Milestones: March 14, 2024

March 14, 2024 Brooklyn Eagle Staff

Share this:

BRIEF PRESIDENCY — MIKHAIL GORBACHEV (1931-2022) WAS ELECTED PRESIDENT OF THE SOVIET UNION ON MARCH 14, 1990, and was the last Soviet leader to serve before that government’s collapse in December 1991. Gorbachev had also been in power since 1985, when he served as General Secretary of the Communist Park and as head of state, starting in 1988. Gorbachev became known for his opening up and reforms of the political process in the Soviet Union, including Perestroika, which was a restructuring of the political and economic structure and Glasnost, which promoted transparency and openness in government. Gorbachev and then-U.S. President Ronald Reagan held a series of summits on nuclear arms reductions.

Although Gorbachev had been elected to a five-year term, the Soviet Union collapsed on Dec. 26, 1991, after a tumble of communism throughout Eastern Europe two years before. Boris Yeltsin, who had criticized Gorbachev for the slow progress on reforms, succeeded him as president of Russia.

✰✰✰

EINSTEIN BORN — SCIENTIST AND PHYSICIST ALBERT EINSTEIN WAS BORN IN ULM, GERMANY ON MARCH 14, 1879. The son of a Jewish electrical engineer, Einstein already had a firm grounding in science; and he would later develop theories of relativity that would not only transform the world of physics, develop quantum mechanics and lead to the creation of a destructive weapon — the atom bomb. Becoming a Swiss citizen in 1905, he earned his Ph.D. from the University of Zurich that same year while working at the Swiss patent office in Bern. During this seminal year, Einstein published five theoretical papers, the fourth of which focused on his special theory of relativity, which posits that time and space are not absolute, but relative to the motion of the observer.

Einstein’s fifth paper, also published in 1905, focused on the mathematics of special relativity, with Einstein stating that mass and energy were equivalent and could be calculated with an equation, E=mc2.

✰✰✰

PI OR PIE DAY? — IT MIGHT BE A SYNERGISTIC COINCIDENCE THAT THE INTERNATIONAL DAY OF MATHEMATICS is observed on Einstein’s birthday, March 14, but this celebration has a different origin. It stands for Pi, the infinite decimal with no resolution whose first three digits are 3.14, and is represented by the Greek letter Ⅱ. Because 3.14 also corresponds to the date, March 14, it was selected, with UNESCO first proclaiming this day officially just five years into 2019, although the international agency recognized that much of the world had already been celebrating it.

Punsters also enjoy celebrating Pi Day as Pie Day, baking or at least eating pies filled with any number of fruits, or even quiche, which is a cheese and egg concoction.

✰✰✰

JACK RUBY FOUND GUILTY — JACK RUBY, THE DALLAS NIGHTCLUB OWNER WHO SHOT AND KILLED ACCUSED JFK ASSASSIN LEE HARVEY OSWALD, WAS FOUND GUILTY OF “MURDER WITH MALICE” ON MARCH 14, 1964, almost five months after Kennedy was killed in that city. At the time Ruby (born Jacob Rubenstein) encountered Oswald, the suspect was being escorted from the basement of Dallas police headquarters to a secure location, with a gaggle of reporters and TV news crews following the police. Ruby burst out from the crowd, shooting Oswald once in the forehead and later claiming he was distraught over the President’s assassination.

While the public widely believed that Ruby and Oswald were part of a conspiracy and that Ruby had intentionally and permanently silenced Oswald, a commission headed by then-Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren found no evidence of this, ruling that Oswald had acted alone. However, the Warren Commission’s report proved controversial in itself.

✰✰✰

FINAL RESTING PLACE — THE SLAIN PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY, WHOSE DEATH HAD CAUSED SUCH TURBULENCE, WAS MOVED ON MARCH 14, 1967 TO A BURIAL SPOT JUST A FEW FEET AWAY from where he had been originally interred at Arlington National Cemetery after his November 25, 1963 funeral. The Boston native had qualified for burial at Arlington both as a World War II veteran hero and because he was a President. Jacqueline Kennedy, in agreeing to the original spot, had said her husband “belonged to the people.” JFK’s remains were moved to a more secure spot where a stable natural gas line could keep the eternal flame burning and would be able to reignite a pilot if inclement weather blew it out.

The Kennedy family chose Cape Cod granite flagstones to surround the flame. Although the family underwrote the original burial, the federal budget maintains JFK’s burial site.

See previous milestones, here.