January 1967

The following events occurred in January 1967:

January 1, 1967 (Sunday)

• Canada began a year-long celebration of the 100th anniversary of the British North America Act, 1867, with the Expo 67 World's Fair as a highlight.
• Medicaid went into effect in the United States, providing free medical care for disabled low income persons and marking what one observer would later refer to as one of the "key dates after which Americans began outspending the rest of the world on health care," the other one being the July 1, 1966 implementation of the Medicare program for retired persons. ^[1]
• Police raided a Los Angeles gay bar, the Black Cat Tavern, and arrested several patrons for kissing as they celebrated New Year. ^[2] The violence that followed would escalate into a more widespread riot.
• People's Daily, the official newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party, began the new year with the editorial "Carry the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution Through to the End", directing all Party faithful to launch a general attack on specific people, particularly China's President, Liu Shaoqi; the next day, officials addressing a rally of 10,000 people in Beijing listed twenty charges against Liu. ^[3]
• In the first elections in Laos to restore voting privileges to all citizens 18 and older, voters favored the Lao Neutralist Party led by Prime Minister Souvanna Phouma. ^[4]
• The residents of the small town of Ellington, Connecticut, saved the life of a private pilot whose radio had failed while he was flying through fog and rain. After townspeople heard a low-flying, but not visible, plane, the Ellington Fire Department brought three fire engines and its 25 volunteer firemen to the town's unlit airstrip at Hyde Field, and dozens of people followed in their cars. Lionel Labreche, a trooper with the Connecticut State Police, directed everyone to park on either side of the runway and to light it up with their headlights. The pilot, Frank Robinson, was able to spot the revolving lights of the fire trucks and then the lit runway; he commented later, "It was wonderful the way they did it. If they hadn't... I'd have ended up in the woods." ^[5]
• In the two league championship games leading up to the first AFL-NFL Super Bowl, the home team lost both times. The Green Bay Packers won the NFL Championship Game by holding off a rally by the Dallas Cowboys, 34-27, ^[6] while the Kansas City Chiefs won the AFL Championship, 31-7, over the Buffalo Bills. ^[7]
• Died: Moon Mullican, 57, American country and western music piano player

January 2, 1967 (Monday)

• Operation Bolo was as a success as the United States Air Force shot down five (and perhaps as many as seven) North Vietnamese MiG-21 jets in the largest air battle fought in the Vietnam War up to that time. Lt. Colonel Robin Olds devised the plan to lure the Vietnam People's Air Force into sending most of its MiG-21 fighters against what seemed to be a fleet of the F-105 fighters that the VPAF had been successful in combating. "The MiGs rose to the bait," an author would write later, "and found the Phantom IIs waiting for them above the dense overcast." ^[8] As each of four VPAF planes took off from the Noi Bai base, each one was shot down, and the leader of the second formation met the same fate. ^[9] None of the American fighter jets, all of them F-4C Phantoms were lost. ^{[10] [11]} The USAF pilots counted seven MiG kills, while North Vietnamese and Soviet data counted five, but in either event, the VPAF "Fishbed" force lost a large portion of its 16 MiGs and was grounded for four months. ^[12]
• At 12:01 a.m., future U.S. President Ronald Reagan was sworn in as the 33rd Governor of California in an oath administered by state Supreme Court justice Marshall F. McComb. ^[13] Reagan took his oath on the Bible that Father Junípero Serra had brought from Spain to California in the 18th century. ^[14]
• U.S. Navy Commander James Stockdale, the senior prisoner of war at North Vietnam's Hoa Lo prison, nicknamed the "Hanoi Hilton" by its inmates, wrote out his first covert message using the "invisible carbon" that had been sent to him by U.S. Naval Intelligence in a letter from his wife. Concealed on the second page of a letter home was Stockdale's list of the names of forty fellow American POWs in the prison camp, written perpendicular to his visible handwriting. The signal that there was a secret message in any given letter was to begin the letter with the word "Darling" and to close with "Your adoring husband." ^[15]
• North Vietnam's Prime Minister Pham Van Dong signaled in an interview with New York Times correspondent Harrison Salisbury that his nation would begin direct peace talks with the United States if the U.S. maintained an unconditional halt to American bombing, a statement confirmed by President Ho Chi Minh two weeks later. ^[16]
• Chinese Marxist theorist Zhou Yang became the latest victim of China's Cultural Revolution and the People's Daily published its new editorial, "Criticizing the Reactionary Two-faced Zhou Yang", though the article also contained a subtle criticism of another high party official, Propaganda Minister Tao Zhu, who would become the next Revolution victim two days later. ^[17]
• United States government agents raided a beach house in Marathon, Florida and arrested 121 people as they were preparing to lead an expeditionary force to Haiti to overthrow that nation's president, Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier. ^[18]
• The South African Grand Prix was won by Pedro Rodríguez. ^[19]
• Died: Ambikagiri Raichoudhury, 81, Indian poet and nationalist who wrote in the Assamese language

January 3, 1967 (Tuesday)

• Brazil enacted its first major conservation measure, the Law on Protection of Fauna, as public law 5197, declaring that "animals of any species, at any stage of their development and living out of captivity... are the property of the State", and prohibiting the "use, persecution, destruction, hunting or harvesting" of the governmental property except as permitted by the national government. ^[20]
• A group of at least 20 members of China's Red Guards appeared at the Zhongnanhai section of Beijing where the nation's prominent party and governmental leaders lived and invaded the residence of President Liu Shaoqi and his wife, Wang Guangmei, then ordered them to listen to a 40-minute lecture about his failures. Two days earlier, other members of the "Zhongnanhai Insurrectionists Team" had painted slogans on Liu's home, including "No good end to anyone who opposes Mao Zedong Thought!" and "Down with China's Khrushchev, Liu Shaoqi!" ^[17]
• Israel's Ministry of Defense issued an order to the Israel Defense Forces that they were not to return fire against tank or mortar attacks by Syria from its side of the border, in an effort to prevent violence from escalating into war. ^[21]
• A reshuffle took place within the government of Luxembourg, under prime minister Pierre Werner.^[22]
• Born: Miguel Poiares Maduro, Portuguese academic and politician, in Coimbra.
• Died:
  • Jack Ruby, 55, the Dallas nightclub proprietor who killed accused presidential assassin Lee Harvey Oswald on live television on November 24, 1963, died in Dallas of a pulmonary embolism after being diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. As with John F. Kennedy and Oswald, Ruby was pronounced dead at Parkland Memorial Hospital. ^[23]
  • Mohamed Khider, 54, exiled Algerian politician and former Secretary General of Algeria's FLN Party, was assassinated in Madrid, three years after he had taken more than $12,000,000 of party funds. ^[24]

January 4, 1967 (Wednesday)

• The "January Storm" revolution began in China's largest city, Shanghai, as Zhang Chunqiao and Yao Wenyuan — two radical Communists who would later be villified in Chinese history as half of the "Gang of Four" — incited the takeover of the existing Communist municipal government, as well as its newspapers, radio stations and television station. ^[25] Michael Dillon, China: A Modern History (I.B.Tauris, 2012) p334
• British speedboat racer Donald Campbell was attempting to become the first person to race a boat at 300 mph (480 km/h) and apparently reached that speed in his jet-powered hydrofoil, Bluebird K7 on Coniston Water, a lake in Lancashire, England. Campbell had reached 297 mph on his north to south run over one kilometer, and was 150 meters short of completing the south to north return trip at an average speed of "well above 300 mph" when the boat became airborne, flipped, and disintegrated upon hitting the water, killing Campbell instantly. Campbell's radio transmissions could be heard by spectators over an intercom, and his last words were "She's going... she's going..." ^{[26] [27]} The Bluebird K7 and Campbell's remains would stay at the bottom of Coniston Water for more than 34 years, until his boat's recovery from the lake on March 9, 2001, and the discovery of his skeleton on May 28 of that year. ^[28]
• The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory confirmed the existence of a 10th moon orbiting the planet Saturn, which French astronomer Audouin Dollfus had found while studying a photograph taken on December 15. The satellite, which would be named Janus, marked the first new Saturnian moon discovered since Phoebe was found in 1899. ^[29]
• Tao Chu, the Director of the Chinese Communist Party's Propaganda Department and the fourth highest ranking official of the CCP (after Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai and Liu Shaoqi), was purged from his position in the wake of the Cultural Revolution. After the Red Guards denounced him as a "bourgeois reactionary", Tao was marched through the streets of Beijing and subjected to what the Associated Press described as "a curbside kangaroo court". ^{[17] [30]} In the city of Nanjing, thousands of supporters of Tao clashed with the Red Guards in rioting that killed 54 people and injured over 900 during the next several days. ^[31]
• Died: Ezra Norton, 69, Australian newspaper magnate

January 5, 1967 (Thursday)

• Bombers from Egypt dropped canisters of poison phosgene gas on the Yemeni village of Kitaf, near Yemen's border with Saudi Arabia, in an attack on anti-government rebels during the North Yemen Civil War. Persons who lived downwind and within two kilometers (one and quarter miles) of the impact site were the victims, and 95% of them died less than an hour after the bombing ^[32] and more than 200 people died. ^[33]
• The government of Jordan closed down the offices of the Palestine Liberation Organization in East Jerusalem and detained its leaders. ^[34]
• The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency's secret "OXCART" program suffered its first fatality as a Lockheed A-12 reconnaissance jet ran out of fuel while attempting to return to the Area 51 landing strip in Nevada. Pilot Walter Ray reported that he had run out of fuel sooner than expected, and was gliding toward the base when he was forced to eject from the jet at 30,000 feet. Unfortunately, his parachute failed to deploy and he impacted with the ground, still strapped in his seat. To protect the secrecy of the A-12 program, the U.S. Air Force reported that an SR-71 Blackbird jet was missing and that the pilot had been a civilian. ^[35]
• In Paris, Spain and Romania signed an agreement establishing full consular and commercial relations, but avoided full diplomatic relations.
• Charlie Chaplin's last film, A Countess from Hong Kong, completed filming.^[36]
• The White House confirmed that U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson had rejected an official portrait painted of him by renowned artist Peter Hurd, and Hurd corroborated the account on the same day. Hurd said that he had painted the portrait in the spring of 1966, and when he presented it to President Johnson at the LBJ Ranch later in the year, Hurd said, the President had gotten angry and said that the painting was "the ugliest thing I ever saw". The White House listed its official objections to the painting, commissioned by the White House Historical Association, describing it as too large, "not consistent with other White House portraits", and containing an image of the U.S. Capitol that was "inappropriate for this kind of portrait". ^{[37] [38]}

January 6, 1967 (Friday)

• At least 83 Roman Catholic pilgrims were killed in the worst traffic disaster in the history of the Philippines when two charter buses plunged off of a narrow mountain road in the Cavite Province. The buses were part of a convoy of 57 vehicles that was on its way to a religious festival; the brakes of one of the buses failed as it was trying to negotiate a sharp curve, and it slammed into the bus ahead of it and sent both falling into a 60 foot ravine. ^[39]
• Cao Diqiu (referred to in the Western press at the time as Ts'ao Ti-ch'iu) was deposed as Mayor of Shanghai along with most of the municipal government. ^[40] The act by Shanghai's rebels was approved by China's leader, Mao Zedong, who "proposed it as an example to be emulated", leading to the Red Guards and rebels to "seize power" in their schools and workplaces. ^{[41] [17]}
• British Prime Minister Harold Wilson's first Ministry was given a reshuffle as he fired eight of his 23 cabinet ministers. Harold Lever and Peter Shore both joined the ministerial team in the Department for Economic Affairs; Eirene White and Walter Padley left Foreign Affairs, to be replaced by George Thomson and Fred Mulley; and John Stonehouse was made Minister of State for Aviation, his former role of Parliamentary Secretary for Aviation being abolished. Lord Shackleton and Patrick Gordon Walker became Ministers without Portfolio. ^[42]
• At Phu Loc in South Vietnam, Vaughn Nickell, a sniper with the 2nd Battalion of the 5th Marines, registered the longest range confirmed kill in American military history when he killed a Viet Cong sniper at a distance of 1,202 yards (1,099 m), a distance of slightly more than one mile away from the target. ^[43]
• USMC and ARVN troops launched Operation Deckhouse Five in the Mekong Delta of South Vietnam. ^{[44] [45]}
• Syrian tanks fired across the Syrian-Israeli border on an attack against Israeli workers near the Tel Katzir kibbutz and the HaOn kibbutz but, pursuant to orders issued three days earlier, the Israeli army was not permitted to fire back. ^{[46] [21]}

January 7, 1967 (Saturday)

• The Forsyte Saga, a British television series adapted from the series of novels by John Galsworthy, was broadcast for the first time, originally on BBC2 when six million people watched. The reaction to it was so positive that on its repeat showing the next night on BBC1, 18 million people would tune in, and the show would become popular worldwide. ^[47]
• A suicide bomber killed himself and five other people, injured eight others, and demolished the three story high Orbit Inn in Las Vegas. At 1:25 in the morning, a registered guest in Room 214 of the motel, Richard James Paris, fired a .25 caliber pistol into a bundle of 14 sticks of dynamite, and the explosion killed him, his new bride, and two couples in adjacent rooms. ^{[48] [49] [50]}
• The U.S. Navy deployed its new Mobile Riverine Force into combat for the first time, as units arrived at Vung Tau in South Vietnam, joining the U.S. Army units that had been operating there since December 19. ^{[51] [52]}
• The Surveyor 1 lunar probe, which transmitted data from the surface of the Moon to U.S. scientists after landing on June 2, 1966 in the Oceanus Procellarum (the "Sea of Storms"), 35 miles north of the crater Flamsteed, ceased transmissions as its battery ran out. ^[53]
• Born: Nick Clegg, English politician who served as Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 2010 to 2015; in Chalfont St Giles, Buckinghamshire
• Died: David Goodis, 49, American mystery novelist, after suffering a stroke. Goodis, who had sued the ABC television network and United Artists on grounds that the TV series The Fugitive was based on his 1946 novel Dark Passage, passed away a month after his deposition had been taken by the attorneys defending the case. ^[54]

January 8, 1967 (Sunday)

• China's Prime Minister Zhou Enlai appeared at a rally of the Red Guards in Beijing, and directed the group to concentrate its attacks on two of his colleagues, President Liu Shaoqi and Communist Party secretary-general Deng Xiaoping. Zhou named six persons whom he said the Guards should not persecute, including Foreign Minister Chen Yi, Security Minister Xie Fuzhi, and Oil Minister Yu Qiuli; and three Vice Premiers, Li Fuchun, Li Xiannian, and Tan Zhenlin. ^[55]
• Operation Cedar Falls started in the Vietnam War. ^[56]
• Born: R. Kelly, American singer, as Robert Sylvester Kelly, in Chicago
• Died: General Yan Hongyan, 57, the First Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party in Yunnan Province, committed suicide after he was accused during the Cultural Revolution of being a "capitalist roader"; Zhou Enlai would comment a week later that "Yan Hongyan is a shameless renegade." ^[40]

January 9, 1967 (Monday)

• A raiding party from Laos carried out the Ban Naden raid, the only successful rescue of prisoners of war during the Vietnam War; no American prisoners were among those freed from the camp.^[57]
• Handen murders: Two police officers were killed by Leif Peters in Handen, Sweden, after attempting to thwart a robbery.^[58]

January 10, 1967 (Tuesday)

• President Johnson delivered the annual State of the Union address to Congress, and told the gathered legislators "I recommend to the Congress a surcharge of 6 percent on both corporate and individual income taxes--to last for 2 years or for so long as the unusual expenditures associated with our efforts in Vietnam continue." Regarding the war, Johnson said "I wish I could report to you that the conflict is almost over. This I cannot do. We face more cost, more loss, and more agony," and he delivered a record 135-billion dollar federal government budget proposal. ^{[59] [60]}
• The U.S. House of Representatives voted 364-64 to prevent New York's Congressman Adam Clayton Powell from taking his seat in the House. ^[61]
• The Georgia State Legislature resolved the 1966 election for state governor, voting along party lines, 182-66, to elect segregationist and Democrat Lester Maddox over his Republican challenger, Howard "Bo" Callaway. Although Callaway had drawn 3,039 more popular votes than Maddox, neither candidate received the required majority of the popular vote because 7% of the voters had favored an independent, Ellis Arnall. Minutes after the roll call vote, Maddox walked into the governor's office in the Capitol building and was sworn in as the 75th Governor of Georgia. ^[62]
• In parliamentary elections in the Bahamas, which was then a British colony, the black candidates for the Progressive Liberal Party increased their share of seats from four to 18, while the white candidates of the United Bahamian Party made no increase from its 18 seats in the 38-seat House of Assembly. ^[63] British Governor Ralph Grey would break the 18 to 18 deadlock (and the even split in the House of Assembly between 19 black and 19 white candidates) by picking Randol Fawkes, a black legislator and the lone Labour Party candidate, to head a coalition, bringing an end to the dominance of the White elite Bay Street Boys in the 85% black colony.

January 11, 1967 (Wednesday)

• People's Daily carried its new notice, "The 'January Storm' that Initiated the Power Seizure", praising the recent purges of Communist party officials who had fallen out of favor, and the death and violence that followed would prove to be the height of the Cultural Revolution. ^[3]
• The Intelsat II F-2 communications satellite was successfully launched from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station Space Launch Complex 17. ^[64]
• Died: Sir Eruera Tirikatene, 72, New Zealand Maori politician; Wolfgang Zeller, 74, German film composer

January 12, 1967 (Thursday)

• Following his death from cancer, Dr. James Bedford became the first person to be cryonically preserved with the intent of future resuscitation.^[65]

January 13, 1967 (Friday)

• Members of the New York Police Department saved about 300 sleeping residents of the Jamaica section of the borough of Queens, running from house to house before in the 20 minutes before a natural gas explosion leveled houses and started a fire that eventually destroyed 22 buildings. The NYPD was alerted at 5:11 in the morning, and the underground gas lines exploded at 5:30, but only four people were hurt, none seriously. ^[66]
• Mao Zedong, the Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, signaled through editorials in the newspaper People's Daily and the theatrical journal Red Flag, that he would purge the People's Liberation Army of all counterrevolutionaries. "We will crush completely all bourgeois lines and defend to the last the proletarian revolution line." Mao named his wife, Jiang Qing as an adviser to a new committee in the PVA. ^[67]
• President Nicolas Grunitzky of Togo was overthrown in a military coup in the capital at Lomé. Lt. Col. Étienne Eyadema and his 1,200 troops seized key locations and forced Grunitzky to resign. ^[68]

January 14, 1967 (Saturday)

• Louis Leakey announced the discovery of pre-human fossils in Kenya, evidence of the earliest known ancestor of Homo sapiens and dating back 20,000,000 years. Leakey, whose team unearthed the fossils at Rusinga Island in Lake Victoria, announced that he had named the species Kenyapithecus africanus. ^[69]
• Forty-four people drowned in the sinking of a South Korean ferry boat, the Hanliho, after it collided with a Republic of Korea Navy destroyer escort, the Chungmu, a mile from the port of Jinhae. Only 16 passengers and crew were saved. The Hanliho was traveling from Yeosu to Pusan, while the Chungmu was returning to Jinhae following a drill. ^[70]
• The New York Times reported that the U.S. Army was conducting secret germ warfare experiments.
• The Human Be-In took place in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco. The event set the stage for what would be described as "The Summer of Love".

January 15, 1967 (Sunday)

• The Green Bay Packers of the NFL defeated the Kansas City Chiefs of the AFL, 35-10, at the First AFL-NFL World Championship Game at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum to win the first interleague championship of American professional football. A the time, the name "Super Bowl" was unofficial. ^[71]
• In Rome, the United Kingdom entered the first round of negotiations for European Economic Community membership.
• The Rolling Stones appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show for the second time, but only after acceding to a demand by Sullivan to alter the words of their hit song, "Let's Spend the Night Together". After Sullivan reportedly said, "Either the song goes or the Stones go," Mick Jagger sang the refrain as "Let's spend some time together." ^[72]

January 16, 1967 (Monday)

• A referendum was held in Goa to decide the future of the Union Territory of Goa, Daman and Diu within the Indian Union. The people of Goa voted against the merger and Goa continued to be a union territory.^[73]
• At St. Bartholomew's Hospital in London, gynecologist Gordon Bourne led a team of surgeons in London in performing the first fetal exchange transfusion on a human being, replacing the blood of an unborn child who was endangered by Rh factor incompatibilty. Because a safe premature delivery was deemed unfeasible, the Rh positive blood of the fetus was completely removed and replaced with one fifth of a pint of the mother's Rh negative blood, two months ahead of the March 21 due date. ^[74]
• At least half of North America's largest convention center, McCormick Place in Chicago, Illinois, was destroyed by a fire. ^[75] The fire started inside one of the 2,357 booths in the annual exhibit of the National Houseware Manufacturers Association and destroyed the main exposition hall, causing the roof to collapse and killing a night watchman.
• Jacqueline Kennedy, the former First Lady of the United States, settled her lawsuit aginst author William Manchester and the Harper & Row publishing company, which had temporarily enjoined the publication of Manchester's book, The Death of a President. ^[76]
• The 39th Rescue Squadron of the United States Air Force was formed at Udorn Royal Thai Air Force Base with six Lockheed HC-130Hs transferred from the 37th Aerospace Rescue and Recovery Squadron.^[77]

January 17, 1967 (Tuesday)

• Eduardo Frei, the President of Chile, was forced to decline an invitation to meet U.S. President Johnson at the White House on February 1, after the Chilean Senate voted 23 to 15 to deny him permission to leave the country. Under Article 43 of the Chilean constitution, congressional approval was required for an incumbent president to depart, a seldom-used provision from the 19th Century that had been "aimed at preventing presidents from absconding with the national treasury." ^[78] Members of rightist and leftist opposition parties had joined in the unprecedented move as a protest against the United States, and President Frei's cabinet ministers resigned in response to the vote. ^{[79] [80]}
• U.S. Senator Ralph Yarborough of Texas introduced the Bilingual Education Act, Senate Bill 428, as an amendment to the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act. The Act, the first American plan to provide education in Spanish as well as English to Mexican-American students in order to make them fully literate in the English language while educating them at the same time in other core curricula. ^[81] Yarborough declared that the typical Mexican-American child "is wrongly led to believe from his first day of school that there is something wrong with him because of his language. This misbelief soon spreads to the image he has of his culture, of the history of his people, and of his people themselves. This is a subtle and cruel form of discrimination." ^{[82] [83]}
• Arkansas State University was elevated by the Arkansas legislature to full university status, 56 years after it had been founded as the First District Agricultural School, a high school in Jonesboro, Arkansas. In 1918, it began offering a two-year college program, and in 1930, was authorized to give a four-year degree program as First District Agricultural and Mechanical College, then as Arkansas State College. As a university, ASU became only the second institution in Arkansas to offer a master's degree and doctoral degree program. ^[84]

January 18, 1967 (Wednesday)

• Albert DeSalvo, the "Boston Strangler", was convicted of numerous crimes other than the 13 homicides of which he had been accused, and was sentenced to life in prison. The life sentence was for armed robbery, while the other indictments were for breaking and entering, assault and battery, and "unnatural and lascivious acts", for which DeSalvo's attorney, F. Lee Bailey had sought to argue that the defendant was not guilty by reason of insanity. The jury's rejection of the insanity plea marked the first loss for Bailey in a major case; the defense had already admitted that DeSalvo had committed the lesser crimes and framed the issue as whether DeSalvo was legally insane. Pending an appeal, DeSalvo would continue to be confined at the Bridgewater State Hospital. ^[85]
• Jeremy Thorpe became leader of Britain's Liberal Party, after receiving the votes of six of the 12 Liberal Party MPs in the House of Commons, ahead of Emlyn Hooson and Eric Lubbock, who each had three votes. ^[86]
• A Fistful of Dollars, the first significant "spaghetti Western" film, was released in the United States.
• Nineteen coal miners were killed in an explosion at the largest coal mine in New Zealand, the Strongman colliery, located on South Island at Greymouth. ^[87]
• The United States Air Force launched eight communications satellites into orbit on a Titan IIIC rocket, increasing its "globe girdling satellite communications network" to 15 located above the Earth and closing the gaps between the seven launched in 1966. ^[88]

January 19, 1967 (Thursday)

• Major Bernard F. Fisher of the United States Air Force became the first person to be awarded the Air Force Medal of Honor whose design had been authorized on November 1, 1965. From 1947 to 1965, USAF members who were awarded the highest order of valor in the United States were presented with the Army Medal of Honor. Major Fisher's recognition came for his heroism on March 10, 1966, when he risked his life by landing his A-1E/H Skyraider plane on a short airstrip in the A Shau Valley in South Vietnam to rescue a fellow pilot who was about to be captured by the North Vietnamese Army. ^[89]
• Transmissions from the Soviet lunar probe Luna 12 ceased after the satellite had made 602 orbits around the Moon, and 85 days after its launch on October 22, 1966. ^[90]
• Kosmos 138, a Soviet optical film-return reconnaissance satellite, was launched by a Vostok-2 rocket. ^[91] from Site 41/1 at the Plesetsk Cosmodrome.

January 20, 1967 (Friday)

• Thirty-nine sailors of the Republic of Korea Navy were killed when their South Korean Navy patrol boat was sunk by cannon fire from the shores of North Korea. The South Korean vote had ventured into North Korea's coastal waters in an effort to save 70 fishing vessels that had strayed off course. The incident marked the first time that a South Korean naval vessel had been sunk by the Communist north. ^[92]
• Died: Giulio Calì, 71, Italian film actor

January 21, 1967 (Saturday)

• In the first encounter between a computer and a master-rated chess player in a tournament, the "Mac Hack" computer program designed by Richard Greenblatt of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology program almost defeated another MIT student, Carl Wagner, who was rated at "a little above master" by the United States Chess Federation. Wagner was playing at the monthly chess club tournament at the YMCA building in Boylston, Massachusetts, while the Mac Hack (entered in the tournament as "Robert Q. Computer") remained at MIT while the moves and responses were relayed by teletype. ^[93]
• At Omaha, Nebraska, skater Peggy Fleming won her fourth successive women's figure skating title at the U.S. Figure Skating Championships. ^[94]
• Died:
  • Ann Sheridan, 51, American film actress nicknamed "The Oomph Girl"
  • Princess Dorothea of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, 85, Austrian duchess

January 22, 1967 (Sunday)

• Six gunboats from the People's Republic of China pulled into the harbor at Macao, which, at the time was a colony of Portugal on the Chinese mainland and under a 99-year lease. Thousands of residents watched as the vessels moved into the inner harbor between Macao and the island of Taipa, to see whether a Communist invasion was imminent, but the gunboats departed after an hour of intimidation. The colony would revert to China's control in 1999.^[95]
• Heavy rains began in Brazil, causing the Paraíba do Sul river to overflow its banks and leading to flash floods that killed hundreds of people. ^[96]
• The Pro Bowl, the National Football League's seventeenth annual all-star game, was played in a heavy rainstorm at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum on the week after the Super Bowl. ^[97]
• Died: Charles A. Buckley, 76, U.S. Representative for New York for 30 years, from 1935 to 1965.

January 23, 1967 (Monday)

• In Munich, the trial began of former SS-General Wilhelm Harster, who stood accused of the murder of 82,856 Jews (including Anne Frank) during his tenure as chief of German security police during the Nazi German occupation of the Netherlands. Facing trial with Harster were former SS Major Wilhelm Zoepf, who operated the "Jewish Department" in The Hague during the Nazi occupation, and Harster's former secretary, Gertrud Slottke. ^[98] Harster would be sentenced to 15 years in prison.
• For the first time since the Headquarters of the United Nations had been opened in New York City in 1952, the New York Police Department began the ticketing and towing away of illegally-parked diplomatic vehicles, by order of Mayor John V. Lindsay. On the first day that the tow-away program started to include the cars of the world's UN representatives, diplomats from the Soviet Union, West Germany, Ecuador, Turkey, Mauritania and Ghana discovered that their vehicles had been taken to pier 74 at Manhattan's 34th Street. ^[99]
• NASA announced that the Apollo 1, first of the American space shots to have three astronauts, would be launched on February 21, with Virgil Grissom commanding, and Edward White and Roger Chaffee as the other two crewmembers. Under the schedule, the Apollo 1 capsule would orbit the Earth while the crew spent up to 14 days testing all systems on the new ship. ^[100]

January 24, 1967 (Tuesday)

• President Johnson presented a record 135 billion dollar U.S. government budget to Congress for approval for fiscal year 1968. The $135,033,000,000 sought reflected the largest request for military spending since World War II ($72,300,000,000) and $18.3 billion in social programs, to be paid for by an additional ten billion dollars in individual income taxes. ^[101]
• Died: Luigi Federzoni, 88, Italian Fascist politician

January 25, 1967 (Wednesday)

• In the Kuwaiti general election, pro-government candidates won 20 of the 50 available seats in the National Assembly, while independents had 17 and Shi'ite Muslim candidates had 8. Voting was limited to men only, and 17,590 votes (65.6%) participated. ^[102] Pro-government candidates remained the largest bloc in Parliament. Voter turnout was 65.6%.^[103]
• Lt. General Nguyen Huu Co was dismissed from his positions as Deputy Premier and Defense Minister of South Vietnam, and removed from his place in the military junta governing the nation, by vote of the other junta members. ^[104]

January 26, 1967 (Thursday)

• The House of Commons voted 306 to 220 to nationalize the British steel industry for the second time in United Kingdom history. The first nationalization had been approved by the Labour government in 1950, then denationalized in 1952 during the second administration of Winston Churchill. The new bill affected 90% of the British steel industry. ^[105]

January 27, 1967 (Friday)

• Apollo 1 was destroyed by fire at Launch Complex 34 at Cape Kennedy, killing all three of the American astronauts on board. Killed in the blaze were Command Pilot Virgil I. "Gus" Grissom, 40; Senior Pilot Edward H. White II, 36; and Pilot Roger B. Chaffee, 31. At 6:31 in the evening, the three men were inside the capsule of the Saturn rocket, engaged in a full-scale simulation of the planned February 21 launch, and were wearing their pressurized space suits while in a pure oxygen atmosphere. ^{[106] [107]} A spark from a short-circuited wire ignited a flash fire that swept the cabin moments after it was noticed by one of the astronauts. ^[108]
• Earlier in the day, in Moscow, the United States, the Soviet Union and the United Kingdom signed the Outer Space Treaty, jointly agreeing to not use outer space or the Moon for military purposes. Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, while the American and British ambassadors to the USSR (Llewellyn Thompson and Sir Geoffrey Harrison) signed on behalf of the US and the UK. ^[109]

January 28, 1967 (Saturday)

• In one of the biggest upsets in the history of Scottish football, Berwick Rangers defeated Glasgow Rangers 1-0 in a Scottish Cup match at Shielfield Park in Northumberland.^[110][111]
• Died: Bechor-Shalom Sheetrit, 71, Israeli politician^[112]

January 29, 1967 (Sunday)

• In the Japanese general election, the ruling Liberal Democratic Party retained a majority control of Japan's parliament, the Diet, winning 277 out of 486 seats. ^[113][114]
• In Portland, the The Oregonian and its afternoon edition, the The Oregon Journal, closed out their run as the last metropolitan newspapers in America to sell for only five cents, the price that had been charged since 1883. Effective Monday, both papers doubled their price to the ten cents charged everywhere else in the U.S. ^[115]

January 30, 1967 (Monday)

• In the United Kingdom, the final section of the North Cornwall Railway, between Bodmin and Wadebridge, was closed as a result of the Beeching cuts.^[116]

January 31, 1967 (Tuesday)

• West Germany and Romania established diplomatic relations. The decision was made following a two day meeting in Bonn between Foreign Minister (and later West German Chancellor) Willy Brandt and his Romanian counterpart, Corneliu Mănescu. ^[117]
• Only four days after the deaths of the Apollo 1 astronauts, two U.S. Air Force airmen at the School of Aerospace Medicine at San Antonio were killed in a similar accident, burned to death by a flash fire spread by a pure oxygen atmosphere while they sat inside a space cabin simulator. Airman 2nd Class William F. Bartlery, Jr. and Airman 3rd Class Richard G. Harmon had been doing maintenance inside the simulator for an experiment. Both were rescued, but died of their burns within hours. ^[118]

References