan in a very trying time, but I would say to your question about Joe, He was Bob's very close friend and Man Friday, as I saw it, and he was someone, when Felix got in a jam, as he often did, you know, he led a pretty rough life, Joe was al­ ways the man he could turn to and freewheel and do things, everybody else was off doing something programatically, and of course Joe was very loya:~·, he had some blinkers about some things but they were his own blinkers, they weren't blinkers to Felix, as far as I knew, and I'd be surprised if they were. I never seriously thought that Joe would be a successor to Felix, I wouldn't have opposed it, but 21 JC cont. I didn't think he would. It was a medical operation, you almost had to have a•••••• EAR Do you think that Joe may have had a secret expectation that that would happen? JC I detected that Joe began to act as though, in fact he began to develop a slightly imperial, that's the wrong word, but you know what I mean, that's tso strong. (EAR - I understand). But you know there's kind of a free-wheeling detachment of being the center of attention type of thing, and saying bright things, being very penetrating and saying illuminating things ••• EAR Did you know, were you part of the little, well I don't want to call it a clique, because that sounds quite negative, (JC - the inner circle?) yeah, that Joe and John Eberhardt and maybe Phil Sapir and a couple of other people were very close with each other and espec­ cially John Eberhardt, I think, and Phil Sapir were very disappointed and I think very distressed when Joe was presumably shunted aside when Stan Yolles came along. Were you aware of that kind of relation~ ship? JC No, I wasn't. I had been a part of the inner clique in the earlier days and I got shunted before that happened, in other words there were several things. For one thing I got tied up with too many things. I did more traveling, I think, than anybody in the Institute, I was out more and another thing was, all these various things I was mixed up in, John Eberhardt was never threa~ened by me but for some reason Joe was and although I felt very loyal to Joe and would have been, although I didn't mind speaking my mind about things or being critical. If he got into a row with earl Rodgers, he'd turn to me about some things, but in the earlier days we_were all kind of on one level, and then of course as we reorganized and got more compli­ cated, I had never any ambitions administratively, in other words I was always interested in seizing hold of part of the program that I could do and working with that, that's the reason I chose the Commis­ sioned Corps because I didn't have to climb over anybody else or be an administrator. So I was never interested in being a Branch Chief I had no ambitions whatever, I didn't mind so much being a Section Chief because the administrative duties there were pretty light and I could still do some other things, but I never put in a bid, or bucked for it or expected it, in fact the one or two times I might have I deliberately avoided it. Of course I had nothing to gain by 22 JC cont. it economically and it wasn't what I wanted to do anyway. EAR Let me ask you about one more person because you did have a very unique relationship with a number of people. Did you have any part in bring Hal Hildreth in to NIMH? JC Yeah. EAR Could you talk about him a little bit and how he got started. JE. Yeah. He left on righteous indignation from the VA, it was a matter of high principles and he was kind of shoddy, he had kind of worn himself to a frazzle. EAR I heard his famous speech when he threatened to leave and and:_ they took him up on his threat. JC. Well, he left. He came out ·to see Felix and he came out to see Joe Bobbitt and he came out to see me. Of course Hal and I were Branch Chiefs together and we had become very good friends over the years and very close friends. Felix was agreeable, if anybody would take him and find a place for him, but here again in terms of trying to find a place for somebody, I'll give you o:m guess as to the only person in the Institute who did, namely me. We had just started a hospital consultation service, had brought Bob Hewitt in and Ruth Knee, and who was the nurse who later died, So I undertook to find a place for Hal and did, which he wasn't happy with for very many months. Well, for some reason I was a little surprised at Joe because Joe was in as good or better position than I was to do something to find a place for him, and the place I had for him was a very reasonable cne and it wasn't because of any unhappiness with him, it was his unhappiness with the assignment. And with Ruth Knee and that nurse, who was a stem winder, anyway I could understand why Hal wasn't happy, then later Joe did find a place for him, see with him. And then in terms of the money, I helped find the money to support, Hal had the idea he would like to work, rather than hospital consultation which was kind of old hat to him and a bit pedestrian from his point of view, and I could understand that. Well, he went with Joe and talked with me about it, and what he really wanted to do, he told me he was unhappy with it and Joe had suggested he might be able to work something out, which Joe did. Then he was instigated into neglected areas, like homosexuality and sexu~lity and suicide and so on, and when he was in the community services branch I encouraged him very much in that direction. I remember he brought a couple of people him, Furbelough and Shneidman, I guess it was Furbelour he 23 JC cont. brought in first and I gave him all the support I could, in fact I helped find the money for some support, and then the same thing happened with the Masters' type of study, Masters and Johnson, in fact at the St. Louis meeting I was one of those who heard the first presentation of Masters and Johnsons work. You remember that? You were there. And I had met Bill Masters. Joe was a little ner­ vous about it and he wasn't altogether supportive as he might have been of Hal, and I was very supportive of Hal, in fact I had thought it was a very good thing to do and there weren't many people who had enough guts to attempt it, and he introduced me to Evelyn Hooker, and I helped find the money for a lot of these things and encouraged him and he used to come to see me every once in a while and kind of kept me posted on what was happening. I was very fond of Hal, he was a very sweet guy and he did a very good job in terms of encouraging these people who wouldn't have gotten any support otherwise because early I had tried to, in Indiana Pomeron and Kinsey, whom I knew, and later on I was a consultant to Kinsey when he first started. EAR Were there any other people that you think would be important to bring into the picture that you had some close relationships with and have not talked about so far? JC Well, we haven't said much about Vesty. When the world was small we used to all have a brown bag lunch in T6 and often Felix and Vesty and John Eberhardt and six or eight people or teri.,maJ[be would be in my office, it was a sizeable office. I shared a table with a man who had kind of been transferred by the Surgeon General for something, he was in the doghouse, I forget what for, he went over to ~the clinical center for a time but I can't remember his name, but anyway they came in for lunch. Vesty was an arch Republican and I was an ultra-Liberal, at least for the purpose of the meeting, until the day that Vesty converted me, I became a shuttle Vestermark Republican and we would have lunch together and we had quite a bit of socializing at that time. Of course Vesty was a funny sort of a guy, he could be very rigid and very conventional and he and Jim Lowry kind of feuded about some things, and all of a sudden he switched positions and he became more in Jim's corner than Jim was, in terms of reaching out into the world, and then of course he began to try to pull Jim up, and that was the day, EAR What was your feeling about Vesty 1 s relationship with Bob? JC Well they were very close, I guess they had been to Lexington together, 24 JC cont. and they were contemporar~\_in other words they were full partners. I think of all the people there, it was my perception of them, the Vestermarks and the Felixes lived within a block of each other and their wives and families knew each other and I would guess that Felix was closer to Vestermark than I would say to Dale Cameron or Joe Bobbitt. They had children about the same age and Vesty always deferred to Bob although he always spoke his piece and of course Ve sty wasn • t as sharp as Dale Cameron and so_.:_ on, he was a very compulsive individual, in other words, if you had a meeting to have and you had to do certain things, you could be sure that it was done, so in terms of reviewing all these training grants and so on, he kept the show on the road. Now sometimes he was a little limited in his perception and comprehension of things and that used·:to dismay some of the people around him and it would take a little time for Vesty to kind of catch up with some of the people, but once he caught up and then sometimes he would surprise everybody by kind of leapfrogging ahead of them, but I was very fond of Vesty and I visited him in his last days in the hospital, and at home, and I was very fond of Lucille, his wife, EAR Well, he was a real gentleman. JC He was. He came up kind of the hard way. I think his mother had to raise a family of boys. He knew a great deal of poverty in his life, hardship, and I think he came up a little bit on the under­ priviledged side •••• EAR We're almost at the end of the tape and I don't want to do more than that because I found that more than an hour and a half is too much we've touched on a lot of things and it's been very helpful, is there anything else that you can think of that perhaps we missed altogether or anything else you want to add to, in terms of circumstances, inci­ dents or people that played an important role in this growth and de­ velopment of NIMH as we both shared it, you much more than me. JC The.later history you know about. The Comprehensive Community Mental Health Act, you know all about that, you were there. One thing about Felix, I was always a little bit on the hyperactive side and my rela­ tions with Felix were rather unusual in a way. I don't know if they were unusual but when I went out and found something was wrong or something was not going well, of course I didn't hesi~ate to come back and write a trip report and I'd go in to see Felix and tell him all about it, which apparently used to upset him quite a bit because 25 JC cont. I always told it more or less like it was, and I found out that wasn't a very good thing to do. Also, I became aware of the fact and I wasn't the only one, that a tall person had to be a little care­ ful with Bob. You didn't tower over Bob, you see, and I would get up to him and get excited and start talking, and apparently this turned Bob off. EAR That's funny. You will be amused to hear that yesterday I spoke to George Kingman, and George Kingman, you remember, is about my size, he's really not that tall, and he said, you know, Eli, it took me about two years to find out that I was taller than Bob Felix. He was in a sense really awed by the guy and so the physical relationship was overcome by the psychological perception he had of the man. It's really funny. JC Well the first person who ever called my attention to it was John Eberhardt. In fact he cautioned me. He had seen me at one session and said, listen, don't you know better than to do that. And so I tried to pay attention after that, but I had kinda gotten a little bit in the doghouse by that time, because when something went wrong, particularly out in the states, with commissioners of mental health and various things that he didn't know much about, and yet these were the things he had to talk to Congressmen about and he had to get appropriations and they always wanted to know what he was actually doing, and when things went wrong apparently that bothered him. In fact I think Dale Cameron gave me a little lecture once that I might be alittle more circumspect, if things went wrong maybe I ought to think twice before I brought them to Bob Felix, and I a~~ays thought that there was sometming wrong, that he ought to be the first to know about it. EAR Well, listen, this has been very helpful Jerry and I do appreciate your taking the time to spend with me. lNow there is a discussion of the materials Jerry loaned you.) EAR We're talking about Lennie Duell. JC Well, your mentioning Lennie Due11 1 s name to me brought to mind something that is interesting in the earlier days. As a psycholo­ gist and working in the community I was acquainted with the problems of mental retardation. Of course, I had worked with C.M.Louttit and he had been at Vineland with Doll and so on, so I was trained and brought up more or less to be pretty sensi.tive to mental retardation problems. And then I had wrestled in the earlier days with the things 26 JC cont. you couldn't get hold of with alcoholism so I considered since our mission at that time was not only mental illness, but mental retardation including alcoholism and everything, I guess I was about the only member of the staff that I knew anything about who was con­ cerned with retardation, and to a lesser extent, about alcoholism. I had a lot of trouble with the psychiatrists. My psychiatrist frimnds would listen to me but they didn't pay much attention to this. They could never bring themselves to do anything about it, and cf course the commissioners of mental health weren't interested in mental re­ tardation, ,except for the very few who formerly had something to do with the program in their own states, so we had a young psychiatrist, before Duell, Larry Greany, who came from New York City. He was a very bright able guy and I was trying to get somebody to be concerned with mental retardation, I ~hought this was important and Larry was responsive. To give you some idea of how far away -everybody else was, from mental retardation, which program we later lost, when the Kennedys came in, I talked Larry into visiting Vineland Training School provided I would go with hi~ and then later we went to visit Letchworth Village, I guess I didn't go to Letchworth with him, I had been to Letchworkh and if I would go to Vineland with him so he could be acquainted with what it was like, he was very hesitant about it, but at the time I thought well isn't this a hell of a note, he was probably the youngest and the most venturesom psychiatrist we had in the place and would only go to Vineland if I went with him; so I went with Larry to Vineland, he became interested and returned and gave a staff report about what he saw as our responsibilities towards mental retardation. Then he left after a year or so and then Lenny came, and Lenny got into this business of mental retardation. Then I had a problem with Lenny because Lenny would decide on things, notify other people that they could look to me to do certain things and I was too busy to do them. So I would have to tell Lenny to go to hell every once in a while and it used to annoy the hell out of him, but at least he did •,1-­ do something about mental retardation. Now if NIMH had started earlier and had really done anything about it, they wouldn't have lost the program. They wouldn't have given Eunice Shriver the opportunity, she took it away and I can see it now, NIMH ~asn•t going to do any­ thing about it and they did the same thing with alcoholism, and in visiting the commissioners I always asked them if they were doing anything in these areas, but without much luck. I remember visiting 27 JC cont. W~st Virginia, they were being threatened by a s_eparate com­ mission on alcoholism and I remember giving the state health officer who was responsible at the time a little bit of hell by saying, God damn it, why haven't you been doing anything about it. Of course there wasn't time and then also psychiatrists were trained in terms of the way departments of psychiatry trained them, and that's all they need. They have this little stereotype and they didn't know anything about mental retardation, very few of them did, nobody liked alcoholism and who wanted to be bothered with alco~olics. I never saw a psychiatrist who wanted to waste his tiim~ with alcoholics, at that time.