What experience and history teach is this – that people and governments never have learned anything from history or acted on the principles deduced from it.
~G.W.F. Hegel
1901 – Queen Victoria died at the age of 81 after 63 years on the British throne.
1905 – In Russia, the revolution of 1905 began when czarist troops opened fire on a peaceful group of workers marching to the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg to petition their grievances to Czar Nicholas II. Some 500 protestors were massacred on “Bloody Sunday,” setting off months of protest and disorder throughout Russia.
1946 – The National Intelligence Authority, which later became the Central Intelligence Agency, was established by U.S. President Harry Truman.
1950 – Actor Alan Hale, Sr. (The Adventures of Robin Hood, The Private Lives Of Elizabeth And Essex, Stella Dallas, They Drive By Night, and the father of Alan Hale, Gilligan’s Island “skipper”) died of a liver ailment and viral infection. He was 57.
1968 – Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In premiered, beginning a five-year run on NBC. Out of a list of 40, the only four to remain from the show’s inception to its finale were hosts Dan Rowan and Dick Martin, announcer Gary Owens, and comedienne Ruth Buzzi.
During the September 16, 1968, episode, Richard Nixon, running for president, appeared for a few seconds with a disbelieving vocal inflection, asking “Sock it to me?” An invitation was extended to Nixon’s opponent, Vice-President Hubert Humphrey, but he declined. Humphrey later said that not doing it may have cost him the election. “Nixon said for the rest of his life that appearing on Laugh-In is what got him elected. And I believe that. And I’ve had to live with that.”
1973 – Lyndon B. Johnson, the 36th President of the United States, a position he assumed after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, died of a massive heart attack at the age of 64.
Johnson, who completed Kennedy’s term and was elected President in his own right in the 1964 election, was one of four people who served in both offices (Vice President and President) of the executive branch as well as both houses of Congress. The others were John Tyler, Andrew Johnson and Richard Nixon.
1973 – In a historic decision, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Roe v. Wade that women, as part of their constitutional right to privacy, can terminate a pregnancy during its first two trimesters. Only during the last trimester, when the fetus can survive outside the womb, would states be permitted to regulate abortion of a healthy pregnancy.
The controversial ruling, essentially reversing a century of anti-abortion legislation in the United States, was the result of a call by many American women for control over their own reproductive processes. Although defended by the Supreme Court on several occasions, the legalization of abortion became a divisive and intensely emotional public issue.
1973 – A plane returning Muslim pilgrims from Mecca crashed in Kano, Nigeria, killing 176 people. It was the deadliest air disaster of its time. As the 707’s American pilot, John Waterman, brought the plane in to Kano, there was a sudden sandstorm. The blinding conditions forced Waterman to abandon the landing and try again.
On the second attempt, the landing gear collapsed as the plane hit the runway and the 707 burst into flames. It was never determined exactly what caused the landing gear to fail. Some believed that the runway was in poor shape and that it caused the gear to crumple on contact. Others suggested that the plane had been loaded too heavily with extra fuel.
1980 – One of the Soviet Union’s most outspoken critics, nuclear physicist Dr. Andrei Sakharov, was ordered into internal exile. Officials in Moscow were angered by an interview Dr. Sakharov gave American television, in which he called for the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan.
Sakharov and his wife, Yelena Bonner, were seized by officers of the Soviet secret service, the KGB, while walking in a Moscow street. The couple were given two hours to pack before being sent to Gorky, an industrial city 250 miles east of Moscow and off limits to foreign reporters.
On December 19, 1986, Mikhail Gorbachev informed Sakharov that he and his wife could return to Moscow.
1987 – Robert Budd Dwyer, Treasurer of the State of Pennsylvania, called a news conference in the Pennsylvania state capital of Harrisburg where he killed himself in front of the gathered reporters with a .357 Magnum revolver.
In 1986, Dwyer was convicted of receiving a bribe from a California firm. Throughout his trial and after his conviction, he maintained that he was innocent of the charge and that he had been framed. Dwyer was scheduled to be sentenced on those charges on January 23.
The prosecution’s primary witness, William T. Smith, whose testimony was largely used to obtain Dwyer’s conviction, later admitted in an interview that he (Smith) had lied under oath about Dwyer taking the bribe in order to receive a reduced sentence
1994 – Actor Telly Savalas (Birdman Of Alcatraz, Kelly’s Heroes, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, The Dirty Dozen, and of course Kojak) died of complications of bladder and prostate cancer. He was 72.
1995 – Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, the wife of former Ambassador Joseph Kennedy, and the mother of President John F. Kennedy and Senators Robert Kennedy and Ted Kennedy, died from complications from pneumonia at the age of 104.
1998 – Theodore Kaczynski pleaded guilty in Sacramento, Calif., to being the “Unabomber” in return for a sentence of life in prison without parole.
2005 – Rose Mary Woods, who was Richard Nixon’s secretary from his days in Congress in 1951, through the end of his political career, died of natural causes at the age of 87.
Woods claimed responsibility in a 1974 grand jury testimony for inadvertently erasing up to five minutes of an 18 ½ minute gap in a June 20, 1972, audio tape. She was working on a conversation between Nixon and his chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman that might have shed light on whether Nixon knew about the Watergate break-in three days earlier.
Her demonstration of how the erasure might have occurred – which depended upon her stretching to simultaneously press controls several feet apart (what the press dubbed the “Rose Mary Stretch”) – was met with skepticism from those who believed the erasures, from whatever source, to be deliberate. The contents of the gap remain a mystery.
2008 – Actor Heath Ledger (The Patriot, Monster’s Ball, Brokeback Mountain, I’m Not There, The Dark Knight) died as a result of “accidental acute intoxication by the combined effects oxycodone, hydrocodone, diazepam, temazepam, alprazolam and doxylamine.”
2008 – Jose Padilla, once accused of plotting with al-Qaida to blow up a radioactive “dirty bomb,” was sentenced by a U.S. federal judge in Miami to more than 17 years in prison on terrorism conspiracy charges.
2010 – Conan O’Brien ended his brief tenure as host of The Tonight Show after accepting a $45 million buyout from NBC to leave the show after only seven months.
Compiled by Ray Lemire ©2016 RayLemire.com. All Rights Reserved.