April Can Be The Cruelest Month

The poet T.S. Eliot described April as "the cruelest month:"

"April is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain."

Today is the 150th anniversary of the death of fifty-six year old President Abraham Lincoln at the hands of the assassin John Wilkes Booth. 

154 Years ago on April 12th, Confederate forces commanded by General P.G.T. Beauregard, fired at the United States Fort Sumter, guarding Charleston Harbor, setting off the Civil War.

Seventy years ago, April 28, 1945, Italian partisans captured and executed their erstwhile fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini.

Two days after the death of Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, the fifty-six year old Nazi dictator of Germany, committed suicide in his Berlin Bunker.

Seventy years ago, while at his vacation place at Warm Springs, Georgia, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt suddenly died of a massive stroke.

Forty-Seven years ago, April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated.

Of all U.S. Presidents, the two who most clearly left the country better than they found it were Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Delano Roosevelt.