Việt Cộng mortar barrages blasted three targets in the Quảng Trị area near the North Vietnam frontier early today. Thirty Vietnamese civilians and two soldiers were killed and three American soldiers were slightly wounded. One of the mortar attacks, shortly after midnight, hit the headquarters area of the United States Military Assistance Command headquarters, wounding the three Americans and a Vietnamese interpreter. The Communist guerrillas fired about 100 rounds of mortar shells in the second attack, killing 30 civilians and wounding two Vietnamese soldiers in the housing area of a command post of the 11th Vietnamese Army Artillery Battalion. The post is at La Vang, near Quảng Trị.
Army riflemen will be sent to South Vietnam to strengthen security at about 75 locations where Americans are based. About 1,100 troops, including some military policemen, will be spread around the country in detachments. The infantrymen and M.P.s will relieve helicopter mechanics, cooks, supply clerks and others who have had to stand guard against attacks from Communist guerrillas. The reinforcements are part of several thousand agreed on at the time of Ambassador Maxwell D. Taylor’s recent conferences here. Most of the additions will reach Vietnam over a period of months.
Vietnamese Roman Catholic leaders, concerned about the previous day’s purge of several high-ranking military officers charged with corruption, inform Premier Quát that they fear Catholic officers are being replaced because of Buddhist pressure to end the war. It is also reported that the Catholics are planning to lead a military stand against any threat of complete Communist domination.
The Catholic leaders fear that a number of officers, including Major General Trần Văn Minh, commander in chief of the armed forces, and Major General Nguyễn Văn Thiệu, the Armed Forces Minister, will soon be replaced. The churchmen were not satisfied with the report they had received from the meeting between their representative and the Premier. “Quát is too soft a man,” one Catholic leader said, “and now he is definitely bowing under the pressure of the Armed Forces Council, which in turn follows the line of the Buddhist neutralists.”
The Catholics’ conviction that the Buddhists are plotting to undermine the war effort against the Communists has led them to prepare several plans. The top Catholic officials have considered staking out a huge land area in South Vietnam where refugees could draw a final line of defense if the country fell to the Communists. They have debated establishing a military Catholic community either on Phú Quốc Island, west of the tip of South Vietnam, or in the Mekong Delta at Long Xuyên Province.
The Rev. Hoàng Quỳnh, the acknowledged spokesman for about 900,000 Catholic refugees from North Vietnam, has been among the priests organizing local militia units. Priests in 116 parishes in the Saigon area have armed young men with knives and sticks with which to defend their communities. Father Quỳnh, who has repeatedly charged the Quát Government with being “too soft on Communism,” has warned that the Catholics and their allies among the Cao Đài and Hòa Hảo sects would stage demonstrations if pressed too far.
The Việt Cộng are reported to have engendered resentment among peasants in many areas of South Vietnam by sharply raising taxes on recent rice harvests. These reports come from an increasing number of peasants who are leaving Việt Cộng-controlled areas from provincial government officials and from United States specialists in the field. There has been some open peasant resistance to Việt Cộng taxation.
One farmer reported that in Bình Tuy province east of Saigon a villager refused the Việt Cộng demand to harvest the crops immediately and to pay a larger share. The Việt Cộng then asked a neighboring village to harvest the rice in return for half of the yield. In most areas, however, the peasants adhere to the discipline imposed by the Việt Cộng, often out of fear of terrorist retaliation. In areas where the Việt Cộng are not garrisoned, patrols periodically pass through villages and inflict punishment on those who have evaded taxation or have been friendly to government forces.
In recent years, the Việt Cộng have gained considerable peasant support by disenfranchising wealthier landlords and dividing their large land holdings. They have tolerated smaller landlords and have not instituted collectivization. In North Vietnam about 50 percent of the land has been collectivized on the Soviet pattern after overcoming peasant resistance.
Enormous problems have been created for the Saigon Government by the Việt Cộng policies. One problem area in recent months has been Bình Định province, in central Vietnam, where the government retook areas after the Việt Cộng had divided the land. Eager to retain the loyalty of residents, the government has not yet worked out a policy for satisfying both the peasant demands and the claims of evicted landlords. A top aide of Premier Phan Huy Quát said that the government had begun to work out an urgently needed program of national land reform. He said the land reform problem had been virtually ignored by Saigon for several years, especially during the last year of political instability.
The Governments of North Vietnam and Communist China have turned down British suggestions that Patrick Gordon Walker, the former Foreign Secretary, visit Hanoi and Peking to discuss the Vietnam situation. A note from Peking was received tonight. The Foreign Office confirmed its receipt after a Peking broadcast, heard in Tokyo, said that Mr. Gordon Walker would be “unwelcome.”
There was also a formal rejection from Hanoi. The Foreign Office would not comment on this, but Mr. Gordon Walker is expected to disclose the Hanoi reply at a news conference that has been scheduled for tomorrow. Mr. Gordon Walker leaves Wednesday for a tour of Southeast Asia on behalf of Prime Minister Harold Wilson. It was described as a “fact-finding” trip, but the real hope here was that it would begin the process of discussion that would lead to negotiations on Vietnam.
North Vietnamese President Hồ Chí Minh was reported today to have described President Johnson’s Vietnamese policies as “the daydream of a madman.” A dispatch by Hsinhua from Hanoi said the Hanoi leader rejected Mr. Johnson’s offer of unconditional peace talks in an address Saturday to North Vietnam’s National Assembly.
Communist China charged today that every time President Johnson says the United States “seeks no wider war” in Vietnam, “it immediately takes another big step to extend the war in Indochina.” The charge was made in a Jenmin Jih Pao editorial broadcast by Peking.
West Berliners crossed through the wall to visit relatives in East Germany today as the two-week period of Easter visits began. There had been speculation in the last week that the East German regime might abrogate the agreement on passes for such visits as a new reprisal for the meeting of the West German Bundestag, the lower house of Parliament, in West Berlin last Wednesday. However, East Berlin policemen began processing West Berliners through the four checkpoints along the wall on schedule at 7 AM. More than a million West Berliners are expected to enter East Germany during the period that is covered by the agreement. On Easter Sunday about 100,000 West Berliners are expected to cross. Today, with most West Berliners at their jobs, only about 15,000 were expected to make the trip. There was little waiting at the checkpoints.
Mayor Willy Brandt of West Berlin arrived tonight for talks with President Johnson. He said that the Communists “should not maneuver with maneuvers” and block West Berlin under the pretext of military exercises. Mr. Brandt, who is in the United States on a 10-day visit, stopped off in New York for about three hours before proceeding to Washington.
Italian Deputy Premier Pietro Nenni, a Socialist, had an hour-long interview tonight with Pope Paul VI — an encounter marking a turning point in relations between the Vatican and the officially Marxist and atheist Italian Socialists. The official Socialist newspaper Avanti will say tomorrow that Mr. Nenni was the first important Italian Socialist leader ever to enter the doors of the Vatican. Neither the Vatican nor the Socialist party disclosed any details of the conversation. But the party newspaper will say that the two men certainly must have discussed their mutual concern for the preservation of world peace. At the same time, the article will say, it is also reasonable to suppose that Mr. Nenni raised the question of Socialist desires for revision of the Lateran Treaty, which governs relations between the church and the Italian state.
Thieves broke into the vault of a bank in a Montreal shopping center and, using torches and diamond-tipped drills, looted 400 to 700 safe deposit boxes over the weekend. The police and bank officials said today they could not give an accurate count of the number of boxes broken into or of the total loss until all those who rented boxes could be canvassed. A police official estimated the loss at perhaps $1 million.
Indian Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri told Parliament today that India would not “allow” Pakistan to retain her military post at Kanjarkot on the marshy border between the Indian state of Gujerat and West Pakistan.
Government forces fighting in the northeastern Congo have seized vast supplies of arms and ammunition abandoned by the rebels. Most of the weapons are of Soviet and Chinese origin.
Colonel Frank Williams, chief of the U.S. military mission in the Congo, warned against excessive optimism following the government victory over rebel forces in the northeast.
President Ahmed Ben Bella tonight commuted the death sentences of Hocine Ait-Ahmed, leader of the illegal Socialist Forces Front, and Commandant Si Moussa, an opposition guerrilla leader in western Algeria.
A revolutionary plan for economic integration of Latin America, patterned after Europe’s Common Market, was presented to Western Hemisphere nations.
A military plot to overthrow Fidel Castro has been thwarted, anti-Castro forces in Miami said. A former Cuban Army captain who fled Cuba with 19 others in a homemade boat said today that the Castro regime had apparently arrested hundreds of soldiers and secret policemen in the last three weeks. Manuel D. Toranzo Vega, who had been a captain in Fidel Castro’s rebel army and a customs inspector at Havana Airport said “my army friends” had reported the arrest of 350 soldiers at the Fifth Military District in Havana.
Club-swinging policemen battled today a mob of 3,000 university students protesting agreements normalizing relations between South Korea and Japan.
Canada’s unexpectedly vigorous economy reduced the Government’s budgetary deficit to $83 million in the fiscal year that ended March 31. The deficit in the previous year was $619.2 million.
TASS, the Soviet news agency, announced that proof of an extraterrestrial civilization had been discovered by radio astronomers at the Sternberg Astronomical Institute in Moscow, and astronomer Nikolai Kardashev was quoted as saying, “A new supercivilization has been discovered.” The conclusions were based on observations by Kardashev and Iosif Shklovsky of a variable pattern of signals from the quasar CTA-102. The next day, Shklovsky held a press conference in Moscow and conceded that “to speak now about the artificial origin of the signals would be premature”, and criticized TASS for “the distorted version” of his remarks and for causing “unhealthy sensationalism.”
The death toll in yesterday’s tornado disaster rose today to at least 239. Indiana, the hardest hit area, counted 132 dead, making this the worst of any disaster in its history. Ohio reported 53 dead, Michigan 44, Illinois 7 and Wisconsin 3. The list of injured in Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin and Iowa approached 2,500. In whole communities not a building escaped intact and damage estimates mounted into the tens of millions of dollars. Governor Warren Knowles of Wisconsin said damage in his state would exceed $20 million. Authorities at Crystal Lake, Illinois, estimated damage there at $10 million.
Thousands of people were homeless. Nearly 400 homes were destroyed in Indiana alone. The United States Weather Bureau counted 37 separate tornadoes in the area from Iowa to Ohio yesterday and last night. It said that across Indiana the twisters were as much as a mile wide three times the normal maximum width of such storms. Dr. Robert M. White, chief of the Weather Bureau, named a team of investigators to check the effectiveness of the bureau’s warnings of the approach of the storm. He said it might take a week to complete the study. The death toll was greater than that recorded from tornadoes throughout the United States in an average year.
The twisters derailed 50 cars of a freight train near Shelby, Ohio; rolled up a new blacktop road like a carpet in Michigan; pushed planks like spears through solid masonry walls at Crystal Lake, Illinois; smashed factories in Indiana; wrapped aluminum siding around utility poles in Mount Gilead, Ohio; wrenched metal guard rail from concrete posts along Indiana highways, and lifted cars, trucks and a bus from roads in five states. Communications lines were out along with electric power in a 40-county area of Indiana. Governor Roger D. Branigin proclaimed a state of emergency and ordered 18 planes into the air for a damage survey. Victims needing aid were urged in radio broadcasts to lay out signals for the planes.
Minnesota s exhausting combat with flooding rivers spread to the Mississippi River today as new high water poured in from swollen tributaries.
An all-white grand jury in Dallas County, Alabama, began considering murder charges against four Selma men in the death of a civil rights demonstrator — the Rev. James J. Reeb, the Boston Unitarian minister. Two Unitarian ministers who were with the Rev. Reeb when he was fatally beaten testified in closed session today before a grand jury that once tried to investigate the United States Department of Justice.
Senate minority leader Everett M. Dirksen (R-Illinois) said most of the criticism of his “escape hatch” provision in the voting rights bill results from a misunderstanding.
Former Republican Sen. Kenneth B. Keating of New York has been upheld by the Fair Campaign Practices Committee on his complaint about remarks made by Democrat Robert F. Kennedy, who defeated Keating.
A simple stone monument to the memory of the late President Franklin D. Roosevelt was dedicated in Washington, the first in the national capital to the New Deal chief. A wreath was placed by President Johnson.
The nation’s war on poverty was pictured today as “off to a good start” by members of Congress who have seen it in action. Sargent Shriver, chief of the administration’s War on Poverty, urged Congress to double the new program’s spending authorization for the coming year and not to fence it in with administrative curbs.
Robert F. Kennedy’s campaign statements about Republican Senator Kenneth B. Keating last fall were described yesterday as “such as to lead to a substantial distortion in the public’s mind as to Keating’s position” on the nuclear test-ban treaty.
Three approaches to the problem of educating children from disadvantaged homes and a new journal to report on efforts in this field will be supported by grants totaling $4,455,000 announced yesterday by the Ford Foundation.
The Murray Ohio bicycle plant, shut down for five weeks by a Teamsters strike, resumed full production on its day shift today as the police cleared pickets out of the way.
The Defense Department announced today the award of the first production contract, totaling more than $1.5 billion, for the controversial TFX fighter plane. The contract, covering procurement of 431 Air Force and Navy models, was granted to General Dynamics Corporation of Fort Worth, Texas. The plane is known as the F-111A in its Air Force version, and as the F-111B in its Navy form.
Major League Baseball:
Opening Day.
President Johnson throws out the first ball, then watches as the Red Sox beat the Senators in DC, 7–2. Five Boston home runs tie a Major League record for an opener and 7 total home runs set a Major League record. The succes will be short lived, as they will lose 100 games. The Red Sox drew only 652,201 fans to Fenway Park in 65, seventh in the ten-team league but the Red Sox’ lowest turnstile count since 1945, the last year of World War II. Tony Conigliaro goes 3-4 in the opener, and will lead the league with 32 homeruns.
The A’s mascot Charlie-O the Mule, chosen to highlight the role the Missouri mules played in Allies victory in World War I by lugging ammunition and supplies through the mud and snow of France, makes his debut on Opening Night at Kansas City’s Municipal Stadium. In a pregame ceremony, Warren Hearnes, the governor of Missouri, presents the 1,400-pound animal to team owner Charlie O.Finley, who rides his namesake much to the delight of the 18,109 fans attending the game against the Tigers.
Don Drysdale slugs his second opening day homer, this one a 2–run shot off New York’s Al Jackson. LA wins, 6–1, at Shea Stadium.
Ed Bailey hits a game-ending home run to give Bob Veale and the Pirates a 1–0 win over the Giants. Juan Marichal serves up the 9th inning homer. Bailey is the first major leaguer to hit an Opening Day walkoff homer in a game that was scoreless to that point. Pittsburgh’s Neil Walker will match it in 2014.
In Cincinnati, Joe Torre hits two home runs in Milwaukee’s 4-2 Opening Day victory at Crosley Field. Next season on the same date, the Braves catcher will do it again, joining teammate Eddie Mathews as the only major leaguers to have hit two round-trippers twice in games played on Opening Day.
In Minnesota, the Yankees drop their second straight 11th inning opener, as the Twins win, 5–4. Twins starter Jim Kaat, stranded because of the ice and snow, is brought to Metropolitan Stadium by helicopter. Kaat is matched by Jim Bouton, who goes five innings, giving up two earned runs. Bob Allison’s wind-blown fly ball in the 11th drops untouched for a three-base error by Hector Lopez, one of eight errors the two teams combine for. Cesar Tovar’s 2–out single scores the winner off Pedro Ramos.
On opening day in Chicago, the Cards hand Bob Gibson a 5–run lead in the 1st inning against Larry Jackson. But the wind is blowing out and the game ends after 11 innings called because of darkness. The standoff is 10–10. For the Cubs, Roberto Pena makes 3 errors in 7 chances but is 3–for-6 with home run and double. Ernie Banks hits the only other home run.
St. Louis Cardinals 10, Chicago Cubs 10
Milwaukee Braves 4, Cincinnati Reds 2
Philadelphia Phillies 2, Houston Astros 0
Detroit Tigers 6, Kansas City Athletics 2
New York Yankees 4, Minnesota Twins 5
Los Angeles Dodgers 6, New York Mets 1
San Francisco Giants 0, Pittsburgh Pirates 1
Boston Red Sox 7, Washington Senators 2
Dow Jones Industrial Average: 906.36 (+5.07)
Born:
Tom O’Brien, American actor (“The Big Easy”, “The Astronaut’s Wife”), in Burbank, California.
Kip Corrington, NFL defensive back (Denver Broncos), in Ames, Iowa.
History Diaries 