March 1968

March 1, 1968 (Friday)

• Three North Vietnamese fishing trawlers were destroyed by the U.S. Navy and South Vietnamese forces while attempting to resupply the Viet Cong, and a fourth was turned back as part of Operation Market Time. Three of the trawlers were destroyed; a fourth vessel headed back out to sea and, because it got more than away from the coast and reached international waters, the U.S. Navy was forbidden from firing on the North Vietnamese ship. "American patrol boats were powerless to do anything except to request the flagless, unmarked trawler to identify itself. It refused and continued unscratched." An unidentified navy officer told the UPI, "Sure it's crazy, but it's the rules of the game."
• In what would later be called the "Battle of Valle Giulia", protests became violent at La Sapienza, the 650-year-old university in Rome. Italian students fought with city police outside the university's Faculty of Agriculture building on the Via di Valle Giulia. According to one account, "Students threw stones and incendiary bombs against police armed with nightsticks and hoses", and hundreds of people were injured.
• South Vietnamese troops uncovered a mass grave in the City of Hue containing about 100 bodies. Official sources said the dead all found with their hands tied behind their backs were policemen, civil servants and military men murdered by the invading Viet Cong and North Vietnamese forces. The mayor of Hue reported that the Communists had executed around 300 people during their occupation of the city.
• Operation Coburg, an Australian and New Zealand military action, came to an end. During the six weeks of the operation, the Australians had lost 17 killed and 61 wounded, with allied casualties including two New Zealanders and one American killed, and eight New Zealanders and six Americans wounded.
• The first public performance of an Andrew Lloyd Webber–Tim Rice musical took place when Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat was staged in its original form as a "pop cantata", by pupils of Colet Court preparatory school in Hammersmith, London, UK.
• Huntington, Indiana, became the second city in the nation to begin operation of a 9-1-1 emergency call system.
• Country musicians Johnny Cash and June Carter were married in Franklin, Kentucky, with Merle Kilgore as best man.
• Born: Muhō Noelke, West German-born Japanese Zen Buddhist monk; as Jens Olaf Christian Nölke in West Berlin

  March 2, 1968 (Saturday)

• The Soviet Union launched the uncrewed Zond 4 mission as a test of its Soyuz 7K-L1 space capsule and the feasibility of a crewed space mission to the Moon. By design, the launch was made "not to fly towards the Moon, but directly opposite" and to travel to a distance of from Earth, a bit less than the closest perigee of the Moon of. After reaching its furthest distance on March 6, Zond 4 returned to Earth on March 9 but had to be destroyed after a failed re-entry.
• The United States made its first field test of its Spartan anti-ballistic missile. The missile was designed to carry a five-megaton W-71 nuclear warhead to intercept incoming missiles and to detonate close enough to neutralize them before they re-entered the atmosphere.
• In front of 97,887 fans at Wembley Stadium, Leeds United defeated Arsenal, 1–0, to win the 1968 Football League Cup Final.
• Born: Daniel Craig, English film actor who portrayed Agent 007 in the James Bond series starting in 2006, succeeding Pierce Brosnan; in Chester
• Died: Frank Erickson, 72, wealthy American bookie who had become a multi-millionaire by conducting gambling operations

  March 3, 1968 (Sunday)

• Television Wales and the West an independent British TV network known in some areas of Wales as Teledu Cymru, broadcast its last original programming. Following a one-hour variety special called All Good Things..., and a five-minute commercial break, John Betjeman appeared at 11:35 in the evening with a 15-minute commentary titled Come to an End. The next day, Harlech Television would replace TWW and fill its time with a temporary broadcast schedule called "Independent Television Service for Wales and the West", showing reruns of old TWW shows and feeds from ITV. Harlech would finally go on the air with its own network on May 20.
• A group of Asian American stage actors held a press conference in New York City to announce that they would take a stand against the portrayal of Chinese and Japanese characters by Caucasian actors in "yellowface" makeup. That evening, the new organization, Oriental Actors of America, picketed the opening of the Broadway musical Here's Where I Belong at the Billy Rose Theatre; the producers had bypassed Chinese-American actors to cast the role of a Chinese servant character, and awarded the part to a white actor in makeup.
• The Liberian-registered tanker Ocean Eagle, manned by a Greek crew, ran aground at San Juan, Puerto Rico, then broke in two and spilled oil on the beaches in San Juan Harbor. The front section of the Ocean Eagle blocked the channel leading out of the harbor, trapping three U.S. Navy submarines, two American sub tenders and an American destroyer, as well as four Canadian Navy destroyers, along with five freighters.
• In his continuing campaign against Jews in Iraq, Iraqi Prime Minister Tahir Yahya announced a new regulation forbidding Jews from selling their property without government approval. In the nine months since the Six-Day War, Iraqi Jews had been fired from public office and had had their bank accounts frozen, while Jewish students were barred from university educations.
• Born: Brian Leetch, American professional ice hockey defenseman and Hockey Hall of Fame inductee; in Corpus Christi, Texas

  March 4, 1968 (Monday)

• Joe Frazier knocked out Buster Mathis in the 11th round to win a share of the vacant world heavyweight boxing title, in the second feature of a "championship doubleheader" at the new Madison Square Garden in New York City; Frazier was recognized as champ by the New York State Athletic Commission, while the World Boxing Association and the World Boxing Council had still not filled the vacancy left after the different groups had stripped Muhammad Ali of his crown. Prior to the Frazier-Mathis bout, world middleweight boxing champion Emile Griffith lost to Italian professional boxer Nino Benvenuti.
• The film adaptation, by Franco Zeffirelli, of Romeo and Juliet was shown for the first time, as the feature of the annual Royal Film Performance at the Odeon Cinema in London's Leicester Square. Queen Elizabeth II and her husband, Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh were in attendance along with their son, Prince Charles. The American press made note of the fact that the silver screen version of William Shakespeare's late 16th Century play included nudity and that the love scene between teenage actors Leonard Whiting and Olivia Hussey "was passed for general exhibition by Britain's board of movie censors which decided it was filmed in impeccable taste."
• The Presidium of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia voted to dismantle censorship of the press, an unprecedented step in a Communist nation. At the end of the week, newspapers would begin printing demands that President Antonín Novotný step down. The Central Publications Bureau, that had previously been charged with reviewing material before it was published, was removed from the jurisdiction of Czechoslovakia's Ministry of the Interior and suspended political censorship.
• Exactly a month before his assassination, Martin Luther King Jr. announced the "Nonviolent Poor People's March on Washington", to take place on Monday, April 22, 1968, and to include impoverished Americans from all races. During the rest of the month, he would work toward preparing the event.
• Born:
• * Giovanni Carrara, Venezuelan Major League Baseball player, El Tigre, Venezuela
• * Patsy Kensit, British actress, in Lambeth, London
• *Kyriakos Mitsotakis, Greek politician, Prime Minister of Greece, in Athens
• Died: Einar Sissener, 70, Norwegian actor and director

  March 5, 1968 (Tuesday)

• A "musical chess match" between painter Marcel Duchamp and musical composer John Cage took place at an engineering festival at Ryerson Polytechnical Institute in Toronto. With the title "Reunion", the two men "played chess on a board hooked up with sixty-four photoresistors— one per square", with "sonic input" from independent, unrelated compositions by Gordon Mumma, David Tudor, David Behrman, and Lowell Cross, who designed the electronic circuitry. Duchamp quickly defeated Cage as an amused audience watched.
• What would become known as the "East L.A. walkouts" began in large numbers when thousands of Hispanic students walked out of two high schools in East Los Angeles, California. At Garfield High School, which would later become famous in the film Stand and Deliver, "2,700 of the 3,750 predominantly Mexican-American students" walked across the street when classes were dismissed for lunch, and refused to come back inside until the day's end. Hispanic students also walked out of Jefferson High School, where African American students were in the majority.
• All 67 people on board Air France Flight 212 were killed when the Boeing 707 smashed into La Grande Soufrière mountain while making its approach to Pointe-à-Pitre on the island of Guadeloupe. The flight was making its sixth stop on a route that had originated in Santiago de Chile with a final destination of Paris. Almost two years later, another Air France Flight 212 on the same Santiago to Paris route would crash after taking off from Caracas to Pointe-à-Pitre, killing all 62 people on board.
• Born: Gordon Bajnai, Prime Minister of Hungary from 2009 to 2010; in Szeged