January 1967

[January 1], 1967 (Sunday)

• 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."
• 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.
• Medicaid went into effect in the United States, providing free medical care for disabled low-income people 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 the retired.
• 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, while the Kansas City Chiefs won the AFL Championship, 31–7, over the Buffalo Bills.
• Police raided a Los Angeles gay bar, the Black Cat Tavern, and arrested several patrons for kissing as they celebrated the New Year. The violence that followed would escalate into a more widespread riot.
• 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.
• 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.
• Died: Maurice Leyland, 66, British cricketer

  [January 2], 1967 (Monday)

• 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. It is believed this specific time was chosen due to Nancy Reagan's astrological advisors. They claimed the stars were in favor of her husband at that time. Reagan took his oath on the Bible that Father Junípero Serra had brought from Spain to California in the 18th century.
• Operation Bolo was a success as the United States Air Force shot down five 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." 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. None of the American fighter jets, all of them F-4C Phantoms, were lost. 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.
• 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."
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• Pedro Rodríguez won the South African Grand Prix.
• Born: Tia Carrere, American film and television actress; in Honolulu
• Died: Ambikagiri Raichoudhury, 81, Indian poet and nationalist who wrote in the Assamese language

  [January 3], 1967 (Tuesday)

• 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 Liu's 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!"
• 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.
• 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.
• A reshuffle took place within the government of Luxembourg, under prime minister Pierre Werner.
• Died:
• *Jack Ruby, 55, the Dallas nightclub proprietor who killed accused presidential assassin Lee Harvey Oswald on live television on November 24, 1963; in Dallas of a pulmonary embolism after being diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. As with President John F. Kennedy and Oswald, Ruby was pronounced dead at Parkland Memorial Hospital.
• *Mohamed Khider, 54, exiled Algerian politician and former Secretary General of Algeria's FLN Party, was assassinated in Madrid, three years after he had stolen more than $12,000,000 of party funds.
• *Mary Garden, 92, Scottish operatic soprano and actress

  [January 4], 1967 (Wednesday)

• British speedboat racer Donald Campbell was attempting to become the first person to race a boat at and apparently reached that speed in his jet-powered hydrofoil Bluebird K7 on Coniston Water, a lake in Lancashire, England. Campbell had reached on his north to south run over and was 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..." 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.
• Tao Chu, the Director of the Chinese Communist Party's Propaganda Department and the fourth highest-ranking official of the CCP, 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". 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.
• 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.
• The "January Storm" revolution began in China's largest city, Shanghai, as Zhang Chunqiao and Yao Wenyuan—two radical Communists who would later be vilified 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.
• The Doors released their self-titled debut album to critical success. The album is largely viewed as an essential part of the psychedelic rock evolution.
• Born: Marina Orsini, Canadian TV actress; in Montreal
• Died: Ezra Norton, 69, Australian newspaper magnate