President Nixon vetoed the War Powers Act. His veto was overridden on November 7.
A second ceasefire between Egypt and Israel went into effect in the Yom Kippur War. By this point in the war Egyptian gains had been more than reversed.
Kojak premiered.
The day was the first UN World Development Information Day, which coincided with United Nations Day.
Watergate prosecutor Archibald Cox was dismissed by the Administration, and attorney General Elliot L. Richardson and deputy attorney General William B. Ruckelshaus resigned. Cox was dismissed by Robert Bork, who later became an unsuccessful Supreme Court nominee, but who nonetheless was influential in the philosophy of the current Supreme Court.
The Sydney Opera House was inaugurated and opened by Queen Elizabeth II.
Saudi Arabia and Algeria halted petroleum exports to the U.S., the embargo now becoming a full-blown disaster.
Libya announced that it would completely halt oil exports to the United States. The U.S. Federal Reserve regards this as the beginning of the full Arab Oil Embargo.
President Nixon rejected the Appeals Court decision that he turn over tapes to Federal investigators. Instead, he proposed to have them transcribed, and then reviewed by Democratic Senator John C. Stennis. Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox rejected the offer and resigned the following day.
Solutions for the Yom Kippur War were being discussed on an international level.
Elizabeth II, on a trip to Australian, signed the Royal Styles and Titles Act and assumed the title of "Queen of Australia". She had previously been "Elizabeth the second, by the grace of God, of the United Kingdom, Australia and her other realms and territories, queen, head of the Commonwealth.".
Saudi Arabia cut its oil production by 10% and threatened to halt all of its oil shipments to the United States unless the US halt aid to Israel. The United Arab Emirates completely stopped shipments to the U.S.
The Chilean Army's Caravan of Death, led by General Sergio Arellano, arrived in Antofagasta and summarily executed 56 left wing prisoners. Military Governor of Antofagasta, General Joaquin Lagos, resigned in disgust, which actually brought to an end the Caravan.
Walt Kelly, cartoonist who started his career with Disney and the created Pogo, died of a cerebral thrombosis.
Pogo often dealt with serious themes and famously coined the phrase "we have met the enemy and he is us", a phrase truer now than ever. "I go Pogo" was a bogus election phrases making fun of Eisenhower's "I like Ike" that also was associated with the cartoon.
OPEC having doubled prices the day prior, Arab oil producing nations, led by Saudi Arabia, now went further and cut production overall by 5% and then placed an embargo on the United States, the Netherlands, Canada, the United Kingdom, West Germany, Japan, Rhodesia, South Africa, and Portugal. Western oil producers Venezuela nor Ecuador refused to join the embargo.
This causes us to recall part of what we recently posted here:
Congressman Gerald Ford was nominated to be Vice President by Richard Nixon.
Also on that day, President Nixon authorized Operation Nickel Grass, the airlift of weapons to Israel.
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M60 tank being loaded as part of Operation Nickel Grass
The operation revealed severe problems with the U.S. airlift capacity and would likely have not been possible without the assistance of Portugal, whose Azores facilities reduced the need for air-to-air refueling. The transfer of equipment would also leave the United States dangerously short of some sorts of military equipment, including radios, something that was compounded by the fact that the U.S. was transferring a large volume of equipment to the Republic of Vietnam at the same time.
This would directly result in the Arab Oil Embargo, which had been threatened. The embargo commenced on October 17.
U.S. oil production had peaked in 1970. Oil imports rose by 52% between 1969 and 1972, an era when fuel efficiency was disregarded. By 1972 the U.S. was importing 83% of its oil from the Middle East, but the real cost of petroleum had declined from the late 1950s.
The low cost of petroleum was a major factor in American post-war affluence from the mid 1940s through the 1960s. The embargo resulted in a major expansion of Wyoming's oil and gas industry, and in some ways fundamentally completed a shift in the state's economy that had been slowly ongoing since World War One, replacing agriculture with hydrocarbon extraction as the predominant industry.
We often hear a lot of anecdotal information about this topic today.
In this context, it's interesting to note that petroleum consumption is not much greater today in the U.S. than it was in 1973, but domestic production is the highest, by far, it's ever been. Importation of petroleum is falling, but it's also higher than it was in 1973, but exportation of petroleum is the highest it's ever been, exceeding the amount produced in 1973. If experts are balanced against imports, we're at an effective all-time low for importation. In effect, presently, all we're doing with importation is balancing sources.
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People hate this thought locally, but with renewable energy sources coming online, there's a real chance that petroleum consumption will fall for the first time since the 1970s, which would have the impact of reducing imports to irrelevancy. Any way its looked at, the U.S. is no hostage to Middle Eastern oil any more.
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Juan and Isabel Person were sworn into office as the elected president and vice president of Argentina
Judge John Sirica ruled that the Senate Watergate Committee was not entitled to have access to President Nixon's tape recordings, but that the U.S. Department of Justice special prosecutor, Archibald Cox, could subpoena them as evidence.
Motorola Corporation's engineer's filed for a patent on the DynaTAC, the first hand-held cellular telephone. It would be issued two years later and our long modern nightmare would accelerate.
The DynaTAC would not enter production until 1983.
The Mets took game four of the World Series against the A's. I surely would have watched that on the television with my father.
OPEC doubled the price of oil from $2.18/bbl to $5.12/bbl. It didn't consult with the oil companies before doing so, and in some ways initiated in the modern, post, post World War Two, economy.
$5.12? Yes, that's what it was.
That would be $33.75 adjusted for inflation.
The UK and Iceland came to an agreement to end the Cod War.
Henry Kissinger and Lê Đức Thọ were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. The North Vietnamese negotiation, however, did not accept it, stating:
However, since the signing of the Paris agreement, the United States and the Saigon administration continue in grave violation of a number of key clauses of this agreement. The Saigon administration, aided and encouraged by the United States, continues its acts of war. Peace has not yet really been established in South Vietnam. In these circumstances it is impossible for me to accept the 1973 Nobel Prize for Peace which the committee has bestowed on me. Once the Paris accord on Vietnam is respected, the arms are silenced and a real peace is established in South Vietnam, I will be able to consider accepting this prize. With my thanks to the Nobel Prize Committee please accept, madame, my sincere respects.
The Popular Uprising (เหตุการณ์ 14 ตุลา), which had been going on against the Thai military government since October 9, reached a watershed moment with Thai soldiers killed 77 protestors and wounded 857.
Protests would briefly carry on, but this resulted in the resignation of the military government and the establishment of a civilian one, but military influence remained and the new government was not democratic.
The Virgin Mary appears to Sr. Agnes Sasagawa at Akita, Japan, for the third and final time, telling her:
My dear daughter, listen well to what I have to say to you. You will inform your superior
.As I told you, if men do not repent and better themselves, the Father will inflict a terrible punishment on all humanity. It will be a punishment greater than the deluge, such as one will never seen before. Fire will fall from the sky and will wipe out a great part of humanity, the good as well as the bad, sparing neither priests nor faithful. The survivors will find themselves so desolate that they will envy the dead. The only arms which will remain for you will be the Rosary and the Sign left by My Son. Each day recite the prayers of the Rosary. With the Rosary, pray for the Pope, the bishops and priests.
The work of the devil will infiltrate even into the Church in such a way that one will see cardinals opposing cardinals, bishops against bishops. The priests who venerate me will be scorned and opposed by their confreres...churches and altars sacked; the Church will be full of those who accept compromises and the demon will press many priests and consecrated souls to leave the service of the Lord.
The demon will be especially implacable against souls consecrated to God. The thought of the loss of so many souls is the cause of my sadness. If sins increase in number and gravity, there will be no longer pardon for them.
With courage, speak to your superior. He will know how to encourage each one of you to pray and to accomplish works of reparation.
It is Bishop Ito, who directs your community.
You have still something to ask? Today is the last time that I will speak to you in living voice. From now on you will obey the one sent to you and your superior.
Pray very much the prayers of the Rosary. I alone am able still to save you from the calamities which approach. Those who place their confidence in me will be saved.
The prior two messages were:
July 6, 1973
My daughter, my novice, you have obeyed me well in abandoning all to follow me. Is the infirmity of your ears painful? Your deafness will be healed, be sure. Does the wound of your hand cause you to suffer? Pray in reparation for the sins of men. Each person in this community is my irreplaceable daughter. Do you say well the prayer of the Handmaids of the Eucharist? Then, let us pray it together."
Most Sacred Heart of Jesus, truly present in Holy Eucharist, I consecrate my body and soul to be entirely one with Your Heart, being sacrificed at every instant on all the altars of the world and giving praise to the Father pleading for the coming of His Kingdom.
Please receive this humble offering of myself. Use me as You will for the glory of the Father and the salvation of souls.
"Most holy Mother of God, never let me be separated from Your Divine Son. Please defend and protect me as Your Special Child. Amen.
When the prayer was finished, the Heavenly Voice said: "Pray very much for the Pope, Bishops, and Priests. Since your Baptism you have always prayed faithfully for them. Continue to pray very much...very much. Tell your superior all that passed today and obey him in everything that he will tell you. He has asked that you pray with fervor.
August 3, 1973
My daughter, my novice, do you love the Lord? If you love the Lord, listen to what I have to say to you.
It is very important...You will convey it to your superior.
Many men in this world afflict the Lord. I desire souls to console Him to soften the anger of the Heavenly Father. I wish, with my Son, for souls who will repair by their suffering and their poverty for the sinners and ingrates.
In order that the world might know His anger, the Heavenly Father is preparing to inflict a great chastisement on all mankind. With my Son I have intervened so many times to appease the wrath of the Father. I have prevented the coming of calamities by offering Him the sufferings of the Son on the Cross, His Precious Blood, and beloved souls who console Him forming a cohort of victim souls. Prayer, penance and courageous sacrifices can soften the Father's anger. I desire this also from your community...that it love poverty, that it sanctify itself and pray in reparation for the ingratitude and outrages of so many men.
Recite the prayer of the Handmaids of the Eucharist with awareness of its meaning; put it into practice; offer in reparation (whatever God may send) for sins. Let each one endeavor, according to capacity and position, to offer herself entirely to the Lord.
Even in a secular institute prayer is necessary. Already souls who wish to pray are on the way to being gathered together. Without attaching to much attention to the form, be faithful and fervent in prayer to console the Master."Is what you think in your heart true? Are you truly decided to become the rejected stone? My novice, you who wish to belong without reserve to the Lord, to become the spouse worthy of the Spouse, make your vows knowing that you must be fastened to the Cross with three nails. These three nails are poverty, chastity, and obedience. Of the three, obedience is the foundation. In total abandon, let yourself be led by your superior. He will know how to understand you and to direct you.
A solid theological opinion, such as held by such as Jimmy Akin, is that messages from the Virgin Mary, when they occur (and no Catholic is obligated to regard them as genuine), are specific for their time. He feels, in this instance, that the warning from Our Lady pertained to the period in issue.
The message, however, has been getting a lot of attention recently, in part due to the Synod. It's the following line that such people are focused on:
The work of the devil will infiltrate even into the Church in such a way that one will see cardinals opposing cardinals, bishops against bishops. The priests who venerate me will be scorned and opposed by their confreres...churches and altars sacked; the Church will be full of those who accept compromises and the demon will press many priests and consecrated souls to leave the service of the Lord.
Am I adopting this view? No, I'm not adopting any view at all. But I will note that the rapid expression of moral laxity that some clerics, including Bishops and Cardinals, are now expressing, is distressing. It tends to fly in the face of human experience, and I'd argue evolutionary biology, as well as seemingly the long standing positions of the Church, dating back to St. Paul.
Sr. Agnes Sasagawa remains alive fifity years later.
On the same day, everyone on board Aeroflot Flight 964 was killed with the Tu-104 crashed on its approach at Moscow. Aeroflot is the world's most dangerous major airline.
Gordie How was joined by his sons Marty and Mark for the Houston Aeros opening World Hockey Association match against the Los Angeles Sharks, the first time father and sons had played in that fashion.
Congressman Gerald Ford was nominated to be Vice President by Richard Nixon.
Also on that day, President Nixon authorized Operation Nickel Grass, the airlift of weapons to Israel.
M60 tank being loaded as part of Operation Nickel Grass
The operation revealed severe problems with the U.S. airlift capacity and would likely have not been possible without the assistance of Portugal, whose Azores facilities reduced the need for air-to-air refueling. The transfer of equipment would also leave the United States dangerously short of some sorts of military equipment, including radios, something that was compounded by the fact that the U.S. was transferring a large volume of equipment to the Republic of Vietnam at the same time.
This would directly result in the Arab Oil Embargo, which had been threatened. The embargo commenced on October 17.
U.S. oil production had peaked in 1970. Oil imports rose by 52% between 1969 and 1972, an era when fuel efficiency was disregarded. By 1972 the U.S. was importing 83% of its oil from the Middle East, but the real cost of petroleum had declined from the late 1950s.
The low cost of petroleum was a major factor in American post-war affluence from the mid 1940s through the 1960s. The embargo resulted in a major expansion of Wyoming's oil and gas industry, and in some ways fundamentally completed a shift in the state's economy that had been slowly ongoing since World War One, replacing agriculture with hydrocarbon extraction as the predominant industry.
We often hear a lot of anecdotal information about this topic today.
In this context, it's interesting to note that petroleum consumption is not much greater today in the U.S. than it was in 1973, but domestic production is the highest, by far, it's ever been. Importation of petroleum is falling, but it's also higher than it was in 1973, but exportation of petroleum is the highest it's ever been, exceeding the amount produced in 1973. If experts are balanced against imports, we're at an effective all-time low for importation. In effect, presently, all we're doing with importation is balancing sources.
People hate this thought locally, but with renewable energy sources coming online, there's a real chance that petroleum consumption will fall for the first time since the 1970s, which would have the impact of reducing imports to irrelevancy. Any way its looked at, the U.S. is no hostage to Middle Eastern oil any more.
Juan and Isabel Person were sworn into office as the elected president and vice president of Argentina
British Prime Minister Edward Heath called the White House to discuss the Yom Kippur War but, after some discussion, was told to call back in the morning as President Nixon was drunk. The story related to the Prime Minister was that Nixon was unavailable.
Vice President Spiro T. Agnew resigned as Vice President and then, on the same day, plead no contest to income tax evasion, this baack in the day when such accusations would doom your position in office.
Angew was the son of a Greek immigrant father and an American mother of English background. Mixed marriages were unusual for those of Greek ethnicity in the first place and even more unusually, he was raised as an Episcopalian rather than as Greek Orthodox. He served in the Army during World War Two and entered politics thereafter.
His tax troubles lead Maryland to disbar him as "morally obtuse", back when there was such a thing as a state bar that would disbar somebody for being morally obtuse. He died in 1996.
The USSR began airlifting military equipment to Egypt and Syria.
The Senate passed the War Powers Act. It'd be vetoed, but Congress over road the veto.
Famed economist Ludwig Heinrich Edler von Mises died in New York at age 92.
Egypt and Syria launched a surprise attack on Israel timed for the Yom Kippur holy day. The attack oddly commenced at 2:05 p.m.
It would be the largest of the Arab Israeli Wars, and one in which the Israeli Defense Force fared much more poorly than it had previously. Egypt's goals were limited, involving crossing the Suez Canal, which they succeeded in doing. Israeli forces would ultimately repulse the invading forces and come very near the Syrian capital of Damascus, but the results allowed the Egyptians to bargain for peace terms with Israel in later years.
Arab forces fared very well at first, catching the IDF off guard. Syrian advances caused the Israeli government to distribute Israel's small stock of nuclear weapons to is air force in case Arab forces advanced inside Israel itself, making this a non superpower war that came relatively close to becoming a nuclear one.
The Army of the Republic of Vietnam repulsed a largescale raid in a war that was theoretically over, in the Battle of Ap Da Bien. The raiders, the Peoples Army of Vietnam's 207th Regiment, were mostly former students of the Hanoi University of Civil Engineering.
The Soviet Union launched eight satellites simultaneously.
President Nixon's secretary, Rose Mary Woods, claimed to have committed a transcription incident that lead to the removal of 18 minutes of one of the Nixon tapes.
Henry Kissinger was confirmed as Secretary of State by the Senate. He had been serving as National Security Advisor under Nixon prior to that.
Kissinger is still alive at age 100 and still occasionally gives his views on foreign policy. Born in Weimar Germany, he immigrated with his parents in 1935 and served in the U.S. Army during World War Two.
A practitioner of realpolitik, I'm frankly not a fan, and regard him as complicit with Nixon in a cynical abandonment of the South Vietnamese.
Ford Motors introduced the lighter, disappointing, Mustang II, demonstrating the decline in American automobiles of the early 1970s as the realitites of being a petroleum importing nation started to set in.
"The Battle of the Sexes" took place in the Houston Astrodome between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs. King won three straight sets.
This event was a big deal at the time, and I can recall my parents watching the television coverage of it. It's always seemed odd to me as Riggs, who had been a tennis great in his youth, was well past his prime, while King was in hers. Riggs, however, was quite the promoter and much of the attention can be attributed to that.
It was, up until that point, the most watched tennis match of all time.
Jim Croce, age 30, was killed along with five others when a chartered Beechcraft E18S hit a tree during takeoff from the Natchitoches Regional Airport in Louisiana.
Croce was a well known pop singer at the time. When in grade school, one year we had to learn his Time In A Bottle song for a performance of some sort. Perhaps it's for that reason, but I've never liked that song since then, and I didn't like it then. Or maybe its just the song. I have always liked his Leroy Brown song.
The Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic were admitted to the United Nations.
King Hussein issued a general amnesty for Palestinian terrorists held by Jordan.
It what was a sign of things to come, the Laotian government agreed to allow the Pathet Lao to become part of a coalition government.
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Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia was held at gunpoint by his grandson, Iskinder Desta, deputy commander of the Ethiopian Navy. Ultimately, the coup attempt would be abandoned when Desta's mother, Princess Tenague, backed him off of it. A towering figure of Ethiopia in the 20th Century, this too was a sign of things to come. Things would not work out well, in the end, for Desta either.
The Spanish government was deposed in a coup led by Miguel Primo de Rivera y Orbaneja, 2nd Marquis of Estella, a military officer. The coup came about as it's leaders were upset with the Spanish government's inability to deal with the economic conditions which were a precursor to the Great Depression.
Although CIA did not instigate the coup that ended Allende's government on 11 September 1973, it was aware of coup-plotting by the military, had ongoing intelligence collection relationships with some plotters, and—because CIA did not discourage the takeover and had sought to instigate a coup in 1970—probably appeared to condone it.
Church Committee.
On this day in 1973 nearly the whole of the Chilean military rose up to depose Salvador Allende, the democratically elected Marxist president of the country. The crisis had been brewing for months, and this coup was actually the second one attempted that year.
In the weeks and years to follow, hundreds would die at the hands of the military regime with many people, including the sister of a friend of mine, simply disappearing. Allende refused to surrender himself and instead killed himself with an AK47 that had been given to him by Fidel Castro. Augusto Pinochet would become the military ruler of the country until democracy was restored in 1990. Pinochet retired as commander of the Chilean Army in 1998.
As the Church Committee's report noted, the CIA did not initiate the coup or have a role in it, although the US has tended to be blamed for it. The Administration was not sympathetic to Allende's regime, so the conclusion was probably natural enough. Having said that, Allende had been in trouble for months and the coup was probably inevitable. The coup was positively received, if not openly, by many Western nations, which saw it as preventing a Chilean descent into Communist rule.
Dealing with the coup in Chile has been problematic, with the country never getting over, for obvious reasons, the large number of people who disappeared. At the same time, support for the coup itself has grown in recent years, although it is still a minority of Chileans who feel it was justified.
