My brother was the first President of the United States to state publicly that segregation was morally wrong. His heart and his soul are in this bill… - Ted Kennedy

Carter found out that Califano and I were going to the same meeting, and he heard that they were just talking in general terms, and he became enormously suspicious of Califano. Califano never trimmed on Jimmy Carter’s principles. Wherever Carter came down, he stayed. You’d talk a little bit about it here and there, trying to glad-hand your bid on some of these kinds of things, which I understood. But he never trimmed, never played a game on that thing, and he stayed absolutely consistent. Carter fired him because he thought he was becoming too friendly with me on this, there’s no real question. And once he left—I mean, he was the only one who really understood the healthcare issue—it was gone. Eizenstat was, I thought, a positive. He wanted to be helpful in trying to bridge the gap. Califano didn’t want to have a split. It’s kind of interesting, in these notes, the extent that Jimmy Carter said that he didn’t want to have a split with us.

Now we’re into the period of the ’70s, and we’re trying to think about how to go through—We go through a whole series of different maneuvers over a very considerable period of time. We’re trying to see how we can build a coalition and how we can expand the breadth of our support. One interesting phenomenon during this period of time is that Wilbur Mills, who was the Chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, an enormously powerful position, was interested in running for President. No one gave him much of a chance, but he thought that the way to do it was to be for national health insurance, and so this opened up—To have the Chairman of the Ways and Means Committee being your ally on this was a very significant and important opportunity. He and I got along fine. I had never been all that close to him, but he respected my brother Jack, and they had some mutual friends. So we had this sort of dance, trying to get him into the program. He wouldn’t go for the single-payer program and through all of this period, we’re sort of adjusting and changing. The Republicans, even when they came our way later on, were always sort of holding back and always tipping the tide to the industry—and the industries that were most effective were the insurance industries and hospitals—during the series of debates. We suffered a very serious setback as we started to move ahead in the early ’70s, with the loss of—Walter Reuther was killed in an airplane crash. And also by the fact that Wilbur Mills got himself in trouble.

And of course, all of us in Congress quickly learned to host fundraisers the way Tip O'Neill did it--a thousand dollars if you came, and two thousand dollars if you didn't. Tip was scrupulously neutral in the 1980 Democratic primaries between President Carter and myself. But he told me that every night, before he went to sleep, he was secretly getting down on his knees and praying that we would have another Irish President of the United States. The prayer was a little ambiguous--but Tip's friend Ronald Reagan was very grateful. There was never any secret about the genius of Tip O'Neill. In his years as Speaker of the House, the entire Nation came to know him and love him as we did in Massachusetts. He was a Speaker who was never afraid to speak out for the average man and woman--the worker trying to keep a job, the child going hungry in the night, the family struggling to make ends meet, the senior citizen trying to live in dignity in retirement.