“In the past, they had pleaded to the nation for funds for cancer. Now, as they pleaded for the nation for a more coordinated attack on cancer, they found themselves colossally empowered in the public imagination. The cure for cancer became incorporated into the very fabric of the American dream. “To oppose big spending against cancer,” one observer told the historian James Patterson, was to “oppose Mom, apple pie, and the flag.” In America, this was a triumvirate too powerful for even the president to ignore.”