Chapter Twenty-One

Finding Peace

WITH LORD & THOMAS gone, where would Albert direct his still-formidable energy and invest his newly liquid financial resources? One answer was the Lasker Foundation, which Albert and Mary established with the goal of supporting medical research. Lasker put only half the proceeds from the sale of Lord & Thomas into the Foundation, but he added money from time to time and through his will provided the Foundation with another large infusion of cash.

One of the initial activities of the Foundation was to establish awards to recognize outstanding contributions in the field of medical research. The first recipient was William Menninger, who received the award from the National Committee for Mental Hygiene in 1944. The awards were Mary’s inspiration; she was drawing up a will at about this time, and this spurred her to think about her legacy: “When thinking aloud with a lawyer about how I wanted to dispose of my funds, I thought that I would like to establish awards, similar to the Nobel Prizes, in medical research only or in the field of health and medicine. And when the idea struck me, I was so emotionally moved by the idea that I might be able to do this after I died, that I thought, ‘Well, why don’t I do it while I’m alive, if this is all so exciting to me?’”¹

Albert was less enthusiastic. He didn’t relish the idea of having his name attached to so public a gesture. Mary understood his reticence—acknowledging her husband’s “absolute passion for anonymity in anything he did”—but strong-armed him into going along with her.²

The fields of medicine and health had preoccupied Mary since she was a child. She vividly recalled her own sickly childhood, as well as a deeply upsetting childhood visit to the sickroom where the family’s laundress lay dying. When Mary’s mother told her that the woman had cancer and her breasts had been removed, Mary was shocked. “I thought this shouldn’t happen to anybody,” she recalled. “I was absolutely infuriated, indignant, that this woman should suffer so and that there should be no help for her.”³

Cancer seemed to lurk on the periphery of Mary’s life. The mother of her close friend, Kay Swift, died of breast cancer. In 1943, the Laskers’ cook was diagnosed with cancer. Mary arranged for the woman to be seen by a doctor and receive radium treatments, but the disease had progressed too far. Mary was shocked to find that almost no progress had been made in the field in the previous two decades, especially when she came across a pamphlet published by the New York City Cancer Committee, which asserted that if a hospital or research group was given $500,000 a year for a few years for cancer research, great progress could be made. Mary was “infuriated” that nobody had come up with this kind of money, especially in light of the “vast economic resources of the people of the United States.”⁴

At about this same time, the Laskers were vacationing with their friends Dan and Florence Mahoney in Palm Beach, and Mary discussed her outrage with Florence. Florence jumped into the cause, taking over the annual fundraising drive for the Cancer Society in Miami. That year, instead of the typical total of between $800 and $900, the Mahoneys managed to raise $35,000 for cancer-related work in Miami. Mary was thrilled, and the two women became staunch allies in the fight to support cancer research.

Albert Lasker initially steered clear of direct involvement in this cause. Although willing to help financially, he didn’t want to become deeply engaged in the details of the work. “He wasn’t interested in health,” Mary later explained. “Medical problems and illnesses frightened him, and he knew absolutely nothing about them and didn’t want to learn.”⁵

Her summary wasn’t entirely accurate. In 1922, in memory of Albert’s younger brother, who had died of cancer a year earlier, the Laskers had established the Harry M. Lasker Memorial Fund as a permanent endowment of the American Society for the Control of Cancer. Albert added $25,000 to this fund the following year; together, these two gifts represented almost the entire endowment of the Society in its first decade of operations.⁶ Then, in 1928, Albert and Flora made a $1 million gift to the University of Chicago to establish the “Lasker Foundation for Medical Research” to support research into the “causes, nature, prevention, and cure” of degenerative diseases.⁷

So Albert had a history of supporting medical research. He also fully understood the importance of seed money, and leverage, to pursue Big Ideas. It was Albert, for example, who gave Mary the crucial suggestion to seek public funds for her crusade. “You need federal money,” he said, “and I will show you how to get it.”⁸

Lasker was constitutionally inclined to think big. From his stint on the Shipping Board, moreover, he understood both the “mechanics of legislation, and the psychology of politicians” (as Mary later phrased it). His broad vision and insider know-how, coupled with Mary’s tenacity, proved a formidable combination.

Their first target in Washington was Senator Claude Pepper, Democrat from Florida. Pepper was Chair of the Senate Subcommittee on Wartime Health and Education, which funded the Office of Medical Research (OMR): the only federal organization that then controlled significant medical research funds. By this time, OMR had spent between $10 and $15 million on diseases related to military service, and had made great strides in the fight against typhus. But in the summer of 1944, the war appeared to be nearing its end, and there was no impetus in Washington to transfer these funds to research into civilian-oriented health issues.

Pepper could exert considerable influence in this area, and the Laskers could exert considerable influence on Pepper, who was up for reelection in the fall of 1944. During the summer of 1944, therefore, Pepper sent two aides to call on the Laskers to discuss hearings on national health issues. At this time, the Public Health Service contained both the National Institutes of Health and the National Cancer Institute, which between them controlled about $2 million for research. The National Cancer Institute, founded in 1937, was limited by law to an overall budget of only $700,000, and—amazingly—had only $70,000 to distribute for outside research grants in 1944.⁹ Mary convinced Pepper’s aides that research should be a much bigger priority in the landscape of federal spending on disease, citing the notably successful wartime OMR campaigns as a case in point.

After this meeting, Pepper arranged subcommittee hearings for September 17 and 18, which Albert and Mary attended. These hearings generated compelling testimony. Selective Service representatives, for example, revealed that 40 percent of all individuals drafted for service in World War II had been rejected because of poor health resulting from inadequate medical care—an astounding and disgraceful state of affairs in a relatively wealthy country. The subcommittee agreed to pursue the matter more fully, and Congressional hearings were set for December 13 and 14. These hearings ultimately led Pepper to agree to support a draft “National Medical Research Bill.”

Concurrently, the Laskers were pushing the American Society for the Control of Cancer (ASCC) to raise money for research. During the fall of 1943, Mary and Florence Mahoney paid a visit to Dr. Clarence Cook Little, then director of the Society, and were shocked to discover that the ASCC was spending no money on cancer research.¹⁰

The main role of the Society at that time was educational; it published thousands of pamphlets yearly detailing the “danger signs” of cancer. As noted, the Lasker family had created an endowment for this purpose in the 1920s. Unfortunately, as Mary dryly observed, Lasker had never actually reviewed the pamphlets he had funded, “or some dynamite could have been put in the organization much earlier.”¹¹

Upon hearing the concerns raised by Mary and Florence about research, Little asked Mary if Albert could be persuaded to join the Society’s board of directors. Mary guessed that Albert would refuse, so she steered Little toward Emerson Foote—partner in the newly established Foote, Cone & Belding—whose parents had died of cancer, and seemed more likely to respond positively to the invitation.

Foote joined the board early in 1944. He had only limited impact in that first year, although donations more than doubled (to $832,000). But in that seemingly quiet period, Foote and Mary Lasker were laying the groundwork for a full-fledged fund-raising campaign. When presented with the far-reaching plan, Little overcame his reluctance and agreed—largely because the Laskers agreed to fund the entire cost of the campaign. But the Laskers imposed one condition: the Society would have to agree to put 25 percent of the proceeds of the campaign directly into cancer research.

The first substantial donation to the campaign came on December 1, 1944, from the Lever Brothers Company. This was a result of Albert Lasker’s behind-the-scenes maneuvering growing out of the July sale of Pepsodent. Lasker agreed to relinquish his Pepsodent holdings on condition that Lever Brothers make a $50,000 corporate contribution to the Society for each of the succeeding five years.¹²

Mary, meanwhile, was pushing for changes of her own. The organization’s name—the American Society for the Control of Cancer—had always struck her as weak. (The “control” of cancer, she thought, implied that the Society wasn’t interested in a pursuing a cure for the disease.) With Emerson Foote’s strong backing, therefore, she persuaded the Society to change its name. Thus was today’s American Cancer Society (ACS) born.¹³

By May 1945, the money was pouring in—to the extent that the treasurer of the ACS complained to Mary that he wasn’t prepared to deal with the unprecedented flood of contributions. These successes brought with them an unanticipated benefit: when Albert Lasker realized that the revamped Society had an opportunity to make a real difference in the medical field, he became passionately interested in its affairs. He joined the ACS board, and began exerting his influence in the broadcasting community to get several groundbreaking cancer-related programs on the air.

One of these was the popular nationally syndicated radio show Fibber McGee and Molly, which—on April 28, 1945—aired a precedent-shattering show with an explicit cancer theme. The program focused on Fibber’s concerns about his friend Charley, who feared that he might have cancer but was afraid to bring up the subject. Bluntly, the show delivered messages that had never before been heard on the radio: Cancer isn’t a thing that will go away if you close your eyes. Cancer isn’t a disgrace; it’s a disgrace to think it’s a disgrace. The broadcast ended with an appeal to send money to the American Cancer Society to fight the disease, asserting that “the more money you give, the fewer lives cancer will take.”¹⁴

This first campaign ended in the summer of 1945, having raised just under $4.3 million in donations, of which $960,000 went directly into research. The Laskers understood that this was only a start—but they also knew that such an outpouring of support would put pressure on Congress to begin funding cancer research, and medical research more generally.

In 1946, Mary learned that veteran West Virginia congressman Matthew Mansfield Neely was introducing a bill calling for $100 million for cancer research. She immediately pushed Albert to convince the ACS to support the bill, which by almost any measure seemed a huge leap. Up to this point, the ACS had raised a total of $10 million in new money, of which $2 million was targeted for research, so the prospect of $100 million for research seemed almost fantastical.

The bill got through the House of Representatives, and Claude Pepper brought it to the Senate floor in the summer of 1946. It died there, stymied by a series of parliamentary blocking maneuvers, but its near success convinced the Public Health Service (PHS) that Congress might be willing to fund medical research at a significant level. This led the PHS to request $14 million for cancer research in fiscal 1948. The approval of this PHS budget, although little heralded at the time, represented the first sizeable federal government commitment to the fight against cancer.

Another of the Laskers’ medical interests was mental health.

Mary’s passion for this field stemmed in part from friendships with legendary psychoanalyst Franz Alexander and famed American psychiatrists (and brothers) Karl and William Menninger. In the late 1930s, Alexander asked her to join the board of the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis, which he had founded in 1932. After her marriage to Albert, she convinced him to help support a study in 1941 and 1942 on how psychoanalytic techniques might be applied more widely; the couple also supported three psychotherapy council meetings organized by the Institute for Psychoanalysis. These proved a disillusioning experience for Mary, who was appalled when the doctors involved fought bitterly among themselves about controversial new ideas in the field. “These men,” she later lamented, “who were expected by lay persons to have such great understanding of themselves and others, didn’t always seem to me to have been thoroughly analyzed.”¹⁵

Disillusioned but not discouraged, Mary readily agreed when longtime mental-health activist Blanche Ittleson asked her in 1942 to become a member of the National Committee for Mental Hygiene (NCMH). At the time, this was the only nationwide voluntary mental-health organization, and—like its counterpart in the field of cancer—its members lacked basic organizational and fundraising skills.

In early 1945, Mary convinced Dr. George Stevenson, head of the NCMH, to suggest the idea of a “National Mental Health Institute” to the PHS. Meanwhile, she also manipulated the media adroitly. She fed information on the sorry state of the nation’s mental health to Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter and columnist Thomas L. Stokes, who published a powerful article that was syndicated in newspapers across the nation. Representative Percy Priest, Democrat from Tennessee, publicly demanded that the PHS draft a proposal to remedy the situation. The National Mental Health Act, authorizing a National Mental Health Institute, was passed in June 1946, and signed into law by President Harry Truman on July 7. It was the first major piece of federal mental-health legislation in almost one hundred years.

The NCMH provided only minimal support to Mary Lasker and her fellow activists during the congressional campaign; at that time, the organization’s mission (like the early mission of the American Cancer Society) focused principally on publicizing mental-health issues rather than advocating for research in the field. In frustration, Mary resigned in 1949 and founded a new organization, the National Committee Against Mental Illness (NCAMI).

NCAMI began life with little more than the Laskers’ money behind it (and a total budget of less than $80,000 per year). But it soon began exerting an influence far beyond its size—a process that intensified in 1953, when nationally celebrated writer and mental-health activist Thomas “Mike” Gorman signed on as executive director of the organization. Working as a team, he and Mary began demanding that more federal dollars be spent researching mental illness. “It is probably safe to say,” wrote one observer in 1970, “that no comparable expenditure of funds has ever resulted in as much research-fund allocation [as the Laskers’ investment in NCAMI].”¹⁶

Mary and Gorman soon encountered a dismaying lack of interest among health professionals in mental-health research, especially in the area of new drug development. Some of that skepticism could be found even within the volunteer ranks of NCAMI. “Too often,” Mary later recalled, “the people who were on the Council, the professionals, were interested only in the psychiatric aspects of mental illness, and didn’t conceive of the idea that it could be based on any chemical disorganization within a person.”¹⁷ Mary herself became so convinced of the potential of drug therapies that she attended a conference on drug use in 1953, where she heard the first reports about the effect of Serpazil and Thorazine on schizophrenic patients. She immediately phoned Dr. Nathan Kline, research director of the Rockland State Hospital in New York. Kline agreed to run some experiments with Thorazine among his eight thousand patients, and the results led to a revolution in the management of mental illness.¹⁸

Even in the face of new evidence, however, many analysts remained extremely skeptical. In fact, one member of the NCAMI resigned from the Committee because he felt that the NCAMI was advocating drugs too strongly. Dr. Robert Felix—head of the National Mental Health Institute—at first weighed in against the use of drugs in the treatment of mental illness. At Mary’s and Gorman’s insistence, however, he established a psychopharmacology testing center within the National Mental Health Institute. Over the next several years, as the evidence of the effectiveness of drug therapies mounted, Felix himself became a convert to the use of psychoactive drugs.

By 1963, the funds for the National Mental Health Institute had increased to more than $143 million, thanks in large part to Gorman’s and Mary’s efforts.

Better than most philanthropists, the Laskers understood how to use their wealth and influence to fight for social causes. But they also drew on Albert’s fortune to enrich their life together and to pursue hobbies not open to ordinary people.

Soon after their marriage, Albert rented (and later purchased) CBS founder William Paley’s spectacular seven-and-a-half-story New York City townhouse at 29 Beekman Place, overlooking the East River. Later, at Mary’s insistence, he also acquired a farm near Millbrook, New York, comprising 410 acres of rolling green hills, fields, and forests. “I enjoy the quiet,” Lasker wrote of the Millbrook estate. “I have now reached the grand old age where I like to be away from excitement.”¹⁹ Typically, Lasker (with prodding from Mary) made his own local excitement:

We are building two houses at our farm, one a gardener’s cottage and the other a guest house, and supervising these operations has really kept me occupied. These architects, contractors, and workmen can think up more double talk than anyone could imagine, and the net of all this double talk is that there is a double delay on whatever they are doing, and a double price for their not doing. By the time our houses will be finished, I think I will have lost the capacity to enjoy them, but it is going to be very lovely.²⁰

Mary also gradually interested Lasker in the world of fine art. She knew that her husband was not interested in paintings, but some months after their marriage, Mary attended an auction in the hopes of buying a Renoir, and convinced Lasker to go with her. What ensued surprised them both:

I went to the door of the sale with Albert and he said, “Well, I’ll wait for you out here,” and I said, “Oh, why don’t you come in?” “Well,” he said, “It will take too long.” I said, “No, come in, sit with me.”

Well, then, there were no chairs, so he sat behind me, and I bid for the picture and when I stopped bidding at $10,000, I heard two other people bidding and I looked around and one of them was Albert. He bid up to $25,000 against [prominent New York art dealer] Paul Rosenberg. He didn’t know who he was bidding against, and then he got frightened because he had never bid for a picture in his life before and he thought maybe he had gone mad, so he stopped bidding at $25,000. And we didn’t get the picture; Mr. Rosenberg got it.²¹

Rosenberg won that skirmish, but Albert was hooked, and he started to visit Rosenberg’s gallery. “How long has this been going on?” he asked Rosenberg on that first visit.²² Eventually, Albert bought the Renoir (“Young Girl in a Boat”) that he had been bidding on at the auction, as well as a second (“Flowers and Cats”) that Rosenberg had, for the then-staggering price of $105,000.

Over the years, Albert became more and more interested in art and also increasingly knowledgeable. Although his collecting started on the relatively conservative ground of Renoir, he soon became more adventurous, building up an extensive but discerning collection of works by Degas, Monet, Cezanne, Van Gogh, Chagall, Dalí, and many other notable contemporary painters.

Mary continued to buy paintings as well, supplementing Lasker’s collection with her own more eclectic tastes. On one occasion, their aesthetics clashed: Mary bought a Picasso—“Still-Life with Fishes,” a Cubist work depicting three dead fish on a table—to which Lasker took a violent dislike. The painting wound up being hung in an out of-the-way corridor in the upper reaches of Beekman Place, with a sign prepared by Albert affixed to the back: This picture belongs to Mary Lasker and is not to be thought of as part of the Albert Lasker collection.²³ Albert occasionally would make his way up to the sixth-floor hallway, study the work closely, grunt with disapproval, and then turn it over to make sure that his disclaimer was still attached.

And yet he bought other Picasso works, and understood and admired them. When the wife of a Hollywood studio head challenged him to say exactly what he saw in Picasso’s strange shapes and colors, he had a ready answer: “Don’t you understand that after the camera was invented and there was no more need to paint with fidelity to nature, artists began to paint how they felt about nature—really the color of their feelings about it?”²⁴

Increasingly, Albert’s favorite was Henri Matisse, whom he saw as the successor to Renoir and as the artist to “bet on.” Matisse favored the kinds of bright colors, sharp contrasts, and dazzling depictions of daylight that appealed to Albert’s eye and on a deeper level probably helped combat Albert’s depressive tendencies. As Matisse himself wrote: “What I dream of is an art of balance, of purity and serenity devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter, an art which might be for every mental worker, be he businessman or writer, like an appeasing influence, like a mental soother, something like a good armchair in which to rest from physical fatigue.”²⁵

Albert considered his visit with Matisse—at the artist’s studio in Nice, in 1949—one of the highlights of his life.²⁶ Youth and aging were a dominant subtext of the visit. Albert, then sixty-nine years old, told the artist that he wished he were a little younger; Matisse, then eighty, assured Lasker that he was “still a child.” And when Albert asked him who the greatest young artist of the day was, Matisse replied, “Moi.” After Lasker died, Matisse did preliminary sketches for a memorial window for him, but died before finishing it.

The “Lasker Collection” of almost two hundred oils, watercolors, and etchings, sketches, and sculpture remained intact until 1971, at which point Mary sold several of the Renoirs and Mirós when she moved from Beekman Place to a smaller apartment. “They didn’t look good here,” she told the New York Times, “and I wanted to be able to give away the money.”²⁷ The rest of the collection—including the forever-offending Picasso—was left by Mary to the Lasker Foundation.

In the last decade of his life, Albert Lasker had two experiences that reminded him of a lesson he had learned a quarter-century earlier: that although a relatively secular Jew, he nevertheless had a Jewish identity.

The first episode caused him to sever his relationship with the University of Chicago. Lasker, himself only a high-school graduate, believed strongly in education, and was a strong proponent of the University, dating back to his gift in support of medical research in the 1920s. In 1929, the University recruited the thirty-year-old dean of Yale Law School, Robert M. Hutchins, to serve as its president. Early in the Depression, Hutchins made common cause with Lasker in raising money for the relief of Chicago’s destitute. The young president came to enjoy the company of the seasoned ad man—likening him to Yellowstone Park’s geyser, Old Faithful: a “bizarre and overwhelming, but predictable, force of nature”—and in August 1937 asked Lasker to join the University’s board of trustees.²⁸ Lasker, flattered to be invited into this exclusive bastion of Chicago’s overwhelmingly Gentile power elite, happily accepted.

Although this new formal connection complicated their warm relationship, it didn’t tie either Lasker’s or Hutchins’s tongue. In 1939, for example, Hutchins approached his board with a radical proposal: to do away with football. Lasker disapproved. “Football is what unifies a university,” he declared at one board meeting. “What will take its place?”

“Education,” Hutchins replied, and the board voted its approval.²⁹

Lasker gave his beloved Mill Road Farm to the University in the early months of 1940, but by that time the bonds between Lasker and Hutchins already were weakening. The first reason was Hutchins’s strongly isolationist stance toward the war in Europe, which was then heating up. Lasker—once an outspoken isolationist—now believed that U.S. involvement in World War II was inevitable. But the proximate cause of the rupture between Lasker and his friend was an article published in the March 1942 edition of the Saturday Evening Post, entitled “The Case Against the Jew.” Its author was Hutchins’s close friend and sometime ghostwriter, Milton Mayer. Although Mayer was a half-time employee in the University’s public relations office, he also freelanced for the Post and other publications. No one at the University—certainly including Hutchins—had anything to do with “The Case Against the Jew.”

Lasker, who didn’t get past the article’s incendiary title, was furious at Mayer’s seemingly anti-Semitic stance. The fact that Mayer was himself Jewish, and that the article (upon closer scrutiny) actually “made a case” for Jews, failed to calm Lasker. He decided to resign as a University trustee, and in an April 16 phone call, he informed Hutchins of his intent. In that conversation and in subsequent talks and correspondence, Hutchins tried to persuade his angry friend and ally to change his mind, but Lasker was adamant. Although the two men parted company on amicable terms—with Lasker joking that Hutchins could still count on being the “tenant of his furniture” at Mill Road Farm in the coming summer—their close friendship was over.³⁰

Years later, when Lasker and Hutchins met by chance at a social gathering, Lasker confessed that he finally had read “The Case Against the Jew,” and decided that it was a good piece of work. “It wasn’t a bad article,” Lasker admitted. “But the title was unfortunate.”

“Wasn’t it,” Hutchins replied coolly.³¹

The second episode that sparked Lasker’s renewed awareness of his Jewish identity during these last years of his life was a sixteen-day trip to Israel in May 1950, immediately after his seventieth birthday. A year earlier, Lasker had donated $50,000 to help establish a children’s health clinic in Jerusalem, and this trip was scheduled to allow him to attend its dedication. He and Mary sailed to France together on the Queen Mary, and—while Mary stayed in Paris with her close friend Anna Rosenberg, scouting up available works of art—Lasker went on to Israel with his two sisters and his friend Emery Reves, a well-known writer and literary agent.³²

“I went there with an open mind,” Lasker later said. “I had never been a Zionist, but I had never been an anti-Zionist. I had been a non-Zionist.”³³

In fact, Lasker had been a close observer of the process that led to the creation of the Jewish state in May 1948. Early in that year, for example, he indirectly lobbied President Truman to intervene in the fighting then raging between the Jewish and Arab residents of Palestine. “Unless the President gets this Palestine matter settled pretty soon,” he warned one of Truman’s closest advisers, “the Jews will clobber him in the election this fall.”³⁴

Now, two years later, the Lasker party was criss-crossing the young country and meeting with its leaders. (Lasker had long conversations with Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion and President Chaim Weizmann, among others.) But he also met and mingled with less-exalted Israelis, encountering Jews from a startling range of nationalities: Afghans, Turks, Rumanians, Bulgarians, Yemenis, Algerians, Moroccans, Russians, and Germans, many dressed in their native garb and speaking their own languages.

Reminiscing with Columbia’s oral historians shortly after his return, Lasker’s mind was still full of the sights and sounds of the infant Jewish state. Always the marketer, he declared that Israel faced unique marketing challenges. It had to present its most dire problems to the international Jewish community, because it was dependent on their “charity money.” At the same time, it had to present its best face, so that potential donors would have cause for hope.

Lasker had been struck by the outstanding quality of Israel’s leaders—“realists but idealists”—and likened them to America’s founding fathers. This was no coincidence, he asserted:“When a great revolution that is going to affect the world for decades and maybe a century or more takes place, it gives opportunity for men who would have remained hidden, to rise. It’s because the times call, that these men of ability get chosen for leadership.”

Israel was a “miracle,” Lasker concluded—a tiny Jewish state of 800,000 people that had beaten back Arab forces representing more than 30 million people. It was a place where Jewish immigrants were never refused, where Jews didn’t have to keep looking back over their shoulders, and where they could finally belong.³⁵ He was struck by the life on the kibbutzes he visited, marveling that at the end of the workday, farmers of both genders traded their blue jeans for khakis or dresses and spent the next several hours in various cultural pursuits. Again, he was reminded of a long-ago home: “Here in this ancient [biblical] country you have a strange feeling. It is a pioneer country. I had the same feeling there that I had as a boy in the ’80s and ’90s in Texas. It is a pioneer people, with all the released energy of pioneer people who are going to open up a new country against that Biblical background of worn land.”

“For the first time in my life,” Lasker later observed, “I know what the expression, ‘the Jewish people’ means. These are my people, and I am part of them.”³⁶ For Lasker, then nearing the end of his life, traveling to Israel was a journey home.

Shortly after Lasker returned from Israel, he began experiencing severe abdominal pains. He first thought that he was suffering from liver trouble caused by a rich Continental diet on his trip. Soon, though, it became clear that his condition was serious, and on July 5, he underwent an exploratory operation. The surgeons found a tumor, and—within a few weeks—the lab results pointed to a malignant cancer. Mary, well aware of Lasker’s intense fear of the disease that had claimed his brother Harry’s life, kept the diagnosis from him. Lasker never learned, even during his terminal battle against the illness, that he was fighting colon cancer.

Lasker recovered from this first surgery, returning home in mid-August. Because his lymph nodes had been removed, there seemed to be some chance that he would make a full recovery. He regained most of his strength, and in November, he and Mary once again began their intensive lobbying in support of medical research. They met with the Director of the Bureau of the Budget on November 9, but were able to extract only small increases in funding. The following month, Mary met face-to-face with President Harry Truman, who agreed to appoint one of his executive assistants as the White House liaison for health issues.

The Laskers visited Europe one last time in the spring of 1951, during which Albert experienced an ominous spike in his blood pressure. (“I overdid [it] in Paris,” he explained to a friend, “having too much fun.”³⁷) When an executive at International Cellulose retired in December, Lasker wrote him a tongue-in-cheek note of reassurance:

A hearty welcome to the Retired Men’s Club, of which I have been an active member for almost ten years now. I understand that during the coming year you are going to quit your business activities, and I want to be among the first to give you a hearty welcome into the charmed circle of which I found myself a member when I retired.

I did so with much trepidation, only to learn to my amazement that the richest years of my life lay before me, for in the almost ten years since I have retired, I have found interests and usefulness that I never knew before which have given me cause for great satisfaction. I am sure that in full measure the same kind fate awaits you.³⁸

By February 1952, Albert’s colon cancer had returned. Mary moved into the hospital to be able to spend most of her time at his side. Once again—now from a hospital room—the two campaigners followed the progress of appropriations bills through the House and Senate. This time, the results were far more positive. Mary later recalled that the positive reports coming in from Washington were “one of the few things that gave Albert pleasure in the last few weeks of his life.”³⁹

As May drew to a close, Lasker quietly slipped into a coma. On May 30, a month past his seventy-second birthday, he died at 8:00 a.m., with Mary at his side.

In his will, Lasker made it clear that he had already provided for his children and grandchildren, and that they were not expecting anything from his estate. He made a number of $50,000 and $100,000 bequests to individuals—including $50,000 to his psychiatrist—and bequeathed his art collection and half of his remaining estate to Mary, with the balance going to the Lasker Foundation. He also requested (but did not require) that the directors of the foundation spend its resources down within twenty years.⁴⁰

In the years to come, Mary continued the battles that the two had begun, especially her campaign against the disease that took her husband’s life. The Lasker Foundation carries forward its charitable work, and the Lasker Awards—which Mary renamed the “Albert Lasker Awards” in 1954 in his honor, and are today known as the Lasker Prizes—continue to keep Albert Lasker’s name and memory alive.