Deep Politics Timeline

[Tracy Riddle]

• 1965 Charles De Gaulle orders all non-French soldiers out of France, and NATO headquarters to leave France in six months.
  
• Second Vatican Council formally admitted that Christian communities separated from the Catholic Church are used by the Holy Spirit as "means of salvation" for those who belong to them. The phrase calling Rome "the one true Church founded by Jesus Christ" was abandoned.
  
• US federal spending: $118 billion ($1.4 billion deficit). National debt was $313 billion. 28.5% of seniors live in poverty. Robert Moog shows elements of his early synthesizers. Also, William Lear (better known as the developer of the Learjet) sees his other great innovations, the 8-track cartridge and player, go into production.
  
• The Coinage Act of 1965 provides that US coins will have the inscription "E Pluribus Unum" and "In God We Trust." (Davis, US Coin Collecting)
  
• As part of Project 112, the US military sprays a biological agent on barracks in Oahu, Hawaii. The agent is believed to be harmless but later shown to infect those with damaged immune systems . The program is coordinated by the Desert Test Center, part of a "biological and chemical weapons complex" in the Utah desert. [Associated Press, 10/9/02] Civilians may have been exposed to the gasses. [Reuters, 10/10/02] 1965-1967: As part of Project 112, the US military performs a series of tests at the Gerstle River test site near Fort Greeley, Alaska, involving artillery shells and bombs filled with sarin and VX, both of which are lethal nerve agents. The program is coordinated by the Desert Test Center, part of a "biological and chemical weapons complex," in the Utah desert. [Associated Press, 10/9/02] Civilians may have been exposed to the gasses. [Reuters, 10/10/02] The US military later claims the experiments were conducted "out of concern for [the United States'] ability to protect and defend against these potential threats." [US Department of Defense, 10/09/2002; Reuters, 10/10/02]
  
• In a three year study beginning in 1965, 70 volunteer prisoners at the Holmesburg State Prison in Philadelphia were subjected to tests of dioxin, the highly toxic chemical contaminant in Agent Orange. Lesions which the men developed were not treated and remained for up to seven months. None of the subjects was informed that they would later be studied for the development of cancer. This was the second such experiment which Dow Chemical undertook on "volunteers" who did not receive the information which the world proclaimed was necessary for "informed consent" at Nuremberg.
  
• "Manhattan-based historical-documents dealer Gary Zimet told Newsday he has acquired a letter written by Jack Ruby accusing President Johnson of complicity in the 1963 assassination of President Kennedy. In the 12-page letter written from prison in 1965, Ruby also claimed he was framed for conspiracy in the assassination of JFK. The letter was addressed to a Dallas police officer friend named "Joe," Zimet said…Zimet said he bought the letter six weeks ago from "someone one step removed from the Ruby family." In the letter, Zimet said, Ruby wrote he was "being framed for being in on the assassination, that I had been used to silence Oswald." "Someday, Joe, you will find out what President Johnson is!" Ruby wrote, according to Zimet. "What he had to do with the assassination. One thing is for certain, Joe, he couldn't stand a polygraph test." Ruby questioned in the letter how Oswald "went to work a week or 10 days at the Texas School Book Depository before even Kennedy knew he himself was coming to Dallas." "Who up in Washington was so close to the president to know this information and to pass it on the Oswald?" the letter had asked, according to Zirpet. (Newsday 4/16/1995)
  
• During this year, RFK - on the Amazon River - swims out of a dugout canoe in piranha-infested waters. As the rest of the men on the expedition paddle around, RFK intones to a petrified Richard Goodwin that, while "It was impossible to pinpoint the exact time and place when he decided to run for president...the idea seemed to take hold as he was swimming in the Amazonian River of Nhamunda."
  
• 1965 Suppressing Sarkhan The followup book to The Ugly American by William Lederer and Eugene Burdick disappears from bookstores. Lederer claims the CIA did it because it revealed too much about then current operations in Thailand. It was finally released in 1977 under the title 'The Deceptive American'.
  
• The city fathers of Bogalusa, Louisiana invited moderate Arkansas congressman Brooks Hays to speak at a local church. The state's Original Knights of the KKK distributed 6000 handbills claiming that Hays was coming "to convince you that you should help integration by sitting in church with the black man, hiring more of them in your businesses, serving and eating with them in your cafes, and allowing your children to sit by filthy, runny-nosed, ragged, ugly little niggers in your public schools…We will know the names of all who are invited to the Brooks Hays meeting and we will know who did and did not attend this meeting…Those who do attend this meeting will be tagged as integrationists and will be dealt with accordingly by the knights of the Ku Klux Klan." When the hosting church was threatened with bombing, Hays' visit was cancelled. (The Nation 2/1/1965)
  
• It was superfluous for a White House spokesman to publicly reassure Mr. J. Edgar Hoover ... that the President was not contemplating replacing him ... Several Presidents did not dare do that and the things already known about the amassing of Mr. Johnson's fortunes may well suggest the thickness of his file in Mr. Hoover's office. ...... Whether he preaches on religion, family, patriotism, Communism or civil rights, Mr. Hoover is America's most capable man in finding legal formulations for values most foreign to the Constitution and the very idea of freedom.While Hoover's hidden dialogue with the reactionaries of America accounts for the popular adulation of him, for power he relies on more tangible mechanisms. Where is the man who would not mind having everything about him exposed? And where is the man who does not have a personal file in Hoover's organization? Certainly, there is no such man in the White House. The Minority of One, Editorial, Hoover's Survivability, p. 4
  
• The January and March 1965 issues of Liberation magazine carried articles highly critical of the Warren Report by Philadelphia attorney Vincent Salandria.
  
• 1/1965 A Lawyer's Notes on the Warren Commission Report by Alfredda Scobey Law Assistant to the Court of Appeals of Georgia American Bar Association Journal, January 1965, Vol. 51, pages 3943.
  
• 1/1/1965 New Year's Eve costume ball at California Hall, S.F., to raise funds for the Council on Religion and the Homosexual was harassed by police. It became a turning point in the San Francisco gay rights movement. ACLU took the case, which was dismissed.
  
• 1/1/1965 After closing down Operation Mongoose and the CIA's JM/WAVE station in Miami, Theodore Shackley and deputy Thomas Clines are sent to Laos to organize opposition to the Pathet Lao guerilla force. Meo hill tribesmen are recruited and conduct a massive extermination program of guerilla sympathizers. (Fonzi chronology)
  
• 1/2/1965 Martin Luther King Jr. announced the launching of Project Alabama, a campaign of mass marches in Selma in an effort to push the federal government to enact federal legislation to protect black voting rights.
  
• 1/3/1965 UC officials announce a new campus policy that allows political activity on campus. (SF Chronicle 6/9/02)
  
• 1/4/1965 In his State of the Union address, LBJ announced his goal of creating a Great Society, with programs aimed at eliminating poverty and racism. They included Head Start, Medicare, food stamps, housing subsidies, federal aid to elementary and secondary schools and to universities, Model Cities, job training, student loans. He also called for federal efforts to aid the arts, the cities, and fight pollution. Johnson would define the Great Society as a "war" on poverty, with federal funds to be "fired in" to pockets of poverty in what Washington called the "rifle-shot approach."
  
• 1/4/1965 Gerald Ford replaced Charlie Halleck as GOP House Minority Leader.
  
• 1/4/1965 Four armed CIA agents, among them Eloy Gutierrez Menoyo, who revealed U.S. plans against Cuba, captured by the Cubans. Menoyo is forced to go on Cuban television to publicly confess after beatings that result in having "all his ribs broken" and losing "all his hearing from one ear." Menoyo is "accused by the regime of having conspired to kill [Fidel] Castro" and begins serving a life sentence.
  
• 1/5/1965 Atlanta Constitution quoted the new member of the HUAC, liberal Atlanta congressman Charles Weltner, who was urging an investigation of the KKK: "I believe I speak for a vast majority of southerners in calling for action. For in doing nothing we will inaugurate a second century for the Ku Klux Klan." Liberals generally opposed the Un-American Activities Committee investigating the Klan, fearing a whitewash.
  
• 1/7/1965 Johnson sent his Medicare bill to Congress. LBJ met with labor leaders in the White House: Jim Carey, David Dubinsky, David MacDonald, George Meany, Walter Reuther.
  
• 1/7/1965 This evening, LBJ had the Businessmen's Council over to the White House: Roger Blough (US Steel), Frederick Kappel (AT&T), W.B. Murphy (Campbell's Soup), L.F. McCollum (Continental Oil of Houston), Tom Watson (IBM), Fred Lazarus Jr. (Federated Dept Stores), Neil McElroy (Procter and Gamble), C.R. Smith (American Airlines). (White House Diary p33)
  
• 1/14/1965 Lady Bird Johnson and Sargent Shriver discussed the new program Operation Head Start, designed to help young underprivileged children with education, nutrition and health before they enter the public schools.
  
• 1/17/1965 Journalist Arnold Beichman, who knew LBJ well when he was VP, wrote: "Johnson's loyalties were surely tried. He had an unhappy idea that he was being followed, that his wires were tapped." (New York Herald-Tribune)
  
• 1/17/1965 Two rural black churches were destroyed by fire in Jonesboro, Louisiana.
  
• 1/18-20/1965 Billy Hargis' Christian Crusade Anti-Communist Leadership School in Miami featured speaker Samuel Blumenthal, who had repeatedly charged that the JFK assassination was a "deliberately planned act of the Communist conspiracy."
  
• 1/20/1965 LBJ's inauguration for his first full presidential term. Lady Bird Johnson wrote in her diary, "I heard that the lone spectator watching the parade from the balcony on an upper floor of the Justice Department turned out to be J. Edgar Hoover. He has seen a lot of us come and go." The first change in the Cabinet he had inherited from JFK becomes official this month. John T. Connor is sworn in as secretary of commerce, succeeding Luther H. Hodges, Nicholas de B. Katzenbach is named Attorney General to succeed Robert F. Kennedy.
  
• 1/20/1965 At a large meeting of congressional leaders, Lyndon leaned over to Larry O'Brien and said, "John Kennedy is watching us up in heaven and we are going to wrap up all of his legislation and put it in a package and tie it up and label it JFK." (White House Diary p231)
  
• 1/21/1965 Iran: PM Hassan Ali Mansour was fatally wounded by an assassin in Teheran.
  
• 1/23/1965 LBJ entered Bethesda Hospital.
  
• 1/23/1965 Three explosions demolished a black funeral home in New Bern, North Carolina.
  
• 1/24/1965 Winston Churchill died.
  
• 1/26/1965 LBJ returned to the White House from Bethesda.
  
• 1/27/1965 LBJ spent the night before with a terrible attack of sweating, "a symptom of his illnesses for all the years I have known him," Lady Bird wrote. (White House Diary 232)
  
• 1/27/1965 McNamara and Bundy gave LBJ a memo saying that the weak political situation in Saigon might be partly due to low morale because of America's hesitant policy, and a full-scale US military presence might turn things around. Bundy was then sent to Saigon to appraise the prospects for military action against North Vietnam. Robert McNamara and McGeorge Bundy submit a memorandum on Vietnam to LBJ: "The worst course of action is to continue in this essentially passive role which can only lead to eventual defeat and an invitation to get out in humiliating circumstances. We see two alternatives. The first is to use our military power in the Far East and to force a change in Communist policy. The second is to deploy all our resources along a track of negotiation, aimed at salvaging what little can be preserved with no major addition to our present military risks. [We] tend to favor the first course, but we believe that both should be carefully studied." McNamara will later write: "Between January 28 and July 28, 1965, President Johnson made the fateful choices that locked the United States onto a path of massive military intervention in Vietnam, an intervention that ultimately destroyed his presidency and polarized America like nothing since the Civil War."
  
• 1/27/1965 Nick Katzenbach was named Attorney General, with Ramsey Clark being named Deputy Attorney General.
  
• 1/30/1965 As the KKK grows increasingly cocky over its ability to commit crimes, and the federal government's inability to stop them, the Saturday Evening Post quoted UKA Imperial Wizard Shelton at a South Carolina rally: "You know how they finally found them three boys that was buried in that dam near Philadelphia, Mississippi? The mailman found them. He walked by there delivering welfare checks, and the nigger reached up to get his."
  
• 2/1965 Harold Weisberg's Whitewash, the first book to critique the Warren Report and its 26 volumes of evidence, is completed. He has a difficult time finding a publisher and it is privately published later in the year.
  
• 2/1965 The journal Postgraduate Medicine characterized Oswald and the assassins before him as "stand[ing] midway between the aggressive and paranoid psychopath" who share a common "desire for recognition." (Story by Sidney J. Slomich and Robert E. Kantor)
  
• 2/1965 A view between both demonological poles of J. Edgar Hoover as a superlative bureaucrat in a superlatively bureaucratic environment. Quotes Francis Biddle: "A career man in the truest sense. … he cares for power and more power; but unlike many men, it is power bent to the purpose of his life's work - the success of the FBI." Commentary, J. Edgar Hoover, The Compleat Bureaucrat, Joseph Kraft
  
• 2/1965 Senator Hiram Fong (R-HI) answered questions concerning the possible change in our cultural pattern by an influx of Asians. "Asians represent six-tenths of 1 percent of the population of the United States ... with respect to Japan, we estimate that there will be a total for the first 5 years of some 5,391 ... the people from that part of the world will never reach 1 percent of the population .. .Our cultural pattern will never be changed as far as America is concerned." (U.S. Senate, Subcommittee on Immigration and Naturalization of the Committee on the Judiciary, Washington, D.C., Feb. 10, 1965, pp.71, 119.) [Note: From 1966 to 1970, 19,399 immigrants came from Japan, more than three times Sen. Fong's estimate. Immigration from Asia as a whole has totaled 5,627,576 from 1966 to 1993. Three percent of the American population is currently of Asian birth or heritage.] A certain Myra C. Hacker, Vice President of the New Jersey Coalition, testified at a Senate immigration subcommittee hearing: "In light of our 5 percent unemployment rate, our worries over the so called population explosion, and our menacingly mounting welfare costs, are we prepared to embrace so great a horde of the world's unfortunates? At the very least, the hidden mathematics of the bill should be made clear to the public so that they may tell their Congressmen how they feel about providing jobs, schools, homes, security against want, citizen education, and a brotherly welcome ... for an indeterminately enormous number of aliens from underprivileged lands." "We should remember that people accustomed to such marginal existence in their own land will tend to live fully here, to hoard our bounteous minimum wages and our humanitarian welfare handouts ... lower our wage and living standards, disrupt our cultural patterns ..." "Whatever may be our benevolent intent toward many people, [the bill] fails to give due consideration to the economic needs, the cultural traditions, and the public sentiment of the citizens of the United States." (U.S. Senate, Subcommittee on Immigration and Naturalization of the Committee on the Judiciary, Washington, D.C., Feb. 10, 1965. pp. 681-687.)
  
• 2/1/1965 Dr. Pierre Finck letter about his experiences with the autopsy of President Kennedy.
  
• 2/3/1965 Mississippi's Senators Stennis and Eastland entered some horror stories about civil rights "agitators" into the congressional record: Stennis: The white boys and white girls would live in Negro houses. They would sit in the courthouse square on park benches, and they would love and hug and go down the street holding hands. I am speaking of the white girls and white boys in the groups that came in. Eastland: I know of several instances in which members of this group were syphilitic and the Public Health Service had to take charge. Stennis: Yes, I heard of that too. The mores, customs and traditions that the people there were taught in their youth were flouted daily in the faces of both races… Eastland: I know of an instance in my hometown in which a Negro woman cut her husband up because of his attention to one of those white girls.
  
• 2/7/1965 Mac Bundy wrote a memo advocating a sustained air campaign against North Vietnam.
  
• 2/8/1965 Bundy presented his report at an NSC meeting; he urged a bombing campaign to raise Vietnamese morale, but did not promise it would solve much: "At its very best the struggle in Vietnam will be long. It seems to us important that this fundamental fact be made clear and our understanding of it be made clear to our own people." But LBJ came away urging everyone to take the position that the bombing would not "broaden the war."
  
• 2/9/1965 500 US Marines, manning a Hawk anti-aircraft missile unit, arrive near Danang. (JFK & LBJ 265)
  
• 2/9/1965 Colonel Harold Hauser, head of the U.S. military mission to Guatemala, was the target of a failed assassination attempt by Movimiento Revolucionario-13 terrorists.
  
• 2/9/1965 Soviets condemned US air attacks and announced it would "take further measures to safeguard the security and strengthen the defense capabilities of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam." The Chinese accused the US of "expanding the war beyond South Vietnam."
  
• 2/10/1965 Jacques Vallee diary entry: "The Vietnam War is getting worse. The US army communiques about recent victories sound eerily identical to the French news I heard as a child. They speak of police operations,' of routine rounding-up of suspects, of mounting casualties among the rebels,' of their imminent defeat." (Forbidden Science p134)
  
• 2/10/1965 Senate immigration subcommittee chairman Edward Kennedy (D-MA.) reassured his colleagues and the nation with the following: "First, our cities will not be flooded with a million immigrants annually. Under the proposed bill, the present level of immigration remains substantially the same ... Secondly, the ethnic mix of this country will not be upset ... Contrary to the charges in some quarters, [the bill] will not inundate America with immigrants from any one country or area, or the most populated and deprived nations of Africa and Asia ... In the final analysis, the ethnic pattern of immigration under the proposed measure is not expected to change as sharply as the critics seem to think." Sen. Kennedy concluded by saying, "The bill will not flood our cities with immigrants. It will not upset the ethnic mix of our society. It will not relax the standards of admission. It will not cause American workers to lose their jobs." (U.S. Senate, Subcommittee on Immigration and Naturalization of the Committee on the Judiciary, Washington, D.C., Feb. 10, 1965. pp. 1-3.) "
  
• 2/11/1965 US announced general policy of punishing "aggression" by bombing North Vietnam. 160 US and South Vietnamese planes attack Chan Hoa and Chap Le in retaliation for VC attack on Qui Nhon. (JFK & LBJ 265)
  
• 2/13/1965 Sustained US bombing of North Vietnam began.
  
• 2/13/1965 Portuguese Gen. Humberto Delgado gunned down
  
• 2/14/1965 NY Times commented that Nixon had "firmly grasped the leadership role" of the GOP after Goldwater abandoned it.
  
• 2/14/1965 Lady Bird wrote, "Ah, how comfortable the job of Senator looks from this vantage point! Bill Fulbright can disagree with everything that happens, and he doesn't have to come up with the answers of what to do." (White House Diary 245)
  
• 2/14/1965 Malcolm X said in a Detroit speech, "I've never advocated any violence. I've only said that Black people who are the victims of organized violence perpetrated upon us by the Klan, the Citizen's Council, and many other forms, we should defend ourselves... I think the Black man in this country above and beyond people all over the world will be more than justified when he stands up and starts to protect himself no matter how many necks he has to break." Tonight, he and his wife and four daughters escaped unharmed when three gas bombs were thrown into the living room of their Queens apartment.
  
• 2/14/1965 Arthur Krock reported in the NYT that the Joint Chiefs wanted to send 40,000 troops to Vietnam as early as the fall of '61, but JFK rejected their proposal 10/11/1961.
  
• 2/15/1965 In the Letters section of the Journal of the American Medical Association, a doctor wrote to complain that JFK's autopsy was "a grossly incomplete record."
  
• 2/16/1965 Washington Post published a Gallup poll showing that 64% of Americans wanted to "continue" in Vietnam, and only 18% wanted to "pull out."
  
• 2/16/1965 Truman issued a statement supporting LBJ's war policy; he attacked the "irresponsible critics...who have neither all the facts - nor the answers."
  
• 2/17/1965 LBJ met with Eisenhower, Bundy, McNamara, Wheeler. Ike told LBJ his first duty was to contain communism in Asia, and thought that bombing would weaken Hanoi's will. If it was necessary to send in large numbers of combat troops, "so be it." Ike also said that threatened Chinese or Soviet intervention should be detered by warning them that the US might use nuclear weapons. (In Retrospect 172-3)
  
• 2/18/1965 McNamara testified before the House Armed Services Committee, and called for a nationwide network of bomb shelters and development of an anti-ballistic missile system.
  
• 2/18/1965 Officially for the first time, US-piloted planes attack VC positions in South Vietnam. (JFK & LBJ 265)
  
• 2/19/1965 LBJ decided on air strikes against North Vietnam, but still wanted to keep it from the public. (In Retrospect 173)
  
• 2/20/1965 Ranger 8 spacecraft crashed on the moon after sending back thousands of pictures of the lunar surface.
  
• 2/21/1965 Malcolm X arrived at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem to speak before 400 people. He had just uttered the Arabic greeting "As-salaam alaikum" when he was assassinated. Five black men had come to NY that morning from Paterson, NJ and had arrived early. All were Muslims and belonged to the Newark mosque; they were able to slip past Malcolm's security. 22-year-old Talmadge Hayer took a seat near the podium. Another man in the back of the room jumped up and began yelling to distract attention; another assassin in the second row stood up, pulled a shotgun out of his trenchcoat and fired at Malcolm, striking him in the chest. Hayer pulled out his .45 automatic and a comrade brought out his 9mm Lugar; both blazed away at the fallen Malcolm. Someone shot Hayer in the leg and he was accosted by the crowd. His partners got away. Hayer confessed to the killing but claimed to have acted alone; within two weeks police arrested Norman 3X Butler and Thomas 15X Johnson, both from the Bronx and from the Black Muslim militia unit Fruit of Islam. Though there was evidence that Butler and Johnson were elsewhere at the time, the jury found them and Hayer guilty. All were sentenced to life in prison. When Elijah Mohammed died in 1975, Hayer broke his silence and said he and four other Muslims Leon, Wilbur, Willie X and Ben had carried out the assassination because they feared Malcolm X would bring down their beloved leader. Hayer continued to insist that Butler and Johnson were innocent. The three men were released in the mid-80s.
  
• 2/21/965 Augustus Owsley Stanley, a former Air Force electronics specialist, working in radio intelligence and radar who later worked at Pasadena's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, had moved to Berkeley and got involved in making LSD and meth. On February 21, 1965, that lab was raided by state narcotics agents who seized all his lab equipment and charged Stanley with operating a meth lab. As Barry Miles recounted in Hippie, "Berkeley was awash with speed and Owsley was responsible for much of it." Nevertheless, Owsley walked away from the raid unscathed, and, with the help of his attorney, who happened to be the vice-mayor of Berkeley, he even successfully sued to have all his lab equipment returned (LSD was not yet illegal). He quickly put that equipment to work producing some 4,000,000 tabs of nearly pure LSD in the mid-1960s. Also in February of 1965, Owsley and his frequent sidekicks, the Grateful Dead, moved down to the Watts area of Los Angeles, of all places, to ostensibly conduct acid tests.' The group rented a house that was conveniently located right next door to a brothel, curiously paralleling the modus operandi of various intelligence operatives who were (or had been) involved in conducting their own acid tests.' The band departed the communal dwelling in April 1965, just a few months before Watts exploded in violence that left thirty-four corpses littering the streets. In 1967, Owsley unleashed on the Haight a particularly nasty hallucinogen known as STP. Developed by the friendly folks at Dow Chemical, STP had been tested extensively at the Edgewood Arsenal as a possible biowarfare agent before being distributed to hippies as a recreational drug. Owsley reportedly obtained the recipe from Alexander Shulgin, a former Harvard man who developed a keen interest in psychopharmacology while serving in the U.S. Navy. Shulgin worked for many years as a senior research chemist at Dow, and later worked very closely with the DEA.
  
• 2/22/1965 Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter died.
  
• 2/23/1965 DeLoach memo to Hoover noted that LBJ had promised "that Attorney General Katzenbach would not be around very long and that he hoped we could put up with him for the time being."
  
• 2/23/1965 Dean Rusk sent a memo to LBJ saying, "I am convinced it would be disastrous for the United States and the Free World to permit Southeast Asia to be overrun by the Communist North." Everything should be done to contain Hanoi, even at "the risk of major escalation."
  
• 2/23/1965 J. Edgar Hoover's relations with LBJ, problems of picking a successor. Among those who could retire along with Hoover, or earlier, are his associate director and his two assistants. Next in line are the 10 assistant directors, only four of whom are below voluntary-retirement age [50]. They are: James H. Gale, who was recently named head of the special investigations division; C. Lester Trotter, head of the identification division [and the man in charge of the enormous file of fingerprints]; Saxby Tavel, head of communications and records, and C. D. [Deke] DeLoach, head of crime records. Look, What's Ahead for the FBI, by Miriam Ottenburg
  
• 2/23/1965 Sen. Thomas Dodd made a lengthy speech charging that to advocate negotiating with the Vietnamese Communists "is akin to asking Churchill to negotiate with the Germans at the time of Dunkirk."
  
• 2/23/1965 Jacques Vallee diary entry: "In his most recent letter to me, Aime Michel reports on a curious change among some secret services in Europe which seem to have taken an open interest in the subject. Thus a former agent of the British Intelligence Service has leaked the news that Great Britain is now swapping information on UFOs with the Soviets, both having reached the conclusion that the objects are real. Another agent, an American, has assured Michel that the FBI took the whole issue very seriously. Finally, Colonel Clerouin, whom he had not seen for years, suddenly invited him for lunch and told him there was a lot of interest in the subject among the French military staff. Aime does not trust any of these shadowy people, whose very business is lying and cheating in the first place…Someone is using us to snow' somebody else, he thinks." (Forbidden Science p137)
  
• 2/24/1965 US attacks of 2/18 are disclosed in Saigon and new US sorties are flown in Binhdinh province. (JFK and LBJ 265)
  
• 2/25/1965 Beginning of US air attacks against VC concentrations near Saigon. (JFK & LBJ 265)
  
• 2/25/1965 NY Times: "The United States Embassy disclosed today that American jet aircraft were sent on air strikes against the Vietcong in South Vietnam during the last week." The administration used the Tonkin Resolution to justify these actions as "appropriate, fitting and measured."
  
• 2/26/1965 James Reston column in NYT: "The guiding principle of American foreign policy since 1945 has been that no state shall use military force or the threat of military force to achieve its political objectives. And the companion of this principle has been that the United States would use its influence and its power, when necessary and where it could be effective, against any state that defied this principle." This principle was "at stake in Vietnam…the United States is now challenging the Communist effort to seek power by the more cunning technique of military subversion."
  
• 2/27/1965 RFK records an oral history interview with Art Schlesinger: "The Bay of Pigs was the best thing that happened to the administration, because if it hadn't been for the Bay of Pigs, we would have sent troops into Laos...[JFK] started asking questions that were not asked at the Bay of Pigs..." He recalled that the JCS told him they could land 1000 troops a day into Laos, but when Kennedy asked how the early arrivals would fight off thousands of Pathet Lao guerillas, "Well, they said, they really hadn't thought about that....They just wanted to go in and drop bombs on people. Even after the Cuban missile crisis, two of the Chiefs of Staff were really mad. One of them suggested that we go and bomb them anyway on Monday, and the other one said, 'We've been sold out.'....LeMay and Anderson. That's really the reason why the President got rid of Anderson." He said that LBJ played little part in foreign policy: "he was never in on any of the real meetings...he was their for the first meeting, I think. Then he went to Hawaii...He wasn't there at all when the decisions were being made. He came back on the Sunday night before the Russians withdrew their missiles from Cuba...He was displeased with what we were doing, although he never made it clear what he would do. He said he had the feeling that we were being too weak...[LBJ] liked Diem...Johnson is...incapable of telling the truth...And my experience with him since then is that he lies all the time. I'm telling you, he just lies continuously, about everything. In every conversation I have with him, he lies. As I've said, he lies even when he doesn't have to...At one time, you know, I liked John Connally. I don't like him now...He's been very ungracious. I really dislike him..."
  
• 2/27/1965 State Dept issues a white paper accusing North Vietnam of aggression. It claimed that most of the communist fighters in the South were actually Northern infiltrators, not native rebels. This claim was greeted with considerable skepticism by reporters covering Vietnam.
  
• 2/27/1965 Warren Commission staffer Joseph Ball, on a Los Angeles KNBC-TV show, was asked about the grassy knoll; he replied, "That happens to be the part of the investigation of which I had charge...There were no people there."
  
• 2/28/1965 US announces "continuous limited airstrikes" against North Vietnam.