Deep Politics Timeline

[Tracy Riddle]

• 9/1961 In September the number of guerrilla attacks in South Vietnam almost tripled from the previous months' totals. Saigon was shocked when Phuoc Thanh, a provincial capital nearby, was seized and Diem's province chief was beheaded before the insurgents retreated. (Pentagon Papers)
  
• 9/1961 By fall, Defense Undersecretary Roswell Gilpatric would acknowledge in a public speech that U.S. forces (with 185 ICBMs and over 3,400 deliverable nuclear bombs at that time) were vastly superior to those of the Russians.
  
• 9-10/1961 Congress passed a series of laws giving FBI jurisdiction to act against large-scale interstate gambling.
  
• 9/1961 JFK urges Americans to build fallout shelters. (Nat Geographic Aug 05)
  
• 9/1/1961 The Soviets resumed atmospheric nuclear testing with a series of 50 tests that continued for the next two months.
  
• 9/5/1961JFK signed legislation making airplane hijacking a federal offense. (Almanac of American History)
  
• 9/5/1961 The Agency for International Development is set up by the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961. (Almanac of American History)
  
• 9/5/1961 Soviets sentence US tourist Marvin Makinen to eight years in prison for espionage.
  
• 9/5/1961 JFK ordered resumption of atomic testing, suspended since 10/1958, in response to the Soviet testing of two more hydrogen bombs.
  
• 9/6/1961 Faced with an inflation rate of 4%, JFK had won an agreement from unions to hold wage demands down if the steel industry would agree to keep prices down. On this day he wrote the heads of 12 US steel companies asking that they "heed the clear call of national interest" and "forgo a steel-price increase in the near future."
  
• 9/6-7/1961 McNamara appears before Senate Armed Services subcommittee studying troop indoctrinating and the alleged "muzzling" of officers. He explains that Walker was only admonished for his behavior.
  
• 9/8/1961 Sen. Thomas Dodd declared that it "is not the business of the UN to go about overthrowing anti-communist governments..."
  
• 9/8/1961 The Journal of the AMA reported that there was a statistical link between smoking and heart disease.
  
• 9/8 or 9/9 this night, Charles de Gaulle was travelling with his wife in the Pont-sur-Seine district, near the village of Crancey. The car, driven by his favorite chauffeur, Francis Marroux, was speeding at 70mph toward a sandpile containing a napalm bomb that would be triggered by wires. The bomb exploded, and de Gaulle ordered the driver to speed through the flames; no one was hurt.
  
• 9/9/1961 Khrushchev vowed that the West must accept a German peace treaty.
  
• 9/10/1961 Oswald writes a letter to his brother Robert; it is remarkably free of grammatical and spelling errors. (H 16 838-39)
  
• 9/11/1961 RFK passed an FBI report along to JFK warning that security in Central America was "extremely deficient."
  
• 9/12/1961 Rep. Donald C. Bruce (R-Indiana) charged "the US State Department...is acquiescing in the communist takeover of the Congo...over a period of years the tragic growth of communism and its victories in one area after another of the world forms a consistent pattern. What is wrong with our State Department?"
  
• 9/13/1961 The UN, with logistical support from the US Air Force, attacked breakaway Katanga because it refused to rejoin the Congo.
  
• 9/15/1961 The US and UK resumed underground nuclear testing. In Washington, Big Four ministers meet to discuss Berlin. (Almanac of American History)
  
• 9/16/1961 Eisenhower criticized the Kennedy administration for "indecision and uncertainty" in dealing with Cuba and Laos.
  
• 9/16/1961 US announces support for UN military action in Katanga.
  
• 9/17/1961 Turkish leader Adnan Menderes was executed by the military high command
  
• 9/18/1961 UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold was killed when his DC-6B airline crashed in a jungle near Ndola in present-day Zambia (the Congo), shortly after midnight. He had been en route to Northern Rhodesia. The others on the plane were killed instantly, but Hammarskjold and an aide were thrown clear. Though the plane was several hours overdue and a police inspector phoned the airport to describe a mysterious flash, no search party was organized until 10am. The wreckage was sighted at 3:10pm. Hammarskjold had died during the night, but his aide, Sgt. Harold Julien, a security officer, survived for five days and raved about explosions and sparks in the sky. A postmortem established that two of the victims were riddled by bullets, officially from a box of ammo that had exploded on impact. The official verdict was "pilot error." Harry Truman commented, "Dag Hammarskjold was on the point of getting something done when they killed him. Notice that I said, when they killed him.'" (The Peoples' Almanac #3 p58)
  
• 9/18/1961 The NYT this morning (9/17 in the US) featured an AP dispatch headlined "Tshombe Confers with UN's Chief on Katanga Truce." The story said, "Hammarskjold and President Moise Tshombe of Katanga Province met for more than an hour…Separate planes brought Mr. Tshombe and Mr. Hammarskjold to Ndola, 130 miles southeast of the Katanga capital of Elisabethville...Mr. Hammarskjold's chartered DC-4 from Leopoldville landed about four hours after Mr. Tshombe arrived." None of this was true; Hammarskjold's plane never arrived from Leopoldville; the meeting described in the AP story never happened. The entire story was faked by someone at AP, and it got out on the wires before Hammarskjold's death was announced. (Unreliable Sources p33)
  
• 9/19/1961 A large crowd watches as the Presidential motorcade arrives at Blair House, Washington, D.C.
  
• 9/21/1961 US Army's 5th Special Forces Group, 1st Special Forces, is activated at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Kennedy authorizes the group to wear green berets, which became their symbol. One of Kennedy's worst decisions as president would be to develop the role of counterinsurgent warfare by enlarging the U.S. Army's Special Forces, then re-baptizing them as the Green Berets. Kennedy promoted the Green Berets as a response to communist guerrillas, failing to recognize that counterinsurgent warfare would turn into a form of terrorism. The idea that the United States could deploy Green Beret forces in client states "to win the hearts and minds of the people" was a contradiction that would become a negative part of Kennedy's legacy.
  
• 9/21/1961 An inter-agency report on Soviet nuclear capabilities, National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) 11-8/1-61, is disseminated within the government. The NIE and later intelligence reports show for the first time that the Soviet ICBM program is far behind previous U.S. estimates. Only some ten to twenty-five Soviet ICBMs on launchers are believed to exist, with no major increase in Soviet ICBM strength expected in the near future.
  
• 9/22/1961 JFK signs an Act of Congress formally establishing the Peace Corps. (Almanac of American History)
  
• 9/22/1961 The Interstate Commerce Commission, by the urging of Kennedy, ordered the desegregation of all facilities and terminals used in interstate bus travel. When a few cities pleaded local ordinances as an excuse for non-compliance, the Justice Dept brought suit and at the same time took action against segregated airports and railroad stations. An amazed black woman exclaimed, "Bless God! We now have a President who's going to make sure we can go anywhere we want like the white folks in this country." (The Fiery Cross p312)
  
• 9/23/1961 JFK nominated eight men, including Thurgood Marshall (a black man), to federal judgeships.
  
• 9/24/1961 CIA agent Luis Torroella, who had infiltrated Cuba with the mission to kill Castro, is captured. Cuban government announces it has smashed "AM/BLOOD" a Castro assassination attempt by exiles trained by the CIA on Guantanamo, the American naval base in Cuba. (Hinckle and Turner, pp106-107)
  
• 9/25/1961 Kennedy's Motorcade to United Nations Headquarters. After a summer of increasing tensions over Berlin, JFK was about to give his first speech at the United Nations. On the weekend before his UN appearance, as the Berlin crisis was continuing, the president and Pierre Salinger were staying overnight at a Manhattan hotel. Salinger agreed to an urgent phone request from Georgi Bolshakov, Soviet embassy press attache, that he meet in private with Soviet press chief Mikhail Kharlamov. When Salinger opened his hotel room door to his Russian visitor, Kharlamov was smiling. "The storm in Berlin is over," he said. A puzzled Salinger replied, on the contrary, the situation couldn't have been much worse. Kharlamov kept smiling. "Just wait, my friend, " he said. When Kharlamov was inside the room, his words came tumbling out. His urgent message to John Kennedy from Nikita Khrushchev was that Khrushchev "was now willing, for the first time, to consider American proposals for a rapprochement on Berlin." (Pierre Salinger, With Kennedy (Garden City, N.Y. : Doubleday, 1966) , p.191.) The Soviet premier hoped he and Kennedy could arrange a summit meeting as soon as possible. Kharlamov said Khrushchev was feeling intense pressure from the communist bloc to keep pushing Kennedy on the German question. However, the Soviet leader felt himself that it was time for a settlement on Berlin. He was afraid that a major military incident there could spark terrible consequences. Kharlamov ended Khrushchev's message to Kennedy with an appeal: "He hopes your President's speech to the UN won't be another warlike ultimatum like the one on July 25 [when Kennedy had said the U.S. was willing to wage war to stop the Soviets in Germany]. He didn't like that at all. "It was obvious that Khrushchev wanted Kennedy to know his more conciliatory attitude on Germany before the president made his UN speech. Salinger conveyed Khrushchev's message personally to the president at 1:00 A.M. Kennedy had been sitting up reading in his hotel bed. He asked his press secretary to repeat the key points carefully. Then he got up, went to a window, and stood for a long time in his white pajamas gazing at the lights of the Manhattan skyline. Finally he said, "There's only one way you can read it. If Khrushchev is ready to listen to our views on Germany, he's not going to recognize the [Walter] Ulbricht [East German] regime-not this year, at least-and that's good news. " He dictated a message to Khrushchev, for Salinger to give verbally to Kharlamov, that he was " cautiously receptive to Khrushchev's proposal for an early summit on Berlin. But first there should be a demonstration of Soviet good faith in Laos, "according to the agreement they had reached in Vienna . Berlin and Laos were linked. The Communist Pathet Lao army needed to back off and allow the neutralist Souvanna Phouma to form a coalition government, just as he and Khrushchev had agreed in Vienna. He would return to this theme repeatedly in his messages to Khrushchev. The president's more substantive response to the premier's secretly conveyed "good news" was the speech he gave on September 25 to the United Nations. The speech had been written before he received Khrushchev's message, but he reviewed it in his hotel room in that light. Like his opponent, Kennedy had already felt the need to back away from the brink in Berlin. He saw that he didn't have to revise the speech's text. His central theme, in contrast to his speech of July 25, was disarmament. He told the United Nations that disarmament was not an option but an absolute imperative: "Today, every inhabitant of this planet must contemplate the day when this planet may no longer be habitable. Every man, woman and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident or miscalculation or by madness. The weapons of war must be abolished before they abolish us. " . . . It is therefore our intention to challenge the Soviet Union, not to an arms race, but to a peace race-to advance together step by step, stage by stage, until general and complete disarmament has been achieved."
  
• 9/26/1961 President John F. Kennedy's motorcade travels to the airport, New York City, New York. Departure for Newport, Rhode Island
  
• 9/26/1961 JFK appointed Thurgood Marshall to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. Sen. Eastland bottled the nomination up in his Judiciary Committee for a year until he got his old college friend Harold Cox appointed as a federal judge in the circuit that handles most of the Deep South's civil rights cases. Eastland told RFK, "Tell your brother that if he will give me Harold Cox I will give him the nigger." (Gothic Politics in the Deep South p212) Cox would serve on the federal bench and call some Negro defendants "chimpanzees," and threaten to send Nick Katzenbach to jail for contempt. Cox would also throw out indictments against 17 men charged with the murder of Goodman, Chaney and Schwerner in 1964.
  
• 9/26/1961 Congress passed the Arms Control and Disarmament Act.
  
• 9/27/1961 Allen Dulles' resignation as CIA director accepted. JFK announced that his replacement would be John McCone; JFK praised Dulles' service and said he would continue to consult for him on intelligence matters. (Washington Post 9/28) Allen Dulles's own closely guarded feelings toward John Kennedy were revealed years later in a remark to a prospective ghostwriter. Harper's young assistant editor Willie Morris had gone to Dulles's Georgetown mansion in Washington to collaborate with him on a piece in defense of the CIA's role in the Bay of Pigs-a never-to-be-published article whose most revealing, handwritten notes would one day be cited in "The ' Confessions' of Allen Dulles." In one discussion they had about President Kennedy, Dulles stunned Morris with an abrupt comment. "That little Kennedy," Dulles said, ". . . he thought he was a god." "Even now," Morris wrote over a quarter of a century later, "those words leap out at me, the only strident ones I would hear from my unlikely collaborator." Willie Morris, New York Days (Boston: Little, Brown, 1993), p. 36
  
• 9/27/1961 Nixon announced he would run for governor of California.
  
• 9/29/1961 NYT review by Robert Shelton: "A bright new face in folk music is appearing at Gerde's Folk City. Although only 20 years old, Bob Dylan is one of the most distinctive stylists to play a Manhattan cabaret in months. Resembling a cross between a choir boy and a beatnik, Mr. Dylan has a cherubic look and a mop of tousled hair he partly covers with a Huck Finn black corduroy cap. His clothes may need a bit of tailoring, but when he works his guitar, harmonica or piano and composes new songs faster than he can remember them, there is no doubt that he is bursting at the seams with talent. Mr. Dylan's voice is anything but pretty. He is consciously trying to recapture the rude beauty of a Southern field hand musing in melody on his porch. All the "husk and bark" are left on his notes and a searing intensity pervades his songs…But if not for every taste, his music-making has the mark of originality and inspiration, all the more noteworthy for his youth. Mr. Dylan is vague about his antecedents and birthplace, but it matters less where he has been than where he is going, and that would seem to be straight up."
  
• 9/29/1961 Khrushchev had sent his first private letter to Kennedy on September 29, 1961, during the Berlin crisis. Wrapped in a newspaper, it was brought to Kennedy's press secretary Pierre Salinger at a New York hotel room by a Soviet "magazine editor " and KGB agent, Georgi Bolshakov, whom Khrushchev trusted to maintain silence. The secrecy was at least as much to avoid Soviet attention as American. As presidential aide Theodore Sorensen said three decades later, Khrushchev was " taking his risks, assuming that these letters were, as we believe, being kept secret from the ( Soviet) military, from the foreign service, from the top people in the Kremlin. He was taking some risk that if discovered, they would be very unhappy with him. " (Paul Wells, " Private Letters Shed Light on Cold War, " Montreal Gazette (July 24, 1993). The private letters between Kennedy and Khrushchev, known as the " Pen Pal Correspondence, " were published with the Cold War leaders' more formal, public letters in the State Department volume Foreign Relations of the United States [FR US], 1961-1963, Volume VI: Kennedy-Khrushchev Exchanges (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1996) . Khrushchev's first letter was written from a retreat beside the Black Sea. While the Berlin crisis was still not over, the Soviet premier began the correspondence with his enemy by meditating on the beauty of the sea and the threat of war. " Dear Mr. President, " he wrote, "At present I am on the shore of the Black Sea . . . This is indeed a wonderful place. As a former Naval officer you would surely appreciate the merits of these surroundings, the beauty of the sea and the grandeur of the Caucasian mountains. Under this bright southern sun it is even somehow hard to believe that there still exist problems in the world which, due to lack of solutions, cast a sinister shadow on peaceful life, on the future of millions of people. " Now as the threat of war over Berlin continued, Khrushchev expressed a regret about Vienna. He said he had "given much thought of late to the development of international events since our meeting in Vienna, and 1 have decided to approach you with this letter. The whole world hopefully expected that our meeting and a frank exchange of views would have a soothing effect, would turn relations between our countries into the correct channel and promote the adoption of decisions which would give the peoples confidence that at last peace on earth will be secured. To my regret-and, 1 believe, to yours-this did not happen. " "I listened with great interest to the account which our journalists Adjubei and Kharlamov gave of the meeting they had with you in Washington. They gave me many interesting details and I questioned them most thoroughly. You prepossessed them by your informality, modesty and frankness which are not to be found very often in men who occupy such a high position. " "My thoughts have more than once returned to our meetings in Vienna. I remember you emphasized that you did not want to proceed towards war and favored living in peace with our country while competing in the peaceful domain. And though subsequent events did not proceed in the way that could be desired, I thought it might be useful in a purely informal and personal way to approach you and share some of my ideas. If you do not agree with me you can consider that this letter did not exist while naturally I, for my part, will not use this correspondence in my public statements. After all only in confidential correspondence can you say what you think without a backward glance at the press, at the journalists. " "As you see," he added apologetically, " I started out by describing the delights of the Black Sea coast, but then I nevertheless turned to politics. But that cannot be helped. They say that you sometimes cast politics out through the door but it climbs back through the window, particularly when the windows are open. " In Khrushchev's first private letter to Kennedy, on September 29, 1961 , the Soviet premier had written: " I note with gratification that you and I are of the same opinion as to the need for the withdrawal of foreign troops from the territory of Laos . "
  
• 9/29/1961 tonight's episode of The Twilight Zone is "The Shelter," about a man who has built a bomb shelter in his home, and his neighbors want access to it when they fear a nuclear war is imminent.
  
• Late Sep: State Dept issued a document entitled 'Freedom from War: The United States Program for General and Complete Disarmament in a Peaceful World,' which would ban nuclear weapons, keep space free of armed conflict, and "no state (including the U.S.) would have the military power to challenge the progressively strengthened UN Peace Force." (None Dare Call it Treason p81) This was based on a speech Kennedy gave 9/25.
  
• 10/1961 According to some sources, JFK meets Marilyn Monroe for the first time at a party at Peter Lawford's home in Santa Monica, at which Janet Leigh, Kim Novak and Angie Dickinson are also present.
  
• Fall 1961 Notable among the "wild-eyed promoters" were the California right-wingers. Pres. Kennedy's Palladium speech came hard on the heels of a unique event: a coast-to-coast television program titled "Hollywood's Answer to Communism" and put on by the Christian Anti-Communism Crusade. The Crusade had many prominent Hollywood figures in its ranks, such as one-time General Electric pitchman Ronald Reagan, who had said in 1960: "Shouldn't someone tag Mr. Kennedy's bold new imaginative program with its proper age? Under the tousled boyish haircut is still old Karl Marx -- first launched a century ago." That was about the level of it. In the the fall of 1961 the head of the Crusade, Dr. Fred Schwarz, an Australian physician-turned-commie-hunter, had held a five-day "Southern California School of Anti-Communism" at which many prominent people in the military or industry spoke (including Reagan). A Marine color guard was dispatched to give the proceedings an apparent official sanction. Rear Admiral Charles Ward warned that the idea of disarmament was "a trap," that nuclear testing must resume at once, that Kennedy Administration policies were ruinous and must be changed from accommodation to belligerence. Former FBI agent W. Cleon Skousen wanted a Congressional investigation to root out "a small leftwing group in the State Department," severance of diplomatic and trade ties to communist countries, and withdrawal from the United Nations.
  
• 10/1961 At the Geneva Conference, Averell Harriman was trying to carry out the president's order to negotiate a settlement for a neutral Laos. JFK had been explicit to him that the alternative was unacceptable: "I don't want to put troops in." Harriman brought to the conference the asset of a mutual respect with the Russians. He had done business in the Soviet Union. The Russians regarded Harriman as a friendly capitalist. He and Nikita Khrushchev had visited each other for informal diplomatic exchanges, first at the Kremlin, then at Harriman's Manhattan home, during the year before Kennedy became president. JFK had recognized Khrushchev's confidence in Harriman and would use that relationship later to great effect when Harriman represented JFK in negotiating the test ban treaty with Khrushchev in Moscow. In Geneva, Harriman and his counterpart, Soviet negotiator Georgi M. Pushkin, were developing a wary friendship as they tried to find a way together through Laotian battlegrounds and Cold War intrigues. While representing opposite, contentious sides of the Cold War, Harriman and Pushkin respected each other and were inclined to conspire together for peace. A turning point at Geneva came in October 1961, when leaders of the three Laotian factions agreed to neutralist Souvanna Phouma 's becoming prime minister of a provisional coalition government. Then, as Rudy Abramson, Harriman's biographer, put it, the Soviets " agreed to take responsibility for all the Communist states' compliance with the neutrality declaration and accepted language declaring that Laotian territory would not be used in the affairs of neighboring states-meaning the North Vietnamese could not use the trails through Laos to support the insurgency in South Vietnam. " This largely unwritten understanding would become known in U.S. circles as the " Pushkin agreement. " A major obstacle arose, however, when the Soviets, the North Vietnamese, and the Pathet Lao insisted on the right of all three Laotian factions to approve any movements of the International Control Commission. The Pathet Lao would thereby be given a veto power over inspections to monitor violations of the accord. The communists wouldn't budge on the issue. With the Pathet Lao controlling the battlefield, Harriman became convinced that the Geneva Conference would collapse unless the United States was willing to compromise. Although the State Department was adamantly opposed, Kennedy reluctantly decided with Harriman that the critical compromise with the Communists was necessary. The negotiations moved on. But from then on, a "neutral Laos " would take the form of a partitioned country under the guise of a coalition government. Georgi Pushkin would soon die. The agreement named after him would never be honored by Soviet leaders, who lacked the power to tell the Pathet Lao and the North Vietnamese what to do. The corridor running down the eastern border of Laos would become known as the " Ho Chi Minh Trail" for its infiltrating North Vietnamese soldiers on their way to South Vietnam-or as State Department critics would call the same route, the "Averell Harriman Highway. " Kennedy, struggling to avoid both war and Communist domination of Laos in the midst of the larger East-West conflicts over Cuba, Berlin, and the Congo, was happy to get the compromise Harriman had worked out with Pushkin. The president's most bitter opponents to a Laotian settlement, in the Defense Department and the CIA, tried to destroy the agreement. They kept up their support of General Phoumi's provocations and violations of the cease-fire. Rudy Abramson, Spanning the Century: The Life of W. Averell Harriman, 1891-1986 (New York: William Morrow, 1992), pp. 586 - 87.
  
• 10/1961 In October 1961, the president's newly appointed personal representative in West Berlin, retired General Lucius Clay, tried to escalate the Berlin crisis to a point where the president would be forced to choose victory. In August, Khrushchev had ordered the building of the Berlin Wall, thereby ending a mass exodus of East Germans to the capitalist side of the city. In September, General Clay began secret preparations to tear down the wall. He ordered Major General Albert Watson, the U.S. military commandant in West Berlin, to have army engineers build a duplicate section of the Berlin Wall in a forest. U.S. tanks with bulldozer attachments then experimented with assaults on the substitute wall. General Bruce Clarke, who commanded U.S. forces in Europe, learned of Clay's exercise and put a stop to it. (Raymond L. Garthoff, " Berlin 1961: The Record Corrected, " Foreign Policy no. 84 (Fall 1991) , p.147) When he told Clay to end the wall-bashing rehearsals, Clarke looked at Clay's red telephone to the White House and said, "If you don't like that, call the President and see what he says." (Reeves, President Kennedy: Profile of Power, p. 249.) Clay chose not to. Nor did either man ever inform the president of what had gone on at the secret wall in the forest. While Kennedy remained unaware of Clay's provocative planning, Khrushchev was much better informed. Soviet spies had watched the forest maneuvers, had taken pictures of them, and had relayed their reports and pictures to Moscow. Khrushchev then assembled a group of close advisers to plot out step by step their counter scenario to a U.S. assault on the Berlin Wall. (Garthoff, " Berlin 1961, " pp. 147-48 , 152) However, Nikita Khrushchev doubted that John Kennedy had authorized any such attack. He and the president had already begun their secret communications and had in fact even made private progress in the previous month on the question of Berlin. Khrushchev strongly suspected that Kennedy was being undermined. (Sergei Khrushchev, Nikita Khrushchev and the Creation o f a Superpower (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University, 2000), p. 464.)
  
• 10/1961 Khrushchev's son, Sergei, in his memoir, Nikita Khrushchev and the Creation of a Superpower, has described from the Soviet standpoint how the two Cold War leaders had begun to conspire toward coexistence. His account has been corroborated at key points by Kennedy's press secretary, Pierre Salinger. At their Vienna meeting in June, Kennedy had proposed to Khrushchev that they establish "a private and unofficial channel of communications that would bypass all formalities." Khrushchev agreed. In September the Soviet premier made a first use of the back channel.
  
• 10/1961 the United Klans of America began sponsoring training seminars on how to build bombs, led by a former Navy frogman. (The Fiery Cross p321)
  
• 10/1961 Oswald pleaded with the US Embassy to do something to expedite the visas; "there have been systematic and concerted attempts to intimidate my wife into withdrawing her application for on visa. [sic]" (CE 1122) Marina's uncle feared for his position if his niece was branded an "enemy of the state," and her aunts told her that she would be forgotten about in the cruel USA. (Marina and Lee p159) He recorded in his diary the great strain Marina was under over the decision.
  
• 10/1/1961 Diem requests a bilateral defense treaty with US, while SEATO experts meet in Bangkok to discuss guerilla warfare in South Vietnam.
  
• 10/1/1961 The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) was created.
  
• 10/2/1961 Diem tells the National Assembly that the situation has developed into a "real war" with guerillas using "regular units fully and completely equipped."
  
• 10/4/1961 Arrival Ceremonies and motorcade for El Ferik Ibrahim Abboud, President of Sudan. In car (Lincoln Continental), back seat: President Abboud; President John F. Kennedy. Front seat: Secret Service Agent Gerald "Jerry" Behn (right); Military Aide to the President General Chester V. Clifton (center); others unidentified.
  
• 10/4/1961 Oswald wrote to the embassy demanding that the US government intervene with the Soviets to secure his visa, saying it was "in the interests of the United States government and the American Embassy in Moscow" to arrange this.
  
• 10/5/1961 NSAM 100, issued by McGeorge Bundy to Dean Rusk, directed assessment of potential courses of action "if Castro were removed from the Cuban scene."
  
• 10/5/1961 Castro assassination attempt planned by Antonio Veciana and CIA 's "Bishop" is discovered by Castro and Veciana is forced to flee Cuba; Reynol Gonzalez, one of Veciana 's co-conspirators, is later arrested hiding on the estate of Amador Odio, a wealthy industrialist and father of Silvia Odio. Gonzales, the elder Odio and his wife are arrested. (Fonzi Chronology p 416)
  
• 10/5/1961 Intelligence estimates that most of the Vietcong in South Vietnam are not relying on outside supplies.
  
• 10/10/1961 Kennedy arrived in Dallas to visit a very ill Sam Rayburn; only one public official greeted the President: the chief of police. (Death of a President p47)
  
• 10/10/1961 Joseph Heller's satirical anti-war novel, Catch-22, is published.
  
• 10/11/1961 At a NSC meeting, Kennedy is asked to accept "as our real and ultimate objective the defeat of the Vietcong." JCS estimated that 40,000 US troops could accomplish the job, and another 120,000 could deal with possible North Vietnamese intervention. JFK decides to send Max Taylor to Vietnam.
  
• 10/12/1961 JFK attacks the far-right in a speech at the University of North Carolina, saying that "we shall be neither Red nor dead, but alive and free..." (Wash. Post 10/13)
  
• 10/12/1961 President Kennedy had many medical problems and took many medications. Dr. Travell kept a list of his typical medications, which, on October 12, 1961, consisted of the following: * Ascorbic acid, 500 mg twice daily (Vitamin C), * Hydrocortisone, 10 mg daily (equivalent to 2.5 mg of prednisone daily), * Prednisone 2.5, mg twice daily (total 5 mg each day, add in the hydrocortisone, total daily intake of prednisone was 7.5 mg daily), * Methyltestosterone, 10 mg daily (anabolic steroid used to treat testosterone deficiency), * Liothyronine sodium, 25 micrograms twice daily (total 50 micrograms each day, for hypothyroidism), * Fludrocortisone, 0.1 mg daily, * Diphenoxylate hydrochloride and atropine sulfate, 2 tablets as needed (brand name: Lomotil), and * Vitamin B12 and B complex injections. (38)
  
• 10/13/1961 Washington Post reports that new Speaker of the House John McCormack has frequently opposed Kennedy's policies.
  
• 10/13/1961 NSAM 104 "SUBJECT: Southeast Asia....Subject to agreement with the government of Vietnam which is now being sought, introduce the Air Force 'Jungle Jim' squadron into Vietnam for the initial purpose of training Vietnamese forces. Initiate guerrilla ground action, including use of US advisors if necessary, against Communist aerial resupply missions in Tchepone area."
  
• 10/13/1961 Diem sends an urgent request for US combat units and aircraft.
  
• 10/15/1961 Maxwell Taylor is sent on a survey mission to South Vietnam, Laos and Thailand.
  
• Mid-Oct Kennedy was so resistant to the military's demand for troops that he took a step he knew would further alienate them. He subverted his military leaders ' recommendations by planting a story that they were against sending combat units. In mid-October the New York Times reported erroneously: "Military leaders at the Pentagon, no less than General Taylor himself, are understood to be reluctant to send organized U.S. combat units into Southeast Asia. " The opposite was the truth. As we have seen, the Pentagon leaders and General Taylor were in fact beating their war drums as loudly as they could in the president's ears. They wanted combat troops. Kennedy fought back with a public lie. As the Pentagon Papers noted, " It is just about inconceivable that this story could have been given out except at the direction of the president, or by him personally. " The president was undermining his military leaders by dispensing the false information that they were against the very step they most wanted him to take. The ploy worked . As the Pentagon Papers observed, "The Times story had the apparently desired effect. Speculation about combat troops almost disappeared from news stories . . . " However, besides misleading the public, Kennedy was playing a dangerous game with the Pentagon's leaders. His misrepresentation of their push for combat troops would prove to be one more piece of evidence in their mounting case against the president. But Kennedy would do anything he could to keep from sending combat troops to Vietnam. He told Arthur Schlesinger, " They want a force of American troops. They say it's necessary in order to restore confidence and maintain morale. But it will be just like Berlin. The troops will march in; the bands will play; the crowds will cheer; and in four days everyone will have forgotten. Then we will be told we have to send in more troops. It's like taking a drink. The effect wears off, and you have to take another. "
  
• 10/16/1961 Kennedy responded privately to Khrushchev on October 16, 1961, from his own place of retreat beside the ocean, Hyannis Port: "My family has had a home here overlooking the Atlantic for many years. My father and brothers own homes near my own, and my children always have a large group of cousins for company. So this is an ideal place for me to spend my weekends during the summer and fall, to relax, to think, to devote my time to major tasks instead of constant appointments, telephone calls and details. Thus, I know how you must feel about the spot on the Black Sea from which your letter was written, for I value my own opportunities to get a clearer and quieter perspective away from the din of Washington . " He thanked Khrushchev for initiating the correspondence and agreed to keep it quiet: " Certainly you are correct in emphasizing that this correspondence must be kept wholly private, not to be hinted at in public statements, much less disclosed to the press. " Their private letters should supplement public statements " and give us each a chance to address the other in frank, realistic and fundamental terms. Neither of us is going to convert the other to a new social, economic or political point of view. Neither of us will be induced by a letter to desert or subvert his own cause. So these letters can be free from the polemics of the 'cold war' debate. " Kennedy agreed wholeheartedly with Khrushchev's biblical image: " I like very much your analogy of Noah's Ark, with both the 'clean' and the 'unclean' determined that it stay afloat. Whatever our differences, our collaboration to keep the peace is as urgent-if not more urgent-than our collaboration to win the last world war. " In his October 16, 1961, letter to Khrushchev, Kennedy said, as he had in his verbal message through Salinger and Kharlamov three weeks before, that any second summit meeting should be preceded by a peaceful resolution of Laos: " Indeed I do not see how we can expect to reach a settlement on so bitter and complex an issue as Berlin, where both of us have vital interests at stake, if we cannot come to a final agreement on Laos, which we have previously agreed should be neutral and independent after the fashion of Burma and Cambodia . "
  
• 10/17/1961 Paris Massacre, police crush peaceful demonstration of Algerians
  
• 10/18/1961 Because of increased rebel attacks and severe flooding in the Mekong Valley, Diem issued an "emergency decree" allowing him to suspend the constitution and "take any action necessary for national security." The National Assembly promptly ratified his decree.
  
• 10/18/1961 Maxwell Taylor's visit to Saigon 10/18-24; Diem does not renew his request for US combat troops, but asks for military support. Taylor wired Kennedy from Saigon that the United States should take quick advantage of a severe flood in South Vietnam by introducing six thousand to eight thousand U.S. troops under the guise of " flood relief, " including combat units that would then " give a much needed shot in the arm to national morale. " (Pentagon Papers) In a follow-up wire from the Philippines, Taylor acknowledged that those first eight thousand troops could well be just the beginning: " If the ultimate result sought is the closing of the frontiers and the clean-up of the insurgents within SVN, there is no limit to our possible commitment (unless we attack the source in Hanoi ) . " On the other hand, regardless of the number of troops needed, Taylor thought "there can be no action so convincing of U.S. seriousness of purpose and hence so reassuring to the people and Government of SVN and to our other friends and allies in [Southeast Asia] as the introduction of U.S. forces into SVN. " Taylor's enthusiasm for troops was seconded in a cable by Ambassador Frederick Nolting, who cited " conversations over past ten days with Vietnamese in various walks of life " showing a " virtually unanimous desire for introduction of U.S. forces into Viet-Nam. " (Pentagon Papers)
  
• 10/19/1961 James Reston wrote in the NYT: "Reports…that the United States is about to plunge into the guerrilla warfare of Southeast Asia…should be taken with considerable skepticism…General Maxwell Taylor is not only a soldier but a philosopher…He is not likely to favor plunging blithely into a jungle war 7000 miles from home."
  
• 10/20/1961 Soviets exploded a 58-megaton atomic bomb.
  
• 10/21/1961 In a major speech cleared by Rusk, Bundy and President JFK, Roswell Gilpatric publicly deflates the "missile gap" theory, telling his audience in Hot Springs, Virginia, that the United States actually possessed a substantially larger nuclear arsenal than the USSR.
  
• 10/22/1961 Oswald writes his mother a letter asking for "any books…You needn't worry about my losing American citizenship I can only do that if I want to and I don't want too…"
  
• 10/26/1961 JFK sent note to Diem pledging continued US aid to South Vietnam.
  
• 10/27/1961 On October 27, ten American M-4 8 tanks, with bulldozers mounted on the lead tanks, ground their way up to Checkpoint Charlie at the center of the Berlin Wall. They were confronted by ten Soviet tanks, which had been waiting for them quietly on the side streets of East Berlin. A well-briefed Nikita Khrushchev and his advisers had set their counterplan in motion. Twenty more Soviet tanks arrived soon after as reinforcements, and twenty more U.S. tanks moved up from the allied side. The American and Russian tanks faced off, with their long-nosed guns trained on one another, ready to fire. Throughout the night and for a total of sixteen hours, the confrontation continued. Soviet foreign affairs adviser Valentin Falin was beside Khrushchev throughout the crisis. Falin said later that if the U.S. tanks and bulldozers had advanced farther, the Soviet tanks would have fired on them, bringing the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. "closer to the third world war than ever . . . Had the tank duel started then in Berlin-and everything was running toward it-the events most probably would have gone beyond any possibility of control. " (Michael R. Beschloss, The Crisis Years: Kennedy and Khrushchev ( New York: Edward Burlingame Books, 1991) , p.335) An alarmed President Kennedy phoned Lucius Clay. Although Kennedy left no record of the conversation, Clay claims the president said, "I know you people over there haven't lost your nerve." Clay said his bold reply was: "Mr. President, we're not worried about our nerves. We're worrying about those of you people in Washington." At that point the president sent an urgent message to Khrushchev via the back channel. Robert Kennedy contacted Soviet press attache Georgi Bolshakov. RFK said that if Khrushchev would withdraw his tanks within twenty-four hours, JFK would do the same within thirty minutes later. (Robert Kennedy in His Own Words, edited by Edwin O. Guthman and Jeffrey Shulman (New York: Bantam Books, 1988) , pp. 259-60. See also Garthoff, " Berlin 1961, " p. 150, and S. Khrushchev, Nikita Khrushchev, p. 466.) The president then ordered Lucius Clay to be ready to carry out the U.S. side of such a withdrawal.
  
• 10/27/1961 Carrier USS Constellation (CVA 64) is commissioned.
  
• 10/28/1961 This morning the Soviet tanks backed away, and the U.S. tanks followed suit in thirty minutes. The Checkpoint Charlie crisis was over. Its resolution prefigured that of the Cuban Missile Crisis one year later. In both cases Kennedy asked Khrushchev to take the first step. The Soviet leader did so, in gracious recognition that Kennedy was under even more intense pressure than he was. In both cases a back-channel communication via Robert Kennedy was critical. And in both cases Khrushchev, in withdrawing his tanks and later his missiles, achieved his own objectives in exchange from Kennedy: the removal of U.S. threats to bulldoze the Wall and to invade Cuba, and the withdrawal of U.S. missiles from Turkey and Italy.
  
• 10/28/1961 Soviets exploded a 50-megaton bomb in an atomic test.
  
• 10/29/1961 NYT: Thus far, Southern California right-wingers have not been specific about their political preferences. It is plain to most observers that few, if any, are in sympathy with the Kennedy Administration... Mr. Welch [head of the John Birch Society] has also written that "the one man who comes closest to measuring up to all the needs and qualifications [of the office of President] is Barry Goldwater." [NYT, October 29, 1961, p. 43]
  
• 10/30/1961 Stalin's body is removed from the Lenin Mausoleum in Red Square.
  
• 10/30/1961 USSR explodes the world's largest nuclear bomb, with a yield of 50 megatons. (Nat Geographic Aug 05)
  
• 10/31/1961 Sen. Henry "Scoop" Jackson (D-Washignton) criticized JFK for delaying construction of the Boeing B-70.
  
• 10/31/1961 The Soviets climax their nuclear tests with a 57-megaton blast.