History Diaries

Venezuelan police and troops with automatic weapons and bazookas fight snipers in downtown Caracas in the second day of an all-out communist campaign of terror in the capital. When the firing dies down, the toll for the two days of strife by the pro-Castro underground stands at 24 dead and 84 wounded. Violence also is reported elsewhere in Venezuela.

Three hundred students take over Iraq’s embassy in London for six hours and shout slogans against the country’s new military regime. There is a brief flurry of punching when London police try to force out the students, but the embassy orders the bobbies off “Iraqi territory.” The Iraqi ambassador then persuades the students to leave, and their spokesman says they were promised that members of the deposed Baathist party would be included in Iraq’s new government.

The $250-million U.S.-Russia wheat deal hinges on American guarantees of credit to meet Soviet terms, Treasury Secretary Douglas Dillon told Congress.

The United States is preparing to close out its program of military and economic assistance in Cambodia.

Top U.S. military and diplomatic officials attended a Honolulu meeting to discuss policy in Southeast Asia, particularly South Vietnam.

A House Republican task force proposed that Europe be given tactical nuclear weapons. The plea has the support of former President Dwight D. Eisenhower.

The Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination was adopted by voice vote, without any dissenting vote, by the United Nations General Assembly. The United Nations — with the United States expressing a serious constitutional reservation — votes for a declaration of human rights. South Africa, condemned by the U.N. for its apartheid policy, does not participate. Adlai Stevenson, United States delegate, says the resolution clashes with the American constitutional safeguard of free speech.

The Central Intelligence Agency is accused of paying American travelers in Russia to spy. The charge was made by Dr. Corliss Lamont, chairman of the National Council of American-Soviet Friendship, at a rally attended by the Russian ambassador to the United States and other Russian dignitaries. The rally was held in New York in celebration of the 30th anniversary of diplomatic relations between the United States and the Soviet Union.

[Through the VENONA intercepts, we know that Lamont was recruited as a KGB agent, code named AUTHOR.]

Congolese police arrested two Soviet diplomats, beat them and seized papers allegedly connected with a Communist-supported plot to overthrow Premier Cyrille Adoula.

A group of American prelates led by Albert Gregory Cardinal Meyer of Chicago joined in defense of proposed Roman Catholic declarations on Jews and religious liberty.

A Vienna policeman has been suspended after admitting he was one of the Nazi officers who arrested Anne Frank and her Jewish family in wartime Amsterdam.

An army artillery battery of 78 men fires a Pershing missile in New Mexico. This is the army’s newest big nuclear delivery system and is scheduled to be sent to Germany to replace the obsolete Redstone missile. The Pershing has a range of 100 to 400 miles and is highly mobile on land.

A U-2 spy plane believed to have been on a reconnaissance mission over Cuba crashed today in the Gulf of Mexico 40 miles northwest of Key West, Florida. Military sources in Washington said the U-2 pilot gave no indication of trouble before the crash and the plane presumably went down because of mechanical trouble. The announcement of the crash was made at Strategic Air Command (SAC) headquarters in Omaha. SAC said the jet vanished from land-based radar scopes and eight minutes later a pilot in the area observed an oil slick. The pilot of the U-2 was identified as Captain Joe E. Hyde Jr., 33, La Grange, Georgia.

President John F. Kennedy met with the Democratic congressional leaders for breakfast. At that breakfast, some of them were concerned about his going to Dallas, in light of how Adlai Stevenson had been treated there. In the meeting he drew doodles of sailboats, with the caption above reading “20th anniversary” and “August.” It is unclear if he was thinking about the 20th anniversary of the sinking of his boat PT-109 during the second world war in August of 1943, or the death of his brother Joe in the war in August of 1944.

He read a draft copy of Jim Bishop’s proposed book “A Day in the Life of President Kennedy” and approved the manuscript. Jacqueline Kennedy, on the other hand, asked for about 60 changes. That afternoon he met with Roger Hilsman and Alexis Johnson on the subject of aid to Cambodia. He also hosted a reception at the White House for Supreme Court Justices. Among the visitors were sixty-five-year-old justice William O. Douglas and his new bride, twenty-three-year-old law student Joan Carol Martin. At the reception, Kennedy told his Treasury Secretary C. Douglas Dillon, “you’re going off to Japan and I’ve got to go to Texas. I wish we could trade places.”

November 20th was Robert Kennedy’s 38th birthday. (He would be 98 today if still living). At the reception, he spoke with Jacqueline Kennedy and asked if she had recovered sufficiently from the death of her son Patrick to endure the Texas trip. RFK told someone at the reception that he didn’t want his brother to go to Texas.

On the same day, Jean Daniel was in Havana, where he delivered a message to Fidel Castro on behalf of President Kennedy.

There was a surprise birthday party for Robert Kennedy later that night, but President Kennedy did not go, choosing instead to have a quiet dinner at home with the first lady. According to author Thurston Clarke in his recent book entitled “JFK’s Last Hundred Days: The Transformation of a Man and the Emergence of a Great President at page 328”:

“He asked Jackie what she was packing. Referring to the November 22 luncheon at the Dallas Trade Mart, he said, "There are going to be all these rich Republican women at that lunch, wearing mink coats and diamond bracelets, and you've got to look as marvelous as any of them. Be simple — show these Texans what good taste really is." She held up some dresses and outfits, and they chose a pink suit with a navy blue collar and a matching pink pillbox hat for Dallas.”

The Senate passed a $13,266,789,650 appropriation bill tonight to pay expenses of 28 independent government agencies through next June 30. Economy advocates failed in repeated attempts to reduce spending for such things as jobs for “political has-beens” in civil defense, airline subsidies, and the President’s pet project of sending an American to the moon.

But the Senate passed by one vote an amendment by Senator William Proxmire (D-Wisconsin) to cut the appropriation for the National Aeronautics administration by 90 million dollars. It was the only cut in the bill that was approved. The reduction was approved after the Senate voted down an amendment by Senator William Fulbright (D-Arkansas) to cut the moonshot program by 519 million dollars. Fulbright asserted that the triumph of being first on the moon would be just a “gaudy sideshow in the real work of the world.” Fulbright, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, was floor manager of the foreign aid bill that was cut by 519 million dollars last week.

[Ed: Even by the egregiously low standards of Congress, and congressional Democrats, Bill Proxmire was a pathetic little cretin. And Fulbright was a petty asshole.]

Rep. Oliver P. Bolton (R-Ohio) demands that the Civil Aeronautics Board make public the passenger list of a still-unpaid charter flight that carried 80 persons to a Democratic fundraising dinner in Las Vegas in April. The $100-a-plate dinner honored Senator Howard W. Cannon (D-Nevada). A $16,000 bill for the trip was sent to Robert G. (Bobby) Baker, who resigned October 7 as secretary to the Senate Democratic majority. Baker has not paid the bill.

The AFL-CIO national convention ended a week-long session today with a call for a 35-hour work week, a minimum wage of $2 an hour, and President Kennedy’s 11-billion-dollar tax reduction program. The 1,200 delegates reelected President George Meany and all other officers and took a slap at the American Medical association through an announcement by Meany of a $400,000 damage suit against the A.M.A. by an official of the steelworkers union.

The convention cleared the way for harmonious adjournment by avoiding a floor battle on a long-simmering dispute between the building trades and industrial union wings of the AFL-CIO over job jurisdiction at work sites. This was done by returning proposed controversial constitutional changes to the executive council for report and possible action in 1965. Meany had no opposition for reelection to his fifth consecutive two-year term as president of the world’s largest labor organization. The job pays $45,000 a year.

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., civil rights leader, lashed out at critics who charge that federal civil rights legislation is “ineffective because you cannot legislate morals” in a speech here last night. He called such beliefs “myths” that have been perpetrated by opponents of social justice for all Americans, regardless of race. “Legislation may not change morals,” he said, “But it can legislate desegregation, and that is necessary for integration. Law may not make a man love me, but it may prevent him from lynching me.”

An attorney for James R. Hoffa was barred from practicing in Federal District Court in Nashville tonight on the ground he conspired to give a $10,000 bribe to a prospective juror in the teamster boss’ jury tampering trial. Two federal judges took the action against Z. T. Osborn Jr., 44, a former United States attorney. The judges, William E. Miller and Frank Gray Jr., said Osborn admitted making a deal with a Nashville policeman to bribe the policeman’s cousin, one of 36 prospective jurors in Hoffa’s January 6 trial on a charge of tampering with the jury in an earlier case. The judges said the juror, Ralph A. Elliott of Springfield, Tennessee, was “altogether blameless.” The judges’ memorandum on the case did not make entirely clear the position of the policeman, Robert D. Vick, in the case. It did not absolve Vick, as it did his cousin.

A neighbor told the jury in the Minneapolis trial of T. Eugene Thompson, accused of hiring a hitman to murder his wife, how the mortally-wounded woman staggered through the snow to the neighbor’s door, gasping “help me.” “She was so bloody and beaten that we did not recognize her,” the neighbor testified.

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.

Dow Jones Industrial Average: 742.06 (+5.41).

Born:

Timothy Gowers, British mathematician (1998 Fields Medal), in Malborough, England, United Kingdom.

Ming-Na Wen, actress (Mulan, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D), in Coloane Island, Macau.

Jim Yarbrough, NFL defensive back (New York Giants), in Knoxville, Tennessee (d. 2023).

Died:

Nikolay Baranskiy, 82, Russian economic geographer.