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On the evening 5 June 1944, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt had big war news to report to the nation via radio: Allied troops had liberated the city of Rome, making it the first of the three Axis powers' capitals to be taken (in the words of FDR, One up, two to go). The following day, FDR had even bigger news to discuss with his audience: Allied troops had begun the invasion of German-occupied Europe with the Normandy landings, an event which would come to be known simply as D-Day. On that latter occasion, FDR asked his American radio audience to join with him in a prayer seeking blessings for American troops, reciting a supplication he had written himself, entitled Let Our Hearts Be Stout: (A recording of FDR's reciting Let Our Hearts Be Stout can be heard here.) On 1 June 2011, Rep. Bill Johnson of Ohio introduced a bill in the House of Representatives (HR 2070) which sought to direct the Secretary of the Interior to install in the area of the World War II Memorial in the District of Columbia a suitable plaque or an inscription with the words that President Franklin D. Roosevelt prayed with the Nation on June 6, 1944, the morning of D-Day. Robert Abbey, the director of the Bureau of Land Management, indicated in statement provided to a congressional subcommittee on 3 November 2011 that his department did not view the proposal favorably: It is inaccurate to maintain that President Obama killed the plan proposed by HR 2070, as the bill had not yet even been voted upon by either house of Congress, much less passed by both and sent to the president for signature (or veto), at the time the message quoted above was written. Ultimately, the bill was passed by the House but stalled in the Senate and was never brought to a vote in the latter body.
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