March 6, 1945: Harry O'Neill is Killed in Action

March 6, 1945, 80 years ago: Harry O'Neill is killed in action in World War II. He was 1 of 2 Major League Baseball players lost in "The Big One."

Harry Mink O'Neill was born on May 8, 1917 in Philadelphia. Like Elmer Gedeon, the other player to be killed in the war, he starred in 3 different sports, in his case, baseball, football and basketball. And, like Hall of Fame pitcher Eddie Plank, he went from Gettysburg College to the Philadelphia Athletics. They signed him right after he graduated in 1939.

But manager-owner Connie Mack only put him into 1 game, on July 23, as a defensive replacement in the 8th inning, for catcher Frankie Hayes. He didn't get to bat, becoming what's now known as a "Moonlight Graham." The A's lost to the Detroit Tigers, 16-3 at Briggs Stadium in Detroit. (That ballpark was renamed Tiger Stadium in 1961.) He wore Number 30 in that game, was switched to Number 36, but got into no more games.

He played 16 games for the Harrisburg Senators in the 1940 season, batting just .238, and that was it for his professional baseball career. He later played semi-pro football and basketball, until the attack on Pearl Harbor. He enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps, and rose to the rank of 1st Lieutenant. On June 16, 1944, he was wounded in the Battle of Saipan, and recovered in time to take part in the Battle of Tinian.

On March 6, 1945, 14 days after the Marines raised the flag on Iwo Jima, Lt. Harry O'Neill was killed there, by a Japanese sniper. He was 27 years old, and was survived by his wife, the former Ethel McKay.

By a weird coincidence, both MLB players who were killed in World War II, O'Neill and Elmer Gedeon, and the one who was killed in the Korean War, Bob Neighbors, played in the majors only briefly, during the 1939 season, for teams that no longer exist in those forms. (Gedeon played for the Washington Senators, Neighbors for the St. Louis Browns.)

March 5, 1875: The Brief Return of Andrew Johnson

March 5, 1875, 150 years ago: Andrew Johnson is sworn in as a member of the U.S. Senate. Just 7 years earlier, the Senate had tried to ensure that he never held public office in America again.

Andrew Johnson (no middle name) was born on December 29, 1808 in Raleigh, North Carolina. His father died when he was 3 years old, casting the family into dire poverty. He apprenticed as a tailor, moved to Greenville, Tennessee, and, at age 18, married 16-year-old Eliza McCardle, in a ceremony performed by Justice of the Peace Mordecai Lincoln -- a 1st cousin of Abraham Lincoln. They had 5 children, none of whom ever ran for public office. All 3 sons died young, from alcoholism, and 2 of them predeceased Andrew.

He had as many as 10 slaves, but freed them shortly after the Emancipation Proclamation, keeping them as paid servants. He was elected an Alderman in Greenville in 1829, and became a delegate to a convention writing a new Constitution for Tennessee. He was elected Mayor in 1834, to the State House of Representatives in 1835, to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1843, Governor in 1853, and U.S. Senator in 1857.

Johnson was the only Senator from a State that seceded from the Union in 1860-61 who did not resign his seat. He remained loyal to the Union. President Lincoln rewarded him for this by appointing him Military Governor of Tennessee in 1862. In 1864, seeking to widen his support, the Republican Lincoln asked his Vice President, former Maine Senator Hannibal Hamlin, to step aside from the ticket, and he formed a "National Union" ticket with the Democratic Johnson.

Lincoln and Johnson won, and were inaugurated on March 4, 1865. But while Lincoln's Inaugural Address was one of the greatest ever -- with its request, "With malice toward none, with charity for all" -- Johnson was hungover from celebrating the night before, was given more drinks, and was drunk when he delivered his Inaugural Address. He was still so out of it when Lincoln spoke that, knowing there were photographers, Hamlin blocked Johnson's face with his top hat.

Lincoln was shot by John Wilkes Booth on April 14, 1865, and died the next morning, April 15, at 7:22 AM. At 11:00 AM, Johnson was sworn in by the Chief Justice of the United States, Salmon P. Chase, a former Senator from Ohio. The ceremony was held at the Kirkwood House, a boarding house, at 1111 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, 4 blocks east of the White House. (It was demolished in 1874. The site is now occupied by an office building, with ground-floor retail, including The West Wing Cafe.)

Johnson continued Lincoln's lenient "Reconstruction" policy toward the South, which was considered too lenient by the "Radical Republicans" who then controlled Congress. It's important to note that, at this point in the nation's history, the Republicans were liberal, including being pro-civil rights, and, while they were based in what's now considered the Midwest, they also dominated the Northeast; while the Democrats were conservative, with a base in the "Solid South," and stood up for white supremacy.

And so, the Republicans, led by such men as Representative Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania and Senator Benjamin Franklin Wade of Ohio, and Johnson fought like cats and dogs. Congress passed the Tenure of Office Act, preventing the President from firing any member of the Cabinet without the consent of the Senate. After all, the Senate had to give consent to appoint someone to the Cabinet, so why shouldn't their consent be needed to remove someone from it?

But the consent of the Senate for Cabinet appointments was written into the Constitution of the United States. The Constitution did not prevent the President from firing a Cabinet member without the Senate's consent. Eventually, well after Johnson was dead, the U.S. Supreme Court would rule that Johnson was right, and struck the Act down.

Johnson fired the Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton, who had been appointed by Lincoln. On February 24, 1868, the House impeached Johnson, the 1st impeachment of a President. His trial began in the Senate on March 5, with a conflict of interest: Under the law in effect at the time, since the Vice Presidency was vacant following Johnson's rise to the Presidency, if he were to be convicted, the next President would be the President Pro Tempore of the U.S. Senate -- Ben Wade. He should have recused himself from the trial. He did not.

On May 16, the Senate voted on the 11th Article of Impeachment, accusing Johnson of firing Stanton in violation of the Tenure of Office of Act once the Senate had overturned his suspension. The vote was 35 Guilty, 19 Not Guilty. With a 2/3rds majority required to convict Johnson and remove him from the Presidency, he thus stayed in office by 1 vote. One vote. In the days to come, 2 other Articles of Impeachment also went down to 35-19 votes, and the others were dropped, with the presumption that the results would be roughly the same.

There were 10 Republicans who broke from their party to acquit him. One, James Grimes of Iowa, said, "I cannot agree to destroy the harmonious working of the Constitution for the sake of getting rid of an unacceptable president." Another, Edmund G. Ross of Kansas, would later be one of the Senators cited in John F. Kennedy's book Profiles in Courage.

It was just as well: Johnson was done as President within a year, anyway. The Republicans, no longer needing votes from the South, were never going to re-elect him. And the Democrats viewed him as having abandoned them. In the 1868 election, the Republican nominee, General Ulysses S. Grant, easily defeated the Democratic nominee, Governor Horatio Seymour of New York.

On March 4, 1869, Johnson did not attend Grant's Inauguration. They already did not get along, and Johnson refused the traditional carriage ride of the outgoing and the incoming Presidents from the White House to the Capitol. He stayed at his desk, literally working until the last minute of the last day of his Administration. While some of those carriage rides, which became an automobile ride in 1921, were tense, no outgoing President would refuse to attend the incoming President's Inauguration again until Donald Trump for Joe Biden in 2021.

Seeking vindication for himself, and revenge against his political enemies, he launched a Senate bid soon after returning home. At the time, Senators were still elected by State legislatures, and he lost his 1869 race. He lost a House race in 1872. On January 26, 1875, he won a Senate seat. He remains the only former President to be elected to the Senate, although John Quincy Adams was elected to the House after his failed bid for re-election.

When Andrew Johnson walked into the Senate chamber for his swearing-in on March 5, 1875, he was greeted with a standing ovation, and given a bouquet of flowers. John Sherman of Ohio, brother of General William Tecumseh Sherman, and one of the leaders of the move to convict him, shook his hand. With some irony, Johnson's predecessor as Vice President, Hannibal Hamlin, had also been returned to the Senate, and they were sworn in together by the current Vice President, Henry Wilson.

Johnson returned to Tennessee after the special session of Congress ended, and died of a stroke as his daughter Mary's farm near Elizabethton on July 30, 1875, at the age of 66, less than 5 months after his return to the Senate. When he was buried in Greenville, a copy of the Constitution was put in his coffin, in place of a pillow.

Because of his pro-South policies and racism, much more than for the circumstances that led to his impeachment, he has consistently been rated one of the worst Presidents. Nevertheless, he did produce one of the greatest comebacks in the history of American politics.

Only one film has been made about him: Tennessee Johnson, in 1942, starring Van Heflin -- not to be confused with Van Johnson (no relation to Andrew) or Van Williams. A Presidential Library was set up for him on the campus of Tusculum University in Greenville, Tennessee. U.S. Route 11E in northeastern Tennessee, including Greenville, is named the Andrew Johnson Highway. No U.S. Navy ship has been named for him.

A note about Chief Justice Chase, who swore Johnson in as President: In 1934, his portrait appeared on a one-time issue of a gold certificate with a face value of $10,000. The U.S. government has not issued a bill larger than $100 since.

March 4, 1925: The Inauguration of Calvin Coolidge

March 4, 1925, 100 years ago: Calvin Coolidge, who became the 30th President of the United States upon the death of Warren Harding in 1923, and won a full term of his own in 1924, is sworn in as President. Charles G. Dawes, a former U.S. Ambassador to Britain, is sworn in as Vice President.

A 52-year-old native of Plymouth Notch, Vermont, and Governor of Massachusetts when he was elected Vice President in 1920, he is sworn in on the West Front of the Capitol Building, by the Chief Justice, himself a former President, William Howard Taft.

This was the 1st time that a former President swore in an incoming President. In spite of this, Taft goofed on the Oath of Office: Instead of asking Coolidge to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States," it came out, "protect, preserve and defend." Four years later, for Herbert Hoover, Taft goofed again, making it "preserve, and maintain, and defend…"

His reputation as "Silent Cal" led to a story that two women at a White House party made a bet, and one walked up to Coolidge and said, "I made a bet with my friend that I could get you to say at least three words to me," and Coolidge said, "You lose." Belying this reputation, this speech was, and remains, the 6th-longest Inaugural Address of any President. His Inaugural Address is the 1st to be broadcast on radio. Unfortunately, no sound recording of the Address survives.

The Address is not especially memorable. He closes by saying, "America seeks no earthly empire built on blood and force. No ambition, no temptation, lures her to thought of foreign dominions. The legions which she sends forth are armed, not with the sword, but with the cross. The higher state to which she seeks the allegiance of all mankind is not of human, but of divine origin. She cherishes no purpose save to merit the favor of Almighty God."

The theme of his 1924 election campaign was "Keep Cool with Coolidge"; alternately, "Keep Cool and Keep Coolidge." The scandals of the late President Harding were forgotten: Coolidge was a model of propriety. And the country enjoyed "Coolidge Prosperity," and enjoyed an isolationist foreign policy: There were no international entanglements during his time in office.

On vacation in the Summer of 1927, he told the press, "I do not choose to run for President in 1928." Maybe he saw the writing on the wall, that an economic crash was coming. Herbert Hoover, Secretary of Commerce under Harding and Coolidge, was elected, and was left holding the bag for the Crash of 1929. Coolidge escaped blame for the Great Depression.

He died on January 5, 1933, 2 months before his 2nd full term, had he sought it and won it, would have ended. He remains the modern model for a boring President: When told he had died, theater critic Dorothy Parker said, "How can you tell?"

March 4, 1825: The Inauguration of John Quincy Adams

March 4, 1825, 200 years ago: John Quincy Adams, son of John Adams, the 2nd President of the United States, is Inaugurated as the 6th President of the United States, in the House of Representatives Chamber of the U.S. Capitol Building.

John C. Calhoun, the outgoing U.S. Secretary of War, is sworn in as Vice President.

Certainly, Adams was qualified for the office. He had been a U.S Senator from Massachusetts; U.S. Minister to the Netherlands, Prussia (Germany), Russia and Britain; and Secretary of State under the previous President, James Monroe.

But he becomes President under controversial circumstances, having not won the popular vote or the initial Electoral Vote, and having been elected by the U.S. House of Representatives thanks to a competitor, Speaker of the House Henry Clay, throwing Adams his support, in what appears to have been a quid pro quo, as Adams appointed Clay to be Secretary of State -- at the time, tantamount to being named heir presumptive as President -- allowing him to win over the man who led in both the popular and the Electoral Vote, General Andrew Jackson.

Sworn in by Chief Justice John Marshall, he is the only President to swear the Oath of Office with his hand on a book other than a Bible, using a book of laws. And, as the 1st President who could not be counted among the "Founding Fathers," he changed the fashion of the ceremony: Instead of long hair tied in a queue, he had his hair cut short; and instead of the traditional knee breeches, he wore long trousers.

As Thomas Jefferson had, following the previous most contentious election, he tried a conciliatory tone in his Inaugural Address, saying, "The collisions of party spirit which originate in speculative opinions or in different views of administrative policy are in their nature transitory." He noted his status as the 1st minority-vote President by saying, "I am deeply conscious of the prospect that I shall stand more and oftener in need of your indulgence."

His Presidency was a failure. The Democratic Party wanted nothing to do with him, and what had become the National Republican Party discovered that the natural contentious personality common to the Adams men was rather strong in him. He got very little done, and when his rematch with Andrew Jackson came in 1828, he was soundly defeated.

In 1830, he became the 1st former President to be elected to the House of Representatives. He served a District outside Boston, becoming the House's leading advocate for the abolition of slavery, until his death in 1848.

March 3, 1875: The Premiere of "Carmen" & The 1st Indoor Hockey Game

Georges Bizet

March 3, 1875, 150 years ago: Carmen, an opera by French composer Georges Bizet, premieres, at the Opéra-Comique in Paris. It is based on the 1845 novella of the same title, by French writer Prosper Mérimée. He died in 1870, and so did not live to see the opera.

The opera is not comic: It is set in southern Spain in 1820, in the wake of the country's devastating defense of itself against Napoleon in the Peninsular War, and with the loss of its Latin American colonies in progress.

Don José, a naïve soldier, is seduced by the wiles of the fiery Romani woman Carmen. (She is referred to as a "gypsy," but that term for the Romani is now considered a slur.) He abandons his childhood sweetheart, and deserts from his military duties, but loses Carmen's love to the bullfighter Escamillo, after which José kills her in a jealous rage.

The depictions of proletarian life, immorality, and lawlessness, and the tragic death of the main character on stage, broke new ground in French opera, and were highly controversial. It has become part of the trope that every opera is a tragedy, which is far from true.

Bizet died just 3 months after the premiere, on June 3, 1875, at 36, from a lingering fever and 2 heart attacks.

Just as most 20th Century Americans came to know "The March of the Swiss Soldiers," the end of the the Overture to Gioachino Rossini's 1829 opera William Tell as the theme from the 1949-57 TV show The Lone Ranger, many Americans came to know the songs "Habanera" and "The Toreador Song" from their inclusion in the 1976 baseball film The Bad News Bears.

*

On the exact same day, across the Atlantic Ocean, but also in a French-speaking city, the first recorded indoor ice hockey game took place.

Just as a young man named James Creighton was the 1st great pitcher in baseball, before a bizarre injury took his life at the age of 21, another James Creighton organized the 1st indoor hockey game. He put it together at the Victoria Skating Rink in Montreal, between a local team and the Victoria Skating Club, a team captained by Creighton.

The game featured 9 players on each side, as opposed to the modern 6. And here is the entire report of the game, from the next day's Montreal Gazette -- originally a single run-on sentence, but I've added paragraphs for easier reading, although this writer uses the term "shinty" instead of the more common "shinny":

HOCKEY – At the Rink last night a very large audience gathered to witness a novel contest on the ice. The game of hockey, though much in vogue on the ice in New England and other parts of the United States, is not much known here, and in consequence the game of last evening was looked forward to with great interest.

Hockey is played usually with a ball, but last night, in order that no accident should happen, a flat block of wood was used, so that it should slide along the ice without rising, and thus going among the spectators to their discomfort. The game is like Lacrosse in one sense – the block having to go through flags placed about 8 feet apart in the same manner as the rubber ball – but in the main the old country game of shinty gives the best idea of hockey.

The players last night were eighteen in number – nine on each side – and were as follows: – Messrs. Torrance (captain), Meagher, Potter, Goff, Barnston, Gardner, Griffin, Jarvis and Whiting. Creighton (captain), Campbell, Campbell, Esdaile, Joseph, Henshaw, Chapman, Powell and Clouston.

The match was an interesting and well-contested affair, the efforts of the players exciting much merriment as they wheeled and dodged each other, and notwithstanding the brilliant play of Captain Torrance's team Captain Creighton's men carried the day, winning two games to the single of the Torrance nine. The game was concluded about half-past nine, and the spectators then adjourned well satisfied with the evening's entertainment.

Artist's depiction of the game

What the Gazette didn't report was that there was a fight after the game -- not between players, as would become so common in the sport, but between the players and the fans, as some members of the Skating Club didn't like that their rink, so used to the leisure of skating, was being used for a competitive sport, and causing damage to the ice.

Creighton went on to become the law clerk for the Canadian Senate in Ottawa, and lived until 1930. 

The Victoria Skating Rink opened in 1862, on a block bordered by Drummond Street, St. Catherine Street, Stanley Street and Dorchester Boulevard (now Boulevard René-Léveseque). In 1886, it became the home of the 1st amateur hockey league, the Amateur Hockey Association of Canada. In 1894, it was the location of the 1st Stanley Cup Playoff games. (The Cup was a challenge trophy, and when the Montreal Amateur Athletic Association won the AHAC title in 1893, no champion of another league challenged them, so there was no playoff that 1st season.)

Moving the sport indoors forced, for the 1st time, a standardized rink size, which became 200 feet long by 85 feet wide. On March 3, 1925, 50 years to the day after the 1st game, the last game was held there, a tournament semifinal for an amateur league. But times had changed: The Rink was in bad shape, and, a mile to the west, the Montreal Forum had opened the previous November. The Rink was soon demolished, and a parking garage was built in its place. The garage still stands.

No, it doesn't look much like a historical site. But, while not the place where hockey was "invented," it can legitimately be called "the place where hockey as we know it was born."

March 1, 1965: The Moynihan Report

March 1, 1965, 60 years ago: The Moynihan Report is released, although that is not its title, and the name "Moynihan" doesn't appear anywhere on it. That's the name that it got, because some people insist upon assigning credit, while others insist upon assigning blame.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan may have seemed like the most Irish of New Yorkers, but he was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1927, before moving to Hell's Kitchen on Manhattan's West Side with his family as a boy. He worked as a longshoreman before getting a free education at City College of New York, then serving in the U.S. Navy during World War II, and getting a Ph.D. in history from Tufts University.

"Pat" went to the London School of Economics, where he began to cultivate, in his own words, "a taste for Savile Row suits, rococo conversational riffs and Churchillian oratory," even as he maintained that "nothing and no one at LSE ever disposed me to be anything but a New York Democrat who had some friends who worked on the docks and drank beer after work."

He worked on the staff of New York Governor W. Averell Harriman, before being appointed an Assistant Secretary of Labor under President John F. Kennedy. The night that JFK was assassinated, he spoke with Mary McGrory of The Washington Star, invoking the heritage of both of them and the fallen President: "There's no point in being Irish if you don't know that the world will break your heart eventually."

He remained under the new President, Lyndon B. Johnson, who wanted the Department of Labor to give him as much information as he could for his "War On Poverty." The result was The Negro Family: The Case For National Action, published on March 1, 1965. Moynihan wrote the report on his own initiative, hoping to persuade White House officials that civil-rights legislation alone would not produce racial equality. Few people doubted this.

But Moynihan didn't suggest an additional solution, only an additional subject to address: Black families. He pointed out that the out-of-wedlock birthrate was much higher for black people than for white people. And he used the phrase "tangle of pathologies" to describe conditions within black families.

Conservatives loved it: Only 5 months after their epic electoral defeat at LBJ's hands, here was a lifeline, and it was coming from inside their enemy's own house. The report seemed to back up their idea that spending money on achieving racial equality shouldn't be done, giving them the justification that it was pointless.

Liberals hated it: The report seemed to "blame the victim" for his own problems. This presaged later conservative "dog whistles," like "race hustler," "poverty pimp," "welfare queen," and "superpredator."

Between the backlash against this report, and LBJ's perception that Moynihan was too close to his intraparty rival, now-Senator Robert F. Kennedy of New York, Moynihan realized that his position in the Johnson Administration was untenable. Before the year was out, he resigned to take a professor's position at Harvard University.

But the Republicans remembered. In 1969, the new President, Richard Nixon, appointed Moynihan to be Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy; and, later in the year, as Counselor to the President. (He would be succeeded in these offices by John Ehrlichman and Donald Rumsfeld, respectively.)

But his support for a guaranteed national income, or a "negative income tax," was too close to socialism for Tricky Dick and his tricksters. At the end of 1970, he left the Administration, and went back to Harvard. In 1973, Nixon appointed him to be U.S. Ambassador to India. In 1975, President Gerald Ford appointed him U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. In 1976, despite still officially living in Massachusetts, he ran for the U.S. Senate from New York, for the seat formerly held by RFK, and won it.

He would serve 4 terms, becoming, as I eventually put it, in language that wouldn't go over well today, "a political transvestite." He was reliably Democratic on education, the environment, civil liberties and abortion, and was a reliable vote for federal judges appointed by Democratic Presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. But he seemed to side with the Republicans on taxes, and absolutely sided with them on health care and welfare.

During the health care reform debate in early 1994, he was the Chairman of the Senate's Committee on Finance, which had to approve any reform bill. Clinton had been pushing for universal coverage, saying there was a crisis on the issue. But the Republicans were saying there wasn't any crisis. In other words, the Republicans were lying.

Moynihan appeared as a guest on NBC's Meet the Press, hosted by a former aide of his, Tim Russert, and said, as if he were a Republican, "We don't have a health care crisis in this country. But we do have a welfare crisis." Russert asked him if there would be a new health care reform law. Moynihan said, "Ah, in this Congress? No." By refusing to even consider such a bill, he did as much to kill health care reform for the next 16 years as any conservative, in Congress or in the media. 

Clinton did sign a welfare reform bill in 1996, after vetoing 2 others he thought too draconian. But, as someone with more medical difficulties than jobs between 1994 and 2010, I have never forgiven Moynihan -- or the Republicans -- for killing health care reform, offering it as a sacrifice to the god of welfare reform.

Moynihan continued to officially be a Democrat, while taking some Republican positions, until, bowing to advancing age, he retired in advance of the 2000 election. His seat was won by Hillary Clinton, Bill's wife. She had been careful to get on good terms with him, despite the fact that the health care reform movement was as much her pet project as it was her husband's. So Hillary winning Moynihan's seat must have given both Clintons satisfaction on more than one level.

Moynihan died in 2003. In 2021, something for which he had long advocated and attempted to fund, an expansion of New York's Pennsylvania Station, opened in the former main post office across 8th Avenue. Designed to handle Amtrak traffic, so that the station between 8th and 7th Avenues could handle New Jersey Transit and the Long Island Rail Road more easily, the new facility was named Moynihan Train Hall.

If anything, the commuter portion of Penn Station should have been named for Moynihan, given how often he commuted between America's 2 main political parties. 

March 1, 1945: FDR's Last Speech

March 1, 1945, 80 years ago: President Franklin D. Roosevelt addresses a Joint Session of Congress, at the Capitol Building in Washington.

Just 18 days earlier, he had concluded the Yalta Conference, meeting with Prime Minister Winston Churchill of Britain and Premier Joseph Stalin of the Soviet Union, in the Crimea, on Stalin's home turf. They discussed how to finish the European and Pacific phases of World War II, and what to do with the defeated nations afterward, and how to rebuild the postwar world.

Due to having contracted polio in 1921, whenever FDR had to give a public speech, would be "walked" up to the podium by holding onto a cane with one hand and an aide's arm with the other. His braces would be adjusted so that he could stand, and he would then deliver his speech.

But now, early in his 4th term, he was 63 years old, tired, and sick: His blood pressure was much too high, and he had heart disease. As I said, it had been 18 days since Yalta had wrapped up. Had he been healthy, then, given the transportation modes then available, he could have needed only about half that to get home and prepare his remarks for Congress.

And it wasn't just rest he needed: He wasn't going to be able to stand to make the speech. For the 1st time, he addressed Congress from his wheelchair. Also for the 1st time during his Presidency, in an address broadcast coast-to-coast over the nation's radio networks, he made a public reference to his disability. 

He began as follows: "I hope that you will pardon me for this unusual posture of sitting down during the presentation of what I want to say. But I know that you will realize that it makes it a lot easier for me not to have to carry about ten pounds of steel around on the bottom of my legs; and also because of the fact that I have just completed a fourteen-thousand-mile trip." The members of Congress applauded.

He added, "First of all, I want to say, it is good to be home." More applause. He went on: "It has been a long journey. I hope you will also agree that it has been, so far, a fruitful one. Speaking in all frankness, the question of whether it is entirely fruitful or not lies to a great extent in your hands. For unless you here in the halls of the American Congress, with the support of the American people, concur in the general conclusions reached at Yalta, and give them your active support, the meeting will not have produced lasting results."

In other words, unless Congress properly funded the Department of War to end the job of the war, and the Department of State to start the job of the peace, then the war effort, which had already killed about 300,000 Americans, would have amounted to nothing.

Roosevelt went on to explain the progress of our fighting men. U.S. troops had already crossed into German territory. Six days later, they would cross the Rhine River at the Ludendorff Bridge. He spoke of why Yalta was chosen as the site, because it was once a Black Sea resort, and of what the Nazis had done to devastate it. So he spoke of how the Nazis had to pay for what they'd done, but that the German people shouldn't have to suffer any further.

And he spoke of building a new international organization to replace the failed League of Nations, the United Nations, with a Charter that would be based on the Constitution of the United States.

He also said, "On the way back from the Crimea, I made arrangements to meet personally King Farouk of Egypt; Halle Selassie, the Emperor of Ethiopia; and King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia. Our conversations had to do with matters of common interest. They will be of great mutual advantage because they gave me, and a good many of us, an opportunity of meeting and talking face to face, and of exchanging views in personal conversation instead of formal correspondence."

He said, "Twenty-five years ago, American fighting men looked to the statesmen of the world to finish the work of peace for which they fought and suffered. We failed them then. We cannot fail them again, and expect the world again to survive."

Ever since the Yalta Conference, conservatives have claimed that FDR "betrayed" Eastern Europe by leaving it to Stalin there. But the war was not over. Germany was still fighting, even if the end, there, was in sight. Japan was still fighting, with no end in sight. The Battles of Iwo Jima and Okinawa were yet to come. FDR needed the Soviet Union in that fight.

The Red Army was already in control of most of Poland by the time they met at Yalta. In other words, Poland and Eastern Europe were not Roosevelt's to "sell." Stalin already had already "bought" them, his "currency" being the lives of millions of Soviet soldiers.

FDR also knew that the United Nations would be stronger after the war if the Soviets were in it. He agreed to some concessions at Yalta, for the same reason he cut his social programs short, telling a reporter, "Dr. New Deal had to give way to Dr. Win the War."

FDR never made another public speech. This address, and his Inaugural Address on January 20, would be his only public appearances in the U.S. during his 4th term. He left Washington, and returned to his home in Hyde Park, New York. But he didn't think he was getting the rest he needed there. So, on March 30, he left for his "Little White House" in Warm Springs, Georgia, where he had previously gone in his vain attempt to regain the use of his legs. He died there on April 12. Not only was the war not finished, but Adolf Hitler was still alive and in charge -- albeit of a quickly crumbling Third Reich.

After FDR's death, it was 18 days before Hitler killed himself, rather than be taken by Soviet troops; 26 days before Germany surrendered, V-E Day; and 134 days before Japan surrendered, V-J Day.

Between the lasting legacy of the New Deal, and the way he set things up for the postwar world, perhaps FDR's greatest achievement was building a world that didn't need him anymore.