World Events
Population: 3.345 billion
The first US combat troops arrive in Vietnam. By the end of the year, 190,000 American soldiers are in Vietnam. Background: Vietnam War
US Marines land in the Dominican Republic as fighting persists between rebels and Dominican army (April 28).
France withdraws its Atlantic fleet from NATO.
Rhodesia unilaterally declares its independence from Britain (Nov. 11).
U.S. Events
President: Lyndon B. Johnson
Vice President: Hubert H. Humphrey
Population: 194,302,963
Life expectancy: 70.2 years
Violent Crime Rate (per 1,000): 24.5
Property Crime Rate (per 1,000): 22.5
Homicide Rate (per 100,000): 5.5
Economics
US GDP (1998 dollars): $719.1 billion
Federal spending: $118.23 billion
Federal debt: $322.3 billion
Consumer Price Index: 31.5
Unemployment: 5.2%
Cost of a first-class stamp: $0.05
Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and more than 2,600 others arrested in Selma, Ala., during demonstrations against voter-registration rules (Feb. 1). Background: Civil Rights
Malcolm X, black-nationalist leader, shot to death at Harlem rally (Feb. 21).
Blacks riot for six days in Watts section of Los Angeles: 34 dead, over 1,000 injured, nearly 4,000 arrested (Aug. 11-16).
Sports
World Series
LA Dodgers d. Minnesota (4-3)
NBA Championship
Boston d. LA Lakers (4-1)
Stanley Cup
Montreal d. Chicago (4-3)
Wimbledon
Women: Margaret Smith d. M. Bueno (6-4 7-5)
Men: Roy Emerson d. F. Stolle (6-2 6-4 6-4)
Kentucky Derby Champion
Lucky Debonair
NCAA Basketball Championship
UCLA d. Michigan (91-80)
NCAA Football Champions
Alabama (AP, FW-tie) (9-1-1) & Michigan St. (UPI, NFF, FW-tie) (10-1-0)
Entertainment
Pulitzer Prizes
Fiction: The Keepers of the House, Shirley Ann Grau
Drama: The Subject Was Roses, Frank D. Gilroy
Oscars awarded in 1965
Academy Award, Best Picture: My Fair Lady, Jack L. Warner, producer (Warner Bros.)
Nobel Prize for Literature: Mikhail Sholokhov (USSR)
rammy Awards
Record of the Year: The Girl From Ipanema - Stan Getz and Astrud Gilberto
Album of the Year: Getz/Gilberto - Stan Getz and Joao Gilberto (Verve)
Song of the Year: "Hello, Dolly!" -Jerry Herman, songwriter
Miss America: Vonda Kay Van Dyke (AZ)
The Sound of Music film premieres. An instant hit, the film was one of the top-grossing films of 1965 and remains one of film's most popular musicals.
ABC pays an unprecedented $32 million for a four-year contract with the NCAA to broadcast football games on Saturday afternoons.
Bill Cosby, starring in I Spy, becomes the first African American to headline a television show.
Movies
Dr. Zhivago, The Sound of Music, A Thousand Clowns, Darling
Books
James Baldwin, Going to Meet the Man
Amiri Baraka, The Dead Lecturer
Heinrich Böll, The Clown
Alex Haley, The Autobiography of Malcolm X
Peter Matthiessen, At Play in the Fields of the Lord
Ralph Nader, Unsafe at Any Speed
Sylvia Plath, Ariel, The Uncollected Poems
Eudora Welty, Thirteen Stories
Science
Nobel Prizes in Science
Chemistry: Robert B. Woodward (US), for work in synthesizing complicated organic compounds
Physics: Richard P. Feynman, Julian S. Schwinger (both US), and Shinichiro Tomonaga (Japan), for research in quantum electrodynamics
Physiology or Medicine: François Jacob, André Lwolff, and Jacques Monod (all France), for study of regulatory activities in body cells
Arno A. Penzias and Robert W. Wilson's (US) discovery of cosmic background radiation confirms the "Big Bang" theory. Background: Astronomy
Early Bird, the first commercial communications satellite, is launched.
Wally Schirra and Thomas Stafford aboard Gemini VI perform the first rendezvous with another spacecraft,
Gemini VII, with Frank Borman and James Lovell. Background: US Staffed Space Flights
Soviet cosmonaut Aleksei Leonov performs the first spacewalk (Mar. 18). Edward White II becomes the first American to walk in space (June 3).
Deaths
Winston Churchill
Nat King Cole
T.S. Eliot
Adlai Stevenson