The following events occurred in June 1965:
June 1, 1965 (Tuesday) An explosion at the coal mine in Fukuoka, Japan, killed 237 people. Another 280 miners were able to get out uninjured, while 36 were brought alive to the surface. The Molten-Salt Reactor Experiment (MSRE) reactor in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, first achieved criticality, with its uranium-235 fuel able to sustain a chain reaction on its own, marking the first time that the inherently safer MSR was proved to be practical. It would reach full power by May 23, 1966. It would continue to operate until March 26, 1968. Florida International University was founded in Miami. Elliott Roosevelt, the son of former President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, won his first, and only, political office, defeating incumbent Melvin J. Richard for the office of Mayor of Miami Beach, Florida. Marina Oswald, the widow of accused presidential assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, remarried a little more than 18 months after her husband's slaying. Eluding reporters who had learned of their engagement, she and an electronics worker, Kenneth Porter, got a license in the Dallas suburb of Sherman, Texas, drove to Durant, Oklahoma, to get a blood test, then were wed by a justice of the peace in Fate, Texas. Born: Larisa Lazutina, Russian cross-country skier, Olympic gold medalist in 1992, 1994, and 1998, and gold medalist in six world championships between 1987 and 2001; in Kondopoga, Karelian ASSR, Soviet Union Nigel Short, British chess grandmaster who lost to Garry Kasparov in the 1993 World Chess Championship; in Leigh Died: Earl "Curly" Lambeau, 67, American pro football player, coach and co-founder of the Green Bay Packers
June 2, 1965 (Wednesday) The first contingent of Australian combat troops to fight in the Vietnam War arrived in South Vietnam. A two-day-long series of storms, with winds as high as , dissipated after devastating the Barisal Division of East Pakistan (now Bangladesh). According to the investigation performed by the Pakistani government, the death toll from the second cyclone in less than a month was 12,047 after storm surges swept across the settlements near sea level. Deputy Sheriffs Oneal Moore and Creed Rogers, the first African-American deputies with the Washington Parish, Louisiana Sheriff's Office, were shot by the occupant of the bed of a pickup truck that pulled up alongside their patrol car. Moore was killed and Rogers was blinded in one eye. The FBI would continue investigating the shooting, believed to be racially motivated, into the 21st century, although the prime suspect, Ernest Ray McElveen, would die in 2003. Born: Steve Waugh and Mark Waugh, Australian cricketers, in Canterbury, New South Wales
June 3, 1965 (Thursday) In Japan, the Farmland Reward Bill took effect as 1965 Law 121, to compensate former landowners who had lost their property in the land reforms that had followed World War II. The bill authorized a fund of ¥145.6 billion Japanese yen ($400,000,000 US dollars) for payments over a ten-year period to 1,670,000 people who had owned land prior to 1945, or to their heirs.
Gemini 4, the second crewed and first long-duration mission in the Gemini program, was launched from complex 19 at Cape Kennedy at 11:16 a.m. Command pilot Astronaut James A. McDivitt and pilot Astronaut Edward H. White II were the crew. At 3:45 p.m., when the craft was making its third orbit and passing at an altitude of above the southern United States, White, using a hand-held maneuvering gun, became the first U.S. astronaut (and only the second person, after Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov had ventured outside Voskhod 2 on March 18) to walk in space. White stayed outside the capsule for 20 minutes as the ship moved at over the nation. Gemini 4 was the first mission to be controlled from the mission control center in Houston.
June 4, 1965 (Friday) Duane Earl Pope, a 22-year-old man who had graduated from McPherson College only a week earlier, committed what was called "the modern era's bloodiest bank robbery", murdering three people and critically wounding another. Pope, a resident of Salina, Kansas, drove to Big Springs, Nebraska, and walked into the Farmers State Bank at noon. There were no customers in the bank, but one of the four employees, a teller, pressed the button for the bank alarm. Pope then ordered the bank president, the teller, a bookkeeper, and another employee to lie face down on the floor, then shot all four in the back before escaping with $1,500. After a nationwide search that lasted a week, Pope called police in Kansas City, Missouri, and surrendered because he was "tired of running". Born: Mick Doohan, Australian motorcycle racer and five time 500 cc World Champion; in Gold Coast, Queensland