June 1972

June 1, 1972 (Thursday)

• Andreas Baader, co-founder of the "Baader-Meinhof Gang", was arrested after West German police traced him to a warehouse in Munich. Captured also were Holger Meins and Jan-Carl Raspe. The other half of a couple compared to Bonnie and Clyde, Ulrike Meinhof, was still on the run.
• The Convention for the Conservation of Antarctic Seals was signed in London by twelve nations.
• The Iraq Petroleum Company was completely nationalized by the government of Iraq, through its Public Law 69, making the company part of the state-owned Iraq National Oil Company.
• Pablo Picasso completed his final painting, The Embrace, at his home in Mougins, France. He died ten months later at the age of 91.
• Alice Cooper released their breakout album School's Out.

  June 2, 1972 (Friday)

• The Passamaquoddy and Penobscot Indian tribes filed Joint Tribal Council of the Passamaquoddy Tribe v. Morton, a suit against the State of Maine in the U.S. District Court in Portland. Attorney Tom Tureen sued for enforcement of a treaty that provided the tribe ownership of 2/3 of Maine. Judgment would be made in favor of the Indian tribes in 1980.
• The Four Power Agreement on Berlin was signed by the foreign ministers of the Allied Powers in World War II, as Alec Douglas-Home , Maurice Schumann, Andrei Gromyko and William P. Rogers met in West Berlin.
• The United Republic of Cameroon was proclaimed by Federal Republic of Cameroon President Ahmadou Ahidjo, following a referendum where voters supported a resolution to end separate cabinets for the east and west portions of the African nation. East Cameroon Premier Simon Pierre Tchoungui and West Cameroon Premier Salomon Tandeng Muna assumed jobs in President Ahidjo's new cabinet and the office of Prime Minister was abolished.
• Major Roger Locher, whose F-4D had been shot down on May 10, was finally rescued after 23 days behind enemy lines. He was northwest of Hanoi and within of the heavily defended Yên Bái Air Base. 7th Air Force General John Vogt canceled the entire strike mission set for Hanoi that day and dedicated all available resources to rescuing Lochar. The direct task force of 119 aircraft successfully pulled him out of the jungle without any losses. His time behind enemy lines and successful rescue was a record for the Vietnam War. It was the farthest penetration of an American search and rescue operation into North Vietnam.
• Born: Wayne Brady, American comedian and game show host; in Orlando, Florida

  June 3, 1972 (Saturday)

• Sally Priesand became the first American woman to be ordained as a rabbi, as one of 26 Hebrew Union College graduates ordained at the Isaac M. Wise Temple in Cincinnati.
• Born: Ashk Dahlén, Swedish scholar and translator, in Tafresh

  June 4, 1972 (Sunday)

• African-American activist Angela Davis was acquitted by an all-white jury in San Jose, California, after a 14-week trial. Davis, formerly a 28-year-old instructor at UCLA, had been charged with conspiracy for murder and kidnapping in a 1970 murder of a judge in Marin County. Jurors, who deliberated over the weekend, said later that they had doubted her guilt throughout the trial.
• Soviet author Joseph Brodsky was summoned to the Leningrad office of the Ministry of the Interior, where he was told that he was being expelled from U.S.S.R. immediately. He was then put on an Aeroflot flight to Vienna. Brodsky settled in the United States, where he later became the American poet Laureate, and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1987.
• The first presidential election held in the Khmer Republic resulted in a victory for the incumbent, Lon Nol, although counting within the capital of Phnom Penh showed a majority for challenger In Tam. Lon Nol ordered the military to collect and count the poll results from the countryside, where In Tam had had greater support, and was soon declared the winner.
• Died: Robert Harrill, 79, the "Fort Fisher Hermit"

  June 5, 1972 (Monday)

• The United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, also called the Stockholm Conference, convened in Sweden, with representatives from 113 nations in attendance for the largest international meeting ever held on ecological issues. The twelve-day conference led to the creation of UNEP, the United Nations Environment Programme. June 5 is now observed annually by the U.N. as World Environment Day.
• G. Gordon Liddy spoke with James W. McCord Jr. about problems with getting anything useful from wiretaps planted more than a week before on the phone of DNC Chairman Larry O'Brien. Liddy recounted later that if the problem were not fixed, McCord's team would get no further money from the Committee to Re-Elect the President, "because the job should have been done correctly the first time". The Watergate burglars were caught after breaking into O'Brien's office again on June 17, 1972.

  June 6, 1972 (Tuesday)

• An explosion killed 426 coal miners at the Wankie No. 2 Colliery in Hwange, Rhodesia. In addition to 176 Rhodesians, the dead hailed from various nations—Zambia, Mozambique, Malawi, Tanzania, Britain, South Africa, Namibia, the Caprivi Strip and Botswana.
• U.S. Senator George McGovern of South Dakota won the Democratic primary in California, along with 274 delegates, putting him far in the lead for his party's nomination for president.
• Voters in Montana approved a new constitution.
• U.S. Patent No. 3,668,658 was granted to the IBM Corporation for the first "floppy disk".
• Died: Abraham Adrian Albert, 66, American mathematician

  June 7, 1972 (Wednesday)

• The U.S. Department of Labor issued the first regulations in America to limit exposure to asbestos. At the time, there were 200,000 workers in the asbestos industry.
• Ananda Mohan Chakrabarty became the first person to apply for a patent for a genetically engineered living organism, a strain of Pseudomonas bacteria that could consume crude oil. The U.S. Supreme Court would uphold the right to patent a living organism in 1980 in Diamond v. Chakrabarty.
• The 1950s nostalgia musical Grease began the first of 3,388 performances on Broadway, running until April 13, 1980.
• A measurable amount of rain fell in Phoenix, Arizona for the first time since the start of the year, after a drought in the American city that had gone on for 160 consecutive days, a record for any major U.S. city. The capital of Arizona, which had more than one million people in its metropolitan area and 600,000 within city limits, had last seen precipitation on December 29, 1971, before the 1972 thunderstorm brought a downpour that spilled over downtown street curbs within minutes.
• Born: Karl Urban, New Zealand actor, in Wellington
• Died: E. M. Forster, 91, British novelist

  June 8, 1972 (Thursday)

• A South Vietnamese village outside of Trang Bang was bombed with napalm in an errant air strike by the South Vietnamese Army, shortly after Nick Ut took a photograph that became an iconic symbol of the horrors of war. The wirephoto, published on the front pages of newspapers that evening and the next morning, showed children crying in pain from their burns, including a 9-year-old girl, Phan Thị Kim Phúc, who had torn her clothes off after catching fire. The image would win a Pulitzer Prize.

  June 9, 1972 (Friday)

• At 10:45 p.m., the Canyon Lake Dam at Rapid City, South Dakota, gave way under the pressure of a downpour, sending millions of gallons of water through the city. The results of the Black Hills flood were 238 people killed, and 3,057 more injured. More than 5,000 vehicles and 700 homes were destroyed, and the total damages were.
• Bruce Springsteen received his big break as he was signed to a ten-record deal by CBS Records.
• Born: Wes Scantlin, American rock musician, in Kansas City, Missouri
• Died: Lt. Col. John Paul Vann, 47; later the subject of book and film A Bright Shining Lie; in a helicopter crash

  June 10, 1972 (Saturday)

• Barbara Jordan, President Pro Tempore of the Texas State Senate, was sworn in as Acting Governor of Texas for one day as Governor Preston Smith and Lieutenant Governor Ben Barnes were absent, becoming the first African-American woman in history to serve as a state Governor.

  June 11, 1972 (Sunday)

• Deep Throat, perhaps the most famous pornographic film of all time, made its debut, at the World Theatre in Manhattan. Made for $25,000, the film returned more than $600,000,000 worldwide.

  June 12, 1972 (Monday)

• The city of North Charleston, South Carolina, made up of predominantly African-American areas that had been kept outside of the city limits of predominantly white Charleston, was formally incorporated, 14 months after a referendum had resulted in a majority of voters approving a separate city. North Charleston, with a roughly 58% black and Hispanic population, contrasts with 70% white Charleston.
• American Airlines Flight 96 made an emergency landing after an improperly closed cargo door was blown off at, shortly after the DC-10 took off from Detroit for a flight to Buffalo. Captain Bryce McCormick struggled with failing flight controls to land the jet, and the 67 people on board, at Cleveland. In a similar accident in 1974 on Turkish Airlines Flight 981, all 346 people on board were killed after the cargo door fell off.

  June 13, 1972 (Tuesday)

• Captain Nikolay Grigoryevich Petrov, a GRU secret agent stationed at the Soviet Embassy in Indonesia, defected by surrendering to the American naval attache in Jakarta. Petrov, who had stolen the equivalent of $900 from his supervisor and then panicked, was given the call sign "Houdini" and relocated to the United States, where he supplied detailed information about GRU activities to the CIA. Against the advice of the agency, he returned to the U.S.S.R. in the late 1970s, and was never heard from again.
• Died:
• *Georg von Békésy, 73, Hungarian biophysicist, 1961 Nobel laureate
• *Stephanie von Hohenlohe, 80, German World War II spy