This Day In American History: March 1

March 1, 2017 is the 60th day of the year, with 305 days remaining. The moon is in a waxing crescent phase, with illumination at 10 percent.

President Kennedy Establishes Peace Corps

The year 1961 marked a number of firsts for the United States: Astronaut Alan Shepherd's launch into space, 20 percent of the East German population left and defected for West Germany, and America broke its diplomatic relations with Cuba. This was also the year that John Fitzgerald "Jack" Kennedy became the 35th president of the United States, and on March 1, in one of his first actions as the leader of the free world, Kennedy issued Executive Order 10924 to establish the Peace Corps as a new agency within the Department of State. That same day, Kennedy requested permanent funding from Congress for the Peace Corps, enabling trained American women and men to visit foreign nations to assist in development efforts.

Kennedy reportedly sensed the general public's enthusiasm for the Peace Corps's immediate precursor, the Point Four Youth Corps, proposed by then-Wisconsin Rep. Henry Reuss. The agency was seen as a means of countering the stereotypes of "Yankee imperialism," most notably in the then-emerging nations of post-colonial Asia and Africa.

Robert Gates Calls Obama "More Analytical" Than Predecessor

Statesman Robert Gates, who served as the nation's 22nd secretary of Defense from 2006 to 2011, was the sole Cabinet holdover from the George W. Bush administration. Gates said during an appearance on NBC News' talk show, "Meet The Press," that Obama was "somewhat more analytical [than Bush], and he makes sure he hears from everybody in the room on an issue, and if they don't speak up, he calls on them."

Gates described Bush as having been interested in hearing different points of view but said that the 43rd president of the United States "didn't go out of his way to make sure everybody spoke if they hadn't spoken up before."

White House Defends Approval of "Earmarks"

Enter 2009. White House officials have announced that President Obama intended to sign a $410 billion spending bill that included thousands of pet projects, known as earmarks, despite campaign promises of reforming the practice. Officials had estimated that the spending bill, intended to finance government operations through Sept. 30 of that same year, contained almost 9,000 provisions, added by legislators, to use public funds for projects in those legislators' home districts.

The bill was ultimately signed in private on March 11. Obama said of the expenditure, "The future demands that we operate in a different way than we have in the past."

"So, let there be no doubt," the president continued. "This piece of legislation must mark an end to the old way of doing business and the beginning of a new era of responsibility and accountability that the American people have every right to expect and demand."

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Photo credit: Photographer Abbie Rowe (1961) / U.S. National Archives