April 1969

Some of what happened in the U.S. and around the world in the month of April, 50 years ago.

On April 3, DoD announced that the number of Americans killed in the Vietnam War had exceeded 32,629, which had been the toll from the Korean War. As of March 28, 33,641 Americans had been killed.

The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, both popular and controversial, was canceled by CBS on April 4. The television network said the producers, Dick Smothers and Tommy Smothers, had failed to submit tapes of shows for CBS and local stations to preview and were “unwilling to accept the criteria for taste established by the network’s program practices department.”

Baseball’s four newest teams all won games on opening day, April 8. The San Diego Padres beat Houston, 3-1; Montreal Expos defeated the New York Mets, 11-10; Kansas City Royals (replacing the Athletics, which had moved to Oakland) beat Minnesota Twins, 4-3; and the Seattle Pilots won, 4-3, over the California Angels. Auspicious start for Seattle, but the Pilots went bankrupt and became the Milwaukee Brewers in 1970.

Cambridge (Mass.) police and Massachusetts State Police, employing billy clubs and pepper spray, evicted about 300 Harvard students and supporters from the Harvard Administration Building occupied by the students earlier on April 9. Police arrested 184 and injured 45. Among those arrested was Chris Wallace, now a Fox News journalist, who used his one phone call to contact the campus radio station and give a first-hand account.

EC-121

An unarmed U.S. EC-121 reconnaissance plane was shot down on April 15 by a North Korean MiG-21 over the Sea of Japan. All 31 servicemen onboard were killed. The U.S. response was limited to sending Navy warships to the area for 10 days and adding armed escorts to future reconnaissance flights in the region.

Sirhan Sirhan was convicted on April 18 in Los Angeles County Superior Court for the murder of U.S. Senator Robert F. Kennedy the previous year. 

Community members of Berkeley, Calif., seized an empty lot owned by the University of California on April 20 and began to build “People’s Park.”

Bill Clinton, at Oxford 1969

Bill Clinton, then a 22-year-old Rhodes Scholar at the University of Oxford and future President of the United States, received an induction notice on April 22, directing him to return to the U.S. to begin military service. The letter had arrived late, and Clinton would get a postponement of his reporting date. He then avoided induction by agreeing to enroll in the Army ROTC program at the University of Arkansas in 1970. He would renege on that commitment.

The number of U.S. troops in South Vietnam reached its peak — 543,842 — on April 30. From the next month on, until the end of the Vietnam war, the number would steadily decline.