President Johnson today called top military and diplomatic advisers to the White House for a discussion of the defense budget and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Johnson met for an hour with Secretary of State Dean Rusk: Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara; Walt W. Restow, state department counselor and chairman of its policy planning council; McGeorge Bundy, Presidential assistant for national security affairs, and William P. Bundy, assistant defense secretary for international security affairs. The Bundys are brothers. Pierre Salinger, White House press secretary, said the conference was called “to discuss defense planning and NATO matters.”
Salinger said Johnson and his advisers took up “a number of problems,” including the NATO council meeting in Paris later this month, the current Paris negotiations on the United States proposal for a multinational nuclear naval force, and interrelated defense-state department budget matters. The NATO council meeting begins December 16. Rostow participated in today’s White House discussion on behalf of Livingston T. Merchant, the President’s representative in the negotiations on formation of the multilateral nuclear force within the western defense alliance. Merchant, a career diplomat, was given the assignment last January by President Kennedy.
Four American airmen and a Vietnamese observer were killed yesterday when their photo reconnaissance aircraft crashed into the Mekong River 35 miles south of Saigon. The RB-26 aircraft plunged into 5 feet of water, an American spokesman said. United States authorities were trying to determine whether the aircraft was shot down. Only two bodies had been recovered last night. Navy boats searched the river while helicopters provided security.
The West German government announced today that West Berliners for the first time since the communist border closure August 13, 1961, may be allowed to visit. relatives in East Berlin over Christmas. If negotiations over details. are successful, it will be the first-time people separated by the wall will have been allowed to visit each other in nearly two and a half years, though East Berliners will not be allowed to cross the wall.
The official announcement said the Bonn government and the West Berlin senate had been informed that East Berlin authorities intend to permit West Berliners to visit the eastern sector over the Christmas holidays. West German and West Berlin officials were quick to welcome the planned temporary relaxation of restrictions. The Bonn government said West German officials were ready to cooperate in technical matters concerning the issuance of day passes for the West Berliners.
A spokesman of the West Berlin senate expressed West Berlin’s willingness to cooperate but he emphasized that the western part of the divided city would not make political concessions that would imply recognition of the communist East German regime. West Berliners-with the exception of some doctors, artists, and others needed in East Berlin-are not allowed in the communist half of the city. The exempted West Germans and foreigners are permitted to enter East Berlin only through specified crossing points.
A West German who sought to enter communist East Germany was shot dead today by East German tommy gunners at a watchtower on the border just east of Lübeck. West German border guards saw the incident. They said the man, described as a 34-year-old worker from Hamburg, was in custody and showing no signs of trying to escape when he was cut down. The East German news agency ADN called him a frontier violator. It reported that he was shot while trying to flee after being caught “in a provocation on the state border.”
West German customs officials said the man had applied to them for permission to cross the border and they cleared him after inspecting his papers to see that he was not a fugitive. The customs officers said the man went to the barbed wire barrier on the communist side of the demarcation line and shouted loudly to attract attention. They gave this account: A two-man border patrol guided him along a path through a minefield to the watchtower. As the man was standing quietly between the two guards, two other guards arrived in a jeep.
They shouted “Hands up” and shortly afterward fired three bursts from their tommy guns at point blank range. The victim lay at the watchtower for about a quarter of an hour. Then he was taken away in a truck. The ADN version was that the traveler tried to bolt back to the west, ignoring calls to stop and warning shots. “The sentries of the national people’s army were compelled to use their weapons,” ADN added. “The provocateur was thereby fatally injured on the territory of the [East] German Democratic Republic.”
Traffic was held up today when 13 columns of farm tractors converged on the Hamburg, Germany, city center carrying farmers protesting over produce prices. They demanded that food imports from communist countries be stopped and those from other countries cut.
President Romulo Betancourt orders every pocket of communist guerrillas in Venezuela wiped out as military operations erase 25 pro-Castro rebels in four days. He tells police to increase their vigilance at embassies and other foreign-owned properties.
Three setbacks at the polls cloud the outlook for Prime Minister Alec Douglas-Home’s Conservative government. Balloting to fill three vacancies in the British House of Commons shows waning Tory support. The Conservatives’ share of the total vote is down nearly 10 percent.
Pope Paul VI sets January 4 to 6 for his pilgrimage to the Holy Land. The pontiff plans to meet with Orthodox leaders in Jerusalem, and an Orthodox patriarch suggests the trip include a conference of leaders of all major Christian faiths. The trip will be made by plane — the first by a pope.
U.S. Army Corporal Jerry Wayne Parrish became the third American in 19 months to defect to North Korea. Parrish would spend the remaining 34 years of his life in North Korea, and die of kidney disease on August 25, 1998.
The United States delivered the first of seven HU-16B antisubmarine war planes to the Spanish air force today.
Two weeks after the assassination of President Kennedy, former First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy, her daughter Caroline and her son John, Jr., moved out of the White House shortly after noon. President Johnson and his wife, Lady Bird Johnson, had agreed that the Kennedy family could have as much time as they needed to pack up their belongings and move to a different home. Mrs. Kennedy and her children then moved into a townhouse in nearby Georgetown, loaned to them by Undersecretary of State W. Averell Harriman. On their last full day in the White House, John Jr.’s birthday party, postponed because November 25 had been the day of his father’s funeral, was celebrated. Caroline continued to attend her first grade class with friends at the White House until the end of the year, after which the school was disbanded.
Writings and memoranda sifted by federal agents from papers of Lee Harvey Oswald, accused of the assassination of President Kennedy, suggested today that the 24-year-old Marxist also was the night bushwhacker who took a shot at retired General Edwin A. Walker here months ago. Police here and FBI agents in Washington confirmed that Walker’s name and his local Dallas telephone number were found on a notation pad from Oswald’s room. This information was in a form that would be used by someone who might have jotted it down from the public telephone directories where it is listed.
Walker, who was narrowly missed by the bushwhacker’s bullet on April 10 while sitting in the study of his residence here, told Dallas police at the time he had received several threatening calls before the shooting. Although unsupported, a report was spread widely in Dallas and Washington during the day that the FBI had further support for linking Oswald to the Walker incident. It was reported that Mrs. Marina Oswald, Russian wife of the accused assassin, has said her husband “boasted to her that he had fired a shot at General Walker.”
Mrs. John F. Kennedy asks the Defense Department to abandon plans for setting aside three acres in Arlington national cemetery as a memorial to her husband. Mrs. Kennedy informs Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara the family has no need for that much land.
Republicans in the House and Senate decry attempts to link the assassination of President Kennedy to the right wing, and to create a sense of shared guilt in Americans generally. If hate and bigotry were involved, they say, then it is the hate and bigotry that spring from the doctrines of communism.
Senator Barry Goldwater (R-Arizona) was described by friends today as stunned and shocked by receipt of a number of abusive telegrams and letters, some containing threats of a violent nature. This outpouring of invective is a factor in the “major reassessment” which Goldwater is now making of his political future. Senator John Tower (R-Texas), who has been Goldwater’s chief Senate sponsor as a candidate for the Republican Presidential nomination, has also received threatening letters and wires. He moved his family out of his present Washington home for several days because of these warnings of possible violence. But a spokesman in his office said the family returned today.
T. Eugene Thompson is found guilty of plotting the murder of his wife, Carol, 34, and sentenced to life imprisonment at hard labor. A jury of six women and six men returns the first degree murder verdict after being out 26 hours and deliberating more than 12. The vote was evenly divided on the first ballot and unanimous after eight votes, the foreman discloses.
“Nobody has resigned,” says James R. Hoffa, teamster union president. This is Hoffa’s denial that his chief assistant and other union aides quit as a result of a dispute over President Kennedy’s assassination. Hoffa terms “pure nonsense” a report that he was angry because teamster headquarters in Washington was closed November 25, a day of mourning for the President.
Church leaders meeting in Philadelphia are advised that Roman Catholics in England soon will be using an adaptation of a Protestant edition of the Holy Bible. Changes and revisions are so minor, 1964 is hailed as a milestone — the first year Catholics and Protestants will read the same Bible.
Four railroad operating unions file a court suit to upset the arbitration award made recently by a board appointed to examine the long-standing dispute over featherbedding. One union, the conductors and brakemen, declines to join the suit. Failing to upset the award, the four unions seek to have the enabling law declared unconstitutional.
President Lyndon B. Johnson confers the Presidential Medal of Freedom on 31 recipients selected by JFK, including: contralto Marian Anderson; diplomat Ralph Bunche; cellist Pablo Casals; Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter; labor leader George Meaney; architect Mies van der Rohe; pianist Rudolf Serkin; writers E. B. White and Thorton Wilder; and painter Andrew Wyeth; as well as posthumously to JFK himself, and Pope John XXIII.
Air Force test pilot Major Robert W. Smith takes the Lockheed NF-104A Aerospace Trainer, 56-0756, out for a little spin…
Starting at 0.85 Mach and 35,000 feet (10,668 meters) over the Pacific Ocean west of Vandenberg Air Force Base, California, Bob Smith turned toward Edwards Air Force Base and accelerated to Military Power and then lit the afterburner, which increased the General Electric J79-GE-3B turbojet engine’s 9,800 pounds of thrust (43.59 kilonewtons) to 15,000 pounds (66.72 kilonewtons). The modified Starfighter accelerated in level flight. At Mach 2.2, Smith ignited the Rocketdyne LR121 rocket engine, which burned a mixture of JP-4 and hydrogen peroxide. The LR121 was throttleable and could produce from 3,000 to 6,000 pounds of thrust (13.35–26.69 kilonewtons).
When the AST reached Mach 2.5, Smith began a steady 3.5G pull-up until the interceptor was in a 70° climb. At 75,000 feet (22,860 meters), the test pilot shut off the afterburner to avoid exceeding the turbojet’s exhaust temperature (EGT) limits. He gradually reduced the jet engine power to idle by 85,000 feet (25,908 meters), then shut it off. Without the engine running, cabin pressurization was lost and the pilot’s A/P22S-2 full-pressure suit inflated. The NF-104A continued to zoom to an altitude where its aerodynamic control surfaces were no longer functional. It had to be controlled by the reaction jets in the nose and wing tips. 756 reached a peak altitude of 120,800 feet (36,820 meters), before reentering the atmosphere in a 70° dive. Major Smith used the windmill effect of air rushing into the intakes to restart the jet engine.
Major Smith had set an unofficial record for altitude. Although Lockheed had paid the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale (FAI) license fee, the Air Force had not requested certification in advance so no FAI or National Aeronautic Association personnel were on site to certify the flight.
The Beatles begin a tradition of releasing a Christmas record for fan club members.
Brian Booth of Australia scored a century in the first test against South Africa at Brisbane.
Dow Jones Industrial Average: 760.25 (-3.61).
Born:
Lance Blankenship, MLB outfielder, second baseman, and third baseman (World Series Champions-A’s, 1989; Oakland A’s), in Portland, Oregon.
Ulrich Thomsen, Danish film actor, in Odense, Denmark.
Antonella Clerici, Italian host of sport and cooking TV shows, in Legnano, Italy.
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