Deep Politics Timeline

[Tracy Riddle]

• 5/1976 US House Banking and Currency Committee Report, May 1976, entitled "International Banking", identifies the Rothschild Five Arrows Group and its five branches: N.M.Rothschild & Sons, Ltd in London, Banque Rothschild in France, Banque Lambert in Belgium, New Court Securities in New York, and Pierson, Holding & Company in Amsterdam, all of which were combined into Rothschild Intercontinental Bank, Ltd, who in turn has three American subsidiaries: National City Bank of Cleveland, First City National Bank (First City Bancorp) in Houston, and First National Bank in Seattle. First City Bancorp in Houston would co-chair the Reagan Bush campaign of 1980. The House Report also noted "the Rothschild banks are affiliated with Manufacturers Hanover of London and Manufacturers Hanover in New York, which buys CIT Financial Corporation in 1983 for $1.6 billion.
  
• 5/1976 Carter told the US Chamber of Commerce that the US needed a "commitment" to the Trilateral Commission's goals.
  
• 5/1/1976 Texas GOP primary; Ford lost by a huge margin to Reagan, who had charged the president with being soft on defense. Ford accused Reagan of raising "false alarms" and said he was so "simplistic" that as president he would make "irresponsible and fundamentally harmful policy decisions."
  
• 5/7/1976 Sec. of Treasury William Simon visited Pinochet in Chile; he praised him for the country's commitment to a free-market economy. In return, the Chileans released a token amount of political prisoners. Kissinger visited Chile in June, and both he and Simon declared that the country had improved its human rights policies. Actually, this was not the case.
  
• 5/7/1976 Sen. Goldwater letter to Ford: "You are the President. Do not stupe to arguing with another candidate. Your speeches are a little bit too long. Get a good speech that is short and use it and use it and use it. Reagan's trick, as you know, is to have a whole handful of cards and he shuffles out whatever comes out to be ten minutes of speaking, and I don't think this deck has changed much over the years. Your speech writer has to be more punchy. It has to sound like you and no matter how much you have to rehearse it do it. You are not going to get the Reagan vote. These are the same people who got me the nomination and they will never swerve, but ninety per cent of them will vote for you for President, so get after middle America. They have never had it so good. They are making more money and they are not at war and, for God's sake, get off of Panama, but don't let Reagan off that hook."
  
• 5/14/1976 Ford urges Congress to adopt timetable for fundamental and extensive reform of government's regulatory program and agencies.
  
• 5/16/1976 on Face the Nation, Sen. Walter Mondale (a member of the Church Committee) said he felt that the CIA and FBI had done poorly in working with the WC, and his committee had found "quite significant" leads in the Kennedy case.
  
• 5/18/1976 Ford officially revises Federal Elections Commission clearing way for resumption of Federal campaign subsidies.
  
• 5/18/9176 Ford bounces back from a string of primary losses with victories in Michigan and Maryland.
  
• 5/19/1976 Congress sets up a permanent 15-member board to oversee the intelligence agencies.
  
• 5/20/1976 "The Miami News: New leads into the assassination of President John F. Kennedy involve Lee Harvey Oswald's connections with both pro-Communist and anti-Communist Cuban groups, The Miami News has learned. A spokesman for Sen. Richard Schweiker (R-Pa.), heading a Senate subcommittee probing the assassination, said new leads developed by investigators who had been in Miami were the dominant factor in the formation of a permanent panel to restudy the murder. The spokesman said Miami has now become one of several focal points in the investigation. He said the investigators had been looking into Oswald's connections ""with both anti-Castro Cubans who blamed Kennedy for the Bay of Pigs fiasco, and pro-Castro Cubans."" A report on the new developments will be completed in two weeks, the spokesman for Schweiker said. The Senate Intelligence Committee has criticized the CIA for not disclosing to the Warren Commission several assassination plots against Cuban Premier Fidel Castro attempted by the agency during the Kennedy era, attempts which could have provided pro-Castro Communists with a motive to get rid of Kennedy. There is no question that both the FBI and the CIA lied to the Warren Commission. the spokesman said. He added that the CIA also hid from the Warren Commission a Secret Service report on a Cuban refugee opposed to Castro and known to be violently anti-Kennedy as well, who had been trying to buy bazookas and machine guns in Dallas shortly before the President's death. According to the Senate committee, Oswald infiltrated an anti- Castro Cuban group in New Orleans before he started his own phony pro-Castro organization the ""Fair Play for Cuba Committee, "" under which he distributed propaganda favorable to Castro. Oswald lived in New Orleans from April to September 1963. He clashed with anti-Castro Cuban exiles there during the summer preceding the assassination. Yesterday, anti-Castro Cubans in Miami vehemently denied any links to Oswald. When Kennedy was killed, Cuban exiles here who were active against Castro had not yet lost faith in the President, said Carlos Prio, the only surviving former president of Cuba, who now lives in Miami. ""Cubans were still waiting for Kennedy to fulfill his promise to help free Cuba. According to Prio and other exile leaders, the most numerous and significant CIA operations and other U.S. supported activities against Castro ever launched from U.S. soil occurred during the Kennedy period after the Bay of Pigs invasion attempt. The operations grew both in intensity and number even after the October 1962 missile crisis and the peace pact Kennedy allegedly signed with Soviet leaders at that time, promising that no anti- Castro attacks would be launched from U.S. soil. These operations began to be phased out under the late President Lyndon Johnson. The phase-out of all covert CIA military actions against Cuba from Miami was completed during President Richard Nixon's first term. Anti-Castro Cubans believe that Oswald was part of a pro-Castro conspiracy. The belief is that Castro found out the U.S. --under Kennedy-- was trying to assassinate him and he tried the same tactic, except he was more efficient, said a former CIA agent involved in commando raids against Cuba before and after the Bay of Pigs."
  
• 5/20-21/1976 NATO holds its semiannual meeting in Oslo, Norway.
  
• 5/24/1976 British-French supersonic Concorde jetliner begins service to Dulles International Airport.
  
• 5/25/1976 Ford defeats Reagan in Kentucky, Tennessee and Oregon; Carter wins the primaries in Arkansas, Tennessee and Kentucky.
  
• 5/28/1976 Treaty on Underground Nuclear Explosions is signed by US and USSR; this would control and limit the number of underground nuclear tests.
  
• 5/30/1976 Ford strongly defended the WC to the Washington Post; he believed the WC "got full cooperation of all federal agencies at that time." He said he saw no reason to question the performance of either the CIA or FBI in the investigation.
  
• 6/1976 While accurate and current statistics from different sources tend to vary, they do agree on one thing -- more than twice as many American Vietnam veterans have died after returning home than were killed in the fourteen years of actual combat. The estimated number of actual combat deaths ranges from 45,806 to 46,520. Data from the Veterans Administration (VA), dated June, 1976, reveals that 101,000 Vietnam veterans have died since returning to civilian life. According to a report for Ralph Nader's Center for the Study of Responsive Law, "Although reliable statistics are not available, suicide appears to be one of the leading causes of deaths among Vietnam veterans in general, and disabled veterans in particular. One other cause rivaling suicide is drug use and the two have much in common -- an overwhelming desire for surcease from pain." While the problems of Vietnamese refugees in America received widespread publicity, the problems of America's returning veterans did not receive comparable coverage. The untold, but continuing story of the tragedy of America's Vietnam veterans qualifies this for nomination as one of the "censored" stories of 1976.
  
• Britain plotted to support a coup d'etat in Rome in 1976 because of grave fears that the Italian Communist Party would win the election and form a government, according to declassified documents. The papers, uncovered by an Italian researcher at the National Archives at Kew, reveal a flurry of anxious correspondence between the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and its diplomats, as well as with Henry Kissinger, the US Secretary of State, European officials in Brussels and even the Vatican in the months before the election. One paper dated May 6, 1976 when James Callaghan was the Labour Prime Minister from the planning staff of the Foreign Office, is entitled Action in Support of a Coup d'etat or Other Subversive Action. It says: "By its nature a coup is likely to be an unexpected development, but theoretically a coup could be promoted . . . it would presumably come from the right wing drawing in the army and the police." Last night Sir Guy Millard, 90, who was the British Ambassador to Rome between 1974 and 1976, told The Times that he knew nothing of a coup plot. "I never thought the Communists would win the election because the Italians would have been scared of separating themselves from the Americans," he said. Sir Guy left Rome in October 1976, four months after the Italian elections when the Communists were just pipped at the post, winning 34.3 per cent of the vote, compared with 38.7 per cent for the Christian Democrats. "If there was a plot to mount a coup the Foreign Office never told me, but then it would have been so secret that they wouldn't have wanted diplomats to know about it," he said. "It may be that the CIA was planning something, and if the CIA was involved, SIS [Secret Intelligence Service, MI6] may have been conscious of it, but I knew nothing about it. Communism in Italy, you know, was a pretty mild variety. We called it Eurocommunism, and the ones I met seemed most civilised." According to the documents, senior officials in the Foreign Office thought otherwise. Aldo Moro, the Christian Democrat leader who was assassinated two years later by the Red Brigades terrorist group, was the head of a weak government and the Partito Comunista Italiano (PCI) had made significant gains in administrative elections. Parliamentary voting was scheduled for June 1976, and the possibility that the PCI would garner more votes than the Christian Democrats was real. The Foreign Office believed that a Communist presence in the Italian Government "could turn out to be an event with catastrophic consequences", especially for Nato and the European Economic Community. The contents of the declassified documents appeared in yesterday's La Repubblica newspaper. The CIA had set up a secret network in Italy many years before the 1976 election to prepare for the possibility of a Communist takeover in Rome. It was called Operation Gladio. American documents declassified in the 1970s revealed that the chief of Italian military intelligence had joined the US in the 1950s in preparing a plan against a Communist takeover. MI6 and other Nato intelligence agencies were thought to have been involved. The National Archives documents reveal for the first time that the Foreign Office contemplated having to give its backing to a coup. In one, dated April 13, 1976, the Western European department of the Foreign Office offered a variety of possible approaches to the Communist problem. Some proposed ways to avoid a victory of the party, headed by the popular Enrico Berlinguer, including financing opposing parties, and a media blitz about the dangers of Communism, thus discrediting the PCI. Other documents addressed the prospect of the Communist Party in government: "Option No 4: subversive or military intervention against the PCI." There was talk of financial support to "democratic forces" to "direct intervention in support of a coup encouraged from outside". (Britain joined plot to overthrow a Communist Italian government From The Times January 14, 2008)
  
• 6/1976 Carter announced that "the time has come for us to seek a partnership between North America, Western Europe and Japan."
  
• 6/1976 it was disclosed that in a late 12/1963 meeting James J. Angleton had proposed being allowed to take over CIA responsibility for dealing with the WC probe. Richard Helms agreed to it. (Report p31) "It is important to note that Mr Angleton testified that he was often in contact with Dulles after the latter had left the Agency. Angleton testified that Dulles consulted with him before agreeing to President Johnson's request that he be on the Commission and that he was in frequent contact with Dulles. Angleton had also indicated that he and Dulles informally discussed the progress of the Commission's investigation and that Dulles consulted with him about what further investigation the CIA could do..." (Report p69)
  
• 6/1976 Britain: unemployment reached 6.4%, the worst since 1940.
  
• 6/1976 Garry Wills wrote in The Atlantic: "There is concern over Carter's religion that is not mere bigotry. It may seem unjust to punish real religion when we reward empty religiosity; but the thing makes sense…when a man means what he says in this awesome area, he drifts outside the ties and shared weaknesses that keep us in touch with each other."
  
• 6/1976 This month, George de Mohrenschildt completes a manuscript which he claims names names. "That's when disaster struck. You see, in that book I played the devil's advocate. Without directly implicating myself as an accomplice in the JFK assassination I still mentioned a number of names, particularly of FBI and CIA officials who apparently may not be exposed under any circumstances. I was drugged surreptitiously. As a result I was committed to a mental hospital ..."
  
• 6/2/1976 Don Bolles was permanently "censored" as an investigative reporter for the Arizona Republic when his car exploded in the parking lot of the Hotel Chardon in Phoenix. As he had been for more than ten years, Bolles was investigating a new lead dealing with massive land frauds, political payoffs, the underworld, and corporate crime. While Bolles was silenced, the story he was working on was not. A group of 36 reporter and editor volunteers, called the Investigation Reporters and Editors, Inc., spent six months investigating land fraud, gambling, prostitutions, illegal labor activities, and other subjects following the bombing murder of Bolles. The IRE started publishing their findings through United Press International in March, 1977. The Bolles' story is being nominated as one of the "best censored stories" of 1976 since it is a classic example of a form of violent censorship which still takes place in the United States.
  
• 6/3/1976 AFL-CIO Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union is established when the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America and the Textile Workers Union merge.
  
• 6/5/1976 US unemployment rate is at 7.3%.
  
• 6/8/1976 CIA's William Harvey dies after heart surgery. Of all the CIA players involved in the assassination attempts against Fidel Castro, William "Bill" Harvey is a major key. He is 60 years old. Harvey testified before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that he had been told by superiors that the Castro assassination plots had been approved at the highest levels of government (meaning the Presidency), and that he had discussed the efforts with his immediate superior, Richard Helms, who later became Director of the Agency. A CIA officer says Harvey was "asked to do things that nobody should have been asked to do." Harvey's widow, railing against "that awful Frank Church", says that her husband was clearly the chosen scapegoat in the assassination plots against Castro.
  
• 6/13/1976 Washington Post reported that Lucien Conein had admitted in an interview to having close ties to the Corsican Mafia while in Vietnam in the early '60s.
  
• 6/14/1976 Sen. Frank Church withdraws from the presidential race.
  
• 6/16/1976 The Senate passed a bill to cut off military aid to Chile. Orlando Letelier's lobbying for the provision was key to its success.
  
• 6/16/1976 Frank Fitzsimmons was reelected president of the Teamsters Union.
  
• 6/16/1976 Brezhnev is made chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet.
  
• 6/16/1976 US ambassador to Lebanon Francis E. Meloy Jr. and his economic counselor Robert O. Warwick are kidnapped and shot to death in Beirut.
  
• 6/21/9716 Very simply, the story is: "Single-handedly, America's fifth largest corporation is keeping alive a regime that has been not only embargoed but condemned by virtually every nation on earth." The corporation is Mobil Oil; the nation is Rhodesia. The story was released, with supporting documentation, at a press conference held by the People's Bicentennial Commission (PBC) in Washington, D.C., June 21, 1976. Attending the press conference were more that 40 reporters from America's major papers, all three networks, the wire services, along with radio and freelance people. On the same day, the PBC turned the documentation over to the Treasury Department, the House and Senate Committees on Africa, and Senator Frank Church's subcommittee on multinationals. The only extensive coverage occurred six weeks later when the N.Y. Times broke the story, announcing that the Treasury had begun its investigation of the PBC charges. But unless you saw that story or a short story subsequently carried by AP, you would-be unaware of the Mobil Oil/ Rhodesian connection. None of the networks, not Time and Newsweek, gave coverage to the story. The story charged that Mobil, by developing a string of dummy companies, post office addresses, and phony order sheets and invoices was able to set up a circuitous "paper chase" thereby disguising the fact that Mobil was selling Rhodesia as much as $ 20 million a year in oil products, including specialized aviation fuel for Rhodesia's air force. When asked about the lack of coverage on the story, a reporter in the Washington bureau of the Los Angeles Times said: "Look, Mobil may have been subjected to higher standards than 99 percent of the news stories we run, but hell, nobody wants to take on Mobil Oil without fucking good grounds. I'd be a fool not to say that Mobil is a big national advertiser." The apparent media self-censorship which occurred with this story qualifies it to be considered for one of the "ten best censored" stories of 1976. SOURCE: "Let's Make A Deal" by Richard Parker, editor, Mother Jones, September/October 1976.
  
• 6/21/1976 Kissinger addresses the annual ministerial meeting of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in Paris.
  
• 6/23/1976 Washington Star reported Haldeman saying, "If I had seen Dean's FBI dossier it would have barred him from the White House. Allegations about a conflict-of-interest charge...involving his prior affiliation with a law firm would have been enough to concern me..."
  
• 6/23-24/1976 Kissinger talks with South African PM John Vorster in West Germany.
  
• 6/23/1976 Church Committee released its Report on The Investigation of the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy: Performance of the Intelligence Agencies. It faulted Hoover and the FBI for not cooperating with the WC and for quickly presuming Oswald's guilt. Senator Richard Schweiker, on the subcommittee investigating foreign assassinations, says today: "The American people were denied the truth about the Vietnam war, the Cambodian bombing, and Watergate. I do not think we yet know the whole truth about the Kennedy assassination."
  
• 6/24/1976 Supreme Court rules that federal minimum wage laws are not binding on state and local governments.
  
• 6/24/1976 Ford sends sweeping busing legislation to Congress.
  
• 6/24/1976 Washington Post story on the Church report by George Lardner Jr.
  
• 6/24/1976 Chicago Sun Times quoted Thomas Mann who said that RFK had ordered the CIA to stop investigating Oswald's ties to Castro just days after the assassination.
  
• 6/25/1976 In 1975, American consumers spent $6,728,270,000 on cosmetics and toiletries. And while millions of these consumers were using these cosmetics and toiletries daily, few of them were aware of how hazardous they may be to their health. Author/researcher Chris Welles states "The awful truth is that despite their enticing and beguiling appearance, they may be secretly and quietly destroying us." Sixty percent of the substance enters a person's system and may very possibly be a cause of diseases as serious as cancer. The lack of information on the effects of the chemicals in some of America's most widely used cosmetics is appalling. Heinz Eiermann, of the Food and Drug Administration, says "The trouble is, not only can't I stop it but I often don't even know the product exists. We don't have authority to require anything." Considering the national advertising budget of the cosmetics and toiletries industry, it is not surprising the mass media have done so little to warn the consumer of the potential dangers of the products. Or, as the author of the article puts it, "Why do we have to kill or maim our way to consumer legislation reform?" The widespread use of these products, combined with their potential dangers to the user and the inadequate protection from the FDA, qualifies this story for nomination as a "best censored" story of 1976. SOURCE: New Times Magazine, June 25, 1976, p 42, "Warning: Cosmetics May Be Hazardous To Your Health," by Chris Welles.
  
• 6/25/1976 Washington Star reported that Johnson had told Joseph Califano he thought that Castro was responsible for the assassination: "Kennedy tried to get Castro, but Castro got Kennedy first." Johnson said the same thing to Howard K. Smith.
  
• 6/27/1976 Ford hosts Economic Summit in Puerto Rico.
  
• 6/27/1976 Senator Richard Schweider said on CBS 'Face the Nation' that his work during the last 18 months indicates that there is need to look into the role which Lyndon Johnson's White House played in the Warren Commission's investigation. He cited the specific possibility of cover up by people high in the Johnson White House and State Department. The behavior of Lyndon Johnson's White House during the summer of 1964 is indeed mysterious if it is looked at in light of the fact that Lyndon Johnson was anxious to hurry the Report on John F. Kennedy's assassination to a conclusion before the November elections. Also questionable are the actions of LBJ's White House and the strange behavior it pursued against Robert Kennedy who at that time was Attorney General…Mysteriously, however, neither Johnson nor Yarborough were called to testify before the Warren Commission - only written disposition was asked for. Yarborough has stated that he was repeatedly pressured in the summer of 1964 by nervous and demanding FBI agents. They wanted him to hurry his report. Yarborough has also stated that the White House reports of Lyndon Johnson were not submitted to the Warren Commission until after Yarborough submitted his on July 10, 1964. The story of pressuring Ralph Yarborough, however, was not LBJ's principal worry during the summer of 1964. Johnson's first political worry, during the 1964 summer, was to make sure the Democratic nomination did not escape him and go to Robert Kennedy. Accordingly, LBJ had taken extra-ordinary measures to make sure that Robert Kennedy, for who he had deep political contempt, did not slip up on his renomination. Originally, Johnson had the investigative structure of the Warren Commission - FBI - Department of Justice take on a public appearance of making certain that Attorney General Robert Kennedy, brother of the slain JFK, knew any and all information that the assassination investigation revealed. The public appearance of Robert Kennedy being the first to know about vital assassination facts was, in reality, just so much window dressing…There is little wonder that the FBI people and Lyndon Johnson's White House were concerned about what Ralph Yarborough was going to tell the Warren Commission The FBI and Johnson's White House could control what Robert Kennedy would see or his Department of Justice would say; they cold not, however, control Ralph Yarborough. According to J. Edgar Hoover's own testimony of May 11, 1964, he acknowledged that he submitted vital information to LBJ first and second to Robert Kennedy's Justice Department. Thus, the Justice Dept. received only what LBJ and Hoover wanted…The church committee's report of April 1976, reveals evidence of a so-called 'special squad' of FBI agents. This 'special squad' was exclusively at the individual behest of LBJ and its main concern at the Democratic Convention was to spy on Robert Kennedy (who under Constitutional provisions should have been the person to authorize any such 'special squads'). The Church Committee Report further stated that the 'special squads' information that was gathered on Robert Kennedy went exclusively to Johnson's no. 1 administrative assistant, Walter Jenkins. Jenkins reported individually to LBJ on what Robert Kennedy was up to. During Watergate, these 'special squads' were labeled 'plumbers,' but back in the summer of 1964, they were just 'special squads' to keep Lyndon Johnson informed about Robert Kennedy's activities during the ostentatious Democratic Convention that awarded Lyndon Johnson the nomination on his birthday…first Lyndon Johnson pushed the blame of the Warren Report questions onto Robert Kennedy; second, LBJ talked about evidence being ""brought forth;"" and finally, Johnson had disbanded the Commission in 1964; while in 1966, he talked about it taking further action - a glaring inconsistency which no one bothered to question."