Things that happened 50 years ago.
On August 2, U.S. Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield confirmed a Washington Post report that in 1963 President John F. Kennedy had decided to order withdrawal of all American troops from South Vietnam after the 1964 election. Kennedy was assassinated before that election and his successor, Lyndon Johnson, increased troop levels to half a million troops during his term.
Marin County Superior Court Judge Harold Haley was taken hostage from his San Rafael, Calif., courtroom on August 7 and later killed. During the criminal trial of a member of the Black Panthers, James McClain, a teenage Jonathan Jackson tossed a sawed-off shotgun he had smuggled into the courtroom, along with other weapons, to McClain. Holding the shotgun against the judge’s neck, McClain, as well as Jackson and two convict witnesses, took an assistant prosecutor and three women jurors as additional hostages and attempted to leave in a rented van. They ran into a police blockade. In the ensuing shootout, McClain killed Judge Haley, and McClain, Jackson, and the two other convicts were killed by police. The weapons smuggled into the courtroom and used in the incident were registered to Angela Davis, now professor emerita at UC Santa Cruz.
Former heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali was granted a license to box on August 11, three years after being stripped of his title in 1967 for refusing induction into the Army.
Singer Janis Joplin gave what would be her final concert on August 12 before 35,000 people at the Harvard University Stadium, Cambridge, Mass. She would die October 4 of a heroin overdose.
Robert Fassnacht, a 33-year-old physicist working late at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisc., was killed instantly on the morning of August 24, when a explosives-laden truck exploded outside of Sterling Hall, a building that contained the U.S. Army Mathematics Research Center. It was the work of a group called “The New Year’s Gang” in protest against the Vietnam War. Three of the four individuals in the gang were arrested and each served several years in prison. The fourth was never located.
Thirty-two U.S. servicemen were killed on August 26 when a rocket-propelled grenade struck their Chinook helicopter in Quang Nam Province, South Vietnam. It was one of the worst aircraft personnel losses in the war.
The McDonnell-Douglas DC-10, competitor to the Boeing 747, made its maiden flight on August 29. Carrying only a flight crew, the other “jumbo jet” took off from Long Beach, Calif., and flew for several hours before landing at Edwards Air Force Base.