With months to spare, the Apollo 11 astronauts fulfilled late President John F. Kennedy’s 1961 goal of landing a man on the moon by the end of the decade. Back on earth, 1969 was also the year of the Woodstock music festival, the Stonewall riots for gay rights and the Tate-LaBianca murders by followers of Charles Manson. "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" and "The Love Bug" topped Hollywood box office, and a movie ticket cost about $1.50.
Jan
12
On January 12, 1969, at the Orange Bowl in Miami, the New York Jets of the American Football League defeat the NFL's Baltimore Colts, 16-7, in Super Bowl III—a result considered one of the biggest upsets in sports history. Days earlier, Jets quarterback Joe Namath guaranteed a victory by New York, an 18-point underdog.
Jan
14
Jan
20
Richard Nixon is inaugurated as president of the United States and says, “After a period of confrontation [in Vietnam], we are entering an era of negotiation.” Eight years after losing to John F. Kennedy in the 1960 election, Nixon had defeated Hubert H. Humphrey for the presidency.
Feb
22
On February 22, 1969, 19-year-old Barbara Jo Rubin becomes the first female jockey to win a race at an American thoroughbred track when she rides Cohesion to a victory by a neck over Reely Beeg in the ninth race at Charles Town, West Virginia.
Mar
01
On March 1, 1969, New York Yankees center fielder Mickey Mantle announces his retirement from baseball. Mantle was an idol to millions, known for his remarkable power and speed and his everyman personality. While “The Mick” patrolled center field and batted clean-up between 1951 and 1968, the Yankees won 12 American League pennants and seven World Series.
Mar
02
In a dramatic confirmation of the growing rift between the two most powerful communist nations in the world, troops from the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China fire on each other at a border outpost on the Ussuri River in the eastern region of the USSR, north of Vladivostok. In the years following this incident, the United States used the Soviet-Chinese schism to its advantage in its Cold War diplomacy.
Mar
05
Mar
12
The London drug squad appears at house of George Harrison and Pattie Boyd with a warrant and drug-sniffing canines. Boyd immediately used the direct hotline to Beatles headquarters and George returned to find his home turned upside down. He is reported to have told the officers “You needn’t have turned the whole bloody place upside down. All you had to do was ask me and I would have shown you where I keep everything.”
Mar
17
On March 17, 1969, 70-year-old Golda Meir makes history when she is elected as Israel’s first female prime minister. She was the country’s fourth prime minister and is still the only woman to have held this post.
David Rubinger/The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images
Mar
18
U.S. B-52 bombers are diverted from their targets in South Vietnam to attack suspected communist base camps and supply areas in Cambodia for the first time in the Vietnam war. While meant to shut down reinforcements for enemy Viet Cong, the bombs terrorize innocent civilians in a country that was still officially neutral in the Vietnam War.
Mar
26
A group called Women Strike for Peace demonstrate in Washington, D.C., in the first large antiwar demonstration since President Richard Nixon’s inauguration in January. The antiwar movement had initially given Nixon a chance to make good on his campaign promises to end the war in Vietnam. However, it became increasingly clear that Nixon had no quick solution. As the fighting dragged on, antiwar sentiment against the president and his handling of the war mounted steadily during his term in office.
Mar
28
Dwight D. Eisenhower, the 34th president of the United States and one of the most highly regarded American generals of World War II, dies in Washington, D.C., at the age of 78.
(Original Caption) General view inside the rotunda of the U.S. Capitol, 3/30, as President Nixon delivers eulogy at casket of Dwight D. Eisenhower.
Bettmann Archive
Apr
03
Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird announces that the United States is moving to “Vietnamize” the war as rapidly as possible. By this, he meant that the responsibility for the fighting would be gradually transferred to the South Vietnamese as they became more combat capable. However, Laird emphasized that it would not serve the United States’ purpose to discuss troop withdrawals while the North Vietnamese continued to conduct offensive operations in South Vietnam. Despite Laird’s protestations to the contrary, Nixon’s “Vietnamization” program, as he would announce it in June, did include a series of scheduled U.S. troop withdrawals, the first of the war.
Apr
09
The Chicago Eight, indicted on federal charges of conspiracy to incite a riot at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, plead not guilty. The defendants included David Dellinger of the National Mobilization Committee (NMC); Rennie Davis and Thomas Hayden of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS); Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, founders of the Youth International Party (“Yippies”); Bobby Seale of the Black Panthers; and two lesser known activists, Lee Weiner and John Froines.
Apr
14
On April 14, 1969, during the first internationally televised Oscars ceremony, Ingrid Bergman exclaims “It’s a tie!” upon opening the Best Actress envelope—the first tie in a major acting category in three decades. The award went to both Katharine Hepburn, for her turn as Eleanor of Aquitaine in The Lion in Winter, and Barbra Streisand, for her debut performance in Funny Girl.
Bettmann / Contributor / Getty Images
Apr
17
Alexander Dubcek, the communist leader who launched a broad program of liberal reforms in Czechoslovakia, is forced to resign as first secretary by the Soviet forces occupying his country. The staunchly pro-Soviet Gustav Husak was appointed Czechoslovak leader in his place, reestablishing an authoritarian communist dictatorship in the Soviet satellite state.
Apr
23
On April 23, 1969, Sirhan Sirhan is sentenced to the death penalty after being convicted in the assassination of politician Robert F. Kennedy. In 1972, Sirhan’s sentence was commuted to life in prison after California abolished the death penalty.
Apr
28
May
09
May
11
On May 11, 1969, Hamburger Hill becomes the scene of an intense and controversial battle during the Vietnam War. Known to military planners as Hill 937 (a reference to its height in meters), the solitary peak is located in the dense jungles of the A Shau Valley of Vietnam, about a mile from the border with Laos.
May
20
After 10 days and 10 bloody assaults, Hill 937 in South Vietnam is finally captured by U.S. and South Vietnamese troops. The Americans who fought there cynically dubbed Hill 937 “Hamburger Hill” because the battle and its high casualty rate reminded them of a meat grinder.
Jun
05
On June 5, 1969, U.S. troops abandon Ap Bia Mountain. A spokesman for the 101st Airborne Division said that the U.S. troops “have completed their search of the mountain and are now continuing their reconnaissance-in-force mission throughout the A Shau Valley.”
Jun
28
Sometime after midnight on June 28, 1969, in what is now regarded by many as history’s first major protest on behalf of equal rights for LGBTQ people, a police raid of the Stonewall Inn—a popular gay club located on New York City's Christopher Street—turns violent as patrons and local sympathizers begin rioting against the authorities.
NY Daily News Archive/Getty Images
Jun
29
On the afternoon of June 29, 1969, a crowd consisting mostly of Black people from the nearby area packs Harlem’s Mt. Morris Park (now Marcus Garvey Park). Over the course of this afternoon and the next five Sunday afternoons, Black performers from many different genres and eras appear on the park’s brightly-colored, sunlit stage in a dazzling series of shows known as the Harlem Cultural Festival. The festival will draw a total of over 300,000 people.
Jul
03
Jul
08
A battalion of the U.S. 9th Infantry Division leaves Saigon in the initial withdrawal of U.S. troops. The 814 soldiers were the first of 25,000 troops that were withdrawn in the first stage of the U.S. disengagement from the Vietnam War. There would be 14 more increments in the withdrawal, but the last U.S. troops did not leave until after the Paris Peace Accords were signed in January 1973.
Jul
13
Former Alabama Governor George Wallace criticizes President Richard Nixon for his handling of the war and says he favors an all-out military victory if the Paris talks fail to produce peace soon. Wallace had run unsuccessfully against Nixon as a third party candidate in the 1968 presidential election.
Jul
16
Jul
18
Shortly after leaving a party on Chappaquiddick Island, Senator Edward “Ted” Kennedy of Massachusetts drives an Oldsmobile off a wooden bridge into a tide-swept pond. Kennedy escaped the submerged car, but his passenger, 28-year-old Mary Jo Kopechne, did not. The senator did not report the fatal car accident for 10 hours.
Jul
20
At 10:56 p.m. EDT, American astronaut Neil Armstrong, 240,000 miles from Earth, speaks these words to more than a billion people listening at home: “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.” Stepping off the lunar module Eagle, Armstrong became the first human to walk on the surface of the moon.
Tranquility Base, the Moon: Apollo 11 commander Neil Armstrong, first man in history to walk on the moon, plants his boot in the lunar surface during his July 20th walk. After him came lunar module pilot Buzz Aldrin.
Bettmann Archive
Jul
20
On July 20, 1969, President Richard Nixon, along with millions of others, watches as two American astronauts walk on the moon. Later that evening, Nixon recorded succinctly in his diary “the President held an interplanetary conversation with Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin on the Moon.”
Jul
24
Jul
25
President Richard Nixon announces that henceforth the United States will expect its Asian allies to tend to their own military defense. The Nixon Doctrine, as the president’s statement came to be known, clearly indicated his determination to “Vietnamize” the Vietnam War.
Aug
06
The U.S. Army announces that Colonel Robert B. Rheault, Commander of the Fifth Special Forces Group in Vietnam, and seven other Green Berets have been charged with premeditated murder and conspiracy to commit murder in the summary execution of a Vietnamese national, Thai Khac Chuyen, who had served as an agent for Detachment B-57. Chuyen was reportedly summarily executed for being a double agent who had compromised a secret mission.
Aug
09
Early in the morning of August 9, 1969, members of Charles Manson’s cult kill five people in movie director Roman Polanski’s Beverly Hills, California, home, including Polanski’s pregnant wife, actress Sharon Tate. Less than two days later, the group killed again, murdering supermarket executive Leno LaBianca and his wife Rosemary in their home. The savage crimes shocked the nation and turned Charles Manson into a criminal icon.
Julian Wasser/The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images
Aug
15
On August 15, 1969, the Woodstock music festival opens on a patch of farmland in White Lake, a hamlet in the upstate New York town of Bethel.
Music fans watch Richie Havens perform at the Woodstock Music and Art Fair in Bethel, New York State, 15th August 1969. (Photo by Archive Photos/Getty Images)
Getty Images
Aug
17
On Sunday, August 17, 1969, one of the all-time grooviest events in music history—the Woodstock Music & Art Fair—approaches its end after more than three days of peace, love and rock ‘n’ roll in upstate New York. Rain and other delays push the festival, originally scheduled to finish before midnight, into a marathon night of music that continues past dawn.
(Original Caption) On foot, in cars, atop cars, young people leave the great love-in of the sixties, the Woodstock Music Festival. Three hundred thousand young people descended upon Bethel, N.Y., and to the surprise of most, took part in a festival that will, no doubt, go down in history. Peace reigned supreme and youth, for once, told of its disdain of the establishment in a manner that could be understood by all. Coming at a time when the young generation's public relations was at its worst, the Woodstock Music Festival may have helped lessen the ever-widening generation gap. It was beautiful baby.
Bettmann Archive
Aug
22
The American pop-rock duo Zager and Evans end a six-week run at the top of the charts with their ponderously titled single “In The Year 2525." With lyrics focused on the ominous effects of future technology, it would be their one and only hit.
Aug
24
Company A of the Third Battalion, 196th Light Infantry Brigade refuses the order of its commander, Lieutenant Eugene Schurtz, Jr., to continue an attack that had been launched to reach a downed helicopter shot down in the Que Son valley, 30 miles south of Da Nang. The unit had been in fierce combat for five days against entrenched North Vietnamese forces and had taken heavy casualties. Schurtz called his battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Robert C. Bacon, and informed him that his men had refused to follow his order to move out because they had “simply had enough” and that they were “broken.”
Aug
30
Ho Chi Minh’s reply to President Nixon’s letter of July 15 is received in Paris. Ho accused the United States of a “war of aggression” against the Vietnamese people, “violating our fundamental national rights” and warned that “the longer the war goes on, the more it accumulates the mourning and burdens of the American people.” Ho said he favored the National Liberation Front’s 10-point plan as “a logical and reasonable basis for the settlement of the Vietnamese problem.” Ho demanded that the United States “cease the war of aggression,” withdraw its troops from Vietnam and allow self-determination for the Vietnamese people.
Sep
01
Sep
02
On September 2, 1969, America’s first automatic teller machine (ATM) makes its public debut, dispensing cash to customers at Chemical Bank in Rockville Centre, New York. ATMs went on to revolutionize the banking industry, eliminating the need to visit a bank to conduct basic financial transactions. By the 1980s, these money machines had become widely popular and handled many of the functions previously performed by human tellers, such as check deposits and money transfers between accounts. Today, ATMs are as indispensable to most people as cell phones and e-mail.
A fire that started in a bakery engulfed and destroyed much of London, including St. Paul’s Cathedral, on September 1. Many historical events occurred on September 1 and are recapped by Russ Mitchell in this video clip from This Day In History. Also, Theodore Roosevelt said his famous line that the US should speak softly and carry a big stick at a Minnesota State Fair. A US French expedition claimed they found the wreck of the Titanic, and the first ATM was used by the public on this day as well.
Sep
02
Sep
04
Sep
05
Lt. William Calley is charged with six specifications of premeditated murder in the death of 109 Vietnamese civilians at My Lai in March 1968. Calley, a platoon leader in Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry, 11th Infantry Brigade (Light) of the 23rd (Americal) Division had led his men in a massacre of Vietnamese civilians, including women and children, at My Lai 4, a cluster of hamlets that made up Son My village in Son Tinh District in Quang Ngai Province in the coastal lowlands of I Corps Tactical Zone on March 16, 1968. The company had been conducting a search and destroy mission as part of the yearlong Operation Wheeler/Wallowa (November 1967 through November 1968).
Sep
09
Funeral services, attended by 250,000 mourners, are held for Ho Chi Minh in Hanoi’s Ba Dinh Square. Among those in attendance were Soviet Premier Aleksei Kosygin, Chinese Vice-Premier Li Hsien-nien and Prince Norodom Sihanouk of Cambodia. Ho had established the Indochinese Communist Party in 1929. In September 1945, as the defeated Japanese prepared to leave Vietnam, Ho declared Vietnamese independence from French colonial rule and announced the formation of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. The French, attempting to reimpose colonial rule, soon clashed with Ho and his Viet Minh forces.
Sep
19
President Nixon announces the cancellation of the draft calls for November and December. He reduced the draft call by 50,000 (32,000 in November and 18,000 in December). This move accompanied his twin program of turning the war over to the South Vietnamese concurrent with U.S. troop withdrawals and was calculated to quell antiwar protests by students returning to college campuses after the summer.
Sep
23
On September 23, 1969, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, starring Paul Newman and Robert Redford as a team of bank robbers in the Old West, premieres in New York City. The film was a commercial and critical success, receiving seven Oscar nominations (including Best Picture and Best Director) and winning in the categories of Best Screenplay (William Goldman), Best Song (Burt Bacharach’s “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head”), Best Score and Best Cinematography.
Sep
24
The trial for eight antiwar activists charged with inciting violent demonstrations at the August 1968 Democratic National Convention opens in Chicago before Judge Julius Hoffman. Initially there were eight defendants, but one, Bobby Seale of the Black Panthers, denounced Hoffman as a racist and demanded a separate trial. The seven other defendants, including David Dellinger of the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam (MOBE); Rennie Davis and Tom Hayden of MOBE and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS); and Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman of the Youth International Party (Yippies), were accused of conspiring to incite a riot.
Sep
26
On September 26, 1969, American television audiences hear the soon-to-be-famous opening lyrics “Here’s the story of a lovely lady, who was bringing up three very lovely girls…” as "The Brady Bunch," a sitcom that will become an icon of American pop culture, airs for the first time.
Oct
24
Movie star Richard Burton dazzles wife Elizabeth Taylor—and their legions of fans—when he buys her a 69-carat Cartier diamond ring costing $1.5 million. It was just another chapter in a tempestuous marriage that began on the Ides of March and continued thereafter in the public eye.
Oct
29
Nov
03
Nov
10
On November 10, 1969, “Sesame Street,” a pioneering TV show that would teach generations of young children the alphabet and how to count, makes its broadcast debut. “Sesame Street,” with its memorable theme song (“Can you tell me how to get/How to get to Sesame Street”), went on to become the most widely viewed children’s program in the world. It has aired in more than 120 countries.
NEW YORK - MARCH 1970: Actor Bob McGrath, an crew member, puppeteer Jim Henson holding an 'Anything Muppet' dentist, puppeteer Daniel Seagren, puppeteer Frank Oz holding an 'Anything Muppet' postman, and another unknown crew member during the taping of Sesame Street's very first season at Reeves TeleTape Studio in March, 1970 in New York City, New York. Taken for America Illustrated Magazine. (Photo by David Attie/Getty Images)
Getty Images
Nov
12
In a cable filed through Dispatch News Service and picked up by more than 30 newspapers, investigative journalist Seymour Hersh reveals the extent of the U.S. Army’s charges against 1st Lt. William L. Calley at My Lai. Hersh wrote: “The Army says he [Calley] deliberately murdered at least 109 Vietnamese civilians during a search-and-destroy mission in March 1968, in a Viet Cong stronghold known as ‘Pinkville.'”
Nov
14
Apollo 12, the second manned mission to the surface of the moon, is launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, with astronauts Charles Conrad, Jr.; Richard F. Gordon, Jr.; and Alan L. Bean aboard. President Richard Nixon viewed the liftoff from Pad A at Cape Canaveral. He was the first president to attend the liftoff of a manned space flight.
Nov
17
Nov
19
Dec
04
Black Panthers Fred Hampton, 21, and Mark Clark, 22, are gunned down by 14 police officers as they lie sleeping in their Chicago, Illinois, apartment. About a hundred bullets had been fired in what police described as a fierce gun battle with members of the Black Panther Party. However, ballistics experts later determined that only one of those bullets came from the Panthers’ side. In addition, the “bullet holes” in the front door of the apartment, which police pointed to as evidence that the Panthers had been shooting from within the apartment, were actually nail holes created by police in an attempt to cover up the attack. Four other Black Panthers were wounded in the raid, as well as two police officers.
Dec
06
Dec
08
At a news conference, President Richard Nixon says that the Vietnam War is coming to a “conclusion as a result of the plan that we have instituted.” Nixon had announced at a conference in Midway in June that the United States would be following a new program he termed “Vietnamization.”
Dec
11
The secretary of the Moscow writer’s union declares that nudity as displayed in the popular play Oh! Calcutta! is a sign of decadence in Western culture. More disturbing, he claimed, was the fact that this “bourgeois” thinking was infecting Russian youth.
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