2014—Despite nine tries, Okla. prison officials miss Clayton Lockett’s veins; the poison goes into muscle. Without enough left to kill, they discuss options as he writhes. He ends their debate by dying of a heart attack.
2006—During the Correspondents Dinner, Stephen Colbert performs the first autopsy of a sitting President.
2004—The Commission “investigating” 9/11 allows George W.[MD] Bush and Dick “Dick” Cheney to “testify” without taking an oath.
1992—A mostly-white jury in Simi Valley finds L.A. police not guilty of assaulting Rodney King. Soldiers and Marines end the rioting six days later.
1975—As helicopters begin evacuating Saigon, Marines Charles McMahon and Darwin Judge become the last two Americans to die in Vietnam.
1974—The term “expletive deleted” enters the English language when the Nixon White House releases redacted transcripts of Oval Office recordings.
1961—The Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army says “we cannot win a conventional war in Southeast Asia.”
1938—FDR to Congress: “[T]he liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is Fascism….”
1899—Hundreds of union miners hijack a train in Idaho, haul 1.5 tons of dynamite to the mill of the Bunker Hill Mine, and blow it to bits.