2005—Veep Dick “Dick” Cheney explains to Larry King that the insurgency in Iraq is “in the last throes.”
1970—Off Kamchatka, the Soviet sub K-108 loses a screw to the pursuing U.S.S. Tautog, the sail of which picks up a permanent 2-degree bend.
1965—Navy Lts. Clinton B. Johnson and Charles Hartman, flying prop-driven Douglas A-1 Skyraiders, down a MiG jet fighter over Vietnam.
1963—The White House-Kremlin “Hot Line” is installed.
1953—Lt. Gen. John W. “Iron Mike” O’Daniel arrives in Saigon to confer with French General Henri Navarre on how to bring peace to Vietnam.
1947—Standing up for labor, President Harry S Truman vetoes the anti-union Taft-Hartley Act.
1943—A three-day race riot begins in Detroit; 34 die, 25 of them Black, 17 of whom are killed by white cops.
1942—Four prisoners in stolen Nazi uniforms drive out Auschwitz’s main gate in the commandant’s car.
1941—The sub U.S.S. 0-9 sinks east of the Isles of Shoals with 33 aboard.
1940—Elbert Williams is lynched for organizing the NAACP in Brownsville, Tenn.; cops can find no evidence.
1790—T. Jefferson, J. Madison, and A. Hamilton make a deal: a Potomac Capitol, assuming states’ debts.
1631—Pirates led by Murad—a Dutchman “gone Turk”—sack Baltimore, in County Cork; its inhabitants end up enslaved in North Africa.