In the years following World War II, a mental health lobby developed to support the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) and to encourage members of Congress to do the same. Foremost among the lobbyists was Mike Gorman, a graduate of New York University who worked for a newspaper in Oklahoma. In 1948, Gorman published a scathing expose of Oklahoma’s state mental hospitals. He then moved to Washington to work for Mary Lasker, a wealthy philanthropist who contributed heavily to members of Congress who supported her interests in mental health and birth control. As Mrs. Laskar’s point person, Gorman was very influential and claimed to be “on a first name basis with 150–175 members of the House” and was a close friend of Senator Lister Hill, a key supporter for mental health issues in the Senate. Gorman thus played an important role behind the scenes in a 1955 mental health study, which led directly to the creation of the Joint Commission on Mental Illness and Health. The Joint Commission’s recommendations for further federal involvement were published in 1960 as a book, Action for Mental Health. Gorman later claimed to have written the recommendations for the Joint Commission before its members had been appointed and also acknowledged that his “hidden agenda was to break the back of the state mental hospitals.”