Observers then and later have disagreed regarding the degree to which the CP succeeded in its ambition to be a tightly disciplined organization. Even membership could be ambiguous. Caroline Decker recalled, “I never carried a book, I never paid dues. . . . As far as I was concerned, I was a member; I was prepared to give my life and I gave an awful lot of it. But . . . no evaluation papers or applications, and not even membership books. Not even dues. Where was I going to get money to pay dues?” Dorothy Ray Healey similarly recalled, “I never regularly paid dues until 1946. When you moved around a great deal, the way I did, the bookkeeping never kept up with you.” But, like Decker, she specified that “you could still be a Communist accepted by others as a Communist, whether you paid dues or not.” She added, “There is this myth that the Party ran like some kind of well-oiled machine, but it was never that well organized internally. . . . The FBI did a much better job of keeping track of our members than we did, unfortunately.”