November 20 Birthday

Famous Birthdays on November 20

• Robert F. Kennedy (1925)

  American politician and U.S. Attorney General who later served as a senator and ran for president before his 1968 assassination.

• Joe Biden (1942)

  American politician who served as the 46th President of the United States after decades in the U.S. Senate and as Vice President.

• Bo Derek (1956)

  American actress and model known for the 1979 film 10.

• Ming-Na Wen (1963)

  American actress known for voicing Mulan and for her role in Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.

This Day in History

• 1945 — The Nuremberg trials began, putting senior surviving Nazi leaders on trial for war crimes before an international tribunal.

• 1959 — The United Nations General Assembly adopted the Declaration of the Rights of the Child.

• 1985 — Microsoft released Windows 1.0, its first graphical operating environment for personal computers.

What November 20 Says About You

The Nuremberg trials, which began on this date in 1945, represented something genuinely new in international law: an attempt to hold specific individuals formally accountable, in open court, for crimes committed under a government's own authority. That project of establishing formal accountability where none had clearly existed before echoes through the rest of November 20's real historical record. Fourteen years later, the UN General Assembly adopted the Declaration of the Rights of the Child on this same date, formally naming protections that had previously existed only informally or unevenly. And in 1985, Microsoft released Windows 1.0, an early, imperfect attempt to give ordinary computer users a formal, visual system for navigating machines that had, until then, mostly demanded command-line expertise. Establishing structure and accountability where things had been informal or unregulated is a genuinely Scorpio project, since the sign is associated astrologically with a strong pull toward truth, justice, and getting to the bottom of things properly rather than leaving them ambiguous. The numerology of the 20th reduces to day number 2, tied to partnership, diplomacy, and cooperative effort — fitting for an international tribunal built on cooperation among Allied powers, and for the UN declaration, itself a product of international consensus-building. Joe Biden, born on this date in 1942, spent nearly five decades in the U.S. Senate before serving as vice president and eventually president, a career built almost entirely on legislative negotiation and coalition-building rather than solo maneuvering. Robert F. Kennedy served as attorney general during a period of intense civil rights negotiation and later built a Senate and presidential campaign career around coalition politics before his assassination in 1968. Ming-Na Wen has spent decades collaborating across animation, television, and franchise filmmaking, building a career on adaptability within ensemble projects rather than solo star vehicles. The Nuremberg proceedings themselves ran for nearly a year and produced a written judicial record so extensive it's still cited today as a foundational template for how later international tribunals, from the Hague to Rwanda, would structure their own war crimes cases. Bo Derek's most famous role, in the 1979 film 10, turned into an unexpected cultural shorthand for measuring attractiveness on a numerical scale, an odd, lighter echo of a date otherwise devoted to weightier kinds of formal reckoning. November's topaz, in some traditions associated with fostering honest communication between people, closes out a birthday whose history keeps circling back to formal cooperation and accountability finally catching up to something that had previously been left loose or unaddressed. The Nuremberg tribunal was jointly staffed by judges and prosecutors from the United States, Britain, the Soviet Union, and France, an unusual instance of wartime allies who would soon become Cold War rivals still cooperating closely on a shared legal project. Windows 1.0 required a mouse to use effectively and was widely seen as a commercial disappointment at launch, taking Microsoft several more version releases across the following decade before Windows became the dominant operating system standard. Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles in June 1968, just after winning California's Democratic presidential primary, by a gunman named Sirhan Sirhan.