After months of maintaining his innocence, Agnew pleaded no contest to a single felony charge of tax evasion and resigned from office. Nixon replaced him with House Republican leader Gerald Ford. Agnew spent the remainder of his life quietly, rarely making public appearances.
Gerald Ford (center) was sworn in as Vice President. Ford, the longtime House Minority Leader, was selected as VP by Richard Nixon (far right) after the resignation of Spiro Agnew. Ford would become president eight months later when Nixon himself resigned.
On this day in 1968, North Korea seized the U.S. Navy ship Pueblo, charging it had intruded into the nation’s territorial waters on a spying mission. The crew was released 11 months later.
The Pueblo’s mission began in early January, 1968, when the crew set off from the U.S. Navy base on Yokosuka, Japan with orders to conduct surveillance on Soviet Navy and North Korean signal and electronic intelligence activity.
The captured crew (above) were beaten and nearly starved in the incident that almost led to another war.
Pueblo on display in North Korea, 2012.
North Koreans raise their fists during a rally in 2010 in front of the U.S. Navy spy ship Pueblo.
On this day in 1977, the TV mini-series "Roots," began airing on ABC. The show was based on the Alex Haley novel. Roots received 37 Primetime Emmy Award nominations and won nine. It also won a Golden Globe and a Peabody Award. It received unprecedented Nielsen ratings for the finale, which still holds a record as the third-highest-rated episode for any type of television series, and the second-most watched overall series finale in U.S. television history.
LeVar Burton as Kunta Kinte, a warrior of the Mandinka people in Gambia who is captured by slavers and taken to Annapolis, Md.
John William Carson(October 23, 1925 – January 23, 2005)
On this day in 1963, Dallas nightclub owner Jack Ruby (below) shot and killed Lee Harvey Oswald live on national television.
The pistol that Jack Ruby used to kill Lee Harvey Oswald.
It was on November 22, two days before the shooting of Oswald.
On this day in 1971, hijacker Dan Cooper, known as D.B. Cooper, parachuted from a Northwest Airlines 727 over Washington state with $200,000 in ransom money.
On October 10, 1973, after months of maintaining his innocence, Agnew pleaded no contest to a single felony charge of tax evasion and resigned from office. He was replaced by House Minority Leader Gerald Ford (below).
Gerald Ford (center) was sworn in as Vice President Ford.
George Orson Welles (May 6, 1915 – October 10, 1985)
Wells is best remembered for the legendary 1938 radio broadcast of “The War of the Worlds’’, and in film, Citizen Kane (1941), consistently ranked as one of the greatest films ever made.
