2019—President Trump makes a phone call to Ukraine President Vladimir Zelenskey. It’s “perfect.”
2000—In a touching display of naiveté, George W.[MD] Bush announces that he has picked Dick “Dick” Cheney as running mate.
1990—Ambassador April Glaspie tells Saddam the U.S. won’t take sides in an Iraq-Kuwait border dispute.
1975—Chester Plummer, Jr., a Black ’Nam vet with a three-foot pipe in his hand, becomes the first person shot dead on the White House lawn.
1972—AP: The U.S. used Black men as guinea pigs for 40 years.
1969—Sen. Ted Kennedy gets two months (suspended) for leaving the scene of a fatal accident.
1965—Bob Dylan outrages the Newport Folk Festival with electricity.
1952—Généreux Ruest, a disabled watchmaker who helped bomb an airliner, is wheeled to Quebec’s gallows and hanged in a chair. His hangman is inept; he strangles for 21 minutes.
1946—The first underwater A-Bomb hits Navy sailors at Bikini Atoll with far more radiation than expected.
1853—The freshly-killed head of legendary bandit Joaquin Murietta is put in a jar of brandy for display—until it’s lost in the San Francisco Earthquake.
1826—“Nothing succeeds with me,” says Decembrist revolutionary Mikhail Bestuzhev-Ryumin after the hangman’s first rope breaks. “Even here I meet with disappointment.”