Nov 22 (Friday) Times are Central Standard Time unless indicated

6pm

7pm

8pm

9pm

10pm

Nov 23 1963 (Saturday)

Nov 23 1963 (Saturday)

November 24 (Sunday)

• 1965 Charles De Gaulle orders all non-French soldiers out of France, and NATO headquarters to leave France in six months.
  
• Second Vatican Council formally admitted that Christian communities separated from the Catholic Church are used by the Holy Spirit as "means of salvation" for those who belong to them. The phrase calling Rome "the one true Church founded by Jesus Christ" was abandoned.
  
• US federal spending: $118 billion ($1.4 billion deficit). National debt was $313 billion. 28.5% of seniors live in poverty. Robert Moog shows elements of his early synthesizers. Also, William Lear (better known as the developer of the Learjet) sees his other great innovations, the 8-track cartridge and player, go into production.
  
• The Coinage Act of 1965 provides that US coins will have the inscription "E Pluribus Unum" and "In God We Trust." (Davis, US Coin Collecting)
  
• As part of Project 112, the US military sprays a biological agent on barracks in Oahu, Hawaii. The agent is believed to be harmless but later shown to infect those with damaged immune systems . The program is coordinated by the Desert Test Center, part of a "biological and chemical weapons complex" in the Utah desert. [Associated Press, 10/9/02] Civilians may have been exposed to the gasses. [Reuters, 10/10/02] 1965-1967: As part of Project 112, the US military performs a series of tests at the Gerstle River test site near Fort Greeley, Alaska, involving artillery shells and bombs filled with sarin and VX, both of which are lethal nerve agents. The program is coordinated by the Desert Test Center, part of a "biological and chemical weapons complex," in the Utah desert. [Associated Press, 10/9/02] Civilians may have been exposed to the gasses. [Reuters, 10/10/02] The US military later claims the experiments were conducted "out of concern for [the United States'] ability to protect and defend against these potential threats." [US Department of Defense, 10/09/2002; Reuters, 10/10/02]
  
• In a three year study beginning in 1965, 70 volunteer prisoners at the Holmesburg State Prison in Philadelphia were subjected to tests of dioxin, the highly toxic chemical contaminant in Agent Orange. Lesions which the men developed were not treated and remained for up to seven months. None of the subjects was informed that they would later be studied for the development of cancer. This was the second such experiment which Dow Chemical undertook on "volunteers" who did not receive the information which the world proclaimed was necessary for "informed consent" at Nuremberg.
  
• "Manhattan-based historical-documents dealer Gary Zimet told Newsday he has acquired a letter written by Jack Ruby accusing President Johnson of complicity in the 1963 assassination of President Kennedy. In the 12-page letter written from prison in 1965, Ruby also claimed he was framed for conspiracy in the assassination of JFK. The letter was addressed to a Dallas police officer friend named "Joe," Zimet said…Zimet said he bought the letter six weeks ago from "someone one step removed from the Ruby family." In the letter, Zimet said, Ruby wrote he was "being framed for being in on the assassination, that I had been used to silence Oswald." "Someday, Joe, you will find out what President Johnson is!" Ruby wrote, according to Zimet. "What he had to do with the assassination. One thing is for certain, Joe, he couldn't stand a polygraph test." Ruby questioned in the letter how Oswald "went to work a week or 10 days at the Texas School Book Depository before even Kennedy knew he himself was coming to Dallas." "Who up in Washington was so close to the president to know this information and to pass it on the Oswald?" the letter had asked, according to Zirpet. (Newsday 4/16/1995)
  
• During this year, RFK - on the Amazon River - swims out of a dugout canoe in piranha-infested waters. As the rest of the men on the expedition paddle around, RFK intones to a petrified Richard Goodwin that, while "It was impossible to pinpoint the exact time and place when he decided to run for president...the idea seemed to take hold as he was swimming in the Amazonian River of Nhamunda."
  
• 1965 Suppressing Sarkhan The followup book to The Ugly American by William Lederer and Eugene Burdick disappears from bookstores. Lederer claims the CIA did it because it revealed too much about then current operations in Thailand. It was finally released in 1977 under the title 'The Deceptive American'.
  
• The city fathers of Bogalusa, Louisiana invited moderate Arkansas congressman Brooks Hays to speak at a local church. The state's Original Knights of the KKK distributed 6000 handbills claiming that Hays was coming "to convince you that you should help integration by sitting in church with the black man, hiring more of them in your businesses, serving and eating with them in your cafes, and allowing your children to sit by filthy, runny-nosed, ragged, ugly little niggers in your public schools…We will know the names of all who are invited to the Brooks Hays meeting and we will know who did and did not attend this meeting…Those who do attend this meeting will be tagged as integrationists and will be dealt with accordingly by the knights of the Ku Klux Klan." When the hosting church was threatened with bombing, Hays' visit was cancelled. (The Nation 2/1/1965)
  
• It was superfluous for a White House spokesman to publicly reassure Mr. J. Edgar Hoover ... that the President was not contemplating replacing him ... Several Presidents did not dare do that and the things already known about the amassing of Mr. Johnson's fortunes may well suggest the thickness of his file in Mr. Hoover's office. ...... Whether he preaches on religion, family, patriotism, Communism or civil rights, Mr. Hoover is America's most capable man in finding legal formulations for values most foreign to the Constitution and the very idea of freedom.While Hoover's hidden dialogue with the reactionaries of America accounts for the popular adulation of him, for power he relies on more tangible mechanisms. Where is the man who would not mind having everything about him exposed? And where is the man who does not have a personal file in Hoover's organization? Certainly, there is no such man in the White House. The Minority of One, Editorial, Hoover's Survivability, p. 4
  
• The January and March 1965 issues of Liberation magazine carried articles highly critical of the Warren Report by Philadelphia attorney Vincent Salandria.
  
• 1/1965 A Lawyer's Notes on the Warren Commission Report by Alfredda Scobey Law Assistant to the Court of Appeals of Georgia American Bar Association Journal, January 1965, Vol. 51, pages 3943.
  
• 1/1/1965 New Year's Eve costume ball at California Hall, S.F., to raise funds for the Council on Religion and the Homosexual was harassed by police. It became a turning point in the San Francisco gay rights movement. ACLU took the case, which was dismissed.
  
• 1/1/1965 After closing down Operation Mongoose and the CIA's JM/WAVE station in Miami, Theodore Shackley and deputy Thomas Clines are sent to Laos to organize opposition to the Pathet Lao guerilla force. Meo hill tribesmen are recruited and conduct a massive extermination program of guerilla sympathizers. (Fonzi chronology)
  
• 1/2/1965 Martin Luther King Jr. announced the launching of Project Alabama, a campaign of mass marches in Selma in an effort to push the federal government to enact federal legislation to protect black voting rights.
  
• 1/3/1965 UC officials announce a new campus policy that allows political activity on campus. (SF Chronicle 6/9/02)
  
• 1/4/1965 In his State of the Union address, LBJ announced his goal of creating a Great Society, with programs aimed at eliminating poverty and racism. They included Head Start, Medicare, food stamps, housing subsidies, federal aid to elementary and secondary schools and to universities, Model Cities, job training, student loans. He also called for federal efforts to aid the arts, the cities, and fight pollution. Johnson would define the Great Society as a "war" on poverty, with federal funds to be "fired in" to pockets of poverty in what Washington called the "rifle-shot approach."
  
• 1/4/1965 Gerald Ford replaced Charlie Halleck as GOP House Minority Leader.
  
• 1/4/1965 Four armed CIA agents, among them Eloy Gutierrez Menoyo, who revealed U.S. plans against Cuba, captured by the Cubans. Menoyo is forced to go on Cuban television to publicly confess after beatings that result in having "all his ribs broken" and losing "all his hearing from one ear." Menoyo is "accused by the regime of having conspired to kill [Fidel] Castro" and begins serving a life sentence.
  
• 1/5/1965 Atlanta Constitution quoted the new member of the HUAC, liberal Atlanta congressman Charles Weltner, who was urging an investigation of the KKK: "I believe I speak for a vast majority of southerners in calling for action. For in doing nothing we will inaugurate a second century for the Ku Klux Klan." Liberals generally opposed the Un-American Activities Committee investigating the Klan, fearing a whitewash.
  
• 1/7/1965 Johnson sent his Medicare bill to Congress. LBJ met with labor leaders in the White House: Jim Carey, David Dubinsky, David MacDonald, George Meany, Walter Reuther.
  
• 1/7/1965 This evening, LBJ had the Businessmen's Council over to the White House: Roger Blough (US Steel), Frederick Kappel (AT&T), W.B. Murphy (Campbell's Soup), L.F. McCollum (Continental Oil of Houston), Tom Watson (IBM), Fred Lazarus Jr. (Federated Dept Stores), Neil McElroy (Procter and Gamble), C.R. Smith (American Airlines). (White House Diary p33)
  
• 1/14/1965 Lady Bird Johnson and Sargent Shriver discussed the new program Operation Head Start, designed to help young underprivileged children with education, nutrition and health before they enter the public schools.
  
• 1/17/1965 Journalist Arnold Beichman, who knew LBJ well when he was VP, wrote: "Johnson's loyalties were surely tried. He had an unhappy idea that he was being followed, that his wires were tapped." (New York Herald-Tribune)
  
• 1/17/1965 Two rural black churches were destroyed by fire in Jonesboro, Louisiana.
  
• 1/18-20/1965 Billy Hargis' Christian Crusade Anti-Communist Leadership School in Miami featured speaker Samuel Blumenthal, who had repeatedly charged that the JFK assassination was a "deliberately planned act of the Communist conspiracy."
  
• 1/20/1965 LBJ's inauguration for his first full presidential term. Lady Bird Johnson wrote in her diary, "I heard that the lone spectator watching the parade from the balcony on an upper floor of the Justice Department turned out to be J. Edgar Hoover. He has seen a lot of us come and go." The first change in the Cabinet he had inherited from JFK becomes official this month. John T. Connor is sworn in as secretary of commerce, succeeding Luther H. Hodges, Nicholas de B. Katzenbach is named Attorney General to succeed Robert F. Kennedy.
  
• 1/20/1965 At a large meeting of congressional leaders, Lyndon leaned over to Larry O'Brien and said, "John Kennedy is watching us up in heaven and we are going to wrap up all of his legislation and put it in a package and tie it up and label it JFK." (White House Diary p231)
  
• 1/21/1965 Iran: PM Hassan Ali Mansour was fatally wounded by an assassin in Teheran.
  
• 1/23/1965 LBJ entered Bethesda Hospital.
  
• 1/23/1965 Three explosions demolished a black funeral home in New Bern, North Carolina.
  
• 1/24/1965 Winston Churchill died.
  
• 1/26/1965 LBJ returned to the White House from Bethesda.
  
• 1/27/1965 LBJ spent the night before with a terrible attack of sweating, "a symptom of his illnesses for all the years I have known him," Lady Bird wrote. (White House Diary 232)
  
• 1/27/1965 McNamara and Bundy gave LBJ a memo saying that the weak political situation in Saigon might be partly due to low morale because of America's hesitant policy, and a full-scale US military presence might turn things around. Bundy was then sent to Saigon to appraise the prospects for military action against North Vietnam. Robert McNamara and McGeorge Bundy submit a memorandum on Vietnam to LBJ: "The worst course of action is to continue in this essentially passive role which can only lead to eventual defeat and an invitation to get out in humiliating circumstances. We see two alternatives. The first is to use our military power in the Far East and to force a change in Communist policy. The second is to deploy all our resources along a track of negotiation, aimed at salvaging what little can be preserved with no major addition to our present military risks. [We] tend to favor the first course, but we believe that both should be carefully studied." McNamara will later write: "Between January 28 and July 28, 1965, President Johnson made the fateful choices that locked the United States onto a path of massive military intervention in Vietnam, an intervention that ultimately destroyed his presidency and polarized America like nothing since the Civil War."
  
• 1/27/1965 Nick Katzenbach was named Attorney General, with Ramsey Clark being named Deputy Attorney General.
  
• 1/30/1965 As the KKK grows increasingly cocky over its ability to commit crimes, and the federal government's inability to stop them, the Saturday Evening Post quoted UKA Imperial Wizard Shelton at a South Carolina rally: "You know how they finally found them three boys that was buried in that dam near Philadelphia, Mississippi? The mailman found them. He walked by there delivering welfare checks, and the nigger reached up to get his."
  
• 2/1965 Harold Weisberg's Whitewash, the first book to critique the Warren Report and its 26 volumes of evidence, is completed. He has a difficult time finding a publisher and it is privately published later in the year.
  
• 2/1965 The journal Postgraduate Medicine characterized Oswald and the assassins before him as "stand[ing] midway between the aggressive and paranoid psychopath" who share a common "desire for recognition." (Story by Sidney J. Slomich and Robert E. Kantor)
  
• 2/1965 A view between both demonological poles of J. Edgar Hoover as a superlative bureaucrat in a superlatively bureaucratic environment. Quotes Francis Biddle: "A career man in the truest sense. … he cares for power and more power; but unlike many men, it is power bent to the purpose of his life's work - the success of the FBI." Commentary, J. Edgar Hoover, The Compleat Bureaucrat, Joseph Kraft
  
• 2/1965 Senator Hiram Fong (R-HI) answered questions concerning the possible change in our cultural pattern by an influx of Asians. "Asians represent six-tenths of 1 percent of the population of the United States ... with respect to Japan, we estimate that there will be a total for the first 5 years of some 5,391 ... the people from that part of the world will never reach 1 percent of the population .. .Our cultural pattern will never be changed as far as America is concerned." (U.S. Senate, Subcommittee on Immigration and Naturalization of the Committee on the Judiciary, Washington, D.C., Feb. 10, 1965, pp.71, 119.) [Note: From 1966 to 1970, 19,399 immigrants came from Japan, more than three times Sen. Fong's estimate. Immigration from Asia as a whole has totaled 5,627,576 from 1966 to 1993. Three percent of the American population is currently of Asian birth or heritage.] A certain Myra C. Hacker, Vice President of the New Jersey Coalition, testified at a Senate immigration subcommittee hearing: "In light of our 5 percent unemployment rate, our worries over the so called population explosion, and our menacingly mounting welfare costs, are we prepared to embrace so great a horde of the world's unfortunates? At the very least, the hidden mathematics of the bill should be made clear to the public so that they may tell their Congressmen how they feel about providing jobs, schools, homes, security against want, citizen education, and a brotherly welcome ... for an indeterminately enormous number of aliens from underprivileged lands." "We should remember that people accustomed to such marginal existence in their own land will tend to live fully here, to hoard our bounteous minimum wages and our humanitarian welfare handouts ... lower our wage and living standards, disrupt our cultural patterns ..." "Whatever may be our benevolent intent toward many people, [the bill] fails to give due consideration to the economic needs, the cultural traditions, and the public sentiment of the citizens of the United States." (U.S. Senate, Subcommittee on Immigration and Naturalization of the Committee on the Judiciary, Washington, D.C., Feb. 10, 1965. pp. 681-687.)
  
• 2/1/1965 Dr. Pierre Finck letter about his experiences with the autopsy of President Kennedy.
  
• 2/3/1965 Mississippi's Senators Stennis and Eastland entered some horror stories about civil rights "agitators" into the congressional record: Stennis: The white boys and white girls would live in Negro houses. They would sit in the courthouse square on park benches, and they would love and hug and go down the street holding hands. I am speaking of the white girls and white boys in the groups that came in. Eastland: I know of several instances in which members of this group were syphilitic and the Public Health Service had to take charge. Stennis: Yes, I heard of that too. The mores, customs and traditions that the people there were taught in their youth were flouted daily in the faces of both races… Eastland: I know of an instance in my hometown in which a Negro woman cut her husband up because of his attention to one of those white girls.
  
• 2/7/1965 Mac Bundy wrote a memo advocating a sustained air campaign against North Vietnam.
  
• 2/8/1965 Bundy presented his report at an NSC meeting; he urged a bombing campaign to raise Vietnamese morale, but did not promise it would solve much: "At its very best the struggle in Vietnam will be long. It seems to us important that this fundamental fact be made clear and our understanding of it be made clear to our own people." But LBJ came away urging everyone to take the position that the bombing would not "broaden the war."
  
• 2/9/1965 500 US Marines, manning a Hawk anti-aircraft missile unit, arrive near Danang. (JFK & LBJ 265)
  
• 2/9/1965 Colonel Harold Hauser, head of the U.S. military mission to Guatemala, was the target of a failed assassination attempt by Movimiento Revolucionario-13 terrorists.
  
• 2/9/1965 Soviets condemned US air attacks and announced it would "take further measures to safeguard the security and strengthen the defense capabilities of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam." The Chinese accused the US of "expanding the war beyond South Vietnam."
  
• 2/10/1965 Jacques Vallee diary entry: "The Vietnam War is getting worse. The US army communiques about recent victories sound eerily identical to the French news I heard as a child. They speak of police operations,' of routine rounding-up of suspects, of mounting casualties among the rebels,' of their imminent defeat." (Forbidden Science p134)
  
• 2/10/1965 Senate immigration subcommittee chairman Edward Kennedy (D-MA.) reassured his colleagues and the nation with the following: "First, our cities will not be flooded with a million immigrants annually. Under the proposed bill, the present level of immigration remains substantially the same ... Secondly, the ethnic mix of this country will not be upset ... Contrary to the charges in some quarters, [the bill] will not inundate America with immigrants from any one country or area, or the most populated and deprived nations of Africa and Asia ... In the final analysis, the ethnic pattern of immigration under the proposed measure is not expected to change as sharply as the critics seem to think." Sen. Kennedy concluded by saying, "The bill will not flood our cities with immigrants. It will not upset the ethnic mix of our society. It will not relax the standards of admission. It will not cause American workers to lose their jobs." (U.S. Senate, Subcommittee on Immigration and Naturalization of the Committee on the Judiciary, Washington, D.C., Feb. 10, 1965. pp. 1-3.) "
  
• 2/11/1965 US announced general policy of punishing "aggression" by bombing North Vietnam. 160 US and South Vietnamese planes attack Chan Hoa and Chap Le in retaliation for VC attack on Qui Nhon. (JFK & LBJ 265)
  
• 2/13/1965 Sustained US bombing of North Vietnam began.
  
• 2/13/1965 Portuguese Gen. Humberto Delgado gunned down
  
• 2/14/1965 NY Times commented that Nixon had "firmly grasped the leadership role" of the GOP after Goldwater abandoned it.
  
• 2/14/1965 Lady Bird wrote, "Ah, how comfortable the job of Senator looks from this vantage point! Bill Fulbright can disagree with everything that happens, and he doesn't have to come up with the answers of what to do." (White House Diary 245)
  
• 2/14/1965 Malcolm X said in a Detroit speech, "I've never advocated any violence. I've only said that Black people who are the victims of organized violence perpetrated upon us by the Klan, the Citizen's Council, and many other forms, we should defend ourselves... I think the Black man in this country above and beyond people all over the world will be more than justified when he stands up and starts to protect himself no matter how many necks he has to break." Tonight, he and his wife and four daughters escaped unharmed when three gas bombs were thrown into the living room of their Queens apartment.
  
• 2/14/1965 Arthur Krock reported in the NYT that the Joint Chiefs wanted to send 40,000 troops to Vietnam as early as the fall of '61, but JFK rejected their proposal 10/11/1961.
  
• 2/15/1965 In the Letters section of the Journal of the American Medical Association, a doctor wrote to complain that JFK's autopsy was "a grossly incomplete record."
  
• 2/16/1965 Washington Post published a Gallup poll showing that 64% of Americans wanted to "continue" in Vietnam, and only 18% wanted to "pull out."
  
• 2/16/1965 Truman issued a statement supporting LBJ's war policy; he attacked the "irresponsible critics...who have neither all the facts - nor the answers."
  
• 2/17/1965 LBJ met with Eisenhower, Bundy, McNamara, Wheeler. Ike told LBJ his first duty was to contain communism in Asia, and thought that bombing would weaken Hanoi's will. If it was necessary to send in large numbers of combat troops, "so be it." Ike also said that threatened Chinese or Soviet intervention should be detered by warning them that the US might use nuclear weapons. (In Retrospect 172-3)
  
• 2/18/1965 McNamara testified before the House Armed Services Committee, and called for a nationwide network of bomb shelters and development of an anti-ballistic missile system.
  
• 2/18/1965 Officially for the first time, US-piloted planes attack VC positions in South Vietnam. (JFK & LBJ 265)
  
• 2/19/1965 LBJ decided on air strikes against North Vietnam, but still wanted to keep it from the public. (In Retrospect 173)
  
• 2/20/1965 Ranger 8 spacecraft crashed on the moon after sending back thousands of pictures of the lunar surface.
  
• 2/21/1965 Malcolm X arrived at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem to speak before 400 people. He had just uttered the Arabic greeting "As-salaam alaikum" when he was assassinated. Five black men had come to NY that morning from Paterson, NJ and had arrived early. All were Muslims and belonged to the Newark mosque; they were able to slip past Malcolm's security. 22-year-old Talmadge Hayer took a seat near the podium. Another man in the back of the room jumped up and began yelling to distract attention; another assassin in the second row stood up, pulled a shotgun out of his trenchcoat and fired at Malcolm, striking him in the chest. Hayer pulled out his .45 automatic and a comrade brought out his 9mm Lugar; both blazed away at the fallen Malcolm. Someone shot Hayer in the leg and he was accosted by the crowd. His partners got away. Hayer confessed to the killing but claimed to have acted alone; within two weeks police arrested Norman 3X Butler and Thomas 15X Johnson, both from the Bronx and from the Black Muslim militia unit Fruit of Islam. Though there was evidence that Butler and Johnson were elsewhere at the time, the jury found them and Hayer guilty. All were sentenced to life in prison. When Elijah Mohammed died in 1975, Hayer broke his silence and said he and four other Muslims Leon, Wilbur, Willie X and Ben had carried out the assassination because they feared Malcolm X would bring down their beloved leader. Hayer continued to insist that Butler and Johnson were innocent. The three men were released in the mid-80s.
  
• 2/21/965 Augustus Owsley Stanley, a former Air Force electronics specialist, working in radio intelligence and radar who later worked at Pasadena's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, had moved to Berkeley and got involved in making LSD and meth. On February 21, 1965, that lab was raided by state narcotics agents who seized all his lab equipment and charged Stanley with operating a meth lab. As Barry Miles recounted in Hippie, "Berkeley was awash with speed and Owsley was responsible for much of it." Nevertheless, Owsley walked away from the raid unscathed, and, with the help of his attorney, who happened to be the vice-mayor of Berkeley, he even successfully sued to have all his lab equipment returned (LSD was not yet illegal). He quickly put that equipment to work producing some 4,000,000 tabs of nearly pure LSD in the mid-1960s. Also in February of 1965, Owsley and his frequent sidekicks, the Grateful Dead, moved down to the Watts area of Los Angeles, of all places, to ostensibly conduct acid tests.' The group rented a house that was conveniently located right next door to a brothel, curiously paralleling the modus operandi of various intelligence operatives who were (or had been) involved in conducting their own acid tests.' The band departed the communal dwelling in April 1965, just a few months before Watts exploded in violence that left thirty-four corpses littering the streets. In 1967, Owsley unleashed on the Haight a particularly nasty hallucinogen known as STP. Developed by the friendly folks at Dow Chemical, STP had been tested extensively at the Edgewood Arsenal as a possible biowarfare agent before being distributed to hippies as a recreational drug. Owsley reportedly obtained the recipe from Alexander Shulgin, a former Harvard man who developed a keen interest in psychopharmacology while serving in the U.S. Navy. Shulgin worked for many years as a senior research chemist at Dow, and later worked very closely with the DEA.
  
• 2/22/1965 Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter died.
  
• 2/23/1965 DeLoach memo to Hoover noted that LBJ had promised "that Attorney General Katzenbach would not be around very long and that he hoped we could put up with him for the time being."
  
• 2/23/1965 Dean Rusk sent a memo to LBJ saying, "I am convinced it would be disastrous for the United States and the Free World to permit Southeast Asia to be overrun by the Communist North." Everything should be done to contain Hanoi, even at "the risk of major escalation."
  
• 2/23/1965 J. Edgar Hoover's relations with LBJ, problems of picking a successor. Among those who could retire along with Hoover, or earlier, are his associate director and his two assistants. Next in line are the 10 assistant directors, only four of whom are below voluntary-retirement age [50]. They are: James H. Gale, who was recently named head of the special investigations division; C. Lester Trotter, head of the identification division [and the man in charge of the enormous file of fingerprints]; Saxby Tavel, head of communications and records, and C. D. [Deke] DeLoach, head of crime records. Look, What's Ahead for the FBI, by Miriam Ottenburg
  
• 2/23/1965 Sen. Thomas Dodd made a lengthy speech charging that to advocate negotiating with the Vietnamese Communists "is akin to asking Churchill to negotiate with the Germans at the time of Dunkirk."
  
• 2/23/1965 Jacques Vallee diary entry: "In his most recent letter to me, Aime Michel reports on a curious change among some secret services in Europe which seem to have taken an open interest in the subject. Thus a former agent of the British Intelligence Service has leaked the news that Great Britain is now swapping information on UFOs with the Soviets, both having reached the conclusion that the objects are real. Another agent, an American, has assured Michel that the FBI took the whole issue very seriously. Finally, Colonel Clerouin, whom he had not seen for years, suddenly invited him for lunch and told him there was a lot of interest in the subject among the French military staff. Aime does not trust any of these shadowy people, whose very business is lying and cheating in the first place…Someone is using us to snow' somebody else, he thinks." (Forbidden Science p137)
  
• 2/24/1965 US attacks of 2/18 are disclosed in Saigon and new US sorties are flown in Binhdinh province. (JFK and LBJ 265)
  
• 2/25/1965 Beginning of US air attacks against VC concentrations near Saigon. (JFK & LBJ 265)
  
• 2/25/1965 NY Times: "The United States Embassy disclosed today that American jet aircraft were sent on air strikes against the Vietcong in South Vietnam during the last week." The administration used the Tonkin Resolution to justify these actions as "appropriate, fitting and measured."
  
• 2/26/1965 James Reston column in NYT: "The guiding principle of American foreign policy since 1945 has been that no state shall use military force or the threat of military force to achieve its political objectives. And the companion of this principle has been that the United States would use its influence and its power, when necessary and where it could be effective, against any state that defied this principle." This principle was "at stake in Vietnam…the United States is now challenging the Communist effort to seek power by the more cunning technique of military subversion."
  
• 2/27/1965 RFK records an oral history interview with Art Schlesinger: "The Bay of Pigs was the best thing that happened to the administration, because if it hadn't been for the Bay of Pigs, we would have sent troops into Laos...[JFK] started asking questions that were not asked at the Bay of Pigs..." He recalled that the JCS told him they could land 1000 troops a day into Laos, but when Kennedy asked how the early arrivals would fight off thousands of Pathet Lao guerillas, "Well, they said, they really hadn't thought about that....They just wanted to go in and drop bombs on people. Even after the Cuban missile crisis, two of the Chiefs of Staff were really mad. One of them suggested that we go and bomb them anyway on Monday, and the other one said, 'We've been sold out.'....LeMay and Anderson. That's really the reason why the President got rid of Anderson." He said that LBJ played little part in foreign policy: "he was never in on any of the real meetings...he was their for the first meeting, I think. Then he went to Hawaii...He wasn't there at all when the decisions were being made. He came back on the Sunday night before the Russians withdrew their missiles from Cuba...He was displeased with what we were doing, although he never made it clear what he would do. He said he had the feeling that we were being too weak...[LBJ] liked Diem...Johnson is...incapable of telling the truth...And my experience with him since then is that he lies all the time. I'm telling you, he just lies continuously, about everything. In every conversation I have with him, he lies. As I've said, he lies even when he doesn't have to...At one time, you know, I liked John Connally. I don't like him now...He's been very ungracious. I really dislike him..."
  
• 2/27/1965 State Dept issues a white paper accusing North Vietnam of aggression. It claimed that most of the communist fighters in the South were actually Northern infiltrators, not native rebels. This claim was greeted with considerable skepticism by reporters covering Vietnam.
  
• 2/27/1965 Warren Commission staffer Joseph Ball, on a Los Angeles KNBC-TV show, was asked about the grassy knoll; he replied, "That happens to be the part of the investigation of which I had charge...There were no people there."
  
• 2/28/1965 US announces "continuous limited airstrikes" against North Vietnam.
  

• 3/1965 Analysis by former FBI agent. "When the FBI blunders it just makes another movie." Ramparts, After J. Edgar, Who?, William Turner, p. 66
  
• 3/1965 DEATH of a PRESIDENT: The ESTABLISHED FACTS by LORD DEVLIN Atlantic Monthly, March 1965, pages 112118
  
• 3/1 and 15/1965 Supreme Court rulings strike down the film-censorship laws in Maryland and New York; this causes an increase in demands for a movie ratings system.
  
• 3/1/1965 NY Times reported, "American commanders in Saigon were instructed to prepare for a continuing aerial offensive, but publicly and with announcements. Ambassador Maxwell D. Taylor argued for silence, but was overruled by the argument that clandestine raids would be politically unpopular in the United States."
  
• 3/2/1965 Operation Rolling Thunder, sustained bombing of the North, begins. 160 US aircraft launched from carriers in the South China Sea and air bases in South Vietnam hit an ammo depot at Xombang and a naval base at Quangkhe, both in the North. LBJ sent Army Chief of Staff Harold Johnson to Saigon to appraise the situation.
  
• 3/3/1965 RFK argued with Bernard Fensterwald, counsel for the Senate Subcommittee on Administrative Practice and Procedure, about informants. RFK defended their value in exposing criminal activity.
  
• 3/3/1965 More than 30 US planes from Danang bomb unspecified targest in Eastern Laos. (JFK & LBJ 265)
  
• 3/3/1965 NY Times: "The Administration described today's air strikes against North Vietnam as part of a continuing' effort to resist aggression and made no attempt, as in the past, to relate them to particular provocations."
  
• 3/4/1965 Hoover told the House Subcommittee on Appropriations that the FBI was now keeping tabs on 14 KKK-type groups. "During the past year there has been a marked increase in Klan membership." He named Robert Shelton's United Klans as the largest group, followed by Sam Bowers' White Knights in Mississippi.
  
• 3/5/1965 A Freedom School and library were burned to the ground by the KKK in Indianola, Mississippi.
  
• 3/6/1965 Bundy told LBJ that McNamara felt that the possibility of a negotiated settlement must always be kept in mind.
  
• 3/7/1965 525 marchers protesting lack of voting rights in Selma, Alabama, are attacked by 200 state troopers using nightsticks, tear gas and whips. The march from Selma to Montgomery begins as planned. The day will later be known as "Bloody Sunday." One of the marchers wounded is SNCC chairman John Lewis, who is hospitalized with a fractured skull.
  
• 3/7/1965 Lady Bird wrote, "I am counting the months until March 1968, when, like Truman, it will be possible to say, I don't want this office, this responsibility, any longer, even if you want me.'...In talking about the Vietnam situation, Lyndon summed it up quite simply, I can't get out. I can't finish it with what I have got. So what the hell can I do?'" (White House Diary 248)
  
• 3/8/1965 The first American uniformed combat units (3,500 from the Third Marine regiment) came ashore in Vietnam to defend Da Nang air base. Vietnamese girls were there to garland the Marines with leis. Westmoreland had requested them, though Max Taylor was opposed to it. By April 1965, fully 25,000 uniformed American kids, most still teenagers barely out of high school, will be slogging through the rice paddies of Vietnam. By the end of the year, U.S. troop strength will have surged to 200,000.
  
• 3/8/1965 THE STATE OF TEXAS vs. JACK RUBENSTEIN -- Hearing before Judge Brown on defense motion for sanity hearing. Defense counsel files motions to disqualify Judge Brown, for change of venue, for Ruby's right to choose his own attorneys, and for an extension to prepare for a pretrial conference and sanity hearing. Judge Brown overrules each motion. Jack Ruby's lawyers file motions to disqualify Judge Brown and for a change of venue.
  
• 3/1965 In March 1965 (some sources say September), Ruby conducted a brief televised news conference in which he stated: "Everything pertaining to what's happening has never come to the surface. The world will never know the true facts of what occurred, my motives. The people who had so much to gain, and had such an ulterior motive for putting me in the position I'm in, will never let the true facts come above board to the world." When asked by a reporter, "Are these people in very high positions Jack?", he responded "Yes."
  
• 3/8/1965 Supreme Court ruled unanimously in the Seeger case to give a broad interpretation to conscientious objector status.
  
• 3/8/1965 US air attack on North Vietnamese border village of Cobai.
  
• 3/8/1965 In March 1965, several men and women in Alabama tested President Lyndon Johnson's legendary political skills. Martin Luther King, Hosea Williams, Amelia Boynton, John Lewis, and hundreds of other activists exposed the brutality of white supremacy in Selma, while Governor George Wallace was orchestrating his own responses in Montgomery. As the president struggled to satisfy the demonstrators' demands for voting rights, the notoriously brutal Al Lingo of the state police and Sheriff Jim Clark of Dallas County (where Selma was the county seat) and the arch-segregationist Governor Wallace made the balancing act even more difficult. In particular, over a two week period, Wallace retreated on his word, made inflammatory statements, and blamed the President for problems. For Johnson, the struggle began in earnest on March 8one day after the infamous "Bloody Sunday" march where Alabama law enforcement officials brutally attacked non-violent civil rights marchers on Selma's Edmund Pettis Bridge. President Johnson recognized the need to contact Wallace to resolve whether another march to Montgomery could actually take place. Nicholas Katzenbach, his attorney general, admitted the problem of getting through to Wallace. Wallace's "till the bitter end" philosophy would soon come into play in Selma. Knowing what they were up against, the President, Katzenbach, and Ellington took precautions to record their conversations with Wallace.
  
• 3/9/1965 Rev. James Reeb, a Unitarian minister from Boston, was staying in Selma. This evening, he and a friend were accosted by four white men who beat them with clubs and lead pipes. Reeb fell into a coma.
  
• 3/10/1965 With Ellington's promise to help reach Wallace, President Johnson and Katzenbach quickly sought a policy to let the marchers continue to Montgomery safely. One complicating factor occurred on March 9, referred to by some as "turnaround Tuesday," as the Rev. Dr. King ended a follow-up demonstration by turning around at the Pettus bridge to avoid marching without federal judicial approval. That evening, a white Unitarian Minister from Boston was attacked by white thugs, dying a day later. The Supreme Court of Alabama ruled that the march could carry on the set route, and Buford Ellington transmitted the message to Wallace. President Johnson, believing that the limited conditions of the march combined with the cajoling by Ellington would satisfy Wallace, congratulated Katzenbach on their successful policy.
  
• 3/11/1965 Rev. James J. Reeb of Boston died in Selma, Alabama after being beaten 3/9 by four white segregationists. 4/13 three men would be indicted for killing him.
  
• 3/11/1965 Civil rights marchers, posing as tourists, walked into the White House and staged a sit-in on the ground floor.
  
• 3/12/1965 The judge in Jack Ruby's case, Joe Brown, wrote a letter to the managing editor of Holt, Rinehart and Winston, stating that he had about 190 pages of his book, Dallas, Ruby and the Law, completed. When this information was made public, Brown removed himself from the case. (Ruby-Oswald Affair 87)
  
• 3/14/1965 LBJ, speaking off the cuff to a group of southern officials in Nashville, said that satellite reconnaissance alone produced enough hard intelligence to justify spending ten times the $35 billion the US already invested in space programs.
  
• 3/14 and 3/15/1965 Tiger Island naval base and ammo dump at Phuqui were bombed by the US; US air attack on Phuqui, 100 miles south of Hanoi.
  
• 3/14/1965 NY Times: "The President acknowledged that in the last five weeks there had been a change in American tactics and in some instances in strategy. He was referring to strikes by American planes against Communist targets in North and South Vietnam..."
  
• 3/15/1965 LBJ, in an inspiring speech, asked Congress for a bill to guarantee blacks the right to vote. President Johnson addressed Congress, calling for passage of the voting rights act. The speech cam one week after a gathering in Selma, AL led to deadly violence when African-Americans preparing to march to Montgomery were attacked by police. A white Unitarian Minister from Boston, James J. Reeb, was killed.
  
• 3/15/1965 Harold Johnson told LBJ that more ground troops for security in the South, and an expanded air campaign were needed. He estimated that it could take half a million US soldiers five years to win the war. This estimate shocked LBJ and McNamara. (In Retrospect 177)
  
• 3/15/1965 Journalist Ted Szulc later writes that today "In Havana the thread between Fidel Castro and Che [Guevara] is broken forever, and Che is never seen [in public] again -- except two and a half years from now in Bolivia, South America. What occurs today continues to be a mystery."
  
• 3/16/1965 Black and white demonstrators are beaten by sheriff's deputies and police on horseback in Montgomery.
  
• 3/17/1965 Westmoreland asked for another marine battalion to defend Da Nang.
  
• 3/17/1965 MLK and his followers won a federal court order from Judge Franke Johnson allowing them to march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. Robert McNamara urged LBJ to federalize the state national guard to protect the marchers, because George Wallace wasn't going to do anything about preventing violence. LBJ initially refused, saying he would like to see Wallace hurt politically if there was any violence, but McNamara finally convinced him. (In Retrospect 177-8)
  
• 3/18/1965 Unfortunately, George Wallace's tendency to go back on his word caught up with President Johnson sooner than he had thought. The two met for almost three hours in a tense Oval Office setting on March 13, then emerged for a press conference. Two days later, Johnson delivered his powerful "American Promise" speech before Congress and the American public, calling for strong voting rights legislation and promising "we shall overcome. On March 18, in Alabama, a federal judge ruled that a march to Montgomery could proceed, thereby ensuring that the long-awaited response to Bloody Sundy would finally occur. For Johnson, the triumph was not yet complete. He recorded a conversation with Wallace where he pressed the governor to follow through on preserving law and order. As the conversation progressed, Wallace repeated his insistence that the President ensure an orderly march, while President Johnson continually told him to call up his own state National Guard.
  
• 3/18/1965 Vokshod II piloted by Belyayev while Alexei Leonov became the first man to walk in space. Some charged that the Soviets faked the entire incident. (Russia's Space Hoax, Lloyd Mallan, 1966)
  
• 3/18-19/1965 THE STATE OF TEXAS vs. JACK RUBENSTEIN -- Hearing before United States District Court in Dallas on defense counsel's petition to place jurisdiction of Jack Ruby under the district. Judge Davidson denies petition but returns case to the Administrative Judge of the Dallas Court instead of Judge Brown. Jack Ruby's attorneys made an appearance in the United States District Court in Dallas, with Judge T. Whitfield Davidson presiding, seeking a writ of habeas corpus in order to insure that control of Ruby's whereabouts remain under the jurisdiction of the Federal Court and the Federal Marshall. Opposing arguments were also heard from the State, represented by Bill Alexander. The following afternoon Judge Davidson called a further hearing on the matter, As required by law, Ruby himself was brought before the judge, but none of Ruby's attorneys were prepared to attend. Ruby took advantage of the opportunity to speak without his attorneys present, interrupting the proceedings to make an unexpected appeal to the judge. "Your Honor, may I say something? I don't have any counsel here, your Honor, and I wish the courtesy of the Court to give me a chance to take the stand . . ." Attorney Joe Tonahill was on hand, and, although he was not formally representing Ruby at the time, was allowed to preface Ruby's statements with some remarks. Tonahill sought to inform the Court that psychiatrist L. J. West had sworn an affidavit stating that "Jack Ruby was insane, and highly susceptible to delusions and suspicions, and a complete paranoid." Dr. West had demonstrated, Tonahill said, that Ruby's condition necessitated the presence of an attorney to represent him. He also insisted that Ruby's mental illness was primarily responsible for his own removal from Ruby's defense team. Judge Davidson allowed Ruby to speak, however. "I will permit him to stand where he is," without requiring Ruby to be sworn in, "and he may give the Court any statement he may care to give." Ruby wasted no time whatsoever. "This is the most tragic thing in the history of the world," he announced. "One of the most tragic conspiracies in the world," he declared. "I will get on the stand and speak with tears in my heart because of such a terrible conspiracy which is combined against me." What Mr. Tonahill has said is a total lie [Ruby continued]. That goes from the contract I signed, I never did sign a contract with him. It has been a conspiracy between him and the District Attorney, [attorney] Phil Burleson and Joe Tonahill, to convince the public that Jack Ruby is insane. Now, your Honor, you have had many a person appear before you pleading their case. If I am a person who sounds insane at this time, then the rest of the world is crazy. I say this with choking in my heart and tears in my eyes. The most tragic thing happened that Sunday morning when I went down that ramp. I happened to be there for a purpose which is going to be the most tragic thing that ever happened in this world. . . . [Lengthy description of Ruby's succession of attorneys omitted.] At 10:15, I left my apartment, and the story was out that this person [Oswald] was supposed to leave the jail at ten AM. I received a call from a young girl [Karen Carlin, one of Ruby's strippers] who wanted some money. [Because Ruby had closed his club for the weekend, out of respect for the slain President, Carlin was unable to pay her rent.](1) I went to the Western Union, which was coincidental, and prior to that, I will admit [I'd read] a letter [that] was written to Caroline [Kennedy -- actually an editorial in the November 24, 1963, edition of the Dallas Times Herald] which broke my heart. This letter was written to Caroline telling her how awfully sorry I [sic] was for her. And another situation [in another article], there was something about a trial [Mrs. Kennedy expected to return to Dallas for Oswald's trial]. Don't ask me what took place, and that triggered me off that Sunday morning. I accepted the call at 10:15 and went down to the Western Union and parked my car across the street, and took off to transact my business. . . . At 11:17 I walked, I don't say it was premeditated, but never prior to Sunday morning, I never made up my mind what to do. From 11:17 until later, I was guilty of a homicide. Which must be the most perfect conspiracy in the history of the world that a man was going to accept a call and came from his apartment down to the Western Union. If it had been three seconds later I would have missed this particular person [Oswald]. I guess God was against me. I left the Western Union and it took about three and a half minutes to go to the bottom of the ramp. I didn't conspire or sneak in to do these things, I am telling you. If they had said, 'Jack, are you going down now?' that would make some conspiracy on me. I left the Western Union and it was a fraction of a second until that tragic act happened. Now, it seems all these circumstances were against me. I had a great emotional feeling for our beloved President and Mrs. Kennedy, or I never would have been involved in this tragic crime, that was completely reverse from what my emotional feeling was. Ruby returned to the subject of his numerous attorneys and how he felt they had mistreated him and mishandled his defense. As far as Joe Tonahill is concerned, he doesn't care what happens to me, nor does Phil Burleson, and I am not saying this just to make the headlines, I am not remembering this from rehearsal, I am speaking word-for-word, that I know what took place. And I am like the stupid idiot, that loved this country so much, and I felt so sorry for Mrs. Kennedy when she was standing on that plane with blood on her dress, and they were bringing the casket back with our beloved President, and now I am going to [go] down in history as the most despicable person that ever lived. If I am able to use this little oratory on you, as I am doing, if I have that capability, looking at you and telling this courtroom a slight fraction of a lie then I am a genius. Thank you. (Elmer Gertz, Moment of Madness: The People vs. Jack Ruby (Chicago: Follett Publishing Co., 1968), pp. 174-189.)
  
• Unknown dated in 1965: Jack Ruby appeared in court to ask for a change of counsel and removal to federal jurisdiction. He told the court that while he was in jail, a guard became friendly with him and got him to talk about "me being involved in sending four guns to a friend of mine in 1959, during peacetime, and my association with Cuba, and this particular man, Mr. McWillie…" He denied conspiring with anyone to get into the basement. "I had a great emotional feeling for our beloved President and Mrs. Kennedy…it is strange that a person like Harvey Oswald, who never worked a day in his life…is able to secure a job in a bookstore weeks prior to the anticipated arrival of our beloved President." He again worried that he was being implicated in the plot to kill JFK. He was then seen briefly on TV (CBS telecast); Sylvia Meagher jotted down notes as she watched on TV in New York: "...complete conspiracy...and the assassination too...if you knew the facts you would be amazed," Ruby said. He told reporters that he was perfectly sane and in good health. (Accessories After the Fact 453)
  
• 3/19-5/13/1965 US and South Vietnamese air raids increased in numbers and intensity.
  
• 3/20/1965 JCS pushed for another marine division and an army division for offensive operations in Vietnam.
  
• 3/21/1965 A young Lynchburg, Virginia preacher, Jerry Falwell, denounced the mixing of religion and politics in a noted sermon, "Ministers and Marches." He said, "Nowhere are we commissioned to reform the externals [in society]. We are not told to wage war against bootleggers, liquor stores, gamblers, murderers, prostitutes, racketeers, prejudiced persons or institutions, or any other existing evil as such...our only purpose on this earth is to know Christ and to make Him known...Preachers are not called to be politicians but soul-winners." He also questioned "the sincerity and nonviolent intentions of some civil rights leaders such as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Mr. James Farmer and others, who are known to have left-wing positions. It is very obvious that the communists, as they do in all parts of the world, are taking advantage of a tense situation in our land, and are exploiting every incident to bring about violence and bloodshed." Falwell would later repudiate this sermon, even calling it a "false prophecy."
  
• 3/21/1965 An 80-car Klan motorcade drove along Highway 80 in Selma yelling obscenities at the marchers.
  
• 3/21-24/1965 MLK marches with 25,000 followers from Selma to Montgomery, gathering voter-registration support for blacks. Violence was kept to a minimum. LBJ had federalized the state national guard and sent 2200 troops to protect the demonstrators.
  
• 3/23/1965 Gemini 3 mission: three-orbit flight by Grissom and Young; the orbit was altered three times, demonstrating for the first time that a manned aircraft could change course. It splashed down in the Atlantic; the astronauts were recovered by the carrier Intrepid.
  
• 3/23/1965 Edward Jay Epstein interviewed WC staffer Norman Redlich. Redlich said that "To say that they [JFK and Connally] were hit by separate bullets is synonymous with saying that there were two assassins."
  
• 3/24/1965 Edward Jay Epstein interviewed WC staffer Melvin Eisenberg.
  
• 3/24/1965 First teach-in protest against the war held at the University of Michigan. A faculty group had planned a one-day moratorium during which professors would speak on the war instead of teaching. They decided to have an all-night meeting instead; more than 3000 students attended.
  
• 3/25/1965 This evening four Klansmen in Montgomery saw Viola Liuzzo driving with a black teenage boy, LeRoy Moton, in the front seat. She was returning from the rally in Selma They were shocked by the sight of a white woman with a black man and began following her. A skilled driver, she kept ahead of them, with the cars reaching 100mph. Finally, the pursuing car pulled up alongside and the Klansmen opened fire with .38 revolvers. Viola was hit in the head with two bullets and killed; Moton survived. But one of the men in the car, Gary T. Rowe, was an FBI informant. Mar 26 In an FBI memo (not declassified until 20 years later), Hoover recounted a private talk with LBJ: "I stated [Jim Liuzzo] doesn't have too good a background and the woman [Viola] had indications of needle marks in her arms where she had been taking dope; that she was sitting very, very close to the Negro in the car; that it had the appearance of a necking party." But the Alabama coroner's report said nothing about needle marks on her arms. (The Fiery Cross p352) Hoover's innuendoes were leaked by FBI agents to local police and the press in the South, and her moral character soon came to be the prime topic of conversation. Many thought she shouldn't have left her children at home while she was gallavanting around with civil rights activists. The resulting trial of the three Klansmen resulted in a hung jury, and the men were treated like local heroes.
  
• 3/26/1965 On or about this day, LBJ went on national TV: "We will not be intimidated by the terrorists of the Ku Klux Klan any more than by the terrorists of the Viet Cong. My father fought them in Texas. I have fought them all my life, because I believe them to threaten the peace of every community where they exist. I shall continued to fight them because I know their loyalty is not to the United States but to a hooded society of bigots…If Klansmen hear my voice today, let it be both an appeal and a warning to get out of the Klan now and return to decent society before it is too late."
  
• 3/26/1965 An FBI memo (not declassified until 20 years later), Hoover recounted a private talk with LBJ: "I stated [Jim Liuzzo] doesn't have too good a background and the woman [Viola] had indications of needle marks in her arms where she had been taking dope; that she was sitting very, very close to the Negro in the car; that it had the appearance of a necking party." But the Alabama coroner's report said nothing about needle marks on her arms. (The Fiery Cross p352) Hoover's innuendoes were leaked by FBI agents to local police and the press in the South, and her moral character soon came to be the prime topic of conversation. Many thought she shouldn't have left her children at home while she was gallavanting around with civil rights activists. The resulting trial of the three Klansmen resulted in a hung jury, and the men were treated like local heroes.
  
• 3/27/1965 Thomas Hale Howard, attorney, dies of a heart attack in Dallas. He is 48 years old. Howard is the attorney who advised Ruby to say that he shot LHO "to prevent Jackie Kennedy from having to return to Dallas." Howard was also the first attorney to represent Jack Ruby. According to Mark Lane, Howard met with Jack Ruby's roommate George Senator and two members of the press at Ruby's apartment on the evening of November 24, hours after Ruby shot Oswald. What was discussed at the meeting is unknown. None of the three men Senator met with will live past this year.
  
• 3/28/1965 De Gaulle assassination attempt.
  
• 3/29/1965 Edward Jay Epstein interviewed WC chief counsel J. Lee Rankin.
  
• 3/30/1965 Katzenbach directed that Hoover's "bugs" could be initiated only with the same authorization procedures as wiretaps. He no longer wanted Hoover to tap or bug without getting permission from the Attorney General. (Church report)
  
• 4/1965 The House appropriated $50,000 for an investigation of the KKK by HUAC. Membes of the subcommittee: liberal Charles Weltner, red-hunter Edwin Willis of Louisiana, segregationist Joe Pool from Texas, and civil rights opponents John Buchanan of Alabama and John Ashbrook of Ohio.
  
• 4/1/1965 LBJ met with McNamara, Rusk and Bundy; decided to grant Westmoreland and Sharp their troop requests, but not the Joint Chiefs' request; he also decided to allow US troops to engage in active combat. But he kept the decision secret.
  
• 4/2/1965 In an NSC meeting, McCone urged a greatly expanded bombing program; he felt Hanoi's behavior could be changed by bombing alone. (In Retrospect 180) Over the years to come, millions of tons of bombs, missiles, rockets, incendiary devices and chemical warfare agents will be dumped on the people of Vietnam in what can only be described as one of the worst crimes against humanity ever perpetrated on this planet.
  
• 4/5/1965 Earl Warren wrote a letter to Katzenbach urging that JFK-related documents be declassified before the 75-year time limit, by letting the agencies involved review the documents and decide which ones could be released. The White House and other involved agencies approved of the plan, except for the CIA, which urged that the 75-year seal be kept and perhaps extended. (Hurt, Reasonable Doubt p433)
  
• 4/6/1965 The CIA told Johnson that Hanoi had sent a NVA battalion into the central highlands near Da Nang. The JCS wanted to send in two more brigades.
  
• 4/6/1965 NASA launches Early Bird', the first commercial space satellite (this one for telecommunications).
  
• 4/6/1965 NSAM 328 put in writing LBJ's decision to US troops to conduct offensive operations in South Vietnam. Again he emphasized that "premature publicity be avoided by all possible precautions...minimize any appearance of sudden changes in policy...The president's desire is that these movements and changes should be understood as being gradual and wholly consistent with existing policy."
  
• 4/7/1965 LBJ made a speech at Johns Hopkins where he offered a billion-dollar Southeast Asia aid package (a Mekong Delta TVA) if the North Vietnamese will participate in "unconditional discussions." But he also stressed that the US would not withdraw, "and we must be prepared for a long continued conflict." He explained, "We fight because we must fight if we are to live in a world where every country can shape its own destiny...North Vietnam has attacked the independent nation of South Vietnam...Over this war - and all Asia - is another reality: the deepening shadow of Communist China...We are there because we have a promise to keep...We are also there to strengthen world order...To leave Vietnam to its fate would shake the confidence of all these people in the value of an American commitment...To withdraw from one battlefield means only to prepare for the next...We want nothing for ourselves...We will not withdraw, either openly or under the cloak of a meaningless agreement...The central lesson of our time is that the appetite of aggression is never satisfied...No nation need ever fear that we desire their land, or to impose their will, or to dictate their institutions...But we dream of an end to war." Hanoi quickly responded with their "Four Points" peace plan, calling for an end to all foreign involvement in Vietnam, as well as Viet Cong participation in a Saigon government. Max Taylor cabled Washington that he didn't think more troops should be sent in: "It shows a far greater willingness to get into the ground war than I had discerned in Washington during my recent trip."
  
• 4/7/65 Washington - Katzenbach and J. Edgar Hoover friendly. Katzenbach goes to see J. Edgar Hoover instead of vice versa, but J. Edgar Hoover "carefully observing the proper channels through Katzenbach for official business [with the White House]. Notes LBJ and J. Edgar Hoover retain their close relationship of two decades. AP, Joseph Mohbat
  
• 4/7/1965 NY Times: "An improvement in the morale and performance of the South Vietnamese Government and its troops has been the chief discernible result of the last month's air strikes against North Vietnam, a senior American military spokesman said today."
  
• 4/8/1965 The House voted on Medicare; it was approved 313-115.
  
• 4/9/1965 A plan to assassinate Vice President Hubert Humphrey is foiled tonight at the Jack Tar Capitol House Hotel in Baton Rouge. Undercover agent Joe Cooper discovers a Ku Klux Klan plan to kill Humphrey while he delivers a speech. Cooper immediately tips off the FBI. A trap is set by the FBI and Secret Service. Two would-be assassins are arrested before any violence takes place. By next year, Cooper will be off on his own JFK assassination investigation. Cooper will become convinced that LHO was a Naval Intelligence agent.
  
• 4/10/1965 Richard M. Helms was the overnight guest of LBJ at his ranch in Texas, along with Sen. Eugene McCarthy. McCarthy was an outspoken critic of the CIA but an admirer of Helms, but he was dismayed when Helms couldn't identify various kinds of flowers or wine vintages. He was sure James Bond could do that. (Wise, Espionage Establishment)
  
• 4/11/1965 LBJ signed the Education Bill. He also announced to the press that he had named Adm. Raborn as head of the CIA and Richard Helms as his deputy.
  
• 4/16/1965 Lady Bird wrote, "Lyndon keeps talking more and more about retiring." (White House Diary 260)
  
• 4/17/1965 Johnson told the press that US request for peace talks have met with no reply from Hanoi or Peking.
  
• 4/17/1965 An anti-war rally in Washington DC by Students for a Democratic Society.
  
• 4/19/1965 LBJ complained to reporters, "How can an American Senator or an American newspaperman or an American student tie the hands of our fellow American military men? Are they duped; are they sucked in?" (White House Diary 262)
  
• 4/20/1965 Meeting in Honolulu: McNamara, Taylor, Westmoreland, Wheeler, Sharp, Bundy and John McNaughton. McNamara agreed to a moderate increase in troops.
  
• 4/20-23/1965 Hearing before United States District Court in Jacksonville, Florida, on defense counsel's petition for a stay of Judge Davidson's order to return Jack Ruby's case to the Administrative Judge of the Dallas Court. Motion denied.
  
• 4/21/1965 William H. Orrick, head of the Antitrust Division of the Justice Department testified before the Senate that "concentration of industrial power may lead to the police state. Can anyone doubt that the prewar experience of Germany, Japan and Italy have proven the wisdom of the nation's concern over concentration of economic power?"
  
• 4/21/1965 McNamara told LBJ that more troops would be needed due to the likelihood of a Communist offensive; he urged Johnson to level with Congress about the broadening of the war, but LBJ refused. Ball, at the same meeting, urged Johnson not to send in more troops without exploring the possibility of a settlement; he replied, "All right, George, I'll give you until tomorrow to get me a settlement plan. If you can pull a rabbit out of the hat, I'm all for it." (The Past Has Another Pattern 393) Ball submitted a plan to LBJ that night, but it failed to show exactly how a non-Communist South Vietnam could be maintained. He urged free elections which would included the VC.
  
• 4/22/1965 Letter from Robert Kennedy to JFK's doctor George Burkley. "This will authorize you to release to my custody all of the material of President Kennedy, of which you have personal knowledge, and now being held by the Secret Service. I would appreciate it if you would accompany this material personally and turn it over for safekeeping to Mrs Evelyn Lincoln at the National Archives. I am sending a copy of this letter to Mrs Lincoln with instructions that this material is not to be released to anyone without my written permission and approval." Evelyn Lincoln's office is now in the National Archives.
  
• 4/25/1965 NYT reported that South Vietnamese PM Phan Huy Quat was opposed to the introduction of more US troops, saying it "would raise unpleasant recollections of the French Colonial War."
  
• 4/25/1965 Lady Bird Johnson honors Jackie Kennedy by naming the East Garden for her at a White House ceremony. Mrs. Kennedy does not attend.
  
• 4/26/1965 Letter from George Burkley, to Evelyn Lincoln. "In accordance with authorization dated April 22, 1965 from Senator Robert F. Kennedy, the items on the attached list relating to the autopsy of the late President John F. Kennedy are herewith transferred to the Archives for your custody, and in accordance with the instructions contained in Senator Kennedy's letter." An inventory lists microscopic tissue slides and photos of the internal chest wounds, which would later turn up missing. Secret Service transfer JFK autopsy photos, X-rays, brain, and slides to Robert Kennedy via Evelyn Lincoln. It is noted that the detailed inventory includes: 1 stainless steel container, 7 by 8 inches in diameter. It it suggested that this container may have held JFK's brain. What it known is that RFK takes possession of a brain (purportedly JFK's) at the National Archives on this date. On October 29, 1966 a second transfer occurrs when the Kennedys transfer the autopsy materials to the National Archives. Two days later, on October 31, 1966, a group of officials will meet at the Archives to open the footlocker that holds the autopsy materials. The inventory list [dated on this date] is also still inside the footlocker. It is quickly evident, however, that on October 31, 1966, six boxes of slides and the brain are missing. It will not be until August 1972 that the public first learns the brain is gone. Frank Mankiewicz, former press secretary for Robert F. Kennedy, will later recall that the brain was interred with the body at a later date. JFK's burial site will be moved and the coffin reinterred on March 14, 1967 - almost five months after the brain will be first noted to be missing, and while RFK is still alive.
  
• 4/27/1965 US carrier Boxer began an airlift in which over 1,000 men, women and children were evacuated from the Dominican Republic to Navy ships standing off shore.
  
• 4/28/1965 Supreme Court ruled 6-2 that remarks by a judge or prosecutor about a murder defendant's failure to testify violated his 5th Amendment rights. 4/28/1965 5pm Presidential meeting with advisers; LBJ debated about whether to include in his speech a warning that the DR could become "another Cuba," but it was decided not to.
  
• 4/28/1965 7:30pm LBJ briefed congressional leaders, expressing his fears that the Dominican Republic could go communist.
  
• 4/28/1965 8:40pm LBJ went on national TV to tell the public he had sent the Marines ashore in the Dominican Republic "in order to protect American lives." Johnson sent in 23,000 troops. The US press played up the familiar theme of benign US intervention to restore Latin chaos and protect Americans, supposedly the work of "Castroite extremists". 19 or 26 Americans died, 2,850 Dominicans were killed. The tidy little war was very popular in the US and "sent a message" to Castro, North Vietnam, etc. LBJ pulled together an OAS occupational force made up of Costa Rican, Salvadoran, Honduran and Nicaraguan troops; Argentina, Colombia and Venezuela refused to take part. Supposedly, ambassador Bennett called Washington from the DR to request US troops, and "was talking to us from under a desk while bullets were going through his windows and he had a thousand American men, women and children assembled in the hotel who were pleading with their president for help to preserve their lives." (LBJ's words, 6/17)
  
• 4/29/1965 US Commissioner of Education Francis Keppel announced that all public school districts must desegregate their schools by the fall of 1967.
  
• 4/30/1965 The wiretap on MLK's home was discontinued when he moved.
  
• 4/30/1965 Dean Rusk told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the US had intervened in the Dominican Republic to protect American lives. No communist threat was mentioned.
  

• 5/1965 Congress voted for a $700 million supplemental military appropriation for Vietnam. Gaylord Nelson, Morse and Gruening were the only Senators to vote against it. The Kennedy brothers privately wanted to vote against it, but did not yet want to create a public clash with the president.
  
• 5/1965 The FBI's vaunted record has been built against second and third stringers - it has never successfully tackled the real overlords of crime. Ramparts, The FBI and Organized Crime, Fred J. Cook., p. 16
  
• 5/1965 Jacques Vallee's Anatomy of a Phenomenon is published; it is one of the first scholarly books about UFOs, and is given generally good reviews in the mainstream press. "Anatomy of a Phenomenon" is one of the best books ever written on the subject of unidentified flying objects. Written in the 60s, Vallee shows that UFOs constitute a genuine scientific enigma of potentially explosive importance. Carl Sagan is said to have recommended this book to one of his colleagues before his abrupt departure from esoteric study. Given Vallee's scientific sensibilities and admirable refusal to jump to conclusions, it's easy to see why. "Anatomy of a Phenomenon" reveals a critical phase in Vallee's investigative career.
  
• 5/1965 The Warren Commission from the Procedural Standpoint Arthur L. Goodheart New York University Law Review, Vol. 40, May 1965, pp. 404423
  
• 5/1965 Did Lee Harvey Oswald Act Without Help? J. M. van Bemmelen New York University Law Review, Vol. 40, May 1965, pp. 466476
  
• 5/1965 Why the Warren Commission? Robert F. Cushman New York University Law Review, Vol. 40, May 1965, pp. 477503 (Robert F. Cushman is Associate Professor of Government at New York University.)
  
• 5/2/1965 Johnson told the American people that "what had begun as a popular democratic revolution in the Dominican Republic had been taken over and really seized and placed in the hands of a band of communist conspirators." But there was no real evidence of this, and he had previously made no public mention of such a threat. LBJ's policy toward Latin America was one of contempt. The Organization of American States "couldn't pour piss out of a boot if the instructions were written on the heel." His man in charge of Latin American programs, Thomas Mann, once said: "They understand only two things - a buck in the pocket and a kick in the ass." LBJ had planned a second invasion of Cuba for early 1965, using US troops, but the operation was never carried out because of the unexpected crisis in the Dominican Republic. (Tad Szulc, "Cuba on Our Mind," Compulsive Spy)
  
• 5/3/1965 Edward Jay Epstein interviewed WC staffer Howard Willens.
  
• 5/3/1965 In a speech, LBJ read a cable from ambassador W. Tapley Bennett in the Dominican Republic: "You must land troops immediately or blood will run in the streets, American blood will run in the streets."
  
• 5/4/1965 LBJ message to Congress; he assured them that his intelligence showed that the rebels in the Dominican Republican were led by Communists. Johnson bragged that "in March and April, we flew more than 3,200 sorties against military targets in hostile areas" in Vietnam. He also asked Congress for an "additional $700 million to meet mounting military requirements in Vietnam." Lady Bird wrote, "Lyndon looks tired and worn. The Dominican troubles have taken their toll." (White House Diary 265)
  
• 5/4/1965 Allen Dulles in NBC-TV interview: "All that I can say is that I am a parson's son, and I was brought up as a Presbyterian, maybe as a Calvinist, maybe that may be a fatalist. I don't know. But I hope I have a reasonable moral standard." In the same interview, Richard Bissell explained that CIA men "feel a higher loyalty and that they are acting in obedience to that higher loyalty." He conceded that agents sometimes undertook actions "that were contrary to their moral precepts" but contended that "the morality of, shall we call it for short, cold war is so infinitely easier than the morality of almost any kind of hot war that I never encountered this as a serious problem." (The Espionage Establishment, David Wise)
  
• 5/5/1965 Edward Jay Epstein interviewed Sen. John Sherman Cooper, Rep. Gerald Ford, and Alfred Goldberg.
  
• 5/6/1965 RFK said before Congress that he advocated negotiations, rather than withdrawal or escalation, in Vietnam.
  
• 5/8/1965 Truman became the first former president to address the U.S. Senate while it was in formal session. The Senate honored him on his eightieth birthday.
  
• 5/9/1965 US government announces that there are 42,200 US fighting men in Vietnam.
  
• 5/10/1965 Dean Rusk State Dept bulletin: "I continue to hear and see nonsense about the nature of the struggle there...There is no evidence that the Viet Cong has any significant popular following in South Viet-Nam."
  
• 5/11/1965 Blacks held mass meeting in Norfolk (Va.) and demanded equal rights and ballots. Other equal rights meetings and conventions were held in Petersburg, Va., June 6; Vicksburg, Miss., June 19; Alexandria, Va., August 3; Nashville, Tenn., August 7-11; Raleigh, N.C., September 29-October 3; Richmond, September 18; Jackson, Miss., October 7.
  
• 5/13/1965 An unpublicized bombing pause in Vietnam begins, after McNamara had urged it, hoping it might encourage Hanoi to talk peace.
  
• 5/15/1965 National Teach-In held throughout the US. This anti-war effort was broadcast to over 100 colleges.
  
• 5/16/1965 After no response from Hanoi, LBJ indicated he wanted to resume the bombing.
  
• 5/17/1965 Jacques Vallee diary entry: "A curious incident recently took place during a conversation with a Martin Marietta engineer who says he is compiling a reference book on UFOs. As he was spending the evening at Bryn Mawr with our Little Society the conversation came to sightings in the Soviet Union. He told us he had written (in Russian) to their Academy of Sciences, and had received the reply that no study was being made of the subject. He showed us the Russian reply, held in a thick black binder. As the conversation continued the binder was passed around and came to Sam [Randlett] who read the letter and innocently turned the page. The engineer lept out of his chair like a tiger and tore the binder away, tersely spitting out, The other papers have nothing to do with that!' We were left fairly shocked by the violence of his reaction. Of course we began to wonder what else was in that binder. There are rumors that major aerospace companies are conducting their own secret studies of UFOs." (Forbidden Science p143) This month, Vallee's Anatomy of a Phenomenon' is published; it is one of the first scholarly books about UFOs, and is given generally good reviews in the mainstream press.
  
• 5/18/1965 US resumes bombing of North Vietnam. Tom Wicker says it was 5/19 (JFK & LBJ 265)
  
• 5/23/1965 David Wise coined the term "credibility gap" in an article for the Herald-Tribune.
  
• 5/24/1965 De Gaulle assassination attempt.
  
• 5/24/1965 Hearing before Judge Holland on Jack Ruby's choice of counsel. Joe Tonahill is removed as Ruby's counsel.
  
• 5/26/1965 OAS agrees to provide a peace-keeping force to enforce a truce to replace US troops in DR.
  
• 5/26/1965 Washington - Growing role for Hoover as Johnson adviser, as shown by assignment of FBI men to probe Communist activity in the Dominican Republic. Chronological editorial, same date, comments on curious role for FBI agents. San Francisco Chronicle, Times-Post Service
  
• 5/27/1965 At Raiford State Prison in Florida a riot ensued; after it was over, prisoners were treated horribly until they agreed to sign confessions (which were used to convict them in new trials). The Supreme Court would later rule unanimously to overturn the convictions.
  
• 5/29/1965 (The 48th anniversary of JFK's birth) The Texas House of Representatives defeats on a record vote of 72 - 52 (with Governor Connally's brother voting with the majority) a bill passed unanimously in the State Senate proposing to rename the state school for the mentally retarded at Richmond in JFK's honor.
  
• 5/29/1965 1000 Vietcong troops attacked three ARVN batallions at the hamlet of Ba Gia; the South Vietnamese troops panicked and fled, leaving their equipment behind. US air strikes and napalm fire drove the Vietcong out.
  
• 6/1965 Supreme Court ruled 5-4 to strike down a federal law making it a crime for a communist to hold office in a labor union.
  
• 6/1965 Federal Reserve Chairman Martin gave a speech underlining "disquieting similarities between our present prosperity and the fabulous 20s." This speech depressed the stock market for weeks.
  
• 6/1965 Sen. Fulbright gave a speech supporting the administration's Vietnam policy.
  
• 6/1965 Playboy interview with Melvin Belli. Detailed, highly opinionated analysis of what J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI do and do not do, and why.
  
• 6/1/1965 THE STATE OF TEXAS vs. JACK RUBENSTEIN -- Defense counsel files amended motion to disqualify Judge Brown.
  
• 6/1/1965 Cuban exile David Sanchez Morales is assigned as a deep-cover operative, working as a public safety officer for the Agency for International Development (AID) in Lima, Peru. (Fonzi chronology)
  
• 6/2/1965 Harold Weisberg on trying to get his first book, Whitewash, published in Europe: "An executive of a highly respected French publisher, in Washington on June 2, 1965, castigated American publishers as cowards. His house, he said, would be very interested in this subject. He would personally read the book and, if his approval was confirmed by the president, they would print it as fast as possible. He even laid out a tentative publishing schedule. Amidst the most uninhibited praise of the author's courage and persistence, he promised the final decision within 28 days. Those were his last words. Neither he nor his superior has answered six letters from the author and at least one informal inquiry from an appropriate member of the French foreign service, his personal friend. Mail from German publishers has failed to reach the author. But this is not surprising when it is understood that his mail from Washington, 30 miles away, sometimes requires six days, for delivery, and that from New York, less than 250 miles, as much as two weeks. A major magazine, first written before Thanksgiving by its United States correspondent and the author, finally received a later letter the next year and replied about Easter time, saying, "Unfortunately, the copy of your book . . . must have been lost, either here in our house or during transportation. We are, however, eagerly interested...." This letter reached the author three weeks prior to this writing."
  
• 6/3/1965 Taylor cabled Washington: "We should...make very clear that we do not believe that any feasible amount of bombing is of itself likely to cause the DRV to cease and desist its actions in the south."
  
• 6/3/1965 Gemini 4 mission: Ed White becomes first American to walk in space while James McDivitt was the pilot.
  
• 6/3/1965 LBJ stated, "Over the years of our history our forces have gone forth into many lands, but always they returned when they were no longer needed. For the purpose of America is never to suppress liberty, but always to save it. The purpose of America is never to take freedom, but always to return it; never to break peace but to bolster it, and never to seize land but always to save lives. One month ago it became my duty to send our marines into the Dominican Republic, and I sent them for these same ends." (US State Dept Publication 7971)
  
• 6/4/1965 LBJ spoke at Howard University about civil rights: "You do not take a man who for years has been hobbled by chains, liberate him, bring him to the starting line of a race saying 'you are free to compete with all the others' and still justly believe you have been completely fair."
  
• 6/5/1965 Taylor cabled that the South Vietnamese army was plagued by bad leadership, desertions and heading quickly toward collapse. At this point he felt "It will probably be necessary to commit US ground forces to action." That afternoon, in a White House meeting, LBJ was gloomy about the situation.
  
• 6/7/1965 Supreme Court struck down a Connecticut law against the use of contraceptives; the ruling was 7-2 (with Black and Stewart dissenting over Douglas' view that the Constitution contained a right to privacy').
  
• 6/7/1965 Westmoreland cabled that the South Vietnamese army was near collapse, communist forces were growing stronger, and US troops would be needed in large numbers, 175,000 in all. He added that more soldiers might be needed down the road.
  
• 6/7/1965 Edward Jay Epstein interviewed WC member John McCloy.
  
• 6/8/1965 White House meeting in the morning discussing Westmoreland's cable.
  
• 6/8/1965 LBJ authorizes commanders in Vietnam to commit US ground forces to combat.
  
• 6/8/1965 US Embassy in Saigon withdrew its support from PM Phan Huy Quat and his efforts to end the war.
  
• 6/8/1965 State Dept spokesman Robert McCloskey announced to the press that US forces in Vietnam would be available for "combat support" if needed. This was the first public mention of a combat role for US troops.
  
• 6/9/1965 White House issued a statement: "There has been no change in the mission of United States ground combat units in Vietnam in recent days or weeks."
  
• 6/10/1965 Edward Jay Epstein interviewed WC staffer Samuel Stern.
  
• 6/11/1965 Edward Jay Epstein interviewed WC member Rep. Hale Boggs.
  
• 6/15/1965 Lady Bird complained in her diary of "hammer blows of the front page stories - New York Times, New York Herald Tribune, even the Washington Post. All of them seemed to delight in faulting their country and their President."
  
• 6/15/1965 Sen. Richard Russell stated in the Senate, "Whether or not the initial decision was a mistake is now moot. The United States does have a commitment in South Vietnam. The flag is there. United States honor and prestige are there. And, most important of all, United States soldiers are there."
  
• 6/16/1965 McNamara spoke with the press, explaining that US strategy was to stop the communists' attempt to take over the South. The same day, Eisenhower informed LBJ that he thought Westmoreland should be given the forces he requested: "we have got to win." (In Retrospect 190)
  
• 6/17/1965 Grabbing documents from his pockets and slamming his fist on his desk, LBJ told the press that before he sent troops into the Dominican Republic, "some 1500 innocent people were murdered and shot, and their heads cut off...our ambassador...was talking to us from under a desk while bullets were going through his windows." It soon turned out that the atrocity stories were greatly exaggerated and ambassador W. Tapley Bennett Jr. had not been hiding under his desk. (Politics of Lying p42)
  
• 6/17/1965 A Lou Harris poll showed that 65% of the public approved of LBJ's handling of the war in Vietnam; 47% wanted to send in more troops; 23% were "not sure"; 19% did not want to increase troops; 11% wanted to withdraw. Johnson told reporters that the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution gave him all the authority he needed in Vietnam. Sens. Mansfield and Dirksen had both told LBJ that if he brought the issue before Congress again it would just tear the country apart. (In Retrospect 191-2)
  
• 6/18/1965 The beginning of devastating Arc Light air raids by B-52 Stratofortresses against communist positions. Such massive strikes ("swatting flies with sledgehammers," said critics) were inconclusive. The Arc Light raids ended 8/1973.
  
• 6/18/1965 George Ball sent LBJ another memo, suggesting that US troops in Vietnam be kept below 100,000.
  
• 6/18/1965 State Senate's "Burns committee" on Un-American Activities releases a report blaming the campus protests of the fall on the lax policies of Kerr. (SF Chronicle 6/9/02)
  
• 6/19/1965 Nguyen Kao Ky is appointed South Vietnamese Prime Minister.
  
• 6/21/1965 Judge Brown requests that he be removed from any further duty in the case of The State of Texas vs. Jack Ruby.
  
• 6/21/1965 LBJ told McNamara he was pessimistic that the American people would continue to support the war as things got worse. "And I don't believe they're [the communists] ever goin' to quit. And I don't see...that we have any...plan for victory militarily or diplomatically...[Sen. Richard] Russell thinks we ought to take one of these [regime] changes to get out of there. I do not think we can get out of there with our treaty like it is and with what all we've said and I think it would just lose us face in the world and I just shudder to think what all of 'em would say." (In Retrospect p190-1)
  
• 6/23/1965 George Ball suggested in a meeting that if we were forced out of South Vietnam we could retreat to Thailand and hold there. Rusk and McNamara strongly objected.
  
• 6/23/1965 On this day, the dismembered bodies of the parents of Charles Frederick Rogers are discovered in Houston, Texas. Rogers has been positively identified by Houston police forensic artist Lois Gibson as "Frenchy," the shortest of the three tramps apprehended in Dealey Plaza moments after the JFK assassination, hiding in a railroad car behind the grassy knoll. According to private detective John R. Craig, Charles F. Rogers has worked for the CIA since 1956. He is a physicist with graduate training in nuclear physics, a linguist and was a close personal friend of assassination suspect David Ferrie. He was born in 1921. He graduated from the University of Houston with a degree in physics and was a member of Sigma Phi Sigma fraternity. He was also a member of the Civil Air Patrol in the mid-1950's. He was a seismologist for Shell Oil for nine years after World War II. Officially, Rogers will disappear this year and will not be seen again. It is Craig's theory, however, that Rogers is alive and still active as a secret agent. Craig claims that "He has been active with the CIA since he murdered his parents. The last place we have [placed] him is in 1986 in Guatemala where he was still working in the Iran-Contra program. He is a pilot and flew for Air America."
  
• 6/24/1965 Edward Jay Epstein interviewed WC staffer Joseph Ball.
  
• 6/25/1965 Harry Truman received from the South Korean ambassador the "Order of Merit for the National Foundation Joongjang," the republic's highest honor.
  
• 6/25/1965 Department of Defense Directive 5230.7 stated that in the event of a "national emergency" declared by either the President or the Secretary of Defense, the Office of Wartime Information Security would activate contingency plans for imposing censorship on the press, the mails and all telecommunications. Provisions also existed for the detention in military camps of anyone deemed a "security risk."
  
• 6/26/1965 US government announces deployment of 21,000 more US soldiers to Vietnam.
  
• 6/28/1965 US combat troops began their first full-scale offensive in Vietnam, 20 miles NE of Saigon.
  
• 6/29/1965 Columnist Ralph de Toledano commented on the replacement of conservative RNC chairman Dean Burch with Ray Bliss: "Like other Liberal Leftist Republicans, Mr. Bliss had made no secret of the fact that he cares not a wit about the sensibilities of the Conservatives who make up the bulk of the party's workers. Conservatives, he contended, have nowhere else to go."
  
• 6/30/1965 As of today, there are 1,041,244 active-duty military personnel in the US, while the Pentagon also had control over 940,763 civilian employees. (Mollenhoff, The Pentagon)
  
• 6/30-7/1/1965 Edward Jay Epstein interviewed WC staffer Wesley Liebeler.
  
• Mid-1965 The Making of the President 1964 is published. Author Theodore White described the Zapruder film in terms similar to Life's grossly inaccurate 12/1963 summary: "The President turns in the back seat, all the way around to his right, and flings out his hand in greeting. Then the hand bends quickly up as if to touch his throat, as if something hurts. His wife, at this moment, is also leaning forward, turning to the right. Slowly he leans back to her, as if to rest his head on her shoulder. She quickly puts her arm around him, and leans even farther forward to look at him. Then...the head of the president is jolted by some invisible and terrible second impact. It is flung up, jerked up...One notices the red roses spill from her lap as the President's body topples from sight." (p.3) Practically every part of that statement is incorrect; interestingly, it was written in early 1965, after the WR was already issued. White should have known by then that the bullet officially hit Kennedy in the back and exited through his throat. "John F. Kennedy was killed by a lunatic, Lee Harvey Oswald, who had momentarily given loyalty to the paranoid Fidel Castro of Cuba. And Oswald was, in turn...slain by another madman, Jack Ruby...an act of unreason, avenged by an individual act of obscenity." (p29-30)
  

• 7/1965 Walt Rostow told Daniel Ellsberg, "Dan, it looks very good. The Vietcong are going to collapse within weeks. Not months but weeks." (The Best and the Brightest, Halberstam)
  
• 7/1965 Harold Russell attends a party with a female friend. (Russell was with Warren Reynolds when the J. D. Tippit shooting took place. Both men saw the Tippit killer escape.) He seemingly goes out of his mind at the party and starts telling everyone he is going to be killed. He begs friends to hide him. Someone calls the police. When the policemen arrive, one of them hits Russell on the head with his pistol. Russell is then taken to a hospital where he is pronounced dead a few hours later: cause of death is listed as "heart failure."
  
• 7/1965 The Journal-Lancet contained an article by a psychiatrist, Dr. Donald W. Hastings, characterizing American assassins as having "schizophrenia, in most cases a paranoid type."
  
• 7/1/1965 Dean Rusk wrote LBJ: "The integrity of the US commitment is the principal pillar of peace throughout the world. If that commitment becomes unreliable, the communist world would draw conclusions that would lead to our ruin and almost certainly to a catastrophic war. So long as the South Vietnamese are prepared to fight for themselves, we cannot abandon them without disaster to peace and to our interests throughout the world."
  
• 7/2/1965 LBJ was torn over what to do; he decided to send McNamara to Saigon again, send Averell Harriman to Moscow to explore a Geneva Conference, and told Ball to explore direct contacts with Hanoi's representative in Paris.
  
• 7/4/1965 The Vietcong quickly took over Ba Gia again, after only 90 minutes of battle with the ARVN. US Marines drove the VC out again.
  
• 7/4/1965 Brezhnev demands a rearmanent program to counter US military spending.
  
• 7/5/1965 David Atlee Phillips is made station chief in Dominican Republic following LBJ's decision to send the U.S. Marines to bolster the right-wing government's fight against leftist rebels. Serving as CIA adviser to the Dominican Republic's military is Mitchel Livingston WerBell III, an OSS veteran and CIA supplier of sophisticated assassination devices. (Fonzi chronology)
  
• 7/8/1965 Edward Jay Epstein interviewed WC staffer Francis W.H. Adams.
  
• 78/1965 Bundy met with the "Wise Men" (Omar Bradley, Gilpatric, George Kistiakowsky, Arthur Larson, McCloy, John Cowles, Acheson, Arthur Dean, Paul Hoffman, Lovett) about the war; McCloy and Lovett had serious doubts about the war, though both felt the US had to stick it out and win. Later that evening, LBJ met with them; Acheson told him to stop whining about the criticism he was getting: "I blew my top and told him he was wholly right on Vietnam, that he had no choice except to press on..." (The Wise Men 651-2) According to McNamara, everyone but Larson and Hoffman was committed to doing whatever was necessary to win; Acheson and Arthur Dean were especially against negotiation. McCloy stated, "We are about to get our noses bloodied but you've got to do it. You've got to go in." (In Retrospect 197)
  
• 7/9/1965 RFK spoke about the need to find non-military solutions in Vietnam: "political first, political last, political always. Victory in a revolutionary war is won not by escalation, but by descalation." LBJ was furious, and the press generally accused him of being politically motivated.
  
• 7/12/1965 Le Monde quoted RFK: "If, in response to revolutionary activity, a government can only promise its people ten years of napalm or heavy artillery, there will not be government for long."
  
• 7/12-13/1965 Former Mississippi governor Jim Coleman testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee; LBJ had nominated him to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. Nick Katzenbach defended him: "Some say that Mr. Coleman is a racial extremist. In the context of Mississippi politics, he could not be so classified in any sense of the term." Coleman did a remarkable amount of double-talking, telling Sen. Jacob Javits, "I don't think we have segregation in the true sense of the word in Mississippi or ever had."
  
• 7/13/1965 Thurgood Marshall is appointed US Solicitor General by LBJ.
  
• 7/13/1965 Lady Bird wrote in her diary, "the press has been boiling these last few days with Schlesinger's account in his book of how Lyndon became Vice President. Everybody's got to have his say about that...Everybody but us."
  
• 7/13/1965 LBJ told the press there was no credence to rumors that Dean Rusk might resign.
  
• 7/14/1965 Adlai Stevenson collapsed suddenly while walking in London's Grosvenor Square and died almost immediately. Rumors would circulate that he had somehow been assassinated.
  
• 7/14/1965 LBJ walks into a staff meeting, takes a seat, listens for a while, and then says: "Don't let me interrupt. But there's one thing you ought to know. Vietnam is like being in a plane without a parachute, when all the engines go out. If you jump, you'll probably be killed, and if you stay in, you'll crash and probably burn. That's what it is." Then, without waiting for a response, LBJ walks out of the room. During this period of time, both Bill Moyers and Richard N. Goodwin privately consult with psychiatrists concerning what they perceive to be LBJ's growing irrational behavior.
  
• 7/14/1965 LBJ told Newseek editor James Cannon that his number one goal as President was "to make life better and more enjoyable and more significant" for Americans. "I'm more aware of the problems of more people than before. I am more sensitive to the injustices we have put on the Negro...I'm a little less selfish, a little more selfless..."
  
• 7/14/1965 McNamara and LBJ talk before the Defense Secretary left for Saigon; Johnson agonized that he had never intended to send so many troops to Vietnam when he pushed the Tonkin Resolution through Congress.
  
• 7/16-17/1965 McNamara met with Westmoreland in Saigon; he was told 175,000 troops would be needed by year's end and 100,000 more in 1966. Westy noted that air attacks were having little effect since the communists forces relied on so few supplies to move and fight.
  
• 7/17/1965 De Gaulle assassination attempt.
  
• 7/18/1965 Washington - Disclosure of wiretapping by IRS regarded as great blow to feds' fight against organized crime. Quotes sources as saying drive been getting along on momentum generated during RFK tenure. The decline, it was reported, started on the day of President Kennedy's death. "The next day we stopped getting information from the FBI on the Bobby Baker investigation," said a young Justice Department lawyer, "Within a month the FBI men in the field wouldn't tell us anything. We started running out of gas." New York Times, Fred P. Graham
  
• 7/20/1965 General Maxwell D. Taylor was the target of an attempt on his life in Vietnam.
  
• 7/21/1965 Ho Chi Minh announces that his people "will fight 20 years if necessary"; US ground troops now number 75,000. McNamara reported to LBJ that "The situation in South Vietnam is worse than a year ago (when it was worse than a year before that)...A hard VC push is now on to dismember the nation and to maul the army...There are no signs that we have throttled the inflow of supplies for the VC or can throttle the flow while their material needs are as low as they are..."
  
• 7/22-23/1965 Tom Wicker articles in the NYT about the Bay of Pigs invasion. Richard Bissell was quoted as saying that the Cuban exile invasion force was powerful enough to cause trouble if they had not been allowed to invade Cuba: "…it is entirely possible that they might have tried to seize a base in Nicaragua, Honduras or Guatemala: there is not the slightest doubt that they could have defeated any Guatemalan force." Wicker concluded that the project became a "sort of Frankenstein's monster that once created, went out of control."
  
• 7/22/1965 Washington - J. Edgar Hoover challenges Katzenbach criticism of FBI role in fighting organized crime. Denies any organizational jealousy or lack of cooperation, etc. AP, Mohbat
  
• 7/23/1965 THE STATE OF TEXAS vs. JACK RUBENSTEIN -- Hearing before Judge Holland on defense counsel's petition formally to disqualify Judge Brown. No decision.
  
• 7/27/1965 LBJ signed a law to require health warnings to be printed on cigarette packages and ads.
  
• 7/27/1965 LBJ approved the plan to send more US troops. Sen. Mansfield told LBJ he was opposed to sending troops, and feared growing discontent about the war in the US.
  
• 7/27/1965 Assassination attempt against Castro.
  
• 7/28/1965 LBJ announced he was nominating Abe Fortas to the Supreme Court.
  
• 7/28/1965 US and South Vietnamese bombers mistakenly hit a Buddhist monastery, killing two.
  
• 7/28/1965 LBJ announces he is sending 50,000 more men to South Vietnam -- increasing American troop strength from the present 75,000 to 125, 000. LBJ announced to the public his plan to expand US forces in Vietnam from 75,000 to 125,000, but he tried to publicly downplay its scope by announcing it in a low-key press conference. The monthly draft quota is doubled from 17,000 to 35,000. "We did not choose to be the guardians at the gate, but there is no one else." He gave the example of Munich as the likely result of refusing to fight. "If we are driven from the field in Vietnam, then no nation can ever again have the same confidence in American promises, or in American protection." A reporter asked him if this meant a change in US policy from simply providing backup support for South Vietnamese forces; LBJ replied, "It does not imply any change in policy whatever." Johnson also reiterated that the US would be glad to negotiate with Hanoi: "Fifteen efforts have been made to start these discussions with the help of 40 nations throughout the world but there has been no answer." McNamara advised asking for $10 billion from Congress and a tax hike, but Johnson refused. Polls taken in August reflected that 60%-70% of the American people agreed with LBJ's stance.
  
• 7/29/1965 Hanson Baldwin reported in the NY Times that the Pentagon had been hoping for a full wartime footing (calling up the reserves, etc.)
  
• 7/29/1965 The first 4000 paratroopers of the 101st Airborne Division arrive at Camranh Bay.
  
• 7/29/1965 Washington - ... If Hoover's sense of public relations has deserted him to that extent. He is no longer the phenomenon who erected Washington's only record of infallibility. San Francisco Chronicle, Times Service, Tom Wicker, J. Edgar Hoover as a public relations expert. His record, his reputation, his mistakes.
  
• 7/30/1965 LBJ signed into law Medicare bill, providing health insurance for eldery and disabled. Medicaid also established. He signed the bill in Missouri at the Harry Truman Library, with the ex-president sitting next to him. Mr. and Mrs. Truman would receive the first two Medicare cards in January 1966. Spending on Medicare would rise from $7.1 billion in 1970 to $164.5 billion in 1994.
  
• 7/31/1965 Pravda quoted Ho Chi Minh: "South Vietnam will unquestionably be liberated."
  
• 8/1965 Mona B. Saenz dies, hit by a bus. She is the Texas State Employment clerk who interviewed LHO during his search for work in Dallas.
  
• 8/1965 Early this month at Ft. Bragg, North Carolina, Daniel Marvin is asked by the CIA to kill US Navy Lieutenant Commander William Bruce Pitzer. Marvin is told that Pitzer is a traitor who is about to give States secrets to the enemy. Marvin refuses the offer.
  
• 8/1965 CBS documentary on the war showed US Marines burning villages while old people and children pleaded that their homes be spared. CBS was jammed with angry calls denouncing the program as Communist propaganda. Yet the program for the most part stuck to the government line; numerous officials were invited to participate (and even edit their interviews before broadcast), but no war critics appeared. (The First Casualty p396; Captive Press p134)
  
• 8/1965 Playboy featured an interview with UKA Imperial Wizard Robert Shelton. "There is several Klans, you know," Shelton said. "That is the trouble of throwing every nut in the same bag and saying it's all the same kind of nuts." Shortly after, Shelton told a rally in Alabama that anyone who took the Fifth Amendment before HUAC was probably a Communist. (The Fiery Cross p357)
  
• 8/1/1965 Gerald Ford is charged by LBJ with having accused prominent Democrats of pressuring Johnson into not calling up the reserves; Ford denies making the accusation.
  
• 8/2/1965 Tulsa, Oklahoma. A large wave of UFO sightings occurred in 1965 in the US. From coast to coast strange low flying flying objects were reported almost nightly by people of all ages and walks of life. As the year progressed, the number of reports rose dramatically. On the night of August 2, 1965, thousands of people in 4 midwestern states witnessed spectacular aerial displays by large formations of UFOs.
  
• 8/3/1965 LBJ assured the world that the US did not intend to impose its "ideology" on Vietnam or any other country; it only wanted to make sure that other countries could decide their own future.
  
• 8/4/1965 LBJ asked Congress for $1.7 billion more funding for the war.
  
• 8/4/1965 NYT quoted Dean Rusk: "We would be glad to go to the conference table but thus far Hanoi and Peking say no."
  
• 8/5/1965 Edward Jay Epstein interviewed Melvin Eisenberg of the Warren Commission.
  
• 8/5/1965 NSC meeting on Vietnam; Max Taylor, now back from Saigon as a presidential adviser, predicted that the Communist offensive would be stopped by year's end. The same day, the Pentagon completed a series of war games that showed that a guerilla war would be difficult for the US to win, and that North Vietnam could probably withstand US bombing.
  
• 8/6/1965 LBJ signed Voting Rights Act into law, giving federal government the power to guarantee voting access for all; poll taxes and literacy tests were forbidden. It had passed the Senate 77-19 and the House 333-85.
  
• 8/6/1965 TIME's John Shaw reported that US marines in Vietnam were killing VC prisoners.
  
• 8/8/1965 Congress passed Omnibus Housing Act, with new funds for low-income housing.
  
• 8/11-16/1965 riots in Watts district of Los Angeles; looting and burning by blacks after a black man was mistreated by police. Unemployment among black males in Watts is 30%. 34 people died (mostly blacks), 1,032 were injured, over 200 businesses were destroyed. $40 million in damage was caused. 12,000 National Guardsmen was called out to restore order. Similar riots broke out in Chicago. It lasted 6 days in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, California, in August 1965. By the time the riot subsided, 34 people had been killed, 1,032 injured, and 3,438 arrested. It would stand as the most severe riot in Los Angeles history until the Los Angeles riots of 1992.
  
• 8/17/1965 Even Sen. Strom Thurmond (R-SC), who voted against the immigration bill out of concern for overpopulation, didn't think the new preference system would mean much of a change: "The preferences which would be established by this proposal are based, I believe, on sound reasoning and meritorious considerations, not entirely dissimilar in effect from those which underlie the national origins quotas of existing law." (Congressional Record, Sept. 17, 1965, p. 24237.)"
  
• 8/17-23/1965 a minor controversy erupts when Eisenhower said that his 10/1954 letter to Diem had intended to offer economic, not military aid to Vietnam. The Johnson Administration was to issue a pamphlet 8/23 titled "Why Vietnam?" which would use Ike's letter as justification for US involvement there. Finally, on 8/19 Ike tried to end the dispute by stating, "I support the president."
  
• 8/17/1965 Harold Weisberg's Whitewash, a critique of the Warren Report, is privately published in a limited edition.
  
• 8/18-21/1965 US forces won a major victory against VC forces on the Batangan Peninsula.
  
• 8/19/1965 In entering a New York Times editorial into the Congressional Record, Congressman Donald Rumsfeld said, "I believe the following significant and timely editorial which appeared in today's issue of the New York Times and which discusses our involvement in Vietnam merits wide attention. I concur in the conclusion expressed therein that the people of the United States must know not only how their country became involved but where we are heading." [Congressional Record, 89th Cong. Pg. 21081, 8/19/65; New York Times, 8/19/65]
  
• 8/25/1965 Rep. Philip Burton (D-CA) said in Congress: "Just as we sought to eliminate discrimination in our land through the Civil Rights Act, today we seek by phasing out the national origins quota system to eliminate discrimination in immigration to this nation composed of the descendants of immigrants." (Congressional Record, Aug. 25, 1965, p. 21783.) Rep. Emanuel Celler (D-NY), a sponsor of the bill, told his colleagues: "With the end of discrimination due to place of birth, there will be shifts in countries other than those of northern and western Europe. Immigrants from Asia and Africa will have to compete and qualify in order to get in, quantitatively and qualitatively, which, itself will hold the numbers down. There will not be, comparatively, many Asians or Africans entering this country. .. .Since the people of Africa and Asia have very few relatives here, comparatively few could immigrate from those countries because they have no family ties in the U.S." (Congressional Record, Aug. 25, 1965, p. 21812.)
  
• 8/25/1965 Edward Jay Epstein interviewed Arlen Specter, former staffer on the Warren Commission.
  
• 8/27/1965 Rusk told a press conference that he would welcome De Gaulle's personal efforts to negotiate an end to the war.
  
• 8/27/1965 Harold Weisberg on trying to get his first book, Whitewash, published in the UK: "In addition, an aging but wonderful agent in England made strenuous efforts, without success. One prominent British publisher with a world-wide reputation for "courage" wrote her on August 27, 1965, that the subject "is absolutely no go for us. I'd even go so far as to say the subject is almost dead in England." Another British publisher of like stature wrote "I feel this subject has now been exhausted, at least on this side of the Atlantic.""
  
• 8/30/1965 Washington - Rate of increase of serious crime declines. No comment by J. Edgar Hoover, nor even mention of his name, usually found in crime progress reports of this kind. New York Times, Fred P. Graham
  
• 8/31/1965 LBJ signed into law a bill making it a crime to destroy or mutilate a draft card.
  

• 9/1965 Fall 1965 the Hoover-approved TV series, The FBI Story, premiered on ABC. It was a glamorized account of the Bureau, controlled in almost every detail by Hoover, Tolson and DeLoach; yet several times Hoover tried to have the show cancelled when an episode didn't turn out just as he wanted it. Starring Efrem Zimbalist Jr., the show never once mentioned the Mafia.
  
• 9/1965 This month's issue of the JBS' American Opinion featured an article by Martin Dies called "Warren Report: The Strange Conclusions." He criticized the commission for being unwilling to look into "the International Communist Conspiracy."
  
• 9/1965 In a classified paper, Westmoreland spelled out the objectives of the war: to stop North Vietnamese aggression and force them to make a negotiated settlement.
  
• 9/2/1965 Chinese Defense Minister Lin Biao called on developing nations to rise up against the industrialized world, and ridiculed America's effort in Vietnam.
  
• 9/3/1965 LBJ announced the settlement of the steel strike.
  
• 9/3/1965 In a newspaper column item regarding the JFK assassination, syndicated columnist Dorothy Kilgallen writes: "This story isn't going to die as long as there's a real reporter alive -- and there are a lot of them." Dorothy Kilgallen's last public reference to the JFK assassination appeared on Sept. 3, 1965 when she challenged the authenticity of the famous Life magazine cover of Lee Harvey Oswald supposedly holding a rifle. She also chastised Marina Oswald for vouching for it. The incriminating photo has since been discredited by analysts who say Oswald's head was pasted on someone else's body. (By Sara Jordan, Midwest Today Magazine, October 21, 2007)
  
• 9/4/1965 Melba Marcades (Rose Cheramie) is found dead beside a highway near Big Sandy, Texas -- a small town in East Texas about midway between Dallas and Louisiana. A man tells authorities that Cheramie was lying in the roadway, apparently after being thrown from a car, and that he drove over hear head while trying to avoid her. Police can find no relationship between the woman and the driver and the case is closed. A later attempt to contact the driver indicates that his Tyler, Texas address is nonexistent.
  
• 9/6/1965 ... The Russian leaders who would like still further deterioration in relations have been aided, regrettably, by the Johnson Administration's surrender to J. Edgar Hoover and several insistent pressure groups of right-wing extremists on the Soviet American consular agreement. The decision not to press for Senate ratification of the treaty now supplies ammunition for peddlers in Moscow of the tired propaganda line that American foreign policy is not determined by President Johnson but by "fascists" and "imperialists." New York Times Editorial, More Cold war Chill
  
• 9/7/1965 After having terrible pains in his stomach, LBJ called over Dr. Burkley, who felt he was having kidney stones. (White House Diary 316)
  
• 9/9/1965 LBJ signed legislation creating Department of Housing and Urban Development at Cabinet level; its head, Robert Weaver, is the first black Cabinet member.
  
• 9/9/1965 THE STATE OF TEXAS vs. JACK RUBENSTEIN -- Today in Judge Louis Holland's court, Jack Ruby disregards his lawyers who are telling him to be quiet and declares that there was a conspiracy in high places behind JFK's assassination. As his lawyers try to push TV microphones away, Ruby says: "The world has the right to hear the truth." Second hearing before Judge Holland on defense counsel's petition to disqualify Judge Brown. Judge Holland passes the defense counsel's petition up to the Court of Criminal Appeals. Jack Ruby gave some notes to Elmer Gertz while in court in Dallas: "Elmer, you must believe me, that I am not imagining crazy thoughts etc. This is all so hopeless, that they have everything in the bag and there isn't any chance or hope for me. These hearings are just to stall for time. What chance to do I have, when I know at this time that they are killing are our people here now in this very building….you must believe me, as to what is happening they are torturing people right here…Why should I continually repeat all these things over and over."
  
• 9/13/1965 Columnist Joseph Alsop wrote about Vietnam: "At last there is light at the end of the tunnel."
  
• 9/16/1965 Most of NYC's major papers go out on strike; it will last three weeks.
  
• 9/18/1965 Roscoe White resigns from the Dallas Police Department.
  
• 9/19/1965 "Meet the Press" became the first network television program to broadcast a live satellite interview.
  
• 9/21/1965 Water Quality Act passed.
  
• 9/23/1965 Edward Jay Epstein interviewed J. Lee Rankin.
  
• 9/25/1965 Sen. Spessard Holland (D-FL), told his colleagues: "What I object to is imposing no limitation insofar as areas of the earth are concerned, but saying that we are throwing the doors open and equally inviting people from the Orient, from the islands of the Pacific, from the subcontinent of Asia, from the Near East, from all of Africa, all of Europe, and all of the Western Hemisphere on exactly the same basis. I am inviting attention to the fact that this is a complete and radical departure from what has always heretofore been regarded as sound principles of immigration." (Congressional Record, Sept. 22, 1965, p. 24779.) "
  
• 9/29/1965 Edward Jay Epstein interviewed Allen Dulles.
  
• 10/1965 Sylvan Fox's The Unanswered Questions about the Kennedy Assassination is published.
  
• 10/1965 Sirhan Sirhan takes a job as a stable boy at Santa Anita Racetrack, Calif.
  
• 10/1/1965 Congress passes an anti-pollution bill which empowers the Secretary of HEW to set emission standards on toxic pollutants in new diesel and gasoline powered cars.
  
• 10/1/1965 New Orleans: Clay Shaw, 52 years old, retires as director of the International Trade Mart, and a testimonial luncheon was held in his honor; the mayor presented him with the International Order of Merit medal.
  
• 10/3/1965 Liberty Island, NY harbor: LBJ signed the landmark Hart-Celler Immigration Bill that ended most ethnic quotas in effect since 1921, raised the ceiling on legal immigration; this led to a vast increase in immigrants from Asia, the Middle East and Latin America over the next few decades. Johnson said, "This bill we sign today is not a revolutionary bill. It does not affect the lives of millions. It will not restructure the shape of our daily lives." He criticized the old quota system: "This system violates the basic principle of American democracy -- the principle that values and rewards each man on the basis of his merit as a man. It has been un-American in the highest sense, because it has been untrue to the faith that brought thousands to these shores even before we were a country." Despite the noble words, the architects of the 1965 law did not see it as a means of significantly changing the immigration flow it was considered more a symbolic act, an extension of civil rights sentiments beyond our borders. Proponents repeatedly denied that the law would lead to a huge and sustained increase in the number of newcomers and become a vehicle for globalizing immigration. Many senators and representatives believed that the new, equal quotas would not be fully used by European, Asian, and Middle Eastern nations. In addition, they did not foresee the expansion of non-quota admissions (those not covered by numerical limits) under the act's strengthened provisions for family reunification.
  
• 10/4/1965 The original version of the immigration bill gave top preference to people with special skills, but that was changed in the final version to the current nepotistic emphasis on family relationship. A Washington Post editorial was no better at predicting the result than the bill's congressional supporters: "The most important change, in fact, was in direction, shuffling the preference categories to give first consideration to relatives of American citizens instead of to specially skilled persons. This had more emotional appeal and, perhaps more to the point, insured that the new immigration pattern would not stray radically from the old one." (The Washington Post, Oct. 4, 1965, p. 16.)
  
• 10/4/1965 Pope Paul VI addressed the UN General Assembly: "Listen to the lucid words of the great departed John Kennedy, who proclaimed, four years ago, Mankind must put an end to war, or war will put an end to mankind.' No more war, war never again! Peace, it is peace which must guide the destinies of peoples and of all mankind."
  
• 10/5/1965 Chalmers M. Roberts wrote in the Washington Post, "The FBI-Secret Service feud has long been well known. The Secret Service men have felt Hoover wanted to swallow their much smaller agency."
  
• 10/6/1965 LBJ signed a bill providing $340 million for regional medical centers fighting heart disease, cancer and stroke.
  
• 10/6/1965 "On Oct. 6, 1965, the Selective Service lifted its ban against drafting married men who had no children. Nine months and two days later, Mr. Cheney's first daughter, Elizabeth, was born." This quote comes from a Saturday NYTimes article -- "Cheney's Five Draft Deferments During the Vietnam Era Emerge as a Campaign Issue" -- discussing the lengths VP Dick Cheney went to in order to avoid serving during the Viet Nam war. It is apparent from the piece that Richard Cheney did everything humanly possible -- short of fleeing to Canada -- to avoid military conscription: He applied for and recieved 5 student deferments, a number described as "incredible" by professor David Curry of the University of Missouri in St. Louis. Curry has written extensively about the draft, including a 1985 book, "Sunshine Patriots: Punishment and the Vietnam Offender." The Times quotes Mr. Curry as observing: "That's a lot of times for the draft board to say O.K." Three weeks and a day after the Gulf of Tonkin resolution passed (giving President Johnson unlimited military force in Vietnam), Cheney married Lynn Cheney. Within a day or so of the end of deferment for "Married w/o children," Mr. and Mrs. Cheney conceived their first child.
  
• 10/8/1965 LBJ is operated on at Bethesda to have his gall bladder removed.
  
• 10/9/1965 Quotes Stouts "In a democratic country, J. Edgar Hoover is a completely impossible person to be in a position of authority …" Saturday Review, interview by Haskel Frankel with Rex Stout, author of The Doorbell Rang.
  
• 10/10/1965 Speaking at Coalinga Junior College, Ronald Reagan calls for an official declaration of war in Vietnam. (SF Chronicle 6/9/02) Reagan said in an interview with the Fresno Bee, "We should declare war on North Vietnam…It's silly talking about how many years we will have to spend in the jungles of Vietnam when we could pave the whole country and put parking stripes on it and still be home by Christmas."
  
• 10/11/1965 Study group headed by Tommy Thompson, with Taylor, Bill Bundy and McNaughton, issued its report; attacking Northern targets such as Haiphong harbor could bring the Chinese and/or Soviets into the war, and they recommended a bombing pause to encourage peace talks.
  
• 10/11/1965 Columbia releases the film The Bedford Incident, a Cold War thriller, starring Richard Widmark and Sidney Poitier. A Captain Ahab-type destroyer commander, armed with nuclear ASROC missiles, is obssessed with a Soviet sub armed with nuclear torpedoes. The screenplay by James Poe is based on the 1963 book by Mark Rascovich, which was patterned after Herman Melville's Moby-Dick. The film was directed by James B. Harris, who up to that time was best known as Stanley Kubrick's producer. Harris had recently split from a nine-year partnership with Kubrick. Just after the split, Kubrick would make Dr. Strangelove (1964), which raises similar issues to The Bedford Incident.
  
• 10/13/1965 Wesley Liebeler wrote a letter to Rankin about meeting David Lifton; he asked for an explanation of the splice and the missing frames in the Z-film. Rankin and Redlich soon replied that the missing frames couldn't possibly show a bullet hole in the Stemmons Freeway sign, because Oswald couldn't have hit the sign from where he was. Redlich added that the frames might have been deleted because "they were of little value because during those frames the Presidential limousine was almost completely hidden by the sign." Redlich also falsely claimed that the sign had not been replaced since the assassination. (Best Evidence p30) This year, the Stemmons Freeway sign is permanently removed from Dealey Plaza. Emmett Hudson, groundskeeper at Dealey Plaza, will later reveal that one of the two fixed points [the Book Depository window and the car positioned at the Stemmons Freeway sign] - the Stemmons sign is shifted from its place soon after the assassination and removed completely by early in 1965. Sylvia Meagher points out in her book, Accessories After The Fact, that "we do not know if the sign was moved before or after the FBI reenactment tests of May 24, 1964 or, for that matter, before or after the Secret Service reenactments of December 5, 1963. The repositioning and ultimate disappearance of the Stemmons sign is a mystery with ominous undertones. Having no interest in evidence which did not incriminate Oswald, the Warren Commission took not the slightest interest in the Stemmons sign and, needless to say, made no investigation into when and why it was moved."
  
• 10/15-16/1965 National Coordinating Committee to End the War in Vietnam sponsors nationwide demonstrations in the US. In New York, police made the first arrest under a new Federal draft-card-burning law. In Berkeley, marchers were attacked by the Hell's Angels.
  
• 10/15/1965 The Chicago Daily News quoted Nixon: "If the United States gives up [in Vietnam]…the Pacific Ocean will become a Red Sea."
  
• 10/17/1965 Imperial Wizard Robert Shelton testified before HUAC. The committee began by handing him a copy of the UKA's corporation papers and asking to identify them. Shelton pulled out a piece of paper and read haltingly from it: "Sir, I respectfully decline to answer that question for the reason that I honestly feel my answer might tend to incriminate me in violation of my rights as guaranteed to me under the amendments five, one, four and fourteen of the Constitution of the United States." Shelton took the Fifth a total of 158 times during his testimony. Walter Goodman commented in The Nation, "For a Kluxer to take the fifth like an ordinary Commie is poetry; for him to take the fourteenth is epic."
  
• 10/20/1965 AP: Washington - J. Edgar Hoover says Communist youth group [Dubois Club] is pulling the strings in anti Viet Nam war demonstrations. Rocky Mountain News, Denver
  
• 10/21/1965 Leaving Bethesda, LBJ stopped to meet with some wounded Vietnam vets.
  
• 10/22 or 29/1965 Time cover story: "The Turning Point in Viet Nam." It read, "Today, South Viet Nam throbs with a pride and power...The remarkable turnabout in the war is the result of one of the swiftest, biggest military buildups in the history of warfare..."
  
• 10/22/1965 Rep. John Bell Williams gave a speech in Congress: "The wave of demonstrations and civil disobedience that spread throughout the country last weekend have all the earmarks of a highly organized Communist plot...this same Communist influence and participation...that lately has been going on in the name of civil rights." He called Martin Luther King "the high mogul of all racial demagogues and racketeers."
  
• 10/24/1965 Washington Post (Stanley Karnow) reported that a Vietcong officer said to his American prisoner: "You were our heroes after the War. We read American books and saw American films, and a common phrase in those days was 'to be as rich and as wise as an American.' What happened?"
  
• 10/27/1965 Nixon stated in NYC: "We must never forget that if the war in Vietnam is lost…the right of free speech will be extinguished throughout the world."
  
• 10/29/1965 suicide of CIA's Frank Wisner
  
• 10/29/1965 NY Times quotes Nixon, warning that if the VC captured South Vietnam, it "would mean ultimately the destruction of freedom of speech for all time not only in Asia but in the United States as well." This was in response to Robert Kennedy's defense of the right of people to protest against the war.
  
• 10/29/1965 Diosdado Macapagal, president of the Philippines, was the target of an unsuccessful assassination attempt.