Volume 265 | No. 4

2010—Ex-cop James B. Fowler pleads guilty to the 1965 murder of civil rights activist Jimmie Lee Jackson in Ala. He gets six months. 1996—British officials return the Stone of Scone to the Scots from whom they stole it 700 years earlier. 1995—Pres. William J. Clinton begins behaving improperly with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. 1969—Two million in the U.S. protest the war, 250,000 in Washington, D.C. Nixon vows to ignore them all. 1967—An NVA mortar round detonates 1,100 tons of ordinance at the Dak To ammo dump—the largest explosion of the war. “I have never been more encouraged,” says General Westmoreland, 77 days before Tet. …

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2002—Donald Rumsfeld predicts the Iraq War will last “five days or five weeks or five months…[no] longer….” 1968—In Quang Tri, Marine PFC Frank Baldino, 19, is killed by a tiger. 1965—The First Cav, choppering into the Ia Drang Valley, is surprised to discover six battalions of NVA. 1942—Seaman Calvin L. Graham is wounded at Guadalcanal. He’s 12. 1932—Nison Miller’s petition for U.S. citizenship is denied on grounds of “ignorance.” Donald Trump puts his grandson Stephen in charge of immigration policy 84 years later. 1927—Workmen in Pittsburgh, using an open flame blowlamp to fix a leak in the world’s largest gasometer, ignite 5 million cubic feet …

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2003—Because he would not remove his Ten Commandments monument from the courthouse, Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore is himself removed. 1982—The Vietnam Veterans Memorial is dedicated in Washington, D.C. Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, and Robert McNamara are no-shows. 1974—Karen Silkwood, a disgruntled Kerr-McGee worker, conveniently turns up dead. 1970—Up to half a million die as a cyclone hits Bangladesh. 1965—The dysfunctional tinderbox Yarmouth Castle burns en route to Nassau; 90 passengers burn or drown, deserted by captain and crew. 1942—The torpedoed cruiser U.S.S. Juneau sinks in 20 minutes, 100 of 673 surviving the explosion. Two other cruisers depart, assuming no survivors. Eight days later, ten …

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2001—Flight 587 falls apart and crashes off Queens, N.Y., killing 261. 1970—A half ton of dynamite set off by Oregon highway workers sends parts of an eight-ton sperm whale 100 feet in the air. The tail crushes Walter Umanhofer’s new Olds, bought from a lot advertising “a whale of a deal.” 1941—Abe “Kid Twist” Reles earns the posthumous sobriquet “the canary who sang but couldn’t fly” when he autodefenestrates (or is defenestrated) from the sixth floor of a Coney Island hotel while under the protection of six New York City cops. 1926—The first documented aerial bombing conducted in the U.S. leaves Shady Rest, bootlegger Charlie …

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2000—Republicans go to court to stop manual recounts in Florida. 1956—The last pockets of resistance are suppressed in Hungary. 1940—The Royal Navy destroys half the Italian Navy, at anchor in Taranto, with Fairey Swordfish biplanes. 1933—“The Great Black Blizzard,” the first of the great dust storms, hits the Great Plains. 1919—In Centralia, Wash., a mob of American Legionaires attacking an I.W.W. union hall discover the Wobblies are armed. After four Legionaires die, the survivors kidnap, torture, and kill Wobblie and fellow WW I vet Wesley Everest. 1918—The War to End Wars ends, too late for 2,738 who die this day. 1887—Albert Parsons, George Engel, Adolph …

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2004—George W.[MD] Bush nominates a new Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales—who goes on to make his predecessor John Ashcroft look slightly less terrible by comparison. 1982—The Vietnam Veterans Memorial, a gift to the nation from those it had shunned, opens in Washington, D.C. 1975—The ore carrier Edmund Fitzgerald sinks on Lake Superior, taking with her a crew of 29. 1973—In Drake, N.D. the school board fires a teacher and burns the book he assigned, Slaughterhouse Five. 1972—Anti-police brutality activist Louis Moore, threatened with bogus charges by Detroit police, tries a radical remedy: skyjacking a DC-9 out of Birmingham, Ala. A two-day, nine-stop odyssey ends in a …

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