Lester E. Bush Jr.

What's happened is more of the population, because they are aging, moves into that zone.

The final paper that Lester Bush published, he and I did together, he was the one who had done the seminal paper on Blacks and priesthood 50 years ago.

It was looking at gerontocracy and the future of the church.

His background was that he was a physician by training who spent his entire career at the Central Intelligence Agency, and eventually was the director of the medical division there-

Give us some of the highlights of those 60 years.

Well, I think one of the most important pieces that Dialogue has ever published was in 1973 by Lester Bush.

It was an article on race in the priesthood, and it was called Mormonism's Negro Doctrine, a Historical Overview.

And it went back, you know, he was one of those guys that had those questions about, OK, why are we not ordaining black men? Why are black women not allowed into the temples? So he decides to go back into the history and figure out where did this restriction, this priesthood restriction come from? At the time, many people thought that it came from Joseph Smith himself.

I mean, it was really, it really had a flashback.

like a freezing effect on so many people who were engaged in this intellectual world.

Yeah, I know Bob Reese, who was the editor when the Lester Bush article came out that we talked about, was told that if Dialogue published that article, he could face excommunication.

So that was pretty explicit with him.