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West Berlin Mayor Willy Brandt, meeting with President Kennedy at The White House, expressed optimism there would be no East-West crisis over Berlin in the near future. The only problem; nobody really defined what "near future" was.

Otherwise, it was reported that the combined U.S. and European Allies had been spending an estimated $7 billion dollars annually for the past four years, aiding under-developed countries, while the Communist Bloc had been spending a scant $3/4 billion.

In other overseas news - the Conference of British Commonwealth Nations met and became involved in controversy regarding racial equality, focusing on the Apartheid government of South Africa. 7 out of 12 Commonwealth Nations voted to have South Africa recant those policies or resign from the Conference.

Back in the U.S. - President Kennedy would be asking Congress to approve funding for a stockpile of Polio vaccine. Congress did approve JFK's 10-point program to improve standards of living in Latin America. Cardinal Spellman opened up a salvo by opposing any Federal Aid to Education if it didn't include Parochial Schools.

And former Republican vice-President and 1960 Presidential hopeful Richard Nixon signed on with an L.A. Law firm. He also put the temporary kabosh on rumors he would be running for Governor of California. The operative word here is "temporary".

And so went that particular March 13 in 1961 as reported by NBC News On The Hour with Martin Agronsky.

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(An Eisenhower Press Conference - cheerfully referred to as Old Bubblehead)

I'm trying to do the math here. The tape says this is Press Conference Number 68. It's from May 11, 1955 - Eisenhower has been in office since January 1953. So as best as I can round it out, that's about one Press Conference every two weeks. I've spoken with several people who were with the White House Press Corps at the time and they honestly did refer to Eisenhower as "Old Bubblehead" - I'm not making it up.

I wonder if he was guilty of being overexposed?

At any rate - two subjects were covered:

First was The Big 4 Summit back when only four countries were considered worth getting together. Times have changed.

Pres. Eisenhower: “I would think the most important thing to possibly be done at such a meeting would be to define the lines or directions in which we commonly would want our Foreign Ministers to work to see if there’s any opportunity to relieve the tensions in the world. And beyond that, I don’t think you can possibly say what the subjects would be. Certainly there would be no agenda except in the most generalized form, to talk about a general group of subjects . No agenda in the sense that Foreign Ministers would normally meet.”

A sort of summit to sit around and talk about what they're going to sit around and talk about.

The other important topic in this press conference was the newly introduced Polio Vaccine which had been temporarily held up by reports of Polio outbreaks among people who got the vaccine.

1955 was the year the Salk Polio Vaccine was made public. People don't talk about Polio that much anymore, as it has been all but eradicated. But in the 1950s it was scary, especially if you were a kid.

The one thing that struck me was the civility of the press - not much in the way of screaming. Fancy that.