March 1965

[March 1], 1965 (Monday)

• The first general election in the Bechuanaland Protectorate to feature universal suffrage took place throughout the former British colony and African protectorate. The Bechuanaland Democratic Party won 28 of the 31 seats in the new parliament, and the BDP leader, Sir Seretse Khama, became the first prime minister. Bechuanaland would be granted independence from the United Kingdom in 1966 as Botswana. Khama, who had been destined to become the Chief Khama IV of the Bamangwato tribe, had been ostracized for his interracial marriage to a white British woman, Ruth Williams, and exiled from his homeland until 1956, then returned to even greater popularity.
• The United States Supreme Court rendered its opinion in Freedman v. Maryland, unanimously striking down a Maryland censorship law that had given the state censor the authority to ban the showing of a film and putting the burden on the film exhibitor to file a lawsuit in order to appeal. Under the new rule, it would become the burden of the censor to prove that a film content was not protected by the U.S. Constitution, and the censor would now have the burden of filing for an injunction against the showing of a film. The guidelines of the ruling would apply to all state censorship laws.
• Olympic swimming champion and 1964 Australian of the Year Dawn Fraser was banned from competition for ten years by the Australian Amateur Swimming Union, in apparent disapproval of her partying lifestyle and for her behavior during the 1964 Summer Olympics.
• At 8:12 a.m., A natural gas explosion killed 28 people at the La Salle Heights Apartments in La Salle, Quebec. Eighteen of the apartment units in the three-story building at Bergevin and Jean Milot Streets were destroyed, and most of the dead were children.
• Bruce McLaren won the 1965 Australian Grand Prix, held at the Longford Circuit at Launceston, Tasmania, but the race was marred by a crash that killed driver Rocky Tresise and a cameraman, Robin Babera.
• The U.S. made its first underground silo launch of the new Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missile. The test took place at Ellsworth Air Force Base near Rapid City, South Dakota.
• East African members of the British Commonwealth began negotiations with the "Common Market".
• NASA's Office of Manned Space Flight began two days of Project Gemini design certification review. Gemini 3 was ready for launch as soon as the planned test and checkout procedures at Cape Kennedy were completed.
• Born:
• *Booker T, American professional wrestling champion and promoter; as Robert Brooker Tio Huffman in Plain Dealing, Bossier, Louisiana
• *Mike Dean, American record producer, audio engineer and multi-instrumentalist; in Houston
• *Stewart Elliott, Canadian-born American thoroughbred racing jockey; in Toronto

  [March 2], 1965 (Tuesday)

• Canadian drug lord and mobster Lucien Rivard escaped from the Bourdeaux Jail in Montreal, where he had been held for ten months while fighting extradition to the United States to face charges of drug trafficking. At about 6:20 p.m., Rivard and a fellow inmate, Andre Durocher, asked one of the guards for permission to get a hose "so they could flood the jail's hockey rink". After a guard escorted them to the storage room, Durocher pointed a gun at the guard, tied him and two maintenance workers up with wire, overpowered another guard and took his shotgun, scaled the high wall around the jail with a ladder, used the hose to slide to the ground, hijacked a car that was stopped at a traffic light, and made their escape. The incident would lead to a scandal in which the members of the cabinet of Prime Minister Lester Pearson were accused of complicity in the escape, and which would ultimately lead to the resignation of Canada's Minister of Justice, Guy Favreau. Rivard would be recaptured on July 16 at a cottage southwest of the jail.
• Operation Rolling Thunder, the daily bombing of North Vietnam by the United States, began as the 8th and the 13th Bomber Squadrons set off from the Biên Hòa Airfield with eight B-57 Canberra bombers and the protection of F-100 Super Sabres. The first raid was on an ammunition dump at Xom Bong, in North Vietnamese territory north of the Demilitarized Zone, and did serious damage, but at the cost of three F-105 and two F-100 fighters, and the capture of the one surviving pilot of the five; a historian would later note, "America was shocked that its large, high-tech, expensive air force, in combat for the first time since the Korean War, had been humbled by a third world country, a communist one at that." The operation would have 700,000 sorties until its halt on October 31, 1968, without bringing any visible end to the Vietnam War. "Rolling Thunder's ultimate failure came as a result of an inappropriate strategy that dictated a conventional air war against North Vietnam to affect what was basically an unconventional war in South Vietnam."
• The Sound of Music, starring Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer in 20th Century Fox's film adaptation of the Rodgers & Hammerstein musical, premiered at the Rivoli Theater in New York City. It would be released in Los Angeles on March 10, and elsewhere in the U.S. on the Wednesdays that followed. "Sneak" previews had also been held on January 15 at the Mann Theatre in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and in Tulsa, Oklahoma the next day.
• In the U.S. city of Philadelphia, four men were driving past the Fidelity Philadelphia Trust Company bank when they spotted a bag that had been accidentally dropped by a Brink's armored car, and picked up what turned out to be $40,000 in cash. They were arrested four days later after one of the group used some of his newfound wealth to buy a 1963 Cadillac automobile.
• An avalanche in the Austrian Alps killed 14 college students from Sweden. The students were passengers on a bus that was taking them to the ski resort at Obertauern, and were on the Radstadt Tauern road. They died after falling rocks swept the vehicle down into a valley below.
• The U.S. space program suffered a setback when a $12,000,000 Atlas-Centaur rocket exploded during an attempted uncrewed launch. The rocket "rose about three feet from its pad, lost power from two of its three engines, crashed back to the ground and erupted into a brilliant orange ball of fire".

  [March 3], 1965 (Wednesday)

• Wilbur Mills, the Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, "pulled a 'legislative coup' that would forever change the nation's health care system" with the surprise recommendation that all three of the alternative proposals for health care should be combined. The result would be that the Social Security Amendments of 1965 would have the Democrats' King-Anderson Bill as "Medicare Part A", the Republicans' "Bettercare" bill would become "Medicare Part B", and the "Eldercare" bill would become Medicaid.
• Congress voted to repeal a requirement that one-fourth of bank deposit liabilities of the Federal Reserve System had to be matched by an equivalent amount of gold. The rule had been in effect for 52 years since the passage of the original Federal Reserve Act in 1913. President Johnson signed the bill into the law the next day. The requirement of gold backing for one-fourth of bank notes on deposit in the 12 Federal Reserve System would continue until March 18, 1968.
• The U.S. House of Representatives voted 257–165 to approve the Appalachian Regional Development Act, the first of the war on poverty bills, a month after the U.S. Senate had given 62–22 approval. President Lyndon Johnson would sign the one-billion-dollar measure, which provided $1,092,200,000 toward highway construction and other projects, on March 9.*The bombing raids by the United States against North Vietnam were not a "war", according to a U.S. State Department release. The bombing "does not bring about the existence of a state of war, which is a legal characterization rather than an actual description," a spokesman wrote. Instead, there was "armed aggression from the north against the Republic of Viet Nam" and "Pursuant to South Viet Nam's request and consultations between our two governments, the Republic of Viet Nam and the United States are engaged in collective defense against that armed aggression."
• Lincoln City, Oregon was created by the merger of five towns. The name, suggested by a group of schoolchildren, was selected in a contest.
• Born: Dragan Stojković, Serbian footballer and football manager; in Niš, Yugoslavia
• Died: Renato Biasutti, 76, Italian geographer and physical anthropologist who wrote The Races and People of the World, classifying homo sapiens into "five subspecies, sixteen primary races, and fifty-two secondary races".

  [March 4], 1965 (Thursday)

• At 6:04 a.m., 17 people were killed by the explosion of a natural gas pipeline that destroyed a neighborhood in Natchitoches, Louisiana. The blast left a deep crater where seven homes had stood. The disaster was later traced to high pressure that had ruptured the pipe; an area of of land was incinerated, and pieces of metal weighing hundreds of pounds were hurled as far as by the explosion.
• An angry mob assembled at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow to protest the bombing of North Vietnam, before finally being driven away by police on horseback and soldiers. The next day, the Soviet Union formally apologized to the U.S. government and began replacement of 310 broken windows in the ten-story high embassy building, and the removal of stains from more than 200 inkpots that had been shattered against the walls.
• The government of British Prime Minister Harold Wilson survived a censure motion in the House of Commons by a margin of only five votes, with 293 in favor of the condemnation of his national defense policy, and 298 against.
• The U.S. formally requested New Zealand to participate in the Vietnam War. Prime Minister Keith Holyoake did not respond initially, and a second request would be sent eight days later.
• Born: Khaled Hosseini, Afghan novelist, UNHCR Ambassador, and former physician; in Kabul
• Died: Willard Motley, 55, African-American novelist and author of Knock on Any Door, later adapted for film, died of a gangrene infection contracted while living in Mexico City.