February 1965

[February 1], 1965 (Monday)

• Law enforcement officers in Selma, Alabama, arrested 768 people who were marching to protest the impediments to voter registration within Selma and Dallas County. Sheriff Jim Clark charged the group with "parading without permit". Sheriff Clark would arrest another 150 marchers, mostly high school students, later in the week.
• Television commercials were shown by the Swiss Broadcasting Corporation for the first time. Initially, the government limited total TV advertising to a maximum of 12 minutes per day.
• Manned Spacecraft Center received the first qualification configuration extravehicular life-support system chest pack. Tests of this unit and the ELSS umbilical assembly were being conducted at MSC. Meanwhile, AiResearch was preparing for systems qualification tests. Zero-gravity flight tests of the ELSS had shown that egress and ingress while wearing a chest pack could readily be done by properly trained astronauts.
• John P. McConnell replaced Curtis LeMay as Chief of Staff of the United States Air Force.
• Born:
• *Brandon Lee, Chinese-American actor, son of Bruce Lee and Linda Lee Cadwell; in Oakland, California
• *Princess Stéphanie of Monaco, daughter of Prince Rainier III and Princess Grace; in Monte Carlo
• *Sherilyn Fenn, American film and TV actress; in Detroit

  [February 2], 1965 (Tuesday)

• Missing salesman Lawrence Joseph Bader was spotted at the National Sporting Goods Show in Chicago, United States, by a former classmate almost 8 years after he had vanished. Bader had been missing since May 15, 1957, and had been declared legally dead in 1960, enabling his wife to collect $40,000 of life insurance. Shortly after his disappearance in 1957, he had become known in Omaha, Nebraska, as John Francis "Fritz" Johnson, had married again, and had become a sportscaster at the KETV television station. After multiple confirmations of his identity, Johnson still denied having any memory of being Lawrence Bader, and offered to have his fingerprints compared to Bader's army record; the prints were a match and specialists concluded that he had suffered from amnesia for eight years. He died of cancer, in Omaha, on September 16, 1966.
• British Prime Minister Harold Wilson announced to the House of Commons that the Cabinet had voted to cancel three expensive defense projects. Two were for aircraft capable of vertical takeoffs and landings : the Armstrong Whitworth AW.681 was a large military transport plane, and the Hawker Siddeley P.1154 was a supersonic fighter aircraft. The third, the British Aircraft Corporation TSR-2 was a high-speed attack and reconnaissance jet. Wilson said that the cost of the research and development for the TSR-2 alone had already reached 750,000,000 British pounds, more than eight times the original forecast, and that each of the 150 planned TSR-2s would cost four million pounds apiece.
• A vote on a Conservative Party motion of no confidence in the government of Prime Minister Wilson, made in the House of Commons and intended to remove Wilson from office, failed by 17 votes. Voting along party lines, the parties disapproved the censure motion, a resolution describing Wilson's decisions in his first 100 days as premier as "hasty and ill-considered", with 289 Conservative members voting in favor, and 306 Labour members against. The nine MPs from the Liberal Party abstained.
• The U.S. National Science Foundation announced that a team of scientists, led by Keith A.J. Wise of the Bishop Museum of Hawaii, had discovered living animals "in a miniature garden high above a desolate Antarctic icecap 309 miles from the South Pole". The tiny mites, only one quarter of a millimeter in length, were discovered in soil in the Queen Maud Mountains.
• Police in Selma, Alabama, jailed an additional 520 African-American protesters, bringing the total number of people to 1,288.
• Born: Catherine Elizabeth "Cady" Huffman, Tony Award-winning American stage actress; in Santa Barbara, California
• Died: G. N. Watson, 79, English mathematician best known for Watson's lemma

  [February 3], 1965 (Wednesday)

• An 8.7 magnitude earthquake struck Alaska's Rat Islands at 7:01 p.m. local time in the western Aleutian Islands of the U.S., and would prove to be the last of the major Pacific quakes of the 20th century. Its epicenter was at 51.3° N, 178.6° E, south of the uninhabited Amchitka Island, and there were no fatalities despite its large magnitude.
• Abdul Kahar Muzakkar, the 44-year-old leader of the Darul Islam rebellion against the Indonesian government in South Sulawesi, was tracked down and killed by an Indonesian Army patrol, bringing an end to the rebellion.
• U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson received the "America's Democratic Legacy" award from the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith.
• Renny Ottolina launched his new show, Renny Presenta..., on Venezuelan television.
• Born: Maura Tierney, American film and TV actress; in Boston

  [February 4], 1965 (Thursday)

• Trofim Lysenko, whose opinions on genetics and biology held Soviet research isolated from the rest of the world scientific community, was dismissed from his position as Director of the Institute of Genetics at the Soviet Academy of Sciences. Lysenko, who had been made Director in 1940 by Joseph Stalin, was removed after Academy Director Mstislav Keldysh condemned his policies.
• At a press conference in Paris, French President Charles de Gaulle called for an end to the Bretton Woods system that had been in force since 1958, and a worldwide return to the gold standard. Over the next two years, de Gaulle would lobby for transfer payments between nations to be made in gold and would ultimately abandon the idea in favor of closer cooperation with France's European partners.
• Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom was given the "Freedom of the City" honor in a ceremony at Addis Ababa City Hall during her visit to Ethiopia.
• The Confederation of British Industry was founded.
• Died: J. B. Danquah, 69, Ghanaian independence leader who had run for president against Kwame Nkrumah, died of a heart attack while in solitary confinement at Medium Prison in Nsawam.

  [February 5], 1965 (Friday)

• Prime Minister Zhou Enlai of the People's Republic of China hosted Prime Minister Alexei Kosygin of the Soviet Union at a banquet, in the first visit by a Soviet leader to China since a rift had developed between the two Communist nations. Kosygin then departed Beijing the next day for a visit to North Vietnam.
• The Walt Disney studio bought the Disneyland theme park along with the WED Enterprises name.
• Born: Gheorghe Hagi, Romanian soccer football midfielder, Romanian national team starter from 1983 to 2000 and participant in three World Cups; in Săcele
• Died: Irving Bacon, 71, American character actor in 509 films and 33 television series over a 50-year period

  [February 6], 1965 (Saturday)

• All 87 persons aboard LAN Chile Flight 107 were killed when the DC-6B airliner crashed into the Andes Mountains, a few minutes after taking off from Santiago in Chile to Buenos Aires in Argentina. The dead included 22 players and staff of Santiago's Antonio Varas soccer football team, who were on their way to Uruguay for a match against the Camadeo team in Montevideo; the DC-6B plane was only 20 minutes into its flight, and at an altitude of, when it struck the dormant San Jose volcano.
• Congolese Prime Minister Moise Tshombe and Belgian Foreign Minister Paul-Henri Spaak signed an agreement in Brussels, with Belgium paying off $250 million worth of interest on Congo's pre-independence debts of nearly one billion dollars. In return, Congo would compensate the Belgian owners of mines that had been nationalized by the government. "From today, the Congo is independent", Tshombe told reporters, adding "We will achieve our program of economic reconstruction."
• Partap Singh Kairon, the former Chief Minister of the Indian state of Punjab, was assassinated after meeting with Prime Minister Shastri. Kairon, who had been a leader of the Punjabi independence movement in India, was being driven from Delhi on his way back to his home at Amritsar. He was passing through the village of Resni when four men with rifles attacked his car, killing him, his chauffeur, his private secretary and a former state cabinet aide.
• Five days after his 50th birthday, Sir Stanley Matthews became the oldest person ever to play a game in England's highest-level soccer Football League, when he assisted Stoke City in its 5–1 win at home over Fulham. Matthews, who had been knighted earlier as part of the New Year Honours, had made his debut for Stoke City almost 33 years earlier, in March, 1932, and retired from competition after the game.
• Soviet Prime Minister Alexei Kosygin arrived in Hanoi for a state visit to North Vietnam.

  [February 7], 1965 (Sunday)

• McGeorge Bundy, National Security Advisor to U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson, delivered a memorandum, "Re: A Policy of Sustained Reprisal", that followed up on his January 27 recommendation that the United States begin the bombing of North Vietnam. In the second statement, Bundy told the President, "We believe that the best available way of increasing our chance of success in Vietnam is the development and execution of a policy of sustained reprisal against North Vietnam... Once a program of reprisals is clearly underway, it should not be necessary to connect each specific act against North Vietnam to a particular outrage in the South..." Although Bundy conceded the odds of success "may be somewhere between 25% and 75%", he added, "What we can say is that even if it fails, the policy will be worth it. At a minimum it will damp down the charge that we did not do all that we could have done, and this charge will be important in many countries, including our own." Author Charles Lemert would later comment, "Bundy's sustained reprisal memorandum defined Johnson's fatal policy. By December 1965, 200,000 troops had replaced the 20,000 or so advisers in Vietnam at the beginning of the year. And by 1968 Johnson's presidency and his Great Society program would be in ruins..."
• Lester Maddox closed his popular Pickrick Restaurant in Atlanta, one day after he had begrudgingly announced that he would relent to a court order and serve African-American customers, rather than face a daily $200 fine for contempt of court. At noon, when a young black man named Jack Googer arrived to be the first customer, Maddox announced that he was closing the business. "I cannot betray my vow to my God", he told reporters. "Dollars are unimportant to me." Maddox then placed a sign on the door, announcing that the Pickrick was "out of business, resulting from an act passed by the U.S. Congress, signed by President Johnson and inspired and supported by deadly and bloody Communism."
• The Broadway musical Kelly, with lyrics by Eddie Lawrence and music by Mark Charlap, had its opening night performance at the Broadhurst Theatre and then closed, making history as the most expensive Broadway failure up to that time. The loss to investors in 1965 was $650,000, equivalent to almost $4.9 million fifty years later.
• A mortar and small arms attack by the Viet Cong, on the Camp Holloway U.S. station adjacent to the airport at Pleiku, killed eight American advisers and wounded 126 others. The attackers also destroyed six Huey helicopters and a Caribou transport plane and damaged 15 other aircraft.
• President Johnson responded by launching Operation Flaming Dart, sending 49 U.S. Navy bombers to bomb North Vietnamese army barracks in Đồng Hới and other targets around North Vietnam's Gulf of Tonkin.
• Born: Chris Rock, African-American comedian; in Andrews, South Carolina
• Died:
• *Lee Hoi-chuen, 64, Chinese opera singer and film actor; father of Hong Kong-American martial artist and actor Bruce Lee
• *Nance O'Neil, 90, American stage and silent film actress nicknamed "the American Bernhardt"