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February 16 – Gunman Richard Farley kills seven people inside his former workplace, ESL Incorporated in Sunnyvale, California. He had been stalking colleague Laura Black who still worked there; however, she survived the shooting. Farley is currently on death row.
February 17 – U.S. Lieutenant Colonel William R. Higgins, serving with a United Nations group monitoring a truce in southern Lebanon, is kidnapped (he is later killed by his captors).
U.S. presidential candidate George Herbert Walker Bush defeats Bob Dole in numerous Republican primaries and caucuses on "Super Tuesday". The bipartisan primary/caucus calendar, designed by Democrats to help solidify their own nominee early, backfires when none of the six competing candidates are able to break out of the pack in the day's Democratic contests. Jesse Jackson, however, wins several Southern state primaries.
March 26 – U.S. presidential candidate Jesse Jackson defeats Michael Dukakis in the Michigan Democratic caucuses, becoming the frontrunner temporarily for the party's nomination. Richard Gephardt withdraws his candidacy after his campaign speeches against imported automobiles fail to earn him much support in Detroit.
April
April – The unemployment rate drops to 5.4%, the lowest since June 1974.
May 14 – Bus collision near Carrollton, Kentucky: A drunk driver traveling in the wrong direction on Interstate 71 hits a converted school bus carrying a church youth group from Radcliff, Kentucky. The resulting fire kills 27 people, making it tied for first in the U.S. for most fatalities involving 2 vehicles to the present day. Coincidentally, the other 2-vehicle accident involving a bus that also killed 27 occurred in Prestonsburg, Kentucky thirty years prior.
June 28 – Four workers are asphyxiated at a metal-plating plant in Auburn, Indiana, in the worst confined-space industrial accident in U.S. history (a fifth victim dies two days later).
July 6 – The first reported medical waste on beaches in the Greater New York area (including hypodermic needles and syringes possibly infected with the AIDS virus) washes ashore on Long Island. Subsequent medical waste discoveries on beaches in Coney Island, Brooklyn and in Monmouth County, New Jersey force the closure of numerous New York–area beaches in the middle of one of the hottest summers on record in the American Northeast.
July 14 – Volkswagen closes its Westmoreland Assembly Plant after ten years of operation (the first factory built by a non-American automaker in the U.S.).
August 6-7 – Tompkins Square Park Police Riot in New York City: A riot erupts in Tompkins Square Park when police attempt to enforce a newly passed curfew for the park. Bystanders, artists, residents, homeless people and political activists are caught up in the police action, which takes place during the night of August 6 and into the early morning of August 7.
August 9 – Wrigley Field has its first night game of baseball, ending long opposition to lights at the field.
September 29: STS-26, "Return to Flight"September 29: The TDRS is prepared for deployment.
September 5 – With the US's largest thrift institution, American Savings and Loan Association, entering receivership, the Robert M. Bass Group (headed by Robert Bass) agrees to buy its good assets with US$1.7 billion in federal aid (completed December).[1]
September 17–October 2 – The United States participates in the 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul, South Korea and ranks in third place, bringing home 36 gold, 31 silver and 27 bronze medals for a total of 94 medals behind the Soviet Union in first place and East Germany in second.
November 11 – In Sacramento, California, police find a body buried in the lawn of sixty-year-old landlady Dorothea Puente. Seven bodies are eventually found and Puente is convicted of three murders and sentenced to life in prison.
December 14 – After Yasir Arafat renounces violence, the U.S. says it will open dialogue with the PLO.
December 16 – Perennial U.S. presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche is convicted of mail fraud.
December 19 – Gorbachev cuts short his visit to the United States and returns home to the Soviet Union, as thousands of people have died in an earthquake in Armenia.[4]
January 11 – Isidor Isaac Rabi, physicist, winner of Nobel Prize in Physics in 1944 for invention of the atomic beam magnetic resonance method of measuring magnetic properties of atoms and molecules (born 1898 in Poland)
August 21 – Ray Eames, architect and designer, partner of Charles Eames (born 1912)
August 28 – Max Shulman, novelist, short-story writer and dramatist (born 1919)
September 1 – Luis Walter Alvarez, experimental physicist, winner of Nobel Prize in Physics in 1968 for bubble chamber research into particle physics (born 1911)
Media related to 1988 in the United States at Wikimedia Commons