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THIS WEEK IN PEOPLE’S HISTORY, JAN 28-FEB 3, 2026  
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_ An Endless Coverup (1986), Genocide’s the Real Crime (1996),
Whites Kill, Blacks Do Time (1966), Andrew Jackson, Ahead of His Time
(1834), How Did President Wilson Sleep? (1921), Wars Kill, But Mum’s
the Word (1991), John Kennedy, Movie Fan (1961) _

Courtesy of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, NASA

 

_IS THIS 40-YEAR-OLD COVERUP STILL IN PROGRESS?_

JANUARY 28 IS THE 40TH ANNIVERSARY of the catastrophic failure of the
Space Shuttle Challenger and the beginning of an official cover-up
that might still be going on.

The main fuel tank of the Space Shuttle exploded 73 seconds after
launch, destroying the Shuttle and killing all seven astronauts. The
televised launch was being watched by an enormous audience, including
some 2.5 million U.S. students. The large school-age audience was
watching because one of those on board the Shuttle was a high-school
school teacher who had been recruited to be the first “Teacher in
Space” and conduct science lessons from orbit to foster interest in
space exploration.

As soon as the Shuttle, which was easy to see because it was only nine
miles up in a clear, blue sky, disappeared in a ball of smoke and
flame, several observers had a very good idea of what had gone
wrong.  The Shuttle’s 530,000-gallon fuel tank had exploded, almost
certainly because it had been heated by a leak of super-hot gasses
from one of the Shuttle’s two solid-fuel booster rockets.

Some of the people who immediately understood what had happened had
been directly involved in an angry debate a half day earlier about
whether the Shuttle could be launched safely. They had argued that a
launch would be unacceptably dangerous, because Florida was
experiencing an unusual cold snap and the Shuttle was not designed to
operate in sub-40-degree weather, but after hours of back-and-forth,
their objections had been rejected by NASA managers.

On the day of the disaster, the cover-up began. At first, the cover-up
concerned the reason for the explosion, which, even though it was
obvious to the men who had said the launch was too dangerous, took
more than a month of investigation and hearings to show that NASA
managers had been flat wrong to reject the advice of experienced
engineers.

When the presidentially appointed Rogers Commission began its
investigation, NASA officials kept mum about the pre-launch argument
concerning safety and claimed they had no idea what might have caused
the explosion.

It took more than a month for the Rogers Commission to discover a
senior truth-telling engineer to testify. Then Allan McDonald, a
high-level engineer at Thiokol, the company that built the Shuttle’s
solid-rocket boosters, and who was also Thiokol’s representative at
Cape Kennedy, revealed that he and other senior engineers had been
completely opposed to the launch because of the unprecedentedly cold
weather. 

McDonald was the first witness to speak frankly about the effect of
cold weather on the performance of rubber gaskets, known as O-rings,
that were designed to seal the joints in the Shuttle’s solid-rocket
boosters. McDonald knew that the O-rings had to be flexible to work
properly, and that low temperatures reduced their flexibility. No one
could say exactly _how_ cold was _too_ cold, but McDonald had been
certain that it was too cold that morning for the Shuttle to fly
safely.

On the day before the launch, when McDonald told a flight-readiness
meeting his opinion that a safe launch that day was impossible, NASA
managers mocked him, asking him, must we put the launch on hold until
April? 

It was, as McDonald testified, unlike any other flight-readiness
meeting he had participated in. McDonald testified: “I've been in
many flight readiness reviews, probably as many as anyone in the past
year and a half at Thiokol. And I've had to get up and stand before, I
think, a very critical audience, . . .  justifying why our hardware
was ready to fly. . . . It's been that way through all the reviews
I've ever had. And that's the way it should be. . . . And I was
surprised here at this particular meeting that the tone of the meeting
was just opposite of that.”

Roger Boisjoly, another Thiokol engineer in the flight-readiness
meeting put it this way in his testimony: “This was a meeting where
the determination was to launch and it was up to us to prove beyond a
shadow of a doubt that it was not safe to do so. This is an entire
reverse to what the position usually is in a pre-flight conversation
or flight readiness review.”

In fact, there had been 24 successful Shuttle launches before the
Challenger disaster; exactly eight of them launched on the date and
time scheduled; another eight had launched late, but within 26 hours
of the scheduled time; and eight had launched between two and 74 days
late. Every one of the 2-days-plus delays had been due to unresolved
safety concerns.

After McDonald and Boisjoly testified and the Rogers Commission knew
where to look, it found plentiful evidence that the explosion had been
caused by hot gas leaking past a cold and relatively inflexible
O-ring. 

That left the Rogers Commission with an obvious follow-up question:
why had NASA managers behaved completely uncharacteristically during
that fatal flight-readiness meeting, requiring incontrovertible proof
that safety concerns were valid instead of proof that safety concerns
were mistaken?

The answer to that question is the real explanation of what happened
to the Challenger and why. Forty years later, it remains a
mystery. [link removed]

 

 

_IT’S NOT A CRIME TO DAMAGE A WEAPON OF GENOCIDE_

JANUARY 29 IS THE 30TH ANNIVERSARY of a break-in to an English
aircraft storage facility by three members of the Seeds of Hope East
Timor Ploughshares Group. Three anti-genocide activists, all of them
women, attacked a brand-new fighter jet with carpenters’ hammers,
causing more than $2 million in damage.

The target of the 1996 attack was a jet that was being prepared for
sale to the Indonesian military for use in their genocidal war against
the people of East Timor. When the activists had done what they could
to render the jet useless, their presence in the hangar had not yet
been detected, so they telephoned security in order to take full
responsibility for the action.

The three were arrested, as was a fourth member of the group who had
helped plan the break-in but had not been part of the attacking squad.
The four were charged with criminal damage and conspiracy and held in
pre-trial detention for six months, after which they were tried by a
jury in Liverpool.

Faced with the possibility of serving 10 years in prison, the four
pled not guilty on the ground they “were acting to prevent British
Aerospace and the British Government from aiding and abetting
genocide.” The jury acquitted them because it deemed their action
reasonable under the UK’s Genocide Act of 1969, a law that gave
effect to the UN’s Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of
the Crime of Genocide. [link removed]

 

 

_WHITES KILL, BUT BLACKS DO TIME (1966)_

JANUARY 30 IS THE 60TH ANNIVERSARY of the publication of a report
showing that there had recently been an increase in the number of
civil-rights related murders in the southern U.S. The report,
published by the Atlanta-based Southern Regional Council, detailed 20
murders during the 13 months ending in January 1966, making 1965 an
unusually bloody year for those with connections with the struggle
against Jim Crow.

Seven of the 1965 slayings occurred in Alabama, four in Mississippi,
two each in Georgia and Louisiana and one each in Arkansas and South
Carolina.

According to the 1966 report, 17 of the murder victims had been Black
and three had been White. The report compared the murder statistics to
those it had collected for previous years: 14 murders in 1964, 13 in
1963, four in 1962, three in 1961, six in 1960, four in 1959, nine in
1958, three in 1957, seven in 1956 and six in 1955.     

Almost all of the tabulated killings had been committed by White
southerners, according to the report. Despite the fact that Whites
were the killers in the vast majority of cases, the statistics also
showed that a total of five Whites and four Blacks had been sentenced
to prison for any of the 85
killings. [link removed]  

 

_NO WONDER TRUMP ADMIRES ANDREW JACKSON _

JANUARY 31 IS THE 192ND ANNIVERSARY of the arrival of two companies
of U.S. Army troops in Williamsport, Maryland, where they began a
2-month deployment as strike-breakers. They had been dispatched by
President Andrew Jackson, who was using his authority under the
Insurrection Act, the same law that President Trump refers to so
often, but has yet to put into play.

It was the first time in U.S. history that the federal military had
been given orders to break a strike.

The 1834 strike of workers on the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal was quickly
suppressed, but the troops remained on-scene for more than eight weeks
to insure that the government-imposed labor peace prevailed. 

It is notable that Jackson took the unprecedented step of ordering
federal troops to break a strike to come to the assistance of John
Eaton, the president of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal Company, who
just happened to be Jackson’s bosom friend and Jackson’s former
Secretary of
War.  [link removed]

 

 

_IF ANYONE NEEDS A PARDON, IT’S PRESIDENT WILSON_

FEBRUARY 1 IS THE 105TH ANNIVERSARY of Eugene Debs fiery denunciation
of President Woodrow Wilson’s decision to refuse to pardon Debs from
serving 10 years in the penitentiary. Debs’ crime was to have
allegedly “incited insubordination, disloyalty, and obstruction of
military recruitment,” all violations of the “Espionage Act.”

After Wilson’s 1921 decision was announced, Debs wrote, and widely
distributed: _“I may be in prison, but unlike the man who keeps me
here, I am not an exile from my own country. . . . I understand
perfectly the feelings of Wilson. When he reviews what he has done,
when he realizes the suffering that he has brought about, then he is
being punished. It is he, not I, who needs a pardon. If I had it in my
power I would give him the pardon which would set him free._

_“Woodrow Wilson is an exile from the hearts of his people. The
betrayal of his ideas makes him the most pathetic figure in the world.
No man in public life in American history ever retired so thoroughly
discredited, so scathingly rebuked, so overwhelmingly impeached and
repudiated as Woodrow Wilson. . . . _

_“I shall remain faithful to my ideals of democracy to my last
heartbeat. I was sent here for my convictions and I shall leave here
with them. I hope Mr. Wilson sleeps as easily and with as clear a
conscience in the White House as I do in the
penitentiary.”_ [link removed]

 

 

_WARS KILL, BUT MUM’S THE WORD_

FEBRUARY 2 IS THE 35TH ANNIVERSARY of the Pentagon’s ban on news
reporting or photographs of the arrival in the U.S. of the remains of
military personnel killed in the Gulf War. 

It seemed that in 1991 the Department of Defense decided that
photographs and descriptions of planeloads of flag-draped coffins was
more than the U.S. public could bear. Or could it have been that the
government was trying to hide the human cost of war?

The ban on such news coverage remained in place until February
2009.   [link removed]

 

 

_JOHN F. KENNEDY, MOVIE FAN_

FEBRUARY 3 IS THE 65TH ANNIVERSARY of President John Kennedy going to
a movie theater near the White House on a weekday afternoon to watch
the film Spartacus. While it was unusual for a sitting President to
see a film in theater with members of the general public, Kennedy’s
trip to the theater was really exceptional because the anti-communist
right wing, including the American Legion, was actively boycotting
Spartacus and denouncing those who ignored the boycott. 

The inspiration for the 1961 boycott was that the screenplay for
Spartacus was written by Dalton Trumbo, who had spent 11 months in
prison for his 1948 refusal to testify about his political
associations to the House Un-American Activities Committee. After
serving his time, Trumbo, like hundreds of other left-leaning workers
in the film industry, was blacklisted and prevented from working in
Hollywood. In addition, the movie was based on a novel written by
Howard Fast, who had also served time in prison to punish him for
having been a Communist. 

Spartacus, the film, gave full credit to Trumbo for having written the
screenplay, which was the first time in more than 10 years that a
major film studio had ignored the blacklisters’ antagonism to the
left. Giving credit to Trumbo was like a crack in a dam; it presaged a
flood of defiance that soon wiped the blacklist out.

Kennedy ignored the American Legion’s cries of “shame,” but he
never suggested he had ignored the boycott as a matter of principle.
His explanation for the visit to the theater was that he was a Kirk
Douglass fan and he wanted to see the film projected in 70 millimeter
format, which was not possible in the White House screening
room. [link removed]
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For more People's History,
visithttps://www.facebook.com/jonathan.bennett.7771/

* NASA
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* Indonesian genocide
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* Jury nullification
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* Racist violence USA
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* Andrew Jackson
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* Eugene Debs
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* Espionage Act of 1917
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* Hollywood Blacklist
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