October 1965

[October 1], 1965 (Friday)

• Members of the 30 September Movement assassinated six Indonesian Army generals in an abortive coup d'état. Other victims included the 5-year-old daughter of General Abdul Harris Nasution, shot by mistake. The movement also kidnapped First Lieutenant Pierre Tendean, mistaking him for General Nasution. At 7:00 a.m., Radio Republik Indonesia broadcast a message from Lieutenant-Colonel Untung Syamsuri, commander of Cakrabirawa, the Presidential guard, stating that the 30 September Movement, an internal army organization, had taken control of strategic locations in Jakarta, with the help of other military units, in order to forestall a coup attempt by a 'General's Council' aided by the Central Intelligence Agency, intent on removing President Sukarno on 5 October, "Army Day". Sukarno took up residence in the Bogor Palace, while Omar Dhani and D.N. Aidit, implicated in the coup, fled the country. Led by Suharto, commander of the Army's Strategic Reserve, the army regained control of all the installations previously held by forces of the 30 September Movement.
• Assassinated by the September 30 movement:
• *Major General M. T. Haryono, 41, Third Deputy Indonesian Army Commander
• *Brigadier General D. I. Pandjaitan, 40, Indonesian Army
• *Major General Siswondo Parman, 47, Indonesian Army, shot
• *Major General R. Soeprapto, 45, Second Deputy Indonesian Army Commander
• *Brigadier General Sutoyo Siswomiharjo, 43, Chief Military Prosecutor
• *Lieutenant General Ahmad Yani, 43, Minister of the Army of Indonesia
• The first telephone conversation between two undersea habitats took place when the aquanauts of the American SEALAB II spoke for 16 minutes with the French oceanauts living in the bathyscaph commanded by Jacques Cousteau. SEALAB II was beneath the Pacific Ocean off the coast of La Jolla, California, while Cousteau and his crew were below the harbor of Monte Carlo, Monaco. Oceanographer Rick Gregg, who could speak French, did most of the talking for the Americans, while French team leader André Laban spoke English. According to the UPI account, "The aquanauts and oceanauts had some difficulty understanding one another because the concentration of helium in the atmosphere they breathe made their voices sound like Donald Duck, according to one observer."
• Died: Gareth Hughes, 71, Welsh stage and silent film actor, died of complications of the occupational lung disease byssinosis

  [October 2], 1965 (Saturday)

• Soviet Communist Party First Secretary Leonid Brezhnev, the de facto leader of the Soviet Union, was given an official Soviet government position when he was returned to the 16 member Presidium of the Supreme Soviet. Brezhnev had been the President of the Presidium, the Soviet Union's head of state, from 1960 to 1964 before replacing Nikita Khrushchev as Party First Secretary. The Presidium also fired Pyotr Lomako from his jobs as Chairman of the State Planning Committee and Deputy Premier, in an apparent move to shift to more productive industrial management.
• The Los Angeles Dodgers won the National League pennant as pitcher Sandy Koufax hurled his 26th win of the season in a 3 to 1 defeat of the Milwaukee Braves on the second to the last day of the season. Going into the 161st game of the 162 game NL season, the Dodgers had a 95–65 and the San Francisco Giants were two games behind at 93–67. While the Giants beat the Cincinnati Reds, 3–2, the Dodgers win left the Giants two games out of first place with only one game left to play.
• Monsignor Harold Robert Perry became the first African-American Roman Catholic bishop of the 20th Century, as Pope Paul VI named him one of the two auxiliary bishops of the Archdiocese of New Orleans. From 1875 to 1900, the Bishop of Portland, Maine, had been James Augustine Healy, a mixed-race priest who was a Negro under the laws of his home state of Georgia.
• The Indonesian Army regained control of Halim Air Force Base after a short battle, effectively ending the 30 September Movement within two days.
• Died:
• *Nicky Arnstein, 86, American gambler and confidence trickster, second husband of Fanny Brice
• *Oskar R. Lange, 61, Polish economist and diplomat

  [October 3], 1965 (Sunday)

• U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 which ended quotas based on national origin. Johnson chose to hold the signing on Liberty Island in New York Harbor, next to the Statue of Liberty. As one historian would observe fifty years later, "the law changed the face of America. The major source countries of immigration radically shifted from Europe to Latin America and Asia. The number of immigrants tripled by 1978. It made the country the highly diverse, multinational, multiethnic, multicultural American nation of immigrants that it is today." Johnson said in a speech, "from this day forth those wishing to immigrate to America shall be admitted on the basis of their skills and their close relationship to those already here. This is a simple test, and it is a fair test. Those who can contribute most to this country--to its growth, to its strength, to its spirit--will be the first that are admitted to this land. The fairness of this standard is so self-evident that we may well wonder that it has not always been applied. Yet the fact is that for over four decades the immigration policy of the United States has been twisted and has been distorted by the harsh injustice of the national origins quota system.... Today, with my signature, this system is abolished. We can now believe that it will never again shadow the gate to the American Nation with the twin barriers of prejudice and privilege."
• Fidel Castro formed the First Secretary of the Communist Party of Cuba, the highest office within the Communist Party of Cuba. Castro would hold the position as First Secretary until he retired from the party in 2011.
• On the same day, Fidel Castro announced that Che Guevara had resigned his government position on April 1 and had left Cuba to fight for the revolutionary cause abroad.
• Born: Jan-Ove Waldner, Swedish table tennis player and world single champion in 1989, 1997, and 2000; in Stockholm
• Died: Zachary Scott, 51, American film and stage actor, died of a brain tumor

  [October 4], 1965 (Monday)

• The new University of Warwick held its first classes, with 430 students on a campus in Canterbury. Warwick was one of seven new "plate glass universities" created as part of the British campaign to expand the availability of university education to students in the United Kingdom. Fifty years later, Warwick would have almost 27,000 students.
• The United States began bombing Cambodia, despite that nation's neutrality in the Vietnam War, to attack Viet Cong guerrillas who crossed the border from South Vietnam. Records released in 2000 would show that between October 4, 1965, and August 15, 1973, there would be 2,756,941 tons of bombs dropped in 230,516 separate missions.
• The new University of California, Santa Cruz held its first classes, with 665 students, of whom 525 were freshmen in the buildings of Cowell College, the first of ten "residential colleges" that would be the feature of UCSC. Fifty years later, UC Santa Cruz would have almost 18,000 students.
• Eighty-seven people were killed and ten seriously injured when the last three coaches of a South African Railways commuter train derailed near Durban, South Africa. Most of the victims were black; one white railway employee who ran to the scene was beaten to death by angry survivors.
• Pope Paul VI made the first visit ever by the Roman Catholic Pontiff to the United States, appearing for a Mass before 90,000 people at New York's Yankee Stadium and making a speech at the United Nations, as well as meeting with U.S. President Johnson.
• Born: Micky Ward, American light heavyweight boxing champion who competed from 1985 to 2003; in Lowell, Massachusetts

  [October 5], 1965 (Tuesday)

• The American satellite "Orbital Vehicle 1" was launched westward into orbit from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, becoming the first human-made object in space to orbit the Earth from east to west, counter to the rotation of the planet. Since the launch of Sputnik in 1957, all Soviet and American satellites had been sent on a west–east trajectory or, in the case of those sent from Vandenberg into polar orbit, fired southward.
• Born:
• *Mario Lemieux, Canadian ice hockey star and Hockey Hall of Fame inductee who played for, and later became the owner of the NHL Pittsburgh Penguins; in Montreal
• *Patrick Roy, Canadian ice hockey star and Hockey Hall of Fame inductee who played goaltender for the NHL Montreal Canadiens and the Colorado Avalanche; in Quebec City

  [October 6], 1965 (Wednesday)

• Ian Brady and Myra Hindley murdered their fifth and last young victim, luring Edward Evans, a 17-year-old apprentice electrician. After Hindley drove Brady to the Manchester Central Railway station, they selected Evans as a victim and lured him to a house at 16 Wardle Brook Avenue on the Hattersley housing estate in Cheshire. Brady took a hatchet and hacked him to death. Hindley's brother-in-law, who witnessed the murder, called the Cheshire Constabulary early the next day, and Brady was arrested. Hindley would be arrested five days later.
• The Football Association, England's premier soccer organization, inaugurated closed-circuit television broadcasting of games, placing outdoor screens in Coventry so that fans of the Coventry City F.C. Sky Blues could pay to watch their team play away in Wales against the Cardiff City F.C. Bluebirds. Coventry won the match, 2–1. Over 10,000 people paid to watch at Coventry, "only a couple of thousand less than the actual gate".
• Peter Watkins's The War Game, a British television drama-documentary depicting the aftermath of a nuclear attack on the UK, was pulled from its planned transmission as BBC1's The Wednesday Play for political reasons. It would go on to win the 1966 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.
• The United Kingdom and the Netherlands reached a boundary agreement delineating the undersea border between the two nations' control of the continental shelf of the North Sea.
• The Chicago suburb of Bolingbrook, Illinois, was incorporated with roughly 7,000 residents. As of 2010, its population would be 73,366.
• Born: Steve Scalise, current House Minority Whip and U.S. representative of Louisiana's 1st congressional district; in New Orleans