OCTOBER 14 — 1890 Happy birthday Dwight Eisenhower; 2002 President Bush calls out al Queda for Bali combings; 2007 Keeping Up with the Kardashians premieres; 1975 Amityville trials begin
OCTOBER 14
1890 – Happy Birthday Dwight Eisenhower.
…Born in Denison Texas, the first of two American presidents from Texas, Ike grew up in Abilene Kansas as the third of seven children in a poor household. His mom was a pacifist, but gave her blessings for young Dwight to attend West Point. He played football until he was injured tackling Jim Thorpe, who was the first Native American who would later win a gold at the Olympics for America. That ended Ike’s sports stint as a player in college, and he became a cheerleader and coached the junior varsity team. He graduated from West Point with the legendary “class the stars fell on,” where 59 of 164 students would make brigadier general or higher and one of two to the rank of General of the Army.
After West Point, Ike was stationed in Texas as a second lieutenant, where he met Mamie Geneva Doud, to whom he proposed marriage on Valentine’s Day 1916. They had two children, but only John Eisenhower would grow up to adulthood. I’ll get to John in a minute.
Ike was scheduled to fight in WWI, but a week prior to his deployment the war ended. Nonetheless, Dwight was able to serve under Generals John Pershing and Douglas MacArthur. Promoted to Brig. General, he earned his first star right before the outbreak of WWII. Working in Washington DC, Army chief of staff General George C. Marshall was so impressed with Eisenhower he directed Ike to to command Operation Torch in 1942, which was an Allied victory in North Africa. From there he commanded the amphibious invasion of Sicily, followed by success on the Italian mainland that led to the fall of Rome two years later. In 1944 he was assigned to lead the D-Day invasion of France. Yup, that’s right. In only five years, Dwight “The Kansas Cyclone” Eisenhower rose from the ranks of Lt. Colonel to spearhead the greatest invasion force mankind has ever seen.
He returned home to one of the biggest hero’s welcome in U.S. History, and his popularity soared so greatly that President Truman asked him to run with him for Vice President. Ike declined however, remaining loyal to the Republican Party. From there, he became President of Columbia U. in 1948, but he didn’t care much for that job, mainly because of the fact that it took too many discussions and meetings to get anything done. In 1950 he took leave from Columbia University to assume supreme command over the new North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO as we call it. By 1952, the war in Korea was taking its toll on Truman’s approval ratings, and the Republicans persuaded Eisenhower to run for President, along with California Senator Richard Nixon as his running mate for VP. The slogan “I Like Ike” was irresistible to Americans, and he won a landslide victory over Democrat Adlai Stevenson.
Ike’s son, John, whom I mentioned a couple minutes ago, was serving on the front lines of the Korean War. For his inauguration, Haberdasher Harry ordered John, to come home, which was an awesome surprise for Dwight. After his inaugural ceremony, Ike offered Haberdasher Harry and former first lady Bess Truman a sleek ride on Air Force One back to MO, Truman replied, and I paraphrase no thanks. I’ll take the train. C’mon Harry! Dwight’s a license pilot!
Anyway, Eisenhower would win presidential campaign victory another one over Stevenson in 1956. During these two terms in office, President Duckpin was known as a moderate Republican, continuing most of the New Deal and Fair Deal programs to emphasize a balanced budget, established by his predecessors FDR and Truman. He loved fly fishing, eating TV dinners, watching westerns, and playing bridge, and golf He ordered a putting green that was installed on the White House lawns. He was the first president to appear on color TV, had two dogs named Heidi and Spunky, and loved cooking. He had a mean egg nog recipe.
As far as segregation went, Ike dragged his feet on 1954’s Brown Vs Board of Education decision in Topeka KS, although did eventually send troops to protect African-American students at Little Rock’s Central High School in 1957, to ensure desegregation orders of the Federal court were compliant. Meanwhile, Republican Senator Joe McCarthy was on a witchhunt, accusing dozens of American citizens of communism and started holding hearings on TV. Ike would covertly keep his distance from Tailgunner Joe, and eventually discredit him. Eisenhower also created the Interstate Highway System, which is a whole spinoff story about Goodyear I’ll have to get to another time. NASA was also created during Ike’s administration.
In foreign affairs, he tried reducing the strains of the Cold War. A truce for an armed peace after three years of fighting was signed along the border of South Korea in 1953. The CIA helped to topple the governments of Iran in Guatemala. Russian leader Josef Stalin had just died in 1953, which changed relations between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. Both countries had hydrogen bombs, and new Russian leaders wanted to neutralize Austria. In 1955, President Eisenhower met with leaders of the British, French and Russian governments in Geneva, where he proposed exchanges of blueprints between the U.S. and Soviet Union, in order to “provide within our countries facilities for aerial photography to the other country.” The Russians rejected it, although it won international approval. Until 1960, when the U2 spy plane was shot down, but that’s another story. Basically it killed any hopes of a treaty between Ike and new Russian leader Nikita Khrushchev.
In Indochina, Ike decided not to authorize an air strike to rescue French troops from Dien Bien Phu, though his administration helped to create an anti-communist government in South Vietnam. We all know what happened next.
Ike suffered two heart attacks in office but quickly recuperated. Upon leaving office, the Kansas Cyclone warned us against the Military Industrial Complex. Look it up, scholars, this is important. As the national military strength merges with big business, he warned, it could lead to problems in shaping America’s government and our way of life, quote: “in the goodness of time.”
After that, he retired to his farm in Gettysburg, and passed away at age 78 in Washington D.C. America is best described as one word: Freedom, he said in 1959.
1912 – Teddy Roosevelt gets shot and then delivers a speech, bullet in place.
Like a boss!
Teddy had started his Progressive Party, and he was the Bull Moose behind it. He was to deliver a speech in Milwaukee, when saloonkeeper John Flammang Schrank shot TR in the chest because in his dreams, former president McKinley, who was recently, assassinated thereby ascending TR to the White House, asked Schrank to avenge his death by protecting democracy from a three term president. Rather than being taken to the hospital, the Rough Rider insisted on delivering his speech. He began by saying “Friends, I shall ask you to be as quite as possible. I don’t know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot. But it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose. ” But TR was breathing, though sporadically as he gave his speech.
As a boy, young Teddy had asthma and at nights felt like he was being smothered to death. At age seven, Teddy came across a dead seal at a market and wanted his head, which would be the first to start one of his biggest conquests later on in life; a natural museum of history. Two years later at age nine, TR began collecting dead insects for his Natural Insect Museum, which he began writing about in papers. His father liked to take the family travelling, and Teddy noticed through physical exercise, he could get over his asthma, and would spend the rest of his life asthma free.
On this day in 1912, he continued with his speech: “I can tell you with absolute truthfulness that I am very much uninterested in whether I am shot or not. It was just as when I was colonel of my regiment. I always felt that a private was to be excused for feeling at times some pangs of anxiety about his personal safety, but I cannot understand a man fit to be a colonel who can pay any heed to his personal safety when he is occupied as he ought to be with the absorbing desire to do his duty.” After Schrank had shot TR, the president’s stenographer grabbed Schrank into a headlock and took him down.
During the early 1880’s, Teddy was truly the Batman of New York politics, aligning himself with the Mug umps and continually harassing corruption wherever he could. On December 2, 1886, he married his childhood family friend Edith Kermit Carrot, with whom they had five children. In 1894, influenced by books such as ‘How the Other Half Lives’ by Jacob Riis, he would continue his fight by becoming Assistant Secretary of the Navy, went to war in Cuba, became governor of New York, then Vice President to McKinley. TR was known for trust-busting, or splitting up what he considered unfair monopolies.
As he stood bleeding through his chest, he put the Standard Oil and Tobacco Trust monopolies and anything else that JP Morgan had his hands on, and put them on blast in front of his audience in Milwaukee: “Our proposal is to lay down certain requirements, and then to require the commerce commission – the industrial commission – to see that the trusts live up to those requirements. Our opponents”, TR continues, “have spoken as if we were going to let the commission declare what those requirements should be. Not at all. We are going to to put the requirements in the law and then see that the commission requires them to obey that law.”
Sure enough in 1912, the election stand-off between Woodrow Wilson, William Taft, and the Bull Moose himself would take down the Republican Party until the Great Depression. But today, the Wizard of Menlo Park Thomas Edison was using his new invention, a recording device, to capture the audio, and is available, where a bleeding Roosevelt points his denunciation At Standard Oil and Tobacco, Sugar, the Beef, all those trusts are organized in the state of Mr. Wilson’s home state of New Jersey and the laws of New Jersey say that their charters can at any time be amended or repealed if they misbehave themselves and give the government ample power to act about those laws.”
Then he was done. The Great White Chief. The Bull Moose. The Old Lion. He would spend the next 8 days in the hospital, where the bullet was inaccessible to the point of risking further tissue and muscle damage. The wound began to heal, and that bullet remained in TR’s chest for eternity. As far as Schrank went, he wound up in a mental institution and died of sickness in 1943. The Rough Rider, ever so determined to go after JP Morgan, had one thing right that is indisputable. It takes more than a bullet to kill a Bull Moose.
2002 – President Bush blames al Qaeda for Bali bombings.
202 people, including 7 Americans, people were killed when on Holiday Island in Indonesia when a van fully loaded with TNT blew up in a popular tourist area. The bloodbath continued as hospitals and ambulances couldn’t keep up with the hundreds of others who were injured.
The violent Islamic group Jemaah Islamiah, the Southeast Asian faction of al Qaeda, claimed responsibility. Meanwhile here in America President George W> Bush pointed out that these attacks were similar to al Qaeda attacks in Kuwait and Yemen which showed that al Qaeda was on the rise and would continue to be a threat to the United States.
He told reporters on the South Lawn on the White House, “I’m concerned about our homeland. Obviously if I knew of a specific piece of intelligence that would indicate a moment or a place in which the enemy would attack, we’d do a lot about it.”. These days the site is a virtual sanctuary. Ten years later, Indonesian president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyo0no stated Justice has been done. The bombings set off a series of critical chain reactions, Indonesia developed a highly skilled and dedicated police anti-terror unit, and an international campaign was launched to restore the image of Indonesia as a peaceful tourist destination.
2007 – Keeping up with the Kardashians premiere.
The whole clan’s there! Kris, Kourtney, Caitlyn, Kim, Khloe, Kendall, Kylie and Rob. Kim by the way would turn out to be the highest paid reality star in the history of ever, in 2015 taking $51M, 40% supposedly coming from her video game Kim Kardashian: Hollywood made another $71M! Q: How big is Kim Kardashian’s butt? When she was born, the doctor said “Congratulations! Twins!” It’s so big that they still can’t find the last chair she sat on. She put on some BVD’s and by the time they reached her waist they spelled out boulevard. She sat on a rainbow and made Skittles! A5: When her beeper goes off, people think she is backing up! A6: She has to iron her pants on the driveway!
Happy birthday Ike!
1975 – Trials begin for Amityville murders.
…In 1974, Ronald DeFeo shot and killed killed his parents and four brothers and sisters, all somehow in their sleep. Neighbors didn’t hear gunshots, even though DeFGeo didn’t use a silencer. Interesting. Later, the Lutz family bought the house, moved in, saw ghosts and scrammed. The story of the Amityville Horror was written based on these events, and was a successful movie adaptation was released. Turns out George Lutz was on heroin, and when you do heroin you tend to seen ghosts that aren’t there. Drugs is bad, mk?