1966

Years: 1963 1964 1965 - 1966 - 1967 1968 1969

Decades: 1930s 1940s 1950s - 1960s - 1970s 1980s 1990s

Events of 1966

January

• January 1 - In a coup, Colonel Jean-Bédel Bokassa takes over as military ruler of the Central African Republic, ousting President David Dacko.
• January 4 - A military coup occurs in Upper Volta (later Burkina Faso).
• January 4 - The prime ministers of India and Pakistan meet in Moscow.
• January 4 - A gas leak fire at the Feyzin oil refinery near Lyon, France kills 18 and injures 84.
• January 10 - Pakistani-Indian peace negotiations end successfully in Tashkent.
• January 11 - A conference on Rhodesia begins in Lagos, Nigeria.
• January 11 - The first SR-71 Blackbird spy plane goes into service at Beale AFB.
• January 12 - United States President Lyndon Johnson states that the United States should stay in South Vietnam until Communist aggression there is ended.
• January 13 - Robert C. Weaver becomes the first Black Cabinet member, by being appointed United States Secretary of Housing and Urban Development.
• January 15 - A violent military coup is staged in Nigeria.
• January 17 - The Nigerian coup is overturned.
• January 17 - A B-52 bomber collides with a KC-135 Stratotanker over Spain, dropping three 70-kiloton hydrogen bombs near the town of Palomares, and 1 into the sea, in the 1966 Palomares B-52 crash.
• January 18 - About 8,000 U.S. soldiers land in South Vietnam; U.S. troops now total 190,000.
• January 19 - Indira Gandhi is elected Prime Minister of India; she is sworn in January 24.
• January 20 - Demonstrations occur against high food prices in Hungary.
• January 21 - Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro resigns due to a power struggle in his party.
• January 22 - The military government of Nigeria announces that ex-prime minister Abubakar Tafawa Balewa was killed during the coup.
• January 22 - The Chadian Muslim insurgent group FROLINAT is founded in Sudan, starting the Chadian Civil War.
• January 26 - Harold Holt becomes Prime Minister of Australia when Robert Menzies retires.
• January 27 - The British government promises the U.S. that British troops in Malaysia will stay until more peaceful conditions occur in the region.
• January 31 - The United Kingdom ceases all trade with Rhodesia.

February

• February 1 - West Germany procures some 2,600 political prisoners from East Germany.
• February 3 - The unmanned Soviet Luna 9 spacecraft makes the first controlled rocket-assisted landing on the Moon.
• February 4 - All Nippon Airways Flight 60 plunges into Tokyo Bay; 133 re killed.
• February 6 - Fidel Castro blames China for spreading anti-Soviet propaganda among Cuban soldiers.
• February 11 - The Belgian government resigns.
• February 14 - The Australian dollar is introduced at a rate of 2 dollars per pound, or 10 shillings per dollar.
• February 23 - A military coup in Syria replaces the previous government with a Ba'athist regime.
• February 24 - A military coup in Ghana raises sacked General Ankrah to power while president Kwame Nkrumah is abroad.
• February 26 - A curfew is declared in Jakarta, Indonesia.
• February 28 - U.S. astronauts Charles Bassett and Elliott See are killed in an aircraft accident in St. Louis, Missouri.

March

• March 1 - Soviet space probe Venera 3 crashes on Venus, becoming the first spacecraft to land on another planet's surface.
• March 1 - The Ba'ath Party takes power in Syria.
• March 2 - Kwame Nkrumah arrives in Guinea and is granted asylum.
• March 4 - The Beatles: In an interview published in The London Evening Standard, John Lennon comments, "We're more popular than Jesus now," eventually sparking a controversy in the United States.
• March 5 - A massive theft of nuclear materials is revealed in Brazil.
• March 7 - Charles De Gaulle asks U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson for negotiations about the state of NATO equipment in France.
• March 8 - Anti-communist demonstrations occur at the Indonesian Foreign Ministry.
• March 8 - Vietnam War: Australia announces it will substantially increase its number of troops in Vietnam.
• March 8 - An Irish Republican Army bomb destroys Nelson's Pillar in Dublin.
• March 11 - Indonesian President Sukarno gives all executive powers to General Suharto (see Transition to the New Order and Supersemar).
• March 11 - French President Charles De Gaulle states that French troops will be taken out of NATO and that all French NATO bases and HQ's must be closed within a year.
• March 16 - Gemini 8 (David Scott, Neil Armstrong) docks with an Agena target vehicle.
• March 17 - More anti-communist demonstrations occur in Indonesia.
• March 17 - Off the coast of Spain in the Mediterranean, the DSV Alvin submarine finds a missing American hydrogen bomb.
• March 22 - In Washington, D.C., General Motors President James M. Roche appears before a Senate subcommittee, and apologizes to consumer advocate Ralph Nader for the company's intimidation and harassment campaign against him.
• March 23 - Pope Paul VI and Arthur Michael Ramsey, the Archbishop of Canterbury, meet in Rome.
• March 26 - Demonstrations are held across the United States against the Vietnam War.
• March 27 - In South Vietnam, 20,000 Buddhists march in demonstrations against the policies of the military government.
• March 28 - Indira Gandhi visits Washington, D.C.
• March 29 - The 23rd Communist Party Conference is held in the Soviet Union; Leonid Brezhnev demands that U.S. troops leave Vietnam, and announces that Chinese-Soviet relations are not satisfying.
• March 31 - The Labour Party under Harold Wilson wins the British General Election.
• March 31 - The Soviet Union launches Luna 10, which later becomes the first space probe to enter orbit around the Moon.

April

• April 2 - The Indonesian army demands that the country rejoin the United Nations.
• April 4 - Luna 10 enters orbit around the Moon.
• April 7 - The United Kingdom asks the United Nations Security Council for authority to use force to stop oil tankers that violate the embargo against Rhodesia (authority is given April 10).
• April 8 - Buddhists in South Vietnam protest against the fact that the new government has not set a date for free elections.
• April 13 - United States president Lyndon Johnson signs the 1966 Uniform Time Act, dealing with daylight saving time.
• April 14 - The South Vietnamese government promises free elections in 3–5 months.
• April 15 - An anti-Nasser conspiracy is exposed in Egypt.
• April 18 - China declares that it will stop economic aid to Indonesia.
• April 21 - An artificial heart is installed in the chest of Marcel DeRudder in a Houston, Texas hospital.
• April 21 - The opening of the Parliament of the United Kingdom is televised for the first time.
• April 21 - Haile Selassie visits Jamaica for the first time, meeting with Rastafarian leaders.
• April 27 - Pope Paul VI and Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko meet in the Vatican (the first meeting between leaders of the Roman Catholic Church and the Soviet Union).
• April 28 - In Rhodesia, security forces kill 7 ZANLA men in combat; Chimurenga, the ZANU rebellion, begins.
• April 29 - U.S. troops in Vietnam total 250,000.
• April 30 - Regular hovercraft service begins over the English Channel (discontinued in 2000 due to the Channel Tunnel).
• April 30 - The Church of Satan is formed by Anton Szandor LaVey in San Francisco
• April 30 - Uniform daylight saving time is first observed in most parts of North America.

May

• May 1 - Floods occur on the Finnish coast.
• May 4 - Fiat signs a contract with the Soviet government to build a car factory in the Soviet Union.
• May 12 - African members of the UN Security Council say that the British army should blockade Rhodesia.
• May 12 - The Busch Memorial Stadium opens in St Louis, Missouri.
• May 12 - Radio Peking claims that U.S. planes have shot down a Chinese plane over Yunnan (the U.S. denies the story the next day).
• May 14 - Turkey and Greece intend to start negotiations about the situation in Cyprus.
• May 15 - Indonesia asks Malaysia for peace negotiations.
• May 15 - The South Vietnamese army besieges Da Nang.
• May 15 - Tens of thousands of anti-war demonstrators again picket the White House, then rally at the Washington Monument.
• May 16 - A seamen's strike is called in Britain.
• May 16 - In New York City, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. makes his first public speech on the Vietnam War.
• May 19 - Gertrude Baniszewski is found guilty of murdering and torturing Sylvia Likens and is sentenced to life in prison. (she is released on parole in December 1985).
• May 24 - Ugandan army troops arrest Mutesa II of Buganda and occupy his palace.
• May 24 - The Nigerian government forbids all political activity in the country until January 17, 1969.
• May 25 - Explorer program: Explorer 32 is launched.
• May 25 - In St. Louis, Missouri, U.S. Vice-President Hubert Humphrey and U.S. Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall dedicate the Gateway Arch, as part of the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial.
• May 26 - Guyana achieves independence.
• May 28 - Fidel Castro delcares martial law in Cuba because of a possible U.S. attack.
• May 28 - The Indonesian and Malayan governments declare that the Indonesian Confrontation is over (a treaty is signed on August 11).
• May 31 - The Philippines reestablishes diplomatic relations with Malaysia.

June

• June 2 - Éamon de Valera is re-elected as Irish president.
• June 2 - Surveyor program: Surveyor 1 lands in Oceanus Procellarum on the Moon, becoming the first U.S. spacecraft to soft-land on another world.
• June 2 - Four former cabinet ministers are executed in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, for alleged involvement in a plot to kill Mobutu Sese Seko.
• June 3 - Joaquín Balaguer is elected president of the Dominican Republic.
• June 5 - Gemini 9: Gene Cernan completes the second U.S. spacewalk (2 hours, 7 minutes).
• June 6 - Civil rights activist James Meredith is shot while trying to march across Mississippi.
• June 8 - An XB-70 Valkyrie prototype is destroyed in a mid-air collision with a F-104 Starfighter chase plane during a photo shoot. NASA pilot Joseph A. Walker and USAF test pilot Carl Cross are both killed.
• June 8 - Topeka, Kansas is devastated by a tornado that registers as an "F5" on the Fujita Scale, the first to exceed US $100 million in damages. Sixteen people are killed, hundreds more injured, and thousands of homes damaged or destroyed. [1]
• June 13 - Miranda v. Arizona: The Supreme Court of the United States rules that the police must inform suspects of their rights before questioning them.
• June 14 - The Vatican abolishes the Index Librorum Prohibitorum (index of banned books).
• June 17 - An Air France personnel strike begins.
• June 18 - CIA chief William Raborn resigns; Richard Helms becomes his successor.
• June 20 - French President Charles De Gaulle starts his visit to the Soviet Union.
• June 21 - Opposition leader Arthur Calwell is shot after attending a political meeting in Mosman, Sydney, Australia.
• June 28 - In Argentina, a junta deposes president Arturo Umberto Illia in a coup, and appoints General Juan Carlos Ongania to lead.
• June 29 - A sailors' strike, organised by the National Union of Seamen, ends in the United Kingdom.
• June 29 - Vietnam War: U.S. planes begin bombing Hanoi and Haiphong.
• June 30 - France formally leaves NATO.
• June 30 - The National Organization for Women (NOW) is founded in Washington, DC.

July

• July 1 - Joaquin Balaguer becomes president of the Dominican Republic.
• July 3 - Rene Barrientos is elected president of Bolivia.
• July 4 - North Vietnam declares general mobilization.
• July 4 - President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Freedom of Information Act, which goes into effect the following year.
• July 6 - Malawi becomes a republic.
• July 7 - A Warsaw Pact conference ends with a promise to support North Vietnam.
• July 8 - King Mwambutsa IV Bangiriceng of Burundi is deposed by his son Ntare V, who is in turn deposed by prime minister Michel Micombero.
• July 12 - Indira Gandhi visits Moscow.
• July 12 - Zambia threatens to leave the Commonwealth of Nations because of British peace overtures to Rhodesia.
• July 12 - U.S. Lieutenant Major W.H. Whalen is arrested for spying.
• July 14 - Israeli and Syrian jet fighters clash over the Jordan River.
• July 16 - British Prime Minister Harold Wilson flies to Moscow to try to start peace negotiations about the Vietnam War (the Soviet government refutes his ideas).
• July 18 - Gemini 10 (John Young, Michael Collins) is launched. After docking with an Agena target vehicle, the astronauts then set a world altitude record of 474 miles (763 km).
• July 18 - The Hough Riots break out in Cleveland, Ohio, the city's first race riot.
• July 19 - A Chinese delegate in the Netherlands, Liu en-Tsiu, is declared persona non grata because of the death of a Chinese engineer in unclear circumstances; there are claims that he was kidnapped and taken to the delegate's office.
• July 22 - The Chinese government declares Dutch delegate G. J. Jongejans persona non grata, but tells him not to leave the country before a group of Chinese engineers has left the Netherlands.
• July 23 - Katangese troops in Stanleyville, Congo, revolt for several weeks in support of the exiled minister Moise Tshombe.
• July 24 - U.N. Secretary General U Thant visits Moscow.
• July 28 - The U.S. announces that a Lockheed U-2 reconnaissance plane has disappeared over Cuba.
• July 29 - The Nigerian army rebels and executes head of state General Aguiyi-Ironsi.

August

• August 1 - A military coup occurs in Nigeria; General Yakubu Gowon takes over.
• August 2 - The Spanish government forbids overflights of British military aircraft.
• August 5 - Martin Luther King Jr. leads a civil rights march in Chicago, during which he is struck by a rock thrown from an angry white mob.
• August 6 - Braniff Airlines Flight 250 crashes in Falls City, Nebraska, killing all 42 on board.
• August 6 - Rene Barrientos takes office as the president of Bolivia.
• August 6 - The Tagus River Bridge opens in Lisbon, Portugal.
• August 7 - Race riots occur in Lansing, Michigan.
• August 10 - An East German court sentences Günter Laudahn to life imprisonment for spying for the United States.
• August 10 - Lunar Orbiter 1, the first U.S. spacecraft to orbit another world, is launched.
• August 11 - The Beatles hold a press conference in Chicago, during which John Lennon apologizes for his "more popular than Jesus" remark, saying, "I didn't mean it as a lousy anti-religious thing."
• August 13 - In the People's Republic of China, Mao Zedong begins the Cultural Revolution to purge and reorganize China's Communist Party.
• August 13 - An earthquake in Turkey kills 2,394 and injures 10,000.
• August 15 - Syrian and Israeli troops clash over Lake Genesaret for 3 hours.
• August 15 - It is announced that the New York Herald Tribune will not resume publication.
• August 16 - Vietnam War: The House Un-American Activities Committee starts investigating Americans who have aided the Viet Cong, with the intent to make these activities illegal. Anti-war demonstrators disrupt the meeting and 50 are arrested.
• August 17 - Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Republic begin negotiations in Kuwait to end the war in Yemen.
• August 18 - Vietnam War - Battle of Long Tan: D Company, 6th Battalion of the Royal Australian Regiment, meets and defeats a Viet Cong force estimated to be 4 times larger, at the in Phuoc Tuy Province, Republic of Vietnam.
• August 19 - An earthquake in eastern Turkey destroys whole cities.
• August 21 - Seven men are sentenced to death in Egypt, for anti-Nasser agitation.
• August 22 - The United Farm Workers Organizing Committee (UFWOC), predecessor of the United Farm Workers of America (UFW), is formed.
• August 26 - Riots occur in French Somaliland.
• August 30 - France offers independence to French Somaliland.

September

• September 1 - United Nations Secretary-General U Thant declares that he will not seek re-election, because U.N. efforts in Vietnam have failed.
• September 1 - 98 British tourists die in an air crash in Ljubljana, Yugoslavia.
• September 6 - In Cape Town, the South African architect of Apartheid, Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd, is stabbed to death by Dimitri Tsafendas during a parliamentary meeting.
• September 9 - NATO decides to move SHAPE headquarters to Belgium.
• September 12 - Gemini 11 (Richard Gordon, Pete Conrad) docks with an Agena target vehicle.
• September 12 - Balthazar Johannes Vorster becomes the new South African Prime Minister.
• September 13 - TASS reports on clashes between the Chinese Communist Party and the Red Guards.
• September 16 - In South Vietnam, Thich Tri Quang ends a 100-day hunger strike.
• September 30 - Baldur von Schirach and Albert Speer are released from Spandau Prison.
• September 30 - Botswana achieves independence.

October

• October 1 - West Coast Airlines Flight 956 crashes with 18 fatal injuries and no survivors 5.5 mi south of Wemme, Oregon. This accident marks the first loss of a DC-9.
• October 3 - Tunisia severs diplomatic relations with the United Arab Republic.
• October 4 - Israel applies for the outer membership of the EEC.
• October 4 - Basutoland becomes independent and takes the name Lesotho.
• October 5 - UNESCO signs the Recommendation Concerning the Status of Teachers. This event is now celebrated as World Teachers' Day.
• October 7 - The Soviet Union declares that all Chinese students must leave the country before the end of October.
• October 11 - France and the Soviet Union sign a treaty for cooperation in nuclear research.
• October 14 - The city of Montreal inaugurates its metro system (see Montreal Metro).
• October 15 - U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson signs a bill creating the United States Department of Transportation.
• October 17 - Lesotho and Botswana are admitted to the United Nations.
• October 21 - The Aberfan disaster occurs in South Wales, United Kingdom.
• October 22 - British spy George Blake escapes from Wormwood Scrubs prison; he is next seen in Moscow.
• October 22 - Spain demands that the United Kingdom stop military flights to Gibraltar; Britain refuses the next day.
• October 24 - Negotiations about the Vietnam War begin in Manila, Philippines.
• October 25 - A military court in Jakarta sentences ex-foreign minister Subandrio to death.
• October 25 - Spain closes its Gibraltar border to non-pedestrian traffic.
• October 26 - NATO moves its HQ from Paris to Brussels.
• October 27 - The United Nations takes Namibia from South Africa.
• October 29 - The Guinean delegation to the OAU meeting in Ethiopia, become hostages of the Ghanaian government in Accra.

November

• November 2 - The Cuban Adjustment Act comes into force, allowing 123,000 Cubans the opportunity to apply for permanent residence in the United States.
• November 4 - The Arno river floods Florence, damaging many art treasures.
• November 5 - Thirty-eight African states demand that the United Kingdom use force against the Rhodesian government.
• November 6 - Lunar Orbiter 2 is launched.
• November 8 - Former Massachusetts Attorney General Edward Brooke becomes the first Black elected to the United States Senate since Reconstruction.
• November 8 - Actor Ronald Reagan, a Republican, is elected Governor of California.
• November 11 - Spain declares general amnesty for crimes committed during the Spanish Civil War (effective only for the Falangists' side).
• November 15 - Gemini 12 (James A. Lovell, Buzz Aldrin), splashes down safely in the Atlantic Ocean, 600 km east of the Bahamas.
• November 15 - A Boeing 727 carrying Pan Am Flight 708 crashes near Berlin, Germany, killing all three people on board.
• November 17 - The U.N. General Assembly decides to found the United Nations Industrial Development Organization.
• November 17 - A spectacular Leonid meteor shower passes over Arizona, at the rate of 2,300 a minute for 20 minutes.
• November 21 - In Togo, the army crushes an attempted coup.
• November 30 - Barbados achieves independence.
• November 30 - George Lincoln Rockwell gives a major speech at Brown University [2]

December

• December 1 - Kurt Georg Kiesinger is elected Chancellor of West Germany.
• December 1 - British Prime Minister Harold Wilson and Rhodesian Prime minister Ian Smith negotiate on the HMS Tiger in the Mediterranean.
• December 2 - U Thant agrees to serve a second term as U.N. Secretary General.
• December 3 - Anti-Portuguese demonstrations occur in Macau; a curfew is declared the next day.
• December 7 - Syria offers weapons to rebels in Jordan.
• December 7 - Barbados is admitted to the United Nations.
• December 8 - The Typaldos Line's ferry Heraklion sinks in rough seas, in the Aegean Sea near Crete, leaving 217 dead.
• December 16 - The U.N. Security Council approves an oil embargo against Rhodesia.
• December 16 - The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights are adopted by the General Assembly, as Resolution 2200 A (XXI).
• December 17 - South Africa does not join the trade embargo against Rhodesia.
• December 20 - Harold Wilson withdraws all his previous offers to the Rhodesian government, and announces that he will agree to independence only after the founding of a Black majority government.
• December 22 - Prime Minister Ian Smith declares that Rhodesia is already a republic.
• December 26 - The first Kwanzaa is celebrated by Maulana Karenga, the chair of Black Studies, at California State University, Long Beach.
• December 31 - East German Premier Walter Ulbricht discusses negotiations about German reunification.
• December 31 - Thieves steal millions' worth of paintings from the Dulwich Art Gallery in London.
• December 31 - The Congolese government takes over the Union Minière du Haut Katanga.

Births

• October 9 - David Cameron, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
• November 5 - Andreas J. Voigt, German author

Deaths

• January 18 - Kathleen Norris, American novelist and American First Committee member (d. 1966)
• April 29 - Elizabeth Dilling, Anti-communist author and defendant in the Great Sedition Trial of 1944 (b. 1894)
• July 16 - Joseph Brown Matthews, fellow traveler and later anti-communist investigator and journalist (b. 1895)
• August 20 - Fulton Lewis, conservative American radio broadcaster (b. 1903)
• September 6 - Margaret Sanger, eugenics advocate (b. 1879)
• September 14 - Hiram Wesley Evans, Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan (b. 1881)
• December 15 - Walt Disney, American animator (b. 1901)