Deep Politics Timeline

[Tracy Riddle]

• 12/1962 Following the death of Herman Brown, Halliburton Energy Services acquired Brown & Root (a Texas construction company) in December 1962. According to Dan Briody, who wrote a book on the subject, the company became part of a consortium of four companies that built about 85 percent of the infrastructure needed by the Navy during the Vietnam War. At the height of the anti-war movement of the 1960s, Brown & Root was derided as "Burn & Loot" by protesters.
  
• 12/1962 JUAN EMILIO BOSCH GAVINO elected President of Dominican Republic in a landslide, first freely elected president since 1924. His party and government, weak and inexperienced, was accused by the CIA of suffering from leftist infiltration. After nine months in office he was ousted by right-wing officers September 1963 and he went into exile. With pressure from Kennedy, the junta placed a civilian in charge. Kennedy sent aid to the new regime but it proved corrupt and repressive.
  
• 12/1962 Special Group "Cuba Coordinating Committee" takes over covert operations against Cuba.
  
• 12/1962 After the missile crisis, Cuban exile groups were refused time on Florida radio stations to make anti-Castro speeches, and remarks attacking Castro were deleted from Spanish language newscasts on Miami radio stations WGBS, WCKR, and WMIE. (News & Courier, Charleston, 12/10/1962; St. Louis Globe Democrat 12/13/1962; St. Louis Post Dispatch 4/3/1963)
  
• 12/1/1962 New Orleans businessman Clay Shaw told Who's Who in the South and Southwest that he was a director for the Swiss corporation Permindex, widely suspected of being a dirty-tricks CIA front company.
  
• 12/1/1962 Carlos Todd, editor of the Cuban Information Service, released maps showing dozens of locations where Soviet missiles were hidden in underground caves.
  
• 12/2/1962 Sen. Mansfield comes back from Vietnam and is publicly pessimistic.
  
• 12/3/1962 Hilsman memo to Rusk warns that the VC are capable of a long struggle, is firmly entrenched in the South, and that a non-Communist coup against Diem "could occur at any time."
  
• 12/3/1962 11:00A.M.: John McCloy meets with Soviet negotiators at the Waldorf Suite in New York City. Earlier, in one of the final sessions between the U.S. and Soviet negotiators, Vasily Kuznetsov met with McCloy at the McCloy's home in Connecticut. As their talk ended, Kuznetsov reportedly said, "all right, Mr. McCloy, we will get the IL-28 's out as we have taken the missiles out. But I want to tell you something, Mr. McCloy. The Soviet Union is not going to find itself in a position like this ever again." (Chronology of Negotiations Re: Cuban Crisis, 12/6/62; Bohlen, pp. 495-96)
  
• 12/4/1962 5:30P.M.: ExComm members discuss future policy toward Cuba at a working meeting held without President Kennedy . The group reviews U.S. planning for future overflights of Cuba, apparently agreeing that continued aerial reconnaissance is necessary to verify the removal of the IL-28 s and to ensure offensive weapons are not reintroduced into Cuba. When John McCone raises the possibility that another U-2 might be shot down, the ExComm decides that the United States should respond by attacking one or more SAM sites. Troubled by the potential for a new crisis arising over another attack on U.S. reconnaissance, McCone writes to McGeorge Bundy the following morning to recommend that "diplomatic measures be taken" to assure that the United States does not find itself in the position of having to attack Soviet-controlled bases in Cuba. (Warning That the United States May Soon Face the Contingency of Responding to a Shootdown of Another U-2, 12/5/62; Guidelines for Planning of Cuban Overflights, 11/30/62)
  
• 12/4/1962 U.S. Customs officers capture twelve anti-Castro guerillas, mostly American soldiers of fortune trained by the CIA, at a secret training base called No Name Key, north of Key West, as they are about to embark on a raid to Cuba. They are charged with violation of the Neutrality Act. Among those arrested is Gerry Patrick Hemming, founder with Frank Sturgis of the International Anti-Communist Brigade. (FBI Memorandum 105-1198, Miami Field Office, Jan 20, 1963, National Archives; Hinckle and Turner, pp154-157; Fonzi chronology p 418)
  
• 12/5/1962 JFK met with McNamara, Max Taylor, Jerome Wiesner. JFK wonders why they are building so many nuclear weapons, and wonders if they have enough right now to deter the USSR. McNamara warns that the Pentagon will give them trouble if they try to reduce the number of nukes. Taylor is also opposed to the idea. 27 seconds of the recording of this meeting have been censored for "national security" reasons. (The War State, Michael Swanson; "Camelot's Nuclear Conscience," The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists 2006)
  
• 12/5/1962 Sen. Richard Russell, in a TV interview in Atlanta, lamented that the US was now "babysitting for Castro and guaranteeing the integrity of the communist regime in Cuba."
  
• 12/5/1962 Stevenson and McCloy send an eyes-only cable to Secretary Rusk and the president protesting their instructions to achieve and agreement on onsite verification even though all the missiles and planes have already been removed from Cuba. The cable states that they have the growing impression that effects of victory in public mind are being gradually effaced by prolonged and inconclusive negotiation which gives impression we are still seeking vital objective we have not achieved. If public presumes this objective is on-site verification, more and more importance will be attached to such inspection as negotiation continues. If and when we emerge from negotiation without achieving that objective, even though it may have been otherwise successful, we will risk seeming to have failed rather than to have succeeded.(Bird, p. 538)
  
• 12/5/1962 McNamara was quoted as telling Congress that he planned to eliminate eight National Guard divisions and 750 units of the organized reserves. (St. Louis Globe Democrat)
  
• 12/6/1962 Gen. Edwin Walker spoke before the Miss. House of Representatives, and warned that a planned reorganization of the National Guard and Reserves was part of a "State Department plan to put our armed forces under the control of the United Nations." (UPI 12/7)
  
• 12/6/1962 Jimmy Hoffa was the target of a failed assassination attempt in Tennessee.
  
• 12/6/1962 Arthur Sylvester, Asst. Sec of Defense for Public Affairs, was asked by a reporter about JFK's "cold" during the beginning of the missile crisis; Sylvester explained, "it's inherent in government's right, if necessary, to lie to save itself when it's going up into a nuclear war. That seems to me basic." (12/7 NYT)
  
• 12/7/1962 Oswald takes out a Dallas Public Library card, which was found on him 11/22/1963. He put down 602 Elsbeth as his address rather than the correct 604 for his flat.
  
• 12/7/1962 JFK went to Offutt Air Force Base, Nebraska, was briefed by Curtis LeMay and Thomas Power about their secret underground SAC base.
  
• 12/8/1962 Typographers struck all 9 major NYC newspapers, putting them out of business until 4/1/1963.
  
• 12/9/1962 Letter to Oswald from Bob Chester of the SWP's New York headquarters. He thanked Lee for his offer to do photographic work for the party: "It is clear from your work that you are skilled at blow-ups, reversals and reproduction work generally." But he explained that they had people in NY who could do that work for them. (H 19 579)
  
• 12/10/1962 Khrushchev sends a nine-page letter to Kennedy on the situation in both Cuba and Berlin. He indicates that the United States and the Soviet Union have come to the final stage of the Cuban affair. The Soviet premier then raises the issue of Berlin and attempts to drive a wedge between the U.S. and German leader Konrad Adenauer. "Should really you and we--two great states--submit, willingly or unwillingly, to the old-aged man who both morally and physically is with one foot in [the] grave? Should we really become toys in his hands?" (Premier Khrushchev 's Letter to President Kennedy , 12/10/62)
  
• 12/10/1962 DJ Alan Freed begins his payola trial in New York; later in the month he would admit to taking bribes from record companies to play certain records, and would be fined $300 and sentenced to probation.
  
• 12/10/1962 Newsweek's new correspondent in Vietnam, Kenneth Crawford, did a cover story praising Diem and calling Madame Nhu a "beautiful and strong-willed woman."
  
• 12/11/1962 OSWALD pays $190.00 (two postal money orders) to State Dept against travel loan. Posted 12/12/62 from Box 2915, Dallas, TX. (CE 1120)
  
• 12/11/1962 CIA Memo from Donald Jameson, Chief SR/CA, dated December 11, 1962: "Priscilla Johnson was selected as a likely candidate to write an article on Yevtushenko in a major U. S. magazine for our campaign...I think that Miss Johnson can be encouraged to write pretty much the articles we want." Johnson had interviewed Oswald in the USSR and would later write a book with Marina Oswald.
  
• 12/12/1962 In a major two and one-half hour speech to the Supreme Soviet--his first major address since the Cuban crisis--Premier Khrushchev asserts that a U.S. "pledge" not to invade Cuba exists. He warns, however, that if the United States carries out an invasion, Cuba would not be left "defenseless." (The Soviet Bloc Armed Forces and the Cuban Crisis: A Chronology, 6/18/63, pp. 115, 121-22) He replies to China's criticisms of him by saying that the paper tiger (the US) "has nuclear teeth."
  
• 12/12/1962 At a press conference, President Kennedy tells reporters that, in the best judgment of the United States, all strategic missiles and IL-28 bombers have been removed from Cuba. JFK was cautiously optimistic about Vietnam.
  
• 12/12/1962 On 12th December, Lyndon B. Johnson visited Forth Worth to join in the festivities at the General Dynamics plant. Congressman James Wright, the Texas Democrat representing the Fort Worth district introduced Johnson as the "greatest Texan of them all". He pointed out that Johnson had played an important role in obtaining the TFX contract. Wright added "you have to have friends and they have to stick with you through thick and thin even if you do have merit on your side." During the McClellan's Permanent Investigations Committee hearings into the contract, Senator Sam Ervin asked Robert McNamara "whether or not there was any connection whatever between your selection of General Dynamics, and the fact that the Vice President of the United States happens to be a resident of the state in which that company has one of its principal, if not its principal office." At this point McNamara was close to tears and commented that: "Last night when I got home at midnight, after preparing for today's hearing, my wife told me that my own 12-year-old son had asked how long it would take for his father to prove his honesty." McNamara rejected the idea that Lyndon B. Johnson was involved in the decision but evidence was to emerge that he did play an important role in the awarding of the TFX project to General Dynamics. For example, William Proxmire found some interesting information on the TFX project while investigating the role played by Richard Russell in the granting of the C-5A contract to Lockheed. The C-5A was built in Marietta, Georgia, the state that Russell represented. The Air Force Contract Selection Board originally selected Boeing that was located in the states of Washington and Kansas. However, Proxmire claimed that Russell was able to persuade the board to change its mind and give the C-5A contract to Lockheed. Proxmire quotes Howard Atherton, the mayor of Marietta, as saying that "Russell was key to landing the contract". Atherton added that Russell believed that Robert McNamara was going ahead with the C-5A in order to "give the plane to Boeing because Boeing got left out on the TFX fighter." According to Atherton, Russell got the contract after talking to Lyndon Johnson. Atherton added, "without Russell, we wouldn't have gotten the contract".
  
• 12/13/1962 James J. Tormey replies to Oswald's offer of photographic work for Hall-Davis Defense Committee. (CD 366) He thanked Oswald for the offer, and said they would keep him in mind "in the event that such need arises."
  
• 12/14/1962 President Kennedy writes to Premier Khrushchev in response to Khrushchev's December 11 message. The letter thanks Khrushchev "for [his] expression of appreciation of the understanding and flexibility we have tried to display" and expresses hope that a final settlement to the "Cuban question" could be found quickly. Kennedy also discusses communications between the two leaders during the missile crisis: he suggests that the use of reporters such as John Scali is not a satisfactory method of transmitting messages and expresses disappointment that Georgi Bolshakov, the channel for many exchanges between Kennedy and Khrushchev , is being called back to the Soviet Union. (President Kennedy 's Response to Khrushchev 's December 11 Letter, 12/14/62)
  
• 12/14/1962 JFK: "It is increasingly clear that no matter what party is in power, so long as our national security needs keep rising, an economy hampered by restrictive tax rates will never produce enough jobs or enough profits." Address to Economic Club of New York, 12/14/62 "If the economy of today were operating close to capacity levels with little unemployment, or if a sudden change in our military requirements should cause a scramble for men and resources, then I would oppose tax reductions as irresponsible and inflationary; and I would not hesitate to recommend a tax increase if that were necessary." Address to Economic Club of New York, 12/14/62
  
• 12/17/1962 In a television and radio interview, President Kennedy offers some of his thoughts on the crisis. He observes that "if we had to act on Wednesday [October 17] in the first twenty-four hours, I don't think we would have chosen as prudently as we finally did." He characterizes the Soviet attempt to install missiles in Cuba as "an effort to materially change the balance of power...It would have appeared to, and appearances contribute to reality." Kennedy compares the miscalculations leading to the Cuban missile crisis with those misjudgments that had led to World Wars I and II. When "you see the Soviet Union and the United States, so far separated in their beliefs...and you put the nuclear equation into that struggle; that is what makes this...such a dangerous time...One mistake can make this whole thing blow up." (Television and Radio Interview: "After Two Years--A Conversation with the President," 12/17/62) He also discussed the proposed Skybolt missile, a joint use missile to be developed by the US and UK. The missile had performed disappointingly in tests, and Kennedy expressed doubts about the project.
  
• 12/17/1962 Federal jury in Washington convicts US Communist Party of failure to register as agent of the USSR, and Judge Alexander Holtzoff fines the party $120,000. During the trial, defense attorney John Abt argued that the act of registration was self-incriminatory. The Supreme Court would later overturn the decision of the federal court.
  
• 12/17/1962 Oswald subscribes to The Militant.
  
• 12/18/1962 Sen. Mike Mansfield was in a unique position to advise Kennedy on Vietnam. When Lyndon Johnson became Vice President, Mansfield succeeded him as Senate Majority Leader, thereby becoming one of the most influential people in Washington. Like John Kennedy, Mansfield had for years taken a special interest in Southeast Asia. He had visited Vietnam three times in the 1 950s. He was known as the Senate's authority on Indochina. Moreover, he had been singularly responsible for convincing the Eisenhower administration to support the rise to power of Ngo Dinh Diem. Mansfield had endorsed Diem as a Vietnamese nationalist independent of both the French and the Viet Minh. The Senator's support proved so critical to the survival of Diem's government in the late fifties that Mansfield was known popularly as "Diem's godfather. " (Gregory Allen Olson, Mansfield and Vietnam: A Study in Rhetorical Adaptation ( East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1995) , p. 2 . Nevertheless, by the fall of 1962, Mansfield had become opposed to the increasing U.S. commitment to a war in support of that same government. His reversal moved JFK to ask him to investigate the situation firsthand. Mansfield's December 18, 1962, report was uncomfortable reading for the president. Mansfield wrote that Vietnam, outside its cities, was "run at least at night largely by the Vietcong. The government in Saigon is still seeking acceptance by the ordinary people in large areas of the countryside. Out of fear or indifference or hostility the peasants still withhold acquiescence, let alone approval of that government. In short, it would be well to face the fact that we are once again at the beginning of the beginning. " While continuing to praise Ngo Dinh Diem, Mansfield questioned the capacity of the Saigon government-under the increasing dominance of Diem's manipulative brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu-to gain any popular support. Mansfield cautioned Kennedy against trying to win a war in support of an unpopular government by "a truly massive commitment of American military personnel and other resources-in short going to war fully ourselves against the guerrillas-and the establishment of some form of neocolonial rule in South Vietnam . " To continue the president's policy, Mansfield warned, may " draw us inexorably into some variation of the unenviable position in Vietnam which was formerly occupied by the French. " Kennedy was stunned by his friend's critique. He was again confronted by his own first understanding of Vietnam, shared first by Edmund Gullion, repeated by John Kenneth Galbraith, and now punched back into his consciousness by Mike Mansfield. The Senate Majority Leader's comparison between the French rule and JFK's policy stung the president. But the more Kennedy thought about Mansfield's challenging words, the more they struck him as the truth-a truth he didn't want to accept but had to. He summed up his reaction to the Mansfield report by a razor-sharp comment on himself, made to aide Kenny O'Donnell: "I got angry with Mike for disagreeing with our policy so completely, and I got angry with myself because I found myself agreeing with him. " (O'Donnell and Powers, "johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye, " p. 1 5 ) Isaiah Berlin, the British philosopher, once observed of Kennedy: " I've never known a man who listened to every single word that one uttered more attentively. And he replied always very relevantly. He didn't obviously have ideas in his own mind which he wanted to expound, or for which he simply used one's own talk as an occasion, as a sort of launching pad. He really listened to what one said and answered that. " (Isaiah Berlin oral history, John F. Kennedy Library. Cited b y David Kaiser, American Tragedy: Kennedy, johnson, and the Origins of the Vietnam War ( Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2000 ) , p. 4 1 ) Mike Mansfield said of Kennedy's response to his critique: " President Kennedy didn't waste words. He was pretty sparse with his language. But it was not unusual for him to shift position. There is no doubt that he had shifted definitely and unequivocally on Vietnam but he never had the chance to put the plan into effect. " (Cited by Roberts, First Rough Draft, p . 22 1 .)
  
• 12/18/1962 Fletcher Knebel wrote in Look that in 10/1961 JFK, "still bearing his scars from the [Bay of Pigs] disaster, secretly ordered the Joint Chiefs of Staff to prepare an invasion plan for Cuba - to be used if and when needed."
  
• 12/18-19/1962 St Louis Globe Democrat reported that the Administration had stopped all production of long range manned bombers and cancelled production of the Skybolt missile.
  
• 12/19/1962 Premier Khrushchev sends a letter to President Kennedy suggesting that the "time has come now to put an end once and for all to nuclear tests." He writes, "with the elimination of the Cuban crisis we relieved mankind of the direct menace of combat use of lethal nuclear weapons that impended over the world. Can't we solve a far simpler question--that of cessation of experimental explosions of nuclear weapons in the peaceful conditions?" Kennedy responds to Khrushchev 's letter on December 28. Continued negotiations subsequently lead to the eventual signing of a limited test-ban treaty on August 5, 1963.( Khrushchev 's Letter, 12/19/62; Garthoff 1, pp. 131, 134)
  
• 12/19/1962 Letter from Louis Weinstock, General Manager of The Worker, to Oswald thanking him for his photographic samples and saying that they might call on him for his services. (H 21 721)
  
• 12/21/1962 Lawyer James B. Donovan finally manages to negotiate with Castro a deal for the release of the Bay of Pigs prisoners. Castro will get $53 million in medicine, tractors and baby food, plus $2.9 million for the sick and wounded prisoners already released last April. This amount had been agreed upon after long negotiations involving a bipartisan US committee (which included Milton Eisenhower and Eleanor Roosevelt.) The administration's man in the negotiations, Donovan, was unknowingly involved in a CIA plot (conceived in "early 1963" by Desmond Fitzgerald and William Harvey) to present a contaminated diving-suit to Castro, but the plan fell through. (Senate Intelligence Committee Report 85-86)
  
• 12/21/1962 Kennedy and Macmillan announced at Nassau that both governments had agreed that in place of Skybolt the US would make available to Britain Polaris missiles without warheads, that the UK would build more submarines.
  
• 12/22/1962-1/6/1963 William Harvey is in Miami. Details of activity unknown.
  
• 12/23/1962 Washington Post published a David Kraslow interview with Ike. Ike made the statement (which may or may not have ended up in the article) that his greatest mistake was "the lie we told about the U-2. I didn't realize how high a price we were going to have to pay for that lie. And if I had to do it all over again, we would have kept our mouths shut." (Politics of Lying 35)
  
• 12/23-24/1962 1,113 Cuban exiles are airlifted to Miami. Castro also agrees to release 923 relatives of the prisoners.
  
• 12/25/1962 John and Elena Hall of Fort Worth visit the Oswalds for Christmas. They notice they have no Christmas tree, and Lee explains that he doesn't believe in religion or commercialized Christmas. (H 8 409)
  
• 12/27/1962 In Palm Beach for a working vacation, JFK receives officers of Brigade 2506.
  
• 12/28/1962 De Mohrenschildt had the Oswalds over to a Russian New Year party at the Fords' house; he basically crashed the party. Oswald spent most of the night talking to Yaeko Okui, a Japanese woman and date of Lev Aronson. She later told the FBI that she never saw Oswald again, and they did not discuss politics. (H 23 641)
  
• 12/28/1962 Hoover memo authorized the D.C. office to bug the residence of Fred Black, a Washington lobbyist with ties to gambling and influence peddling. Black would be convicted of income tax evasion, and then later successfully appeal his conviction on the grounds that the FBI had violated his rights by bugging him.
  
• 12/29/1962 Saigon announces that its strategic hamlets now house 39% of the Southern population, though these figures are questionable.
  
• 12/29/1962 JFK went to Miami's Orange Bowl to greet the freed Bay of Pigs veterans. Pepe San Roman gave Kennedy the flag of Brigade 2506, and the President said, "I can assure you that this flag will be returned to this Brigade in a free Havana….The Cuban people were promised by the Revolution political liberty, social justice, intellectual freedom, land for the peasants, and an end to economic exploitation. They have received a police state, the elimination of the dignity of land ownership, the destruction of free speech and of free press, and the complete subjugation of individual human welfare to the service of the state and of foreign states…" Jackie spoke in Spanish to the crowd. Howard Hunt later wrote, "Artime told me the flag was a replica, and that the Brigade feeling against Kennedy was so great that the presentation nearly did not take place." A Cuban man identified only as 'Chino' was taken into custody and questioned concerning an assassination plot planned against Kennedy while at the Orange Bowl engagement. At RFK 's insistence and over Kenny O 'Donnell 's objections, JFK attends welcoming ceremony for exiled prisoners at the Orange Bowl saying the exiles would return their flag to a free Cuba. Schlesinger observed later that "both the Brigade and Castro received the wrong message." (Schlesinger p580) Note: O 'Donnell told JFK that it would "look as if you 're planning to back them in another invasion of Cuba." The president concurred, "You 're absolutely right. I shouldn 't do it." (O"Donnell and Powers, pp312-313) JFK spends an hour in Palm Beach with brigade leaders Manuel Artime, Pepe San Roman, Enrique Ruiz-Williams, and a half-dozen others. They personally invite the president to the rally so he changes his mind and attends. (Mahoney p220) A scheduled [exile] plot against JFK does not proceed. Note: The Secret Service and the Miami Police are tipped off about his presence. "A Cuban male, 25 yrs. 5 '4", 135-155 lbs., strong muscular build, known only as CHINO" for questioning. (Mahoney p220, endnote 231, p407)
  
• 12/31/1962 On New Year's Eve, Marina wrote a letter to a former boyfriend in Russia, complaining about how lonely she was; it was returned within a week due to insufficient postage and Lee discovered it. He beat her and told her, "I'll never trust you again." (H 1 33) At that time, Oswald sent a holiday greetings card to the staff of the Soviet embassy in Washington, wishing them "health, success and all of the best" and signed "Marina and Lee Oswald." (CE 986) On this day, Marina also wrote to the Russian embassy to register her new Dallas address as PO Box 2915.
  
• 12/31/1962 JFK's crusade against the Mafia "went on to convict 101 in 1962." (Davis, Dynasty and Disaster) Hundreds more are on trial.
  
• 12/31/1962 The joint US-UK Skybolt missile project is canceled.
  
• 12/31/1962 Red Cross reported that in Katanga, UN soldiers "moved into the hospital after being fired on from the building and machine-gunned patients in their beds." (St. Louis Post Dispatch)
  
• 12/31/1962 There are 11,300 US military personnel in Vietnam, with 109 dead or wounded this year. China claims to have armed the VC with more than 90,000 rifles and machine guns this year.