Currents: The Potomac Blog
King George VI and Queen Elizabeth Luncheon Cruise – June 9, 1939
USS POTOMAC MINI-HISTORY BY WALTER ABERNATHY King George VI and Queen Elizabeth Luncheon Cruise - June 9, 1939 King George VI1 was the first reigning British monarch to visit the United States. It was June 1939, when war in Europe was imminent. Three months earlier,...
Grounded at Shangri-La
In the fall of 1941 after five years of maritime service including on ocean waters, a panel of Coast Guard inspectors suddenly announced that the USS Potomac was unseaworthy. The cause given was that she was “top heavy” with a new deck added when...
FDR’s Run for a Third Term as Planned on the USS Potomac
George Washington set the precedent, reinforced by Thomas Jefferson, of a two-term limit for United States presidents. It was challenged 141 years later by Franklin D. Roosevelt. He had won two terms by landslides in 1932 and 1936. No president...
USS Potomac’s Role in President Roosevelt’s Tehran Conference
Recent release of the bestselling book, “The Nazi Conspiracy, the Secret Plot to Kill Roosevelt, Stalin & Churchill,” reminds us of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s 1943 North Africa/Middle East trip including the first meeting with Winston...
Potomac’s Filipino Mess Crew
The Spanish-American conflict was a “splendid little war[1]” that marked America’s entry as an imperial power into world affairs. Coincidentally that same splendid little war was the origin of the USS Potomac’s all-Filipino mess crew and...
Short Term Skipper President Harry S. Truman
Vice President Harry Truman liked to spend afternoons with a bourbon and branch at House Speaker Sam Rayburn’s “Board of Education” hideaway. When he arrived on April 12, 1945, Rayburn told Truman to call Steve Early in the White House...