June 1968

The following events occurred in June 1968:

June 1, 1968 (Saturday)

* Austria became the first Western nation to agree to purchase natural gas from the Soviet Union, signing a long-term lease for an extension of a pipeline from Bratislava in Czechoslovakia.
*Italy's government fell on the 22nd anniversary of the founding of the republic, as the Socialist Party decided not to form another coalition with the Christian Democrats.
*The Sunday Times Golden Globe Race, promoted by London's ''Sunday Times'' as a round-the-world yacht race for a £5,000 prize, began with the departure from the Ireland island of Kilronan by John Ridgway on his sloop, ''English Rose IV''.
*The Six Flags AstroWorld theme park opened in Houston, 8 months after its development was announced by Roy Hofheinz. The park would last for 37 years, closing permanently on October 30, 2005, at the end of the season.
*The flag of Alberta was officially adopted by the government of the Canadian province.
*Born: Jason Donovan, Australian actor and singer, in Melbourne

*Died: Helen Keller, 87, American author, political activist, and lecturer, and the first deaf-blind person to earn a bachelor of arts degree, died at her estate near Easton, Connecticut.

June 2, 1968 (Sunday)

*A lack of seating at a theatrical performance in Yugoslavia triggered violent student protests in Belgrade. A blackout struck the "Student City" (''Studentski grad'') dormitories on the day before final examinations were to start at the University of Belgrade, and students went across the street to the adult education center of Novi Beograd to watch a dress rehearsal of a variety show, "Caravan of Friendship". Security guards at the center tried to turn the students away, a scuffle broke out and a 40-man unit of riot police was called to use a water cannon to send the demonstrators back to their dormitories. By midnight, 3,000 students would begin a march toward government buildings in Belgrade and a riot began. A student strike followed with 10,000 students occupying classroom and administration buildings and closing down the university. One week later, Yugoslavia's President Josip Broz Tito would make a surprise response to the demonstrations.
*Leaders of the Basque separatist organization ETA decided to carry out their first assassinations of officials of the government of Spain, targeting Melitón Manzanas, the head of the Brigada Político-Social secret police organization in San Sebastián, and another BPS chief in Bilbao. The attempt on the life of Manzanas would be foiled on June 7."The origins of ETA: between Francoism and democracy, 1958—1981", by Gaizka Fernandez, in ''ETA's Terrorist Campaign: From Violence to Politics, 1968–2015'' (Routledge, 2016) p25
*The first peace talks to end violence in Cyprus began as Greek Cypriot leader Glafcos Clerides and Turkish Cypriot leader Rauf Denktaş met at a neutral site ( Beirut in Lebanon) as guests of the United Nations.
* José María Velasco Ibarra was re-elected for a fifth term as President of Ecuador. Velasco Ibarra would assume dictatorial powers in 1970 and would be overthrown in a coup on February 15, 1972.
*In the Turkish senate elections, the Justice Party (AP) won 49.9% of the vote. In this election 53 members of the senate were elected.(50 members for 1/3 of the senate and 3 empty seats)

June 3, 1968 (Monday)

* Valerie Solanas shot and almost killed pop artist Andy Warhol after following him into his studio, "The Factory", in New York City. With a .32 caliber automatic pistol, she shot Warhol several times while he was talking on the telephone. Warhol underwent hours of surgery after the bullets tore through his chest, abdomen, spleen and both lungs. Art critic Mario Amaya was slightly wounded; Warhol survived the attack and would recover. Solanas, a self-described radical feminist who had founded the "Society for Cutting Up Men" (SCUM), and told police that she shot Warhol because "he had too much control of my life." Warhol would spend two months recovering in a hospital, and Solanas would serve a three-year sentence at the New York State Prison for Women.
*"The Atheist Point of View", the first regularly scheduled broadcast in the United States to promote atheism went on the air on KTBC, a radio station in Austin, Texas, owned by the family of U.S. President Lyndon Johnson. Madalyn Murray O'Hair, the president of the Society of Separationists, purchased time for a 15-minute program that would run from 10:00 to 10:15 p.m. every Monday. In accordance with the Federal Communications Commission's Fairness Doctrine, KTBC allowed a 15-minute program at 10:15, hosted by Pastor John Barclay of Austin's Central Christian Church.
*Police in Italy recaptured the University of Rome administration building, three days after it had been taken over by students.

June 4, 1968 (Tuesday)

* NASA released a new Apollo Applications Program (AAP) launch readiness and delivery schedule. The schedule decreased the number of Saturn flights to 11 Saturn IB flights and one Saturn V flight. It called for three Workshops. One of the Workshops would be launched by a Saturn IB, and another would serve as a backup. The third Workshop would be launched by a Saturn V. The schedule also included one Apollo Telescope Mount (ATM). Launch of the first Workshop would be in November 1970. Lunar missions were no longer planned in the AAP.
*The S&P 500 stock market index, considered by many a bellwether for the U.S. economy, closed above 100 for the first time, at 100.38.
*U.S. Senator Robert F. Kennedy of New York narrowly defeated Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota to win all 172 delegates in California's Democratic presidential primary. The results would not be confirmed until after midnight. As CBS News projected that he would be the winner, the result was described as "a major boost in his nomination race against the man he sees as the real opponent: Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey". U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson joked about the primary in remarks during a state dinner at the White House and said, "We might pick up some tremors later tonight from a disturbance out in California."
*Died: Walter Nash, 86, the 27th Prime Minister of New Zealand

June 5, 1968 (Wednesday)

*Moments after thanking supporters for his win in the California primary, Senator Robert F. Kennedy was shot and fatally wounded while walking through a corridor at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. After the 12:20 a.m. shooting, police arrested Sirhan Sirhan, a citizen of Jordan who had been a U.S. resident for 12 years. Kennedy was rushed to Central Receiving Hospital, where doctors worked on trying to save his life. and then transferred to the Hospital of the Good Samaritan for surgery. A team of six surgeons began operating at 3:12 a.m. after x-rays showed that bullet fragments had penetrated his brain stem, and finished at 6:52 a.m.; Kennedy never regained consciousness.Jerry Oppenheimer, ''The Other Mrs. Kennedy: An Intimate and Revealing Look at the Hidden Life of Ethel Skakel Kennedy'' (Macmillan, 1995) p446, 453 Although Kennedy had been facing Sirhan when the shots were fired, the three bullets that had hit him "traveled back to front", wounding him in the neck, the shoulder and his head.
*Five other people were wounded in addition to Kennedy, and required hospitalization: ABC News reporter William Weisel, union official Paul Schrade, radio reporter Ira Goldstein, and two campaign volunteers, Elizabeth Evans and teenager volunteer Irwin Stroll. Fifty years later, as Sirhan began his 51st year in prison, Schrade and the Senator's son, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., would both express their belief that Sirhan had not been the gunman.
*CIA test pilot Jack Weeks disappeared while conducting the last test of the Lockheed A-12 supersonic reconnaissance jet during the CIA's "Oxcart" program. The A-12s were already scheduled for retirement when Weeks departed from USAF Kadena Air Base in Japan and, 41 minutes later, the onboard telemetry system signaled that an engine was overheating, followed by a drop of fuel flow and a rapid decrease in altitude. Weeks's last known position had been over the Philippine Sea, east of Manila. No trace of the wreckage would be located.

June 6, 1968 (Thursday)

* Pakistan announced that it would be the first of the five member signatories to the 1955 Baghdad Pact to withdraw from CENTO, the Central Treaty Organisation. The mutual security pact had been signed by Iraq, Iran, Turkey, Pakistan and the United Kingdom. After the Iranian Revolution of 1979, the other Middle Eastern nations would withdraw as well.
*Secret Service protection was extended to all major US presidential and vice presidential candidates under Public Law 90—331 after President Johnson signed a bill into law hours after it had been passed by both houses of the U.S. Congress.
*Died:
** Robert F. Kennedy, 42, U.S. Senator for New York since 1965, after being shot the day before by Sirhan Bishara Sirhan. Kennedy was pronounced dead at the Good Samaritan Hospital in Los Angeles, more than 25 hours after he had been shot in the head, and almost seven hours after surgeons had completed emergency surgery to remove bullet fragments from his brain stem. Kennedy never regained consciousness, and was removed from mechanical life support by consent of his family after his doctors had informed them that brain activity had ceased and Reverend Thomas Pecha had administered the last rites. Fifteen minutes after Kennedy's death, his press secretary, Frank Mankiewicz, told reporters, "I have a short announcement to read... Senator Robert Francis Kennedy died at 1:44 A.M. today, June 6, 1968. With Senator Kennedy at the time of his death was his wife Ethel, his sisters, Mrs. Patricia Lawford, and Mrs. Stephen Smith, his brother-in-law, Stephen Smith, and his sister-in-law, Mrs. John F. Kennedy. He was 42 years old."
** Randolph Churchill, 57, English journalist and politician, son of Sir Winston Churchill, of a heart attack.

June 7, 1968 (Friday)

*In the United Kingdom, sewing machinists went on strike at the Ford Dagenham assembly plant, as 187 female workers walked out on strike to demand pay equal to that of men for jobs rated at the same technical grade. "The Women Workers at Fords of Dagenham" made seat covers for car seats in Ford vehicles. The walkout would last three weeks, during which more than 2,000 cars could not be completed, and would end only after the government dispatched Barbara Castle, the Secretary of State for Employment and Productivity. In the long run, the strike would be a catalyst for the passing of the UK's Equal Pay Act 1970.
*Txabi Etxebarrieta, selected by the '' Euskadi ta Askatasuna'' (ETA) Basque separatist organization, was killed while on his way to carry out ETA's first attempt at a political assassination, the killing of police superintendent Melitón Manzanas. Etxebarrieta and his assistant, Iñaki Sarasketa, were driving in a stolen automobile when their car was pulled over for a random traffic check by a civil guardsmen. The guardsman, Jose Antonio Pardines, became the first of 820 people to be killed by ETA terrorists. Etxebarrieta fled the scene and was stopped at Tolosa, where he was killed in an exchange of gunfire with other guardsmen. Pardines would be imprisoned until 1977; Manzanas would be killed at his home on August 2.
*The first of 14,000 patients to be diagnosed with Yushō disease entered a hospital in Japan with symptoms of acneiform eruptions caused by chemical poisoning from polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and polychlorinated dibenzofurans (PCDFs). All of them had ingested food that had been cooked in rice bran oil that had been produced by the Kanemi Company and shipped to distributors in February. Eventually, 500 people would die from Yushō disease.
*The first Legoland amusement park was opened in Billund, Denmark, where the Lego Group company headquarters was located. As of 2017, there are eight Legoland parks, in seven nations.
*The European Convention on Information on Foreign Law was signed in London and would come into effect on December 17, 1969.
*At the village of Jostoma, located eight miles from Kohima (capital of the Indian state of Nagaland), Chinese-trained Naga rebels fought a battle with members of India's Border Security Force. The government forces suffered 90 casualties but routed the rebels, who had 200 members who were killed or wounded, and captured Chinese-made weapons and documents implicating the People's Republic of China.
*Mrs. Esther Matthews, a 41-year old African-American housewife in Dallas, became the first woman to receive a heart transplant, and the 21st overall. She died on the operating table 90 minutes after the heart had been implanted by a surgical team from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center.
*Died: Dan Duryea, 61, American actor, of cancer

June 8, 1968 (Saturday)

*At 11:15 in the morning local time, James Earl Ray was arrested at Heathrow Airport in London for the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Ray was spotted while preparing to board an airplane to fly to Brussels. Scotland Yard officials said that he had been carrying a loaded pistol and two false Canadian passports bearing the name of Ramon Sneyd, after receiving a tip from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police watchlist. During his 65 days on the run, Ray drove from Memphis, Tennessee, to Birmingham, Alabama, and then to Atlanta. He abandoned his car, rode a bus from Atlanta to Detroit, rode in a taxicab to Windsor, Ontario, and got a train to Toronto on April 6. After a month in Toronto, where he got a passport in the name of Sneyd, he flew to London on May 6, then flew to Lisbon where he tried to get a visa to take a ship to Africa. Deciding that he would have a better chance in Belgium, he planned to go to Brussels after changing planes at London.
* Italy and Yugoslavia played to a 1–1 draw in the final of the 1968 European Championship soccer football tournament. To resolve the tie, 30 minutes of extra time were played without either team scoring, leading to a second complete game to be played two days later.
*The funeral of Robert F. Kennedy took place in Washington, D.C., two days after his death, after which he was buried in Arlington National Cemetery adjacent to the grave of his brother, John F. Kennedy. The last surviving brother, Edward M. Kennedy, gave the eulogy.
*NASA launched two Aerobee 150 sounding rockets from White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico. The first rocket carried a Naval Research Laboratory and University of Maryland payload to a altitude to flight test a design verification unit of the high-resolution spectroheliograph planned for use on the Apollo Telescope Mount (ATM). The second rocket carried an American Science and Engineering, Inc., payload to a altitude to obtain high-resolution x-ray pictures of active regions of the Sun during solar flare and general x-ray emission of solar corona. The rocket and instrumentation performed satisfactorily, but the payload of the first rocket failed to separate, thus preventing functioning of the parachute recovery system.

June 9, 1968 (Sunday)

* Yugoslavia's President, Josip Broz Tito, appeared on state television and radio to address the student revolt in the University of Belgrade and on other campuses. The Communist leader conceded that the student demonstrations were a response to the nation's flaws and a legitimate protest against unjust policies of local governments. His recognition that the student demands were legitimate, and that the Yugoslav federal government needed to investigate them, brought an end to the revolt. "I think the events which occurred at New Belgrade struck at the heads of many of us," he told the audience, and acknowledged that he and the Communist Party bore some of the blame for the unrest. He added that "I can say that 90% of students are honest youth of whom we did not take sufficient care", and urged students to return to their studies; "This time," he said, "I will wholeheartedly endeavor for solutions, and students must help me in this. If I am not able to settle these issues, then I should not remain in my post."
*U.S. Marine Corps 1st Lt. Walter R. Schmidt, Jr., was shot down over the A Shau Valley of North Vietnam while leading a flight in an aerial attack of supply trucks. He ejected safely and, for more than five years, was listed as an American prisoner-of-war. Then, after he was neither repatriated nor mentioned on the list of POWs who died in captivity at war's end, his parents were told that his status had been changed to "deceased, body not recovered". Declassified documents of the U.S. Department of Defense would indicate their belief that Schmidt was still alive after the war as an abandoned "missing in action" (MIA) prisoner.
*U.S. Coast Guard Lieutenant Jack C. Rittchier became the first member of the Coast Guard to die in enemy action in the Vietnam War. Rittchier's helicopter was shot down while he was trying to rescue a downed Marine Corps pilot. In all, seven Guardsmen (out of 8,000) were killed in the war, and 60 wounded.
*The Belgian Grand Prix took place at the Circuit de Spa-Francorchamps and was won by Bruce McLaren.
*The final of the DFB-Pokal football tournament, was played at Südweststadion in Ludwigshafen, Germany, and was won by FC Köln, who defeated VfL Bochum 4–1.
*The 1968 Surfers Paradise 4-Hour endurance race for touring cars was held at Surfers Paradise International Raceway in Queensland, Australia, and was won by John French, in an Alfa Romeo GTV.
*Born: Aleksandr Konovalov, Russian prosecutor and Minister of Justice 2008 to 2020; in Leningrad, RSFSR, Soviet Union.

June 10, 1968 (Monday)

*U.S. Army General Creighton Abrams assumed the command of military operations in the Vietnam War, succeeding General William Westmoreland. During his four years as commander, a biographer would later note, General Abrams "stressed pacification rather than Westmoreland's policy of search and destroy" In carrying out the American policy of " Vietnamization", to gradually withdraw American forces while increasing the strength of South Vietnam's forces, Abrams would oversee a decrease in the number of U.S. troops from 543,000 to 49,000.
* Italy beat Yugoslavia 2–0 in a replay of the final of the 1968 European Championship. Two days earlier, the teams had played to a 1–1 draw that was unresolved after 30 minutes of extra time. Noting that and the 90 minute rematch, ''The Guardian'' noted that "It took the Italians 210 minutes of grueling football to overcome the tenacious Yugoslavs" and "won their first major honour since they captured the World Cup in 1938".
*Born: Bill Burr, American stand-up comedian, in Canton, Massachusetts
*Died: Marshall Hodgson, 46, American historian and authority on Islamic studies, died while completing the revisions on his six-volume work ''The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization''.

June 11, 1968 (Tuesday)

*Four inmates of the federal penitentiary in Atlanta (a murderer and three bank robbers) seized control of the administration building and took 25 employees hostage (18 men and 7 women) after failing in an escape attempt. Two of the women and a man were released later. After prison officials agreed to the publication of the inmates' list of nine grievances in the ''Atlanta Journal'', the hostages were released unharmed. Three hours after the inmates surrendered, the FBI announced the arrest of a girlfriend of one of the prisoners and charged her with having smuggled in "two pistols, 50 rounds of ammunition for each gun and four hacksaw blades".
*The 1968 Giro d'Italia cycle race concluded in Naples, with Belgian Eddy Merckx the overall winner.
*The progress of the Gun Control Act of 1968 was delayed by a tied vote in the U.S. House Judiciary Committee.

June 12, 1968 (Wednesday)

*The United Nations General Assembly voted to approve the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons by a margin of 95 to 4, with 21 members nations abstaining.
*The General Assembly also approved UNGA Resolution 2372, changing the name of the UN Territory of South-West Africa which was administered by the white minority government of South Africa over the UN's continued protest. Though not recognized by South Africa, the new name for South-West Africa was drawn from the Namib Desert that runs across the area's coast; Namibia would become independent in 1990.
* Paul Vanden Boeynants resigned as Prime Minister of Belgium. Gaston Eyskens formed a new coalition of ministers.
*The French government banned all street demonstrations and ordered the dissolution of seven "extremist student groups" (including the "March 22 Movement" founded by Daniel Cohn-Bendit and the "Revolutionary Communist Youth Organization". The restrictions were to remain in place until the end of the June 30 elections for the French National Assembly, and campaign rallies were limited to indoor events.
*The controversial film '' Rosemary's Baby'', directed by Roman Polanski and starring Mia Farrow, premiered in the United States. The film was an inductee of the 2014 National Film Registry list.
*After the withdrawal of Soo Line Railroad's objections, the Interstate Commerce Commission approved the proposed merger of Chicago and North Western Railway with Chicago Great Western Railroad.
*Six of the 63 people on board Pan American World Airways Flight 1 were killed when the Boeing 707 crashed short of the runway at the airport in Kolkata (then Calcutta) at the end of its flight from Bangkok. Most of the passengers were Americans, including four of the dead.

June 13, 1968 (Thursday)

*Earl Warren, the Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, met with U.S. President Lyndon Johnson, and announced his intention to retire so that Johnson could appoint a successor. Warren was 77 and, after the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, believed that it was likely that the Republican Party nominee would win the presidential election. Warren's strategy would fail after Johnson's nomination of Associate Justice Abe Fortas as the next Chief Justice, and Fortas would do poorly in the confirmation hearings before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee. By the time of Johnson's withdrawal of the nomination, there would be only one month left until the election; Richard M. Nixon would choose Warren Burger as Earl Warren's successor.
* Uruguay's President, Jorge Pacheco Areco, declared a state of emergency in the South American nation in response to increasing unrest by opposition political parties and anti-government revolutionary groups. The emergency would briefly be lifted on March 15, 1969, but would be reinstated on June 24.
* Czechoslovakia abolished the Central Publication Office that had conducted censorship of all publications since the 1948 coup that had left the nation's Communist Party in control of the government. Two weeks later, on June 26, the Party would confirm the abolition of censorship.
*The U.S. House of Representatives passed the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968 by a 368 to 17 margin, after the U.S. Senate's earlier 72 to 4 approval, but U.S. President Lyndon Johnson was dissatisfied with the compromises on gun control within the legislation and declined to sign it until June 19. House Minority Leader (and future President) Gerald R. Ford said that, rather than hesitate, the President should reject the bill "so we can re-enact it over his veto".
* A tornado killed 13 people and injured 125 others in and around the small town of Tracy, Minnesota. The town elementary school and 110 houses were destroyed when the F5 tornado, with speed of up to hit the town of about 2,800 people at about 7:00 in the evening.
*The first attempt to transplant the heart of a sheep into a human being failed, as Dr. Denton A. Cooley and a team of surgeons at St. Luke's Episcopal Hospital in Houston worked unsuccessfully to keep a patient alive until a human donor could be found. Sam Willoughby, a life insurance agency manager from Waterloo, Iowa, agreed for the implantation of the heart of a 125-pound ram as "a last resort" after being resuscitated from cardiac arrest in the hospital, but died before the operation could be completed. On January 24, 1964, Dr. James Hardy had implanted the heart of a chimpanzee into a patient who had survived for one hour after the operation.
*Died: U.S. Army Lt. Col. Frank A. Barker, 40, was killed in a helicopter crash in South Vietnam. Three months earlier, Barker had ordered a U.S. Army task force to clear the area around My Lai, where the My Lai Massacre of 347 civilians at Song My village had taken place on March 16. "Whether or not Barker directly ordered the deliberate killing of noncombatants," a historian would write later, a U.S. Army Captain under his command would testify before a board of inquiry "that Barker had instructed him to destroy the hamlet known as My Lai". The board would conclude that Barker "was culpable of at least 11 violations of army regulations, some of which were considered war crimes".

June 14, 1968 (Friday)

*At 2148 UTC, the asteroid Icarus made its closest approach to Earth since 1949, but astronomers had already debunked rumors (that had abounded for the past three years) that the half-mile wide object would collide with the planet. Earlier, Dr. Brian G. Marsden of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory told reporters that the "miss distance" was estimated to be roughly 3,951,000 miles (6,359,000 km), give or take "a few hundred miles", a distance that made Icarus 16 times further away than the Moon, and that Icarus would still be "600 times fainter than the naked eye can see". The approach of Icarus had inspired the first group study of what is now called " asteroid impact avoidance", in an undergraduate class at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, "Advanced Space Systems Engineering", in the spring 1967 semester. Students were asked to assume that Icarus would actually strike the Earth within 70 weeks and assigned to study whether it could be deflected. Their conclusion was that the only solution was for 100-megaton thermonuclear weapons to be detonated on the surface at various times, with the first 73 days before impact (April 16, 1968) and the last chance only five days before impact, with the goal of either fragmenting or deflecting Icarus. An author would write in 2016, "most of what they concluded would still be valid today".

*Dr. Benjamin Spock, a pediatrician famous to two generations for the child-raising guide ''The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care'', was convicted by a 12-man federal jury in Boston for conspiracy to disrupt the selective service process, along with three of his four co-defendants. Dr. Spock, Yale chaplain William Sloane Coffin, Jr., teacher Mitchell Goodman and graduate student Michael Ferber were sentenced to two years in prison for aiding young American men in avoiding being drafted into military service during the Vietnam War, but the sentences were suspended pending an appeal. The convictions would later be set aside on appeal. The other member of the "Boston Five", Marcus Raskin, was acquitted.
*Josef Windeck and Bernard Bonitz, both former prisoners of the Auschwitz concentration camp, were sentenced to life imprisonment by a court in Frankfurt, West Germany, after being convicted of murdering their fellow inmates. Neither was Jewish, but both had been professional criminals who had been deported as "undesirables" to Auschwitz from prison and then given free rein to terrorize the camp population in the capacity of a "Kapo", a "Kameradschaftpolizei" ("comrade policeman") accorded special treatment in return for assisting the guards. Windeck had been charged with 117 murders and convicted of five. Boenitz had been charged with 72 and convicted of one. Windeck would be released after a year for health reasons and survive until 1977.
*The student occupation of the Odeon Theatre in Paris ended after a month, as police expelled 208 young men and women who had taken over the national theater on May 14. The expulsion came peaceably as 132 people voluntarily left on the promise that they would not be arrested. The other 76 were brought out forcibly but then released as soon as they got outside.
*Died: Salvatore Quasimodo, 66, Italian poet and 1964 Nobel Prize in Literature laureate, of a cerebral hemorrhage

June 15, 1968 (Saturday)

*Former French Army General Raoul Salan and 10 other officers of the Organisation armée secrète (OAS) were released from prison after being pardoned by the man whose overthrow and assassination they had plotted, President Charles de Gaulle. Formerly a national hero and France's most-decorated military officer, Salan had led a revolt against his government in 1961 in an attempt to keep French Algeria from being granted independence. He had been convicted of treason and sentenced to life imprisonment at Tulle Prison. The surprise forgiveness was viewed as an attempt by DeGaulle to win the support in the upcoming national elections from right-wing voters and the 750,000 "''Pieds-Noirs''", Europeans who had fled from Algeria after the Arab Algerian majority government had been elected.
*The defending women's downhill skiing champion, who had won in 1966 as Erika Schinegger, appeared at a press conference in Vienna to announce that he had completed the last of four gender reassignment surgeries and would resume his skiing and racing career as a man under his new name, Erik Schinegger.
*Died: Kim Soo-young, 46, South Korean poet and translator, after being struck by bus while walking in Seoul

June 16, 1968 (Sunday)

*Following up on the retaking of the Odeon Theatre, French police evicted student rebels who had occupied the Sorbonne at the University of Paris. Hundreds of students in the '' Quarterier Latin'' assembled outside the historic Sorbonne building, and were driven away by riot police with tear gas and concussion grenades. Although "student leaders had claimed there were 500 occupiers inside" the building, the police reported that only 136 remained to be evacuated. The rebels peaceably filed out after Interior Ministry officials "told them they would be searched for arms but not arrested". No firearms were discovered in the search, but the police collected "several hundred clubs, pick handles and iron bars with chains, gas masks, helmets, gasoline for Molotov cocktails, garbage-can-cover shields and hundreds of leftist pamphlets and posters". Once the building was retaken, police hauled down the rebel banner and raised the French Tricolor on the flagpole.
*Five crewmembers of the U.S. Navy Swift boat ''PCF19'' were killed by friendly fire when an American F-4 Phantom fired on the boat and sank it. Two other crewmembers were able to escape from the boat, which had been near the mouth of the Cua Viet River in South Vietnam.
*The U.S. Open golf tournament was won by Lee Trevino after he became the first golfer to shoot under par in all four of the 18-hole rounds of the event (69-68-68-69). He also tied the Open under par and tied the Open's record of 275 strokes on 72 holes. Going into the final round, Bert Yancey appeared on the verge of winning his first major championship, leading Trevino 205 to 206 after 54 holes, and the two were even during the first 8 holes, but Yancey did poorly on the 9th and 10th hole and finished with 76 strokes and third place. After the win, Trevino (who was born in Dallas) told reporters, "I'm about the happiest Mexican in the world right now."
*After the end of the Giro d’Italia, won by Eddy Merckx, 10 cyclists, including Italian champion Felice Gimondi, were disqualified for use of doping to enhance performance. It was the first major scandal in professional cycling. Giro d'Italia officials struck the records of all 10 finishers, which also changed the order of finish for 10 other cyclists. Later, the decision in Gimondi's would be reversed.
*Born: James Patrick Stuart, American television actor known for ''Galactica 1980'' and ''General Hospital''

June 17, 1968 (Monday)

*Two Royal Australian Navy sailors on the guided-missile destroyer HMS ''Hobart'' were killed, and 7 others wounded, when the ship was struck by a trio of American AIM-7 Sparrow air-to-air missiles that had been fired by two American planes. The ''Hobart'' had been off the coast of North Vietnam when it was hit. Chief Electrician Henry Hunt and Quartermaster Raymond Butterworth became the first RAN members to die at sea in the Vietnam War.
*The Actors' Equity Association, the labor union for stage actors, went on strike, canceling 19 of the 21 Broadway productions in New York City and road shows in other American cities. The strike was settled two days later.
*The Malayan Communist Party launched a second insurgency on the 20th anniversary of the June 17, 1948 Malayan Emergency. MCP guerrillas ambushed and killed 17 Malaysian soldiers in the northern state of Perak. The Second Malayan Emergency, which would last for 21 years, was imposed.
*In a provocative poem, called ''The PCI and the young ones'' and published on the Italian magazine ''L’espresso'', Pier Paolo Pasolini condemned the students’ movement. The writer called the young protesters “petty bourgeois” and “dad's sons” and declared, “When yesterday you came to blows with the policemen, I sympathized with the policemen, because the policemen are the sons of the poor people.” Pasolini's stance alluded to the fierce controversy, within the Communist PCI, between the secretary Luigi Longo and Giorgio Amendola, the supporter and the opponent, respectively, of the protest movements.
*Tom Stoppard's play, '' The Real Inspector Hound'', starring Richard Briers and Ronnie Barker, opened at the Criterion Theatre in London's West End.
*Died: Cassandre (Adolphe Jean-Marie Mouron), 67, French commercial artist, committed suicide

June 18, 1968 (Tuesday)

*Operation Šumava, a series of military exercises by the Joint Armed Forces of the member nations of the Warsaw Pact, began as scheduled, with most of the exercises taking place in Czechoslovakia, where the events of the Prague Spring were taking place. Several divisions of the Army of the Soviet Union remained behind after what proved to be part of a rehearsal for the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in August.Jaromír Navrátil, ''The Prague Spring 1968: A National Security Archive Documents Reader'' (Central European University Press, 1998) pp192-199
*The Foreign Ministers of Argentina and Uruguay met at the Uruguayan capital, Montevideo, to begin the first discussions to end the boundary dispute between their nations.
*The 37th Air Division (37th AD) of the United States Air Force was inactivated, and Hopedale Air Station in Canada. was abandoned.
*Died:
** Nikolaus von Falkenhorst, 83, former German Wehrmacht General during World War II and convicted Nazi war criminal. Originally sentenced to death, von Falkenhorst had his punishment commuted to 20 years imprisonment and was released seven years after his conviction.
**Sally O'Neil, 59, silent film leading lady of the 1920s

June 19, 1968 (Wednesday)

*After two postponements, the Poor People's March on Washington took place in the nation's capital as a multiracial crowd of impoverished Americans gathered in front of the Lincoln Memorial. Coretta Scott King, the widow of Martin Luther King Jr., was the keynote speaker at the rally. The National Park Service had granted a seven-day extension of the original permit because of the postponements of the event, but the Southern Christian Leadership Conference was advised that it would have until 8:00 of the evening of June 23 to tear down the temporary housing called "Resurrection City" and to vacate the 15-acre area in West Potomac Park.
*President Johnson signed the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968 into law.

June 20, 1968 (Thursday)

*In the United Kingdom, Austin Currie, an elected member of Northern Ireland's parliament, the Stormont, called national attention to discrimination against the Roman Catholic minority in predominantly Protestant Northern Ireland by becoming a squatter. Currie and two other people learned of a house in Caledon, County Tyrone, that had been allocated to a single, 19-year old Protestant woman even though there were 269 families ahead of her on a waiting list for housing. When police from the Royal Ulster Constabulary moved in to remove Currie and his group, he had a television crew present to film the action. The BBC Evening News telecast the incident and "for many people in Britain, it was the first they heard of religious discrimination in Northern Ireland", an author would later note.
*The Air Defense Artillery Branch was created as a separate combat branch of the United States Army to specialize in anti-aircraft weapons.
*A federal law, that had prohibited the printing of color images of United States postage stamps, was repealed as President Johnson signed legislation. "Since stamp counterfeiting is today virtually nonexistent," a White House statement said, "this restriction is no longer necessary. There is no reason now why the full meaning and beauty of our postage stamps cannot be communicated to all the world in color reproduction." Previously, stamp catalogs and encyclopedias could only display black-and-white images. The law had become obsolete after U.S. stamps were "impregnated with an invisible phosphor which causes canceling machines to reject counterfeits".
* David Ruffin was fired from The Temptations for missing a performance, after he developed a cocaine addition and began questioning Berry Gordy's handling of the group's financial affairs.
*Born:
** Mateusz Morawiecki, Prime Minister of Poland since 2017
** Robert Rodriguez, American filmmaker, screenwriter, and musician, in San Antonio, Texas
*Died: Rong Guotuan, 30, Chinese table tennis player who won the 1959 world championship while representing the People's Republic of China, hanged himself after being accused of spying during China's Cultural Revolution.

June 21, 1968 (Friday)

*Five months after U.S. President Johnson had sent him a letter proposing a start on negotiations over limiting strategic missiles, Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin sent an official response that did not commit to anything. Kosygin wrote in his letter to Johnson that the Soviet Union leaders "attach great importance to these questions, having in mind that they should be considered together... All aspects of this complex problem are now being carefully examined by us, and we hope that before long it will be possible more concretely to exchange views with regard to further ways of discussing this problem, if, of course, the general world situation does not hinder this." The first agreement, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty would not be signed until 1972.
*Earl Warren formally announced his resignation as Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.
*The last flight of the CIA's supersonic reconnaissance aircraft, the Lockheed A-12 Cygnus, was made by pilot Frank Murray. He flew the jet, designated "Article 131", from the runway at the Nevada Test and Training Range near the Groom dry lake, to the Lockheed airfield at Palmdale, California.
*The 18th Berlin International Film Festival opened in West Berlin.
*In a press conference, U.S. Secretary of State Dean Rusk stated that nearly three months after the U.S. had limited its bombing to below the 17th parallel north in North Vietnam, infiltration by NVA combat troops into South Vietnam had increased to record levels, and North Vietnam had started a campaign of indiscrimate rocket attacks into residential areas of Saigon, the South Vietnamese capital.
*Born:
**Chris Gueffroy, East German restaurant waiter and the last person to be killed by border guards while trying to flee over the Berlin Wall; in Pasewalk (killed February 5, 1989)
** Sonique (Sonia Marina Clarke), British singer and musician; in Crouch End, London

June 22, 1968 (Saturday)

* Pope Paul VI, the Pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church, hosted Six metropolitans of Egypt's Coptic Christian Church and three archbishops of Ethiopia's Orthodox Tewahedo Church, along with 10 priests and 70 other adherents of Coptic Christianity, in a meeting of the churches that traced their founding to Saint Peter and Saint Mark, respectively. The Pope presented the delegation one of the relics of Saint Mark's Basilica, located in Venice, described as a small particle of bone from Saint Mark's body.
*The ARA ''Santa Cruz'', an Argentine Navy destroyer, fired five rounds of artillery at two fishing vessels from the Soviet Union, after the Soviet crews ignored warnings to leave what Argentina had designated as its territorial waters. The fishing ships were then escorted to the harbor of Mar del Plata and detained for 20 days until the Soviet Ministry of Fish Industry paid fines for fishing without a license.
*An infantry battalion of Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) troops was ambushed by Viet Cong guerrillas in "one of the worst setbacks in months for the South Vietnamese army"; 44 men were killed and 71 wounded during the day.
*Seven North Korean infiltrators were killed in a series of clashes along the Demilitarized Zone separating the two Koreas. South Korea had been tightening security suspecting the North Koreans had been planning an incident to coincide with the 28th anniversary of the start of the Korean war.The President's Daily Brief
22 June 1968. Retrieved 3 May 2020.
*The CIA reported that the Soviet Union had spent two billion dollars (USD) in the previous 12 months for foreign aid, with a majority of the expenditures going in military aid to North Vietnam and to Arab nations to replace their losses during the Six Day War.
*In a complete reversal from previous statements, North Vietnam (through their representative in Budapest) admitted that it had troops stationed and fighting in South Vietnam.
*At the White House, President Johnson met with his main foreign policy advisers to discuss the U.S.-initiated Vietnam peace talks then underway in Paris. The talks were further discussed in a private meeting later that evening between Averell Harriman (the chief U.S. negotiator in Paris) and Soviet Ambassador to Washington Anatoly Dobrynin.
* Presidential hopefuls Hubert Humphrey and Richard Nixon won significant delegate victories in eight different states at the expense of rivals Eugene McCarthy and Nelson Rockefeller. Nixon notched nearly 75 more delegates spanning five states while Humphrey comprehensively won the home-state showdown with McCarthy in Minnesota.

June 23, 1968 (Sunday)

* Seventy-four people were killed and 150 other injured in a stampede at a football match between Boca Juniors and Club Atlético River Plate in Buenos Aires, Argentina. River Plate was hosting the Boca Juniors and 90,000 spectators at its stadium, El Monumental

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