2002—The White House admits it knew before 9/11 that al-Qaeda had plans to hijack U.S. airliners.
2001—Two engineers, in a locomotive, chase & stop an unmanned train full of hazardous chemicals rolling 66 miles across Ohio at high speeds.
1991—The Pentagon confirms: Manuel Noriega was on the CIA payroll.
1975—Some Marines retake the abandoned Mayaguez. Others, green, chopper to Koh Tang Island. Khmer Rouge, dug-in there, kill 15 and wound 50. Three are left on the beach.
1970—City and State cops shoot 14 protesting Black students, killing two, at Jackson State in Mississippi.
1969—Governor Reagan and his flunky Ed Meese send 800 cops into Peoples Park with shotguns. To quell the ensuing riot, he sends 2,700 National Guardsmen. The butcher’s bill: one dead, one blinded, 35 wounded.
1968—J. Edgar Hoover orders the Chicago FBI office to tell the Mafia that Dick Gregory is bad-mouthing them—setting the comic up for a hit.
1951—Gen. Omar Bradley calls Gen. MacArthur’s Korea plan “[t]he wrong war, at the wrong place, at the wrong time, and with the wrong enemy.”
1943—A bat-borne napalm bomb project goes awry, setting an Army airfield in Carlsbad, N.M. on fire.
1935—The Labor Relations Act gives U.S. workers the right to organize.
1923—Upton Sinclair is arrested for reading the Bill of Rights out loud.