• 7/1964 A WC assistant counsel called Robert Oswald and tried to get his help in determing a motive for Lee's crimes.
  
• 7/1964 Violent race riots in New York City after police killed a black boy in Harlem; hundreds arrested.
  
• 7/1/1964 The Dallas Times Herald carried an article captioned, "Wade Denies Diary Leak"; this is in reference to Oswald's "History Diary."
  
• 7/2/1964 Civil Rights Act of 1964 passed the House 289-126, and LBJ quickly signed it into law. It prohibited legal racial segregation in public accommodations and jobs; MLK attended the signing. LBJ privately remarked to Bill Moyers, "I think we just delivered the South to the Republican Party." Early in 1965, the Supreme Court unanimously upheld the constitutionality of the Civil Rights Act.
  
• 7/2/1964 US announced that Castro's sister had been a CIA informant for four years.
  
• 7/2/1964 Commission No. 1216. Memo for: J. Lee Rankin...Subject: Lee Harvey Oswald. 1. The following remarks have been recently attributed to Soviet Consul Pavel Antonovich Yatskov in Mexico City regarding the subject. 'I met Oswald here. He stormed into my office and wanted me to introduce him to the Cubans. He told me that he had lived in the USSR. I told him that I would have to check before I could recommend him. He was nervous and his hands trembled, and he stormed out of my office. I don't believe that a person as nervous as Oswald, whose hands trembled, could have accurately fired a rifle.' 2...has checked its records for the period Oswald was in Mexico City and has advised it is quite possible that Oswald thought he had talked with Valery Kostikov when he actually had spoken to Yatskov; or that he first spoke to Kostikov who turned him over to his superior Yatskov. 3. The source of the above information is a confidential contact...who is believed to be reliable. Anthony Summers obtained this document through the FOIA and showed it to Col. Nechiporenko in 1993. (NECH p283)
  
• 7/2/1964 Airtel from NY's FBI special agent in charge to Hoover regarding a book to be published linking RFK with Marilyn Monroe's death.
  
• 7/2/1964 Mark Lane testified before the WC again.
  
• 7/4/1964 In The Klan Ledger, Imperial Wizard Sam Bowers published an open letter to the Klan community: "We are now in the midst of the long hot summer' of agitation which was promised to the Innocent People of Mississippi by the savage blacks and their Communist masters…We were NOT involved, and there was NO DISAPPEARANCE. Anyone who is so simple that he cannot recognize a Communist hoax which is as plain as the one they pulled on Kennedy in Dallas (and which Earl Warren is working so hard to cover-up), had better do a little reading in J. Edgar Hoover's primer on communism, Masters of Deceit.' We refuse to be concerned or upset about this fraud…We Knights are working day and night to preserve Law and Order here in Mississippi, in the only way that it can be preserved: by strict segregation of the races, and the control of the social structure in the hands of the Christian, Anglo-Saxon White men, the only race on earth that can build and maintain just and stable governments. We are deadly serious about this business…Take heed, atheists and mongrels, we will not travel your path to a Leninist Hell, but we will buy YOU a ticket to the Eternal if you insist."
  
• 7/6/1964 Chinese Foreign Minister Chen Yi warned that if the US attacked North Vietnam, "the Chinese people naturally cannot be expected to look on with folded arms." The US interpreted the message to mean that only a land invasion of North Vietnam would bring Chinese intervention.
  
• 7/7/1964 Memo to William Sullivan; the Atlanta FBI office requested authority to install "three additional technical surveillances" at the SCLC facilities. Hoover authorized it with an "OK" at the bottom.
  
• 7/7/1964 White House memorandum, Top Secret, "Adlai Stevenson and Lisa Howard," July 7, 1964. Gordon Chase reports to Bundy on his concerns that Howard's role as an intermediary has now escalated through her contact with Stevenson at the United Nations and the fact that a message has been sent back through her to Castro from the White House. Chase recommends trying "to remove Lisa from direct participation in the business of passing messages," and using Cuban Ambassador to the UN, Carlos Lechuga, instead.
  
• 7/7/1964 Rankin letter to Hoover about the James Tague missed bullet. Rankin wanted to know at what point in the Zapruder film the "wild" shot passed over the limo and struck near the Triple Underpass. (McKnight)
  
• 7/8/1964 Hoover warned RFK in a memo that a new book was to be published about Bobby's alleged relations with Marilyn Monroe: "He will indicate in his book that you and Miss Monroe were intimate, and that you were in Miss Monroe's home at the time of her death." Its author, right-winger Frank Capell, also accused RFK of being an agent of international communism, and claimed Marilyn was killed by Bobby's communist friends to keep her from upsetting their plans for taking over the government.
  
• 7/8/1964 Letter from Hoover to Rankin: "As previously reported to the Commission, certain small lead metal fragments uncovered in connection with this matter were analyzed spectrographically to determine whether they could be associated with one or more of the lead bullet fragments and no significant differences were found within the sensitivity of the spectrographic method. Because of the higher sensitivity of the neutron activation analysis, certain of the small lead fragments were then subjected to neutron activation analyses and comparisons with the larger bullet fragments. The items analyzed included the following: C1 - bullet from stretcher; C2 - fragment from front seat cushion; C4 and C5 - metal fragments from President Kennedy's head; C9 - metal fragment from the arm of Governor Connally; C16 - metal fragments from rear floor board carpet of the car. While minor variations in composition were found by this method, these were not considered sufficient to permit positively differentiating among the larger bullet fragments and thus positively determining from which of the larger bullet fragments any given small lead fragment may have come." (Post Mortem 607) This is all the WC got from the FBI on fragment tests; there was not even any attached documentation or data. Weisberg uncovered this memo in 1974.
  
• 7/9/1964 Meeting of Commission Members With Psychiatric Panel on July 9,.1964 (Tad Szulc, The Warren Commission in its Own Words, 9/1975) Allen Dulles advised his colleagues not to worry about the final report being scrutinized: "But nobody reads. Don't believe people read in this country. There will be a few professors that will read the record...the public will read very little."
  
• 7/10/1964 LBJ flies J. Edgar Hoover down to Jackson, Missippi on Air Force One. Received by local politicians as a hero and sympathizer, Hoover emphasizes that the Bureau "does not and will not give protection to civil rights workers" and refuses to repudiate the governor's statement that "the state should refuse to comply with the new Civil Rights Law."
  
• 7/10/1964 LBJ wrote a statement to the WC that gave his recollections on the assassination (H 5 561-4). "As the motorcade proceeded down Elm Street to the point where the assassination occurred, it was traveling at a speed which I should estimate at 12 or 15 miles an hour. After we had proceeded a short way down Elm Street, I heard a sharp report...The Vice-Presidential car was then about three car lengths behind President Kennedy's car, with the Presidential followup car intervening. I was startled by the sharp report or explosion. but I had no time to speculate as to its origin because Agent Youngblood turned in a flash, immediately after the first explosion, hitting me on the shoulder, and shouted to all of us in the back seat to get down...Almost in the same moment in which he hit or pushed me, he vaulted over the back seat and sat on me. I was bent over under the weight of Agent Youngblood's body, toward Mrs. Johnson and Senator Yarborough. I remember attempting to turn my head to make sure that Mrs. Johnson had bent down. Both she and Senator Yarborough had crouched down at Agent Youngblood's command. At some time in this sequence of events. I heard other explosions. It was impossible for me to tell the direction from which the explosions came. I felt the automobile sharply accelerate, and in a moment or so Agent Youngblood released me. I ascertained that Mrs. Johnson and Senator Yarborough were all right. I heard Agent Youngblood speaking over his radio transmitter. I asked him what had happened. He said that he was not sure but that he had learned that the motorcade was going to the hospital. I did not see anything that was going on in and around the President's automobile. When we arrived at the hospital; Agent Youngblood told me to get out of the car, go into the building, not to stop, and to stay close to him and the other agents. When the car came to a stop, a cordon of agents formed around me, and we walked rapidly into the hospital and then we went into a room there...I found it hard to believe that this had happened. The whole thing seemed unreal--unbelievable. A few hours earlier, I had breakfast with John Kennedy; he was alive, strong, vigorous. I could not believe now that he was dead. I was shocked and sickened...When Mr. O'Donnell told us to get on the plane and go back to Washington, I asked about Mrs. Kennedy. O'Donnell told me that Mrs. Kennedy would not leave the hospital without the President's body, and urged again that we go ahead and take Air Force I and return to Washington. I did not want to go and leave Mrs. Kennedy in this situation. I said so, but I agreed that we would board the airplane and wait until Mrs. Kennedy and the President's body were brought aboard the plane." RFK told him he should be sworn in right away.
  
• 7/10/1964 Life magazine featured an article on Oswald's Russian diary, which was discovered by Dallas reporter Hugh Aynesworth, who leaked it to the Dallas Morning News.
  
• 7/11/1964 Lady Bird Johnson diary entry: "This weekend [Lyndon] is going through the throes of what may be the last desperate turning away, the desire to escape being the Democratic candidate this fall. But the trouble is he can't find any honorable escape."
  
• 7/11/1964 Three black army reserve officers were returning home to Washington DC after serving two weeks of reserve duty at Georgia's Fort Benning. At five in the morning they stopped their car near Athens, Georgia and Lt. Lemuel A. Penn, a 49-year-old teacher and combat veteran, took over driving. Near the Broad River Bridge on Highway 172, the car was sighted by Klansmen Howard Sims and Cecil Myers, who were in a station wagon driven by James Lackey. They drove up alongside the other car, Sims and Myers fired their shotguns and killed Penn instantly.
  
• 7/12/1964 Viet Cong troops inflict a major defeat on government troops in the Mekong Delta region.
  
• 7/13/1964 Adm. Arleigh Burke was interviewed by US News & World Report. He stated, "Do we really believe that a nation that's starving can field a more powerful force in South Vietnam than we - the most powerful nation in the world?"
  
• 7/13/1964 Responding to a second written request from the Warren Commission, J. Edgar Hoover again refuses to allow the FBI to administer a polygraph test to Jack Ruby.
  
• 7/14/1964 Lemuel Penn was buried with full honors at Arlington National Cemetery. His body was conveyed on the same military caisson used in JFK's funeral. (The Fiery Cross p345)
  
• 7/14/1964 US sends 600 more troops to Vietnam.
  
• 7/15/1964 Barry Goldwater is nominated for president by the GOP in San Francisco.
  
• 7/15/1964 Liberty Magazine, a Toronto publication, prints an interview with Norman Similas. His story will later be revealed as a fraud. The title of the story is called "THE DALLAS PUZZLE". The reporter who conducted the interview, Kenneth Gamble Armstrong, claims Norman Similas approved its contents. The following excerpts are the words of Norman Similas: "While I attended a national convention of the carbonated beverage bottlers, the following events occurred ... Nov.21 - I interviewed Vice President Lyndon Johnson and photographed him in several informal poses. I spent more than an hour chatting with Jack Ruby in his nightclub. November 22 - I witnessed from a distance of less that seven feet the assassination of President Kennedy, and unwittingly photographed his assassin or assassins as a rifle was leveled at him from a nearby building. I am convinced that if Oswald was the assassin - and this has never been definitely proven - he was not alone when he aimed from the sixth floor window of the depository. One of the pictures I took as the presidential car passed, showed two figures beside the gun barrel in the window. A reporter for the Dallas Times also saw two figures. His newspaper published that story too. (The FBI determined that Similas was referring to photographer Robert H. Jackson of the Dallas Times.) More than seven months have passed since the horrors of Dallas. Never a day passes but what the projector has not flipped in my mind, and the scenes tumble out in sequence after sequence. I can see Lyndon Johnson smiling as he pushed his hand into his coat and says, "Shall I pose like Napoleon?" In the semidarkness of the entrance of his night club, Jack Ruby throws a bear-like arm around my shoulders and ushers me to a table. He is saying, "Save your film. Why shoot the entertainers when you can photograph the President tomorrow. He'll be passing by, just down the street." There is a fade-out and I'm next standing on the curb across from the Texas School Book Depository. I have selected a spot not far from the underpass where the crowd has thinned out. As the crowds cheer and wave the limousine slowly passes the Book Depository."
  
• 7/16/1964 In his acceptance speech, Goldwater said, "failure infest the jungles of Vietnam...Don't try to sweep this under the rug. We are at war in Vietnam. And yet the President...refuses to say...whether or not the objective over there is victory, and his Secretary of Defense continues to mislead and misinform the American people...I needn't remind you, but I will, it has been during Democratic years that a billion persons were cast into Communist captivity and their fates cynically sealed." The Republicans offered voters "a choice, not an echo"; Goldwater wanted to eliminate the welfare state and have a more aggressive anti-communist foreign policy. Some mainstream conservatives felt he was a dangerous revolutionary who wanted to turn the country upside-down. Moderates at the convention in San Francisco were shouted down by Goldwaterites; Goldwater, generally a down-to-earth and conscientious man, reluctantly accepted the nomination with the statement "extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice!" Gore Vidal, who covered the convention for Westinghouse, wrote four years later that "Reagan would some day find himself up there on the platform: as the age of television progresses, the Reagans will be the rule, not the exception." (NY Review of Books 9/12/1968)
  
• 7/18/1964 A polygraph test is finally administered to Jack Ruby. (The House Assassinations Committee will eventually conclude that the results are impossible to interpret because of "numerous procedural errors made during the test.)
  
• 7/18-23/1964 Riots occur in Harlem. One black man is killed.
  
• 7/19/1964 South Vietnamese president Khanh made an impassioned public speech demanding that he be given the equipment to launch an invasion of the North. LBJ fumed, "Can't this man shut up for awhile? If Khanh marches north, Lyndon Johnson isn't marching with him." This week, Air Marshal Nguyen Cao Ky offhandledly revealed to reporters that for three years the South had been sending "combat teams" on hit-and-run raids against the North "by land, air and sea."
  
• 7/19/1964 Mrs. Wilma Tice receives a letter asking her to testify for the Warren Commission.
  
• 7/20/1964 Warren Commission staffer Wesley Liebeler met with Arthur Dooley at CIA. Liebeler had already received affidavits from FBI's James Malley and Bardwell Odum regarding the CIA Mexico City mystery man photograph, but Liebeler also wanted an affidavit from the CIA regarding the date the photo was taken, and indicated that the Commission would publish the photo. [Memorandum of Arthur Dooley of 7-20-64, at RIF #104-10400-10293]
  
• 7/20/1964 Liebeler submitted his WR chapter on Oswald's motives; Redlich and Rankin thought it was "too psychological," and Goldberg was given the task of rewriting it. (Inquest)
  
• 7/20/1964 Mrs. Wilma Tice receives an anonymous call from a man who warns her: "It would pay to keep your mouth shut."
  
• 7/21/1964 President Johnson and Attorney General Robert Kennedy phone conversation, which was recorded:
  

• 7/21/1964 reporter Hugh Aynesworth's name surfaced in the newspapers in Dallas in a column by his friend Holmes Alexander. Alexander implied that Aynesworth did not trust Earl Warren and therefore was conducting his own investigation of the Kennedy murder. He was ready to reveal that the FBI knew Oswald was a potential assassin and blew their assignment. He also had talked to Marina Oswald and she had told him that Oswald had also threatened to kill Richard Nixon. Alexander goes on to say that these kinds of incidents show the mind of a killer at work. That "of a hard-driven, politically radical Leftist which is emerging from the small amount of news put out by the Warren Commission. If the full report follows the expected line, Oswald will be shown as a homicidal maniac." Holmes concludes his piece with a warning: If the Commission's verdict "jibes with that of Aynesworth's independent research, credibility will be added to its findings. If [it] does not there will be some explaining to do." Clearly, Aynesworth contributed mightily to the article, had decided Oswald had done it even before the Commission had revealed its evidence, and was bent on destroying its credibility if it differed from his opinion.
  
• 7/21/1964 Dean Andrews appeared before the WC. He told the WC that Bertrand was 5' 8" with sandy hair, blue eyes, a ruddy complexion, weighing 165 pounds, and said he was bisexual. He told the FBI that he was 6' 1" with brown hair.
  
• 7/22/1964 Memo from Arthur Marmor to Norman Redlich about Deputy Sheriff Buddy Walthers (declassified 1997): "Walthers confirmed Patrolman McDonald's testimony that Oswald said at the time of his arrest, "It's all over." (Ch. 4, p 56) He also alleged that a set of metal file-cabinets were found at Irving containing records that appeared to be names and activities of Cuban sympathizers. He said this evidence was turned over to Captain Fritz and Secret Service Officers."
  
• 7/22/1964 Mr. Emmett Hudson, groundskeeper for Dealey Plaza, testifies that "they have moved some of those signs." Questions still remain today about the true location of the Stemmons freeway sign in Dealey Plaza.
  
• 7/22/1964 Mrs. Wilma Tice calls police because someone has tried to break into her home while her husband is away.
  
• 7/22/1964 Sylvia Odio testified before the WC.
  
• 7/22/1964 McNamara told the Senate Appropriations Committee, "The primary problem in South Vietnam is not a military problem. The primary problem is a political and economic problem."
  
• 7/22/1964 Warren Reynolds told the WC that the man he saw at the Tippit murder scene was Oswald.
  
• 7/23/1964 Richard Helms supplied an affidavit to Chief Counsel Rankin, along with a request that the Warren Commission not publish the CIA Mexico City "Oswald" photograph, giving as reasons that "…it would jeopardize a most confidential and productive operation" and "It could be embarrassing to the individual involved who as far as this Agency is aware, had no connection with Lee Harvey Oswald or the assassination of President Kennedy." [Memo from Helms to Rankin, 7-23-64, at RIF #104-10400-10292] The CIA's concern for this individual's privacy is touching, but the Commission did not back down. Two months later, on September 22, Arthur Dooley and Louis Pucket of CIA visited the Commission, where they met with staffers Goldberg and Liebeler, who insisted that the photo must be published, but deferred the final decision as to cropping and other matters to Chief Counsel Rankin. [Dooley memorandum of 9-25-64, at RIF #104-10400-10279] CIA Headquarters promptly alerted the Mexico City Station the next day regarding publication of the "Oswald" photo. The possibility that publication would "blow" the photo-surveillance operation was on Headquarter's mind, and the cable noted: "OUSLER BEING CALLED TO WASH TO GIVE INFORMED OPINION OF POSSIBLE DAMAGE TO LILYRIC OR LIMITED" [the photo surveillance operations] [DIR 51937 of 9-23-64, at RIF #104-10400-10291]. In a follow-up memo the next day, Headquarters invited the station's comment on possible exposure of the photo surveillance operations, but added "IT IS NOT POSSIBLE HAVE PHOTOS EXCLUDED FROM REPORT." [DIR 52398 of 9-24-64, at RIF #104-10400-10290]
  
• 7/23/1964 The Crescent Firearms Company was the supplier of both rifles of this type and soft-nosed bullets (26H65). The Commission was in touch with this company, from which on July 23, 1964, it obtained an affidavit five brief sentences long. This set forth that the FBI had been in contact with the company November 22, 1963, had learned of the sale of the C2766 rifle to Klein's Sporting Goods in Chicago, had gotten all appropriate records from Crescent, and mentioned not a single word about ammunition (11H205).
  
• 7/23/1964 Gen. Edwin Walker testifies before the WC. When assistant counsel Wesley Liebeler deposed Walker for two hours, he never mentioned CE 573, the mutilated remainder of the bullet recovered from Gen. Walker's home. This seemed odd since Walker held the bullet in his hands after the shooting. Fifteen years later Walker was watching a televised hearing of the House Select Committee on Assassinations. Chief Counsel Robert Blakey held up CE 573 for the camera while discussing the firearms evidence in the JFK case. As McKnight notes: "Walker, a thirty-year career army officer with extensive combat experience in World War II, and with more than a passing familiarity with military weaponry, was stunned. According to Walker, what Blakey represented as the bullet fired into his home bore no resemblance to the piece of lead the police had recovered, which he had held in his own hand and closely examined. (Breach of Trust p. 52)
  
• 7/23/1964 James Tague, whose cheek was cut by a piece of concrete blown off by one of the bullets fired at JFK, is interviewed and finally deposed by the Warren Commission. Deputy Sheriff Eddy Walthers, one of the officers who inspected the curb just after the shooting is also deposed by Wesley Liebeler, an assistant council to the commission. Liebeler has been sent back to Dallas specifically for these depositions. Tague was shocked to find out that Liebeler knew that he had gone back to the area in Dealey Plaza to take pictures of the curb. Tague said that the mark on the curb was no longer visible.
  
• 7/23/1964 Senate passed LBJ's anti-poverty bill.
  
• 7/23/1964 DeGaulle said in a news conference that peace in Indochina would best be achieved by foreign powers keeping out of those countries.
  
• 7/23/1964 NY Times quoted South Vietnam's Vice-Marshall Nguyen Cao Ky, commander of the air force, as saying, "We are ready [to attack the North]. We could go this afternoon. I cannot assure that all of North Vietnam would be destroyed, but Hanoi would certainly be destroyed." NYT reported "Sabotage raids on North [Vietnam] confirmed by Saigon aide."
  
• 7/24/1964 Charlestown, Rhode Island, United States - Criticality Accident * An error by a worker at a United Nuclear Corporation fuel facility led to an accidental criticality. Robert Peabody, believing he was using a diluted uranium solution, accidentally put concentrated solution into an agitation tank containing sodium carbonate. Peabody was exposed to 10,000rad (100Gy) of radiation and died two days later. Ninety minutes after the criticality, a plant manager and another administrator returned to the building and were exposed to 100rad (1Gy), but suffered no ill effects.
  
• 7/24/1964 The Commission called James A. Zahm, a Marine non-commissioned officer in weapons training (11H306ff.) Zahm was willing to call Oswald a good shot. But even he specified a minimum of ten practice shots as prerequisite in the use of the telescopic sight (R192). And this, of course, assumed a good telescopic sight.
  
• 7/24/1964 Jimmy Hoffa was convicted by a federal jury of mail fraud and conspiracy to abuse the Teamsters' pension fund.
  
• 7/24/1964 LBJ met with Goldwater to discuss civil rights and the campaign.
  
• 7/24/1964 Wesley Liebeler today arranges a meeting of Mrs. Edith Whitworth and Mrs. Gertrude Hunter with Marina Oswald and her two children. The meeting takes place in the U.S. attorney's office located in the main Post Office building in Dallas, Texas. Mrs. Whitworth and Mrs. Hunter were in the Furniture Mart at 149 East Irving Boulevard in early November, 1963 when Lee Harvey Oswald, Marina and the two Oswald children supposedly visited the shop. The two women's testimony is troubling the Commission because their account of the visit has Oswald driving a car. He supposedly could not drive and had no license. Also present at the meeting today are: William McKenzie and Henry Baer, attorneys for Mrs. Oswald; Peter Paul Gregory, an interpreter; and Forrest Sorrels and John Joe Howlett, agents for the U.S. Secret Service. Despite tough cross-examination by Mr. McKenzie, both women continue to assert without reservation that Mrs. Oswald and her two children were in the store with her husband on a weekday afternoon during the first week of November. Mrs. Oswald is equally uncompromising in her insistence that she has never met the two women and that she has never set foot in the Furniture Mart. The meeting ends as a complete failure in solving the problem. Ultimately, the Commission will impugn the integrity of Mrs. Whitworth and Mrs. Hunter.
  
• 7/25/1964 The CIA's Mexico City Station was not happy. Replying on September 25, the Station responded that "STATION UNCLEAR AS TO PURPOSE SERVED BY PUBLICATION PHOTO OF PERSON NOT EVEN INVOLVED IN THIS CASE." After complaining that Marguerite Oswald could simply be ignored in this matter (she had been shown the "Oswald" photo months earlier and thought it was Jack Ruby), the cable went on to add a very curious paragraph: "IF AS MEXI PREFERS TO BELIEVE OF ODENVY SHE SHOWN SPREAD OF CROPPED PHOTOS ALL OF WHICH TO APPEAR, NO OBJECTION HERE TO PUBLICATION OF REF PHOTO. IF THIS INCORRECT AND THIS SOLE PHOTO SHOWN HER AND TO BE PUBLISHED AGAINST MEXI WISHES, REQUEST EXACT ACCOUNT OF WHAT ODENVY TOLD HER." [MEXI 1011 of 9-25-64, at RIF #104-10400-10286] This cable is strange in several regards. For one thing, the testimony of Marguerite Oswald is explicit that she was shown a single photograph by FBI Agent Bardwell Odum, "in the cup of his hand." [WH1, p.152-153] And an affidavit signed by Odum on July 10 1964 refers to his cropping and display of a single photo [Affidavit of Bardwell D. Odum, WH11 p.468]. So why does the Mexico City station "prefer to believe" that she was shown a spread of cropped photos. And if this is really true, was it a spread consisting of all of the Mystery Man photos flown up from Mexico City (several were indeed supplied), or was it a spread of other photos which included a single Mystery Man photo? If the latter, why would they all have been cropped? Probably the strangest aspect of the cable is that the Mexico City station did not object to an entire spread of photos being published; the objection was if publication was to be of a single photo. This makes no sense if the real objection had to do with blowing the photo-surveillance operation (i.e., showing backgrounds which would reveal camera placements to the Cubans and Soviets, etc). The more photographs published, the more likely someone would identify the source. What is going on here? The cable ends with the plea: "STATION WOULD APPRECIATE EFFORT TO DELETE PHOTO FROM PUBLICATION." CIA Headquarters replied the same day, confirming that the FBI had indeed shown Marguerite Oswald an entire spread of photos, "BUT SUBJECT PHOTO ONLY ONE WHICH ATTRACTED ATTENTION." [DIR 52774 of 9-25-64, at RIF #104-10400-10287] And again on the same day, Mexico City Station responded, announcing its plans to evacuate the photo-surveillance stations in anticipation of publication of the offending photograph. But the detailed plans for such evacuation were preceded by the most curious statements in all of these cables, reproduced below: 1. REFS OBVIOUSLY CROSSED. IN STATION VIEW DANGERS PARA 3, LARGELY RECOGNIZED IN REF A, STILL APPLY. 2. ONLY REMAINING HOPE WOULD APPEAR BE TO GET ASCHAM PREVAIL ON COMMISSION NOT ONLY RETOUCH BACKGROUND IN PHOTOS BUT ALSO RETOUCH FACE TO DEGREE OBVIOUSLY NOT IDENTIFIABLE WITH RUBY BUT ALSO NOT WITH ACTUAL SUBJECT OF PHOTO. [MEXI 1018 of 9-25-64, at RIF #104-10400-10288] This cable is remarkable. The "dangers para 3" refer to the earlier Mexi cable's assertion that "CANNOT PREDICT SECURITY EFFECT OF PUBLICATION WITHOUT ANSWER PARA 2," where paragraph 2 is the strange assertion previously shown, i.e., that the Mexi station was fine with publication of an entire spread of photos, but not of the single Mystery Man shot. What is yet more remarkable here is the Mexico City Station's request to retouch not only the background but also the face of the unidentified man. The Warren Commission had agreed to strip out every stitch of background at CIA's requestnow the CIA, or at least the Mexico City Station, abruptly urged a photo alteration to avoid revealing (to whom?) the identity of the supposedly unknown Mystery Man. It strains credulity that such a request was made by people who did not know the identity of the man in the photograph. There is at least one albeit cryptic indication in the record that they did.
  
• 7/27/1964 Dulles wrote a memo to Rankin asking him, "Where have we dealt with the evidence as to Oswald's ability to handle a rifle?" (CIA 1647-452B)
  
• 7/27/1964 US plans to send 5000 more advisers to Vietnam.
  
• 7/27-30/1964 Greg Scarpa takes top secret journey from New York to Miami to New Orleans to Philadelphia, Miss., to find out where the slain civil rights workers are buried, and returns to New York.
  
• 7/28/1964 THE STATE OF TEXAS vs. JACK RUBENSTEIN -- Defense counsel files fifteen formal bills of exception.
  
• 7/29/1964 RFK and LBJ met in the Oval Office. LBJ switched on his tape recorder, then told Bobby he wasn't going to be his running-mate; would he be interested in another job? Bobby said he only wanted to be Attorney General. RFK brought up the Baker scandal, and LBJ said he thought the issue was dead because, he implied, he had the goods on various Republicans. (It Didn't Start with Watergate p137-41)
  
• 7/29/1964 Today and 8/1 articles in Le Monde quote South Vietnamese Gen. Nguyen Cao Ky saying that US-trained commandos were parachuted into North Vietnam by US planes on sabotage raids as early as 1957.
  
• 7/30/1964 10:01am in a phone call, Mac Bundy urges LBJ to just announce his choice for VP and get it over with. Johnson worries that "everybody that's left out concentrates their attentions on the fellow's deficiencies and the party men go to hitting at him."
  
• 7/30/1964 This afternoon, Ken O'Donnell tells LBJ in a phone call that however Johnson wants to announce that RFK won't be his running-mate is fine with Kennedy.
  
• 7/30/1964 5:34pm LBJ tells McNamara in a phone call that he had been a serious contender for the position of Johnson's running-mate.
  
• 7/30/1964 5:56pm LBJ calls Humphrey ally James Rowe; he wants to make sure that Humphrey will be a loyal vice-president if he should be chosen. Johnson worries that Humphrey voices his opinions too much in public.
  
• 7/30/1964 6:00pm LBJ tells the press that no members of his cabinet will be chosen as his running-mate.
  
• 7/30/1964 6:10pm LBJ phone call with Dick Russell. Russell: That'll eliminate a whole lot of em. LBJ: [laughs gleefully] I just had to eliminate one."
  
• 7/30/1964 6:46pm Humphrey calls LBJ and assures him that he will be a loyal VP.
  
• 7/30/1964 8:50pm LBJ phone call with Robert Anderson, former Treasury Sec. under Ike. He tells Anderson that he thinks RFK is plotting to stir up the blacks to create a white backlash, so that LBJ will lose in November.
  
• 7/30/1964 A covert-action plan carried out by South Vietnamese patrol boats shelled two North Vietnamese islands in the Tonkin Gulf. This plan (Op Plan 34-A) was approved by LBJ in early 1964. The boats left Da Nang and attacked Hon Me and Hon Ngu shortly after midnight on 7/31. The boats had only 40mm and 20mm guns.
  
• 7/31/1964 The USS Maddox sighted the South Vietnamese boats, and at first thought they were Soviet P-6 vessels. The Maddox began to patrol the area.
  
• Late July 1964 an informant told the FBI where the bodies of the civil rights workers could be found; he was paid $30,000 and his identity was never released. When the FBI offered a $25,000 reward for news of the workers' whereabouts, a break came in the case. After paying at least one participant in the crime for details, the FBI found the men's bodies on August 4. They were buried in an earthen dam on Olen Burrage's Old Jolly Farm, six miles southwest of Philadelphia, Mississippi. Schwerner and Goodman had each been shot once in the heart; Chaney, a black man, had been beaten and shot three times. Known as "Mr. X", the identity of the informant was a closely held secret by the government for 40 years. In the process of studying the case, journalist Jerry Mitchell and teacher Barry Bradford uncovered his identity: Maynard King, a highway patrolman who had been tipped off by Klansman Pete Jordan. In 2007, Linda Schiro testified in an unrelated court case that her late boyfriend, Gregory Scarpa Sr., a capo in the Colombo crime family, had been recruited by the FBI to help find the civil rights workers' bodies. She said that she had been with Scarpa in Mississippi at the time and had witnessed his being given a gun, and later a cash payment, by FBI agents. She testified he told her he had threatened a Klansman by placing a gun in his mouth, forcing him to reveal the location of the bodies. Similar stories of mafia involvement in the case had been circulating for years, and had been previously published in the New York Daily News, but had never before been introduced in court.
  

• 8/1964 McGeorge Bundy wrote a memo to LBJ outlining how to get "Backing from the Establishment...I think the key to these people is McCloy. He is for us, but he is under very heavy pressure from Eisenhower and others to keep quiet" during the campaign. John McCloy was finally persuaded to join LBJ's "Peace Panel" of Establishment figures (including Acheson and Lovett) for a photo-opportunity 9/10/1964. (The Wise Men p644)
  
• 8/1964 Another trademark of Aynseworth's Kennedy career appeared: his penchant to attack and ridicule anyone who disagreed with him. Aynesworth published a review of Joachim Joesten's early book on the case entitled Oswald: Assassin or Fall Guy. The review is not really a review at all, it is just a string of invective directed at the author for believing such silly notions that Oswald could have been innocent and that he could have been an agent of the FBI and/or CIA. When rumors circulated that Oswald had been an FBI informant, which he apparently was, Aynesworth went to work discrediting them saying that it was all a joke he had made up --- even though he was not the source of the quite specific information.
  
• 8/1/1964 Hanoi protested the attacks on its territory by Laotian aircraft and South Vietnamese gunboats. (NYT 8/2)
  
• 8/1/1964 Maddox in the vicinity of North Vietnamese islands, around 7 miles from the mainland. Maddox picked up radio traffic from North Vietnam, which was placing a defensive ring of PT boats to prevent a repetition of the South Vietnamese attack. The North Vietnamese also monitored the Maddox's movements.
  
• 8/1/1964 FBI scouts out earthen dam six miles southwest of Philadelphia, Mississippi.
  
• 8/2/1964 At 3:40pm (3:40am Washington time), Maddox attacked in Gulf of Tonkin. A North Vietnamese commander in the area ordered three PT boats to attack the destroyer to test the destroyer's reaction. Officially, three North Vietnamese PT boats fired torpedoes and shells at the Maddox while it was on patrol 30 miles off the coast; the destroyer fired back and drove them off. Actually, the Maddox was between 4 and 10 miles from the coast during the first attack, not in international waters; the destroyer was providing cover for South Vietnamese gunboats, "manned with CIA crew" according to former CIA station chief John Stockwell, who had long been raiding the North Vietnamese coast. The Maddox's log also showed that it fired the first shot while the PT boats were still 6 miles away. Robert McNamara says that Hanoi had never made a claim on the size of its territorial waters, so the administration assumed three miles; only after the Gulf of Tonkin did Hanoi claim a 12-mile territorial limit. As it was, he says that the Maddox was more than 25 miles off the coast. (In Retrospect p130-1) The Maddox was actually the first to open fire, and some of the crew (and the ship's log) said they were not "warning shots." The PT boats continued coming and returned fire with torpedoes and machine guns. Capt Herrick: "They came at us with blood in their eyes." Planes from the nearby Ticonderoga came to their assistance. The Maddox was going to finish off the PT boats when one of the planes thought it was experiencing a malfunction, and the destroyer pulled away in case the pilot had to ditch. Only one North Vietnamese bullet struck the Maddox; this bullet would be produced by the administration to prove to Congress that the attack happened. (Truth is the First Casualty p132, 202) The admiral in charge of the US fleet in the gulf was George Stephen Morrison, father of Doors singer Jim Morrison. (LA Times 12/8/2008, NYT 12/9/2008; Adm. Morrison died Nov 17 2008 at the age of 89)
  
• 8/2/1964 Before dawn in Washington, Mac Bundy heard the first reports of the attack, but decided not to wake LBJ until more information was available.
  
• 8/2/1964 10:15am the Pentagon announced, "While on routine patrol in international waters at 020808 GCT (1608 local time) the US destroyer Maddox underwent an unprovoked attack by three PT type boats in latitude 19-40 North; longitude 106-34 East, in the Tonkin Gulf. The attacking boats launched three torpedoes and used 37mm gunfire. The Maddox answered with 5in gunfire. Shortly thereafter four F-8 (Crusader) aircraft joined in the defense of the Maddox, using Zuni rockets and 20mm strafing attacks. The PT boats were driven off, with one seen to be badly damaged and not moving, and the other two damaged and retreating slowly. No casualties or damage were sustained by Maddox or the aircraft."
  
• 8/2/1964 11:30am (Washington time), LBJ met with his advisers, decided to overlook the incident and not retaliate because the Maddox had hit the PT boats hard; Max Taylor urged retaliation. Johnson did want the destroyer to go back into the area to demonstrate that the US had a right to be there. The meeting lasted 45 minutes; they mostly wondered why the North Vietnamese would attack the US Navy. A note of protest was sent to Hanoi and another destroyer was sent into the Gulf. General Nguyen Dinh Voc, director of the Institute of Military History in Hanoi, confirmed LBJ's belief that this attack was ordered by a local commander acting on his own, not Hanoi. (NYT Magazine 8/10/1997) Johnson also decided to draft a personal message to Khrushchev and sent it over the "hot line," assuring him that the US did not want a wider war in Vietnam.
  
• 8/2/1964 Barry Goldwater declined to comment to the press, claiming a lack of information.
  
• 8/3/1964 On August 3 Roy Truly supplied the Warren Commission with an affidavit (7H591) attesting that the door in the vestibule outside the employees' lunchroom was usually closed because it was controlled by an automatic mechanism.
  
• 8/3/1964 Washington Post reported North Vietnamese claims (made on Hanoi radio shortly before the Tonkin incident) that the South had raided two islands on the night of 7/30-31. "Administration officials denied there was any shelling of North Vietnamese islands…"
  
• 8/3/1964 9:46am Robert Anderson phone conversation with LBJ. LBJ: There have been some covert operations in that area that we have been carrying on - blowing up some bridges and things of that kind, roads and so forth. So I imagine they wanted to put a stop to it. So they...fired and we responded immediately with five-inch [shells] from the destroyer and with planes overhead. And we...knock one of em out and cripple the other two. Anderson: You're going to be running against a man who's a wild man on this subject. Any lack of firmness he'll make up...You've got to do what's right for the country...we're not soft...I haven't heard any adverse criticism from anybody. But I just know that this fellow's [Goldwater] going to play all the angles."
  
• 8/3/1964 10:20am Phone call between LBJ and McNamara.
  
• 8/3/1964 11:30am LBJ gave a statement to the press that the Navy would continue patrolling the Gulf of Tonkin and was under orders to destroy any enemy craft that attacked them. No questions from reporters were permitted.
  
• 8/3/1964 Noon: the Pentagon releases to the public a chronology of the attack. Again it is stated by spokesman Robert McCloskey that the US ships were on routine patrol in international waters, but he would not give more details. He rejected as "without foundation" charges by the North Vietnamese that their islands had been attacked. Privately, in background briefings with reporters, administration officials theorized that the Communists were testing US resolve.
  
• 8/3/1964 Noon: The Maddox, joined by the destroyer C. Turner Joy, began patrolling the Tonkin Gulf again. Maddox radarman James Stankevitz recalled, "We didn't even know this South Vietnamese deal had taken place. We thought it was kind of a shady deal to be pulling on us, setting us up as ducks. The crew was very resentful of it." (Truth is the First Casualty p139)
  
• 8/3/1964 NY Times reported Defense Dept officials saying that they had no idea why the North Vietnamese patrol boats would attack the US fleet. At this time, the North Vietnamese navy consisted of 4 wooden PT boats, 12 aluminum PT boats, three subchaser patrol craft and three small gunboats.
  
• 8/3/1964 Goldwater told the press: "Does the presence of American destroyers in the area signify the possible landing of larger American ground forces? Does it mean medium bombers are going to be used to intercept supply lines?"
  
• 8/3/1964 3pm Rusk and McNamara briefed members of the Senate Foreign Relations and Armed Services committee secretly about the events of the previous days.
  
• 8/3/1964 4pm: a group of South Vietnamese patrol boats left Da Nang, and by midnight were attacking North Vietnamese island installations at Cua Ron and Cape Vinh Son. Washington was not made aware of these attacks until sometime after 8/6. Why local US commanders did not inform Washington is not known. (Truth p139)
  
• 8/4/1964 FBI supervisor Lyndal L. Shaneyfelt arrived in Dallas to collect "the desired portion of the curb" containing the "chip marks."
  
• 8/4/1964 The FBI dug up a new earthen dam on a farm southwest of Philadelphia, Miss. Just as the informant had said, the bodies of the three slain civil rights workers were found under it. The FBI soon named 21 Klansmen responsible for the crime, including Sheriff Lawrence Rainey and Deputy Cecil Price. Schwerner's family wanted to bury Mickey next to his friend James Chaney in Meridian, but the state law forbid blacks and whites to be buried in the same cemetery. At Chaney's funeral, his friend Dave Dennis (Mickey Schwerner's supervisor in COFU/CORE) spoke, originally planning to talk about nonviolence. But when he saw Chaney's younger brother Ben, rage built up inside him and he thundered, "I'm sick and tired of going to the funerals of black men who have been murdered by white men! I've got vengeance in my heart tonight...The white men who murdered James Chaney are never going to be punished...if you take it and don't do something about it, then God damn your souls! Don't bow down anymore! We want our freedom now!"
  
• 8/4/1964 7:40pm (Vietnamese time) The Maddox reported radar contact with unidentified surface vessels who were paralleling its course. The Maddox's sonar equipment and the IFF device to identify friendly ships were giving them trouble.
  
• 8/4/1964 8:36pm (Vietnamese time) Maddox established two new radar contacts with two unidentified surface and three unidentified aircraft. Fighter aircraft were launched from the Ticonderoga to rendezvous with the Maddox and Turner Joy.
  
• 8/4/1964 9:08pm (Vietnamese time) the unidentified aircraft disappeared from radar and the surface vessels remained at a distance.
  
• 8/4/1964 9:30pm (Vietnamese time) attack occurred; additional vessels appeared on the Maddox's radar and were observed to close very rapidly on the destroyers from the west and south. The night was pitch black and the weather was very bad; numerous confusing signals were picked up, and were assumed to be enemy boats. The main sonarman/gun director on the Maddox, Patrick Park, was certain that they never picked up any real evidence of enemy craft. Capt. Herrick was certain that at least one torpedo was fired. Meanwhile, the Turner Joy fired away at various "targets."
  
• 8/4/1964 9:20am (EST) the war room in the Pentagon received the first flash message that another attack was thought to be under way. Admiral Sharp requested and was granted permission to ready carrier planes for a possible retaliatory strike.
  
• 8/4/1964 9:52pm (Vietnamese time) Maddox and Turner Joy reported they were under continuous torpedo attack.
  
• 8/4/1964 10:15pm (Vietnamese time) destroyers reported they were avoiding torpedoes and had sunk one attacking patrol craft.
  
• 8/4/1964 10:42pm (Vietnamese time) destroyers reported they had sunk a second patrol craft.
  
• 8/4/1964 10:52pm (Vietnamese time) Maddox reported the destroyers were again under attack.
  
• Midnight (Vietnamese time) destroyers reported they had suffered no hits, no casualties, and that the aircraft from the Ticonderoga were illuminating the area and attacking enemy boats. Patrick N. Park, fire-control radar operator aboard the Maddox, is told by the bridge to fire at a large target spotted on radar. "Just before I pushed the trigger I realized, That's the Turner Joy. This came right with the order to open fire. I shouted back, Where is the Turner Joy?' There was a lot of yelling of Goddamn' back and forth, with the bridge telling me to fire before we lose the contact' and me yelling right back at them…I finally told them, I'm not opening fire until I know where the Turner Joy is.' The bridge got on the phone and said, Turn on your lights, Turner Joy.' Sure enough, there she was, right in the crosshairs. I had six five-inch guns right at the Turner Joy, 1500 yards away. If I had fired, it would have blown it clean out of the water." (12/2/1968 interview with Park by Joseph Goulden; Truth is the First Casualty p11)
  
• 8/4/1964 12:32am (Vietnamese time) they reported that an additional PT boat was believed to have been sunk, but poor weather was making it difficult for planes to operate.
  
• 8/4/1964 12:54am (Vietnamese time) Turner Joy reported that during the attack they had been fired upon by automatic weapons while being illuminated by search lights.
  
• 8/4/1964 1:30am (Vietnamese time) destroyers reported that attacking craft had broken off the engagement.
  
• 8/4/1964 During a meeting with Rusk, McNamara, Bundy and McCone, LBJ insisted that Hanoi had to be punished with a retaliatory strike. Targets would be shore installations associated with the PT boat attacks.
  
• 8/4/1964 12:03pm: (EST) the second attack had occurred 3 hours before, but Adm. William Mack, in a press conference, did not mention it to the press.
  
• 8/4/1964 At 1:30pm (EST) a cable from Commodore John Herrick aboard the Maddox reached the Pentagon: "Review of action makes many recorded contacts and torpedoes fired appear doubtful. Freak weather effects and overeager sonarman may have accounted for many reports. No actual visual sightings by Maddox. Suggest complete evaluation before any further action." This cable was made public during the 1968 Senate hearings.
  
• 8/4/1964 6:00pm (EST) Defense Dept issued a public statement: "A second deliberate attack was made during darkness by an undetermined number of North Vietnamese PT boats on the USS Maddox and USS C. Turner Joy while the two destroyers were cruising in company on routine patrol in the Tonkin Gulf in international waters about 65 miles from the nearest land. The attack came at 10:3pm local time (10:30am, August 4, Washington time). The PT boats were taken under fire by the destroyers and thereafter by attack aircraft from the Ticonderoga and the Constellation. The attackers were driven off with no US casualties, no hits and no damage to either destroyer. It is believed that at least two of the PT boats were sunk and two others damaged."
  
• 8/4/1964 6:45pm key congressmen were assembled at the White House for a briefing. LBJ informed them that the US would retaliate. The congressmen were briefed by McCone, Wheeler and McNamara until 8:15pm. They were admonished to keep quiet about it for the time being.
  
• 8/4/1964 8:00pm (EST) Herrick cabled: "Maddox scored no known hits and never positively identified a boat as such...Weather was overcast with limited visibility...almost total darkness throughout action...it is supposed that sonarman was hearing ship's own propeller beat." Herrick would later tell the L.A. Times (4/28/1985) he thought no torpedo was fired.
  
• 8/4/1964 8:25pm (EST) George Reedy told reporters there would be a presidential statement on national TV later that night.
  
• 8/4/1964 10:07pm (EST) the White House briefed Goldwater on the impending bombing raid.
  
• 8/4/1964 11:00pm: (EST) bombers were already on their way to bomb North Vietnam and LBJ was preparing to go on television; Vice Admiral Roy L. Johnson sent an urgent cable to the Turner Joy: "Who were witnesses, what is witness reliability? Most important that present evidence substantiating type and number of attacking forces be gathered and disseminated."
  
• 8/4/1964 11:37pm: (EST) LBJ went on national TV and told the public about the two attacks, and said that US planes were already on their way to bomb targets in the North as a retaliatory measure. Actually, the attack would not begin for another hour and 40 minutes, but if Johnson had waited any longer, the news networks would have gone off the air for the night. "Aggression by terror against the peaceful villages of South Vietnam has now been joined by open aggession on the high seas against the United States of America…We still seek no wider war." The North Vietnamese denied any involvement in the second "attack."
  
• 8/5/1964 12:02-12:30am McNamara spoke to reporters in the Pentagon, telling them that planes from the Ticonderoga and Constellation had conducted air strikes against the PT boat bases. He also said that the US was moving "substantial military reinforcements to Southeast Asia from our Pacific bases…" He repeatedly emphasized that they were on "routine patrol…between 30 and 60 miles of the North Vietnamese coast." He estimated there were between 3 and 6 PT boats. McNamara claimed not to know of any South Vietnamese raids against Northern islands, and said that US ships do not participate in any of the South Vietnamese naval operations.
  
• 8/5/1964 1:15pm (Vietnamese time) the first air attack began; another strike happened at 4:45pm.
  
• 8/5/1964 9am (EST) McNamara televised press conference: he announced that 64 US air attack sorties had been launched at four patrol-boat bases (in Hon Gay, Loc Chao, Phuc Loi and Quang Khe) and at the oil storage depot at Vinh. Two planes were lost; one pilot, Richard Sather, was killed, and the other, Everett Alvarez Jr., was captured. He was the first US pilot shot down by the North Vietnamese; he was released 8 years later.
  
• 8/5/1964 Dean Rusk did TV interviews for CBS and NBC. He said he had "no satisfactory explanation" for the attacks because the Communists "see the world in wholly different terms" from the US. On NBC, he denied that the US was involved in South Vietnamese raids: "Hanoi knows just as well as we do that our destroyers were not involved in any mission other than that was publicly announced."
  
• 8/5/1964 This morning, Sen. Morse received a telephone call from a civilian bureaucrat at the Pentagon. He suggested that Morse get hold of the logbooks of the Maddox and find out that ship's exact location in the Gulf of Tonkin. The caller told him that the ship was absolutely not on routine patrol, but was actually a spy ship connected with the South Vietnamese raids. Morse soon found out from McNamara that the logs would not be available for days; he began warning his collegaues that LBJ would try to rush the resolution through as soon as possible. Morse found most of his colleagues willing to trust Johnson. (Truth is the First Casualty 48)
  
• 8/5/1964 The President, proclaimed the New York Times, "went to the American people last night with the somber facts." The Los Angeles Times urged Americans to "face the fact that the Communists, by their attack on American vessels in international waters, have themselves escalated the hostilities."
  
• 8/5/1964 Washington Post analysis by Chalmers Roberts: "The United States turned loose its military might on North Vietnam last night to prevent the Communist leaders in Hanoi and Peking from making the mistaken decision that they could attack American ships with impunity...not a decision to escalate the war in Southeast Asia. These views came last night from official American sources who would not let themselves be otherwise identified. But there was no doubt they reflected the views of President Johnson...It was said by American sources that the attacks, clearly not accidental, could be part of some over-all plan." In 1966, professors Franz Schurmann, Peter Dale Scott and Reginald Zelnik would advance the thesis (in The Politics of Escalation) that the Gulf of Tonkin incident was created to quash a Geneva-style conference on ending the war in Vietnam, which had been agreed to by the UN, France, the USSR, North Vietnam and China.
  
• 8/5/1964 Noon: a presidential messenger brought the Tonkin Gulf Resolution to the Senate. It read, "Whereas naval units of the Communist regime in Vietnam, in violation of the Charter of the United Nations and of international law, have deliberately and repeatedly attacked United States naval vessels lawfully present in international waters, and have thereby created a serious threat to international peace; and whereas these attacks are part of a deliberate and systematic campaign of aggression that the Communist regime in North Vietnam has been waging against its neighbors and the nations joined with them in the collective defense of their freedom; and whereas the United States is assisting the peoples of Southeast Asia to protect their freedom and has no territorial, military, or political ambitions in that area, but desires only that these people should be left in peace to work out their own destinies in their own way: Now, therefore, be it resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That the Congress approves and supports the determination of the President, as Commander in Chief, to take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression. Section 2. The United States regards as vital to its national interest and to world peace the maintenance of international peace and security in southeast Asia. Consonant with the Constitution of the United States and the Charter of the United Nations and in accordance with its obligations under the Southeast Asia Collective Defense Treaty, the United States is, therefore, prepared, as the President determines, to take all necessary steps, including the use of armed force, to assist any member or protocol state of the Southeast Asia Collective Defense Treaty requesting assistance in defense of its freedom. Section 3. This resolution shall expire when the President shall determine that the peace and security of the area is reasonably assured by international conditions created by action of the United Nations or otherwise, except that it may be terminated earlier by concurrent resolution of the Congress." The final 13 words were added at the suggestion of Sen. Russell, who wanted to give Congress a way of withdrawing its endorsement of the resolution in needed.
  
• 8/5/1964 Sen. Morse told the Senate, that bombing mainland North Vietnam required a declaration of war from Congress, and suggested that South Vietnamese raids may have provoked the attack. "I have been briefed many times, as have the other members of the Foreign Relations Committee, and all this time witness after witness from the State Department and from the Pentagon have admitted under examination that they had no evidence of any foreign troops in South Vietnam from North Vietnam, Red China, Cambodia or anywhere else." Sen. Fulbright disagreed, saying that the administration had been forthcoming about the incident: "I do not believe there has been any tendency to withhold anything." Morse received hundreds of telegrams that day in response to his speech, nearly all of them favorable.
  
• 8/5/1964 After the first US air strikes on North Vietnam, LBJ bragged to reporters, "I didn't just screw Ho Chi Minh. I cut his pecker off." (The Best and the Brightest, Halberstam)
  
• 8/5/1964 A piece of curb from Dealey Plaza with a bullet mark in it, near where James Tague stood, is removed by the FBI under the direction of Lyndal Shaneyfelt.
  
• 8/6/1964 LBJ met with Mayor Daley about the possibility of race riots breaking out in Chicago. (White House Diary 189)
  
• 8/6/1964 "McNamara, Rusk and Wheeler testified before the Senate Foreign Relations and Armed Services Committees. Several Senators disputed the administration's version of the events of the previous days. McNamara said that 8/3 had been an "uneventful" day. Rusk emphasized that the SEATO treaty "does not cover any action to resist aggression that is not Communist in origin…it is directed solely against Communist' aggression…" He assured the Committee that the administration would continue to be forthcoming about all future events in Southeast Asia. Fulbright asked no questions, only praised the administration for its handling of the situation. Sen. Morse again accused the US destroyers of being involved in the South Vietnamese raids. Rusk grew somewhat angry, insisting that the Communists were the aggressors around the world, while the US was just trying to help other countries: "We have none of them in any American empire." McNamara: "Our Navy played absolutely no part in, was not associated with, was not aware of any South Vietnamese actions, if there were any. I want to make that very clear." This reponse and Morse's comments about it were censored by the Pentagon in its published report of the hearings 11/1966. McNamara admitted that their was still confusion about the night attack. Rusk told Sen. Ervin that the US was helping Vietnam because the Saigon government had asked us for help, not because of obligations under the SEATO treaty. But by 1966 Rusk would be using the SEATO treaty as a former obligation of the US to be in Vietnam. McNamara told Sen. Thurmond, "It is our objective to move our forces as rapidly out of Vietnam as that government can maintain its independence and as rapidly as the North Vietnamese stop their attempts to subvert it." Morse and Rusk argued about Rusk's off-the-record statement 8/2, and whether he had said then that the US ships were within 11 miles of the North Vietnam. Finally, the hearing ended, and with only Morse dissenting, the Resolution was sent to the floor for a vote. The administration was pressing hard for immediate approval, without delay or amendments.
  
• 8/6/1964 In Senate debate, Morse and Sen. Lausche argued over whether administration officials had actually admitted to knowing about South Vietnamese raids against North Vietnamese islands. Lausche: There is no testimony to that effect whatsoever. That is an inference made by the Senator from Oregon as to the… Morse: Get permission from the State Dept or the Pentagon to publicly release the whole of the transcript without a single word deleted, and let the country know what they said. Senator Daniel Brewster of Maryland expressed concern that the Resolution might be used to introduce US combat troops into Vietnam. Sen. Fulbright replied, "There is nothing in the resolution, as I read it, that contemplates it. I agree with the Senator that that is the last thing we would want to do. However, the language of the resolution would not prevent it.""
  
• 8/6/1964 Chinese government announced, "Should US imperialism at any moment invade the DRV's territory or its territorial waters and air space, the Chinese people will be honor bound to give resolute support to the Vietnamese people."
  
• 8/6/1964 McNamara said in a press conference, "I think it probable that the Communist Chinese will introduce some combat aircraft into North Vietnam in support of them; North Vietnam does not possess any combat aircraft of its own…"
  
• 8/6/1964 THE STATE OF TEXAS vs. JACK RUBENSTEIN -- Judge Brown refuses to approve fifteen bills of exception.
  
• 8/7/1964 Richard Helms wrote an affidavit for the WC.
  
• 8/7/1964 Further debate in the Senate: Sen. Gruening denounced the resolution as "a predated declaration of war." Sen. Morse predicted "that history will record that we have made a great mistake…we are in effect giving the President…warmaking powers in the absence of a declaration of war." Altogether, the Senate debated the resolution for a total of 8 hours.
  
• 8/7/1964 Congress passed Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. It was approved by the Senate 88-2 (with only Morse and Gruening dissenting), by the House unanimously. "Even while he was blasting Goldwater as a warmonger, LBJ had made up his mind to escalate the conflict by bombing North Vietnam - a fact he later confided to Charles W. Roberts of Newsweek...he ordered his national security adviser, McGeorge Bundy, to draw up a resolution which would give him a free hand in Vietnam. The idea was to send it to Congress for approval at the proper time. Bundy later confirmed there was such a draft, explaining, 'We had always anticipated...the possibility that things might take a more drastic turn at any time.'" (It Didn't Start with Watergate p183) McNamara says that the reason why the resolution was prepared a couple of months in advance was because of the deteriorating situation in Vietnam, and because they had briefly considered escalating the war effort in June 1964, but then decided against it. (In Retrospect p121-22) George Ball told the BBC in 1977 that "Many of the people who were associated with the war...were looking for any excuse to initiate bombing...The DESOTO [covert action] patrol [raids] was primarily for provocation...There was a feeling that if the destroyer got into some trouble, that would provide the provocation we needed." William Bundy said in the same interview that the crisis had not been "engineered"; he believed that both Hanoi and Washington miscalculated.
  
• 8/27/1964 In the New York Times today, of the 27 editorials excerpted fully 24 endorsed the bombing without reservation, 2 expressed minor reservations, and one was noncommittal.
  
• 8/8/1964 House passed LBJ's anti-poverty bill 226-184.
  
• 8/8/1964 French paper Le Monde commented that the US was ignoring the influence of its covert raids in provoking the North Vietnamese attacks.
  
• 8/10/1964 Lou Harris poll found that 85% of the country approved of the reprisal attacks on North Vietnam. In July, 58% of the public had criticized LBJ's handling of the war. That changed to 72% favorable after the Gulf of Tonkin. All year, polls had showed the public felt LBJ would handle the war better than Goldwater.
  
• 8/11/1964 Hoover memo to NY office, granting authority to bug MLK while he was at the Democratic Convention.
  
• 8/11/1964 After drinking an unknown amount of beer and vodka, John Franklin Elrod winds up at the Shelby County sheriff's Office in downtown Memphis. While there he volunteers information that he had been a cell mate of LHO's on November 22, 1963. The FBI sends two agents -- Norman L. Casey and Francil B. Cole, to interview Elrod. The agents dictate a two-page report summarizing Elrod's story. Dallas Police Department files discovered in 1992 will confirm that Elrod was in the Dallas City Jail on the day of the assassination.
  
• 8/12/1964 LBJ made a speech to the American Bar Association in NYC in which he argued that the US had a moral duty to help weaker nations resist aggression. He also attacked "others" who wanted to enlarge the war in Vietnam and "to supply American boys to do the job that Asian boys should do...Such action would offer no solution at all to the real problem of Vietnam."
  
• 8/12/1964 The CIA reports: "American citizen Waldemar Boris Karapatnitsky last known address West Berlin, visited relatives USSR 1959, and believed hospitalized Botkina Hospital Moscow in bed next to OSWALD October 21, 1959, to October 28, 1959. Subject a retired machinery importer-exporter born January 14, 1886, Ukraine ... Subject denounced 1950 by neighbor as communist based on conversations between informant and SAC. No further derog. traces." From 1958 to 1962, Counter-Intelligence HT-LINGUAL will intercept 15 letters mailed either to the Soviet Union from the United States by Boris Karapatnitsky, or mailed from the Soviet Union and received by him in the United States. The CIA is reluctant to take the testimony of Boris Karapatnitsky because of "complications that would later arise," and discusses the problem with David Slawson. David Slawson tells the CIA he will get the State Department to take Boris Karapatnitsky's statement. From the State Department report: "A Mission Officer called on Boris Karapatnitsky on August 14, 1964, under pretext of checking residences of older U.S. citizens residing in Berlin. Karapatnitsky said he thought he knew why the officer had come and stated he had intended to visit consular section for advice concerning problem. He described problem as follows: He had been informed by a friend in New York that a Secret Service agent, representing the Warren Commission, had inquired about him asking Kara had been in USSR certain time and if he had known OSWALD. Showed Consular Officer letter from friend dated August 10, 1964, surmising that Sovs had furnished names of all patients in hospital at time of OSWALD'S hospitalization and that he had been traced from there. Kara said he had never heard of OSWALD until after assassination of President Kennedy. He volunteered there had been only one American in Karapatnitsky's room in hospital but he was 69 year old industrialist. In response to repeated he had heard nothing about OSWALD in the USSR and could recall no reason to believe their paths have crossed."
  
• 8/13/1964 Mac Bundy sent a memo to LBJ admitting that "South Vietnam is not going well." He worried about Saigon's possible collapse, but wouldn't recommend anything specific other than refusing to negotiate with Hanoi.
  
• 8/14/1964 Time and LIFE magazines had blatantly inaccurate stories about the second Gulf of Tonkin "attack." From Life, a story "pieced together by Life correspondent Bill Wise with the help of US Navy Intelligence and the Department of Defense": "A few of [the PT boats] amazed those aboard the Maddox by brazenly using searchlights to light up the destroyers thus making ideal targets of themselves. They also peppered the ships with more 37mm fire, keeping heads on the US craft low but causing no real damage." From Time: "The night glowed eerily with the nightmarish glare of air-dropped flares and boats' searchlights. For 3 ½ hours the small boats attacked in pass after pass. Ten enemy torpedoes sizzled through the water…Two of the enemy boats went down. Then, at 1:30am, the remaining PTs ended the fight, roared off through the black night to the north." Maddox radarman James Stankevitz recalled four years later, "I couldn't believe it, the way they blew that story out of proportion. It was something out of Male Magazine, the way they described that battle.' All we needed were naked women running up and down the deck. We were disgusted, because it just wasn't true. It didn't happen that way…" (Truth is the First Casualty p158)
  
• 8/14/1964 Vice Adm. Roy L. Johnson and Adm. Thomas Moorer wrote a report on the Tonkin incident, and agreed that the night attack definitely occurred. Only the conclusions were made public, not the report itself.
  
• 8/14/1964 JCS told McNamara that plans for air strikes on North Vietnam and the Ho Chi Minh Trail should be prepared.
  
• 8/17/1964 Marina Oswald discovers bus tickets for Mexican bus company in brown suitcase for trip from Mexico City to Laredo, Texas on 10/30/63.
  
• 8/18/1964 Max Taylor cabled from Saigon to propose "a carefully orchestrated bombing attack" on North Vietnam beginning 1/1/1965.
  
• 8/20/1964 J. Edgar Hoover writes to J. Lee Rankin: "... it should be noted that the firing pin of this rifle has been used extensively as shown by wear on the nose or striking portion of the firing pin and, further, the presence of rust on the firing pin and its spring may be an indication that the firing pin had not been recently changed prior to November 22, 1963. This rust would have been disturbed had the firing pin been changed subsequent to the formation of the rust. In this regard, the firing pin and spring of this weapon are well oiled and the rust present necessarily must have been formed prior to the oiling of these parts. No oil has been applied to the weapon by the FBI; however, it is not known whether it was oiled by any other person having this rifle in his possession. It was noted during the examination of the firing pin that numerous shots have been fired with the weapon in its present well-oiled condition as shown by the presence of residues on the interior surfaces of the bolt and on the firing pin. The Laboratory has no record of any outlet where spare parts, including firing pins, can be obtained for rifles such as Commission Number 139. In accordance with Mr. Redlich's telephonic request and in the absence of any indication that the firing pin of the rifle was changed, no investigative survey was conducted to ascertain whether any such outlets exist in the United States."
  
• 8/20/1964 AFFIDAVIT IN ANY FACT My name is J.L. Popplewell. I entered the Dallas Police Department January 11th, 1957. I have worked the fifth floor jail most of this time. The 23rd day of November, 1963, at 3PM, I was assigned to guard the area in front of Lee Harvey Oswald's cell, watching all of his movements to see that he didn't hurt himself. At about 4PM Lt. Lord called on the jail phone and instructed me to put Oswald on the phone. Oswald asked the operator for two telephone numbers - then asked me for pencil and paper while in the telephone booth. I tore a small piece of plain paper, about two by three inches from the telephone record sheet that hung outside the telephone booth; then handed this piece of paper and my pencil to him. Oswald wrote a number on this paper and then returned my pencil to me. Then he asked if he could call later. Oswald did not get his call through at this time. I called Lt. Lord and informed him that Oswald did not get his party and wanted to call again later. About 8PM Lt. Lord came up to the jail and told me to let Oswald use the phone. I was instructed to step back away from the booth so the phone call could be private. From this location I watched the prisoner talking to someone. He used the phone about thirty minutes. I asked Oswald if he got his call through and he answered, yes. I then returned him to his cell. About four months ago on a Monday, I received a call from an FBI agent who wanted to know about a slip of paper with a phone number on it. This was supposed to have been in Oswald's pocket when he died. The agent asked if we allowed prisoners to keep phone numbers on their person. I said that if a call wasn't completed the first time, we could let them write the number down and keep it for a later call. The agent asked me the size of the paper I might have given Oswald to write on. I told him it was probably torn off of a telephone record sheet hanging outside the telephone booth; that the paper was plain, unmarked, about two by three inches. The telephone sheet is usually used for writing names of prisoners who use the phone, but due to the large volume of prisoners that weekend, it was possible I missed writing Oswald's name down on it. I have been unable to locate a sheet with his name on it.
  
• 8/20/1964 LBJ signs Economic Opportunity Act into law.
  
• 8/21/1964 Sen. Wayne Morse complained in a Senate speech that the US had sent gunboats to attack two North Vietnamese islands before the Gulf of Tonkin.
  
• 8/21/1964 THE STATE OF TEXAS vs. JACK RUBENSTEIN -- Defense counsel files bystander bills of exception -- a "bystander" filing being necessary when the presiding judge has denied approval of the initial filing of the bills of exception.
  
• 8/22/1964 RFK announces his candidacy for the United States Senate today in New York. LBJ, now headed for a landslide against Barry Goldwater, performs on platforms with RFK. In public, LBJ hugs RFK and calls him "ma boy." RFK will win by a little over 700,000 votes, although Johnson carries New York by 2.7 million. LBJ's participation has probably secured his Senate seat for RFK, but Kennedy refrains from mentioning LBJ in his victory statement.
  
• 8/24/1964 St. Louis, Missouri: the first Catholic Mass ever performed in English was done by Rev. Frederick R. McManus of Catholic University.
  
• 8/24/1964 Attorney General Robert Kennedy told House immigration subcommittee members, "I would say for the Asia-Pacific Triangle it [immigration] would be approximately 5,000, Mr. Chairman, after which immigration from that source would virtually disappear; 5,000 immigrants would come the first year, but we do not expect that there would be any great influx after that." (U.S. Congress, House, 1964 hearings, p. 418.) And in a letter to The New York Times, he called for repeal of the national origins system: "The time has come for us to insist that the quota system be replaced by the merit system...It deprives us of able immigrants whose contributions we need...It would increase the amount of authorized immigration by only a fraction." (The New York Times, Aug. 24, 1964, p. 26.)
  
• 8/26/1964 LBJ and Humphrey are nominated at the Democratic convention. Sen. Fulbright seconded LBJ's nomination, praising his "sense of responsibility" in foreign affairs and citing the Tonkin Gulf incident as evidence of his "restraint." A top official of one of the news networks got a call from LBJ telling him to "get your goddamn cameras off the niggers out front and back on the speaker's stand inside, goddamn it!" (Accidental President p19)
  
• 8/26/1964 L.J. Lewis, an eyewitness at the scene of Tippit's murder, who was interviewed by two FBI agents on January 21, 1964 submits an affidavit to the Warren Commission in which he states that the FBI report submitted by the two agents is incorrect.
  
• 8/26/1964 The FBI files a report on this date concerning assassination suspect Gilberto Policarpo Lopez who is now in Cuba. It contains an interview with Lopez's cousin, Guillermo Serpa Rodriguez, conducted in Key West, Florida. Rodriguez says that Lopez had come to the United States after Castro took over in Cuba, had returned to Cuba after about a year because he was homesick, then returned to the U.S.A. in 1960 or 1961 to avoid the Cuban draft. According to the report, Lopez told Rodriguez of his plans to return to Cuba in November 1963, saying he was afraid of getting drafted into the U.S. military. This report also contains an interview with Lopez's wife, also conducted in Key West. She says that Lopez was hospitalized at Jackson Memorial Hospital in early 1963 in Miami because he had begun to suffer from epileptic attacks. He was also treated for the condition by doctors in Key West and Coral Gables. In the opinion of Lopez's wife, his seizures were brought on by worry for his family in Cuba. She says that Lopez has written her since his return to Cuba, telling her that his trip had been made with financial assistance from "an organization in Tampa."
  
• 8/27/1964 FBI agents submit a second report to the Warren Commission regarding the testimony of L.J. Lewis in which they say Lewis wishes to make certain "clarifications" regarding his original statement. The timing of the events, as Lewis says he saw them occur, is STILL incorrect. Thus after Lewis has submitted an affidavit correcting the original FBI report, agents submit a second report -- similarly incorrect -- which also conforms to the Warren Commission's accepted narrative.
  
• 8/28/1964 CE 3045: letter from Rankin to Hoover, requesting an investigation of Sylvia Odio's story. "It is a matter of some importance to the Commission that Mrs Odio's allegations either be proved or disproved...We are also concerned about the possibility that Oswald may have left New Orleans on September 24, 1963, instead of September 25, 1963 as has been previously thought. In that connection, Marina Oswald has recently advised us that her husband told her he intended to leave New Orleans the very next day following her departure on September 23, 1963. She has also indicated that he told her an unemployment check would be forwarded to Mrs Ruth Paine's address in Irving from his post office box in New Orleans. We also have testimony that Oswald left his apartment on the evening of September 24, 1963, carrying two suitcases. It also seems impossible to us that Oswald would have gone all the way back to the Winn-Dixie Store at 4303 Magazine Street to cash the unemployment check which he supposedly picked up at the Lafayette Branch of the Post Office when he could have cashed it at Martin's Restaurant, where he had previously cashed many of his Reily checks and one unemployment check. That is particularly true if he received the check on September 25, 1963, as previously thought, and had left his apartment with his suitcases the evening before." (H 26 595) No new information was turned up about this by the FBI, but the WR stated as a fact that Oswald had left on 9/25/1963.
  
• 8/28/1964 Internal FBI memo from Rosen to Belmont: "Rankin advised because of the circumstances that now exist there was a serious question in the minds of the Commission as to whether or not the palm print impression that has been obtained from the Dallas Police Department is a legitimate latent palm print impression removed from the rifle barrel or whether it was obtained from some other source and that for this reason this matter needs to be resolved." This was declassified in 1978.
  
• 8/28/1964 Federal government passed a law making it a federal crime to kill, assault or kidnap the President, Vice-President and certain officials.
  
• 8/29/1964 In a speech in Stonewall, Texas, LBJ attacked the idea of bombing North Vietnam and escalating the war, "and result in our committing a good many American boys to fighting a war that I think ought to be fought by the boys of Asia..."
  
• 8/29/1964 Cartha DeLoach wrote a report about LBJ's use of the FBI to infiltrate and monitor the various elements of the Democratic Party during the 1964 convention. "...we utilized a highly successful cover through cooperation of the [deleted] furnished us credentials. I selected several members of this squad to use this cover. As an example, one of our 'reporters' was able to gain the confidence [deleted]....One of our [deleted] successfully established contact with [deleted] Saturday night, August 22nd, and maintained this relationship throughout the course of the entire Convention...proved to be a highly valuable source of information since [deleted] was constantly trying to incite racial groups to violence...we established a secondary command post at the Convention Hall Rotunda operated by an Agent using his 'reporter' cover...the boardwalk was the center of agitation by dissident elements...We necessarily kept these people under close observation." They wiretapped MLK to keep track of "plans" to "disrupt the orderly progress of the Convention." Bill Moyers and Walter Jenkins worked closely with the FBI on these operations. All of these things went on without the knowledge of Bobby Kennedy, the Secret Service and the local police, indicating that these groups were more of a political risk than a true security risk.
  
• 8/30/1964 Congress passed a law making it a federal offense to knowingly "destroy or mutilate a Selective Service registration card."
  
• 8/31/1964 Almost as the Report was going to press and more than nine months following the assassination, the Commission wrote the FBI Dallas office asking that Roy S. Truly, manager of the Depository, "be interviewed to ascertain if he knows of any curtain rods having been found in the TSBD building after November 22, 1963." The FBI reported, ". . . He stated that it would be customary for any discovery of curtain rods to immediately be called to his attention and that he has received no information to the effect that any curtain rods were found . . ." (Exhibit 2640, 25H899). (Weisberg, Whitewash)
  
• 8/31/1964 The New York Post reported: "Investigative agencies have spent many hours and interviewed hundreds of witnesses since the Nov. 22 assassination trying to trace Oswald's steps on the Mexico trip. It is known, for instance, that he was seen in a Dallas bus station at 6pm Sept. 25 and that he crossed the border at Nuevo Laredo next day." ('Bus Stub Traces Oswald in Mexico') The WC never refuted this claim. Posner says that Oswald was very talkative on the bus ride to Mexico since "he felt he had no reason to be secretive any longer since he would soon be in Cuba..."
  

• 9/1/1964 The Commission wrote to the FBI requesting certain additional information about the lifted print (the actual letter does not appear in the Exhibits). (Meagher)
  
• 9/1/1964 Wesley Liebeler memo to Howard Willens: "...it reflects badly that Marina Oswald still had material on August 26 not known to the FBI." (Inquest)
  
• 9/2 or 9/3/1964 RFK resigns as Attorney General.
  
• 9/2/1964 Jackie Kennedy and her children move, this month, to live in New York City.
  
• 9/4/1964 In a JCS meeting, Army Chief of Staff Gen. Harold K. Johnson argued that air strikes against the North wouldn't have much effect. Johnson's dissent was not mentioned to McNamara. (In Retrospect p152-3)
  
• 9/4/1964 CE 2637: Letter from Hoover to Rankin about the palm print found on the rifle: "This palm print lift has been compared with the assassination rifle in the FBI laboratory. The laboratory examiners were able to positively identify this lift as having come from the assassination rifle in the area of the wooden foregrip. This conclusion is based on a comparison of irregularities in the surface of the metal of the barrel with the impressions of these irregularities as shown in the lift." Sylvia Meagher: "On September 4, 1964, J. Edgar Hoover replied, stating that the palmprint lift had been compared with the assassination rifle in the FBI Laboratory, and that the laboratory examiners had positively identified the lift as having come from the assassination rifle on the basis of a comparison of irregularities on the surface of the metal of the barrel with the impressions of those irregularities as shown in the lift. (CE 2637) The authentication was obtained not in sworn testimony, but in a letter, and no inquiries were made to determine whether those "irregularities" could have been imposed or superimposed on the lift. Obviously, the authenticity of the lift cannot be taken as proved unless the possibility of the imposition of the rifle markings can be ruled out. The possibility of fabrication still exists--and becomes all the more apparent on returning to Latona's testimony and his 12 points of identity between the lift and the inked palmprint. An arrested person having his fingerprints and palmprints taken holds his inked hand flat, on a police record form. A person who handles a rifle curls his hand around the barrel. The curving of the hand would almost certainly, it seems to me, distort the lines and loops [of the impression] so that the resulting print would differ markedly from a print made by the flat of the hand. Nothing in Latona's testimony suggests the lifted palmprint had any characteristics indicating that the print was made by a curved hand. On the contrary, Latona found 12 points of identity between the lift and a palmprint made by a hand in flat position. (Accessories After the Fact, Vintage Books Edition, New York: Vintage Books, 1992, reprint, p. 127)
  
• 9/4/1964 Galley proofs of the Warren Report were circulated among the Commission and staffers for final comments. (Inquest)
  
• 9/4/1964 Washington - Review of Robert Kennedy's three years in office; obliquely deals with RFK - J. Edgar Hoover frictions, including fact that RFK made the first real effort in years to bring FBI and its powerful director under effective direction and to turn its attention to such law enforcement problems as civil rights and organized crime. New York Times, Anthony Lewis
  
• 9/5/1964 William Bradford Huie wrote about the Mississippi murders in the Saturday Evening Post: "What makes this lynching a high crime against humanity is the role of the police. The three young men were not criminals. They were unarmed. They were well-intentioned. They were peaceful and peace-loving. Mississippi requires no visa for an American citizen to visit it."
  
• 9/5/1964 Memo from Melvin Eisenberg to Norman Redlich: "Subject: Neutron Activation Analysis. The following questions should be asked of the FBI: 1.A description of the neutron activation test. 2.When the test was performed on the paraffin cast. 3.How much barium and antimony were found on the cast. 4.Were any significant elements of other than barium and antimony found? 5.How rare are barium and antimony as compared with nitrates or other oxidozing agents which can cause a reaction to the paraffin test? 6.Were barium and antimony found on both sides of the paraffin cast of the cheek? 7.If so, doesn't that indicate that the casts were contaminated so that the whole test was worthless? 8.What is the meaning of the statement in the letter from the FBI that there was more barium and antimony on the cast than might normally be expected to be found on a person who had not fired a weapon. Does this mean that there were more barium and antimony than would be present on a person's hands even if he had handled some of the items listed in the letter from the FBI setting forth items containing barium and/or antimony? If not, what is the validity of the statement?" (Post-Mortem p447)
  
• 9/6/1964 26-page memo from Liebeler to Rankin attacking the Warren Report chapter on the identity of the assassin; it was revised again. (Inquest) He argued that "...the best evidence that Oswald could fire as fast as he did and hit the target is the fact that he did so." He admitted that the "fact is that not one person alive today ever saw that rifle [the Carcano] in the Paine garage in such a way that it could be identified as that rifle." He complained about how the Commission equated Oswald's hunting in Russia with a shotgun, to his experience with a rifle: "Under what theory do we include activities concerning a shotgun under a heading relating to rifle practice, and then presume not to advise the reader of that?" He feared that the Report was too strongly biased against Oswald and would end up looking like a prosecution brief: "To put it bluntly, this sort of selection from the record could seriously affect the integrity and credibility of the entire report...Gaps cannot be filled by ignoring them." He noted that Frazier's description of Oswald carrying the rifle bag cupped in his hand agreed with his estimation of the length of the bag. Liebeler also warned that relying on Helen Markham's testimony would leave the Report open to criticism from critics. He felt it was "dishonest" not to mention the misaligned scope, or evidence that Oswald was a poor shot, and leave the reader with the impression that the shooting was easy to accomplish. When Liebeler gave this memo to Rankin, the latter complained, "No more memorandums! The Report has to be published!" Redlich also complained about Liebeler's criticisms, saying, "The Commission judged it an easy shot, and I work for the Commission." (Inquest) Liebeler also warned that "some question might be raised when the public discovers that there was only one person who saw Oswald kill him. All the rest only saw subsequent events. Mrs. Markham is nicely buried here, but I predict not for long."
  
• 9/6/1964 Sen. Richard Russell led a small expedition to a US Naval Air Station in Dallas to interview Marina Oswald. Russell presided, with Boggs and Cooper in attendance. Rankin was there along with two interpreters. (WC Vol. V, p. 589) "I feel in my own mind that Lee did not have President Kennedy as a prime target when he assassinated him." Representative Boggs asks, "Well, who was it?" Marina replies, "I think it was Connally. That's my personal opinion that he perhaps was shooting at Governor Connally, the Governor of Texas." From the beginning of his examination of Marina Oswald, Russell makes two things clear. First, he has thoroughly digested the past record of her interrogations. This includes her relationship with Ruth Paine, who he once called Marina's alter ego and "one of the most charitable people we have." (12/16 Commission meeting, p. 41) Second, unlike Bugliosi and others, he has real doubts about Marina's testimony concerning her husband and about Oswald's real reasons for going to Russia. For instance, he asked the following: if Lee had told Marina that Russia was such an outstanding communist country to live in, and that is why he moved there, then why did he decline citizenship in Russia? (ibid) Some of Marina's answers make little sense. She actually says that Oswald was unhappy with his living quarters and his wages. (ibid p. 590) Yet most observers know that Oswald was granted a very nice domicile at a low rent and was given a fairly good job. Clearly, as far as living standards went, this is as good as it got for Oswald once he left the service. Russell then went on to address the possible Cuban connection with Oswald. He asked if Oswald knew any Cubans while in Russia, New Orleans or Texas. (ibid) He asked her about his joining a gun club in Minsk and got her to admit that he only went hunting there once. (ibid p. 591) Russell then probed for any connections between Marina and the KGB or the Soviet military. The CIA had written a memo in March 1964 that stated, "In practice, permission for a Soviet wife to accompany her foreign national husband abroad is rarely given. In almost every case available for our review, the foreign national was obliged to depart the USSR alone and either return to escort his wife out or arrange for her exit while he was still abroad. In some cases, the wife was never granted permission to leave." Following this proven record, Russell asked Marina who she saw in the military to get her exit visa out of Russia. He then asks another pointed question: Did she know any other Russian citizen who left Russia with a foreign national? (ibid p. 592) Clearly, Russell is skeptical about why she was allowed to leave Russia at the height of the Cold War. In fact, this line of questioning got Marina so on the defensive that she actually volunteered that she was never given any assignment by the Soviets or the Americans! Even though she was never asked that specific question. (ibid p. 604) Russell also uncovered the fact that Marina, with Priscilla Johnson's help, found a ticket stub to Mexico in the middle of a television program guide. (ibid p. 602) Conveniently, right after this discovery, Wesley Liebeler happened to call her with questions about Oswald in Mexico. And she told him about this ticket stub that she and Priscilla had miraculously discovered nine months after the police first searched the Paine residence. (ibid p. 602) Russell also discovered that Marina was planning on publishing her memoirs at the end of 1964. (ibid p. 600) She didn't. So the timely appearance of the eventual co-writer Ms. Johnson helped delay her plans for about 13 years. Sen. Cooper also pressed the ease with which she gained an exit visa from the Soviets. (ibid p. 604) And it is here that Marina denied any "assignment" for the Soviets or Americans. Cooper also probed her relationship with Ruth Paine. (ibid p. 607) In trying to discern a motive, Boggs asked her questions about how Oswald felt about Kennedy. (ibid p. 606) He was so persistent in this line that he got her to admit she was thoroughly rehearsed on this point in her previous Commission appearance. (p. 607) The questions also focused on Marina's facility with the English language. Russell seemed to doubt her need for an interpreter. (ibid p. 600)
  
• 9/6/1964 Max Taylor cabled from Saigon that "only the emergence of an exceptional leader could improve the situation and no George Washington is in sight."
  
• 9/6/1964 16 Questions on the Assassination By Bertrand Russell The Minority of One, 6 September 1964
  
• 9/7/1964 Bundy statement in State Dept bulletin: "We seek no wider war...it is clear enough that anything in the nature of attacks on North Viet-Nam of a systematic character by the South Vietnamese or ourselves would involve very grave issues and we would, therefore, prefer to pursue the policy we are now pursuing of maximum assistance in South Viet-Nam."
  
• 9/7/1964 Few people know that the day after Russell's interview with Marina Oswald, he visited Dealey Plaza with Boggs and Cooper. He took an unloaded rifle up to the sixth floor and simulated firing at JFK. In light of what Corso had told him, he commented rather wryly that "Oswald must have been an expert shot." Which, of course, he knew he wasn't. (Flagpole Magazine, 11/19/03, "Sen. Richard Russell and the Great American Murder Mystery") Russell also consulted with was Colonel Philip Corso, a retired Army Intelligence officer who had been on the staff of the National Security Council under Eisenhower. Corso did some investigating for the Commissioner and found out some interesting tidbits. He concluded that the Mannlicher-Carcano could not have performed as the official story leads us to believe. He also concluded that there was a Second Oswald. Further, that Oswald had gone to Russia as part of a fake defector program being run out of the Office of Naval Intelligence. After doing all this inquiry he told Russell that his opinion was the assassination was a project of rogue CIA agents and anti-Castro Cubans. Russell tended to agree with him but he said he could never get the other members of the panel to believe him. (On the Trail of the JFK Assassins, Dick Russell)
  
• 9/8/1964 Republican Vice Presidential candidate Rep. William Miller of New York wrote: "We estimate that if the President gets his way, and the current immigration laws are repealed, the number of immigrants next year will increase threefold and in subsequent years will increase even more ... shall we, instead, look at this situation realistically and begin solving our own unemployment problems before we start tackling the world's?" (The New York Times, Sept. 8, 1964, p. 14.)
  
• 9/8/1964 A WC lawyer wrote a memo warning that "eight months' work of the Commission and staff is in serious danger of being nullified because of the present impatience to publish [the Report]...Staff members are becoming increasingly unwilling to discuss change or refinement, which would cause a printing delay." (Inquest)
  
• 9/8/1964 Dr. Howard P. Rome of the Mayo Clinic wrote the WC about Oswald's spelling and grammar; he concluded that LHO "had a specific learning disability…" (H 26 812-7)
  
• 9/8/1964 (Telex from J. Edgar Hoover to RCMP): "URGENT ... appreciate knowing if you have on record any reference to one NORMAN SIMILAS of Toronto Canada being an eye witness within ten feet to the assassination of President Kennedy on Nov. 22/63. Urgent wire reply collect."
  
• 9/9/1964 In a meeting, the top military leaders split over whether to launch air strikes on North Vietnam; Wheeler, Johnson, Westmoreland and Max Taylor were opposed to it. Everyone present (which included LBJ, McCone, McNamara, and Rusk) agreed that Hanoi could not be allowed to win, but no one had any solution to prevent it from happening.
  
• 9/9/1964 LBJ authorized NSAM 314, okaying US retaliation against North Vietnam for any "special" attacks against US units by Hanoi or the VC.
  
• 9/10/1964 DeLoach letter to Bill Moyers, commenting on the success of the "operation in Atlantic City."
  
• 9/10/1964 (Memo to RCMP from FBI Liaison Officer): "The President's Commission has requested that the author of this article (from Liberty Magazine) be contacted and the photograph referred to be obtained, if possible. The Commission has also requested that the name of the presumably Dallas Times reporter referred to in the article be determined in order to ascertain whether such a picture ever existed."
  
• 9/11/1964 The FBI hastily interviews the superintendent of the Book Depository regarding the cartons on the sixth floor and particularly those cartons at the "sniper's perch." The report contains the statement that "there were no cartons on the sixth floor ... which could not have been handled by one man." This interview takes place because someone apparently became concerned that the "cardboard cartons" piled around the sniper's window to ensure seclusion might have been too heavy to be moved by one man. It is determined that the cartons weighed approximately 50 pounds apiece.
  
• 9/11/1964 (Memo to Commanding Officer of the RCMP branch in Toronto from the RCMP Commissioner in Ottawa): "FBI advise article appearing in July issue of Liberty Magazine by Norman Similas (address unknown) suggests Similas took photo which shows two persons at window from which fatal shots fired at late President Kennedy. Article also indicated reporter from Dallas Newspaper present when photo taken. Ascertain (a) whether such photo exists (b) identity of Dallas reporter."
  
• 9/11/1964 Lady Bird Johnson began a tour of the South to meet with various governors (except for George Wallace).
  
• 9/13/1964 A failed coup in Saigon by Catholics in the military who felt that Khanh was too friendly with the Buddhists. The NY Times today reported that Khanh "has accepted in general and in detail an immediate Buddhist formula for reforming his government along new civilian lines."
  
• 9/14-18/1964 CIA provides most of its information to the Warren Commission on these dates. Questions have been posed to the Agency by the Commission months earlier. The report will be officially presented to LBJ in only six days. The CIA is in the process of amassing what will be something on the order of 300,000 pages of info on LHO. (The public will see little of this material until August 1993.)
  
• 9/14/1964 (Memo to RCMP from FBI Liaison Officer): "One Robert H. Jackson, a photographer for the Dallas Times was interviewed in this matter last year and stated that upon hearing the shots, he looked up at the Texas School Book Depository window in time to see the barrel of a rifle being pulled inside the window, but could not see the person holding the rifle. He also recalled seeing two Negro individuals looking out of the windows immediately below the window in which he saw the rifle."
  
• 9/14/1964 The theologian Reinhold Neibuhr receives the Medal of Freedom.
  
• 9/14/1964 UC Berkeley officials announce a new policy prohibiting political action at the campus entrance at Bancroft Way and Telegraph Avenue. (SF Chronicle 6/9/02)
  
• 9/14/1964 The Warren Commission By Maurice Rosenberg The Nation, 14 September 1964, pages 110112
  
• 9/15/1964 The last person to testify before the Warren Commission, John F. Gallagher, gives testimony to Norman Relich.
  
• 9/15/1964 (Internal RCMP memo from Criminal Investigation Branch to Operations Division): "Kindly endeavor to obtain a copy of the August, 1964 issue of Liberty Magazine. The FBI have requested that this matter be treated as urgent."
  
• 9/15/1964 The CIA responded to the WC's February request for information by saying that "an examination of Central Intelligence Agency files has produced no information on Jack Ruby or his activities. The Central Intelligence Agency has no indication that Ruby and Lee Harvey Oswald ever knew each other, were associated, or might have been connected in any manner." (H 26 466).
  
• 9/16/1964 Sen. Richard Russell wrote a 2-page dissent for his files about the single-bullet theory. It was later found in his private papers. Russell disagreed with the Warren Report view that JFK and Connally were hit by the same bullet, and also disagreed with the Report's conclusion of no conspiracy. In Russell's judgment, the insufficiency of the evidence gathered against Oswald "preclude the conclusive determination that Oswald and Oswald alone, without the knowledge, encouragement or assistance of any other person, planned and perpetrated the assassination."
  
• 9/16/1964 FBI interview of Loran Hall, 16 Sep 1964. In this interview, Loran Hall said he had visited Ms. Odio's apartment in late September 1963 with Lawrence Howard and William Seymour. International Anti-Communist Brigade soldier of fortune Loran Hall allegedly tells FBI agents that it was her, William Seymour and Lawrence Howard who visited Silvia Odio in Dallas. The WC uses the FBI conclusions in its report to dismiss her story. Later, both Seymour and Howard contradict Hall. Hall later tells the HSCA he never told FBI of any visit. (Fonzi chronology)
  
• 9/16/1964 Two RCMP officers pay a visit to the home of Norman Similas. They take down the following statement: "The position I finally took (for picture taking) was approximately 250 or 300 yards west of the Texas School Book Depository building. Approximately five minutes later the autocade appeared at the corner of Main and Houston. I took my first picture as the lead motorcycle passed in front of me. At the same time as I took the first picture I heard the first shot fired. I didn't take any more pictures until a bus carrying the Presidential Press Party came into view. I took a bus from Dallas to Chicago as I was unable to make airline reservations. En route I picked up a newspaper in St. Louis and noticed a story which was published on the day of the assassination and which was written by a Dallas reporter. His account of the assassination indicated that he observed two people and the rifle barrel being withdrawn from the window in the building. At Chicago I contacted T.C.A. Reservations where I received a message to call a local Chicago number. I called and a Ray Jefferies answered. It was the Associated Press Office. They sent a car for me and I gave him the rolls of film less one of which I did not know the locale. They developed the film there and advised me that they had coverage of most of the pictures that I had. I arrived in Toronto at about 10 PM on November 23rd. Almost immediately on my arrival at home, I was contacted by a reporter from the Toronto Telegram who advised they received word from the AP in Chicago that I had negatives that they might be interested in. He arrived in my home in five or ten minutes. He then examined the negatives, and while examining them he exclaimed, "there looks like two people at this window." I then went over and looked at the negative and I agreed that there were two objects in the window on the 6th floor southeast corner of the building. This window differed from the others in that it had an alcove above the window as opposed to the others on the 5th and other floors, which were square frame. The two objects appeared to be people and the Telegram reporter thought he saw what appeared to be a rifle barrel between them. I did not make any comment on this upon looking at it as it blended into the shadow of the object to the left. This negative was one of a strip of three and this strip plus another of three was handed over to this reporter. The following Wednesday, my wife telephoned me at work and told me a letter had arrived from the Telegram. This letter apologetically explained that they had lost the negatives. In a matter of a few days I received a cheque for $50.00 from the Telegram. Since that time I have heard nothing further from the Telegram."
  
• 9/16/1964 Disillusioned with Johnson's push for civil rights legislation and his sending troops to Vietnam without a clear goal of victory, Strom Thurmond left the Democratic Party and in a state-wide television speech today, told South Carolina voters that he was backing Goldwater. Explaining his reasons for leaving the party: The Democratic Party has forsaken the people to become the party of minority groups [and] power-hungry union leaders....'
  
• 9/17-18/1964 this night, US destroyers Morton and Edwards were on patrol in the Gulf of Tonkin; they picked up numerous radar contacts of enemy boats and the Morton began firing at them. A Navy review board 9/21-22 concluded that the destroyers had not actually been attacked by North Vietnamese craft.
  
• 9/17/1964 One of the two investigating officers files a report on Norman Similas. This is his statement: "During the course of this interview SIMILAS struck me as being a cocky, brash, individual who was quite anxious to create the impression of the "big-shot". When we began to question him on specifics he lost some of his composure and became extremely nervous and unsure of himself. It was not until Nov. 23rd, 1963 when he and a Toronto Telegram reporter were examining the negatives of photos he took, that the idea that two persons may have been in the window came up. SIMILAS went on to say that it was this reporter who drew it to his attention, and SIMILAS is very careful to point out that the reporter said "two people". I have attempted to verify the loss of the negatives by the Toronto Telegram newspaper as alleged by SIMILAS and inquiries at the Photo Department have failed to produce them. The photographer who took this picture is one Colin Davis however, I have been unable to contact him to date, as he is on assignment and only reports in to the office when he has something for publication. [signed] C.A. Beacock RCMP Sgt."
  
• 9/18/1964 Final WC executive session instigated by Sen. Russell. Russell helped Harold Weisberg track down the transcript to this meeting. He recalls that they had discussed problem areas in the WC's findings during that meeting. He "was shaken" when Weisberg told him that the transcript he received (prepared under the direction of Rankin) made no mention of the discrepancies Russell and other members had pointed out that day. Apparently the only transcript that existed was a fake one prepared by Rankin. Soon after this revelation, Russell "broke his long friendship with Lyndon Johnson and resigned the chairmanship of the Military Affairs Committee so important to him and his district..." (Whitewash IV p20-22; Washington Post 10/11/1968)
  
• 9/18/1964 Conversation between President Johnson and Warren Commissioner Richard Russell. In a taped call of that day, they both said that they did not believe the single bullet theory. Russell said, "I don't believe it" and LBJ replied with "I don't either." They also talked about the Gulf of Tonkin incident, and both express skepticism about what happened.
  

• 9/18/1964 CE 2676 memo from Richard Helms to Rankin: "Subject: Lee Harvey Oswald. In response to your request, I forward information regarding Lee Harvey Oswald's stay in Helsinki. According to a reliable source, Oswald stayed at the Torni Hotel in Helsinki from 10 to 11 October 1959 and then moved to the Klaus Kurki Hotel, where he stayed until 15 October, apparently waiting for a visa to be issued him by the Soviet Consulate in Helsinki. He traveled to the USSR by train, crossing at Vainikkala on 15 October." "Subject: Lee Harvey Oswald's Arrival time in Helsinki on 10 October 1959. 1. In response to your memorandum of 25 May 1964, we have established that the only direct flight from London to Helsinki on 10 October 1959 was Finn Air flight 852 which arrived in Helsinki at 2333 (11:33pm.) If Oswald had taken this flight, he could not normally have cleared customs and landing formalities and reached the Torni Hotel downtown by 2400 (midnight) on the same day. This is based on the judgement of officers in this Agency familiar with the Helsinki airport. 2. We are presently attempting to determine if Oswald could have taken a more circuitous flight from London, with a stop at Stockholm, Copenhagen or some other city. Any additional information received will be forwarded to you promptly."
  
• 9/18/1964 Dr. King has an audience with Pope Paul VI at the Vatican.
  
• 9/18/1964 FBI interview of William Seymour, 18 Sep 1964. Seymour disputed Hall's account and called him a liar.
  
• 9/18/1964 In an FBI report dated this day, Special Agent Wallace R. Heitman reveals the identity of "George Perrel" (known to the FBI since before the assassination). Heitman explains that the reason "Perrel" -- aka Fermin de Goicochea Sanchez -- couldn't be interviewed until the month the Warren Report is published is because Agent James Hosty was too busy investigating the JFK assassination.
  
• 9/18/1964 During the fall of this year, JFK Jr. moves from Washington to New York, where he attends a Catholic private school, then the Collegiate boys' school.
  
• 9/19/1964 RCMP Sgt. Beacock interviews the Toronto Telegram reporter regarding Norman Similas: "Further to previous report in this regard I interviewed Mr. Colin Davies, reporter and photographer of the Toronto Telegram. Davies stated that Similas was very excited at the time of this interview. While viewing the negatives Similas was said to have pointed out the window and asked Davies if he didn't think there were two people there. Similas drew his attention to the article written by a Dallas reporter in which two people were mentioned as being in the window. Davies said he felt that it was the power of suggestion and that Similas wanted to see two people in the negative so badly that he actually believed that he did. It was Davies opinion that the negatives were worthless from a news standpoint, but due to Similas' state of excitement he didn't have the heart to disappoint him. Davies decided to take the negatives and let the Photo Editor decide what should be done. During the next day or so, the negatives somehow became lost and the Telegram, feeling responsible, sent Similas a cheque to pay for them. I questioned Davies as to his impression of Similas and his story and he replied that he had no doubt that Similas has witnessed the assassination, but "he was sure going to get a lot of mileage out of the story." There appears to be a complete reversal of the roles played by SIMILAS and DAVIES depending on whose story you hear.
  
• 9/19/1964 Memo from acting CIA Deputy Director for Plans Thomas Karamessines to Rankin. "Information Concerning Jack Ruby and His Associates. Reference is made to your memorandum of 19 May 1964, requesting that this Agency furnish any information in its files relative to Jack Ruby, his activities and his associates...An examination of Central Intelligence Agency files has produced no information on Jack Ruby and his activities...no indication that Ruby or Lee Harvey Oswald ever knew each other, were associated, or might have been connected in any manner."
  
• 9/20/1964 FBI interview of Lawrence Howard, 20 Sep 1964. Howard similarly disputed meeting Sylvia Odio, but he did tell the FBI of a trip to Dallas in September to obtain "supplies" and funds.
  
• 9/20/1964 FBI interview of Loran Hall, 20 Sep 1964. On September 20 Hall retracted his original account.
  
• 9/21/1964 The body of Jim Koethe, a young Dallas reporter, is found swathed in a blanket on the floor of his bachelor apartment. Police say the cause of death is asphyxiation from a broken bone at the base of the neck --- apparently the result of a karate chop. Robbery appears to be the motive, although Koethe's parents believe he has been killed for other reasons. Whoever ransacked his apartment, they point out, was careful to remove his notes for a book he was preparing, in collaboration with two other journalists, on the Kennedy assassination. Within a week a 22-year-old ex-con from Alabama named Larry Earl Reno will be picked up selling Koethe's personal effects and held on suspicion of murder. Reno's lawyers will be Mike Barclay and Jim Martin, both friends of Jack Ruby's room mate George Senator. Martin and Senator were with Koethe at a meeting on the evening of November 24, 1963 in Ruby's apartment. When the Reno case comes before the grand jury, District Attorney Henry Wade secretly instructs the jurors not to indict---an extraordinary move for a chief prosecuting officer with as strong a case as he has. The grand jury returns a no-bill. Reno, however, remains in jail on a previous charge. When they finally spring him, in January 1965, he is rearrested within a month for the robbery of a hotel. This time the prosecution, led by a one-time law partner of Martin's has no qualms about getting an indictment, and a conviction. Reno is sentenced to life for the hotel robbery. At the trial, his lawyers call no witnesses in his defense.
  
• 9/21/1964 RCMP Statement by Kenneth G. Armstrong, editor of Liberty Magazine regarding Norman Similas: "On our first meeting (with Similas) we discussed his visit to Dallas and the events leading up to the assassination. There were two subsequent meetings at which I got the remainder of the information that I wanted for my story. Similas offered to supply me with pictures which were taken prior to and during the assassination. These were to be used to illustrate the story. It was my understanding that one of these pictures was the one in which two persons and the gun barrel could be seen, and these were to be forthcoming when developed. I phoned Similas a day or so later and he said they had been mailed to me from a Post Office on Yonge St. After a week had gone by Albert Plock, Art Director of Liberty, and I went through the entire amount of mail received during the previous week but we found nothing. I mention this because it was so important to the story to have that picture which contained the two faces at the window. We still held out hope that they might arrive in time for the second installment, however, they never did arrive."
  
• 9/22/1964 Conclusion of report submitted by RCMP Stg. C.A. Beacock regarding Norman Similas: "The foregoing statement indicates that SIMILAS knowingly deceived ARMSTRONG into buying the story by promising him pictures which he knew to be nonexistent. The paragraph of the July issue which states "a picture I took showed two figures beside a gun barrel" was actually the main point of interest of this story. From all the inquiries here I doubt that such a picture ever existed and it is a certainty that is does not now exist. It was pointed out to me that had SIMILAS taken the picture showing the assassin or assassins, it would have been an exclusive and every medium in the world would be after it. SIMILAS told ARMSTRONG that he mailed this photograph along with others to the Liberty Magazine fully three months after he had been paid for the pictures lost by the Toronto Telegram and which supposedly contained this picture. SIMILAS' story to me, and to both Davis and Armstrong contains too many inconsistencies and outright lies to be taken seriously. I feel he was an opportunist who saw a chance to cash in on the fact that he had witnessed the assassination and in order to do so he had to make the story as convincing as possible. It is unfortunate that by a coincidence the negatives which would prove the lie have been lost." The RCMP sent their report down to the FBI and closed the books on Norman Similas.
  
• 9/22/1964 A CIA bulletin stated that around the world there was a widespread suspicion that Kennedy had been killed as a result of a political plot. "Covert assets should explain the tragedy wherever it is genuinely misunderstood and counter all efforts to misconstrue it intentionally…communists and other extremists always attempt to prove a political conspiracy behind violence." (Kelin; ARRB)
  
• 9/23/1964 Letter from Hoover and Rankin: "On September 22, 1964, during a discussion by you with J.R. Malley, the matter of information relating to the assassination of President Kennedy continuing to be referred to the FBI and subsequent investigations made as a result of these referrals was discussed in some detail. Particular reference was made to the necessity of this Bureau, as the investigating agency, being able to refer results of its investigation to some authority designated for such purpose after the termination of the President's Commission. It is quite possible that information relating to the assassination of President Kennedy will continue to be received for an indefinite period of time and the FBI will continue to fulfill its responsibilities in checking out to the fullest all information which is received. It would be appreciated if you would advise the name of the appropriate authority to receive such investigation conducted by this Bureau following termination of the President's Commission." (Post Mortem p315)
  
• 9/23/1964 Assassin or Fall Guy? - Book Reviews Victor Perlo, American Journalist New Times, No. 38, 23 September 1964, pp. 30-31.
  
• 9/24/1964 The Warren Commission's report is submitted to LBJ by Chief Justice Earl Warren. Of the $1.2 million allocated to the investigation, $608,000 went to the cost of printing the report and the 1500 copies of its 26 volumes.
  
• 9/24/1964 Spanish freighter Sierra Aranzazu carrying a shipment of toys for Cuba is attacked seventy-five miles off Cuba. Captain and two crewmen killed in the attack.
  
• 9/24 or 9/29/1964 "Mr Hoover, after reading a Washington Post article captioned 'Praise is Voiced for Staff Engaged in Warren Report,' directed that the Bureau's files on the eighty-four staff members listed in the article 'be checked.'" The "derogatory information" was then given to him 10/2/1964. (Church Report)
  
• 9/24/1964 Gus Russo: "Although Moynihan declined to divulge any information [about the Kennedy family's investigation of the Secret Services], other sources, albeit second-hand ones, have disclosed that Bobby Kennedy's next foray into the mystery of his brother's death came after the release of the Warren Commission Report. At that time, Kennedy said, "I just can't believe that guy [Oswald] acted alone. I'm going to contact someone independent of this government to get to the bottom of this." Bobby then contacted a lifelong friend of the Kennedy family, then working in Britain's intelligence agency, known as MI6. The friendship dated back to the days when Papa Joe Kennedy was the US Ambassador to England. Undertaking this highly secretive mission, the MI6 agent contacted two French intelligence operatives who proceeded to conduct, over a three year period, a quiet investigation that involved hundreds of interviews in the United States. One agent was the head of the French Secret Service, Andre Ducret. The second was known only as "Philippe" -- believed to be Philippe Vosjoly, who was a former French Intelligence Chief in the United States. Over the years, Ducret and Philippe hired men to infiltrate the Texas oil industry, the CIA, and Cuban mercenary groups in Florida. Their report, replete with innuendo about Lyndon Johnson and right-wing Texas oil barons, was delivered to Bobby Kennedy only months before his own assassination in June of 1968. There is no information concerning Bobby's reaction to the document. After Bobby's death, the MI6 agent contacted the last surviving brother, Senator Ted Kennedy, inquiring as to what to do with the material. Teddy said the family wasn't interested. The agent proceeded to hire a French writer by the name of Herve LaMarre to fashion the material into a book. Published in Europe and authored under the pseudonym of "James Hepburn," the book was entitled Farewell, America. It contains highly exaggerated prose combined with a large dose of poetic license. Because the anecdotes about LBJ and others could be considered downright libelous, the book was never published in America. Over the years, however, through private dealers, the book obtained an "underground" distributorship in the United States. One of the dealers approached Dave Powers, Kennedy intimate and curator of the John F. Kennedy Museum, for his opinion of the book. Echoing Moynihan, Powers responded, "I can't confirm or deny the European connection, but Bobby definitely didn't believe the Warren Report." (Al Navis, interview by author, 19 November 1993. In the 1980's, Navis conducted inquiries about RFK's investigation with members of the Kennedy family inner-circle.)
  
• 9/25/1964 Adm. Sharp cabled Wheeler that "the political situation in RVN is now so unstable as to raise some serious questions about our future courses of action...Conceivably the decision could be one of disengagement."
  
• 9/25/1964 FBI agent Harry Whidbee reported on the interviews of the previous week, including the retractions. Note that this report is dated one day after the delivery of the Warren Report to President Johnson.
  
• 9/25/1964 September 25, 1964 THE STATE OF TEXAS vs. JACK RUBENSTEIN -- Defense counsel files second motion for extension of time to file statement of facts. Judge Brown grants thirty-day extension.
  
• 9/25/1964 LBJ, dedicating a dam in Oklahoma, said, "There are those that say you ought to go north and drop bombs, to try to wipe out the supply lines...We don't want our American boys to do the fighting for Asian boys...and get tied down in a land war in Asia."
  
• 9/26/1964 FBI report of 26 Sep 1964. This report recorded more details from the follow-up interviews with Howard, Seymour, and an associate named Celio Sergio Castro Alba.
  
• 9/27/1964 This evening, CBS aired a two-hour news special titled, "November 22 and the Warren Report," hosted by Walter Cronkite, Dan Rather and Eddie Barker; it was produced by Les Midgely. George O'Toole later commented: "while not openly challenging the Warren Report, [it] seemed to carry strong undercurrents of doubt about the official conclusions." John Connally was interviewed, and he insisted he wasn't hit by the same bullet as Kennedy. Interviews (done by Eddie Barker) were conducted with numerous witnesses. Marguerite insisted her son worked for US intelligence. Ruth Paine repeated almost verbatin the story she told in her first televised interview. Jesse Curry said that LHO was not in the Dallas police "subversive files." Wesley Frazier recalled that Oswald said he wouldn't need a ride home on Friday night. Malcolm Price and Garland Slack were interviewed, but then it was explained that the Warren Commission discounted their stories. CBS had originally agreed to give Mark Lane and de Antonio access to their 9/1964 documentary outtakes; the company's film librarian had given them this assurance. They viewed enormous amounts of outtake footage and had wanted to purchase large quantities of it for use in their film, but higher-ups at CBS soon vetoed this idea. They were told that this footage would not be sold, and would soon be destroyed. CBS had had very good relations with the WC during its existence; Inquest reported (p136) that the WC had originally decided not to mention Howard Brennan in the Report because of the inconsistencies in his testimony. CBS' planned documentary therefore would exclude Brennan. But when the WC decided to include him as an important witness, CBS also included him in their program, interviewing him at the last moment. The outtake footage that Lane and de Antonio saw included interviews with witnesses making statements contrary to the official story. When a witness was finally prompted to say that he thought the shots came from the Depository, only that bit of footage was used. (Citizen's Dissent 75-78)
  
• 9/28/1964 The Warren Report is made public. It is a 469-page document, supplemented by eighteen appendices. Although more than thirty persons had a hand in writing it, the work was mainly written by Norman Redlich and Alfred Goldberg. William L. O'Neill, Professor of History at Rutgers University, wrote in his history of the Sixties, Coming Apart (1971): "Solitary maniacs who assassinate Presidents are a national tradition. The idea of a conspiracy, so logical to European minds, was alien to Americans. Then too, if even one more suspect was uncovered the whole ghastly matter would have to be reopened with unpredictable consequences. No one wanted that. It was much better all around to accept the Warren Report...For all its bulk, the report was a sloppy piece of work, carelessly researched and based on a priori judgements...Evidence that cast doubt on the single-killer hypothesis was ignored, so was material pointing to other possibilities...There was no proof that Oswald was such a marksman, considerable evidence that he was a poor shot, yet the Commission insisted that he was expert and the shot itself an easy one...There was much reason to doubt [the single-bullet theory], little to believe it, yet the Commission clung to it desperately." Hugh Brogan, British historian and author, wrote in his 1985 book, The Penguin History of the United States of America: "An official investigating commission, headed by Chief Justice Warren, found that the President had been shot by a solitary psychotic, like Lincoln and McKinley before him; but it tortured the evidence to arrive at this conclusion. It seems more likely that the assassination was the work of a small-time, semi-criminal, semi-political conspiracy, but the truth has never been satisfactorily established. Whatever it may be, the event was a reminder of all the ugly, chaotic forces in American life..." (p654).
  
• 9/28/1964 A special request, on behalf of LBJ, is made to the Archivist of the United States that the seventy-five year ban on the Warren Commission files be waived wherever possible and that much of the material be opened to the public. Following approved guidelines, all the agencies involved in the investigation are to review their files and declassify everything except pages containing the names of confidential informers, information damaging to innocent parties, and information about the agencies' operating procedures. There is to be a periodic review by all the agencies concerned. This request, made on behalf of LBJ and the approved guidelines are made by McGeorge Bundy.
  
• 9/28/1964 In a telephone conversation with Mike Mansfield, LBJ says: "I wouldn't have this repeated to anybody - my judgment is that they're [the Secret Service] more likely to get me killed than they are to protect me ... They're just not heavy thinkers. They're just like the average cop and they don't plan. Hoover's the one that's put me in an [armored limousine] ... [and] he doesn't object to my shakin' hands with high school kids or people along a fence at Billings, Montana."
  
• 9/28/1964 Robert Kennedy issued at his campaign headquarters in New York a formal statement that said: "As I said in Poland last summer, I am convinced that Oswald was solely responsible for what happened and that he did not have any outside help or assistance. He was a malcontent who could not get along here or in the Soviet Union. I have not read his (sic) report nor do I plan to. But I have been briefed on it and I am completely satisfied that the Commission investigated every lead and examined every piece of evidence. The Commission's enquiry was thorough and conscientious."
  
• 9/28/1964 The day the Warren Report was published, The New York Herald Tribune carried an article by its star reporter Jimmy Breslin entitled "A Brother Who Won't Read the Report..." based on an interview Mr. Breslin had obtained from Robert Kennedy the night before while driving with him in a car through Manhattan. Here are a few significant excerpts from this article which throws a disturbing light both on the Report and on the workings of Bobby's mind:
  

• 9/28/1964 In a speech in Manchester, New Hampshire, LBJ criticized Republicans for urging that the war in Vietnam be brought to the North.
  
• 9/28/1964 CIA reported that the regime in Saigon was likely to continue to disintegrate.
  
• 9/28/1964 Thomas Buchanan, Detective By Leo Sauvage The New Leader, 28 September 1964, pages 1015
  
• 9/28/1964 Radio Havana criticized the WR and argued that if Oswald had been a genuine Marxist, he wouldn't have engaged in assassination. "But it's already clear that it is a document that tries to cover up, tries to sweep the mess under the rug, and fails to get at the facts."
  
• 9/28/1964 The NY Times reported on its front page that "the Commission analyzed every issue in exhaustive, almost archaeological detail." The editorial page commented, "the facts - exhaustively gathered, independently checked and cogently set forth - destroy the basis for conspiracy theories that have grown weedlike in this country and abroad." The New York Times had favorable coverage of the WR by Anthony Lewis and James Reston. The Times printed the entire Report in a 48-page supplement on this day. C.L. Sulzberger expressed relief at the report's conclusions. "It was essential in these restless days," he wrote, "to remove unfounded suspicions that could excite latent jingo spirit. And it was necessary to reassure our allies that ours is a stable reliable democracy." In addition the Times collaborated with the Book of the Month Club on a hard-bound edition and with Bantam Books on a soft-bound edition of the report (with a laudatory introduction by Harrison Salisbury in the latter). By the end of the first week Bantam had printed 1,100,000 copies. Ironically the Times would later imply that the critics of the report were guilty of exploitation because of the "minor, if lucrative industry" that arose from their challenges to the official version of the assassination. In the Washington Post it was praised by Robert Donovan, Roscoe Drummond and Marquis Childs; an editorial said the WR "deserves acceptance as the whole truth, and nothing but the truth."
  
• 9/29/1964 Mrs. Joseph P. Kennedy, the President's mother, declared at a news conference in Montreal, Canada, on Sept. 29, 1964, that she had no intention of reading the Warren Report. The UPI dispatch reporting this gave no indication, however, as to whether she, too, believed Oswald to have been the killer.
  
• 9/29/1964 Mr Hoover, after reading a Washington Post article captioned 'Praise is Voiced for Staff Engaged in Warren Report,' directed that the Bureau's files on the eighty-four staff members listed in the article 'be checked.' (Church Committee Report)
  
• 9/29/1964 NY Times' Arthur Krock wrote that the WR was the "definitive history of the tragedy."
  
• 9/29/1964 Hoover ordered Agent Hosty transferred to the Kansas City office.
  
• 9/29/1964 20 Questions for the Warren Report Curtis Crawford radio Lecture, WBAI-FM, 29 September 1964
  
• 9/30/1964 New York Journal-American (a Hearst paper) editorialized, "The Warren Commission Report is a magnificent masterpiece of soundly reasoned judgement. It is clear, judicial, calm and meticulous in its determinations. All persons capable of restrained consideration of the facts, and of discarding conjecture based on spectacular rumor, will accept the conclusion inevitably reached by the seven eminent Americans who with superb achievement realize their purpose: TRUTH."
  

• 10/1964 George and Patricia Nash documented Commission negligence in the October 1964 New Leader by locating without difficulty three witnesses to the slaying of Patrolman Tippit who had not been called by the Warren Commission, but whose accounts differed radically from the Commission's.
  
• 10/1/1964 US Army Fifth Special Forces Group arrives in Vietnam.
  
• 10/1-2/1964 A 32-hour sit-in by students at Berkeley in protest over the banning of political activities on campus. Former graduate student Jack Weinberg is arrested for conducting political activity on campus, but students surround the police car and prevent the officers from leaving. Mario Savio, a junior, addresses the crowd from the car. (SF Chronicle 6/9/02)
  
• 10/2/1964 CD 1553 FBI report on 9/18/1964 interview with William Seymour in which he denied ever having any contact with Sylvia Odio. This report was not included in the WC's Exhibits, and was discovered at the National Archives by Paul Hoch.
  
• 10/2/1964 Kerr meets with students, including Savio, and reaches an agreement that includes dropping charges against Weinberg. Over the next two days, student leaders create the Free Speech Movement. (SF Chronicle 6/9/02)
  
• 10/2/1964 Life magazine featured an article about the Warren Report written by WC member Gerald Ford; this issue showed 8 frames of the Zapruder film and it went through two revisions after going to press. The first edition showed frame 323 and the caption describing JFK's head "snapping to the side." The second edition substituted frame 313 for 323, with a caption describing how the shot "caused the front part of his skull to explode forward."
  
• 10/2/1964 Time featured a lengthy story praising the Warren Report.
  
• 10/2/1964 J. Edgar Hoover, stung by the Warren Commission's condemnation of the FBI in its report, probably has Cartha DeLoach leak a copy of the FBI director's May 1964 testimony before the Commission to Jerry O'Leary of the Washington Star. O'Leary writes a copyrighted front-page story that attempts to absolve the bureau and contradict the Commission's criticism.
  
• 10/3/1964 57 people escape from East Berlin via a 470 foot tunnel they had dug under the Berlin Wall.
  
• 10/3/1964 USS Enterprise (CVAN 65), along with USS Long Beach and USS Bainbridge, complete Operation Sea Orbit. The task force was the world's first composed of solely nuclear-powered ships. The ships circumnavigated the globe in 65 days without taking on either fuel or provisions.
  
• 10/4/64 Washington State Department angry at J. Edgar Hoover's contention that it had concluded Oswald was "a thoroughly safe risk." State Department officials said they could find no reports or documents to support that statement by the FBI chief. "A widespread view in official Washington yesterday was that Hoover authorized advance disclosure of his testimony before the Warren Commission to try to offset [Warren Report] criticism of the FBI." San Francisco Chronicle, Unattributed
  
• 10/5/1964 George Ball sent a lengthy memo to McNamara, Rusk and Bundy arguing that the US should find some political means to begin disengaging from Vietnam; he forcefully argued against escalation: "Once on the tiger's back we cannot be sure of picking the place to dismount." They met with Ball about the memo 10/7, but his proposals were ignored after that.
  
• 10/5/1964 The Left and the Warren Commission Report I. F. Stone I. F. Stone's Weekly Vol. XII, NO. 33, October 5, 1964
  
• 10/5/1964 Texas Atty General Waggoner Carr presented to Governor Connally the "Texas Supplemental on The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy and the Serious Wounding of Governor John B. Connally November 22, 1963." It claims to be a "supplement to the Warren Report" but actually appears to be an attempt to counter the negative allegations directed towards the Dallas Police.
  
• 10/5/1964 FBI agent Hosty was suspended without pay for 30 days. His badge and gun were confiscated. Hoover had wanted to fire him, but all twelve assistant directors talked him into only a suspension. (Assignment Oswald p163)
  
• 10/5/1964 Newsweek had a lengthy article praising the Warren Report.
  
• 10/7/1964 The film Fail-Safe is theatrically released after a 9/15 premiere at the NY Film Festival; this somber account of a President trying to prevent a nuclear war triggered by a technical malfunction is quite effective. Directed by Sidney Lumet, starring Henry Fonda, Dan O'Herlihy, Walter Matthau. The scene where the US President and Soviet Premier are on the phone desperately trying to avoid nuclear war, while their militaries are increasingly out of their control, is reminiscent of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
  
• 10/7/1964 Interview of Constine Alfred Droby, President of the Criminal Bar Association of Dallas, by Jean Campbell for the London Evening Standard, Oct. 7, 1964; Droby was Ruby's first lawyer...... Droby told me that as Ruby's attorney he had rushed around Ruby's apartment soon after the shooting with Jim Koethe, a Dallas news reporter. "The place was in chaos. I think we were the first people to see it." "You remember anything especially?" I said.. "No, just chaos and newspapers," Droby answered. "I wonder if Jim Koethe saw anything?" I asked. Mr. Droby folded his hands and leaned forward: "Koethe's murdered," he said. "He was choked to death the Monday before."
  
• 10/7/1964 Walter W. Jenkins, chief White House aide and longtime friend of LBJ, was arrested on a morals charge in a YMCA bathroom two blocks from the White House. He had been arrested in the same bathroom for the same charge in 1/1959, but the arrest had not been publicized. Jenkins was discovered in a YMCA pay toilet with another man. Ultimately, Jenkins is forced to resign, so as not to jeopardize Johnson's re-election campaign. Jenkins stated that during his arrest, his mind had been "befuddled by fatigue, alcohol, physical illness, and lack of food."
  
• 10/8/1964 C. D. DeLoach memo about Jesse Curry's allegations that the FBI knew about Oswald before the assassination.
  
• 10/9/1964 The Rolling Stones announce the cancellation of a planned South African tour due to an anti-apartheid embargo by the British Musicians' Union.
  
• 10/9/1964 Mark Lane engaged in a stage debate with Melvin Belli in San Francisco; the moderator, Jake Ehrlich, who described himself as a friend of Earl Warren, pointedly asked Lane, "How do you explain the chicken bones and Oswald's prints on the bag they were in?" The audience groaned. Belli argued, "If we cannot trust the FBI, the CIA and Earl Warren, then God pity us!" and accused Lane of "hurting our national image." None of the three major area papers carried any news about the debate; only a leftist paper, the People's World (10/17/1964), covered it.
  
• 10/10/1964 Warren Report: Case for the Prosecution Murray Kempton The New Republic, 10 October 1964
  
• 10/10/1964 One of the most interesting aspects of the Report has been the unexpected emergence of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover in the guise of a civil libertarian. ... Hoover declared that he was opposed to tightening Presidential security to any large degree because "I don't think you can get absolute security without almost establishing a police state - and we don't want that." National Guardian
  
• 10/12/1964 Mary Pinchot Meyer was shot to death in Georgetown; she was a Georgetown artist and sister-in-law of Ben Bradlee, and reportedly a mistress of JFK's up until his death. The Washington Post reported 2/23/1976 that shortly after her death her personal diary was stolen from her home by James Jesus Angleton, a friend of the Meyer family. The Post claims Angleton then took the diary to CIA headquarters in Virginia and destroyed it. Angleton refused any comment. (Washington Post, Newsweek). Her murder was never solved. Mary Pinchot is the niece of that early conservationist hero Gifford Pinchot. She married CIA officer, and Allen Dulles protégé, Cord Meyer. Mary's sister is named Tony and is married to Ben Bradlee. Mary and Cord divorced in 1956 and he later goes on to become a CIA-associated reporter for various papers including the Chicago Tribune. In the fall of 1964, while walking along the tow path of the C & O Canal in Georgetown, Mary Pinchot Meyer is murdered by being shot through the face. A suspiciously acting black man is apprehended nearby and is identified by a witness as being the nearest person to Meyer before she was killed. At the trial, the man was acquitted through the efforts of a very good defense attorney, mainly due to the circumstantial nature of the case. Many years after Mary's death, the National Enquirer will reveal that she had been a girlfriend of Kennedy. Ben Bradlee is the editor of the Washington Post in 1976 when the Enquirer breaks the story. The Post gives it its imprimatur by filling out certain elements of the story and giving it respectable, mainstream play. The night of the Meyer murder, at his home, Bradlee gets a call from Anne Truitt, Mary's artist friend and then the wife of Jim Truitt, Newsweek's Tokyo correspondent. Mary has told Anne to retrieve her diary in case anything happens to her. The next morning, Ben and Tony go to Mary's house. Once inside they discover James Angleton there (Bradlee provides no explanation as to why he was there). No diary is found. But later in the day the Bradlees decide to go to Mary's art studio which is down the alley in their garage. They again discover Angleton there in the process of picking the lock. Embarrassed, the super spook walks off. The Bradlees make a pass through the studio and don't find the diary. But an hour later, Tony secures it. In Bradlee's telling, there is only a diary. Bradlee writes that, although Kennedy's name is not in it, it is clear that he is the person having an affair with her. Bradlee decides not to make the diary public and a day or so later, gives it to Angleton because he feels he will be able to ensure that it will be permanently destroyed. Years later, when Tony Bradlee asks Angleton how he had destroyed the diary, Angleton admits he hadn't. She demands it back. He gives it to her and she burns it with a friend (not named) as a witness.
  
• 10/12/1964 At the Mormon Tabernacle in Salt Lake City, Barry Goldwater said, "Why do we see wave after wave of crime in our streets and in our homes? Why do we see riot and disorder in our cities; a breakdown of the morals of our young people; an alarming rise in juvenile delinquency; an increasing flood of obscene literature; corruption around our highest offices, erosion of the honor and dignity of our nation and of the individuals who compose it? Something basic, something dangerous is eating away at the morality, the dignity, and respect of our citizens…is this the time in our nation's history for our federal government to ban almighty God from our schoolrooms?"
  
• 10/12/1964 The Triumph of Caliban - Karl E. Meyer The New Leader, 12 October 1964, pages 46: " No doubt the central conclusion of the long-awaited Warren Commission Reportthat Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone, killed President Kennedywill continue to be challenged. But the Commission's Report is so solidly wrought, so overwhelmingly backed by fact, so persuasive in its parts and so coherent as a whole, that it will be vastly more difficult to confute than earlier, garbled accounts of the Dallas infamy. In my view, the Report's services are three: (1) It meets head-on various conspiracy theories; (2) it offers a critique of police, national and local; (3) it provides a troubling moral commentary for a country still struggling to come to terms with what happened last November 22. When President Kennedy died, efforts were quickly made to pin the blame on conspiracies of the extreme Right or Left. In the circumstances, considering Oswald's Marxist views and record as a defector in the Soviet Union, it was perhaps surprisingand surely encouragingthat there was no orgy of McCarthyism. Most Americans saw that neither Moscow nor Havana had anything to gain from Kennedy's death and were prepared to believe that Oswald had no foreign encouragement. But the extreme Right spread reports that Oswald had secretly visited Cuba, that he had been recruited into Soviet espionage, and that Castro, in a drunken moment, had referred in a speech to a clandestine trip of Oswald to Havana. The Warren Commission, whose members include such impeccable conservatives as Senator Russell of Georgia, has now definitively set to rest all such lurid rumors. Every charge is answered in painstaking detail; every aspect of Oswald's stay in the Soviet Union and of his trip to Mexico City shortly before the assassination is explored. Nothing has come to light to support charges of a Leftist plot, though the Report makes quite clear that in his own muddled way Oswald was a Leftist."
  
• 10/12/1964 The Other Witnesses By George and Patricia Nash The New Leader, 12 October 1964, pages 69
  
• 10/12/1964 Russian spacecraft Vokshod I contained pilot Vladimir Komarov, a doctor and a scientist for 15 orbits.
  
• 10/13/1964 Paid advertisement by International Latex Corp. pointing out J. Edgar Hoover's testimony before Warren Commission [See 10/10/64] to effect that security can't be tightened too much without infringing on personal liberties. New York Times
  
• 10/14/1964 The news breaks that Walter Jenkins, LBJ's closest aide, has been arrested in a YMCA toilet, two blocks from the White House, having sex with a retired Army soldier. Jenkins admits the offense, resigns and takes refuge in a hospital room, suffering from "exhaustion." A rapid FBI inquiry concludes that Jenkins has never compromised national security. Jenkins has actually been arrested for a similar lapse, in the very same toilet, nearly six years earlier.
  
• 10/14/1964 It is announced that MLK will be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Hoover was enraged, and contacted Bill Moyers. Soon Hoover sent out a booklet on King's sexual activities to the secretary of state, secretary of defense, CIA director, Katzenbach, and the heads of all military intelligence agencies; he also made sure US ambassadors in Europe (where King would receive the award), UN ambassador Adlai Stevenson, Nelson Rockefeller, Nixon, and Humphrey were briefed about King's private life. Hoover did everything he could to ruin King's trip to Europe and his return home. (Church report; The Man and the Secrets 571) But Hoover's efforts failed to produce a leak to the press.
  
• 10/14/1964 Khrushchev had been brought back from a vacation on the Black Sea to face the Central Committee plenum, which required his resignation. Realizing inevitable fall, he signed his resignation as First Secretary and head of government accepted by the plenum today. Khrushchev is removed by hardliners in the Kremlin. Today he was relieved of duties by the decree issued by the Presidium of the 6th Supreme Soviet. Former KGB chief Alexander Shelpin and his protegé, Vladamir Semichastny, reportedly instigate the action against Khrushchev. Although the Cuban missile crisis is not a major cause of Khrushchev 's fall--the majority of the formal charges leveled against Krushchev reportedly deal with domestic affairs--his handling of the Cuban crisis may have contributed indirectly to his loss of support among the other high-level Soviet officials. (WP, 9/15/88; Time, 11/14/88)
  
• 10/15/1964 NYT reported, "The telephone awoke the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. yesterday in an Atlanta hospital room, where he had gone for a rest. The caller was his wife, Coretta. She told him that he had just won the Nobel Peace Prize. I was not fully awake' Dr. King said later. For a while I thought it was a dream, and then I realized that it was true…History has thrust me into this position. It would both be immoral and a sign of ingratitude if I did not face my moral responsibility to do what I can in this struggle.'"
  
• 10/16/1964 China exploded its first atomic bomb.
  
• 10/17/1964 Westmoreland wrote a memo to the JCS saying that no amount of US military might could substitute for a stable regime in Saigon.
  
• 10/17/1964 Pravda attacked Khrushchev and his "harebrained scheming...and actions divorced from reality," and announced he was resigning due to his health. Breznhev and Kosygin took over his posts.
  
• 10/18/1964 New York Daily News says J. Edgar Hoover blasts Warren Commission for accusing FBI of failing to notify Secret Service about Oswald. AP
  
• 10/19/1964 DeLoach memo to Hoover; LBJ and Abe Fortas had decided to explain that Jenkins' behavior was caused by "a very serious disease which causes disintegration of the brain." But since the FBI could not get Jenkin's physician to agree to this, the explanation was never made public. (The Man and the Secrets 580)
  
• 10/19/1964 State Dept bulletin issued by Bundy: "Expansion of the war outside South Vietnam, while not a course we want or seek, could be forced upon us by the increased external pressures of the Communists, including a rising scale of infiltration."
  
• 10/19/1964 Debate between Mark Lane and Melvin Belli at the Manhattan Center, NYC. Like the Frisco debate, this one was sold-out. It was moderated by William Kunstler. This time, Belli argued that Oswald "has been tried in the Dallas police station and been found guilty." Lane later wrote, "Belli was ill-prepared and misinformed regarding the facts, and his not inconsiderable oratorical gifts were squandered as he pleaded with the audience to have faith in the nation's Federal police force and political leaders." Again, there was no real coverage of the debate in the papers. Belli cancelled the proposed third debate. "The New York Times refers to itself as a newspaper of record. That which is not found within its many pages ostensibly did not happen. For this reason the Belli encounter in New York is known to some as the debate that never occurred." (Citizen's Dissent 32-36)
  
• 10/19/1964 Barry Goldwater gave a speech on civil rights, written by William Rehnquist, in which he came out against both compulsory segregation and compulsory integration, opting instead for the right of free association.
  
• 10/19/1964 By this date, the Warren Report's lone-assassin conclusion is doubted by 31% of the American population.
  
• 10/21/1964 In a campaign address in Akron, Ohio, LBJ stated, "We are not about to send American boys nine or ten thousand miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves." During this month, LBJ had made the decision to bomb North Vietnam (according to White House correspondent Charles Roberts), but kept quiet about it because "the American public…was not prepared psychologically for a deliberate calculated step-up in the war effort." (LBJ's Inner Circle, 1965)
  
• 10/21/1964 Alleged JFK plot witness Rose Cheramie (Melba Marcades) is charged with vagrancy. Her behavior is described as loud and erratic.
  
• 10/21/1964 An article in today's Washington Post is titled "CIA withheld vital intelligence from Warren Commission." It is written by Robert S. Allen and Paul Scott. This concerns a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) warning that it is Kremlin policy to remove from public office by assassination Western officials who oppose Soviet policy.
  
• 10/22/1964 THE STATE OF TEXAS vs. JACK RUBENSTEIN -- Defense counsel files third motion for extension of time to file statement of facts.
  
• 10/23/1964 FBI director J. Edgar Hoover apparently did notice, however, that there was a de Mohrenschildt-Paine parallel of a classified nature whose public revelation could threaten the credibility of the Warren Commission. Hoover wrote a letter to J. Lee Rankin on October 23, 1 964, urging him not to release certain FBI " reports and memoranda dealing with Michael and Ruth Paine and George and Jeanne de Mohrenschildt." Hoover warned Rankin: " Making the contents of such documents available to the public could cause serious repercussions to the Commission. " (J. Edgar Hoover Letter to J. Lee Rankin, October 23, 1 964. FBI Record Number 124-10147-10006. Agency File Number 105-126128-1sT NR 120.)
  
• 10/24/1964 With the independence of Northern Rhodesia (Zambia), Southern Rhodesia colony becomes simply colony of Rhodesia.
  
• 10/27/1964 DeLoach memo to Hoover reported that LBJ wanted FBI "agents to bear down on [the man arrested with Jenkins] with respect to his knowledge of...Republican National Committee members." Jenkins and Goldwater had flown together in the same Air Force squadron, and LBJ was sure there had to be a link. The FBI interviewed more than 300 people to ensure that Jenkins hadn't compromised the nation's security by his homosexual acts. Finally, the White House calmed down when a poll showed that most Americans couldn't care less about the issue. (The Man and the Secrets 580) But right-wing admirers of Hoover were angry that he had "whitewashed" the Jenkins issue.
  
• 10/27/1964 Ronald Reagan made a nationally televised speech in support of Goldwater, and it established him as a rising star among conservatives: "The Founding Fathers knew a government can't control the economy without controlling people. And they knew when a government sets out to do that, it must use force and coercion to achieve its purpose. So we have come to a time for choosing…They say the world has become too complex for simple answers. They are wrong. There are no easy answers, but there are simple answers. We must have the courage to do what we know is morally right… We are for a provision that destitution should not follow unemployment by reason of old age, and to that end we have accepted Social Security as a step toward meeting the problem. However, we are against those entrusted with this program when they practice deception regarding its fiscal shortcomings, when they charge that any criticism of the program means that we want to end payments…We are for aiding our allies by sharing our material blessings with nations which share our fundamental beliefs, but we are against doling out money government to government, creating bureaucracy, if not socialism, all over the world...We need true tax reform that will at least make a start toward restoring for our children the American Dream that wealth is denied to no one, that each individual has the right to fly as high as his strength and ability will take him...But we cannot have such reform while our tax policy is engineered by people who view the tax as a means of achieving changes in our social structure… Have we the courage and the will to face up to the immorality and discrimination of the progressive tax, and demand a return to traditional proportionate taxation?...Today in our country the tax collector's share is 37 cents of every dollar earned. Freedom has never been so fragile, so close to slipping from our grasp…You and I are told we must choose between a left or right, but I suggest there is no such thing as a left or right. There is only an up or down. Up to man's age-old dream -- the maximum of individual freedom consistent with order -- or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism. Regardless of their sincerity, their humanitarian motives, those who would sacrifice freedom for security have embarked on this downward path… You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We will preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we will sentence them to take the first step into a thousand years of darkness. If we fail, at least let our children and our children's children say of us we justified our brief moment here. We did all that could be done." Phyllis Schlafly recalled that Reagan's speech "just went through the country like electricity. As soon as it was shown on television, all of these unorganized grassrooters went around raising their last dollar to keep putting it on again."
  
• 10/27/1964 LBJ campaign speech: "There is and will be, as long as I am president, peace for all Americans."
  
• 10/27/1964 The JCS sent a memo to McNamara warning that US military action had to be taken to shore up the Saigon regime.
  
• 10/28/1964 LBJ campaign speech: "The only real issue in this campaign, the only one you ought to be concerned about, is who can best keep the peace."
  
• 10/28/1964 Washington -- J. Edgar Hoover criticized for sending flowers to Walter Jenkins, White House Aide [See AP World in 1964, pp. 182, 185; Hoover, 1/14/66]. Who hospitalized after arrest on morals charge. Critics mostly right-wingers who formerly among Hoover s more ardent admirers. New York Times. Minneapolis - Former Representative Walter Judd alarmed by report J. Edgar Hoover sent flowers to Walter Jenkins after latter hospitalized following arrest on morals charge. [10/7, AP, The World in 1964, p. 182]. Says "the public wonders if these has been some sort of impropriety involving FBI agents. That would be devastating." Called on J. Edgar Hoover to explain the flowers. AP
  
• 10/1964 Iraq: After going underground, police found Saddam Hussein and after a vicious shootout he was arrested and jailed.
  

• 11/1964 In this month's Harpers magazine was the famous essay, "The Paranoid Style of American Politics," by historian and public intellectual Richard Hofstadter. Appearing in the wake of President John F. Kennedy's assassination and Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater's Republican presidential nomination, the tract remains emblematic of liberal anxiety toward serious and in many cases unresolved questions regarding the forces behind American governance. "The Paranoid Style" overall helped establish the term "conspiracy theory" as perhaps the most powerful epithet in the American political lexicon. "American politics has often been an arena for angry minds," Hofstadter wrote. "In recent years, we have seen angry minds at work, mainly among extreme right-wingers, who have now demonstrated, in the Goldwater movement, how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority. But, behind this, I believe, there is a style of mind that is far from new, and that is not necessarily right-wing. I call it the paranoid style, simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind."
  
• 11/1964 This month's issue of Readers Digest, Nixon wrote an article ("Cuba, Castro and John F. Kennedy") about his involvement with the anti-Castro programs. He discussed his meeting with Castro 4/1960: "After 3 1/2 hours of discussion, I summed up my impressions in this way - he looked like a revolutionary, talked like an idealistic college professor and reacted like a communist...At the conclusion of our conference I wrote a four-page secret memorandum, and sent copies to President Eisenhower, Secretary Herter and Allen Dulles...My conclusion was, 'Castro is either incredible naive about communism or is under communist discipline.'" Nixon says that most of the State Dept did not view Castro as a communist. "By early 1960 President Eisenhower reached the conclusion that Castro was an agent of international communism and a menace to peace in this hemisphere. In a top-secret meeting in his office, at which I was present, he authorized the CIA to organize and train Cuban exiles for the eventual purpose of freeing their homeland from Castro's communist rule." Nixon recalled that he had to appear "soft" on Cuba during the presidential debates with JFK to protect the security of the invasion. "...as had happened in the Eisenhower administration, a sharp difference of opinion about Castro developed among President Kennedy's advisers. One group of activists urged him to go forward with the invasion plan. His liberal advisers...advised that the United States should either try to get along with Castro or find some other method of dealing with him...in the end the soft-liners won their point and, by last-minute compromises, doomed the operation to failure." He met with Allen Dulles during the landing, and Dulles told him "Everything is lost. The Cuban invasion is a total failure."
  
• 11/1/1964 The VC attacked Bien Hoa air base outside Saigon with artillery. After inflicting substantial damage and casualties on US forces (4 dead, 12 wounded), they withdrew undetected. JCS chairman Wheeler told McNamara that if LBJ wouldn't escalate in Vietnam, then withdrawal was the only other possibility. Taylor recommended a retaliatory air strike, but LBJ refused.
  
• 11/2/1964 LBJ sets up a working group under Assistant Secretary of State William Bundy to review the Vietnam War policy alternatives. It included Vice Adm. Lloyd M. Mustin, CIA man Harold Ford, and John T. McNaughton. The Working Group will eventually conclude: "We cannot guarantee to maintain a noncommunist South Vietnam short of committing ourselves to whatever military action would be required to defeat North Vietnam and probably Communist China militarily. Such a commitment would involve high risks of a major conflict in Asia, which could not be confined to air and naval action but would almost inevitably involve a Korean-scale ground action and possibly even the use of nuclear weapons at some point."
  
• 11/2/1964 Lawyer Vincent Salandria writes an extensive criticism of the Warren Report in The Legal Intelligencer.
  
• 11/2/1964 A Measure of the Achievement Herbert L. Packer The Nation, 2 November 1964 (an article defending the WC)
  
• 11/3/1964 LBJ elected over Goldwater by 61% to 38.5% margin. The 89th Congress contained 68 Democrats in the Senate and 295 in the House (with 140 Republicans, a loss of 38 for the GOP). The GOP lost 2 Senate seats, but picked up a net gain of one governor's seat. 91 new Democrats were elected to Congress that year; voter turnout was 62%. LBJ got 43 million votes (486 electoral) to Goldwater's 27 million (52 electoral); Eric Hass (Socialist-Labor) got 45,187 votes; Clifton DeBarry (Socialist Workers) got 32,701; Other 258,794. The two parties spent a total of $37.5 million on the presidential race. Newcomers in Congress included Sens. Harry Byrd Jr., former film star George Murphy. In the Georgia House of Representatives, Julian Bond (a black civil rights leader) won a seat but was blocked from taking office because of his opposition to the Vietnam War. The Supreme Court would rule 12/5/1966 that Bond's rights had been violated.
  
• 11/3/1964 Maxwell Taylor told McNamara that he feared the JCS was moving away from the principle of having the South Vietnamese "fight their own war."
  
• 11/3/1964 A high-level committee headed by William Bundy met, and recommended bombing of North Vietnam.
  
• 11/4/1964 James Reston wrote in the NYT: "Barry Goldwater has not only lost the Republican election yesterday, but the conservative cause as well. He has wrecked his party for a long time to come..."
  
• 11/4/1964 Discussing LBJ's choices following election, asks: "Will the attorney general regain control over the communications of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, or will the FBI retain the independent access it has had to the White House for the last ten months?" New York Times, James Reston
  
• 11/4/1964 Louis Farrakhan, known now as Louis X, makes the following statement in an issue of Muhammad Speaks: "The die is set, and Malcolm [X] shall not escape, especially after such evil, foolish talk about his benefactor, Elijah Muhammad, in trying to rob him of the divine glory which Allah had bestowed upon him. Such a man as Malcolm is worthy of death, and would have met with death if it had not been for Muhammad's confidence in Allah for victory over his enemies."
  
• 11/8/1964 The Meridian (Miss.) Star recommended to citizens that they not talk to FBI agents. But numerous Mississippians did talk, including hundreds of Klansmen.
  
• 11/10/1964 Oakland Tribune's Warren Duffee quoted Nixon in an interview as saying that the GOP had "gone too far right" and should move to the center. "I will discourage - I will not tolerate - any activity on behalf of myself by anyone else for 1968."
  
• 11/10/1964 Bundy's working group wrote a draft report that concluded that full military escalation to save Saigon could be very costly, and would require ground troops.
  
• 11/18/1964 DeLoach memo to Hoover, expressing LBJ's concern that some of RFK's people who worked on his Senate campaign were being re-employed at the Justice Department.
  
• 11/18/1964 J. Edgar Hoover summons a contingent of the Women's National Press Club, and, after rambling through chapter and verse to repudiate the notion that the Bureau has done nothing in the civil rights field, refers to Martin Luther King's complaints in 1962 "In view of King's attitude and his continued criticism of the FBI on this point," Hoover says, "I consider King to be the most notorious liar in the country." Off the record, he stated, "He is one of the lowest characters in the country."(Church report) Later this month, LBJ will personally contact Hoover and order him to patch things up with King. Hoover also charges the Warren Commission with "a classic case of Monday morning quarterbacking" for daring to criticize the FBI.
  
• 11/18/1964 AP, Houston - Aaron Henry, NAACP leader, says FBI agents in south general not in sympathy with civil rights. "I'll go farther than that. J. Edgar Hoover himself is not in tune with civil rights."
  
• 11/19/1964 Major media report J. Edgar Hoover calling Martin Luther King, Jr. "most notorious liar in-the country." Washington Post quoted Hoover saying that he didn't like "wet nursing" those "who go down to reform the South."
  
• 11/19/1964 McNamara announced the further closing of 95 military bases and installations which would save $477 million a year.
  
• 11/20/1964 NY Times quoted King's reponse to Hoover: "I cannot conceive of Mr. Hoover making a statement like this without being under extreme pressure. He has apparently faltered under the awesome burden, complexities and responsibilities of his office."
  
• 11/20/1964 UPI Atlanta - Dr. Martin Luther King said yesterday that J. Edgar Hoover "has apparently faltered under the awesome burden, complexities and responsibilities of his office." See also Chronicle editorial same date, also New York Times version of story, same date. Times editorial, calls for J. Edgar Hoover's retirement. San Francisco Chronicle, UPI
  
• 11/20/1964 THE STATE OF TEXAS vs. JACK RUBENSTEIN -- Defense counsel files fourth motion for extension of time to file statement of facts. Judge Brown grants ten-day extension. Judge Brown also signs statement of facts.
  
• 11/20/1964 In San Marcos, Texas, President Johnson makes a speech at Southwest Texas State Teachers College where he once worked his way to a college degree as a student and part-time janitor. He says: "I have traveled a long way from this college to the office I now occupy. In few times -- yes, in few nations, in man's journey, has it been possible for any man to travel such a road."
  
• 11/20/1964 Hoover lashed out in an internal memo to the Bureau's number three man, Deputy Associate Director Alan Belmont: 'I can't understand why we are unable to get the true facts before the public. We can't even get our accomplishments published. We are never taking the aggressive, but above lies [i.e., King's charges against the Bureau and Hoover] remain unanswered.' Later that same dayand it would be reasonable to surmise it was in response to Hoover's outburstSullivan slipped a piece of untraceable unwatermarked paper into an old, also untraceable, typewriter, and composed and crudely typed a letter to King: "King, look into your heart. You know, you are a complete fraud and a greater liability to all of us Negroes. White people in this country have enough frauds of their own but I am sure they don't have one at this time that is anywhere near your equal. You are no clergyman and you know it. I repeat that you are a colossal fraud and an evil, vicious one at that….King, like all frauds your end is approaching. You could have been our greatest leader….But you are done. Your honorary degrees, your Nobel Prize (what a grim farce) and other awards will not save you. King, I repeat you are done….The American public, the church organizations that have been helpingProtestants, Catholics and Jews will know you for what you arean evil beast. So will others who have backed you. You are done. King, there is only one thing left for you to do. You know what it is. You have just 34 days in which to do (this exact number has been selected for a specific reason, it has definite practical significance). You are done. There is but one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy fraudulent self is bared to the nation." When he had finished typing, Sullivan placed the note in a package containing a reel of tape. Earlier that day, Sullivan had had the FBI labs prepare a composite tape of the most salacious episodes recorded by microphones hidden in King's hotel. The tape contained bawdy conversations between King and his friends, sexual conversations between King and several different female sexual partners, and soundsmattress creaking, groans and criesassociated with sexual intercourse. The next morning Sullivan handed the package to an agent, told him to fly to Miami, and mail the package to King at his Atlanta SCLC office. The package was opened, as it happened, by King's wife Coretta. She often received recordings of King's speeches, and assumed that this was another. She listened to part of it, quickly recognizing that this was something different, and then she read the threatening note. She called King. Then she, King, Ralph Abernathy, Andrew Young and Joseph Lowery listened to it all. They immediately realized that the source had to be the FBI. Some of King's friends thought the purpose had been to blackmail King into declining the Nobel Prize. Others thought the tapes were intended to goad Coretta into divorcing King. A third theory, and the most plausible, was that Sullivan was trying to put the thought of suicide in King's mind. 'They are out to break me,' King said. 'They are out to get me, harass me, break my spirit.' He was right. The FBI was trying to destroy him, cruelly using 'the content of his character' against him. And even after King's death, the Bureau continued its assault on his name and memory. Whenever there were calls to honor the fallen civil rights leader, Hoover was sure to counter with an unsolicited missive alluding to King's character flaws and his associations with Communists.
  
• 11/21/1964 Four Days in November debuted today in American theaters. A two-hour, high-quality documentary produced and directed by Mel Stuart for David Wolper productions. Narrated by Richard Basehart, score by Elmer Bernstein, made up mostly of newsreel footage, with some recreations in Dallas to simulate Oswald's movements (the same manner as the film Rise and Fall of the Third Reich). Sylvia Meagher saw the film several times; "On viewing the picture for the first time in 1965, I was impressed by the quality, volume and variety of the sound track: it seemed exactly as if one were hearing the event in person, standing right there or riding in the motorcade. And when the Presidential car turned on to Elm Street in the newsreel, I expected, with rising excitement, to hear the actual 'crack!' of the first shot. Instead, both the film and the sound stopped abruptly, and a still photograph showing the President after he was shot in the head [the Moorman photo] was projected onto the screen...if the original unedited sound track recorded [other sounds]...why couldn't it resolve the problem of how many shots were fired, and of the interval between the shots?" (Accessories After the Fact p24-5) There is no mention of anyone hearing shots from the grassy knoll, and no footage is shown of people running in that direction; Four Days sticks closely to the official story. Film footage of the rifle being discovered is a highlight. (The film had a New York premiere on October 7, 1964, a month-and-a-half prior to its general USA release date.) "Four Days" received a significant amount of attention and was, in fact, nominated for an Academy Award (for "Best Documentary Feature" of 1964). Via several re-creations of the actual Dallas events (using some of the people who were directly involved, such as Buell Wesley Frazier, Linnie Mae Randle, Johnny Brewer, and William Whaley) Assassination footage shown: Orville Nix's films of the motorcade entering Dealey Plaza, the fatal head shot followed by Secret Service Agent Clint Hill climbing on top of the limousine and the post-shooting confusion at the Plaza; Mary Moorman's photo taken just a fraction of a second after the fatal shot. The Zapruder film is not shown.
  
• 11/21/1964 An FBI-drafted, anonymous letter was sent to MLK at the SCLC office in Atlanta, where his wife frequently opened the mail addressed to him: "King, look into your heart. You know you are a complete fraud and a great liability to all of us Negroes...You are no clergyman and you know it...you are a colossal fraud and an evil, vicious one at that. You could not believe in God and act as you do...you end is approaching...you are done. Your 'honorary' degrees, your Nobel Prize (what a grim farce) and other awards will not save you King..." The letter made reference to King's sexual activities and included a tape medley of surveillances from various hotel rooms. "The American public, the church organizations that have been helping...will know you for what you are - an evil, abnormal beast....there is only one thing left for you to do. You know what it is...There is but one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy, abnormal fraudulent self is bared to the nation." The letter stated he should kill himself before he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Belmont and Sullivan later told Curt Gentry that this was done because the FBI was concerned about King's adultery. (The Man and the Secrets 572) Some would later point out that Hoover had been guilty of sending "obscene" materials through the mails. But MLK would not find out about the mail until early January 1965, when his wife opened the box and called him about it.
  
• 11/22/1964 Richard Russell visits LBJ at his Texas ranch. They decide it's best that they don't go deer hunting today.
  
• 11/23/1964 Supreme Court overturned Louisiana District Attorney Jim Garrison's libel conviction on the ground that "speech concerning public affairs is more than self-expression; it is the essence of self-government."
  
• 11/23/1964 The 26 volumes of testimony and exhibits from the Warren Commission are released.
  
• 11/23/1964 LBJ lays a wreath on JFK's grave in Arlington.
  
• 11/24/1964 CIA reported that bombing would have little effect on North Vietnam because most of its economy was pre-industrial.
  
• 11/24/1964 Hoover gave a speech at Loyola and referred to "degenerates" in "pressure groups," a slap at MLK and the civil rights movement.
  
• 11/25/1964 The Senate Intelligence Committee disclosed in the mid-'70s that on this day the Washington bureau chief of a "national news publication" told Nicholas B. Katzenbach that one of his reporters had been approached by the FBI and offered tapes of MLK. Katzenbach and Burke Marshall were so shocked, they flew to LBJ's ranch and told him about it.
  
• 11/25/1964 AP: Washington - The Secret Service investigated 34 Texas-based threats against President John F. Kennedy in the two years before his assassination in Dallas, Warren Commission testimony revealed. Among them:… An informant's claim that a man had told a bridge party he would donate $1,000 toward the assassination of the President.… An alleged statement by an auxiliary deputy sheriff in Houston that Kennedy should be "gotten rid of." ...
  
• 11/25/1964 The NYT Times instant analysis of the more than 10 million words contained in the WC volumes brought the premature observation that their publication by the Warren Commission "brings to a close its inquiry, at once monumental and meticulous." Within a month, again in collaboration with Bantam, the Times published The Witnesses, consisting of "highlights" of the hearings before the Warren Commission, prepared by "a group of editors and reporters of The New York Times." The Witnesses included the affidavit of Arnold Rowland stating that he had observed a man with a rifle on the 6th floor of the Texas School Book Depository before the assassination, but not his testimony in which he stated that he had actually seen two men, and that the FBI had told him to "forget it," and in which he stated his opinion that the source of the shots had been the railroad yards in front of the President. Omitted from the testimony of amateur photographer Abraham Zapruder was his statement that his immediate reaction was that the shots had come from behind him (in front of the President). Similar statements relating an immediate impression that the shots had come from the front were deleted from the excerpted testimony of David F. Powers, a special assistant to the President, and Secret Service Agent Forest V. Sorrels, as it appeared in The Witnesses.
  
• 11/27/1964 NY Times reported Sen. Russell as saying, "We either have to get out or take some action to help the Vietnamese. They won't help themselves. We made a big mistake in going in there, but I can't figure out any way to get out without scaring the rest of the world."
  
• 11/27/1964 DeLoach memo to John Mohr; Roy Wilkins came to see DeLoach today, asking the FBI not to release any damaging information about King's private life. DeLoach told him that "King had organized a bitter crusade against the Director and the FBI" and that Hoover otherwise "sympathized with the civil rights movement...we deeply and bitterly resented the lies and falsehoods told by King and that if King wanted war we certainly would give it to him...Wilkins...will attempt to see King, along with other Negro leaders, and tell King he can't possibly win in any battle with the FBI and that the best thing for him to do is retire from public life." On November 27, Roy Wilkins was told by Cartha DeLoach that if King wanted "war" the FBI was prepared to engage in one, and the two of them discussed the FBI's "derogatory" material. Wilkins told DeLoach that if the FBI made it public, it could ruin the civil rights movement. Obviously Wilkins reported this back to King, and a number of leaders, including King, agreed to take steps to set up a meeting with the director.
  
• 11/27/1964 Washington - J. Edgar Hoover tells Betty Beale of Washington Star he has sworn off press conferences. [Miss Beale is wife of AP chief of bureau William L. Beale]. She also says J. Edgar Hoover explains his sending of flowers to Walter Jenkins was before he knew Jenkins was to be investigated on morals arrest charge. AP
  
• 11/30/1964 AP New York - Newsweek magazine says LBJ decided to replace J. Edgar Hoover. White House promptly denies it. Newsweek, discussing feud between RFK and J. Edgar Hoover, says J. Edgar Hoover never bothered to send note of regret to RFK when JFK assassinated. AP says FBI spokesman in Washington quotes note he claims J. Edgar Hoover did send.
  
• 11/30/1964 An account of J. Edgar Hoover's famous press conference in which he blasted Martin Luther King, Jr. as the most notorious liar in the country. Contains extensive verbatim quotes from reporter's notes. Also reaction from various quarters. Newsweek, Off the Chest and Into the Fire, p. 29 U.S. News &World Report version of J. Edgar Hoover's famous press conference 11/18. All quotes, possibly laundered. U.S. News &World Report, J. Edgar Hoover Speaks Out, p. 56
  
• 12/1964 Castro enlisted the help of Cuban Minister of Industry Ernesto "Che" Guevara, previously an opponent to dialogue, in what had become a Cuban diplomatic offensive for negotiations with the United States. During Guevara's December 1964 visit to the United Nations, he tried to arrange a secret meeting with a White House or State Department representative but was unsuccessful. Finally Guevara met with Senator Eugene McCarthy at Lisa Howard's apartment. The next day McCarthy reported to Under Secretary of State George Ball that Guevara's purpose was " to express Cuban interest in trade with the U.S. and U.S. recognition of the Castro regime. " Ball rewarded McCarthy by admonishing him for even meeting with Guevara, because there was " suspicion throughout Latin America that the U.S. might make a deal with Cuba behind the backs of the other American states. " Ball told McCarthy to say nothing publicly about the meeting. When Lyndon Johnson ignored this Cuban initiative as well, Castro gave up on him. He realized that John Kennedy's successor as president had no interest whatsoever in speaking with Fidel Castro, no matter what he had to say. (Kornbluth, JFK and Castro)
  
• 12/1964 McNamara went ahead with the shutdown of the Brooklyn Navy Yard in the face of protests by Senator-elector Robert Kennedy. (The Pentagon, Mollenhoff)
  
• 12/1964 In the 1970s, Fidel Castro reflected on a peculiar fact of Cold War history that related closely to the story of John Kennedy. Thanks to the decisions made by Khrushchev and Kennedy, "in the final balance Cuba was not invaded and there was no world war. We did not, therefore, have to suffer a war like Vietnam-because many Americans could ask themselves, why a war in Vietnam, thousands of miles away, why millions of tons of bombs dropped on Vietnam and not in Cuba? It was much more logical for the United States to do this to Cuba than to do it ten thousand kilometers away." (Frank Mankiewicz and Kirby Jones, With Fidel: A Portrait of Castro and Cuba (Chicago: Playboy Press, 1975), p. 173)
  
• 12/1964 Joan Baez leads six hundred people in an antiwar demonstration in San Francisco.
  
• 12/1964 In 1964 the US GNP was $622 billion. Prime rate of interest: 4.5%
  
• 12/1964 Who Killed Kennedy, a critical book by American expatriate Thomas Buchanan was already a best-seller in Europe by the end of 1964. In Britain, philosopher Bertrand Russell organized a "Who Killed Kennedy Committee" composed of some of the most influential members of the British intellectual community. In December 1964, Hugh Trevor-Roper, well-known British historian and Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford University, writing in The Sunday Times of London, accused the Warren Commission of setting up a smokescreen of irrelevant material while failing to ask elementary and essential questions. The WHO KILLED KENNEDY COMMITTEE was founded in 1964 in England; members included Lord Boyd Orr (former director-general of the UN Food Organization), Sir Compton Mackenzie, J.B. Priestley, Hugh Trevor-Roper, Kingsley Martin (former editor of the New Statesman), Michael Foot, Tony Richardson (the movie producer), Kenneth Tynan (writer and critic), and Bertrand Russell. Lord Russell announced that the group believed that "there has never been a more subversive, conspiratorial, unpatriotic or endangering course for the security of the United States and the world than the attempt by the United States Government to hide the murderer of its recent President."
  
• 12/1/1964 Harrisonburg, Virginia: a Mr. Burns saw a huge object cross the road, hover at ground level in a field for less than one minute, then take off vertically. There were other witnesses in the area. Some local college teachers measured strong radioactivity at the site, but Air Force investigators ridicule the witnesses as "nuts" and decided that their own equipment was malfunctioning when they took picked up radioactivity. (Forbidden Science p136)
  
• 12/1/1964 The Working Group met with LBJ, Hubert Humphrey and Max Taylor. Johnson decided to give Taylor one more chance to try to create a stable regime in Saigon; if that didn't work, then bombing would be the next step.
  
• 12/1/1964 FBI memo by Cartha DeLoach said: "Bill Moyers, while I was at the White House today, advised that word had gotten to the President this afternoon that [the newsman] was telling all over town...that the FBI had told him that Martin Luther King was [deleted.] [The newsman] according to Moyers had stated to several people that, 'If the FBI will do this to Martin Luther King, they will undoubtedly do it to anyone for personal reasons.' Moyers stated the President wanted to get this word to us so we would know not to trust [the newsman]." The newsman was later identified as Ben Bradlee. Moyers could later recall nothing of this episode. (It Didn't Start with Watergate 195-201)
  
• 12/1/1964 MLK, Ralph Abernathy, Dr. Andrew Young and Walter Fauntroy met with Hoover and DeLoach at FBI headquarters. LBJ had ordered Hoover to meet with King to patch things up. King was apologetic and conciliatory to Hoover, and expressed his concern about Communists in the civil rights movement; Hoover assured King he was doing all he could to help the movement in the South. (DeLoach memo to John Mohr 12/2/1964) By most accounts the two men were polite to each other, though in 1970 Hoover would create a wholly fictional account of the meeting for a Time reporter, claiming that he had repeatedly called King a liar. Hoover thought he had succeeded in charming King, but soon a wiretap picked up MLK remarking, "the old man talks too much." Sullivan would recall, "there was no hope for [King] after that." (The Man and the Secrets 575)
  
• 12/2/1964 Memo from William Sullivan to Belmont: Hoover ordered the tapes of MLK to be transcribed.
  
• 12/2/1964 Gov. Pat Brown orders police to arrest hundreds of students who took over Sproul Hall in protest of campus ban on political activity. (SF Chronicle 6/9/02)
  
• 12/3/1964 The Catholic Legion of Decency attacks the increasing number of Hollywood's "morally objectionable films."
  
• 12/4/1964 As part of the Free Speech Movement, most of the students at the University of Berkeley went on strike.
  
• 12/4/1964 FBI arrests 20, including the imperial wizard of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, Samuel Bowers Jr., Sheriff Lawrence Rainey and Deputy Sheriff Price for conspiring to violate the civil rights of the three slain workers.
  
• 12/4/1964 Tulsa, OK - ... [Melvin] Belli told reporters here he thought FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover had outlived any usefulness and charged Hoover with attempting to establish a police state.… Belli said he was "scared of this man. … I'm scared this man will knock at my door. The faster we get rid of him the better off we all are, the more securely we'll sleep in our homes …" AP
  
• 12/4/1964 AP - Washington - Interview with J. Edgar Hoover by Don Whitehead, retired, indicating J. Edgar Hoover has no intention of quitting, and why.
  
• 12/4/1964 WC staffer Joseph Ball, ACLU lawyer A.L. Wirin, and Herman Selvin (former president of the Los Angeles County Bar Association) met Mark Lane at the Beverly Hills High School. Though the terms of the debate were patently one-side, Lane agreed to it anyway. A reporter for KPFK-FM radio asked the participants if he could record the debate; everyone agreed, but at the end Ball tried to get the reporter to promise not to broadcast the recording. When the reporter protested, Ball shouted that he would sue his station. This was all caught on tape, and was broadcast on KPFK. Since then, he began avoiding public debates. A.L. Wirin, said, "I say thank God for Earl Warren. He saved us from a pogrom. He saved our nation. God bless him for what he has done in establishing that Oswald was the lone assassin." In response to a question from Lane, Wirin said that even if Oswald were innocent, Warren had done the right thing for the country. (Plausible Denial 52)
  
• 12/4/1964 Robert F. Kennedy and Burke Marshall interviewed by Anthony Lewis Dec 4 and 6.
  
• 12/5/1964 Drew Pearson - Account of J. Edgar Hoover interview with Martin Lather King, Jr., his understanding - and lack of it - of-the Negro and civil rights problem. San Francisco Chronicle
  
• 12/6/1964 In a letter to the editors of the New Haven Register, former Lt. (jg) John W. White of Cheshire, Connecticut wrote: "I maintain that President Johnson, Secretary McNamara and the Joint Chiefs of Staff gave false information to Congress in their report about US destroyers being attacked in the Gulf of Tonkin." He was an officer aboard the USS Pine Island which was the first ship to enter the war zone in response to the attack on the destroyers. "I recall clearly the confusing radio messages sent at that time by the destroyers confusing because the destroyers themselves were not certain they were being attacked. Granted that some North Vietnamese motor torpedo boats were in the area and using harassing maneuvers, the question is this: did they actually fire shells or torpedoes at US warships? The answer is no. I learned this by speaking with the chief sonarman of the Maddox who was in the sonar room during the attack.' He told me that his evaluation of the sonarscope picture was negative, meaning that no torpedoes were fired through the water, at the ship or otherwise. And he also said that he consistently reported this to the commanding officer during the attack.'"
  
• 12/7-9/1964 British PM Harold Wilson is in Washington; he was briefed on LBJ's plans to begin bombing North Vietnam in the near future. (Politics of Lying p48)
  
• 12/7/1964 None too gentle resume of the Bureau's and Hoover's history, pegged on J. Edgar Hoover's blasts at the Warren Commission and Martin Luther King, Jr.... Johnson had decided by last week that he must find a new chief for the FBI … The search is on ...... A friend recently cautioned Hoover not to go too far in his attacks on Martin Luther King, Jr. and other civil rights leaders. "They might get you," said the friend. "They might," said Hoover, "if I were gettable." Newsweek, J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI., p. 21
  
• 12/10/1964 Mark Lane lectured on the JFK assassination at University College, London.
  
• 12/10/1964 Bernard Fall delivered a lecture at the Naval War College on "The Theory and Practice of Insurgency and Counterinsurgency". He believed that the real objective of guerrilla (or small) war methods is to advance "an ideology or a political system". The US government saw fighting as the primary challenge and responded by seeking a military solution. In so doing, it misjudged the depth and extent of political action by the North Vietnamese and Vietcong - the primacy of "political, ideological and administrative" control - and thus the true nature of their "revolutionary warfare". Moreover, in failing to properly assess the political and ideological (nationalistic) forces at work in Vietnam, the Lyndon B Johnson and Richard Nixon administrations tended to mischaracterize (or ignore) the multitudinous economic and social cross-currents that were represented by those committed to the cause of Vietnam unification under Vietnamese leaders.
  
• 12/10/1964 MLK received the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, Norway.
  
• 12/11/1964 Soul singer Sam Cooke is shot and beaten to death by a woman who managed a motel in Los Angeles. Cooke allegedly broke into her office trying to find a woman he had fought with earlier that night.
  
• 12/11/1964 MLK said in a speech, "Those who pioneer in the struggle for peace and freedom will still be battered by the storms of persecution, leading them to nagging feelings that they can no longer bear such a heavy burden."
  
• 12/12/1964 Courtney Evans resigned from the FBI to take a job at the Justice Dept.
  
• 12/13/1964 New York Herald Tribune quoted Hoover: "Let me emphasize that the American civil-rights movement is not and has never been dominated by Communists - because the overwhelming majority of civil-rights leaders in this country…have recognized and rejected Communism as a menace to the freedom of all."
  
• 12/13/1964 Reporter Tad Szulc meets in New York City with Che Guevara for "several hours. On Che's eight-day trip to the UN this month, he also has secret meetings with Senator Eugene McCarthy and former ABC reporter Lisa Howard, who has told the White House "Che has something to say to us." Che's relationship to Castro is at a very low ebb.
  
• 12/14 or 4/1964 Hoover memo refers to "Adrian" Zapruder and mentions that the CIA would like to view the film "for training purposes." (Photographic Whitewash, Weisberg) J. Edgar Hoover wrote to J. Lee Rankin, saying the CIA requested the FBI copy of the film be loaned to them "solely for training purposes." Rankin contacted Time, and informed the FBI that Time would contact the CIA to make their own arrangements.(Trask)
  
• 12/14/1964 LBJ phone call with Katzenbach. LBJ wants to see if there is any legal way to get every American registered to vote automatically, and get 100% voter turnout in elections.
  
• 12/18/1964 The New York Herald Tribune reports: "Evidence and investigating reports used by the Warren commission have been stored in a special vault in the National Archives Building and will remain inaccessible to the public for 75 years. As a result, much of what was said off the record by some of the 552 witnesses during the investigation of President Kennedy's assassination may not be known in our lifetime.'" "The Kennedy assassination material will be stored in an inner vault equipped with highly sensitive electronic detection devices to guard against fire and theft ... The combination to the vault will be known by only two or three persons." Robert H. Bahmer, deputy archivist at the National Archives, was quoted in the New York Herald Tribune as saying "75 years was chosen as the declassification figure [for WC documents] because it is considered to be the life span of an individual." Several years after the Warren Commission publishes its Report and disbands, Earl Warren writes his memoirs. In a chapter devoted to the Commission's work, he writes the following: "Practically all the Cabinet members of President Kennedy's administration, along with Director J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI and Chief James Rowley of the Secret Service...testified that to their knowledge there was no sign of any conspiracy. To say now that these people, as well as the Commission, suppressed, neglected to unearth, or overlooked evidence of conspiracy would be an indictment of the entire government of the United States. It would mean the whole structure was absolutely corrupt from top to bottom..."
  
• 12/1964 During this month, LBJ writes to Jacqueline Kennedy concerning their continued correspondence saying: "I find it a selfish motive, but one over which my disciplines have no power: I enjoy reading a letter from you just for the sheer pleasure of hearing you speak on paper." He continues: "Time goes by too swiftly, my dear Jackie. But the day never goes by without some tremor of a memory or some edge of a feeling that reminds me of all that you and I went through together." He concludes: "Please let my young friends, Caroline and John, know they are loved by the Johnsons."
  
• 12/20/1964 Simon Wiesenthal, Nazi hunter, was the target of an unsuccessful assassination attempt in Austria.
  
• 12/21/1964 Aristotle Onassis is driven by his chauffeur onto a runway at Orlay Airport in Paris where an Olympic jet has just landed. There is only one passenger onboard - Jackie Kennedy. She by-passes customs and goes straight to Onassis's apartment for a secluded visit. She will return to the USA three months from now, and the same secret procedures will be followed. It is alleged that the two have seen each other at least 30 times since the death of JFK.
  
• 12/21/1964 US News reported that Goldwater was not going to try to dominate the party or dictate policy for the GOP.
  
• 12/21/1964 Newsweek quoted North Carolina governor Terry Sanford - responding to threats made by the Klan against businessmen who sponsored integrated Christmas parades - "I would urge all members of the KKK to read the Christmas story and the message of goodwill to all men contained in the Bible. In the meantime, I am instructing the State Highway Patrol to provide all aid necessary…If there are illegal acts on the part of the Ku Klux Klan, they will be prosecuted."
  
• 12/22/1964 Robert F. Kennedy and Burke Marshall interviewed by Anthony Lewis
  
• 12/23/1964 Five days after Che Guevara's eight-day trip to the UN, one of Eloy Menoyo's CIA files talks about the "imminent infiltration [into Cuba] of Cuban exiles allegedly involved in [Castro] assassination plots.
  
• 12/24/1964 VC kill two US soldiers in a bomb attack on the Brinks Hotel in Saigon. Max Taylor recommended bombing retaliation, but LBJ refused.
  
• 12/30/1964 LBJ cabled to Taylor that he was irritated with the JCS for constantly pushing a full-scale bombing campaign: "I have never felt that this war will be won from the air...What is much more needed and would be more effective is...appropriate military strength on the ground...I am ready to look with great favor on this kind of increased American effort."
  
• 12/31/1964 US military personnel in Vietnam now at 23,300. Max Taylor cabled that withdrawing support from Saigon, "an unreliable ally" might force the government there "to walk on its own legs and be responsible for its own stumbles."
  
• 12/31/1964 Malcolm X said in a speech, "Never at any time in the history of our people in this country have we made advances or progress in any way based upon the internal goodwill of this country. We have made advancement in this country only when this country was under pressure from forces above and beyond its control."
  

November 27 1963 (Wednesday)

November 28 (Thursday)

November 29 (Friday)