Deep Politics Timeline

[Tracy Riddle]

• 7/1/1976 Kenneth A. Gibson is elected the first black president of the US Conference of Mayors.
  
• 7/1/1976 Supreme Court rules that states cannot require a woman to get her husband's consent before having an abortion.
  
• 7/2/1976 Supreme Court rules 7-2 that the death penalty does not violate the Constitution's ban on "cruel and unusual" punishment.
  
• 7/3-4/1976 Israeli paratroopers landed at Entebbe Airport in Uganda to rescue 110 Israeli passengers and the French crew of an Air France jet hijacked by Palestinians.
  
• 7/4/1976 massive celebrations as US marks its 200th (Bicentennial) anniversary.
  
• 7/4/1976 Dallas Times Herald story based on an AP report: "A former contract employee of the CIA has told the Senate Intelligence Committee that Jack Ruby met with Cuban premier Fidel Castro in 1963 and discussed the possibility of assassinating President Kennedy...the meeting took place 10 weeks before Kennedy was killed...the CIA man was a former federal undercover narcotics agent...Ruby flew to Havana from Mexico City to try and set up a Cuban connection for importing narcotics to the United States. He met with Castro, and in the course of their conversation, Castro mentioned Kennedy had tried to have him assassinated and he might want to retaliate. Castro asked Ruby if he, with his contacts in the Dallas and Chicago underworlds, would be willing to kill Kennedy or could help arrange the killing. The CIA agent told the committee he did not know what Ruby said in reply. After Kennedy was killed, a Cuban refugee in Miami received a letter from a relative who was close to Castro and who claimed to have attended Castro's conference with Ruby. The refugee turned the letter over to the FBI, but its existence was not mentioned in the Warren Commission report...[The New York Sunday News] quoted a Senate Intelligence Committee source saying the former agent's account might be a red herring' designed to lead investigators away from possible real conspirators."
  
• 7/7/1976 Queen Elizabeth visits the President.
  
• 7/8/1976 Nixon is disbarred from practicing law in New York state.
  
• 7/14/1976 Ford signed a bill authorizing $32.5 billion in fiscal 77 for arms procurement and research.
  
• 7/14/1976 Barbados: CORU bombed the British West Indian Airline Office and the car of the manager of Cubana Airlines.
  
• 7/15/1976 Ford meets with German chancellor Schmidt.
  
• 7/17/1976 West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt ends a three-day visit to Washington.
  
• 7/17/1976 Colombia: CORU machine-gunned the Cuban embassy, bombed the Air Panama office in Bogata and a car owned by a Colombian government official in charge of dealings with Cuba.
  
• 7/22/1976 Congress passes a $3.9 billion jobs bill over Ford's veto. Unemployment in June was 7.5%.
  
• 7/22/1976 CORU failed to kidnap Cuban Consul Daniel Ferrer Fernandez in Merida, Mexico.
  
• 7/24/1976 three members of the anti-Castro group CNM were arrested for trying to bomb the New York Academy of Music, which was holding an event celebrating the Cuban Revolution.
  
• 7/27/1976 Fred Black, Jr. - a major defense lobbyist - telephones Johnny Roselli from Los Angeles with an urgent message, "Get out of Miami."
  
• 7/28/1976 Johnny Roselli is murdered.
  
• 7/31/1976 an 11-day strike by California cannery workers ends with a new contract.
  
• 8/1976 Gallery magazine: "Indonesia 1958: Nixon, the CIA, and the Secret War" by L. Fletcher Prouty
  
• 8/3/1976 Jerry Litton, a Democratic U.S. Representative from Missouri, died with his wife and two children while en route via a small plane to the victory party after winning Missouri's state Democratic primary for U.S. Senate.
  
• 8/3/1976 United Press dispatch says that Chairman Thomas Downing has "distributed a 79-page packet compiled by author Robert Morrow, entitled Motivation Behind the Assassination of John F. Kennedy, suggesting right-wing Cuban exiles sought Kennedy's assassination in retaliation for his withdrawal of air support for the Bay of Pigs invasion." The material also alleges that then Vice President Richard Nixon was "the CIA action man in the White House" in earlier stages of planning for the Bay of Pigs attack and that Mr. Nixon had promised a right-wing Cuban exile leader he could eliminate left-wing-anti-Castro exiles after the invasion.
  
• 8/6/1976 Labor Department announces that employment rose by more than 400,000 in July to a new record high of 87.9 million, up 3.8 million from March 1975 recession low.
  
• 8/7/1976 Johnny Roselli's body is discovered floating in a 55-gallon oil drum in Dumbfoundling Bay in Miami. He had apparently been stabbed, strangled and dismembered. He had disappeared ten days earlier, just before the Church committee releases its report on the John Kennedy assassination that incorporates Roselli's claim -- which the House Assassinations Committee will later debunk in favor of the Mafia-did-it theory -- that the CIA-Mafia attempts on Castro had boomeranged on JFK. Roselli's murderer or murderers remain unidentified. According to Roselli, who divulged the information just prior to his own murder, LHO was to have been met at the Texas Theater following the JFK assassination by a contact who would then take him to a local airport. There, he would have been flown to either Mexico or Central America where he would "disappear." The actual plan was to take him out of the country and kill him. He would have been identified as the assassin of the president, and a worldwide manhunt would have ensued. It is probable that his body would then have been quickly found, then presented as "shot attempting to escape apprehension." An alternate plan would be to identify the assassin, then discover that he had fled to Cuba. This later plan would serve several purposes, not the least of which would be to implicate Castro in the murder.
  
• 8/9/1976 William and Emily Harris are convicted of kidnapping in the Patty Hearst case.
  
• 8/9/1976 CORU claimed credit for the kidnap-murder in Buenos Aires of two Cuban Embassy officials.
  
• 8/12/1976Washington Post editorial suggested that the Mafia-CIA link should be further explored: "is it really, as the sophisticated wisdom goes, 'paranoid' on our part to brood about the suggestive and possibly monstrous interconnections between all these facts and to wonder why they are not the subject of intense press and government scrutiny. What accounts for the general indifference in high places?"
  
• 8/14/1976 Ford signed a bill raising the price of domestic oil.
  
• 8/18/1976 Panama: CORU bombs the Tocuman International Airport and the offices of Cubana Airlines.
  
• 8/18/1976 Gerald R. Ford is nominated as the Republican candidate for president. As an appointed president, Ford has proved unable to generate the kind of enthusiasm and loyalty within his party that elected presidents traditionally expect.
  
• 8/19/1976 Ford is nominated by the Republicans.
  
• 8/19/1976 National Enquirer reported that Sam Giancana bragged to Judith Campbell that "if it wasn't for me, your boyfriend wouldn't even be in the White House."
  
• 8/22/1976 Washington Post (and also Jack Anderson 9/7/1976) reported that Roselli said Trafficante had been behind the assassination of JFK, and may have worked with Castro to do it.
  
• 8/22/1976 Two Chilean agents using the names Juan Williams and Alejandro Romeral arrive in Miami using Chilean passports. They had originally obtained visas from the US Embassy in Paraguay, under false premises; then Ambassador George Landau ordered them to be revoked and lookouts placed in case they tried to enter the US.
  
• 8/25/1976 Jack Anderson column about a foiled assassination plot against Kissinger in Costa Rica, when he visited that country in February. It was foiled by US and local authorities four days before it was to be carried out by Cuban exile Orlando Bosch. He had slipped into the country with a false passport, but the FBI and SS had been alerted. The plans by Bosch's group went back as far as 1972 due to anger over his efforts to improve relations with Castro that year.