November 1963

[November 1], 1963 (Friday)

• At 1:15 p.m. in Saigon, three Marine battalions of South Vietnam began their seizure of communications throughout the capital city, taking control of the city's radio stations, national and municipal police stations, and the public and Defense Ministry telecommunications centers. The acts were the first in a coup d'état against President Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu. The planners had set a deadline of 1:15 to either begin the coup or to call it off, and were waiting until visiting U.S. Admiral Harry Felt had departed. Admiral Felt's airplane took off at 1:00 p.m. Diem and Nhu quietly escaped Gia Long Palace by 8:00 p.m. and fled to refuge at the Roman Catholic church in the nearby Cholon section of the city.
• In the first test of the type of rocket to be used by U.S. astronauts in the Gemini program, Titan II development flight N-25 was launched from the Atlantic Missile Range. The modified Titan II missile carried an oxidizer surge chamber and fuel accumulator kit to reduce the amplitude of longitudinal vibration, a problem in earlier flights, to less than 0.25g, the maximum level tolerable in human spaceflight. The N-25 flight achieved a vibration level of 0.22g, within acceptable limits. Two later Titan II rocket flights would confirm that the surge chamber and accumulator kit had solved the problem.
• In the mountains of Puerto Rico, the Arecibo Observatory, along with the world's largest fixed-reflector radar and radio telescope, were officially dedicated. Assistant U.S. Secretary of Defense formally accepted the instrument for use by the DOD's Advanced Research Projects Agency.
• Lennox Madikane, Mxolisi Dam'ane and Felix Jaxa, three African National Congress members who had been convicted of violating South Africa's Sabotage Act of 1962 for inciting riots at Paarl the year before, were hanged at Robben Island prison.
• Born: Rick Allen, English drummer who plays for the hard rock band Def Leppard; in Dronfield, Derbyshire
• Died: Elsa Maxwell, 80, American gossip columnist and socialite

  [November 2], 1963 (Saturday)

• At 6:37 a.m., guards defending the Presidential Palace in Saigon raised the white flag of surrender after more than two hours of shelling by rebels within the South Vietnam military, but found that President Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, had slipped out of the surrounded building, apparently through a tunnel that emerged at a beauty parlor several blocks away. Around 8:00 a.m., witnesses outside the St. Francis Xavier Church in Cholon recognized Diem and Nhu, who had asked church authorities to notify the rebels that they were willing to surrender. The coup leader, General Duong Van Minh, sent a convoy to pick up the Ngo brothers, and General Mai Huu Xuan oversaw their arrest. After promising them safe conduct into exile, General Xuan had both men step into an M113 armored personnel carrier at 9:45 a.m. Reports differ as to whether the act was committed inside the APC by their captor, Captain Nguyễn Văn Nhung, or by General Xuan after torture at the National Police headquarters, but the Ngo brothers were tortured and then shot to death. The official announcement from the rebels on Radio Saigon, however, was that both men had committed suicide.
• U.S. President John F. Kennedy was scheduled to be driven in a motorcade in Chicago, along Jackson Boulevard and Michigan Avenue en route to the Hilton Hotel, and then to watch college football's annual Army–Navy Game, being held that year at Soldier Field. That morning, however, Kennedy abruptly canceled the trip, and announced that he would remain at the White House to confer with advisers about events in South Vietnam.
• Born: Borut Pahor, President of Slovenia from 2012 to 2022 and Prime Minister of Slovenia from 2008 to 2012; in Postojna, SR Slovenia, Yugoslavia

  [November 3], 1963 (Sunday)

• Barry E. Steiner, a 20-year old medical student at Boston University, was arrested at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport after having flown hundreds of thousands of miles on stolen airplane tickets. In 1963, it was commonplace to purchase a ticket at the airline counter, have the ticket agent fill it out, and then to board the airplane. Steiner's method was simply to reach behind an unattended counter at an airport, steal blank tickets, write in the flight number and destination of his choice, and then walk on to the appropriate plane. To avoid suspicion, he carried an authentic-looking Federal Aviation Administration badge and posed as an FAA official if needed.
• In "the most fair election ever to be held in Greece", as the British Embassy in Athens described it, voters brought Centre Union party leader Georgios Papandreou into office as Prime Minister. No party got a majority of the seats in Parliament, but the EK ended up with a 138 to 132 lead over the National Radical Union party of incumbent Premier Konstantinos Karamanlis.
• Soviet cosmonauts Andriyan Nikolayev and Valentina Tereshkova, who had been launched into space aboard Vostok 3 and Vostok 6, respectively, were married in Moscow in a ceremony attended by Party Secretary Khrushchev and other prominent government leaders. They had a daughter seven months later, and separated before the end of 1964, officially divorcing in 1982.
• Born: Davis Guggenheim, American film director and producer; in St. Louis

  [November 4], 1963 (Monday)

• The U.S. Secret Service concluded that the more secure and the larger of two locations for President Kennedy's fundraising luncheon in Dallas would be the "Women's Building" at Fair Park at the east side of downtown, rather than the Trade Mart on the west side near Dealey Plaza. Despite the recommendations of Chief Gerald Behn of the White House detail, and Dallas field office agent Forrest Sorrels, the state Democratic Party leaders in Texas settled on the Trade Mart. " different destination for the motorcade," author Vincent Bugliosi would write later, "would have meant a different route altogether, and no assassination."
• The Beatles appeared before the British royal family as "the seventh of nineteen acts" in the annual Royal Variety Performance at the Prince of Wales Theatre in London, and played a set of four songs. After the show, the "Fab Four" were greeted by Queen Elizabeth II, and had conversations with the Queen Mother, Princess Margaret and Lord Snowden. The event was taped, and the televised broadcast on November 11 would be watched by what was then a record 26 million viewers.
• Major General Duong Van Minh, and the other leaders of the new government of South Vietnam, approved "a hastily drawn provisional charter" to replace the 1956 Constitution, and giving the Revolutionary Military Council all executive and legislative power.
• The Sand War, a border dispute between Algeria and Morocco, finally came to an end, five days after the signing of a cease-fire agreement, with the mediation of a monitoring officer from Mali.
• Born: Lena Zavaroni, Scottish singer ; in Greenock, Renfrewshire
• Died: Carlos Magalhães de Azeredo, 91, Brazilian poet, short story writer, diplomat and journalist

  [November 5], 1963 (Tuesday)

• Ngo Dinh Can, the last member of the Ngo political family remaining in South Vietnam, was handed over to the new government on orders of U.S. Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., after an American military plane transported him to Saigon from Huế, where he had sought refuge at the American consulate. Put on trial for murder, the unpopular Can, who had ruled Central Vietnam as a dictator during the regime of his brother, President Ngo Dinh Diem, would be executed by a firing squad six months later.
• McDonnell Aircraft Corporation reviewed work on the beryllium shingles to be used for the heat shield of the Gemini spacecraft, after a labor strike at Pioneer Astro Industries had delayed shingle tests. The finished shingles had problems with flaking, lamination, and cracking, and the decision was made to substitute chemical etching for machine tooling wherever possible and to use lighter cuts where machine tooling was unavoidable.
• Giovanni Leone resigned as Prime Minister of Italy six months after forming a minority government. President Antonio Segni requested Leone to remain on the job until a successor could be found to form a new cabinet of ministers.
• Born:
• *Andrea McArdle, American child actress and singer known for portraying "Annie" in the Broadway musical of the same name; in Philadelphia
• *Tatum O'Neal, American child actress and Academy Award winner known for portraying "Addie" in the film Paper Moon; in Los Angeles
• *Yair Lapid, Leader of the Opposition in Israel since 2023; in Tel Aviv

  [November 6], 1963 (Wednesday)

• In Midland, Texas, 17-year old Laura Welch, who would later marry George W. Bush and become the First Lady upon his inauguration as President of the United States, ran a stop sign at the intersection of Farm to Market Road 868 and Big Spring Street, and crashed into the side of a car driven by one of her classmates at Robert E. Lee High School, 17-year old Michael Dutton Douglas. Laura Bush would finally write about the accident after her husband left office, in her 2010 memoir, Spoken from the Heart, recounting that she and her friend were hurrying to a drive-in movie. Douglas, whose neck was broken, died at the local hospital.
• Coup leader General Duong Van Minh formally took office as the new head of state of South Vietnam, with civilian Nguyen Ngoc Tho as the prime minister.
• Died: Daniel Mannix, 99, Irish-born Australian clergyman who served as the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Melbourne since 1917

  [November 7], 1963 (Thursday)

• In the Wunder von Lengede, 11 underground miners were rescued two weeks after they had been feared drowned in a deep iron mine near Lengede in West Germany. They had been among 129 men who were working underground when a sludge pond had given way, flooding the mines. Stuck nearly below the surface of the buttock, 21 people in their group had been able to find air in an unsupported section of the mine, but rockfalls had killed 10 of the survivors over the days that followed. By November 2, the forty people still entombed had all been given up for dead, but sound equipment picked up tapping, and drilling commenced. After five days, the drilled hole was large enough to lower a bomb-shaped cylinder into the cavity. The first person to climb inside and to be brought to the surface was 51-year-old Heinz Kull, and over the next hour, the other ten came out. Last of the group was Bernhard Wolter, credited by his comrades with having kept up their hopes during the ordeal.
• Nelson Rockefeller, the Governor of New York, entered the 1964 U.S. presidential campaign by announcing on NBC's Today news show that he would be a candidate for the Republican Party nomination. Following that appearance from a studio in Albany, he flew to Nashua, New Hampshire to address a crowd of supporters. U.S. Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, the front-runner for the Republican nomination in polls of voters, made no comment but was expected to enter the race. President John F. Kennedy was not expected to have any opposition in his nomination as the Democratic Party candidate for 1964.
• Major General Leighton I. Davis outlined U.S. Department of Defense plans for support in carrying out Project Gemini operations. As DOD representative, Major General Davis acted as DOD's single point of contact with NASA, responsible for meeting NASA's needs for DOD support in the launch, tracking network, planned contingency recovery and medical assistance, as well as communications and public affairs.