Is it true that President Barack Obama is the only president who hasn’t visited the D-Day Monument on D-Day? An email I received says that over the past 70 years, every president except Obama have paid tribute to the fallen soldiers.
Not true.
In fact, nearly every media outlet documented in text and photos the trip Obama made to Normandy in 2009, when he spoke at the American Cemetery on June 6 during the 65th anniversary of the Allied invasion. He and Michelle Obama also visited an American battlefield museum, laid a wreath in honor of those who died, and talked with U.S. military members and uniformed World War II veterans, according to numerous media reports.
Still, the email intimates that every president except Obama makes a pilgrimage every year to the “D-Day Monument.” And, as Snopes.com points out, “if the term ‘D-Day Monument’ references any of the various monuments, memorials or cemeteries around the sites of the June 6, 1944, Allied landings on the Normandy coast of France, then such visits by U.S. presidents in commemoration of D-Day have been neither a long-established nor a regular occurrence. Those D-Day visits are a fairly recent phenomenon and no president has made more than one.”
The presidents have been more likely to visit Normandy during a special anniversary. Ronald Reagan, the first president to visit according to Snopes.com, gave a speech there for the 40th anniversary in 1984. President Bill Clinton visited and spoke on the 50th anniversary in 1994, George W. Bush went there on the 60th anniversary in 2004 and Obama the 65th in 2009. Their speeches are chronicled on YouTube. Bush also spoke at Normandy in 2002, but that was for Memorial Day.
Snopes.com, a nonpartisan website that confirms or debunks rumors and urban legends, notes that there are other memorial sites that could have come under the viral email’s purview.
The D-Day Memorial in Bedford, Va., opened in 2001, and Bush attended the dedication ceremony on June 6. But he never returned as president, and Obama has not been there on D-Day either.
The National World War II Memorial in Washington, D.C., first received visitors when it opened in 2004 and has never hosted a presidential visit on D-Day.
Snopes.com checked the available White House presidential schedules for June 6 from 2001 through 2012 and found that a president’s visit to a D-Day site is the exception rather than the rule. The schedules list no public events connected to D-Day in 2012, 2011, 2010, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005, 2003, or 2002.
