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Top Song(s)
• Frank Sinatra - Strangers in the Night
• Nancy Sinatra - These Boots Are Made For Walking
• The Beach Boys - Good Vibrations
• The Beatles - Paperback Writer
• The Rolling Stones - Paint it Black
Top Film(s)
• The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
• Persona
• Andrei Rublev
• The Battle of Algiers
• Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Best Selling Book(s)
• Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead - Tom Stoppard
• In Cold Blood - Truman Capote
• Flowers for Algernon - Daniel Keyes
• The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress - Robert A. Heinlein
• Fantastic Voyage - Isaac Asimov
Famous Deaths
• January 1 – Vincent Auriol, French politician, President of France
• March 12 – Nestor Guillén, Bolivian politician, 40th President of Bolivia
• April 23 – George Ohsawa, Japanese dietist, founder of Macrobiotics
• May 15 - Venceslau Bras, 9th President of Brazil, leader in World War I
• June 20 – Georges Lemaître, Belgian priest and astrophysicist
• July 2 - John the Wonderworker, Chinese Orthodox bishop, American archbishop and saint
• August 24 - Vicente Mejía Colindres, 29th President of Honduras
• September 6 - Hendrik Verwoerd, 2nd Prime Minister of South Africa
• October 18 – Elizabeth Arden, Canadian-born American beautician and cosmetics entrepreneur
• December 15 – Walt Disney, American animated film producer and founder of The Walt Disney Company
Medical/Science/Technology
• The first live specimen of a mountain pygmy possum, previously known only from the fossil record, is discovered.
• While waiting at a bus stop Ralph H. Baer, writes the basic principles for creating a video game.
• Martin Richards designs the BCPL programming language.
• Walter C. Pitman and James Heirtzler present the "magic" Eltanin marine magnetic anomaly profile.
• David Mumford introduces Mumford–Tate groups.
• Chen Jingrun publishes Chen's theorem.
• An artificial heart is installed in the chest of Marcel DeRudder in a Houston, Texas, hospital.
• Long-term potentiation (LTP), the putative cellular mechanism of learning and memory, is first observed.
• Andreas Rett first describes Rett syndrome.
• First proposals for optical fiber communication presented by Charles K. Kao with George Hockham.
Political
• January 12 - President Lyndon Johnson states that the U.S. should stay in South Vietnam until Communist aggression there is ended.
• March 7 – French president Charles De Gaulle asks President Lyndon B. Johnson for negotiations about NATO equipment in France.
• March 8 – Vietnam War: U.S. announces it will substantially increase its number of troops in Vietnam.
• March 21 – The Supreme Court rules that the English novel Fanny Hill does not meet the Roth Standard for obscenity.
• May 25 – In St. Louis, Missouri, U.S. Vice-president Hubert Humphrey and Stewart Udall dedicate the Gateway Arch.
• June 13 – The Supreme Court of the U.S. rules that the police must inform suspects of their rights before questioning them.
• October 15 - President Lyndon B. Johnson signs a bill creating the United States Department of Transportation.
• October 15 - The U.S. Congress passes a bill for the creation of Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore.
• October 21 – The AFL-NFL merger in football is approved by the U.S. Congress.
• November 2 – The Cuban Adjustment Act comes into force.
National
• January 2 – 1966 New York City transit strike.
• January 11 – The first SR-71 Blackbird reconnaissance aircraft goes into service at Beale AFB.
• February 28 – U.S. astronauts Charles Bassett and Elliot See are killed in a plane crash in St. Louis, Missouri.
• April 19 – Bobbi Gibb becomes the first woman to run the Boston Marathon.
• May 16 - In New York City, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. makes his first public speech on the Vietnam War.
• June 6 – Civil rights activist James Meredith is shot while trying to march across Mississippi; he survives.
• August 5 - Groundbreaking takes place for the World Trade Center in New York City.
• September 7 – The ocean liner SS Hanseatic catches fire and burns in New York Harbor.
• November 3 - Screen actor Ronald Reagan, a Republican, is elected Governor of California.
• December 18 – How the Grinch Stole Christmas, narrated by Boris Karloff, is shown for the first time on CBS.
Worldwide
• January 24 – Air India Flight 101 crashes into Mont Blanc, killing all 117 people on board.
• February 3 – The unmanned Soviet Luna 9 spacecraft makes the first controlled rocket-assisted landing on the Moon.
• March 28 – Cevdet Sunay becomes the fifth president of Turkey.
• April 18 - China declares that it will stop economic aid to Indonesia.
• May 4 - Fiat signs a contract with the Soviet government to build a car factory in the Soviet Union.
• June 3 – Joaquín Balaguer is elected president of the Dominican Republic.
• July 7 – A Warsaw Pact conference ends with a promise to support North Vietnam.
• August 21 – Seven men are sentenced to death in Egypt for anti-Nasser agitation.
• September 9 – NATO decides to move Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe to Belgium.
• December 17 – South Africa does not join the trade embargo against Rhodesia.