Deep Politics Timeline

[Tracy Riddle]

• 11/1973 a severe recession in US begins, triggered by tight money and the OPEC oil shock; economy declines by 4.3%, industrial production by almost 15%. Unemployment would reach a peak of 9.1%; this was the worst downturn since the Depression.
  
• 11/1973 Jack Cleveland, a partner of Nixon's brother Donald, died; he was to have been questioned about a possible payoff to Howard Hughes.
  
• 11/1973 Andrew St. George article in Harper's ("The Cold War Comes Home") claimed that Richard Helms found out about the Watergate break-in when a CIA watch officer at Langely called him at 7am on 6/17/1972. Later, when questioned by the Senate, he was unable to verify his account in any way.
  
• 11/1973 William Colby told reporters and editors from the New York Times and the Washington Star that the Agency had "some three dozen" American newsmen "on the CIA payroll," including five who worked for "general-circulation news organizations." Yet even while the Senate Intelligence Committee was holding its hearings in 1976, according to high-level CIA sources, the CIA continued to maintain ties with seventy-five to ninety journalists of every descriptionexecutives, reporters, stringers, photographers, columnists, bureau clerks and members of broadcast technical crews. More than half of these had been moved off CIA contracts and payrolls but they were still bound by other secret agreements with the Agency. According to an unpublished report by the House Select Committee on Intelligence, chaired by Representative Otis Pike, at least fifteen news organizations were still providing cover for CIA operatives as of 1976. (Carl Bernstein)
  
• 11/1/1973 Nomination hearings into the approval of Ford as VP began.
  
• 11/1/1973 Nixon appointed Leon Jaworski as Watergate special prosecutor.
  
• 11/1/1973 Alfred Baldwin appeared in executive session testimony before the Ervin Committee.
  
• 11/2/1973 ACLU printed a full-page ad in major newspapers: "Stand Up for Law and Order: Impeach Richard Nixon."
  
• 11/3/1973 Martha Mitchell told the UP that Nixon would have to quit in early 1974, and she confirmed that her marriage to John Mitchell "was over." But she never gave up on the idea that her husband had been framed.
  
• 11/3/1973 Two White House lawyers recommend that Nixon resign.
  
• 11/4/1973 GOP Sen. Edward Brooke publicly calls for Nixon's resignation, as do editorials in Time, the New York Times, and the Detroit News.
  
• 11/5/1973 During his confirmation hearings, Gerald Ford was asked about using excerpts from the top secret 1/27/1964 Warren Commission transcript in his book, Portrait of the Assassin. His reply was an utter falsehood.
  
• 11/5/1973 Newsweek commented, "Comet Kohoutek promises to be the celestial extravaganza of the century." Actually, at its closest approach to Earth, it was nearly invisible.
  
• 11/5/1973 Leon Jaworski is sworn in as Special Prosecutor. [Jaworski was present when Earl Warren and Gerald Ford questioned Jack Ruby in jail.] Nixon had tried to hire John J. McCloy as Special Prosecutor for Watergate. [McCloy was a member of the Warren Commission]
  
• 11/6/1973 Nixon wrote Sirica expressing his concern over the impression that there are two missing tapes: "there are no missing tapes. The two conversations in question were a 5-minute telephone conversation with John Mitchell on the evening of June 20 and a conversation with John Dean in the EOB on the evening of April 15. These conversations were not recorded for purely mechanical reasons..."
  
• 11/7/1973 Congress overrode Nixon's veto of the War Powers Act, limiting the president's power to place American troops in foreign combat situations; many Republicans joined in the override. The Act required congressional approval for commitment of US forces in combat for longer than 60 days.
  
• 11/7/1973 Nixon addresses the nation by television on the energy crisis; he proposes year-round daylight savings time and relaxation of environmental standards to ease energy demands.
  
• 11/7/1973 US and Egypt announce resumption of diplomatic relations.
  
• 11/9/1973 Six of the Watergate defendants, including Hunt and Liddy, are sentenced by Sirica.
  
• 11/9/1973 Philadelphia Inquirer reported Sen. Goldwater's views on UFOs: "I've been flying now for 44 years, and I'm the last guy that's going to say I don't believe they're up there. I've never seen one, but when Air Force pilots, Navy pilots, Airline pilots tell me they see something come up on their wing that wasn't an airplane, I have to believe them."
  
• 11/13/1973 Plans for a trans-Alaska oil pipeline were approved by Congress.
  
• 11/13/1973 Gulf Oil and Ashland Oil plead guilty to illegal contributions to Nixon's reelection fund.
  
• 11/14/1973 Released in November 1973, near the tenth anniversary of the Kennedy assassination, EXECUTIVE ACTION is often overlooked as a film because of Oliver Stone's extraordinarily controversial 1991 film JFK. It obviously doesn't have the high-budget gloss or the montage that Stone's film does, but what it does have is a hard-hitting inside look into the individuals who might have had a direct hand in plotting this hideous crime. Burt Lancaster, Robert Ryan (in one of his final movies), and Will Geer are the conspirators, right-wing businessmen with an axe to grind. As in Stone's film, the motivations for the assassination are disgust with the way Kennedy handled Fidel Castro and the possibility that he would have stopped our involvement in Vietnam before it ever got to the ground troop stage. Based on Mark Lane's book "Rush To Judgement", scripted by former blacklisted writer Dalton Trumbo, and directed by David Miller (LONELY ARE THE BRAVE), EXECUTIVE ACTION is very somber and cold-blooded, but superbly constructed. It is amazing to think that three actors with ultra-liberal political credentials like Lancaster, Ryan, and Geer should be so icily convincing in their portrayals of fascists. The film makes very plausible the banality of evil. And like JFK, it also blows holes in the Warren Commission report big enough to drive a truck through and make apologists like Gerald Posner apoplectic.
  
• 11/14/1973 Commerce Sec. Stans admits that major corporations were expected to donate money to Nixon's reelection.
  
• 11/14/1973 Fred Buzhardt is granted access to the White House tapes. White House lawyers learn of the 18-minute gap in the 6/20/1972 tape.
  
• 11/15/1973 Ford testified before the House Judiciary Committee in nomination hearings.
  
• 11/15/1973 Braniff International, American Airlines and Goodyear admit to illegal donations to Nixon's reelection fund.
  
• 11/15/1973 Haig finally told Nixon about the 18.5 minute gap on the tape.
  
• 11/16/1973 Department of State, Chilean Executions, November 16, 1973: This memo, sent to the Secretary of State by Jack Kubisch, states that summary executions in the nineteen days following the coup totaled 320--more than three times the publicly acknowledged figure. At the same time, Kubisch reports on new economic assistance just authorized by the Nixon administration. The memo provides information about the Chilean military's justification for the continued executions. It also includes a situation report and human rights fact sheet on Chile.
  
• 11/16/1973 Nixon signs the Alaska Pipeline Bill to build a 789-mile pipeline across Alaska to carry oil to the rest of the US; it was opposed by environmental groups.
  
• 11/17/1973 Student uprising at Athens Polytechnic; police killed dozens.
  
• 11/17/1973 In a televised interview at the AP Managing Editors Association convention in Florida, Nixon said, "People have got to know whether or not their President is a crook. Well, I'm not a crook."
  
• 11/18/1973 In a NY Times book review, Priscilla and George McMillan praised Belin's You Are the Jury, a defense of the Warren Commission.
  
• 11/19/1973 Buzhardt returned certain unspecified tapes to the White House vault.
  
• 11/20/1973 Senate Rules Committee unanimously approved Ford's confirmation as VP.
  
• 11/20/1973 Buzhardt told Haig that he could find "no innocent explanation" for the 18.5 minute gap.
  
• 11/21/1973 The 18.5 minute gap is made known by the White House to Sirica and the public in court; Sirica appoints an advisory panel of experts to study the tapes.
  
• 11/22/1973 Priscilla McMillan wrote an article on the aniversary of the JFK assassination (NY Times); she described the WR as "the most completely documented story of a crime every put together....its mountain of positive evidence has yet to be refuted...The assassination of President Kennedy was a parricide...Oswald, it is true, lacked a father...Oswald had the Oedipal emotions. Like most people, and all neurotics, he failed to resolve them...he chose to enact the unresolved part of the drama - violently...We hold onto conspiracy theories because they are a defense, a screen, a barrier, against having to accept those feelings in ourselves."
  
• 11/22/1973 Researcher Alan Weberman sponsored a demonstration in front of the National Archives in Washington. The demonstrators demanded that all the documents that concerned the Kennedy assassination be released. Folksinger Phil Ochs attended the rally.
  
• 11/22/1973 Eugene McCarthy warned against a rush to impeachment because of the effect it would have on the conduct of foreign policy "which, with Henry Kissinger as Secretary of State, has been as good or better than what might have been supported by recent Democratic Presidents and candidates." (Village Voice)
  
• 11/22/1973 Billy Graham told the press that Americans should pray for Nixon, since "in all probability, Mr. Nixon will be the only president we have for the next three years."
  
• 11/22/1973 President Nixon's secretary, Rose Mary Woods, faces possible prosecution for erasing a critical portion of one of Nixon's tapes reportedly dealing with the assassination of JFK. She hires Charles Rhyne, a personal friend of Nixon, who was an official observer in monitoring the Warren investigation and advising on the individual rights of various witnesses.
  
• 11/23/1973 Argo 16 was the codename of an Italian Air Force C-47 Dakota aircraft, registration MM61832, used by the Italian Secret Service and the Central Intelligence Agency in covert operations. Officially, those operations were limited to electronic surveillance on the Adriatic Sea and interference with the Yugoslavian radar network. The aircraft crashed on November 23, 1973 at Marghera, Italy after an improvised explosive device detonated on board. Venetian Judge Carlo Mastelloni determined that the Argo 16 aircraft was used to shuttle trainees and munitions of NATO members between the military bases around Italy: the aircraft had been involved in unclear operations, as the repatriation of terrorists and transport of secret service agents. The explosion and the subsequent crash killed the four operatives onboard. There are many conspiracy theories surrounding this crash. Some believe that the aircraft was used by CIA in the Cold War conflict. According to a December 1, 1990 article in The Independent, quoted by Statewatch, "General Geraldo Serraville, head of Gladio from 1971 to 1974, told a television programme that he now thought the explosion aboard the plane Argo 16 on 23 November 1973 was probably the work of gladiatori who were refusing to hand over their clandestine arms. Until then it was widely believed the sabotage was carried out by Mossad, the Israeli foreign service, in retaliation for the pro-Libyan Italian government's decision to expel, rather than try, five Arabs who had tried to blow up an Israeli airliner. The Arabs had been spirited out of the country on board the Argo 16."
  
• 11/25/1973 Haig told Nick Thimmesch that he had experience with every part of government, "even the judicial process [sic] when I was with Bobby Kennedy during the Cuban missile crisis." He had been a briefing and liaison officer at that time. He bragged of sitting "at McNamara's right hand." (Washington Post)
  
• 11/27/1973 Senate voted to confirm Ford by 92 to 3 (Sens. Thomas Eagleton, William Hathaway, Gaylord Nelson).
  
• 11/27/1973 Rose Mary Woods testifies about accidentally erasing about 5 minutes of the 6/20/1972 tape while transcribing it.
  
• 11/27/1973 AP report: Navy Captain John W. Young, an astronaut aboard the Apollo 16 mission, and the 9th American on the moon commented: "If you bet against it [UFOs], you'd be betting against an almost sure thing. There are so many stars that it's mathematically improbable that there aren't other life sources in the universe."
  
• 11/28/1973 Washington Post quoted Haig telling Laurence Stern that the outcome of Watergate would be "to restore a sense of confidence in the office of the presidency...I'm not interested in politics, but I might well be interested in continued public service."
  
• 11/29/1973 NYT printed result of a Gallup Poll which showed that 57% of Americans believe UFOs are real.
  
• 11/30/1973 Buzhardt obtained the same batch of tapes from the White House vault as before, at 1:25pm, and returned them at 6pm that day.
  
• 11/30 or 12/1/1973 Egil Krogh Jr. pleaded guilty in the burglary of the office of Ellsberg's psychiatrist.
  
• 11/30/1973 Mark Lane tells us, "On November 30, 1973, it was revealed that the CIA had forty full-time news reporters on the CIA payroll as undercover informants, some of them as full-time agents." Lane adds, "It seems clear than an agent-journalist is really an agent, not a journalist." In 1973, the American press was able to secure just two of the forty names in the CIA file of journalists. The Washington Star and the Washington Post reported that one of the two was Jeremiah O'Leary. (Murder in Memphis)
  
• 11/30/1973 Nixon administration admits studying the legality of sending US bombers back into action over Vietnam, but pledged to take no action without "consulting" Congress.
  
• 12/1973 Nixon signed into law Endangered Species Act.
  
• 12/1973 Oregon takes the first steps towards decriminalization of cannabis. For the next 25 years, possession of up to one ounce of marijuana is considered the equivalent of a misdemeanor, with no criminal record for those caught in possession.
  
• 12/1973 AP reported 1/1/2004: LONDON - British spy chiefs warned after the 1973 Arab-Israeli war that they believed the United States might invade Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Abu Dhabi to seize their oil fields, according to records released Thursday. A British intelligence committee report from December 1973 said America was so angry over Arab nations' earlier decision to cut oil production and impose an embargo on the United States that seizing oil-producing areas in the region was "the possibility uppermost in American thinking." Details of the Joint Intelligence Committee report were released under rules requiring that some secret documents be made public after 30 years. The report suggested that then-President Nixon might risk such a drastic move if Arab-Israeli fighting reignited and the oil-producing nations imposed new restrictions. The 1973 embargo and production cuts, used by oil-rich Arab nations as a means to pressure the United States and Western Europe, caused a major global energy crisis and sent oil prices skyrocketing. The committee of intelligence service directors calculated that the United States could guarantee sufficient oil supplies for themselves and their allies by taking oil fields in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Abu Dhabi, with total reserves of more than 28 billion tons. It warned however that the American occupation would need to last 10 years, as western nations developed alternative energy sources, and would lead to the "total alienation" of Arab states and many developing countries, as well as "domestic dissension" in the United States. Other records released Thursday showed that Prime Minister Edward Heath was furious at Nixon over the American president's failure to tell him he was putting U.S. forces on a worldwide alert during the 1973 Arab-Israeli war. Heath learned of the alert considered a high point in Cold War tensions from news reports while he waited in the House of Commons for Foreign Secretary Alec Douglas-Home to make a statement on the Middle East crisis. Britain's intelligence listening post, Government Communications Headquarters, had learned of the alert but did not tell Heath's office or the Foreign Office because officials assumed Heath and Douglas-Home already knew about it, the papers showed. Nixon said he put U.S. troops on high alert for just under a week, starting on Oct. 25, 1973, to show the Soviet Union that America would not allow it to send military forces to aid Arab states fighting Israel. The alert covered U.S. forces stationed in Britain, and Heath wrote in a memo that he thought Nixon's move, which came in the midst of the Watergate scandal, had been deeply damaging. "Personally I fail to see how any initiative, threatened or real, by the Soviet leadership required such a world wide nuclear alert," the prime minister wrote. "We have to face the fact that the American action has done immense harm, I believe, both in this country and worldwide."
  
• US 1973 defense budget was 30% of the federal budget. Inflation rate for the year was 8.8%
  
• 12/1/1973 The AP reported that more than three dozen US journalists in foreign countries were doubling as CIA spies; most of them were free-lance writers.
  
• 12/1/1973 Buzhardt requested and received nine tapes from the White House vault. He later told Clark Mollenhoff that all of these comings and goings had nothing to do with Ford's confirmation hearings. (The Man Who Pardoned Nixon 280)
  
• 12/4/1973 Chicago Seven case: Dellinger, Hoffman, Rubin and their attorney William Kunstler were convicted of contempt of court, but no sentence was imposed.
  
• 12/5/1973 Nixon asks Arlen Specter to head his legal defense team. Specter met with Haig to discuss the situation, but Specter turned the job down. (Philadelphia Bulletin) Specter is a former Democrat and Warren Commission staffer. Specter is the protégé of John Mitchell and served as Co-Chairman of the Pennsylvania CREEP in 1972.
  
• 12/1973 Also during this month Beverly Kay, who works for the Secret Service in the White House, dies of a "massive stroke" at the age of forty-two. She dies in the White House. Her job, among other things, is to store the tape recordings which the Secret Service has made of President Nixon. She has been telling her friends what she thinks about the culpability of Nixon and his aides from what she has heard on the tapes.
  
• 12/5/1973 Haig testified in Sirica's court about the 18.5 minute gap; he explained that "perhaps some sinister force had come in and...taken care of the information on that tape."
  
• 12/6/1973 House voted to confirm Ford as VP 387 to 35. Later in the day, Ford is sworn in.
  
• 12/6/1973 Nixon signs a bill providing a 10% cost-of-living boost to the monthly pension benefits of veterans and their dependents.
  
• 12/6/1973 Haig testified about the possible causes of the 18.5 minute gap on the tape, saying that White House lawyers had considered it possible that it was caused by "some sinister force."
  
• 12/6/1973 Daniel Ellsberg interview in Rolling Stone; he recalled that RFK told him in 1967 that the Kennedys were "determined early that we would never get into that position [of the French in Vietnam]." He also said that in 1964 John McNaughton informed him that McNamara "had told him of an understanding with President Kennedy that they would close out Vietnam by '65, whether it was in good shape or bad." RFK told Ellsberg that his brother would have arranged "a Laotian type solution, some form of coalition government with people who would ask us to leave."
  
• 12/7/1973 The AP reported that internal FBI memos showed that the Bureau launched a campaign to disrupt the New Left from 5/1968 to 4/1971.
  
• 12/7/1973 Ford announced that there was "no evidence that would justify impeachment."
  
• 12/8/1973 Nixon revealed that he had paid less than $1000 in taxes in 1970 and 1971.
  
• 12/8/1973 Dorothy Hunt, wife of E. Howard Hunt, dies in a mysterious crash of United Airlines - flight # 553 - in Chicago. She is reputedly carrying a large amount of money -- in excess of $100,000. The plane takes off from Washington National Airport for Chicago. There are sixty-one people and six crew members on the plane, a Boeing 737. With Dorothy Hunt is Michelle Clark of CBS. Michelle Clark "had learned from her inside sources that the Hunts might be getting ready to blow the White House out of the water, and that before Howard Hunt was hung out to twist slowly in the breeze he would bring down every tree in the forest." The plane crashes at 2:29 PM, and from that moment on, the FBI is in charge of the crash site for the first time in history. (The FBI office is forty minutes away from the crash site.) Immediately after the crash, even before the fire department arrives, over 200 FBI and DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency) men come in and take over the area. None show credentials when asked by local police or anyone. The head of the NTSB, John Reed, testifies that he complained to the FBI because FBI agents had taken over their job in the crash and were interviewing people before the NTSB could, and also listened to the tower tapes before anyone else, and then confiscated the tapes. Independent researcher Sherman Skolnick believes that Dorothy Hunt was also carrying documents that link Nixon to the Kennedy assassination. According to Skolnick these papers, which are being used to blackmail Nixon, are immediately seized by the FBI. One day after the plane crash, White House aide Egil Krough is appointed Undersecretary of Transportation. This gives him direct control over the National Transportation Safety Board and the Federal Aviation Administration -- the two agencies that are in charge of investigating the crash. Soon Dwight Chapin, Nixon's Appointment Secretary, becomes a top executive at United Airlines. (Dorothy is on a United carrier when she makes her ill-fated journey.)
  
• 12/10-11/1973 Kissinger attends the annual NATO winter ministerial meeting in Brussels.
  
• 12/11/1973 Rockefeller resigns as governor of New York.
  
• 12/13/1973 Gore Vidal wrote in NY Review of Books about the idea that Howard Hunt might have forged Arthur Bremer's diaries. "Although H.H. is a self-admitted forger of state papers, I do not think that he actually had a hand in writing Bremer's diary on the ground that the journal is a brilliant if flawed piece of work, and beyond H.H.'s known literary competence." His views on the JFK assassination: "the only Cuban group that would be entirely satisfied by Kennedy's death would be the right-wing enemies of Castro who held Kennedy responsible for their humiliation at the Bay of Pigs...setting up Oswald as a pro-Castro, pro-Moscow agent, they might be able to precipitate some desperate international crisis that would serve their cause. Certainly Castro at this date had no motive for killing Kennedy...I suspect that whoever planned the murder must have been astonished at the reaction of the American establishment...The fact that Bobby Kennedy accepted the Warren Report was proof to most people (myself among them) that Oswald acted alone. It was not until several years later that I learned from a member of the family that...[Bobby] refused to look at any of the FBI reports or even speculate on what might have happened in Dallas. Too shaken up, I was told...Most intriguing is Richard H. Popkin's theory that there were two Oswalds." (NY Review of Books 12/13/1973)
  
• 12/13/1973 FBI internal memo: "The only information we furnish to that [Watergate] Committee is the opportunity to review FD-302s of interviews conducted during the McCord investigation. Such FD-302s must be specified by the name of the person interviewed and are made available only for review, not copying." (Secret Agenda pxvii)
  
• 12/13/1973 Rev. Jim Jones was arrested and charged with soliciting a man for sex in a movie theater bathroom known for homosexual activity, in MacArthur Park in Los Angeles.
  
• 12/13/1973 Earl Warren, in a speech before the National Press Club, he described Watergate as "conduct debasing our institutions" and "a debacle, the great tragedy of our time...cancerous to the body politic."
  
• 12/15/1973 The American Psychiatric Association declared that homosexuality was not a mental illness, reversing its century-old position.
  
• 12/15/1973 Commerce Sec. Frederick Dent, at a GOP rally, called Nixon's critics "political jackals who worked tooth and claw to defeat him in 1972 and are now trying to reverse the decision of 45 million American voters. They are the people who would violate the sanctity of the ballot box, who would subvert the democratic electoral process..."
  
• 12/16/1973 Runoff election in New Orleans; Jim Garrison narrowly lost the District Attorney's race.
  
• 12/16/1973 Gallup poll showed that 54% of Americans were against Nixon leaving the presidency; his overall approval rating was 31%.
  
• 12/22/1973 The 93rd Congress ends its first session.
  
• 12/22/1973 After a meeting with the President, Zumwalt recorded in a memo, "The President is paranoid. Kissinger's paranoid. Haig is paranoid." Nixon saw himself as the victim of the "eastern liberal establishment...a vast plot by intellectual snobs to destroy a president who was representative of the man in the street." (On Watch)
  
• 12/22/1973 Haig visited Sen. Hugh Scott to quell congressional demands for the presidential tapes. Again Haig assured him that the 3/21/1973 recording would prove Nixon's innocence. (Washington Post 12/19/1980)
  
• 12/24/1973 Jim Garrison charged that irregular voting led to his narrow loss in the Democratic runoff election the week before. (UPI) 12/26 a judge dismissed Garrison's charges.
  
• 12/27/1973 James Earl Ray filed a $500,000 damage suit against Tennessee officials, claiming he was wrongfully imprisoned for a crime he didn't commit; his former attorney, Percy Foreman, explained, "I think he's stir crazy. He has a disorganized mind." (UPI)
  
• 12/27/1973 Howard Hughes, who was in the Bahamas, was indicted on charges of stock manipulation. Robert Maheu, Chester C. Davis, David B. Charnay and James H. Nall were also indicted.
  
• 12/28/1973 Nixon signs a comprehensive manpower training and jobs bill.
  
• 12/29/1973 Nixon signs the Health Maintenance Organization (HMO) Act.
  
• 12/31/1973 Knesset election in Israel: Golda Meir's Labor party won 51 seats, and Likud, led by Menachem Begin, 39.