June 6, 1976 – The World This Week – CBS Radio – Gordon Skene Sound Collection –
June 6, 1976, a Sunday in 1976 which capped off a week of tragedies, intrigues and scandals.
Starting off with news of the Teton Dam collapse in Idaho, causing mass flooding and at least one death. The collapse was reported to have been caused by an earthquake, which environmentalists warned would happen if an earthen dam such as the Teton was constructed near a fault in the earth subject to earthquake activity. The dam burst, inundating several hundred square miles in water and drowning untold numbers of livestock and several people in its wake.
The Middle-East was in the news this week as Syrian troops marched into Lebanon, this time as peacekeepers between warring Christian and Muslim factions, who had been fighting for 14 months around the Capitol of Beirut.
Britain and Iceland reached a settlement in what became know as “the Cod War“. Government leaders in both London and Rejyevik congratulated each other on reaching the compromise, but critics were less charitable; leftists called it a “sellout to NATO” and British fishermen accused London of caving in to Icelandic demands to fewer trawlers and tighter restrictions inside Iceland’s self-declared 200 mile zone.
The 1976 Presidential Primaries officially end on June 8th, 1976, but Minnesota Senator Hubert Humphrey indicated he might enter the race as an eleventh hour candidate.
And Ohio Congressman Wayne Hayes tended his resignation to the Democratic Congressional Committee over the Elizabeth Ray uproar. Ray was the central figure in a much publicized Sex Scandal involving Hayes, who had put her on the Congressional Payroll for some 2 years before the scandal broke. Ray admitted her actual job duties were providing sexual favors for Hayes and that, by her own admission; “couldn’t type, couldn’t file and couldn’t even answer the phone” when she began working for Hayes in 1972. Ray later detailed the odyssey in a tell-all book; The Washington Fringe Benefit.
And that’s just a sample of what happened this week, which ended on June 6, 1976 as reported on CBS Radio’s World This Week.
