Duty, Honor, Country
speakingforleaders Douglas MacArthur · May 12, 1962 Occasion. West Point, Sylvanus Thayer Award, May 12, 1962. MacArthur is 82; this is his last appearance before the Corps. Eleven years after Truman…
August 2026
War Message
Woodrow Wilson · April 2, 1917 Occasion. Joint session of Congress, the evening of April 2, 1917. Wilson had won reelection five months earlier on "He kept us out of…
Farewell Address
Dwight D. Eisenhower · January 17, 1961 Occasion. White House television, January 17, 1961. The successor three days away is Kennedy, unnamed here. Eisenhower is a career general leaving a…
Statement on the Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.
Robert F. Kennedy · April 4, 1968 Occasion. Back of a flatbed, 17th and Broadway, Indianapolis, the night of April 4, 1968. He is campaigning in a predominantly Black neighborhood…
The Man with the Muckrake
Theodore Roosevelt · April 14, 1906 Occasion. Cornerstone laying of the new House Office Building, April 14, 1906. Upton Sinclair's The Jungle had appeared in February; muckraking is at high…
I’ve Been to the Mountaintop
Martin Luther King Jr. · April 3, 1968 Occasion. Mason Temple, Memphis, supporting the sanitation workers. The strike began after Echol Cole and Robert Walker were crushed in a garbage…
Old Soldiers Never Die
Douglas MacArthur · April 19, 1951 Occasion. Joint session of Congress, April 19, 1951. Truman fired him eight days earlier for publicly challenging limited-war policy in Korea after China entered.…
Statement on the Articles of Impeachment
Barbara Jordan · July 25, 1974 Occasion. House Judiciary Committee, televised, July 25, 1974. Jordan is a junior member, the first Black woman elected to Congress from the South. The…
The Rainbow Coalition
Jesse Jackson · July 18, 1984 Occasion. Democratic National Convention, San Francisco. Jackson has lost the nomination to Mondale after the first major Black presidential candidacy of the modern era.…
A Tale of Two Cities
Mario Cuomo · July 16, 1984 Occasion. Democratic National Convention keynote, Moscone Center, San Francisco. Mondale holds the nomination after a split primary with Hart and Jackson; the hall still…