July 1965

[July 1], 1965 (Thursday)

• Australia began training its first draftees for the Vietnam War, bringing up the first of 63,790 conscripts who would have two years full-time service in the Australian Regular Army, followed by further service in the army reserves. In all, 804,286 young men who were 20 years old at the time that the draft reactivated, or turned 20 during the Vietnam era, registered for National Service.
• The People's Republic of China established its Strategic Missile Force, the Dier Paobing. "Despite its small number of personnel," an author has noted, "the SMF has always been allocated the highest percentage of military outlays in the PLA," with 20% of the People's Liberation Army budget.
• NASA announced that Frank Borman and James A. Lovell, Jr., had been selected as the prime flight crew for Gemini 7. The backup crew for the flight, which would last up to 14 days, would be Edward H. White II and Michael Collins.
• Continental Airlines Flight 12, a Boeing 707-124 with 66 people on board, overran the runway while landing at Kansas City Municipal Airport in Kansas City, Missouri, and broke into three pieces. Coming in during a heavy rain, the plane "hit a pool of water and slid through a fence and across a Missouri River dike", crashing "at almost the same spot" as Continental Flight 290 on January 29, 1963. There were no fatalities.
• The U.S. Army combined the 11th Air Assault Division with the 2nd Infantry Division to form the 1st Cavalry Division, a unique division that included three airborne-qualified battalions and several battalions of helicopters which were integral to its combat elements, allowing it to engage in helicopter assault operations in Vietnam.
• Born:
• *Carl Fogarty, British motorcycle racer and winner of the Superbike World Championship in 1994, 1995, 1998 and 1999; in Blackburn, Lancashire
• *Tito Beltrán, Chilean opera singer; in Punta Arenas
• *Harald Zwart, Dutch-born Norwegian film director
• Died:
• *Wally Hammond, 62, English international cricketer and captain of the national team from 1938 to 1947
• *Robert Ruark, 50, American journalist and syndicated newspaper columnist

  [July 2], 1965 (Friday)

• The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission was formed in the United States as Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 went into effect. The new law prohibited workplace discrimination and the EEOC was authorized to investigate any allegations of discrimination based on race, skin color, religion, sex, or national origin, and initially applied to any companies that had 100 or more employees. Franklin Delano Roosevelt Jr., son of the 32nd president of the United States, served as the first EEOC commissioner.
• Because of an administrative error, U.S. criminal Richard Speck was released from prison in Huntsville, Texas, after serving only six months of a 16-month sentence for attempted rape. A little more than a year later, Speck would murder eight nurses in Chicago.
• The Tunnel Railway had been a tourist attraction in Ramsgate, England, traveling through one of the famed white cliffs on England's west coast, but suffered a catastrophic accident that would lead to its permanent closure, derailing and smashing into a building. As a result, the owners decided to close down the attraction on September 26 at the end of the season, and it would never reopen.
• In the Wimbledon Men's Singles final, Roy Emerson defeated Fred Stolle in straight sets, 6–2, 6–4, 6–4.

  [July 3], 1965 (Saturday)

• Soviet Communist Party Chief Leonid Brezhnev said that the USSR had "orbital missiles", implying that his nation could put nuclear missiles into orbit around the Earth and bring them down, on command, to any location on Earth. The possible existence of missiles in orbit had been referred to at least twice by Soviet media, but it marked the first time that the Soviet Union's leader had suggested their existence. Brezhnev's comments came in an address to graduates of the Voroshilov Military Academy. "It is hardly necessary to give concrete examples of the quantity of intercontinental and orbital rockets at the disposal of the Soviet Union," Brezhnev said. "I can only say one thing. There are enough, quite enough, of them so that once and forever, we can put an end to any aggressor or any group of aggressors."
• The Football Association, the governing body for all professional soccer football in England, changed its rules to allow teams to substitute players during a game. Previously, when a player was injured, no replacement was allowed. Initially, a team could make only one substitution during the duration of the game, which would be raised to two in 1986 and three in the 1990s.
• Mao Zedong, chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, issued a directive to change educational policy in the People's Republic, commenting that "The burdens of students are too heavy, thus affecting their health, making even study useless," and suggested that school activities should be cut by one-third.
• "The Meddling Monk" became the first Time Lord to make an appearance in the British sci-fi serial, Doctor Who.
• Two different recordings of the song "All I Really Want to Do" entered the Billboard Hot 100 list of best-selling songs in the United States, published by Billboard magazine, on the same day. The version by Cher, her first single without Sonny Bono, would eventually climb to #15 on the chart, while a shorter recording by The Byrds, who had previously hit #1 with "Mr. Tambourine Man", would reach no higher than #40.
• Born:
• *Tommy Flanagan, Scottish actor known for his role as Filip "Chibs" Telford in the FX crime drama television series Sons of Anarchy and its spin-off Mayans M.C.; in Easterhouse, Glasgow, Scotland
• *Shinya Hashimoto, Japanese professional wrestler; in Toki City
• *Connie Nielsen, Danish actress; in Frederikshavn
• Died: Trigger, 30, the horse owned by Roy Rogers and featured in 87 of Rogers's films and television series episodes. After the horse's death, Rogers employed the service of a taxidermist to preserve Trigger's remains, which can still be seen at the Roy Rogers and Dale Evans Museum in Victorville, California.

  [July 4], 1965 (Sunday)

• At a desk placed in front of the base of the Statue of Liberty, U.S. President Lyndon Johnson signed the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 into law, abolishing the Emergency Quota Act that had been in place since 1921. The Hart–Cellar Act limited immigration to 170,000 persons per year, but based the number of people from each country on the nations' populations. "The changes that resulted from this renewed migration pattern," a historian would write later, "created fresh images in the cultural and religious landscape that many Americans were not used to encountering. Hindu temples, once only encountered in India, were more routinely seen in U.S. cities. Islam, which had established a strong presence among the African American community, was now also widely practiced by burgeoning immigrant populations in both Shi'a and Sunni expressions of faith."
• Martin Luther King Jr. delivered a memorable sermon entitled "The American Dream" at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. Following up on his famous "I Have a Dream" speech in the March on Washington in 1963, King said, "So yes, the dream has been shattered, and I have had my nightmarish experiences, but I tell you this morning once more that I haven't lost the faith. I still have a dream..."
• In the earliest LGBT demonstrations in the United States, the first Annual Reminder took place at Independence Hall in Philadelphia when a group of homosexuals picketed in front of the hall for equal rights. The last Annual Reminder would take place at the same location on July 4, 1969, a week after the Stonewall riots.
• The A-6 Intruder attack plane was sent into the Vietnam War for the first time, as several Intruders were launched from the USS Independence on a combat mission.
• Born: Constanze Moser-Scandolo, East German Olympic speed skater; in Weimar
• Died:
• *Edward Sackville-West, 63, British music critic, novelist and member of the House of Lords as Baron Sackville
• *Lisa Howard, 35, pioneering American television journalist, committed suicide with an overdose of barbiturates

  [July 5], 1965 (Monday)

• Leabua Jonathan became the new Prime Minister of Basutoland, after being selected by the colonial parliament to succeed Sekhonyana Maseribane. Jonathan would control the southern African nation for the next 20 years, until being deposed in a coup d'état in 1986.
• Maria Callas gave her final operatic performance, as Tosca at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden.
• Died:
• *Porfirio Rubirosa, 56, Dominican millionaire, race car driver, polo player, and international playboy, was killed in an auto accident in Paris after he lost control of his Ferrari 250 while speeding through the Bois de Boulogne park at about 8:30 in the morning. As he raced down the Avenue de la Reine Maruguerite, he struck a parked car "whose driver had pulled over to the curb to read a morning paper", then skidded more than and crashed into a tree. The day before, Rubirosa and his three teammates had won the Coupe de France polo tournament, and Rubirosa had partied through the night at Jimmy's, a Parisian nightclub.
• *Coley McDonough, 49, a former National Football League quarterback who had been serving as a patrolman for the Pittsburgh Bureau of Police, was shot and killed in the line of duty. McDonough had played for the Steelers from 1939 to 1941.

  [July 6], 1965 (Tuesday)

• The United States Senate voted 68 to 5 to approve the proposed Twenty-fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution, clearing the way for the change in presidential succession to be sent to the states for ratification. The amendment also made provisions to fill a vacancy in the office of the U.S. Vice President and created a procedure for the vice president to serve as acting president if the president were to become disabled. The U.S. House of Representatives had already approved the amendment. Voting against the measure were Senators Albert Gore Sr. of Tennessee, Walter F. Mondale of Minnesota, Frank Lausche of Ohio, Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota, and John Tower of Texas.
• The House of Commons of the United Kingdom voted against the Labour Party government of Prime Minister Harold Wilson on three different attempts at passing the Finance Bill, and MP Edward Heath called upon Wilson and his government to resign so that new elections could be held. On the first vote concerning a limit on investment tax rates, the measure failed 166–180; an amendment proposal failed 167–180, and a motion to adjourn the debate failed by the same measure.
• All 41 Royal Air Force servicemen on a Hastings C1A airplane were killed when the aircraft crashed shortly after takeoff from RAF Abingdon. The Hastings was making its climb when metal fatigue caused two bolts to fail on the craft's elevator and sent it climbing steeply until it stalled and went out of control. The plane was transporting paratroopers of the No. 36 Squadron for a drop over Weston-on-the-Green.
• The Council of Ministers of the Soviet Union approved sending 2,500 Soviet Army instructors to North Vietnam, not to fight in combat, but to train North Vietnamese troops on how to use surface-to-air missiles against American airplanes. During the course of the war, between 10,000 and 12,000 Soviet advisers would see service in the Vietnam War.