Deep Politics Timeline

[Tracy Riddle]

• 5/1966 Nixon said in a speech that "a retreat of the United States from Vietnam would be a Communist victory of massive proportions and would lead to World War III."
  
• 5/3/1966 Look magazine article quoted Sen. Fulbright: "But this Gulf of Tonkin incident, if I may say so, was a very vague one. We were briefed on it, but we have no way of knowing, even to this day, what actually happened...I have been told that there was no physical damage. They weren't hit by anything."
  
• 5/6/1966 State Senate's Burns committee releases another report calling the Berkeley campus a haven for communists. (SF Chronicle 6/9/02)
  
• 5/7/1966 Harold Weisberg's Whitewash is published in a widespread paperback edition by Dell.
  
• 5/10/1966 NYT quoted RFK: "These people [of Latin America] will not accept this kind of existence for the next generation. We would not; they will not...So a revolution is coming - a revolution which will be peaceful if we are wise enough; compassionate if we care enough; successful if we are fortunate enough...We can affect its character; we cannot alter its inevitability."
  
• 5/10/1966 CBS-TV featured a documentary on UFOs sponsored by IBM. It featured debunker Dr. Donald Menzel pouring benzene over a bath of acetone to explain how mirages caused UFOs. Carl Sagan explained that aliens might have visited the earth centuries ago, but not in modern times. An officer from NORAD calmly explained that there were no unidentified echoes on the radar screens scanning America's skies. An astronomer from the Smithsonian also assured the audience that there were no unidentified objects on astronomical photos, either.
  
• 5/12/1966 Hoover memo to Asst Atty Gen. Mitchell Rogovin about the Fred Black case; "to disclose our coverage on Black to the [Supreme] Court at this time would be extremely poor timing...such a disclosure would result in widespread publicity and would undoubtedly trigger a great deal of unwarranted criticism against the Bureau and the Department..."
  
• 5/12/1966 On the campaign trail, Ronald Reagan calls for the dismissal of those who contributed to the "degradation" of UC. (SF Chronicle 6/9/02)
  
• 5/13/1966 Federal education funding is denied to 12 school districts in the South because of violations of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
  
• 5/16/1966 Stokely Carmichael was elected chairman of the SNCC.
  
• 5/17/1966 "There will be some Nervous Nellies," LBJ said in a speech, "and some who will become frustrated and bothered and break ranks under the strain. And some will turn on their leaders and on their country and on our fighting men."
  
• 5/18/1966 In a speech in Montreal, McNamara warned that military might alone could not solve the instability of developing nations: "A nation can reach the point at which it does not buy more security for itself simply by buying more military hardware, and we are at that point." This speech resulted in intense criticism from hawks in Congress and elsewhere.
  
• 5/18/1966 THE STATE OF TEXAS vs. JACK RUBENSTEIN -- Texas Court of Criminal Appeals directs Judge Holland to proceed with sanity hearing, allowing Joe Tonahill to be one of defense counsel, and remands Jack Ruby to the custody of the sheriff of Dallas County.
  
• 5/20/1966 Hoover memo to Katzenbach about the Fred Black case: "the attorneys in the Tax Division [of the Justice Dept] are attempting to make themselves look good with the Supreme Court at the expense of the FBI when they avoid mentioning that the Department had knowledge of our confidential coverage as early as August 24, 1965."
  
• 5/22/1966 At Chatham College, McNamara spoke about the war and defended the students' right to protest against it.
  
• 5/23/1966 James Gale memo to DeLoach on the Fred Black case: "Senator Long...reiterated that he had no desire to hurt the FBI or hold hearings on the FBI and he would figure out something with respect to handling his critics..."
  
• 5/23/1966 Harold Weisberg wrote Hoover about releasing the FBI's spectrographic analyses test data on the JFK assassination. He never received a response.
  
• 5/24/1966 Milton Jones memo to FBI asst director Robert Wick: "Attached is a blank, undated statement by 'an FBI spokesman' which clearly shows that Robert Kennedy, as Attorney General, had knowledge of and gave his approval to the FBI's use of electronic devices in crime and racketeering cases. Recommendation: That the attached blank, undated statement be approved and be returned to your office for possible future use. Specific approval will be needed at the time it is given out."
  
• 5/24/1966 Harold Weisberg sent Drs. Humes and Boswell a copy of his book Whitewash and asked for an opportunity to discuss the medical evidence with them. Neither ever replied.
  
• 5/27/1966 James Gale memo to DeLoach; Gale wondered "what, if any, notice should be given to the [Justice] Department concerning the extent of our microphone coverage. A review of our microphone coverage from 1960 to the present revealed that the three investigative divisions operated a total of 738 such units...The Department and/or United States Attorneys were notified of 158 of these sources...We know that the Department completely lacks security, leaks confidential information to the press...we should take not action toward advising the Department at this time of the extent of our microphone coverage during the past six years."
  
• 5/27/1966 Mark Lane interview with Dealey Plaza witness Orville Nix for the film Rush To Judgment
  
• 5/28/1966 Exile launch lands two CIA agents in Cuba, then engages in combat with and is sunk by Cuban Navy torpedo boat.
  
• 5/29/1966 Hermino Diaz, a Cuban agent of the CIA, dies in a gun fight with a Cuban militia patrol while trying to infiltrate the area around the Hotel Comodoro in Havana, Cuba. He undertook the mission, directed by Jorge Mas Canosa, in order to carry out a new attempt to assassinate Fidel Castro. The criminal record of Hermino Diaz is extensive. A paid assassin for the dictator Trujillo, in 1948 he murdered in Mexico a Cuban named Rogelio Hernandez, from whom he took the victim's surname as a pseudonym. In 1957, again under the orders of Trujillo, he attempted to murder the president of Costa Rica, Jose Figueres. He was subsequently detained in that country. Diaz is an expert shooter. Hermino is also a mulatto with an unmistakable bald patch. (Some researchers suggest that Diaz was a participant in JFK's assassination and could have possibly been one of the Latino men seen in and around Deadly Plaza on Nov. 22.)
  
• 5/29/1966 The Washington Post ran an 8-column banner headline on Page One, "An Inquest: Skeptical Postscript to Warren Group's Report on Assassination," dealing with Harold Weisberg's Whitewash and Edward J. Epstein's Inquest. The lengthy article reported, "on December 18, 1963, the Washington Post and other newspapers reported on the basis of rumors from Dallas that the first bullet to strike the President 'was found deep in his shoulder.' This report was confirmed prior to publication by the FBI." The Post concluded that the two books raised "grave doubts about the Commission's work." The article covered a sizeable portion of page 1 and nearly all of page 3, and concluded that the two books raised "grave doubts about the Commission's work." Epstein had obtained interviews from several members of the Warren Commission and its staff and was given access to a number of internal Commission memoranda (the book began as an intended Masters thesis). Concentrating on the internal workings of the Commission, Epstein argued that bureaucratic pressures from within and time pressures imposed from without had severely handicapped the Commission with the result that the investigation was superficial rather than exhaustive. He cited the discrepancies pertaining to the location of the President's back wound, noting that the holes in the President's shirt and jacket, the report on the autopsy filed by FBI agents Siebert and O'Neill, and the testimony of three Secret Service agents all placed the location in the back below the shoulder while the official autopsy report located the wound significantly higher at the base of the neck. The higher location was essential to the Warren Commission's theory that the wound in the President's throat was one of exit for a bullet that had traversed his neck from the rear. Epstein contended that the Warren Commission was more interested in dispelling rumors than in exposing facts and that it preferred not to consider the possibility that there had been a second assassin. He implied the belief that the Warren Commission had deliberately altered the autopsy report, adding that if this were the case the Warren Report would have to be viewed as an expression of "political truth." Weisberg approached the issue on a much broader level by carefully dissecting the mass of evidence purported by the Warren Commission to prove that Oswald was the lone assassin. In addition to the back wound discrepancy, Weisberg went into such matters as Oswald's marksmanship; the lack of tangible evidence linking Oswald with the shooting or the 6th floor window with the actual source of the shots; the shooting of officer Tippit, etc. Weisberg strongly implied that more than one gunman had been involved and that it was by no means certain that Oswald had been one of them.
  
• 5/30/1966 US Surveyor I, an unmanned probe, lands on the moon.
  
• 6/1966 Robert Kennedy undertook a 1966 tour of South Africa in which he championed the cause of the anti-apartheid movement. The tour was greeted with international praise at a time when few politicians dared to entangle themselves in the politics of South Africa. Kennedy spoke out against the oppression of the native population and was welcomed by the black population as though a visiting head of state. In an interview with Look Magazine he had this to say: "At the University of Natal in Durban, I was told the church to which most of the white population belongs teaches apartheid as a moral necessity. A questioner declared that few churches allow black Africans to pray with the white because the Bible says that is the way it should be, because God created Negroes to serve. 'But suppose God is black', I replied. 'What if we go to Heaven and we, all our lives, have treated the Negro as an inferior, and God is there, and we look up and He is not white? What then is our response?' There was no answer. Only silence." In South Africa, a group of foreign press representatives chartered an aircraft, after the National Union of South African Students failed to make sufficient travel arrangements. Kennedy not only accommodated a suspected Special Branch policeman on board, but took with good grace the discovery that the aircraft had once belonged to Fidel Castro.
  
• 6/1966 issue of The Realist featured an editorial by Eric Norden criticizing fake establishment liberals for being more interested in power and status, justifying American military and economic imperialism, and preserving their delusional view of how America works, than looking for the hard truth about issues like the JFK assassination. "Liberals, however, do not even possess the one virtue of most fanatics: loyalty. Libs pursue their vendettas with vicious vigor, but they are equally prepared to jettison the ostensible object of their devotion when the transcendent interests of the power structure are threatened, as in the case of the Kennedy assassination. The grief of the libs at the loss of their young champion did not extend to a dedication to uncover the truth about his death; as soon as the indicators pointed, not to a lone assassin, but a well-organized conspiracy within agencies of the federal government, including the FBI and the CIA, the liberals looked the other way. JFK could be mourned, but not avenged; too many apple-carts would be upset in the process. At the upper-level of the Liberal Establishment there was a desperate effort, conscious and cynical, to cover up all traces of conspiracy and reassure the American people that all was still for the best in the best of all possible worlds…To even entertain the suspicion that elements of this most wondrous of all governments, whether in the intelligence networks or the political police, could band together to liquidate the presiding High Brahmin, and then coolly cover up their deeds, would shake the average liberal's neat and soothing assumptions about his world to their very roots. Such things could and do happen with depressing regularity in many other countries but never, never, of course, in America. Thus, those who challenged the Establishment's version of events were extremists' with one or another different axes to grind, perhaps paranoid and at the very least victims of a conspiratorial view of history.' History is not, of course, a succession of conspiracies; what liberals conveniently forgot was that there are conspiracies in history. The world, much less America, is not the tidy design of the League of Women Voters; it can happen here. But the blood of John Kennedy was a small price to pay for the preservation of liberal delusions."
  
• 6/1966 Captain Frank Martin dies this month. He was a Dallas police captain who witnessed the slaying of LHO by Jack Ruby. When he testified to the Warren Commission, he stated: "There's a lot to be said but probably be better if I don't say it." Cause of death: cancer.
  
• 6/1966 Edward Jay Epstein's Inquest is published.
  
• 6/1/1966 LBJ appoints Richard Helms as CIA Director.
  
• 6/3/1966 Hoover memo to Katzenbach: "there could be no possible doubt but that the Bureau was operating in this field [bugging] with the authorization of former Attornery General Robert F. Kennedy.."
  
• 6/3/1966 Gemini 9 mission with Stafford and Cernan (who made a two-hour space walk) took off; docking mission failed. Astronaut Eugene Cernan took a walk in space but his visor fogged up so badly he could barely see. The flight ended 6/6.
  
• 6/4/1966 LBJ's secretary Mildred Stegall told DeLoach that Johnson was disturbed about Katzenbach seeming to protect RFK in the Fred Black case. (6/6/1966 memo to Tolson)
  
• 6/5/1966 Sunday Times (London) reporter Nicholas Tomalin quoted Gen. James F. Hollingsworth, "There's no better way to fight than goin' out to shoot VCs. An' there's nothing I love better than killin' Cong. No sir."
  
• 6/5/1966 James Meredith, civil rights activist, was the target of a failed assassination attempt in Mississippi while on a march to register black voters. He was wounded by a sniper. One angry NYC young man, upon hearing the news, burned an American flag in protest; the Supreme Court would later rule 6-3 that this was protected free speech (Warren, Hugo Black and Byron White dissented).
  
• 6/5/1966 Following the May 29, 1966 Washington Post headline, a NY Times reporter was assigned to do a story on the emerging controversy. His story appeared on June 5not on page 1, but on page 42. The author of the piece, Peter Kihss, wrote one of the critics (Harold Weisberg): "With space limitations and national desk instructions, I am sorry that everything but the single-bullet hypothesis got forced out of the story."
  
• 6/6/1966 Cartha DeLoach talked with Marvin Watson, who shared in the desire to "put Katzenbach in his place...Watson told me that he had tried a number of times to make Ramsey Clark understand the fact that the Kennedys were poison...Clark has failed to find anything wrong with Bobby Kennedy. On occasions he has defended Kennedy.." (6/6 memo to Tolson)
  
• 6/6/1966 Robert F. Kennedy's most famous speech, delivered exactly two years before his death, at University of Capetown, Capetown, South Africa: "I came here because of my deep interest and affection for a land settled by the Dutch in the mid-seventeenth century, then taken over by the British, and at last independent; a land in which the native inhabitants were at first subdued, but relations with whom remain a problem to this day; a land which defined itself on a hostile frontier; a land which has tamed rich natural resources through the energetic application of modern technology; a land which once imported slaves, and now must struggle to wipe out the last traces of that former bondage. I refer, of course, to the United States of America."
  
• 6/7/1966 Hoover letter to Marvin Watson: "I personally deplore that this situation has arisen and has degenerated into an effort upon the part of the Attorney General to absolve...Kennedy from the responsibility of having knowledge of and having given authorization for the use of wire taps and microphones with trespass."
  
• 6/11/1966 McNamara announces that US troops in Vietnam now number 285,000. LBJ's approval rating in the Gallup Poll has dropped to 46% from 54% in May.
  
• 6/13/1966 Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in Miranda vs. Arizona case that criminal suspects must be read their rights before interrogation. Harlan, Stewart, White and Clark dissented. Police departments predictably were enraged: Garland, Texas police chief said, "We might as well close up shop." Los Angeles Mayor Sam Yorty called it "another set of handcuffs on the police department." J. Edgar Hoover provided notes to Sen. Robert Byrd for a speech condemning the decision. North Carolina Democrat Sam Ervin predicted that many guilty suspects would escape prosecution.
  
• 6/13/1966 A Texas state court, in a sanity hearing, found Jack Ruby to be sane.
  
• 6/13/1966 Some Unanswered Questions The Warren Commission Report: I Fred J. Cook The Nation, 13 June 1966, pages 705715
  
• 6/14/1966 DeLoach memo to Tolson on DeLoach's talk with Abe Fortas the previous day over the Black case; "Fortas stated that the entire matter boiled down to a continuing fight for the Presidency...He added that if facts, as possessed by the FBI, concerning Kennedy's approval of wiretapping were made known to the general public that it would serve to completely destroy Kennedy."
  
• 6/15/1966 DeLoach talked to Mildred Stegall, who told him that LBJ was glad the Black case had turned out this way: "This puts the finger on Bobby Kennedy where it belongs. Edgar certainly has the goods on Bobby." (6/15 memo to Tolson)
  
• 6/17/1966 James Cameron wrote in The New Statesman, "Nobody but the Americans could have invented a President who poses as a peasant to conceal the expert ruthlessness that conceals the fact that he is a peasant all the time."
  
• 6/19/1966 Australia: Arthur Calwell, head of the Labor party, was the target of an unsuccessful assassination attempt by Peter R. Kocan.
  
• 6/20/1966 Washington Post: "Repeated recommendations of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for a callup of reserves and declaration of a national emergency were rejected by the White House, Gen. Harold R. Johnson states, because of the "shivers and tremors" this would create around the world. Johnson, Army Chief of Staff, disclosed in testimony released by the Senate Preparedness Subcommittee yesterday, -that the JCS had recommended unanimously, last spring, last fall and again early this year, some recall of reserves and the declaration of an emergency permitting troops to be kept in uniform."
  
• 6/20/1966 Bell Telephone Laboratories demonstrates computer-animated movies.
  
• 6/20/1966 Testimony of the Eyewitnesses The Warren Commission Report: II Fred J. Cook The Nation, 20 June 1966, pages 737746
  
• 6/21/1966 NYT dispatch from Saigon: "The United States Air Force turned its attention yesterday to a column of 10 water buffalos sighted along a road just north of the Mugia Pass on the Laotian-North Vietnamese border. The spokesman said the buffalos were heavily laden with what was suspected to be enemy ammunition. The animals died under fire from F105 Thunderchief jets…United States Marine pilots also strafed a column of 11 pack elephants in the mountains 35 miles southwest of Danang…"
  
• 6/21/1966 The FBI wiretap on the SCLC headquarters in Atlanta was ended at Katzenbach's request.
  
• 6/22/1966 DeLoach memo to Tolson; Sen. Long had warned Katzenbach that unless the whole Black affair was straightened out, he might have to call everyone before Congress for hearings. Katzenbach was upset at this idea; "Senator Long...got quite a chuckle out of [this]...He of course had no intention of calling the Director or the Attorney General, however, he felt that his conversation this morning and his letter would put the 'fear of God' in the Attorney General. He...would follow this matter closely."
  
• 6/23/1966 McNamara told Harriman that a military solution was impossible and negotiation was the only way out.
  
• 6/24/1966 Briefs on the appeal of Jack Ruby's death sentence are filed by defense counsel and the State of Texas.
  
• 6/24/1966 DeLoach memo to Tolson revealed that LBJ wanted to get the facts of the Black case public in such a way so that "Kennedy will be seriously injured, as far as the left wing is concerned...Watson stated the President was most anxious to see that the Director not get hurt in connection with this matter..."
  
• 6/25/1966 Rostow wrote LBJ: "Mr. President, you can smell it all over: Hanoi's operation, backed by the Chicoms, is no longer being regarded as the wave of the future...We're not in, but we're moving."
  
• 6/28/1966 Dean Rusk wrote in a memo that "the situation has reached the point where North Vietnam cannot succeed."
  
• 6/28/1966 Argentina: President Arturo Umberto Illia was ousted by the military.
  
• 6/29/1966 Richard Helms is sworn in as Director of CIA, and is highly praised by LBJ. He was the first career intelligence man to head the agency. Supporters praised Helms for being a non-political, professional, non-ideological technocrat. (Wise, Espionage Establishment)
  
• 6/29/1966 US begins bombing oil facilities in Hanoi and Haiphong. Lodge cabled that "the military side of this war is going well...This means that the real danger - and the only real danger - would be in the American people were to lose heart and chose to 'bring the boys home.' This would indeed be the first domino to fall." Forty-six planes from USS Constellation and USS Rangerstrike oil storage plants on the outskirts of Hanoi and Haiphong.
  
• 6/30/1966 Earl Warren told James Feron of the NY Times: "We wrote our [Warren Commission] report - it was the best we could do after ten months of intensive research - and we delivered to the National Archives every document that we had, every working paper and the differences of opinion in staff and ourselves as we went along...that was our conclusion, it was unanimous, it was the best work we could do in ten months."