Today in History: JFK was elected U.S. president, narrowly defeating Richard Nixon
1923 – Adolf Hitler tried to start a putsch in Munich, but was arrested four days later.
1960 – Democrat John F. Kennedy was elected U.S. president, narrowly defeating Republican Vice President Richard Nixon.
1989 – Douglas Wilder was elected governor of Virginia, the first African American to become a U.S. state governor. On the same day, David Dinkins was elected New York’s first black mayor.
1994 – The U.N. war crimes tribunal of former Yugoslavia held its first public hearing, paving the way for the Bosnian Serb Dusan Tadic to become the first suspect to stand trial.
1996 – A 19th-century Swedish postage stamp sold at auction for 2.875 million Swiss francs ($2.23 million), making it the world’s most valuable stamp.
1997 – China blocked the main channel of the Yangtze River to begin work on the controversial Three Gorges Dam, the world’s largest hydroelectric power project.
1998 – A Bangladeshi court sentenced 15 former army officers to death for killing Sheikh Mujibur Rahman in a 1975 coup.
2000 – The leader of the left-wing Japanese Red Army, Fusako Shigenobu, was captured in western Japan after 30 years on the run.
2002 – James Kilgore, alleged leader of the radical and violent American underground group the Symbionese Liberation Army, was arrested in Cape Town after 27 years on the run.
2006 – Markus Wolf, the legendary East German spymaster whose Cold War activities are believed to have inspired novelist John le Carre, died aged 83.
2016 – Donald Trump defeats Democrat Hillary Clinton to be elected President of the United States.
(Reuters)
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Reading today's press, It looks like fact, fiction and history are all meeting to end the world as we know it! In 1983 the USSR reckoned that NATO’s Able Archer exercise was a smokescreen and that NATO was planning to deliver a genuine nuclear first strike.
ReplyDeleteThe extent to which John F Kennedy took his NATO partners into his confidence during the Cuban crisis remains debatable. In 1962, the British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, colloquially known as SuperMac, was supposedly JFK’s chief confidant and adviser throughout the crisis. What were the consequences of that?
For starters it meant that anything JFK (via the CIA) and/or SuperMac shared with MI6 about how best to manage the crisis was also shared with Nikita Khrushchev and Fidel Castro via Kim Philby who was then in his heyday. In addition, Dr Richard Alan Fairclough (ex MI1 and a leading British scientist) was a close confidant of SuperMac.
Since then Richard Fairclough (aka Roger Burlington) featured in The Burlington Files series of fact based spy novels which were centred on the life and times of his son Bill Fairclough (aka Edward Burlington, real life MI6 codename JJ).
One could ask were the Fairclough family involved in the seventies in the Haitian equivalent to the Cuban Bay of Pigs? Before it's too late we had all best read Beyond Enkription, the only novel published to date in The Burlington Files series, to find out what has been disclosed to date on all these issues. As for today's concerns, hopefully in 50 years from now we can read about today's Kim Philby and Oleg Penkovsky.
Do Google The Burlington Files and read Beyond Enkription.