High School in the county seat of White County. He thereafter graduated from Hendrix College in Conway, Arkansas as salutatorian, having resided in Martin Hall. He studied constitutional law at Harvard Law School under Felix Frankfurter, who later was nominated and confirmed (1939) as an associate justice of the United States Supreme Court. Mills returned to Arkansas to run his father's bank and assist with the store, during the Great Depression and was soon admitted to the Arkansas Bar Association in 1933. Mills served as the 29th county judge of White County, between 1935 and 1939, and began small Medicare-like, county-funded program, with a $5,000 fund to pay medical bills (), prescription drugs which were sold at cost, and hospital treatment for the indigent which were lowered to $2.50 per day (), as well as have doctors see qualified patients free of charge. Patients were qualified for the program through petitioning the local justice of the peace, who in turn made a recommendation to Mills as county judge. In Congress House Ways and Means Committee Mills served in Congress from 1939 to 1977, 17 of them (1958–1974) as chairman of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, a post he held longer than any other person in U.S. history. Mills was often termed "the most powerful man in Washington" during his tenure. He was a signatory to the 1956 Southern Manifesto opposing the desegregation of public schools ordered by the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education. However, Mills was never a segregationist: always a strong advocate for inclusion, his longest and closest aide was Walter Little, a black man from North Carolina. Mills told House Speaker Sam Rayburn that he was not going to sign the Manifesto, to which Rayburn responded by advising him that he would be defeated for re-election if he did not sign, so Mills ultimately did. Mills's accomplishments in Congress included playing a large role, as the Congressional architect, in creating the Highway Trust Fund, opening up economic development through commerce between rivers and railroads, and then first creating the Kerr-Mills Health Insurance legislation, and then being the Congressional architect of the Medicare and Medicaid programs. Mills initially had reservations about the program because he was worried about the eventual cost, especially since the early proposals by the President and some Members of Congress proposed funding Medicare from the Social Security Trust Fund. Mills