February 10 · This Day in America
It is just before nine in the morning, freezing, on a bridge between West Berlin and Potsdam that the Cold War has made into a seam in the world. At one end stands Francis Gary Powers, the American U-2 pilot shot down over the Soviet Union. At the other, Rudolf Abel, a Soviet colonel who ran a spy ring out of a Brooklyn studio. A Brooklyn insurance lawyer named James Donovan negotiated this — argued that mercy was its own kind of strength. On a signal the two men walk toward each other and pass without a word in the middle of the span, each going home. No shots. No speeches. Two superpowers that could end the world instead, for one careful morning, simply exchanged their prisoners and let them live.
Source: www.history.com
Also on this day · 2007
On a bitterly cold morning in Springfield, Illinois, before the Old State Capitol where Lincoln once spoke of a house divided, a first-term senator declares his candidacy for the presidency to a crowd of seventeen thousand. Most of the country barely knows his name. Twenty-one months later he will be elected the first Black president of the United States. He chose the steps deliberately, and the symbolism held.
Source: www.nprillinois.org