This Week in NPC History: Club sponsors off-the-record luncheon for Wilkie in 1940

June 5, 2012: On display in the National Press Club lobby is the gold-finished aluminum Olympic torch carried by NPC member Tony Culley-Foster for the United States across the borders of Counties Londonderry and Tyrone, Northern Ireland. In the spring of 1980, Culley-Foster became the only person in history to run the 1,234-mile circumference of Ireland, averaging under seven minutes a mile for 39 miles a day.

June 11, 1927: The Press Club holds a reception for the most famous aviator in the world, Colonel Charles A. Lindbergh, shortly after his solo trans-Atlantic flight. The Club at that time was too small to hold the crowd, so the event was moved to the auditorium of the U. S. Chamber of Commerce.

June 11, 2001: Historian David McCullough discusses his latest best-seller, John Adams, at an NPC Book Rap.

June 12, 1940: Wendell Willkie, a novice at running for public office, and a former Democrat, speaks at an off-the-record luncheon as he campaigns for the Republican presidential nomination. Trailing behind his rivals, Thomas E. Dewey, Robert Taft and Arthur Vandenberg, Willkie wins the Republican nomination in an upset later that summer.

June 13, 1971: The New York Times begins publishing a series of articles based on the Pentagon Papers, a top-secret government study of the increasing U. S. involvement in Southeast Asia, setting off a constitutional battle over freedom of the press. At an NPC Luncheon later that year, Neil Sheehan receives the Drew Pearson Award for investigative journalism for breaking the story.

This Week In National Press Club History is sponsored by the NPC History & Heritage Committee, whose goal is to preserve and revitalize the Club’s illustrious history through revolving lobby displays of Club speakers, panel discussions, events and an on-going oral-history project. For more information about the committee’s activities or to join it, contact Chair Gilbert Klein at [email protected].