Thread by @WestWingReport

He was arguably the most qualified person ever to become President: James Monroe, re-elected on this day in 1820. He won 228 electoral votes to John Quincy Adams's 1

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No one has ascended to the presidency with the kind of qualifications that James Monroe brought to the job. Excerpt from "Under This Roof," the 2015 book by WWR's Paul Brandus:

The 13th Amendment to the Constitution—which abolished slavery—was ratified on this day in 1865. Abraham Lincoln, murdered eight months earlier, would have been gratified. Ending slavery had not been his principal goal when the Civil War began, however - preserving the Union was

Building on the Monroe Doctrine, Theodore Roosevelt made the case for U.S. military intervention abroad. In his State of the Union on this day in 1904 (he mailed it in), TR said America was obliged to be an “international police power” in the Western hemisphere as needed

The first presidential address on the radio was made by Calvin Coolidge - on this day in 1923 (it was his State of the Union). The NY Times, noting the significance of this, said the president’s voice “will be heard by more people than the voice of any man in history.”

Harry Truman said he would beat up a Washington Post music critic, after the critic, Paul Hume, wrote a scathing review of daughter Margaret Truman's singing. This day, 1950

This Day, 1963: Holding the hands of her kids, Jacqueline Kennedy moved out of the White House, two weeks to the day after her husband's assassination. Until she moved to NY in Sept. 1964, she told drivers to avoid routes that would allow her to see it. She returned once, in 1971

This Day, 1973: Gerald Ford was sworn in as vice president. Ford, the longtime House Minority Leader, was selected as VP by Richard Nixon after the resignation of Spiro Agnew in a tax/bribery scandal. Ford would become president eight months later when Nixon himself resigned