Secrets

2012—Stabbed in a bar fight, actor Sean Bean orders another drink. 2010—An imaginary bus bomb inspires panic in Portsmouth, N.H. 2010—A Londoner scamming from his parents’ basement gives The Invisible Hand of the Market™ jitters: the Dow drops nine pct. in five minutes. 1996—Missing for nine days, ex-CIA Director William Colby turns up in Chesapeake Bay, dead but remarkably fresh-looking, 20 feet from where searchers found his canoe eight days earlier. Verdict: a routine drowning. 1982—LAPD Chief Darryl Gates explains “some blacks [die in choke holds because] the veins or arteries do not open up as fast as they do in normal people.” 1978—In Chicago, …

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1985—In Bitburg, Germany, Republican President Ronald Reagan lays a wreath at a cemetery full of Nazis. 1981—In Ireland’s Maze Prison, Bobby Sands dies of starvation. 1970—Jerry Rubin speaks at UNH. 1961—New Hampshire’s own Alan Shepard prays, “Please, dear God, don’t let me f__k up.” Prayer answered, he’s 1st American in space. 1960—The U.S. announces that Gary Powers’s U-2 was a “weather research plane” and its pilot a “civilian employed by Lockheed.” 1945—The collier Black Point is torpedoed by U-853 within sight of the Point Judith, R.I. lighthouse. 1945—Sunday school picnickers in Bly, Ore., find a strange object. The Japanese balloon bomb explodes as they’re dragging …

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1990—Six-inch flames shoot from Jesse Joseph Tafero’s head as Florida’s “Old Sparky” takes three jolts and seven minutes to kill him. 1989—U.S.M.C. Lieut. Col. Oliver North is convicted of four felonies in the Iran-Contra scandal, but a Congressional screw-up lets him skate. 1970—In Haymarket Square, Chicago, a new cop statue replaces one destroyed by a bomb months earlier. This one gets blown up, too, months later. 1970—Ohio National Guard troops shoot 13 unarmed students, killing four, at Kent State. 1961—The Freedom Rides begin throughout the south. 1942—The Battle of the Coral Sea begins. In four days 14 ships are sunk or damaged, 159 planes destroyed, …

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2016—Lindsey Graham tweets, “If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed…and we will deserve it.” 2016—After suggesting Ted Cruz’s father helped assassinate JFK (prompting Cruz to recall Donald Trump’s boast that dodging VD had been his Vietnam) Trump wins the Indiana Primary and clinches the Republican Presidential nomination. 2003—The law of gravity busts the Old Man of the Mountain. 1995—Alabama Governor “Fob” James reintroduces chain gangs. 1987—E. J. Dionne’s column quotes Sen. Gary Hart (D-Colo.): “Follow me around;” meanwhile, the Miami Herald reports that a woman (not his wife) spent the night in his D.C. townhouse. 1970—“[The North Vietnamese] have been in a war for …

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2011—After outliving the Administration of G.W.[MD] Bush, Osama bin Laden is whacked by its successor. 2006—With stereotypical inefficiency, state workers in Lucasville, Ohio jab Joseph Clark 19 times over 86 minutes to kill him by lethal injection[s]. 2003—Richard Perle, its architect, writes that the Iraq War “ended without the Arab world rising up against us, as the war’s critics feared, without the quagmire they predicted, without the heavy losses in house-to-house fighting they warned us to expect.” 1972—The good die young. J. Edgar Hoover does it at 77. 1971—The U.S. Government reneges on its permit, calls in the 82nd Airborne, arrests 12,600 protestors, and packs …

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2003—G.W.[MD] Bush says “major combat operations in Iraq have ended.” U.S. death toll so far: 140. 1999—The New Hampshire Gazette resumes regular (fortnightly) publication in Portsmouth. 1989—“Bill” Gardner, Secretary of State for Life, assigns rights to the trade name New Hampshire Gazette to a collateral descendant of the founder. 1977—Seabrook: 1,414 Clams busted. 1975—Tom Polgar sends CIA’s last cable from Saigon: “…we have lost.…Let us hope…that we have learned our lesson. Saigon signing off.” 1970—U.S. troops join ARVN soldiers in the Cambodian “Incursion.” 1960—Russian missiles bring down a U-2 piloted by the CIA’s Gary Powers. 1955—To supplant Harding’s failed “Americanization Day,” Ike proclaims an equally-doomed …

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