This week In National Press Club history

June 16, 2015: Actor Gary Sinise, familiar to audiences as Lt. Dan in the 1995 movie “Forrest Gump” and for his starring role in “CSI-NY,” tells a Club Speakers breakfast that his long commitment to military families and veterans is "the most rewarding mission I’ve had in my life. We’ve been at war for the past fourteen years,” he reminded the attendees, and “the emotional trauma” alone experienced by veterans “is at epidemic proportions.”

June 22, 1966: James Meredith addresses a Club Luncheon while recuperating from buckshot wounds sustained in Mississippi during his March Against Fear, to encourage blacks to register to vote.

June 23, 1982: Benny Goodman, the “King of Swing”, performs at a Club-sponsored jazz concert.

June 26, 1942: Exiled King Peter ll of Yugoslavia addresses a National Press Club luncheon about the occupation of his country by Nazi Germany. The Club has over the decades welcomed other royals: Edward, Prince of Wales (the future King Edward VIII) in 1919; 19-year-old Crown Prince Akihito of Japan (the future emperor of Japan) in 1953; King Hussein of Jordan in 1970; Prince Albert II of Monaco in 2009.

June 27, 2013: Retiring Secretary of Transportation, Republican Ray LaHood makes a farewell appearance at a National Press Club Luncheon. He describes President Obama as someone who has “bipartisanship in his DNA,” but says that the President might have worked better with Congress if he’d been in the Senate longer than two years, as had Lyndon B. Johnson and Joe Biden. “That’s how you build the relationships.”


This Week In National Press Club History is sponsored by the History & Heritage Committee, which preserves and revitalizes the Club’s history with lobby displays, panel discussions, special events, and oral histories. For more information about the committee or to join it, contact Chair Gilbert Klein at [email protected].