Deep Politics Timeline

[Peter Lemkin]

That just passed 800 pages, single spaced, on my computer! What % have you put up...and what else have you been doing with your life - if you had the time when not ordering these items? I see no way to re-order these posts on the Forum, and can't even think of a way to tell my computer to - other than by 'hand and mind'. Mostly, I have them in order, but a few are not...anyway, thanks!

Massive amount of work you did!!!!!

[Lauren Johnson]

That just passed 800 pages, single spaced, on my computer! What % have you put up...and what else have you been doing with your life - if you had the time when not ordering these items? I see no way to re-order these posts on the Forum, and can't even think of a way to tell my computer to - other than by 'hand and mind'. Mostly, I have them in order, but a few are not...anyway, thanks!

Massive amount of work you did!!!!!

I IM's TR a while back hoping this would all become a single file -- a .pdf maybe. He said that when he is done, he would do that.

This is amazing work indeed.

[Magda Hassan]

That just passed 800 pages, single spaced, on my computer! What % have you put up...and what else have you been doing with your life - if you had the time when not ordering these items? I see no way to re-order these posts on the Forum, and can't even think of a way to tell my computer to - other than by 'hand and mind'. Mostly, I have them in order, but a few are not...anyway, thanks!

Massive amount of work you did!!!!!

I IM's TR a while back hoping this would all become a single file -- a .pdf maybe. He said that when he is done, he would do that.

This is amazing work indeed.

Absolutely! An amazing amount of work and detail and collated in such a useful way for all to see. Big love to Tracy for this. ::

[Tracy Riddle]

That just passed 800 pages, single spaced, on my computer! What % have you put up...and what else have you been doing with your life - if you had the time when not ordering these items? I see no way to re-order these posts on the Forum, and can't even think of a way to tell my computer to - other than by 'hand and mind'. Mostly, I have them in order, but a few are not...anyway, thanks!

Massive amount of work you did!!!!!

Well, I'm a very fast typist, and some of this stuff was copied/pasted from various electronic sources. I've also been working on it since the early 90s.

I do have a life! :: I've always worked full-time (in Quality/Engineering/Manufacturing), I have a girlfriend (I'm a guy, in case my name misleads you), I'm a big music and film buff, and I like animals and gardening. But politics/history/world affairs have been a passion of mine since I was a teen.

[Tracy Riddle]

• This year, according to Gerry Patrick Hemming, a plan was put together regarding the possible assassination of Richard Nixon. "The only contact Hargraves had with federal agents [in Miami during 1970] was when I took him with me to brief Secret Service Special Agent Joseph Gasquez ["Protective Research"]. The briefing involved an "Op/Northwoods" type scheme, wherein Alpha-66 affiliated Cubans, operating together with previously corrupted skippers of Castro's PT Boat crews, were about to execute a preemptive strike! The plan involved using one or more of the Soviet supplied Cuban P-6 "Komar" PT Boats. The Cuban skippers would dupe the crews into multiple "shots over the horizon" [usually 10 to 15 nautical miles]. Said "Shots" would consist of "hot-launching" several "Styx" [NATO designation] missiles against the oceanfront Nixon "Presidential Compound" [located on Key Biscayne, Miami]. The Cuban PT skippers were promised asylum and monetary rewards."
  
• Lady Bird Johnson publishes White House Diary, an account of her years as First Lady. It reveals LBJ's unhappiness as president almost from the beginning, and the likelihood that he would not run for reelection in 1968.
  
• Personality-altering Prolexin administered to 1,093 inmates at Vacaville. Special Programs Unit behavior mod program begins at Joliet, Illinois, under Dr. Martin Groder. Bureau of Prisons requests funds for Federal Center for Correctional Research in Butner, North Carolina.
  
• Korean CIA undertakes a massive influence peddling campaign, eventually 50 congressmen accept bribes and links are make between the Nixon Administration and the Unification Church.
  
• 1970 Col. James A. Donovan (USMC, retired) publishes the book Militarism, USA: "Then there have been a large ration of war comic books devoured for years by the young and simple-minded. They have been generally violent, bloody, and concerned with the militant destruction of "Commies," "Reds," "Nazis," and all the other "bad guys" who threaten the "good guys" on our side. The images and attitudes created by the steady diet of this form of entertainment and the resulting beliefs formed in the immature minds of young generations are hard to define. The influence has probably been considerable." "Chauvinism is a proud and bellicose form of patriotism...which identifies numerous enemies who can only be dealt with through military power and which equates the national honor with military victory." "It has not been the uniformed military chieftains alone who have sponsored the new militarism. There is a new breed of civilian militants, creatures in part of a cold war and of the new technology, who figure prominently in national-security decision-making." "For the past 22 years, the nation's and the militarists' enemy has been 'aggressive communism', the product of the world-wide Communist conspiracy.... The military, for its part, always has to focus upon a potential enemy. Communist aggressors are the most convenient, current, and identifiable enemy. If there were no Communist bloc and no such enemy threat, the defense establishment would have to invent one." He says that the military-industrial complex is a conjunction of the immense defense establishment and the vast permanent arms industry. There is an additional complex of related interests which include reserves, veterans, scientists, university research centers, congressmen, local businesses, labor, professional publications, and even news media. As for the vast network of overseas bases: "Over the years, the real purposes of many of these overseas bases has changed from tactical and strategic locations of military value to elaborate American housing and logistic installations away from home. They provide locations and facilities for some units that would have no reason for existence if based in the United States, and they furnish justification for interesting and attractive overseas travel and adventure for the troops and their families."
  
• Early 1970s: NSA Develops Rhyolite' Satellite Surveillance System The NSA, following up on its successful pilot program of satellite-based intelligence gathering called "Canyon" (see 1968), develops a much more sophisticated satellite surveillance program called "Rhyolite." Rhyolite, later renamed "Aquacade," is a breakthrough in the world of signal intelligence (sigint). Most importantly, it can monitor microwave transmissions, used extensively by the Soviet Union for its most secure transmissions. Its possibilities, says one insider, are "mind-blowing." Britain's own security agency, GCHQ, is a full party to Rhyolite/Aquacade. Former Army sigint officer Owen Lewis recalls in 1997, "When Rhyolite came in, the take was so enormous that there was no way of handling it. Years of development and billions of dollars then went into developing systems capable of handling it." The NSA will pass much of the information it gathers to the GCHQ for transcription and analysis. Subsequently, the NSA will deploy new and even more sophisticated surveillance systems, code-named "Chalet" and "Vortex." In doing so, it constructs numerous listening stations on friendly foreign soil, including the Menwith Hill facility that will later become a linchpin of the satellite surveillance program known as Echelon (see February 27, 2000). The new programs will revitalize the lapsed sigint alliance between the US, Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand (see July 11, 2001). [Federation of American Scientists, 7/17/1997]
  

• 1/1-2/1970 Spiro Agnew visits Vietnam while on a tour of Asia.
  
• 1/5/1970 Joseph Yablonski, the defeated reform candidate for head of the United Mine Workers, and his wife and daughter were found murdered in their Pennsylvania home. 4 years later, UMW President Tony Boyle was convicted of ordering the killing. Joseph A. Yablonski, unsuccessful reform candidate to unseat "Tough Tony" Boyle as President of the United Mine Workers, was murdered, along with his wife and daughter, in their Clarksville, Pennsylvania home by assassins acting on Boyle's orders. Boyle was later convicted of the killing. West Virginia miners went on strike the following day in protest. On December 31, 1969, three hitmen shot Yablonski, his wife Margaret, and his 25-year-old daughter Charlotte, as they slept in the Yablonski home in Clarksville, Pennsylvania. The bodies were discovered on January 5, 1970, by Yablonski's son, Kenneth. The killings had been ordered by Boyle, who had demanded Yablonski's death on June 23, 1969, after a meeting with Yablonski at UMWA headquarters degenerated into a screaming match. In September 1969, UMWA executive council member Albert Pass received $20,000 from Boyle (who had embezzled the money from union funds) to hire gunmen to kill Yablonski. Paul Gilly, an out-of-work house painter and son-in-law of a minor UMWA official, and two drifters, Aubran Martin and Claude Vealey, agreed to do the job. The murder was postponed until after the election, however, to avoid suspicion falling on Boyle. After three aborted attempts to murder Yablonski, the killers did their job. But they left so many fingerprints behind, it took police only three days to catch them. A few hours after Yablonski's funeral, several of the miners who had supported Yablonski met in the basement of the church where the memorial service was held. They met with attorney Joseph Rauh and drew up plans to establish a reform caucus within the United Mine Workers. The day after the killing, 20,000 miners in West Virginia walked off the job in a one-day strike, convinced Boyle was responsible for the murders.
  
• 1/6/1970 Nixon announces a major diplomatic agreement with France that will curb heroin traffic.
  
• 1/9/1970 Memo from Nixon to Haldeman about the need to "sanitize the White House staff. You will recall my concern with regard to one of the offices where big pictures of Kennedy were in the office..."
  
• 1/11/1970 H. Ross Perot said on ABC's Issues and Answers, "I don't have any ambitions at all to run for office."
  
• 1/14/1970 Supreme Court sets deadline of 2/1 for desegregation of public schools.
  
• 1/14/1970 In his State of the Nation address to the Bundestag (similar to the U.S. presidents' State of the Union speech), Willy Brandt outlines his government's views on the Special Status of Berlin, and supports the Four-Power talks on improving conditions for West Berlin.
  
• 1/15/1970 Martin Luther King's birthday, not yet an official holiday, is honored by many across the nation.
  
• 1/19/1970 Nixon nominated G. Harrold Carswell of Florida to the Supreme Court.
  
• 1/19/1970 Agnew finishes his tour of Asia and the Pacific.
  
• 1/19/1970 Washington Post article: Sen. Richard Russell (former member of the Warren Commission) said he believed JFK was killed by a criminal conspiracy, and joined forces with researcher Harold Weisberg to have files declassified. Russell stated in the article "I think someone else worked with him [Oswald.] There were too many things - the fact that he was at Minsk and that was the principal center for educating Cuban students...some of the trips he made to Mexico City and a number of discrepancies in the evidence, or as to means of transportation, the luggage he had and whether or not anyone was with him - caused me to doubt that he planned it all by himself." Although professing to have not "the slightest doubt" that Oswald fired the fatal shots, Russell went beyond his 1966 remarks and stated flatly that he "never believed that Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated President Kennedy without at least some encouragement from others." Russell added: "I think someone else worked with him."
  
• 1/20/1970 Iraq: Attempted coup by rebel forces supported by Iran was put down.
  
• 1/20/1970 MEMORANDUM ADMINISTRATIVELY CONFIDENTIAL MEMORANDUM FOR: MR. HALDEMAN FROM: ALEXANDER P. BUTTERFIELD RE: A. Ernest Fitzgerald I may be "beating a dead horse" at this late date ... but it was only a few days ago that Alan Woods called to ask if we had arrived at any particular Administration line regarding Mr. A. E. Fitzgerald. And someone else (I can't remember who) asked the same question at about the same time. You'll recall that I relayed to you my personal comments while you were at San Clemente, but let me cite them once again -- partly for the record -- and partly because some of you with more political horse sense than I will probably want to review the matter prior to next Monday's press conference. * Fitzgerald is no doubt a top-notch cost expert, but he must be given very low marks in loyalty; and after all, loyalty is the name of the game. * Last May he slipped off alone to a meeting of the National Democratic Coalition and while there revealed to a senior AFL-CIO official (who happened to be unsympathetic) that he planned to "blow the whistle on the Air Force" by exposing to full public view that Service's "shoddy purchasing practices". Only a basic no-goodnik would take his official business grievances so far from normal channels. As imperfect as the Air Force and other military Services are, they very definitely do not go out of their way to waste government funds; in fact, quite to the contrary, they strive continuously (at least in spirit) to find new ways to economize. If McNamara did nothing else he made the Services more cost-conscious and introspective -- so I think it is safe to say that none of their bungling is malicious ... or even preconceived. * Upon leaving the Pentagon -- on his last official day -- he announced to the press that "contrary to recent newspaper reports" he was not going to work for the Federal Government, but instead, was going to "work on the outside" as a private consultant. * We should let him bleed, for a while at least. Any rush to pick him up and put him back on the Federal payroll would be tantamount to an admission of earlier wrong-doing on our part. * We owe "first choice on Fitzgerald" to Proxmire and others who tried so hard to make him a hero.
  
• 1/21/1970 Three men are arrested in connection with the Yablonski murder.
  
• 1/22/1970 Nixon, in his State of the Union message, calls for equality of opportunity, a responsive government, enviromental legislation, a guaranteed minimum income to replace welfare, and "an end to the war in Vietnam."
  
• 1/22/1970 US rejects Soviet proposals for Middle East peace.
  
• 1/24/1970 Human Events magazine, which had strongly supported Nixon in 1968, criticized him for offering more of the same Democratic big-government.
  
• 1/24/1970 Look magazine featured a cover story called "Billionaire Ross Perot: Can one Texan save the USA?"
  
• 1/30/1970 Seven Black Panthers are indicted for attempted murder by a Chicago grand jury.
  
• 1/30/1970 Guatemala: A state of siege was declared following the attempted assassination of a presidential candidate and the murder of a newspaper editor who opposed Communism.
  
• 1/31/1970 Arthur Burns becomes chairman of the Federal Reserve board. He is the first Jewish chairman in a post long held by Protestant bankers.
  
• 2/2/1970 Agnew, in a speech in St. Paul, Minnesota, accused the Democrats of "a weird desire to suck up the political support of organized dissidents."
  
• 2/2/1970 Pre-trial hearing for 13 Black Panthers in NYC opens.
  
• 2/2/1970 In a TV interview Sen. Richard Russell once again stated that he never believed Oswald acted alone, but a majority of the commissioners wanted to show that he had. (WSB-TV, Atlanta)
  
• 2/9/1970 Letter from Colson to David Bradshaw: "We are...prepared to go ahead with...a No. 2 man, Howard Hunt, if you approve."
  
• 2/10/1970 US, UK and France accept a Soviet proposal for four-power talks on Berlin.
  
• 2/12-17/1970 US and Soviet delegates discuss the peaceful use of nuclear explosions.
  
• 2/17/1970 Pat Buchanan memo about a meeting with Nixon; the president stated, in Buchanan's words, "The interest of the US policy in the Middle East is designed to advance the interests of the United States primarily. Those interests involve vital stakes in the Mediterranean and Iran; they involve oil interests in the Arab world..."
  
• 2/18/1970 The Chicago Seven - Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Tom Hayden, Rennie Davis, David Dellinger, Lee Weiner, and John Froines - were acquitted of conspiring to incite a riot at the 1968 convention. Hoffman, Hayden, Davis, Rubin and Dellinger are found guilty of a lesser charge of crossing state lines with the intent to incite a riot.
  
• 2/19/1970 Memo from John R. Brown to Ehrlichman: "The President noted that he thinks interest in this issue [concern about the environment] will recede."
  
• 2/20/1970 Kissinger opens secret peace talks in Paris.
  
• 2/23/1970 Nixon "action memo" to Colson instructed him to get moving on the "president's request that you develop a list of rich people with strong religious interest to be invited to the White House church services."
  
• 2/25 or 26/1970 anti-war demonstrators set fire to a Bank of America in Santa Barbara, California.
  
• 2/27/1970 Clay Shaw sues Jim Garrison and others for $5 million in damages.
  
• 3/1970 A U.S. intelligence officer passes a vial of African swine fever virus to a terrorist group. The vial is taken by fishing trawler to Navassa Island, which has been used in the past by the CIA as an advance base, and is smuggled into Cuba. Six weeks from now, Cuba suffers the first outbreak of swine fever in the Western Hemisphere; pig herds are decimated, causing a serious shortage of pork, the nation's dietary staple. The United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization will call it the "most alarming event" of the year and futilely tries to tack down "how the disease had been transmitted."
  
• 3/1970 Fortune magazine reported that during the 1968 campaign, the GOP spent $25 million, the Democrats spent $10.6 million, and Wallace $6.9 million. Big business, which had gone over to LBJ in '64, went back to the GOP in '68.
  
• 3/1970 Charles Maechling Jr. wrote in Foreign Service Journal: "President Kennedy and his brother regarded Vietnam...only as a counter in a larger game...they were totally devoid of the obsessive attitudes that characterized President Johnson under the influence of the 'hard-liners.'"
  
• 3/2/1970 Lockheed Aircraft Corp. appeals to the Defense Dept for interim funding.
  
• 3/4/1970 Nixon signs legislation delaying a nationwide railroad strike.
  
• 3/4/1970 SAN ANTONIO EXPRESS Army's Civilian Spying Said Ended - Army intelligence officers in San Antonio and elsewhere throughout the nation apparently were back conducting only military business Tuesday with the task of destroying computerized files on the political activities of civilians reportedly completed. The army last week ordered the information it collected in a computer the past three years on persons and organizations considered political activists, potential activists and potential participants in riots, destroyed. A Pentagon spokesman said Tuesday the army had completed destroying the files. "Now that the civil disturbance operation has been discontinued, it will give them (Army Intelligence) more time for conducting security clearances on military personnel," the spokesman reported. The order to destroy the information, fed into a computer, known as the "Databank of Domestic Political Activities," at Fort Holabird, Md., and supplied from seven Army intelligence units, including one located at Fort Sam Houston and downtown San Antonio, came after U.S. Rep. Cornelius Gallagher, D-N.J., informed the Army he would hold public hearings on the "validity and legality of such a program." The 112th Military Intelligence Group is located here and was the operation which relayed information to the Data Bank for the 112th Army area although it is not part of the 4th Army. The fact the San Antonio-based 112th was among those units feeding information on the political activities o f civilians from San Antonio was confirmed by Army General Counsel Robert E. Jordan III*, at the pentagon. Officers in the 112th at Fort Sam Houston and at their downtown offices at the 301 Building, at 301 Broadway (formerly the Manion Building), were unwilling to discuss their operation. They also refused to discuss why the 112th maintained downtown offices as well as a building at Fort Sam Houston, and newsmen were not allowed inside their second-floor downtown office. Meanwhile, San Antonio Chief of Police George Bichsel said there was no doubt in his mind same police information had been fed into the Data Bank files. "From time to time Military Intelligence has checked with the Department on various groups and we always have given them what we had," Bichsel said. "We share information with the FBI and if they wished they could have given the 112th this information," Bichsel added. He added that the Police Department did not "go around making reports" for the military, but just released information they asked for. Asked if photographs taken of protestors of multi-family housing in the Edgewood Independent School District outside the Lulac anniversary banquet last Saturday at the Gunter Hotel by policemen were taken for Military Intelligence, Bichsel said he was positive they were not. He said his department occasionally photographs individuals and groups involved in protests or demonstrations so the department would have a photo file available for its officers, if ever needed. "This does not imply they (demonstrators) are doing anything unlawful," Bichsel said.
  
• 3/5/1970 Lawrence F. O'Brien is elected Democratic national chairman.
  
• 3/6/1970 A Weathermen bomb factory explodes in a Greenwich Village townhouse.
  
• 3/8/1970 Makarios III, president of Cyprus, was the target of an unsuccessful assassination attempt in Nicosia. Polycarpos Georghadjis, ex-minister of interior, was thought to be involved.
  
• 3/9/1970 Haldeman memo to Nofziger: "In moving ahead on Operation O'Brien, we should push hard to get demands made that he disclose his clients and the nature of his affiliation with each. We should look for every opportunity to keep the heat on the DNC and O'Brien."
  
• 3/13/1970 Bobby Seale of the Black Panthers is extradicted from San Francisco to Connecticut.
  
• 3/16/1970 Lyn Nofziger memo to Haldeman: "It is obvious some of our appointees are collecting memos for use when: 1. they are fired. 2. they quit. 3. they want to embarass the President or members of his administration...Use the phone more and memos less...Fire the people in this administration who are opposed to the President. If this leaks, it proves my point."
  
• 3/16-22/1970 the New Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam sponsors a national "anti-draft week."
  
• 3/18/1970 Postal workers in NYC go out on strike for higher wages; it soon spreads to other cities and eventually involves 200,000 post office employees. The first mass work stoppage in the 195-year history of the Post Office Department began with a walkout of letter carriers in Brooklyn and Manhattan, soon involving 210,000 of the nation's 750,000 postal employees. With mail service virtually paralzyed in New York, Detroit, and Philadelphia, President Nixon declared a state of national emergency and assigned military units to New York City post offices. The stand-off culminated two weeks later.
  
• 3/18/1970 United Farm Workers forced California grape growers to sign an agreement after a five-year strike.
  
• 3/19/1970 First meeting of the heads of state of the two Germanies-- Willy Brandt for West Germany and Willi Stoph for East Germany, in the East German city of Erfurt.
  
• 3/21/1970 On or about this day, in response to Haldeman's instructions, Clark Mollenhoff sends Haldeman IRS tax information on George Wallace's brother, Gerald; Mollenhoff later stated that the request for this information originated with Nixon.
  
• 3/23/1970 Nixon orders troops to help move the mail in NYC because of a postal strike.
  
• 3/23/1970 A memo from Hoover to Asst Attorney General Richard McLaren; 3/19/1970 a representative of Howard Hughes told owners of the Dunes Hotel in Las Vegas that he had been given the go-ahead by the Antitrust Division of the Justice Dept to purchase the hotel. (Secret Files 110)
  
• 3/26/1970 Nixon signs a bill increasing G.I. educational monthly allowances.
  
• 3/26/1970 Ambassadors of the Four Powers meet in the Allied Control Authority Building (former German Supreme Court Building) for the first time since the start of the Berlin Blockade in 1948. As the building is in the American Sector of the divided city, they are guarded by U.S. Military Police, who in turn are guarded by the West Berlin city police. The symbolism is deep. The victorious Allied powers might actually be getting back on track to resolving issues left frozen two decades earlier. The U.S. Army's bomb squad searching the building found a forgotten collection of books, documents, maps that were gathered for the Allied staff who thought they might have to administer a broken, defeated Germany for years.
  
• 3/29/1970 Haynes Johnson of the Washington Post reported that Agnew "thinks the prospects for the Republican Party are tantalizing. America, he believes, is now witnessing the emergence of a new Republican majority."
  
• 3/29/1970 Northern Ireland: there were serious disturbances in Derry following a march to commemorate the Easter Rising. The British Army later established a cordon around parts of the Bogside.
  
• 4/2/1970 Mass. governor Francis Sargent signs a bill that challenges the legality of the Vietnam war.
  
• 4/7/1970 The drowning case of Mary Jo Kopechne is closed with no indictments.
  
• 4/9/1970 Nixon told the press that the Senate was discriminating against the South by refusing to confirm any nominee he chose from that region.
  
• 4/11/1970 Willy Brandt ends a week-long visit to the US.
  
• 4/11/1970 1:13pm (Houston time) Apollo 13 mission launched with James Lovell, John Swigert and FredHaise to land on the moon and collect samples of lunar soil. 3:48pm Translunar injection
  
• 4/12/1970 7:53 P.M. Mid-course correction burn to leave free-return trajectory
  
• 4/13/1970 Apollo 13, now a quarter million miles from Earth, suffers an explosion in one of the three oxygen tanks; the mission was aborted and the spacecraft headed back home. They had to use the engines of the lunar landing craft to provide propulsion.
  
• 8:24 P.M. Beginning of last TV transmission
  
• 9:07 P.M. Oxygen tank two explodes
  
• 10:50 P.M. Crew abandons Odyssey
  
• 4/13/1970 Jack Anderson article reveals the IRS investigation of the Wallaces; IRS Commissioner Randolph Towner later said that an IRS probe revealed that neither the IRS nor the Treasury Dept had leaked the information.
  
• 4/15/1970 Gerry Ford introduced a resolution in the House calling for William O. Douglas' impeachment. He cited a story Douglas had published in a "hard-core pornography" magazine, Evergreen Review. Actually, the article was an excerpt from Douglas's book Points of Rebellion. Ford also accused Douglas of having ties to the underworld. 12/1970 the House Judiciary Committee ruled that there was no evidence for impeachment, Ford charged that the investigation was a "whitewash."
  
• 4/16/1970 SALT talks resume in Vienna after a recess.
  
• 4/17/1970 Apollo 13 splashes down with the crew safe and sound.
  
• 4/17/1970 Asst Sec of State Joseph Sisco cancels his trip to Jordan after anti-US riots there.
  
• 4/17/1970 A group of Cuban exiles from the U.S. lands in Cuba in a failed raid.
  
• 4/20/1970 TIME: Nation: Another Death Plot? That conspiratorial army of would-be historians who specialize in the assassination of John Kennedy may have a brand-new plot to play with. In Chicago last week, Legal Researcher Sherman H. Skolnick filed suit in federal district court against the National Archives and Records Service to release certain documents. He contended that the archives had unlawfully squirreled away the details of a hitherto unknown plot or plots to kill J.F.K. at the Nov. 2, 1963, Army-Air Force game in Chicago, 20 days before his assassination by Lee Harvey Oswald. Quixotic as his quest may sound, Skolnick, who is a paraplegic, is not a man to be taken lightly. He is a well-known courtroom gadfly with a penchant for legal battles, and he played a key role in getting two Illinois Supreme Court judges to resign amid charges of conflict of interest brought by him (TIME, Aug. 29). Thus it was not surprising that people with information about the alleged plot sought him out to help make their case; among the informants is a former Secret Service agent. As Skolnick tells it, the Chicago assassination plot involved a supposed accomplice of Oswald's by the name of Thomas Arthur Vallee and three or four other men whose identities are uncertain. Their plan to kill the President had to be abandoned when Vallee, a lithographer, was picked up by Chicago police on a minor traffic violation on the day of the game. After spotting a hunting knife on the front seat of his car, the cops looked further and found a rifle. Vallee was put on probation for concealing a weapon; for the traffic violation he drew a $5 fine, which was suspended. He has since disappeared, as has the photograph that should be attached to his arrest card. Skolnick firmly believes that Oswald was somehow involved in Vallee's alleged plot. In an effort to prove it, he wants to see certain documents that the Warren Commission considered in making its report and then turned over to the archives, where they are to be kept secret for 75 years. Skolnick argues that the archives can prove that the 1962 Ford Falcon driven by Vallee was as he believeslinked to Oswald in some way or even registered in his name. Skolnick also maintains that the archives have Government documents showing that Klein's Sporting Goods Co. of Chicago had no receipt for the gun allegedly sent to Oswaldan allegation that raises the possibility that the weapon actually came from some other source. The Justice Department, however, has responded to Skolnick's suit with a "No comment," and National Archivist Marion Johnson claims that he has "seen no evidence in the records connecting Vallee to an assassination attempt." The Government has 60 days in which to answer the suit.
  
• 4/24/1970 Invited by Tricia Nixon to a White House tea party for alumni of Finch College, Grace Slick of the Jefferson Airplane shows up with her escort, Abbie Hoffman, who is not allowed on the premises by security. Slick later recalls that she was fully prepared to dose Nixon's tea with LSD.
  
• 4/30/1970 US invasion of Cambodia. Nixon gives a speech to the nation about his Cambodia policy.
  
• 4/30/1970 Howard Hunt officially retired from the CIA. He had pretended to leave the Agency twice before (in 1960 and 1965), though both times he was still on the CIA payroll. After this third departure, Richard Helms saw to it that Hunt received large no-interest personal "loans" from a special CIA fund, and wrote a personal recommendation for him that he be hired by the Washington-based Robert B. Mullen Company, itself a CIA front. The firm hired Hunt in May. (Secret Agenda p6) E. Howard Hunt "retires" from the CIA. He goes to work for Mullen & Company the next day. Mullen & Co., a Washington based "public relations" firm with offices across the street from the White House is headed by Robert Mullen, a one-time press aide to President Eisenhower who ran the Marshall Plan's propaganda arm. It has been asserted that Mullen & Co. works like an "arm" of the CIA.
  
• 4/1970 Aubrey Mayhew from Nashville, Tennessee, buys the Texas School Book Depository in Dallas, Texas for $650,000.00. The original owner of the property, D. Harold Byrd, wishes him "luck" and hopes he will make a lot of money. In his statement to news reporters, Byrd says he does not want to profit from the tragedy and that he has turned down a million dollar offer to turn the building into a lucrative attraction. Two years from now, in late July of 1972, Mayhew loses the building when the Republican National Bank forecloses on him. D. H. Byrd eventually buys the property back and finally sells it to the county.
  

[Tracy Riddle]

• 5/1970 Richard E. Sprague published the tramp arrest photos from Dealey Plaza in Computers and Automation magazine in May 1970. They had already been published in Penn Jones' book Forgive My Grief.
  
• 5/1970 A Gallup poll in May shows that 56% of the public believed that sending troops to Vietnam was a mistake.
  
• 5/1/1970 This night, at Kent State University in Ohio, a riot resulted in the ROTC building being torched. Gov. James Rhodes declared martial law at the University and sent in elements of the National Guard.
  
• 5/2/1970 Haig Orders Four More Wiretaps When the press reports the secret US-led invasion of Cambodia (see April 24-30, 1970) and the subsequent massive air strikes in that country, Alexander Haig, the military aide to National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger, notes that New York Times reporter William Beecher has been asking some suspiciously well-informed questions about the operation. Beecher's latest story also alerts Defense Secretary Melvin Laird to the bombings (Laird, whom Kissinger considers a hated rival, has been kept out of the loop on the bombings). Haig tells the FBI he suspects a "serious security violation" has taken place, and receives four new wiretaps: on Beecher; Laird's assistant Robert Pursley; Secretary of State William Rogers's assistant Richard Pederson; and Rogers's deputy, William Sullivan. [Reeves, 2001, pp. 212]
  
• 5/3/1970 Oil pipeline from Saudi Arabia to the Mediterranean Sea interrupted in Syria, creating all-time tanker rate highs from June to December. [In hindsight, this launched the Energy Crisis as an issue, as it demonstrated how easily Middle Eastern countries could gain attention or actual advantages by pressure on oil supplies. Not much later, these issues were to overlap into German events.]
  
• 5/4/1970 Wiretap placed on Beecher; it was removed 2/10/1971. Wiretap placed on William Sullivan (dep. asst for East Asian affairs); removed 2/10/1971. Wiretap placed on Richard Pederson (a State Dept employee), and a second tap placed on Pursley; both were ended 2/10/1971.
  
• 5/4/1970 Soviet PM Kosygin, in a public news conference, criticized Nixon for sending troops into Cambodia.
  
• 5/4/1970 At Ohio's Kent State University, National Guardsmen fire into a crowd of students protesting the Vietnam War, killing four and wounding eight others. J. Edgar Hoover privately says: "The students invited and got what they deserved." Upon hearing the news, Richard Nixon asks H. R. Haldeman, "Are they dead?" The guardsmen had been called in by Kent's mayor because of a night of rioting by drunken students and by Ohio's Governor. None of the four students who were killed were radicals. The Nixon administration's casual reaction to the shooting further enraged the students and campus violence escalated. The incident would inspire Neil Young to write the song "Ohio."
  
• 5/5/1970 Nationwide student strike protested the Kent State incident.
  
• 5/5-6/1970 More than 100 universities and colleges across the US are shut down by striking students. Gov. Reagan closes down the entire California university and college system until 5/11.
  
• 5/7/1970 Police informant William Somersett dies in Goldsboro, NC after a long illness. He is 68 years old.
  
• 5/7/1970 By the middle of this month, Aristotle Onassis is revisiting his former mistress, Maria Callas - spending almost a week with her in her Paris apartment. He has told his wife, Jackie: "I will do exactly as I please."
  
• 5/8/1970 More than 250 State Dept employees sign a letter to Sec of State Rogers protesting the Cambodia invasion.
  
• 5/8/1970 Earl Warren attended church services memorializing the dead students at Kent State.
  
• 5/8/1970 The Chicago Seven are freed with all charges against them dropped.
  
• 5/8/1970 Ten days after Nixon announced the Cambodian invasion (and 4 days after the Kent State shootings), 100,000 protesters gathered in Washington and another 150,000 in San Francisco. Nationwide, students turned their anger on what was often the nearest military facilitycollege and university Reserve Officers' Training Corps (ROTC) offices. All told, 30 ROTC buildings went up in flames or were bombed. There were violent clashes between students and police at 26 schools and National Guard units were mobilized on 21 campuses in 16 states. For the most part, however, the protests were peaceful if often tense. Students at New York University, for example, hung a banner out of a window which read "They Can't Kill Us All." The protests and strikes had a dramatic impact, and convinced many Americans, particularly within the administration of President Richard Nixon, that the nation was on the verge of insurrection. Ray Price, Nixon's chief speechwriter from 196974, recalled the Washington demonstrations saying, "The city was an armed camp. The mobs were smashing windows, slashing tires, dragging parked cars into intersections, even throwing bedsprings off overpasses into the traffic down below. This was the quote, student protest. That's not student protest, that's civil war." Not only was Nixon taken to Camp David for two days for his own protection, but Charles Colson (Counsel to President Nixon from 1969 to 1973) stated that the military was called up to protect the administration from the angry students, he recalled that "The 82nd Airborne was in the basement of the executive office building, so I went down just to talk to some of the guys and walk among them, and they're lying on the floor leaning on their packs and their helmets and their cartridge belts and their rifles cocked and you're thinking, 'This can't be the United States of America. This is not the greatest free democracy in the world. This is a nation at war with itself.'" Anti-war students marched through Wall Street, where Mayor Lindsay had ordered the flag at City Hall to fly at half-staff in honor of the students killed at Kent State; hard-hat construction workers beat up the students while police watched, shouting, "All the way, USA," then raised the flag to full-staff.
  
• 5/9/1970 UAW leader Walter P. Reuther, his wife May, architect Oscar Stonorov, and also a bodyguard, the pilot and co-pilot were killed when their chartered Lear-Jet crashed in flames at 9:33 P.M. Michigan time. The plane, arriving from Detroit in rain and fog, was on final approach to the Pellston, Michigan, airstrip near the union's recreational and educational facility at Black Lake, Michigan. In October 1968, a year and a half before the fatal crash, Reuther and his brother Victor were almost killed in a small private plane as it approached Dulles airport. Both incidents are amazingly similar; the altimeter in the fatal crash was believed to have malfunctioned. When Victor Reuther was interviewed many years after the fatal crash he said "I and other family members are convinced that both the fatal crash and the near fatal one in 1968 were not accidental." The FBI still refuses to turn over nearly 200 pages of documents pertaining to Walter Reuther's death, and correspondence between field offices and J. Edgar Hoover.
  
• 5/9/1970 President Richard Nixon had a middle-of-the-night impromptu, brief meeting with protesters preparing to march against the Vietnam War just days after the Kent State shootings. As historian Stanley Karnow reported in his Vietnam: A History, on May 9, 1970 the President appeared at 4:15 a.m. on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial to discuss the war with 30 student dissidents who were conducting a vigil there. Nixon "treated them to a clumsy and condescending monologue, which he made public in an awkward attempt to display his benevolence." Nixon had been trailed by White House Deputy for Domestic Affairs Egil Krogh, who saw it differently than Karnow, saying, "I thought it was a very significant and major effort to reach out." In any regard, neither side could convince the other and after meeting with the students Nixon expressed that those in the anti-war movement were the pawns of foreign communists. After the student protests, Nixon asked H. R. Haldeman to consider the Huston Plan, which would have used illegal procedures to gather information on the leaders of the anti-war movement. Only the resistance of FBI head J. Edgar Hoover stopped the plan.
  
• 5/10/1970 Haig met with William Sullivan about the taps.
  
• 5/10/1970 Cuban exiles and two U.S. citizens infiltrate Cuba and are captured.
  
• 5/11/1970 2000 construction workers marched through Wall Street supporting Nixon and the war.
  
• 5/11/1970 Senate takes first steps to approve an amendment by Sens. John Sherman Cooper and Frank Church forbidding any more US military operations in Cambodia.
  
• 5/12/1970 Murray Chotiner memo to Haldeman, saying he was looking systematically into O'Brien's activities.
  
• 5/12/1970 A race riot occurs in Augusta, Georgia. Six African Americans are killed. Authorities say five of the victims were shot by police.
  
• 5/13/1970 Wiretap placed on phone of William Lake (a Muskie adviser); removed 2/10/1971. Wiretap placed on Winston Lord of the NSC, removed 2/10/1971. At a meeting of Nixon, Hoover and Haldeman, FBI agrees to begin sending wiretap summaries only to Haldeman. Haig would later say he could not recall the Lord and Lake taps.
  
• 5/13/1970 Memo from Nixon to Haldeman on his visit to the Lincoln Memorial: he told the students that the problems of race, poverty and the plight of the American Indian had to be dealt with, the enviroment must be protected, nuclear arms must be limited, and China must be opened up to the rest of the world. "For the next 25 years the world is going to get much smaller...it is vitally important that you know and appreciate and understand people everywhere..." (Secret Files 127)
  
• 5/13/1970 Memo from Nixon to Haldeman complaining about news media bias, though "the President has taken all this with good grace." He also complained about Democratic policy makers "that got us into Vietnam" now criticizing his war policies.
  
• 5/14/1970 Colson memo to Nixon, assuring him that he had the constitutional authority to intervene in Cambodia.
  
• 5/14/1970 In the second day of violent protests at the mostly-black school of Jackson State College, Miss., state law enforcement officials fire into a crowd of bottle- and rock-throwing youths, killing two
  
• 5/15/1970 Congress is deluged with mail and telegrams opposing involvement in Cambodia.
  
• 5/18/1970 Hoover memo: "Spiro Agnew called...to see whether I could be of some assistance. He said he was really concerned about the continuing inflammatory pronouncements of Ralph Abernathy. I commented that he is one of the worst. The Vice President said he had seen some of the background material on him and he knows what that is, but it is beyond the pale as far as executive use is concerned...he thought he was going to have to start destroying Abernathy's credentials so anything I can give him would be appreciated. I told him I would be glad to. I said I was the only one who spoke out against Martin Luther King and I got hell, but I did not give a damn because it is more like bouquets than brickbats from some people."
  
• 5/20/1970 Colson memo to Harry Dent, urging that the South Dakota GOP work on getting "a constitutional amendment on the ballot this fall to provide for a recall...which means that as soon as it became law a petition campaign could be started to recall McGovern." (Secret Files 139)
  
• 5/20/1970 NYC: 100,000 construction workers, dockmen and office workers march in support of the war.
  
• 5/26/1970 22 union leaders, mostly from the building trades, met with Nixon at the White House and presented him with a hard-hat labeled "Commander in Chief."
  
• 5/29/1970 Pedro Eugenio Arambaru, former president of Argentina, was abducted and murdered by terrorists whose demands for freeing political inmates were denied.
  
• 5/31/1970 (AP 11/16/05): Even after Richard Nixon's secret war in Cambodia became known, the president persisted in deception. "Publicly, we say one thing," he told aides. "Actually, we do another." Newly declassified documents from the Nixon years shed light on the Vietnam War, the struggle with the Soviet Union for global influence and a president who tried not to let public and congressional opinion get in his way. They also show an administration determined to win re-election in 1972, with Nixon aides seeking ways to use Jimmy Hoffa to tap into the labor movement. The former Teamsters president had been pardoned by Nixon in 1971. The release Wednesday of some 50,000 pages by the National Archives means about half the national security files from the Nixon era now are public. On May 31, 1970, a month after Nixon went on TV to defend the previously secret U.S. bombings and troop movements in Cambodia, asserting that he would not let his nation become "a pitiful, helpless giant," the president met his top military and national security aides at the Western White House in San Clemente, Calif. Revelation of the operation had sparked protests and congressional action against what many lawmakers from both parties considered an illegal war. Nixon noted that Americans believed the Cambodian operation was "all but over," even as 14,000 troops were engaged across the border in a hunt for North Vietnamese operating there. In a memo from the meeting marked "Eyes Only, Top Secret Sensitive," Nixon told his military men to continue doing what was necessary in Cambodia, but to say for public consumption that the United States was merely providing support to South Vietnamese forces when necessary to protect U.S. troops. "That is what we will say publicly," he asserted. "But now, let's talk about what we will actually do." He instructed: "I want you to put the air in there and not spare the horses. Do not withdraw for domestic reasons but only for military reasons." "We have taken all the heat on this one." He went on: "Just do it. Don't come back and ask permission each time." The military chiefs, more than their civilian bosses, expressed worry about how the war was going. "If the enemy is allowed to recover this time, we are through," said Adm. Thomas H. Moorer, the naval operations chief who two months later would become chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Nixon told his aides to plan offensive operations in neutral Laos, continue U.S. air operations in Cambodia and work on a summer offensive in South Vietnam. "We cannot sit here and let the enemy believe that Cambodia is our last gasp." The papers also are thick with minute aspects of Vietnam war-making and diplomacy. They show growing worries about the ability of the South Vietnamese government years before it fell, but also seek encouragement wherever it could be found. One May 1970 cable marked "For Confidential Eyes Only" provided national security adviser Henry Kissinger with an inventory of captured weapons, supplies and food. It noted, for example, that the 1,652.5 tons of rice seized so far would "feed over 6,000 enemy soldiers for a full year at the full ration." The papers also show concern that superpower rivalry would take a dangerous turn if events in the Middle East got out of hand. Israel's secretive nuclear program quietly alarmed Washington. One U.S. official, reporting to Secretary of State William Rogers in 1969, said Israel's public and private assurances that it would not introduce nuclear weapons to the Middle East could not be believed. The memo by undersecretary Joseph J. Sisco said U.S. intelligence believed "Israel is rapidly developing a capability to produce and deploy nuclear weapons," and this could spark a Middle East nuclear arms race drawing Arab nations under a Soviet "nuclear umbrella." Sisco's memo foresaw a chain of troubles if Israel could not be restrained. "Israel's possession of nuclear weapons would do nothing to deter Arab guerrilla warfare or reduce Arab irrationality; on the contrary it would add a dangerous new element to Arab-Israeli hostility with added risk of confrontation between the U.S. and U.S.S.R," Sisco said. To this day, Israel officially neither confirms nor denies its nuclear status and the actual size of its stockpile remains uncertain. But it has long been considered the only nation in the Middle East with atomic weapons. "For a long time, the U.S. kept secret its assessment of the status of the Israeli nuclear program," said William Burr, senior analyst at the National Security Archives at George Washington University. The paper shows "Israel could develop nuclear weapons fairly quickly, something that isn't widely known." On the political front, the documents show the Nixon administration saw Hoffa as a potential help to the re-election campaign. A memo on March 19, 1971, from White House counsel John Dean to Attorney General John Mitchell spelled out the political calculation after Hoffa's wife and son requested a meeting with Nixon to ask for leniency. At the time, White House officials were concerned that Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., could mount a fierce challenge for the presidency. "If he is paroled, we may get some credit and he will start off with a constructive relationship with the president. He would be a dedicated factor to box in Kennedy, and he might eventually be key for us to organized labor," Dean wrote. Nixon pardoned Hoffa in December 1971 for convictions on jury tampering and mail fraud charges, then got the Teamsters' endorsement a year later. Critics have long contended that administration officials cut a deal in exchange for political favors, though that never has been proved.
  
• 6/4/1970 Ralph de Toledano commented, "Mr. Nixon [has] forgotten the prime rule of politics...Reward your friends and punish your enemies. The opposite has been true in this administration." (Houston Tribune)
  
• 6/5/1970 Oval Office meeting: Nixon, Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Huston, Hoover, Donald Bennett (director of the DIA), Noel Gayler (NSA director) and Richard Helms. Nixon establishes an ad hoc interagency committee to develop plans for better domestic intelligence, with Hoover as its head. Nixon Focuses on Domestic Intelligence Gathering President Nixon meets with FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, CIA Director Richard Helms, and the heads of the NSA and DIA to discuss a proposed new domestic intelligence system. His presentation is prepared by young White House aide Tom Charles Huston (derisively called "Secret Agent X-5" behind his back by some White House officials). The plan is based on the assumption that, as Nixon says, "hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Americansmostly under 30are determined to destroy our society." Nixon complains that the various US intelligence agencies spend as much time battling with one another over turf and influence as they do working to locate threats to national security both inside and outside of the country. The agencies need to prove the assumed connections between the antiwar demonstrators and Communists. The group in Nixon's office will now be called the "Interagency Committee on Intelligence," Nixon orders, with Hoover chairing the new ad hoc group, and demands an immediate "threat assessment" about domestic enemies to his administration. Huston will be the White House liaison. Historian Richard Reeves will later write: "The elevation of Huston, a fourth-level White House aide, into the company of Hoover and Helms was a calculated insult. Nixon was convinced that both the FBI and the CIA had failed to find the links he was sure bound domestic troubles and foreign communism. But bringing them to the White House was also part of a larger Nixon plan. He was determined to exert presidential control over the parts of the government he cared most aboutthe agencies dealing with foreign policy, military matters, intelligence, law, criminal justice, and general order." [Reeves, 2001, pp. 229-230]
  
• 6/5/1970 Hoover memo: "The President called...I said the court has several cases involving capital punishment and I would image the court is going to be 5-4 [in favor of declaring it unconstitutional]...unless we can get another vacancy to be filled by a real man...I said we have the same problem in obscenity...The President said...that the country is sick of that crap they see in the newsstands...that's what is getting kids on dope and everything else."
  
• 6/13/1970 As a direct result of the student strike, on June 13, 1970, President Nixon established the President's Commission on Campus Unrest, which became known as the Scranton Commission after its chairman, former Pennsylvania governor William Scranton. Scranton was asked to study the dissent, disorder, and violence breaking out on college and university campuses.
  
• 6/19/1970 Memo from Higby to Haldeman listing "our financial angels." The list includes: H. Ross Perot, Walter Annenberg, Henry Ford, Robert H. Abplanalp, Clement Hirsch, William Casey, A.C. Nielsen.
  
• 6/24/1970 NYT quoted Billy Graham: "I think we have allowed patriotism to slip. We have allowed the word patriotism' to get into the hands of some right-wingers. I don't guess anybody loves the flag more than some of the people that are against the war." Graham was furiously criticized by the far-right for this comment.
  
• 6/25/1970 Memo from Huston to Haldeman about "Coordination of Domestic Intelligence Information." The committee submitted its "Special Report Interagency Committee on Intelligence (Ad Hoc)" (the Huston plan) to Nixon; it recommended many activities that, it warned, are "clearly illegal."
  
• 6/26/1970 AMA votes to allow doctors to perform abortions for social and economic reasons.
  
• 7/1/1970 New York state adopted the most liberal abortion law in the country, allowing the woman to have one for any reason in the first 24 weeks of pregnancy.
  
• 7/4/1970 Honor America Day is staged on this Fourth of July in Washington. Billy Graham and Bob Hope appeal for national unity; some 300,000 people attend.
  
• 7/14/1970 A top-secret memo from Haldeman informs Huston that Nixon had approved his plan. Nixon approves the "Huston Plan" for greatly expanding domestic intelligence-gathering by the FBI, CIA and other agencies. Four days later he rescinds his approval. [Washington Post, 2008] Nixon aide Tom Charles Huston comes up with the plan, which involves authorizing the CIA, FBI, NSA, and military intelligence agencies to escalate their electronic surveillance of "domestic security threats" in the face of supposed threats from Communist-led youth agitators and antiwar groups (see June 5, 1970). The plan would also authorize the surreptitious reading of private mail, lift restrictions against surreptitious entries or break-ins to gather information, plant informants on college campuses, and create a new, White House-based "Interagency Group on Domestic Intelligence and Internal Security." Huston's Top Secret memo warns that parts of the plan are "clearly illegal." Nixon approves the plan, but rejects one elementthat he personally authorize any break-ins. Nixon orders that all information and operations to be undertaken under the new plan be channeled through his chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, with Nixon deliberately being left out of the loop. The first operations to be undertaken are using the Internal Revenue Service to harass left-wing think tanks and charitable organizations such as the Brookings Institute and the Ford Foundation. Huston writes that "[m]aking sensitive political inquiries at the IRS is about as safe a procedure as trusting a whore," since the administration has no "reliable political friends at IRS." He adds, "We won't be in control of the government and in a position of effective leverage until such time as we have complete and total control of the top three slots of the IRS." Huston suggests breaking into the Brookings Institute to find "the classified material which they have stashed over there," adding: "There are a number of ways we could handle this. There are risks in all of them, of course; but there are also risks in allowing a government-in-exile to grow increasingly arrogant and powerful as each day goes by." [Reeves, 2001, pp. 235-236] In 2007, author James Reston Jr. will call the Huston plan "arguably the most anti-democratic document in American history… a blueprint to undermine the fundamental right of dissent and free speech in America." [Reston, 2007, pp. 102]
  
• 7/16/1970 Huston memo to Haldeman, warning that the IRS was not controlled by Nixon-friendly officials and so should not be relied upon to quietly conduct investigations into opponents. (Secret Files 147)
  
• 7/20/1970 Newsweek featured a cover story about Billy Graham, calling him "The President's Preacher" and said he "holds a passport into the world of power politics of a kind that no other US preacher before him has ever been granted."
  
• 7/23/1970 President Nixon approves the Huston plan for expansion of domestic intelligence-gathering activities. It is apparently rescinded five days later. On or about this date, Huston tells the committee through a memo of Nixon's decision to okay his plan.
  
• 7/26-27/1970 After President Nixon approves of the so-called "Huston Plan" to implement a sweeping new domestic intelligence and internal security apparatus (see July 14, 1970), FBI director J. Edgar Hoover brings the plan's author, White House aide Tom Charles Huston (see June 5, 1970), into his office and vents his disapproval. The "old ways" of unfettered wiretaps, political infiltration, and calculated break-ins and burglaries are "too dangerous," he tells Huston. When, not if, the operations are revealed to the public, they will open up scrutiny of US law enforcement and intelligence agencies, and possibly reveal other, past illegal domestic surveillance operations that would embarrass the government. Hoover says he will not share FBI intelligence with other agencies, and will not authorize any illegal activities without President Nixon's personal, written approval. The next day, Nixon orders all copies of the decision memo collected, and withdraws his support for the plan. [Reeves, 2001, pp. 236-237] W. Mark Felt, the deputy director of the FBI, later calls Huston "a kind of White House gauleiter over the intelligence community." Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward will note that the definition of "gauleiter" is, according to Webster's Dictionary, "the leader or chief official of a political district under Nazi control." [Woodward, 2005, pp. 33-34]
  
• 7/26/1970 Hoover tells Mitchell about the Huston plan, and Mitchell is opposed to it. On this or the next day, Haldeman tells Huston to recall the 7/23 memo and get all copies returned to the White House.
  
• 7/27/1970 Portugal: Antonio Salazar, dictator since 1928, dies.
  
• 7/28/1970 Hoover and Mitchell's opposition to the Huston plan leads Nixon to abandon it.
  
• 7/30/1970 Columnist Paul Scott noted that "for the first time since World War II, federal expenditures this year for health, education, welfare and labor programs will exceed defense expenditures." This was roughly $74 billion for social programs, $73 billion for defense. (Yakima Eagle)
  
• 7/30/1970 Israeli jets met Soviet MiGs near the Suez Canal; 4 MiGs were shot down with no Israeli losses, but the involvement of USSR forces scared everyone into bringing about a ceasefire.
  
• 7/31/1970 Israel joins Egypt and Jordan in accepting the US Middle East peace plan.
  
• 8/1970 A Gallup Poll showed that 76% of the American people strongly disapproved of the KKK, a higher percentage than those who disliked the Viet Cong.
  
• 8/3/1970 Jack Anderson reported Sen. Mansfield as saying that JFK had intended a gradual withdrawal from Vietnam.
  
• 8/3/1970 JFK assassination researcher Harold Weisberg filed an FOIA suit against the government to gain the release of the FBI's spectrographic analysis tests performed in 1964 (Weisberg vs. Dept of Justice, #2301-70) 10/6/1970 Mitchell's Justice Department filed a motion to dismiss the suit, on the grounds that the release of the test results "would seriously interfere with the efficient operation of the FBI" and would also "create a highly dangerous precedent in this regard." A hearing was held 11/16/1970; Asst US Attorney Robert Werdig explained that Mitchell "has determined that it is not in the national interest to divulge these spectrographic analyses." The suit was dismissed, but this led to an amending of the FOIA to favor investigators like Weisberg.
  
• 8/4/1970 Bill Safire memo to Haldeman; he suggested that Larry O'Brien's new job as an international consultant could be portrayed as "lobbying for foreign governments...We could have a little fun with this and keep O'Brien on the defensive." (Secret Files 150)
  
• 8/4/1970 Apparently prompted by Cuban fears of an invasion by the United States, Soviet Chargé Yuli M. Vorontsov meets with National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger some eight years after the Cuban missile crisis in an attempt to reconfirm the Kennedy- Khrushchev understanding on Cuba. Without consulting others within the administration, President Nixon and Henry Kissinger decide to "reaffirm" the understanding. On August 7, Kissinger meets with Vorontsov, and both give their word that the understanding is "still in full force." This is the first time that U.S. leaders have unequivocally accepted the mutual commitments proposed in 1962. (Garthoff 1, pp. 141-42; Nixon, p. 486)
  
• 8/7/1970 Judge Harold Haley and three kidnappers are killed in an escape attempt by black militants from San Rafael, Calif., courthouse.
  
• 8/9/1970 NYT reported that during the Korean War, when US forces were being overwhelmed by "human waves" of Chinese, "the Army dug into captured Nazi chemical warfare documents describing Sarin, a nerve gas so lethal that a few pounds could kill thousands of people in minutes...By the mid-nineteen-fifties, the Army was manufacturing thousands of gallons of Sarin."
  
• 8/10/1970 LIFE reported that Jim Garrison had "managed to hush up the fact that last June, a Marcello bagman, Vic Corona, died after suffering a heart attack during a political meeting held in Garrison's own home."
  
• 8/11-14/1970 at its Annual Convention in Atlanta, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference adopted a resolution condemning Hoover and the FBI for "their attacks on Martin Luther King Jr. and their failure to meet their responsibilities such as protecting civil rights, stopping narcotics traffic and other organized crime..."
  
• 8/11/1970 Treaty between USSR and West Germany is signed by Brezhnev and Willy Brandt.
  
• 8/12/1970 Treaty of Moscow; FRG (West Germany) signs non-agression pact and acknowledgement of all the existing borders in Europe, including the Oder-Neisse Border between Germany and Poland and the boundary between the FRG (BRD) and GDR (DDR).
  
• 8/12/1970 Roswell Gilpatric, in a recorded oral history interview, recalled that "Resistance was encountered from [JFK] at every stage as this total amount of US personnel deployment increased" in Vietnam. (RFK and his Times 764)
  
• 8/14/1970 The Vienna phase of the SALT sessions ends.
  
• 8/15/1970 Paraguayan dictator Alfredo Stroessner was the target of a failed assassination attempt.
  
• 8/19/1970 After two years of undeclared war, Egypt, Israel and Jordan accepted a US-proposed cease-fire; it saw 721 Israelis killed, and an unknown number of Arabs killed.
  
• 8/20/1970 Nixon meets with Mexican president Diaz to discuss a treaty concerning border disputes.
  
• 8/24/1970 near 3:40 a.m., a van filled with ammonium nitrate and fuel oil mixture was detonated on the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the Sterling Hall bombing.
  
• 8/26/1970 In a demonstration organized by Betty Friedan, women across the nation marched to push for women's rights and mark the 50th anniversay of female suffrage.
  
• 8/28/1970 Vortex I: A Biodegradable Festival of Life: To avert potential violence arising from planned anti-war protests, a government-sponsored rock festival was held near Portland, Oregon from August 28 to September 3, attracting 100,000 participants. The festival, arranged by the People's Army Jamboree (an ad hoc group) and Oregon governor Tom McCall, was set up when the FBI told the governor that President Nixon's planned appearance at an American Legion convention in Portland could lead to violence worse than that seen at 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
  
• 8/29/1970 The Chicano Moratorium: on August 29, some 25,000 Mexican-Americans participated in the largest anti-war demonstration in Los Angeles. Police attacked the crowd with billyclubs and tear gas; two people were killed. Immediately after the marchers were dispersed, sheriff's deputies raided a nearby bar, where they shot and killed Rubén Salazar, KMEX news director and Los Angeles Times columnist, with a tear-gas projectile. LA Times columnist Ruben Salazar was killed and dozens of others were injured when an East Los Angeles parade and rally to demonstrate Latino opposition to the Vietnam War turned into rioting after clashes between officers and protesters. During the rioting, sheriff's deputies surrounded the Silver Dollar Cafe on Whittier Boulevard after receiving reports of a man carrying a gun inside, The Times reported. After ordering the building evacuated, "tear gas but no bullets was fired inside, deputies said, and two men, a woman and a child left the building through a back door." "At 5:30 p.m., nearly two hours later, deputies in the area were approached by a man who said, 'I think there's somebody in the bar.' It was Mr. Salazar," the newspaper said. Deputies found him sprawled on the floor, with "a bullet wound in the head," according to The Times. It was later determined that Salazar, "one of the city's leading spokesmen for Chicano rights," died after being struck by a deputy's tear gas canister. The parade and rally had been called "in support of a National Chicano Moratorium, which, its leaders said, was an effort to urge young Chicanos to resist military service abroad in favor of fighting for social justice at home."
  
• 8/30/1970 Abraham Zapruder dies of carcinoma of the stomach at Dallas's Presbyterian Hospital. He is buried on Sept. 1. He privately believed that LHO's main target was not JFK, but rather Governor John Connally.
  
• 8/30/1970 Agnew completes his tour of Asia.
  
• 8/31/1970 James McCord retired from the CIA, ostensibly to take a better-paying job so he could care for his retarded daughter.
  
• 9/1/1970 A Palestinian attempt to kill king Hussein of Jordan failed.
  
• 9/4/1970 Mexican president Gustavo Díaz Ordaz and U.S. President Richard Nixon rode in an open-car presidential motorcade in San Diego, California.
  
• 9/5/1970 Department of State, U.S. Embassy Cables on the Election of Salvador Allende and Efforts to Block his Assumption of the Presidency, September 5-22, 1970: This series of eight cables, written by U.S. Ambassador to Chile, Edward Korry, record the reaction and activities of the U.S. Embassy after the election of Salvador Allende's Popular Unity coalition. Known as "Korrygrams," his reports contain some of the most candid, and at times undiplomatic, opinions and observations ever offered by a U.S. Ambassador. With titles such as "No Hope for Chile," and "Some Hope for Chile," Korry provides extensive details about political efforts to block Allende's ratification by the Chilean Congress. The cables report on the activities of Chile's political institutions in response to Allende's election and provide Korry's explicit assessments of the character of key Chilean leaders, particularly the outgoing president, Eduardo Frei.
  
• 9/6/1970 In a confrontation with Frank Sinatra's entourage, the casino manager at Caesars Palace is arrested for pulling a gun to back up his order to cut off Sinatra's credit at the baccarat table. But the arresting sheriff also says of Sinatra, "He's through picking on little people in this town."
  
• 9/6/1970 On September 6, in the series of Dawson's Field hijackings, three planes were hijacked by PFLP: a SwissAir and a TWA in Zarqa and a BOAC in Cairo, on September 9, a British Airways plane at Amman, the passengers were held hostage. The PFLP announced that the hijackings were designed "to teach the Americans a lesson because of their long-standing support of Israel". After all hostages were removed, the planes were demonstratively blown up in front of TV cameras. Directly confronting and angering the King, the rebels declared Irbid area a "liberated region".
  
• 9/8/1970 Memo from John R. Brown to Ehrlichman, Finch and Haldeman, warning that the administration was listening too much to "D.C. press, social and intellectual set" and must "emphasize anti-crime, anti-demonstrations, anti-drugs, anti-obscenity. We must get with the mood of the country which is fed up with the liberals."
  
• 9/8/1970 Memo from Haldeman to Colson, saying that the president wanted him to take charge of improving relations with unions, especially "the Teamsters, the Firefighters, the Marine Union, the Carpenters, etc. There is a great deal of gold there to be mined."
  
• 9/9-12/1970 Young Americans for Freedom hold their 19th anniversary meeting at the University of Hartford, Conn.
  
• 9/9/1970 A Soviet flotilla, including special vessels used to support the operations of Soviet nuclear submarines, arrives at the port of Cienfuegos, Cuba.
  
• 9/10/1970 Agnew began his national speaking tour for the fall campaign.
  
• 9/15/1970 President Nixon orders CIA Director Richard Helms to prevent Salvadore Allende's accession to office in Chile. CIA, Notes on Meeting with the President on Chile, September 15, 1970: These handwritten notes, taken by CIA director Richard Helms, record the orders of the President of the United States, Richard Nixon, to foster a coup in Chile. Helms' notes reflect Nixon's orders: l in 10 chance perhaps, but save Chile!; worth spending; not concerned; no involvement of embassy; $10,000,00 available, more if necessary; full-time job--best men we have; game plan; make the economy scream; 48 hours for plan of action. This presidential directive initiates major covert operations to block Allende's ascension to office, and promote a coup in Chile. The CIA is to play a direct role in organizing a military coup d'etat. Helms puts David Atlee Phillips in charge of this involvement, known as Track II. Helms related to his impressions of the President's instructions: "The Director told the group that President Nixon had decided that an Allende regime in Chile was unacceptable to the United States. The President asked the Agency to prevent Allende from coming to power or to unseat him. The President authorized $10,000,000.00 for this purpose, if needed. Further, the Agency is to carry out this mission without coordination with the Departments of State or Defense." (Memorandum/Genesis of the Project 9/16/70)
  
• 9/15/1970 Over 340,000 members of the United Auto Workers go on strike against GM in both the US and Canada. It will last sixty-seven days.
  
• 9/15-20/1970 Golda Meir visits the US and talks with Nixon.
  
• 9/15/1970 Vice President Spiro Agnew announced that the youth of America were being "brainwashed into a drug culture" by rock music, movies and other elements of the counter-culture.
  
• 9/16/1970 CIA, Genesis of Project FUBELT, September 16, 1970: These minutes record the first meeting between CIA director Helms and high agency officials on covert operations--codenamed "FUBELT"--against Allende. A special task force under the supervision of CIA deputy director of plans, Thomas Karamessines, is established, headed by veteran agent David Atlee Phillips. The memorandum notes that the CIA must prepare an action plan for National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger within 48 hours.
  
• 9/16/1970 King Hussein of Jordan declared martial law.
  
• 9/17/1970 Columnist David Broder praised Nixon for "put[ting] the Pentagon on its leanest rations in years" and wanting to get out of Vietnam.
  
• 9/17/1970 Jordanian tanks (the 60th armored brigade) attacked the headquarters of Palestinian organizations in Amman; the army also attacked camps in Irbid, Salt, Sweileh and Zarqa. Then the head of Pakistani training mission to Jordan, Brigadier Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq (later President of Pakistan), took command of the 2nd division. The armored troops were inefficient in narrow city streets, and after first casualties they resorted to unobserved shelling. Soon, many city blocks were left with no electricity, food or water. Some Palestinians deserted from the Jordanian army. Brigadier Bajahat Muhaisein (a Jordanian who had a Palestinian wife) quit.
  
• 9/17/1970 Sen. George Murphy (Calif.) was quoted as saying he doubted the Warren Commission's investigation of JFK's death. (S.F. Chronicle)
  
• 9/18/1970 FCC Commissioner Nicholas Johnson attacked Agnew for ignoring legal drugs such as liquor and tobacco, and the politicians who support them.
  
• 9/18/1970 Syrian armored forces began invasion into Jordan. In three days, with support of Palestine Liberation Army (PLA), they were the size of a division and were met by the 40th armored brigade of Jordanian army. In light of the recent war, after unsuccessful attempts to avert the increasing danger diplomatically, Israel Air Force planes made low overflights over the Syrian tanks as a sign of warning. Soon Syrian troops began to withdraw. Hafez al-Assad, the Syrian defense minister at the time, later said that Syria invaded Jordan in order to protect the Palestinians.
  
• 9/18/1970 Jimi Hendrix, who reportedly briefly occupied the sprawling mansion just north of the Log Cabin in Laurel Canyon after he moved to LA in 1968, died in London under seriously questionable circumstances on September 18, 1970. Though he rarely spoke of it, Jimi had served a stint in the U.S. Army with the 101st Airborne Division at Fort Campbell. His official records indicate that he was forced into the service by the courts and then released after just one year when he purportedly proved to be a poor soldier. One wonders though why he was assigned to such an elite division if he was indeed such a failure. One also wonders why he wasn't subjected to disciplinary measures rather than being handed a free pass out of his ostensibly court-ordered service. In any event, Jimi himself once told reporters that he was given a medical discharge after breaking an ankle during a parachute jump. And one biographer has claimed that Jimi faked being gay to earn an early release. The truth, alas, remains rather elusive. At the time of Jimi's death, the first person called by his girlfriend Monika Danneman, who was the last to see Hendrix alive was Eric Burden of the Animals. Two years earlier, Burden had relocated to LA and taken over ringmaster duties from Frank Zappa after Zappa had vacated the Log Cabin and moved into a less high-profile Laurel Canyon home. Within a year of Jimi's death, an underage prostitute named Devon Wilson who had been with Jimi the day before his death, plunged from an eighth-floor window of New York's Chelsea Hotel. On March 5, 1973, a shadowy character named Michael Jeffery, who had managed both Hendrix and Burden, was killed in a mid-air plane collision. Jeffery was known to openly boast of having organized crime connections and of working for the CIA. After Jimi's death, it was discovered that Jeffery had been funneling most of Hendrix's gross earnings into offshore accounts in the Bahamas linked to international drug trafficking. Years later, on April 5, 1996, Danneman, the daughter of a wealthy German industrialist, was found dead near her home in a fume-filled Mercedes.
  
• 9/20/1970 Evangelical Christian George Otis visited Governor Reagan and talked about prophecy and the Rapture at the end of the world. Otis claimed he prophesized Reagan one day becoming President. (Visit with a King)
  
• 9/21/1970 Nixon memo to Haldeman, saying how "greatly impressed" he was with Colson and Edward Morgan.
  
• 9/21/1970 Article in New York magazine titled "Richard Nixon and the Great Socialist Revival," by John Kenneth Galbraith. "In the past the war power has been notoriously a cover for socialist experiment and, feeling that the end justifies the means, socialists have not hesitated, on occasion, to stretch the law...Certainly the least predicted development under the Nixon Administration was this great new thrust to socialism..." Galbraith predicted that a socialization of Wall Street - government subsidizing and insuring of firms - would occur. He theorized that tight money policies were being deliberately implemented to cause business failures and government bailouts.
  
• 9/22/1970 Nixon signed a bill giving the District of Columbia nonvoting delegate in the House of Rep.
  
• 9/23/1970 Agnew accused FCC Commissioner Nicholas Johnson of "backing the kind of radical-liberal philosophy of permissiveness and self-flagellation that has encouraged so many of our youth to turn to marijuana and worse."
  
• 9/23/1970 Sargent Shriver called Agnew "this nation's great divider...appeals to everything low and mean and bitter in the American character." (Hartford Courant)
  
• 9/24/1970 Memo from Hoover to Tolson, Mohr, Thomas Bishop, Nicholas Callahan: "I called Mr. Egil Krogh at the White House and told him...that I have been trying to do a little footwork around the Capitol to find out how our supplemental appropriation should be handled and get it through...[George] Mahon [chairman of Appropriations Comm.] is a very reasonable fellow and, in addition to that, I have a staff of agents who are assigned to the Appropriations Committee...to conduct investigations for them, so he is very cordially inclined toward that Bureau for that assistance and would respond very readily, and [John J.] Rooney is a Democrat but he is also cordially inclined toward the Bureau..."
  
• 9/25/1970 J. Edgar Hoover memo: "Haldeman...stated the President wanted him to ask, and he would imagine I would have it pretty much at hand so there would be no specific investigation, for a rundown on the homosexuals known and suspected in the Washington press corps. I said I thought we have some of that material. Mr. Haldeman mentioned [deleted] and some of the others rumored generally to be and also whether we had any other stuff; that he, the President, has an interest in what, if anything else, we know. I told Mr. Haldeman I would get after that right away..."
  
• 9/26/1970 Presidents Commission on Campus Unrest calls the gap between youth culture and mainstream society a threat to US stability.
  
• 9/27/1970 Both Jordan's King Hussein and Yassir Arafat attended the meeting of leaders of Arab countries in Cairo and on September 27 Hussein signed an agreement that treated both sides as equals and acknowledged the right of the Palestinian organizations to operate in Jordan. The next day, Egypt's Nasser died of a sudden heart attack.
  
• 9/30/1970 Columnist Scotty Reston commented that Nixon was trying to "liberate himself from his conservative and anti-Communist past, and work toward a progressive policy at home and a policy of reconciliation with the Communists abroad..."
  

[Tracy Riddle]

• 10/1970 Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) created.
  
• 10/3/1970 Another March for Victory rally was held in Washington, but the crowd was small.
  
• 10/4/1970 Janis Joplin, vocalist extraordinaire, was found dead of a heroin overdose on October 4, 1970 at the Landmark Hotel, about a mile east of the mouth of Laurel Canyon, where she occasionally visited. Indications were that she had taken or been given a "hot shot," many times stronger than standard street heroin. Joplin's father, by the way, was a petroleum engineer for Texaco. And though it might normally seem an odd coupling, it somehow seems perfectly natural, in the context of this story, that Janis once dated that great crusader in the war on all things immoral, William Bennett. Like Morrison and Hendrix, Joplin died at the age of twenty-seven.
  
• 10/5/1970 Nixon ends an 8-day trip to Europe.
  
• 10/6/1970 NY mafia figure Salvatore Granello was found stuffed in the trunk of a rented car; he had been shot in the head four times.
  
• 10/6/1970 In an attempt to defuse increasing diplomatic tensions over the Cienfiegos "submarine port," Anatoly Dobrynin meets with Kissinger. He hands Kissinger a note reaffirming the Kennedy-Khrushchev understanding; it states that "in the Cuban question, the Soviet government continues to proceed from the understanding reached on this question in 1962." Dobrynin also states that "he was prepared on behalf of his government to affirm that ballistic missile submarines would never call there [Cuba] in an operational capacity."
  
• 10/7/1970 Colson memo to Haldeman, pointing out that "Roper, Gallup and John Kraft all believe that Harris [polling] is dishonest and slanted."
  
• 10/9/1970 Henry Kissinger gives Anatoly Dobrynin a formal message from Nixon welcoming the Soviet assurances but offering the U.S. interpretation of the 1962 understanding that settled the Cuban missile crisis: The U.S. government understands that the U.S.S.R. will not establish, utilize, or permit the establishment of any facility in Cuba that can be employed to support or repair Soviet naval ships capable of carrying offensive weapons, i.e. submarines or surface ships armed with nuclear capable, surface-to-surface missiles.The note lists five specific actions that the U.S. government would consider violations of the 1962 agreement. Dobrynin reportedly objects to the bluntness of the language but hints that the issue will soon be resolved.
  
• 10/10/1970 FCC Commissioner Johnson advises Agnew to listen to the lyrics of rock songs to understand what's happening in the country.
  
• 10/13/1970 Angela Davis is seized and arrested by FBI agents in NYC.
  
• 10/13/1970 Colson memo to Haldeman: "'Dusty' Miller, who heads the Southern Region for the Teamsters, is actively backing George Bush with money and political support...Be sure this guy is in our Labor book and rewarded appropriately." (Secret Files of RN 163)
  
• 10/14/1970 CIA internal memo to Thomas Karamesines ("Subject: E. Howard Hunt Utilization by Central Cover Staff") indicated that Hunt's top-secret security clearance had been renewed and extended prior to Hunt's "retirement" from the CIA. (Sen. Baker report in appendix of Ervin Committee report 6/1974)
  
• 10/15/1970 CIA, Memorandum of Conversation of Meeting with Henry Kissinger, Thomas Karamessines, and Alexander Haig, October 15, 1970: This memcon records a discussion of promoting a coup in Chile, known as "Track II" of covert operations to block Allende. The three officials discuss the possibility that the plot of one Chilean military official, Roberto Viaux, might fail with "unfortunate repercussions" for U.S. objectives. Kissinger orders the CIA to "continue keeping the pressure on every Allende weak spot in sight."
  
• 10/16/1970 CIA, Operating Guidance Cable on Coup Plotting, October 16, 1970: In a secret cable, CIA deputy director of plans, Thomas Karamessines, conveys Kissinger's orders to CIA station chief in Santiago, Henry Hecksher: "It is firm and continuing policy that Allende be overthrown by a coup." The "operating guidance" makes it clear that these operations are to be conducted so as to hide the "American hand," and that the CIA is to ignore any orders to the contrary from Ambassador Korry who has not been informed of Track II operations.
  
• 10/18/1970 CIA, Cable Transmissions on Coup Plotting, October 18, 1970: These three cables between CIA headquarters in Langley, VA., and the CIA Station in Santiago address the secret shipment of weapons and ammunition for use in a plot to kidnap the Chilean military commander, General Rene Schneider. "Neutralizing" Schneider was a key prerequisite for a military coup; he opposed any intervention by the armed forces to block Allende's constitutional election. The CIA supplied a group of Chilean officers led by General Camilo Valenzuela with "sterile" weapons for the operation which was to be blamed on Allende supporters and prompt a military takeover. Instead, on October 22, General Schneider was killed by another group of plotters the CIA had been collaborating with, led by retired General Roberto Viaux. Instead of a coup, the military and the country rallied behind Allende's ratification by Chile's Congress on October 24.
  
• 10/20/1970 American Norman Borlaug wins the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts in perfecting and introducing around the world new strains of high-yield, disease-resistant wheat and rice-crops.
  
• 10/21/1970 A US spy plane is downed by the Soviets while on a reconnaissance mission. Its crew of 4 is successfully recovered.
  
• 10/22/1970 Nixon and Soviet foreign minister Gromyko meet in Washington.
  
• 10/23/1970 Nixon addresses the United Nations.
  
• 10/23/1970 Colson memo to Haldeman: "ABC continues to play it straight and CBS is doing much better; NBC remains a thorn in our side."
  
• 10/23/1970 Anatoly Dobrynin reassures Kissinger that the USSR does not have a military facility in Cuba and confirms that it will continue to abide by the 1962 Kennedy-Khrushchev agreement.
  
• 10/24/1970 In a speech to radio broadcasters, Nixon urges that rock lyrics be screened and those urging drug use be banned.
  
• 10/26/1970 National Security Decision Memo #89 defines administration's "Cambodia Strategy": to "capitalize on Cambodian nationalism."
  
• 10/28/1970 During a St. Petersburg, Florida, motorcade, a motorcycle policeman was injured when hit by a truck. Nixon rushed over to express his sympathies, and the policeman replied he was sorry for delaying the motorcade. After an awkward silence, Nixon asked, "Do you like your work?"
  
• 10/29/1970 A small fire breaks out at Nixon's San Clemente home; it is quickly put out by Secret Service agents and firemen.
  
• 11/1970 This month, Attorney General John Mitchell orders the Justice Department "to block the release of crucial ballistics evidence from the Kennedy assassination on grounds of national security." This evidence consists of the FBI's secret spectrographic analysis of the bullet and bullet fragments recovered following the fatal shooting of JFK and near killing of Connally.
  
• 11/1970 Census states that the US population is now 203 million; the birth rate had declined greatly during the 60s.
  
• 11/1970 A 36-month economic expansion begins, lasting until 11/1973. Growth in first year was 3.2%, in second year was 7.2%.
  
• 11/1970 The Late Great Planet Earth by Hal Lindsey published by Zondervan and ushers in a wave of apocalyptic books.
  
• 11/3/1970 National Security Council, Options Paper on Chile (NSSM 97), November 3, 1970: A comprehensive secret/sensitive options paper, prepared for Henry Kissinger and the National Security Council on the day of Allende's inauguration, laid out U.S. objectives, interests and potential policy toward Chile. U.S. interests were defined as preventing Chile from falling under Communist control and preventing the rest of Latin America from following Chile "as a model." Option C--maintaining an "outwardly cool posture" while working behind the scenes to undermine the Allende government through economic pressures and diplomatic isolation--was chosen by Nixon. CIA operations and options are not included in this document.
  
• 11/3/1970 Congressional elections saw the Democrats gain 12 House seats and lose 2 Senate seats; Dems also gained 9 or 11 governors' seats. 46% voter turnout. Newcomers include Sen. Lowell Weicker, Hubert Humphrey (who returns to the Senate after being vice-president), Lloyd Bentsen; Eugene McCarthy and Ralph Yarborough lost their Senate seats.
  
• 11/6/1970 CIA, Briefing by Richard Helms for the National Security Council, Chile, November 6, 1970: This paper provides the talking points for CIA director Richard Helms to brief the NSC on the situation in Chile. The briefing contains details on the failed coup attempt on October 22--but does not acknowledge a CIA role in the assassination of General Rene Schneider. Helms also assesses Allende's "tenacious" character and Soviet policy toward Chile. Intelligence suggests that Chile's socialists, he informs council members, "will exercise restraint in promoting closer ties with Russia."
  
• 11/9/1970 National Security Council, National Security Decision Memorandum 93, Policy Towards Chile, November 9, 1970: This memorandum summarizes the presidential decisions regarding changes in U.S. policy toward Chile following Allende's election. Written by Henry Kissinger and sent to the Secretaries of State, Defense, the Director of the Office of Emergency Preparedness and the Director of Central Intelligence, this memo directs U.S. agencies to adopt a "cool" posture toward Allende's government, in order to prevent his consolidation of power and "limit [his] ability to implement policies contrary to U.S. and hemisphere interests." The memo states that existing U.S. assistance and investments in Chile should be reduced, and no new commitments undertaken. Furthermore, according to Kissinger's memo, "close relations" should be established and maintained with military leaders throughout Latin America to facilitate coordination of pressure and other opposition efforts.
  
• 11/9/1970 Charles de Gaulle died of a heart attack while sitting in his armchair watching television.
  
• 11/12/1970 US delegates to the United Nations argue against Red China's expulsion from the UN.
  
• 11/13/1970 Coup in Syria led by Hafiz al-Assad.
  
• 11/15/1970 In a speech, Earl Warren attacked Nixon and Agnew for exploiting the law and order issue "in strident terms, but with no discussion of the causes or proposed cures..." (S.F. Examiner)
  
• 11/17/1970 The first anniversary of the SALT talks.
  
• 11/17/1970 Memo from Colson to Haldeman complaining about "terrifically slanted" election night NBC news coverage toward the Democrats. The network presidents will be advised by Dean Burch "that steps have to be taken on their own to deal with this problem or the FCC may have to consider regulatory remedies." (From the President 174)
  
• 11/18/1970 CIA, Report of CIA Chilean Task Force Activities, 15 September to 3 November 1970, November 18, 1970: The CIA prepared a summary of its efforts to prevent Allende's ratification as president and to foment a coup in Chile-- track I and track II covert operations. The summary details the composition of the Task Force, headed by David Atlee Phillips, the team of covert operatives "inserted individually into Chile," and their contacts with Col. Paul Winert, the U.S. Army Attache detailed to the CIA for this operation. It reviews the propaganda operations designed to push Chilean president Eduardo Frei to support "a military coup which would prevent Allende from taking office on 3 November."
  
• 11/20/1970 The 67-day national strike against GM by the United Auto Workers ends.
  
• 11/22/1970 Memo from Nixon to Kissinger on "where we are to go with regard to the admission of Red China to the UN. It seems to me that the time is approaching sooner than we might think when we will not have the votes to block admission."
  
• 11/23/1970 Melvin Laird announced the failed raid on Son Tay prison to the public. He admitted that the camp had been abandoned for several weeks prior to the mission. He denied that any US attacks had been made in the area.
  
• 11/23/1970 Pope Paul VI issued a decree barring cardinals over the age of 80 from voting for a new pope.\
  
• 11/24/1970 Memo from Hoover to Atty General; the Securities and Exchange Commission told Hughes they had no problem with him buying the Dunes Hotel.
  
• 11/24/1970 Laird appeared before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and provoked laughter when he insisted that "we have made tremendous progress as far as intelligence is concerned," even though no prisoners were found at Son Tay. He claimed that only flares were dropped by planes to serve as a distraction. The bombing halt made by LBJ in Oct 68 was still being publicly observed by the Nixon administration.
  
• 11/25/1970 Nixon dismisses Interior Secretary Walter J. Hickel.
  
• 11/25/1970 Hoover memo to Asst Directors: "Haldeman...stated the President wanted him to ask...for a run down on the homosexuals known and suspected in the Washington press corps."
  
• 11/27/1970 Pope Paul VI was threatened, but not hurt in the Manila, Philippines airport by Benjamin Mendoza, a Bolivian who was armed with a knife.
  
• 11/30/1970 Memo from Nixon to Kissinger: he agreed to keep Helms as DCI, as Kissinger had recommended, but "I will do so only on condition that there be a thorough housecleaning at other levels at CIA...Also I want a good thinning down of the whole CIA personnel situation, as well as our intelligence activities generally." (From the President 179)
  
• In 1970, the President's Commission on Obscenity and Pornography concluded that "there was insufficient evidence that exposure to explicit sexual materials played a significant role in the causation of delinquent or criminal behavior." In general, with regard to adults, the Commission recommended that legislation "should not seek to interfere with the right of adults who wish to do so to read, obtain, or view explicit sexual materials." Regarding the view that these materials should be restricted for adults in order to protect young people from exposure to them, the Commission found that it is "inappropriate to adjust the level of adult communication to that considered suitable for children." The Supreme Court supported this view. A large portion of the Commission's budget was applied to funding original research on the effects of sexually explicit materials. One experiment is described in which repeated exposure of male college students to pornography "caused decreased interest in it, less response to it and no lasting effect," although it appears that the satiation effect does wear off eventually ("Once more"). William B. Lockhart, Dean of the University of Minnesota Law School and chairman of the commission, said that before his work with the commission he had favored control of obscenity for both children and adults, but had changed his mind as a result of scientific studies done by commission researchers. In reference to dissenting commission members Keating and Rev. Morton Hill, Lockhart said, "When these men have been forgotten, the research developed by the commission will provide a factual basis for informed, intelligent policymaking by the legislators of tomorrow". Commission member Father Morton A. Hill, S.J., the founder of Morality in Media, helped author a minority report that disagreed with the findings of the Commission. Believing that the Commission was stacked towards First Amendment free speech advocates, Father Hill and another clergyman on the Commission, Dr. Winfrey C. Link, issued the Hill-Link Minority Report rebutting the conclusions of the majority report. Issued in 1970, the majority report was rejected by both President Richard Nixon and the United States Congress. The Hill-Link Report, which recommended maintaining anti-obscenity statutes, was read into the record of both the Senate and the House of Representatives. It was cited by the Burger Court in its 1973 obscenity decisions, including Miller v. California. The President's Commission on Obscenity and Pornography was established by Congress in October 1967 under Public Law 90-100 (81 Stat. 253). In January 1968, President Johnson appointed eighteen members of this Commission. President Nixon's only appointment to this Commission was Charles Keating, Jr., founder of Citizens for Decent Literature, which came as a result of the resignation of Kenneth Keating on his appointment as ambassador to India. Other members of the Commission included Edward E. Elson, Thomas D. Gill, Edward D. Greenwood, Reverend Morton A. Hill, S.J., G. William Jones, Joseph T. Klapper, Otto N. Larsen, Rabbi Irving Lehrman, Freeman Lewis, Reverend Winfrey C. Link, Morris A. Lipton, William B. Lockhart, Thomas C. Lynch, Barbara Scott, Cathryn A. Speits, Frederick Herbert Wagman, and Marvin Wolfgang. The Commission was terminated after the presentation of its final report in late 1970. The Commission was charged with the responsibility of studying the relationship of obscene and pornographic materials to anti-social behavior and determining whether a need existed for more effective methods to control the transmission of such materials. 1970: Nixon rejected the "morally bankrupt" conclusions of the President's Commission on Obscenity and Pornography, which decided that adults should be allowed to view porn. Nixon said that the commission had "performed a disservice" to the nation and that "American morality is not to be trifled with…Smut should be outlawed in every state of the Union…So long as I am in the White House, there will be no reduction in the national effort to control and eliminate smut."
  
• 12/1970 US GNP $1.015 trillion. Federal spending was $195 billion ($2.8 billion deficit).National debt was $370 billion. Inflation rate for 1/1970-1/1971 was 5.3%. Poverty rate was 12.6%. US population was 204.7 million. Federal government workers: approx 2.5 million. Local government workers: approx 7 million. Prime rate of interest: 7.9% Divorces per 1000 married women: 14.9. Median age: 28.1 Births per 1000 people: 18.4. Distribution of wealth for each fifth of US families: lowest: 5.5%; second: 12.2%; third: 17.6%; fourth: 23.8%; highest fifth: 40.9%.
  
• 12/1970 Clean Air Act passed; mandated pollution-free cars by 1975.
  
• 12/1/1970 House subcommittee rejects an impeachment charge by Gerald Ford against William O. Douglas.
  
• 12/1/1970 Reviewing Jim Garrison's new book A HERITAGE OF STONE, New York Times reviewer John Leonard writes: "Frankly, I prefer to believe that the Warren Commission did a poor job, rather than a dishonest one. I like to think that Mr. Garrison invents monsters to explain incompetence. But until somebody explains why two autopsies came to two different conclusions about the President's wounds, why the limousine was washed out and rebuilt without investigation, why certain witnesses near the grassy knoll' were never asked to testify before the Commission, why we were all so eager to buy Oswald's brilliant marksmanship in split seconds, why no one inquired into Jack Ruby's relations with a staggering variety of strange people, why a loner' like Oswald always had friends and could always get a passport -- who can blame the Garrison guerrillas for fantasizing?"
  
• 12/4/1970 Department of State, Memorandum for Henry Kissinger on Chile, December 4, 1970: In response to a November 27 directive from Kissinger, an inter-agency Ad Hoc Working Group on Chile prepared this set of strategy papers covering a range of possible sanctions and pressures against the new Allende government. These included a possible diplomatic effort to force Chile to withdraw--or be expelled--from the Organization of American States as well as consultations with other Latin American countries "to promote their sharing of our concern over Chile." The documents show that the Nixon administration did engage in an invisible economic blockade against Allende, intervening at the World Bank, IDB, and Export-Import bank to curtail or terminate credits and loans to Chile before Allende had been in office for a month.
  
• 12/4/1970 Memo from Nixon to Haldeman, noting that Donald Rumsfeld "has the feeling that Bob Dole may be losing some of his effectiveness because he is a 'knee-jerk' defender of the Administration...One another subject, one very important PR theme which we should now start to play up is the underdog role...the general theme of RN as standing up alone, against his Cabinet [on Cambodia], against the White House staff, against the Congress, and against the press is one that people like..."
  
• 12/6/1970 David and Albert Maysles' documentary film about the Altamont concert, Gimme Shelter, premieres in New York.
  
• 12/7/1970 Harry Reasoner, who had left CBS News weeks before, joined Howard K. Smith for "The ABC Evening News with Howard K. Smith and Harry Reasoner". The Smith-Reasoner team lasted almost five years.
  
• 12/7/1970 Treaty of Warsaw; FRG (West Germany) signs non-agression pact, recognizes the Oder-Neisse Border between Germany and Poland, and normalizes diplomatic relations between the two signing nations.
  
• 12/7-8/1970 The Golpe Borghese was a failed Italian coup d'état allegedly planned for the night of 7 or 8 December 1970. It was named after Junio Valerio Borghese, an Italian World War II commander of the Xª MAS unit, the "Black Prince", convicted of fighting with Nazi Germany but not of war crimes, but still a hero in the eyes of many post-War Italian fascists. The coup attempt became publicly known when the left-wing journal "Paese Sera" ran the headline on the evening of March 18, 1971 : Subversive plan against the Republic: far-right plot discovered. The secret operation was code-named 'Operation Tora Tora' after the Japanese attack on the US ships in Pearl Harbor which had led the United States to enter the Second World War on December 7, 1941. The plan of the coup in its final phase envisaged the involvement of US and NATO warships which were on alert in the Mediterranean.
  
• 12/8/1970 Nixon meets with Jordan's King Hussein at the White House.
  
• 12/9/1970 Colson memo proposing that the administration support a "campaign spending limitation bill...Recognizing that the most desirable outcome for us is no bill at all...The Congress will hardly accept our plan but we would then be in a position to veto theirs on the ground that ours was superior...our proposal will help muddy the waters and slow down the legislation process." (Secret Files 184)
  
• 12/9/1970 Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries meets in Caracas, Venezuela and established minimum tax rate for petroleum. Also demands that posted oil prices be changed to reflect changes in foreign exchange rates [so that as the US$ fell in value, oil prices set in dollars would be adjusted upwards].
  
• 12/10/1970 A major nationwide rail strike ends two hours after it began after congressional legislation defers it; Nixon quickly signed the legislation, which raised wages 13.5% and postponed the strike 80 days.
  
• 12/10/1970 The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission charges AT&T with gross discrimination against women and minorities.
  
• 12/11/1970 Nixon meets with Israeli defense minister Moshe Dayan at the White House.
  
• 12/11/1970 Nixon announces appointment of Rep. George H.W. Bush as US representative to the UN.
  
• 12/14/1970 John Connally nominated as Sec. of Treasury.
  
• 12/14/1970 Wiretap placed on White House employee James McLane, son-in-law of Gov. Francis Sargent. It was removed 1/27/1971.
  
• 12/14/1970 Memo from SAC Memphis James Startzell to Hoover on Rep. William Anderson, providing him with allegations that Anderson had consorted with prostitutes.
  
• 12/18/1970 Supreme Court rules that 18-year-olds can vote in federal elections.
  
• 12/19/1970 Nixon commends MGM chief Mike Curb for ridding his record label of 18 rock bands that supposedly advocated drug use.
  
• 12/21/1970 Angela Davis is extradited from NY to California.
  
• 12/21/1970 Supreme Court rules that the new voting rights of 18-years-olds applies only in federal elections.
  
• 12/22/1970 Cooper-Church amendment goes into effect, prohibiting US troops in Cambodia.
  
• 12/29/1970 Nixon signed into law Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHA), setting up workplace standards.
  

[Tracy Riddle]

• Los Angeles authorities conduct a series of videotaped reenactments to prove that Sirhan fired all of the shots at RFK, but the tapes are suppressed until 1986.
  
• Markus Wolf, foreign intelligence boss for the GDR, awarded the "Red Star of the Interior Ministry of the Soviet Union".
  
• William L. O'Neill, Professor of History at Rutgers University, publishes an excellent overview of the Sixties, Coming Apart (1971). It contains the following on the JFK assassination: "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."
  
• The San Antonio Contraceptive Study was a clinical research study about the side effects of oral contraceptives published in 1971. Women came to a clinic in San Antonio for preventing pregnancies and were not told they were participating in a research study or receiving placebos. 10 of the women became pregnant while on placebos.
  
• Daughter of conspiracy investigator Mae Brussell is killed in a suspicious car accident.
  
• E. Howard Hunt is hired by the White House to gather damaging evidence against Daniel Ellsberg, Edward Kennedy and other "enemies". Hunt hires Barker and other Bay of Pigs veterans to make a break in at Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office. Barker attempts to get plans to building that will house the Democratic Convention. Plumber Chief David Young, former Kissinger aide, contacts CIA for a psychiatric profile of Ellsberg. He is referred to Howard Osborn, a possible Oswald link. White House agent Segretti meets with FBI, Minutemen and others to plan kidnapping of radicals during the 1972 Convention, a plan later scrapped.
  
• 1/1971 Nixon faced a panel of reporters on an ABC broadcast; when asked why he had been unable to bring the country "the lift of a driving dream" he had promised during the primaries, Nixon looked at the reporters and then mumbled, "When you have inherited nightmares you are unable to bring the country the lift of a driving dream."
  
• 1/1 or 2/1971 Congress adjourns after banning all cigarette ads on radio and TV.
  
• 1/2/1971 A team of Israeli scholars announced the discovery in Jerusalem of a 2,000-year-old skeleton of a crucified male. Found in a cave-tomb, it was the first direct physical evidence of the well-documented Roman method of execution.
  
• 1/3/1971 The Los Angeles Times (story by Jack Nelson) reports that the government purchases a new limousine for J. Edgar Hoover every year, at a cost of about $30,000. By contrast, the Secret Service leases the president's bulletproof limo, for approximately $5,000.
  
• 1/3/1971 This month, Charles Colson requests that E. Howard Hunt and his wife, Dorothy, be invited to an after-banquet White House reception for Don Juan Carlos, the future king of Spain. Colson writes: "It is very important politically that we let him know he is in the family."
  
• 1/4/1971 Congressional Black Caucus is organized.
  
• 1/7/1971 Laird visits Thailand to assess the military situation.
  
• 1/7/1971 Mac Wallace, an old LBJ associate, is killed in a single-car "accident" in Pittsburg, Texas. He is 50 years old. His car drifts off the road and he dies of massive head injuries. An empty bottle for his medication for narcolepsy is found in the wreckage. Wallace's fingerprints will later be allegedly identified as being on one of the cardboard boxes found near the "sniper's" window in the TSBD. Billie Sol Estes will also implicate Wallace in the murder of JFK.
  
• 1/8-11/1971 Laird visits South Vietnam.
  
• 1/11/1971 Pat Buchanan memo reporting "real hostility on the right...I am getting inklings of a Reagan for President move..."
  
• 1/12/1971 Rev. Philip F. Berrigan and five others are indicted on charges of conspiring to kidnap Henry Kissinger.
  
• 1/13/1971 The Republican National Committee met in Washington. One committeeman, a longtime Nixon backer, asked rhetorically, "Who and what is Richard Nixon?" (Nixon in the White House p4)
  
• 1/13/1971 Interior Dept recommended construction of Trans-Alaska Pipeline System.
  
• 1/13/1971 Nixon signs bill repealing the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution.
  
• 1/14/1971 Nixon memo to Haldeman: "It would seem that the time is approaching when Larry O'Brien is held accountable for his retainer with Hughes....Perhaps Colson should make a check on this."
  
• 1/14/1971 Nixon memo to Haldeman recommending that Pat Buchanan give political briefings to Bob Dole.
  
• 1/14-19/1971 most of NYC's police officers go on a wildcat strike.
  
• 1/15/1971 Sen. Edmund Muskie talks with Soviet PM Kosygin in Moscow about the Middle East and Southeast Asia.
  
• 1/18/1971 Sen. George McGovern announces his campaign for the presidency in a televised speech.
  
• 1/19/1971 Kissinger was quoted as saying that "Power is the great aphrodisiac." (NY Times)
  
• 1/19/1971 Sen. George Smathers recalled that JFK had told him that he wanted to reform the CIA: "I remember him saying that the CIA frequently did things he didn't know about...He complained that the CIA was almost autonomous. He told me he believed the CIA had arranged to have Diem and Trujillo bumped off." (Jack Anderson column 1/19/1971 and "Cuba on our Mind", Tad Szulc, Esquire 2/1974.)
  
• 1/21/1971 The 92nd Congress convened.
  
• 1/21/1971 Washington Post reported Melvin Laird explaining continuing US air support in Cambodia; he said that Nixon had said only that "air support would not be used...during the termination of those sanctuary operations." Though Nixon had said no such thing, Laird ended by saying he did not wish to get into "semantics."
  
• 1/21/1971 Richard B. Russell died today. Senator Russell was a member of The Warren Commission. Russell, along with Hale Boggs were the two Commission members most vocal in their dissatisfaction with the Warren Commission's final Report. Russell had become so convinced that the Warren Commission wasn't obtaining all the intelligence needed to make a thorough report, he secured "outside counsel," secretly commissioning his own private investigation. All briefings of the Senator by Colonel Philip Corso, who conducted the inquiry, were oral. Nothing was to be kept on paper.
  
• 1/22/1971 Nixon's State of the Union address: proposed revenue sharing with the states. He called for a "new American revolution in which power is turned back to the people."
  
• 1/25/1971 Tom Huston memo to George Bell, compiling a list of "groups and individuals that may be catergorized as unfriendly." This included the Ford Foundation, Brookings Institution, "JFK Crowd," Common Cause, and Noam Chomsky.
  
• 1/25/1971 Supreme Court rules that companies cannot deny employment to women with preschool children unless the same criterion applies to men.
  
• 1/25/1971 Jack Anderson column reported an attempt on Castro's life 3/1961 with a poison capsule supplied by Johnny Roselli.
  
• 1/26/1971 John Dean memo to Haldeman on status of investigation into Larry O'Brien and Howard Hughes: "I have also been informed by a source of Jack Caulfield's that O'Brien and Maheu are long time friends from the Boston area, a friendship which dates back to early or pre-Kennedy days. During the Kennedy administration, there apparently was a continuous liaison between O'Brien and Maheu...it is alleged that Maheu offered O'Brien a piece of the Hughes action in Las Vegas...O'Brien apparentlly did not accept the offer...The Clark Clifford law firm has been the Washington representative of the Hughes legal interests in Washington for a number of years." (Secret Files 210)
  
• 1/26/1971 Charles Manson and three of his female followers are convicted of first degree murder in the slaying of actress Sharon Tate and six other persons.
  
• 1/29/1971 Nixon submits his budget for 1972 to Congress.
  
• 1/31-2/2/1971 Vietnam vets testify in Detroit about atrocities committed against Vietnamese (north and south, soldier and civilian) by US soldiers (including themselves). They described how their superiors did nothing to discourage the idea that the Vietanamese were inferior "gooks" who could be killed with impunity. Their statements were filmed and released as the documentary Winter Soldier later this year.
  
• 2/1971 Voice-activated tape-recording equipment is installed in the Oval Office, Nixon's office in the Executive Office Building, the Cabinet Room and the Lincoln Sitting Room, and Camp David. The Secret Service's technical division is ordered to install a super-secret recording system. The system eventually consists of a network of seven stations, mostly using noise-activated recorders. Nixon orders his chief of staff H. R. Haldeman to see to the installation, and to keep it extremely quiet. Haldeman delegates the installation to aides Lawrence Higby and Alexander Butterfield. Haldeman decides the Army Signal Corps should not install the system because someone in that group might report back to the Pentagon; instead he has the Secret Service's technical security division install it. The work is done late at night; five microphones are embedded in Nixon's Oval Office desk, and two more in the wall light fixtures on either side of the fireplace, over the couch and chairs where Nixon often greets visitors. All three phones are wiretapped. By February 16, the system in both chambers is in place. All conversations are recorded on Sony reel-to-reel tape recorders, with Secret Service agents changing the reels every day and storing the tapes in a small, locked room in the Executive Office Building. [Reeves, 2001, pp. 305] The system continues to expand as the months pass. LBJ's recording system had to be manually operated. Nixon's recording system is automatic. In May, 1972, Nixon even has the Aspen Lodge wired in the Camp David retreat. Altogether, more than five thousand hours of conversations are eventually taped.
  
• 2/1971 60 Minutes aired a story about the Hughes empire which included an interview with Maheu.
  
• 2/1971 By early 1971, Billy James Hargis had become more critical of Nixon, and began quoting from Gen. Curtis LeMay, who said in mid-1971 that "within 18 months Russia would demand our total surrender or would threaten to blow us off the face of the earth."
  
• 2/2/1971 John R. Brown memo to Haldeman; he expressed concern about Jack Anderson's acquiring presidential memos and private transcipts of White House meetings: "a question was raised as to what we are going to do about it."
  
• 2/6 & 8/1971 H.R. Haldeman wrote himself a memo: "[Billy] Graham wants to be helpful next year…Point him in areas where do most good. He thinks there are real stirrings in religious directions, especially re young people. I call him and set up date. No other level - can't have leak…Must mobilize [Graham] and his crowd."
  
• 2/8/1971 Nixon memo to Haldeman urging that Muskie's "moderate image" be unmasked in the South as that of a closet liberal.
  
• 2/8/1971 Haig orders the last 9 of the 17 wiretaps shut down in a call to Sullivan. They were shut down 2/10. Copies of the taping logs were put into Ehrlichman's safe.
  
• 2/8/1971 South Vietnamese troops with US air and artillery support launch a major offensive against the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos.
  
• 2/8/1971 Apollo 14 splashes down after nine days in space, including 33 hours on the moon.
  
• 2/11/1971 John Connally, Democrat and former Texas Governor, is sworn in as Treasury Secretary. He will serve until June 12 1972. Before agreeing to take the appointment, however, Connally told Nixon that the president must find a position in the administration for George H.W. Bush, the Republican who had been defeated in November 1970 in a hard-fought U.S. Senate race against Democrat Lloyd M. Bentsen. Connally told Nixon that his taking the treasury post would embarrass Bush, who had "labored in the vineyards" for Nixon's election as president, while Connally had supported Humphrey. Ben Barnes, then the lieutenant governor and originally a Connally ally, claims in his autobiography that Connally's insistence saved Bush's political career because the then former U.S. representative and twice-defeated Senate candidate relied on appointed offices to build a resume by which to seek the presidency in 1980 and again in 1988. Nixon hence named Bush as ambassador to the United Nations in order to secure Connally's services at treasury. Barnes also said that he doubted George W. Bush could have become president in 2001 had Bush's father not first been given the string of federal appointments during the 1970s to strengthen the family's political viability. (Ben Barnes with Lisa Dickey, Barn Burning Barn Building: Tales of a Political Life from LBJ to George W. Bush and Beyond, Albany, Texas: Bright Sky Press, 2006, p. 189) No mention of Connally in Bush's autobiography. On taking the Treasury post, Connally famously told a delegation of Europeans worried about exchange rate fluctuations that the American dollar "is our currency, but your problem." Secretary Connally defended a $50 billion increase in the debt ceiling and a $35 to $40 billion budget deficit as an essential "fiscal stimulus" at a time when five million Americans were unemployed. He unveiled Nixon's program of raising the price of gold and formally devaluing the dollarfinally leaving the old gold standard entirely, a process begun in 1934 by Franklin D. Roosevelt. Prices continued to increase during 1971, and Nixon allowed wage and price guidelines, which Congress had authorized on a stand-by basis, to be implemented. Connally later shied away from his role in recommending the failed wage and price controls. Connally announced guaranteed loans for the ailing Lockheed aircraft company. He fought a lonely battle too against growing balance-of-payment problems with the nation's trading partners. He also undertook important foreign diplomatic trips for Nixon through his role as Treasury Secretary. Historian Bruce Schulman wrote that Nixon was "awed" by the handsome, urbane Texan who was also a tough political fighter. Schulman added that Henry Kissinger, Nixon's National Security Advisor, noted that Connally was the only cabinet member that Nixon did not disparage behind his back, and that this was high praise indeed.
  
• 2/11/1971 Treaty forbidding the installation of nuclear weapons on the ocean floor is signed by 63 nations.
  
• 2/11/1971 Jack Caulfield memo on Jack Anderson to Haldeman: "Anderson does, indeed, have access to intelligence digests..." He advised more efforts to track down the source of the leaks.
  
• 2/12/1971 Patrick J. Buchanan memo to Nixon: "I think the President should give serious consideration to replacing Mr. Hoover as soon as possible...has already passed the peak of his national esteem...he has had nowhere to go but down; and he is going down steadily...with each of these new picayune battles in which he involves himself, his place is being sullied...Mr. Hoover stands today with the American people as an almost unvarnished symbol of what is right with American law enforcement...On more and more of these quarrels, Mr. Hoover is not totally right - and comes off as something of a reactionary...McGovern is making him a focal point of attack...if Hoover goes now he can be retired in full glory...and not let him...wind up his career a dead lion being chewed over by the jackals of the Left." He also recommended that Nixon appoint his successor rather than letting some future Democratic administration do it.
  
• 2/13/1971 Lon Nol leaves for Hawaii for treatment of a stroke.
  
• 2/21/19711 US and 20 other UN members sign an international treaty to end illegal drug sales.
  
• 2/22/1971 Haldeman memo: "We need to get a petition started in McCloskey's district demanding his resignation on the basis of his calling for the impeachment of the President."
  
• 2/22/1971 Eugene McCarthy speech in Boston to drum up more anti-war support on college campuses.
  
• 2/23 and 27/1971 CBS-TV broadcasts The Selling of the Pentagon.
  
• 2/24/1971 The U.S. Coast Guard vessel Cape York captures several Cuban fishing boats in international waters.
  
• 2/24/1971 Laird and Gen. Vogt displayed a length of gasoline pipe supposedly taken from the Ho Chih Minh trail by ground forces recently; a few days later, the Pentagon admitted that the pipe came from an earlier South Vietnamese raid into Laos, the first official confirmation that they had been crossing the border into Laos.
  
• 2/25/1971 Nixon makes his annual State-of-the-World address.
  
• 2/25/1971 and 3/9/1971 Gervais secretly taped conversations with Jim Garrison for the IRS, in which Garrison talked about the money Gervais was bringing, and assured him that Governor McKeithen would protect the pinball operators.
  
• 2/26/1971 US and France sign a protocol to crack down on organized drug trafficking.
  
• 3/1/1971 Weather Underground bombed a Senate bathroom in Washington, protesting the Laos invasion.
  
• 3/2/1971 George H.W. Bush becomes US ambassador to the UN.
  
• 3/9/1971 Memo from FBI supervisor Milton Jones: "The following summarizes all material concerning...McGovern as contained in Bureau files...A review of the personal records in the Director's Office failed to locate any additional pertinent material concerning McGovern."
  
• 3/10/1971 FBI memo from Asst Dir. D.J. Dalbey to Tolson on McGovern's comments against Hoover. "There is no act that would get political sympathy for McGovern than the belief of other politicians that the Director had used the power at his disposal against McGovern. There is no gain here to justify the risk."
  
• 3/12/1971 Pat Buchanan memo expressing concern about Nixon's public talk of a "full generation of peace" and Vietnam being "our last war" as possibly dangerous and naive.
  
• 3/12/1971 Carlos Marcello is released from the Medical Center for Federal Prisoners in Springfield, Missouri.
  
• 3/14/1971 The SPD gains an absolute majority in the West Berlin government. Ironically, this creates a need to bring all elements of the party into positions of power, including the far left wing. Leftists in the new city government obstruct policies, disrupt legislation, leading to a negative reaction against the socialists from the voters in the Mar 75 election.
  
• 3/15/1971 The fourth round of the US-Soviet SALT talks begins in Vienna.
  
• 3/15/1971 At Bien Hoa, a U.S. Army base in South Vietnam, a fragmentation grenade exploded; this time in an officer's barracks for an artillery unit, killing two lieutenants and wounding a third. All were white. The unit commander Captain Rigby and First Sergeant Willis decided they knew who did it: a black soldier from California, Billy Dean Smith. Smith was an outspoken critic of the rampant racism in the army and particularly objected to the segregated bars and clubs in Vietnam. Without any evidence, Smith was charged with two counts of murder, two counts of resisting arrest, one count of assault, and two counts of attempted murder. Smith proclaimed his innocence and pled not guilty to all the charges. If found guilty he would have faced the death penalty. Smith's lawyer, civilian Luke McKissack, went to Vietnam and investigated the situation, and petitioned to have the trial moved to Fort Ord in California. After a change in venue was granted, McKissack wrote directly to the president complaining of the treatment of his client. "I wrote a letter to (then President Richard) Nixon asking him to intervene on Billy's behalf and also asking why Calley (who had been convicted of 22 counts of murder by this time) was living it up in a bachelor type pad while my guy, who hadn't been tried yet, was confined to a 6 x 9 cage, seeing daylight one hour a day. I asked if it was because Billy was Black and Calley white, because Billy was an enlisted grunt and Calley an officer, and then I invoked the mere gook rule.' My guy had allegedly killed white people, Calley had blown away mere gooks.'" McKissack was stunned when he received a reply from a Nixon aide agreeing with him. "As you pointed out in your petition, the issues of Private Smith's case are in no way similar to the issues inherent in Lieutenant Calley's case," wrote Nixon aide General Lawrence Williams. The only "evidence" the army had against Smith was that he had hand grenade pins in his pocket when arrested. "I put G.I. after G.I. on the stand who not only said they routinely carried around grenade pins, but that they also saw what they felt was an ongoing need in their unit for drastic actions like fragging," said McKissack. After McKissack's vigorous defense and a campaign organized by G.I.s and antiwar activists, Smith was acquitted on all charges. After he left the military, Smith became an organizer for the American Servicemen's Union (ASU), one of the most serious attempts at organizing a trade union for military personnel. There were many more Calley-like cases, such as the Green Beret murder case and the Son Thang massacre.
  
• 3/18/1971 House voted against funding the supersonic transport plane (SST).
  
• 3/20/1971 Nixon Campaign Decides to Bug Democrats Two White House aides, Frederick LaRue and G. Gordon Liddy, attend a meeting of the Nixon presidential campaign, the Committee to Re-elect the President (CREEP), where it is agreed that the organization will spend $250,000 to conduct an "intelligence gathering" operation against the Democratic Party for the upcoming elections. [Spartacus Schoolnet, 8/2007] The members decide, among other things, to plant electronic surveillance devices in the Democratic National Committee (DNC) headquarters. LaRue is a veteran of the 1968 Nixon campaign (see November 5, 1968), as is Liddy, a former FBI agent. [Spartacus Schoolnet, 8/2007; Spartacus Schoolnet, 8/2007] LaRue decides to pay the proposed "Special Investigations Unit," later informally called the "Plumbers", large amounts of "hush money" to keep them quiet. He tasks former New York City policeman Tony Ulasewicz with arranging the payments. LaRue later informs another Nixon aide, Hugh Sloan, that LaRue is prepared to commit perjury if necessary to protect the operation. A 1973 New York Times article will call LaRue "an elusive, anonymous, secret operator at the highest levels of the shattered Nixon power structure." [Spartacus Schoolnet, 8/2007] The FBI will later determine that this decision took place between March 20 and 30, 1972, not 1971. In this case, the FBI timeline is almost certainly in error, since the "Plumbers" break-in of the offices of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist came well before this date.
  
• 3/21/1971 Oleg Nechiporenko and other KGB officials are expelled from Mexico.
  
• 3/22/1971 Nixon, in an interview with Howard K. Smith on ABC-TV, complained that the media was trying to exaggerate how poorly the South Vietnamese troops were doing in Laos. He explained that US air support in Cambodia was primarily to protect US forces. "I think the credibility gap will rapidly disappear. It is events that cause the credibility gap, not the fact that a President deliberately lies or misleads the people. That is my opinion."
  
• 3/23/1971 Nixon raised milk price supports; he would later get $2 million in campaign contributions from the dairy industry.
  
• 3/23/1971 Citizens of the District of Columbia elect their first (non-voting) congressman since 1875.
  
• 3/23/1971 Brian Faulkner succeeds as Northern Ireland Prime Minister after defeating William Craig in a Unionist Party leadership election.
  
• 3/24/1971 South Vietnamese, facing large losses, end their attempt to cut supply lines in Laos.
  
• 3/24/1971 The Senate votes against government sponsorship of the supersonic transport plane (SST).
  
• 3/29/1971 Charles Manson and three women are sentenced to death in the gas chamber.
  
• 3/29/1971 First Lt. William Calley convicted of murdering Vietnamese civilians at My Lai. This was an Army court-martial; he is sentenced 3/31 to life at hard labor, but 8/20 this is reduced to 20 years. Yet, his conviction began to win him support (and even sympathy) from many who were upset that the senior officers were not convicted, and many who felt Calley was being made the scapegoat. President Nixon even got involved. He transferred Calley from Ft. Benning (Ga.) to house arrest, and promised to give a final review to Calley after the appeals were completed (this never happened, as Nixon became sidetracked with Watergate). The officer who convened the court-martial (the Ft. Benning commander) exercised his power to commute Calley's sentence to 20 years. The Secretary of the Army reduced it to 10 years. Due to time already served, Calley was paroled 6 months after entering federal prison. By the time his conviction was upheld on September 10, 1975, he had been out of prison for almost 1 1/2 years.
  
• 4/1971 United Steelworkers President I.W. Abel attacked Nixon for being opposed to wage increase demands from unions; he called the administration's economic policies "disastrous."
  
• 4/1971 John Kerry of Vietnam Veterans Against the War testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and said that My Lai-style crimes were "not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command. Over 150 honorably discharged and many very highly decorated veterans testified to war crimes committed in Southeast Asia…[they] had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam." Kerry would later become a US Senator.
  
• 4/1971 Gen. Charles Cabell dies. CIA deputy director connected to anti-Castro Cubans. His brother was Earl Cabell, Mayor of Dallas in 1963. Fired by JFK after Bay of Pigs. Collapses and dies after physical at Fort Myers.
  
• 4/2/1971 Anthony Lewis editorialized that "as Americans are told by their government that the war is winding down, the number of Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians being killed and maimed and made homeless is at a record high level...Most of these casualties are caused, and people made refugees, by American and Allied military activity." (NY Times)
  
• 4/3/1971 Nixon announces he will personally review the case of Lt. Calley.
  
• 4/5/1971 House Majority Leader Hale Boggs delivered a speech on the House floor, declaring Hoover to be incompetent and senile. He said that the FBI had used "the tactics of the Soviet Union and Hitler's Gestapo." He demanded Hoover's immediate resignation. He charged that FBI agents had tapped his phone and those of other congressmen. He blasted Attorney General Mitchell, who "says he is a law and order man. If law and order means the suppression of the Bill of Rights...then I say 'God help us.'" (Washington Post 4/6/1971)
  
• 4/7/1971 Outtakes of the CBS documentary The Selling of the Pentagon are subpoenaed by a House subcommittee.
  
• 4/14/1971 Nixon relaxed the trade embargo against China.
  
• 4/17/1971 US table-tennis team leaves China after a week-long tour.
  
• 4/17/1971 E. Howard Hunt returns to Miami on the eve of the tenth anniversary of the Bay of Pigs. A memorial to the fallen members of Brigade 2506 is dedicated in Little Havana. Hunt retires from the CIA to the agency-connected Robert R. Mullen Company, a Washington public relations firm with clients of the solvency of General Foods and the Hughes Tool Company. Howard Hunt renews his acquaintance with Bernard Barker at a Bay of Pigs veterans reunion in Miami.
  
• 4/18/1971 White House Conference on Youth is held.
  
• 4/18/1971 John Kerry on Meet the Press: "There are all kinds of atrocities and I would have to say that, yes, yes, I committed the same kind of atrocities as thousands of other soldiers have committed in that I took part in shootings in free-fire zones. I conducted harassment and interdiction fire. I used 50-caliber machine guns which we were granted and ordered to use, which were our only weapon against people. I took part in search-and-destroy missions, in the burning of villages. All of this is contrary to the laws of warfare."
  
• 4/19/1971 Buchanan memo to Haldeman: "Is the Democratic Party providing staff assistance and/or financial assistance to the McCloskey campaign...If so, we can discredit McCloskey as not a man of principle, but as a party traitor..."
  
• 4/20/1971 Supreme Court, in unanimous decision, supports busing to end "state-imposed segregation" in schools. The ruling did not affect de facto segregation in Northern states.
  
• 4/21/1971 Hugh Gates of the University of Georgia did an interview with former WC member Sen. Cooper; he stated flatly that he and Sen. Russell did not accept the single-bullet theory.
  
• 4/24/1971 "Out Now" rally in D.C. against the war drew between 200,000 and 500,000. Hundreds of Vietnam vets threw away their medals.
  
• 4/26/1971 Retired Mexico City station chief Winston Scott dies of a heart attack in Mexico City while eating breakfast. The CIA's counterintelligence chief, James Angleton, immediately flies to Mexico from Washington to retrieve Scott's autobiographical manuscript and other personal files. It is reported that Angleton also seizes a tape of LHO's conversations in the Cuban Embassy in Mexico City. Cratefuls of material, referred to as "legendary", are removed from Scott's home by a CIA team. They have never resurfaced. (The CIA has previously informed Congressional investigators that they routinely destroyed the audio tapes prior to the assassination.)
  
• 4/27/1971 Robert Mardian delivered a Law Day address at a banquet of the Federal Bar Association in Washington. He spoke of the pressing need for increased internal security measures at both the federal and state levels. The New York Times reported that he also said "that the assassination of President Kennedy might have been made possible by what the Warren Commission called the Federal Bureau of Investigation's restrictive view of it's duty to investigate Lee Harvey Oswald." The same day, Hoover abruptly cancelled all COINTELPRO operations, which surprised the Nixon people. The Senate Intelligence Committee was interested in finding out if there was a link between the two events, but Hoover associates say that he had planned to cancel COINTELPRO for several weeks prior to Mardian's speech. (Coincidence or Conspiracy 536-7)
  
• 4/29/1971 Rev. Ralph Abernathy conducted a teach-in at HEW and led a mule train from the Department's offices to the White House. The next day he read a "poor people's bill of particulars" against the Justice Dept.
  
• 4/30/1971 Rev. Philip Berrigan and seven others are indicted for plotting to kidnap Kissinger and blow up heating tunnels in government buildings.
  

[Tracy Riddle]

• 5/1971 Israel: after the Black Panther riots of May 18, an Israeli-Yemeni policeman commented, "I only pray that there be no peace [with the Arabs], otherwise we shall destroy each other." The Black Panthers were Jews from who immigrated from Middle Eastern countries and felt they were being treated as second-class citizens in a country run by mostly European Jews. (O'Brien, The Siege)
  
• 5/1971 Cholera and smallpox epidemic in Bangladesh.
  
• 5/1/1971 The National Railroad Passenger Corporation (Amtrak), the government-run railroad passenger service, began operation.
  
• 5/3-5/1971 People's Coalition for Peace and Justice demonstrates against the war in D.C.; they attempted to shut down the capital. Local police, the army, marines and guardsmen were called in and arrested more than 7000 people at random. Many were herded into a football field and the D.C. Coliseum. The arrests and convictions were later overturned because of widespread violations of constitutional rights.
  
• 5/3/1971 James Earl Ray made a failed escape attempt from Brushy Mountain Prison, Tenn.
  
• 5/4/1971 Erich Honecker replaces Walter Ulbricht as First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Socialist Unity Party (SED) in the GDR (DDR). [Another source reports this as 3 May 71.]
  
• 5/5/1971 A race riot occurs in the Brownsville section of New York City.
  
• 5/9/1971 Secretary of State Rogers returns from his tour of the Middle East.
  
• 5/13/1971 (James) Charles Evers, brother of the slain civil rights leader Medgar Evers, becomes the first black mayor of Fayette, Mississippi.
  
• 5/21/1971 Secretary of the Army Stanley R. Resor resigns.
  
• 5/22/1971 Nixon joins LBJ in dedicating Johnson's presidential library at the University of Texas.
  
• 5/25/1971 Nixon signs bill ending production of the SST.
  
• 5/27/1971 Colson memo to Haldeman about Fitzsimmons becoming the new head of the Teamsters: "Fitzsimmons...told me that if elected...it was his intention to try to deliver the Teamsters [support] to us next year."
  
• 5/28/1971 US and Soviet negotiators finish the fourth round of SALT talks in Vienna.
  
• 5/30/1971 Mariner 9, a US space probe bound for Mars, is launched from Cape Kennedy.
  
• 6/1971 After re-submitting his welfare reform bill, Nixon saw it passed by the House but killed in the Senate.
  
• 6/1/1971 E. Howard Hunt joins the Nixon White House as a "consultant." The CIA's Technical Services Division assists him. He begins planning operations to discredit Senator Edward Kennedy and Daniel Ellsberg and to set up a disinformation scheme to blame JFK for the assassination of Diem. Hunt receives assistance from the CIA's Technical Services Division.
  
• 6/1/1971 Nixon pledges a national drive against drug addiction.
  
• 6/1/1971 Vietnam Veterans for a Just Peace condemn the protests of Vietnam Veterans Against the War as "irreseponsible."
  
• 6/3/1971 Jimmy Hoffa announces from prison that he is not a candidate for election as president of the Teamsters.
  
• 6/6/1971 Honduras: Ramon Cruz is elected President.
  
• 6/7/1971 A federal court issued a permanent injuction against Jim Garrison from prosecuting Clay Shaw, accusing him of bad faith.
  
• 6/8/1971 Memo from Colson to Klein: "Haldeman has asked that we get Jack Kemp operating as the 'truth squad' to refute McCloskey."
  
• 6/9/1971 US cites Israeli settlements in Jordanian Jerusalem as a violation of Geneva Convention.
  
• 6/10/1971 Nixon announced that the trade embargo on Communist China would be lifted.
  
• 6/10/1971 Riots in Mexico City kill ten students, injure 130.
  
• 6/12/1971 J Edgar Hoover informed author Victor Lasky that Robert Kennedy had wiretapped his phone for several weeks in the summer of 1963. "The FBI had not done the job, he said...it was done by 'outside people' whom he did not identify." (It Didn't Start with Watergate 77-9)
  
• 6/12/1971 David Hilliard, Black Panther chief of staff, is convicted of assault in connection with the 4/1968 shootout with police.
  
• 6/13/1971 France: Francois Mitterand is named head of the Socialist Party.
  
• 6/13/1971 In March, 1971, UFOlogist James McDonald's wife Betsy told him she wanted a divorce. McDonald seems to have started planning his suicide not long afterwards. He finished a few articles he was writing (UFO-related and otherwise), and made plans for the storage of his notes, papers, and research. In April 1971 he attempted suicide by shooting himself in the head. He survived, but was blinded and was wheelchair bound. For a short period, McDonald was committed to the psychiatric ward of a Tucson, Arizona hospital. He recovered a degree of peripheral vision, and made plans to return to his teaching position. However, on June 13, 1971, a family, walking along a creek close to the bridge spanning the Canada Del Oro Wash near Tucson, found a body that was later identified as McDonald's. A .38 caliber revolver was found close to him, as well as a suicide note.
  
• 6/13/1971 The New York Times begins publishing the Pentagon Papers. The headline of the three column story reads: "VIETNAM ARCHIVE: PENTAGON STUDY TRACES 3 DECADES OF GROWING U.S. INVOLVEMENT" Richard Nixon reads the story and tells aide H.R. Haldeman it was "criminally traitorous" for someone to turn over the papers and for the Times to publish them, but initially decides it is best for the Administration to "keep out of it." Later that day, Henry Kissinger begins urging Nixon to take action against the newspaper because the release threatened ongoing secret negotiations. The Pentagon Papers quickly provokes a legal battle, and a rise in anxiety in the White House about leaks. From the article by Neil Sheehan: "A massive study of how the United States went to war in Indochina, conducted by the Pentagon three years ago, demonstrates that four administrations progressively developed a sense of commitment to a non-Communist Vietnam, a readiness to fight the North to protect the South, and an ultimate frustration with this effort--to a much greater extent than their public statements acknowledged at the time…The study led its 30 to 40 authors and researchers to many broad conclusions and specific findings, including the following: That the Truman Administration decision to give military aid to France in her colonial war against the Communist-led Vietminh "directly involved" the United States in Vietnam and "set" the course of American policy. That the Eisenhower Administration's decision to rescue a fledgling South Vietnam from a Communist takeover and attempt to undermine the new Communist regime of North Vietnam gave the Administration a "direct role in the ultimate breakdown of the Geneva settlement" for Indochina in 1954. That the Kennedy Administration, though ultimately spared from major escalation decisions by the death of its leader, transformed a policy of "limited-risk gamble," which it inherited, into a "broad commitment" that left President Johnson with a choice between more war and withdrawal. That the Johnson Administration, though the President was reluctant and hesitant to take the final decisions, intensified the covert warfare against North Vietnam and began planning in the spring of 1964 to wage overt war, a full year before it publicly revealed the depth of its involvement and its fear of defeat. That this campaign of growing clandestine military pressure through 1964 and the expanding program of bombing North Vietnam in 1965 were begun despite the judgment of the Government's intelligence community that the measures would not cause Hanoi to cease its support of the Vietcong insurgency in the South, and that the bombing was deemed militarily ineffective within a few months. That these four succeeding administrations built up the American political, military and psychological stakes in Indochina, often more deeply than they realized at the time, with large-scale military equipment to the French in 1950; with acts of sabotage and terror warfare against North Vietnam, beginning in 1954; with moves that encouraged and abetted the overthrow of President Ngo Dinh Diuem of South Vietnam in 1963; with plans, pledges and threats of further action that sprang to life in the Tonkin Gulf clashes in August, 1964; with the careful preparation of public opinion for the years of open warfare that were to follow; and with the calculation in 1965, as the planes and troops were openly committed to sustained combat, that neither accommodation inside South Vietnam nor early negotiations with North Vietnam would achieve the desired result. The Pentagon study also ranges beyond such historical judgments. It suggests that the predominant American interest was at first containment of Communism and later the defense of the power influence and prestige of the United States in both stages irrespective of conditions in Vietnam.
  
• 6/13/1971 NYT article, by Hedrick Smith: "In June, 1967, at a time of great personal disenchantment with the Indochina war and rising frustration among his colleagues at the Pentagon, Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara commissioned a major study of how and why the United States had become so deeply involved in Vietnam…Their report runs to more than 7,000 pages--1.5 million words of historical narratives plus a million words of documents--enough to fill a small crate. Even so, it is not a complete or polished history. It displays many inconsistencies and lacks a single all- embracing summary. It is an extended internal critique based on the documentary record, which the researchers did not supplement with personal interviews, partly because they were pressed for time…Some important gaps appear in the study. The researchers did not have access to the complete files of Presidents or to all the memorandums of their conversations and decisions. Moreover, there is another important gap in the copy of the Pentagon study obtained by The New York Times: It lacks the section on the secret diplomacy of the Johnson period…But the Pentagon account and its accompanying documents also reveal that once the basic objective of policy was set, the internal debate on Vietnam from 1950 until mid-1967 dealt almost entirely with how to reach those objectives rather than with the basic direction of policy…The research project was organized in the Pentagon's office of International Security Affairs--I.S.A., as it is known to Government insiders--the politico-military affairs branch, whose head is the third-ranking official in the Defense Department. This was Assistant Secretary McNaughton when the study was commissioned and Assistant Secretary Paul C. Warnke when the study was completed. In the fall of 1968, it was transmitted to Mr. Warnke, who reportedly "signed off" on it. Former officials say this meant that he acknowledged completion of the work without endorsing its contents and forwarded it to Mr. Clifford…Because of its extreme sensitivity, very few copies were reproduced--from 6 to 15, by various accounts. One copy was delivered by hand to Mr. McNamara, then president of the World Bank. His reaction is not known, but at least one other former policy maker was reportedly displeased by the study's candor."
  
• 6/14/1971 This evening, John Mitchell requests that the NY Times stop printing the Pentagon Papers, saying it would cause "irreparable injury to the defense interests of the United States" but the Times refuses. If the paper refused, another Justice Department official said, the Government would try to forbid further publication by court action tomorrow.
  
• 6/14/1971 Memo from Chuck Colson called Edward Land (head of the Polaroid Corporation) "an extreme liberal though obviously brilliant...he is a member of the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board" and was appointed to that post by Nixon, though Colson suspected him of giving money to the Black United Front. (Secret Files 270)
  
• 6/15/1971 Nixon memo to Haldeman: "I have decided that we must take action within the White House to deal with the problem...under no circumstances is anyone connected with the White House to give any interview to a member of the staff of the New York Times without my express permission."
  
• 6/15/1971 After three installments of the NYT series, the Justice Department obtained a temporary restraining order against further publication, with the government claiming that if publication continued "the national defense interests of the United States and the nation's security will suffer immediate and irreparable harm." US District Judge Murray L. Gurfein ordered the paper to stop publication for four days; the Times complied.
  
• 6/15/1971 Haldeman memo on developing a strategy to deal with the Papers mess: "These should be referred to as the Kennedy/Johnson papers on the war...We need some hard-hitting speeches in Congress - that the Times is putting the press interest above the national interest...Kissinger should mobilize some of the old establishment to hit the Times."
  
• 6/15/1971 Ehrlichman memo to Nixon, saying that it doesn't matter that the Papers deal with JFK/LBJ policies, "The Times violated a very important law...paramount national interests supersede and preclude publication of secrets vital to national security."
  
• 6/15/1971 Justice Department Injuction Opens Landmark Case against New York Times At the behest of President Nixon, the Justice Department files a motion with the US District Court in New York requesting a temporary restraining order and an injunction against the New York Times to prevent further publication of articles stemming from the "Pentagon Papers". The landmark case of New York Times Company v. United States begins. The government's argument is based on the assertion that the publication of the documents jeopardizes national security, makes it more difficult to prosecute the Vietnam War, and endangers US intelligence assets. The Times will base its defense on the principles embodied in the First Amendment, as well as the argument that just because the government claims that some materials are legitimately classified as top secret, this does not mean they have to be kept out of the public eye; the Times will argue that the government does not want to keep the papers secret to protect national security, but instead to protect itself from embarrassment and possible criminal charges. The court grants the temporary restraining order request, forcing the Times to temporarily stop publishing excerpts from the documents. [Herda, 1994; Moran, 2007]
  
• 6/16/1971 US Conference of Mayors urged Nixon to withdraw all troops from Vietnam by the end of the year.
  
• 6/16/1971 Lyndon Johnson received Leo Janos, the Houston bureau chief for Time magazine, at the Johnson Library. The meeting occurred at a propitious moment. Three days earlier The New York Times had published the first installment in what would become known as the Pentagon Papers, a secret study of U.S. involvement in Vietnam. There was much to talk about, and Johnson was in an expansive mood. Over coffee after lunch the conversation turned briefly to President Kennedy. Confident that his former speechwriter would respect the ground rules (the conversation was off the record), Johnson not only reiterated what he had told Howard K. Smith in 1968 and Walter Cronkite in 1969 but went into more detail than he ever had before, making his pregnant "Murder Inc." remarkwhich Janos did not publish until after Johnson's death.
  
• 6/17/1971 Mack Trucks, an American firm, signs a contract to build a factory in the USSR.
  
• 6/17/1971 Maxwell Taylor, on the CBS Morning News, said, "One of the most serious wrongs, in my judgement, was our connivance at the overthrow of President Diem...we had absolutely nothing but chaos which followed...I would be sure that no American ever wanted Diem assassinated, you understand. And it was certainly a terrible shock to President Kennedy when...that developed. But the organization of coups and the execution of a coup is not like organizing a tea party; it's a very dangerous business. So I didn't think we had any right to be surprised when - when Diem and his brother were murdered." Taylor was asked, "Well, what do you make, General, of the principle of the people's right to know?" Taylor answered, "I don't believe in that as a general principle."
  
• 6/17/1971 US signs pact to return Okinawa to Japan.
  
• 6/18/1971 France: philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre is indicted for libeling police.
  
• 6/18-19/1971 Washington Post begins publishing articles based on the Pentagon Papers.
  
• 6/21/1971 Chou En-Lai announces that withdrawal of US support from Taiwan would result in better relations between the US and China.
  
• 6/22/1971 Haldeman memo on the Papers controversy: "The key now is to poison the Democratic well...start going through all the secret documents, especially the Cuban Missile Crisis as well as Korea, etc., and follow up on the demand that these be released....We must...get off the wicket of appearing to cover up for Johnson." (Secret Files 278)
  
• 6/22-23/1971 the Boston Globe and the Chicago Sun-Times publish their own articles on the Pentagon Papers.
  
• 6/22/1971 The Senate, partly upset over Richard Nixon's refusal to provide Congress with copies of the Pentagon Papers, for the first time votes for a unilateral withdrawal from Indochina, regardless of the consequences. For the first time, too, a Gallup poll records a majority favoring an end to the Vietnam war, "even at the risk of eventual Communist takeover."
  
• 6/23/1971 Daniel Ellsberg appears on CBS-TV news and discloses that he is the "leaker" of the Pentagon Papers and urges that Americans take responsibility to end the hostilities in Indochina which have caused the deaths of one to two million people in the last quarter-century. [Former hawk Ellsberg had become disillusioned while running a CIA "pacification" program in the 1960s. Back home and working at the Rand Corporation think tank with a high security clearance, he methodically photocopied the relevant Pentagon documents over a period of months.]
  
• 6/25/1971 Colson memo to Haldeman: "Ellsberg...is a natural villain to the extent that he can be painted evil...we can discredit the peace movement and we have the Democrats on a marvelous hook because thus far most of them have defended the release of the documents." He urged tactics to keep the Democrats "divided and fighting" including: "We could of course plant and try to prove the thesis that Bobby Kennedy was behind the preparation of these papers because he planned to use them to overthrow Lyndon Johnson..." (Secret Files 279)
  
• 6/26/1971 Justice Dept issues a warrant for Daniel Ellsberg.
  
• 6/271971 Max Taylor interview, recorded in early spring '71, is shown; he claims, "I did not recommend combat forces [in 1961]. I stressed we would bring in engineer forces, logistics forces...and help in the very serious flood problem in 1961. So this was not a combat force."
  
• 6/28/1971 Mob leader Joseph A. Colombo Jr. was shot and critically wounded; the assailant, a 25-year-old black man named Jerome A. Johnson, was shot dead at the scene.
  
• 6/28/1971 Los Angeles grand jury indicted Ellsberg on one count of theft of government property and one count of unauthorized possession of writings related to national defense. Ellsberg confessed to leaking the Pentagon Papers because he was convinced of the Vietnam War's immorality. Daniel Ellsberg, who has been evading the FBI, surrenders in Boston to federal authorities.
  
• 6/28/1971 Supreme Court rules 8-1 that state aid to parochial schools is unconstitutional, even if the aid is for non-religious purposes. Court also ruled that Muhammad Ali was improperly drafted because the Justice Dept misled the Selective Service in telling them that his claim to be a conscientious objector was unwarranted.
  
• 6/30/1971 Supreme Court Refuses to Block Publication of Pentagon Papers The Supreme Court rules 6-3 not to permanently enjoin the New York Times and other press organs from publishing articles derived from the Pentagon Papers. Three justices, William O. Douglas, Hugo Black, and Thurgood Marshall, insist that the government can never suppress the publication of information no matter what the threat to national security; the other three in the majority, Potter Stewart, Byron White, and William Brennan, use a more moderate "common sense" standard that says, though the government can suppress publication of sensitive information under circumstances of war or national emergency, this case did not meet the criteria for such suppression. Chief Justice Warren Burger is joined by Harry Blackmun and John Harlan in dissenting; they believe that the president has the unrestrained authority to prevent confidential materials affecting foreign policy from being published. The Times's lawyer says that the ruling will help ensure that a federal court will not issue a restraining order against a news outlet simply because the government is unhappy with the publication of a particular article. [Herda, 1994]
  
• 6/30/1971 Oval Office conversation; Nixon ordered Haldeman to break into the Brookings Institution, presumably to steal Vietnam-related documents: "Just break in. Break in and take them out!" (AP 11/21/1996)
  
• 6/30/1971 Nixon announces that Turkey has agreed to curb opium production.
  
• 6/30/1971 Jim Garrison is arrested at his home by agents of the Internal Revenue Service who charge him with accepting illegal payoffs from pinball machine operators. He will not go to trial for two years. Jim Garrison was arrested by IRS Agents on charges of taking payoffs on pinball gambling by the Mob, "the last of which - $1,000 in marked $50 bills that had been delivered by Gervais earlier that evening - was found in a drawer, where Gervais said it would be. Before he was fingerprinted, Garrison submitted to an examination of his hands, which showed traces of the luminous powder that had been used to mark the bills. (Garrison did not deny receiving the money, but maintained it had been to repay a loan he had made to repay a loan he had made to Gervais.)" The government's star witness against him was Pershing Gervais, and Garrison alleged that he had been bribed by the government.
  
• 6/30/1971 Soviets reported that the Soyuz spacecraft that made an endurance record for orbiting the earth had made a normal re-entry this morning, but its three Cosmonauts were found dead.
  
• 6/30/1971 26th Amendment to the Constitution is ratified.
  
• 6/30/1971 Twelve Black Panthers are cleared of charges of murdering a policeman and conspiracy to murder in a gun fight with police in Detroit 10/1970.
  
• 7/1971 The Pentagon Papers are published in book form by Bantam.
  
• 7/1/1971 Nixon inaugurates the new volunteer agency Action, which merges the Peace Corps, VISTA and seven other volunteer service agencies.
  
• 7/1/1971 David Young is brought to the White House to head the new Special Investigations Unit.
  
• 7/1/1971 Butterfield memo to Nixon stating that McGovern's war record is "routine and clean" and contains no useful dirt.
  
• 7/1/1971 Viet Cong agree to trade POWs for US withdrawal before the end of the year.
  
• 7/1/1971 Charles Colson records a telephone conversation he has with E. Howard Hunt at the end of which Colson asks: "Weren't you the guy who told me, maybe that last time we were up to your house for dinner, that if the truth ever came out about Kennedy and the Bay of Pigs, that it would destroy them?" Colson points out that Hunt was "the CIA mastermind on Bay of Pigs." Hunt: "We should go down the line to nail the guy [Ellsberg] cold."
  
• 7/1/1971 Black Panther David Hilliard is sentenced to a 1-10 year prison term.
  
• 7/1/1971 The new semi-independent Postal Service goes into operation.
  
• 7/2/1971 Colson and Haldeman talk about hiring Hunt.
  
• 7/3/1971 Indonesia holds first national elections since 1955.
  
• 7/3/1971 Doors singer Jim Morrison, who for a time lived in a home on Rothdell Trail, behind the Laurel Canyon Country Store, may or may not have died in Paris on July 3, 1971. The events of that day remain shrouded in mystery and rumor, and the details of the story, such as they are, have changed over the years. What is known is that, on that very same day, his father Admiral George Stephen Morrison delivered the keynote speech at a decommissioning ceremony for the aircraft carrier USS Bon Homme Richard, from where, seven years earlier, he had helped choreograph the Tonkin Gulf Incident. A few years after Jim's death, his common-law wife, Pamela Courson, dropped dead as well, officially of a heroin overdose. Like Hendrix, Morrison had been an avid student of the occult, with a particular fondness for the work of Aleister Crowley. According to super-groupie Pamela DesBarres, he had also "read all he could about incest and sadism." Also like Hendrix, Morrison was just twenty-seven at the time of his (possible) death.
  
• 7/5-9/1971 NAACP holds its 62nd annual convention in Minneapolis.
  
• 7/6/1971 Hunt is retained at $100 a day as a consultant at Colson's White House office. Hunt, in Undercover, would pretend that he was reluctant to take the job, though he had been pestering Colson for some time for work in the White House. Charles Colson is urging John Ehrlichman to meet E. Howard Hunt in order to "assure yourself the kind of man we're getting."
  
• 7/7/1971 Today Colson introduced Hunt to Ehrlichman. Hunt said he had been retired from the CIA for a year. Colson needs Ehrlichman's permission to hire Hunt. Files indicate that Hunt's employment records actually begin on July 6th.
  
• 7/7/1971 Ehrlichman phoned General Robert E. Cushman to request technical support for Hunt. Cushman was deputy director of CIA, and knew Hunt well. Cushman would later say he wasn't sure if it was Ehrlichman he talked to, or someone else in the Nixon administation.
  
• 7/7/1971 CIA memo discusses Ehrlichman arrangement for Hunt to work with Cushman.
  
• 7/7/1971 South Vietnamese General Ngo Dzu is accused in US Congress of engaging in heroin trafficking.
  
• 7/7/1971 Haig sent out a memo requesting the names and clearances of all persons in the government who had a "Top Secret" clearance to see the Pentagon Papers.
  
• 7/7/1971 Seven Black Panthers are indicted in NYC on charges of murder and arson.
  
• 7/8/1971 Frank Fitzimmons is elected president of the Teamsters.
  
• 7/8/1971 As Ehrlichman left for California, Hunt arranged for an interview with former CIA operative Lucien Conein. Hunt and Colson hoped Conein could provide information that JFK had ordered the overthrow and/or assassination of Diem. To record the interview, Hunt had the SS install a clandestine taping system in Ehrlichman's offices. The tape recorder, installed in the cushions of a couch, failed to operate because Conein sat on it throughout the interview. (Secret Agenda p33-34)
  
• 7/8/1971 Northern Ireland: during rioting in Derry, two Catholic men, Seamus Cusack (27) and Desmond Beattie (19), were shot dead by the British Army in disputed circumstances. The Army claimed the men were armed but local people maintained that they did not have any weapons at any time. The rioting intensified following their deaths. [The Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) withdrew from Stormont on 16 July 1971 because no inquiry was announced into the killings.]
  
• 7/9/1971 Rep. Paul McCloskey Jr. announces he will challenge Nixon in the GOP presidential primaries.
  
• 7/9/1971 US troops relinguish total responsibility for defense of the area just below the demilitarized zone to South Vietnamese troops.
  
• 7/10/1971 Morocco: soldiers fail to seize power in attack on king's palace.
  
• 7/11/1971 Nixon signs a $5.15 billion education spending bill.
  
• 7/12/1971 Nixon signs the Emergency Employment Act, providing $2.25 billion for public service jobs over the next two years at the state and local levels.
  
• 7/12/1971 In San Clemente, Nixon, Ehrlichman and Mardian discuss the Pentagon Papers.
  
• 7/12/1971 Miami-based Cuban exiles claim responsibility for an act of sabotage causing a railroad accident in Guantanamo.
  
• 7/13/1971 Morocco: Army executes ten leaders of the attempted coup.
  
• 7/14/1971 400,000 US phone workers go on strike in the US.
  
• 7/15/1971 Nixon announces that he has accepted "with pleasure" the invitation by Chou En-Lai to visit China.
  
• 7/15/1971 NBC Saigon correspondent Phil Brady told the audience of NBC Nightly News that Lt. Gen. Dang Van Quang was "the biggest pusher" in South Vietnam. He also claimed from "extremely reliable sources" that Thieu and Ky were using drug money to finance their presidential campaign that summer. Brady was expelled from Vietnam "for providing help and comfort to the Communist enemy."
  
• 7/16, 22/1971 representatives of US, UK, France and USSR meet in Berlin to discuss the area's future.
  
• 7/17/1971 Agnew criticizes US black leaders.
  
• 7/18/1971 Billy James Hargis writes in his newsletter that he is dismayed that Nixon's foreign policy is not much different than Kennedy's or Johnson's: "I am not a prophet nor a son of a prophet, but I am here to tell you that if President Nixon trusts this disarmament treaty with the Soviet Union and cuts back on our U.S. Safeguard Anti-Ballistic Missile System, this can amount to committing suicide as far as the United States is concerned."
  
• 7/19/1971 Nixon memo to Kissinger noting that his (Nixon's) character and attributes are very similar to Chou En-Lai's.
  
• 7/19/1971 Ehrlichman hires G. Gordon Liddy for the Domestic Council staff.
  
• 7/20/1971 Liddy was transferred out of the Treasury Dept to the White House Domestic Council.
  
• 7/20/1971 Dr. Fred Fielding refuses to discuss his patient, Daniel Ellsberg, with the FBI.
  
• 7/22/1971 Agriculture Dept issues new food stamp program regulations.
  
• 7/22/1971 Colson memo to Ehrlichman: "Liddy is an excellent man. Hunt can be very useful....I have assigned Howard Hunt the job of going through the Pentagon Papers, picking out those areas where we might be able to expose the Harrimans, the Warnkes, the Cliffords, the Vances, the McGeorge Bundys, the McNamaras, etc."
  
• 7/22/1971 Hunt goes to Langley in a White House limousine and met with Robert E. Cushman. Cushman secretly recorded their talk in his office. Hunt: "I've been charged with quite a highly sensitive mission by the White House to visit and elicit information from an individual whose ideology we aren't entirely sure of, and for that purpose they asked me to come over here and see if you could get me two things: flash alias documentation…and some degree of physical disguise for a one-time op in and out." Hunt was going to interview a man who claimed to know explosive information about Chappaquiddick. (Nedzi report p1125-31) Hunt and Cushman had shared an office together in CIA's Clandestine Division during the spring of 1950. (Nightmare p80)
  
• 7/22/1971 Weekly US death toll in Vietnam has dropped to its lowest level since 1965. 230,000 troops remain in the country, and the total number of US dead in Vietnam and Cambodia since 1961 is 45,384 so far; total South Vietnamese military deaths: 130,366; North Vietnamese and VC listed as 759,000 deaths.
  
• 7/23/1971 CIA supplies Hunt with a brown wig, thick glasses and I.D. in name of Edward Joseph Warren. He was also given devices to alter his voice and his gait.
  
• 7/23/1971 Sudan executes four charged in an attempted coup.
  
• 7/24/1971 Colson memo to Pat O'Donnell: "We should always consider using George Bush more often as a good speaking resource...he takes our line beautifully." (Secret Files 302)
  
• 7/24/1971 The White House Special Investigations Unit met for the first time. It had been approved by Nixon, who was in San Clemente.
  
• 7/24/1971 US and UK announce their support of Iran's military buildup.
  
• 7/25/1971 26th Amendment added to the constitution, giving 18-year-olds the right to vote.
  
• 7/26/1971 Apollo 15 is launched.
  
• 7/28/1971 Pat Buchanan memo to Haldeman, urging that Edith Efron's The News Twisters be given "broad circulation...columns should be encouraged...give it maximum publicity...Behind Miss Efron is a foundation on which W.F. Buckley and others are situated. They are the ones who tracked me to it."
  
• 7/28/1971 Hunt memo to Colson; it proposed that the CIA perform "a covert psychological assessment/evaluation" of David Ellsberg. It urged collection of all derogatory files on him, including "files from his psychiatric analyst."
  
• 7/28/1971 Agnew returns from his 32-day diplomatic tour of 10 nations.
  
• 7/28/1971 US suspends spy flights over Communist China.
  
• 7/29/1971 After discussing the matter with Helms, Howard Osborn instructed the CIA's Office of Medical Services to create a profile on Ellsberg.
  
• 7/29/1971 Yugoslavia: Tito is reelected to another term.
  
• 7/31-8/2/1971 two US astronauts drive an electric car on the moon as part of the Apollo 15 mission. Sharp color footage was transmitted back to Earth.
  
• 8/1971 Reverend Jerry Falwell started Lynchburg Baptist College with 154 students, four full-time faculty, and no campus. In 1976, the name was changed to Liberty Baptist College and was renamed Liberty University in 1985 after adding its seventh college/school.
  
• 8/1/1971 AP reported, "Evangelist Billy James Hargis, an anti-Communist crusader who says his emphasis no longer is concerned with conspiratorial problems but internal moral problems,' operates from his base here [Tulsa], convinced the influence in the Fundamentalist Capital of the World,' as he calls it, has meant the city has been virtually free of unemployment, racial tension, student dissidents or other Communist agitation.'…Hargis now strikes hard at drug use, the sexual revolution,' X-rated movies and Satan worship. We're convinced Satan worship is on the rise in this country,' he says…"
  
• 8/2/1971 Howard Hunt memo to Colson about "Kennedy Holdovers in the Nixon Administration."
  
• 8/2/1971 Railroad strikes by the AFL-CIO United Transportation Union end with a new contract.
  
• 8/2/1971 US announces its support for future membership of Communist China in the UN.
  
• 8/2/1971 CIA admits it has a 30,000-man army in Laos.
  
• 8/2/1971 Washington Post reported that G. Gordon Liddy was the administration's spokesman at the National Rifle Association's annual convention.
  
• 8/3/1971 Colson memo to Haldeman: "Is someone around here working on suggestions for what we might do to bring the conservatives back into line?...they can become intractable and vindictive."
  
• 8/3/1971 Hoover gives his approval to proceed in investigation of the Pentagon Papers.
  
• 8/5/1971 George Wallace announces he will run for president in 1972.
  
• 8/5/1971 Selective Service System conducts its third draft lottery since Congress authorized the random selection of men into the armed forces in 1969.
  
• 8/5/1971 Turkey opened relations with Peking and dropped its ties with Taiwan.
  
• 8/6/1971 A New Orleans jury acquits 12 Black Panthers of attempted murder of five New Orleans cops in a gun fight 9/1970.
  
• 8/6/1971 Jack Anderson reported that in 1968 Robert Maheu, acting on Howard Hughes' orders, had contributed $100,000 to the Nixon campaign and delivered it to Bebe Rebozo.
  
• 8/7/1971 Apollo 15 splashes down safely in the Pacific.
  
• 8/9/1971 Nixon signs a bill providing a $250 million government-guaranteed loan to Lockheed; also signs the public service jobs bill to provide 150,000 jobs for the unemployed, and a bill appropriating $20 billion for FY 1972 for the Depts of Labor and HEW.
  
• 8/9/1971 David Young met with Howard Osborn and John Paisley from the CIA at Langley headquarters, according to a memo Young wrote. "I reviewed the need for us to gain a data base on all leaks at least since January of 1969." Paisley's wife Marianne recalled that he and Osborn and the Plumbers met frequently in the following months. (Secret Agenda p40)
  
• 8/9/1971 Ulster invokes emergency powers as 12 die in Northern Ireland riots. Introduction of Internment. In a series of raids across Northern Ireland, 342 people were arrested and taken to makeshift camps. There was an immediate upsurge of violence and 17 people were killed during the next 48 hours. Of these 10 were Catholic civilians who were shot dead by the British Army. Hugh Mullan (38) was the first Catholic priest to be killed in the conflict when he was shot dead by the British Army as he was giving the last rites to a wounded man. Winston Donnell (22) became the first Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR) solider to die in 'the Troubles' when he was shot by the Irish Republican Army (IRA) near Clady, County Tyrone. [There were more arrests in the following days and months. Internment was to continue until 5 December 1975. During that time 1,981 people were detained; 1,874 were Catholic / Republican, while 107 were Protestant / Loyalist. Internment had been proposed by Unionist politicians as the solution to the security situation in Northern Ireland but was to lead to a very high level of violence over the next few years and to increased support for the IRA.]
  
• 8/9/1971 India and USSR sign a non-aggression pact.
  
• 8/10/1971 The CIA profile on Ellsberg was completed.
  
• 8/11/1971 Ehrlichman approves covert operation, as long as it is not traceable, to obtain Ellsberg's psychiatric file.
  
• 8/11/1971 NY Mayor John Lindsay switches from the GOP to the Democratic party.
  
• 8/11/1971 Defense Sec. Laird announced that from now on all ground operations in Vietnam will be conducted solely by ARVN.
  
• 8/12/1971 CIA's psychiatric profile on Ellsberg is sent to the Plumbers. A meeting attended by Hunt, Liddy, Young and doctors from the CIA discussed the report, which said that Ellsberg had problems with authority figures and might be suffering from a mid-life crisis. Hunt and Liddy were disappointed with the results. (Nedzi report p497)
  
• 8/12/1971 Syria severs ties to Jordan in support of the PLO.
  
• 8/13/1971 Nixon met with his economic advisers. Trade deficits had been appearing each month since April, and by the summer the US' gold reserve had shrunk from a postwar high of $25 billion to only $10.5 billion. Currency traders around the world began selling off their dollars.
  
• 8/13/1971 Atty General Mitchell drops the federal investigation of the Kent State shootings.
  
• 8/15/1971 Nixon announced to the nation his "Phase One" of a new economic program. The US was going off the gold standard; the US would no longer redeem dollars in gold. This momentous decision meant that foreign currencies would no longer be pegged to the dollar, as they had since 1946. Nixon also announced that he would also impose wage-price controls for 90 days to combat inflation; this latter action gained much more press attention than the more important ending of the Bretton Woods agreement. Nixon indicated that this would only be temporary, but it turned out to be permanent.
  
• 8/16/1971 John Dean prepared a memo ("Dealing with our Political Enemies") suggested ways "we can use the available Federal machinery to screw our political enemies."
  
• 8/17/1971 Nixon signed the Export Expansion Finance Act of 1971 into law.
  
• 8/18/1971 Hunt requested a CIA secretary he had worked with before to come to work at the Plumbers office, but the request was denied.
  
• 8/18/1971 Australia and New Zealand announce they will pull their troops out of Vietnam this year.
  
• 8/20/1971 Jimmy Hoffa is denied parole.
  
• 8/20/1971 Alex Butterfield memo to Security Assistant Miss Gertrude Brown: "you should instruct the FBI to proceed with the full field background investigation of Mr. Daniel Lewis Schorr..."
  
• 8/20/1971 Hunt went to the CIA safehouse on Wisconsin Avenue. There he met the CIA's Cleo Gephart, a TSD technician, who issued him a tape recorder concealed in a typewriter case.
  
• 8/20/1971 British authorities arrest leaders of terrorist group the Angry Brigade
  
• 8/20/1971 Lt. Calley's sentence for the My Lai massacre is reduced to 20 years.
  
• 8/21/1971 George Jackson dies, supposedly shot while trying to escape from San Quentin. George Lester Jackson (September 23, 1941 August 21, 1971) was an American convict who became a left-wing activist, Marxist, author, and a member of the Black Panther Party while incarcerated. Jackson achieved fame as one of the Soledad Brothers and was later shot to death by prison guards in San Quentin Prison under debated circumstances.
  
• 8/21/1971 FBI agents and local police foil a Selective Service office raid in Buffalo, NY, arresting five young men and women.
  
• 8/21/1971 Philippines: assassins tried to slay numerous members of the opposition Liberal Party in Manila.
  
• 8/22/1971 At Attica, inmates fast and hold a silent protest at breakfast in memory of George Jackson.
  
• 8/22/1971 FBI agents and local police prevent a raid on a Selective Service office in Camden, NJ, by 20 people.
  
• 8/22/1971 Bolivia: military takes over and installs Gen. Hugo Banzer Suarez. The leftist military regime of Juan Jose Torres was ousted. Banzer made a nationwide broadcast late today in which he said his government would make "an honest sacrifice" to improve Bolivia's notoriously impoverished life. Banzer, 43-year-old former head of the military academy in La Paz, said. "We were tired of chaos and anarchy, with the demagoguery which had become the bread of everyday life." The military leaders who overthrew Torres had charged when the rebellion began Thursday in Bolivia's eastern provinces that Torres was leading the nation towards Communism. Banzer led an unsuccessful coup attempt last January. Wednesday he was arrested in La Paz after Torres accused him of plotting against the government. The other members of the junta are Gen. Florentino Mendieta and Col. Andres Selich. Selich led Bolivian troops who wiped out the Cuban-supported guerrilla band of Ernesto Che Guevara in 1967. The junta named Mario Gutierrez, president of the Bolivian Socialist Falange, and Ciro Humbolt of the National Revolutionary Movement as co-ministers of state. Humbolt is a close friend of Bolivia's former President Victor Paz Estenssoro, who is living in exile in Peru.
  
• 8/25/1971 Nixon requested a 90-day freeze in wages and prices, asked Congress for a tax cut and a 10% surcharge on many imports; all to control inflation and strengthen the dollar.
  
• 8/25/1971 Hunt and Liddy went to a CIA safehouse in Washington and met with Steve Greenwood. Liddy was given alias documentation as "George Leonard," a resident of Kansas, plus a disguise and a small camera concealed in a tobacco pouch. This afternoon, they left for Los Angeles. By night, they had arrived at Dr. Fielding's office, though the doctor had left for the night. Hunt spoke to the cleaning lady in Spanish, and told her they were friends of Fielding's. They were allowed to enter his office, where Liddy photographed the interior. They then took the first flight back to Washington, arriving on 8/26 at 6am. (Will; Secret Agenda)
  
• 8/26/1971 Buchanan memo to Nixon, referring to an Atlantic article about heredity rather than environment determining how intelligent people will be: "And every study we have shows blacks 15 IQ points below whites on the average. This is a powerful and seminal article...it seems to me that a lot of what we are doing in terms of integration of blacks and whites...is less likely to result in accomodation than it is in perpetual friction..."
  
• 8/27/1971 The CIA developed Liddy's film, but his Tessina camera had failed to work properly. The CIA kept a set of prints, noticing that they were obviously "casing" photos. (Nightmare p102) Today, Gen. Cushman called Ehrlichman to say that the CIA would no longer provide assistance to Hunt. Ehrlichman was unaware that the CIA had been helping Hunt at all. (Nedzi report 331-42)
  
• 8/29/1971 Manila: opposition leader Benigno Aquino leaves on a campaign tour.
  
• 8/30/1971 William Sullivan has his last meeting with Hoover: "What I did tell him was that he ruled the bureau by fear and that men along in years who had served faithfully in the FBI lived in dread of him. I added that I no longer intended to be intimidated...When I finished, he grew red and began to sputter and stammer." Sullivan told him, "I think you'd be doing the country a great service if you retired." Hoover replied, "Well, I don't intend to...I've taken this up with Attorney General Mitchell and he agrees with me that it is you who should be forced out." The next morning, Sullivan found the lock on his office changed and his name removed from the door. (The Bureau p13-14) Reportedly, when Hoover called Sullivan a Judas, Sullivan responded, "Well, I'm no Judas Iscariot, and you're no Jesus Christ!" (Hosty, Assignment Oswald p187)
  
• 8/30/1971 NY Times reported that the Director of Customs in South Vietnam had stated that he "believed that planes of the South Vietnamese Air Force were the principal carriers" of heroin into the region.
  
• 8/31/1971 Gen. Cushman memo to Helms documenting his call to Ehrlichman that no further CIA help would be provided. Cushman felt that "Hunt was becoming a pain in the neck. John said he would restrain Hunt." (Nedzi report p9) But the CIA continued to help the Plumbers "well into 1972," as Liddy later wrote in Will.
  
• Fall 1971: Nixon Aides Develop Operation Sandwedge' A staff aide to President Nixon, former New York City police detective Jack Caulfield, develops a broad plan for launching an intelligence operation against the Democrats for the 1972 re-election campaign, "Operation Sandwedge." The original proposal, as Caulfield will later recall, is a 12-page document detailing what would be required to create an "accurate, intelligence-assessment capability" against not just the Democrats but "also to ensure that the then powerful anti-war movement did not destroy Nixon's public campaign, as had been done to Hubert Humphrey in 1968" (see November 5, 1968). Sandwedge is created in anticipation of the Democrats mounting their own political espionage efforts, which Caulfield and other Nixon aides believe will use a private investigations firm, Intertel, headed by former Justice Department officials loyal to former Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. Caulfield will later recall, "Intertel represented, in my opinion, the potential for both formidable and sophisticated intelligence opposition tactics in that upcoming election campaign." Sandwedge is turned down by senior White House aides in favor of the "Special Investigation Unit" (see March 20, 1971 and September 29, 1972) headed by G. Gordon Liddy. Caulfield resigns from the White House shortly thereafter. He will later call the decision not to implement "Sandwedge" a "monumental" error that "rapidly created the catastrophic path leading directly to the Watergate complexand the president's eventual resignation." Caulfield has little faith in Liddy, considering him an amateurish blowhard with no real experience in intelligence or security matters; when White House counsel John Dean asks him for his assessment of Liddy's ability to run such an operation, he snaps, "John, you g_ddamn well better have him closely supervised" and walks out of Dean's office. Caulfield later writes, "I, therefore, unequivocally contend that had there been Sandwedge' there would have been no Liddy, no Hunt, no McCord, no Cubans (see 2:30 a.m.June 17, 1972) and, critically, since I had personally decided to negate, while still on the White House staff, a developing intelligence interest by Dean in the Watergate's Democratic National Committee offices, seven months prior to the break-in! NO WATERGATE!" [John J. 'Jack' Caulfield, 2006; Spartacus Schoolnet, 8/2007]
  
• 9/1971 Cliff Carter, LBJ's aide who rode in the vice president's follow up car in the motorcade in Dealey Plaza where President Kennedy was gunned down, was LBJ's top aide during his first administration. Carter dies of mysterious circumstances this month. Carter dies of pneumonia when no penicillin can be located in Washington, D.C.
  
• 9/3-4/1971 White House aides E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy supervise the burglary (by Bernard Barker, Eugenio Martinez and Felipe DeDiego) of the office of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist. The Cubans smashed a window on the ground floor and used a crowbar to pry open the front door of the second-floor office. The office was ransacked and pills were scattered around the floor to make police think the burglary had been done by drug addicts. The three burglars later testified they found no file on Ellsberg, though Dr. Fielding would testify that the file was taken from his file cabinet and was laying on the floor, the pages clearly having been "fingered." DeDiego also said that the file was located and photographed, testifying that he held it while Martinez snapped shots with his Minox.
  
• 9/3/1971 Saigon: Nguyen Cao Ky, barred from the ballot, threatens a coup in the election proceeds.
  
• 9/3/1971 Signing of the Four Power Agreement, known as the Quadripartite Agreement on Berlin. This provided the framework for the subsequent Transit Agreement. Soviet Ambassador Abrassimov wraps up the process with the quote that could be translated as "All's well that ends well." [The Quadripartite Agreement is known as the Four Power Agreement on the Status of West-Berlin in GDR documents.] Lord Mayor Schuetz calls it "status quo plus" in describing it from the city's standpoint.
  
• 9/3/1971 USSR guaranteed to the US in writing Western access to West Berlin. The US guaranteed that West Germany would not try to incorporate that half of the city.
  
• 9/9/1971 Convicts revolt at Attica prison in NY, holding 32 guards.
  
• 9/9/1971 Colson sends Dean a "Priority List" of 20 "political enemies."
  
• 9/9/1971 Colson memo to Haldeman, asking him to encourage Bob Dole to "attack hard" in his speeches against Democrats.
  
• 9/11/1971 Ehrlichman memo to Nixon recommending "going forward with the proposed lawsuits" against the TV networks.
  
• 9/11/1971 Black Panther Bobby Seale is brought in to negotiate with the Attica convicts.
  
• 9/11/1971 Nikita Khrushchev dies in obscurity.
  
• 9/13/1971 NY Gov. Nelson Rockefeller sent police and troops into Attica. At 9:46 a.m., tear gas was dropped into the yard and New York State Police troopers and soldiers from the New York National Guard opened fire non-stop for two minutes into the smoke. Among the weapons used by the troopers were shotguns, which led to the wounding and killing of hostages and inmates who were not resisting. Former prison officers were allowed to participate, a decision later called "inexcusable" by the commission established by Rockefeller to study the riot and the aftermath. By the time the facility was retaken, nine hostages and 29 inmates had been killed. A tenth hostage died on October 9, 1972, of gunshot wounds received during the assault. The final death toll from the riot also included the officer fatally injured at the start of the riot and four inmates who were subject to vigilante killings. Nine hostages died from gunfire by state troopers and soldiers. The New York State Special Commission on Attica wrote, "With the exception of Indian massacres in the late 19th century, the State Police assault which ended the four-day prison uprising was the bloodiest one-day encounter between Americans since the Civil War."
  
• 9/14/1971 Arthur Bremer bought a 1967 Rambler for $800.
  
• 9/16/1971 Look magazine announced it was going out of business because of competition from Life and TV.
  
• 9/16/1971 In a news conference, Nixon says, "I would remind all concerned that the way we got into Vietnam was through...the complicity in the murder of Diem."
  
• 9/17/1971 Supreme Court justice Hugo Black resigns because of poor health.
  
• 9/18/1971 Egypt and Israel exchange fire over the Suez Canal after a 13-month truce.
  
• 9/19/1971 US Army announced it was changing its bayonet drill slogan from "Kill! Kill!" to "Yah! Yah." An Army training specialist said, "We're trying to keep things modern and in good taste."
  
• 9/21/1971 Federal agents seize personal papers and property belong to Daniel Ellsberg.
  
• 9/21/1971 Congress extends the military draft for two more years.
  
• 9/21/1971 US reveals the existence of 8 letters from Ho Chi Minh c1945 to the US requesting aid, though none were ever answered.
  
• 9/22/1971 US formally submits two resolutions to the UN bearing on the seating of the Chinese delegation in the UN.
  
• 9/22/1971 A military jury in Georgia found Capt. Ernest Medina not guilty of charges of murder in the deaths at My Lai.
  
• 9/23/1971 John Harlan retires from the Supreme Court.
  
• 9/24/1971 Fifth round of US-USSR negotiations over SALT ends in Helsinki.
  
• 9/24/1971 London expels 105 Soviets for espionage.
  
• 9/24/1971 Roscoe Anthony White dies after sustaining serious burns from the explosion of a welding tank. He is reported to have admitted his involvement in JFK's assassination in a declaration to a preacher, Reverend Jack Shaw, just before he dies. Shaw says that White confessed several murders to him, and that later Geneva White revealed what she knew about the affair. Shaw later states that "I am convinced that Roscoe White did shoot President Kennedy. I believe that Roscoe was telling the truth and had no reason to lie." According to Roscoe's son, Ricky, his father kept a diary in which he spoke of being a shooter on the Grassy Knoll, then later eliminating twenty-eight witnesses to the killing. The diary also placed White with J.D. Tippit on the day of the assassination when Tippit was killed during Oswald's flight to the Texas Theater. It is alleged that Tippit, who just happened to live cater corner to the White's, was part of the operation (whose mission was to take Oswald to Red Bird field to be flown to Houston -- and a waiting David Ferrie) but balked when he discovered Oswald was supposedly the one who was identified as the suspect in the shooting. Tippit did not want to be connected to the escape of the killer, or to harboring, aiding or abetting a fugitive. White, to keep the operation intact and do damage control, then had to eliminate Tippit. In 1975, the White's home is burgled and the diary is supposedly stolen.
  
• 9/25/1971 Former Supreme Court justice Hugo Black dies.
  
• 9/25/1971 Belgrade: Tito and Brezhnev sign a declaration asserting Yugoslavia's independence.
  
• 9/26/1971 Nixon greets Japanese Emperor Hirohito in Anchorage, Alaska, during a stopover on the Emperor's flight to Europe.
  
• 9/28/1971 After 15 years of sanctuary in the US embassy in Budapest, Cardinal Mindszenty accepts exile in Rome.
  
• 9/30/1971 Nine-member citizens committee appointed to investigate the Attica massacre. Gov. Rockefeller named the panel, and it will be headed by Robert B. McKay, dean of the law school at NY University. One member, Amos Henix, is a former convict.
  

[Tracy Riddle]

• 10/1971 Ann Dorothy Chapman, reporter/MI6 agent, killed in Greece.
  
• 10/1/1971 James McCord begins part-time work with CREEP.
  
• 10/1/1971 Saigon: police attack an anti-Thieu Buddhist rally.
  
• 10/3/1971 Elections in South Vietnam saw victory for Thieu, the only candidate; he was reelected to a four-year term as President.
  
• 10/4/1971 Labor leader George Meany urges Congress to take control of the economy away from Nixon.
  
• 10/4/1971 Secretary of State Rogers addresses the UN General Assembly, asking for the seating of Communist China on the Security Council but asking that Taiwan not be expelled from the General Assembly.
  
• 10/6/1971 Los Angeles Times revealed that federal immigration agents had caught 36 illegal immigrants in a raid on a food processing company owned by Romana Banuelos, who three weeks earlier had been named by Nixon to be Treasurer of the United States.
  
• 10/6-13/1971 Newsday publishes a series of articles about Bebe Rebozo, and Dean later testified that he and Caulfield (at Haldeman's suggestion) use the IRS to go after one the authors, reporter Robert Greene.
  
• 10/6/1971 Yasser Arafat was the target of a failed attempt on his life.
  
• 10/7/1971 Nixon told John Mitchell to have the INS raid the Los Angeles Times in search of illegal immigrants and to check whether publisher Otis Chandler's gardener was a "wetback." Nixon stated that he had already ordered John Connally to have the IRS investigate the income tax returns of every member of the Chandler family, "every one of those sons of bitches." Nixon also told Mitchell that "the fellow out there in the immigration service is a kike by the name of [George] Rosenberg. He is out. He is to be out. Transfer him to some other place out of Los Angeles. I don't give a goddamn what the story is!" (Los Angeles Times 3/22/1997)
  
• 10/8/1971 Nixon visits West Virginia and becomes the first president to visit all 50 states.
  
• 10/10/1971 Tape recording exists of a conversation between Nixon and CIA director Richard Helms. Before Helms arrives, Nixon's aide John Erlichman tells the president Helms has been stonewalling his request for documents about the Bay of Pigs. Erlichman makes it clear that he didn't tell Helms his real purpose. "I was kind of mysterious about it," he explains. But they think they have leverage on Helms. At one point Ehrlichman says, "Helms is scared to death of this guy [Howard] Hunt we got working for us because he knows where a lot of the bodies are buried." When the CIA director arrives, Nixon offers some typically awkward and forced small talk about baseball player Ted Williams and then gets down to business. He says he wants to address the "sensitive" issue of the documents he is seeking. He assures Helms that he fully supports what he calls "the dirty tricks department." "I know what happened in Iran and I know what happened in Guatemala and I totally approve of that. I know what happened with the planning of the Bay of Pigs," he says."The problem was not the CIA. My interest there is solely to know the facts." When Helms doesn't say much, Nixon presses his case by reminding Helms he is the president. "First. This is my information," he says, "Second, I need it for a defensive reasons, for a negotiation." When those arguments elicit no response. Nixon tries another justification: He needs the information to protect the CIA. In making his case, Nixon talks about what might be in the records and he utters these words (at around 17:00 in the file): "The Who shot John?' angle. Is Eisenhower to blame? Is Kennedy to blame? Is Johnson to blame? Is Nixon to blame? Etc, etc. It may become, not by me, a very vigorous issue but if it does, I need to know what is necessary to protect frankly the intelligence gathering and the Dirty Tricks Department and I will protect it. I have done more than my share of lying to protect you, and I believe it's totally right to do it."
  
• 10/12/1971 The House passes the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) 354 to 23.
  
• 10/12/1971 Nixon announces he will travel to Moscow in 1972 to meet with Soviet leaders.
  
• 10/12/1971 Sen. Birch Bayh announces he will not run for president in 1972.
  
• 10/12/1971 Cuban exiles in armed boats attack the village of Boca de Sama, on the eastern part of Cuba.
  
• 10/12/1971 Dean Acheson dies at age 78. The White House issued a statement: "The nation, the Western alliance and the world all share in the loss of one of their stanchest champions. It is a measure of Dean Acheson's stature as a man and statesman that almost 20 years after his service as Secretary of State he continued to be recognized as one of the towering figures of his time. He was a man not only of great achievement but also of rare intellect, of rigorous conscience and of profound devotion to his country."
  
• 10/12-18/1971 Gov. Reagan tours six Asian nations as a special presidential representative
  
• 10/14/1971 US forces in Vietnam cut to 206,000.
  
• 10/15/1971 Nixon announced a 10% duty on foreign cars, and a relaxation of the 7% tax on domestically produced cars.
  
• 10/15/1971 Japan agrees to curb the flow of textiles into the US.
  
• 10/15/1971 The Charlotte Observer reported that Billy Graham was being criticized by some Southern Baptists for getting "too close to the powerful and too fond of the things of the world, [and] likened him to the prophets of old who told the kings of Israel what they wanted to hear."
  
• 10/15/1971 Arthur Bremer rented an apartment on West Michigan Avenue in Milwaukee for $138 a month.
  
• mid-October 1971 Hunt had lunch with Tomas Karamessines, CIA's deputy director for plans. During Hunt's previous phony retirement from the Agency, Karamessines had been his case officer. (Secret Agenda p54-55)
  
• 10/16/1971 H. Rap Brown, the fugitive black militant who disappeared 17 months ago, shot and captured by NYC police after an armed robbery.
  
• 10/16-23/1971 Spiro Agnew visits Greece, for a meeting with PM Papadopoulos and a private tour.
  
• 10/17/1971 A Washington study showed that Hispanic families in the US earned more than blacks.
  
• 10/18/1971 The House orders Nixon not to cut funds for school lunch programs.
  
• 10/18/1971 Soviet PM Kosygin was unhurt by an attack near the Canadian Parliament in Ottawa by a protester.
  
• 10/18/1974 President Richard Nixon announces that the army's biowarfare laboratories at Fort Detrick, Maryland, will be converted to cancer research. The military biowarfare unit is subsequently retitled the Frederick Cancer Research Center, and Litton Bionetics is named as the military's prime contractor. The initial task of the Center is "the large-scale production of oncogenic (cancer-causing) and suspected oncogenic viruses to meet research needs on a continuing basis." Special attention is given to primate viruses. Bionetics Research Laboratories, under contract to Fort Detrick, will inoculate a total of 2,274 primates with various viruses. Some of these animals will eventually be released back into the wild. (The first few cases of AIDS will not be reported to the Centers for Disease Control until 1979). Utilizing the latest genetic engineering techniques, virologists force cancer-causing viruses to jump from one species of animal to another - eventually producting new forms of deadly cancer and immunodeficiency diseases. Biowarfare experts undoubtedly take notice of these "supergerms" and their possible use as newly-created biowarfare agents.
  
• 10/20-25/1971 Kissinger visits Peking to arrange things for Nixon's upcoming trip to China.
  
• 10/21/1971 Nixon names Lewis Powell and William Rehnquist to the Supreme Court.
  
• 10/21/1971 Colson memo to Peter Flanigan on the administration's desire to gain "immediate control" of PBS because of its anti-Nixon programming.
  
• 10/23/1971 Ulster: British soldies kill five in riots.
  
• 10/25/1971 Communist China takes Taiwan's seat at the UN.
  
• 10/26/1971 About 300 anti-war protestors are arrested for sitting down in the middle of Pennsylvania Avenue during rush hour.
  
• 10/26/1971 Taiwan protests that the UN move is illegal.
  
• 10/27/1971 The Congo is renamed Zaire.
  
• 10/28/1971 House of Commons approved British membership in the European Common Market by a vote of 356 to 244, though polls show that a majority of the English oppose the move.
  
• 10/31/1971 Billy James Hargis, pleased to see his media enemies having financial troubles, writes in Christian Crusade Weekly, "Do not lament the passing of Look Magazine. I think it is a good thing for America. I just wish Newseek and Life and Time would follow suit, as quickly as possible. It was encouraging to me when the Saturday Evening Post perished in February 1968…"
  
• 10/31/1971 Saigon begins the release of 1,938 Hanoi POWs.
  
• 10/1971 five-year restriction on JFK autopsy photos and X-rays expires.
  
• 11/1/1971 The Chinese flag is raised at the UN for the first time.
  
• 11/3/1971 US announces it will deny passports to those who refuse to take an oath of allegiance.
  
• 11/4/1971 Northern Ireland: At 5.00am in the morning, the British Army again moved in large numbers into the Catholic areas of Derry; Bogside, Creggan and Shantallow, breaking their way into homes, and taking a further 17 men away for internment. The following day, Derry was at a standstill with factory workers going on strike, and schools and shops etc., closing. Rioting began again on the streets of Derry.
  
• 11/5/1971 US announced the sale to the Soviets of $136 million in grain.
  
• 11/5/1971 A new surge of immigration by Soviet Jews from the USSR is reported.
  
• 11/5/1971 Colson memo to John Scali about John Chancellor's "scandalous, yellow, shabby journalism...We should not bother to call him, we should break his goddamned nose."
  
• 11/5/1971 (6/28/05 AP) President Nixon referred privately to Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi as an "old witch" and national security adviser Henry Kissinger insulted Indians in general, according to transcripts of Oval Office tapes and newly declassified documents released Tuesday. Nixon and Kissinger met in the Oval Office on the morning of Nov. 5, 1971, to discuss Nixon's conversation with Gandhi the day before. "We really slobbered over the old witch," Nixon told Kissinger, according to a transcript of their conversation released as part of a State Department compilation of significant documents involving American foreign policy. Nixon's remark came as the two men speculated about Gandhi's motives during the White House meeting and discussed India's intentions in the looming conflict with neighboring Pakistan. The United States was allied with Pakistan and saw India as too closely allied with the Soviet Union. "The Indians are bastards anyway," Kissinger told the president. "They are starting a war there." Kissinger also told his boss that he had bested Gandhi in their meeting. "While she was a bitch, we got what we wanted too," Kissinger said. "She will not be able to go home and say that the United States didn't give her a warm reception and therefore in despair she's got to go to war." Other documents chart U.S. contacts with China, as facilitated by Pakistan, and U.S. concern that India was developing nuclear technology. The archive covers U.S. policy in South Asia in 1971 and 1972. The documents, many declassified only earlier this month, generally cover old ground, several Cold War scholars said. Still, the particulars are intriguing, including rosters of who was in various meetings and quotes from conversations among Nixon, his aides and foreign leaders. "They see everything through a Cold War prism," said Bill Burr, a senior analyst at the National Security Archive at George Washington University. "It's a wholly distorted view." U.S.-India relations were strained for decades as a result of Cold War alliances and have significantly improved only recently. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice visited India earlier this year, and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh will visit Washington in July.
  
• 11/6/1971 The most powerful underground nuclear test conducted by the US is executed on the Alaskan island of Amchitka.
  
• 11/7/1971 India admits its forces entered Bangladesh to stop its artillery.
  
• 11/12/1971 CIA delivers an expanded psychological profile of Ellsberg to the plumbers.
  
• 11/12/1971 Nixon memo to Haldeman: "Pat Boone spoke to me about Goldwater's appearance in Atlanta and told me how effective it was. He urged strongly that Goldwater be used more all across the country."
  
• 11/12/1971 Nixon memo to Kissinger: "I think we ought to find an occasion where we can get Moorer in alone with me without Laird to talk about national defense matters."
  
• 11/12/1971 Nixon confines US ground forces in Vietnam to a defensive role. He announces withdrawal of 45,000 more men from Vietnam by February.
  
• 11/13/1971 Aubran W. Martin is sentenced to death for his role in the murder of union official Joseph Yablonski, his wife and daughter.
  
• 11/13/1971 Donald Sutherland and Jane Fonda bring their FTA ("Free" The Army) antiwar show to areas near US military bases in Southeast Asia.
  
• 11/13/1971 US interplanetary probe Mariner 9 goes into orbit around Mars, the first man-made object to orbit another planet.
  
• 11/14/1971 Three months of wage-price controls are lifted by Nixon, but only to allow wages and prices to rise slightly. This was "Phase II" of Nixon's economic plan.
  
• 11/15/1971 Clay T. Whitehead memo to Nixon about PBS' "slanted public affairs programming...the PBS schedule includes no program in which the moderate to conservative viewpoints are featured to balance the Moyers/Vanocur/MacNeil/Drew/NET type of programming...Unless some reforms are made in the Public Broadcasting Act, CPB [Corporation for Public Broadcasting] will...grow into a US version of the BBC under the constant nuturing of the Democrats."
  
• 11/16/1971 Roger de Louette, a former French intelligence agent, pleaded guilty to charges of smuggling $12 million worth of heroin into the US; he accused Col. Paul Fournier, a high-ranking French counter-espionage officer, of being the head of the conspiracy.
  
• 11/16/1971 First working session of the sixth round of the SALT negotiations is held.
  
• 11/18/971 Arthur Bremer was arrested for the first time in his life, for having his car parked in a no-parking zone. The police confiscated the .38 pistol he was carrying.
  
• 11/19/1971 Sen. Henry Jackson announces his candidacy for the presidency.
  
• 11/19/1971 Demonstrations in Japan against US bases in Okinawa.
  
• 11/20/1971 US to give Turkey $35 million for farmers who stop growing opium poppies.
  
• 11/22/1971 NY Times carried an article by David Belin, "The Warren Commission Was Right."
  
• 11/22/1971 India begins full-scale attack on Bangladesh.
  
• 11/24/1971 D. B. Cooper is a moniker associated with an unidentified man who hijacked a Boeing 727 aircraft in the northwestern United States on November 24, 1971, demanded and received $200,000 in ransom, and parachuted from the aircraft to an uncertain fate. Despite a massive manhunt and exhaustive F.B.I. investigation, Cooper has never been found or positively identified. To date, the case remains the only unsolved airline hijacking in American aviation history. The suspect purchased his airline ticket under the name Dan Cooper, but through a later press miscommunication, he became known as D.B. Cooper. Hundreds of leads have been pursued in the ensuing years, but no conclusive evidence has ever surfaced regarding Cooper's true identity or whereabouts, and the bulk of the ransom money has never been recovered. Several theories offer competing speculative explanations of events subsequent to his exiting the aircraft. Officially the F.B.I.'s investigation remains open, but published reports indicate that agents currently handling the case believe Cooper did not survive his escape attempt.
  
• 11/26/1971 Saudi king Faisal agrees to let Israeli Moslems visit the holy city of Mecca.
  
• 11/28/1971 Billy James Hargis wrote in Christian Crusade Weekly that Jesus was not a long-haired hippie: "There is solid evidence from the ancient world which undercuts the degenerate idea abroad today that Jesus was a welfare case looking like a shiftless hippie.' If anyone can find any Biblical evidence that Jesus had long hair, please send it along."
  
• 11/28-12/2/1971 White House holds a Conference on Aging.
  
• 11/28/1971 Anglican Church ordains its first two women priests.
  
• 11/28/1971 Wasfi Tal, PM of Jordan, was assassinated in Cairo by Black September Palestinian guerrillas.
  
• 11/31/1971 On instructions of Maurice Bishop, Antonio Veciana organizes a Castro assassination for his visit to Chile. Bishop coordinates with the Chilean military; Veciana says CIA contract agent Luis Posada was also involved in the planning. Later, David Atlee Phillips, unaware of Veciana's detailed revelations, would admit to the HSCA that Posada worked with him on operations in Chile. (Fonzi chronology)
  
• 12/1971 Nixon devalued the dollar 7.9%. Inflation rate for 1/1971-1/1972 was 3.4%.
  
• 12/1971 Iraq expels thousands of Iranians.
  
• 12/1971 Richard Nixon's special assistant, Murray Chotiner, has finally cleared Jimmy Hoffa's release with the Teamsters and with the Detroit and Chicago mafia families. Accordingly, President Nixon officially pardons Jimmy Hoffa. With the permission of the Nixon presidency, both Jimmy Hoffa and Carlos Marcello are free men in 1971. Hoffa is destined to vanish. Marcello will go on to enjoy the most prosperous period of his life -- a decade during which it is alleged that he will become the richest and most powerful Mafia leader in the western hemisphere.
  
• 12/1/1971 Buchanan memo to Haldeman on how to make the "Conservative Case for Richard Nixon," that is, how to get conservatives to realize they shouldn't challenge Nixon in 1972.
  
• 12/6/1971 Haldeman approves Liddy's transfer to CREEP.
  
• 12/7/1971 McGraw-Hill announced plans to publish Howard Hughes' memoirs, supposedly written in collaboration with novelist Clifford Irving.
  
• 12/7/1971 The state of Ohio drops all charges against defendants in the Kent State riot trials, because of lack of evidence.
  
• 12/7/1971 Libya nationalizes British Petroleum Co.
  
• 12/8/1971 Ken Khachigian memo to Buchanan, recommending that the administration put out some important announcement on the same day Muskie announced his candidacy "to blow Muskie off the front page."
  
• 12/9/1971 Nixon vetoed a child-development bill after a tremendous amount of grass-roots conservative opposition was generated.
  
• 12/10/1971 Nixon sent the Enterprise aircraft carrier and 9 other warships to the Bay of Bengal, without consulting with the Joint Chiefs first. Adm. Zumwalt recalled that this action outraged the JCS (On Watch).
  
• 12/10/1971 Jon Huntsman memo to Ehrlichman complaining about White House staffers leaking to the press Nixon's plan to get Hoover to retire in the near future. (Secret Files 345)
  
• 12/10/1971 Nobel Peace Prize is awarded to Willy Brandt.
  
• 12/12/1971 Magruder later testified that he met Liddy for the first time on this date, and Liddy said he'd been promised $1 million for a "broad-gauged intelligence plan." Magruder told him to draw up a plan for Mitchell to see.
  
• 12/12/1971 Former head of RCA and founder of NBC David Sarnoff died.
  
• 12/13-14/1971 Nixon and French president Pompidou confer on the devaluation of the dollar.
  
• 12/14/1971 Krogh and Young are told to find the source of the leaks for Jack Anderson's 12/13 article.
  
• 12/14/1971 NYC Detective Frank Serpico testified to the Knapp Commission about widespread police corruption.
  
• 12/15/1971 Buchanan memo to Haldeman about how to deal with a McCloskey challenge in the primaries: "If McCloskey's campaign can be portrayed - with any legitimacy, as the covert effort of Democrats...then we have a tremendous case to use with every Republican who leans to McCloskey...destroy his credibility as a legitimate Republican." He recommended using the Manchester Union-Leader for the anti-McCloskey campaign.
  
• 12/16-23/1971 Radford is interrogated by DOD investigators who suspected him of leaking documents to Jack Anderson. Years later, Anderson would deny that Radford leaked anything to him: "You don't get these kind of secrets from an enlisted man. You get them from generals and admirals." (Silent Coup 19) Radford was given an lie-detector test, and revealed that he had given classified materials to unauthorized persons, then began spilling his guts about all the spying he had done for the JCS.
  
• 12/17/1971 The first session of the 92nd Congress adjourns.
  
• 12/17/1971 Transit Agreement between the GDR and DDR is signed.
  
• 12/18/1971 US devalues the dollar by 8.57%; this is designed to increase US exports and end the trade deficit.
  
• 12/18/1971 Nixon signs an Alaska native land settlement bill, granting a total of $962.5 million and 40 million acres of land and mineral rights to native Alaskans.
  
• 12/18/1971 Rev. Jesse Jackson announces the formation of a new black political organization, PUSH (People United to Save Humanity).
  
• 12/20-21/1971 Nixon meets with British PM Heath in Bermuda to discuss world problems.
  
• 12/21/1971 Kurt Waldheim is named to replace U Thant as UN Secretary General.
  
• 12/21/1971 Nixon returned to the White House and was first told about the Radford confession, by Haldeman, Ehrlichman and Mitchell. Nixon decided that Radford's superior, Adm. Robert Welander, should be questioned. Over three decades ago on December 21, 1971, Richard Nixon approved the first major cover-up of his administration. He did so reluctantly at the behest of his closest political advisers, Attorney General John Mitchell, Domestic Counselor John Ehrlichman, and Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman. The public remains ignorant of this seminal event in Nixon's first term and journalists and historians have largely ignored it. The question is why? A recently released Nixon tape transcribed from an enhanced CD produced by the Nixon Era Center provides the clearest answer to this thirty-year-old Nixon secret. On that December day Nixon agreed to cover-up a criminally insubordinate spying operation conducted by the Joint Chiefs of Staff inside the National Security Council because of the military's strong, visceral dislike of Nixon's foreign policy. In particular, the JCS thought Nixon gone "soft on communism" by reaching out to the Chinese and Russians, and they resented Vietnamization as a way to end the war. As early as 1976 Admiral Elmo Zumwalt publicly made these military suspicions and resentment abundantly clear in his book, On Watch: A Memoir. "I had first become concerned many months before the June 1972 burglary," Zumwalt wrote, "[about] the deliberate, systematic and, unfortunately, extremely successful efforts of the President, Henry Kissinger, and a few subordinate members of their inner circle to conceal, sometimes by simple silence, more often by articulate deceit, their real policies about the most critical matters of national security." In a word, Zumwalt, like many within the American military elite, thought that Nixon's foreign policies bordered on the traitorous because they "were inimical to the security of the United States." This atmosphere of extreme distrust led Admiral Thomas Moorer, head of the JCS, to first authorize Rear Admiral Rembrandt C. Robinson and later Rear Admiral Robert O. Welander, both liaisons between the Joint Chiefs and the White House's National Security Council, to start spying on the NSC. For thirteen months, from late 1970 to late 1971, Navy Yeoman Charles E. Radford, an aide to both Robinson and Welander, systematically stole and copied NSC documents from burn bags containing carbon copies, briefcases, and desks of Henry Kissinger, Alexander Haig, and their staff. He then turned them over to his superiors. The White House became suspicious when Jack Anderson published a column on December 14 entitled, "U.S. Tilts to Pakistan." Such information logically could only have come from meetings of the Washington Special Action Group, December 3 and 4, which discussed the fact that Pakistan was being used as a conduit for the top secret negotiations the Nixon administration was carrying on with China--negotiations that would culminate in rapprochement with that Communist nation the spring of the next year. Clearly someone had leaked the minutes of the WSAG meeting to Anderson and the suspicion fell on the military. The White House immediately ordered an investigation of this leak and Pentagon Chief Investigator W. Donald Stewart subsequently uncovered the JCS spy operation when Yeoman Radford "broke down and cried" during a polygraph test, indicating that he spied with the "implied approval of his supervisor" Admiral Welander. Stewart believed that it was a "hanging offence" for the military to spy on the president and Ehrlichman's assistant, Egil ("Bud") Krogh thought that it was the beginning of a military coup because of the interference it represented "into the deliberations of duly-elected and appointed civilians to carry out foreign policy." Radford's confession not only led to such dire evaluations, but also to the December 21 conversation among the president, Ehrlich man, Haldeman, and John Mitchell. The most striking aspect of this tape is the passive role played by Nixon--the so-called original imperial president. First, he is out-talked by the others throughout this fifty-two-minute conversation. Toward the end of tape, the president can be heard saying to his advisers in a loud voice that the JCS spy activity was "wrong! Understand? I'm just saying that's wrong. Do you agree?" A little later he called it a "federal offense of the highest order." Up to this point, however, John Mitchell told the president that "the important thing is to paper this thing over" because "this Welander thing . . . Is going to get right into the middle of Joint Chiefs of Staff." In other words, Nixon would have to take on the entire military command if he exposed the spy ring. Moreover, this expose would take place in an election year and when the president had scheduled trips to both China and the Soviet Union to confirm improved relations with these countries--which the military opposed. Taking on the military establishment with such important political and diplomatic events on the horizon could have proven disastrous for the president's most important objectives and revealed other back-channel diplomatic activities of the administration. Later in his memoirs the president said that the media would have completely distorted the incident and exposure would have done "damage to the military at time when it was already under heavy attack." In contrast, at the time all three men agreed with Nixon about the seriousness of the crime committed by the JCS. Mitchell even compared it to "coming in [to the president's office] and robbing your desk." However, they advised him to do no more than to inform Moorer that the White House knew about the JCS spy ring, to interview Welander (who was later transferred to sea duty), and to transfer Radford. Moorer subsequently denied obtaining any information from purloined documents, fallaciously claiming that Nixon kept him fully informed about all his foreign policy initiatives. If this had been true there would have been no need for Moorer to set up a spy ring. Welander, for his part according to this tape, had initially refused to answer questions about the spying he was supervising on the questionable grounds that he had a "personal and confidential relationship" with both Kissinger and Haig. Nixon became incensed when he heard this. "Just knock it out of the ballpark, stop that relationship," he told his aides on December 21. Subsequently in his first interview Welander admitted his role in the naval surveillance operation, and implicated then Brigadier General Alexander Haig, Kissinger's aide and liaison between the Pentagon and the White House, in this criminal operation. Haig ultimately prevailed upon his old friend and colleague Fred Buzhardt, general counsel to the Defense Department, to re-interview Admiral Welander and eliminate the compromising references to him. Still the existence of this first Welander interview continued to haunt Haig because he knew if the president found out there would be no more military promotions for him, let alone a future in politics and so he was determined to see that his role in this affair remained under raps. Haig has succeeded in covering up his involvement down to the present day. For example, he told an interviewer in 1996 that the whole JCS spy ring was nothing more than the normal kind of internal espionage that goes on all the time among executive branch departments. Nonetheless, after he became Nixon's chief of staff, he went to great lengths to ensure that the various congressional investigations never concentrated on the Moorer/Radford affair, thus preventing exposure of his involvement in spying on the NSC while Kissinger's aide. When caught in the tug-of-war between the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the White House, Haig's loyalties to the very end remained with the military. This December 21 tape also indicates that Nixon did not trust either Kissinger or Haig. At one point he stated that "Henry is not a good security risk" and that he was convinced that "Haig must have known about this operation . . . It seems unlikely he wouldn't have known." Yet after Watergate forced the resignations of Haldeman and Ehrlichman, Nixon appointed Haig his chief of staff! Had the president chosen to ignore the advisce of his closest aides in December 1971 and follow his own instincts about exposing the JCS, Haig's culpability would have become evident and his career under Nixon would have ended and quite possibly prevented him from serving in both the Ford and Reagan administrations. By covering up JCS spy ring (but letting the military know they knew about it) Nixon and his aides apparently deluded themselves into thinking they would have greater leverage with a hostile defense establishment. However, the JCS also knew that Nixon and Kissinger had been by-passing both Secretaries of State (William Rogers) and Defense (Melvin Laird) in making their foreign policy decisions and could have retaliated with the charge that civilian leaders had been deliberately ignored in the administration's back-channel processes. This successful cover-up of the Moorer-Radford affair set the stage for more minor cover-ups ultimately culminating in the mother of them all--Watergate. As a result it should be considered the first and most important of the Nixon cover-ups. Had it not take place perhaps Nixon would have survived his second term in office.
  
• 12/22/1971 Ehrlichman questioned Welander in the former's White House office; Welander initially refused to admit to spying, but Ehrlichman's disarming mood led him to make a detailed confession. Ehrlichman taped the conversation (with Welander's knowledge). He revealed that he reported only to Adm. Moorer, and not to any of the other chiefs. Welander had a close relationship with Haig. But then Welander pulled back from his confession, and at one point tried to blame the whole thing on Radford. He several times alluded to Haig, who was in the position to convey information from the JCS to the White House and vice-versa. David Young wondered if Haig wasn't aware of Radford's actions. Welander would later admit to the authors of Silent Coup that he had turned Radford's documents over to Moorer, but he didn't think it was espionage; he also felt that Haig knew Radford was transmitting information to the JCS. Immediately after meeting with Welander, Ehrlichman and Young met with Nixon, Haldeman and Mitchell; Nixon quickly decided to keep quiet about the spy ring. Ehrlichman feels this was because he wanted to preserve his backchannel communications, and that didn't want anyone to know he had been spied upon; Nixon explained in RN that he didn't want to further demoralize the military and create a public scandal. Nixon also kept Moorer on, knowing that he would now have the chairman on a short leash. (Silent Coup) Nixon also hoped that he could find some sinister link between Radford and Jack Anderson, and blame it all on them. Mitchell, who had not heard the tape of Welander's confession, then talked to Moorer, who denied knowing about any spy ring.
  
• 12/23/1971 Nixon commutes Jimmy Hoffa's sentence.
  
• 12/23/1971 Nixon told Ehrlichman to tell Kissinger not to make a big deal about the JCS spy ring, keep quiet about it, and don't blame Haig for it. The JCS liaison office was closed. That evening, Haig called Young and yelled at him for impugning Welander with only circumstantial evidence. (Silent Coup 53,59)
  
• 12/24/1971 Young wrote a memo to Ehrlichman: "I am all the more convinced that it is now up to only you and Bob to protect Henry; i.e., it is very difficult for him to say no to Haig. Haig's change from enthusiastic retribution against Welander to outrage over the dismissal of Welander is odd." That morning, Ehrlichman played the tape of Welander's confession to Kissinger and Haig.
  
• 12/26/1971 Nixon orders resumption of bombing of the North.
  
• 12/26/1971 A group of Vietnam vets seized control of the Statue of Liberty in an anti-war protest.
  
• 12/27/1971 Adm. Rembrandt Robinson, Radford's previous boss, was interviewed by Ehrlichman about the spy ring, and dissembled a great deal; before the interview, he had been primed by the Pentagon's Fred Buzhardt about the questions he would be asked. (Silent Coup 59)
  
• 12/28-29/1971 Willy Brandt of West Germany visited Washington; Haig sat in with Nixon during their meeting because Kissinger was ill.
  
• 12/28/1971 Nixon signs a bill requiring most persons receiving welfare to register for jobs or job training.
  
• 12/28/1971 Justice Dept sues Mississippi officials for ignorning the ballots of black voters.
  
• 12/29/1971 Daniel Ellsberg and Rand co-worker Anthony Russo were indicted for espionage and conspiracy.
  
• 12/29/1971 Nixon signs a bill extending unemployment benefits.
  
• 12/31/1971 US troops in Vietnam reduced to 156,800, with 53,900 Allies; 45,626 US troops killed to date. A Cornell University study found that by the end of this year, the US had dropped 6 million tons of bombs and other munitions in Indochina, three times the total tonnage in WWII.