This week in National Press Club history

October 6, 1965: President Lyndon B. Johnson, with less than an hour’s warning, is seated at the head table for a National Press Club luncheon honoring political cartoonists. Johnson remarks that a politician once angered by a caricature purportedly said, “We couldn’t find the artist, so we hung the picture instead.”

October 7, 1994: Nelson Mandela addresses a packed National Press Club luncheon. Then-NPC president Gilbert Klein recounted later that Peter Lynch, Wall Street tycoon, had already been scheduled, but accepting the South African embassy’s offer of an appearance on Mandela’s first visit as President of the Republic of South Africa to the United States was a must, so Lynch was moved to the Hotel Washington, where he spoke to three hundred financial writers. Klein remembers most Mandela’s “inner peace, his perfect calmness” in the face of turmoil at the biggest Club event of the year. Mandela firmly believed, Klein recalled, that freedom of the press is absolutely essential to maintaining liberty, and that the only way forward for his country was for it “to unite on the basis of reconciliation and reconstruction.” In 1991 Mandela had spoken to the Club as President of the African National Congress twenty-two months after his release from prison, and in 2012, Myron Belkind, then-chair of the International Correspondents Committee, organized a South Africa Night to celebrate Mandela’s accomplishments.

This Week In National Press Club History is brought to you by the History & Heritage Committee, which preserves and revitalizes the Club’s exciting history through revolving lobby displays, events, panel discussions and a long-standing oral history project.

For more information on the Committee’s activities and plans, contact Chair Gilbert Klein at [email protected].