Meet The Press, the longest running television program in the United States, premiered in that format. It had previously premiered on radio as American Mercury Presents: Meet the Press on October 5, 1945.
While I very much favor This Week over Meet the Press, it occurs to me that somewhat ironically, as I listed to the audio podcast variant, I listed to it closer to the radio version.
The first guess for the then 30-minute Thursday night program was James Farley, the Postmaster General and DNC Committee chairman. The initial moderator was Martha Roundtree, reprising her role from the radio variant, and the only woman moderator of the show to date. Roundtree hosted the program until 1953.
She died in 1999 in Washington D.C., nearly blind since the 1980s, due to the harsh effects of primitive television lighting.
As noted, I do listen to it, but I'm not a fan of the current moderator, Chuck Todd. Indeed, I was hoping for a second female moderator in the form of Kasi Hunt.
On the same day, Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov told a Moscow audience that the means of making an atomic weapons were no longer secret. American intelligence took that to mean that the Soviet Union knew how to build a bomb, but didn't necessarily have one. The Soviets, who had penetrated the American government fairly successfully, suspected that the US was working on such a weapon by 1942 and started their own project accordingly. Nonetheless, they had not developed a bomb by this point themselves, but were only two years away from doing so.
Canada invited Newfoundland to join the Canadian Dominion.
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