What do Eleanor Roosevelt and Angelina Jolie have in common?

The National Press Club History and Heritage Team

March 10, 2025

Dip down anywhere in the National Press Club’s 117-year history and we can find remarkable stories about events at our Club that contributed to American, world and social history. The Club’s History and Heritage team is highlighting just a few each month so our members can appreciate the role the Club has played for well over a century as the place where news happens. Here are a few from March:

March 6, 1933: First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt holds a news conference just for women journalists, the first of hundreds she held weekly in her effort to promote women Washington correspondents so they would not be laid off in the Depression. She held her final press conference the morning FDR died in Warm Springs, Ga. Women were not admitted to the National Press Club at the time, but many of them were members of the Women’s National Press Club, which later merged with the NPC.

Secretary of State Cordell Hull during 1938 luncheon

March 13, 1938: Secretary of State Cordell Hull tells the Club that the maintenance of international law and order is vital to peace. As the world moves toward war, he says, “The crucial issue today is whether these principles will be vitalized and be firmly established as the foundation of an international order or whether international anarchy based on brute force will inundate the world and ultimately sweep away the very basis of civilization."

March 15, 1974: King Hussein of Jordan tells the Club that a new political climate makes it a good time for Middle East peace.

March 8, 1994: Eduard Shevardnadze, who had been foreign affairs minister for the Soviet Union and a strong ally of Mikhail Gorbachev but is now the leader of his native Georgia, makes an impassioned speech for his small, embattled country which was facing huge economic problems as meddlesome Russians encouraged separatists to split it into even smaller pieces. He says through an interpreter that while Georgia is tiny, its fate is indicative of what will happen in the post-Cold War world. It will help define what a country is, and what influence Russia will have over its former empire.

March 16, 1994: To honor Freedom of Information Day, the Club presents its International Freedom of the Press Award to Kalala Mbengo Kalau, a journalist from Zaire, which is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Kalau denounces its dictator, Mobutu Sese Seko. The next morning Kalala learned he would be killed if he returned. In addition, his pregnant wife, Silvie, was imperiled. The Club helped arrange to help Silvie flee Zaire and come to DC, and for legal help for both of them to earn refugee status to stay in the United States.