November 1963

1963

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The following events occurred in November 1963:

November 1, 1963 (Friday)

• In the mountains of Puerto Rico, the Arecibo Observatory, along with the world's largest fixed-reflector radar and radio telescope, were officially dedicated. Assistant U.S. Secretary of Defense formally accepted the instrument for use by the DOD's Advanced Research Projects Agency.
• Lennox Madikane, Mxolisi Dam'ane and Felix Jaxa, three African National Congress (ANC) members who had been convicted of violating South Africa's Sabotage Act of 1962 for inciting riots at Paarl the year before, were hanged at Robben Island prison.
• At 1:15 pm in Saigon, three marine battalions of the South Vietnam began their seizure of communications throughout the capital city, taking control of the city's radio stations, national and municipal police stations, and the public and Defense Ministry telecommunications centers. The acts were the first in a coup d'état against President Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu. The planners had set a deadline of 1:15 to either begin the coup or to call it off, and were waiting until visiting U.S. Admiral Harry Felt had departed. Admiral Felt's airplane took off at 1:00 pm. Diem and Nhu quietly escaped the palace by 8:00 p.m. and feld to refuge at the Roman Catholic church in the nearby Cholon section of the city.
• Died: Elsa Maxwell, 80, American gossip columnist and socialite

November 2, 1963 (Saturday)

• At 6:37 a.m., guards defending the Presidential Palace in Saigon raised the white flag of surrender after more than two hours of shelling by rebels within the South Vietnam military, but found that President Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, had slipped out of the surrounded building, apparently through a tunnel that emerged at a beauty parlor several blocks away. Around 8:00 a.m., witnesses outside the St. Francis Xavier Church in Cholon recognized Diem and Nhu, who had asked church authorities to notify the rebels that they were willing to surrender. The coup leader, General Duong Van Minh, sent a convoy to pick up the Ngo brothers, and General Mai Huu Xuan oversaw their arrest. After promising them safe conduct into exile, General Xuan had both men step into an M113 armored personnel carrier at 9:45 a.m. Reports differ as to whether the act was committed inside the APC by their captor, Captain Nguyễn Văn Nhung, or by General Xuan after torture at the National Police headquarters, but the Ngo brothers were tortured and then short to death. The official announcement from the rebels on Radio Saigon, however, was that both men had committed suicide.
• U.S. President John F. Kennedy was scheduled to be driven in a motorcade in Chicago, along Jackson Boulevard and Michigan Avenue en route to the Hilton Hotel, and then to watch college football's annual Army–Navy Game, being held that year at Soldier Field. That morning, however, Kennedy abruptly canceled the trip, and announced that he would remain at the White House to confer with advisers about events in South Vietnam. Twelve years later, in the magazine Chicago Independent, journalist Edwin Black would report that the trip was canceled after the United States Secret Service had learned of an assassination plot involving four men, two of whom were arrested and released. Black's story was based on interviews with a fired Secret Service agent in Chicago, Abraham Bolden, and confirmed by other law-enforcement sources.

November 3, 1963 (Sunday)

• Greek legislative election, 1963: "The most fair election ever to be held in Greece", as the British Embassy in Athens described it, swept Centre Union (Enosis Kentrou or EK) party leader Georgios Papandreou into office as Prime Minister. No party got a majority of the seats in Parliament, but the EK ended up with a 138 to 132 lead (out of 338 seats) over the National Radical Union (Ethniki Rizospastiki Enosis or ERE) party of incumbent Premier Konstantinos Karamanlis.
• Soviet cosmonauts Andriyan Nikolayev and Valentina Tereshkova, who had been launched into space aboard Vostok 3 and Vostok 6, respectively, were married in Moscow in a ceremony attended by Party Secretary Khrushchev and other prominent government leaders. They would have a daughter seven months later, and would separate before the end of 1964, officially divorcing in 1982.
• Barry E. Steiner, a 20-year old medical student at Boston University, was arrested at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport after having flown hundreds of thousands of miles on stolen airplane tickets. In 1963, it was commonplace to purchase a ticket at the airline counter, have the ticket agent fill it out, and then to board the airplane. Steiner's method was simply to reach behind an unattended counter at an airport, steal blank tickets, write in the flight number and destination of his choice, and then walk on to the appropriate plane. To avoid suspicion, he carried an authentic-looking Federal Aviation Administration badge and posed as an FAA official if needed.
• Born: Philip Davis Guggenheim, American film director and producer, in St. Louis, Missouri

November 4, 1963 (Monday)

• The U.S. Secret Service concluded that the more secure and the larger of two locations for President Kennedy's fundraising luncheon in Dallas would be the "Women's Building" at Fair Park at the east side of downtown, rather than the Trade Mart on the west side near Dealey Plaza. Despite the recommendations of Chief Gerald Behn of the White House detail, and Dallas field office agent Forrest Sorrels, the state Democratic Party leaders in Texas settled on the Trade Mart. "[A] different destination for the motorcade," author Vincent Bugliosi would write later, "would have meant a different route altogether, and no assassination.".
• The Beatles appeared before the British royal family as "the seventh of nineteen acts" in the annual Royal Variety Performance at the Prince of Wales Theatre in London, and played a set of four songs. After the show, the "Fab Four" were greeted by Queen Elizabeth II, and had conversations with the Queen Mother, (Queen Elizabeth II's mother), Princess Margaret and Lord Snowden. The event was taped, and the televised broadcast on November 11 would be watched by what was then a record 26 million viewers.
• The Sand War, a border dispute between Algeria and Morocco, finally came to an end, five days after the signing of a cease-fire agreement, with the mediation of monitoring officer from Mali.
• Major General Duong Van Minh, and the other leaders of the new government of South Vietnam, approved "a hastily drawn provisional charter" to replace the 1956 Constitution, and giving the Revolutionary Military Council all executive and legislative power.
• Born: Lena Zavaroni, Scottish singer, in Greenock, Scotland
• Died: Carlos Magalhães de Azeredo, 91, Brazilian poet, short story writer, diplomat and journalist

November 5, 1963 (Tuesday)

• Ngo Dinh Can, the last member of the Ngo political family remaining in South Vietnam, was handed over to the new government on orders of U.S. Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., after an American military plane transported him to Saigon from Huế, where he had sought refuge at the American consulate. Put on trial for murder, the unpopular Can, who had ruled Central Vietnam as a dictator during the regime of his brother, President Ngo Dinh Diem, would be executed by a firing squad six months later.
• Giovanni Leone resigned as Prime Minister of Italy six months after forming a minority government. President Antonio Segni requested Leone to remain on the job until a successor could be found to form a new cabinet of ministers.

November 6, 1963 (Wednesday)

• In Midland, Texas, 17-year old Laura Welch, who would later marry George W. Bush and become the First Lady upon his inauguration as President of the United States, ran a stop sign at the intersection of Farm Road 868 and Big Spring Street, and crashed into the side of a car driven by one of her classmates at Robert E. Lee High School, 17-year old Michael Dutton Douglas. Laura Bush would finally write about it after her husband left office, in her 2010 memoir, Spoken from the Heart, recounting that she and her friend were hurrying to a drive-in movie. Douglas, whose neck was broken, died at the local hospital. "Youth Killed", AP report in Corsicana (TX) Daily Sun, November 7, 1963, p3.
• Vietnam War: Coup leader General Duong Van Minh formally took office as the new Head of State of South Vietnam.

November 7, 1963 (Thursday)

• Wunder von Lengede ("The Miarcle of Lengede"): Eleven miners were rescued after surviving for two weeks trapped inside a deep iron mine near Lengede, West Germany. They had been among 129 men who were working underground when a sludge pond had given way, flooding the mines. Stuck nearly 200 feet below the surface, 21 people in their group had been able to find air in an unsupported section of the mine, but rockfalls killed ten of the survivors over the days that followed. By November 2, the forty people still entombed had all been given up for dead, but tapping was picked up by sound equipment, and drilling commenced. After five days, the drilled hole was large enough to lower a bomb-shaped cylinder (known as the Dahlbuschbombe) into the cavity. The first person to climb inside and to be brought to the surface was 51 year old Heinz Kull, and over the next hour, the other ten came out. Last of the group was Bernhard Wolter, credited by his comrades with having kept up their hopes during the ordeal.
• Nelson Rockefeller, the Governor of New York, entered the 1964 U.S. presidential campaign by announcing on NBC's Today news show that he would be a candidate for the Republican Party nomination. Following that appearance from a studio in Albany, he flew to Nashua, New Hampshire to address a crowd of supporters. U.S. Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, the front-runner for the Republican nomination in polls of voters, made no comment but was expected to enter the race. President John F. Kennedy was not expected to have any opposition in his nomination as the Democratic Party candidate for 1964.

November 8, 1963 (Friday)

• Sir Alec Douglas-Home, the new Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, won the by-election for Kinross and West Perthshire, to fill the House of Commons vacancy left by the August 15 death of Gilmour Leburn. Placed as a candidate in one of the most conservative constituencies in the nation, Home drew more than 57% of the vote, with more than twice as much as Liberal Party candidate Alistair Duncan Millar or Labour candidate Andrew Forrester. Having renounced his title and his place in the House of Lords, the former Lord Home became an MP in the House of Commons for the first time.
• Finnair flight 217, a DC-3 airliner, crashed as it was coming in for a landing at Mariehamn airport at the capital of the Åland Islands, killing 22 of the 25 people on board. The accident was attributed to a defect in the plane's altimeter, which led the pilot to believe that he was at a higher altitude as he made an instrument landing.
• A wiretap was installed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation on the home telephone line of civil rights activist Martin Luther King, after approval by U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy on recommendations by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. During the rest of Dr. King's stay in the home, the FBI monitored his phone conversations, discontinuing the surveillance on April 30, 1965.
• Five jewel thieves in Manhattan overpowered six unarmed employees and the driver of a station wagon transporting three million dollars worth of precious gems and gold, after forcing the vehicle to the curb at 12th Avenue and 41st Street, in a carefully planned operation that would have been the perfect crime, except for one flaw in the scheme. Four of the bandits got back in their own truck, and the remaining one prepared to drive the car and its cargo to a place where the vehicle could be looted. The getaway driver, however, didn't know how to operate the clutch and gear shift in a car with standard transmission, and abandoned the stalled vehicle — and its multimillion-dollar contents — a block away. The value of $3,000,000 in 1963 would be worth more than 23 million dollars in 2015.

November 9, 1963 (Saturday)

• Hundreds of people were killed in two separate and unrelated disasters in Japan. At 3:20 p.m. local time in the city of Omuta, a powerful explosion (believed to have been caused by a spark igniting a cloud of coal dust) ripped through the large Mitsui Mikawa coal mine, where more than 1,300 people were underground because of the afternoon shift change, twice as many as would have been present most of the time. The final death toll was 458 coal miners. Those who had not died in the blast were poisoned by carbon monoxide, and hundreds of survivors were hospitalized. Even two years after the disaster, the Asahi Evening News would report in late 1965, 286 people were still in the hospital, and 20 of them remained comatose. Under the Japanese workers' compensation law at the time, however, "compensatory aid lessens if the victim is not cured within three years". Less than seven hours later and 600 miles to the east, a triple railroad disaster at Tsurumi began shortly before 10:00 p.m. near Yokohama. The driver of a large dump truck had tried to cross a set of six tracks near the Tsurumi Station, in front of a slow moving freight train, which was derailed in the collision. Three of the freight cars were scattered over the eastbound tracks used by the high-speed Yokosuka Line. In the next 30 seconds, a passenger train bound for Tokyo crashed into the freight cars, and was scattered over the Yokosuka Line's westbound tracks, where a third train collided with the first two on its way from the Tokyo-suburb of Kawasaki. The final death toll was 161 people.

November 10, 1963 (Sunday)

• Black Muslim activist Malcolm X delivered what would become a widely re-quoted speech, "Message to the Grass Roots" to the Northern Negro Leadership Conference at the King Solomon Baptist Church in Detroit. Almost all of his listeners were black Christians, and Malcolm X's message was one of revolution rather than accommodation. "You don’t catch hell ’cause you’re a Methodist or Baptist... a Democrat or a Republican... a Mason or an Elk. And you sure don’t catch hell ’cause you’re an American; ’cause if you was an American, you wouldn’t catch no hell. You catch hell ’cause you’re a black man. You catch hell, all of us catch hell, for the same reason." He was unsparing in his criticism of "The Big Six" (Martin Luther King, Jr., Roy Wilkins, Whitney Young, Adam Clayton Powell, A. Philip Randolph and James Farmer), Negro leaders whom he said had sold out to the white man called, and added that the March on Washington was "nothing but a circus, with clowns and all... white and black clowns."
• GANEFO, the first GAmes of the New Emerging FOrces, commenced in opening ceremonies at Jakarta, Indonesia, after Indonesia had been ruled ineligible to participate in the 1964 Olympic Games. Despite warnings to member nations from the International Olympic Committee, FIFA, and other organizations, against participation in the GANEFO events, 2,404 athletes from 63 nations participated anyway. and the games were played until the closing ceremonies on November 22. The team from the People's Republic of China (which had not participated in the Olympics since 1952), won 68 gold medals (and 171 overall). In second place was the Soviet Union, which heeded the IOC warning and didn't send its top Olympic athletes to Jakarta.
• In Florida, where President Kennedy was to visit on November 18, the Miami Police Department provided the FBI and the Secret Service copies of a tape recording made by a police informant, Bill Somersett, of a discussion with Joseph Adams Milteer, a wealthy white supremacist activist. Milteer confided to Somersett that plans were already "in the working" in a plan to shoot Kennedy "from an office building, with a high-powered rifle". Extra precautions were taken for the Miami visit, and no motorcade took place. After Kennedy's death four days afterward, Milteer bragged to Somersett, "Everything ran true to form. I guess you thought I was kidding you when I said he would be killed from a window by a high-powered rifle." However, neither the FBI nor the Secret Service provided the knowledge of the tape recordings to the Warren Commission. Milteer would pass away on February 28, 1974 before the U.S. House of Representatives reopened the investigation into the Kennedy murder.
• An American version of the British television news satire That Was The Week That Was was shown at 9:00 p.m. Eastern time s a special broadcast on NBC-TV, and would become a regular series two months later For the pilot, the host was Henry Fonda. Supporting players would include Woody Allen, Steve Allen, Bill Cosby, and future M*A*S*H co-stars Alan Alda and Henry Morgan.
• Born: Mike Powell, American track and field athlete whose 1991 leap of 29 feet, 4 1/4 inches, remains the world's record for the long jump, in Philadelphia. Powell had broken the 23-year-old record of Bob Beamon; as of August 30, 2015, he has held the record for 24 years.

November 11, 1963 (Monday)

• In Vienna, Volksstimme, the official newspaper of the Communist Party of Austria (KPO), broke the news story of the discovery of Karl Silberbauer, the man who had arrested Anne Frank. Silberbauer, whom Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal had identified to the Vienna police as one of their inspectors, had been suspended from the force on October 4 after admitting that he had been the SS officer who arrested the Frank family on August 4, 1944, in Amsterdam.
• Seventy-year old adventurer William Willis stepped ashore at Falulela on the island of Upolu in Samoa, along with his two cats, Kiki and Aussie, after a voyage of 130 days and 7,540 miles on his trimaran boat, Age Unlimited. On July 5, he had set off from Callao, Peru and set off for Australia, hoping to reach Sydney, and for had been considered missing since that time. On his third try, in 1964, Willis would succeed in his Peru to Australia trip. Finally, in 1968, Willis would set off from Montauk, Long Island, in hopes of reaching Plymouth, England, but disappear after being forced to abandon his boat.;
• The first interplanetary probe in the Soviet Union's Zond program, designated Kosmos 21, failed to escape Earth orbit after a misfiring of a rocket and a failure of proper attitude control.
• In Kano, in the autonomous Northern Region of Nigeria, Muslim scholar and politician Mudi Salga founded Fityan al-Islam (Heroes of Islam) fundamentalist group formed in Nigeria to challenge the modernization efforts of the Region's leader, Ahmadu Bello. The group would become "the most dynamic Islamic organization in Northern Nigeria", and open thousands of schools and mosques throughout the Nigerian nation.
• Died: André Le Troquer, 79, French lawyer and politician

November 12, 1963 (Tuesday)

• Iraqi coup d'état: Ali Salih al-Sadi, the Vice Premier of Iraq, was fired from the leadership of Iraq's Ba'athist Party, and he had 18 of his colleagues were seized at gunpoint and flown into exile in Madrid. Replacing the Ba'ath leadership was Prime Minister Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr at the head of a 15-member council. The shakeup would lead to repercussions that would change the Iraqi government. Reportedly, 15 members of the Iraqi Army burst into a meeting of the Ba'ath Congress and seized al-Sadi and the other advisers at gunpoint before putting them on the airplane to Spain.
• Salah al-Din al-Bitar stepped down as Prime Minister of Syria, and was replaced by Major General Amin al-Hafiz, the commander in chief of Syria's armed forces and chairman of the National Revolutionary Council. Bitar had talked for several months about his wish to resign from the Ba'ath government, and his departure was not related to the shakeup within the Ba'ath Party in neighboring Iraq.
• Ten days before his death, President Kennedy signed off on National Security Memorandum Number 271, a then-secret memorandum to NASA Administrator James E. Webb, entitled "Cooperation with the USSR on Outer Space Matters", telling him "to assume personally the initiative and central responsibility" to develop specific technical proposals "for broader cooperation between the United States and the USSR in outer space, including cooperation in lunar landing programs." Following Kennedy's death, the United States continued pursuing its goal of putting a man on the Moon before the end of the decade— and without Soviet assistance.

November 13, 1963 (Wednesday)

• President of Sukarno of Indonesia dissolved his cabinet, six days after the death of First Minister Djuanda Kartawidjaja. The acting First Minister, Dr. Johannes Leimena, was dismissed, and Sukarno abolished the position entirely, then revived the office of Prime Minister of Indonesia and appointed himself as head of government in addition to head of state.
• King Hassan II of Morocco, who had been ruling as both head of state and head of the government since ascending the throne in 1961, appointed a Prime Minister and replaced his Foreign Minister. The shakeup in the north African nation came following the border conflict with neighboring Algeria. Justice Minister Ahmed Bahnini was appointed as the first civilian Prime Minister of Morocco since King Mohammed V had removed Abdallah Ibrahim on May 20, 1960. Foreign Minister Ahmed Balafrej, who had briefly served as Premier in 1958 and who wanted to keep Morocco neutral, was replaced by Agriculture Minister Ahmed Reda Guedria, who wanted more co-operation with the Western nations.
• Iraqi coup: Two hours after Radio Baghdad announced that Syria's Ba'athist Party was now led by Prime Minister al-Bakr, the station was taken off of the air by supporters of recently deposed leader al-Sadi, Iraqi fighter jets strafed the Presidential Palace, and thousands of demonstrators protested the shakeup. Premier al-Bakr and eight of the new council leaders were overthrown and sent into exile in Beirut, Lebanon, the next day.
• Born: Joe Dooley, Irish hurler, in Clareen

November 14, 1963 (Thursday)

• Heavy rains struck northern Haiti and eastern Cuba. In Haiti, flash flooding and landslides at Grande-Rivière-du-Nord killed at least 500 people on the first and second days of the storm. The nation's public health department made its estimate based on the number of bodies that had been recovered a week later.

November 15, 1963 (Friday)

• The new island of Surtsey was created off of the coast of Iceland by the eruption of an undersea volcano; by 1967, when the eruption would cease, the island would have an area of 2.8 square kilometers (1.08 square miles).
• The U.S. Air Force announced that Major Robert W. Smith had set a new record for altitude reached by an airplane from ground takeoff, topping out at 118,860 feet, or more than 22½ miles above sea level. Although the feat is commonly described as having happened on this date, Brigadier General Irving L. Branch noted only that it had happened "this week" rather than on that day. Major Smith, a former fighter pilot during the Korean War, was flying an F-104A Starfighter jet that had been outfitted with an additional rocket motor with 6,000 pounds of thrust. He had taken off from the Lockheed Corporation proving grounds in Palmdale, California, about 2,600 feet above sea level, and broken a Soviet record of 113,890 feet set on April 28, 1961.
• Seven days before President Kennedy's scheduled visit to Dallas, Baxton Bryant of the Dallas Citizens Council sent an angry telegram to the White House complaining that since the Kennedys were to travel in a motorcade at other stops on his Texas tour, supporters in his city should be accorded the same honor. "A motorcade from Dallas Love Field to downtown Dallas was arranged for the Kennedys after another Bryant complaint," a United Press International report would note on the eve of the President's visit.
• Died: Duncan K. MacTavish, 64, Canadian Senator from Ottawa, and former president of the National Liberal Federation, in a five-car pileup on the Queen Elizabeth Way.

November 16, 1963 (Saturday)

• Yale University Professor Frederick C. Barghoorn was released by the Soviet Union after 16 days of imprisonment. Dr. Barghoorn, a 52-year old professor of political science, had been arrested while walking on a street near the Hotel Metropole in Moscow, the day before he was scheduled to fly home from a vacation. He was accused of espionage, and kept in a cell in a the Lubyanka Prison. Ten days passed before his American colleagues became aware that he had been arrested. After protests by the U.S. Department of State, and the personal assurance by President Kennedy to Premier Khrushchev that Barghoorn was not a spy, the professor was ordered released. Less than two hours later, he was put on British European Airways Flight 911 from Moscow to London.
• Arturo Illia, the President of Argentina, announced a decree cancelling all contracts between Argentina and private corporations for oil production. The largest companies affected were Standard Oil of New Jersey (later Exxon), which operated in the north at the Salta Province, and a combine of British companies that drilled in the south near Comodoro Rivadavia.
• Died: Carlo Buti, 61, Italian popular singer

November 17, 1963 (Sunday)

• At a dinner party in St. Louis, August Busch, Jr., Chairman of the Anheuser-Busch Brewing Company, made a chance remark that ended plans for Walt Disney to locate his next theme park in the Missouri city. Mayor Raymond Tucker had suggested that the proposed park should offer beer and liquor to its patrons, but the Disney Company had reiterated its position that alcohol sales would be inconsistent with the company's image. Busch remarked to Disney, "Any man who thinks he can design an attraction that is going to be a success in this city, and not serve beer or liquor, ought to have his head examined." A historian would write later, "[T]he remark had not offended Walt's sense of morality; it was actually worse than that. It had insulted his business acumen." Disney said nothing to Busch, but upon returning to his hotel, he canceled the next day's plans to sign a letter of commitment to building Riverfront Square in St. Louis, and told one of his vice-presidents, "It's all finished. We're not coming. Forget about it." Five days later, he would find a site in central Florida for his next theme park.
• In Mexico City, Gustavo Díaz Ordaz, who had recently resigned as Interior Minister, was nominated by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (Partido Revolucionario Institucional or PRI) as its candidate for the 1964 Mexican presidential election. In that the PRI candidate had won seven consecutive presidential elections since 1929, it was expected that Díaz would be the next President of Mexico; he would receive 89% of the popular vote on July 5.
• William S. Walter, a night employee of the FBI office in New Orleans, would state in 1967 that his office (and presumably others) received a telex from the Washington office, that began with the text "Threat to assassinate President Kennedy in Dallas Texas November 22 dash Three Nineteen Sixty Three. Misc information concerning info has been received by the Bureau". Walter would say that he told five other agents in the office about the memo "and considered his job done". Although some sources say that researcher Mark Lane obtained a copy of the telex message in 1976 under the Freedom of Information Act, the United States House Select Committee on Assassinations would conclude in 1978 "that Walter's allegations were unfounded".

November 18, 1963 (Monday)

• Iraqi president Abdul Salam Arif, his brother, Brigade General Abdul Rahman Arif and their Iraqi Army supporters suppressed the Ba'ath National Guard Militia, bombed its headquarters, and removed Prime Minister al-Bakr from office and deposed him as Ba'ath Party leader. A new Party Council, was created, which did not include al-Bakr or former Vice-Premier al-Sadi.
• The Dartford Tunnel, under the River Thames opened in the United Kingdom, 164 years after the idea had first been proposed in 1799.
• Prince Norodom Sihanouk, the ruling monarch of Cambodia, announced that his Southeast Asian nation would sever all military and economic relations with the United States. Sihanouk told a crowd that Cambodian rebels were using American equipment and making incursions into Cambodia from neighboring South Vietnam.
• In Atlantic City, New Jersey, a fire broke out at the Surfside Hotel, which regularly served as a convalescent home for elderly people after the summer tourist season ended. Twenty-five of the 34 registered hotel guests died in the blaze, and another later died of her injuries. Ten bodies were never recovered; only two of the other 15 could be identified. A former mental patient and convicted arsonist would be arrested on June 20, 1964, and confess that he had poured gasoline into the hotel's boiler and set it ablaze. However, an Atlantic City grand jury did not find probable cause to return an indictment.

November 19, 1963 (Tuesday)

• In the concluding event for the three-day centennial celebration of the Gettysburg Address delivered by President Abraham Lincoln on November 19, 1863, former U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower addressed the crowd in a ceremony of rededication for the Gettysburg National Cemetery. General Eisenhower, who had retired to a farm near the battlefield after his term as President had ended, told the audience, "My friends, Lincoln reminded his hearers that they had no power to dedicate this ground. So we, today, have no power to rededicate it. But with the playing of Taps, the soldier's farewell, we can share the grief of every family who has heard that a son or father or sweetheart has fallen. If we can but do this, we will begin to do our part to solve the unfinished business of which Lincoln spoke.".
• Born: Amado Boudou, Argentinian politician and businessman, Vice President of Argentina, in Buenos Aires
• Died: Donald Summerville, 48, Mayor of Toronto. Mr. Summerville had made an appearance at a hockey game for charity, tending goal for a few minutes, then had a heart attack while in the locker room. City Council member Philip Givens would be appointed to serve out Summerville's term.
• Died: Carmen Amaya, 60, Spanish flamenco dancer and singer

November 20, 1963 (Wednesday)

• The Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination was adopted by voice vote, without any dissent, by the United Nations General Assembly.
• The deathbed wish of Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World, was honored by his wife Laura, who injected him with 200 micrograms of the hallucinogen LSD. The drug was delivered to her by recently fired Harvard University Professor Timothy Leary. Huxley would die two days later.
• Died: Nikolay Baranskiy, 82, Russian economic geographer

November 21, 1963 (Thursday)

• India began its space program with the launching of a sounding rocket from the Thumba Equatorial Rocket Launching Station (TERLS), located at the far south end of the Indian subcontinent, near Thiruvananthapuram in the Kerala State. The rocket test took place 25 minutes after sunset, and reached an altitude of 200 kilometers (124 miles) where it released a sodium vapor cloud in the thermosphere.
• Japanese general election, 1963: The Liberal Democratic Party, led by Prime Minister Hayato Ikeda, retained its comfortable majority in the 467 seat House of Representatives (the Shugiin), despite dropping from 296 seats to 283.
• At 10:50 a.m., President Kennedy and his wife Jacqueline Kennedy departed the White House on the Marine One helicopter, then flew to San Antonio, Texas on Air Force One to begin a three-day speaking and fundraising tour. Mr. and Mrs. Kennedy then traveled by motorcade through San Antonio, where he dedicated the USAF School of Aerospace Medicine at Brooks Air Force Base. From there, he flew to Houston, where he traveled in another motorcade en route to another speech at the Houston Coliseum and then went to Fort Worth where they spent the night at the Hotel Texas on the eighth floor in Room 850. Speeches were set for the next day at Fort Worth, Dallas and Austin.
• Died: Robert Stroud, 73, American prisoner known as "The Birdman of Alcatraz", while incarcerated at Springfield, Missouri.

November 22, 1963 (Friday)

• Assassination of John F. Kennedy (JFK) :U.S. President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas, while he was riding as a passenger in a Lincoln Continental convertible automobile, along with his wife, Jacqueline Kennedy, Texas Governor John B. Connally and the Governor's wife, Secret Service Agent Roy Kellerman, and the driver, agent William Greer. The group was part of several cars in a motorcade of vehicles on the way from the Dallas airport, Love Field, to the Dallas Trade Mart, where the President was scheduled to deliver a speech at a luncheon for 2,600 guests. At 12:30 p.m., as their car was passing in front of the Texas School Book Depository on 411 Elm Street, President Kennedy and Governor Connally were struck by bullets fired at long range. The President arrived at the Parkland Memorial Hospital at 12:38 p.m. and was taken into surgery, and pronounced dead at 1:00 p.m.
• Lee Harvey Oswald, a 24-year old employee at the book depository, left the building approximately three minutes after the shots were fired, and went to his home at 1026 North Beckley Avenue. At 1:15 p.m., Dallas Police officer J. D. Tippit was shot four times by Oswald. Oswald was seen walking into a cinema, the Texas Theatre, where patrolman M. N. "Nick" McDonald disarmed and arrested him at 1:50 p.m.
• At 2:38 p.m., Vice-President Lyndon B. Johnson was sworn in as the 36th President of the United States by U.S. District Judge Sarah T. Hughes, on board Air Force One prior to the airplane's departure from Dallas. Because a Bible could not be located on the plane, Johnson took his oath instead upon a Roman Catholic liturgical book, the Saint Joseph Sunday Missal. Air Force One, with a coffin containing President Kennedy's body, arrived at Andrews Air Force Base in Bethesda, Maryland, at 5:58 p.m. local time.
• Earlier in the day, at 10:15, President Kennedy had placed a telephone call to former U.S. Vice President John Nance Garner on the occasion of Garner's 95th birthday. President Kennedy delivered a speech to supporters at the Hotel Texas in Fort Worth before flying on Air Force One to nearby Dallas.
• In early afternoon editions, some newspapers in the United States ran stories based on the advance text of the speech that President Kennedy had planned to give at the Dallas Trade Mart, anticipating that the address would already have been delivered by the time that the newspapers were being read.
• On the same day, television signals were broadcast from the United States to Japan for the first time, with transmission sent from Barstow, California, via the Relay 1 satellite, across the Pacific Ocean. A pre-recorded message from President Kennedy was hastily removed from the items to be sent, because the President had died an hour before the scheduled broadcast. Because of the 17-hour time difference between California and Japan, it was 4:00 a.m. on Saturday in Tokyo at the same time that transmission began to the NHK.
• The GANEFO games closed in Indonesia. Earlier in the day, the games' soccer championship was played between the United Arab Republic and North Korea before 100,000 fans in Jakarta. The score was tied 0-0 at the end of regulation, and a 30-minute overtime period was added. After the extra time, the score was tied at 1-1, so the gold medal was decided by a coin toss, which the UAR won.
• The Beatles' second album, With The Beatles, was released in the United Kingdom by Parlophone Records, and became an immediate hit. The album included their hit song "All My Loving".
• Walt Disney decided on the location for his second amusement park, an eastern counterpart to his successful Disneyland park in California. He and several top executives boarded an airplane in Tampa, in order to fly over the area around Orlando, Florida. Earlier in the month, Disney had scouted sites around St. Louis, Missouri; Niagara Falls, New York; and New Orleans, Louisiana. The other potential Florida site was in Ocala, but Disney made his decision after seeing that the ongoing construction of Interstate Highway 4 would meet with the Florida Turnpike, and that the potential site would be adjacent to swampland that would be unsuitable for competing businesses.
• Born: Brian Robbins, American TV actor ("Eric Maridian" on Head of the Class), TV producer (Smallville), and film director (Varsity Blues, Norbit); in Brooklyn
• Died: Aldous Huxley, 69, English novelist
• Died: C. S. Lewis, 64, Irish novelist, poet, academic, medievalist, literary critic, essayist, lay theologian and Christian advocate
• Died: John F. Kennedy, 46, 35th President of the United States
• Died: J. D. Tippit, 39, officer of the Dallas Police Department.

November 23, 1963 (Saturday)

• At 5:15 p.m. on the BBC television network, the very first episode of the series Doctor Who was broadcast. William Hartnell was the first actor to portray the title character, in a story entitled "“An Unearthly Child”. During the first fifty years of the show's run, ten more actors would portray the Doctor, and the change of appearance would be explained as the ability of all Time Lords to accomplish as "regeneration".
• A fire at the Golden Age Nursing Home, located at Fitchville, Ohio, killed 63 elderly people. Investigators concluded that the fire was caused by the overloading of electrical circuits, and that the lack of plans for an evacuation procedure, the lack of a fire hydrant within five miles of the facility, and the lack of knowledge of the correct fire department to call added to the death toll. Tragically, the first call to a phone operator for help went to the fire department of Norwalk, Ohio, but the dispatcher declined to respond because Fitchville was outside of the Norwalk jurisdiction. The New London, Ohio department did not reach the scene until half an hour after the electrical fire, traced to the plugging in of a steam table, had started.

November 24, 1963 (Sunday)

• Despite being surrounded by a crowd of officers in the Dallas Police Department headquarters, Lee Harvey Oswald, the accused assassin of John F. Kennedy, was shot and mortally wounded by nightclub owner Jack Ruby. Because his imminent transfer from the police department to the Dallas County jail was being covered on live television by all of the U.S. broadcast networks, millions of viewers were watching as Ruby shot Oswald in the abdomen, at point blank range, with a .38 caliber revolver. The shooting took place at 11:21 a.m. local time; Oswald was taken into surgery at Parkland Memorial Hospital, and died at 1:07 p.m., never to face trial.
• The evening before, Jack Ruby had promised to give one of his employees, Karen Carlin, an advance on her paycheck. On Sunday morning, Ruby was at home when Mrs. Carlin called at 10:19 and requested $25.00, and Ruby went to the Western Union office on Main Street in downtown Dallas to wire the amount to her. After waiting in line and paying for the money transfer at 11:17, Ruby walked up Main Street to the nearby police station, and entered the building on the unguarded ramp to the basement, moments before Oswald was being escorted into the area.
• At one of his first meetings with foreign policy advisors since becoming President, Lyndon Johnson rescinded President Kennedy's plans to withdraw soldiers from South Vietnam. According to McGeorge Bundy, the National Security Advisor, Johnson told the group, "I am not going to lose Vietnam. I am not going to be the President who saw Southeast Asia go the way China went." Johnson then issued a statement reaffirming the nation's commitment to support South Vietnam militarily and economically.
• The National Football League played all six of its Week 11 games as scheduled, at Cleveland, Los Angeles, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, New York, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh., while the American Football League postponed all three of its games.

November 25, 1963 (Monday)

• The state funeral of John F. Kennedy took place in Washington, D.C., as the late President's casket was transported in the funeral procession to the Arlington National Cemetery. Millions of viewers watched the funeral on live television worldwide. Present at the occasion were 220 foreign dignitaries from 92 countries, including eight heads of state and ten prime ministers". In addition to U.S. President Lyndon Johnson were the presidents of France (Charles de Gaulle); West Germany (Heinrich Lübke); Ireland (Éamon de Valera); South Korea (Park Chung-hee); the Philippines (Diosdado Macapagal) and Israel Zalman Shazar (Israel), and former U.S. Presidents Harry S. Truman and Dwight Eisenhower. Prime Ministers arrived from the United Kingdom (Alec Douglas-Home); Canada (Lester B. Pearson); West Germany (Chancellor Ludwig Erhard); Japan (Hayato Ikeda); Sweden (Tage Erlander); Norway (Einar Gerhardsen); Denmark (Jens Otto Krag); Austria (Chancellor Alfons Gorbach; Turkey (İsmet İnönü); Tunisia (Bahi Ladgham); Yugoslavia (Petar Stambolić); and Jamaica (Alexander Bustamante). Royal personages were Emperor Haile Selassie I of Ethiopia and King Baudouin I of Belgium, as well as Prince Philip, the husband of Queen Elizabeth II; Queen Frederica, wife of the King of Greece; and Jean, the heir apparent to the duchy of Luxembourg. The Soviet Union was represented by its First Deputy Prime Minister, Anastas Mikoyan. The Roman Catholic Archbishop of Boston, Richard Cardinal Cushing, delivered the funeral mass at the St. Matthew's Cathedral, in the presence of the late President's widow, daughter and son.
• Three hours after the funeral of President Kennedy was completed, graveside services were held for Lee Harvey Oswald at the Rose Hill Cemetery near Fort Worth, Texas. Local police and the U.S. Secret Service did not allow the general public to be present, and the only other persons present were Oswald's wife, mother, brother, and two daughters. After a Lutheran minister from Dallas reconsidered appearing for the service, the Reverend Louis Saunders appeared on behalf of the Fort Worth Council of Churches, telling newsmen, "We do not want it said a man can be buried in Fort Worth without a minister." Oswald was buried in a family plot that had been owned for several years by his mother, and six of the reporters present served as pallbearers. The Miller Funeral Home of Fort Worth was hired for the arrangements, and police with guard dogs were stationed at the cemetery indefinitely in order to protect against vandalism.
• Funeral services were held for fallen Dallas policeman J. D. Tippit at the Beckley Hills Baptist Church in Dallas, in a service attended by 1,000 of his fellow officers and mourners from the community. Burial followed at the Laureland Cemetery, in a memorial presided over by Pastor C. D. Tipps, in the presence of Tippit's widow, daughter and two sons.
• For only the third time in history, telephone service in the United States was halted for one minute. At noon, Eastern time, A T & T operators bowed their heads in mourning for President Kennedy. The only other occasions were on April 16, 1920, after the death of A T & T President Theodore N. Vail, and on August 2, 1922, following the death of telephone inventor Alexander Graham Bell.
• Las Vegas closed all of its casinos for only the third time in its history. The first two times had been on Good Friday (March 22) in 1940, and on April 12, 1945, after President Franklin D. Roosevelt died.
• The first renaming of places for the late President Kennedy took place in two cities outside the United States. In Algiers, President of Algeria Ahmed Ben Bella and U.S. Ambassador William J. Porter attended a ceremony where the Place de la Republique was designated as the Place John Kennedy. That evening in West Berlin, the Rudolf-Wilde-Platz in front of the City Hall, where Kennedy had delivered his "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech, was renamed the John-F.-Kennedy-Platz in a memorial ceremony.
• Abraham Zapruder sold all rights to his 8 mm film of the Kennedy assassination to LIFE Magazine for $150,000 to be paid in installments of $25,000 per year. Two days later, Zapruder donated his first $25,000 to the widow of Officer J. D. Tippit.

November 26, 1963 (Tuesday)

• Parliamentary elections were held in South Korea. Despite receiving only one-third of the votes overall, the Democratic Republican Party won 110 of the 175 seats in the National Assembly because the opposition for most seats was split among several other political parties.
• All regularly-scheduled television programming resumed in the United States, after having been preempted since Friday afternoon for news coverage of, and tributes to, the late President Kennedy. National network broadcasting of entertainment programs began at 8:00 a.m. Eastern time with Captain Kangaroo on CBS, the game show Say When!! on ABC at 10:00, and the game show Word for Word on NBC at 10:30.
• President Johnson issued National Security Action Memorandum 273 (NSAM 273), a modification of American policy in Vietnam. Although the memorandum had already been drafted by adviser McGeorge Bundy at the request of President Kennedy, Johnson added some modifications. Most notably, the memo "for the first time introduced the word 'win' into the U.S. objective". The declaration read that "It remains the central object of the United States in South Vietnam to assist the people and Government of that country to win their contest against the externally directed and supported Communist conspiracy," which, one historian observes, "unmistakably obliged the United States to deeper responsibilities that would lead to war."
• The American satellite Explorer 18 was launched as a project to study the magnetic field around the Moon, using a package of instruments referred to as the "IMP" (Interplanetary Monitoring Platform).
• Jack Ruby was formally indicted by the grand jury of Dallas County, Texas, for the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald. He would be found guilty of murder on March 14, 1964, and sentenced to be executed in the electric chair, though an appeals court would reverse the conviction in 1966 and remand the case for a second trial. Before he could be retried, Ruby would die from lung cancer on January 3, 1967.
• The U.S. Federal Reserve Bank began the removal of silver certificates from circulation, starting with the discontinuation of the one dollar notes. After a dramatic increase in the U.S. Department of the Treasury's supply of silver dollars in one month, Secretary Douglas Dillon would announce on March 25, 1964, that the certificates would no longer be exchangeable for anything other than regular bills of the same denomination.
• During a meeting between President Johnson and Soviet Vice-Premier Anastas Mikoyan at the White House, made while Mikoyan was in town for John F. Kennedy's funeral, the President assured the Soviet envoy that the United States would not invade Cuba during his presidency. Two days later, however, Johnson instructed CIA Director John A. McCone to develop policies that were "more aggressive", including a possible May 30, 1964 invasion.
• On the same day, Cuba issued Law 1129, directing all Cuban males between the age of 16 and 44 to register for military service, effective December 1. Teenage boys would enter military schools beginning in April 1964.
• Big Butte School, in Butte, Montana, became the first of almost 1,000 schools to be renamed in honor of the late President. Upon unanimous vote of the board for the school board district at a special meeting, the institution was rechristened as "John F. Kennedy Elementary School".
• Died: Edwin B. Willis, 70, American set designer for MGM Studios, who won eight Academy Awards during his career.

November 27, 1963 (Wednesday)

• Lyndon Johnson addressed joint session of Congress in his first major speech since being sworn in as President of the United States, and pledged that he would not depart from the programs that had been started by his predecessor, John F. Kennedy. In what would become known as his "Let Us Continue" speech, he urged Congress to pass legislation for a tax cut and a civil rights bill. "All I have I would have given gladly not to be standing here today," Johnson told Congress, calling Kennedy "the greatest leader of our time... struck down by the foulest deed of our time." Reminding his listeners that Kennedy had said "let us begin" in his inaugural address, Johnson added, "Today in this moment of new resolve, I would say to my fellow Americans, let us continue.... Let us here highly resolve that John Fitzgerald Kennedy did not live— or die— in vain."
• The day after the launch of the IMP into space, the United States made its first successful test of the Atlas-Centaur launch system, as well as a new rocket propellant combining liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen. The five ton payload was, in the words of a NASA spokesman, a "relatively worthless satellite, made up mostly of old rocket casing", but large enough to be visible with the naked eye. The spokesman compared its apparent magnitude to "a second or third magnitude star... a tumbling action will make it sort of flash in the sky." By comparison, all but one of the stars within the "Big Dipper" in Ursa Major are second magnitude.
• The Strasbourg Patent Convention, providing for a common patent law to apply in Western European countries, was signed by the 17 members of the Council of Europe. It would not be ratified by enough nations to make it effective, however, until August 1, 1980.
• The Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional (FALN), a group of leftist revolutionaries in Venezuela, kidnapped Colonel James K. Chenault, the deputy chief of the U.S. Army mission in Caracas, as he was being picked up at his home by the mission chauffeur.; Colonel Chenault would be released, unharmed, by the FALN gunmen on December 5.

November 28, 1963 (Thursday)

• On Thanksgiving Day, President Johnson issued an Executive Order the immediate renaming of the space center at Cape Canaveral, in Florida to "Cape Kennedy", then told the nation about it as part of a televised address. In addition, the President noted that the cape itself "shall be known hereafter as Cape Kennedy". The day before, at Johnson's request, the United States Board on Geographic Names had approved the renaming of the peninsula, which had first been identified as "Cabo Cañaveral" by explorer Juan Ponce de León. Despite protests from the residents of the city of Cape Canaveral, Florida, the order affected only the cape itself and the federally-owned property, rather than the town. Florida Governor Farris Bryant told critics on December 5, "The people of Florida, in the year 2063, will look back and understand what President Johnson has done and will approve.". However, the old name would be restored less than ten years later, on October 9, 1973, at the request of Florida Congressman Lou Frey, Jr..
• Born: Armando Iannucci, Scottish satirist, in Glasgow
• Died: American actress Karyn Kupcinet, 22. She was found dead in her West Hollywood apartment two days later by friends, actor Mark Goddard and his wife. The death is officially recorded as an unsolved homicide.

November 29, 1963 (Friday)

• Trans-Canada Airlines Flight 831, a Douglas DC-8, crashed in a field near the village of Sainte-Thérèse, Quebec, shortly after taking-off from Montreal's Dorval International Airport en route to Toronto as the first stop on a flight to Vancouver. All 118 people on board (the 111 passengers and seven crew) were killed. Most of the passengers were on their way to Vancouver to watch the Grey Cup game for the championship of the Canadian Football League; 16 other people had been caught in a traffic jam on the way to the airport and were fortunate enough to have missed their flight. Until December 12, 1985, when all 256 persons on board Arrow Air Flight 1285 would be killed in an accident at Newfoundland, the Trans-Canada flight would be the worst air disaster in Canada's history.
• The foundation stone for Mirzapur Cadet College was laid in the city of Gorai in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), by President Ayub Khan.

November 30, 1963 (Saturday)

• Australian federal election, 1963: Led by Prime Minister Robert Menzies, the coalition of the Liberal Party and the Country Party, which had a slim 62-60 majority in the Australian House of Representatives, increased its lead to a 72-50 margin over the Australian Labor Party, which lost ten seats in the 122 member House. The election also marked the first time that indigenous Australians (referred to at the time as Aborigines) were allowed to vote in nationwide elections on the same basis as other electors, a franchise that had not been available in Western Australia, Queensland or the Northern Territory. In addition, it was the first election where the results could be tallied simultaneously from all electorates on live, nationwide television.
• New Zealand general election, 1963: As Robert Chapman observed the next day for the New Zealand Broadcasting Company described it the next day, the NZBC announcer "named the election for us all: the 'No Change Election'.... it is positively uncanny how, yesterday, the voters of New Zealand went out and repeated themselves. They simply conducted the 1960 election over again with the same amount of non-voting..." Only one of the 80 seats in the Parliament, the Manukau electorate, was filled by a different political party. The results were almost identical to those of the previous election in 1960; the National Party went from having a 46 to 34 majority, to a 45 to 35 split with the Labour Party.
• A crisis in the island republic of Cyprus, between the Greek and Turkish Cypriots who lived there, was triggered by a 13-point proposal from the President to reform the dual government that had existed there since the nation had gained independence on August 16, 1960. The President, Archbishop Makarios III, was of Greek descent, while the Vice-President, Dr. Fazıl Küçük was of Turkish descent, and each had the right to veto the decisions of the other. In addition, enactment of laws had to be done by a separate majorities of the Greek Cypriot and the Turkish Cypriot members of the House of Representatives, and each of the five largest cities had separate Greek and Turkish municipalities. With the encouragement of the British High Commissioner, Makarios proposed to amend the nation's constitution to reduce the power of the Turkish minority; the American ambassador to Cyprus had persuaded Makarios to phrase the 13 amendments as suggestions rather than as a declaration.
• Died: Cyril L. N. Newall, who had served as the Governor-General of New Zealand from 1941 to 1946, died in England at the age of 77, on the same day of the nationwide election.