Deep Politics Timeline

[Tracy Riddle]

• 11/1975 In the Chicago Independent, Edwin Black writes about a plot in Chicago in early November 1963 to kill JFK. Edwin Black - a reporter for The Chicago Independent, traces Thomas Arthur Vallee to a trailer park outside Houston, Texas. (Vallee was arrested on Nov. 2, 1963 based on an a tip that he was going to try to assassinate JFK during the President's visit to Chicago, Illinois.) When asked what happened on Nov. 2nd, Vallee replied: "Soldier Field, the plot against John F. Kennedy, I was arrested." He denied threatening JFK, saying he had been framed.
  
• 11/1975 a Senate subcommittee, which was charged with investigating the CIA's assassination plots, uncovered the details of Kennedy's affair with Judith Campbell Exner. Although it comprised just a small footnote, which was buried deep into the report, it was nevertheless exposed by Republicans.
  
• 11/1975 CBS interview with Dan Rather, LBJ aide Joseph Califano said that Johnson "used to say that - that he thought in time, when all the activities of the CIA were flushed out and when - then - then maybe the whole story of the Kennedy assassination would be known." Califano, former director of RFK's Cuban Coordinating Committee, will recall that "on more than one occasion" LBJ expressed "a very strong opinion, almost a conviction," that Kennedy's death was a "response and retaliation" by Fidel Castro.
  
• 11/1975 Ford sent a letter to Sen. Church asking him not to make his panel's assassination report public because it would "do grevious damage to our country" and be "exploited by foreign nations and groups hostile to the United States." Church replied that it had always been the panel's intention to make the report public and felt the country would be "better served by letting the American people know the true and complete story" behind the plots. (Profiles of an Era 126)
  
• 11/2/1975 Ford fires William Colby as CIA director. Schlesinger resigns, Kissinger gives up NSC post. Ford appoints George Herbert Walker Bush to the post.
  
• 11/2/1975 Australian PM Edward Gough Whitlam charged that the CIA was funding the right-wing opposition Country Party.
  
• 11/3/1975 Rockefeller withdrew his name from consideration as Ford's running-mate in 1976. Partly this was because of criticism of him by Rep. Bo Callaway (R-Georgia), who was in charge of Ford's campaign.
  
• 11/4/1975 Ford instituted a shakeup among his National Security officers; Colby and Schlesinger were replaced with George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld. Scowcroft became Assistant for National Security Affairs. Dick Cheney becomes White House chief of staff. Reagan would later jab at Ford that he had "fired the wrong Secretary," meaning he should have fired Kissinger. Polls in mid November showed that GOP voters preferred Reagan over Ford 40-32%. President Ford fires a number of Nixon holdovers and replaces them with "my guys… my own team," both to show his independence and to prepare for a bruising 1976 primary battle with Ronald Reagan. The wholesale firings and reshufflings are dubbed the "Halloween Massacre." Donald Rumsfeld becomes secretary of defense, replacing James Schlesinger. George H. W. Bush replaces William Colby as director of the CIA. Henry Kissinger remains secretary of state, but his position as national security adviser is given to Brent Scowcroft. Dick Cheney, Rumsfeld's deputy chief of staff, moves up to become the youngest chief of staff in White House history. Perhaps the most controversial decision is to replace Nelson Rockefeller as Ford's vice-presidential candidate for the 1976 elections. Ford's shake-up is widely viewed as his cave-in to Republican Party hardliners. He flounders in his defense of his new staffers: for example, when Senator Barry Goldwater (R-AZ) asks him why he thinks Rumsfeld is qualified to run the Pentagon, Ford replies, "He was a pilot in the Korean War." The ultimate winner in the shake-up is Rumsfeld, who instigated the moves from behind the scenes and gains the most from them. Rumsfeld quickly wins a reputation in Washington as a political opportunist, gunning for the vice presidency in 1976 and willing to do whatever is necessary to get it. Rockefeller tells Ford: "Rumsfeld wants to be president of the United States. He has given George Bush the deep six by putting him in the CIA, he has gotten me out.… He was third on your [vice-presidential] list (see August 16-17, 1974) and now he has gotten rid of two of us.… You are not going to be able to put him on the [ticket] because he is defense secretary, but he is not going to want anybody who can possibly be elected with you on that ticket.… I have to say I have a serious question about his loyalty to you." Later, Ford will write of his sharp regret in pushing Rockefeller off the ticket: "I was angry at myself for showing cowardice in not saying to the ultraconservatives: It's going to be Ford and Rockefeller, whatever the consequences." [Werth, 2006, pp. 340-341] "It was the biggest political mistake of my life," Ford later says. "And it was one of the few cowardly things I did in my life." [US Senate, 7/7/2007]
  
• 11/4/1975 US embassy in Australia told the government there that the CIA was not in any way involved in aiding any political parties.
  
• 11/6/1975 William Colby testified before the House Select Committee on Intelligence that in 1964 a CIA official attached to the NSC prepared campaign material for LBJ and, with the help of another CIA employee, got advance texts of Goldwater's speeches; the official was identified as Chester Cooper, who was then an asst deputy director of intelligence. The other employee was a female secretary; no mention was made of Hunt. (It Didn't Start With Watergate 172)
  
• 11/6/1975 Whitlam repeated the charge that the CIA was interfering in Australian politics.
  
• 11/7/1975 Colby denied any CIA interference in Australian politics.
  
• 11/7/1975 Remote electronic sensors at Malmstrom AFB (home of more than 20 Minuteman missiles), indicated that something had violated site security. Two officers who were monitoring the signals called site security who in turn dispatched a helicopter and a Sabotage Alert Team (SAT) to investigate. As the SAT team approached the area in question they could see an orange, glowing object. As they slowly closed in they could see that the object was tremendous in size. They radioed to the Launch Control Facility and informed them that they were witnessing a brightly glowing, orange, football field-size disc. The SAT were ordered to proceed but they refused to do so. The object started to rise slowly and when it reached about 1000ft it was picked up on radar by NORAD. As a result 2 F-106 jet interceptors were launched. As the jets approached the object shot away vertically and was lost from radar at about 200,000 feet. The operators at the Launch Control facility noticed that the missiles were indicating that they had been tampered with. After a series of checks it was established that all the missiles had had their target co-ordinates changed! As a result of this investigation, another incident at Malmstrom was uncovered. During the week of March 20th 1967 a flight of 10 missiles developed problems as their flight path came within a short distance of a UFO which was being tracked on radar. FOIA requests for more information have been refused.
  
• 11/8/1975 CIA reported to Ford, "The determination of the Australian opposition to force a general election is weakening. Prime Minister Whitlam has managed to raise real alarm about the dire consequences of government bankruptcy, which he claims will result from the opposition's blocking of government appropriations."
  
• 11/8/1975 CIA's Ted Shackley reported to Australia's intelligence agency, ASIO, that the CIA was gravely concerned about the actions of Whitlam. (Crimes of Patriots)
  
• 11/10/1975 UN General Assembly, in one of its most controversial actions, adopts resolution calling Zionism a form of racism.
  
• 11/11/1975 Australia: PM Edward Whitlam is removed from office by Governor-General John Kerr. The 1975 Australian constitutional crisis, commonly called The Dismissal, refers to the events that culminated with the removal of Australia's then Prime Minister, Gough Whitlam, by Governor-General Sir John Kerr and appointing the Leader of the Opposition Malcolm Fraser as caretaker Prime Minister. The PM had charged that the CIA was funding his right-wing political opposition. Nov 8 CIA reported to Ford, "The determination of the Australian opposition to force a general election is weakening. Prime Minister Whitlam has managed to raise real alarm about the dire consequences of government bankruptcy, which he claims will result from the opposition's blocking of government appropriations." CIA's Ted Shackley reported to Australia's intelligence agency, ASIO, that the CIA was gravely concerned about the actions of Whitlam. (Crimes of Patriots)
  
• 11/11/1975 Senate JFK Subcommittee Chairman Schweiker decides Church Committee staff is focusing investigation in possible Castro involvement in assassination, decides involvement of CIA with anti-Castro groups also needs probing, and puts Gaeton Fonzi on staff to pursue leads in Miami's Little Havana. (Fonzi chronology)
  
• 11/12/1975 Gov. George Wallace joins the race for the Democratic presidential nomination.
  
• 11/12/1975 William O. Douglas retires from the Supreme Court after 36 years.
  
• 11/12/1975 Memo from Robert Teeter and Stu Spencer to Richard Cheney concerning the upcoming Ford campaign: "We have for the past year and undoubtedly will be for the next year, dealing with an electorate that is more alienated and more cynical than at any point in modern time. These feelings of alienation and cynicism are directed at all major institutions...The common evil most people see in our institutions is their size. Bigness is again and again mentioned as what is wrong. As the society has gotten larger and more complex, individuals have lost their ability to influence any of the institutions that affect their lives...We badly need to find some positions and issues where the President can violate his stereotype as a classic Republican. The problem is every position or statement he has made recently has been something that would have been expected from a Republican President...The President needs to set forth in a major speech sometime soon his idea for what the destiny of the country is and how his programs relates to it. I think the backbone of this theme ought to be anti-bigness. He ought to be against big government, big unions, big businesses, big school systems and the concentration of power in general...Detente is a particularly unpopular idea with most Republican primary voters and the word is worse. We ought to stop using the word whenever possible...the endorsement of respected conservative Repulican officeholders and politicians is particularly important at this time as to destroy Reagan's credibility as a loyal Republican."
  
• 11/14/1975 Ford signed legislation raising the ceiling on the national debt to $595 billion.
  
• 11/14/1975 Kissinger announces that US is prepared to hold talks with Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia about normalizing relations.
  
• 11/14/1975 Cuban troops save the MPLA government in Angola by defeating an invading South African army.
  
• 11/15/1975 Ford to Paris for economic summit.
  
• 11/16/1975 Washington Post leaked the identity of Judith Campbell Exner four days before the Senate Committee on Intelligence released its report.
  
• 11/17/1975 US News & World Report published the results of a poll of members of the Democratic National Committee. They were asked who they thought would be the Democratic Presidential nominee in 1976. Humphrey was number one with 49%, Henry Jackson number two at 14%, and Jimmy Carter a distant last at 3%.
  
• 11/19/1975 Jack Anderson disclosed details of the CIA's spying operation against him; he identified the CIA operation under the agency's code name, Project Mudhen. He said Project Mudhen was terminated after he sent "my Katzenjammer paparazzi" (his nine children armed with cameras) to take pictures of CIA agents who watched him.
  
• 11/20/1975 Church Committee reports that American officials plotted to kill, through the CIA, two foreign leaders and were involved in plots to kill three others. They also used organized crime figures in some of these plots. This is the first time a congressional investigation has ever determined that assassination was employed as an instrument of US foreign policy. The CIA had plotted the assassinations of at least five foreign leaders, including "concrete evidence of at least eight plots involving the CIA to assassinate Fidel Castro from 1960-1965" which used "assassination devices [that] ran the gamut from high-powered rifles to poison pills, poison pens, deadly bacterial powders, and other devices which strain the imagination." In his memoirs, Lyndon Johnson had written: "We were aware of stories that Castro...only lately accusing us of sending CIA agents into the country to assassinate him, was the perpetrator of the Oswald assassination plot. These rumors were another compelling reason that a thorough study had to be made of the Dallas tragedy at once." (The Vantage Point p26)
  
• 11/20/1975 Ronald Reagan announces his candidacy for the GOP presidential nomination
  
• 11/20/1975 Ford announces he is waiting for NYC and New York state to take "concrete action" before giving aid.
  
• 11/21/1975 Richard Case Nagell wrote back to Rep. Edwards, sending him an affidavit that he had sent a letter to Hoover that warned of a plot involving Oswald to kill JFK, probably in Washington DC, somewhere between 9/26 and 9/29/1963. Nagell signed the letter to Hoover using an alias, Joseph Kramer. He told Edwards he was willing to take a polygraph. Edwards would later tell Dick Russell he never received the affidavit, which was mailed separately. (Man Who Knew Too Much 57)
  
• 11/23/1975 Washington Star quoted former WC staffer David Belin calling for reopening the Kennedy case because the WC had not known about the CIA-Mafia plots to kill Castro. On Face the Nation (CBS), Belin said, "No member of the legal staff of the Warren Commission knew about CIA plots directed against foreign leaders, including Castro. I don't know of any member of the Commission, other than Dulles, that knew that the CIA had been involved, and I have specifically discussed this with some of the living members." During this interview Belin remarked that because no conspiracy had been uncovered since the assassination, this was "in itself evidence of the fact there was no conspiracy." CBS correspondent Daniel Schorr replied, "Or that it was a very good one."
  
• 11/24/1975 Time anniversary issue on the JFK assassination ("Who Killed JFK? Just One Assassin") once again tried to lay all doubts to rest. They published the Life cover photo of Oswald again, but this time cropped off at the figure's knees so that no shadows on the ground could be seen. They also "rotated the whole photo a few degrees to the right, aligning the figure vertically, then recropping to straighten the sides and lightly airbrushing the background of fence and houses to obscure the fact that now the background was tilting crazily to the right....To top it off, with the same article, Time printed a diagram of Dealey Plaza which totally mislocated the famous grassy knoll...in the Time drawing, the grassy knoll is shown at Zapruder's left, just next to the depository...The newcomer will look at Time's diagram and justly conclude that, since the grassy knoll and the depository are next to each other, the conflict among the witnesses about the origin of the shots must not be so important." (Oglesby, Yankee and Cowboy War) Ed Magnuson wrote in that issue that NY urologist Dr. John "Lattimer and his sons have fired the Oswald-type gun and ammunition into the rear of human skulls packed with gelatin....in each case the skulls toppled backward off their stands, never forward. Similar tests were conducted with melons by Physicist Luis Alvarez...with the same results."
  
• 11/24/1975 William Alexander, former Assistant Dallas County DA says today: "I was convinced all along that Lee Harvey Oswald had acted alone. Now I don't even know who's buried in Oswald's grave. I think there should be an exhumation of the body."
  
• 11/24/1975 Civil war started in Angola.
  
• 11/25/1975 leaders of the military intelligence services of Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay met, with Juan Manuel Contreras in Santiago de Chile. The main objective was for the CIA to coordinate the actions of the various security services in "eliminating Marxist subversion". Operation Condor was given tacit approval by the United States which feared a Marxist revolution in the region. The targets were officially leftist guerrillas but in fact included all kinds of political opponents
  
• 11/25-26/1975 CBS airs 'The American Assassins: Lee Harvey Oswald and John F. Kennedy', hosted by Dan Rather. They relied on the Itek study commissioned by CBS, and showed the Zapruder film. They staged another shooting recreation, using a moving target and a reproduction of Dealey Plaza. 11 expert riflemen tried to duplicate the shooting feat that Oswald supposedly did. After practicing, two men were able to get two out of three hits in 5.6 seconds. Carl Oglesby noted, "CBS does not pause to say how many total series were fired by these eleven, or how many times the two who did it once could do it again....Since it was possible, it was possible for Oswald. Therefore he must have done it." Dan Rather announced that Oswald had scored, "after all, in the second highest category of marksmen in an outfit, the United States Marines, that prides itself on its marksmanship." CBS concluded that while not all questions had been answered, the basic findings of the WC were correct. Rather stated, "We think the available evidence shows the single bullet theory is at least possible - that's the most that can be said." Rather explained that Itek found that after the head shot, "the President's head went forward with extreme speed, almost twice as rapidly as it subsequently traveled backwards...[Jackie] may have pushed her husband backward while pushing herself forward away from him as a reflex reaction to the fatal shot hit."
  
• 11/26/1975 A CBS Reports special called "The American Assassins (Part II)" is broadcast on this date. In it, LBJ says: "[Oswald] was quite a mysterious fellow, and he did have a connection that bore examination, and the extent of the influence of those connections on him I think history will deal with more than we're able to now."
  
• 11/26/1975 New York Legislature votes tax increase. Banks and teachers union agree to joint plan to avert New York City default. Ford agrees to help NYC get out of its financial mess.
  
• 11/26/1975 Lynette Fromme is convicted by a federal jury in Sacramento of attempting to assassinate Ford.
  
• 11/27/1975 Ford asks $2.3 billion U.S. loans for New York City to help finance plan to avert default.
  
• 11/28/1975 A bomb explodes in the car of the Cuban ambassador to Mexico.
  
• 11/29/1975 Ford signed legislation requiring states to provide free education for handicapped between ages 3 and 21.
  
• 11/29/1975 Ford departs for visits to People's Republic of China, the Philippines, and Indonesia.
  
• 12/1975 US unemployment rate was at 8.3%; inflation for the past twelve months was 9.1%.1975 statistics: US Federal spending was $332 billion ($53.2 billion deficit). National debt was $533 billion. Inflation rate was 9.1%. Poverty rate was 12.3%.
  
• 12/1975 Cartha DeLoach told the Church Committee that LBJ had become "somewhat obsessed with the fact that he himself might be assassinated... it was very apparent to personnel of the FBI that the President was obsessed with fear concerning possible assassination." Johnson actually ordered FBI agents to supplement his Secret Service protection. (Intelligence Committee report 175-6)
  
• 12/1-5/1975 Ford visits China and talks with Mao Tse-Tung and Deng Hsiao-ping.
  
• 12/2/1975 Communist Pathet Lao now controls most of Laos; they abolished the monarchy and established the Peoples Democratic Republic of Laos.
  
• 12/2/1975 Israeli air raid against Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon.
  
• 12/4/1975 Senate Select Committee on Intelligence issued its report on the CIA; it found that the Agency had worked to stop Allende from taking office and then to destabilize his presidency. Though it could not tie the CIA directly to the coup in Chile, it said the Agency had "created the atmosphere" for a coup.
  
• 12/5 or 6/1975 Kissinger and Ford, winding up their tour of Asia, leave Indonesia. Ford had met with Mao Tse-tung; Chinese leaders expressed their concern about US detente with the Soviets.
  
• 12/7/1975 Ford announces in Honolulu a Pacific Doctrine of "peace with all and hostility toward none."
  
• 12/7/1975 Indonesia invaded East Timor; over the next year, tens of thousands of Timorese were killed. The invaders used US military equipment, which was against US law (military aid was supposed to be for defensive purposes only). Congress briefly cut off military aid to Indonesia, but Kissinger made sure it was only for 6 months.
  
• 12/8/1975 A veto by the US blocks a UN Security Council resolution condemning Israel for its air raid against Palestinian refugee camps.
  
• 12/9/1975 Ford signed legislation authorizing the Treasury to lend NYC $2.3 billion a year until 6/30/1978.
  
• 12/10/1975 United Press reports: "Representative Thomas Downing, calling for a congressional investigation, said Monday he believes a foreign conspiracy supported by a domestic cover-up' led to the 1963 assassination of President Kennedy..." Suspicion is now being focused on Cuba.
  
• 12/10/1975 L.A. Police and District Attorney's Office conduct a search of the RFK assassination crime scene, looking for bullets fired by a second gunman; none are found.
  
• 12/12/1975 Sara Jane Moore pleaded guilty to trying to kill President Ford.
  
• 12/12/1975 James Hosty testified before the House; it was presided over by Rep. Don Edwards, a former FBI agent who left the Bureau because of Hoover. Edwards seemed to be sympathetic to Hosty's plight. (Assignment Oswald 203) Hosty then testified before the Senate's Church Committee on this day: "the records of my testimony have been locked away and will never see the light of day," he recalled. "Gary Hart...ask[ed] some rather silly questions about whether right-wing Cuban exiles had anything to do with the killing of Kennedy...I told him I knew nothing to support to such a far-fetched theory." The Committee revealed to Hosty that it was the FBI that failed to tell him that Kostikov was linked to the KGB's assassination squad in October 1963. Hosty testified four days in all. (Ibid. 206)
  
• 12/17/1975 Ford opposes U.S. combat role in Angola War. But he strongly objected to Congress' cutoff of funds for covert CIA operations in the war.
  
• 12/17/1975 Judith Campbell Exner held a press conference in San Diego in which she denied having a role in the plots against Castro.
  
• 12/17/1975 Lynette Fromme is sentenced to life imprisonment for attempting to kill Ford.
  
• 12/18/1975 General Earle Gilmore Wheeler (67 yrs. old) dies of natural causes while being taken to Walter Reed Army Hospital in an ambulance. Wheeler, JFK's staff director at the Joint Chiefs of staff, later became head of the Joint Chief's after JFK's death. It was Wheeler who ran LBJ's -- and later Richard Nixon's -- operations in the Pentagon regarding the war in Vietnam.
  
• 12/18/1975 Meeting between Kissinger, Ingersoll, Eagleburger and Philip Habib. Kissinger was angry that his aides had cabled him about the use of US arms by the Indonesians; it would leak "and it will go to Congress too and then we will have hearings on it....You have a responsibility to recognize that we are living in a revolutionary situation. Everything on paper will be used against me....The Department is falling apart and has reached the point where it disobeys clear-cut orders...We cut it off [aid to Indonesia] while we are studying it. We intend to start again in January." (The Nation 10/29/1990)
  
• 12/18/1975 Woodward and Bernstein reported in the Post that Ford pardoned Nixon "after hearing urgent pleas from the former President's top aides that he be spared the threat of criminal prosecution." They quoted "a reliable source" as saying that Ford give Haig "private assurances" 8/28/1974 that Nixon would be granted a pardon. They also cited a memo from Garment written 8/28/1974 urging Ford to grant a pardon because of Nixon's mental and physical condition. Haig told the Post that he did talk with Ford 8/28 about a pardon.
  
• 12/20/1975 The program to resettle Vietnamese refugees in the US ends.
  
• 12/21/1975 Ford succeeds in pushing through his temporary tax cut bill.
  
• 12/22/1975 Ford signed an energy bill providing for an immediate rollback in oil prices and an end to price controls in 40 months.
  
• 12/22/1975 Hersh, Seymour - "Huge CIA Operation Reported in US Against Antiwar Forces, Other Dissidents in Nixon Years" - New York Times 12/22/1975
  
• 12/23/1975 Richard S. Welch, chief of the CIA station in Athens, was fatally shot as he arrived home by unknown attackers. The CIA takes the opportunity to rebuild the then-eroding fiction that public scrutiny of the CIA endangers not only national security, but the lives of individual men. The Ford administration responded with a lavish funeral, and a major public relations campaign by Dick Cheney and the CIA put out the message that the Church Committee and criticism of the CIA were responsible for Welch's death.
  
• 12/31/1975 As of this date, US Presidents had issued a total of 11,893 executive orders, which are not even mentioned in the Constitution.