DURING the World War there was a club for the enlisted men of the Navy and Marine Corps located at 509 Fifth Avenue, New York City, known then as the Navy Club. The club was operated by a group of ladies under the leadership of Mrs. William H. Hamilton. Countless tales could be told of the club of the war period, but this article does not concern those years which were heroic and memorable to all who visited there. Some time after the Armistice it was decided that the club should be continued as a permanent institution. The rented quarters on Fifth Avenue were unsuitable for a real man’s club, and two houses were purchased on East 41st Street, between Fifth and Madison Avenues. How the money was raised and how interest in the volunteer work was continued after the glamour of war service was ended is a story all its own and credit goes chiefly to a noble group of women and a few business men who somehow did the impossible and made the Manhattan Navy Club a living thing, permanent in its ideals and in its own home. Read the rest of this entry »

On October 26, 1963,the first submerged launching of the Navy’s 2500 nautical mile A-3 Polaris Missile was successfully made by the gold crew of the USS Andrew Jackson (SSBN-619), commanded by Commander James B. Wilson, USN, from a point some 30 miles off Cape Canaveral, Florida.  A practice warhead was hurled over 2,000 NM down the Atlantic Missile Range to land on target.  The A-3 Missile added 1,000 NM miles to the reach of the Polaris nuclear retaliatory missile system.

On 22 October 1962, President John F. Kennedy delivered a televised speech, arguably “the most serious speech delivered in his lifetime” and the “most frightening presidential address” in U.S. history.’  Soviet missile-launch sites had been discovered under construction in Cuba.  The response resuIted from deliberations among the President and his ad hoc Executive Committee (ExCom).  

Its final draft was improved significantly by an unlikely person: the Chief of Naval Operations (CNO), Admiral George W. Anderson, Jr.  Read the rest of this entry »

“We live, my dear soul, in an age of trial. What will be the consequence, I know not.”-John Adams, 1774.

The hardest thing in the world, and
maybe the most important thing of all in writing and teaching history, is to convey the fun­damental truth that nothing ever had to happen the way it happened. The tendency when one teaches and writes history is that this followed this, and that followed that; therefore that’s the way it was preordained. But it never, ever was. The Founding Fathers did not know what was going to happen next, what the outcome of this very dangerous path they were taking-to stage a revolution against the most powerful nation in the world-was going to mean for the country and for themselves.

John Adams’s marvelous wife Abigail wrote back: “You cannot, I know, nor do I wish to see you an inac­tive spectator. We have too many high-sounding words and too few actions to correspond with them.”

Read the rest of this entry »

October 9th, 1873

First meeting of the U. S. Naval Institute