for insurance companies as underwriters of national insurance. Medicare had been bottled up in committee for years, never having enough votes to be reported out onto either chamber's floor. After the 1964 presidential election, President Lyndon B. Johnson demanded that Rep. Wilbur Mills (D-Arkansas), chairman of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, enlarge his committee and stack it with members who would approve Medicare. Mills co-opted the AMA and grafted Medicaid onto the bill, which then easily passed the House. But in the Senate, Cruikshank had to work quickly to avoid disaster. Sen. Russell B. Long (D-Louisiana) offered an amendment in the Senate Finance Committee that would have turned Medicare into a catastrophic health insurance plan, rather than a general insurance program. Long misused a proxy vote from Sen. J. William Fulbright (D-Arkansas) to help win passage of the amendment, and misled Sen. Paul Douglas (D-Illinois) that he could vote to approve the amendment because another vote would be held later after costs had been calculated (a vote Long had no intention of seeking). Knowing that the Long amendment would not pass the House nor be backed by the AFL–CIO, Cruikshank convinced Douglas to exercise his parliamentary rights and ask for reconsideration of the Long amendment. Efforts were made to find a compromise between the Long amendment and the original bill, but backers of the original bill felt they had already compromised too much. Working with Sen. Clinton P. Anderson (D-New Mexico), Cruikshank mustered a majority in the Finance Committee in favor of the original bill. The deciding vote came from Sen. Harry F. Byrd (D-Virginia, who had openly voted against Medicare in the past. Cruikshank made the critical decision to ask Anderson to go ahead with the vote after receiving assurances that Byrd would vote for the bill in committee but would, on principle, vote against the bill on the Senate floor. The Medicare legislation passed the Senate, was approved by a conference committee, and was signed by President Johnson on July 28, 1965. Cruikshank retired from the AFL–CIO in 1965. Later career Cruikshank did not leave the labor movement entirely, however. The year that he retired from the AFL–CIO, he became executive director of the NCSC, the AFL–CIO's retiree organization affiliate and forerunner of the Alliance for Retired Americans. In 1969, he was elected president of NCSC following Aime Forand's retirement. Cruikshank's wife died in 1967. In