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#NEWS: Cleared for takeoff: Our new aircraft electrification facility for the future of flight opens in Endicott, New York.
Read the official announcement to learn more about BAE Systems' new facility here: https://t.co/xmtnY4Ryk9
#AircraftElectrification
He won the Civil War, broke the Klan, went bankrupt at 62, got terminal throat cancer, and wrote one of the greatest books in American literature in the final year of his life. He finished it 5 days before he died.
Ulysses S. Grant was born 204 years ago today.
His name wasn't even Ulysses S. Grant. He was born Hiram Ulysses Grant in Point Pleasant, Ohio on April 27, 1822. The congressman who nominated him to West Point wrote down the wrong name. Grant kept it. The "S." stands for nothing.
He hated his father's tannery and loved horses. Graduated 21st of 39 at West Point. Fought in the Mexican-American War, then came home convinced it was an unjust war designed to expand slavery. He later said he believed the Civil War was divine punishment for it.
He married Julia Dent in 1848, into a slave-owning Missouri family. His abolitionist father refused to attend the wedding. In 1859, broke and desperate, Grant freed the one enslaved man he'd briefly owned instead of selling him. He could have gotten a year's wages.
In the Civil War he became what no other Union general was: relentless. Vicksburg (July 4, 1863) split the Confederacy in half. Lincoln then gave him every Union army. His Appomattox surrender terms: officers kept sidearms, men kept horses for spring planting, no one prosecuted.
As president (1869 to 1877) he did something no president would do again until LBJ: used federal troops to crush the Ku Klux Klan. He suspended habeas corpus in 9 South Carolina counties, prosecuted Klansmen before predominantly Black juries, and broke the first Klan.
His presidency was also rocked by scandal: Black Friday 1869. Crédit Mobilier. The Whiskey Ring. Belknap. Grant himself never took a dime. He was just disastrously loyal to corrupt friends. The pattern damaged his reputation for a century.
After the White House, he toured the world for 2 years. Dined with Queen Victoria. Met the emperor of Japan. Then in 1884, a Wall Street partner named Ferdinand Ward ran what we'd now call a Ponzi scheme. Grant was wiped out. 62 years old. Penniless.
Weeks later he was diagnosed with terminal throat cancer. Mark Twain offered to publish his memoirs. Grant wrote in agony, sometimes 50 pages a day, racing the disease to leave Julia an inheritance. He finished the manuscript July 18, 1885. He died July 23.
The book made Julia $450,000, about $14M today. It's now considered one of the finest memoirs in the English language. For decades historians ranked Grant a failure. Since 2000 he's jumped 13 spots in the C-SPAN survey, the biggest rise of any president.
Happy birthday, General 🇺🇸
Although we don’t yet have the details about the motives behind last night's shooting at the White House Correspondents Dinner, it’s incumbent upon all us to reject the idea that violence has any place in our democracy. It’s also a sobering reminder of the courage and sacrifice that U.S. Secret Service Agents show every day. I’m grateful to them – and thankful that the agent who was shot is going to be okay.
CNN's @VanJones68 says he fears there will be a portion of America that will seek to lionize the #WHCD shooter in much the same way Luigi Mangione has....
"Well, I thought the President did well. I'm starting to worry about something, though, which is that the shooter survived, which means on Monday, he's going to court, which means there is a danger that people try to make him some sort of hero. You watch what happened with Luigi, who shot a CEO to death, and somehow became a hero. So, they said, tonight you saw the worst of America. You saw the best of America. Tonight, you definitely saw the best of America. I hope on Monday, we don't see the worst. Again, this I just want to say very clearly, this kind of despicable behavior has no place in America. It has no place on the right. It has no place on the left. We don't know if he was there because he wanted to hurt Democrats or Republicans. Both were there. We don't know if he wanted to hurt journalists or politicians. Both were there. This kind of behavior has no place in America, and it is -- it is wrong. Violence is not the way to resolve any grievances, and this cheerleader culture for violence, for people who think that the answer to our problems is to go shooting billionaires, or going to synagogues, or all these different things, has to be called out immediately. The minute it starts, every single person with a platform must denounce it, or we're going to see this again."