Ranked as the number one college football team in the United States, the
USC Trojans (9–1–0) faced the #4 ranked
Indiana Hoosiers (9–1–0) in the
Rose Bowl in
Pasadena; that evening, the
Orange Bowl in
Miami pitted the #2 and #3 teams against each other, as the second-ranked
Tennessee Volunteers (9–1–0) met the
Oklahoma Sooners (9–1–0). The format of #1 vs. #4 and #2 vs. #3 would be used half a century later as the semi-finals for the NCAA Division I football championship game, but there were no playoffs in 1968, and USC, Indiana, Tennessee and Oklahoma were champions of their respective conferences. At the time, the Rose Bowl matched the Pac-8 and Big Ten, while the Orange Bowl featured the SEC and Big Eight. USC defeated Indiana, 14–3, on the strength of two touchdown runs by
O. J. Simpson,[1] and would retain its #1 ranking. Oklahoma blew a 19–0 halftime lead over Tennessee, but held off a furious Tennessee comeback which came down to an unsuccessful field goal attempt by West German-born kicker
Karl Kremser, and won the game, 26–24.[2] USC and Oklahoma would not meet for a title game, but would be ranked first and second in the final sportswriters' and coaches' polls.
A new universal military service law went into effect in the Soviet Union, requiring all able-bodied men to report for duty on their 18th birthdays. High school graduates were required to serve for one year; men in the army or air force had to stay two years, and those in the navy or coast guard had three years required service. The new law replaced a 1939 law that required three years in the army or air force, and four years in the navy or coast guard.[3]
The
Viet Cong kept up their record of breaking agreed ceasefires by killing 19 South Vietnamese troops during the 1968 New Year truce period in the Vietnam War.[4]
Dr.
Christiaan Barnard performed the third human
heart transplant in history,[6] and the first that would be considered successful enough that the recipient was able to go home from the hospital.
Philip Blaiberg, a 58-year old retired dentist living in
Cape Town,
South Africa, would leave the hospital after 73 days and would survive for another 17 months until his death on August 17, 1969.[7] The donor was 24-year old Clive Haupt, who had died from a massive
cerebral hemorrhage.[8]
U.S. President
Lyndon Johnson signed the
Bilingual Education Act into law. At the signing ceremony, Johnson said, "Thousands of children of Latin descent, young Indians, and others will get a better start— a better chance— in school... We are now giving every child in America a better chance to touch his outermost limits. We have begun a campaign to unlock the full potential of every boy and girl, regardless of his race, or his religion, or his father's income."[9]
The 36-hour ceasefire in the
Vietnam War expired at 0600 hours local time; during the New Year's Day truce, there were 64 major violations by the Viet Cong and
North Vietnamese Army (NVA).[10] Later in the day, a
U.S. Marine Corps patrol at
Khe Sanh killed a high-ranking NVA regimental commander and five other officers who had been inspecting the site, an indication of plans for a major attack.[11]
Cuba began rationing gasoline for the first time since
Fidel Castro's regime had taken power nine years earlier. In a speech the night before on the anniversary of the revolution, Castro announced that car-owners would be allowed to purchase between eight and 25 gallons per month, depending on the horsepower of their vehicles.[12]
U.S. Senator
Eugene J. McCarthy of Minnesota announced that he would directly challenge President Johnson for the Democratic Party nomination for president and arranged to have his name placed on the ballot for the New Hampshire primary.[13]
An operation by the U.S. 4th Infantry Division in the Dak To area of South Vietnam captured a classified five-page North Vietnamese document, titled "Urgent Combat Order No. 1", that described the strategy for a series of attacks to take place in Pleiku in conjunction with the upcoming Tet holiday.[10][14]
At a meeting with his cabinet, British Prime Minister
Harold Wilson first presented the proposal for the United Kingdom to withdraw from defending
Malaysia and
Singapore by the end of March 1971[15] and to pull out its troops stationed east of the Suez Canal by the middle of 1972.[16]
Following two shows at the Lorensberg Cirkus arena in
Gothenburg, singer
Jimi Hendrix was arrested for vandalizing his room at the Opelan Hotel. Hendrix was kept in jail overnight, then released to continue his tour of Sweden.[17]
Alexander Dubček was chosen as the leader of the Komunistická strana Československa (KSČ), the
Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, after the KSČ Central Committee voted to remove
Antonín Novotný because of his ineffective leadership of the nation. Novotny was allowed to continue in his post as
President of Czechoslovakia, though he would be removed from that job in March. Recommendations for the new First Secretary had been delegated by the Central Committee to a 21-member "Consultative Group" composed of representatives from regional party committees. On January 4, the group was divided with seven preferring Dubček, six in favor of Prime Minister
Jozef Lenárt, and four apiece for Deputy Premier
Oldřich Černík and National Assembly Chairman Bohuslav Lastovička. The choice was narrowed down on Friday morning to Dubček or Lenárt, and the Consultative Group selected Dubček by "a decisive majority" of the 21 members.[18]
Romanian First Deputy Foreign Minister Macovescu met with U.S. Ambassador
W. Averell Harriman to provide a message from top officials in Hanoi, with whom he had just visited. Macovescu provided the clearest indication yet that Hanoi would be willing to open negotiations with the United States if the bombing of North Vietnam was suspended; however, Hanoi did not provide any promises regarding not taking advantage of the bombing pause such as increasing infiltration of men and material into South Vietnam or an all-out invasion across the DMZ.[19]
According to the Los Angeles Times, a group of "more than 200"
Caltech students marched to and demonstrated in front of
NBC's studios in
Burbank[20] as part of what appeared to be a grassroots campaign, actually orchestrated by
Gene Roddenberry, to get the network to renew Star Trek for a third season.[21]
The
Agartala Conspiracy Case arose with the indictment and arrest of 35 people in
East Pakistan who were charged with plotting the
secession of the eastern part of Pakistan from the rest of the nation.
Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, named as the leader of the plot, was charged with traveling to the Indian city of
Agartala to meet with P. N. Ojha, India's representative to the East, in hopes of military support. East Pakistan, whose residents primarily spoke
Bengali, comprised more than half of Pakistan's population, but only 10 percent of its government officials, the West Pakistan residents who primarily spoke
Urdu. Sheikh Mujib and the other defendants would be put on trial on June 19, leading to mass demonstrations, a civil war, and the eventual separation of East Pakistan as the nation of
Bangladesh, with Sheikh Mujib as its first President.[22]
The collision of an express train and a truck stalled on the tracks killed 13 people in England, all of them passengers on the train. The truck driver and his-coworker were uninjured. At
Hixon, a village in
Staffordshire the truck was slowly hauling a 125-ton electrical
transformer over the crossing when the
Manchester to London southbound express train arrived with 500 people on board. The crossing gates lowered automatically, preventing the truck from completing its move off of the crossing, and the locomotive and eight cars derailed.[23]
In
South Korea, President
Park Chung Hee agreed to the petition by the nation's
Hangul Society to phasing out the use of Chinese that were taught in schools and which were published in conjunction with the
Korean alphabet (hangul), with Korean replacements for the Chinese symbols. Instructions would follow on October 25, reducing the number of Chinese words to 2,000 by year's end, 1,300 by the end of 1969, and eliminated altogether by the end of 1972.[24]
Norman Shumway performed the first successful heart transplant in the United States, operating at the
Stanford University Hospital in
California.[25] The donor was a 43-year-old woman, Virginia May White, who had suffered a
cerebral hemorrhage while celebrating her 22nd wedding anniversary; the recipient was Mike Casparak, a 54-year-old steelworker dying of
viral myocarditis. Casparak survived only 15 days, dying on January 21 from
liver failure.[7]
A 27-person team of surgeons at the Transvaal Memorial Hospital for Children (located in
Johannesburg,
South Africa) successfully completed the separation of
conjoined twins, Catherine O'Hare and Shirely O'Hare, who had been joined at the head. Two previous attempts to separate twins conjoined at the head had ended with only one of the twins surviving.[26]
All 45 people on board an Aeroflot An-24B airliner were killed when the plane exploded in midair while flying from
Olyokminsk to
Lensk.[27]
The price of mailing a letter in the United States increased by 20%, requiring six cents of postage to replace the five-cent postage stamp.[29] The increase went into effect exactly five years after the 1963 increase from four cents to five.
Forty-three passengers on a bus in
South Korea were killed near
Jinju when their bus lost one of its front wheels, went out of control, fell over a 33-foot (10 m) high cliff and sank in the
Nam River.[30]
Surveyor 7, the last of the Surveyor lunar probes launched by the United States, was sent up from
Cape Kennedy at 0630 UTC (1:30 in the morning). It would land on the Moon on January 10.[31]
Died:
Gholamreza Takhti, 37, popular Athlete Wrestler who won a gold medal for Iran in the 1956 Summer Olympics, was found dead in his hotel room of an overdose of sleeping pills; officially, the death was a suicide but many of Takhti's fans thought he had been murdered.[32]
Mario Roatta, 80, former Chief of Staff of the Italian Army during World War II, died two years after his return from a post-war exile in Spain
Ephraim Longworth, 80, English soccer football star who played for Liverpool F.C. from 1910 to 1928
Hugo Butler, 53, blacklisted Canadian-born screenwriter; of a heart attack[33]
All 41 U.S. personnel aboard a
Sikorsky CH-53 Sea Stallion helicopter were killed in the worst helicopter accident of the
Vietnam War.[34] The U.S. Marine Corps aircraft had a five-man crew and was transporting 31 Marines, three Navy men, one from the Army and one civilian and was on flying southward from Dong Ha, near the DMZ, to Phu Bai in bad weather. The CH-53 was found four days later, and had apparently slammed into the side of a steep mountain peak.
In Australia,
a Liberal Party leadership election was held to elect a successor to the late Prime Minister
Harold Holt, who
had drowned on December 17. Initially, there were four candidates for the leadership of the party, which was tantamount to the prime ministership:
John Gorton,
Paul Hasluck,
Les Bury, and
Billy Snedden. No candidate received a majority, but Bury and Snedden received the fewest votes and were eliminated from consideration. On the second ballot, Gorton won an absolute majority over Hasluck; he was sworn in as prime minister the following day.[38]
U.S. President Lyndon Johnson polled ahead of
Richard Nixon, the favored candidate for the Republican nomination, in two national surveys, including one by The Washington Post. The poll indicated that if the
November 1968 election was held in January, the incumbent president would defeat any of the four most prominent possibilities for Republican nomination, specifically Richard Nixon,
George W. Romney,
Ronald Reagan and
Nelson Rockefeller.[40]
For the first time since 1955, the weather stopped the clocks in the tower that houses
Big Ben in London. Snow drifts and intense cold caused the clocks' hands to stop at 6:28 a.m.; maintenance crews were able to restart the clock nearly four hours later, at 10:10.[41]
Renovated and refit after being purchased from the United Kingdom, the
Israeli submarine
INS Dakar departed from
Portsmouth Harbour on its first voyage for the
Israeli Navy. All contact with the sub would be lost 15 days later.[42]
The
National Football League Players Association (NFLPA) formally established itself as an independent labor union; the players would strike 6 months later, leading to the league's first collective bargaining agreement.[43]
At 7:05 p.m. in
Houston (0105 UTC on January 10), NASA Mission Control successfully landed
Surveyor 7 on the Moon, 18 miles (29 km) north of the Tycho crater.[45][46]
Cameron Todd Willingham, a possibly innocent American man who was convicted and executed for the murder of his three children by arson at his family home in Corsicana, Texas on December 23, 1991; in
Ardmore, Oklahoma (executed, 2004)[48][49]
Died:Kōkichi Tsuburaya, 27, Japanese marathon runner and bronze medalist in the 1964 Summer Olympics, committed suicide after concluding that his back problems would prevent him from being on the Olympic team in 1968. In a suicide note he wrote, "Kokichi is too tired to run anymore."[50]
The British submarine
HMS Grampus was ensnared in the nets of a fishing boat, immobilizing both vessels traveling in the
Bay of Biscay off the west coast of France. The French
trawlerFormalhaut was dragging its nets deep in the bay when it hit something that brought it to a halt. Ninety feet below the surface, the Grampus would not maneuver. Complicating matters, nobody on the Formalhaut spoke English and nobody on the Grampus spoke French. After a few hours, the trawling cable was cut and the Grampus sailed onward, "with her
conning tower still draped with nets", to continue in a scheduled naval exercise.[51][52]
Fifteen U.S. battalions in
South Vietnam were relocated from the border with
North Vietnam, and ordered moved by General
William C. Westmoreland to new positions around
Saigon and other major cities.[53] While the U.S. would benefit from the decision later in the month, it "failed to anticipate the timing and, more particularly, scale and character" of the full-scale attack in the
Tet Offensive.[54]
India rescinded its approval of the
Tashkent Declaration that had been signed with Pakistan exactly two years earlier (January 10, 1966) as tensions escalated between the neighboring nations.[55]
Died:Eben Dönges (Theophilus Ebenhaezer Dönges), 69, South African President-elect and former Prime Minister. On June 1, Dönges had been elected to the honorary post of
State President, but had suffered a stroke before he could take office and fell into a coma from which he never awoke.[56]
In
Geneva, the
International Red Cross announced that
Israel and
Egypt had agreed to conditions for releasing the prisoners of war who had been captured in June during the
Six-Day War. At the time, there were 4,000 Egyptian POWs and only 20 Israeli ones to be exchanged, in that agreements had already been worked out with Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq. The transfers took place between
Ismailia on the west side of the
Suez Canal, and
El Qantara on the east side, controlled by Israel's occupation forces.[57]
British Foreign Secretary
George Brown met with his American counterpart, U.S. Secretary of State
Dean Rusk, to tell him that Britain's economic problems had led it to a decision to no longer police the Middle East or Southeast Asia. In a meeting that Brown would refer to as "bloody unpleasant",[58] Rusk reportedly said, "Be British, George, be British. How can you betray us?",[59] although the official U.S. State Department transcript of the conversation does not record this remark.[60]
S. T. Muna was appointed as the new Prime Minister of West Cameroon, while
S. P. Tchoungui continued as the Prime Minister of a reorganized East Cameroon, both under the direction of
Ahmadou Ahidjo, the President of the Federal Republic of Cameroon. In 1972, the offices of Muna and Tchoungui would be abolished.[61]
The U.S. Navy electronic surveillance ship
USS Pueblo was dispatched from the port of
Sasebo, Nagasaki toward
North Korea for a 17-day mission to collect intelligence.[62]
Norman M. Yoder, an official within the
Pennsylvania Department of Human Services and commissioner of the state's office that offered services to the blind and visually impaired, told the Associated Press that six college students, all of them men and "all juniors at a western Pennsylvania college" which he declined to identify, had
permanently lost their eyesight after taking the hallucinogen
LSD and staring at the Sun, not realizing what they were doing.[65] Skeptical reporters began investigating, starting with calls to the state's colleges, Pennsylvania Governor
Raymond P. Shafer ordered his Attorney General to make an inquiry[66] and Yoder confessed that he had made the story up.[67][68]
The
American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T), which controlled all but a few of the telephones in the United States, announced plans to provide a universal
emergency telephone number that could be dialed quickly from any telephone in the country, and said that it would allocate $50,000,000 to install the routing equipment in American cities over a period of several years, starting with the exchanges in Washington, D.C. and New York City. According to AT&T, a computer search found that the number most likely to have no conflict with an existing area code or exchange, and to also meet the requirement of not being misdialed from a rotary phone, was
9-1-1.[69]
The trial of four Soviet writers ended with verdicts of being guilty of subversion, and sentences ranging from one to seven years. Poet
Yuri Galanskov received the longest term after being convicted of sedition for working with the anti-Communist organization
Narodno-Trudovoy Soyuz (NTS, the "People's Labor Union"), and author
Alexander Ginzburg got five years. Vera Lashkova was sentenced to one year incarceration, but was given credit for nearly a year of detention. Alexei Dobrovolsky got a reduced two-year sentence in exchange for testifying against Galanskov and Ginzburg.[70]
Zambia released all five members of the
South African Police who had been held in the jail in
Livingstone since December 27. The five men had driven across the
Victoria Falls Bridge from
Rhodesia into
Zambia, then ignored an order by border police to stop, and were "given a taste of the local
gaol" before being deported.[71] The release followed an apology by South Africa's foreign minister,
Hilgard Muller, to Zambia's President
Kenneth Kaunda.[72]
Bill Masterton, a center for the Minnesota North Stars of the National Hockey League, was fatally injured during a game against the Oakland Seals when he received a body check by two defenders while skating toward the Oakland goal with the puck. The incident happened in the early minutes of the game in front of a crowd of 12,119 spectators; after Masterton was taken from the rink and blood cleaned from the ice, play continued in a game that would end in a 2–2 tie.[79] Masterton (who was known for scoring the North Stars' very first goal when the team began play on October 11, 1967) would die 30 hours later from brain hemorrhaging caused by severe head trauma.[80][81]
Johnny Cash performed his historic concert at the
Folsom State Prison in California, selected by his manager because of Cash's 1955 hit song "
Folsom Prison Blues". The concert was not the first that Cash had performed at a penal institution, nor was Cash the only artist to appear that day (the
Statler Brothers,
Carl Perkins,
The Carter Family, and
The Tennessee Three were also present), but it was the first time that Cash had recorded a live album inside a prison. Johnny Cash At Folsom Prison would become the number one country music album in the United States after going on sale in May.[82]
Standing Naval Force Atlantic (STANAVFORLANT), a multinational naval force with ships from the Netherlands, Norway, the United Kingdom and the United States, was activated for the first time, with a base at England's
Portland Harbour. Within six months, Canada,
West Germany and Portugal would each contribute ships and crews as well.[83]
U.S. Ambassador to Saigon
Ellsworth Bunker provided U.S. President Lyndon Johnson with his review of the areas of progress in Vietnam during 1967.[84]
In Belgium, the campus of the
Catholic University of Leuven erupted in violence that spilled into the city of
Leuven, after the clergy administering the 440-year-old institution announced that they would continue to hold classes in French (spoken by the
Walloon minority in the school) in addition to
Flemish Dutch language. Hundreds of students were arrested, and the revolt would spread to other universities and towns in the northern part of the kingdom, leading to the resignation of the Belgian government on February 7. At the end of the spring semester, the university would split into two institutions, with the Flemish-speaking students and professors continuing at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, and the opening of a new campus 30 kilometres (19 mi) away at
Louvain-la-Neuve for the French-speaking Université Catholique de Louvain.[90]
Died:Bill Masterton, 29, Canadian ice hockey player, became the first and only NHL player to die of injuries received in a game.[94] The league now awards the
Masterton Trophy annually to the player "who best exemplifies the qualities of perseverance, sportsmanship, and dedication to ice hockey".[95]
British Prime Minister Harold Wilson addressed the
House of Commons and announced his government's decision to remove its military presence from the
Persian Gulf and from all of Asia (with the exception of
Hong Kong) by January 31, 1971.[96] The reaction from those who remembered the height of the
British Empire varied; an editorial in the New Statesman said of the decision, "It is comparable in importance to Mr Attlee's granting of Indian independence and the Tory government's evacuation of British Africa", while others pointed out that the cost of keeping a British presence in the Persian Gulf, "some £12 million yearly, was negligible compared to the immense revenues in oil."[97]
South Vietnam's President
Nguyễn Văn Thiệu and U.S. Army commander
William C. Westmoreland met at Thiệu's office and decided that they would end the scheduled Tet holiday truce with North Vietnam, four days ahead of schedule, though the announcement of the decision would not be made until January 30. According to the memoirs of a North Vietnamese spy who had infiltrated the Thiệu offices, North Vietnam's military leaders decided to move the date of the
Tet Offensive from February 5 to January 31.[98]
Urho Kekkonen won
re-election to a third term as
President of Finland, receiving the votes of his own Centre Party, as well as those of the Finnish People's Democratic League and the Social Democratic Party, for 201 of the 300 electoral votes. Two rival candidates (Matti Virkkunen of the National Coalition Party and Veikko Vennamo of the Finnish Rural Party) got 66 and 33 electoral votes apiece. Kekkonen won 56% of the popular votes (1,152,700 of 2,049,002).[99]
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, based on the
novel by Muriel Spark, premiered on Broadway; the lead actress
Zoe Caldwell would win a Tony for her role as the title character.
The
Kampuchean Revolutionary Army launched its first attack, with three
Khmer Rouge guerrillas storming a police post at
Bay Damram in
Cambodia's
Battambang Province to steal weapons. Getting away with several guns, the men had overlooked getting ammunition; when they came back a second time to get it, they got the wrong ammunition.[102] The next day, the uprising saw the seizure of weapons in other villages and the killing of three policemen in ambushes, followed by a deadly attack a week later at a guard post in Thvak; the Kampuchean revolutionaries would take control of Cambodia seven years later and begin a reign of terror.[103]
Auto manufacturers
British Motor Holdings and
Leyland Motor Corporation announced their merger to become
British Leyland. The new entity became the largest car company in the United Kingdom and the sixth largest in the world (after General Motors, Ford Motor, Chrysler, Fiat, and Volkswagen). Models under the British Leyland umbrella included Jaguar, MG, Triumph, and Land Rover.[104]
Born:Svetlana Masterkova, Russian athlete and holder of the women's world record for fastest kilometer (2:28.98) since 1996 and for fastest mile (4 minutes, 12.56 seconds) from 1996 to 2019, as well as winner of the 800m and 1500m races in the 1996 Olympics; in
Achinsk,
Russian SFSR, Soviet Union
Singer and actress
Eartha Kitt was a guest at the
White House at a luncheon hosted by
Lady Bird Johnson to honor a group of "Women Doers", influential women invited by the First Lady to talk about specific issues. When President Johnson entered the dining room, Kitt asked him what appeared to be a routine question about "delinquent parents", and didn't like the answer that she had been given. Although Kitt didn't vent her anger on the President himself, her confrontation with the First Lady about the Vietnam War became an embarrassing incident.[105] "I have a baby and then you send him off to war", Kitt reportedly said, "No wonder the kids rebel and take pot. And, Mrs. Johnson, in case you don't understand the lingo, that's marijuana!" Afterward, Kitt would experience "a slow decline in her career".[106] Two days later in a telephone call Chicago Mayor
Richard Daley expressed his support for Ladybird and revealed that a 500 strong woman's group in Chicago had declared their support for Ladybird in the incident including a lady whose 20-year-old son had recently died in Vietnam.[107] Hanoi immediately used Kitt's outburst for their own propaganda purposes.[108]
The first
Red Lobster seafood restaurant was opened, with a single location at 1330 East Memorial Boulevard in
Lakeland, Florida, operated by Bill Darden and Charley Woodsby.[109][110] Fifty years later, the company would have more than 700 Red Lobster restaurants in 11 countries. Before Red Lobster, Darden had started his first restaurant, "The Green Frog", in
Waycross, Georgia, in 1939.[111]
King Hussein of
Jordan alerted U.S. State Department officials about a serious threat by Arab terrorists to assassinate Israeli Defense Minister
Moshe Dayan. Hussein had learned of the plot while on a visit to Saudi Arabia.[112]
Operation Crosstie, "Project Faultless", an experiment to see if an
earthquake could be triggered by detonating an underground nuclear weapon along a
fault line. After the residents of the closest towns to the Central Nevada Test Site (
Tonopah and
Eureka, Nevada) were briefed about what to expect, an atomic bomb was detonated in
Nye County at a depth of 3,200 feet (980 m). The blast, described by the Atomic Energy Commission as being one megaton, was believed to be the most powerful nuclear weapon ever exploded in the United States, and caused upheavals and dropping of the ground in a wide area, breaking windows 87 miles (140 km) away at a high school in
Ely. Because of the surface damage, the test site would eventually be declared unsuitable.[citation needed] According to reports the next day, "Buildings swayed in
Salt Lake City and San Francisco", particularly in the Southern Pacific building in the California city; the tremor caused by the blast was estimated by the University of California at Berkeley to be 6.0 on the Richter scale.[113]
U.S. President Johnson completed the installation of a tape recording system in the
Cabinet Room of the
White House to preserve his discussions of meetings with the leaders of government departments that comprised the
presidential cabinet and with other advisers. Roughly 200 hours worth of recordings would be delivered to the Johnson presidential library after Johnson's death in 1973. Despite Johnson's own wish that the recordings be sealed for 50 years after his passing (until January 22, 2023), most were released after 1992.[114]
Thousands of people protested in Japan as the American aircraft carrier
USS Enterprise made the first visit to that nation by a nuclear-powered ship, docking at the
U.S. Navy base at
Sasebo. The port was about 50 miles (80 km) from
Nagasaki, which on August 9, 1945, had seen the second and last site of nuclear warfare. Permission had been granted by Prime Minister
Eisaku Satō, who had made the decision without consultation with his Foreign Minister or with any other members of his cabinet.[115]
In the first regular-season college basketball game to be shown live on national television, the second-ranked
University of Houston Cougars defeated the top-ranked
UCLA Bruins, 71 to 69, at the
Houston Astrodome. Played inside a domed baseball stadium, the meeting set a record for attendance at a college basketball with 52,693 paying customers (more than 4,000 of whom were standing up because the seats were filled), and was billed as "
The Game of the Century".[116] Both teams were unbeaten (UCLA had a 13–0 record and a 47-game winning streak, and Houston had a 16–0 record). Each had a superstar player, with Houston being fronted by
Elvin Hayes and UCLA's Lew Alcindor (who would later change his name to
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) having been cleared to play after having to miss two games because of an eye injury.[117] The spectators and viewers watched a thriller that came down to the final minute; Hayes scored 39 points, including two free throws that proved to be the winning points with 0:28 left on the clock; UCLA's chance to send the game into overtime ended when a Bruins player inadvertently tipped the ball out of bounds with 0:12 left.[118]
In South Vietnam, a defector from the
North Vietnamese Army surrendered to U.S. Marines at the
Khe Sanh Combat Base and warned them that the NVA was preparing to launch a massive attack there the next day, starting with an assault after midnight against Hill 861 overlooking the area.[119]
North Vietnam once again denied the Red Cross access to U.S. prisoners who were being held in Hanoi in an attempt to conceal the torture tactics they were utilizing in violation of international law.[121]
A U.S.
B-52 Stratofortresscrashed in Greenland, losing its cargo of four
Mark 28 nuclear bombs.[122] The disaster happened while the bomber was monitoring the U.S. Air Force's
Thule Air Base, flying back and forth at an altitude of 35,000 feet (11,000 m) over the base's early warning system. Four "cloth-covered, foam-rubber cushions" had been placed beneath an uncomfortable seat and were blocking a vent; when the co-pilot switched on a backup heating system that relied on warm air that had been pulled in through the plane's
intake manifold, the cushions caught fire. The seven-man crew ejected, and the plane "slammed into the ice of
Bylot Sound" near the base. The high-level conventional explosives inside the four thermonuclear weapons exploded on impact, contaminating three square miles of ice with radioactive
plutonium. However, because of the "
one-point safety" design that had been perfected in the mid-1950s during
Project 56, a larger catastrophe was averted. A historian would note later that, "If the Mark 28 hadn't been made inherently one-point safe, the bombs that hit the ice could have produced a nuclear yield. And the partial detonation of a nuclear weapon, or two, or three— without any warning, at the air base considered essential for the defense of the United States— could have been misinterpreted" at the headquarters of the
Strategic Air Command.[123]
Blue House raid: an attack on the
Blue House, residence of the
President of South Korea in
Seoul, was attempted by a 31-member assault team from the 124th Army unit of
North Korea's
Korean People's Army.[124] The North Korean squad, on a mission to assassinate President
Park Chung Hee, came within 800 metres (870 yd) of the Blue House before a firefight ensued with South Korean police. All but one of the commandos was killed, and the survivor would tell investigators that the objective had been to "agitate the South Korean people to fight with arms against their government and the American imperialists."[125] Eight South Koreans were killed in the fight.[126]
The
Battle of Khe Sanh began at 5:30 in the morning as the North Vietnamese Army began shelling a U.S. Marine combat base from positions in South Vietnam and across the border in Laos, while operating under the cover of a morning fog. On the first day, shells destroyed the American base's main ammunition dump, where 98% of its firepower had been stored.[127] The battle would last for 77 days, with the besieged compound being freed in April,[128] but at a cost of 274 U.S. deaths and the diversion of American forces in advance of the Tet Offensive.
North Vietnamese Army (NVA) General
Võ Nguyên Giáp gave the go-ahead orders to NVA and Viet Cong commanders in South Vietnam to begin the
Tet Offensive on the eve of the Vietnamese New Year celebration, five days ahead of the original plan, after the Tet holiday ceasefire was shortened.[129]
Apollo 5 was launched as an unmanned mission to test the
Lunar Module (LM-2) that would take two astronauts from orbit to the lunar surface, and then back again for a return to Earth. The LM-2 was loaded (without its landing gear) into the nose cone of a Saturn 1B rocket, and was sent up from
Cape Kennedy at 5:48 p.m. local time.[131] After it reached a 138-mile (222 km) orbit, the LM-1 separated from the rocket stage and tests were made of its descent engine (which would guide the astronauts to a soft landing on the
Moon) and its ascent engine (which was required not only to return the module to orbit, but also to fire through the descent engine if necessary to abort a failure).[132]
The deadline in
Nigeria for exchanging old
Nigerian pound banknotes for newly printed currency expired, and the notes that had circulated since 1958 became worthless. The decision to replace the notes had been made in August after the secession of
Biafra as a means of preventing Biafra from trading its holdings of Nigerian pounds on foreign exchanges. In the days leading up to the deadline, tons of the old banknotes were purchased only at a heavy discount.[133] Biafra would introduce its own coins and currency, the
Biafran pound, one week later.
U.S. Air Force Captain
Lance Sijan, 25, died in
North Vietnam's
Hỏa Lò prison camp from pneumonia, malnutrition and multiple injuries. He had spent 40 days eluding his captors after his F-4C fighter had been shot down over Laos on November 9; he had been captured, had escaped, and had then been recaptured. Captain Sijan would posthumously be awarded the
Medal of Honor; his remains would be returned to the United States on March 13, 1974.
Duke Kahanamoku, 77, Hawaiian athlete who won gold medals in the 1912 and 1920 Summer Olympic Games, known best remembered for popularizing the sport of
surfing.
North Korea seized the
USS Pueblo, claiming the ship violated its territorial waters while spying.[135] At 12:27 p.m. local time, a North Korean SO-1 patrol craft approached the American surveillance ship and gave the
International Code of Signals flag combination (I)ndia-(D)elta, meaning "
Heave to or I will open fire"; Captain
Lloyd M. Bucher ordered the Pueblo to signal back that it was in international waters and that it intended to remain at its location until the next day. Three North Korean P-4 torpedo boats then arrived from
Wonsan harbor; the SO-1 boat signaled for the Pueblo to follow. At 1:27, the SO-1 fired its guns, and the P-4 shot gunfire as the slower Pueblo attempted to escape. At 1:45, Bucher surrendered the ship.[124] On December 23, following an American apology, the North Koreans would release the 82 members of the Pueblo crew but would keep the American ship, which is now on display in
Pyongyang near the "Victorious Fatherland Liberation War Museum".[136]
The government of the
Madras State in southern India became the first to drop a requirement that students learn
Hindi, the most commonly spoken language in the nation. Students had the option to take Hindi, but required instruction was in the
Tamil language spoken by a majority of people in Madras, which is now called the
Tamil Nadu state. The only remaining required language for students in Madras was English.[137]
The student strike that had started a week earlier, at Belgium's
Catholic University of Leuven, was intensified as other
Flemish speakers, and high school students in
Flanders walked out of their classrooms.[90]
France made its first test of the experimental
Ludion, a jet pack, propelled by
isopropyl nitrate and designed to lift a soldier and a small amount of equipment for a short distance. The first test, like all but five of the 64 made of the Ludion before the project was abandoned, was a
tethered flight.[139]
Charlie Wilson, one of the perpetrators of the
Great Train Robbery of 1963, was recaptured more than three years after he had escaped from prison on
August 12, 1964, when police found him near Montreal in the Canadian town of
Rigaud, Quebec. Wilson had been living in Rigaud for two years under the alias "Ronald Alloway".[140] Wilson would be released in 1978 after spending 10 more years imprisoned in England, would retire to Spain, and would be murdered on April 23, 1990, at his home in
Marbella in a
contract killing.[141]
The
Israeli submarine
INS Dakar sank in the Mediterranean on its first voyage since being purchased from the United Kingdom, killing the 69 crew on board.[42][142] The wreckage would be located more than 30 years later, on May 28, 1999, apparently the victim of a structural failure in one of the torpedo tubes.[143]
I Never Sang for My Father premiered on Broadway. It was a moderate success, running for 124 performances at the Shubert Theatre. It starred Hal Holbrook and Lillian Gish, and would be made into a film in 1970.[144]
Rioting broke out in the French city of
Caen after police broke up a protest march by about 10,000 protesters and striking workers form the
Saviem truck factory, "liberally dousing them with
tear gas" in an unprovoked attack. Angered, the marchers began throwing rocks and
Molotov cocktails and the riot would go through the night until 5:00 the next morning; 100 people were hurt, 36 of them badly enough to be hospitalized, and another 85 were arrested.[90]
Flying a
Lockheed A-12 Blackbird reconnaissance jet at 80,000 feet (24,000 m) over
North Korea, CIA pilot Jack Weeks located the missing
USS Pueblo, anchored at
Wonson. In the same mission, however, Weeks also took photos that showed that North Korea was not massing troops near the demilitarized zone, easing fears of a new Korean War.[145][146]
The first
Kerala State Lotteries grand prize (and the first government lottery prize ever awarded in India) was drawn at
Trivandrum, with the winner receiving 50,000
Indian rupees (equivalent to $6,700 U.S. dollars at the time). Tickets for the first lottery had been sold since November 1.[147]
Two days after the disaster of the Israeli submarine Dakar, the French submarine Minerve sank in the Mediterranean Sea, killing all 52 of its crew.[148] The last contact that the Minerve had made was when it was in the Mediterranean Sea, approaching its home port at
Toulon and only 25 miles (40 km) away. At the time, the submarine was 40 feet (12 m) below the surface, in waters 6,000 feet (1,800 m) deep; its hull was not designed to survive pressures at depths greater than 1,000 feet (300 m).[149]
At midnight Indochina Time, the official
Tet holiday ceasefire began in South Vietnam and North Vietnam, in the days leading up to the New Year's Eve celebrations to welcome the start of Mau Than, the Year of the Monkey.[150]
In the Indian state of
Bihar, the government of Chief Minister
Mahamaya Prasad Sinha was brought down by a censure motion that passed 163 to 150.[151]
Anibal Escalante and 36 other members of Cuba's Communist Party were arrested and charged with being a "microfaction" (La "Microfracción) within Cuba that was working with the Soviet Embassy. In reaction, the Soviets, who provided the support to the Cuban government's programs, "began to establish diplomatic and commercial relations with governments that Cuba had pledge to topple or had denounced", and decreased the amount of oil that it provided to Cuba.[152][153]
NASA confirmed nomenclature for the
Orbital Workshop (OWS) included in the AAP presented in the FY 1969 budget. The ground-outfitted OWS to be launched with Saturn V would be designated the "
Saturn V Workshop". (This had sometimes been called the "
dry workshop".) The OWS that would be launched by a Saturn IB would be referred to as the "Saturn I Workshop". (Colloquially it had been referred to as the "
wet workshop".) Terminology "Uprated Saturn I" would not be used officially. This launch vehicle would be referred to as the "Saturn IB".[39]
Ford's Theatre, located at 511 10th St, NW in Washington, D.C., held its first entertainment program since April 14, 1865, when the comedy Our American Cousin had been interrupted by
the assassination of U.S. President
Abraham Lincoln. For the reopening,
Henry Fonda,
Harry Belafonte,
Helen Hayes, and
Andy Williams were among the performers on stage in an evening of music and dancing.[158] Television viewers were able to watch a videotaped performance that night at 10:00 p.m. Eastern time, titled Inaugural Evening at Ford's Theater.[159]
Assistant Postmaster General Richard Murphy ruled that
hippies could continue to work for the
United States Postal Service "but they must have neat haircuts and get rid of their beards and sandals" and wear proper attire; according to Murphy, the largest number of hippies worked at post offices in San Francisco and some had been "walking their routes barefooted with shaggy beards, hair down to their shoulders, and wearing everything from bearskin coats to dungarees."[160]
The Jackson 5, an unknown family band at the time, released their debut single "
Big Boy" by
Steeltown Records.[161] Despite the song being neither a critical or commercial success, the
Jackson family were delighted when the song became a local hit after being played on radio stations in the
Chicago-Gary area. On July 26, the Jackson 5 would leave Steeltown after signing with
Motown Records.[162][163]
At 2:45 in the morning, a truck and a taxi cab pulled out of a repair shop near the
U.S. Embassy in
Saigon and drove to the Embassy compound. At 3:00, fifteen commandos set up explosives and blew a large hole in the compound's wall, then scrambled through and killed the two U.S. military police guarding the six-story embassy building. Antitank guns and rockets were fired at the doors, and U.S. Ambassador
Ellsworth Bunker was awakened and taken to a secret hiding place. U.S. Army soldiers counterattacked and retook the compound by 9:15;[164] fortunately, the embassy had been fortified less than a year earlier at a cost of $2,600,000 to put in shatterproof windows and the thick, 8-foot tall wall.[165]
After some sporadic attacks on bases the day before, the
Tet Offensive was unleashed on nearly all of South Vietnam's military bases and major cities simultaneously, with the
Viet Cong and the
North Vietnamese Army coordinating a massive assault that was larger than U.S. intelligence had forecast. An estimated 84,000 troops[166] had infiltrated provincial and district capitals and took advantage of the Tet holiday ceasefire to strike in what would become the turning point of the
Vietnam War.[167] More American soldiers would be killed in action during that day than on any other day of the Vietnam War, with 245 deaths of people whose names are etched upon the
Vietnam Veterans Memorial.[168][169]
The 1,000 guerrillas who had infiltrated
Saigon also seized the government radio station and surrounded, but did not capture, the presidential palace. The old imperial capital at
Huế was taken over by 3:40 in the morning[170] and more than 2,000 residents would be executed over the next three weeks; another 6,000 would be killed in the bombing and shelling of the city in the American counterattack, which would destroy 18,000 of Hue's 20,000 houses.[171] In all, 36 of the 44 provincial capitals and 64 of the 245 district government seats were attacked;[172] one of the capitals,
Bến Tre, was virtually destroyed in the process of being taken over and recaptured.[171]
The small island nation of
Nauru, with a population of 5,560 people (2,734 of whom were natives) was granted independence from Australia, with
Hammer DeRoburt as its first President.[174]
References
^"Indiana Falls to Simpson, U.S.C., 14-3", Chicago Tribune, January 2, 1968, p3-1
^"Sooners Hold Vols' Belated Surge, 26-24", Chicago Tribune, January 2, 1968, p3-1
^Handbook on Soviet Ground Forces (U.S. Department of the Army, 1975) p3-5
^"Day-Lewis Made Poet Laureate", Baltimore Sun, January 2, 1968, p1
^"Dentist, 58, in Good Condition After Heart Is Transplanted". Chicago Tribune. January 3, 1968. p. 5.
^
abWestaby, Stephen; Marais, David (2014). "Christiaan Barnard and Norman Shumway: The Heart Transplant Pioneers". In
Thompson, Gilbert (ed.). Pioneers of Medicine Without a Nobel Prize.
World Scientific. p. 121.
^Petrzela, Natalia Mehlman (2015). Classroom Wars: Language, Sex, and the Making of Modern Political Culture. Oxford University Press.
^
abErrington, Elizabeth Jane; McKercher, B. J. C., eds. (1990). "Intelligence and the Tet Offensive". The Vietnam War as History.
Praeger Publishing. p. 100.
^Brennan, Matthew (1990). Hunter Killer Squadron: Aero-Weapons, Aero-Scouts, Aero-Rifles, Vietnam 1965–1972.
Simon and Schuster. p. 143.
^"Cuba Starts Gasoline Rationing", Orlando Sentinel, January 4, 1968, p31
^"McCarthy Will Run in New Hampshire", Los Angeles Times, January 4, 1968, p1
^James H. Willbanks, The Tet Offensive: A Concise History (Columbia University Press, 2008) p28
^Karl Hack, Defence and Decolonisation in South-East Asia: Britain, Malaya and Singapore 1941–1967 (Routledge, 2013), p286
^Bryan R. Gibson, Sold Out? US Foreign Policy, Iraq, the Kurds, and the Cold War (Springer, 2016) p108
^David Henderson, 'Scuse Me While I Kiss the Sky: Jimi Hendrix: Voodoo Child (Simon and Schuster, 2008) p191
^Skoug, Kenneth N. (1999). Czechoslovakia's Lost Fight for Freedom, 1967–1969: An American Embassy Perspective.
Greenwood. p. 55.
^"Fishing Boat Hooks Big One: British Sub", Philadelphia Inquirer, January 13, 1968, p7
^"Trawler nets a submarine", The Age (Melbourne), January 13, 1968, p2
^Captain Ronnie E. Ford, Tet 1968: Understanding the Surprise (Routledge, 2012) p112
^Jeremy Black, The Cold War: A Military History (Bloomsbury, 2015)
^Alexander Domrin, The Limits of Russian Democratisation: Emergency Powers and States of Emergency (Routledge, 2006) p5
^"Eben Donges Dies in Capetown at 69; President-Elect Succumbs After 8 Months in Hospital", The New York Times, January 11, 1968, p.37
^"Israel, Arab Republic O.K. POW Exchange", Chicago Tribune, January 12, 1968, p. 2
^Paul M. McGarr, The Cold War in South Asia: Britain, the United States and the Indian Subcontinent, 1945–1965 (Cambridge University Press, 2013) p. 356
^Andrew Priest, Kennedy, Johnson and NATO: Britain, America and the Dynamics of Alliance, 1962–68 (Routledge, 2006)
^"Cameroon, Republic of", in Heads of States and Governments: A Worldwide Encyclopedia of Over 2,300 Leaders, 1945 through 1992, by Harris M. Lentz (Fitzroy Dearborn, 1994) p. 1062
^Matthew M. Aid, The Secret Sentry: The Untold History of the National Security Agency (Bloomsbury, 2010) p. 141
^H. Eugene Bovis, The Jerusalem Question, 1917–1968 (Hoover Press, 1971) p. 109
^"Four Russ Writers Sentenced; Trial Called 'Wild Mockery'". Chicago Tribune. January 13, 1968. p. 2.
^Wood, J. R. T. (2012). A Matter of Weeks Rather Than Months: The Impasse Between Harold Wilson and Ian Smith Sanctions, Aborted Settlements and War 1965–1969.
Trafford Publishing. p. 410.
^Kalley, Jacqueline A.; et al., eds. (1999). Southern African Political History: A Chronology of Key Political Events from Independence to Mid-1997. Greenwood. p. 360.
^Bartrop, Paul R. (2012). "Heng Samrin". A Biographical Encyclopedia of Contemporary Genocide: Portraits of Evil and Good. ABC-CLIO. p. 122.
^Dyndal, Gjert Lage (2016). Land Based Air Power or Aircraft Carriers?: A Case Study of the British Debate about Maritime Air Power in the 1960s. Routledge.
^"Hunt H-Bombs in Sea— Plane Falls Through Ice Off Greenland Coast", Chicago Tribune, January 23, 1968, p1
^Eric Schlosser, Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety (Penguin, 2014) p323
^
abNarushige Michishita, North Korea's Military-Diplomatic Campaigns, 1966–2008 (Routledge, 2009)
^Van Jackson, Rival Reputations: Coercion and Credibility in US-North Korea Relations (Cambridge University Press, 2016) p33
^"Red Terrorists Invade Seoul, Kill Eight", Chicago Tribune, January 22, 1968, p7
^Harold A. Winters, Battling the Elements: Weather and Terrain in the Conduct of War (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001) p70
^H.W. Crocker III, Don't Tread on Me: A 400-Year History of America at War, from Indian Fighting to Terrorist Hunting (Crown Publishing Group, 2006) p372
^Cheng Guan Ang, The Vietnam War from the Other Side (Routledge, 2013) p127
^Ervin Birnbaum, The Politics of Compromise: State and Religion in Israel (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1970) p53
^"MOONSHIP TEST SUCCEEDS— Key Engine Fires Well on 2d Trial", Chicago Tribune, January 23, 1968, p1
^David Shayler, Apollo: The Lost and Forgotten Missions (Springer, 2002) p172
^Michael Gould, The Struggle for Modern Nigeria: The Biafran War 1967–1970 (I.B.Tauris, 2011)
^"About us", Directorate of Kerala State Lotteries
^"Report French Sub Missing Near Toulon", Chicago Tribune, January 29, 1968, p3
^Jay Robert Nash, Darkest Hours: A narrative encyclopedia of worldwide disasters from ancient times to the present (Rowman & Littlefield, 1976) p371
^William Thomas Allison, The Tet Offensive: A Brief History with Documents (Routledge, 2010) p117
^Meera Srivastava, Constitutional Crisis in the States in India (Concept Publishing Company, 1980) p175
^Federico Vélez, Latin American Revolutionaries and the Arab World: From the Suez Canal to the Arab Spring (Taylor & Francis, 2017) p99
^"Purge Red Party in Cuba— 9 Top Aides Face Trial for Treason", Chicago Tribune, January 29, 1968, p1
^"CONG ATTACK IN 8 CITIES— Allies Halt Lunar Truce Throughout Viet". Chicago Tribune. January 30, 1968. p. 1.
^Holley, Charles; Sloniker, Mike (1997). Primer of the Helicopter War.
Nissi Publishing. p. 60.
^Zabecki, David T. (2011). "Tet Offensive, Overall Strategy". In
Tucker, Spencer C. (ed.). The Encyclopedia of the Vietnam War: A Political, Social, and Military History. ABC-CLIO. p. 1101.
Ranked as the number one college football team in the United States, the
USC Trojans (9–1–0) faced the #4 ranked
Indiana Hoosiers (9–1–0) in the
Rose Bowl in
Pasadena; that evening, the
Orange Bowl in
Miami pitted the #2 and #3 teams against each other, as the second-ranked
Tennessee Volunteers (9–1–0) met the
Oklahoma Sooners (9–1–0). The format of #1 vs. #4 and #2 vs. #3 would be used half a century later as the semi-finals for the NCAA Division I football championship game, but there were no playoffs in 1968, and USC, Indiana, Tennessee and Oklahoma were champions of their respective conferences. At the time, the Rose Bowl matched the Pac-8 and Big Ten, while the Orange Bowl featured the SEC and Big Eight. USC defeated Indiana, 14–3, on the strength of two touchdown runs by
O. J. Simpson,[1] and would retain its #1 ranking. Oklahoma blew a 19–0 halftime lead over Tennessee, but held off a furious Tennessee comeback which came down to an unsuccessful field goal attempt by West German-born kicker
Karl Kremser, and won the game, 26–24.[2] USC and Oklahoma would not meet for a title game, but would be ranked first and second in the final sportswriters' and coaches' polls.
A new universal military service law went into effect in the Soviet Union, requiring all able-bodied men to report for duty on their 18th birthdays. High school graduates were required to serve for one year; men in the army or air force had to stay two years, and those in the navy or coast guard had three years required service. The new law replaced a 1939 law that required three years in the army or air force, and four years in the navy or coast guard.[3]
The
Viet Cong kept up their record of breaking agreed ceasefires by killing 19 South Vietnamese troops during the 1968 New Year truce period in the Vietnam War.[4]
Dr.
Christiaan Barnard performed the third human
heart transplant in history,[6] and the first that would be considered successful enough that the recipient was able to go home from the hospital.
Philip Blaiberg, a 58-year old retired dentist living in
Cape Town,
South Africa, would leave the hospital after 73 days and would survive for another 17 months until his death on August 17, 1969.[7] The donor was 24-year old Clive Haupt, who had died from a massive
cerebral hemorrhage.[8]
U.S. President
Lyndon Johnson signed the
Bilingual Education Act into law. At the signing ceremony, Johnson said, "Thousands of children of Latin descent, young Indians, and others will get a better start— a better chance— in school... We are now giving every child in America a better chance to touch his outermost limits. We have begun a campaign to unlock the full potential of every boy and girl, regardless of his race, or his religion, or his father's income."[9]
The 36-hour ceasefire in the
Vietnam War expired at 0600 hours local time; during the New Year's Day truce, there were 64 major violations by the Viet Cong and
North Vietnamese Army (NVA).[10] Later in the day, a
U.S. Marine Corps patrol at
Khe Sanh killed a high-ranking NVA regimental commander and five other officers who had been inspecting the site, an indication of plans for a major attack.[11]
Cuba began rationing gasoline for the first time since
Fidel Castro's regime had taken power nine years earlier. In a speech the night before on the anniversary of the revolution, Castro announced that car-owners would be allowed to purchase between eight and 25 gallons per month, depending on the horsepower of their vehicles.[12]
U.S. Senator
Eugene J. McCarthy of Minnesota announced that he would directly challenge President Johnson for the Democratic Party nomination for president and arranged to have his name placed on the ballot for the New Hampshire primary.[13]
An operation by the U.S. 4th Infantry Division in the Dak To area of South Vietnam captured a classified five-page North Vietnamese document, titled "Urgent Combat Order No. 1", that described the strategy for a series of attacks to take place in Pleiku in conjunction with the upcoming Tet holiday.[10][14]
At a meeting with his cabinet, British Prime Minister
Harold Wilson first presented the proposal for the United Kingdom to withdraw from defending
Malaysia and
Singapore by the end of March 1971[15] and to pull out its troops stationed east of the Suez Canal by the middle of 1972.[16]
Following two shows at the Lorensberg Cirkus arena in
Gothenburg, singer
Jimi Hendrix was arrested for vandalizing his room at the Opelan Hotel. Hendrix was kept in jail overnight, then released to continue his tour of Sweden.[17]
Alexander Dubček was chosen as the leader of the Komunistická strana Československa (KSČ), the
Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, after the KSČ Central Committee voted to remove
Antonín Novotný because of his ineffective leadership of the nation. Novotny was allowed to continue in his post as
President of Czechoslovakia, though he would be removed from that job in March. Recommendations for the new First Secretary had been delegated by the Central Committee to a 21-member "Consultative Group" composed of representatives from regional party committees. On January 4, the group was divided with seven preferring Dubček, six in favor of Prime Minister
Jozef Lenárt, and four apiece for Deputy Premier
Oldřich Černík and National Assembly Chairman Bohuslav Lastovička. The choice was narrowed down on Friday morning to Dubček or Lenárt, and the Consultative Group selected Dubček by "a decisive majority" of the 21 members.[18]
Romanian First Deputy Foreign Minister Macovescu met with U.S. Ambassador
W. Averell Harriman to provide a message from top officials in Hanoi, with whom he had just visited. Macovescu provided the clearest indication yet that Hanoi would be willing to open negotiations with the United States if the bombing of North Vietnam was suspended; however, Hanoi did not provide any promises regarding not taking advantage of the bombing pause such as increasing infiltration of men and material into South Vietnam or an all-out invasion across the DMZ.[19]
According to the Los Angeles Times, a group of "more than 200"
Caltech students marched to and demonstrated in front of
NBC's studios in
Burbank[20] as part of what appeared to be a grassroots campaign, actually orchestrated by
Gene Roddenberry, to get the network to renew Star Trek for a third season.[21]
The
Agartala Conspiracy Case arose with the indictment and arrest of 35 people in
East Pakistan who were charged with plotting the
secession of the eastern part of Pakistan from the rest of the nation.
Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, named as the leader of the plot, was charged with traveling to the Indian city of
Agartala to meet with P. N. Ojha, India's representative to the East, in hopes of military support. East Pakistan, whose residents primarily spoke
Bengali, comprised more than half of Pakistan's population, but only 10 percent of its government officials, the West Pakistan residents who primarily spoke
Urdu. Sheikh Mujib and the other defendants would be put on trial on June 19, leading to mass demonstrations, a civil war, and the eventual separation of East Pakistan as the nation of
Bangladesh, with Sheikh Mujib as its first President.[22]
The collision of an express train and a truck stalled on the tracks killed 13 people in England, all of them passengers on the train. The truck driver and his-coworker were uninjured. At
Hixon, a village in
Staffordshire the truck was slowly hauling a 125-ton electrical
transformer over the crossing when the
Manchester to London southbound express train arrived with 500 people on board. The crossing gates lowered automatically, preventing the truck from completing its move off of the crossing, and the locomotive and eight cars derailed.[23]
In
South Korea, President
Park Chung Hee agreed to the petition by the nation's
Hangul Society to phasing out the use of Chinese that were taught in schools and which were published in conjunction with the
Korean alphabet (hangul), with Korean replacements for the Chinese symbols. Instructions would follow on October 25, reducing the number of Chinese words to 2,000 by year's end, 1,300 by the end of 1969, and eliminated altogether by the end of 1972.[24]
Norman Shumway performed the first successful heart transplant in the United States, operating at the
Stanford University Hospital in
California.[25] The donor was a 43-year-old woman, Virginia May White, who had suffered a
cerebral hemorrhage while celebrating her 22nd wedding anniversary; the recipient was Mike Casparak, a 54-year-old steelworker dying of
viral myocarditis. Casparak survived only 15 days, dying on January 21 from
liver failure.[7]
A 27-person team of surgeons at the Transvaal Memorial Hospital for Children (located in
Johannesburg,
South Africa) successfully completed the separation of
conjoined twins, Catherine O'Hare and Shirely O'Hare, who had been joined at the head. Two previous attempts to separate twins conjoined at the head had ended with only one of the twins surviving.[26]
All 45 people on board an Aeroflot An-24B airliner were killed when the plane exploded in midair while flying from
Olyokminsk to
Lensk.[27]
The price of mailing a letter in the United States increased by 20%, requiring six cents of postage to replace the five-cent postage stamp.[29] The increase went into effect exactly five years after the 1963 increase from four cents to five.
Forty-three passengers on a bus in
South Korea were killed near
Jinju when their bus lost one of its front wheels, went out of control, fell over a 33-foot (10 m) high cliff and sank in the
Nam River.[30]
Surveyor 7, the last of the Surveyor lunar probes launched by the United States, was sent up from
Cape Kennedy at 0630 UTC (1:30 in the morning). It would land on the Moon on January 10.[31]
Died:
Gholamreza Takhti, 37, popular Athlete Wrestler who won a gold medal for Iran in the 1956 Summer Olympics, was found dead in his hotel room of an overdose of sleeping pills; officially, the death was a suicide but many of Takhti's fans thought he had been murdered.[32]
Mario Roatta, 80, former Chief of Staff of the Italian Army during World War II, died two years after his return from a post-war exile in Spain
Ephraim Longworth, 80, English soccer football star who played for Liverpool F.C. from 1910 to 1928
Hugo Butler, 53, blacklisted Canadian-born screenwriter; of a heart attack[33]
All 41 U.S. personnel aboard a
Sikorsky CH-53 Sea Stallion helicopter were killed in the worst helicopter accident of the
Vietnam War.[34] The U.S. Marine Corps aircraft had a five-man crew and was transporting 31 Marines, three Navy men, one from the Army and one civilian and was on flying southward from Dong Ha, near the DMZ, to Phu Bai in bad weather. The CH-53 was found four days later, and had apparently slammed into the side of a steep mountain peak.
In Australia,
a Liberal Party leadership election was held to elect a successor to the late Prime Minister
Harold Holt, who
had drowned on December 17. Initially, there were four candidates for the leadership of the party, which was tantamount to the prime ministership:
John Gorton,
Paul Hasluck,
Les Bury, and
Billy Snedden. No candidate received a majority, but Bury and Snedden received the fewest votes and were eliminated from consideration. On the second ballot, Gorton won an absolute majority over Hasluck; he was sworn in as prime minister the following day.[38]
U.S. President Lyndon Johnson polled ahead of
Richard Nixon, the favored candidate for the Republican nomination, in two national surveys, including one by The Washington Post. The poll indicated that if the
November 1968 election was held in January, the incumbent president would defeat any of the four most prominent possibilities for Republican nomination, specifically Richard Nixon,
George W. Romney,
Ronald Reagan and
Nelson Rockefeller.[40]
For the first time since 1955, the weather stopped the clocks in the tower that houses
Big Ben in London. Snow drifts and intense cold caused the clocks' hands to stop at 6:28 a.m.; maintenance crews were able to restart the clock nearly four hours later, at 10:10.[41]
Renovated and refit after being purchased from the United Kingdom, the
Israeli submarine
INS Dakar departed from
Portsmouth Harbour on its first voyage for the
Israeli Navy. All contact with the sub would be lost 15 days later.[42]
The
National Football League Players Association (NFLPA) formally established itself as an independent labor union; the players would strike 6 months later, leading to the league's first collective bargaining agreement.[43]
At 7:05 p.m. in
Houston (0105 UTC on January 10), NASA Mission Control successfully landed
Surveyor 7 on the Moon, 18 miles (29 km) north of the Tycho crater.[45][46]
Cameron Todd Willingham, a possibly innocent American man who was convicted and executed for the murder of his three children by arson at his family home in Corsicana, Texas on December 23, 1991; in
Ardmore, Oklahoma (executed, 2004)[48][49]
Died:Kōkichi Tsuburaya, 27, Japanese marathon runner and bronze medalist in the 1964 Summer Olympics, committed suicide after concluding that his back problems would prevent him from being on the Olympic team in 1968. In a suicide note he wrote, "Kokichi is too tired to run anymore."[50]
The British submarine
HMS Grampus was ensnared in the nets of a fishing boat, immobilizing both vessels traveling in the
Bay of Biscay off the west coast of France. The French
trawlerFormalhaut was dragging its nets deep in the bay when it hit something that brought it to a halt. Ninety feet below the surface, the Grampus would not maneuver. Complicating matters, nobody on the Formalhaut spoke English and nobody on the Grampus spoke French. After a few hours, the trawling cable was cut and the Grampus sailed onward, "with her
conning tower still draped with nets", to continue in a scheduled naval exercise.[51][52]
Fifteen U.S. battalions in
South Vietnam were relocated from the border with
North Vietnam, and ordered moved by General
William C. Westmoreland to new positions around
Saigon and other major cities.[53] While the U.S. would benefit from the decision later in the month, it "failed to anticipate the timing and, more particularly, scale and character" of the full-scale attack in the
Tet Offensive.[54]
India rescinded its approval of the
Tashkent Declaration that had been signed with Pakistan exactly two years earlier (January 10, 1966) as tensions escalated between the neighboring nations.[55]
Died:Eben Dönges (Theophilus Ebenhaezer Dönges), 69, South African President-elect and former Prime Minister. On June 1, Dönges had been elected to the honorary post of
State President, but had suffered a stroke before he could take office and fell into a coma from which he never awoke.[56]
In
Geneva, the
International Red Cross announced that
Israel and
Egypt had agreed to conditions for releasing the prisoners of war who had been captured in June during the
Six-Day War. At the time, there were 4,000 Egyptian POWs and only 20 Israeli ones to be exchanged, in that agreements had already been worked out with Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq. The transfers took place between
Ismailia on the west side of the
Suez Canal, and
El Qantara on the east side, controlled by Israel's occupation forces.[57]
British Foreign Secretary
George Brown met with his American counterpart, U.S. Secretary of State
Dean Rusk, to tell him that Britain's economic problems had led it to a decision to no longer police the Middle East or Southeast Asia. In a meeting that Brown would refer to as "bloody unpleasant",[58] Rusk reportedly said, "Be British, George, be British. How can you betray us?",[59] although the official U.S. State Department transcript of the conversation does not record this remark.[60]
S. T. Muna was appointed as the new Prime Minister of West Cameroon, while
S. P. Tchoungui continued as the Prime Minister of a reorganized East Cameroon, both under the direction of
Ahmadou Ahidjo, the President of the Federal Republic of Cameroon. In 1972, the offices of Muna and Tchoungui would be abolished.[61]
The U.S. Navy electronic surveillance ship
USS Pueblo was dispatched from the port of
Sasebo, Nagasaki toward
North Korea for a 17-day mission to collect intelligence.[62]
Norman M. Yoder, an official within the
Pennsylvania Department of Human Services and commissioner of the state's office that offered services to the blind and visually impaired, told the Associated Press that six college students, all of them men and "all juniors at a western Pennsylvania college" which he declined to identify, had
permanently lost their eyesight after taking the hallucinogen
LSD and staring at the Sun, not realizing what they were doing.[65] Skeptical reporters began investigating, starting with calls to the state's colleges, Pennsylvania Governor
Raymond P. Shafer ordered his Attorney General to make an inquiry[66] and Yoder confessed that he had made the story up.[67][68]
The
American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T), which controlled all but a few of the telephones in the United States, announced plans to provide a universal
emergency telephone number that could be dialed quickly from any telephone in the country, and said that it would allocate $50,000,000 to install the routing equipment in American cities over a period of several years, starting with the exchanges in Washington, D.C. and New York City. According to AT&T, a computer search found that the number most likely to have no conflict with an existing area code or exchange, and to also meet the requirement of not being misdialed from a rotary phone, was
9-1-1.[69]
The trial of four Soviet writers ended with verdicts of being guilty of subversion, and sentences ranging from one to seven years. Poet
Yuri Galanskov received the longest term after being convicted of sedition for working with the anti-Communist organization
Narodno-Trudovoy Soyuz (NTS, the "People's Labor Union"), and author
Alexander Ginzburg got five years. Vera Lashkova was sentenced to one year incarceration, but was given credit for nearly a year of detention. Alexei Dobrovolsky got a reduced two-year sentence in exchange for testifying against Galanskov and Ginzburg.[70]
Zambia released all five members of the
South African Police who had been held in the jail in
Livingstone since December 27. The five men had driven across the
Victoria Falls Bridge from
Rhodesia into
Zambia, then ignored an order by border police to stop, and were "given a taste of the local
gaol" before being deported.[71] The release followed an apology by South Africa's foreign minister,
Hilgard Muller, to Zambia's President
Kenneth Kaunda.[72]
Bill Masterton, a center for the Minnesota North Stars of the National Hockey League, was fatally injured during a game against the Oakland Seals when he received a body check by two defenders while skating toward the Oakland goal with the puck. The incident happened in the early minutes of the game in front of a crowd of 12,119 spectators; after Masterton was taken from the rink and blood cleaned from the ice, play continued in a game that would end in a 2–2 tie.[79] Masterton (who was known for scoring the North Stars' very first goal when the team began play on October 11, 1967) would die 30 hours later from brain hemorrhaging caused by severe head trauma.[80][81]
Johnny Cash performed his historic concert at the
Folsom State Prison in California, selected by his manager because of Cash's 1955 hit song "
Folsom Prison Blues". The concert was not the first that Cash had performed at a penal institution, nor was Cash the only artist to appear that day (the
Statler Brothers,
Carl Perkins,
The Carter Family, and
The Tennessee Three were also present), but it was the first time that Cash had recorded a live album inside a prison. Johnny Cash At Folsom Prison would become the number one country music album in the United States after going on sale in May.[82]
Standing Naval Force Atlantic (STANAVFORLANT), a multinational naval force with ships from the Netherlands, Norway, the United Kingdom and the United States, was activated for the first time, with a base at England's
Portland Harbour. Within six months, Canada,
West Germany and Portugal would each contribute ships and crews as well.[83]
U.S. Ambassador to Saigon
Ellsworth Bunker provided U.S. President Lyndon Johnson with his review of the areas of progress in Vietnam during 1967.[84]
In Belgium, the campus of the
Catholic University of Leuven erupted in violence that spilled into the city of
Leuven, after the clergy administering the 440-year-old institution announced that they would continue to hold classes in French (spoken by the
Walloon minority in the school) in addition to
Flemish Dutch language. Hundreds of students were arrested, and the revolt would spread to other universities and towns in the northern part of the kingdom, leading to the resignation of the Belgian government on February 7. At the end of the spring semester, the university would split into two institutions, with the Flemish-speaking students and professors continuing at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, and the opening of a new campus 30 kilometres (19 mi) away at
Louvain-la-Neuve for the French-speaking Université Catholique de Louvain.[90]
Died:Bill Masterton, 29, Canadian ice hockey player, became the first and only NHL player to die of injuries received in a game.[94] The league now awards the
Masterton Trophy annually to the player "who best exemplifies the qualities of perseverance, sportsmanship, and dedication to ice hockey".[95]
British Prime Minister Harold Wilson addressed the
House of Commons and announced his government's decision to remove its military presence from the
Persian Gulf and from all of Asia (with the exception of
Hong Kong) by January 31, 1971.[96] The reaction from those who remembered the height of the
British Empire varied; an editorial in the New Statesman said of the decision, "It is comparable in importance to Mr Attlee's granting of Indian independence and the Tory government's evacuation of British Africa", while others pointed out that the cost of keeping a British presence in the Persian Gulf, "some £12 million yearly, was negligible compared to the immense revenues in oil."[97]
South Vietnam's President
Nguyễn Văn Thiệu and U.S. Army commander
William C. Westmoreland met at Thiệu's office and decided that they would end the scheduled Tet holiday truce with North Vietnam, four days ahead of schedule, though the announcement of the decision would not be made until January 30. According to the memoirs of a North Vietnamese spy who had infiltrated the Thiệu offices, North Vietnam's military leaders decided to move the date of the
Tet Offensive from February 5 to January 31.[98]
Urho Kekkonen won
re-election to a third term as
President of Finland, receiving the votes of his own Centre Party, as well as those of the Finnish People's Democratic League and the Social Democratic Party, for 201 of the 300 electoral votes. Two rival candidates (Matti Virkkunen of the National Coalition Party and Veikko Vennamo of the Finnish Rural Party) got 66 and 33 electoral votes apiece. Kekkonen won 56% of the popular votes (1,152,700 of 2,049,002).[99]
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, based on the
novel by Muriel Spark, premiered on Broadway; the lead actress
Zoe Caldwell would win a Tony for her role as the title character.
The
Kampuchean Revolutionary Army launched its first attack, with three
Khmer Rouge guerrillas storming a police post at
Bay Damram in
Cambodia's
Battambang Province to steal weapons. Getting away with several guns, the men had overlooked getting ammunition; when they came back a second time to get it, they got the wrong ammunition.[102] The next day, the uprising saw the seizure of weapons in other villages and the killing of three policemen in ambushes, followed by a deadly attack a week later at a guard post in Thvak; the Kampuchean revolutionaries would take control of Cambodia seven years later and begin a reign of terror.[103]
Auto manufacturers
British Motor Holdings and
Leyland Motor Corporation announced their merger to become
British Leyland. The new entity became the largest car company in the United Kingdom and the sixth largest in the world (after General Motors, Ford Motor, Chrysler, Fiat, and Volkswagen). Models under the British Leyland umbrella included Jaguar, MG, Triumph, and Land Rover.[104]
Born:Svetlana Masterkova, Russian athlete and holder of the women's world record for fastest kilometer (2:28.98) since 1996 and for fastest mile (4 minutes, 12.56 seconds) from 1996 to 2019, as well as winner of the 800m and 1500m races in the 1996 Olympics; in
Achinsk,
Russian SFSR, Soviet Union
Singer and actress
Eartha Kitt was a guest at the
White House at a luncheon hosted by
Lady Bird Johnson to honor a group of "Women Doers", influential women invited by the First Lady to talk about specific issues. When President Johnson entered the dining room, Kitt asked him what appeared to be a routine question about "delinquent parents", and didn't like the answer that she had been given. Although Kitt didn't vent her anger on the President himself, her confrontation with the First Lady about the Vietnam War became an embarrassing incident.[105] "I have a baby and then you send him off to war", Kitt reportedly said, "No wonder the kids rebel and take pot. And, Mrs. Johnson, in case you don't understand the lingo, that's marijuana!" Afterward, Kitt would experience "a slow decline in her career".[106] Two days later in a telephone call Chicago Mayor
Richard Daley expressed his support for Ladybird and revealed that a 500 strong woman's group in Chicago had declared their support for Ladybird in the incident including a lady whose 20-year-old son had recently died in Vietnam.[107] Hanoi immediately used Kitt's outburst for their own propaganda purposes.[108]
The first
Red Lobster seafood restaurant was opened, with a single location at 1330 East Memorial Boulevard in
Lakeland, Florida, operated by Bill Darden and Charley Woodsby.[109][110] Fifty years later, the company would have more than 700 Red Lobster restaurants in 11 countries. Before Red Lobster, Darden had started his first restaurant, "The Green Frog", in
Waycross, Georgia, in 1939.[111]
King Hussein of
Jordan alerted U.S. State Department officials about a serious threat by Arab terrorists to assassinate Israeli Defense Minister
Moshe Dayan. Hussein had learned of the plot while on a visit to Saudi Arabia.[112]
Operation Crosstie, "Project Faultless", an experiment to see if an
earthquake could be triggered by detonating an underground nuclear weapon along a
fault line. After the residents of the closest towns to the Central Nevada Test Site (
Tonopah and
Eureka, Nevada) were briefed about what to expect, an atomic bomb was detonated in
Nye County at a depth of 3,200 feet (980 m). The blast, described by the Atomic Energy Commission as being one megaton, was believed to be the most powerful nuclear weapon ever exploded in the United States, and caused upheavals and dropping of the ground in a wide area, breaking windows 87 miles (140 km) away at a high school in
Ely. Because of the surface damage, the test site would eventually be declared unsuitable.[citation needed] According to reports the next day, "Buildings swayed in
Salt Lake City and San Francisco", particularly in the Southern Pacific building in the California city; the tremor caused by the blast was estimated by the University of California at Berkeley to be 6.0 on the Richter scale.[113]
U.S. President Johnson completed the installation of a tape recording system in the
Cabinet Room of the
White House to preserve his discussions of meetings with the leaders of government departments that comprised the
presidential cabinet and with other advisers. Roughly 200 hours worth of recordings would be delivered to the Johnson presidential library after Johnson's death in 1973. Despite Johnson's own wish that the recordings be sealed for 50 years after his passing (until January 22, 2023), most were released after 1992.[114]
Thousands of people protested in Japan as the American aircraft carrier
USS Enterprise made the first visit to that nation by a nuclear-powered ship, docking at the
U.S. Navy base at
Sasebo. The port was about 50 miles (80 km) from
Nagasaki, which on August 9, 1945, had seen the second and last site of nuclear warfare. Permission had been granted by Prime Minister
Eisaku Satō, who had made the decision without consultation with his Foreign Minister or with any other members of his cabinet.[115]
In the first regular-season college basketball game to be shown live on national television, the second-ranked
University of Houston Cougars defeated the top-ranked
UCLA Bruins, 71 to 69, at the
Houston Astrodome. Played inside a domed baseball stadium, the meeting set a record for attendance at a college basketball with 52,693 paying customers (more than 4,000 of whom were standing up because the seats were filled), and was billed as "
The Game of the Century".[116] Both teams were unbeaten (UCLA had a 13–0 record and a 47-game winning streak, and Houston had a 16–0 record). Each had a superstar player, with Houston being fronted by
Elvin Hayes and UCLA's Lew Alcindor (who would later change his name to
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) having been cleared to play after having to miss two games because of an eye injury.[117] The spectators and viewers watched a thriller that came down to the final minute; Hayes scored 39 points, including two free throws that proved to be the winning points with 0:28 left on the clock; UCLA's chance to send the game into overtime ended when a Bruins player inadvertently tipped the ball out of bounds with 0:12 left.[118]
In South Vietnam, a defector from the
North Vietnamese Army surrendered to U.S. Marines at the
Khe Sanh Combat Base and warned them that the NVA was preparing to launch a massive attack there the next day, starting with an assault after midnight against Hill 861 overlooking the area.[119]
North Vietnam once again denied the Red Cross access to U.S. prisoners who were being held in Hanoi in an attempt to conceal the torture tactics they were utilizing in violation of international law.[121]
A U.S.
B-52 Stratofortresscrashed in Greenland, losing its cargo of four
Mark 28 nuclear bombs.[122] The disaster happened while the bomber was monitoring the U.S. Air Force's
Thule Air Base, flying back and forth at an altitude of 35,000 feet (11,000 m) over the base's early warning system. Four "cloth-covered, foam-rubber cushions" had been placed beneath an uncomfortable seat and were blocking a vent; when the co-pilot switched on a backup heating system that relied on warm air that had been pulled in through the plane's
intake manifold, the cushions caught fire. The seven-man crew ejected, and the plane "slammed into the ice of
Bylot Sound" near the base. The high-level conventional explosives inside the four thermonuclear weapons exploded on impact, contaminating three square miles of ice with radioactive
plutonium. However, because of the "
one-point safety" design that had been perfected in the mid-1950s during
Project 56, a larger catastrophe was averted. A historian would note later that, "If the Mark 28 hadn't been made inherently one-point safe, the bombs that hit the ice could have produced a nuclear yield. And the partial detonation of a nuclear weapon, or two, or three— without any warning, at the air base considered essential for the defense of the United States— could have been misinterpreted" at the headquarters of the
Strategic Air Command.[123]
Blue House raid: an attack on the
Blue House, residence of the
President of South Korea in
Seoul, was attempted by a 31-member assault team from the 124th Army unit of
North Korea's
Korean People's Army.[124] The North Korean squad, on a mission to assassinate President
Park Chung Hee, came within 800 metres (870 yd) of the Blue House before a firefight ensued with South Korean police. All but one of the commandos was killed, and the survivor would tell investigators that the objective had been to "agitate the South Korean people to fight with arms against their government and the American imperialists."[125] Eight South Koreans were killed in the fight.[126]
The
Battle of Khe Sanh began at 5:30 in the morning as the North Vietnamese Army began shelling a U.S. Marine combat base from positions in South Vietnam and across the border in Laos, while operating under the cover of a morning fog. On the first day, shells destroyed the American base's main ammunition dump, where 98% of its firepower had been stored.[127] The battle would last for 77 days, with the besieged compound being freed in April,[128] but at a cost of 274 U.S. deaths and the diversion of American forces in advance of the Tet Offensive.
North Vietnamese Army (NVA) General
Võ Nguyên Giáp gave the go-ahead orders to NVA and Viet Cong commanders in South Vietnam to begin the
Tet Offensive on the eve of the Vietnamese New Year celebration, five days ahead of the original plan, after the Tet holiday ceasefire was shortened.[129]
Apollo 5 was launched as an unmanned mission to test the
Lunar Module (LM-2) that would take two astronauts from orbit to the lunar surface, and then back again for a return to Earth. The LM-2 was loaded (without its landing gear) into the nose cone of a Saturn 1B rocket, and was sent up from
Cape Kennedy at 5:48 p.m. local time.[131] After it reached a 138-mile (222 km) orbit, the LM-1 separated from the rocket stage and tests were made of its descent engine (which would guide the astronauts to a soft landing on the
Moon) and its ascent engine (which was required not only to return the module to orbit, but also to fire through the descent engine if necessary to abort a failure).[132]
The deadline in
Nigeria for exchanging old
Nigerian pound banknotes for newly printed currency expired, and the notes that had circulated since 1958 became worthless. The decision to replace the notes had been made in August after the secession of
Biafra as a means of preventing Biafra from trading its holdings of Nigerian pounds on foreign exchanges. In the days leading up to the deadline, tons of the old banknotes were purchased only at a heavy discount.[133] Biafra would introduce its own coins and currency, the
Biafran pound, one week later.
U.S. Air Force Captain
Lance Sijan, 25, died in
North Vietnam's
Hỏa Lò prison camp from pneumonia, malnutrition and multiple injuries. He had spent 40 days eluding his captors after his F-4C fighter had been shot down over Laos on November 9; he had been captured, had escaped, and had then been recaptured. Captain Sijan would posthumously be awarded the
Medal of Honor; his remains would be returned to the United States on March 13, 1974.
Duke Kahanamoku, 77, Hawaiian athlete who won gold medals in the 1912 and 1920 Summer Olympic Games, known best remembered for popularizing the sport of
surfing.
North Korea seized the
USS Pueblo, claiming the ship violated its territorial waters while spying.[135] At 12:27 p.m. local time, a North Korean SO-1 patrol craft approached the American surveillance ship and gave the
International Code of Signals flag combination (I)ndia-(D)elta, meaning "
Heave to or I will open fire"; Captain
Lloyd M. Bucher ordered the Pueblo to signal back that it was in international waters and that it intended to remain at its location until the next day. Three North Korean P-4 torpedo boats then arrived from
Wonsan harbor; the SO-1 boat signaled for the Pueblo to follow. At 1:27, the SO-1 fired its guns, and the P-4 shot gunfire as the slower Pueblo attempted to escape. At 1:45, Bucher surrendered the ship.[124] On December 23, following an American apology, the North Koreans would release the 82 members of the Pueblo crew but would keep the American ship, which is now on display in
Pyongyang near the "Victorious Fatherland Liberation War Museum".[136]
The government of the
Madras State in southern India became the first to drop a requirement that students learn
Hindi, the most commonly spoken language in the nation. Students had the option to take Hindi, but required instruction was in the
Tamil language spoken by a majority of people in Madras, which is now called the
Tamil Nadu state. The only remaining required language for students in Madras was English.[137]
The student strike that had started a week earlier, at Belgium's
Catholic University of Leuven, was intensified as other
Flemish speakers, and high school students in
Flanders walked out of their classrooms.[90]
France made its first test of the experimental
Ludion, a jet pack, propelled by
isopropyl nitrate and designed to lift a soldier and a small amount of equipment for a short distance. The first test, like all but five of the 64 made of the Ludion before the project was abandoned, was a
tethered flight.[139]
Charlie Wilson, one of the perpetrators of the
Great Train Robbery of 1963, was recaptured more than three years after he had escaped from prison on
August 12, 1964, when police found him near Montreal in the Canadian town of
Rigaud, Quebec. Wilson had been living in Rigaud for two years under the alias "Ronald Alloway".[140] Wilson would be released in 1978 after spending 10 more years imprisoned in England, would retire to Spain, and would be murdered on April 23, 1990, at his home in
Marbella in a
contract killing.[141]
The
Israeli submarine
INS Dakar sank in the Mediterranean on its first voyage since being purchased from the United Kingdom, killing the 69 crew on board.[42][142] The wreckage would be located more than 30 years later, on May 28, 1999, apparently the victim of a structural failure in one of the torpedo tubes.[143]
I Never Sang for My Father premiered on Broadway. It was a moderate success, running for 124 performances at the Shubert Theatre. It starred Hal Holbrook and Lillian Gish, and would be made into a film in 1970.[144]
Rioting broke out in the French city of
Caen after police broke up a protest march by about 10,000 protesters and striking workers form the
Saviem truck factory, "liberally dousing them with
tear gas" in an unprovoked attack. Angered, the marchers began throwing rocks and
Molotov cocktails and the riot would go through the night until 5:00 the next morning; 100 people were hurt, 36 of them badly enough to be hospitalized, and another 85 were arrested.[90]
Flying a
Lockheed A-12 Blackbird reconnaissance jet at 80,000 feet (24,000 m) over
North Korea, CIA pilot Jack Weeks located the missing
USS Pueblo, anchored at
Wonson. In the same mission, however, Weeks also took photos that showed that North Korea was not massing troops near the demilitarized zone, easing fears of a new Korean War.[145][146]
The first
Kerala State Lotteries grand prize (and the first government lottery prize ever awarded in India) was drawn at
Trivandrum, with the winner receiving 50,000
Indian rupees (equivalent to $6,700 U.S. dollars at the time). Tickets for the first lottery had been sold since November 1.[147]
Two days after the disaster of the Israeli submarine Dakar, the French submarine Minerve sank in the Mediterranean Sea, killing all 52 of its crew.[148] The last contact that the Minerve had made was when it was in the Mediterranean Sea, approaching its home port at
Toulon and only 25 miles (40 km) away. At the time, the submarine was 40 feet (12 m) below the surface, in waters 6,000 feet (1,800 m) deep; its hull was not designed to survive pressures at depths greater than 1,000 feet (300 m).[149]
At midnight Indochina Time, the official
Tet holiday ceasefire began in South Vietnam and North Vietnam, in the days leading up to the New Year's Eve celebrations to welcome the start of Mau Than, the Year of the Monkey.[150]
In the Indian state of
Bihar, the government of Chief Minister
Mahamaya Prasad Sinha was brought down by a censure motion that passed 163 to 150.[151]
Anibal Escalante and 36 other members of Cuba's Communist Party were arrested and charged with being a "microfaction" (La "Microfracción) within Cuba that was working with the Soviet Embassy. In reaction, the Soviets, who provided the support to the Cuban government's programs, "began to establish diplomatic and commercial relations with governments that Cuba had pledge to topple or had denounced", and decreased the amount of oil that it provided to Cuba.[152][153]
NASA confirmed nomenclature for the
Orbital Workshop (OWS) included in the AAP presented in the FY 1969 budget. The ground-outfitted OWS to be launched with Saturn V would be designated the "
Saturn V Workshop". (This had sometimes been called the "
dry workshop".) The OWS that would be launched by a Saturn IB would be referred to as the "Saturn I Workshop". (Colloquially it had been referred to as the "
wet workshop".) Terminology "Uprated Saturn I" would not be used officially. This launch vehicle would be referred to as the "Saturn IB".[39]
Ford's Theatre, located at 511 10th St, NW in Washington, D.C., held its first entertainment program since April 14, 1865, when the comedy Our American Cousin had been interrupted by
the assassination of U.S. President
Abraham Lincoln. For the reopening,
Henry Fonda,
Harry Belafonte,
Helen Hayes, and
Andy Williams were among the performers on stage in an evening of music and dancing.[158] Television viewers were able to watch a videotaped performance that night at 10:00 p.m. Eastern time, titled Inaugural Evening at Ford's Theater.[159]
Assistant Postmaster General Richard Murphy ruled that
hippies could continue to work for the
United States Postal Service "but they must have neat haircuts and get rid of their beards and sandals" and wear proper attire; according to Murphy, the largest number of hippies worked at post offices in San Francisco and some had been "walking their routes barefooted with shaggy beards, hair down to their shoulders, and wearing everything from bearskin coats to dungarees."[160]
The Jackson 5, an unknown family band at the time, released their debut single "
Big Boy" by
Steeltown Records.[161] Despite the song being neither a critical or commercial success, the
Jackson family were delighted when the song became a local hit after being played on radio stations in the
Chicago-Gary area. On July 26, the Jackson 5 would leave Steeltown after signing with
Motown Records.[162][163]
At 2:45 in the morning, a truck and a taxi cab pulled out of a repair shop near the
U.S. Embassy in
Saigon and drove to the Embassy compound. At 3:00, fifteen commandos set up explosives and blew a large hole in the compound's wall, then scrambled through and killed the two U.S. military police guarding the six-story embassy building. Antitank guns and rockets were fired at the doors, and U.S. Ambassador
Ellsworth Bunker was awakened and taken to a secret hiding place. U.S. Army soldiers counterattacked and retook the compound by 9:15;[164] fortunately, the embassy had been fortified less than a year earlier at a cost of $2,600,000 to put in shatterproof windows and the thick, 8-foot tall wall.[165]
After some sporadic attacks on bases the day before, the
Tet Offensive was unleashed on nearly all of South Vietnam's military bases and major cities simultaneously, with the
Viet Cong and the
North Vietnamese Army coordinating a massive assault that was larger than U.S. intelligence had forecast. An estimated 84,000 troops[166] had infiltrated provincial and district capitals and took advantage of the Tet holiday ceasefire to strike in what would become the turning point of the
Vietnam War.[167] More American soldiers would be killed in action during that day than on any other day of the Vietnam War, with 245 deaths of people whose names are etched upon the
Vietnam Veterans Memorial.[168][169]
The 1,000 guerrillas who had infiltrated
Saigon also seized the government radio station and surrounded, but did not capture, the presidential palace. The old imperial capital at
Huế was taken over by 3:40 in the morning[170] and more than 2,000 residents would be executed over the next three weeks; another 6,000 would be killed in the bombing and shelling of the city in the American counterattack, which would destroy 18,000 of Hue's 20,000 houses.[171] In all, 36 of the 44 provincial capitals and 64 of the 245 district government seats were attacked;[172] one of the capitals,
Bến Tre, was virtually destroyed in the process of being taken over and recaptured.[171]
The small island nation of
Nauru, with a population of 5,560 people (2,734 of whom were natives) was granted independence from Australia, with
Hammer DeRoburt as its first President.[174]
References
^"Indiana Falls to Simpson, U.S.C., 14-3", Chicago Tribune, January 2, 1968, p3-1
^"Sooners Hold Vols' Belated Surge, 26-24", Chicago Tribune, January 2, 1968, p3-1
^Handbook on Soviet Ground Forces (U.S. Department of the Army, 1975) p3-5
^"Day-Lewis Made Poet Laureate", Baltimore Sun, January 2, 1968, p1
^"Dentist, 58, in Good Condition After Heart Is Transplanted". Chicago Tribune. January 3, 1968. p. 5.
^
abWestaby, Stephen; Marais, David (2014). "Christiaan Barnard and Norman Shumway: The Heart Transplant Pioneers". In
Thompson, Gilbert (ed.). Pioneers of Medicine Without a Nobel Prize.
World Scientific. p. 121.
^Petrzela, Natalia Mehlman (2015). Classroom Wars: Language, Sex, and the Making of Modern Political Culture. Oxford University Press.
^
abErrington, Elizabeth Jane; McKercher, B. J. C., eds. (1990). "Intelligence and the Tet Offensive". The Vietnam War as History.
Praeger Publishing. p. 100.
^Brennan, Matthew (1990). Hunter Killer Squadron: Aero-Weapons, Aero-Scouts, Aero-Rifles, Vietnam 1965–1972.
Simon and Schuster. p. 143.
^"Cuba Starts Gasoline Rationing", Orlando Sentinel, January 4, 1968, p31
^"McCarthy Will Run in New Hampshire", Los Angeles Times, January 4, 1968, p1
^James H. Willbanks, The Tet Offensive: A Concise History (Columbia University Press, 2008) p28
^Karl Hack, Defence and Decolonisation in South-East Asia: Britain, Malaya and Singapore 1941–1967 (Routledge, 2013), p286
^Bryan R. Gibson, Sold Out? US Foreign Policy, Iraq, the Kurds, and the Cold War (Springer, 2016) p108
^David Henderson, 'Scuse Me While I Kiss the Sky: Jimi Hendrix: Voodoo Child (Simon and Schuster, 2008) p191
^Skoug, Kenneth N. (1999). Czechoslovakia's Lost Fight for Freedom, 1967–1969: An American Embassy Perspective.
Greenwood. p. 55.
^"Fishing Boat Hooks Big One: British Sub", Philadelphia Inquirer, January 13, 1968, p7
^"Trawler nets a submarine", The Age (Melbourne), January 13, 1968, p2
^Captain Ronnie E. Ford, Tet 1968: Understanding the Surprise (Routledge, 2012) p112
^Jeremy Black, The Cold War: A Military History (Bloomsbury, 2015)
^Alexander Domrin, The Limits of Russian Democratisation: Emergency Powers and States of Emergency (Routledge, 2006) p5
^"Eben Donges Dies in Capetown at 69; President-Elect Succumbs After 8 Months in Hospital", The New York Times, January 11, 1968, p.37
^"Israel, Arab Republic O.K. POW Exchange", Chicago Tribune, January 12, 1968, p. 2
^Paul M. McGarr, The Cold War in South Asia: Britain, the United States and the Indian Subcontinent, 1945–1965 (Cambridge University Press, 2013) p. 356
^Andrew Priest, Kennedy, Johnson and NATO: Britain, America and the Dynamics of Alliance, 1962–68 (Routledge, 2006)
^"Cameroon, Republic of", in Heads of States and Governments: A Worldwide Encyclopedia of Over 2,300 Leaders, 1945 through 1992, by Harris M. Lentz (Fitzroy Dearborn, 1994) p. 1062
^Matthew M. Aid, The Secret Sentry: The Untold History of the National Security Agency (Bloomsbury, 2010) p. 141
^H. Eugene Bovis, The Jerusalem Question, 1917–1968 (Hoover Press, 1971) p. 109
^"Four Russ Writers Sentenced; Trial Called 'Wild Mockery'". Chicago Tribune. January 13, 1968. p. 2.
^Wood, J. R. T. (2012). A Matter of Weeks Rather Than Months: The Impasse Between Harold Wilson and Ian Smith Sanctions, Aborted Settlements and War 1965–1969.
Trafford Publishing. p. 410.
^Kalley, Jacqueline A.; et al., eds. (1999). Southern African Political History: A Chronology of Key Political Events from Independence to Mid-1997. Greenwood. p. 360.
^Bartrop, Paul R. (2012). "Heng Samrin". A Biographical Encyclopedia of Contemporary Genocide: Portraits of Evil and Good. ABC-CLIO. p. 122.
^Dyndal, Gjert Lage (2016). Land Based Air Power or Aircraft Carriers?: A Case Study of the British Debate about Maritime Air Power in the 1960s. Routledge.
^"Hunt H-Bombs in Sea— Plane Falls Through Ice Off Greenland Coast", Chicago Tribune, January 23, 1968, p1
^Eric Schlosser, Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety (Penguin, 2014) p323
^
abNarushige Michishita, North Korea's Military-Diplomatic Campaigns, 1966–2008 (Routledge, 2009)
^Van Jackson, Rival Reputations: Coercion and Credibility in US-North Korea Relations (Cambridge University Press, 2016) p33
^"Red Terrorists Invade Seoul, Kill Eight", Chicago Tribune, January 22, 1968, p7
^Harold A. Winters, Battling the Elements: Weather and Terrain in the Conduct of War (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001) p70
^H.W. Crocker III, Don't Tread on Me: A 400-Year History of America at War, from Indian Fighting to Terrorist Hunting (Crown Publishing Group, 2006) p372
^Cheng Guan Ang, The Vietnam War from the Other Side (Routledge, 2013) p127
^Ervin Birnbaum, The Politics of Compromise: State and Religion in Israel (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1970) p53
^"MOONSHIP TEST SUCCEEDS— Key Engine Fires Well on 2d Trial", Chicago Tribune, January 23, 1968, p1
^David Shayler, Apollo: The Lost and Forgotten Missions (Springer, 2002) p172
^Michael Gould, The Struggle for Modern Nigeria: The Biafran War 1967–1970 (I.B.Tauris, 2011)
^"About us", Directorate of Kerala State Lotteries
^"Report French Sub Missing Near Toulon", Chicago Tribune, January 29, 1968, p3
^Jay Robert Nash, Darkest Hours: A narrative encyclopedia of worldwide disasters from ancient times to the present (Rowman & Littlefield, 1976) p371
^William Thomas Allison, The Tet Offensive: A Brief History with Documents (Routledge, 2010) p117
^Meera Srivastava, Constitutional Crisis in the States in India (Concept Publishing Company, 1980) p175
^Federico Vélez, Latin American Revolutionaries and the Arab World: From the Suez Canal to the Arab Spring (Taylor & Francis, 2017) p99
^"Purge Red Party in Cuba— 9 Top Aides Face Trial for Treason", Chicago Tribune, January 29, 1968, p1
^"CONG ATTACK IN 8 CITIES— Allies Halt Lunar Truce Throughout Viet". Chicago Tribune. January 30, 1968. p. 1.
^Holley, Charles; Sloniker, Mike (1997). Primer of the Helicopter War.
Nissi Publishing. p. 60.
^Zabecki, David T. (2011). "Tet Offensive, Overall Strategy". In
Tucker, Spencer C. (ed.). The Encyclopedia of the Vietnam War: A Political, Social, and Military History. ABC-CLIO. p. 1101.