January 1965

[January 1], 1965 (Friday)

• Fatah, the "Palestinian National Liberation Movement" led by Yasser Arafat, issued its Military Communique No. 1, announcing the formation of a military wing, Al-'Asifah and declaring that it was going to launch a guerrilla action against Israel. Its declared purpose was to show that "the armed revolution is the way to Return and to Liberty" and that the cause of Palestinian reoccupation of the Israeli lands "has not died and will not die." Fatah's first attempt at an attack would come on January 13, when four men rigged an explosive device to water pumps at Beit Netofa Valley water plant and then exchanged gunfire with the Israeli Defense Forces.
• The #1 ranked team in college football, the Alabama Crimson Tide, was beaten by the #3 Texas Longhorns, 21–17, in the Orange Bowl. Meanwhile, the #2 Arkansas Razorbacks rallied to beat the #6 Nebraska Cornhuskers, 10–7, in the Cotton Bowl and remained the only unbeaten major team from 1964. However, since the final Associated Press and United Press International polls had been made at the end of the regular season, Alabama's loss did not affect its #1 standing.
• An hour before he was scheduled to broadcast a nationwide address, Nigeria's President Nnamdi Azikiwe canceled the speech. National elections had been held on December 29, but had been widely boycotted by people who felt they were fraudulent. The text of his address showed that Azkiwe planned to say that he would resign rather than to ask anyone to form a government based on the election results.
• Don Drummond, who was one of the most famous ska musicians in Jamaica, but who also was known to be mentally ill, stabbed and killed his girlfriend, Anita Mahfood, after she returned to their home in Kingston from a nightclub performance. Found to be insane, Drummond was committed to a mental hospital, where he would die four years later.
• Indonesia announced its intention to leave the United Nations, as Indonesian ambassador Lambertus Palar told the news verbally to Secretary General U Thant and UN General Assembly President Alex Quaison-Sackey. No member of the United Nations had quit the organization since its creation in 1945.
• Twenty-two people were killed, and 22 others injured, when their bus overturned near Jalapa in the Veracruz state of Mexico. More might have survived the wreck, but the bus burst into flames after one of the passengers struck a match in order to find his way out of the darkness.
• The Battle of Bình Gia concluded, as the Viet Cong withdrew while in a superior position. The South Vietnamese Army of the Republic of Vietnam lost 201, while the U.S. had its biggest losses in the Vietnam War up to that time, with five killed.
• Luis Muñoz Marín, Governor of Puerto Rico since 1949, was succeeded in the post after twenty years by Roberto Sánchez Vilella.

  [January 2], 1965 (Saturday)

• Surgeons at the Oswestry Orthopaedic Hospital in Britain performed the last of several operations on Ann Rowston, a 19-year-old woman who had grown to tall because of a pituitary gland disorder. With the removal of four inches from her left femur, preceded by operations to take two inches from her shin bones and four from her right femur, it was hoped that her height could be reduced to slightly over tall. On June 2, eight months after the first surgery had started, Rowston would be recovered sufficiently to leave the hospital on crutches and to begin therapy to resume walking.
• Joe Namath, quarterback for the University of Alabama, signed a three-year contract with the New York Jets of the American Football League for an unprecedented $400,000 – the highest amount ever paid to a professional football player. Namath signed at a hotel in Miami, the day after completing his college football career in the Orange Bowl. The deal would prove to be a breakthrough for the AFL in its attempt to compete with the established NFL, and would be a major reason for a major contract offer by the NBC television network for the rights to broadcast the newer league's games.
• In Czechoslovakia, the children's television program Večerníček aired its first episode. The show would celebrate its 50th anniversary in 2015.
• Radio Peking said that the Panchen Lama, who had been removed from office in late 1964 as China's puppet ruler for Tibet, had confessed to conspiring with Tibetan "serf owners" to foment unrest in the former kingdom.
• Denis Healey, the United Kingdom Secretary of Defence, canceled the nation's fighter and military transport programmes and ordered the purchase of the U.S.-built F-4 Phantom and C-130 Hercules in their place.
• The United Kingdom airlifted 1,200 British paratroopers, infantrymen and sailors to Singapore in order to help guard Malaysia from a threatened attack by Indonesia.
• Mohammed Ayub Khan was re-elected as President of Pakistan, defeating challenger Fatima Jinnah, the 76-year-old sister of Pakistan's founder Mohammed Ali Jinnah.
• Martin Meyerson replaced Edward Strong as acting chancellor of U.C. Berkeley, betokening a shift of policy towards the campus Free Speech Movement.
• The long-running British TV sports series World of Sport was launched.

  [January 3], 1965 (Sunday)

• The collapse of a Roman Catholic church in Rijo, a town in the Mexican state of Puebla, killed 57 people and injured 61 others during the first Sunday services in the new building. Twenty of the victims were children, and 100 other children were left as orphans by the disaster.
• Jed Johnson Jr., elected U.S. Representative for Oklahoma in November at the age of 24, became the youngest member of Congress in modern times when he was sworn into office one week after reaching the required minimum age of 25 on December 27.
• The first German airbase on foreign soil since the end of World War II opened, when West Germany's Luftwaffe began joint-operation with the Portuguese Air Force of a base from Lisbon.
• In his first public appearance of the year, Pope Paul VI gave a homily at a Mass for the Italian University.
• Syria announced nationalization of foreign-controlled industries.
• Died:
• *Semyon Kosberg, 61, Soviet Jewish aviation and rocket engineer, Hero of Socialist Labor and four time awardee of the Order of Lenin
• *Milton Avery, 79, American modern art painter

  [January 4], 1965 (Monday)

• As the new U.S. Congress opened, Republican members of the U.S. House of Representatives voted, 73–67, to replace 64-year-old minority leader Charles A. Halleck of Indiana with a younger candidate, 51-year-old Representative Gerald R. Ford of Michigan. "If Ford had not made that run against Halleck", longtime friend and aide Donald Rumsfeld would write later, "he would not have become the House Republican leader, nor would he later have been selected by President Nixon as vice president when Spiro Agnew had to resign. Indeed, it can probably be said that the man who was never elected president by the American people became president of the United States by the narrow margin he received to become House minority leader on January 4, 1965."
• Members of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, a group of several hundred protesters, mostly African-American, asked the House of Representatives to disqualify four Democrats and one Republican who had been elected to represent Mississippi in the House in November, on the grounds that the MFDP's candidates had been illegally kept off the ballot. On the motion of New York Congressman William F. Ryan, the five stood aside while the representatives from the other 49 states were sworn in, and a roll call vote was taken. The House voted 277 to 148 to administer the oath to their five Mississippi colleagues.
• Rubén Olivares began his professional boxing career in a bout in Cuernavaca, Mexico, knocking out Isidro Sotelo in the first round. Olivares would enter the Hall of Fame as one of the hardest punching boxers of all time and would win almost three-quarters of his fights by knockouts, including his first 24 bouts and 50 of his first 53. He would reign as the world bantamweight champion between 1969 and 1972, and the world featherweight champion briefly during 1974, and 1975.
• Deactivation of America's Titan I missiles began less than three years after they had first become operational on April 18, 1962. The 144 Titans had been deployed at five air force bases in the Western United States, and the first to be taken off of alert were those at Beale Air Force Base in California. The ICBMs, which had to be raised out of their silos for fueling before they could be launched, had been made obsolete by the new Minuteman missiles.
• Sixty-four of the 103 people on Aeroflot Flight SU-101 were killed when the plane crashed while attempting to land at the Alma-Ata airport in the Kazakh SSR in the Soviet Union, after departing from Semipalatinsk as part of a multi-stop flight that had originated in Moscow. The pilot had attempted to land during poor visibility, and brought the Ilyushin 18B turboprop down into trees about to the right of the runway.
• The U.S. House of Representatives voted 224–201 to revise its rules in order to prevent the House Rules Committee from blocking legislation that it opposed. Under the new system, if a bill had not been cleared by the Rules Committee within 21 legislative days, the Speaker of the House was authorized to remove it directly to the entire House for a vote.
• U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson announced his plans for the "Great Society" during his State of the Union Address. Johnson spoke at 9:00 in the evening Eastern time, setting a precedent for the annual State of the Union speech to be seen in "prime time"; with few exceptions, previous addresses had generally been given in the afternoon.
• Born: Julia Ormond, English film and television actress; in Epsom, Surrey
• Died: T. S. Eliot, 76, American-born British writer, and 1948 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, died from emphysema.