November 1968

[November 1], 1968 (Friday)

• The bombardment of North Vietnam by the United States halted at 9:00 in the evening local time as airplanes stopped flying missions, ships stopped firing shells and ground units near the border halted artillery fire.
• Heavy rains in north Italy began, causing flash flooding of the Toce River and its streams and killing 61 people in Valle Mosso. Another 12 were found in the surrounding Province of Biella within its first day.
• The MPAA's new rating system went into effect, with films branded "G", "M", "R" or "X". "M" later became "PG".
• Born: Silvio Fauner, Italian cross-country skier and 1995 world champion in the 50 km race; in San Pietro di Cadore
• Died: Georgios Papandreou, 80, Prime Minister of Greece from 1944 to 1945, 1963 and 1964 to 1965 died shortly after being released from house arrest, and the day after surgery for a perforated ulcer.

  [November 2], 1968 (Saturday)

• An FBI document of a conversation between two Nixon campaign workers, future Attorney General John Mitchell and Asian-American lobbyist Anna Chennault confirmed her discussion that she had contacted South Vietnam ambassador to the U.S. Bui Diem to confirm that South Vietnam would avoid participating in the Paris Peace Talks. An author would later describe this as Chennault and Mitchell "conducting a private foreign policy", a violation of United States law.
• South Vietnam's President Nguyen Van Thieu derailed what appeared to be the beginning of the end of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War by announcing "a wildly cheering session of the National Assembly" that South Vietnam would refuse to participate in the Paris Peace Talks agreed to by the United States, North Vietnam and the Viet Cong. "The Republic of Vietnam government is very sorry that such conditions for direct and serious talks between us and Hanoi," Thieu told legislators, "have not yet come about. And therefore, the Republic of Vietnam cannot participate in the present Paris conference." At the same time, North Vietnamese negotiators in Paris said that it was up to the United States to guarantee that South Vietnam would join the peace talks.

  [November 3], 1968 (Sunday)

• The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine engineered the successful escape of founder George Habash from a prison in Syria, along with two other PFLP leaders, Faiz Qaddura and Ali Bushnaq. All three had been arrested on March 19, and PFLP efforts to have them released by diplomatic means had failed.
• Born: Debbie Rochon, Canadian horror film actress; in Vancouver

  [November 4], 1968 (Monday)

• The federal government of Yugoslavia made a compromise with the Albanian-speaking Kosovan minority to change the name of the Serbian province from "The Autonomous Province of Kosovo and Metohija" to "the Socialist Autonomous Province of Kosovo", eliminating the reference to the western portion and allowing the population "wide use" of a flag incorporating the double-headed eagle symbol of the Albanian people.
• Born:
• *Lee Germon, New Zealand cricketer and wicket-keeper; in Christchurch
• *Miles Long, American pornographic film director; in San Francisco
• *Daniel Landa, Czech punk rock musician; in Prague
• Died: Vern Stephens, 48, American baseball shortstop and 1945 American League home run leader, died of a heart attack.

  [November 5], 1968 (Tuesday)

• Former U.S. vice-president and Republican Party nominee Richard M. Nixon was elected President of the United States, defeating incumbent vice-president and Democrat Hubert H. Humphrey, and American Independent Party candidate George C. Wallace. Although the popular vote was close, with Nixon winning 31,783,783 votes and Humphrey 31,271,839 the electoral vote ultimately would not be. Whether Nixon would be the winner, or whether no party would have a majority and cause the election to be decided by the House of Representatives, would remain in doubt until almost noon the next day. With four states remaining in doubt, Nixon had 261 of the 270 needed to win, Humphrey had 166 and Wallace had 45 while the media waited for Chicago Mayor Daley to release the results of the tabulation there, which would determine who won Illinois and its 26 votes. If Humphrey had carried all four states, no candidate would have had 270. Humphrey, speaking from Minneapolis, conceded defeat in the U.S. presidential election shortly after 11:00 in the morning local time and telephoned his congratulations to the President-Elect.
• The Paris Peace Talks, scheduled to have begun on Wednesday, were called off less than 24 hours before they were to open, after the Viet Cong negotiator, Nguyen Thi Binh, said at her press conference that the group had a series of demands before it would negotiate, and the conditions were unacceptable to South Vietnam.
• Shirley Chisholm of Brooklyn, New York became the first African-American woman to be elected to the United States Congress, defeating the heavily favored James Farmer, a black candidate for New York's Liberal Party and the former national director of the Congress of Racial Equality.
• Luis A. Ferré was elected Governor of Puerto Rico, defeating incumbent governor Roberto Sánchez Vilella and becoming the first governor to have won on a platform seeking statehood for Puerto Rico.
• Born:
• *Penny Wong, Malaysian-born Foreign Minister of Australia since 2022; in Kota Kinabalu, Malaysia
• *Sam Rockwell, American film, stage and TV actor; in Daly City, California
• *Aitana Sánchez-Gijón, Italian-born Spanish film actress; in Rome

  [November 6], 1968 (Wednesday)

• The longest student strike in American history began at San Francisco State University, where the Black Student Union joined with a coalition of Asian-American students and white students who supported the cause of diversity in admissions and student curriculum. The strike, organized by the "Third World Liberation Front", would last more than four months until March 20, 1969.
• Born:
• *Jerry Yang, Taiwanese-American billionaire, internet entrepreneur, and co-founder of Yahoo!; as Yang Chih-Yuan in Taipei
• *Kelly Rutherford, American television actress; as Kelly Rutherford Deane in Elizabethtown, Kentucky
• Died:
• *Charles Munch, 77, German Alsatian-born symphony conductor and former music director for the Boston Symphony Orchestra, was found dead in his suite at Hotel John Marshall in Richmond, Virginia. Munch was on a tour of North America with the Orchestre de Paris, and was scheduled to conduct a concert that evening.
• *U.S. Navy Admiral Charles B. McVay III, captain of the USS Indianapolis when it was torpedoed and sunk on July 30, 1945, committed suicide by shooting himself in the head. Captain McVay was the only U.S. Navy captain court-martialed for losing a ship sunk by an act of war, despite the fact that he was on a top secret mission delivering the first nuclear weapon used in war.

  [November 7], 1968 (Thursday)

• French journalist Beate Klarsfeld assaulted West Germany's Chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger at a meeting of the Christian Democratic Union in West Berlin, approaching him on stage and slapping him in the face to bring worldwide attention to his Nazi past. Kiesinger, though not charged with war crimes after the fall of Nazi Germany, had been the deputy director of radio broadcasting for the Reich's Foreign Ministry during the war. Klarsfeld would receive a one-year prison sentence.
• Students in Pakistan marched in the streets of the capital, Rawalpindi, and in Dacca, the regional capital of East Pakistan to demand the restoration of democracy and guarantees of freedom. Police opened fire on the Rawalpindi marchers, killing three of them, and the harsh response would lead to nationwide protests and members of the public participating along with students. Over a period of five months that would not end until the resignation of dictator Mohammad Ayub Khan on March 25, 1969, more than ten million people would participate in the protests, despite arrests and killings.
• Died: Gordon Coventry, 67, Australian rules football forward who was the first to kick 100 goals in a season; his career record of 1,299 career goals for Collingwood of the Victorian Football League would remain unbroken for 60 years until 1997.

  [November 8], 1968 (Friday)

• The Vienna Convention on Road Signs and Signals, an attempt to standardize traffic signs in the nations of Europe and in signatory nations in the rest of the world, opened for signature. The United States, China, Japan and Australia are not participants, but Russia, India, the United Kingdom, South Korea and Mexico are among those that are.
• Bruce Reynolds, the leader, and last of the 15 perpetrators, of the Great Train Robbery of August 8, 1963, was arrested after more than five years on the run. Reynolds had been traced by Scotland Yard to a seaside resort near Torquay. Reynolds and his family had recently returned to the United Kingdom after living lavishly in Mexico and France, partly out of his concern about how his associates were handling "his money"; detective Tommy Butler surprised Reynolds at the Torquay home, and Reynolds reportedly said, "I'm glad it's over. It's no life for anyone, always drifting about." Reynolds would serve seven years of a 25-year prison sentence before being paroled.
• The United States launched the Pioneer 9 satellite into orbit around the Sun on an "assignment as a robot interplanetary weatherman on the lookout for solar radiation storms hazardous to moon-bound astronauts." Pioneer 9 has the closest orbit of the series, coming within of the Sun.
• The divorce between the Beatles' John Lennon and his first wife, Cynthia Lennon, became official, a little more than five months after Cynthia had returned to the couple's home at Weybridge, Surrey, and found that Yoko Ono had moved in. Lennon and Ono would marry a little more than four months later, on March 29.
• Born:
• *Zara Whites, Dutch-born pornographic film actress and animal rights activist; in 's-Gravendeel
• *Parker Posey, American film actress; in Baltimore