Deep Politics Timeline

[Tracy Riddle]

1968 Operation Garden Plot, Nixon interference in Paris Peace Accords, MI5 plot against PM Harold Wilson

• PINE GAP, US intelligence installation, created in Australia
  
• The NSA launches the first of seven satellites, code-named "Canyon," that can pick up various types of voice and data traffic from Earth orbit.
  
• Around the time of race riots in 1968, a paper is drawn up at the US Army War College detailing plans for rounding up millions of American citizens referred to as "militants" and "American negroes."
  
• The US government sprays two types of bacteria, one of which is E. coli, on a Hawaiian rainforest hoping to determine how long the bacteria will remain on the vegetation.
  
• An anonymous author at the NSA wrote a document about UFOs around 1968. It was released via the FOIA in 1984.
  
• 1/2/1968 Hoover requested wiretapping of SCLC headquarters in Atlanta because of MLK's planned march on the capitol in the spring.
  
• 1/3/1968 Ramsey Clark declined Hoover's wiretapping request because "there has not been an adequate demonstration of a direct threat to national security."
  
• 1/5/1968 Czechoslovakia: Alexander Dubcek replaces Antonin Novotny as Party leader and declares his intention to press ahead with extensive reforms.
  
• 1/7/1968 Israeli PM Levi Eshkol visited Washington.
  
• 1/8/1968 A secret Council on Foreign Relations meeting between Douglas Dillon, Richard Bissell and other intelligence figures; Bissell told the group (which included Allen Dulles, Robert Amory, Jr., Thomas Hughes, Ted Sorensen, columnist Joseph Kraft) discussed the need for covert action in foreign countries.
  
• 1/9/1968 NYT reported that Israeli jets had knocked out Jordanian artillery positions on the east bank of the Jordan River. LBJ was quoted as promising visiting PM Eshkol that the US would sell Israel "planes and other weapons." RFK was quoted as supporting this position.
  
• 1/19/1968 James Earl Ray enrolls in a bartenders school in Los Angeles.
  
• 1/21 or 22/1968 A Strategic Air Command B-52 crashes off the coast of Greenland; it was carrying four unarmed hydrogen bombs, which leaked radiation over a large area.
  
• 1/22/1968 The Israeli submarine Dakar (ex-HMS Totem) disappears in the eastern Mediterranean while on its maiden voyage.
  
• 1/23/1968 North Korea seized US intelligence ship Pueblo in the Sea of Japan.
  
• 1/26/1968 Paul Rothermel memo indicates that Jim Garrison is targeting Gen. Walker and the Brown and Hunt families of Texas in his investigation.
  
• 1/26/1968 Letter from JFK autopsy doctor J. Thornton Boswell to Ramsey Clark recommending that a panel examine the autopsy materials. It later turned out that Boswell was asked to write this letter by people within the government.
  
• 1/30/1968 Tet Offensive begins in Vietnam; this massive, well-coordinated attack saw communist forces strike dozens of objectives through the South simultaneously.
  
• 1/31/1968 VC and NVA capture Hue.
  
• 1/31/1968 On Johnny Carson's show Jim Garrison said that the CIA "was deeply involved in the assassination"
  
• 1/31/1968 Sirhan scrawled in his diary: "RFK must die RFK must die…girl the girl the girl no no no no practice practice practice practice practice Mind Control mind control mind control "
  
• 1-2/1968 Gold-outflow crisis in US.
  
• 2/1/1968 a suspected NLF officer was summarily executed on camera by General Nguyen Ngoc Loan, a South Vietnamese National Police Chief.
  
• 2/1/1968 Nixon announces his presidential candidacy.
  
• 2/7/1968 The students at South Carolina State began to rebel in the streets by attacking police cars. The rebellion lasted until the next day. The police along with the National Guard were called in to occupy the campus. The Guard began to fire upon the unarmed students as they sat around a bonfire seeking warmth. Three students were killed and 28 or 33 wounded.
  
• 2/8/1968 Marina Oswald testifies before Jim Garrison's grand jury in New Orleans
  
• 2/8/1968 George Wallace enters the presidential race on the American Independent party ticket
  
• 2/12/1968 Memphis: the more than a thousand garbage men, nearly all blacks, went out on strike to protest the city's refusal to recognize their union. Mayor Henry Loeb refused their demands and began hiring white strikebreakers.
  
• 2/13/1968 US sends 10,500 more combat troops to Vietnam.
  
• 2/16/1968 In New Orleans, Jim Garrison subpoenas former CIA Director and Warren Commission member Allen Dulles. Dulles refuses to appear.
  
• 2/19/1968 Cesar Chavez, the trade union leader, began a hunger strike in protest against the violence being used against his members in California. Robert F. Kennedy went to the San Joaquin Valley to give Chavez his support
  
• 2/20/1968 During the Senate hearings on the Gulf of Tonkin incident, McNamara characterizes as "monstrous" the idea that the government had lied about the attacks.
  
• 2/21/1968 On Dutch TV, Jim Garrison charges that the CIA was involved in killing JFK, who wanted to end the Cold War.
  
• 2/22 or 23/1968 Memphis garbage men on strike marched to the city council to make their protests heard, but they were dispersed with police using truncheons and tear gas.
  
• 2/24/1968 Gen. James M. Gavin wrote an article in the Saturday Evening Post saying that JFK intended to withdraw from Vietnam.
  
• 2/25/1968 US and ARVN recapture Hue.
  
• 2/25/1968 Bobby and Artie Seale are arrested in their home by Oakland police without a warrant.
  
• 2/26-27/1968 Ramsey Clark Panel convenes in Washington D.C. to examine JFK X-rays and autopsy photographs.
  
• 2/27/1968 Walter Cronkite came back from Saigon and told the American people that it seemed the "the bloody experience in Vietnam is to end in stalemate."
  
• 2/27/1968 Westmoreland requests 206,000 more troops. This was Robert McNamara's last official day on the job; his last act was to oppose Westmoreland's troop request.
  
• 2/27/1968 Jim Garrison subpoenas the original print of the Zapruder film from Time, Inc. as evidence in the Clay Shaw trial.
  
• 2/28/1968 Sen. Wayne Morse floor speech: "The time has come for a thorough study by objective civilians of the operations of the military establishment in the United States the military establishment of which we were warned by General Eisenhower as he left the Presidency."
  
• 2/29/1968 Appointed by Johnson to serve as the commission's executive director, David Ginsburg played a pivotal role in writing the Kerner Commission's findings. The Commission's final report, the Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders or Kerner Report was released after seven months of investigation. Its finding was that the riots resulted from black frustration at lack of economic opportunity
  
• Early 1968 Sirhan Sirhan joins the Ancient Mystical Order of the Rosicrucians (AMORC).
  
• 3/1968 Israeli forces assault Jordanian village Al Karamah in retaliation for terrorist raids in the West Bank; they met heavy resistance by armed members of Al Fatah.
  
• 3/2/1968 James Earl Ray graduates from bartenders' school in Los Angeles.
  
• 3/4/1968 Hoover issued a memo on COINTELPRO ("Counter-Intelligence Program - Black Nationalist-Hate Groups - Racial Intelligence")
  
• 3/7/1968 Sen. Fulbright began a Senate debate on the war, declaring in his opinion that the Tonkin Gulf Resolution was "null and void…The resolution has effectively been repealed because it was based on false representations…"
  
• 3/7/1968 Sirhan left his job at the Pasadena Health Food Store.
  
• 3/7/1968 CIA memo: "Garrison and the Kennedy Assassination: Cubans and Other Latin Americans Allegedly Involved"
  
• 3/10/1968 RFK goes to California to visit Cesar Chavez.
  
• 3/12/1968 Eugene McCarthy won 42% of vote in Democratic New Hampshire presidential primary
  
• 3/16/1968 LBJ decides to send 35-50,000 more combat troops to Vietnam.
  
• 3/16/1968 Senator Robert F. Kennedy announces he will seek the Democratic presidential nomination.
  
• 3/16/1968 My Lai massacre in South Vietnam by US troops
  
• 3/16 or 17/1968 James Earl Ray left Los Angeles, indicating his ultimate destination on a postal change of address order as Atlanta. He was actually on his way to New Orleans. MLK was in Los Angeles and spoke at the Second Baptist Church on the 17[SUP]th[/SUP].
  
• 3/18/1968 MLK flew east toward Memphis. James Earl Ray was driving his Mustang across the Southwestern desert, from Los Angeles to New Orleans. Reaching Memphis, King gave a speech in support of the 17,000 strikers. He announced that 3/28 he would lead a citywide demonstration in their support.
  
• 3/20/1968 MLK is in Mississippi. Ray arrives in New Orleans.
  
• 3/21/1968 Ray left for Birmingham.
  
• 3/22/1968 Westmoreland is named as Army Chief of Staff.
  
• 3/22/1968 Ray spent the night in Selma, Alabama. MLK had just left the area the day before.
  
• 3/22/1968 Czechoslovakia: Novotny resigns as president, after facing pressure by party liberals.
  
• 3/23/1968 James Earl Ray drove on to Atlanta.
  
• 3/25/1968 RFK defends the Warren Report while campaigning in California.
  
• 3/28/1968 Memphis: a poorly-organized march was quickly taken over by black militants, who began breaking store windows; police responded violently. A 16-year-old black youth was shot and killed by police; 60 people were injured.
  
• 3/29/1968 Ray is given $750 by "Raoul." Today he bought a .243 Remington rifle and telescopic sight at a Birmingham, Alabama gun shop.
  
• 3/30/1968 Ray exchanged the .243 for a 30.06 Remington Gamesmaster rifle.
  
• 3/31/1968 LBJ drops out of the Presidential race
  
• 3/31/1968 Mike Dorman article in Ramparts magazine that is extremely critical of LBJ. The article describes how LBJ had been "bought off" years ago by Carlos Marcello. Dallas Times Herald article links LBJ to death of Henry Marshall
  
• 3/31/1968 Ray set out from Birmingham for Memphis.
  
• 4/2/1968 Marian sightings in Zeitoun, Cairo, Egypt.
  
• 4/2/1968 Ray left Atlanta and drove to Memphis.
  
• 4/3/1968 William Somersett calls Miami Police Detective Lt. C.H. Sapp and informs him that he has learned through his connections of a plot to assassinate Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in Memphis tomorrow.
  
• 4/3/1968 King returned to Memphis to address a gathering at the Mason Temple (World Headquarters of the Church of God in Christ). King delivered the last speech of his life, now known as the "I've Been to the Mountaintop" address.
  
• 4/3/1968 US Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit ruled "that the evidence introduced by the Government is not sufficient to sustain the conviction" and ordered Richard Case Nagell set free.
  
• 4/3/1968 Ray checks into the New Rebel Motel in Memphis using the name Eric S. Galt. He turns the rifle over to Raul.
  
• 4/4/1968 Martin Luther King Jr., assassinated in Memphis. Riots broke out in 125 cities, causing 46 deaths, 21,000 arrests and 55,000 Federal and National Guard troops used in riot control. The biggest riots were in D.C., Chicago, Baltimore, and Kansas City.
  
• 4/5/1968 Attorney General Clark announces that there was no conspiracy in the MLK killing.
  
• 4/5/1968 Czechoslovakia: Action Program of the Communist Party is published, part of the effort to provide "socialism with a human face."
  
• 4/5/1968 Within twenty-four hours of the killing, the 30.06 Remington 760 Gamemaster rifle found in the bundle near the scene was traced, by its serial number, to the Aeromarine Supply Company in Birmingham, Alabama.
  
• 4/6/1968 Ray abandons the white Mustang in Atlanta and heads for Toronto
  
• 4/8/1968 Ray rents a room on Ossington St. in Toronto using the name Paul Bridgeman.
  
• 4/10/1968 The House passed the Civil Rights Bill of 1968.
  
• 4/10/1968 LBJ names Gen. Creighton Abrams as commander of US troops in Vietnam.
  
• 4/11/1968 Johnson signed Civil Rights Act of 1968.
  
• 4/11/1968 As "Paul Bridgeman", Ray has three passport photos taken at Arcade Photo Studio, Toronto.
  
• 4/11/1968 Baltimore, Maryland: Gov. Spiro Agnew, angry over black rioting, met with civil rights leaders and gave them a "dressing down that cause most to leave in anger - instantly transforming his position in racial politics."
  
• 4/14/1968 Damon Runyon Jr. dies today in Washington, DC. His death is ruled a suicide. He is feature editor for the weekly D.C. Examiner and is currently working on a condensation of the book Were We Controlled? for the National Enquirer
  
• 4/16/1968 James Earl Ray applies for a Canadian passport at Kennedy Travel Agency under the name Ramon George Sneyd.
  
• 4/17/1968 the Birmingham FBI office sought a federal fugitive warrant for Eric Starvo Galt pursuant to an indictment charging a conspiracy to violate Dr. King's civil rights.
  
• 4/18/1968 Ruth Paine testified before Jim Garrison's grand jury in New Orleans.
  
• 4/18/1968 FBI specialists undertook the task of fingerprint comparison; by the next morning, the seven hundredth card matched. It belonged to a fugitive from a Missouri penitentiary. His name was James Earl Ray. It was clear: Galt and Ray were the same man.
  
• 4/18/1968 FBI was quoted as saying it was charging a man named Eric Starvo Galt "with conspiracy" in the murder of MLK. (NY Times) Ray pays his first rent to Mrs. Yee Sun Loo for a room at 962 Dundas St.
  
• 4/18/1968 A new Czech government is formed under Dubcek ally and reformer Oldrich Cernik. Liberalization process goes full swing. Press continues to become more outspoken in support of freedoms.
  
• 4/19/1968 FBI announced it was seeking an escaped convict, James Earl Ray, for the murder of MLK. They issued pictures of Ray to the press.
  
• 4/20/1968 Pierre Trudeau becomes PM of Canada.
  
• 4/23/1968 Columbia University demonstrations begin; SDS members seize five buildings in protest against the school's involvement in research for the Pentagon.
  
• 4/26/1968 200,000 people in NYC demonstrate against the war. Students seize the administration building at Ohio State.
  
• 4/27/1968 Hubert Humphrey announces he will seek Democratic presidential nomination.
  
• 4/27/1968 Ray gets a phone call at Dundas St. from an unidentified man, but Ray is not in at the time.
  
• 4/30-5/2/1968 Ray is seen in the Silver Dollar Tavern in Toronto each night, accompanied on two occasions by an unidentified man.
  
• 5/1968 An Army intelligence document (declassified 2/1971) listed the NAACP, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and CORE as groups "attempting to create, prolong or aggravate racial tensions." Intelligence was to be gathered on these groups and people sympathetic to them.
  
• 5/1/1968 Czechoslovakia: May Day celebrations show huge support for the new reform movement.
  
• 5/2/1968 Another man visits James Earl Ray at Dundas Street. Ray pays $345 for an airplane ticket to London.
  
• 5/2/1968 Sirhan met with a young radical friend of his, Walter Crowe. Crowe expressed his support for Arab terrorist movements such as Al Fatah.
  
• 5/2/1968 The Poor People's March, led by Ralph D. Abernathy, begins as caravans from all over the country leave for Washington, DC., to protest poverty and racial discrimination.
  
• 5/3/1968 LBJ announces that formal peace talks on Vietnam will take place in Paris.
  
• 5/3/1968 Students and riot police clash violently at the Sorbonne university in Paris; 500 students are arrested.
  
• 5/6/1968 James Earl Ray leaves Toronto for London.
  
• 5/7/1968 In Indiana, RFK wins his first presidential primary, taking 42% of the vote; Gov. Branigin, standing in for Humphrey, got 31% and Eugene McCarthy 27%.
  
• 5/7/1968 James Earl Ray arrives in London.
  
• 5/8/1968 Ray flew to England on May 8 and from there he made a quick trip to Portugal to try to get to one of the Portuguese overseas territories -- Angola or Mozambique.
  
• 5/10/1968 Peace talks begin in Paris with Averell Harriman representing the US and Xuan Thuy representing North Vietnam.
  
• 5/10/1968 Hoover signed a number of memos to formally launch a counter-insurgency intelligence program (COINTELPRO); its target was the anti-war and civil rights movements.
  
• 5/11/1968 Jerry Rubin announces the formation of the Youth International Party (Yippies) and its plans for massive demonstrations at the Democratic National Convention.
  
• 5/11/1968 Nine caravans of poor people arrive in Washington, DC for first phase of Poor People's Campaign.
  
• 5/13/1968 Hundreds of thousands of students jammed the streets of Paris, protesting against the government and "police repression."
  
• 5/14/1968 Nebraska primary; RFK won with 52% to 31% for McCarthy and 14% for Humphrey.
  
• 5/18/1968 James Earl Ray arrives back in London.
  
• 5/18/1968 An entry in Sirhan's diary dated this day, reads: "My determination to eliminate RFK is becoming more the more of an unshakable obsession...RFK must die "
  
• 5/20/1968 By this date, millions of French workers had seized control of their factories. The country is nearly paralyzed.
  
• 5/20/1968 RFK spoke before a crowd in the banquet room of Robbie's Restaurant in Pomona. A bartender who was acting as a security check at a stairway leading to the room stopped a young man and woman who claimed they were with the Kennedy party. The man looked a great deal like Sirhan. The couple left after being challenged. Two other onlookers witnessed the incident.
  
• 5/20/1968 Today, a television campaign documentary, "The Story of Robert Kennedy," was aired. The narrator described RFK's 1948 visit to Israel and how he had joined in to "celebrate" Israel's independence.
  
• 5/21/1968 The USS Scorpion, a nuclear-powered attack sub, was last heard from on this date; it was eventually discovered lying on the bottom of the ocean southwest of the Azores.
  
• 5/24/1968 Sirhan attended a rally for RFK at the Los Angeles Sports Arena. A psychologist in the crowd noticed Sirhan because he "appeared very intense and sinister."
  
• 5/26/1968 Press reports about RFK's support for military aid to Israel
  
• 5/28/1968 McCarthy beat RFK in Oregon primary, the first election defeat a Kennedy had ever experienced.
  
• 5/28/1968 RFK spends two hours in Oxnard, California checking out a reported lead to JFK's death. RFK attends a gathering at John Frakenheimer's Malibu beach house with some Hollywood glitteratie. Sirhan attended a meeting of the Rosicrucian Society in Pasadena.
  
• 5/30/1968 Kennedy Campaign headquarters, Azuza, California: Laverne Botting, a 41 year old RFK campaign worker, observed a young woman and two young men enter the campaign office asking about RFK.
  
• 5/30/1968 De Gaulle dissolved the French National Assembly, postponed a national referendum and went on TV vowing to use force to prevent what he believed was a Communist revolution.
  
• 5/31/1968 Camille Chamoun, president of Lebanon, was the target of a failed assassination attempt.
  
• 6/1/1968 Sirhan is seen in the company of other people buying ammunition and target practicing in two different locations.
  
• 6/2/1968 Sirhan and the polka dot dress girl are seen at the Ambassador Hotel
  
• 6/3/1968 Kennedy was scheduled to speak in San Diego at a rally at the El Cortez Hotel. Sirhan made the two-hour trip in his 1956 De Soto and returned that evening to Pasadena, failing to get to RFK.
  
• 6/4/1968 Artist Andy Warhol is shot and wounded by crazed feminist Valerie Solanas.
  
• 6/4/1968 California primary. Sirhan, in the company of another man and a girl in a polka dot dress, are stalking RFK.
  
• 6/5/1968 Robert F. Kennedy is shot at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.
  
• 6/5/1968 Attorney General Ramsey Clark announces there is no evidence of a conspiracy
  
• 6/5/1968 This evening, LBJ went on national television to say he was setting up the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence (Eisenhower Commission 6/5/1968-12/3/1969)
  
• 6/6/1968 Congress passed the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968 (banning the sale by mail of handguns), the first federal gun-control law in 30 years.
  
• 6/6/1968 RFK died, age 42.
  
• 6/8/1968 RFK's body is carried by a funeral train from New York to Washington.
  
• 6/8/1968 James Earl Ray is arrested in London at Heathrow Airport as he disembarks from an airliner bound from Portugal to Belgium.
  
• 6/10/1968 Westmoreland was promoted to the post of Chief of Staff of the US Army.
  
• Summer: .Charlie Manson and various members of his entourage moved in with Beach Boy Dennis Wilson at his home in Laurel Canyon.
  
• 6/13/1968 Earl Warren told LBJ he wanted to resign from the Supreme Court.
  
• 6/14/1968 Dr. Benjamin Spock, Rev. William Sloane Coffin of Yale, and two others were convicted of counseling and aiding draft evaders.
  
• 6/19/1968 LBJ signed a bill giving $400 million in Federal aid to local police, and giving them more freedom to use eavesdropping and wiretapping.
  
• 6/26/1968 Earl Warren announces he will retire from the Supreme Court; LBJ names Abe Fortas to replace him.
  
• 6/28/1968 Congress passed a 10% surcharge on income taxes to finance the war.
  
• 6/30/1968 France: Gaullists win overwhelming majority in elections for National Assembly.
  
• 7/1968 Through Anna Chennault, Richard Nixon told South Vietnamese officials to not cooperate in the peace talks, and promised them a better deal if he was elected.
  
• 7/1/1968 US, USSR and UK sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), followed by dozens of other nations.
  
• 7/13/1968 Edward Jay Epstein broke with Garrison and published an article critical of him in the The New Yorker. That article then produced a CIA dispatch dated July 19, 1968 to CIA stations indicating that it could be used "to brief interested contacts, especially government and other political leaders and to demonstrate to assets (which you may assign to counter [anti-U.S. attacks]) that there is no hard evidence of any such conspiracy."
  
• 7/17/1968 The Ba'ath party comes to power in Iraq in a bloodless coup, led by Saddam Hussein, Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr, and the right-wing of the Baath party.
  
• 7/22/1968 James Earl Ray pleads not guilty to murdering MLK.
  
• 7/23-24/1968 Cleveland: a riot was sparked by a gun battle between police and a black militant group; 11 people, included 3 cops, were killed.
  
• 8/1/1968 Antonio Veciana begins working as a banking consultant in La Paz, Bolivia, employed by US-AID.
  
• 8/2/1968 Sirhan pleads not guilty to murder of RFK.
  
• 8/8/1968 Nixon and Agnew are nominated by the GOP at the convention in Miami.
  
• 8/13/1968 George Papadopoulis, premier of Greece, was the target of a failed assassination attempt.
  
• 8/20/1968 Warsaw Pact night invasion of Czechoslovakia; Soviet, East German, Polish, Bulgarian and Hungarian forces (500,000 troops) occupied the country and deposed Dubcek. Large Soviet garrison remained.
  
• 8/24/1968 France tests its first H-bomb in the South Pacific.
  
• 8/26-29/1968 The 1968 Democratic National Convention was held at the International Amphitheatre in Chicago
  
• 8/28/1968 Democrats adopt a relatively hawkish stand on Vietnam. Humphrey is nominated while antiwar riots go on outside. More than 100 demonstrators and 119 policemen were injured.
  
• 8/28/1968 In Guatemala, US ambassador John Gordon Mein is killed in an ambush.
  
• 9/1968 Farewell America by James Hepburn (a pseudonym) was published in Belgium (it may have been published earlier elsewhere in Europe). Its French title was "America Burns," and represented French intelligence's guesswork about the JFK assassination.
  
• 9/8/1968 Black Panther leader Huey Newton was convicted of manslaughter for killing a policeman in a shoot-out.
  
• 9/17/1968 In Texas, the American Party nominates George Wallace for president.
  
• 9/30/1968 Humphrey pledged to stop bombing North Vietnam if he was elected President.
  
• 10/2/1968 LBJ withdraws his nomination of Abe Fortas after the Senate failed by a vote of 45 to 43 to achieve cloture of a filibuster.
  
• 10/2/1968 Mexico City: student demonstrations against one-party government led to a massacre in the Tlatelolco Plaza by government troops.
  
• 10/4/1968 Northern Ireland: A civil rights march in Derry turns violent
  
• 10/9/1968 LBJ announced that Warren was staying on through the new court term.
  
• 10/16/1968 Rev. Daniel J. Berrigan is convicted with 8 others of burning draft files.
  
• 10/20/1968 Jacqueline Kennedy weds Greek millionaire and shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis.
  
• 10/22/1968 Gun Control Act signed into law.
  
• 10/29/1968 LA Times reported a news story from a Nashville paper: Ray's defense will claim that "Ray played only a small part in a master plot so complex and far-reaching that even Ray does not know who masterminded it...that he was promised $12,000 to $15,000 to lead police away from the real killers and become the lure in the greatest manhunt in history."
  
• 10/31/1968 LBJ announces end of bombing of North Vietnam, starting the next day. He also said that the Paris peace talks would be expanded to include the Viet Cong.
  
• 11/2/1968 Johnson telephones Senate Republican leader Everett Dirksen, lays out some of the evidence, and asks Dirksen to intervene with the Nixon campaign. "The agent [Chennault] says she's just talked to the boss in New Mexico and that he said that you must hold out, just hold on until after the election," Johnson said in an apparent reference to a Nixon campaign plane that carried some of his top aides to New Mexico. "We know what Thieu is saying to them out there. We're pretty well informed at both ends." Johnson then made a thinly veiled threat about going public with the information."I don't want to get this in the campaign," Johnson said, adding: "They oughtn't be doing this. This is treason."
  
• 11/4/1968 Defense Secretary Clark Clifford joined with Secretary of State Dean Rusk in urging President Johnson not to go public with his evidence of Republican treachery. "Some elements of the story are so shocking in their nature that I'm wondering whether it would be good for the country to disclose the story and then possibly have a certain individual [Nixon] elected," Clifford said in a Nov. 4, 1968, conference call. "It could cast his whole administration under such doubt that I think it would be inimical to our country's interests." Clifford's remark came in the context of Johnson learning that Christian Science Monitor reporter Saville Davis was working on a story about how Nixon's entourage had undermined the peace talks by sending its own messages to South Vietnamese officials.
  
• 11/5/1968 Richard Nixon narrowly wins the Presidential election. Democrats keep control of Congress
  
• 11/15/1968 Nixon met with Richard Helms and told him he wanted him to stay on as director of the CIA.
  
• 11/1968 Gov. Reagan refused to extradite Edgar Eugene Bradley to New Orleans because Jim Garrison had failed to produce any witnesses to substantiate the charges against him.
  
• 12/2/1968 Nixon announced that he was appointing Henry Kissinger as Assistant for National Security Affairs.
  
• 12/13/1968 Starting today and for the next ten years, Brazil lived under AI-5, a presidential decree that suspended the constitution, disbanded Congress, and created the so-called previous censorship all in the name of "the defense of the necessary interests of the nation."
  
• 12/28/1968 In response to an attack in an El Al jet in Athens, on the night of December 28, 1968, Israeli commandos mounted a surprise attack on the airport and destroyed 13 aircraft belonging to the Lebanese carriers, Middle East Airlines (Air Liban had merged with MEA by this time), Trans Mediterranean Airways, and Lebanese International Airways.
  
• 12/28/1968 Black Panther Headquarters in Jersey City is firebombed by "two white men wearing police-style uniforms."