She refused to disavow the shameful acts of torture that have undermined America's credibility in Iraq and the world. When Senator Dodd asked her whe… - Ted Kennedy

Experimental research basis by the NIH. There were probably less than a hundred that had gone through it, but they had had positive numbers on that. Before that, it was very tough; the survival rate was not good, you know, 15 to 20 percent. But after this it was 85 or 90 percent. So that was enormously encouraging. After about three months of my being involved in it, they had completed the whole regime for it. While it’s an experimental drug, it’s paid for by the company or whoever is producing it. But once it’s stopped, the payment stops, and these families had to pick it up. Since it’s an experiment, none of the insurance would cover it, except mine, which is Senate insurance, federal employees’ insurance. The cost is $2,700 a treatment. These parents would be in the waiting room—they had sold their house for $20,000 or $30,000, or mortgaged it completely, eating up all their savings, and they could only fund their treatment for six months, or eight months, or a year—and they were asking the doctor what chance their child had if they could only do half the treatment. Did they have a 50 percent chance of survival? A 60 percent chance of survival?

The way the system works, obviously, is whoever is the senior one gets the choice of the different committees. It appeared to me that Claiborne Pell was going to take the Health Committee and I was going to be on the Education Committee. I liked Senator Pell. I had been in the Senate for five years, and although that sounds like a long time, in time of the Senate it was a short time, and I’d been out a good chunk of that time because of the plane crash in ’64—I’d spent’64 out of it, and ’63 was a difficult year. Then we had the ’68 campaign and that was a difficult year as well. But now, in ’69, we’re looking at both the committees and where I’m going to spend time and how I can be the most useful and productive.

Califano and I both went to the Holy Trinity Church here when our children were small, and part of the service was that, after 9:00 or 10:00 mass, the children would go down for Sunday school, and they would have a discussion there for the grownups. They’d have one of the Jesuits who would come over and lead the discussion, and they were always enormously interesting, very interesting, very gifted, talented lecturers. There were always a couple hundred people who were there with their children, and then, at whatever time, an hour later, you would break up and hook up with your children and drive them home.