TODAY IN HISTORY

On March 22, 1968, President Lyndon B. Johnson announced that Gen. William C. Westmoreland, the commander of American forces in Vietnam, would leave that post to become the U.S. Army's new Chief of Staff. Students at the University of Nanterre in suburban Paris occupied the school's administration building in a prelude to massive protests in France that began the following May. The first Red Lobster restaurant opened in Lakeland, Florida.

On this date:

In 1312, Pope Clement V issued a papal bull ordering dissolution of the Order of the Knights Templar.

In 1638, religious dissident Anne Hutchinson was expelled from the Massachusetts Bay Colony for defying Puritan orthodoxy.

In 1765, the British Parliament passed the Stamp Act to raise money from the American colonies, which fiercely resisted the tax. (The Stamp Act was repealed a year later.)

In 1894, hockey's first Stanley Cup championship game was played; home team Montreal defeated Ottawa, 3-1.

In 1929, a U.S. Coast Guard vessel sank a Canadian- registered schooner, the I'm Alone, which was suspected of carrying bootleg liquor, in the Gulf of Mexico.

In 1933, during Prohibition, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed a measure to make wine and beer containing up to 3.2 percent alcohol legal.

In 1941, the Grand Coulee hydroelectric dam in Washington state officially went into operation.

In 1958, movie producer Mike Todd, the husband of actress Elizabeth Taylor, and three other people were killed in the crash of Todd's private plane near Grants, New Mexico.

In 1978, Karl Wallenda, the 73- year- old patriarch of "The Flying Wallendas" high-wire act, fell to his death while attempting to walk a cable strung between two hotel towers in San Juan, Puerto Rico.

In 1988, both houses of Congress overrode President Ronald Reagan's veto of the Civil Rights Restoration Act.

In 1991, high school instructor Pamela Smart, accused of recruiting her teenage lover and his friends to kill her husband, Gregory, was convicted in Exeter, New Hampshire, of murder- conspiracy and being an accomplice to murder and was sentenced to life in prison without parole.

In 1992, 27 people were killed when a USAir Fokker F28 jetliner bound for Cleveland crashed on takeoff from New York's LaGuardia Airport; 24 people survived.

Ten years ago: Vice President Dick Cheney, visiting the Middle East, said the U.S. had an "enduring and unshakable" commitment to Israel's security and its right to defend itself against those bent on destroying the Jewish state.