Robert is buried at Camp Butler National Cemetery, Sangamon County, Illinois. He is honored on the Wall at Panel 1E, line 95.
Twenty-four South Vietnamese Air Force planes, led by Vice-Marshal Kỳ and supported by U.S. jets, bomb the barracks and depots on Cồn Cỏ (‘Tiger’) Island, 20 miles off the coast of North Vietnam. Next day 100 U.S. Air Force jets and carrier-based bombers strike the ammunition depot at Phú Quý, 100 miles south of Hanoi. This is the second set of raids in Operation ROLLING THUNDER and the first in which U.S. planes use napalm.
The strike today, the fifth in five weeks against the North, hit weapons installations, depots, and barracks on Tiger Island. The island, 20 miles off the coast and northeast of the 17th Parallel, is 440 miles northeast of Saigon. Information from Vietnamese commanders at the Đà Nẵng air base suggested that the original target for the strike had been the Communist airfield at Đồng Hới and that bad weather had forced the selection of a secondary target.
The raid appeared to have been smaller than the past attacks on North Vietnam. But new United States restrictions on information made comparisons difficult. The new mission was led by Air Vice Marshal Nguyễn Cao Kỳ, commander of the South Vietnamese Air Force. “I think we caught them by surprise,” he said afterward, “because we went a little farther north and then went back and attacked them.” Marshal Kỳ said visibility had been bad because of haze and low clouds. Reliable sources in Saigon said a raid had been postponed for at least two days because of bad weather.
Before the 24 Vietnamese aircraft returned to their base, 50 minutes after the bombing, Brigadier General Nguyễn Chánh Thi, commander of the army’s I Corps area in Central Vietnam, said in an interview that their target was the Đồng Hới air base. In a briefing after the mission, a Vietnamese spokesman said that intelligence had led the air force to believe that the Tiger Island barracks were filled with Communist troops. He did not estimate casualties. Pilots at Đà Nẵng said they had seen men rush from the barracks and throw themselves into the sea. The pilots said they had “totally destroyed” 49 automatic gun positions, 12 coastal-defense positions, a control reconnaissance center and many depots and troop quarters on the island. A South Vietnamese Government spokesman said the island had been used as a port of call for ships heading from Đồng Hới and Vinh to South Vietnam with weapons for the Communist guerrillas. He said ships had stopped there to receive intelligence and weather information before proceeding southward. In the last month, he added, Việt Cộng units have forbidden fishing boats to approach within 10 miles of the island.
The North Vietnamese charged last year that American and South Vietnamese vessels had attacked Tiger Island. But Saigon officials said the new raid was the first on the island, either by air or by sea. According to American spokesmen here, Defense Department regulations prohibit the disclosure of the number of United States aircraft that accompany Vietnamese bombers for “suppressive fire.” On support missions, the American planes also bomb and strafe targets, particularly anti-aircraft installations. A spokesman said he was permitted to disclose that no American jets were missing after the mission.
The lack of detailed information on American participation in the strike recalled American policies about bombing raids in Laos. Although United States jet aircraft have been bombing Communist supply trails in eastern Laos for months, the United States Government has refused to comment on most of the attacks. In the latest Vietnamese raid, the United States Defense Department forbade disclosures of the tonnage of the bombs. Vietnamese officials said, however, that 60 tons had been used, compared with 80 dropped on March 2 on the Quảng Khê naval base. More than 100 United States aircraft flew support missions for the strike against Quảng Khê and also bombed the Xom Bang ammunition depot the same day.
American spokesmen said Washington had not explained the new Defense Department restrictions. The regulations forbid announcements of the sites from which the planes take off. Observers at Đà Nẵng saw Vietnamese Skyraider fighter-bombers being loaded with bombs, saw Marshal Kỳ enter a plane and saw the propeller-driven Skyraiders take off. No American jets were seen leaving Đà Nẵng. United States Air Force jets are also based at Biên Hòa and Tân Sơn Nhứt in Saigon. There is also a large United States jet air hase at Udon, in northern Thailand.
North Vietnam reported today that its gunners had knocked a United States jet plane into the sea during an American and South Vietnamese attack on Tiger Island. The Hanoi radio broadcast the claim and charged that United States and South Vietnamese warships had veered close to the mainland as well as Tiger Island and had “engaged in provocative activities.”
A United States Marine died late tonight of wounds received when he was accidentally shot during a night patrol. Two other Marines, stationed at the spur of Hill 327 five miles west of the Danang air base, were also wounded. According to an American military spokesman, four Marine enlisted men on the hill heard noises near their listening posts about 10 o’clock last night. Three of the men went to investigate. When the fourth guard heard further sounds from another direction, he fired six rounds from his 7.62-mm. semi-automatic rifle, hitting all three other Marines. One of the wounded men was reported in satisfactory condition after surgery and extensive blood transfusions. The third marine was treated at a hospital and discharged.
Prince Norodom Sihanouk said last night that a Việt Cộng official had told him North Vietnam had not responded to United States and South Vietnamese air raids because of a belief that the United States would not step up the war. Prince Sihanouk, the chief of state, said at a new conference in this mountain resort that he had spoken with Nguyễn Tấn Phát, chief of the Việt Cộng delegation to Cambodia. He quoted Mr. Phat as saying: “We do not overestimate the American forces, and we do not think the Americans will step up the war. That is why North Vietnam is not counterattacking. We are fighting in South Vietnam to isolate the Americans completely and render their position impossible.” Mr. Phat was said to have added: “We are not hurrying the reunification of Vietnam, which could take as long as 20 years. South Vietnam is leading its own life and wants to live like Cambodia.”
Israel and West Germany established diplomatic relations, one week after an announcement made by German Chancellor Ludwig Erhard and nearly twenty years after the defeat of Nazi Germany. The next day, the Foreign Ministers of 13 Arab nations, already meeting in Cairo, announced that they would sever relations with the West Germans, and ordered the immediate recall of their ambassadors from Bonn. Four nations (Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Libya, and Tunisia) later declined to break with West Germany, while six others (Egypt, Iraq, Yemen, Algeria, Kuwait, and the Sudan) announced that they planned to establish stronger relations with East Germany.
Former Soviet Union leader Nikita Khrushchev appeared in public for the first time since he had been fired from his positions as First Secretary of the Communist Party and Prime Minister five months earlier. Khrushchev and his wife, Nina, were casting their votes in Moscow’s city elections and arrived at the Moscow University Club, where he was applauded by “a cluster of citizens”, who let him come to the head of the line. The election monitor who greeted him handed him a ballot without asking him to show his internal passport, and Khrushchev joked, “How come you’re trusting me and letting me vote without identification? You used to be stricter in the past.”
Che Guevara returned to Cuba after a three-month tour of the world and found himself in disfavor with the government. Behind closed doors, “Every one of Che’s possible political ‘offences’ were brought up; his flirtation with Beijing, his digs at the economic systems of the ‘fraternal’ socialist countries, his polemics against Cuba’s Communist old guard and his personal criticism of Castro. Above all, though, there was the withering attack he had made on the Soviet Union in Algeria in February 1965.” Guevara would soon resign his government position and even renounce his citizenship, then travel elsewhere in the world to foment revolution.
The first round of municipal elections was held for all the cities in France, with almost 950,000 candidates for 470,000 offices. Runoff elections would be held a week later for any office where a candidate had not received a majority, with the top two vote-getters being on the ballot for the second round. France chose to retain the status quo today in electing the municipal councils of her 37,779 towns and cities. Whether Gaullist or anti-Gaullist, the councils in power were retained almost everywhere on the basis of substantial although incomplete returns. This meant that the traditional parties, ousted from power nationally by the Fifth Republic of President de Gaulle, were able to hold their local positions. The effort to end the “regime of the parties” in the municipalities was not successful. In general, political lessons could be drawn only from the results in France’s big cities, where considerations of national politics played an important role. In the small towns, local issues and personalities prevailed.
In spite of an Iraqi Government denials, signs are multiplying that the Iraqi Army will begin an offensive in April against the Kurds. Preliminary skirmishes have already been reported by Ismet Sherif Vanly, the spokesman in Europe for General Mustafa al-Barzani, the Kurdish leader, and by Kurdish sources in Beirut. These have involved army thrusts at Ajailer, northeast of Kirkuk and northwest of Sulaimaniya, and in the area of Dahuk, north of Mosul. Iraqis began bombing and artillery fire in the Dohuk area March 1 after the Kurds had rejected a demand to surrender arms, it is reported. In the past, the Iraqi Air Force used napalm to lay waste to Kurdish villages. The Iraqis have now acquired rocket-type artillery that could blast the mountain hideouts of the Kurds.
Zionist leaders appealed to President Johnson yesterday to use his influence to prevail upon the Arab states not to go through with plans to divert the headwaters of the Jordan River. The said such diversion would result in armed conflict between Israel and the Arabs.
An authoritative East European source disclosed today that the Soviet Government had sent a sharply worded note to President Tito protesting the critical essay, “Moscow Summer, 1964,” by the Yugoslav scholar Mihajlo Mihaijlov.
A pressing and angry call by Premier Fidel Castro for unity in the world Communist movement became Havana’s dominant propaganda theme today.
Four Chinese students who Peking says were beaten by Soviet policemen March 4 received a heroes’ welcome when they arrived today. Two thousand students at the airport shouted and waved banners as the four arrived on a Soviet airliner. Banners said. “Welcome home to fellow students persecuted by the Soviet Government.”
The Labor Government in Great Britain is running into a parliamentary squeeze even before its most important legislative proposals reach the House of Commons.
Premier Jean Lesage of Quebec opened a drive this weekend to win public support for the role he envisions for the province under a revised Canadian Constitution. The defeat of Mr. Lesage in this effort would greatly strengthen the Separatists, who want to disassociate the French-speaking province from the rest of Canada.
Fifteen thousand persons, including nuns, priests, ministers, rabbis, members of civil rights organizations, trade unionists, and students, marched through Harlem in New York City today to protest the events last week in Selma, Alabama. After the parade — silent and grim — civil rights leaders called for federal intervention in Selma, which is in the throes of a campaign for Black voter registration. Two men, one Black, one white, have been killed in the area during the registration campaign. Speakers also called on the 49 other states to read Alabama out of the Union, in effect, by imposing a moral, social, and economic boycott against the state. The parade began at 3:30 PM, at the Theresa Hotel, at 125th Street and Seventh Avenue. In the van of the march were Bayard Rustin, organizer of the March on Washington in 1963; John Lewis and James Forman, leaders of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee; James McCain, director of organization for the Congress of Racial Equality, and Nathan H. Schwerner, father of Michael Schwerner, one of the three civil rights workers murdered in Philadelphia, Mississippi, last year.
Behind them were 200 nuns of the order of the Sisters of Charity. They wore black habits. There was also a smaller group of Maryknoll sisters in gray habits. Some of them wore CORE buttons. Many of the marchers wore black arm bands in memory of the Rev. James J. Reeb, a white Unitarian minister from Boston who was beaten fatally in Selma last week, and in memory of Jimmie Lee Jackson, a Negro who was killed February 18 during an attack by the Alabama state police on a night march in Marion. The parade moved up Seventh Avenue to 145th Street, went east to Lenox Avenue, moved downtown on Lenox and finished back at the Theresa an hour and a half later. It was sunny and cool when the parade began; it was cold and nearly dusk when it ended. At least as many whites as Blacks marched in the procession, prompting a black-nationalist leader, James R. Lawson, who did not march, to comment that the demonstration was “not representative of the black man.”
Governor George C. Wallace said today that he would allow a peaceful march by civil rights demonstrators from Selma to Montgomery only if the federal court here directed him to do 50 and the court order was subsequently upheld on appeal. This process could take weeks. Mr. Wallace pledged that he would obey federal court orders. But he strongly indicated that he would rely on the federal courts to require his compliance and that he would take no voluntary actions to conciliate the growing tensions between Blacks and whites in Alabama. His statements to reporters at the historic statehouse here indicated that the Governor had come to only the narrowest agreement with President Johnson yesterday on steps to ease the racial conflict in this state.
Governor Wallace said his words today constituted his answer to the President. “I do not plan to get back to him with detailed answers,” he said. Appearing on the Columbia Broadcasting System television program “Face the Nation” and then immediately afterward at a news conference that was televised by the American Broadcasting Company. Mr. Wallace said he would not continue to allow peaceful Black demonstrations in Selma, the current center of tension in Alabama over Black voting rights. Of the 50-mile Selma-to-Montgomery march that Black leaders are still determined to conduct, Governor Wallace said, “I will seek to let it proceed in peace if there is a final court order.” But he declared emphatically that he would receive no representatives who came to the Capitol “at the head of a march or a demonstration.”
Mr. Wallace repeatedly asserted that “many leaders” in the civil rights movement, including the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the principal spokesman for Blacks in Selma, “belonged to many organizations that have been cited by the Justice Department, the House Un-American Activities Committee and the Senate Internal Security subcommittee as subversive.”
By further declaring that Blacks seeking to meet with him must be citizens of Alabama he appeared to have ruled out any meeting with Dr. King. Later, members of the Governor’s staff were unable to locate the documents that the Governor said were on file in the statehouse alleging that Dr. King was a member of a subversive group. “The man who knows about that is not here today.” the Governor’s aides said. “Come back tomorrow.” President Johnson said yesterday that he had told Mr. Wallace that it was “time to face up to the cause of demonstrations” and that the demonstrations would then cease.
But the one connecting theme of Governor Wallace’s wide-ranging statements today was in direct opposition to this theory. He said flatly that the demonstrations would not cease no matter what he did. “I do not feel that anything we do in Alabama will stop them,” he said. “But I do feel that we can have better understanding.” He did not elaborate on that. He made the point several times that measures to meet Black demands would not guarantee that demonstrations would cease. “We have had more demonstrations since the Civil Rights Bill was passed than we ever had before,” he said. “They said if they passed the civil rights law it would get these people off the streets.” Mr. Wallace accused newsmen, particularly of United Press International and of the three television networks, of “distorting” their reports from Selma and other Alabama communities and, thus, of “inflaming the nation.”
Mayor Joseph T. Smitherman and Sheriff James G. Clark Jr. issued a joint statement today that implied they would make mass arrests rather than disperse or contain racial demonstrations with force. The authorities would not clarify the intent of the statement. The new policy goes into effect at 8 AM tomorrow. Hundreds of Blacks, ministers, nuns and civil rights workers will be in the street to test it. The Rev. C. T. Vivian, an assistant to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., told them to come prepared to go to jail. The march will open the ninth week of a campaign led by Dr. King to speed the registration of Black voters in the Alabama Black Belt. Until about a month ago, street marches by more than a few persons were usually declared a violation of Selma’s parade ordinance, and demonstrators were arrested by the hundreds at the courthouse on several charges. Since early February, however, when arrests reached 3,500 in the Selma area, the policy has been to avoid making arrests.
The statement by the Mayor and Sheriff said in part: “We are convinced first that our entire community must stand firmly, where we are today and we must not yield to or compromise with unlawful pressure or unruly demonstrations. Local government must not prostitute itself before the mob. We assure you that we are fully aware of our joint responsibility to maintain law and order and that we will not tolerate any further violence or unlawful public disturbance from any source whatsoever. We will not permit demonstrators to violate the rights of others and we will not permit law-enforcement officers to use unnecessary force in dealing with demonstrators. Each and every violation of our laws will be met with prompt arrest. We will enforce our laws fully and fairly, but we will rely upon peaceful and orderly arrests rather than physical restraint to maintain law and order.”
The authorities maintained today for the fourth straight day a police blockade of Sylvan Street near the Browns Chapel Methodist Church. Demonstrators kept up their vigil behind a barricade-singing, clapping and praying. At 10 AM they attempted to march forward but stopped when they came face to face with the line of police. Wilson Baker, the city’s Director of Public Safety, put up a flimsy wooden barrier. “I want to give them something to sing about,” Mr. Baker said in jest. Last week the demonstrators had improvised a song called, “The Berlin Wall” about a rope Mr. Baker had stretched across the street. Mr. Baker said the new policy announced by the Selma Mayor and the Dallas County Sheriff would not prevent Blacks from going to the courthouse in small numbers to register or put their names on the appearance book, which is a step preparatory to registration. The Board of Registrars will be open tomorrow for the second and last day this month.
Mayor Smitherman announced that the city football stadium would be made available tomorrow for a memorial service for the Rev. James J. Reeb, the white Boston minister who was fatally beaten by white men on a Selma street corner last Tuesday night. Use of the stadium had been requested by local Black leaders when it became apparent that Browns Chapel Church. would be inadequate for the number expected to attend, The stadium seats 7,500. Dr. King, leader of the voter registration drive, is scheduled to deliver the eulogy at 2 P.M. Ministers and other civil rights advocates continued to arrive here from throughout the nation for the service and to participate in demonstrations.
Selma’s churches barred their doors to visiting clergymen and other civil rights demonstrators who tried, in small groups, to attend services
Citizens by the thousands flocked to demonstrations around the country in sympathy with the Black civil rights drive in Selma, Alabama. From Bangor, Maine, to Honolulu, citizens joined during the last week in protest marches, sit-ins, prayer vigils, rallies and other shows of sympathy for the beleaguered Blacks in Selma.
President Johnson will address a joint session of Congress at 9 o’clock tomorrow evening on the bipartisan voting rights bill he will recommend for speedy enactment.
Experienced American mountain climbers Daniel Doody and Craig Merrihue fell over 1,000 feet (300 m) to their deaths while climbing a difficult route on Mount Washington in preparation for an upcoming trip to the Himalayas. 31-year-old Doody, of North Branford, Connecticut, had served as photographer on the 1963 American expedition to Mount Everest. 31-year-old Merrihue was a physicist at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
The space around earth is getting cluttered with debris from rocket launchings but experts say the chance of an individual being struck by falling junk is infinitesimal.
Born:
Kevin Williamson, American screenwriter, director, and TV producer (“Scream”, “Dawson’s Creek”, “Vampire Diaries”), in New Bern, North Carolina.
Aamir Khan, Indian Bollywood film actor, director, and producer; in Bombay (now Mumbai), India.
Catherine Dent, American actress (“The Shield”), in Baton Rouge, Louisiana
Kevin Brown, MLB pitcher (World Series Champions-Marlins, 1997; No-hitter, June 10, 1997; All-Star, 1992, 1996, 1997, 1998, 2000, 2003; Texas Rangers, Baltimore Orioles, Florida Marlins, San Diego Padres, Los Angeles Dodgers, New York Yankees), in Milledgeville, Georgia.
Died:
Marion Jones, 85, American tennis player (U.S. National Championship 1899, 1902).
Stanko Premrl, 84, Slovenian Roman Catholic priest and composer of the Slovenian national anthem, the Zdravljica.
History Diaries 