2017—By doing everything wrong, officers of the U.S.S. Fitzgerald get a nimble destroyer rammed by a hulking Japanese container ship. Seven enlisted sailors die, three more are injured, repairs will cost $367 million.
2015—Nine people are massacred in a Charleston, S.C. church by a white supremacist punk.
1991—Pres. Taylor’s mortal remains are exhumed for forensic examination.
1982—Found hanging under a London bridge: R. Calvi, “God’s banker.”
1972—Nixon’s spies hit Democratic HQ at the Watergate, but a black Vietnam vet discovers them.
1967—Defense Sec. Robert [Very] Strange McNamara authorizes a secret history of the Vietnam War.
1958—Sherman Adams, N.H.’s ex-Gov., now Ike’s Chief of Staff, admits he accepted a vicuña coat from Boston industrialist Bernard Goldfine.
1948—A false alarm prompts a DC-6 flight crew to activate a fire extinguisher. They leave a relief valve open, though. CO2 escapes, knocking them out; 43 die as the plane crashes in eastern Pennsylvania.
1932—The Senate votes not to pay bonuses due thousands of Great War vets massed outside the Capitol.
1775—Powder pilfered from Portsmouth’s Fort William and Mary, New Hampshire men under Gen. John Stark—along with a few others—kill one-fourth of the British Army’s officers in America at Bunker Hill.