February 9

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February 9 in history:

• 1986: Halley's comet made its most recent closest pass of the Sun; its elliptical orbit brings it back to Earth's vicinity every 76 years or so.

• 1950: In a speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, Joseph McCarthy, a relatively unknown senator from Wisconsin, declared that he had a list of 250 known Communists in the U.S. State Department; now with a national audience, he took the same charges to the Senate floor later in the month, and the Tydings Committee was appointed to investigate (it dismissed the charges).

• 1898: Deliberately fanning U.S. public opinion during the buildup to the Spanish-American War, the Hearst newspapers published a purloined private letter in which the Spanish minister to the United States sharply criticized President William McKinley.

• 1825: The U.S. House of Representatives, exercising this power for the second (and so far last) time in U.S. history, chose John Quincy Adams as president of the United States; the election went to the House because none of the five candidates had secured a majority of electoral votes, but Andrew Jackson had won more than Adams.