Deep Politics Timeline

[Tracy Riddle]

1974 Double-digit inflation in US, National speed limit set to 55mph, Social Security indexed to inflation, SALT II treaty

• 1/7/1974 Nixon approved appointment of former Warren Commission staffer Albert Jenner to serve as Minority Counsel for the Impeachment Investigation of the House Judiciary Committee.
  
• 1/30/1974 Murry Chotiner, Nixon's former political manager, dies one week after his car is struck by a government truck.
  
• Late January First news stories about the Moorer-Radford Pentagon spy ring.
  
• 2/4/1974 Harold Wilson becomes PM of Britain.
  
• 2/5/1974 Patricia Hearst, heir to the newspaper fortune, kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) in Berkeley, Calif.
  
• 2/22/1974 Samuel Byck attempts to hijack a plane to kill Nixon.
  
• 2/24/1974 "We need a programme of psychosurgery for political control of our society. The purpose is physical control of the mind. Everyone who deviates from the given norm can be surgically mutilated. The individual may think that the most important reality is his own existence, but this is only his personal point of view. This lacks historical perspective. Man does not have the right to develop his own mind. This kind of liberal orientation has great appeal. We must electrically control the brain. Some day armies and generals will be controlled by electric stimulation of the brain." Dr. Jose Delgado, February 24, 1974 edition of the Congressional Record
  
• 2/28/1974 Joseph Milteer, right-wing activist with advance knowledge of the JFK assassination, died in a heater explosion.
  
• 3/1/1974 Grand jury indicts Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Mitchell, Mardian, Colson, Parkinson and Strachan for obstructing justice in their attempt to cover-up Watergate, with Nixon being named as unindicted co-conspirator.
  
• 3/15/1974 A federal grand jury concludes that President Nixon joined in a conspiracy to cover up White House involvement in the Watergate break-in of Democratic Party offices.
  
• 3/18/1974 Arab oil-producing nations agree to end the embargo imposed on the US.
  
• 3/24-28 Kissinger talks with Brezhnev, Gromyko and other Soviet officials in Moscow.
  
• 4/1974 Foreign Affairs magazine contained an article by Richard N. Gardner of Columbia University: "In short, the 'house of world order' will have to be built from the bottom up rather than from the top down. An end run around national sovereignty, eroding it piece by piece, will accomplish much more than the old-fashioned frontal assault."
  
• 4/11/1974 Israeli PM Golda Meir resigned.
  
• 4/15/1974 Patty Hearst, now calling herself "Tania," takes part in a bank robbery, and is captured on security cameras wielding a gun.
  
• 4/30/1974 Edited transcripts of the Nixon tapes are released by the White House.
  
• 5/1974 Richard Condon (author of The Manchurian Candidate) publishes his latest thriller, Winter Kills, a fictional account of the JFK assassination.
  
• 5/6/1974 West German chancellor Willy Brandt resigned
  
• 5/9/1974 House Judiciary Committee began formal hearings on impeachment of Nixon.
  
• 5/17/1974 South Los Angeles: two-hour gun battle between the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) and LAPD; the SLA headquarters is burned and six members died.
  
• 5/18/1974 India detonates an underground nuclear device, called Smiling Buddha, in the Rajasthan desert.
  
• 5/21/1974 Jeb Magruder is sentenced to a prison term of 10 months to four years.
  
• 5/28/1974 Piazza della Loggia bombing in Italy
  
• 5/31/1974 Israeli and Syrian military officials sign a cease-fire agreement in Geneva brought about by Kissinger.
  
• 6/1974 Alexander Haig ordered the Army's Criminal Investigation Command (CIC) to make a study of Nixon's alleged ties to organized crime and the smuggling of gold bullion to Vietnam.
  
• 6/5/1974 The private files and documents of the late Howard Hughes were reported stolen from his supposedly impregnable Hollywood headquarters
  
• 6/12-18/1974 Nixon visits Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Jordan and Israel.
  
• 6/12/1974 The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence by Victor Marchetti is published
  
• 6/14/1974 The film The Parallax View is released, an assassination/conspiracy thriller.
  
• 6/23/1974 Chuck Colson was quoted in the Washington Post as saying that Nixon was a prisoner of the CIA.
  
• 6/25/1974 Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that the CIA's budget did not have to be made public; the majority justices were Burger, White, Blackmun, Powell and Rehnquist.
  
• 6/27-7/3/1974 Summit between Nixon and Brezhnev in Moscow over nuclear arms and world peace issues.
  
• 6/30/1974 Gunman inside the Ebenezer Baptist Church fatally shot Martin Luther King's mother, Alberta Williams King.
  
• 7/3/1974 Nixon left Moscow to return to the US.
  
• 7/6/1974 possible sniper attack on Ford's motorcade while driving to Dallas Trade Center
  
• 7/8/1974 Colson began serving his prison sentence. He was quoted in Time magazine: "I don't say this to my people. They'd think I'm nuts. I think the CIA killed Dorothy Hunt."
  
• 7/9/1974 Earl Warren died at the age of 83 of heart disease.
  
• 7/12/1974 Ehrlichman was found guilty by a Washington jury of conspiring to break in to Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office.
  
• 7/15/1974 Makarios in Cyprus ousted
  
• 7/15/1974 Jack Anderson column about Charles Colson being secretly recorded by private eye Richard Bast while speculating about CIA/military behind plot to oust Nixon.
  
• 7/20/1974 Turkey invades Cyprus in dispute with Greece.
  
• 7/24/1974 Supreme Court rules 8-0 that Nixon must turn over the 64 tapes sought by Jaworski; Rehnquist had disqualified himself from hearing this case.
  
• 7/27/1974 House Judiciary Committee passed first article of impeachment - Obstruction of Justice
  
• 7/29/1974 Bribery and perjury indictments were returned against John Connally and Texas lawyer Jake Jacobsen.
  
• 7/29/1974 House Judiciary Committee passed second article of impeachment, on Abuse of Power.
  
• 7/30/1974 House Judiciary Committee passed third article of impeachment,
  
• 8/1974 Jack Anderson disclosed that Colson had met with Gordon Novel 3/1974 to discuss how Nixon's White House tapes could be destroyed by a magnetic erasure technique
  
• 8/2/1974 John Dean is sentenced to one to four years in prison.
  
• 8/4/1974 Italicus Express bombing in Italy
  
• 8/5/1974 The White House released a transcript of 6/23/1972 tape that revealed that he had approved the cover-up only 6 days after the Watergate break-in.
  
• 8/8/1974 Nixon announces he will resign the next day, Kissinger will stay on.
  
• 8/9/1974 Nixon resigns. Al Haig spends the evening burning documents.
  
• 8/15/1974 Death of Clay Shaw, linked to JFK case
  
• 8/15/1974 Park Chung Hee, president of South Korea, was the target of a failed attempt on his life by assassins who fatally shot his wife instead.
  
• 8/19/1974 Rodger P. Davies, U.S. ambassador to Cyprus, was shot to death in Nicosia
  
• 9/4/1974 Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Creighton W. Abrams died
  
• 9/4/1974 George Bush is named to head US liaison office in Peking.
  
• 9/4/1974 Formal US ties established with East Germany; former Sen. John Sherman Cooper is named US ambassador
  
• 9/8/1974 Ford pardons Nixon
  
• 9/10 or 11 deputy press secretary John W. Hushen revealed that Ford was studying a plan to pardon all of the Watergate criminals. Furious reaction from Congress quickly killed the idea.
  
• 9/16/1974 NATO and Ford announced that Al Haig would become head of NATO effective 12/15.
  
• 9/21/1974 President Ford asks Donald Rumsfeld to become chief of staff. He picks former Wyoming Congressman Dick Cheney as his deputy.
  
• 10/1/1974 Trial of five of the seven Watergate defendants begins in Washington.
  
• 10/1/1974 Hussein I, king of Jordan, target of a murder plot by Black September Palestinian assassins in Rabat, Morocco
  
• 10/7/1974 House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Wilbur Mills is pulled over by police and found to be in the company of hooker Fanne Foxe.
  
• 10/15/1974 Ford announced a "great citizens mobilization" under the slogan WIN (Whip Inflation Now).
  
• 10/17/1974 Ford testified before the Judiciary Committee (but not under oath) that there was no deal for a Nixon pardon.
  
• 11/5/1974 Democrats win big in Congressional elections
  
• 11/13/1974 Karen Silkwood, labor union activist and chemical technician at the Kerr-McGee plutonium fields near Crescent, Oklahoma, died in a mysterious car crash.
  
• 11/21/1974 Congress overrode Ford's veto of the Freedom of Information Act, which added amendments to the 1966 act.
  
• 11/24/1974 Ford ends an eight-day world trip through Japan, South Korea and Russia; at Vladivostok he and Brezhnev signed a tentative agreement limiting offensive weapons until 1985.
  
• 11/29/1974 Texas oil baron H.L. Hunt died at age 85 in Dallas.
  
• 12/6/1974 The North Vietnamese launched a test offensive against Phuoc Long province, as a prelude to their 1975 offensive. The province fell in a month.
  
• 12/6/1974 Robert Vesco was quoted as saying that "the forces that threatened me are the same politically that eliminated President Kennedy and then President Nixon and want to eliminate all of Nixon's associates." (Boston Globe 12/6/74)
  
• 12/10/1974 U.S. National Security Council under Kissinger completed a classified 200-page study, "National Security Study Memorandum 200: Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for U.S. Security and Overseas Interests."
  
• 12/15/1974 Al Haig took over as commander of NATO.
  
• 12/19/1974 Nelson Rockefeller sworn in as Vice President
  
• 12/22/1974 New York Times' Seymour Hersh reported that the CIA had spied on domestic dissidents and kept files on 10,000 Americans in the late '60s and early '70s.
  
• 12/23 or 17/1974 James Jesus Angleton is asked to resign by CIA director William Colby.
  
• 12/27/1974 Dick Cheney memo to Ford about creating a presidential commission to investigate CIA
  
• 12/29/1974 Three top officials of the CIA's counterintelligence division - Raymond Rocca, William J. Hood, and Newton S. Miller - resigned.