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Deep Politics Timeline - Tracy Riddle - 14-03-2014

A work in progress based on my research. I'll create one post for each year (except for 1961-63, which will be several posts). Additions and corrections are welcomed.

Deep Politics Timeline - Tracy Riddle - 14-03-2014

  • US GNP $1.015 trillion. Federal spending was $195 billion ($2.8 billion deficit). National debt was $370 billion. Inflation rate for 1/1970-1/1971 was 5.3%. Poverty rate was 12.6%. US population was 204.7 million. Federal government workers: approx 2.5 million. Local government workers: approx 7 million. Prime rate of interest: 7.9%
  • Paladin Group formed by Otto Skorzeny
  • Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof formed the Red Army Faction in West Germany
  • Personality-altering Prolexin administered to 1,093 inmates at Vacaville.
  • SALT talks
  • Spiro Agnew crusade against rock music
  • Breakup of the Beatles
  • Reduction of US troops in Vietnam, modest cuts in defense spending
  • Special Programs Unit behavior mod program begins at Joliet, Illinois, under Dr. Martin Groder.
  • Col. James A. Donovan (USMC, retired) publishes the book Militarism, USA.
  • Early 1970s: NSA Develops Rhyolite' Satellite Surveillance System
  • 1/5/1970 Bodies of Joseph Yablonski of the United Mine Workers, his wife and daughter, are found in their home.
  • 1/12/1970 Biafra capitulates to Nigerian government.
  • 1/16/1970 Col. Muammar Khadafy becomes prime minister of Libya.
  • 1/19/1970 Sen. Richard Russell reveals his doubts about Warren Commission's conclusions.
  • 1/30/1970 State of siege in Guatemala after assassination attempt
  • 1/31/1970 Arthur Burns becomes chairman of the Federal Reserve board, first Jewish chairman in a post long held by Protestant bankers.
  • 2/18/1970 The Chicago Seven acquitted of conspiring to incite a riot at the 1968 convention.
  • 3/1970 A U.S. intelligence officer introduces African swine fever virus into Cuba
  • 3/4/1970 Army Intelligence claims it has destroyed files on and stopped spying on political dissidents
  • 3/6/1970 A Weathermen bomb factory explodes in a Greenwich Village townhouse.
  • 3/8/1970 Makarios III, president of Cyprus, was the target of an unsuccessful assassination attempt in Nicosia
  • 3/18/1970 Postal workers in NYC go out on strike for higher wages
  • 4/1970 Apollo 13 crisis
  • 4/30/1970 Nixon gives speech to nation about Cambodia invasion. E. Howard Hunt officially retired from the CIA.
  • 4/1970 D. Harold Byrd sells Texas School Book Depository building to Aubrey Mayhew.
  • 5/1970 Robert B. Mullen Company, a CIA front, hires Howard Hunt.
  • 5/1/1970 Tonight at Kent State University in Ohio, a riot resulted in the ROTC building being torched.
  • 5/2/1970 Al Haig orders four more wiretaps to find leaks.
  • 5/4/1970 Kent State students killed by National Guard.
  • 5/5-6/1970 Nationwide student strikes against Kent State killing.
  • 5/8/1970 100,000 protesters gathered in Washington and another 150,000 in San Francisco. Violet clashes in New York between protestors and construction workers.
  • 5/9/1970 UAW leader Walter P. Reuther and others killed when their Lear-Jet crashed.
  • 5/9/1970 in early morning hours, Nixon meets with protestors at the Lincoln Memorial.
  • 5/12/1970 Race riot in Augusta, Georgia; six blacks killed, five by police.
  • 5/14/1970 Two killed by authorities at mostly-black school of Jackson State College, Miss.
  • 5/18/1970 Hoover memo about what could be done to destroy Ralph Abernathy's reputation.
  • 5/29/1970 Pedro Eugenio Arambaru, former president of Argentina, was abducted and murdered by terrorists
  • 6/5/1970 Nixon meeting with Hoover, heads of CIA, DIA, NSA to develop domestic surveillance program (Huston plan). Hoover disapproves and Nixon later rescinds the plan later in the month.
  • 6/13/1970 Nixon established the President's Commission on Campus Unrest (Scranton Commission)
  • 7/27/1970 Portugal: Antonio Salazar, dictator since 1928, dies.
  • 8/1970 Red Brigades formed in Italy
  • 8/19/1970 After two years of undeclared war, Egypt, Israel and Jordan accepted a US-proposed cease-fire
  • 8/29/1970 The Chicano Moratorium: 25,000 Mexican-Americans in largest anti-war demonstration in Los Angeles; police attacked the crowd.
  • 8/30/1970 Death of Abraham Zapruder from cancer
  • 8/31/1970 James McCord retired from the CIA
  • 9/6/1970 three airliners hijacked by Palestinians in Middle East
  • 9/15/1970 Nixon orders CIA Director Richard Helms to prevent Salvadore Allende's taking office in Chile.
  • 9/18/1970 War nearly breaks out between Syria and Jordan.
  • 9/18/1970 Death of Jimi Hendrix.
  • 10/1970 Environmental Protection Agency created
  • 10/4/1970 Janis Joplin dies
  • 10/6/1970 NY mafia figure Salvatore Granello founded murdered
  • 10/15/1970 Henry Kissinger, Thomas Karamessines, and Alexander Haig meet to discuss supporting a coup in Chile.
  • 10/22/1970 Chilean General Rene Schneider, supporter of democracy, was killed by another group of plotters the CIA had been collaborating with, led by retired General Roberto Viaux.
  • 11/1970 Attorney General John Mitchell orders Justice Dept "to block the release of crucial ballistics evidence from the Kennedy assassination on grounds of national security."
  • 11/1970 Economic recovery begins in US, lasting until 11/1973.
  • Late 1970 UAW strike against GM
  • 11/3/1970 modest gains for Democrats in Congressional elections.
  • 11/9/1970 Charles de Gaulle died of a heart attack
  • 11/13/1970 Coup in Syria led by Hafiz al-Assad.
  • 11/27/1970 Pope Paul VI was threatened, but not hurt in the Manila, Philippines airport by Benjamin Mendoza, a Bolivian who was armed with a knife.
  • 11/30/1970 Memo from Nixon to Kissinger; agrees to keep Helms as head of CIA, but wants to thin out the Agency and have a "housecleaning."
  • Late 1970 Conclusions of the President's Commission on Obscenity and Pornography condemned by Nixon
  • 12/1970 Clean Air Act passed
  • 12/7/1970 A planned fascist coup in Italy, led by "Black Prince" Junio Valerio Borghese, fizzles out before it starts.
  • 12/11/1970 Nixon announces appointment of Rep. George H.W. Bush as US representative to the UN.
  • 12/14/1970 John Connally nominated as Sec. of Treasury.
  • 12/29/1970 Nixon signed into law Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHA), setting up workplace standards.


Deep Politics Timeline - Tracy Riddle - 14-03-2014

1968 Operation Garden Plot, Nixon interference in Paris Peace Accords, MI5 plot against PM Harold Wilson

  • PINE GAP, US intelligence installation, created in Australia
  • The NSA launches the first of seven satellites, code-named "Canyon," that can pick up various types of voice and data traffic from Earth orbit.
  • Around the time of race riots in 1968, a paper is drawn up at the US Army War College detailing plans for rounding up millions of American citizens referred to as "militants" and "American negroes."
  • The US government sprays two types of bacteria, one of which is E. coli, on a Hawaiian rainforest hoping to determine how long the bacteria will remain on the vegetation.
  • An anonymous author at the NSA wrote a document about UFOs around 1968. It was released via the FOIA in 1984.
  • 1/2/1968 Hoover requested wiretapping of SCLC headquarters in Atlanta because of MLK's planned march on the capitol in the spring.
  • 1/3/1968 Ramsey Clark declined Hoover's wiretapping request because "there has not been an adequate demonstration of a direct threat to national security."
  • 1/5/1968 Czechoslovakia: Alexander Dubcek replaces Antonin Novotny as Party leader and declares his intention to press ahead with extensive reforms.
  • 1/7/1968 Israeli PM Levi Eshkol visited Washington.
  • 1/8/1968 A secret Council on Foreign Relations meeting between Douglas Dillon, Richard Bissell and other intelligence figures; Bissell told the group (which included Allen Dulles, Robert Amory, Jr., Thomas Hughes, Ted Sorensen, columnist Joseph Kraft) discussed the need for covert action in foreign countries.
  • 1/9/1968 NYT reported that Israeli jets had knocked out Jordanian artillery positions on the east bank of the Jordan River. LBJ was quoted as promising visiting PM Eshkol that the US would sell Israel "planes and other weapons." RFK was quoted as supporting this position.
  • 1/19/1968 James Earl Ray enrolls in a bartenders school in Los Angeles.
  • 1/21 or 22/1968 A Strategic Air Command B-52 crashes off the coast of Greenland; it was carrying four unarmed hydrogen bombs, which leaked radiation over a large area.
  • 1/22/1968 The Israeli submarine Dakar (ex-HMS Totem) disappears in the eastern Mediterranean while on its maiden voyage.
  • 1/23/1968 North Korea seized US intelligence ship Pueblo in the Sea of Japan.
  • 1/26/1968 Paul Rothermel memo indicates that Jim Garrison is targeting Gen. Walker and the Brown and Hunt families of Texas in his investigation.
  • 1/26/1968 Letter from JFK autopsy doctor J. Thornton Boswell to Ramsey Clark recommending that a panel examine the autopsy materials. It later turned out that Boswell was asked to write this letter by people within the government.
  • 1/30/1968 Tet Offensive begins in Vietnam; this massive, well-coordinated attack saw communist forces strike dozens of objectives through the South simultaneously.
  • 1/31/1968 VC and NVA capture Hue.
  • 1/31/1968 On Johnny Carson's show Jim Garrison said that the CIA "was deeply involved in the assassination"
  • 1/31/1968 Sirhan scrawled in his diary: "RFK must die RFK must die…girl the girl the girl no no no no practice practice practice practice practice Mind Control mind control mind control "
  • 1-2/1968 Gold-outflow crisis in US.
  • 2/1/1968 a suspected NLF officer was summarily executed on camera by General Nguyen Ngoc Loan, a South Vietnamese National Police Chief.
  • 2/1/1968 Nixon announces his presidential candidacy.
  • 2/7/1968 The students at South Carolina State began to rebel in the streets by attacking police cars. The rebellion lasted until the next day. The police along with the National Guard were called in to occupy the campus. The Guard began to fire upon the unarmed students as they sat around a bonfire seeking warmth. Three students were killed and 28 or 33 wounded.
  • 2/8/1968 Marina Oswald testifies before Jim Garrison's grand jury in New Orleans
  • 2/8/1968 George Wallace enters the presidential race on the American Independent party ticket
  • 2/12/1968 Memphis: the more than a thousand garbage men, nearly all blacks, went out on strike to protest the city's refusal to recognize their union. Mayor Henry Loeb refused their demands and began hiring white strikebreakers.
  • 2/13/1968 US sends 10,500 more combat troops to Vietnam.
  • 2/16/1968 In New Orleans, Jim Garrison subpoenas former CIA Director and Warren Commission member Allen Dulles. Dulles refuses to appear.
  • 2/19/1968 Cesar Chavez, the trade union leader, began a hunger strike in protest against the violence being used against his members in California. Robert F. Kennedy went to the San Joaquin Valley to give Chavez his support
  • 2/20/1968 During the Senate hearings on the Gulf of Tonkin incident, McNamara characterizes as "monstrous" the idea that the government had lied about the attacks.
  • 2/21/1968 On Dutch TV, Jim Garrison charges that the CIA was involved in killing JFK, who wanted to end the Cold War.
  • 2/22 or 23/1968 Memphis garbage men on strike marched to the city council to make their protests heard, but they were dispersed with police using truncheons and tear gas.
  • 2/24/1968 Gen. James M. Gavin wrote an article in the Saturday Evening Post saying that JFK intended to withdraw from Vietnam.
  • 2/25/1968 US and ARVN recapture Hue.
  • 2/25/1968 Bobby and Artie Seale are arrested in their home by Oakland police without a warrant.
  • 2/26-27/1968 Ramsey Clark Panel convenes in Washington D.C. to examine JFK X-rays and autopsy photographs.
  • 2/27/1968 Walter Cronkite came back from Saigon and told the American people that it seemed the "the bloody experience in Vietnam is to end in stalemate."
  • 2/27/1968 Westmoreland requests 206,000 more troops. This was Robert McNamara's last official day on the job; his last act was to oppose Westmoreland's troop request.
  • 2/27/1968 Jim Garrison subpoenas the original print of the Zapruder film from Time, Inc. as evidence in the Clay Shaw trial.
  • 2/28/1968 Sen. Wayne Morse floor speech: "The time has come for a thorough study by objective civilians of the operations of the military establishment in the United States the military establishment of which we were warned by General Eisenhower as he left the Presidency."
  • 2/29/1968 Appointed by Johnson to serve as the commission's executive director, David Ginsburg played a pivotal role in writing the Kerner Commission's findings. The Commission's final report, the Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders or Kerner Report was released after seven months of investigation. Its finding was that the riots resulted from black frustration at lack of economic opportunity
  • Early 1968 Sirhan Sirhan joins the Ancient Mystical Order of the Rosicrucians (AMORC).
  • 3/1968 Israeli forces assault Jordanian village Al Karamah in retaliation for terrorist raids in the West Bank; they met heavy resistance by armed members of Al Fatah.
  • 3/2/1968 James Earl Ray graduates from bartenders' school in Los Angeles.
  • 3/4/1968 Hoover issued a memo on COINTELPRO ("Counter-Intelligence Program - Black Nationalist-Hate Groups - Racial Intelligence")
  • 3/7/1968 Sen. Fulbright began a Senate debate on the war, declaring in his opinion that the Tonkin Gulf Resolution was "null and void…The resolution has effectively been repealed because it was based on false representations…"
  • 3/7/1968 Sirhan left his job at the Pasadena Health Food Store.
  • 3/7/1968 CIA memo: "Garrison and the Kennedy Assassination: Cubans and Other Latin Americans Allegedly Involved"
  • 3/10/1968 RFK goes to California to visit Cesar Chavez.
  • 3/12/1968 Eugene McCarthy won 42% of vote in Democratic New Hampshire presidential primary
  • 3/16/1968 LBJ decides to send 35-50,000 more combat troops to Vietnam.
  • 3/16/1968 Senator Robert F. Kennedy announces he will seek the Democratic presidential nomination.
  • 3/16/1968 My Lai massacre in South Vietnam by US troops
  • 3/16 or 17/1968 James Earl Ray left Los Angeles, indicating his ultimate destination on a postal change of address order as Atlanta. He was actually on his way to New Orleans. MLK was in Los Angeles and spoke at the Second Baptist Church on the 17[SUP]th[/SUP].
  • 3/18/1968 MLK flew east toward Memphis. James Earl Ray was driving his Mustang across the Southwestern desert, from Los Angeles to New Orleans. Reaching Memphis, King gave a speech in support of the 17,000 strikers. He announced that 3/28 he would lead a citywide demonstration in their support.
  • 3/20/1968 MLK is in Mississippi. Ray arrives in New Orleans.
  • 3/21/1968 Ray left for Birmingham.
  • 3/22/1968 Westmoreland is named as Army Chief of Staff.
  • 3/22/1968 Ray spent the night in Selma, Alabama. MLK had just left the area the day before.
  • 3/22/1968 Czechoslovakia: Novotny resigns as president, after facing pressure by party liberals.
  • 3/23/1968 James Earl Ray drove on to Atlanta.
  • 3/25/1968 RFK defends the Warren Report while campaigning in California.
  • 3/28/1968 Memphis: a poorly-organized march was quickly taken over by black militants, who began breaking store windows; police responded violently. A 16-year-old black youth was shot and killed by police; 60 people were injured.
  • 3/29/1968 Ray is given $750 by "Raoul." Today he bought a .243 Remington rifle and telescopic sight at a Birmingham, Alabama gun shop.
  • 3/30/1968 Ray exchanged the .243 for a 30.06 Remington Gamesmaster rifle.
  • 3/31/1968 LBJ drops out of the Presidential race
  • 3/31/1968 Mike Dorman article in Ramparts magazine that is extremely critical of LBJ. The article describes how LBJ had been "bought off" years ago by Carlos Marcello. Dallas Times Herald article links LBJ to death of Henry Marshall
  • 3/31/1968 Ray set out from Birmingham for Memphis.
  • 4/2/1968 Marian sightings in Zeitoun, Cairo, Egypt.
  • 4/2/1968 Ray left Atlanta and drove to Memphis.
  • 4/3/1968 William Somersett calls Miami Police Detective Lt. C.H. Sapp and informs him that he has learned through his connections of a plot to assassinate Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in Memphis tomorrow.
  • 4/3/1968 King returned to Memphis to address a gathering at the Mason Temple (World Headquarters of the Church of God in Christ). King delivered the last speech of his life, now known as the "I've Been to the Mountaintop" address.
  • 4/3/1968 US Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit ruled "that the evidence introduced by the Government is not sufficient to sustain the conviction" and ordered Richard Case Nagell set free.
  • 4/3/1968 Ray checks into the New Rebel Motel in Memphis using the name Eric S. Galt. He turns the rifle over to Raul.
  • 4/4/1968 Martin Luther King Jr., assassinated in Memphis. Riots broke out in 125 cities, causing 46 deaths, 21,000 arrests and 55,000 Federal and National Guard troops used in riot control. The biggest riots were in D.C., Chicago, Baltimore, and Kansas City.
  • 4/5/1968 Attorney General Clark announces that there was no conspiracy in the MLK killing.
  • 4/5/1968 Czechoslovakia: Action Program of the Communist Party is published, part of the effort to provide "socialism with a human face."
  • 4/5/1968 Within twenty-four hours of the killing, the 30.06 Remington 760 Gamemaster rifle found in the bundle near the scene was traced, by its serial number, to the Aeromarine Supply Company in Birmingham, Alabama.
  • 4/6/1968 Ray abandons the white Mustang in Atlanta and heads for Toronto
  • 4/8/1968 Ray rents a room on Ossington St. in Toronto using the name Paul Bridgeman.
  • 4/10/1968 The House passed the Civil Rights Bill of 1968.
  • 4/10/1968 LBJ names Gen. Creighton Abrams as commander of US troops in Vietnam.
  • 4/11/1968 Johnson signed Civil Rights Act of 1968.
  • 4/11/1968 As "Paul Bridgeman", Ray has three passport photos taken at Arcade Photo Studio, Toronto.
  • 4/11/1968 Baltimore, Maryland: Gov. Spiro Agnew, angry over black rioting, met with civil rights leaders and gave them a "dressing down that cause most to leave in anger - instantly transforming his position in racial politics."
  • 4/14/1968 Damon Runyon Jr. dies today in Washington, DC. His death is ruled a suicide. He is feature editor for the weekly D.C. Examiner and is currently working on a condensation of the book Were We Controlled? for the National Enquirer
  • 4/16/1968 James Earl Ray applies for a Canadian passport at Kennedy Travel Agency under the name Ramon George Sneyd.
  • 4/17/1968 the Birmingham FBI office sought a federal fugitive warrant for Eric Starvo Galt pursuant to an indictment charging a conspiracy to violate Dr. King's civil rights.
  • 4/18/1968 Ruth Paine testified before Jim Garrison's grand jury in New Orleans.
  • 4/18/1968 FBI specialists undertook the task of fingerprint comparison; by the next morning, the seven hundredth card matched. It belonged to a fugitive from a Missouri penitentiary. His name was James Earl Ray. It was clear: Galt and Ray were the same man.
  • 4/18/1968 FBI was quoted as saying it was charging a man named Eric Starvo Galt "with conspiracy" in the murder of MLK. (NY Times) Ray pays his first rent to Mrs. Yee Sun Loo for a room at 962 Dundas St.
  • 4/18/1968 A new Czech government is formed under Dubcek ally and reformer Oldrich Cernik. Liberalization process goes full swing. Press continues to become more outspoken in support of freedoms.
  • 4/19/1968 FBI announced it was seeking an escaped convict, James Earl Ray, for the murder of MLK. They issued pictures of Ray to the press.
  • 4/20/1968 Pierre Trudeau becomes PM of Canada.
  • 4/23/1968 Columbia University demonstrations begin; SDS members seize five buildings in protest against the school's involvement in research for the Pentagon.
  • 4/26/1968 200,000 people in NYC demonstrate against the war. Students seize the administration building at Ohio State.
  • 4/27/1968 Hubert Humphrey announces he will seek Democratic presidential nomination.
  • 4/27/1968 Ray gets a phone call at Dundas St. from an unidentified man, but Ray is not in at the time.
  • 4/30-5/2/1968 Ray is seen in the Silver Dollar Tavern in Toronto each night, accompanied on two occasions by an unidentified man.
  • 5/1968 An Army intelligence document (declassified 2/1971) listed the NAACP, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and CORE as groups "attempting to create, prolong or aggravate racial tensions." Intelligence was to be gathered on these groups and people sympathetic to them.
  • 5/1/1968 Czechoslovakia: May Day celebrations show huge support for the new reform movement.
  • 5/2/1968 Another man visits James Earl Ray at Dundas Street. Ray pays $345 for an airplane ticket to London.
  • 5/2/1968 Sirhan met with a young radical friend of his, Walter Crowe. Crowe expressed his support for Arab terrorist movements such as Al Fatah.
  • 5/2/1968 The Poor People's March, led by Ralph D. Abernathy, begins as caravans from all over the country leave for Washington, DC., to protest poverty and racial discrimination.
  • 5/3/1968 LBJ announces that formal peace talks on Vietnam will take place in Paris.
  • 5/3/1968 Students and riot police clash violently at the Sorbonne university in Paris; 500 students are arrested.
  • 5/6/1968 James Earl Ray leaves Toronto for London.
  • 5/7/1968 In Indiana, RFK wins his first presidential primary, taking 42% of the vote; Gov. Branigin, standing in for Humphrey, got 31% and Eugene McCarthy 27%.
  • 5/7/1968 James Earl Ray arrives in London.
  • 5/8/1968 Ray flew to England on May 8 and from there he made a quick trip to Portugal to try to get to one of the Portuguese overseas territories -- Angola or Mozambique.
  • 5/10/1968 Peace talks begin in Paris with Averell Harriman representing the US and Xuan Thuy representing North Vietnam.
  • 5/10/1968 Hoover signed a number of memos to formally launch a counter-insurgency intelligence program (COINTELPRO); its target was the anti-war and civil rights movements.
  • 5/11/1968 Jerry Rubin announces the formation of the Youth International Party (Yippies) and its plans for massive demonstrations at the Democratic National Convention.
  • 5/11/1968 Nine caravans of poor people arrive in Washington, DC for first phase of Poor People's Campaign.
  • 5/13/1968 Hundreds of thousands of students jammed the streets of Paris, protesting against the government and "police repression."
  • 5/14/1968 Nebraska primary; RFK won with 52% to 31% for McCarthy and 14% for Humphrey.
  • 5/18/1968 James Earl Ray arrives back in London.
  • 5/18/1968 An entry in Sirhan's diary dated this day, reads: "My determination to eliminate RFK is becoming more the more of an unshakable obsession...RFK must die "
  • 5/20/1968 By this date, millions of French workers had seized control of their factories. The country is nearly paralyzed.
  • 5/20/1968 RFK spoke before a crowd in the banquet room of Robbie's Restaurant in Pomona. A bartender who was acting as a security check at a stairway leading to the room stopped a young man and woman who claimed they were with the Kennedy party. The man looked a great deal like Sirhan. The couple left after being challenged. Two other onlookers witnessed the incident.
  • 5/20/1968 Today, a television campaign documentary, "The Story of Robert Kennedy," was aired. The narrator described RFK's 1948 visit to Israel and how he had joined in to "celebrate" Israel's independence.
  • 5/21/1968 The USS Scorpion, a nuclear-powered attack sub, was last heard from on this date; it was eventually discovered lying on the bottom of the ocean southwest of the Azores.
  • 5/24/1968 Sirhan attended a rally for RFK at the Los Angeles Sports Arena. A psychologist in the crowd noticed Sirhan because he "appeared very intense and sinister."
  • 5/26/1968 Press reports about RFK's support for military aid to Israel
  • 5/28/1968 McCarthy beat RFK in Oregon primary, the first election defeat a Kennedy had ever experienced.
  • 5/28/1968 RFK spends two hours in Oxnard, California checking out a reported lead to JFK's death. RFK attends a gathering at John Frakenheimer's Malibu beach house with some Hollywood glitteratie. Sirhan attended a meeting of the Rosicrucian Society in Pasadena.
  • 5/30/1968 Kennedy Campaign headquarters, Azuza, California: Laverne Botting, a 41 year old RFK campaign worker, observed a young woman and two young men enter the campaign office asking about RFK.
  • 5/30/1968 De Gaulle dissolved the French National Assembly, postponed a national referendum and went on TV vowing to use force to prevent what he believed was a Communist revolution.
  • 5/31/1968 Camille Chamoun, president of Lebanon, was the target of a failed assassination attempt.
  • 6/1/1968 Sirhan is seen in the company of other people buying ammunition and target practicing in two different locations.
  • 6/2/1968 Sirhan and the polka dot dress girl are seen at the Ambassador Hotel
  • 6/3/1968 Kennedy was scheduled to speak in San Diego at a rally at the El Cortez Hotel. Sirhan made the two-hour trip in his 1956 De Soto and returned that evening to Pasadena, failing to get to RFK.
  • 6/4/1968 Artist Andy Warhol is shot and wounded by crazed feminist Valerie Solanas.
  • 6/4/1968 California primary. Sirhan, in the company of another man and a girl in a polka dot dress, are stalking RFK.
  • 6/5/1968 Robert F. Kennedy is shot at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.
  • 6/5/1968 Attorney General Ramsey Clark announces there is no evidence of a conspiracy
  • 6/5/1968 This evening, LBJ went on national television to say he was setting up the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence (Eisenhower Commission 6/5/1968-12/3/1969)
  • 6/6/1968 Congress passed the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968 (banning the sale by mail of handguns), the first federal gun-control law in 30 years.
  • 6/6/1968 RFK died, age 42.
  • 6/8/1968 RFK's body is carried by a funeral train from New York to Washington.
  • 6/8/1968 James Earl Ray is arrested in London at Heathrow Airport as he disembarks from an airliner bound from Portugal to Belgium.
  • 6/10/1968 Westmoreland was promoted to the post of Chief of Staff of the US Army.
  • Summer: .Charlie Manson and various members of his entourage moved in with Beach Boy Dennis Wilson at his home in Laurel Canyon.
  • 6/13/1968 Earl Warren told LBJ he wanted to resign from the Supreme Court.
  • 6/14/1968 Dr. Benjamin Spock, Rev. William Sloane Coffin of Yale, and two others were convicted of counseling and aiding draft evaders.
  • 6/19/1968 LBJ signed a bill giving $400 million in Federal aid to local police, and giving them more freedom to use eavesdropping and wiretapping.
  • 6/26/1968 Earl Warren announces he will retire from the Supreme Court; LBJ names Abe Fortas to replace him.
  • 6/28/1968 Congress passed a 10% surcharge on income taxes to finance the war.
  • 6/30/1968 France: Gaullists win overwhelming majority in elections for National Assembly.
  • 7/1968 Through Anna Chennault, Richard Nixon told South Vietnamese officials to not cooperate in the peace talks, and promised them a better deal if he was elected.
  • 7/1/1968 US, USSR and UK sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), followed by dozens of other nations.
  • 7/13/1968 Edward Jay Epstein broke with Garrison and published an article critical of him in the The New Yorker. That article then produced a CIA dispatch dated July 19, 1968 to CIA stations indicating that it could be used "to brief interested contacts, especially government and other political leaders and to demonstrate to assets (which you may assign to counter [anti-U.S. attacks]) that there is no hard evidence of any such conspiracy."
  • 7/17/1968 The Ba'ath party comes to power in Iraq in a bloodless coup, led by Saddam Hussein, Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr, and the right-wing of the Baath party.
  • 7/22/1968 James Earl Ray pleads not guilty to murdering MLK.
  • 7/23-24/1968 Cleveland: a riot was sparked by a gun battle between police and a black militant group; 11 people, included 3 cops, were killed.
  • 8/1/1968 Antonio Veciana begins working as a banking consultant in La Paz, Bolivia, employed by US-AID.
  • 8/2/1968 Sirhan pleads not guilty to murder of RFK.
  • 8/8/1968 Nixon and Agnew are nominated by the GOP at the convention in Miami.
  • 8/13/1968 George Papadopoulis, premier of Greece, was the target of a failed assassination attempt.
  • 8/20/1968 Warsaw Pact night invasion of Czechoslovakia; Soviet, East German, Polish, Bulgarian and Hungarian forces (500,000 troops) occupied the country and deposed Dubcek. Large Soviet garrison remained.
  • 8/24/1968 France tests its first H-bomb in the South Pacific.
  • 8/26-29/1968 The 1968 Democratic National Convention was held at the International Amphitheatre in Chicago
  • 8/28/1968 Democrats adopt a relatively hawkish stand on Vietnam. Humphrey is nominated while antiwar riots go on outside. More than 100 demonstrators and 119 policemen were injured.
  • 8/28/1968 In Guatemala, US ambassador John Gordon Mein is killed in an ambush.
  • 9/1968 Farewell America by James Hepburn (a pseudonym) was published in Belgium (it may have been published earlier elsewhere in Europe). Its French title was "America Burns," and represented French intelligence's guesswork about the JFK assassination.
  • 9/8/1968 Black Panther leader Huey Newton was convicted of manslaughter for killing a policeman in a shoot-out.
  • 9/17/1968 In Texas, the American Party nominates George Wallace for president.
  • 9/30/1968 Humphrey pledged to stop bombing North Vietnam if he was elected President.
  • 10/2/1968 LBJ withdraws his nomination of Abe Fortas after the Senate failed by a vote of 45 to 43 to achieve cloture of a filibuster.
  • 10/2/1968 Mexico City: student demonstrations against one-party government led to a massacre in the Tlatelolco Plaza by government troops.
  • 10/4/1968 Northern Ireland: A civil rights march in Derry turns violent
  • 10/9/1968 LBJ announced that Warren was staying on through the new court term.
  • 10/16/1968 Rev. Daniel J. Berrigan is convicted with 8 others of burning draft files.
  • 10/20/1968 Jacqueline Kennedy weds Greek millionaire and shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis.
  • 10/22/1968 Gun Control Act signed into law.
  • 10/29/1968 LA Times reported a news story from a Nashville paper: Ray's defense will claim that "Ray played only a small part in a master plot so complex and far-reaching that even Ray does not know who masterminded it...that he was promised $12,000 to $15,000 to lead police away from the real killers and become the lure in the greatest manhunt in history."
  • 10/31/1968 LBJ announces end of bombing of North Vietnam, starting the next day. He also said that the Paris peace talks would be expanded to include the Viet Cong.
  • 11/2/1968 Johnson telephones Senate Republican leader Everett Dirksen, lays out some of the evidence, and asks Dirksen to intervene with the Nixon campaign. "The agent [Chennault] says she's just talked to the boss in New Mexico and that he said that you must hold out, just hold on until after the election," Johnson said in an apparent reference to a Nixon campaign plane that carried some of his top aides to New Mexico. "We know what Thieu is saying to them out there. We're pretty well informed at both ends." Johnson then made a thinly veiled threat about going public with the information."I don't want to get this in the campaign," Johnson said, adding: "They oughtn't be doing this. This is treason."
  • 11/4/1968 Defense Secretary Clark Clifford joined with Secretary of State Dean Rusk in urging President Johnson not to go public with his evidence of Republican treachery. "Some elements of the story are so shocking in their nature that I'm wondering whether it would be good for the country to disclose the story and then possibly have a certain individual [Nixon] elected," Clifford said in a Nov. 4, 1968, conference call. "It could cast his whole administration under such doubt that I think it would be inimical to our country's interests." Clifford's remark came in the context of Johnson learning that Christian Science Monitor reporter Saville Davis was working on a story about how Nixon's entourage had undermined the peace talks by sending its own messages to South Vietnamese officials.
  • 11/5/1968 Richard Nixon narrowly wins the Presidential election. Democrats keep control of Congress
  • 11/15/1968 Nixon met with Richard Helms and told him he wanted him to stay on as director of the CIA.
  • 11/1968 Gov. Reagan refused to extradite Edgar Eugene Bradley to New Orleans because Jim Garrison had failed to produce any witnesses to substantiate the charges against him.
  • 12/2/1968 Nixon announced that he was appointing Henry Kissinger as Assistant for National Security Affairs.
  • 12/13/1968 Starting today and for the next ten years, Brazil lived under AI-5, a presidential decree that suspended the constitution, disbanded Congress, and created the so-called previous censorship all in the name of "the defense of the necessary interests of the nation."
  • 12/28/1968 In response to an attack in an El Al jet in Athens, on the night of December 28, 1968, Israeli commandos mounted a surprise attack on the airport and destroyed 13 aircraft belonging to the Lebanese carriers, Middle East Airlines (Air Liban had merged with MEA by this time), Trans Mediterranean Airways, and Lebanese International Airways.
  • 12/28/1968 Black Panther Headquarters in Jersey City is firebombed by "two white men wearing police-style uniforms."


Deep Politics Timeline - Tracy Riddle - 14-03-2014

1974 Double-digit inflation in US, National speed limit set to 55mph, Social Security indexed to inflation, SALT II treaty

  • 1/7/1974 Nixon approved appointment of former Warren Commission staffer Albert Jenner to serve as Minority Counsel for the Impeachment Investigation of the House Judiciary Committee.
  • 1/30/1974 Murry Chotiner, Nixon's former political manager, dies one week after his car is struck by a government truck.
  • Late January First news stories about the Moorer-Radford Pentagon spy ring.
  • 2/4/1974 Harold Wilson becomes PM of Britain.
  • 2/5/1974 Patricia Hearst, heir to the newspaper fortune, kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) in Berkeley, Calif.
  • 2/22/1974 Samuel Byck attempts to hijack a plane to kill Nixon.
  • 2/24/1974 "We need a programme of psychosurgery for political control of our society. The purpose is physical control of the mind. Everyone who deviates from the given norm can be surgically mutilated. The individual may think that the most important reality is his own existence, but this is only his personal point of view. This lacks historical perspective. Man does not have the right to develop his own mind. This kind of liberal orientation has great appeal. We must electrically control the brain. Some day armies and generals will be controlled by electric stimulation of the brain." Dr. Jose Delgado, February 24, 1974 edition of the Congressional Record
  • 2/28/1974 Joseph Milteer, right-wing activist with advance knowledge of the JFK assassination, died in a heater explosion.
  • 3/1/1974 Grand jury indicts Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Mitchell, Mardian, Colson, Parkinson and Strachan for obstructing justice in their attempt to cover-up Watergate, with Nixon being named as unindicted co-conspirator.
  • 3/15/1974 A federal grand jury concludes that President Nixon joined in a conspiracy to cover up White House involvement in the Watergate break-in of Democratic Party offices.
  • 3/18/1974 Arab oil-producing nations agree to end the embargo imposed on the US.
  • 3/24-28 Kissinger talks with Brezhnev, Gromyko and other Soviet officials in Moscow.
  • 4/1974 Foreign Affairs magazine contained an article by Richard N. Gardner of Columbia University: "In short, the 'house of world order' will have to be built from the bottom up rather than from the top down. An end run around national sovereignty, eroding it piece by piece, will accomplish much more than the old-fashioned frontal assault."
  • 4/11/1974 Israeli PM Golda Meir resigned.
  • 4/15/1974 Patty Hearst, now calling herself "Tania," takes part in a bank robbery, and is captured on security cameras wielding a gun.
  • 4/30/1974 Edited transcripts of the Nixon tapes are released by the White House.
  • 5/1974 Richard Condon (author of The Manchurian Candidate) publishes his latest thriller, Winter Kills, a fictional account of the JFK assassination.
  • 5/6/1974 West German chancellor Willy Brandt resigned
  • 5/9/1974 House Judiciary Committee began formal hearings on impeachment of Nixon.
  • 5/17/1974 South Los Angeles: two-hour gun battle between the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) and LAPD; the SLA headquarters is burned and six members died.
  • 5/18/1974 India detonates an underground nuclear device, called Smiling Buddha, in the Rajasthan desert.
  • 5/21/1974 Jeb Magruder is sentenced to a prison term of 10 months to four years.
  • 5/28/1974 Piazza della Loggia bombing in Italy
  • 5/31/1974 Israeli and Syrian military officials sign a cease-fire agreement in Geneva brought about by Kissinger.
  • 6/1974 Alexander Haig ordered the Army's Criminal Investigation Command (CIC) to make a study of Nixon's alleged ties to organized crime and the smuggling of gold bullion to Vietnam.
  • 6/5/1974 The private files and documents of the late Howard Hughes were reported stolen from his supposedly impregnable Hollywood headquarters
  • 6/12-18/1974 Nixon visits Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Jordan and Israel.
  • 6/12/1974 The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence by Victor Marchetti is published
  • 6/14/1974 The film The Parallax View is released, an assassination/conspiracy thriller.
  • 6/23/1974 Chuck Colson was quoted in the Washington Post as saying that Nixon was a prisoner of the CIA.
  • 6/25/1974 Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that the CIA's budget did not have to be made public; the majority justices were Burger, White, Blackmun, Powell and Rehnquist.
  • 6/27-7/3/1974 Summit between Nixon and Brezhnev in Moscow over nuclear arms and world peace issues.
  • 6/30/1974 Gunman inside the Ebenezer Baptist Church fatally shot Martin Luther King's mother, Alberta Williams King.
  • 7/3/1974 Nixon left Moscow to return to the US.
  • 7/6/1974 possible sniper attack on Ford's motorcade while driving to Dallas Trade Center
  • 7/8/1974 Colson began serving his prison sentence. He was quoted in Time magazine: "I don't say this to my people. They'd think I'm nuts. I think the CIA killed Dorothy Hunt."
  • 7/9/1974 Earl Warren died at the age of 83 of heart disease.
  • 7/12/1974 Ehrlichman was found guilty by a Washington jury of conspiring to break in to Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office.
  • 7/15/1974 Makarios in Cyprus ousted
  • 7/15/1974 Jack Anderson column about Charles Colson being secretly recorded by private eye Richard Bast while speculating about CIA/military behind plot to oust Nixon.
  • 7/20/1974 Turkey invades Cyprus in dispute with Greece.
  • 7/24/1974 Supreme Court rules 8-0 that Nixon must turn over the 64 tapes sought by Jaworski; Rehnquist had disqualified himself from hearing this case.
  • 7/27/1974 House Judiciary Committee passed first article of impeachment - Obstruction of Justice
  • 7/29/1974 Bribery and perjury indictments were returned against John Connally and Texas lawyer Jake Jacobsen.
  • 7/29/1974 House Judiciary Committee passed second article of impeachment, on Abuse of Power.
  • 7/30/1974 House Judiciary Committee passed third article of impeachment,
  • 8/1974 Jack Anderson disclosed that Colson had met with Gordon Novel 3/1974 to discuss how Nixon's White House tapes could be destroyed by a magnetic erasure technique
  • 8/2/1974 John Dean is sentenced to one to four years in prison.
  • 8/4/1974 Italicus Express bombing in Italy
  • 8/5/1974 The White House released a transcript of 6/23/1972 tape that revealed that he had approved the cover-up only 6 days after the Watergate break-in.
  • 8/8/1974 Nixon announces he will resign the next day, Kissinger will stay on.
  • 8/9/1974 Nixon resigns. Al Haig spends the evening burning documents.
  • 8/15/1974 Death of Clay Shaw, linked to JFK case
  • 8/15/1974 Park Chung Hee, president of South Korea, was the target of a failed attempt on his life by assassins who fatally shot his wife instead.
  • 8/19/1974 Rodger P. Davies, U.S. ambassador to Cyprus, was shot to death in Nicosia
  • 9/4/1974 Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Creighton W. Abrams died
  • 9/4/1974 George Bush is named to head US liaison office in Peking.
  • 9/4/1974 Formal US ties established with East Germany; former Sen. John Sherman Cooper is named US ambassador
  • 9/8/1974 Ford pardons Nixon
  • 9/10 or 11 deputy press secretary John W. Hushen revealed that Ford was studying a plan to pardon all of the Watergate criminals. Furious reaction from Congress quickly killed the idea.
  • 9/16/1974 NATO and Ford announced that Al Haig would become head of NATO effective 12/15.
  • 9/21/1974 President Ford asks Donald Rumsfeld to become chief of staff. He picks former Wyoming Congressman Dick Cheney as his deputy.
  • 10/1/1974 Trial of five of the seven Watergate defendants begins in Washington.
  • 10/1/1974 Hussein I, king of Jordan, target of a murder plot by Black September Palestinian assassins in Rabat, Morocco
  • 10/7/1974 House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Wilbur Mills is pulled over by police and found to be in the company of hooker Fanne Foxe.
  • 10/15/1974 Ford announced a "great citizens mobilization" under the slogan WIN (Whip Inflation Now).
  • 10/17/1974 Ford testified before the Judiciary Committee (but not under oath) that there was no deal for a Nixon pardon.
  • 11/5/1974 Democrats win big in Congressional elections
  • 11/13/1974 Karen Silkwood, labor union activist and chemical technician at the Kerr-McGee plutonium fields near Crescent, Oklahoma, died in a mysterious car crash.
  • 11/21/1974 Congress overrode Ford's veto of the Freedom of Information Act, which added amendments to the 1966 act.
  • 11/24/1974 Ford ends an eight-day world trip through Japan, South Korea and Russia; at Vladivostok he and Brezhnev signed a tentative agreement limiting offensive weapons until 1985.
  • 11/29/1974 Texas oil baron H.L. Hunt died at age 85 in Dallas.
  • 12/6/1974 The North Vietnamese launched a test offensive against Phuoc Long province, as a prelude to their 1975 offensive. The province fell in a month.
  • 12/6/1974 Robert Vesco was quoted as saying that "the forces that threatened me are the same politically that eliminated President Kennedy and then President Nixon and want to eliminate all of Nixon's associates." (Boston Globe 12/6/74)
  • 12/10/1974 U.S. National Security Council under Kissinger completed a classified 200-page study, "National Security Study Memorandum 200: Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for U.S. Security and Overseas Interests."
  • 12/15/1974 Al Haig took over as commander of NATO.
  • 12/19/1974 Nelson Rockefeller sworn in as Vice President
  • 12/22/1974 New York Times' Seymour Hersh reported that the CIA had spied on domestic dissidents and kept files on 10,000 Americans in the late '60s and early '70s.
  • 12/23 or 17/1974 James Jesus Angleton is asked to resign by CIA director William Colby.
  • 12/27/1974 Dick Cheney memo to Ford about creating a presidential commission to investigate CIA
  • 12/29/1974 Three top officials of the CIA's counterintelligence division - Raymond Rocca, William J. Hood, and Newton S. Miller - resigned.


Deep Politics Timeline - Tracy Riddle - 14-03-2014

  • Los Angeles: Special Counsel Thomas Kranz reinvestigates the RFK assassination for the D.A.'s office, and issues the Kranz Report, which confirms the original police findings.
  • This year, FBI surveillance of Santo Trafficante and Carlos Marcello records Trafficante saying: "Now only two people are alive who know who killed Kennedy."
  • Switzerland - One-armed Eduard Billy Meier's UFO photos begin to appear.
  • Lt.Colonel Michael Aquino breaks with the Satanic Church of Anton LeVey and founds the Temple of Set, a group which grew to operate on a national level and involved with US agencies in ritual abuse, sacrifice and mind control.
  • Stockholm International Peace Research Institute publishes a paper on the "Delayed Toxic Effects of Chemical Warfare Agents", specifically organophosphates.
  • Gemstone conspiracy theory about Aristotle Onassis appears
  • "Target de Gaulle" by Pierre Demaret and Christian Plume published, an account of the 31 assassination attempts on de Gaulle's life, most which were made by the OAS (Secret Army Organization).
  • Itek Corporation analysis of the Zapruder film
  • 1/1/1975 Erlichman, Haldeman, Mitchell and Mardian are found guilty in the Watergate cover-up.
  • 1/4/1975 NYT reports that Justice Department will not prosecute anyone in FBI for its COINTELPRO operations.
  • 1/5/1975 The President's Commission on CIA Activities in the United States (Rockefeller Commission) created; run by its Executive Director David Belin, a former Warren Commission staff member.
  • 1/7/1975 Khmer Communist troops began major attacks all around Phnom Penh, Cambodia
  • 1/10/1975 William Attwood reveals his role in JFK's back-channel talks with Castro
  • 1/15/1975 Congress abandoned the seniority system and dumped Rep. Wright Patman (D-Tex) as chairman of the House Banking, Currency and Housing Committee, and Rep. Wayne L. Hays (D-Ohio) as chairman of the Administration Committee.
  • 1/20/1975 The Washington Post confirmed long-standing rumors that the FBI had secret dossiers on members of Congress.
  • 1/27/1975 The Church Committee (SENATE SELECT COMMITTEE TO STUDY GOVERNMENTAL OPERATIONS WITH RESPECT TO INTELLIGENCE ACTIVITIES) formed.
  • 1/31/1975 Charles Colson released from prison after seven months. Federal judge Charles R. Richey in Washington ruled that millions of Nixon's documents, including the Watergate tapes, were the property of the government, not the former president.
  • 2/10/1975 Time's Hugh Sidney revealed that Lyndon Johnson greatly enjoyed listening to the FBI's tape recordings of Martin Luther King and reading their transcripts (which also included King's sexual liaisons.)
  • 2/10-15/1975 Kissinger visited the Middle East.
  • 2/11/1975 Paul B. Fay, Jr., JFK's Navy Undersecretary, was quoted as saying: "If John F. Kennedy had lived, our military involvement in Vietnam would have been over by the end of 1964."
  • 2/11/1975 Richard Ratsimandrava, president of Madagascar, was shot dead in Tananarive.
  • 2/19/1975 The House voted 286 to 120 to create a House Select Intelligence Committee (the Nedzi Committee) to investigate claims of CIA wrongdoing, under Michigan Rep. Lucien Nedzi.
  • 2/21/1975 (Miami, Fla.) Three days after announcing he intends to return to Cuba to challenge Castro to an election, liberal leader Luciano Nieves is gunned down in a hospital parking lot after visiting his sick son.
  • 2/28/1975 First news media revelation that CIA has plotted to assassinate foreign leaders.
  • 3/1975 The Shah of Iran met with Vice-President Saddam Hussein of Iraq. The Shah cut off his aid to Iraq's Kurds; the next day the Iraqis launched a huge offensive against them. The Kurds appealed in desperation to the CIA and Kissinger for aid, but received no response.
  • 3/6/1975 The Zapruder film is shown to the US public for the first time on Geraldo Rivera's "Goodnight America" program
  • 3/7/1975 The Senate revised its filibuster rule, allowing 60 senators to limit debate in most cases, instead of the previously required two-thirds of senators present.
  • 3/10/1975 Seymour Hersh reported on CIA-Mafia attempts to kill Castro.
  • 3/10/1975 Kissinger told the Turkish Foreign Minister, "Before the Freedom of Information Act, I used to say at meetings, The illegal we do immediately; the unconstitutional takes a little longer.' [laughter] But since the Freedom of Information Act, I'm afraid to say things like that." He then explained how he would facilitate the illegal circumvention of a Congressional arms embargo.
  • 3/15/1975 Death of Aristotle Onassis
  • 3/17/1975 Supreme Court rules that the federal government, not the states, has the exclusive right to exploit oil and reserves beneath the continental shelf seabed beyond the three-mile territorial limit.
  • 3/23/1975 CIA mercenary and assassin John O'Hare dies of a heart attack.
  • 3/25/1975 King Faisal of Saudi Arabia is assassinated by his nephew, Prince Raisal ibn Musad, in Riyadh.
  • 3/28/1975 Sen. Barry Goldwater (R-Arizona) wrote to a constituent about his attempts to find out about UFOs and Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.
  • 3/29/1975 Ford announced in an address to the nation his decision to sign the Tax Reduction Act of 1975, providing for a $23 billion tax cut.
  • 4/1975 The Rockefeller Commission examines JFK X-rays and autopsy photographs.
  • 4/1/1975 Communist victories in Cambodia and South Vietnam offensives.
  • 4/5/1975 Chiang Kai-shek died.
  • 4/6/1975 Ford was shown photos of the evacuations and chaos in South Vietnam. Kissinger told press spokesman Ron Nessen, "Why don't these people [the South Vietnamese] die fast? The worst thing that could happen would be for them to linger on."
  • 4/7/1975 McGeorge Bundy, in his first day of Rockefeller Commission testimony, categorically denies any knowledge of "an actual decision" to assassinate a foreign leader.
  • 4/9/1975 Time-LIFE sells the Zapruder film to the family for $1
  • 4/14/1975 Clyde Tolson, J. Edgar Hoover's lifelong companion, dies today.
  • 4/15/1975 Groden shows the Zapruder film and other JFK evidence at the Capitol to the Virginia Congressional Delegation. This will be the first time any Congressional group has ever seen the Zapruder film, or any of the other assassination film footage or slides.
  • 4/16/1975 Ford invokes the Railway Labor Act to avert a nationwide railroad strike.
  • 4/17/1975 John Connally was acquitted of bribery charges by a federal jury.
  • 4/17/1975 Khmer Rouge troops enter Phnom Penh, Cambodia
  • 4/17/1975 Congressman Downing introduced a resolution calling for a new investigation into JFK's death.
  • 4/22/1975 US evacuation of South Vietnam slows as Embassy claims shortage of aircraft.
  • 4/24/1975 Columnist Marianne Means wrote that LBJ told her a year before he died that he thought Oswald had acted alone, but was "either under the influence or the orders" of Castro.
  • 4/24/1975 Former Warren Commission staffer Burt Griffin was quoted in Rolling Stone: "I don't think some agences were candid with us. I never thought the Dallas police were telling us the entire truth. Neither was the FBI."
  • 4/24 or 25/1975 Walter Cronkite aired interview footage with LBJ, shot Sep 1969, as he speculated about a possible conspiracy in the JFK assassination
  • 4/28/1975 McCord's sentence was reduced to four months in prison by Sirica; he gave no reason for doing this.
  • 4/28/1975 Richard Helms publicly loses his temper and swears at Daniel Schorr
  • 4/30-5/1/1975 Saigon falls to communists.
  • 5/5/1975 Cyril Wecht criticizes the Rockefeller Commission.
  • 5/10/1975 Former CIA agent David Atlee Phillips founded the Association of Former Intelligence Officers is formed. Clare Boothe Luce is on the Board of Directors.
  • 5/12/1975 US merchant ship Mayaguez seized by Cambodians
  • 5/15/1975 Former Dallas Deputy sheriff Roger Craig allegedly shoots himself in Dallas. He is 39 years old.
  • 5/21/1975 William Colby testifies before the Senate Intelligence Committee about CIA assassination plots.
  • 5/28-29/1975 Ford attends NATO summit meeting in Brussels. This trip to Europe lasts until 6/3. He also visits Spain, Italy and Austria.
  • 6/1975 mobster crony and CIA asset, John Martino, stricken with cancer, reveals that Cuban exiles were behind the JFK assassination, and Oswald was used by them.
  • 6/5/1975 NYT published details of the CIA "family jewels" and revealed that William Colby had briefed Rep. Nedzi about them in 1973, when Nedzi was chairman of the Armed Services Subcommittee on Intelligence. His fellow Democrats on the Nedzi committee, led by Michael Harrington, revolted.
  • 6/10/1975 Rockefeller Commission report presented to Ford.
  • 6/12/1975 Nedzi resigned as chairman of the committee.
  • 6/12/1975 NYT reported that Cyril Wecht had complained that "his views of President Kennedy's murder were distorted by the Rockefeller Commission."
  • 6/13/1975 Richard Helms told the Church Committee that he didn't tell McCone about the anti-Castro plots
  • 6/15/1975 Chicago Tribune reveals that French dissidents had talked with CIA about assassinating DeGaulle; also that Kennedy aides Powers and O'Donnell had thought the shots didn't come from the TSBD.
  • 6/16/1975 Italy: Communists win 33.4% of the vote in elections; Christian Democrats win 35.3%.
  • 6/17/1975 After revelations of Nedzi's ties to CIA, his Committee was dissolved and replaced by one run by Otis Pike of New York.
  • 6/19/1975 Chicago Mob boss Sam Giancana is shot to death with a .22 caliber pistol a week before his scheduled appearance before the Church Committee.
  • 6/19/1975 Chicago Tribune reveals CIA worked with Giancana and John Roselli trying to poison Castro
  • 6/24/1975 John Roselli testifies before the Church Committee and discusses his role as a CIA-Mafia liaison in the Castro assassination plots.
  • 6/25/1975 Angola (or Mozambique) becomes independent from Portugal.
  • 6/26/1975 Supreme Court ruled unanimously that mental patients are free to leave psychiatric institutions provided they are not dangerous.
  • 6/28/1975 former head of Dallas office Gordon Shanklin takes emergency early retirement from the FBI.
  • 7/1975 Kissinger got Ford's approval for a covert military program designed to install a pro-US regime in Angola.
  • 7/11/1975 John Sirica reduces the sentences of the four Cubans involved in the Watergate break-in.
  • 7/15/1975 US and USSR begin the Apollo/Soyuz mission
  • 7/16/1975 Colonel L. Fletcher Prouty testifies before the Church Committee.
  • 7/24/1975 William Colby meets with the Pike Committee
  • 7/30/1975 Jimmy Hoffa was lured from his Detroit home to a supposed union meeting at the Manchus Red Fox restaurant and disappears.
  • 8/1975 Kissinger signaled Indonesia that the US would not object if that country invaded East Timor.
  • 8/3/1975 John Martino dies at the age of sixty-four; admitted being part of the JFK assassination - supplying equipment and delivering money.
  • 8/15/1975 Sheik Mujibur Rahman, president of Bangladesh, was assassinated during a coup.
  • 8/18/1975 "Dear Mr. Hunt" letter allegedly from Oswald surfaces
  • 8/27/1975 Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie died.
  • 8/31/1975 Dallas Times Herald reported that Oswald had left a note to James Hosty at the Dallas FBI office two weeks before the assassination.
  • 9/4/1975 Israel and Egypt sign a US-mediated interim agreement on Sinai withdrawal. Egypt was provided with a buffer zone east of the Suez Canal.
  • 9/5/1975 Lynette Alice "Squeaky" Fromme failed assassination attempt on Gerald Ford in Sacramento
  • 9/8/1975 Shocked by revelations that Allen Dulles did not tell the WC about plots to kill Castro, Sen. Schweiker conducts a personal preliminary review of the Kennedy assassination and concludes that "the fingerprints of intelligence" were all over Oswald's activities. He convinces Committee Chairman Frank Church to establish a subcommittee to review the role of federal agencies in investigating the JFK case.
  • 9/9/1975 NY state legislature passed a $2.3 billion aid bill to save NYC from financial collapse.
  • 9/11/1975 House Select Committee hearings on the 1973 Middle East War began
  • 9/18/1975 Patty Hearst was arrested by FBI agents in San Francisco in a surprise raid on the apartment of Steve Soliah and Wendy Yoshimura. Sara Jane Moore worried that her radical friends would think she was somehow involved.
  • 9/20/1975 Sara Jane Moore called the San Francisco police to say that she was considering a "test" of the presidential security system. She said she was carrying a gun.
  • 9/21/1975 A San Francisco policeman interviewed Sara Jane Moore, confiscated her .44 caliber pistol, and alerted the Secret Service. She wasn't detained because, police said, the SS felt she "was not of sufficient protection interest to warrant surveillance" and because she was an FBI informant.
  • 9/22/1975 Sarah Jane Moore assassination attempt against Gerald Ford
  • 9/22/1975 NYT reveals CIA's recordings of alleged Oswald Mexico City phone calls.
  • 10/20/1975 US announces agreement with USSR to sell them 6 to 8 million tons of grain a year.
  • 10/23/1975 Former ambassador to Chile Edward Korry told the Church Committee that he had been opposed to overthrowing Allende in Chile: "The CIA is amoral...it could operate behind my back, not merely with the President of the United States, but with Chileans....In that sense, the CIA could be an 'invisible' government."
  • 10/27/1975 UFO sightings over Loring Air Force Base.
  • 10/30/1975 UFO sightings at Wurtsmith AFB, Michigan
  • 10/31/1975 Cuban exile Rolando Masferrer is killed by a dynamite bomb in his 1968 Ford Torino.
  • 11/1975 In the Chicago Independent, Edwin Black writes about a plot in Chicago in early November 1963 to kill JFK.
  • 11/1975 Congressional investigations uncovered the details of Kennedy's affair with Judith Campbell Exner. LBJ aide Joseph Califano tells Dan Rather that LBJ thought Castro killed Kennedy.
  • 11/2-4/1975 Ford fires William Colby as CIA director. Schlesinger resigns, Kissinger gives up NSC post. Ford appoints George Herbert Walker Bush as CIA director. Donald Rumsfeld becomes Secretary of Defense. Dick Cheney becomes White House chief of staff.
  • 11/2/1975 Australian PM Edward Gough Whitlam charged that the CIA was funding the right-wing opposition Country Party.
  • 11/7/1975 Remote electronic sensors at Malmstrom AFB (home of more than 20 Minuteman missiles), indicated that something had violated site security.
  • 11/10/1975 The ore carrier Edmund Fitzgerald broke in two during a heavy storm on Lake Superior.
  • 11/10/1975 UN General Assembly, in one of its most controversial actions, adopts resolution calling Zionism a form of racism.
  • 11/11/1975 Australia: PM Edward Whitlam is removed from office by Governor-General John Kerr.
  • 11/14/1975 Cuban troops save the MPLA government in Angola by defeating an invading South African army.
  • 11/19/1975 Jack Anderson disclosed details of the CIA's spying operation against him; he identified the CIA operation under the agency's code name, Project Mudhen.
  • 11/20/1975 Church Committee reports that American officials plotted to kill, through the CIA, two foreign leaders and were involved in plots to kill three others. They also used organized crime figures in some of these plots.
  • 11/24/1975 TIME anniversary issue on the JFK assassination ("Who Killed JFK? Just One Assassin") once again tried to lay all doubts to rest.
  • 11/25/1975 leaders of the military intelligence services of Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay met with CIA to create Operation Condor an operation to assassinate and terrorize leftists.
  • 11/25-26/1975 CBS airs documentary hosted by Dan Rather once again supporting the Warren Commission.
  • 11/28/1975 A bomb explodes in the car of the Cuban ambassador to Mexico.
  • 12/1-5/1975 Ford visits China and talks with Mao Tse-Tung and Deng Hsiao-ping.
  • 12/3/1975 Communist Pathet Lao now controls most of Laos
  • 12/7/1975 Indonesia invaded East Timor; over the next year, tens of thousands of Timorese were killed.
  • 12/23/1975 Killing of CIA station boss Richard Welch in Athens. He had been "outed" as a CIA officer by the magazine CounterSpy. CIA and allies blamed it on domestic investigations


Deep Politics Timeline - Tracy Riddle - 14-03-2014

  • The Atomic Energy Commission initiated Project Plowshare to develop peaceful uses of nuclear explosives.
  • In 1957, atmospheric nuclear explosions in Nevada, which were part of Operation Plumbbob were later determined to have released enough radiation to have caused from 11,000 to 212,000 excess cases of thyroid cancer amongst U.S. citizens who were exposed to fallout from the explosions, leading to between 1,100 and 21,000 deaths.
  • Gen. Douglas MacArthur: "Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear -- kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor -- with the cry of grave national emergency. Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it by furnishing the exorbitant funds demanded. Yet, in retrospect, these disasters seem never to have happened, seem never to have been quite real." (Whan, ed. "A Soldier Speaks: Public Papers and Speeches of General of the Army Douglas MacArthur," (1965); The Nation, August 17, 1957; as a corporation head of Sperry Rand to its shareholders in 1957)
  • The CIA-ran Project MKULTRA paid Dr. Donald Ewen Cameron for Subproject 68, which would be experiments involving mind-altering substances.
  • Dr. Robert Heath of Tulane University performed experiments on schizophrenic patients, which were funded by the U.S. Army. In the studies, he dosed them with high levels of LSD, and then implanted "deep electrodes" in their brains to take EEG readings.
  • 1/5/1957 Ike told Congress that any communist aggression in Middle East would face US military intervention.
  • 1/6/1957 Oswald reports on sick call for tonsillitis and given 600,000 IU of penicillin.
  • 1/10/1957 Bombs went off in four black churches in Montgomery, as well as in the homes of two ministers who had fought segregation, one white and one black.
  • 1/11/1957 Many black leaders involved in the Alabama boycott formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Martin Luther King Jr. was chosen as its president.
  • 1/18/1957 Oswald departs 2nd Recruit Training group in San Diego. (CE 1961)
  • 1/20/1957 Oswald joins "A" Company, 1st Bn, 2d Infantry Training Rgmt, Camp Pendleton, CA. (CE 1961)
  • 2/16-17/1957 NY Times reporter Herbert Matthews, posing as a tourist, secretly made his way to Castro's jungle hideout and interviewed him; Castro explained that he wanted to be friendly with the US, supported democracy and predicted victory against Batista.
  • 2/26/1957 Oswald departs "A" Company, 1st Bn, 2d Infantry Training Rgnt, Camp Pendleton, CA. (CE 1961)
  • 3/18/1957 Oswald arrived at the Naval Air Technical Training Center in Jacksonville, Florida. (CE 1961)
  • 4/1957 Albert Schweitzer added his voice to those calling for an end to all nuclear testing.
  • 4/1957 Vance Packard's book The Hidden Persuaders is published, exposing psychological manipulation in the advertising industry.
  • 4/1957 Nevil Shute's On the Beach, a post-apocalyptic, end-of-the-world novel, first appeared as a four-part series "The Last Days on Earth" in the London weekly periodical Sunday Graphic.
  • 4/3/1957 Oswald departs from Marine Aviation Det, Naval Air Technical Training Command, Jacksonville, FL. (CE 1961)
  • 4/4/1957 Oswald assigned to Kessler Air Force base, Biloxi, Miss. (CE1961)
  • 4/17/1957 Nnamdi Azikiwe, premier of the Eastern Region of Nigeria, was the target of an unsuccessful assassination attempt in Nigeria.
  • 4/27/1957 Oswald begins "Aircraft Control and Warning Operator" course at Keesler AFB. (CD 82)
  • 5/1957 a Gallup poll showed that 63% of Americans favored an international halt to nuclear bomb tests.
  • 5/2/1957 Sen. Joe McCarthy died
  • 5/3/1957 Oswald is granted a Confidential clearance at MAD, NATTC, Jacksonville, Florida. (CD 82, H 19 665) He was also promoted to private first class.
  • 5/3/1957 Astronaut Gordon Cooper reported suppression of a flying saucer movie filmed in high clarity by two Edwards AFB range photographers on May 3, 1957.
  • 5/4/1957 Oswald arrived at Keesler AFB in Biloxi, Miss. (CE 1961)
  • 5/14/1957 "Energy resources and our future" - remarks by Admiral Hyman Rickover delivered
  • 5/17/1957 MLK delivers a speech for the Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom celebrating the third anniversary of the Supreme Court's desegregation decision. The speech, entitled "Give Us the Ballot," is given at the Lincoln Memorial, Washington, D. C. Hoover quickly opened a file to investigate the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
  • 5/25/1957 Kliment Yefremovich Voroshilov, chairman of the Russian presidium, was the target of an unsuccessful assassination attempt in Indonesia.
  • 5/30/1957 USAF discloses development of the Hughes Falcon air-to-air guided missile armed with a nuclear warhead.
  • 6/1957 In Samuel Roth v. U.S., the Supreme Court ruled that for material to be declared legally obscene it had to be "utterly without redeeming social importance."
  • 6/1/1957 Playwright Arthur Miller has been found guilty of contempt of Congress for refusing to reveal to HUAC the names of members of a literary circle suspected of Communist affiliations.
  • 6/17/1957 "Red Monday" found the Supreme Court ruling against the government in three cases involving suppression of Communists. Ike was furious, privately calling the appointment of Warren "the biggest damn fool thing I ever did."
  • 6/19/1957 Oswald departs Kessler Air Force Base, Biloxi, Miss. (CE 1961)
  • 6/20/1957 Oswald departs on leave. (CD 82)
  • 6/25/1957 Oswald awarded MOS 6741, Aviation Electronics Operator. (CD 82)
  • 6/30/1957 Oswald returns from leave. (CD 82)
  • 7/1957 Soviets launched a formal protest against US spy plane overflights.
  • 7/1957 Col. Rudolf Abel of the Soviet Secret Police was arrested in a room in Brooklyn filled with spy equipment. He was arraigned 8/9 and asked for John J. Abt to provide legal counsel, but he refused to take the case.
  • 7/2/1957 JFK Senate speech came out in favor of Algerian independence: "the most powerful single force in the world today is neither communism nor capitalism, neither the H-bomb nor the guided missile it is man's eternal desire to be free and independent. The great enemy of that tremendous force of freedom is called, for want of a more precise term, imperialism and today that means Soviet imperialism and, whether we like it or not, and though they are not to be equated, Western imperialism."
  • 7/6/1957 John Lennon meets Paul McCartney at a church picnic in Liverpool.
  • 7/9/1957 Oswald joins 4th Replacement Battalion, MAT&RC, Marine Corps Air Station, El Toro, CA. (CE 1961)
  • 7/20/1957 100,000 people filled Yankee Stadium to see Billy Graham. Sitting on the platform with him was Richard Nixon.
  • 7/26/1957 Guatemala: dictator Castillo Armas was assassinated by one of his own guards in the capital; Eisenhower called his death "a great loss to Guatemala and the world."
  • 7/28/1957 A US C-147 "Glovemaster" transporting three nuclear weapons and a nuclear capsule from Dover Air Force Base in Delaware to Europe lost two of its engines over New Jersey; the crew jettisoned two of the weapons in the sea. They were never recovered.
  • 8/1957 A recession in the US begins (3.0% decline)
  • Oct-Nov: Global UFO wave
  • 8/21/1957 Oswald departs 4th Replacement Bn, MAT&RC, El Toro, CA. (CE 1961)
  • 8/22/1957 Oswald embarks on USS Bexar at San Diego for Japan. (CE1961)
  • 8/25/1957 Soviets announce they have successfully tested the world's first intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM).
  • 8/29/1957 Civil Rights Act passed after a 24-hour filibuster by conservative Senator Strom Thurmond (D-South Carolina) was overcome today; gave the government more power to fight discrimination, but its laws were often ignored or unenforced at the local level.
  • 9/1957 The first public call for Warren's impeachment came from a tiny right-wing group in Hollywood. His brochure featured a photo of Warren with "WANTED! FOR IMPEACHMENT"
  • 9/1957 The AEC detonated a 2-kiloton bomb inside a mountain in Nevada to demonstrate the peaceful applications of nuclear power.
  • 9/2/1957 An LBJ-guided anti-Court bill, diluted of all its power, was passed.
  • 9/2/1957 Arkansas Governor Orvall Faubus "prayerfully" mustered the state National Guard the night before the fall school semester began. He intended to use them to "protect the lives and property of citizens" in preventing 9 black students from attending the all-white Central High School in Little Rock.
  • 9/4/1957 Nine black children attempt to attend Central High. One of them, 15-year-old Elizabeth Ann Eckford, tried to approach the school but was blocked by National Guard bayonets; meanwhile, the mob of white protestors screamed at her: "Go home, you bastard of a black bitch!" "Lynch her! Lynch her!" The terrified girl hugged her schoolbooks to her chest as the media captured it all on film.
  • 9/5/1957 The first civil rights act since Reconstruction is passed by Congress, creating the Civil Rights Commisson and the Civil Rights Divison of the Department of Justice.
  • 9/12/1957 Oswald arrived in Yokosuka, Japan. He joins MACS-1, MAG-11, 1st Marine Aircraft Wing at Atsugi. (CE 1961) Oswald was stationed at Atsugi US Marine Air base in Japan, where some U-2 flights originated. (WR 683).
  • 9/19/1957 US conducts its first underground nuclear test in the Nevada desert. (Nat Geographic Aug 05)
  • 9/24/1957 Ike reluctantly ordered units of the Army's 101st Airborne to Little Rock to stop violence on the school grounds. He also federalized the Arkansas National Guard. Maj. Gen. Edwin Walker would be in command of the Airborne troops at Central High. This was the first time since Reconstruction that federal troops had been ordered into the South to protect the rights of blacks. Sen. Richard Russell compared the troops to "Hitler's storm troopers."
  • 9/25/1957 The nine black children reentered Central High School under the protection of federal troops.
  • 9/29/1957 The Kyshtym disaster was a radiation contamination incident that occurred at Mayak, a nuclear fuel reprocessing plant in Russia. It measured as a Level 6 disaster on the International Nuclear Event Scale, making it the second most serious nuclear accident ever recorded (after the Chernobyl disaster).
  • 10/4/1957 Soviets launched Sputnik satellite
  • 10/12/1957 After a concert in Australia, Little Richard announces he has given up rock'n'roll. The next day, he flies to Los Angeles to be baptised a Seventh Day Adventist and "to prepare for the end of the world."
  • 10/22/1957 Thirteen US servicemen are wounded by a communist bomb attack in Saigon.
  • 10/25/1957 Mob hitman Albert Anastasia is assassinated by rival mobsters in New York.
  • 10/26/1957 USSR: Zhukov is removed from the Central Committee and his post as defense minister while visiting Yugoslavia. He is accused of trying to set up a "cult of personality" and pull the military away from party control.
  • 10/27/1957 Injury Report on Lee Harvey Oswald shooting incident. He was admitted to Yokosuka Naval Hospital for gunshot wound of upper left arm. (CD 82, CE 1961)
  • 11/1957 Following a new round of nuclear tests, the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy placed an ad in the NYT calling for an end to nuclear testing. The unexpected public response to the ad sparked the formation of the group SANE.
  • 11/3/1957 NOV 3 Soviets sent up a second satellite, Sputnik II, with a dog aboard; it burned up in the atmosphere 4/14/1958. Ike's Gallup Poll rating dropped 22 points. Foster Dulles wanted Ike to tell the public about the U-2 program, but he refused.
  • 11/8/1957 UK successfully tests a hydrogen bomb in the Line Islands of the Pacific. (Nat. Geographic Aug 05)
  • 11/14/1957 Aborted meeting of Mafia bosses at Apalachin, New York.
  • 11/16/1957 Oswald is released from US Naval Hospital, Yokosuka, and returns to MACS-1 at Atsugi. (CE 1961)
  • 11/20/1957 From this date to 3/6/1958 Oswald's unit, MACS-1, joined other marine units for the Operation Strongback maneuvers in the South China Sea and the Philippines. They left for the Philippines aboard the Terrell County, LST 1157, on 11/20. (CE 1961)
  • 11/25/1957 Ike suffered a stroke, though he quickly recovered.
  • 12/1957 a National Intelligence Estimate projected the Soviets would have between 100 and 500 operational ICBMs by 1960.
  • 12/1/1957 A. Sukarno, president of Indonesia, was the target of a failed attempt on his life in Djakarta, Indo., but ten people died and others were injured in gunfire and grenade blasts.
  • 12/6/1957 AFL-CIO expelled the Teamsters Union.
  • 12/6/1957 The US attempted to launch a satellite with a Vanguard rocket, but it failed.
  • 12/18/1957 First US atomic power plant in operation.


Deep Politics Timeline - Tracy Riddle - 14-03-2014

  • CIA synthesized many of the findings from its psychological research into what became known as the KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation handbook
  • 1963-69 Project Shipboard Hazard and Defense (SHAD), the U.S. Army performed tests which involved spraying several U.S. ships with various biological and chemical warfare agents, while thousands of U.S. military personnel were aboard the ships.
  • 1/1963 New York lawyer James Donovan makes another trip to Cuba. Castro's aide Rene Vallejo raises the subject of normalizing relations with US
  • 1/1/1963 The Special Group Augmented is replaced by a different oversight organization, the Special Group, chaired by McGeorge Bundy. Although Mongoose is abolished, the CIA arm, Task Force W, continues to exist as the Special Affairs Staff, located at the CIA's Miami station. William Harvey, formerly the head of Task Force W, is replaced by Desmond FitzGerald as head of the Special Affairs Staff.
  • 1/2/1963 Gen. Lyman Lemnitzer becomes head of NATO, replacing Gen. Lauris Norstad.
  • 1/2-3/1963 Battle of Ap Bac (a village in the Mekong Delta) saw 2000 ARVN troops, well-equipped with US arms, pinned down by 200 Viet Cong.
  • 1/4/1963 McGeorge Bundy memo to JFK proposed that they find some way to hold talks with Castro.
  • 1/10/1963 Juan Bosch of the Dominican Republic met with JFK in Washington.
  • 1/14/1963 JFK's state of the union address, proposed a tax cut to spur the economy.
  • 1/14/1963 George Wallace is sworn in as governor of Alabama, pledging to support segregation.
  • 1/15/1963 John Connally becomes governor of Texas
  • 1/17/1963 JFK proposes ending oil depletion allowance
  • 1/23/1963 Drew Pearson in his Washington Merry-Co-Round column: "Kennedy Has Chance to End the Cold War."
  • 1/23/1963 Kim Philby fled to Russia
  • 1/25/1963 JFK puts restrictions on Pentagon brass visiting South Vietnam.
  • 1/27-28/1963 Oswald fills out an order for a .38 revolver.
  • 1/29/1963 Sen. Thomas Dodd hearings on mail-order weapons began
  • 1/29/1963 Dallas News and Texas Observer publish articles examining LBJ's TV and cable interests.
  • 1/29/1963 Charles De Gaulle assassination attempt.
  • 1/30/1963 McNamara testified to Congress that 11,000 US troops were in Vietnam.
  • 2/1963 William Harvey removed from Operation Mongoose, sent to Rome as chief of station. CIA sets up Domestic Operations Division run by Tracy Barnes and E. Howard Hunt. David Atlee Phillips becomes more involved with Cuban operations
  • 2/1963 US Rep. Paul Rodgers (D-Florida) called for congressional oversight of the CIA
  • 2/1963 RFK works to get many Bay of Pigs veterans special military training at Fort Benning and Fort Jackson
  • 2/5/1963 Canadian PM Diefenbaker loses a vote of confidence in parliament.
  • 2/13/1963 The Oswalds went to the De Mohrenschildts for dinner. Lee spent the night talking to a young German geologist, Volkmar Schmidt, a right-winger
  • 2/15/1963 a plot in Paris to shoot De Gaulle with a sniper rifle was uncovered
  • 2/21/1963 The Carcano rifle is shipped from Crescent Firearms of NYC to Klein's Sporting Goods of Chicago.
  • 2/22/1963 Oswalds met Ruth Paine at a dinner party given by Volkmar Schmidt (or Everett Glover). The De Mohrenschilts are also present.
  • 2/25/1963 House bill introduced to give Attorney General responsibility for Presidential protection
  • 2/26/1963 Senate hearings on TFX scandal begin
  • 2/27/1963 Juan Bosch is inaugurated as President of the Dominican Republic, after decades of dictatorship.
  • 3/1963 New Orleans FBI informant Eugene De Lapparra overhears three individuals in a Marcello-controlled restaurant talking of killing Kennedy.
  • 3/3/1963 Oswalds move to Neely St address in Dallas.
  • 3/3/1963 Ruth Paine sends her first letter to Marina, asking if she can come visit. Marina agrees. FBI agent James Hosty conducts neighborhood check and discovers Marina Oswald speaks no English.
  • 3/4/1963 FBI agent James Hosty reopens Marina Oswald's case file in Dallas.
  • 3/4/1963 JFK indicates in memo his support for a flexible dialogue with Castro.
  • 3/5/1963 Ngo Dinh Nhu complained about Sen. Mansfield's pessimistic report on Vietnam.
  • Early March Oswald supposedly took photos of Gen. Edwin Walker's house. Marina is writing to Soviet embassy about returning to USSR.
  • 3/6/1963 JFK told the press that the fall of Southeast Asia would affect "the security of India" and "begin to run perhaps all the way toward the Middle East." Privately tells Mansfield he plans to withdraw after being reelected.
  • 3/11/1963 A letter Oswald wrote (signed "L.H.") published in the The Militant. Hosty applied for a reopening of the Oswald case after checking at the Elsbeth St residence.
  • 3/11/1963 Jean-Marie Bastien-Thiry executed in France for being involved in plots to kill De Gaulle.
  • 3/11/1963 Billy Sol Estes went on trial in Federal Court today.
  • 3/12/1963 Envelope containing rifle order form mailed from Dallas while Oswald is at work all day at Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall
  • 3/13/1963 Klein's in Chicago receives order for Carcano rifle
  • 3/14/1963 Tulsa Daily World reports that many leftists had made trips to Cuba via Mexico with no record of the trip being recorded.
  • 3/14/1963 In a memo to his brother, RFK unsuccessfully urged the president to move against Castro
  • 3/18/1963 Supreme Court, in Gideon vs. Wainwright, ruled that all defendants are entitled court-appointed legal counsel if they cannot afford their own.
  • 3/18/1963 CIA-connected Cuban exile group Alpha 66 attacks Soviet freighter off the coast of Cuba.
  • 3/20/1963 The rifle and revolver were both shipped to Oswald on this day.
  • 3/21/1963 JFK tells the press that there might be 15 to 25 nations with nuclear weapons by the 1970s.
  • 3/23/1963 Oswald is given two weeks' notice at Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall
  • 3/25/1963 Oswald supposedly picked up the rifle at his PO Box, then the revolver at the offices of REA Express, while he is at work all day.
  • 3/26/1963 Anti-Castro group L-66 attacks and sinks the Soviet ship Baku. Kennedy administration begins cracking down on exile raids
  • 3/29/1963 Billie Sol Estes is convicted in Texas of mail fraud and conspiracy.
  • 3/30/1963 McNamara decided to close 52 military installations in 25 different states, plus 21 bases overseas.
  • 3/30/1963 The Kennedy administration restricted prominent Cuban exile leaders to Dade County, and announced efforts to shut down all exile raids against Cuba.
  • 3/31/1963 President Jose Miguel Ydigoras Fuentes of Guatemala is overthrown in a coup.
  • 3/31/1963 FBI agent Hosty recommended that Oswald's file be reopened. Marina supposedly takes the photos of Oswald with his weapons in the backyard of the Neely house.
  • 3/31/1963 Robert Kennedy's Justice Dept took its first steps against Cuban exile raids against Cuba.


Deep Politics Timeline - Tracy Riddle - 14-03-2014

  • Spring 1963 - Life magazine editorially adopts the cause of the exiles as its own with photo essays. Claire Booth Luce, wife of Time-Life magazine publisher Henry Luce, former congresswoman, and U.S. ambassador, helped finance an anti-Castro platoon. The Mafia also becomes more active in helping to arm Cuban exile groups.
  • 4/1963 The US and Britain signed agreement for the purchase of up to 100 Polaris missiles. The US at the same time withdrew its Jupiter missiles from Turkey and replaced them with Polaris missiles on submarines patrolling the eastern Mediterranean.
  • 4/1963 CIA tries to use an unwitting James Donovan to deliver a poisoned diving suit to Castro.
  • 4/1963 J. Gordon Shanklin becomes agent-in-charge of the Dallas FBI office.
  • 4/1963 attempts at cease-fire in Laos
  • 4/2/1963 Michael Paine meets Lee Oswald
  • 4/2/1963 Birmingham, Alabama: Sheriff Bull Connor sets police dogs on demonstrators led by MLK.
  • 4/3/1963 Oswald receives and cashes his last full week's paycheck at Jaggars
  • 4/4/1963 Detective Sgt. C.H. Sapp of the Miami Police Intelligence Unit reported to Asst Chief A.W. Anderson about exile animosity toward JFK
  • 4/5/1963 Oswald supposedly gives one of the "backyard photos" to George de Mohrenschildt.
  • 4/6/1963 Oswald's last day at Jaggers-Chiles-Stovall
  • 4/7/1963 According to Marina, Oswald left with the Carcano, and she didn't see it again for several days
  • 4/8/1963 Canada: Conservative PM John Diefenbaker lost the general election to Lester Pearson's Liberal Party
  • 4/8-9/1963 Two men and a car are seen acting suspiciously around Gen. Walker's home in Dallas
  • 4/10/1963 The US atomic sub Thresher sinks 200 miles east of Boston with 129 crew while on sea trials following an overhaul.
  • 4/10/1963 Jack Ruby placed a long-distance phone call from the Carousel Club to Clarence Rector, who lived in Sulphur Springs, Texas. A week later, on April 17, 1963 the Dallas Police sold one of their patrol cars, a 1962 Ford to used-car dealer Elvis Blount, who also lived in Sulphur Springs.
  • 4/10/1963 Tonight, Gen. Edwin Walker narrowly escapes assassination.
  • 4/11/1963 JFK writes a private letter to Khrushchev assuring him that he is trying to stop exile raids on Cuba.
  • 4/11/1963 Pope John XXIII issues his encyclical letter, Pacem in Terris (" Peace on Earth ")
  • 4/12/1963 Diem's brother, Nhu, told CIA station chief John Richardson that it would be good for the US to reduce the number of Americans in Vietnam.
  • 4/12/1963 Birmingham, Alabama police use dogs & cattle prods on peaceful demonstrators. Martin Luther King is arrested.
  • 4/12/1963 Oswald goes downtown to the Texas Employment Commission
  • 4/13/1963 The de Mohrenschildts visit the Oswalds at their Neely St. apartment and see the Oswalds for the last time.
  • 4/13-21/1963 William Harvey is in Plantation Key, Florida with Johnny Roselli
  • 4/14/1963 Oswald supposedly retrieves the rifle from the Walker shooting.
  • 4/15/1963 (approx) Oswald staged a brief "Hands off Cuba" demonstration in downtown Dallas and wrote the FPCC about it.
  • 4/16/1963 In an exchange of notes Canada and the US reached an agreement on making nuclear warheads available to Canada for North American defense.
  • 4/18/1963 Anti-JFK tract circulated among Cuban exile community in Miami, signed by a Texan, hoping that Johnson would soon become President by an act of God. Dr. Jose Miro Cardona, head of the Cuban Revolutionary Council (CRC) in Miami, resigned in protest to the shift in U.S. policy.
  • 4/19/1963 The de Mohrenschildts left Dallas, and never saw the Oswalds again
  • 4/21/1963 Oswald's letter to the FPCC is opened by the FBI and examined.
  • 4/22/1963 Oswald supposedly wants to kill Nixon, according to Marina
  • 4/23/1963 LBJ met in Dallas with executives of the Times-Herald and KRLD, who quoted him as saying that JFK might visit Texas that summer. LBJ quip about not shooting JFK until November.
  • 4/24/1963 Dallas Times Herald reported that JFK would visit Dallas in November.
  • 4/24/1963 Ruth Paine drives Oswald to the bus station.
  • 4/25/1963 Oswald called his aunt Lillian Murret from the bus station in New Orleans
  • 4/25/1963 DeMohrenschiltd arrived in New York City and on April 25 met along with Clemard Charles, a CIA associate, Thomas J. Devine. CIA documents inform that after the first meeting DeMohrenschildt was clearly the priority of interest of Devine and his CIA superior, C. Frank Stone III. Three subsequent meetings or encounters between DeMohrenschildt and Devine were described in CIA documents by May 19,1963.
  • 4/26/1963 Oswald visited the Louisiana Division of Employment Security Office to look for work
  • Late April - At Donovan's recommendation, Castro granted ABC reporter Lisa Howard an interview.
  • 4/27-5/23/1963 Fidel Castro and a large entourage begin a five-week, fourteen-city visit to the Soviet Union.
  • 5/1963 Alleged Castro coup plan by Cuban exiles, CIA and Robert Kennedy put together.
  • 5/1963 Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul H. Nitze sent a the White House proposing "a possible scenario whereby an attack on a United States reconnaissance aircraft could be exploited toward the end of effecting the removal of the Castro regime."
  • 5/1963 the first coordinated Vietnam War protests occur in London and Denmark.
  • 5/1/1963 After her lengthy interview with Fidel Castro, ABC News anchorwoman Lisa Howard is debriefed by the CIA when she returned to the U.S
  • 5/1/1963 In Moscow, Castro is told by Khrushchev about his private conversations with JFK
  • 5/3/1963 Civil rights marches in Birmingham turn violent; ousted Mayor Eugene "Bull" Connor orders firehoses and dogs turned on peaceful protestors, which is seen on national TV.
  • 5/6/1963 McNamara directed the military to prepare to withdraw 1000 advisers from Vietnam by year's end.
  • 5/7/1963 Communications satellite Telstar II is launched from Cape Canaveral.
  • 5/7/1963 New York Times reported that JFK had appointed David L. McDonald as Chief of Naval Operations, bringing "a surprising end to Adm. George W. Anderson's one-term tenure."
  • 5/8/1963 South Vietnam: Diem's troops fire on thousands of Buddhists protestors gathered in Hue after bombs are detonated, apparently set by US intelligence agents.
  • 5/9/1963 Roger Hilsman confirmed by the Senate in his new State Department position as the primary officer responsible for Vietnam. Hilsman later says JFK wanted a policy of neutralization for Vietnam, like Laos.
  • 5/9/1963 Oswald rents at 4905/4907 Magazine St. and found a job at the William Reily Coffee Co.
  • 5/10/1963 Ruth Paine, Marina and the children set out in Ruth's 1955 Chevy station wagon for New Orleans.
  • 5/12/1963 Washington Post reports that Nhu and Diem wanted far fewer Americans in Vietnam.
  • 5/12/1963 two bombs demolished the home of MLK's brother, A.D. King, in Birmingham. More blasts damaged the Gaston Hotel from which MLK and other SCLC leaders had just left.
  • 5/14/1963 Ruth Paine returned to Dallas. Oswald wrote the New York headquarters of the FPCC, gave them his new address, and a few days later did the same for the Soviet Embassy. Mid-May FBI agent Hosty went to the Neely St. house to interview Marina, but found they had moved with no forwarding address.
  • 5/15/1963 Mercury 9 mission: Gordon Cooper sees a UFO
  • 5/18/1963 JFK trip to Nashville, motorcade and possible assassination attempts
  • 5/20/1963 Sukarno appointed president of Indonesia
  • 5/21-23/1963 Oswald obtained a library card at the Napoleon Branch of the New Orleans Public Library
  • 5/22/1963 JFK says in press conference that US will withdraw troops from Vietnam if formally asked to do so by the South Vietnamese government.
  • 5/22/1963 Greece: assassination of leftist parliamentary deputy Gregorios Lambrakis, a popular pacifist leader
  • 5/25/1963 Marina wrote a letter to Ruth complaining about her unhappy circumstances
  • 5/26/1963 Oswald wrote a letter to the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC) saying he wanted to open his own branch in New Orleans
  • 5/29/1963 Vincent T. Lee writes back to Oswald that forming a branch of the FPCC in New Orleans might not be worth the trouble since there were so few supporters in that city. Oswald ordered Hands off Cuba leaflets
  • 6/1963 The announcement this month that Adm. George W. Anderson would not be reappointed as chief of naval operations, and Curtis LeMay would be reappointed for a single year only, prompted legislation in Congress to fix a four-year term for all members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
  • 6/1963 Johnny Rosselli came to Washington to meet with William Harvey who picks him up at Dulles Airport and takes him to dinner.
  • 6/1/1963 Jomo Kenyatta becomes premier of Kenya
  • 6/2/1963 the De Mohrenschildts leave for Haiti
  • 6/3/1963 US government resumed normal relations with Haiti and withdrew a naval task force from Haitian waters.
  • 6/3/1963 Pope John XXIII died from stomach cancer.
  • 6/3/1963 Oswald rented a P.O. Box in New Orleans, listing himself, Marina and A.J. Hidell as people authorized to use it. He ordered from a printer 500 copies of a yellow, 4x9" membership application for his FPCC.
  • 6/4/1963 JFK issued Executive Order 11110, which called for issuance of $4 billion in notes through the US Treasury rather than through the Federal Reserve System.
  • 6/4/1963 Oswald picked up the handbills from Jones Printing Co. Two witnesses later told Harold Weisberg that the man who picked them up wasn't Oswald.
  • 6/5/1963 John Profumo resigned as British War Secretary after admitting that he had lied to the House of Commons in denying any impropriety with Christine Keeler.
  • 6/5/1963 Kennedy spoke at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, then stopped in El Paso, Texas for a motorcade and a meeting with LBJ and Connally at the Cortez Hotel. They agreed on a trip to Dallas in November.
  • 6/5/1963 CIA transmits more than a half dozen intelligence reports indicating that Castro was interested in mending the U.S.-Cuban conflict and establishing normal ties.
  • 6/5/1963 Marina Oswald wrote to Ruth Paine complaining that Lee "insists that I go away to the Soviet Union - which I certainly don't want to do." Oswald picked up his order from Mailing Service Co.
  • 6/5/1963 Jack Ruby called the French Opera House strip joint in New Orleans. He then left Dallas. While in New Orleans, Ruby was not seen or heard from 6/5-8/1963.
  • 6/5/1963 Hoover friend Rep. Edwin E. Willis (D-Louisiana) was elected chairman of the House Committee on Un-American Activities.
  • 6/5-10/1963 Somewhere during this time, Oswald wrote an undated letter to FPCC saying that he was going ahead with forming his own chapter. "I have decided to take an office…you may think the circular it too provocative, but I want it to attract attention, even if it's the attention of the lunitic fringe."
  • 6/6/1963 United States Southern Command (USSOUTHCOM) created.
  • 6/6 or 5/1963 Religious rioting in Iran led to arrests of Moslem leaders, including Ayatollah Khomeini. They are charged with trying to topple the Tehran regime.
  • 6/6/1963 JFK visit to San Diego and motorcade.
  • 6/7/1963 JFK visit to China Lake, California, and motorcade
  • 6/6 or 8/1963 Oswald wrote his name on a government form titled 'International Certificates of Vaccination or Revaccination against Smallpox' and then used his cheap rubber-stamping kit to stamp in the name "Dr. A.J. Hideel." He now told Marina that he would go to Cuba, then China, and finally join her in Russia. He told her that he couldn't travel with her being pregnant.
  • 6/8-9/1963 JFK trip to Hawaii and motorcade
  • 6/8/1963 Bayo-Pawley raid on Cuba
  • 6/8/1963 Lee took Marina to the New Orleans Charity Hospital for prenatal care. Date of a fake vaccination card Oswald made.
  • 6/8/1963 Jack Ruby arrived in New Orleans; his whereabouts on the 6th and 7th are completely unknown. On this day and the 9th, Chicago mobsters began to show up in Dallas to discuss moving taking over the local vice rackets.
  • 6/10 and 13/1963 Ruby placed calls to a restaurant in the Dallas-Fort Worth area where some of the mobsters were meeting.
  • 6/9/1963 Jack Ruby returned to Dallas.
  • 6/10/1963 JFK's American University peace speech, envisioning a world without a Cold War
  • 6/10/1963 Oswald sends letter to The Worker advising them he formed a FPCC chapter and asks for literature. He also enclosed honorary membership cards for Gus Hall and Ben Davis.
  • 6/11/1963 a Buddhist monk, Thich Quang Duc, burned himself to death in Saigon in protest to Diem's repressive policies.
  • 6/11/1963 Governor George C. Wallace tries to stop the court-ordered integration of the University of Alabama by "standing in the schoolhouse door." JFK's civil rights speech given on TV tonight.
  • 6/12/1963 NAACP field secretary Medgar Evers shot dead in sniper ambush in Mississippi
  • 6/13/1963 Senate Bill 603, governing J. Edgar Hoover's replacement, is passed in the Senate but there is no corresponding legislation in the House.
  • 6/14/1963 The Chinese press attacks Khrushchev, calling him the "Great Revisionist." Beginning of Sino-Soviet split
  • 6/15/1963 The French government informed the NATO secretary-general that France would withdraw its naval forces from the NATO command.
  • 6/16/1963 New Orleans: Oswald passed out FPCC leaflets at the Dumaine Street Wharf, where the aircraft carrier Wasp was docked.
  • 6/16/1963 First woman in space is Russian Valentina Tereshkova in Vostok VI; she returned to Earth 6/19.
  • 6/17/1963 Supreme Court ruled 8-1 in Township v. Schempp that required reading of Lord's Prayer and Bible in public schools was unconstitutional.
  • 6/17/1963 Agent Hosty asks New Orleans FBI to verify Oswald's presence in New Orleans.
  • 6/19/1963 JFK civil rights bill submitted to Congress. JFK approves new sabotage program against Cuba
  • 6/20/1963 A memorandum of understanding between the United States and the Soviet Union establishing a "hot line" between Washington and Moscow is signed
  • 6/23/1963 Hoover announced the arrest of a suspect in the Medgar Evers case, Byron de la Beckwith.
  • 6/24/1963 Oswald applied for a new passport, listing possible destinations as England, France, Germany, Holland, Finland, Poland, Italy and the USSR. It was issued the next day.
  • 6/25/1963 JFK speech in Frankfurt
  • 6/26/1963 JFK speech in Berlin
  • 6/27/1963 Henry Cabot Lodge appointed US ambassador to South Vietnam.
  • 6/27-29/1963 JFK is in Ireland


Deep Politics Timeline - Tracy Riddle - 14-03-2014

  • 7/1963 CIA synthesized many of the findings from its psychological research into what became known as the KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation handbook. In 2014 the CIA quietly released a newly declassified version of the infamous 1963 "KUBARK" interrogation manual. (Note: "KUBARK" was the CIA's code name for itself.) The new material adds greatly to our understanding of the CIA's interrogation and torture history. This manual was first released to the Baltimore Sun in 1997 with heavy redactions, and received considerable coverage at the time. In subsequent years, the manual was cited as a harbinger if not model of U.S. torture during the Bush years. The National Security Archive posted the 1997 FOIA version of the manual online.
  • 7/1/1963 US ousts Soviet diplomat Gennadi Sevastyanov for trying to recruit a CIA agent.
  • 7/1/1963 Marina Oswald replies to the Russian embassy, telling them that she was having family problems and wanted to go back to the USSR.
  • 7/5/1963 JFK letter to Israel government expression his objections to their nuclear program.
  • 7/5-19/1963 Chinese-Russian talks in Moscow reveal further worsening in their relationship.
  • 7/8/1963 U.S. restricts currency transactions with Cuba, including freezing $33,000,000 of Cuban deposits in U.S. banks.
  • 7/11/1963 Ruth writes to Marina inviting her to come live with her.
  • 7/15/1963 Miami News Latin American editor Hal Hendrix breaks story, "Backstage With Bobby," detailing RFK 's role as the architect of the Nicaragua-based front against Castro. James Wechsler of the New York Post wrote that the "debilitated" Communist Party USA is kept alive by the work of FBI agents and informants.
  • 7/15/1963 US, USSR and UK open talks on nuclear test ban treaty.
  • 7/16/1963 FBI Courtney Evans memo to Alan Belmont; RFK talked that day with Evans about putting "technical coverage" on MLK and Clarence Jones.
  • 7/17/1963 JFK stated in a press conference, "We are not going to withdraw from that effort," he said in response to a question about Vietnam.
  • 7/19/1963 Oswald was fired from his William Reily job for constantly neglecting his duties.
  • 7/20/1963 US and USSR reach tentative agreement on nuclear test ban.
  • 7/20/1963 The public learned that Rear Admiral George Burkley was the new official "Physician to the President."
  • 7/21/1963 Ruth wrote Marina again, offering to pick her up and drive her back to Dallas.
  • 7/22/1963 Oswald visits Louisiana Division of Employment Security office to seek a job and file interstate claim on Texas for unemployment benefits
  • 7/23/1963 JFK asked Congress to abolish immigration quotas within the next five years.
  • 7/23/1963 RFK turns down a bugging request on MLK from the FBI.
  • 7/24/1963 A group of anti-Castro Cubans arrives in New Orleans from Miami and joins a training camp off Lake Ponchatrain. Members are from the International Anti-Communist Brigade, established by Frank Sturgis and Gerry Hemming.
  • 7/25/1963 Oswald was told that his 1962 demand for a review of his undesirable Marine discharge was rejected.
  • 7/26/1963 Tonight, President Kennedy makes a television appeal to the nation for support of the nuclear test ban treaty
  • 7/271963 Oswald gives a speech about Russia and communism in Mobile, Alabama, before a group of scholars and Jesuit priests at Spring Hill College.
  • 7/28/1963 The Oswalds and Murrets return to New Orleans.
  • 7/30/1963 60,000 Buddhists march in protest against Diem's government in South Vietnam.
  • 7/31/1963 FBI raid of Cuban exile ammo dump seizes more than a ton of dynamite, 20 bomb casings, napalm material, and other devices at William Julius McLaney 's, a well known Havana gambler (and brother of Mike McClaney, former casino owner in Cuba) home at Lacombe, La., in the Lake Ponchatrain, New Orleans area.
  • 8/1963 Connecticut Democratic Sen. Thomas Dodd introduced the first version of what would eventually become the Gun Control Act.
  • 8/1963 John Martino's book I Was Castro's Prisoner is published, co-written by Nathaniel Weyl.
  • 8/1963 Ruth Paine traveled to Baltimore in August 1963. She said, "I was on a big sweep of friends and family that summer, after being separated from husband."
  • 8/1963 French President de Gaulle proposes a united, neutral Vietnam and plans to visit Kennedy in 2/1964 to talk about it.
  • 8/1/1963 Oswald wrote to V.T. Lee of the national FPCC about his local chapter and a confrontation with Cuban exiles that hadn't happened yet.
  • 8/1/1963 Adm. George W. Anderson Jr. succeeded as chief of naval operations by Adm. David L. McDonald
  • 8/2/1963 US cut off economic aid to Haiti. US told the United Nations that it would halt arms sales to South Africa.
  • 8/3/1963 Suicide of Philip L. Graham, president and chief executive officer of The Washington Post and chairman of the board of Newsweek
  • 8/4/1963 Oswald mails the letter to V.T. Lee, though the incident described did not occur until 8/9.
  • 8/5/1963 In Moscow, the US, USSR and UK sign Test Ban Treaty, banning atmospheric, underwater and outer space testing of nuclear weapons.
  • 8/5/1963 Oswald first met Cuban exile leader Carlos Bringuier
  • 8/6/1963 Oswald returns to Casa Roca, leaving his Marine Guidebook with Bringuier's brother-in-law.
  • 8/7/1963 JFK met with Citizens Committee on Test Ban Treaty, running his campaign to whip up public support for the Test Ban Treaty.
  • 8/9/1963 After a street scuffle with anti-Castro Cubans led by Carlos Bringuier, Oswald was arrested.
  • 8/10/1963 Oswald, in jail, asks to speak with a representative of the FBI. Agents Milton Kaack and John Quigley came to interview him. Oswald had no "Hidell" identification on him that day.
  • 8/11/1963 Marina writes to Ruth, inviting her to New Orleans.
  • 8/12/1963 court hearing for Oswald and Bringuier. Oswald pleads guilty to "disturbing the peace by creating a scene" and pays a fine of $10. Charges against the Cubans are dismissed.
  • 8/12/1963 U.S. News and World Report headlined, " If Peace Does Come-What Happens to Business? "
  • 8/13/1963 Oswald sent a letter to the FPCC about his arrest, who never responded to his letters again. Oswald wrote to Arnold Johnson of the Communist Party abou this arrest.
  • 8/16/1963 Chicago Sun-Times had an article on CIA dealings with Sam Giancana from 1959 to before the Bay of Pigs. This prompted CIA Director McCone to ask the Deputy Director for Plans, Helms, for a report about the article. Helms then tells McCone of the anti-Castro plots.
  • 8/16/1963 This morning, Oswald hired two men, for $2 each, from the unemployment office to help him distribute FPCC handbills. For about 20 minutes they passed out leaflets in front of the Trade Mart, and were filmed by cameraman Johann Rush.
  • 8/17/1963 William Stuckey of WDSU radio goes to Oswald's apartment this morning and asks him to do a broadcast interview. At 5pm, he goes to the studio and does a 37-minute taped interview. This evening, Oswald fires off a letter to V.T. Lee of the national FPCC, informing him of the latest developments.
  • 8/19/1963 A debate program is agreed to between Oswald and Bringuier and Edward Butler on a public affairs program called 'Conversation Carte Blanche.'
  • 8/19/1963 Radio Havana reported air attacks on oil storage tanks, the third in four days, blamed on "pirates, organized, armed and directed by the CIA." Landing craft attacked a power plant and sulfuric acid plant in Santa Lucia, Pinar del Rio province.
  • 8/20/1963 JCS recommended to McNamara that no decision be made to withdraw US forces from Vietnam until the end of October. (In Retrospect p49)
  • 8/21/1963 The radio debate on August 21 quickly became an expose of Oswald's history with Soviet Communism.
  • 8/22-9/17/1963 HSCA determined it could not be positive of Oswald's whereabouts during this period. This was the time of the alleged sighting of Oswald in Clinton, Louisiana with Dave Ferrie and either Clay Shaw or Guy Banister.
  • 8/23/1963 FBI headquarters asked its New Orleans branch for the results of their investigation on Oswald.
  • 8/23/1963 FBI's William Sullivan had Division Five produce a report on Communist infiltration of the Civil Rights Movement, with particular attention to its likely role in the upcoming March. Sullivan's August 23 report concluded that 'there has been an obvious failure of the Communist Party of the United States to appreciably infiltrate, influence, or control large numbers of American Negroes in this country.'
  • 8/24/1963 Presidential advisers Roger Hilsman, Averell Harriman, and Michael Forrestal draft a telegram to newly appointed Saigon ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge that conditionally authorizes U.S. support of a coup by rebel South Vietnamese generals. President Kennedy, who is in Hyannis Port, endorses the telegram.
  • 8/26/1963 Henry Cabot Lodge meets with Diem for the first time; Diem refuses to get rid of the Nhus or discuss reform. Lodge tells him that he faces a sharp reduction in aid if he doesn't get rid of the Nhus.
  • 8/27/1963 Another White House meeting about the situation in Saigon; William Colby and Victor Krulak told the President that the anti-Buddhist campaign had not stirred up the populace and created further unrest. JFK expressed more reservations about a coup, but Hilsman urged that it be done immediately.
  • 8/28/1963 Martin Luther King gives his "I have a dream" speech at the civil rights march in Washington
  • 8/28/1963 Oswald wrote a letter to the US Communist Party's Central Committee
  • 8/28/1963 In a NSC meeting, Ball, Harriman, Hilsman and Forrestal urged a Saigon coup, but McNamara, Nolting and JFK expressed reluctance. LBJ, Taylor and McCone were strongly opposed. NYT today reports on coup speculation in Saigon
  • 8/29/1963 Lodge continues to push for a coup in Saigon against Diem
  • 8/30/1963 The "hot line" with Moscow became operational to provide a quick, direct link with Washington during emergencies.
  • 8/30/1963 FBI's William Sullivan wrote a memo about MLK: "We must mark him now, if we have not done so before, as the most dangerous Negro of the future in this nation from the standpoint of communism, the Negro, and national security…."
  • 8/31/1963 Oswald writes to The Worker in New York about getting a job with them as a photographer.
  • Early Sept Talks between the Cuban delegate to the UN, Lechuga, and a U.S. delegate, William Attwood, are proposed by the Cubans. RFK encourages the effort. Attwood reports regularly to the White House and to Adlai Stevenson, U.S. ambassador to the U.N.
  • Early Sept Oswald allegedly met CIA agent David Atlee Phillips in Dallas.
  • Late Fall: The Church Committee only learned late in its term about the fall 1963 preparations to deal with the possible "assassination of American officials," and it asked the agencies in 1976 for all relevant documents about the matter. When the Church Committee's report went to press, it said the Senate was "awaiting a response from these agencies."
  • 9/1963 FBI allegedly approaches Oswald to become an informant after he moved back to Dallas, according to Joseph Goulden in the Philadelphia Inquirer 12/8/1963. Manuel Rodriguez registers as alien in Dallas, sets up local chapter of Alpha 66. Renewed back-channel talks between Kennedy and Castro. The President's Texas trip was expanded to two days.
  • 9/1/1963 Oswald wrote to the Communist Party in New York City and the Socialist Workers Party in New York that he would be relocating to the Baltimore-Washington DC area in October.
  • 9/2/1963 JFK tells Walter Cronkite that the US would continue to help Vietnam, but it was their war to win or lose.
  • 9/6/1963 In a NSC meeting, RFK urged a fundamental reassessment of what the US was doing in Vietnam and even suggested the idea of withdrawing from Vietnam.
  • 9/7/1963 AM/LASH: CIA case officers in Brazil have their first meeting with AM/LASH (Rolando Cubela) since prior to Missile Crisis. They cable Fitzgerald that he would perform an "inside job" on Castro's life and is awaiting a U.S. plan of action.
  • 9/7/1963 Castro appeared at a Brazilian embassy reception in Havana and an impromptu interview to reporter Daniel Harker, where he allegedly threatens Kennedy. Cuban exile planes have been bombing Cuban frequently in recent weeks.
  • 9/9/1963 JFK says in an interview with Huntley-Brinkley that the US should stay in Vietnam.
  • 9/10/1963 FBI headquarters asked Dallas office for information on Oswald.
  • 9/10/1963 When Kennedy sent Gen. Victor Krulak and Joseph Mendenhall on a fact-finding mission to Vietnam, both came back with widely divergent assessments
  • 9/11/1963 Horace Twiford of Houston, national committeeman at large of the Socialist Labor party for the state of Texas, mails to Oswald's Dallas PO Box a copy of the SLP's "Weekly People."
  • 9/11/1963 Henry Cabot Lodge cabled Washington that it was time for a coup in Saigon.
  • 9/12/1963 At a National Security Council meeting, the Joint Chiefs of Staff again present a report evaluating a projected nuclear first strike against the Soviet Union, in a time scheme of 1964 through 1968 . President Kennedy turns the discussion to his conclusion: " Preemption is not possible for us. " He passes over without comment the report's implication that the remaining months of 1963 are still the most advantageous time for the United States to launch a preemptive strike.
  • 9/12/1963 Considering Castro 's recent statements, the Cuban Coordinating Committee meets to conduct a broad review of U.S. contingency plans. They agree there is a strong likelihood Castro will retaliate in some way against the rash of covert activity in Cuba; however an attack on the U.S. is considered unlikely.
  • 9/12/1963 Washington Post broke the Bobby Baker scandal story. Baker was Secretary to Senate Majority Leaders LBJ and Mike Mansfield. Post reports on a breach-of-contract suit against Bobby Baker.
  • 9/13/1963 Mention of a Presidential one-day trip to Dallas, Ft Worth, San Antonio and Houston appeared in the Dallas Times-Herald.
  • 9/15/1963 Oswald obtained his Mexican transit visa.
  • 9/15/1963 Bomb explodes in black church in Birmingham, Alabama.
  • 9/16/1963 At a State Dept meeting, McCone and two CIA agents recently returned from Saigon reported that the Generals who were plotting a coup were not likely to be able to run a viable government once they came to power. (In Retrospect 65)
  • 9/16/1963 Apparent "Oswald" appearance in Milwaukee, who signed in the guest register at the Fox and Hounds Inn.
  • 9/16/1963 FBI's Sullivan wrote a memo urging full COINTELPO measures against MLK.
  • 9/17/1963 Special Adviser to the US delegation at the UN William Attwood was told by Guinea's ambassador to Cuba that Castro was willing to talk to the US about normalizing relations.
  • 9/17/1963 Richard Case Nagell allegedly sent Hoover a registered letter warning of the president's impending assassination
  • 9/17/1963 JFK cabled Lodge to talk with Diem, and that a coup was not a good idea right now.
  • 9/17/1963 Oswald visited the Mexican consulate in New Orleans and got a tourist card.
  • 9/18/1963 William Attwood, deputy U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, wrote memo for Adlai Stevenson and other U.S. officials, requesting authorization to make secret contact with Cuba's UN Ambassador Carlos Lechuga.
  • 9/18/1963 FBI memo: the CIA advised the FBI two days earlier that the "Agency is giving some consideration to countering the activities of [the FPCC] in foreign countries. "
  • 9/19/1963 Arnold Johnson, Director of Information of the Communist Party, wrote a cautious reply to Oswald, saying he might want to "remain in the background, not underground."
  • 9/20/1963 JFK appeared before the UN General Assembly and suggested that the US and USSR cooperate on a trip to the moon. He met with Ambassador Stevenson and gave his approval for journalist William Attwood " to make discreet contact" with Dr. Carlos Lechuga, Cuba's UN ambassador, in order to explore a possible dialogue with Castro.
  • 9/20/1963 Ruth Paine arrived in New Orleans to spend the weekend with the Oswalds.
  • 9/20/1963 Richard Case Nagell staged a bank robbery at the State National Bank in El Paso to get himself arrested. He claimed he had stumbled onto "a domestic-formulated and domestic-sponsored conspiracy" against JFK.
  • 9/22/1963 The Oswalds finished packing their possessions in Ruth's station wagon. There is apparently no luggage long enough to contain the Carcano rifle.
  • 9/23/1963 Journalist William Attwood first met with Carlos Lechuga at a party organized by Lisa Howard.
  • 9/23/1963 Marina left for Texas with Ruth
  • 9/23/1963 Joe Alsop, writing in the Washington Post, compared journalists critical of the war in Vietnam to apologists for Castro and Mao, and called Diem "a courageous, quite viable national leader."
  • 9/24/1963 Attwood flew to Washington and met with RFK, who recommended that an intermediary meet with Castro to keep US involvement secret.
  • 9/24/1963 The Senate voted to ratify the Test Ban Treaty by a vote of 80 to 19.
  • 9/24/1963 JFK announced that Marine Corps Commandant Shoup, who is retiring from the military, would be replaced by Greene. (NY Times 9/25) JFK begins a tour of eleven western states.
  • 9/24/1963 New Orleans FBI informs headquarters that their Oswald investigation is ongoing. The FBI then sends a report to the CIA on Oswald.
  • 9/24/1963 Hal Hendrix of the Miami News wrote about the coup that ousted liberal President Bosch of the Dominican Republic. Seth Kantor relates that Hendrix reported the coup 24 hours before it happened; he reportedly had a CIA source at Homestead Air Force Base south of Miami. Hendrix would become known as "The Spook" because of his tight relations with US intelligence.
  • 9/24/1963 Effective date of a change-of-address card signed by Oswald redirecting his mail from New Orleans to Ruth Paine's house. In the early evening, neighbor Eric Rogers sees Oswald leave 4907 Magazine St carrying two cloth bags, one small and one large. He went across the street and caught a bus headed toward the center of the city.
  • 9/25/1963 JFK is in Ashland, Wisconsin and participates in a motorcade.
  • 9/25/1963 Oswald apparently stayed in New Orleans until this day, to collect his $33 unemployment check; it is uncertain where he spent the night. At the Lafayette Square substation, he picked up his unemployment check and mailed a change-of-address card, postmarked 11am, listing the Paine address in Irving, Texas. Sometime between 7 and 9pm Oswald called the Houston home of Horace Twiford, national committeeman of the Socialist Labor Party for Texas. The WC claimed Oswald cashed his $33 check at a Winn-Dixie and at 12:20pm he probably boarded a Continental Trailways bus, #5121, headed for Houston, due to arrive at 10:50pm. (WR 731)
  • 9/25/1963 CBS Reports aired "McNamara and the Pentagon." Harry Reasoner asked McNamara if it was possible that the South Vietnamese "might win the war on the battlefield and lose it in Saigon"; McNamara admitted that the government had to do a better job winning the support of the people, or no amount of US aid would help. "It is important to recognize it's a South Vietnamese war. It will be won or lost depending upon what they do."
  • 9/25/1963 A man named Harvey Oswald appeared at the Selective Service office in Austin, Texas to get help in having his discharge upgraded.
    9/25/1963 The Soviet Presidium ratified the Test Ban Treaty.
  • 9/25/1963 President Juan Bosch of the Dominican Republic is ousted in a military coup.
  • 9/26/1963 JFK is in Salt Lake City. He participates in a motorcade.
  • 9/26/1963 A White House spokesman made the first public announcement of a trip to Texas, November 21-22, with stops in Dallas, Houston, Ft. Worth and San Antonio.
  • 9/26/1963 The close-out date written on Oswald's New Orleans P.O. Box form
  • 9/26/1963 Lee Oswald supposedly boarded bus #516 of the Flecha Roja line at 2:15pm, bound for Mexico City.
  • 9/25 or 26 or 27/1963 Sylvia Odio incident occurred.
  • 9/27/1963 Joseph Valachi testified on television before the Senate Investigations Committee that Vito Genovese was the "boss of bosses" of organized crime. He named other top heads of the mafia as Carlo Gambino and Thomas Luchese, and described the organization of la Cosa Nostra.
  • 9/27/1963 The Coordinator of Cuban Affairs prepared a memo listing assignments for contingency papers relating to a possible retaliatory actions by the Castro regime.
  • 9/27/1963 William Attwood met Lechuga at the UN Delegates Lounge
  • 9/27/1963 (Fri) Oswald allegedly in Mexico City.
    • 10am Oswald arrives by bus
    • 10:30am Oswald checked in to the Hotel del Commercio.
    • 10:37am A man called the Soviet consulate to inquire about getting a visa to travel to Odessa in the USSR.
    • 11:00 A.M. visit to the Cuban consulate, Oswald applied for a Cuban transit visa for a trip to the Soviet Union.
    • Afternoon: Oswald visits the Soviet embassy
    • 4:05pm the Cuban Consulate phoned the Soviet consulate. Silvia Duran said that a male American citizen was asking for a transit visa to pass through Cuba on his way to the Soviet Union.
    • 4:26pm Soviet embassy calls Cuban embassy and asks Silvia Duran if American had been at the Cuban embassy. She says, "He is here now." (HSCA Vol. III)
    • The CIA photographed a man leaving the Embassy today and initially claimed it was Oswald.

  • 9/28/1963 JFK motorcade in Las Vegas.
  • 9/28/1963 US, British and Soviet foreign ministers met in NY to discuss easing East-West tensions.
  • 9/28/1963 (Sat) Mexico City
  • 9:30-10am The man identifying himself as Oswald returns to the Soviet Embassy, renewing his request for a quick visa to the Soviet Union.
  • 11:51am Silvia Duran calls Soviet embassy. Says Oswald, who had previously been to Cuban embassy, wants to talk. Man speaks broken Russian. (WC Vol. XVIII) Both embassies are actually closed on Saturday.
  • 9/28/1963 Someone later identified as Oswald arrived after dark at the Sports Drome Rifle Range in Dallas, Texas, for the first of numerous sightings that would be reported of Oswald at the rifle range.
  • 9/29/1963 (Sun) Gen. Lemnitzer urged the US and NATO to approve installation of medium-range nuclear missiles in Western Europe.
  • 9/29/1963 President Kennedy rests at the home of singer Bing Crosby in Palm Desert, California before returning to Washington
  • 9/29/1963 Taylor, McNamara, Lodge and Harkins met with Diem, who refused to soften the repressiveness of his regime. He wouldn't get rid of the Nhus and was in denial about the extent of the unrest in the country.
  • 9/30/1963 (Mon) President Kennedy reopens a secret channel of communication between himself and Nikita Khrushchev, via Press Secretary Pierre Salinger and a Washington-based Soviet Secret Police agent.
  • 9/30/1963 Oswald bought a $20.30 ticket at the Chihuahuense travel agency for a Transportes del Norte bus to Nuevo Laredo.


Deep Politics Timeline - Tracy Riddle - 14-03-2014

  • 10/1963 "NATO leaders were disturbed in October when US Deputy Defense Secretary Roswell Gilpatric, speaking in Chicago, declared that American forces abroad could be thinned out without weakening the nation's capacity to deal with Soviet aggression. This speech, coming in the midst of Operation Big Lift' in which the United States flew a 15,000-man division from Texas to West Germany, suggested that henceforth the United States would station more of its troops at home." (1964 Collier's Encyclopedia Yearbook) From story on "doomsday clock" on cover of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: "In 10/63, the nuclear test ban treaty moved the hands back to 12 minutes before midnight - the farthest from doom ever." San Francisco Examiner/UPI [3/24/69]
  • Late Fall 1963 Longtime JFK friend Torby Macdonald is secretly sent to Saigon to urge Diem to remove the Nhus from his government. Diem refused.
  • 10/1/1963 (Tue) In New Orleans, Jesse Garner informed the local FBI that the Oswald had left Magazine St.
  • 10/1/1963 Meeting of anti-Castro Cubans and right-wing Americans in the Dallas suburb of Farmer's Branch; a recording of the conversation exists. The local John Birch Society hosted three militant Cuban exiles; a member of the audience taped Bay of Pigs vet Nestor Castellanos ranting about JFK.
  • 10/1/1963 10:31am Mexico City: a man calls Soviet embassy, saying in broken Russian "This is Lee Harvey Oswald" and he "was at your place last Saturday and talked to your Consul" asked if anything new about telegram to Washington DC, mentions Kostikov.
  • 10/1/1963 Winston Scott memo to Clark D. Anderson (legal attache) about 7 telephone wiretaps involving Oswald in Mexico City.
  • 10/1/1963 Hoover received and then approved a combined COMINFIL-COINTELPRO plan against the civil rights movement. The approved plan called for intensifying "coverage of Communist influence on the Negro."
  • 10/2/1963 (Wed) Richard Starnes story in Washington Daily News saying that CIA had become a malignancy and could stage a coup
  • 10/2/1963 Connally had a meeting at the Hotel Adolphus about the President's trip with J. Eric Jonsson (chairman of the Citizens Council), Robert Cullum (Chamber of Commerce president), R.L. Thornton (publisher of Dallas Morning News), and Albert Jackson of the Dallas Times Herald.
  • 10/2/1963 8:30am Oswald supposedly leaves Mexico City today by bus
  • 10/2/1963 "Memorandum for the President. Subject: Report of McNamara-Taylor Mission to South Vietnam. The military campaign has made great progress and continues to progress. There are serious political tensions in Saigon (and perhaps elsewhere in South Vietnam) where the Diem-Nhu government is becoming increasingly unpopular..."
  • 10/2/1963 As Taylor now believes that the coup against Diem has been called off, Kennedy cables Lodge that no encouragement to a coup should be given, though contacts should be made with a potential alternative leader. (World Almanac of the Vietnam War p61)
  • 10/3/1963 (Thur) Arthur Krock 's NYT article "The Intra-Administration War In Vietnam"
  • 10/3/1963 1:35am - Oswald crossed Mexican border to US from Nuevo Laredo into Texas. Leaves Laredo at 3am. (HSCA)
  • 10/3/1963 Honduras: military coup ousted liberal President Ramon Villeda Morales.
  • 10/3/1963 2:20pm - Oswald arrived in Dallas. (HSCA) He checked in at the YMCA. Later that day he went to the Texas Employment Commission to look for work, listing his address as 2515 West 5th Street, Ruth Paine's house in Irving.
  • 10/3/1963 3:39pm: unidentified man outside calls Soviet embassy in Mexico City, speaks in broken Spanish, then English, says he is looking for visa to Russia.
  • 10/3/1963 US, UK and Soviet foreign ministers agreed in principle to ban nuclear weapons in space.
  • 10/3/1963 at about 6 pm, Oswald was in Alice, Texas -- some 400 miles south of Dallas - asking about a job at radio station KOPY.
  • 10/3/1963 New Orleans FBI office wired Hosty that the Oswalds had left New Orleans a short time before.
  • 10/3/1963 JFK is traveling in Arkansas with Sen. Fulbright, who warns him not to go to Dallas. (Death of a President p39)
  • 10/4/1963 (Fri) Armed Forces' Pacific Stars and Stripes headline: "White House Report: U.S. Troops Seen Out of Viet by '65"
  • 10/4/1963 For 4 days, Cuba was ravaged by the longest and most relentless Caribbean storm in 75 years. At least 1000 people died.
  • 10/4/1963 Connally is at the White House to talk about the Texas trip; it was agreed that Connally would largely plan the events in Texas.
  • 10/4/1963 Oswald looked through the job ads and went to an employment agency in the Adolphus Tower, telling them that he has lived in Dallas for 15 years. "Oswald" returned to KOPY in Alice, Texas accompanied by Marina and June.
  • 10/4/1963 The CIA Station Chief in Saigon, John H. Richardson, is recalled at Lodge's request.
  • 10/4/1963 Richard Helms later told the WC that the CIA's photo of the mystery man in Mexico City was taken on this date, though Oswald was not even in Mexico anymore. (Fonzi, Last Investigation 422)
  • 10/5/1963 (Sat) Dallas Morning News described Connally's meeting with JFK. He said that Kennedy might visit Dallas, Houston, Fort Worth and San Antonio. "White House sources last week frankly stated that the visit would be a political one."
  • 10/5/1963 Oswald tells Marina some details of his Mexico trip. (H 1 27-59)
  • 10/5/1963 In a meeting, JFK decided to take a wait-and-see approach to the possibility of a coup in Saigon. (In Retrospect 81) Lodge reported to Kennedy that the coup was on; JFK assures Gen. Minh that the US will not thwart a coup. (World Almanac of the Vietnam War)
  • 10/5/1963 NYTimes did its first major piece on the Bobby Baker scandal.
  • 10/6/1963 (Sun) The Oswalds moved into Ruth Paine's home.
  • 10/6/1963 A want-ad in the Dallas Morning News advertises a room available at 1026 N. Beckley.
  • 10/6/1963 A CIA cable to Lodge warned him and the CIA station chief to "preserve security and deniability" in all contacts with the coup plotters. (The Politics of Lying p40)
  • 10/7/1963 (Mon) JFK signed the Test Ban treaty in Washington, prohibiting nuclear testing in the atmosphere, underwater or in outer space.
  • 10/7/1963 Madame Nhu arrives in the US, but her presence is officially ignored by the Kennedy administration.
  • 10/7/1963 Bobby Baker resigned his post as Secretary to the Senate Majority Leader.
  • 10/7/1963 Cuban Ambassador Lechuga spoke before the UN General Assembly and rejected the treaty, claiming that US-sponsored violence against Cuba was increasing.
  • 10/7/1963 FBI requested authority again for technical surveillance of MLK and the SCLC.
  • 10/7/1963 Oswald's visa application was received at the Foreign Ministry in Havana and rejected 10/15 because he did not have a Soviet visa.
  • 10/7/1963 Ruth Paine gave Oswald an ENCO map of Dallas for him to use while looking for a job; this would later be found in his apartment with suspicious markings on it. Ruth drove Oswald to the bus station, and she told him that Marina could stay until they got back on their feet. Oswald found a room at 621 Marsalis St in Oak Cliff, Dallas. He registered under his real name, and moved in that same day. (H 6 401-2) Oswald went to a job interview at Solid State Electronics.
  • 10/8/1963 (Tue) "On 8 October, the very day that the Mexico City story on Oswald arrived at FBI HQS, Marvin Gheesling took Oswald off of the espionage watch list a list he had been on since his defection to the USSR on Halloween Day, 1959. Moreover, the person in the CIA's SAS who handled liaison with the FBI, Austin Horn, was wired into Oswald's Cuban and the operation in Mexico and thus had reason to believe that there was a legitimate counter-FPCC operation ongoing in Mexico. Horn had no reason to alert the FBI that the Oswald story in Mexico was cause for concern.With no warning indicators from the CIA, Gheesling's removal of Oswald from the watch list at FBI ensured that Oswald would not be placed on the security index…Hoover censured Gheesling for his action. Why Gheesling has never been deposed and asked why he removed Oswald from the list or who told him to do it is one of the lingering questions…" (John Newman, Oswald and the CIA, 2008)
  • 10/8/1963 David Atlee Phillips told the HSCA in the '70s that on this date he signed off on a cable from Mexico City to CIA headquarters reporting Oswald's visit to the Soviet embassy. Later, records would reveal that Phillips was on leave at the JM/WAVE station in Miami and didn't return to Mexico City station until 10/9. (The Last Investigation)
  • 10/8/1963 On planning of JFK visit to Dallas - earliest mention of 11/22 visit apparently 10/8/63 in headline of Dallas Times Herald.
  • 10/9/1963 (Wed) JFK announced sale of 150 million bushels of wheat to the Soviets, costing them $250 million
  • 10/9/1963 Oswald had a job interview with Burton-Dixie Co, but didn't get it
  • 10/9/1963 CIA headquarters received a cable from its Mexico City Station about an October 1 phone call to the Soviet Consulate that had been wiretapped, taped, transcribed, and translated from Russian into English.
  • 10/10/1963 (Thu) RFK gave the go-ahead for a limited "trial basis" bugging of MLK "and to continue it if productive results were forthcoming." (Courtney Evans memo to Alan Belmont)
  • 10/10/1963 FBI is told by an informant the CIA is meeting with AM/LASH.
  • 10/10/1963 The Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty went into effect as Britain signed the treaty.
  • 10/10/1963 JFK met with Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko and prodded him about the continued presence of Soviet troops in Cuba.
  • 10/10/1963 Dallas Morning News attacked JFK for resisting the "seizure of power by anti-communist forces" in Honduras and the Dominican Republic. 10/10/1963 CD 631, a CIA teletype message to FBI, Navy, and State Dept, is sent about Oswald's visit to Mexico City
  • 10/10/1963 Oswald appears at the Jobco Employment Agency in Dallas, and lists his "closest friend" as George de Mohrenschildt. He looks for a job at the De Vibiss Co.
  • 10/10/1963 Marquis Childs syndicated column "Washington Calling" quoted JFK as criticizing the Hunt family for having "paid small amounts in federal income tax last year" and used "various forms of tax exemption and special tax allowances to subsidize the ultraright on television, radio and in print."
  • 10/11/1963 (Fri) Oswald remained his his room all day and evening, according to his landlady.
  • 10/11/1963 President Kennedy issues National Security Action Memorandum 263, making official government policy the withdrawal from Vietnam of "1 ,000 U.S. military personnel by the end of 1963" and " by the end of 1965 . . . the bulk of U.S. personnel. "
  • 10/12/1963 (Sat) Oswald lost his room at 621 N. Marsalis St. today
  • 10/13/1963 (Sun) Ruth gave Oswald some driving lessons in the parking lot of a closed shopping-center.
  • 10/13/1963 Gallup Poll shows that 57% of Americans approve of JFK and his policies, 28% disapprove.
  • 10/14/1963 (Mon) Ruth drove Lee into Dallas on her way to do errands. Later that day, Ruth, Marina, Dorothy Roberts and Linnie Mae Randle were talking about Lee's situation; Randle suggested that Lee might check out the Texas School Book Depository, where her brother had recently been hired
  • 10/14/1963 Radio Havana put on the air several American defectors to Cuba, who denounced the Red Cross as a agency of the US government and criticized the US for harassing Cuba.
  • 10/14/1963 Oswald rented a small room in a boardinghouse at 1026 North Beckley Avenue in Oak Cliff, Dallas; he registered as O.H. Lee.
  • 10/15/1963 (Tue) The day before Oswald began work at the Texas School Book Depository, Robert Adams of the Texas Employment Commission phoned the Paine residence with a much better job prospect for Oswald.
  • 10/15/1963 Oswald went to the TSBD for an interview and was hired.
  • 10/15/1963 Washington, D.C motorcade: Brig. Gen. Godfrey McHugh is with Special Agent Bill Greer and ASAIC Floyd Boring in the front seat. Either Boring or SAIC Gerald Behn rode in the limousine on all motorcades --- until the Texas tour, when a third-stringer, ASAIC Roy Kellerman, took their place. And, as we know, military aides McHugh and Clifton were not in the limousine at all in Dallas.
  • 10/15/1963 West German chancellor Konrad Adenauer gave a farewell speech to the Bundestag after 14 years in office.
  • In mid-October, Soviet troops held up two US convoys, one for over two days, on the Berlin autobahn.
  • 10/15/1963 The Wall St Journal accused the Kennedy administration of giving 'mere lip service to economic freedom' while pursuing a foreign aid program that favored socialism and a domestic program that led to bureacratic control of the economy. The paper charged that Kennedy's policies reflected a hostility to 'the philosophy of freedom'.
  • 10/16/1963 (Wed) Oswald's first day at the TSBD
  • 10/16/1963 South Korea: Gen. Park Chung Hee was elected president. West Germany: Ludwig Erhard was elected the new chancellor.
  • 10/16/1963 The Russians detained a British convoy for 9 hours before allowing it to enter West Germany.
  • 10/17/1963 (Thu) JFK met with Yugoslav ruler Tito in Washington while protestors marched outside the White House.
  • 10/17/1963 Ngo Dinh Nhu charged that the CIA was plotting with the Buddhists to overthrow the regime in Saigon.
  • 10/18/1963 (Fri) The Delaware State News editorialized, "Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. His name right now happens to be Kennedy - let's shoot him, literally, before Christmas."
  • 10/18/1963 Oswald came out to Irving with Buell Frazier. Marina and Ruth surprised Lee with a birthday party
  • 10/18-19 or 20/1963 Constitution Party national convention in Indianapolis. This meeting of right-wing extremists was attended by Joseph Milteer and Willie Somersett. Col. William Gale was one of the speakers.
  • 10/18/1963 the FBI distributed a memorandum on King to the Justice Department, officials at the White House, the Central Intelligence Agency, the State Department, the Defense Department, and Defense Department intelligence agencies. It was a personal diatribe against MLK's character. The attorney general was outraged and demanded that Hoover seek the return of the report. By October 28, all copies were returned. This was the first-and last-official action to deter Hoover's vendetta against King.
  • 10/18/1963 FBI headquarters is told by its Mexico representative of Oswald's visit to the embassy.
  • 10/20/1963 (Sun) Oswald's second daughter, Rachel, is born
  • 10/20/1963 The White House gave an estimate attributed to McNamara and Taylor that 1000 men or more could be out of Vietnam by the end of the year.
  • 10/21/1963 (Mon) Oswald went to work with Frazier, then back to Irving that evening. He visited Marina at the hospital this evening; she remembered him being very happy about having another daughter.
  • 10/21/1963 US announced it would deny funds to Vietnam's Special Forces if they are used for anything other than fighting the VC, and would not renew the agreement to supply Saigon with surplus food.
  • 10/22/1963 (Tue) Operation Big Lift: In the early morning, soldiers of the 2nd Armored Division at Fort Hood, Texas, lumbered up with their gear and individual weapons to an assembly of large cargo aircraft from the Military Air Transportation Service. Their destination was the front-line of the Cold War, Central Europe.
  • 10/22/1963 FBI agent Hosty receives INS information on Oswald and forwards it to New Orleans. Oswald rides to work from Irving with Frazier; in the evening, he returns to his roominghouse on the bus.
  • 10/22/1963 Vietnam: Gen. Harkins expresses to Gen. Don his disapproval of a coup against Diem.
  • 10/22/1963 UPI in Miami reports that "A big Cuban exile raiding party, heavily armed and accompanied by an American free lance photographer, was intercepted and stopped off Miami Beach Sunday night as it headed for Cuba, US Customs officials announced Monday. There were 21 Cuban men, all members of the Commando L organization…Leader of the raiders was 56-year-old Santiago Alvarez, former governor of Matanzas Province during the Fulgencio Batista regime."
  • 10/22/1963 Radio Havana broadcasts an English translation of a recent Castro speech, accusing the US of magnifying the effects of Hurricane Flora: "Our people do not need the aid of the US imperialists….What we ask for is an end to the economic blockade against our country!"
  • 10/23/1963 (Wed) Tonight, Oswald attended a right-wing rally at the Memorial Auditorium Theater in Dallas, at which Gen. Walker addressed 1,300 people.
  • 10/23/1963 Ruth Paine had a pocket calendar for 1963, and it wound up being Commission Exhibit 401. For the month of March, there is, in the margin, a note saying "Oct. 23," followed by a star, and the words "LHO purchase of rifle". The note is in Ruth Paine's handwriting, which Mrs. Paine readily acknowledged.
  • 10/23/1963 Washington announced that the embargo against Cuba would remain in place.
  • 10/24/1963 (Thu) French reporter Jean Daniel, conducts a brief interview with JFK before setting off on an assignment in Cuba. Though JFK is critical of Castro, he suggests Daniel broach the subject of reestablishing U.S.-Cuba relations with Castro, asks Daniel to report back to him.
  • 10/24/1963 UN Ambassador Adlai Stevenson, in a visit to Dallas, was jeered, jostled and spit on by angry right-wing protestors outside the Dallas Memorial Auditorium Theater.
  • 10/24/1963 CIA requested Navy Dept send recent photographs of Oswald to the Agency so they could be forwarded "to our representative in Mexico."
  • 10/24/1963 UPI dispatch from New York: "Special forces troops of the US Army are in Guatemala on a secret mission, apparently either to train Cuban exiles for another strike against Fidel Castro or to instruct Guatemalan troops in anti-communist tactics."
  • 10/25/1963 (Fri) Oswald left work at the TSBD and spent the weekend in Irving, getting a ride home with Frazier. That evening he attended an ACLU meeting on the campus of Southern Methodist with Michael Paine. Oswald spoke up and criticized Gen. Walker, and told one person after the meeting that JFK "is doing a real fine job, a real good job."
  • 10/25/1963 "The President may make powerful enemies among his own people, and I would not rule out the possibility of an attempted assassination or worse if he is caught off his guard. Mr. President, I am deeply concerned for your personal safety and would respectfully urge you to strengthen your bodyguard, especially when you are in the streets and other public places." - John Pendragin, astrologer, in British Fate magazine, October 25, 1963
  • 10/25/1963 The New Orleans FBI office advised Hosty that through another agency they had determined that Oswald had made contact with the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City a few days earlier. Report by FBI agent DeBrueys determined that Oswald's ties to the FPCC didn't seem to pan out and the P.O. Box number on his handouts "was determined to be non-existent."
  • 10/25/1963 Ambassador Lodge cabled that a coup in South Vietnam was likely and should not be prevented by the US.
  • 10/26/1963 (Sat) New Orleans FBI tells Dallas office that Oswalds have moved from their Irving address, and requests that their new location be found.
  • 10/26/1963 Khrushchev said the Soviets would not race the US to the moon, but ruled out the joint mission JFK had proposed. Khrushchev also called for a cooling-off period in the dispute between USSR and China.
  • 10/26/1963 Jimmy Hoffa financial adviser Irwin S. Weiner had a phone conversation with Jack Ruby at 12:07pm.
  • 10/27/1963 (Sun) Headline in Dallas Morning News: Mayor Cabell is quoted as saying about the people who attacked Stevenson, "They are not conservatives, they are radicals….We have an opportunity to redeem ourselves when the President pays us a visit next month."
  • 10/28/1963 (Mon) Former CIA Director Allen Dulles was in Dallas. A luncheon was put on at the Baker Hotel where the Dallas Council on World Affairs honored him. Dulles gave a speech titled, 'The American Intelligence Service - Its Role In Our National Security'.
  • 10/28/1963 Democratic advance man Jerry Bruno arrived in Austin, Texas.
  • 10/28/1963 Oswald drives in to work with Frazier, returns to his roominghouse after work. Dallas City Council unanimously passed an ordinance forbidding the harassment of public speakers. Business leaders were becoming increasingly concerned that the fanatical fringe was making the city look bad.
  • 10/28/1963 After three weeks without a reply from Havana, with Attwood's approval Lisa Howard began phoning Rene Vallejo, Castro's aide and confidant, who favored a U.S .-Cuban dialogue. Howard doubted the message from Lechuga had ever gotten past the Cuban Foreign Office.
  • 10/28/1963 The Militant accuses Kennedy of stripping the civil rights bill to appeal to Southern racists. Radio Havana slams the US for continued terrorist acts against Cuba.
  • 10/29/1963 (Tue) After a week of leaving phone messages for Lisa Howard, Castro's aide Rene Vallejo finally reached Howard at her home. He assured her that Castro was as eager as he had been during her visit in April to improve relations with the United States.
  • 10/29/1963 Desmond FitzGerald, a senior CIA official, meets AM/LASH. Fitzgerald tells him that a coup against Castro would receive U.S. support.
  • 10/29/1963 New Orleans FBI office advised Hosty that they had a Dallas-area address for the Oswalds, 2515 W. 5th St., Irving. He places a higher priority on finding Oswald now that he knows Oswald had been in contact with the Soviet embassy. (H 4 447) Today, Hosty also goes out to Irving and talks with Dorothy Roberts, who tells him that Ruth Paine has a Russian-speaking woman living with her.
  • 10/29/1963 In a NSC meeting, RFK, Taylor, and McCone recommended that it would not be wise to abandon Diem at this point. (In Retrospect 81) JFK cables Lodge to ask the generals to postpone the coup, but Lodge never delivers the message. (World Almanac of the Vietnam War)
  • 10/29/1963 Radio Havana accuses the US of planning another invasion of Cuba.
  • 10/30/1963 (Wed) Hosty tells New Orleans FBI that the Oswalds live with Ruth Paine, but Lee lives elsewhere.
  • 10/30/1963 Investigation by Secret Service of threats to JFK, two involving his trip to Dallas, the third giving no details on time or place. In the third case, Secret Service report says subject was interviewed by FBI 11/14/63, with no indication where this was done; subject reported to have told FBI he was a member of the KKK and that assassination attempt would be made by "militant group of National States Rights Party".
  • 10/30/1963 Jack Ruby called Carlos Marcello lieutenant Nofio J. Pecora in New Orleans, apparently to reach Harold Tannenbaum.
  • 10/30/1963 Cables between Washington and Saigon showed Lodge pushing for a coup, while the administration was more reluctant.
  • 10/30/1963 Castro announced that they had captured several CIA agents and accused the CIA of operating a raider ship in a sabotage mission against Cuba.
  • 10/31/1963 (Thu) Conservative romance novelist Taylor Caldwell wrote an editorial in the The Wanderer (St. Paul, Minnesota), warning that JFK might be assassinated by Communists or other leftists who were angry that he had not governed as they had hoped he would.
  • 10/31/1963 JFK, in a press conference, made further reference to the withdrawing of advisors from Vietnam. He was also asked if he wanted LBJ on the ticket and if he would keep him on; Kennedy answered quickly, "Yes to both questions." He was also asked about the legality and propriety of Fred Korth's activity in the TFX scandal. Kennedy said he had "no evidence that Mr. Korth acted improperly in the TFX matter."
  • 10/31/1963 JFK, RFK and Hoover had a private lunch. Dave Powers later said they might have discussed Hoover's retirement.
  • 10/31/1963 An FBI report dealing with Oswald's finances suggests that he cashed a check in a grocery store in Irving the night of 10/31 (CE 1165) but the WC decided that this happened on Friday, 11/1, because Oswald supposedly only came home from Dallas on Fridays. (WR 331)
  • 10/31/1963 Hosty spent considerable time interviewing people who knew the Paines and checked to see if they had any sort of police or subversive records. He found none. New Orleans FBI sends the results of its Oswald investigation to headquarters in Washington; Hoover in turn informs the CIA of Oswald's activities.
  • 10/31/1963 Rene Vallejo phoned Lisa Howard again, saying " Castro would very much like to talk to the U.S. official anytime and appreciated the importance of discretion to all concerned. "
  • 10/31/1963 Adm. Harry Felt flew to Saigon for talks with Lodge and Gen. Paul Harkins, as well as with Gen. Gran Van Don, one of the leaders in the plot that would out Diem. (NYT 11/1/63)
  • 10/31/1963 This evening, the NYT correspondent in Saigon received a note with a coded message saying that the long-awaited coup was imminent. (Time 11/8/63)
  • In late October, Oswald wrote to Arnold Johnson, information director of the Communist Party in New York City, that he had settled in Dallas.