We had conversations with Mel Laird about how we were going to proceed. He had basically the concept of pay-or-play, which we would grab today if we … - Ted Kennedy

Success in this effort will be achieved if we meet three core objectives. First, we must demand value from our investments. In early education, value is reflected in the quality of a range of important services. The most significant factors are the knowledge and skills of the service providers, and their capacity to form strong relationships with children and their families. These personal characteristics are influenced by training and compensation. Yet thirty states have no training requirements for preschool teachers before they begin to teach. Parking lot attendants are generally paid more to watch our cars than early education professionals are paid to teach our youngest children. On average, early education providers earn 15,430 dollars a year. It can and must become a national priority to change this -- to improve the skills, the pay, and the retention of the professionals who teach our children at the dawn of life.

You know, it depends on the unions, about where they are. Some of them have got other issues that are as important, if not more important, in terms of the narrow Labor issues. All of the railroad unions were concerned about Amtrak—that’s 31 of the unions who were all concerned about—that’s their particular part of it. The building trades were concerned about independent contracting. And they’re worried about immigration and this kind of thing that they get on the health. The number one issue for Labor today is the Employee Free Choice Act, to permit them to have card check-offs for organizing. That’s really the most powerful, although you still—this is one of the four or five issues that they’ll list, but they’ve got other issues as well. In a number of areas there is a heightened interest on the part of Labor, because in an increasing number of these negotiations they are losing ground because they are having to pay higher co-pays and higher deductibles. Therefore, it’s becoming more of an issue at the bargaining table, where it was sort off the bargaining table for years. Even in the UAW, it was never—all they would do is continue to make progress in coverage, and now they’re in a gradual kind of retreat. They made this macro deal recently, where they developed a foundation to offload some of the expenses—a rather complicated financial deal that helped them get out from some of the legacy costs on it. But I’d say that now, in many more union disputes, healthcare is front and center, but they still care about some of these other issues. We could go on in terms of where we are in the ’70s. We’ve gone through pretty much on Nixon.

There was the time, shortly after the Supreme Cour<nowiki/>t's decision in Roe versus Wade in 1973, when Cardinal Medeiros called Tip and asked to see him on a matter of great urgency. With some trepidation about the purpose of the visit, Tip agreed to see him right away. As it turned out, Cardinal Medeiros was extremely concerned about a powerful hurricane that had just devastated the Cape Verde Islands. He had a specific request for Tip--to see if $8 million in emergency relief could be included in the foreign aid appropriations bill. Tip, with that irrepressible twinkle in his eye, replied, "Your Eminence, I'll put $16 million in, if you won't mention Roe versus Wade." One of Tip's most famous stories concerned the gift by Henry Ford of $5,000 toward a new hospital in Ireland. Unfortunately, the local newspaper the next day reported that the gift was $50,000. The editor apologized profusely for the mistake, and said he'd run a correction right away, explaining that the gift was only $5,000. It took Henry Ford about 10 seconds to realize what was happening, and he said, "No, don't do that. I'll give you the $50,000, but on one condition--that you put a plaque over the entrance to the hospital with this inscription--'I came unto you, and you took me in.'"