January 1
North Vietnam President, Ho Chi Minh, publicly thanked “the American people” for opposing the military actions of their Government.
John Vliet Lindsay, became the third Republican in the 20th century to hold the office of mayor of New York City. His assumption of the mayoralty of the country’s largest city made him a potential candidate for the Presidency.
January 3
Cambodia told the United Nations that it would make armed attacks into South Vietnam if there were further violations of her territory or airspace by United States forces or South Vietnamese troops.
January 4
Samuel L. Younge, a 22 year old Navy veteran and freshman at a predominantly Negro college, Tuskegee Institute, was shot to death late last night, by a white service station attendant was charged today with first-degree murder in the slaying. The victim was a negro active in the civil rights movement.
January 10
Julian Bond, a Negro pacifist was barred from the Georgia House of Representatives membership because of his criticism of the United States military action in Vietnam. The vote was 184 to 12.
January 11
A Vietcong source hinted strongly today that if the United States agreed to negotiate directly with the National Liberation Front In South Vietnam, demands for the withdrawal of American troops prior to peace negotiations might be dropped.
January 12
In a State of the Union Message surprising for the sweep of its proposals, President Johnson pledged to stay in Vietnam “until aggression has stopped.” He said his current peace campaign had produced “no response to prove either success or failure” and he avoided any word that could be interpreted as an ultimatum or a threat to expand the Vietnamese war.
Mr. Johnson also called for a variety of new domestic reforms, including four-year terms for members of the House of Representatives and additional guarantees of equal rights for Negroes. He also announced what he called an anti-inflationary Federal budget for the fiscal year 1967, which begins July 1. Its proposed spending totaled $112.8-billion, the largest in history.
Other proposals put forth by President Johnson include legislation to prohibit racial discrimination in the sale or rental of private housing, and legislation to punish in Federal court those who murder, attack or intimidate civil rights workers. A third proposal in the message—a law to end discrimination in jury selection—had been announced by the President last November.
The Administration announced plans to increase the size of the army in Vietnam to 50,000 more men than was intended when the expansion was originally announced last summer.
January 13
Police clubbed civil-rights demonstrators with nightsticks today after they refused to move from busy intersections in downtown Birmingham and suburban Bessemer. Three groups of approximately 100 demonstrators each, most of them students, formed circles in three major intersections at 2:30pm. They were singing “Ain’t gonna let nobody turn us ‘round’” when the police arrived and ordered them to “Make way for traffic.”
January 15
White House sources disclosed that spending on Great Society programs will rise by $3.3-billion in the next budget. The defense budget will go from $54.2-billion in the current year to $58.3-billion in the new year.
They also revealed that the new budget would have been $102.3-billion instead of the projected $112.8-billion without the war in Vietnam. This means the cost of the war in the fiscal year 1967, beginning July 1, is estimated at $10.5-billion. In the present fiscal year the war is adding $4.7-billion to the budget.
January 17
Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara announced today that the Defense Department would seek an increase of 113,000 men.
France outlined far–reaching proposals today to reduce the power of the Common Market’s Executive Commission.
In a majority opinion, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas barred the city of Macon, Ga., from withdrawing as a trustee of a park to allow the park, as a “private” facility, to discriminate against Negroes.
January 19
Mrs. Indira Gandhi became India’s third Prime Minister today.
January 21
Congress assumes that the United States military commitment to Vietnam will grow to 400,000 men in 1966. This compares 407,000 at the peak of the Korean War. The United States now has 190,000 men in South Vietnam. This does not include the approximately 50,000 men on ships of the 7th Fleet operating in the China Sea.
January 28
Selective Service headquarters announced today that tests and class standing would be restored as criteria for the deferment of college students. It now appears evident that for the first time since the Korean War large number of students will be drafted.
January 29
Oregon Democrat, Senator Wayne Morse offered a resolution to rescind the advance approval voted by Congress in 1964 for “all necessary measures” taken by the President to repel or prevent aggression in Southeast Asia.
January 31
Bombing attacks on North Vietnam resumed after a 37 day suspension.
Dr. Stevan Durovic, discoverer and principal promoter of Krebiozen, and his Krebiozen Research Foundation were found not guilty today of fraud in selling the drug as an agent for suppressing cancer.
General Motors Corporation announced that its net income in 1965 was more than $2.1-billion, the largest profit ever reported by an American company.
The Supreme Court agreed to review the jury-tampering conviction of James R. Hoffa, president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters.
The Senate reluctantly gave its support to President Johnson for his decision to resume the bombing of North Vietnam.
February 1
The Catholic Church sent a letter to all state legislators calling on them not to take any immediate “affirmative action” on the bill to reform the state’s divorce law. Senator Jerome L. Wilson, head of the joint legislative committee that drafted the bill, viewed the letter as “seemingly a declaration of war…in opposition to meaningful divorce reform.”
A sitdown demonstration against the resumption of bombing and the continuing war in Vietnam snarled traffic in Times Square during rush hour.
Vietnam minister, Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap, issued an analysis of American war aims that predicts inevitable failure for the United States regardless of the size of its commitment.
February 3
A New York Times poll indicates widespread support in the to resume the bombing of North Vietnam. Opinion across the nation appeared to be in general agreement with the exception of the South, where the view that the United States should press the war harder seemed to predominate.
An unmanned Soviet spaceship made a successful soft landing on the moon and immediately began transmitting signals, possibly including television pictures, back to the earth. The landing was the first of its kind.
February 4
American scientists and space experts greeted the Soviet Union’s successful soft landing on the moon with strong praise, a trace of wounded pride and high hopes that the Russians would share their new knowledge of the moon’s surface.
February 5
The Soviet Union released its 2 photographs of the moon’s landscape and criticized the pictures released in Britain as inaccurate. Soviet space officials also announced tonight that the Luna 9 spacecraft had completed its mission on the moon. Presumably there will be no more pictures transmitted.
B’nai B’rith, a Jewish service organization, has protested the Administration’s plans to award about $75-million in defense contracts to West German arms producer, Rheinmetall of Dsseldorf that has refused to recognize financial claims by slave laborers during the Nazi regime. Krupp, I.G, Farben and A.E.G. – Telefunken have each paid claims ranging from $1-million to $7.5-million, but Rheinmetall has refused.
February 8
Dr. Kenneth B. Clark was elected today as the first Negro member of the New York Board of Regents, the state’s governing body for education.
February 9
General Motors Corporation announced that it would install two major safety devices on all its 1967 model automobiles. The manufacturer said that it would include as standard equipment a newly developed steering column that collapses on impact and a dual braking system.
February 12
President Johnson will propose a multimillion dollar cost sharing program to assist Federal, state and local governments to clean up polluted river basins.
Pope Paul VI reaffirmed today the teachings on “conjugal chastity” of Pope Pius XI and Pope Pius XII which ban all forms of mechanical or chemical contraception.
February 15
A compromise age of 19 1/2 as the minimum drinking age in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut will be considered by officials of the three states. The minimum drinking age in New York of 18 has long been a cause of concern in neighboring states, whose teen-agers frequently get into trouble driving home from border-town taverns. Efforts to raise New York’s drinking age to 21—the legal age in surrounding states—have been repeatedly rebuffed.
February 16
A hundred distinguished world churchmen unanimously endorsed a call for immediate peace in Vietnam. In doing so they criticized both the United States policy of containing Communism and the Communist policy of supporting wars of liberation.
February 17
President Charles de Gaulle sends President Johnson a blistering message on United States policy in Vietnam. The message condemned the resumption of bombing of North Vietnam and states that military intervention in Vietnam is certain to be self-defeating.
February 18
Secretary of State Dean Rusk and Senator J. W. Fulbright clashed over the Secretary’s contention that the whole structure of world peace is at stake in Vietnam. Mr. Rusk says that the United States’ effort in Vietnam is part of a continuing process, “a process of preventing the expansion and extension of Communist domination by the use of force against the weaker nations on the perimeter of Communist power.”
February 19
Senator Robert F. Kennedy suggests that the United States offer the Vletcong a share of power in South Vietnam as the best hope of reaching a negotiated settlement. The former Attorney General declared that any negotiated .settlement must accept the fact that there are discontented elements in South Vietnam, both Communist and non-Communist. There are three things, Mr. Kennedy said, that the United States can do with such groups, “kill or repress them, turn the country over to them, or admit them to a share of power and responsibility.”
February 21
Vice President Hubert Humphrey describes Senator Robert F. Kennedy’s suggestion for a coalition government in Saigon as “a prescription for the ills of South Vietnam which includes a dose of arsenic.”
Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Senator J. W. Fulbright, agrees with Senator Robert F. Kennedy that any hope for a negotiated settlement in South Vietnam lay in admitting the Vietcong “to a share of power and responsibility.”
The New Jersey State Supreme Court ruled that a barber’s refusal to cue a Negro’s hair is racial discrimination prohibited by law.
February 23
President Johnson outlines a broad program to clean up the air that people breathe, the water they drink and swim in, and to preserve, for present and future generations, many “scenic masterpieces” not now included in the National Park System.
February 24
Solicitor General Thurgood Marshall urges the Supreme Court not to rule out interrogations of criminal suspects by extending the right of counsel into police stations. Mr. Marshall was critical of efforts to safeguard suspects’ rights by extending the right of counsel, which is guaranteed by the Sixth Amendment, to when the suspect was being interrogated and before he was brought before a magistrate.
February 26
A giant rocket that almost never got off the ground, hurled the nation’s Apollo spacecraft on a successful unmanned test flight today to open a new era in American space exploration. The cone-shaped Apollo is scheduled to carry three astronauts toward a landing on the moon before the end of the decade.
February 27
A metal disk that reproduces motion pictures through a television set in much the same manner as a long-playing record reproduces music through a high-fidelity phonograph is in an advanced stage of development. The CBS laboratories division of the Columbia Broadcasting System has demonstrated such a device at Its headquarters in Stamford, Connecticut. The recorded picture Is reported to be of excellent quality. The disk is said to represent a major technical advance over magnetic tape for playing back pictures In the home.
February 28
Gemini 9 astronauts, Elliott M. See Jr. and Maj. Charles A. Bassett 2d, were killed when their jet trainer struck the building in St. Louis where the Gemini capsules are made.
March 1
Talmadge Hayer, who last week swore to his innocence in the murder of Malcolm X, returned to the witness stand yesterday and confessed his guilt. At the same time he tried to absolve his co-defendants, Norman 3X Butler and Thomas 15X Johnson.
An unmanned spacecraft bearing an emblem with the Soviet hammer and sickle crashed onto the surface of the planet Venus. The hard landing was man’s first physical contact with another planet.
Both houses of Congress overwhelmingly approved a $4.8-billion military authorization bill to provide additional funds for the Vietnam war.
March 2
New York Governor Rockefeller said that he strongly favored lowering the voting age in the to 18. “I think that to lower the voting age would increase tremendously students’ interest and participation in public life. If they have the right to vote, they’ve got to know what they’re voting about.”
In the first two months of 1966, the United States suffered more than 4,300 casualties in the Vietnam War. American casualties for all of 1965 were under 7,000. South Vietnamese losses have also been heavy. Last week, 109 United States servicemen were killed and 747 wounded. Total U.S. casualties were 856 for the week, not including the missing.
March 6
In national elections Guatemala turned clearly to the left in what appears to be a sharp reaction against the military regime in power since 1963. Julio César Mendez Montenegro, Presidential candidate of the moderately leftist Revolutionary party, said he had reports of a similar trend in his favor in the country as a whole.
March 7
The Office of Education announced that it would require desegregated teaching staffs next fall in Southern school districts receiving Federal funds.
March 8
The Senate approved Social Security benefits to all persons 70 or more years old, whether or not they have ever paid any Social Security taxes. The payments would be $44 a month for an individual or $66 for a couple.
March 11
All three men charged with the killing of Malcolm X are found guilty of first-degree murder.
The House Appropriations Committee approved the Administration’s $13,135,-719,000 supplementary appropriations request in support of the war in Vietnam.
March 12
Backed by pledges of continued aid from China and the Soviet Union, North Vietnam is believed to be planning a protracted war until the United States bends to its peace terms.
March 14
Stanford University political scientists released a poll showing that Americans are willing to negotiate with the Vietcong to settle the Vietnam war. The poll also showed that, confronted with the choice of withdrawal or all-out war, 60 per cent of those questioned favored all-out war.
March 19
Dr. Joseph F. Sadusk Jr., retiring as medical director of the Food and Drug Administration announced that all drugs approved as safe before 1962 are to be screened for effectiveness. The agency, would initiate planning of the project in his final weeks with the organization. At the same time It was announced that special controls were being imposed on 16 drugs, including such popular tranquilizers as Milltown, Equanil, Librium, Valium and Placldyl.
March 21
According to a report in the New York Times, drugs are becoming a growing problem on college campuses. The Times article states that “visits to a half-dozen campuses show that “hard” narcotics, for instance heroin, are not used and that marijuana and LSD are the drugs most commonly resorted to.” The article goes on to claim that the drugs are used by “graduate students mostly,” and “the pattern among undergraduates is this: The drug takers are majoring in the humanities or social sciences, with more in English than any other subject.” Claims the Times, “there are fewer consistent users in the sciences or in the professional schools. Proportionately, a great many seem to show up in anthropology.” A professor at Berkeley recalled that when a visiting lecturer spoke to the anthropology majors about the Indians of the American Southwest “it damn near turned into a recipe-swapping session for peyote and the magic mushrooms.”
March 22
James M. Roche, the president of General Motors, apologized before a Congressional committee for investigating the private life of an outspoken advocate of safer cars. Mr. Roche acknowledged that private detectives working for the concern had looked extensively into the personal affairs of Washington lawyer, Ralph Nader.
The decisions of the Supreme Court establishing new tests of obscenity have thrown the publishing and entertainment worlds into confusion and consternation. Bookstores catering to the “adult” trade, removed sadomasochistic and homosexual publications that the Court appeared to deem offensive. In store windows, respectable works by writers like Bernard Malamud and Phyllis McGlnley took the places of “The Spankers’ Monthly” and “Simulated Spanish Inquisition Tortures.”
March 24
The Selective Service System issued its new criteria for deferment of college students under the 2-S classification. These list the class standing required for deferment in various college years for a student who does not elect to take the system’s college qualification test, scheduled to be given starting in spring. Increased draft calls due to the military build-up for the Vietnam war led to the action, will undoubtedly mean that larger numbers of college students will be drafted.
Fifty Narcotics Bureau detectives, some of them bearded and dressed as beatniks, swept through Greenwich Village where they arrested twenty men and six women, and seized small amounts of marijuana, heroin, and goofballs. The raids were led by Chief Inspector Sanford D. Garelik and Inspector Ira Bluth, chief of the Narcotics Bureau. Mr. Garelik said the sweep was “the largest narcotics raid in years” in the area.
March 25
Experiments conducted in two Southern states indicate that rural Americans, both white and black, can be induced to adopt modern birth control if information and materials are taken to them systematically and rationally.
March 26
Thousands of antiwar demonstrators paraded down Fifth Avenue as part of an international protest against the war in Vietnam. The New York outpouring was the largest peace demonstration in the country since the protests began last year. Many thousands also took part in demonstrations during the day in San Francisco, Chicago, Washington, Oklahoma City, Detroit, Cambridge, Mass., and other cities throughout the nation.
March 27
Doctors appear to be reconciled if not overly enthusiastic about their role in transforming the nation’s health services. It will make little difference if doctors choose what they call “nonparticipation,” because eligible patients can do the paper work themselves and obtain the same benefits they would get if their doctors did it.
March 29
Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, E. William Henry, criticized radio and television for broadcasting cigarette advertising that ignores the smoking controversy.
Cassius Clay successfully defends his world heavyweight boxing championship by outpointing George Chuvalo in Toronto.
March 31
The National Academy of Sciences reports to the White House that “the time has come when man can no longer continue using the land, sea and air as his ‘trash basket.’ He must find ways to cycle his wastes, both solid and liquid, back into the economy.”
April 1
At least three American military policemen and two South Vietnamese were slain when Vietcong terrorist exploded a bomb at a United States military billet. Sixty American officers were taken to hospitals with injuries suffered in the blast. Minor injuries may raise the United States casualty total to 90 or 100, an official on the scene said.
Mrs. Katherine Oettinger, head of the Children’s Bureau, told a Planned Parenthood audience in Boston that the new policy laid down by John W. Gardner, Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, birth control instruction and contraceptives will now be supplied to all American women who need and request them. Mrs. Oettinger said that the bureau was carrying out the “clear mandate” of President Johnson to support birth control programs.
April 2
Three thousand South Vietnamese troops, encouraged by their officers, marched in Hue to demand the overthrow of the military Government. 55 miles south in Danang, 10,000 marchers demonstrated against the Government shouting anti-American slogans.
April 3
Speaking at a news conference in the New Yorker Hotel, The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), said yesterday that it would make discrimination in the city’s building trades its major concern.
April 6
The new chief of the Food and Drug Administration, Dr. James L. Goddard, told the nation’s drug manufacturers that some of them were more interested in profits than in patients. “I have seen evidence that too many drug manufacturers may well have obscured the prime mission of their industry to help people get well,” said Dr. Goodard. He went on to condemn advertising that exaggerated a drug’s effect and made “emotional appeals,” instead of scientific ones, for its use.
For the second time Republicans failed in the House to force the Administration to trim domestic spending by 5per cent in the coming fiscal year. Under a new strategy Republicans are seeking to attach to each domestic appropriation bill a requirement that spending under the bill be cut by 5 per cent in the fiscal year 1967.
April 8
In a speech in San Antonio, Texas, President Johnson announced that he will propose to Congress broad improvements in the Social Security System.
April 12
For the first time United States B-52 strategic bombers were used in attacks on North Vietnam. A military spokesman said that the Guam-based heavy bombers raided the approaches to Mugia Pass, within a mile of the Laotian border. The pass is about 70 miles northwest of the 17th Parallel, the dividing line between North and South Vietnam, and about 200 miles south of Hanoi. An informed source said that the raid was approved by Washington on a “one-time basis,”, adding that there was no present authorization to make future raids with the heavy Air Force bombers. However, he remarked, “once you open up something like this there is no reason not to press on.”
April 15
Members of the New York Police Department and medical experts meet with municipal and Federal officials in Brooklyn to consider ways of curtailing the increasing use of LSD. At the same time Dr. Donald B. Louria, chairman of the narcotics’ committee of the New York County Medical Society and head of the State Advisory Council on Drug Addiction, said that Governor Rockefeller was “deeply concerned” about the spread of LSD. High on the agenda planned for Friday is consideration of the extent to which supplying the illicit drug has become a business of the underworld.
The drug company, Sandoz Pharmaceuticals, Inc., of Hanover, New Jersey, the country’s only legal distributor of LSD, is recalling all of the hallucinatory drug that it sent to scientists for research. The move, follows the company’s decision to cut off all new supplies to the accredited researchers, will halt most scientific experiments with LSD on people. The company took this action reluctantly, an official said, because it felt that articles about black-market operations in the drug were injuring its reputation. The company, which developed the substance in 1943, does not sell LSD, but gives it to authorized and carefully checked research programs.
A United States military spokesman reported that more United States servicemen were killed in the Vietnamese war in the first 99 days of this year than in all of 1965. 1,361 Army, Marine, Navy and Air Force men died in combat between Jan. 1 and April 9. The growing figure reflected the increased role of Americans in the war as well as the growth of the United States troop commitment.
April 16
Four thousand chanting demonstrators occupied Times Square for two hours as they protested the continuation of the war in Vietnam. About 400 patrolmen protected the demonstrators from physical harm but not from insults and derogatory comments from passers-by.
April 18
The Supreme Court declared unconstitutional Arizona’s loyalty oath for state employees.
April 19
United States Navy fighter bombers hit a 24,000-kilowatt power plant near Haiphong, North Vietnam’s principal port, with 1,000-pound bombs in a surprise attack late yesterday.
Senator Robert F. Kennedy accused the Johnson Administration of making domestic budget cuts that will hurt the poor the most. Proposed reductions in spending for education, school lunches, housing and antipoverty efforts were “unfortunate” and “disturbing.” “Time after time,” Senator Kennedy declared, “the cuts will be felt most by those least able to afford them—the disadvantaged, particularly the disadvantaged children, who live in the vast urban ghettoes, and the rural hollows of the nation.”
April 20
In testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara forecast more political discord in South Vietnam, along with a resumption of heavy fighting. The Secretary scoffed at reports of a shortage of bombs and parts as “baloney.” Air support of ground operations in Vietnam is three times the level of World War II, he said, and no nation in history has been so well prepared to fight as the United States is now.
April 22
In an effort to reduce a speculative wave that has swept the stock market tighter rules for buying securities on credit were announced by the New York Stock Exchange and the American Stock Exchange. Keith Funston, president of the NYSE, said the actions were designed “to discourage uninformed speculation.”
April 27
The New York State Legislature, drastically revamped the state’s rigid divorce statute, which since 1787 has allowed only one ground for dissolving a marriage—adultery. The measure adds several new grounds for divorce, and is designed to discourage out-of-state divorces while setting up a broad, conciliation procedure in an attempt to save troubled marriages.
April 28
President Johnson asked Congress to enact “the first effective Federal law against discrimination” on racial or religious grounds in the sale and rental of all housing. Federal strictures on housing discrimination apply only to -buildings whose mortgages are insured by the Federal Housing Administration or the Veterans Administration.
April 29
Senator J. W. Fulbright warned that “America is showing some signs of that fatal presumption, that overextension of power and mission, which brought ruin to ancient Athens, to Napoleonic France and to Nazi Germany.”
The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. urged Negroes to conquer their fears and vote as a bloc in Tuesday’s Democratic primary. “If we are to use the ballot well, we have to vote together,” Dr. King told thousands who turned out in Sunday clothes and freshly scrubbed overalls to greet him in nine Alabama cities.
Two Yale University doctors announced the successful use in primates of a birth control pill that can be taken up to six days after sexual relations. The Doctors reported that the pill had been given to fertile female monkeys after 65 mid-cycle mating’s and “not a single pregnancy developed.”
April 30
MORE TO COME…