Organization foreign policy aide Mahmoud Abbas. Onlookers included their superiors, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Chairman Yasir Arafat, as well as past and present U.S. Presidents. Despite initial successes, the Accords failed to achieve peace in the region.... 1948, Maine voters elected Margaret Chase Smith (left), then a Republican Member of the U.S. House of Representatives, to the Senate, where she served 24 years, following the death of the incumbent, her husband Clyde. She became the 1st woman to serve in both houses of Congress; her aims were higher, though, as indicated by this note from the website of the Margaret Chase Smith Library:
Senator Smith came to national attention on June 1, 1950, when she became the first member of the Senate to denounce the tactics used by colleague Joseph McCarthy in his anticommunist crusade. Following her "Declaration of Conscience" speech, some pundits speculated that she might be the vice-presidential candidate on the 1952 Republican ticket. The opportunity, however, never materialized. In 1964, Senator Smith pursued her own political ambitions, running in several Republican presidential primaries. She took her candidacy all the way to the Republican National Convention in San Francisco, where she became the first woman to have her name placed in nomination for the presidency by either of the two majority parties. In the final balloting, Smith refused to withdraw and so wound up coming in second to the Republican nominee, Senator Barry Goldwater.
