Today in History: March 14, John McCain freed from POW camp
Today is Friday, March 14, the 73rd day of 2025. There are 292 days left in the year.
Today in history:
On March 14, 1973, future U.S. senator and presidential candidate John McCain was released from North Vietnamese captivity after being held as a prisoner of war for over five years.
Also on this date:
In 1794, Eli Whitney received a patent for his cotton gin, an invention that revolutionized the American cotton industry.
In 1879, Albert Einstein, who would revolutionize physics and the human understanding of the universe, was born in Ulm, Germany.In 1964, a jury in Dallas found Jack Ruby guilty of murdering Lee Harvey Oswald, the accused assassin of President John F. Kennedy, and sentenced Ruby to death. (Both the conviction and death sentence were overturned, but Ruby died before he could be retried.)
In 1967, the body of President John F. Kennedy was moved from a temporary grave to a permanent memorial site at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia.
In 1980, a LOT Polish Airlines jet crashed while attempting to land in Warsaw, killing all 87 people aboard, including 22 athletes and staff members of the U.S. boxing team.
In 2015, Robert Durst, a wealthy eccentric linked to two killings and his wife’s disappearance, was arrested by the FBI in New Orleans on a murder warrant a day before HBO aired the final episode of a serial documentary about his life. (Durst would be convicted in the shooting death of his friend, Susan Berman; he died in January 2022 while serving a life sentence in California.)
In 2018, Stephen Hawking, the best-known theoretical physicist of his time, died at his home in Cambridge, England, at the age of 76 after living with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) for 55 years.
Today’s Birthdays:
- Actor Michael Caine is 92.
- Country musician Michael Martin Murphey is 80.
- Actor-comedian Billy Crystal is 77.
- Country singer Kristian Bush is 55.
- Actor Betsy Brandt is 52.
- Actor Grace Park is 51.
- Actor Corey Stoll is 49.
- Actor Chris Klein is 46.
- Actor Jamie Bell is 39.
- NBA star Stephen Curry is 37.
- Actor Ansel Elgort is 31.
- Olympic gymnastics gold medalist Simone Biles is 28.