TODAY IN HISTORY

TUESDAY OCT 12, 2021

2000

17 sailors were killed in a suicide bomb attack on the destroyer USS Cole in Yemen.

1792

The first recorded U.S. celebration of Columbus Day was held to mark the tricentennial of Christopher Columbus’ landing.

1933

Bank robber John Dillinger escaped from a jail in Allen County, Ohio, with the help of his gang, who killed the sheriff, Jess Sarber.

1942

During World War II, American naval forces defeated the Japanese in the Battle of Cape Esperance. Attorney General Francis Biddle announced during a Columbus Day celebration at Carnegie Hall in New York that Italian nationals in the United States would no longer be considered enemy aliens.

1973

President Richard Nixon nominated House minority leader Gerald R. Ford of Michigan to succeed Spiro T. Agnew as vice president.

1976

It was announced in China that Hua Guofeng had been named to succeed the late Mao Zedong as chairman of the Communist Party; it was also announced that Mao’s widow and three others, known as the “Gang of Four,” had been arrested.

1984

British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher escaped an attempt on her life when an Irish Republican Army bomb exploded at a hotel in Brighton, England, killing five people.

1986

The superpower meeting in Reykjavik, Iceland, ended in stalemate, with President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev unable to agree on arms control or a date for a full-fledged summit in the United States.

1997

Singer John Denver was killed in the crash of his privately built aircraft in Monterey Bay, California; he was 53.

2002

Bombs blamed on al-qaidalinked militants destroyed a nightclub on the Indonesian island of Bali, killing 202 people, including 88Australians and seven Americans.