December 1964

[December 1], 1964 (Tuesday)

• The Supreme Court of the Soviet Union announced a change in the nation's historic presumption of guilt in criminal proceedings, in favor of the presumption of innocence, often described as "innocent until proven guilty". Justice Alexander Gorkin, the President of the Supreme Court and the USSR's highest judicial officer, gave notice in the government newspaper Izvestia of the new criminal procedure, and added that the practice of summary secret police trials, common during the era of Joseph Stalin, was over.
• Civil rights movement leader Martin Luther King Jr. and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover met for 70 minutes at FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C., in order to clear up the animosity between the two men. King had said that the FBI had done a poor job of investigating civil rights violations in the South, and Hoover had called King "the most notorious liar in the country", and the two met at King's request.
• The Ankara Agreement, signed on September 12, 1963, between representatives of Turkey and the European Economic Community, went into effect, beginning the preparatory stage for Turkey's eventual full membership in the EEC. More than fifty years later, Turkey maintains a relationship with the EEC's successor, the European Union, but has not attained membership.
• U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson and his top-ranking advisers met to discuss plans to bomb North Vietnam. After some debate, they agreed on a two-phase bombing plan with an objective of ending North Vietnamese support of Viet Cong operations in South Vietnam and maintaining the security of other non-Communist nations in Southeast Asia.
• Alex Quaison-Sackey of Ghana was elected to a one-year term as President of the United Nations General Assembly, becoming the first black African to hold the post and, at age 40, the youngest. In 1961, Mongi Slim of Tunisia had been the first from an African nation.
• Gustavo Díaz Ordaz took office for a six-year term as the 49th president of Mexico, succeeding Adolfo López Mateos. Díaz Ordaz would serve until December 1, 1970.
• Joseph F. Shea, NASA's Apollo Spacecraft Program Manager, proposed what would become the Apollo Applications Program, for use of technology developed for Apollo to be used after the achievement of the primary goal of landing on the Moon. The proposal came in a letter to Apollo Program Director Samuel C. Phillips regarding tentative spacecraft development and mission planning schedules, touched upon missions following completion of Apollo's prime goal of Such missions, Shea said, would in general fall under the heading of a new program.
• Died:
• *Marie-Clémentine Anuarite Nengapeta, 24, Congolese Roman Catholic nun, was murdered by the Simba rebels in the Congo; she would be beatified by the Roman Catholic Church in 1965.
• *J. B. S. Haldane, 72, British geneticist

  [December 2], 1964 (Wednesday)

• Juan Perón, the former President of Argentina who had been overthrown in 1955, attempted to secretly return from exile in Spain and to take power again as the Argentine dictator. When his flight from Madrid stopped in Brazil at Rio de Janeiro, Brazilian authorities boarded the aircraft and ordered Perón to disembark. Argentine union leader Augusto Vandor, who had organized "Operation Return" and had accompanied Perón on the flight from Spain, was allowed to continue to Argentina. Perón, however, was sent back on the Iberia DC-8 jet on its return flight from Rio to Madrid. Peron's Iberia Airlines flight had been scheduled to land in Montevideo in Uruguay, where Peron had planned to travel by land to Paraguay and then back to Argentina. Peron would finally return to Argentina in 1973 and would serve as President until his death in 1974.
• Mario Savio addressed a crowd of 5,000 students at the University of California in Berkeley, delivering what would be a famous speech now known as the "Bodies Upon the Gears" speech, guiding them to occupy the university's administration building, Sproul Hall. More than 1,000 walked into the building to begin a sit-in; UC officials estimated that 814 of the occupiers were arrested and "that most of those who sat in and were jailed were students." "There is a time," Savio said, "when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart that you can't take part; and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all." The Free Speech Movement would expand from Berkeley to other university and college campuses in America and beyond.

  [December 3], 1964 (Thursday)

• Owners of the 20 National League and American League baseball teams voted to create the Major League Baseball draft in order to make a more uniform distribution of amateur players. In an imitation of the drafting process in other professional sports leagues, the teams would select "in reverse order off the standings at the end of the previous season". Though the proposal was initially opposed by both New York teams, both Los Angeles teams, the St. Louis Cardinals, the Minnesota Twins, and the Washington Senators, the resolution passed unanimously. The teams would have the first option, for a limited time, to negotiate exclusively with the players selected. The first draft would be held on June 8, 1965.
• Sirimavo Bandaranaike lost a vote of confidence as Prime Minister of Ceylon by a single vote, as 14 members of parliament from her Sri Lanka Freedom Party went against her. The final result on the resolution that the House of Representatives had lost confidence in her government was 74 for, 73 against. The immediate cause had been her decision to form a coalition government with the Lanka Sama Samaja Party and to nationalize opposition newspapers. New elections would be held in March, and opposition leader Dudley Senanayake would form a new government with his United National Party.
• Canadian murderer George Marcotte, who had dressed as Santa Claus to hold up a bank in the Montreal suburb of St. Laurent, Quebec, and killed two policemen responding to the alarm, had his death sentence commuted 12 hours before he was scheduled to be hanged. The decision was made by a vote of the cabinet of Prime Minister Lester Pearson at the request of Justice Minister Guy Favreau.
• Police arrested 814 students at the University of California, Berkeley, following their takeover of and massive sit-in at the Sproul Hall administration building. The sit-in most directly protested the U.C. Regents' decision to punish student activists for what many thought had been justified civil disobedience earlier in the conflict.
• NASA ended further flight testing in the Paraglider Landing System Program, following completion of full-scale test vehicle flight test No. 25. NASA authorized North American to use the test vehicles and equipment it had for a contractor-supported flight test program, and North American conducted a two-week test program which culminated in a successful crewed tow-test vehicle flight on December 19.
• A fire which broke out at about 4 a.m. almost completely destroyed the D. Maria II National Theatre in Lisbon, Portugal. Only the theater's facade and exterior walls remained intact. A production of William Shakespeare's Macbeth was playing at the theater at the time. The rebuilt theater would reopen in 1978.
• The Danish football club Brøndby IF was founded as a merger between the two local clubs Brøndbyøster Idrætsforening and Brøndbyvester Idrætsforening. The club would win the national championship in the Danish Superliga 10 times, and the national Danish Cup six times.
• Died: U.S. Navy Admiral Charles P. Snyder, 85, the first Naval Inspector General

  [December 4], 1964 (Friday)

• FBI agents arrested 19 men in and around Neshoba County, Mississippi on federal indictments arising from the June 21 kidnapping and murder of Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner and James Chaney. An author would note later, "The accused, including truck drivers, farmers, cops, and the owner of the burial site, were taken from cafes, farmhouses, and trailers." Two of the most prominent defendants, Neshoba County Sheriff Lawrence A. Rainey and Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price had returned from a raid on a moonshine still to the courthouse in Philadelphia, Mississippi, to find agents waiting for them. Most were freed the same day when friends posted bonds of $5,000 apiece for them. Six days later, a U.S. trial commissioner in Meridian voided the arrest warrants on 19 of the 21 defendants pending a hearing for whether there was probable cause for continuing charges.
• Beatles for Sale, the fourth studio album by The Beatles, was released in the United Kingdom on the Parlophone label, and included the single "Eight Days a Week". Songs from the 34-minute British album would be on two American extended play albums, Beatles '65 and Beatles VI.
• Born:
• *Christopher B. Duncan, American actor best known for his roles on The Jamie Foxx Show, The First Family, and Veronica Mars; in Lincoln, Nebraska
• *Marisa Tomei, American actress and winner of an Academy Award for Best Actress for My Cousin Vinny; in Brooklyn, New York
• *Sertab Erener, Turkish pop music singer; in Istanbul
• Died: Pina Pellicer, 30, Mexican film and television actress known for playing the female lead opposite Marlon Brando in One-Eyed Jacks, and as co-star with Ignacio López Tarso in the classic Mexican film Macario, committed suicide.

  [December 5], 1964 (Saturday)

• An American LGM-30B Minuteman I missile was on strategic alert at Launch Facility L-02 at Ellsworth Air Force Base, South Dakota, when two airmen were dispatched to repair the inner zone security system. In the midst of their checkout of that system, one retrorocket in the spacer below the Reentry Vehicle fired, causing the missile to fall about to the floor of the silo. When the missile struck bottom, the arming and fusing/altitude control subsystem containing the batteries were torn loose, thus removing all sources of power from the missile, which structure received considerable damage. All safety devices operated properly in that they did not sense the proper sequence of events to allow arming the warhead. There was no detonation or radioactive contamination.
• Pope Paul VI returned to Vatican City after a four-day pilgrimage to India, but not before two Turkish Air Force fighters flew dangerously close to the DC-8 airliner that was carrying him. When the Alitalia flight from Bombay to Rome crossed into the airspace of Turkey at, an escort of four planes joined alongside for 25 minutes in what was intended as a show of respect, before responding to a request by the Alitalia pilot to move away. Two of the planes "flew less than a wing length away", a claim confirmed by a photograph taken by one of the DC-8 passengers.
• Controllers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, successfully corrected the trajectory of Mariner 4 by the timed firing of retrorockets to send the probe toward the planet Mars. The course correction was implemented after it was calculated that the Mariner probe's heading would have caused it to miss Mars by more than ; the new heading was calculated to bring the probe within.
• The National Academy of Sciences founded the National Academy of Engineering in the United States, with the approval by the NAS of the new academy's Articles of Organization.