Deep Politics Timeline

[Tracy Riddle]

• The Atomic Energy Commission initiated Project Plowshare to develop peaceful uses of nuclear explosives.
  
• In 1957, atmospheric nuclear explosions in Nevada, which were part of Operation Plumbbob were later determined to have released enough radiation to have caused from 11,000 to 212,000 excess cases of thyroid cancer amongst U.S. citizens who were exposed to fallout from the explosions, leading to between 1,100 and 21,000 deaths.
  
• Gen. Douglas MacArthur: "Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear -- kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor -- with the cry of grave national emergency. Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it by furnishing the exorbitant funds demanded. Yet, in retrospect, these disasters seem never to have happened, seem never to have been quite real." (Whan, ed. "A Soldier Speaks: Public Papers and Speeches of General of the Army Douglas MacArthur," (1965); The Nation, August 17, 1957; as a corporation head of Sperry Rand to its shareholders in 1957)
  
• The CIA-ran Project MKULTRA paid Dr. Donald Ewen Cameron for Subproject 68, which would be experiments involving mind-altering substances.
  
• Dr. Robert Heath of Tulane University performed experiments on schizophrenic patients, which were funded by the U.S. Army. In the studies, he dosed them with high levels of LSD, and then implanted "deep electrodes" in their brains to take EEG readings.
  
• 1/5/1957 Ike told Congress that any communist aggression in Middle East would face US military intervention.
  
• 1/6/1957 Oswald reports on sick call for tonsillitis and given 600,000 IU of penicillin.
  
• 1/10/1957 Bombs went off in four black churches in Montgomery, as well as in the homes of two ministers who had fought segregation, one white and one black.
  
• 1/11/1957 Many black leaders involved in the Alabama boycott formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Martin Luther King Jr. was chosen as its president.
  
• 1/18/1957 Oswald departs 2nd Recruit Training group in San Diego. (CE 1961)
  
• 1/20/1957 Oswald joins "A" Company, 1st Bn, 2d Infantry Training Rgmt, Camp Pendleton, CA. (CE 1961)
  
• 2/16-17/1957 NY Times reporter Herbert Matthews, posing as a tourist, secretly made his way to Castro's jungle hideout and interviewed him; Castro explained that he wanted to be friendly with the US, supported democracy and predicted victory against Batista.
  
• 2/26/1957 Oswald departs "A" Company, 1st Bn, 2d Infantry Training Rgnt, Camp Pendleton, CA. (CE 1961)
  
• 3/18/1957 Oswald arrived at the Naval Air Technical Training Center in Jacksonville, Florida. (CE 1961)
  
• 4/1957 Albert Schweitzer added his voice to those calling for an end to all nuclear testing.
  
• 4/1957 Vance Packard's book The Hidden Persuaders is published, exposing psychological manipulation in the advertising industry.
  
• 4/1957 Nevil Shute's On the Beach, a post-apocalyptic, end-of-the-world novel, first appeared as a four-part series "The Last Days on Earth" in the London weekly periodical Sunday Graphic.
  
• 4/3/1957 Oswald departs from Marine Aviation Det, Naval Air Technical Training Command, Jacksonville, FL. (CE 1961)
  
• 4/4/1957 Oswald assigned to Kessler Air Force base, Biloxi, Miss. (CE1961)
  
• 4/17/1957 Nnamdi Azikiwe, premier of the Eastern Region of Nigeria, was the target of an unsuccessful assassination attempt in Nigeria.
  
• 4/27/1957 Oswald begins "Aircraft Control and Warning Operator" course at Keesler AFB. (CD 82)
  
• 5/1957 a Gallup poll showed that 63% of Americans favored an international halt to nuclear bomb tests.
  
• 5/2/1957 Sen. Joe McCarthy died
  
• 5/3/1957 Oswald is granted a Confidential clearance at MAD, NATTC, Jacksonville, Florida. (CD 82, H 19 665) He was also promoted to private first class.
  
• 5/3/1957 Astronaut Gordon Cooper reported suppression of a flying saucer movie filmed in high clarity by two Edwards AFB range photographers on May 3, 1957.
  
• 5/4/1957 Oswald arrived at Keesler AFB in Biloxi, Miss. (CE 1961)
  
• 5/14/1957 "Energy resources and our future" - remarks by Admiral Hyman Rickover delivered
  
• 5/17/1957 MLK delivers a speech for the Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom celebrating the third anniversary of the Supreme Court's desegregation decision. The speech, entitled "Give Us the Ballot," is given at the Lincoln Memorial, Washington, D. C. Hoover quickly opened a file to investigate the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
  
• 5/25/1957 Kliment Yefremovich Voroshilov, chairman of the Russian presidium, was the target of an unsuccessful assassination attempt in Indonesia.
  
• 5/30/1957 USAF discloses development of the Hughes Falcon air-to-air guided missile armed with a nuclear warhead.
  
• 6/1957 In Samuel Roth v. U.S., the Supreme Court ruled that for material to be declared legally obscene it had to be "utterly without redeeming social importance."
  
• 6/1/1957 Playwright Arthur Miller has been found guilty of contempt of Congress for refusing to reveal to HUAC the names of members of a literary circle suspected of Communist affiliations.
  
• 6/17/1957 "Red Monday" found the Supreme Court ruling against the government in three cases involving suppression of Communists. Ike was furious, privately calling the appointment of Warren "the biggest damn fool thing I ever did."
  
• 6/19/1957 Oswald departs Kessler Air Force Base, Biloxi, Miss. (CE 1961)
  
• 6/20/1957 Oswald departs on leave. (CD 82)
  
• 6/25/1957 Oswald awarded MOS 6741, Aviation Electronics Operator. (CD 82)
  
• 6/30/1957 Oswald returns from leave. (CD 82)
  
• 7/1957 Soviets launched a formal protest against US spy plane overflights.
  
• 7/1957 Col. Rudolf Abel of the Soviet Secret Police was arrested in a room in Brooklyn filled with spy equipment. He was arraigned 8/9 and asked for John J. Abt to provide legal counsel, but he refused to take the case.
  
• 7/2/1957 JFK Senate speech came out in favor of Algerian independence: "the most powerful single force in the world today is neither communism nor capitalism, neither the H-bomb nor the guided missile it is man's eternal desire to be free and independent. The great enemy of that tremendous force of freedom is called, for want of a more precise term, imperialism and today that means Soviet imperialism and, whether we like it or not, and though they are not to be equated, Western imperialism."
  
• 7/6/1957 John Lennon meets Paul McCartney at a church picnic in Liverpool.
  
• 7/9/1957 Oswald joins 4th Replacement Battalion, MAT&RC, Marine Corps Air Station, El Toro, CA. (CE 1961)
  
• 7/20/1957 100,000 people filled Yankee Stadium to see Billy Graham. Sitting on the platform with him was Richard Nixon.
  
• 7/26/1957 Guatemala: dictator Castillo Armas was assassinated by one of his own guards in the capital; Eisenhower called his death "a great loss to Guatemala and the world."
  
• 7/28/1957 A US C-147 "Glovemaster" transporting three nuclear weapons and a nuclear capsule from Dover Air Force Base in Delaware to Europe lost two of its engines over New Jersey; the crew jettisoned two of the weapons in the sea. They were never recovered.
  
• 8/1957 A recession in the US begins (3.0% decline)
  
• Oct-Nov: Global UFO wave
  
• 8/21/1957 Oswald departs 4th Replacement Bn, MAT&RC, El Toro, CA. (CE 1961)
  
• 8/22/1957 Oswald embarks on USS Bexar at San Diego for Japan. (CE1961)
  
• 8/25/1957 Soviets announce they have successfully tested the world's first intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM).
  
• 8/29/1957 Civil Rights Act passed after a 24-hour filibuster by conservative Senator Strom Thurmond (D-South Carolina) was overcome today; gave the government more power to fight discrimination, but its laws were often ignored or unenforced at the local level.
  
• 9/1957 The first public call for Warren's impeachment came from a tiny right-wing group in Hollywood. His brochure featured a photo of Warren with "WANTED! FOR IMPEACHMENT"
  
• 9/1957 The AEC detonated a 2-kiloton bomb inside a mountain in Nevada to demonstrate the peaceful applications of nuclear power.
  
• 9/2/1957 An LBJ-guided anti-Court bill, diluted of all its power, was passed.
  
• 9/2/1957 Arkansas Governor Orvall Faubus "prayerfully" mustered the state National Guard the night before the fall school semester began. He intended to use them to "protect the lives and property of citizens" in preventing 9 black students from attending the all-white Central High School in Little Rock.
  
• 9/4/1957 Nine black children attempt to attend Central High. One of them, 15-year-old Elizabeth Ann Eckford, tried to approach the school but was blocked by National Guard bayonets; meanwhile, the mob of white protestors screamed at her: "Go home, you bastard of a black bitch!" "Lynch her! Lynch her!" The terrified girl hugged her schoolbooks to her chest as the media captured it all on film.
  
• 9/5/1957 The first civil rights act since Reconstruction is passed by Congress, creating the Civil Rights Commisson and the Civil Rights Divison of the Department of Justice.
  
• 9/12/1957 Oswald arrived in Yokosuka, Japan. He joins MACS-1, MAG-11, 1st Marine Aircraft Wing at Atsugi. (CE 1961) Oswald was stationed at Atsugi US Marine Air base in Japan, where some U-2 flights originated. (WR 683).
  
• 9/19/1957 US conducts its first underground nuclear test in the Nevada desert. (Nat Geographic Aug 05)
  
• 9/24/1957 Ike reluctantly ordered units of the Army's 101st Airborne to Little Rock to stop violence on the school grounds. He also federalized the Arkansas National Guard. Maj. Gen. Edwin Walker would be in command of the Airborne troops at Central High. This was the first time since Reconstruction that federal troops had been ordered into the South to protect the rights of blacks. Sen. Richard Russell compared the troops to "Hitler's storm troopers."
  
• 9/25/1957 The nine black children reentered Central High School under the protection of federal troops.
  
• 9/29/1957 The Kyshtym disaster was a radiation contamination incident that occurred at Mayak, a nuclear fuel reprocessing plant in Russia. It measured as a Level 6 disaster on the International Nuclear Event Scale, making it the second most serious nuclear accident ever recorded (after the Chernobyl disaster).
  
• 10/4/1957 Soviets launched Sputnik satellite
  
• 10/12/1957 After a concert in Australia, Little Richard announces he has given up rock'n'roll. The next day, he flies to Los Angeles to be baptised a Seventh Day Adventist and "to prepare for the end of the world."
  
• 10/22/1957 Thirteen US servicemen are wounded by a communist bomb attack in Saigon.
  
• 10/25/1957 Mob hitman Albert Anastasia is assassinated by rival mobsters in New York.
  
• 10/26/1957 USSR: Zhukov is removed from the Central Committee and his post as defense minister while visiting Yugoslavia. He is accused of trying to set up a "cult of personality" and pull the military away from party control.
  
• 10/27/1957 Injury Report on Lee Harvey Oswald shooting incident. He was admitted to Yokosuka Naval Hospital for gunshot wound of upper left arm. (CD 82, CE 1961)
  
• 11/1957 Following a new round of nuclear tests, the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy placed an ad in the NYT calling for an end to nuclear testing. The unexpected public response to the ad sparked the formation of the group SANE.
  
• 11/3/1957 NOV 3 Soviets sent up a second satellite, Sputnik II, with a dog aboard; it burned up in the atmosphere 4/14/1958. Ike's Gallup Poll rating dropped 22 points. Foster Dulles wanted Ike to tell the public about the U-2 program, but he refused.
  
• 11/8/1957 UK successfully tests a hydrogen bomb in the Line Islands of the Pacific. (Nat. Geographic Aug 05)
  
• 11/14/1957 Aborted meeting of Mafia bosses at Apalachin, New York.
  
• 11/16/1957 Oswald is released from US Naval Hospital, Yokosuka, and returns to MACS-1 at Atsugi. (CE 1961)
  
• 11/20/1957 From this date to 3/6/1958 Oswald's unit, MACS-1, joined other marine units for the Operation Strongback maneuvers in the South China Sea and the Philippines. They left for the Philippines aboard the Terrell County, LST 1157, on 11/20. (CE 1961)
  
• 11/25/1957 Ike suffered a stroke, though he quickly recovered.
  
• 12/1957 a National Intelligence Estimate projected the Soviets would have between 100 and 500 operational ICBMs by 1960.
  
• 12/1/1957 A. Sukarno, president of Indonesia, was the target of a failed attempt on his life in Djakarta, Indo., but ten people died and others were injured in gunfire and grenade blasts.
  
• 12/6/1957 AFL-CIO expelled the Teamsters Union.
  
• 12/6/1957 The US attempted to launch a satellite with a Vanguard rocket, but it failed.
  
• 12/18/1957 First US atomic power plant in operation.