January 1968

January 1, 1968 (Monday)

• Ranked as the number one college football team in the United States, the USC Trojans faced the #4 ranked Indiana Hoosiers in the Rose Bowl in Pasadena; that evening, the Orange Bowl in Miami pitted the #2 and #3 teams against each other, as the second-ranked Tennessee Volunteers met the Oklahoma Sooners. The format of #1 vs. #4 and #2 vs. #3 would be used half a century later as the semi-finals for the NCAA Division I football championship game, but there were no playoffs in 1968, and USC, Indiana, Tennessee and Oklahoma were champions of their respective conferences. At the time, the Rose Bowl matched the Pac-8 and Big Ten, while the Orange Bowl featured the SEC and Big Eight. USC defeated Indiana, 14–3, on the strength of two touchdown runs by O. J. Simpson, and would retain its #1 ranking. Oklahoma blew a 19–0 halftime lead over Tennessee, but held off a furious Tennessee comeback which came down to an unsuccessful field goal attempt by West German-born kicker Karl Kremser, and won the game, 26–24. USC and Oklahoma would not meet for a title game, but would be ranked first and second in the final sportswriters' and coaches' polls.
• A new universal military service law went into effect in the Soviet Union, requiring all able-bodied men to report for duty on their 18th birthdays. High school graduates were required to serve for one year; men in the army or air force had to stay two years, and those in the navy or coast guard had three years required service. The new law replaced a 1939 law that required three years in the army or air force, and four years in the navy or coast guard.
• The Viet Cong kept up their record of breaking agreed ceasefires by killing 19 South Vietnamese troops during the 1968 New Year truce period in the Vietnam War.
• Cecil Day-Lewis was named as the 19th Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom, replacing the late John Masefield, who had died on May 12.
• Born: Davor Šuker, Croatian soccer football player and sports executive; in Osijek, SR Croatia, Yugoslavia
• Died: Donagh MacDonagh, 55, Irish playwright

  January 2, 1968 (Tuesday)

• U.S. President Lyndon Johnson signed the Bilingual Education Act into law. At the signing ceremony, Johnson said, "Thousands of children of Latin descent, young Indians, and others will get a better start— a better chance— in school... We are now giving every child in America a better chance to touch his outermost limits. We have begun a campaign to unlock the full potential of every boy and girl, regardless of his race, or his religion, or his father's income."
• The 36-hour ceasefire in the Vietnam War expired at 0600 hours local time; during the New Year's Day truce, there were 64 major violations by the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army. Later in the day, a U.S. Marine Corps patrol at Khe Sanh killed a high-ranking NVA regimental commander and five other officers who had been inspecting the site, an indication of plans for a major attack.
• Sugar Ray Robinson, Joe Jeanette and Barney Aaron were inducted into The Ring Magazine Hall of Fame; the International Boxing Hall of Fame would be founded in 1990.
• Dr. Christiaan Barnard performed the third human heart transplant in history, and the first that would be considered successful enough that the recipient was able to go home from the hospital. Philip Blaiberg, a 58-year old retired dentist living in Cape Town, South Africa, would leave the hospital after 73 days and would survive for another 17 months until his death on August 17, 1969. The donor was 24-year old Clive Haupt, who had died from a massive cerebral hemorrhage.
• Born: Cuba Gooding, Jr., American film actor who won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor in Jerry Maguire; in The Bronx, New York

  January 3, 1968 (Wednesday)

• Cuba began rationing gasoline for the first time since Fidel Castro's regime had taken power nine years earlier. In a speech the night before on the anniversary of the revolution, Castro announced that car-owners would be allowed to purchase between eight and 25 gallons per month, depending on the horsepower of their vehicles.
• U.S. Senator Eugene J. McCarthy of Minnesota announced that he would directly challenge President Johnson for the Democratic Party nomination for president and arranged to have his name placed on the ballot for the New Hampshire primary.
• The Panton Chair was introduced on the market for the first time by the Herman Miller Corporation.

  January 4, 1968 (Thursday)

• An operation by the U.S. 4th Infantry Division in the Dak To area of South Vietnam captured a classified five-page North Vietnamese document, titled "Urgent Combat Order No. 1", that described the strategy for a series of attacks to take place in Pleiku in conjunction with the upcoming Tet holiday.
• At a meeting with his cabinet, British Prime Minister Harold Wilson first presented the proposal for the United Kingdom to withdraw from defending Malaysia and Singapore by the end of March 1971 and to pull out its troops stationed east of the Suez Canal by the middle of 1972.
• Following two shows at the Lorensberg Cirkus arena in Gothenburg, singer Jimi Hendrix was arrested for vandalizing his room at the Opelan Hotel. Hendrix was kept in jail overnight, then released to continue his tour of Sweden.
• Died: Joseph Pholien, 83, Prime Minister of Belgium from 1950 to 1952

  January 5, 1968 (Friday)

• Alexander Dubček was chosen as the leader of the Komunistická strana Československa, the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, after the KSČ Central Committee voted to remove Antonín Novotný because of his ineffective leadership of the nation. Novotny was allowed to continue in his post as President of Czechoslovakia, though he would be removed from that job in March. Recommendations for the new First Secretary had been delegated by the Central Committee to a 21-member "Consultative Group" composed of representatives from regional party committees. On January 4, the group was divided with seven preferring Dubček, six in favor of Prime Minister Jozef Lenárt, and four apiece for Deputy Premier Oldřich Černík and National Assembly Chairman Bohuslav Lastovička. The choice was narrowed down on Friday morning to Dubček or Lenárt, and the Consultative Group selected Dubček by "a decisive majority" of the 21 members.
• Romanian First Deputy Foreign Minister Macovescu met with U.S. Ambassador W. Averell Harriman to provide a message from top officials in Hanoi, with whom he had just visited. Macovescu provided the clearest indication yet that Hanoi would be willing to open negotiations with the United States if the bombing of North Vietnam was suspended; however, Hanoi did not provide any promises regarding not taking advantage of the bombing pause such as increasing infiltration of men and material into South Vietnam or an all-out invasion across the DMZ.
• Born:
• *Carrie Ann Inaba, American dancer and television host; in Honolulu
• *Tom Holland, British author; in Oxfordshire

  January 6, 1968 (Saturday)

• According to the Los Angeles Times, a group of "more than 200" Caltech students marched to and demonstrated in front of NBC's studios in Burbank as part of what appeared to be a grassroots campaign, actually orchestrated by Gene Roddenberry, to get the network to renew Star Trek for a third season.
• The Agartala Conspiracy Case arose with the indictment and arrest of 35 people in East Pakistan who were charged with plotting the secession of the eastern part of Pakistan from the rest of the nation. Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, named as the leader of the plot, was charged with traveling to the Indian city of Agartala to meet with P. N. Ojha, India's representative to the East, in hopes of military support. East Pakistan, whose residents primarily spoke Bengali, comprised more than half of Pakistan's population, but only 10 percent of its government officials, the West Pakistan residents who primarily spoke Urdu. Sheikh Mujib and the other defendants would be put on trial on June 19, leading to mass demonstrations, a civil war, and the eventual separation of East Pakistan as the nation of Bangladesh, with Sheikh Mujib as its first President.
• The collision of an express train and a truck stalled on the tracks killed 13 people in England, all of them passengers on the train. The truck driver and his-coworker were uninjured. At Hixon, a village in Staffordshire the truck was slowly hauling a 125-ton electrical transformer over the crossing when the Manchester to London southbound express train arrived with 500 people on board. The crossing gates lowered automatically, preventing the truck from completing its move off of the crossing, and the locomotive and eight cars derailed.
• In South Korea, President Park Chung Hee agreed to the petition by the nation's Hangul Society to phasing out the use of Chinese that were taught in schools and which were published in conjunction with the Korean alphabet, with Korean replacements for the Chinese symbols. Instructions would follow on October 25, reducing the number of Chinese words to 2,000 by year's end, 1,300 by the end of 1969, and eliminated altogether by the end of 1972.
• Norman Shumway performed the first successful heart transplant in the United States, operating at the Stanford University Hospital in California. The donor was a 43-year-old woman, Virginia May White, who had suffered a cerebral hemorrhage while celebrating her 22nd wedding anniversary; the recipient was Mike Casparak, a 54-year-old steelworker dying of viral myocarditis. Casparak survived only 15 days, dying on January 21 from liver failure.
• A 27-person team of surgeons at the Transvaal Memorial Hospital for Children successfully completed the separation of conjoined twins, Catherine O'Hare and Shirely O'Hare, who had been joined at the head. Two previous attempts to separate twins conjoined at the head had ended with only one of the twins surviving.
• All 45 people on board an Aeroflot An-24B airliner were killed when the plane exploded in midair while flying from Olyokminsk to Lensk.
• Born: John Singleton, African-American director known for Boyz n the Hood ; in Los Angeles
• Died: Karl Kobelt, 76, President of Switzerland in 1946 and 1952 in the course of his membership in the Swiss Federal Council from 1940 to 1954