June 1963

[June 1], 1963 (Saturday)

• Willie Pastrano, a 6 to 1 underdog challenger, won the world light heavyweight boxing championship, defeating titleholder Harold Johnson. Although most sportswriters thought that Johnson had won the 15-round bout in Las Vegas, Pastrano was declared the winner by the judges in a 2 to 1 decision. "I'm not saying that the underworld dictated the decision," Johnson's manager told reporters afterward, "but the betting was 5–1 and 6–1 for my boy? What do you think?"
• Manned Spacecraft Center announced two space station study contracts to compare concepts for a 24-person orbital laboratory: one with the Lockheed Aircraft Corporation and another with Douglas Aircraft Company, Inc., Missiles and Space Systems Division. The stations were to be designed for a useful orbital lifetime of about five years, with periodic resupply and crew rotations.
• In South Vietnam, President Ngô Đình Diệm's office announced the dismissal of the three major officials involved in the May 8 killing of eight Buddhists in Huế. The province chief and his deputy, and the government delegate for the Central Region of Vietnam were fired for failing to maintain order.
• Jomo Kenyatta was sworn in as the first Prime Minister of Kenya.

  [June 2], 1963 (Sunday)

• Fred Lorenzen won the World 600 NASCAR race despite his car running out of gas on the final lap. Junior Johnson had been leading the race until suffering a blown tire with three laps left. Lorenzen's win brought his earnings to "just under $80,000 making him the biggest money winner in stock car racing history", even though the racing season was only half over.
• Stage I of Gemini launch vehicle 1 was erected in Martin-Baltimore's vertical test facility. Stage II would follow on June 9, and inspection was completed June 12. Subsystem Functional Verification Tests began June 10.
• Born: Anand Abhyankar, Indian Marathi actor ; in Nagpur, Maharashtra

  [June 3], 1963 (Monday)

• All 101 people aboard Northwest Airlines Flight 293 were killed when the Douglas DC-7, crashed into the Pacific Ocean west-southwest of Annette Island, Alaska, off the coast of British Columbia. Chartered to carry U.S. military personnel and their families from McChord Air Force Base in Washington, to Elmendorf Air Force Base in Alaska, the plane disappeared shortly after being cleared to climb to an altitude of. Forty-seven years later, the cause of the accident remained unknown and the wreckage of the airplane remained "under more than 8,000 feet of water in the Gulf of Alaska".
• At Huế, South Vietnamese soldiers poured caustic chemicals on the heads of Buddhist protesters, and 67 people were injured. The United States' threat of the halting of aid to President Ngo Dinh Diem's regime was sufficient to lead the military to conclude that Diem could be overthrown without an intervention from the U.S.
• Born: John Kirby, coordinator for Strategic Communications at the National Security Council in the White House since 2022
• Died:
• *Pope John XXIII, 81, Italian Pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church. As Cardinal Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli, he had been the Patriarch of Venice when elected on October 28, 1958, to succeed Pope Pius XII. The Pope's death from stomach cancer, complicated by peritonitis, happened at 7:49 p.m. in Rome, leaving the papacy sede vacante.
• *Nazim Hikmet, 61, Turkish poet, died of a heart attack while picking up a morning newspaper at the door at his summer house in Peredelkino in the Soviet Union.

  [June 4], 1963 (Tuesday)

• The Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, religious leader of Iran's Shi'ite Muslim community, was arrested in the city of Qom after speaking against the emancipation of women in the regime of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Khomeini would be imprisoned for eight months, and released in April 1964. Six months later, he would be arrested again and sent into exile in Turkey, then move the following year to Najaf, in Iraq. In 1979, Khomeini would lead the overthrow of the monarchy and the establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
• U.S. President John F. Kennedy signed Executive Order 11110, delegating authority to the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury to issue silver certificates under the Thomas Amendment to the Agricultural Adjustment Act.
• Robert Wesley Patch, a six-year-old boy from Chevy Chase, Maryland, was awarded United States Patent No. 3,091,888 for a toy truck that could be "readily assembled and disassembled by a child".
• Australian diver Max Cramer became the first person to dive to the wreckage of the ship Batavia, exactly 334 years after the Dutch vessel had sunk on June 4, 1629.
• At a meeting of the Gemini Abort Panel, McDonnell Aircraft Corporation recommended dropping the lower limit for aborting a mission to. The existing abort stages were Mode 1 ; Mode 2 ; and Mode 3, booster shutdown and normal separation from above until the last few seconds of powered flight.
• Died: American footballer Don Fleming, 25, Cleveland Browns safety, was electrocuted along with a co-worker on a construction site near Orlando, Florida.

  [June 5], 1963 (Wednesday)

• British Secretary of State for War John Profumo was forced to resign after revelations of an extramarital affair between him and Christine Keeler, and Profumo's subsequent admission that he had lied about the affair to his fellow MPs in the House of Commons.
• Political demonstrations began in Iran, protesting the arrest of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini by the regime of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. The uprising coincided with the 10th of Muharam, an Islamic holiday marking the start of the new year, 1383 A.H., and the worldwide mourning for the Roman Catholic Pope. The martyrdom of Islamic clerics on that day, the 15th of Khordad, 1342 on the Persian calendar, is now commemorated as a public holiday in Iran.
• U.S. President Kennedy announced during a speech at the United States Air Force Academy that the United States government would team with private industry to quickly develop "the prototype of a commercially successful supersonic transport superior to that being built in any other country," a reference to the British-French Concorde and the Soviet Tupolev Tu-144. His statement would give rise to the Boeing 2707 project.
• Afterwards, President Kennedy flew to El Paso, Texas, where he met U.S. Vice President Lyndon Johnson and Texas Governor John B. Connally, to discuss a presidential tour of Texas to take place in late November 1963, with stops in Dallas, Fort Worth, San Antonio and Houston.
• U.S. District Judge Seybourn H. Lynne of Alabama enjoined the state from blocking the enrollment of the University of Alabama's first two African-American students.
• Guinea's president Sékou Touré began a state visit to the Republic of the Congo, creating a political stir in the country.
• The first annual NHL draft was held in Montreal.
• Died: Lieutenant-General Adrian Carton de Wiart, 83, British Army officer who served in the Second Boer War, World War I, and World War II

  [June 6], 1963 (Thursday)

• Communist Party Chairman Mao Zedong of the People's Republic of China Communist Party sent a letter to Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, stating that "The Chinese people will never accept the privileged position of one or two superpowers" with a monopoly on nuclear weapons, and then gave the go ahead for China to accelerate its own nuclear program. China would explode its first atomic bomb on October 16, 1964.
• Officials of NASA's Manned Spacecraft Center urged NASA to schedule a Mercury 10 mission, citing their belief that the Mercury spacecraft was capable of much longer missions than the 34-hour trip of Mercury 9 completed on May 16. Arguments that a mission of several days could be applied to the forthcoming Gemini and Apollo projects did not sway NASA. Another U.S. launch of a crew would not take place until 21 months later, with Gemini 3 on March 23, 1965.
• Andrew Kalitinsky, a spokesman for General Dynamics, told a gathering of scientists at the American Astronautical Society symposium in Denver that U.S. astronauts could be launched to the planet Mars as early as 1975. Kalitinsky spoke at the symposium "The Exploration of Mars", and envisioned that "a convoy of four multi-ton spaceships" would make the journey. The talk came the day after NASA announced its plan to send two satellites to Mars in November 1964 as the first step toward a crewed mission.
• Born: Jason Isaacs, English film actor; in Liverpool

  [June 7], 1963 (Friday)

• The Rolling Stones' first single, "Come On", was released in the UK, by Decca Records. The cover of "an obscure Chuck Berry ditty" would reach #21 on the British chart.
• Died: ZaSu Pitts, 69, American actress

  [June 8], 1963 (Saturday)

• The Army of Egypt, intervening in the North Yemen Civil War, made the first use of poison gas in warfare since World War II, dropping chemical weapons, believed to be phosgene, on the village of Al Kawma.
• The first Titan II nuclear intercontinental ballistic missiles became operational, with the activation by the U.S. at the Davis–Monthan Air Force Base near Tucson, Arizona.
• Representatives of NASA, the USAF Space Systems Division, The Aerospace Corporation, McDonnell Aircraft and Martin Aircraft met to investigate the structural integrity and compatibility of the Gemini spacecraft and the Gemini rocket. The contractors had been instructed to furnish all available structural data to NASA by July 15.
• Emile Griffith defeated Luis Manuel Rodríguez at Madison Square Garden to regain his welterweight boxing title for a third time. Rodriguez had defeated Griffith in a bout on March 31.
• The U.S. National Museum of Naval Aviation opened at Naval Air Station Pensacola in Pensacola, Florida.