Reply #20: 1972 [View All]

[BrewerJohn]

MAY

02 - FBI founder, J Edgar Hoover dies
06 - Thousands of members of the Tutsi tribe are massacred in the African republic of Burundi by members of the Hutu tribe, backed by Congolese mercenaries
09 - Israeli commandos rescue 92 Black September hijack victims
11 - John Lennon appears on the Dick Cavett TV Show claiming he is under constant surveillance by the FBI, and that his telephone has been tapped
15 - Governor George C. Wallace of Alabama is shot by Arthur H. Bremer at a political rally in Laurel, Maryland. The assassination attempt leaves Wallace paralysed from the waist down
22 - Nixon becomes first US President to visit USSR
26 - Nixon and Brezhnev sign Moscow pact - a treaty limiting strategic arms

JUNE

01/15 - West German police arrest the Baader-Meinhof urban guerrilla group
04 - Black activist Angela Davis is found innocent of abetting a 1970 courtroom escape that left four dead
08 - US Planes bomb Vietnamese village in error
13 - Clyde McPhatter, original vocalist with The Drifters, dies
15 - British Education Secretary Margaret Thatcher discontinues free milk to British schoolchildren
17 - Five intruders are caught trying to install listening devices in the Democratic National Committee's Watergate offices in Washington. One of them is James McCord, a former CIA agent currently working for the Republican National Committee
29 - US Supreme Court rules that death penalty is unconstitutional

NOVEMBER

07 - Nixon re-elected over George McGovern in the largest Republican landslide in history
11 - Berry Oakley, bass player of The Allman Brothers, is killed in a motorcycle accident three blocks from where Duane Allman was also killed

DECEMBER

07 - Apollo 17 is launched, the sixth and last spacecraft of that series. Astronauts Eugene Cernan, Ronald Evans and Harrison Schmitt splash back to Earth on December 19 carrying 249 lb of rock and soil samples from the Moon
18 - US tries to force North Vietnam back to the conference table with resumption of full-scale bombing of North Vietnam after Paris peace negotiation reach impasse
24 - Earthquake kills 10,000 in Managua, Nicaragua
26 - Former US President Harry S Truman dies
30 - Nixon orders halt to Hanoi bombing