“War may sometimes be a necessary evil. But no matter how necessary, it is always an evil, never a good. We will not learn how to live together in peace by killing each other’s children.”
— President Jimmy Carter, Nobel Peace Prize Lecture, December 10, 2002
“Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”
— President Dwight Eisenhower, Farewell Address, January 17, 1961
“The ignorance of one voter in a democracy impairs the security of all.”
— President John F. Kennedy, Address at Vanderbilt University, May 18, 1963
In his inaugural address that day, Roosevelt proclaimed, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.”
On March 4, 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt was inaugurated in the midst of the Great Depression.
“Every American citizen must have an equal right to vote. There is no reason which can excuse the denial of that right. There is no duty which weighs more heavily on us than the duty we have to ensure that right.”
— President Lyndon B. Johnson, March 1965
🗃️ In July 2015, President Barack Obama announced the United States had reached an agreement with Iran to limit its nuclear program.
In remarks at the White House, Obama said the deal made “our country and the world safer and more secure.”
During his time as president and vice president, Joe Biden carried a card in his pocket that listed the precise number of U.S. troop casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan.
On March 1, 1961, President John F. Kennedy signed an executive order establishing the Peace Corps, an initiative that would send American volunteers abroad to assist in addressing social challenges in developing nations.
After receiving reports on the potential casualties from a nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, President John F. Kennedy reportedly remarked to advisers, “And we call ourselves the human race.”
“I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.”
— Dwight Eisenhower, 1946
President Lyndon Johnson reportedly reacted by saying that if he had lost Cronkite, he had lost Middle America.
🗃️ On February 27, 1968, Walter Cronkite, anchorman of CBS Evening News and known as “the most trusted man in America,” broke from his usual objective reporting and predicted that America’s war in Vietnam would likely end in “stalemate” and that Washington should negotiate a settlement.
On February 27, 2013, President Barack Obama joined congressional leaders at the U.S. Capitol to unveil a statue honoring civil rights icon Rosa Parks.
“The Presidency is not merely an administrative office. That’s the least of it. It is more than an engineering job, efficient or inefficient. It is pre-eminently a place of moral leadership.”
— Franklin D. Roosevelt, September 1932
Writing on leadership in his 1967 memoir, former President Dwight Eisenhower wrote, “I once said, as a sort of wisecrack, that leadership consists of nothing but taking responsibility for everything that goes wrong and giving your subordinates credit for everything that goes well.”
🗃️ In 2023, President Joe Biden got into a back-and-forth with Republican lawmakers who were heckling him during his State of the Union address.
On February 25, 1870, Hiram Rhodes Revels was sworn in as a U.S. Senator from Mississippi, becoming the first Black American to serve in either chamber of Congress.
A Republican and minister, Revels had recruited Black soldiers for the Union Army during the Civil War.
On February 25, 1987, President Ronald Reagan hosted Reverend Jesse Jackson in the Oval Office, where Jackson said he called on the administration to ramp up pressure on South Africa’s apartheid government.
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🗃️ In 2020, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi ripped up President Donald Trump’s prepared remarks at the conclusion of his State of the Union address.
On February 23, 1861, President-elect Abraham Lincoln arrived in Washington, D.C., under tight security ahead of his inauguration slated for March 4.
By that time, seven southern states had seceded from the Union as they believed Lincoln’s election posed a threat to the institution of slavery.
On February 23, 1945, U.S. Marines raised the American flag atop Mount Suribachi—the highest, most strategic point on Iwo Jima—during the bloody battle against Japanese forces.
Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal captured the now-iconic moment.
On February 23, 1962, President John F. Kennedy inspected the spacecraft Friendship 7 in Cape Canaveral, just three days after John Glenn became the first American to orbit Earth aboard it.
“For in a government of laws and not of men, no man, however prominent or powerful, and no mob, however unruly or boisterous, is entitled to defy a court of law.”
— President John F. Kennedy, September 1962
🗃️ In January 1984, President Ronald Reagan hosted Democratic presidential candidate Jesse Jackson at the White House after Jackson successfully secured the release of Navy Lt. Robert Goodman, who had been imprisoned in Syria.
A CBS News report detailed the event.
🗃️ In an ad for his 1988 presidential campaign, a narrator says Jesse Jackson will "change the course of the country."
On February 21, 1940, civil rights icon and longtime congressman John Lewis was born in Alabama.
The Reverend Jesse Jackson joined Nelson Mandela in 1990 on his eight-city tour across the United States as he sought to end apartheid in South Africa following his release from prison.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. with a young Jesse Jackson in 1967.
