March 3, 1981 (Tuesday)
- At the Hotel Rŭtli in Zurich, Turkish national Musa Serdar Çelebi offered Mehmet Ali Ağca 1.5 million dollars to kill Pope John Paul II. Ağca carried out the plan, shooting the Pope on May 13.
- At the 26th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, all 14 voting members and 8 non-voting members of the Politburo were re-elected to five-year terms, the first time that there had been no change in the Soviet leadership by a party congress. Those re-elected included First Secretary Leonid I. Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov, Konstantin Chernenko and the youngest of the group, Mikhail S. Gorbachev.
- Chun Doo Hwan was inaugurated to his first elected term as President of South Korea. Chun commuted the sentences of 5,221 prisoners, with at least 3,400 released from incarceration.
- Born: Lil' Flip, American rapper, as Wesley Weston, Jr., in Houston
- Died: Rebecca Lancefield, 86, pioneering American microbiologist
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Famous quotes containing the word march:
“On a late-winter evening in 1983, while driving through fog along the Maine coast, recollections of old campfires began to drift into the March mist, and I thought of the Abnaki Indians of the Algonquin tribe who dwelt near Bangor a thousand years ago.”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)