Jeff Duncan: “in January of 1965, my father was sworn into Congress. My brother and I and my mother's father, Jacob Swisher, got to…”

“in January of 1965, my father was sworn into Congress. My brother and I and my mother's father, Jacob Swisher, got to stand on the Floor alongside him because there was so much room on the Republican side. The 1964 elections had seen big Republican losses, and the Democrats ended up with a 295 to 140 majority in the House. Among the very small band of freshmen Republicans elected to the 89th Congress were my father, John Duncan, and the man who was soon to become his best friend in the House, Dr. Tim Lee Carter. Dr. Carter represented a Kentucky District that joined in part the Tennessee District represented by my father. Early in their service, they went on a trip with Congressman Bill Stanton of Ohio to Vietnam, other parts of Southeast Asia, and India. They went at their own expense. The were men from the same region, who represented similar kinds of people--people who were patriotic, particularly in times of war, but who did not believe in wasteful big government and who basically wanted the government to leave them alone. Both my father and Dr. Carter attended the University of Tennessee, although not together. Dr. Carter graduated from the UT Medical School in Memphis, while my father was a lawyer who did his undergraduate work at UT in Knoxville. I remember that Dr. Carter was very typical of most family doctors of that era--kind, helpful, dignified.…”