Deep Politics Timeline

[Tracy Riddle]

Thanks, everyone.

"Well, it's 1969 okay - war across the USA" - Iggy and the Stooges

• 1/1/1969 The Omnibus Crime Act of 1968 went into effect, making wiretapping a federal offense.
  
• 1/1/1969 Approximately 40 members of People's Democracy (PD) began a four-day march from Belfast across Northern Ireland to Derry. The Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA) and some nationalists in Derry had advised against the march. The march was modelled on Martin Luther King's Selma to Montgomery march. The first day involved a walk from Belfast to Antrim.
  
• 1/4/1969 A series of interviews with Truman in 1961 and '62 were publicized; at the time, Truman remarked that Nixon couldn't be elected "because Nixon is a shifty-eyed, goddamn liar, and people know it...I can't figure out how he came so close to getting elected president in 1960...I can't see how the son of a bitch even carried one state."
  
• 1/4/1969 Northern Ireland: the fourth and final day of the People's Democracy (PD) march took the marchers from Claudy to Derry. Seven miles from its destination, the march was ambushed by a loyalist mob at Burntollet Bridge.
  
• 1/5/1969 Nixon appoints Henry Cabot Lodge as negotiator at Paris peace talks.
  
• 1/7/1969 Sirhan's trial opens in Los Angeles.
  
• 1/10/1969 Dallas Police Deputy Buddy Walthers, a JFK assassination witness, is killed in a hotel room while trying to arrest a wanted criminal without a warrant.
  
• 1/11/1969 NYT reported that the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence found that J. Edgar Hoover "helped spread the view among the police ranks that any kind of mass protest is due to a conspiracy promulgated by agitators, often Communists, 'who misdirected otherwise contented people'."
  
• 1/11/1969 Northern Ireland: a Civil Rights march held in Newry ended in violence and there were also disturbances in Derry. In Newry youths attacked the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) and overturned and burnt several of their vehicles.
  
• 1/13/1969 Nixon was quoted as saying, "if we are not worthy of support from the intellectual community we are not going to get it...I consider myself an intellectual...we want to have a continuing relationship with the best brains in this country, with the colleges, universities, foundations and business organizations." (Los Angeles Times)
  
• 1/13/1969 Memo from James Jesus Angleton to J. Edgar Hoover ("Subject: Garrison and the Kennedy Assassination: Bernard Fensterwald et al."): "Fensterwald, who said he was setting up an office which would open in a week, left the Senate earlier this week after twelve years as counsel for several committees." Angleton recommended checking into the backgrounds of Fensterwald and three other Warren Commission critics. Segments of the memo were deleted before its release.
  
• 1/15/1969 The Pentagon Papers study is officially completed.
  
• 1/15/1969 The first Soviet space station is put into orbit.
  
• 1/16/1969 Hearings were held in January of 1969 in New Orleans to determine if the U.S. Archivist should be compelled to produce autopsy materials for the Clay Shaw Trial. During this legal battle, the Justice Department made public the Clark Panel report, which had been completed and signed nearly a year earlier but kept hidden.
  
• 1/16/1969 Czechoslovak student Jan Palach sets himself afire in protest.
  
• 1/17/1969 Roy Cohn is indicted for bribery, conspiracy and extortion.
  
• 1/17/1969 Government accuses IBM of monopolizing the computer market.
  
• 1/17/1969 Clark Panel report on the JFK autopsy materials is released; the existence of the Panel was not made public until this day. The New York Times announced: "Inquiry Upholds Warren Report - Finds Autopsy Photos Show 2 Shots Killed President"; story by Fred Graham, later of CBS News. Garrison's assistant, James Alcock, called the move by Ramsey Clark a deliberate attempt to interfere with the picking of a jury in the Shaw trial.
  
• 1/17/1969 FBI memo recommending that "the extensive communist influence on King and King's highly immoral personal behavior" be made known to Nixon and John Mitchell so they could head off any attempts to make MLK's birthday a national holiday. A memo to this effect was sent to Mitchell by Hoover 1/23.
  
• 1/20/1969 Richard M. Nixon inaugurated as President. His speech sounded very similar in spots to JFK's inaugural address. "Peace does not come through wishing for it. There is no substitute for days and even years of patient and prolonged diplomacy." During his parade down Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House, the limousine bearing the Nixon family is pelted with sticks, stones, empty beer cans, and homemade smoke bombs.
  
• 1/20/1969 LBJ retires to his Texas ranch, where he devotes himself to writing his version of the presidential years, "The Vantage Point" (1971) and to the establishment of both a library to house his presidential papers and the Lyndon Baines Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas in Austin. He sees a psychiatrist and continues to have heart problems.
  
• 1/20/1969 On his last day as Atty General, Ramsey Clark ordered the Justice Dept to withhold from Jim Garrison the JFK autopsy photos and X-rays. (New York Times 1/20, 21/1969)
  
• 1/21/1969 Nuclear reactor accident at Lucens, Canton of Vaud, Switzerland
  
• 1/21/1969 Jury selection in the Clay Shaw trial began. The first prospective juror examined is promptly excused. His name: John Kennedy. This trial will last 39 days and will be one of the best publicized in American history.
  
• 1/23/1969 James Kirkwood appeared on WDSU's Midday talk show, and indicated that he thought Shaw was innocent. He quickly regretted making this comment during the jury selection process.
  
• 1/25/1969 Nixon memo proposing that the "peaceful uses of atomic explosives" be explored further. (Secret Files p12)
  
• 1/25/1969 Four-party peace talks open in Paris. Henry Cabot Lodge urges a demilitarized zone as the first "practical move toward peace" and a mutual withdrawal of "external" military forces.
  
• 1/26/1969 Dr. Henry Delaune murdered. Brother-in-law and sometimes assistant to Nicholas Chetta, Corner of New Orleans and a key witness in Jim Garrison's case against Clay Shaw.
  
• 1/28/1969 Herb Kalmbach opened a bank account in Newport Beach, Calif. Over the next year or so, he kept up to half a million in this account. Earlier this month, Kalmbach received the GOP 1968 campaign surplus, estimated at $1.2 to $1.7 million.
  
• 1/28/1969 Carlos Bringuier wrote to H.L. Hunt looking for financial aid in getting his book, Red Friday, published. (Man Who Knew Too Much 592)
  
• 2/2/1969 Israeli occupation forces wielded nightsticks in Gaza to herd some 2000 rioting Arab high school girls back into classrooms. Over 90 students were injured.
  
• 2/3/1969 Eduardo Mondlane, leader of Frelimo independence movement, assassinated in Dar-es-Salaam.
  
• 2/3/1969 Rev. Carl McIntire began a "vigorous campaign" over his broadcast network for 24 straight days. He ranted against the ecumenical movement, attacked Existentialism, and talked about the upcoming 1970 census in frightening terms: "The citizens of the United States are confronted with one of the most direct challenges to their liberty and constitutional rights that they have ever faced."
  
• 2/4/1969 Memo from Houston CIA office to the CIA Director of Domestic Contact Service titled 'H.L. Hunt Interest in Garrison Investigation of Kennedy Assassination.' Part of the memo, written by CIA officer J. Walter Moore, is deleted. "Mr. H.L. Hunt has been very concerned that District Attorney Garrison will try to involve him in the Kennedy assassination. He asked his Security Director [Paul Rothermel], a former FBI agent, to keep up with developments in the case. Since [deleted] has been fired by Garrison, he has approached [deleted] for a job with the H.L. Hunt Company. He is interested in writing a book about the assassination and wants Mr. Hunt to sponsor him...[deleted] said he would relay any information he might receive that Garrison planned to involve the Central Intelligence Agency or subpoena any of its representatives in the trial against Clay Shaw."
  
• 2/5/1969 An all-male jury is seated for the Shaw trial.
  
• 2/5/1969 Nixon memo to Haldeman: "I would like to get Eugene McCarthy down for a visit...I think it would be well to worry Teddy a bit in renewing my acquaintance with McCarthy." (Secret Files 14)
  
• 2/6/1969 Nixon announces that reduction of US troops is contingent on progress at the peace talks.
  
• 2/6/1969 Jim Garrison's opening statement in the Shaw trial. He charged that Shaw had conspired with Dave Ferrie, Lee Harvey Oswald and others to murder JFK. "The murder had been planned during the summer and fall of 1963 at two parties held in New Orleans."
  
• 2/9/1969 Gen. Creighton Adams requests B-52 bombing of a Communist base camp inside Cambodia.
  
• 2/12/1969 Rothermel to Hunt memo discovered by Bud Fensterwald in the HSCA's files stated, "[William] Wood said that Garrison had on four or five occasions ordered him to come to Dallas to reassure the Hunts that Garrison was not after them. Wood said it got to be embarrassing to do this, and he questioned Garrison's motives." Wood was afraid that Garrison was out to get him and thought that "Harold Weisberg and Gary Shoener are behind his being dismissed, and thinks they have complete control of the Clay Shaw trial and Garrison."
  
• 2/12/1969 After six weeks of preliminaries and jury selection, Sirhan Bishara Sirhan stands trial in the Los Angeles County Superior Court.
  
• 2/13/1969 Abraham Zapruder appears as a prosecution witness in the Clay Shaw trial in New Orleans. He identifies the film shown at the trial as identical to the film he shot in Dallas, as the film was shown for the first time in public. It is shown 5 times today, altogether. By the end of the case, it will have been shown 5 more times, once frame by frame. While the film is in Jim Garrison's possession, many copies are covertly made. Garrison lets Mark Lane make 100 copies for distribution "to colleges and universities." Copies begin surfacing all over the country; some are 9th or 10th generation copies.
  
• 2/13/1969 An Evans and Novak column remarked how many Republicans were angry that Nixon was leaving so many Democrats in power in the executive branch.
  
• 2/14/1969 CIA memo: H.L. Hunt was so concerned about Jim Garrison's snooping around that he "Asked his security director, a former FBI agent, to keep up with developments in the case." "Mr. H.L. Hunt has been very concerned that District Attorney Garrison will try to involve him in the Kennedy Assassination." The memo was written by J. Walter Moore, the Dallas CIA Domestic Contacts man. (Killing the Truth 491)
  
• 2/16/1969 Columnist Carl Rowan wrote, "Nixon is clearly not what he said he was, not what Democrats feared he was, nor even what Republicans hoped he was during the presidential campaign." (Washington Star)
  
• 2/18/1969 Clyde Johnson, a former Kentwood, Louisiana Preacher is scheduled to testify against Clay Shaw regarding the personal relationship between Clay Shaw and Oswald. He never testifies because he is severely beaten. Previously he told Jim Garrison that on September 2, 1963, from 2:00 to 9:00 PM, he had spoken with Ruby, Clay Shaw, and Oswald at the Jack Tar Capital House in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
  
• 2/22/1969 Robert Frazier of the FBI testified at the Shaw trial. He testified that the "almost intact bullet, two bullet fragments, one a nose and the other a base fragment, three small fragments found in the limousine, and a lead smear taken from the interior of the limousine windshield…all…had the same metallic composition." Frazier said that the hole in the back of Connally's shirt was "slightly elongated, not a regular round hole…an irregular tear accompanied by an egg-shaped hole." (Times-Picayune 2/23)
  
• 2/23/1969 Haig, Haldeman and Kissinger, in Brussels with Nixon on a European trip, agreed that a secret bombing of Cambodia should begin. (General's Progress 138) Though the bombing would be no secret to the Cambodians or the Communists, it would be kept secret from the American people and Congress. Nixon would later write, "We wanted to avoid the domestic uproar that might result from a publicized strike." (No More Vietnams 108)
  
• 2/24/1969 Stewart Alsop wrote in Newsweek, "a great many people who supposed or at least suspected that Mr. Nixon was a sort of human monster have discovered that he isn't." At this point many liberals were surprised (and many conservatives disappointed) at how Nixon was not moving to abandon Democratic programs and ideals.
  
• 2/24/1969 Dr. Finck testifies at Shaw trial.
  
• 2/27 or 28/1969 Clay Shaw took the stand at his trial, and denied ever knowing Oswald or Ferrie; using an alias; any association with the CIA; the Clinton trip; and said that he liked President Kennedy. (Times-Picayune 2/28/1969)
  
• 2/28/1969 Los Angeles court refuses Sirhan's request to be executed.
  
• 2/28/1969 The Clay Shaw trial lasted about three weeks, and went to the jury on the evening of February 28, 1969. Jury deliberates 54 minutes; returns unanimous verdict (reached on first ballot) at 1:02 a.m.: not guilty. Uproar in court, applause, cheers, cries of No! No! Judge Haggerty asks prosecution if it wishes the jury polled; Alcock, slumped in his chair, shakes his head. Alcock has no comment on leaving court. Garrison not present when verdict is read, having left after making closing argument, 11:30 p.m.; says on leaving, "No matter how this thing ends, I will not hold a news conference."
  
• 2/1969 Reader's Digest published an interview with Admiral John S. McCain, C-in-C of the Pacific Theater. He said, "We have the enemy licked now. He is beaten. We have the initiative in all areas. The enemy cannot achieve a military victory; he cannot even mount another major offensive. We are in the process of eliminating his remaining capability to threaten the security of South Vietnam...My optimism is based on hard military realism." Reader's Digest quoted Hanson Baldwin, the NYT military correspondent: "The enemy has lost the war militarily. The signs of deterioration are plain."
  
• 3/1/1969 The New York Times followed the acquittal of Clay L. Shaw with a renewed offensive against previous criticism of the Warren Report.
  
• 3/1-7/1969 Soviet and East German (GDR) troops hold maneuvers in the central and western parts of the GDR. On those grounds, traffic is disrupted between West Berlin and West Germany.
  
• 3/2/1969 Nixon returns from 8-day trip to Europe, visiting leaders of Belgium, Britain, Italy, France and West Germany.
  
• 3/2/1969 NY Times editorial referred to Garrison's "obsessional conviction about the fraudulent character of the Warren Commission" as a "fantasy." The "News of the Week in Review" this day carried a piece by Sidney Zion, "Garrison Flops on the Conspiracy Theory," which maintained, in essence, that Garrison had "restored the credibility of the Warren Report." The Times ignored the fact that the jury had been charged solely with the duty of determining the guilt or innocence of Mr. Shaw, not with determining the validity of the Warren Report.
  
• 3/2-15/1969 Soviet and Chinese troops fight in border skirmishes. This results in personnel movements in the Soviet Army in Germany, and eventually becomes a source of pressure on Soviet leaders to reduce their commitments in Europe.
  
• 3/6/1969 Sirhan testifies that he doesn't remember killing RFK.
  
• 3/7/1969 Nixon addressed the top personnel at the CIA: "It has been truly said that the CIA is a professional organization. That is one of the reasons that when the new administration came in and many changes were made, as they should be made in our American political system after an election, and a change of parties, as far as the executive branch is concerned, I did not make a change...I concluded that Dick Helms was the best man in the country to be Director of the CIA-and that is why we have him here...Going back during the 8 years I was Vice President, I sat on the National Security Council and there learned to respect the organization, its Director, and its reports that were made to the Council...I look upon this organization as not one that is necessary for the conduct of conflict or war, or call it what you may, but in the final analysis is one of the great instruments of our Government for the preservation of peace, for the avoidance of war..."
  
• 3/9/1969 The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour is canceled by CBS-TV for its controversial, anti-Establishment content.
  
• 3/10/1969 Supreme Court ruled on three cases involving secretly recorded conversations of criminal suspects. The Court turned the cases over to the trial judge to decided on their legality.
  
• 3/10/1969 James Earl Ray pleads guilty to murder of MLK, is sentenced to 99 years in prison. The "mini-trial" before Judge W. Preston Battle lasted less than 2.5 hours. He stated that he could not agree with Clark and Hoover that there had been no conspiracy. Within three days he would repudiate his admission of guilt, saying he'd been misled and coerced by his lawyers and the federal government.
  
• 3/11/1969 In a declassified memo dated March 11, 1969, JFK autopsy doctor Pierre Finck meticulously recounted that on February 16, 1969 he had received a telephone call from "E. F. Wegmann, a defense attorney for Clay Shaw," who "defends the conclusions of the Warren Commission and wanted me to come to New Orleans to testify." After advising his superiors of the request, and after (inexplicably) notifying the Deputy Assistant Attorney General, Carl Eardley, Finck's memo recounts that he then went to Eardley's office and reviewed numerous documents pertaining to JFK's autopsy. After that, Finck reports, "Eardley called me … at home notifying me that he had a check and a D. C. Court Order for me to appear in the New Orleans court." Finck then flew to New Orleans and met privately with Shaw's defense team prior to taking the stand. Finck also said that the Assistant U. S. Attorney in New Orleans "called me at the hotel to offer his help."[171] However, Finck's damaging testimony was not exactly what Justice had hoped for when it had directed the elaborate choreography between the feds and Shaw's defense team. Justice then rushed to the rescue. To refute Finck, it called Boswell in. Both in JAMA and under oath to the ARRB, Boswell explained the rest of the story. He said that the Justice Department was "really upset" when Pierre Finck had testified that a general, and not chief pathologist Humes, was in charge of JFK's autopsy. "So," Boswell testified, "(Justice) put me on a plane that day to New Orleans." "They (the Justice Department) … talked to me and tried to get me to agree that (Finck) was very strange …." Then, Boswell explained, "They showed me the transcript of Pierre (Finck's) testimony for the past couple of days, and I spent all night reviewing that testimony." The Justice Department's obvious purpose, Boswell admitted, was to prepare him "to refute Finck's testimony." Ultimately, however, Boswell was never called to the stand.
  
• 3/14/1969 Nixon announces his plans to proceed with a revised anti-ballistic missile (ABM) defense plan. It is called the "Safeguard" system to replace LBJ's proposed "Sentinel" plan and is designed to protect US missile sites rather than US cities.
  
• 3/15/1969 Nixon orders bombing of Viet Cong sanctuaries in neutral Cambodia; three days later US B-52s strike, and continued through 4/1970. The bombing was not revealed to the public until later.
  
• 3/17/1969 Operation Menu was the codename for secret US bombing of alleged North Vietnamese strongholds and supply lines in Cambodia during the Vietnam War in 1969. The bombing of a nation the US was not at war with, began with Operation Breakfast on March 17, 1969 and was conducted in secret until the New York Times broke the story on May 8, 1969.
  
• 3/25/1969 Pakistan: Ayub Khan resigns as a result of increasing violence and unrest. He turned over the government to Gen. Agha Mohammed Yahya Khan, Army commander-in-chief.
  
• 3/28/1969 Former president Dwight D. Eisenhower dies.
  
• 3/29/1969 US combat deaths in Vietnam reach 33,641, exceeding those of the Korean war.
  
• 3/29/1969 An ex-serviceman named Ron Ridenhour (a helicopter gunner) wrote a letter concerning what had been told him about the My Lai massacre by 4 men of C Company. He sent copies to President Nixon; 23 members of Congress; The Secretaries of State, Army and Defense; and the present chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, William Westmoreland, who initiated an army investigation.
  
• 3/31/1969 The judge in the James Earl Ray case, W. Preston Battle, died suddenly in his office of natural causes.
  
• 3/1969 Mario Puzo's novel, The Godfather, is published.
  
• 3/1969 Clay Blair's book The Strange Case of James Earl Ray is published.
  
• 4/1969 Patrick Buchanan urged Nixon in a memo not to visit "the Widow King" on the first anniversary of Martin Luther King's assassination, warning that a visit would "outrage many, many people who believe Dr. King was a fraud and a demagogue and perhaps worse.... Others consider him the Devil incarnate. Dr. King is one of the most divisive men in contemporary history." (New York Daily News, 10/1/90)
  
• 4/1969 "Civilians can scarcely understand or even believe that many ambitious military professionals truly yearn for wars and the opportunities for glory and distinction afforded only in combat. A career of peacetime duty is a dull and frustrating prospect for the normal regular officer to contemplate.... Wars and emergencies put the military and their leaders on the front pages and give status and prestige to the professionals. Wars add to the military traditions, the self-nourishment of heroic deeds, and provide a new crop of military leaders who become the rededicated disciples of the code of service and military action. Being recognized public figures in a nation always seeking folk heroes, the military leaders have been largely exempt from the criticism experienced by the more plebeian politician. Flag officers are considered 'experts,' and their views are often accepted by the press and Congress as the gospel.... Standing closely behind these leaders, encouraging and prompting them, are the rich and powerful defense industries. Standing in front, adorned with service caps, ribbons, and lapel emblems, is a nation of veterans -- patriotic, belligerent, romantic, and well intentioned, finding a certain sublimation and excitement in their country's latest military venture." --David Shoup, former Commandant of the Marine Corps and member of the Joints Chiefs of Staff under President Kennedy, "The New American Militarism," The Atlantic, April 1969
  
• 4/7/1969 Supreme Court rules unanimously laws that prohibit the viewing or reading of obscene materials in one's own home are unconstitutional.
  
• 4/9/1969 300 students, mostly members of SDS, take over Harvard's administration building to protest the university's close ties to the military-industrial complex.
  
• 4/10/1969 A police assault forced students out of University Hall at Harvard.
  
• 4/15/1969 A U.S. EC-121 is shot down by the Soviets while on a reconnaissance mission in Korea. It has a crew of 30. Twenty-eight are not found. Their fate is still unknown. A US Navy intelligence plane is shot down over North Korean air space.
  
• 4/15/1969 John M. Crawford, 46, dies in a mysterious plane crash near Huntsville, Texas. It appears from witnesses that Crawford has left in a rush. Crawford is a homosexual and a close friend of Jack Ruby's. Ruby supposedly carried Crawford's phone number in his pocket at all times. Crawford was also a friend of Buell Wesley Frazier's, the neighbor who took Lee Harvey Oswald to work on that fatal morning of Nov. 22, 1963.
  
• 4/15/1969 Huie's third Look article on Ray: "Conspiracy or Not? Why Ray Killed King." The article was co-written by Ray lawyers Arthur Hanes and Percy Foreman, and it backs away from the conspiracy theorizing in the first two articles. Huie wrote, "I now believe he killed Dr. King to achieve...status."
  
• 4/17/1969 After sixty-four sequestered days and nights, sixteen hours and forty-two minutes of deliberation, a jury finds Sirhan Bishara Sirhan, "alone and not in concert with anyone else," guilty of the murder of Bobby Kennedy. He is sentenced to death in the gas chamber.
  
• 4/17/1969 Dubcek removed as party first secretary, after disturbances that follow Czechoslovak hockey team's victory over a Soviet team in Stockholm. Dubcek replaced by Gustav Husak with full support of the Soviet Union.
  
• 4/18/1969 CIA memo from a CIA SRS/OS official, Sarah K. Hall, to the Chief of the CIA's LEOB/SRS and Deputy Chief of SRS. Titled 'Hunt, H.L. - Interest in Investigation of the Kennedy Assassination.' The memo made references to recent developments in the Garrison case, and to the book Farewell America, which mentioned Hunt. "A copy of the book is held by undersigned if you desire to review the portions referring to Hunt."
  
• 4/20/1969 The New York Times Magazine carried an article, "The Final Chapter in the Assassination Controversy?" by Edward J. Epstein, onetime critic of the Warren Report. It attacked critics by impugning their motives and integrity, and implied that they had a political agenda to push. He suggested that many of the critics were "demonologists" with "books as well as conspiracy theories to advertise." Epstein questioned the necessity of the single-bullet theory for Oswald to have been the lone gunman; he also referred to the Clark Panel report to support the Warren Commission.
  
• 4/20/1969 A weekend of street fighting among Catholics, Protestants and police in Belfast ended with British troops en route to the city.
  
• 4/23/1969 The Army began a full-scale investigation into the My Lai massacre.
  
• 4/23/1969 A Los Angeles jury sentences Sirhan Bishara Sirhan to death in the gas chamber for the murder of RFK, despite a written plea for mercy from Ted Kennedy.
  
• 4/27/1969 Bolivian president Rene Barrientos died as his helicopter became tangled in power lines near his hometown of Cochabamba.
  
• 4/28/1969 Israel paid $3,556,457 in compensation to those men of the Liberty who were wounded. This was obtained only after the claimants retained private legal counsel, the latter taking a substantial part of the award. Although the US submitted a claim of $7,644,146 for the material damage inflicted upon the Liberty, the government of Israel has refused to pay it.
  
• 4/28/1969 French president Charles de Gaulle resigned.
  
• 5/1969 Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, determined to prove to President Nixon that news stories about the secret Cambodian bombings are not being leaked to the press by liberals in the National Security Council offices, urges FBI director J. Edgar Hoover to wiretap several of Nixon's top aides, as well as a selection of reporters. Kissinger will later deny making the request. [Werth, 2006, pp. 169]
  
• 5/3/1969 Several CIA agents led by Amancio Mosquera ("Yarey") infiltrate Cuba and are captured.
  
• 5/5/1969 Kissinger met secretly with Hoover to discuss the leaks. (General's Progress p152)
  
• 5/6/1969 Navy Sec. John Chafee overrules a naval court of inquiry and announces that none of the crew of the Pueblo will be disciplined for failing to defend their ship or destroy intelligence material.
  
• 5/9-10/1969 The New York Times reveals the secret bombings of Cambodia, dubbed "Operation Menu".
  
• The story had been published two days earlier in London when a British correspondent flying over Cambodia saw bomb craters. National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger is apoplectic in his anger: shouting to President Nixon, "We must do something! We must crush those people! We must destroy them!" Kissinger is not only referring to the Times, but Defense Secretary Melvin Laird and Secretary of State William Rogers, whom he believes leaked the information to the Times in order to discredit him. (Nixon has an unproductive phone conversation with Laird before his meeting with Kissinger; Nixon opened the phone call by calling Laird a "son of a b_tch," and Laird hung up on the president.) Nixon suggests Kissinger's own staff may be the source of the leaks. He is most suspicious of Kissinger's aide Morton Halperin. By lunch, Kissinger has talked to the FBI about wiretapping suspected leakers. By dinner, Halperin's phone is tapped. The next day, Kissinger's military aide Alexander Haig has the FBI tap three more men "just for a few days," warning the FBI not to keep any records of the wiretaps.
  
• 5/9/1969 5:05pm Hoover wrote another memo, telling Kissinger that the leak probably came from "arrogant Harvard-type Kennedy men" who "express a very definite Kennedy philosophy" and anti-Nixon elements in the government.
  
• 5/10/1969 Haig tells the FBI that continued leaks will "destroy Kissinger's foreign policy." After an Oval Office meeting with Hoover, Kissinger and Mitchell, Nixon authorized a wiretap program to discover the source of the leak. By Haig's request, the wiretaps were not entered in the FBI indices, and no copies were made of the files and logs, which were kept in Sullivan's office. (The Director 254-5)
  
• 5/12/1969 The first Kissinger-Haig list of wiretap targets is sent to FBI; on the list is Air Force Lt. Gen. Robert E. Pursley, who was considered a dove on foreign policy. On this date, a wiretap is placed on Morton Halperin, and was removed 2/10/1971 (though he had left the NSC 9/1969); summary reports were sent to Nixon, Kissinger and Haldeman by the FBI. A wiretap is placed on Daniel Davidson, removed 9/15/1969. Wiretap placed on Pursley, removed 5/27/1969. Two wiretaps placed on Helmut Sonnenfeldt; removed 2/2/1971.
  
• 5/14/1969 Abe Fortas resigns from the Supreme Court under pressure. President Nixon intended to fill the Court with as many of his choices as possible, and he, along with conservative Republicans and Democrats who do not agree with Fortas's liberal stance on civil rights, targeted Fortas for a smear campaign designed to force him off the bench. Nixon used what White House counsel John Dean will later call "an ugly bluff" against Fortas: He has Attorney General John Mitchell inform Fortas that he intends to open a special probe into Fortas's dealingswhile on the benchwith a financier already under investigation. Mitchell insinuates that he will put Fortas's wife, herself an attorney and partner at Fortas's former law firm, and other former partners of Fortas's on the witness stand. Whether Fortas actually had any direct illegal dealings with this financier is unclearcertainly his dealings had such an appearancebut the bluff worked; Fortas agreed to retire early, thus clearing a position on the Court for Nixon to fill.
  
• 5/14/1969 Nixon announces 8-point peace plan, including phased US withdrawal, internationally supervised cease-fire and free elections. April-May: US troop strength in Vietnam peaks at 543,300.
  
• 5/15/1969 Squatters are forcibly evicted by police from 'Peoples Park' in Berkeley. After a university-owned lot in Berkeley is turned into a park in April, UC officials have it fenced, prompting some 3,000 protesters to try to seize it back. Reagan calls in the National Guard, hundreds of protesters are arrested and one person is killed. The city is placed under a "state of extreme emergency." (SF Chronicle 6/9/02)
  
• 5/18/1969 12:49pm Apollo 10 mission launched from Cape Kennedy. Carrying astronauts Thomas P. Stafford, Eugene A. Cernan, and John W. Young, Jr., it headed for lunar orbit and a dress rehearsal of man's first Moon landing.
  
• 5/20/1969 White House Orders NSC Aides Wiretapped Two National Security Council assistants, Richard Moose and Richard Sneider, are wiretapped by the FBI as part of President Nixon and Henry Kissinger's attempt to seal media leaks. [Reeves, 2001, pp. 86]
  
• 5/21/1969 Nixon nominated Warren Burger as chief justice of the Supreme Court.
  
• 5/21/1969 Memo from Haldeman discussed a Nixon request to assemble a file on Drew Pearson. (Secret Files 30)
  
• 5/23/1969 Sirhan began his residence on Death Row at San Quentin.
  
• 5/28 or 29/1969 Wiretap placed on Henry Brandon of the London Sunday Times; this was ordered by Haig. Numerous FBI summary reports are sent to Nixon, Kissinger and Haldeman before it is removed 2/10/1971. Haig would later testify that he could not recall the wiretap. (General's Progress 158)
  
• 6/1969 Nixon made a speech at the Air Force Academy defending the US military from "unprecedented attack" by critics.
  
• 6/1969 The British satirical film The Bed-Sitting Room premieres in Berlin. It will be released in the UK in 1970. Directed by Richard Lester, it is an absurdist look at the aftermath of a nuclear war in the UK.
  
• 6/4/1969 Hoover and Sullivan met with Haig and Kissinger about the taps. Haig would later say that the taps yielded nothing but "an awful lot of garbage..." (Washington Post 12/20/1980)
  
• 6/5/1969 The New York Times breaks the story of secret negotiations with Japan for the return of Okinawa to Japanese control. The story, by Times reporter Hedrick Smith, reveals details from a secret National Security Council memo that includes plans to announce the turnover as well as the plans to remove all US nuclear weapons from Okinawa. National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger orders the FBI to wiretap Smith's telephone. [Reeves, 2001, pp. 86]
  
• 6/6/1969 Attorney General John Mitchell said in a speech that over the previous two years the number of corporate mergers "more than doubled" and "involved an increasing number of large firms…In 1948, the nation's 200 largest industrial corporations controlled 48% of the manufacturing assets. Today, these firms control 58%, while the top 500 firms control 75% of these assets. The danger that this super-concentration poses to our economic, political and social structure cannot be over-estimated."
  
• 6/6/1969 Vice President Agnew made a speech at Ohio State University graduation ceremonies: "A society which comes to fear its children is effete. A sniveling, hand-wringing power structure deserves the violent rebellion it encourages. If my generation doesn't stop cringing, yours will inherit a lawless society where emotion and muscle displace reason."
  
• 6/7/1969 The Florida legislature asked Nixon to restore the name "Cape Canaveral" from Cape Kennedy. Nixon agreed, and renamed instead only the launching complex for the Apollo-Saturn rockets the Kennedy Space Center, Florida.
  
• 6/8/1969 Nixon announces first US troop withdrawal of 25,000 soldiers from Vietnam. He meets with Thieu on Midway Island to inform him of the withdrawal. They agree that these forces will be replaced with South Vietnamese troops.
  
• 6/9/1969 Warren Burger is confirmed as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court by the Senate 74-3.
  
• 6/9/1969 Dr. Donald MacArthur, a high-level defense department biological research administrator appears at a meeting today of a House committee on military appropriations requesting financial support for research and experimentation. "Within five to ten years," say MacArthur, "it would probably be possible to make a new infective microorganism which would differ in certain important aspects from any known disease-causing organisms. Most important of these is that it might be refractory to the immunological and therapeutic processes upon which we depend to maintain our relative freedom from infectious disease." In short, this proposed "manufactured" disease would destroy the body's immune system. MacArthur goes on to justify his request by adding: "Should an enemy develop it there is little doubt that this is an important area of potential military technological inferiority in which there is no adequate research program." MacArthur receives the funding. In 1977 and 1978, at the tail end of Dr. MacArthur's time frame, the first cases of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) will emerge in Africa. In 1978 more than a thousand non monogamous homosexual adult males will receive experimental vaccinations against hepatitis B, courtesy of the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control. Within six year, 64 percent of those men had AIDS.
  
• 6/9/1969 President Thieu, on Saigon television, attempts to counter the gloom produced by his meeting with Nixon by saying that "this is a replacement, not a withdrawal. Withdrawal is a defeatist and misleading term."
  
• 6/11/1969 Rep. H.R. Gross responded to Nixon's foreign aid proposals: "With the federal debt at around $375 billion...with inflation chewing up the dollar, I am utterly amazed that demands should be made for another multi-billion dollar foreign giveaway program."
  
• 6/11/1969 Prince Sihanouk announces that Cambodia will restore relations with the US.
  
• 6/13/1969 Washington discloses that it used wiretapping devices to eavesdrop on the Chicago Eight' without court approval. John Mitchell states that Presidential powers permit wiretapping of any domestic group "which seeks to attack and subvert the Government by unlawful means."
  
• 6/13/1969 PM Souvanna Phouma of Laos acknowledges publicly that US planes regularly carry out bombing raids in Laos to stop the North Vietnamese from using the country for bases and supply routes.
  
• 6/13/1969 Pentagon reports that B-52 bombing missions over the Ho Chi Minh trail in southern Laos rose to 5567 in 1969, up from 3377 in 1968. Nearly 160,000 tons of bombs were dropped on the Ho Chi Minh trail in 1969, a 60% increase from 1968.
  
• 6/15/1969 Nixon signed the papers approving Howard Hughes' purchase of Air West.
  
• 6/16/1969 Memo from Nixon to Haldeman discussing budget cuts, especially the CIA ("the latter in particular must be cut)." (Secret Files 32)
  
• 6/20/1969 Clint Murchison Sr. dies in Athens, Texas.
  
• 6/23/1969 Warren Burger is sworn in as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court as the era of the Warren Court ends. Former appellate judge Warren Burger begins his term as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Burger was named months before by newly elected president Richard Nixon after two earlier candidates, former Eisenhower attorney general Herbert Brownell and former GOP presidential candidate Thomas Dewey, turned down the job. Supreme Court Associate Justice Abe Fortas was to be Chief Justice as one of then-president Lyndon Johnson's last acts, but Senate Republicans, supported by conservative Senate Democrats who oppose Fortas's civil rights rulings, successfully filibustered Fortas's nomination and actually forced Fortas's premature resignation (see May 14, 1969). The blocking of Fortas has an additional element: in June 1968, Chief Justice Earl Warren announced that he would step down, giving Johnson ample time to place Fortas in the position. However, Republican presidential candidate Richard Nixon wanted to name the Chief Justice himself, if he won the national election. To that end, Nixon sent word to Congressional Republicans to block Johnson's naming of a replacement for Warren. Senate Republicans launched the filibuster after being given information that intimated Fortas had received an inordinately large honorarium for teaching a course at American University, a sum said to have been raised by one of his former law partners. [Dean, 2007, pp. 127-128]
  
• 6/24/1969 Haldeman memo to Buchanan stating that Nixon wanted to set up an operation to send phony "Letters to the Editor" and "Calls to Broadcasters" supporting the President's policies.
  
• 6/27/1969 Crucial crime-scene evidence relating to a second gun in RFK's assassination -- wood from the pantry door frame and several ceiling tiles -- is destroyed by LAPD while Sirhan's case is still being appealed.
  
• 6/30/1969 Walter Trohan, Chicago Tribune correspondent who had close ties to LBJ and Hoover, wrote that RFK "set up an extensive wiretap group under his own command in the Department of Justice. The group was headed by three men. One of these was given a job in the Justice Department, a second was placed on the White House payroll of his brother...and the third was put on the payroll of the Immigration and Naturalization Service."
  
• 7/1/1969 The CIA station in Santiago, Chile receives approval from headquarters for a covert program to establish intelligence agents in the Chilean armed services.
  
• 7/8/1969 William Sullivan recommends to Hoover that the Halperin tap be removed.
  
• 7/8/1969 First US forces left Vietnam, in Nixon's plan to turn the fighting over to the South Vietnamese.
  
• 7/10/1969 Rothermel memo to H.L. Hunt: "James Braden was arrested on the day of the assassination. He was on parole from the State of California. He had been in both prior to and after the assassination to see us on an oil deal...It may be that Fensterwald is going to write a new book, pointing the finger at the Hunts." (The Man Who Knew Too Much p593)
  
• 7/14/1969 Francis Reitemeyer is granted Conscientious Objector status on the basis of a petition his attorney has filed which explicitly details the training and instruction he has just received in assassination and torture techniques in conjunction with his assignment to the Phoenix Program. The horrors of the war are beginning to emerge.
  
• 7/14-19/1969 Armed clashes between the forces of El Salvador and Honduras leave over 1000 dead. The undeclared war was sparked by June riots which had erupted during a playoff between the two nations for the World Soccer Cup. Salvadoran troops had occupied considerable Honduran territory when both sides accepted a cease fire arranged by the OAS. About 2000 people, mostly civilians, died in the fighting.
  
• 7/15/1969 Melvin Laird told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee: "I think we've certainly turned the corner" in the war.
  
• 7/18/1969 In the Chappaquiddick incident, a car driven by Ted Kennedy accidentally goes off a bridge in Chappaquiddick Island, killing his passenger Mary Jo Kopechne. In his July 25 televised statement, Kennedy stated that on the night of the incident he wondered "whether some awful curse did actually hang over all the Kennedys."
  
• 7/18/1969 Nixon speechwriter William Safire recommends contingency planning and writes a draft speech in case something went wrong and the astronauts couldn't get home from the moon.
  
• 7/20/1969 10:56pm (EDT): Neil Armstrong is first man to step on the surface of the moon as he exited the Eagle lunar module. China prefers to pretend the moon landing didn't happen. Renmin Ribao of Beijing along with virtually all other newspapers in communist China fails to mention on its front page the first landing of humans on the moon. In Science Digest, the respected monthly popular science journal, astronomer-author James Mullaney (a former contributing editor to Astronomy magazine) wrote in July 1977 that "the crew of Apollo 11, during the first moon landing, reporting that their capsule was paced by what appeared to be a mass of intelligent energy.... NASA recently released a number of very striking Gemini, Apollo, and Skylab photos of true unidentifieds."
  
• 7/20/1969 Sen. Edward M. Kennedy is charged with leaving the scene of an accident for driving his car into a Chappaquiddick pond and killing 28-year-old Mary Jo Kopechne.
  
• 7/22/1969 Pentagon reveals that the US has shipped lethal nerve gas to overseas troops.
  
• 7/25/1969 President announces 'Nixon Doctrine'; calls for sending more aid to Saigon and a policy of "Vietnamization" to gradually turn the war over to them.
  
• 7/25/1969 Edward Kennedy speech on television about the Chappaquiddick incident.
  
• 7/26-8/3/1969 Nixon tour of eight countries in Asia and Europe. He made an unannounced visit to Romania, the first president to visit a communist country since WWII. Nixon told the Romanians that "nations can have widely different internal orders and live in peace." He pledged his willinginess to negotiate with Communist countries in an atmosphere of "mutual respect."
  
• 8/2/1969 LAPD memo by Sgt. D.O. Varney: "…Robert Buek (of the Jet Set)…just returned from Washington with a story that his wife is a friend of Ted Kennedy's wife, and he learned that Ted Kennedy thinks there is a plot against all the Kennedys." (Melanson, The Robert F. Kennedy Assassination, 1994)
  
• 8/4/1969 Wiretap placed on phone of William Safire; removed 9/15/1969.
  
• 8/4/1969 Kissinger and North Vietnamese hold first secret meeting in Paris.
  
• 8/8/1969 Nixon unveiled his welfare reform plan (Family Assistance Plan) to the nation. His TV speech emphasized the "workfare" elements over the guaranteed annual income. He also introduced his "new federalism," the sharing of federal dollars with the states, though Washington would still control them. Conservatives, led by Ronald Reagan, balked at the cost and told Nixon he had no obligation trying to help the poor and minorities at the expense of the middle class. (The Palace Guard 112) Nixon spent little time pushing the plan. 4/1970 the House passed the plan virtually intact, but it died that year in the Senate.
  
• 8/9/1969 Around midnight, members of the Manson family invaded the Sharon Tate/Roman Polanski household, killing all who were present. Voityck Frykowsky was stabbed over 50 times, struck 13 times in the head with a blunt instrument, and shot. Abigail Folger, the coffee heiress, was killed. The now 8 month pregnant Tate finished the evening for the Manson family, stabbing her repeatedly in the back, breast, neck, and womb.
  
• 8/11/1969 Columnist Scotty Reston congratulated Nixon for moving to the Left on so many issues: "He has cloaked a remarkably progressive welfare policy in conservative language...he has obviously concluded that the American people are for peace abroad and for a more decent distribution of wealth at home..." (NY Times)
  
• 8/12/1969 Tom Charles Huston memo to Haldeman: he urged that Nixon develop a policy to address the concerns of young people or else risk further unrest.
  
• 8/12/1969 Northern Ireland: As the Apprentice Boys parade passed close to the Bogside area serious rioting erupted. The Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), using armoured cars and water cannons, entered the Bogside, in an attempt to end the rioting. The RUC were closely followed by a loyalist crowd. The residents of the Bogside forced the police and the loyalists back out of the area. The RUC used CS gas to again enter the Bogside area. [What was to become known as the 'Battle of the Bogside' lasted for two days.]
  
• 8/13/1969 Serious rioting spread across Northern Ireland from Derry to other Catholic areas stretching the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC). The rioting deteriorated into sectarian conflict between Catholics and Protestants and many people, the majority being Catholics, were forced from their homes. Jack Lynch, then Taoiseach (Irish Prime Minister), made a television address in which he announced that 'field hospitals' would be set up in border areas. He went on to say that: "... the present situation is the inevitable outcome of the policies pursued for decades by successive Stormont governments. It is clear also that the Irish government can no longer stand by and see innocent people injured and perhaps worse."
  
• 8/14/1969 After two days of fighting, and with the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) exhausted, the Stormont government asked Britain for permission to allow British troops to be deployed on the streets of Northern Ireland. Late in the afternoon troops entered the centre of Derry. [At this stage British Troops did not enter the area of the Bogside and the Creggan. There was a tacit understanding between the British Army and the Derry Citizens Defence Association (DCDA) that if the RUC and the army remained outside these areas there would be an end to the rioting. This effectively saw the setting up of the 'no-go areas' where the normal rule of law did not operate.] John Gallagher, a Catholic civilian, was shot dead by the Ulster Special Constabulary ('B-Specials') during street disturbances on the Cathedral Road in Armagh. [John Gallagher was recorded, by the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), as the first 'official' victim of 'the Troubles'.] In Belfast vicious sectarian riots erupted and continued the following day. Many people were killed and injured, and many families were forced to move from their homes. British troops took up duties on the streets of west Belfast.
  
• 8/15-17/1969 Woodstock music Festival
  
• 8/18/1969 Nixon nominated Clement Haynsworth, a conservative from South Carolina, to the Supreme Court.
  
• 8/19/1969 Northern Ireland: British army assumed responsibility for Ulster security.
  
• 8/27/1969 Haskel Wexler's film Medium Cool, shot on the streets of Chicago during the 1968 Democratic Convention, is released.
  
• 8/29/1969 Charges of Jim Garrison's involvement with New Orleans mob leader Carlos Marcello were first made by Warren Rogers in Look magazine on this date. It reported that Garrison had bought a big house at low cost from a Marcello lieutenant ("The Persecution of Clay Shaw"). Garrison denied ever gambling, and challenged anyone to prove that he had. (Destiny Betrayed 364) Blakey: "It was also suspicious that on a salary of less than $18,000 a year he lived with his wife and five children in a big white brick-front home in a prosperous neighborhood. The story got around that he had bought the house for less than it was worth because the contractor, Frank Occhipinti, was a good friend of Garrison's...It was less widely known that Occhipinti was also a friend and business partner of Carlos Marcello's..." "Sandy Smith, a reporter for Life with superb sources in the FBI" learned that Garrison had three times stayed at the Sands Hotel in Vegas (where the casino manager was Marcello henchman Mario Marino) for free and was given $5000 in gambling credits. When Smith confronted him with this information 8/16/1967 Garrison replied "I don't have to worry about things like that. I've cleaned up the rackets in this town." He later stated: "I have never been a guest of mobsters anywhere in my life." Frank Ragano claims that Garrison called Marcello "good people." David Chandler wrote in Life that from 1965 to 1969 Garrison had opted not to prosecute 84 cases against Marcello's men (including 22 on gambling, 1 for attempted murder, three for kidnapping, and one for manslaughter.) An anti-mafia strike force led by Justice Dept attorney John Wall began building a case against Garrison in an effort to get at Marcello; supposedly their evidence included marked money, tape recordings, and Gervais, who was willing to testify that since 1962 Garrison had received payoffs from mob-controlled pinball gambling. Garrison replied that if he was tied to Marcello, he would hardly target David Ferrie, who was Marcello's own former investigator. Playboy described his efforts against organized crime: "...his toughest fight...came in 1962, when he announced that the refusal of the city's eight criminal court judges to approve funds for his investigations of organized crime 'raised interesting questions about racketeer influences.' The judges promptly charged Garrison with defamation of character and criminal libel -- and a State court fined him $1,000.00. Garrison appealed the Court all the way to the Supreme Court, and on November 23, 1964, in a landmark decision on the right to criticize public officials, the nation's highest tribunal reversed his convietion, contending that 'speech concerning public affairs is more than self-expression; it is the essence of self-government.' Never the one to turn the other cheek, Garrison subsequently employed his political influence to unseat a number of the judges when they came up for re-election." (10/1967)
  
• 8/1969 Joseph Goulden's book about the Gulf of Tonkin affair, Truth is the First Casualty, is published.
  
• 8/1969 A North Korean plane shot down an American EC-121 surveillance plane, killing 31.
  
• 9/1969 West Germany: Federal elections bring a coalition government of the SDP/FDP (Socialists/Liberals) under Federal Chancellor Willy Brandt, with FDP leader Walter Scheel as Foreign Minister. This launches a period in German politics sometimes known as the Social Liberal Era (1969-1982). In foreign affairs, this was the period of Ostpolitik, with various negotiations involving West Germany, East Germany and the parties to unresolved World War II boundary issues involving the Germanies. During this time, Brandt also coped with his party's Young Socialists, who wanted to take a more militant line in the domestic economy and against the capitalist United States.
  
• 9/1969 In a CBS-TV interview, LBJ told Cronkite: "I can't honestly say I've been completely relieved of the fact that there might have been international connections...I don't think they [the Warren Commission], or me, or anyone else, is always absolutely sure of everything that might have motivated Oswald or others that could have been involved...I don't think we ought to discuss suspicions because there's not any hard evidence...But he was quite a mysterious fellow, and he did have a connection that bore examination, and the extent of the influence of those connections on him I think history will deal with more than we're able to now." Then he felt he had said too much, and asked CBS to delete that part on "national security" grounds. CBS suppressed his remarks until 1975. (4/25/1975 CBS Evening News; CBS Reports, The American Assassins pt.2, 11/26/1975).
  
• 9/1/1969 Kenneth Crawford reported, "Mr. Nixon is reported to be explaining himself...to his inner circle as a sort of latter-day Disraeli...As Disraeli could do things the Liberals couldn't, so Mr. Nixon can do things Humphrey couldn't." (Newsweek)
  
• 9/1/1969 Muammar Qadhafi seizes power in Libya
  
• 9/3/1969 Ho Chi Minh died.
  
• 9/5/1969 Today, an issue of LIFE magazine reports that J. Edgar Hoover punished three of his FBI agents in New York for cooperating with the United States District Attorney in New York, Robert Morgenthau, in his prosecution against Roy M. Cohn on a number of felony charges.
  
• 9/12/1969 President Nixon orders resumption in bombing of North Vietnam.
  
• 9/12/1969 Agent Jose A. Quesada infiltrates Cuban territory and is captured along with weapons and equipment for espionage.
  
• 9/15/1969 Haig called off all the White House staff wiretaps except for Halperin's (though he had already left his job). (General's Progress 161)
  
• 9/16/1969 Nixon announced withdrawal of another 35,000 Americans from Vietnam.
  
• 9/18/1969 Nixon addresses the UN General Assembly, urging UN members to aid in finding a peace settlement in Vietnam.
  
• 9/22/1969 Memo from Nixon to Ehrlichman, Mitchell, Kissinger: "I feel very strongly that we have to tackle the heroin problem regardless of the foreign policy consequences. I understand the major problem is with Turkey and to a lesser extent with France and with Italy." (Secret Files 51)
  
• 9/24/1969 The Chicago 8 conspiracy trial begins under Judge Julius Hoffman in Chicago.
  
• 9/29/1969 Supermarket tabloid The National Bulletin published a tale claiming that Apollo 11 astronauts saw alien spacecraft on the moon during the first landing on July 16. NASA censored the radio transmissions, but a transcript later revealed to be phony was leaked to the Bulletin. The story would be recycled by later authors.
  
• 10/3/1969 Nixon blocks a rail strike by imposing a 60-day Railway Labor Act freeze in a dispute between seven railroads and four shopcraft unions.
  
• 10/3/1969 The International Monetary Fund began issuing Special Drawing Rights,' the first international currency other than gold, as legal tender among IMF members.
  
• 10/8/1969 In an oral history interview, Nick Katzenbach recalls that after the JFK assassination, Robert Kennedy "never really wanted any investigation" because it would only prolong the grief.
  
• 10/8-11/1969 four violent "Days of Rage" by the Weathermen take place in Chicago.
  
• 10/10/1969 Dep. Commandant of the Marine Corps. Gen Lewis W. Walt spoke at Daytona Beach, Florida: "Without [domestic] dissent, I believe the war would have been over a year ago. It would be history...Those who dissent may not have fired a rifle...but they must bear a part of the responsibility for the loss of those gallant Americans."
  
• 10/13-30/1969 Determined to settle the Vietnam War--their "number one problem", irritated by Soviet assistance to North Vietnam, and frustrated by the stalemated Paris peace talks, President Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger had pressed Moscow and threatened North Vietnam in order to make progress in the negotiations. In early October 1969, Nixon decided to test the "madman theory" by ratcheting up the readiness level of nuclear forces. If his military moves jarred the Soviets sufficiently, Nixon apparently believed, Moscow might use its leverage to induce Hanoi to meet U.S. terms. Under Nixon's orders, in mid-October 1969, the Pentagon undertook secretly a series of military measures designed to put U.S. nuclear forces on a higher state of readiness. The JCS Readiness Test was executed secretly so that the public in the United States and allies would not notice it, but Nixon wanted the measures to be detectable, but not alarming, to the leadership of the Soviet Union and its intelligence services The CINCs--the commanders-in-chief--did not know, and could not find out why, "higher authority" had ordered them to implement the secret readiness measures. Nevertheless, between 13 and 30 October 1969, they put U.S. nuclear bombers on higher alert, and raised the combat readiness of U.S. tactical aircraft and air defense forces and sent more nuclear missile submarines to sea. Moreover, U.S. destroyers, cruisers, and aircraft carriers engaged in a variety of maneuvers in the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, the Gulf of Aden, and the Sea of Japan. At the end of October, the Strategic Air Command conducted a nuclear-armed airborne alert exercise over eastern Alaska. The Pentagon searched for evidence that Moscow had noticed the worldwide readiness measures but little declassified evidence is available showing that the Soviets paid attention. The Soviets may have seen Nixon's moves as a bluff; Moscow made no change in its Vietnam policy.
  
• 10/15/1969 Columnist Walter Trohan wrote, "Conservatives should be realistic enough to recognize that this country is going deeper into socialism and will see expansion of federal power, whether Republicans or Democrats are in power."
  
• 10/15/1969 Massive anti-war demonstrations (National Moratorium Day) by millions across US. 100,000 gathered in Boston Common. Some 250,000 protestors (by police estimates) marched peacefully on Washington.
  
• 10/15/1969 Gen. Wheeler, in a public speech, attacked the "academic-journalistic" complex for being soft on the Vietnam war.
  
• 10/17/1969 Abdi Rashid Ali Shermarke, president of Somalia, was assassinated.
  
• 10/19/1969 Agnew spoke at a GOP fund-raiser in New Orleans and blasted the media and "a spirit of national masochism...encouraged by an effete corps of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals."
  
• 10/20/1969 Brig. Gen. Carroll H. Bolender, the Air Force Deputy Director of Development, wrote a classified memo recommending the termination of Project Blue Book.
  
• 10/21/1969 Gen. Lewis Walt said in Pensacola, "There was a time in this country when a person who opposed our institutions and duly constituted authority was called an anarchist - now he is a dissenter."
  
• 10/21/1969 Columnist Roscoe Drummond noted that on Vietnam, Nixon was outdoing the Democratic doves in his moves to end the war.
  
• 10/29/1969 Supreme Court orders immediate end to all school segregation (Alexander v. Holmes). Nixon had sought to delay desegregation in 33 Mississippi school districts.
  
• 10 or 11/1969 The National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence issued its report. Headed by Milton S. Eisenhower, the commission included Archbishop Terence Cooke, Albert E. Jenner, Patricia Harris, Eric Hoffer, Sens. Philip A Hart (D-Mich.), Roman Hruska (R-Neb.), Reps. Hale Boggs, William M. McCulloch (R-Ohio), A. Leon Higgenbotham Jr. (US District Judge). It presented a psychological profile of assassins emphasizing their alienation and sexual dysfunction. It stressed the "critical importance" of maintaining an "overwhelming sense of the legitimacy of our government and institutions." It suggested that doubts about the lone gunman scenario were "a product of the primal anxieties created by the archetypal crime of parricide - not the inadequacy of the evidence of the lone assassin." The Commission published The Report of the President's Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, plus six staff reports: The History of Violence in America; Rights in Conflict (The Walker Report: Chicago Police Riot); Shoot-Out in Cleveland; To Establish Justice, To Insure Domestic Tranquility; Law and Order Reconsidered; Assassination and Political Violence.
  
• 11/1/1969 Mitchell, on or about this day, asked the FBI about spying on Joseph Kraft; they recommended spot surveillance and a wiretap.
  
• 11/3/1969 Nixon made a televised speech to the nation: "I believe that one of the reasons for the deep division about Vietnam is that many Americans have lost confidence in what their Government has told them about our policy. The American people cannot and should not be asked to support a policy which involves the overriding issues of war and peace unless they know the truth about that policy...In January I could only conclude that the precipitate withdrawal of American forces from Vietnam would be a disaster not only for South Vietnam but for the United States and for the cause of peace...For the United States, this first defeat in our Nation's history would result in a collapse of confidence in American leadership, not only in Asia but throughout the world...It would not bring peace; it would bring more war...Hanoi has refused even to discuss our proposals. They demand our unconditional acceptance of their terms...I did not wait for my inauguration to begin my quest for peace." He spoke of seeking peace through numerous back-channels, but to no avail. "In the previous administration, we Americanized the war in Vietnam. In this administration, we are Vietnamizing the search for peace." He stressed the importance of the South Vietnamese doing the fighting for themselves. "The South Vietnamese have continued to gain in strength. As a result they have been able to take over combat responsibilities from our American troops....Enemy infiltration, infiltration which is essential if they are to launch a major attack, over the last 3 months is less than 20 percent of what it was over the same period last year....as South Vietnamese forces become stronger, the rate of American withdrawal can become greater...Hanoi could make no greater mistake than to assume that an increase in violence will be to its advantage. If I conclude that increased enemy action jeopardizes our remaining forces in Vietnam, I shall not hesitate to take strong and effective measures to deal with that situation....If a vocal minority, however fervent its cause, prevails over reason and the will of the majority, this Nation has no future as a free society...And so tonightto you, the great silent majority of my fellow AmericansI ask for your support...for the more divided we are at home, the less likely the enemy is to negotiate at Paris...North Vietnam cannot defeat or humiliate the United States. Only Americans can do that."
  
• 11/7/1969 Gerald Ford threatened to bring impeachment precedings against William O. Douglas if the Senate rejected Haynsworth on ethical grounds.
  
• 11/12/1969 Lt. William Calley charged with the murder of civilians at Song My, South Vietnam.
  
• 11/13/1969 In a Des Moines speech, Spiro Agnew attacked the news networks for their critical commentary disguised as news and "instant rebuttal to every Presidential address..." by liberal newsmen. The mainstream media counterattacked; Frank Stanton of CBS accused Agnew of practicing censorship through intimidation. Cronkite heard "an implied threat to freedom of speech in this country." Frank Mankiewicz and Tom Braden thought Agnew was implying "that America's press and television is controlled and dominated by a