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DEWEY W. GRANTHAM:

Another of your first committees in the Senate was the Public Works Committee, on which you served, I believed, from 1953 through or to 1957. Could you comment on your service on that committee?

ALBERT GORE:

Well, it was by my membership on that committee that I achieved one of the most (shall I say) notable events of my career. The Public Works Committee handled legislation in the Senate for the TVA, for public roads, for reclamation, interior problems, environmental problems. So I learned a great deal about the problems of our country and the problems of our society by my service on that committee. It was a wonderfully educational experience. And then I was appointed chairman of the Public Roads Subcommittee. I introduced in 1956--no, I introduced earlier--the Interstate Highway bill, I believe in 1954. And it was in 1956 that that bill finally became law. For most of two years my principal interest in the Senate and in the country was holding hearings, visiting, making observations of the highway problems, and fighting the battle in the committee and later on the floor of the Senate and in conference with the House to bring the enactment of the Interstate and National Defense Highway bill (or to give it a short name, the Gore bill) in 1956. I was elated when it finally passed and President Eisenhower signed it into law. It initiated the largest public works program in the history of the world, which is not even yet quite completed.