"For my constituents on the East Side of Manhattan, perhaps my most important fight was against the war in Vietnam. I put together one of the first joint resolutions endorsed bot by representatives who supported and who opposed the war, calling for peace. A number of Congressmen simply could not abandon their initial support for our military involvement, even if they had since shifted their positions; they found it hard to publicly admit error. It was a dilemma for them. The resolution succeeded in creating a climate in which some members who realized hey had erred could change their positions with dignity, now that the war appeared unwinnable. My first run-in over the war was with Congressman Wayne Hays, a really mean-spirited bully from Ohio. He was very smart, and one of the great House debaters. At the time, he was the powerful Chairman of the House Administration Committee. During the week of North Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh's death, I went to the floor and said that, to the Vietnamese, he was like George Washington is to us, the father of his country, and I suggested we use the occasion of his death to extend the hand of friendship. Wayne Hays, in response on the House floor, referred to me as "an emissary from Hanoi." I did not appreciate the charge, so I took Hays's comments from the Congressional Record, placed them alongside my own, and sent them out in a newsletter to my constituents. "Who do you agree with?" I wrote. "Please write to Wayne Hays and tell him what you think." A week or so later, Hays approached me on the floor. "What the hell is goin' on?" he said. "I'm gettin' all these damn letters denouncing me. Stop it!" And then he laughed. I don't think he really cared that he was being deluged with letters form a bunch of liberal New Yorkers. He was amused by the whole thing. I took the exchange with Hays as a kind of signal that I was finally accepted, even by those who thought I was a liberal flake from New York City."