June 1967

[June 1], 1967 (Thursday)

• Israel's Prime Minister Levi Eshkol reorganized his cabinet to include his political rivals as part of a "national unity government" in preparation for the expected war with the neighboring Arab nations. Most notably, Eshkol and Foreign Minister Abba Eban brought in Moshe Dayan as the Israeli Defense Minister.
• The McDonald's fast-food chain went international with the opening of its first restaurant in Canada, located at 712 Number Three Road in Richmond, British Columbia, near Vancouver.
• Born: Roger Sanchez, Grammy Award-winning American DJ and remixer; in Queens

  [June 2], 1967 (Friday)

• During a student protest in West Berlin against the arrival of the Shah of Iran, an unarmed demonstrator, 26-year-old Benno Ohnesorg, was shot at close range and in the back of the head by Karl-Heinz Kurras, a West Berlin police officer. In 2009, German investigators would discover that Kurras had been an operative for East Germany's secret police, the Stasi. Ohnesorg's killing, the indifference of the local press, and the lack of punishment of Kurras by the West German government, would result in the founding of the urban guerrilla group 2 June Movement, with the murder providing "a focus around which the Left could organize and draw larger and larger numbers of young people".
• Luis Jose Monge, prisoner number 35563 at the Colorado State Penitentiary, was executed in the gas chamber at the prison in Canon City, Colorado. On June 28, 1963, Monge had murdered his pregnant wife and three of his children at his home in Denver, then turned himself in to police. Monge would be the last person legally executed in the United States for almost ten years, with the U.S. Supreme Court voiding existing death penalty laws in the 1972 case of Furman v. Georgia and no new executions being done until Gary Gilmore's death by firing squad in 1977.
• American F-105 jets attacked the North Vietnamese port of Cam Pha and cannon fire struck a Soviet diesel ship, the Turkestan, as it sat in harbor. Nikolai Rybachuk, a Soviet merchant sailor, was killed and six others were injured. The United States initially denied that it had struck the Turkestan and attempted to blame the death on North Vietnamese anti-aircraft fire, but conceded 16 days later that the Soviet ship had been strafed by cannon fire from F-105 jets that had participated that day in a third attack on Cam Pha.
• A race riot began in the predominantly African-American Roxbury section of Boston, the first of many riots during the hot summer of 1967. When the rioting in Boston ended after three days, 70 people had been injured, 100 arrested, and millions of dollars of property damage had taken place. Violence in June would follow in Philadelphia, Tampa, and Cincinnati, Dayton, Ohio and Lansing, Michigan, Atlanta and Buffalo.
• A Goodyear blimp, one of two that had been stationed at Indianapolis for the 500 mile race earlier in the week, lost gas on its way back to Akron, Ohio, and was tangled in high tension electrical power lines to the east of Dunreith, Indiana.
• An Israeli Defense Forces patrol battled a four-man squad of the Syrian Army, "bringing the first deaths since the onset of the Middle East crisis". One soldier from Syria and two from Israel were killed.
• Born: Nadhim Zahawi, Iraqi Kurdish-British politician; in Baghdad

  [June 3], 1967 (Saturday)

• All 83 passengers and five crew on board Air Ferry Limited Flight G-APYK, carrying British vacationers to a Mediterranean holiday, were killed when the plane crashed into the side of the Canigou mountain peak in the Pyrenees while circling the resort city of Perpignan for a landing.
• With demolition of the 1964 New York World's Fair site completed and reseeding and reclamation finished by fair organizers, Flushing Meadows Park was turned back over to city officials.
• Born:
• *Tamás Darnyi, Hungarian swimmer and Olympic gold medalist in 1988 and 1992, and World Swimmer of the Year in 1987 and 1991; in Budapest
• *Anderson Cooper, American TV journalist and CNN anchorman; in New York City
• Died: Lord Arthur Tedder, 76, British field marshal and pioneer in bombing techniques during World War II, later Chief of the Air Staff

  [June 4], 1967 (Sunday)

• Less than 12 hours after the deaths of 83 vacationing British airline passengers on an Air Ferry Limited flight, British Midland Air Lines Flight G-ALHG crashed in Hopes Carr, Stockport, killing 72 passengers and crew. The British Midland plane, a four-engine Argonaut, was bringing holiday travelers back from Majorca and was preparing to land at Manchester when it went down. Another 12 people survived.

  [June 5], 1967 (Monday)

• The Six-Day War began as Israel launched a surprise preemptive strike on Egypt shortly after dawn. At 7:10, sixteen Magister Fouga jet trainers began a routine patrol. Four minutes later, the first of 183 Israeli Air Force fighter planes took off from all over Israel, and by 7:30, all but twelve of Israel's 212 fighters were airborne. The armada of jets flew westward over the Mediterranean Sea for 18 minutes, and at 7:48, they turned south for an attack on Egypt. A radar operator in Jordan radioed Egypt with the word Inab, the code word for an imminent enemy attack, but Egyptian intelligence had changed the code the day before without notice. Attacks began simultaneously at ten Egyptian bases, then on 14 others, and 189 of the Egyptian Air Force's airplanes, more than half of its fleet, were destroyed on the ground. Most of the others were unable to take to the air because of the destruction of the airfields. Without air support, the Egyptian Army in the Sinai was quickly overwhelmed by Israeli bombing. The allied armies of Egypt, Syria, Iraq and Jordan invaded Israel in retaliation. The Battle of Ammunition Hill became the start of Jordan's ill-fated campaign.
• After the arrest of 11 leaders of the Alianza Federal de Mercedes in Rio Arriba County, New Mexico, armed members of the Mexican-American rights organization arrived at the county seat, Tierra Amarilla, and attempted a citizen's arrest of the county district attorney. Two police officers were wounded, and two others were taken hostage by the fleeing invaders. In response, members of the New Mexico State Police and the New Mexico National Guard raided a picnic of Alianza members and their families at Canjilon, New Mexico, and kept the men, women and children on the grounds for 24 hours despite the lack of any indication that they were connected to the courthouse shooting. In 1970, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights would prosecute Sanchez and other members of law enforcement for illegal arrests and for repressing the right of free assembly.
• The Moscow–Washington hotline between the President of the United States and the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was used in crisis for the first time since its inauguration on August 30, 1963. White House Press Secretary George Christian disclosed three days later that the first message sent over the teletype between the Kremlin and the White House had been a message from Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin to U.S. President Lyndon Johnson, with Johnson responding later in the day. Christian told reporters later that exchanges between the two leaders had taken place throughout the war. Kosygin's initial message, which reached the U.S. Department of Defense at 7:15 a.m in Washington was a request that the U.S. exert its influence on Israel to call a cease-fire.
• As late as 12:30 p.m., five hours after the war began, Israel sent a proposal to Jordan's King Hussein by way of the UN Truce Supervisor, General Odd Bull, giving Jordan one final chance to avoid becoming involved in the war. Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban would tell the United Nations two weeks later, "Jordan tragically answered not with words but with a torrent of shells... Surely this responsibility cannot fail to have its consequences in a peace settlement."
• Murderer Richard Speck was sentenced to death in the electric chair for killing eight student nurses in Chicago, with a scheduled execution date of September 1, 1967. The death penalty would be declared unconstitutional in 1972 before the sentence could be carried out, and Speck would spend the remainder of his life in prison.
• Born:
• *Ron Livingston, American actor best known for playing Peter Gibbons in the 1999 film Office Space and Captain Lewis Nixon III in the 2001 miniseries Band of Brothers; in Cedar Rapids, Iowa
• *Joe DeLoach, American sprinter and 200m Olympic gold medalist in 1988; in Bay City, Texas
• Died:
• *Paul Schutzer, 37, American photographer for Life magazine, was killed in a battle in the Negev desert while traveling with the Israeli Army to cover the war. Another American newsman, NBC producer Ted Yates, was fatally wounded the same day while accompanying the Israeli invasion of East Jerusalem and died the next day. Ben Oyserman, an Israeli photographer on assignment for the Canadian Broadcasting Company, was killed the next day when he accidentally tripped a booby trap.
• *Arthur Biram, 88, German-born Israeli educator who founded the first Jewish high school in Ottoman Palestine in 1913; of natural causes during the first day of the Six-Day War

  [June 6], 1967 (Tuesday)

• Egypt's President Gamal Abdel Nasser narrowly missed being killed after ordering a plane to fly him over the battlefront in the Sinai. When Nasser's advisers were unable to persuade him not to risk his life, they arranged for him to make the inspection in an unmarked small plane in hopes that the "lumbering, flimsy craft, more for Sunday joy riding than battlefield inspection, would fly too slow and too low to be nailed by the near-supersonic Israeli jets". Twenty minutes after it crossed the Suez Canal at Ismailia, the plane found itself over a procession of Israeli tanks at an altitude of only. An Israeli fighter pilot, unaware that the enemy's president was on the plane, dived at it twice in a strafing run but was unable to shoot it down. Nasser then had the pilot fly north to inspect Bir Hassana and, seeing the ruins of Egypt's armored division, ordered the pilot to return to Cairo.
• United Nations Security Council Resolution 233 was unanimously adopted without debate, expressing concern "at the outbreak of fighting and with the menacing situation in the Near East", and calling upon the participants in the Six-Day War "to take forthwith as a first step all measures for an immediate cease-fire and for a cessation of all military activities in the area", but did not demand that either side withdraw from captured territory. The next day, Resolution 234 was adopted, clarifying that the UN was asking all parties to discontinue fighting by 2000 hours UTC. Starting with Jordan, the Arab nations began accepting Resolution 233 and would halt fighting with Israel by the end of the week.
• George E. Mueller, NASA's Associate Administrator for Manned Space Flight, spoke to the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics and described innovations in the Apollo Applications Program to reduce the cost of future space missions. Among these were reuse of command modules; landing spacecraft on the ground rather than at sea for further reuse; Using the S-IVB as both a propulsive stage and an orbital workshop ; use of the OWS for several missions; longer flights of up to a year's duration; and reuse of existing Apollo program materials and labor. Mueller said that the AAP's innovations "can lead to benefits of enormous significance to all mankind."
• The eleven oil-exporting Arab nations announced a halt of shipments to the United States and the United Kingdom, with Iraq and Kuwait halting oil exports, Lebanon banning the loading at its ports of oil from Saudi Arabian or Iraqi oil, and Algeria placing six American oil companies there under state control.
• Egypt announced the closure of the Suez Canal to all ships in retaliation for American and British support to Israel during the Six-Day War. It would not reopen until 1975.
• East Jerusalem was captured in a battle conducted by Israeli forces without the use of artillery, in order to avoid damage to the Holy City.
• Born: Paul Giamatti, American film actor and Academy Award winner; in New Haven, Connecticut
• Died: USAF Major Edward G. Givens Jr., 37, American astronaut who had been selected for the Apollo program, was killed in an auto accident near Pearland, Texas, when he lost control of his car. Givens would be replaced by William R. Pogue, who would later orbit the Earth in the Skylab 4 space station mission.