News Highlights of 1972: The Year I Was Born

• The Coca-Cola Bottling Company recalls 3 million cans of Coke because some of the aluminum lids are found to be contaminated.
• The Winter Olympics are held in Sapporo, Japan.
• Germany pays $5 million to hijackers of a jumbo jet for the release of passengers held hostage.
• President Nixon becomes the first U.S. president to visit China.
• The Pioneer 10 spacecraft takes a 21-month journey to Jupiter, beaming back to earth detailed photos of the planet and its moons.
• President Nixon becomes the first U.S. president to visit Moscow. He spends one week there in talks with Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev.
• Alabama Governor George Wallace, a controversial presidential candidate because of his white supremacist sympathies, is shot by a sniper and paralyzed from the waist down but plans to continue his quest for the White House.
• Five burgulars are charged with breaking into the Washington, D.C., office of the Democratic National Committee, located in the Watergate complex.
• President Nixon orders the biggest ever bombing raid on North Vietnam.
• South Dakota Senator George McGovern chooses Sargent Shriver as his vice-presidential running mate on the Democratic ticket.
• Arabs massacre 11 Israeli athletes at the Summer Olympics in Munich, West Germany. The Olympic flag flies at half mast.
• American swimmer Mark Spitz wins a record seven gold medals at the Munich Olympics.
• President Nixon and Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko sign a strategic arms limitation treaty.
• Richard Nixon wins a second term in the White House.