Milestones: Tuesday, August 8, 2023

August 8, 2023 Brooklyn Eagle Staff

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FIRST TO RESIGN PRESIDENCY — President Richard M. Nixon, on Aug. 8, 1974, gave an evening televised address to the nation, announcing that he would be the first U.S. President to resign. His decision was hastened by pressure from public opinion and Congress’ impeachment proceedings underway against him for his involvement in the Watergate affair. The next day the 37th president, with First Lady Pat Nixon and family standing by him, thanked and bid farewell to his staff before he left the White House. Meanwhile, Vice President Gerald Ford was queued in the East Room to take the Oath of Office and become the 38th President.

Speaking to the American people for the last time from the Oval Office, Nixon said, “By taking this action, I hope that I will have hastened the start of the process of healing which is so desperately needed in America.”

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PROLIFIC IN ITALY AND THE STATES — DINO DE LAURENTIIS, born on Aug. 8, 1919 at Torre Annunziata (province of Naples) Italy, was a film producer, first in Europe for 30 years and then in the U.S., starting in 1976, and becoming a U.S. citizen ten years later. De Laurentiis for the next 35 years produced a wide range of Hollywood films, from Serpico, Blue Velvet, King Kong, Dune, and Manhunter. During the 1980s he had his own studio, De Laurentiis Entertainment Group (DEG), based in Wilmington, North Carolina, which turned that coastal town into a center of film and television production. Among his films were “Serpico,” and “Blue Velvet.” He was honored with the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award, which the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences awards periodically “to creative producers, whose bodies of work reflect a consistently high quality of motion picture production.” The award’s namesake, Irving Thalberg, was head of the Production Division of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

Before becoming a world-renowned film director, young Dino De Laurentiis spent his youth selling spaghetti made by his father’s pasta factory. During the 1980s, he opened DDL Foodshow, an Italian specialty culinary store with two Manhattan locations and one in Beverly Hills, California.

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FOILED SABOTAGE SCHEME ON U.S. LAND — Six German saboteurs who secretly entered the United States during World War II wound up instead being executed, on Aug. 8, 1942. Having lived in the U.S. before the war, the men were familiar with the Allied nation; their scheme was to attack and destroy its civil infrastructure, including industrial plants, bridges, railroads, waterworks and Jewish-owned department stores. However, an alert Coast Guardsman named John C. Cullen who was on patrol happened upon the saboteurs just after they had planted explosives in the sand off Amagansett, Long Island. Suspicious of them, he nonetheless played along by accepting a bribe from the German team leader, George Dasch, but then escaped in the dense fog to notify his superiors in the Coast Guard.

Turning himself in, Dasch cooperated with the U.S. authorities. However, six of the other saboteurs were executed in the electric chair.

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SOVIETS INVADE MANCHURIA — Even after World War II had ended in Europe in May 1945, it was rekindled between the Soviets and Japan, on Aug. 8, 1945 when the Soviet Union officially declared war on Japan. More than a million Soviet soldiers, in a surprise attack, poured into Japanese-occupied Manchuria, northeastern China, to fight the Japanese army which was at least 700,000-strong. Japan had underestimated the Soviets, believing them to be preoccupied with the German army on the Eastern Front. The Manchurian invasion was so fierce that 650 soldiers were killed or wounded within the first two days of fighting.

The Japanese also had not surrendered unconditionally to the Allies following Truman’s order to detonate the atomic bomb over Hiroshima on August 6. Instead, Japan’s Supreme War Direction Council demanded from the Allies guarantees for its future, particularly regarding Emperor Hirohito. The Aug. 9 Nagasaki bombing and the Manchurian invasion gave the War Direction Council cause to reconsider its refusal.

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FRANCE HAD TO INTERVENE — One of the many conflicts in which the Soviet Union and Russia have more recently been involved was the brief Russo-Georgian War, which broke out on Aug. 8, 2008. What Russia was calling a “peace enforcement operation,” Georgia, which had been a former Soviet republic until the 1991 breakup, considered a violent takeover. That war lasted four days until Nicolas Sarkozy, then the French president, negotiated a ceasefire agreement. Falsely accusing Georgia of genocide, Russia and allies from the territories of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, launched a full-scale land, air and sea invasion of Georgia, including its undisputed territory. Complicating the situation was President George W. Bush’s announcement of support for Georgia and Ukraine to become members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a move that Russia considered hostile.

Russia in 2014 annexed the Crimea, and in 2022 invaded neighboring country Ukraine, in a war that is ongoing as of August 2023.

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THIRD WOMAN TO JOIN SCOTUS — On August 8, 2009, Sonia Sotomayor, the first Hispanic justice to serve on the nation’s highest court, was sworn in as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court. The Bronx-born Sotomayor’s parents were from Puerto Rico; her father died when she was nine. She later said that her inspiration to become a judge began with her watching the CBS legal drama Perry Mason. Sotomayor received a scholarship to Princeton University and then earned her Juris Doctor degree from Yale Law School. She was President Barack Obama’s first nominee for the Supreme Court after he took office in 2009, and the third woman named to the highest court’s bench. The next year, Justice Elena Kagan became the fourth woman to join the Supreme Court.

During her time at Princeton, Sotomayor advocated on behalf of the school’s minority communities.

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ICE OFFERS CLUE INTO GLOBAL WARMING — The term “global warming” is 48 years old, having first appeared in print on August 8, 1975. Wallace Smith Broecker’s paper, titled “Climatic Change: Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming?” was published in the journal Science. As a researcher at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Broecker had in 1970, published a study of ocean sediment cores that revealed the Ice Age had seen rapid transitions in its climate, with ice sheets thousands of years in the making melted during sudden warm periods. Broecker posited that the Ice Age’s rapid fluctuations had been caused by changes in “thermohaline circulation”: the ocean currents and wind systems that transport heat from the equator and cold water toward it. Broecker’s sense of global warming trends is still relevant; in 2017 another Columbia University publication reported that as the planet warms, there was a faster increase of fresh water into the salt-rich oceans.

As Broecker expressed in 1998, “the climate system is an angry beast and we are poking it with sticks.”

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TRUMAN SIGNS U.N. CHARTER — President Harry S. Truman on August 8, 1945 signed the United Nations Charter, thus making the United States the first nation to complete the ratification process. Leaders and citizenries alike hoped that the United Nations would serve as a stronger arbiter of international disputes than had the League of Nations. The major World War II victors, in addition to the U.S., who had drafted the charter and then ratified it, were Great Britain, France, the Soviet Union and China — called the Big Five. These five nations were granted permanent seats on the U.N. Security Council. However, within its ranks, the Security Council wound up having to arbitrate several disputes involving the Soviet Union, now the Russian Federation.

The charter also provided for non-permanent seats on the Security Council. Those seats are filled by nations that are elected to serve for two-year stints on a rotating basis, with member countries coming from five regions: Africa, Asia/Pacific, Eastern Europe, Western Europe/other and Latin America/Caribbean. Currently, the 10 non-permanent members are Gabon, Ghana and Mozambique (Africa); United Arab Emirates and Japan (Asia); Albania (eastern Europe); Brazil and Ecuador (Latin America) and Malta and Switzerland (Western Europe).

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TRANSFORMED — Elder Brigham Young on August 8, 1844, was chosen to be the next leader of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints after his predecessors, Joseph Smith and his brother, were murdered by an angry mob six weeks earlier. The Smith brothers were considered the fathers of Mormonism. But Young had fierce competition in Sidney Rigdon, then 53 and the lone survivor of the church’s First Presidency. Somehow, Young, then 43, became president of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles and argued that this Quorum of Twelve Apostles wielded the true authority and that he should be president.

There were people present who attested to witnessing Brigham Young actually transform into Joseph Smith, both resembling and sounding like the slain founder of Mormonism. Brigham Young wound up winning the election.

See previous milestones, here.