1969 Compositions

This year is notable for Apollo 11's first landing on the moon.

Events

January

* January 4 – The Government of Spain hands over Ifni to Morocco.
* January 5
** Ariana Afghan Airlines Flight 701 crashes into a house on its approach to London's Gatwick Airport, killing 50 of the 62 people on board and two of the home's occupants.
* January 14 – An explosion aboard the aircraft carrier USS ''Enterprise'' near Hawaii kills 27 and injures 314.
* January 19 – End of the siege of the University of Tokyo, marking the beginning of the end for the 1968–69 Japanese university protests.
* January 20 – Richard Nixon is sworn in as the 37th President of the United States.
* January 22 – An assassination attempt is carried out on Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev by deserter Viktor Ilyin. One person is killed, several are injured. Brezhnev escaped unharmed.
* January 27
** Fourteen men, 9 of them Jews, are executed in Baghdad for spying for Israel.
** Reverend Ian Paisley, Northern Irish Unionist leader and founder of the Free Presbyterian Church of Ulster is jailed for three months for illegal assembly.
* January 28 – 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill: A blowout on Union Oil's Platform A spills 80,000 to 100,000 barrels of crude oil into a channel and onto the beaches of Santa Barbara County in Southern California; on February 5 the oil spill closes Santa Barbara's harbor. The incident inspires Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson to organize the first Earth Day in 1970.

February

* February 4 – In Cairo, Yasser Arafat is elected Palestine Liberation Organization leader at the Palestinian National Congress.
* February 8
** The Allende meteorite explodes over Mexico.
** After 147 years, the last weekly issue of '' The Saturday Evening Post'' is published in the United States. (The magazine is later briefly resurrected as a monthly magazine.)
* February 9 – The Boeing 747 "jumbo jet" is flown for the first time, taking off from the Boeing airfield at Everett, Washington.
* February 13 – Front de libération du Québec (FLQ) terrorists bomb the Montreal Stock Exchange.
* February 14 – Pope Paul VI issues '' Mysterii Paschalis'', a '' motu proprio'', deleting many names from the Roman calendar of saints (including Valentine, who was celebrated on this day).
* February 17 – Aquanaut Berry L. Cannon dies of carbon dioxide poisoning while attempting to repair the SEALAB III habitat off San Clemente Island, California.
* February 24 – The Mariner 6 Mars probe is launched from the United States.

March

* March 2
** In Toulouse, France the first Concorde test flight is conducted.
** Soviet and Chinese forces clash at a border outpost on the Ussuri River.
* March 3
** Apollo program: NASA launches Apollo 9 ( James McDivitt, Rusty Schweickart, David Scott) to test the lunar module.
** In a Los Angeles court, Sirhan Sirhan admits that he killed presidential candidate