This week In National Press Club history

April 2, 2012: Jim Lehrer, founder of the PBS Newshour, appears on the 76th Kalb Report at the National Press Club, and insists that the program’s mission is more relevant than ever as the public tries to make sense of a flood of information. “It takes courage to be serious,” he said. Since the day of President Kennedy’s assassination, as a young reporter in Dallas, he revealed, “I have never gone to work unprepared for a calamitous, earth-shaking event."

April 4, 1968: Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. is assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, five days before he was scheduled to appear April 9, 1968, at the National Press Club’s new Town Meetings, but was buried that day instead. King had delivered a major policy statement for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference at the Club in 1962.

This Week In National Press Club History is brought to you by the History and Heritage Committee, which preserves and revitalizes the Club’s history through lobby displays, events, panel discussions and its ongoing oral history project.

For information about the committee’s activities or to join it, contact Chair Gilbert Klein at [email protected].

Be sure to visit the Club’s website for more information on the Club’s dramatic 105-year history at www.press.org/about/history.