On this day in 1912 Before a campaign speech in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Theodore Roosevelt, the presidential candidate for the Progressive Party, is shot at close range by saloonkeeper John Schrank while greeting the public in front of the Gilpatrick Hotel. Schranks .32-caliber bullet, aimed directly at Roosevelts heart, failed to mortally wound the former president because its force was slowed by a glasses case and a bundle of manuscript in the breast pocket of Roosevelts heavy coat--a manuscript containing Roosevelts evening speech. Schrank was immediately detained and reportedly offered as his motive that any man looking for a third term ought to be shot. In 1944, German Gen. Erwin Rommel, nicknamed the Desert Fox, is given the option of facing a public trial for treason, as a co-conspirator in the plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler, or taking cyanide. He chooses the latter. In 1947 U.S. Air Force Captain Chuck Yeager becomes the first person to fly faster than the speed of sound. In 1962 The Cuban Missile Crisis begins on October 14, 1962, bringing the United States and the Soviet Union to the brink of nuclear conflict. Photographs taken by a high-altitude U-2 spy plane offered incontrovertible evidence that Soviet-made medium-range missiles in Cuba—capable of carrying nuclear warheads—were now stationed 90 miles off the American coastline. In 1964 African American civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., is awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his nonviolent resistance to racial prejudice in America. At 35 years of age, the Georgia-born minister was the youngest person ever to receive the award.
Posted on: Tue, 14 Oct 2014 08:38:52 +0000
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