4. April

The first president to die in office, in the White House, of an illness his doctors called pneumonia. The Constitution was unclear whether the vice president became president or only took on the powers and duties.

The first vice president to succeed. After he vetoed their bank bills, his whole cabinet but Daniel Webster resigned and the Whigs expelled him from the party in September 1841.

Read to two meetings in the Tauride Palace, then printed in Pravda on 7 April: no support for the Provisional Government, no “revolutionary defencism”, all power to the soviets. Most Bolshevik leaders thought them mad at first; within three weeks a party conference adopted them.

A small garrison held the hill town on the road to India against a Japanese division. The fiercest fighting was hand to hand across the tennis court of the Deputy Commissioner’s bungalow, whose lines are still marked in the war cemetery there.

“Can’t Buy Me Love”, “Twist and Shout”, “She Loves You”, “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and “Please Please Me”: the whole top five of the Hot 100 on one week’s chart, and 12 songs in the top hundred.

A year to the day before his assassination, King broke with Johnson in a sermon at Riverside Church, calling his government “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today”. Much of the press and the civil rights leadership condemned him.

At 6:01 in the evening he was shot as he stood on the balcony outside room 306 of the Lorraine Motel, and he died at St. Joseph’s Hospital about an hour later. He was 39. Unrest broke out in more than 100 cities. James Earl Ray pleaded guilty in 1969. The motel is now the National Civil Rights…

On the first flight of an airlift of orphans to the United States, the transport’s rear doors blew out and it came down near Tân Sơn Nhứt. About 138 people died, 78 of them children. The airlift carried on and flew out thousands of children.

ChallengerSpace Shuttle Challenger

OV-099, begun as a structural test article and rebuilt to fly. In 10 missions it carried the first American woman in space, the first African American, the first American woman to walk in space and the first untethered spacewalk, and made the first landing in Florida.