2002—A U.S. F-16 pilot on “go pills” drops a 500-pounder: Four are KIA, eight are WIA in Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry regiment.
1986—“[W]hen you meet…President [Reagan],” says Henry Kissinger, “you ask yourself, ‘How did it ever occur to anybody that he should be Governor, much less President?’”
1985—President Ronald Reagan says Waffen SS troops buried at Bitburg were “victims, just as surely as the victims in the concentration camps.”
1977—The federal frame-up of Leonard Peltier succeeds.
1974—As Professor Irwin Corey accepts Thomas Pynchon’s National Book Award for Gravity’s Rainbow, a streaker dashes across the stage.
1968—The Army admits that nerve gas from Dugway Proving Ground killed 6,400 Idaho sheep.
1942—Eighty men in 16 B-25s, led by Jimmy Doolittle, take off from the U.S.S. Hornet, bomb Tokyo, and ditch their planes in China; 90 percent survive.
1930—The BBC newscast reports “there is no news,” then plays music.
1906—San Francisco gets shook up.
1891—The Toledo Express hits a mail train in Kipton, Ohio; eight die because a watch was four minutes off.
1844—Believers in William Miller’s Doomsday prediction are disappointed—for the second time.
1689—A mob of Bostonians overthrow Sir Edmund Andros, Governor of the Dominion of New England.