Christmas Day.
Prayers for world peace were being offered early this new Christmas morning in the little grotto where Jesus, Prince of Peace, was born nearly 2,000 years ago. Candlelight flickered on devout faces as priests and pilgrims knelt beside the figure of an infant wrapped in swaddling clothes and laid in a manger, once of straw and wood, now of marble.
The bells of Bethlehem are pealing out their message of good will more cheerfully than for many years, for the Holy Land’s Christian churches are themselves at peace, putting aside bickering of past years over rights and privileges and united in acclaiming the coming visit of Pope Paul VI of the Roman Catholic church. The Protestant churches, barred from official entry to the holy places, held carol services on the plain of Boaz, two miles east of Bethlehem. It was here that shepherds tending their flocks first heard the angels announce Christ’s birth. This Christmas all is going smoothly, from the arrival yesterday afternoon of the Latin patriarch in Manger square, outside the 16th century Church of the Nativity, to the inspiring moment when, during the midnight pontifical high mass, a white bearded priest descended into the grotto under the mammoth church.
A record throng of more than 65,000 West Berliners poured through the Berlin Wall today to join loved ones in East Berlin for Christmas dinners. They traveled by foot, elevated trains, and in about 3,000 private cars. Communist loudspeakers serenaded them with Bing Crosby’s recording of “White Christmas.” Until today, the greatest number of West Berliners to visit the communist half of the city since the Reds opened the wall for the holiday season went last Sunday, 25,000 in all.
Many of the Christmas day visitors carried fat, paper-wrapped geese under their arms. Others looked forward to mid-day family dinners of geese imported from communist Poland and purchased by their relatives in East Berlin. Loudspeakers on the communist side of the wall greeted the West Berliners with Christmas music broadcast by the East German radio. The broadcast, which began on Christmas eve, consisted of traditional German Christmas carols and foreign selections, including “Jingle Bells” sung by Louis Armstrong. The program was a radical departure from past Christmas broadcasts which varied little from the everyday fare offered by the communist-controlled network.
The East German border guards, with submachine guns slung over their shoulders and long coats and fur caps protecting them against the 10-degree cold, continued to show a courteous holiday behavior. Greeted by West Berliners with the traditional “Frohe Weihnachten” (“Merry Christmas”), some answered in kind instead of with the communist-approved “Frohes Fest” (“Merry Holiday”).
An East German teenager was fatally shot by a Communist machine gunner today as the youth reached the top of the Berlin Wall in an attempt to flee into West Berlin. Paul Schulz, 18, fell bleeding into the outstretched arms of a West Berlin policeman who witnessed the shooting and ran to catch him. He was rushed to a hospital where doctors waged a futile 6½-hour battle to save his life. They said his lungs had been punctured by bullets. An 18-year-old companion of Schulz in the daring flight escaped injury and reached safety, although he was caught in barbed wire atop the wall and was helped down by the policeman who caught the wounded youth. The companion, whose name was withheld, also was taken to the hospital suffering from shock.
The Christmas Day killing by Red border guards — the 22nd killing this year — cast a pall over Berliners who had regarded this as the happiest Christmas in years because of the opening of the wall to permit West Berliners to make Christmas visits to the eastern side. Approximately 10 shots were fired at the fleeing youths. The shots rang through the cold winter air and were heard in nearby homes where Berlin families were celebrating their first Christmas together in years. The scene is near Mariannen Square in the Kreuzberg district of the United States sector. It is near the Heinrich Heine crossing point for West Germans, about a mile south of the United States army’s Checkpoint Charlie at the Freidrichstrasse Crossing.
The youths, both electricians from New Brandenburg, in the Mecklenburg province of East Germany, selected dusk as the time for their dash. They climbed through a wire fence 300 feet from the wall, then another barbed wire fence near a 20-foot guard tower. Next, they leaped across a trench, then dashed across the “death strip,” a cleared field 20 feet wide kept brightly lighted at night. There was more coiled barbed wire just below the wall. When they got through that, they leaped for the top of the nine-foot wall, which also is topped with wire.
The West Berlin policeman said he heard the shot as he was patrolling about 120 feet on the west side of the wall. He said he saw a “man struggling in the barbed wire and another climbing the wall from the other side. As I ran to the wall,” he related, “I heard about 10 shots fired from a submachine gun. That was when the man was hit right in the back. When I reached the wall, he fell into my arms.”
All military forces in battle-torn Cyprus — British, Greek, and Turkish — were placed under unified command headed by a British officer, it was announced by the Cyprus presidential palace tonight. An official spokesman said this was done to restore law and order in Cyprus.
Earlier, Greek Cypriot police and armed civilians broke into the Turkish sectors of Nicosia and seized 500 Turkish men, women, and children as hostages. They locked the hostages in detention camps used five years ago by the British to hold Greek Cypriot resistance fighters. President Archbishop Makarios conferred with Turkish Cypriot officials in the presence of the British high commissioner, Sir Arthur Clark. After nearly three hours, a British spokesman said the two sides agreed to a new cease-fire call.
Tearful family reunions in London welcome home the first British survivors from the tragic cruise of the Greek liner Lakonia. Two Moroccan airlines carry 158 survivors of the flaming sea disaster from Casablanca to London. Other survivors spend Christmas day waiting at Madeira, the Canary Islands, or Casablanca for passage back. The British aircraft carrier HMS Centaur lands 55 bodies at Gibraltar.
İsmet İnönü of the CHP party formed his last government as Prime Minister of Turkey. İnönü had led the party since 1938, and had first served as prime minister in 1923.
Pope Paul VI devoted this Christmas day to the poor and the ill of Rome, to the Communists who reject Christ, and to the faithful. In a cold rain, he drove from the Vatican to a Roman quarter where three out of four voters favor communism. He visited an unemployed laborer with a paralyzed daughter, stopped at a children’s hospital, and then returned to the Vatican to give his first Christmas blessing to the world. By then the rays of the sun were piercing the clouds, and 50,000 Romans and non-Italian tourists were in St. Peter’s square to pray with him for “peace in souls and peace on earth.”
President Johnson tonight ordered a freeze on federal jobs. He directed department and agency heads to prepare to cut below current personnel levels in order to trim the overall federal budget for fiscal 1965. The chief executive, late Christmas day from his ranch where he is spending the holidays, sent a memorandum to department heads warning of upcoming personnel reductions. “The budget I will send to the Congress next month will not only halt the growth in federal employment, but will actually make a small reduction from this year’s level,” he said.
Johnson noted in talking with reporters at his ranch that there had been an increase of 130,000 federal civilian employees since 1961. He said he was determined to reverse this trend. Referring in his memorandum to the need for reducing the number of civilians on the government payroll, the President said he is “unconvinced that we are getting the maximum output possible per employe.” There are presently about 2.5 million civilians working for the federal government. He gave no details on the number of workers who might be affected by his action today, I but said he was aiming at the fiscal 1965 budget instead of immediate federal payroll slashes.
President Johnson spent a busy Christmas today on his Texas ranch, taking care of foreign and domestic government business and conducting a guided tour of his house and grounds before joining his family for a holiday turkey dinner and gift exchanging. The chief executive telephoned the three living former Presidents Herbert Hoover, Harry S. Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower to wish them a “Merry Christmas.” President Johnson delayed dinner for himself, Mrs. Johnson and their two daughters and 23 guests while he spent nearly an hour proudly showing a large group of reporters and photographers through the ranch house and around the grounds — despite Mrs. Johnson’s reminders that the turkey and dressing weren’t getting any warmer.
After the bountiful turkey dinner, the President took off by helicopter for a 45-mile flight northward to the 4,561-acre Haywood ranch which he owns in partnership with his old friend and family attorney, A. W. Moursund. There they took an outboard motorboat and cruised around Lake Travis, part of the big ranch.
Gene Keyes, a 22-year-old conscientious objector and a volunteer for the New York-based Committee for Nonviolent action, responded to an induction notice by becoming the first person to burn his draft card to protest the Vietnam War. Keyes, who had been ordered to report for induction on January 30, stood outside the selective service office in Champaign, Illinois, on Christmas Eve and, at midnight set fire to his card in front of photographers, then lit a candle. Keyes wore a placard that proclaimed “To Light This Candle with a Draft Card… A Prayer for Peace on Earth”.
Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller is abandoning attacks on Senator Barry Goldwater (R-Arizona) in his G.O.P. Presidential nomination drive. The New York governor, only announced candidate for the nomination, resumes campaigning with a January 3 Portsmouth, New Hampshire, speech after a month’s political moratorium following the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The sweeping political changes brought about by the probability that President Johnson will head the 1964 Democratic ticket are expected to be reflected in altered campaign tactics by Rockefeller. In the period preceding Kennedy’s death, Rockefeller gave about equal time to attacking Goldwater for his conservative views to lambasting Kennedy for what the governor said was the President’s failure to live up to his 1960 promises on civil rights, action to end unemployment and to get the country moving faster economically.
Mrs. John F. Kennedy attended a private Christmas mass today with the parents of her slain husband. Jackie was driven by a secret service agent to the home of Joseph P. Kennedy, former ambassador to Great Britain, for the mass. She wore a black coat and white gloves in the chilly, 50-degree weather. A low temperature of 39 degrees gave Palm Beach its coldest Christmas on record.
Sargent Shriver, peace corps director and brother-in-law of the late President, entered the ambassador’s home, prayer book in hand, shortly before Mrs. Kennedy arrived. Other members of the family did not appear, and Mrs. Kennedy’s two children, Caroline, 6, and John Jr., 3, were not present for the mass. Secret service agents said the Rev. John Cavanaugh, family friend and former president of the University of Notre Dame, was at the Kennedy home and presumably said the mass. Mrs. Kennedy left the residence an hour and a half later. As she walked to her car, she nodded to nearly 50 shivering spectators gathered along a narrow road in front of the home.
Twelve sleeping children burned to death today in Charleston, South Carolina in a fire touched off by an oil heater which was tipped over by their parents while putting gifts under a Christmas tree. The children, ranging in age from 2 months to 20 years, were found in their beds in an upstairs bedroom of a two-story frame tenement. The only survivors were Walter Johnson, 51, stepfather and step-grandfather of the children, and his wife, Mary Lee, 47. Johnson was critically burned. Two of the children were sleeping on a single bed, five were on a studio couch, three were on a folding cot and two more were sleeping on the floor. Firemen found charred dolls, skates and other Christmas toys scattered about the burned-out living room. An electric train was still sitting on its tracks inside the front door.
Walt Disney released his 18th feature-length animated motion picture, “The Sword in the Stone,” about the boyhood of King Arthur. It would be the penultimate animated film personally supervised by Disney.
Born:
Leon Pennington, NFL linebacker (Tampa Bay Buccaneers), in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
Mike Hudson, NFL defensive back (San Diego Chargers), in Pawhuska, Oklahoma.
Died:
Tristan Tzara, 67, Romanian-French poet.
Harry C. Oberholser, 93, American ornithologist.
History Diaries 