March 1969

[March 1], 1969 (Saturday)

• Jim Morrison, the lead singer for The Doors, performed a controversial rock concert before 12,000 fans at the Dinner Key Auditorium in Miami. Three days later, a Miami court would issue warrants for his arrest on a felony charge of indecent exposure and five misdemeanor charges, although by that time, he was no longer in Miami. Morrison would return to Miami to be arraigned on the criminal charges on November 9 and remain free after posting bond. Following 16 days of testimony, Morrison would be found guilty of the indecent exposure charge on September 20, 1970, and would be sentenced to six months in jail and a $500 fine, but would post bail while the case was on appeal. Morrison would die of heart failure on July 3, 1971, during the time that the appeal was in progress.
• Clay Shaw, the only person ever indicted for conspiracy in the assassination of John F. Kennedy, was acquitted of all charges by a jury in New Orleans. Rejecting the argument by district attorney Jim Garrison that a conviction would "restore justice and truth and freedom in this country", the jury deliberated for only 55 minutes and concluded that Garrison had not proven his case.
• Born: Javier Bardem, Spanish film actor and Academy Award winner; in Las Palmas, Canary Islands

  [March 2], 1969 (Sunday)

• Soviet and Chinese forces fought a battle on an island claimed by both nations in the middle of the Ussuri River that separated the countries. The extent of Chinese losses was unknown, but the Soviet Union disclosed later that 31 Red Army soldiers had been killed and 14 others wounded in the initial battle.
• Jack "Murph the Surf" Murphy was sentenced to life imprisonment following his conviction on first degree murder in the deaths of two people in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. His co-defendant, Jack Griffith, was found guilty of second degree murder and given a 45-year prison sentence. Under Florida law at that time, Murphy would be eligible for parole after seven years despite the life sentence, while Griffith would not be eligible for 15 years.
• Eleven spectators at a dragstrip track were killed, and more than 40 others injured, when one of the race cars went out of control at a speed of per hour. The car, a 1969 Chevrolet Camaro, crashed through a chain link fence at the Yellow River Drag Racing Strip in Covington, Georgia.
• In Toulouse, France conducted the first Concorde test flight. Chief test pilot André Turcat raced down the runway at Toulouse-Blagnac Airport, attaining a speed of after and took the supersonic jet skyward for 27 minutes before returning to Toulouse.

  [March 3], 1969 (Monday)

• At 11:00 in the morning local time, the United States launched Apollo 9, with astronauts James McDivitt, David Scott and Rusty Schweickart, in a test of the Apollo Lunar Module's ability to undock from, and then redock with, the lunar orbiter. Associated Press reporter Paul Recer described the mission as "a flight that will put America on the moon's threshold or slam the door indefinitely".
• Sirhan Sirhan took the witness stand to testify in his own defense at his trial for the murder of Bobby Kennedy, and, in questioning by defense attorney Grant Cooper, answer that he had shot Kennedy and that he recognized incriminating handwriting as his own, but denied that he remembered the shooting.
• The United States Navy established the Navy Fighter Weapons School at Naval Air Station Miramar.
• Died:
• *Fred Alexander, 88, American tennis player and winner of six Grand Slam doubles events
• *Ali Jawdat al-Aiyubi, 82, three-time Prime Minister of Iraq

  [March 4], 1969 (Tuesday)

• The formative event for the Union of Concerned Scientists took place at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, when scientists who were working on military projects conducted a work stoppage to protest "against misdirected scientific research and the abuse of scientific technology"; researchers at 30 other American universities soon conducted their own temporary strikes. Physicist Kurt Gottfried wrote the UCS mission statement, "Beyond March 4", to be distributed to the MIT participants and then to scientists on other campuses, writing that "the Stone Age may return on the gleaming wings of Science, and what might now shower immeasurable material blessings upon mankind, may even bring about its total destruction. Beware, I say; time may be short."
• Between March 4 and 22, a series of Apollo Telescope Mount extravehicular activity neutral buoyancy tests were performed at Marshall Space Flight Center. Astronauts participated in both scuba gear and pressurized space suits. The purpose of the tests was to evaluate the performance and procedures for moving film cassettes to the two ATM work stations and to perform some of the tasks required at these stations. Recommendations were made for the improvement of most of the features evaluated. As a result of the tests, equipment and procedures modifications were made.
• Born:
• *Chaz Bono, American transgender activist, musician and filmmaker; as Chastity Bono in Los Angeles, to entertainers Sonny Bono and Cher
• *Patrick Roach, Canadian TV and film actor; in Halifax, Nova Scotia
• Died: Nicholas Schenck, 88, Russian-born American theater chain and film studio executive

  [March 5], 1969 (Wednesday)

• Gustav Heinemann was narrowly elected President of West Germany on the third round of balloting by the 1,023 members of the federal and state legislatures, conducted in West Berlin despite protests from the government of East Germany. The final round came down to Heinemann, the nation's Justice Minister, and Defense Minister Gerhard Schroeder, after no candidate had been able to get the absolute majority of votes on the first two rounds. When the number of candidates was reduced to two, Heinemann won the largely ceremonial head of state post by a margin of 512 to 506.
• Serial killer Tony Costa was arrested in Boston an hour after police discovered the dismembered bodies of two 23-year-old women who were last seen on January 24. The women had had the misfortune of renting a room at a boardinghouse in Provincetown, where Costa had also been staying, and had vanished minutes after the house proprietor had introduced them. At the time of Costa's arrest, police had found four bodies buried in the sand dunes of Cape Cod near Truro, Massachusetts.
• South Vietnam's Prime Minister, Tran Van Huong, narrowly escaped an assassination attempt that came as he was being driven to his home at 1:00 in the afternoon in Saigon. Huong's car was attacked by four members of a Viet Cong assassination team, all of whom were wearing stolen uniforms of the ARVN Rangers; fortunately for Huong, the attempt took place in the presence of Saigon police and ARVN troops who opened fire and gave the driver time to accelerate and escape.
• Switzerland's President, Ludwig von Moos, announced to the lower house of parliament in Bern that the seven-man executive council planned to present a constitutional amendment to grant women full power to vote and to be elected to political office, breaking with one of the Alpine nation's oldest traditions.
• All 17 passengers and both crewmembers on Prinair Flight 277 were killed when the propeller-driven de Havilland Heron crashed into a mountain as it was making its approach to San Juan, Puerto Rico on its flight from St. Thomas, Virgin Islands.

  [March 6], 1969 (Thursday)

• The "Moon suit", to be worn by Apollo mission astronauts on the Moon was successfully tested in the vacuum of outer space for the first time. Apollo 9 astronaut Russell L. Schweickart donned the cumbersome pressurized garment and performed a spacewalk for 37 minutes, proving that the suit would be effective for the Apollo 11 astronauts to wear for an extended period on the Moon.
• For the first time during the Vietnam War, a serviceman in the U.S. military was convicted after a court-martial for desertion to Sweden. Setting an example for others, the court-martial tribunal sentenced U.S. Army Spec. 4 Edwin C. Arnett, a cook, to four years imprisonment at hard labor and given a dishonorable discharge, after his trial at Fort Dix, New Jersey. At the time, there were 53,357 men who had been classified as deserters from the armed services as of the last figures. A study by a special U.S. Senate subcommittee also found that less than one percent of classified deserters were convicted of desertion, with a rate of 0.35% in the U.S. Army and 0.48% in the U.S. Navy.
• The number of Americans killed in action in the Vietnam War was reported by the U.S. Department of Defense to have been 32,376 as of the week that ended on March 1, soon to surpass the 33,629 U.S. deaths in the Korean War..
• Born: Tsering Wangmo Dhompa, Indian-born Tibetan poet; in Chennai, Tamil Nadu
• Died:
• *Óscar Osorio, 58, the exiled former President of El Salvador, died from kidney failure at a hospital in Houston.
• *Keisai Aoki, 75, Japanese Okinawan missionary

  [March 7], 1969 (Friday)

• The Apollo 9 astronauts completed the most critical part of the mission, successfully testing the maneuvers needed for a crewed spacecraft to turn around, dock with the lunar module carried from a separately orbiting section of the rocket, allow two members of the crew to safely climb into it, undock it, fired rockets to ascend above the command module to an altitude of and, because of the longer time to make a circuit of the Earth, "gradually fell behind, reaching a maximum trailing distance" of from the command module. At that point, "Spider" fired the descent engine, jettisoned the lower half of the LEM to its original altitude and then flew back. After locating Gumdrop and redocking with it, McDivitt and Schweickart crossed back into the command module, then jettisoned the LEM.
• In Moscow, an angry mob of thousands of Russians were brought by buses to the city center, marched to the embassy of the People's Republic of China and, over the next three hours, broke more than 100 windows and pelted the walls with hurled ink bottles. The demonstrations were made in response to the killing of Soviet troops during the border clash less than a week earlier, and got out of hand despite coordination by the Soviet government.
• With a crew of three, a U.S. Army helicopter rescued 124 South Koreans from a fire in a 13-story tall apartment building in Seoul. The copter made nine trips, including one where a crewmember rescued a woman who was hanging from her 12th-floor apartment.