Deep Politics Timeline

[Tracy Riddle]

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