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19631776 Club

The Moscow-Washington hotline goes live; the first line is about a fox and a dog

A Cold War teleprinter link opens with a typing-test sentence, not a treaty term.

Ten months after the Cuban Missile Crisis, when a single Kremlin cable took nearly twelve hours to decode in Washington, the two superpowers had a faster channel between them. On August 30, 1963, the Moscow-Washington hotline went into operation, its Teletype circuit run from Washington through London, Copenhagen, Stockholm, and Helsinki to Moscow. The first message sent was not a warning or a demand but a printer's test: THE QUICK BROWN FOX JUMPED OVER THE LAZY DOG'S BACK 1234567890, transmitted in capital letters because the equipment had no lowercase. A Soviet diplomat, baffled, later asked the Secretary of State what the sentence meant…

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More from August 30
1945

MacArthur steps onto the tarmac at Atsugi, alone but for a corncob pipe

The newly named Supreme Commander arrives on an airfield American troops had held for only two days.
1983

Challenger lights up the pre-dawn sky on the shuttle program's first night launch

Guion Bluford rides along, becoming the first African American to fly in space.
1945

Four generals form a council to rule Germany; the German Army ceases to exist

Zhukov, Eisenhower, Montgomery and de Lattre de Tassigny sign in as Berlin's new governing body and outlaw the old uniform on the same day.
19671776 Club
Eleven weeks after Johnson named him in the Rose Garden, the vote clears the Senate floor.
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Read the full August 30 edition →Everything that happened on August 30 →
More from Cold War America
1950

Gaetjens heads it in; the US beats England, 1–0, in Belo Horizonte

Borghi shuts out the sport's reigning aristocracy; the American squad includes a hearse driver, a schoolteacher, and men who trained together exactly once.
1956

Eisenhower signs the highway act; 41,000 miles of interstate and $25 billion set in motion

The president who crossed the country on rutted Army roads in 1919 authorizes the largest public works project the nation has yet attempted.
1946

Blandy detonates the bomb over Bikini; the target fleet survives, and the Navy claims vindication

Test Able misses its aim point by 2,130 feet, scattering results that disappoint the Navy's critics but settle nothing about the weapon's power at sea.
1964

Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act; King watches as a year's promise becomes law

The bill survived 72 days of Senate delay to pass 73 to 27, outlawing discrimination by race, sex, religion, and national origin in schools, workplaces, and public accommodations.
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