Deep Politics Timeline

[Tracy Riddle]

Thanks, Dawn, I hope everyone finds it useful.

• 7/1961 Defense Dept order went out restricting the right of military officers to express political opinions in public and participate in "information programs" critical of government policies. Strom Thurmond attacked it as an "attempt to intimidate the leaders of the United States Armed Forces and prevent them from informing their troops about the exact nature of the Communist menace."
  
• 7/1961 Dave Ferrie spoke at a meeting of the New Orleans chapter of the Military Order of World Wars and was asked to stop his ranting when he became "too critical of President Kennedy." (HSCA 10 107). Group members clearly recalled (and reported to the FBI) Ferrie boasting of his links to the CIA and how he had trained pilots in Guatemala for the Bay of Pigs. (Plot or Politics p46).
  
• 7/1961 The Milgram experiment on obedience to authority figures was a series of social psychology experiments conducted by Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram, which measured the willingness of study participants to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform acts that conflicted with their personal conscience. Milgram first described his research in 1963 in an article published in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology,[1] and later discussed his findings in greater depth in his 1974 book, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View. The experiments began in July 1961, three months after the start of the trial of German Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. Milgram devised his psychological study to answer the question: "Was it that Eichmann and his accomplices in the Holocaust had mutual intent, in at least with regard to the goals of the Holocaust?" In other words, "Was there a mutual sense of morality among those involved?" Milgram's testing suggested that it could have been that the millions of accomplices were merely following orders, despite violating their deepest moral beliefs.
  
• 7/1/1961 Gen. Maxwell Taylor became JFK's special military representative.
  
• 7/1/1961 In Boise, ID, the first community air raid shelter was built. The shelter had a capacity of 1,000 people and family memberships sold for $100.
  
• 7/2/1961 Hanoi captures at least three members of Lansdale's US-trained First Observation Group when their C-47 plane goes down.
  
• 7/2/1961 The right-wing Manion Forum radio show read a letter from the father of two Cuban exiles lost in the invasion: "all of us who once believed in the greatness of the United States feel that they and all of us have been the victims of gross, high official treason." (None Dare Call it Treason p60)
  
• 7/2/1961 South Korea: Maj. Gen. Park Chungee is named chairman of the ruling junta, the Supreme Council for National Reconstruction.
  
• 7/2/1961 Author Ernest Hemingway committed suicide.
  
• 7/2/1961 Jackie Robinson, who broke the color line in professional baseball, is the first African-American inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, in Cooperstown, N.Y.
  
• 7/3/1961 The FBI in Washington opened a new file on Oswald under the slug line 105 ("internal security"). John W. Fain was the FBI Fort Worth agent in charge of Oswald's file. (McKnight)
  
• 7/7/1961 The U.S. was far ahead in the arms race. Yet the military continued to press for a rapid build-up of strategic missiles. Curtis LeMay had asked for at least 2,400 Minutemen; Gen. Thomas Power of the Strategic Air Command had asked for 10,000. All were to be unleashed in a single paroxysm of mass annihilation, known as SIOP, the Single Integrated Operating Plan. SIOP was a recipe for blowing up the world, whether in a first or a second strike. As McGeorge Bundy wrote to the President on July 7, 1961: "...All agree that the current strategic war plan is dangerously rigid and, if continued without amendment, may leave you with very little choice as to how you face the moment of thermonuclear truth. We believe that you may want to raise this question with Bob McNamara in order to have a prompt review and new orders if necessary. In essence, the current plan calls for shooting off everything we have in one shot, and is so constructed as to make any more flexible course very difficult." (quoted in Kaplan, 297) During that summer of 1961, the Defense Secretary ordered an overhaul of SIOP carried out by RAND analysts (including Daniel Ellsberg) and quickly approved by the JCS. (Bobbitt, 48) Kennedy and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara eventually imposed a limit of 1,000 Minuteman missiles, angering the Chiefs. Kennedy also launched efforts to gain operational control of the nuclear force, then far from being securely concentrated in the President's hands.
  
• 7/7/1961 James Hoffa was reelected president of the Teamsters union overwhelmingly at their convention in Miami Beach.
  
• 7/8/1961 A Klan meeting was held in Indian Springs, Georgia, with representatives of several separate organizations attending. A new group, the United Klans of America (UKA) was formed, and Alabama's Robert Shelton was selected as Imperial Wizard. Imperial Headquarters was transferred from Atlanta to Tuscaloosa, Alabama.
  
• 7/8/1961 Oswald arrived at the Moscow embassy; in his diary he said he took a plane from Minsk. It was a Saturday, and he was asked to return on Monday.
  
• 7/8/1961 Khrushchev announced that the USSR would postpone its military cutbacks.
  
• 7/9/1961 AP reported that Billy Graham repudiated the idea that America's pulpits were filled with communists, noting that he had never met a single minister in the US whom he suspected of being a communist.
  
• 7/9/1961 Oswald calls Marina and tells her to come to Moscow.
  
• 7/10/1961 JFK wrote a memo to Robert F. Woodward in the State Dept about the recent turmoil in the DR. "Do we have any evidence of Communist activity or Castro activity in the Dominican Republic today? Have they infiltrated the 'popular Dominican movement?'...I also said that if we could not have a democracy with some hope of survival, I would rather continue the present situation than to have a Castro dictatorship...we want to make sure than in attempting to secure democracy we don't end up with a Castro Communist island."
  
• 7/10/1961 Oswald returned to the embassy. Marina then joined him in Moscow. He met with Synder again, and this time Synder found him remorseful. Oswald falsely told him that he had not applied for Soviet citizenship, had not made negative statements about the US, and was not a member of a trade union. He told Synder also that he had never given any secrets to the KGB and they had never interrogated him. Snyder had him fill out an application for renewing his passport (his was going to expire 9/10/1961). He gave him back his passport, and stamped it: "This passport is valid only for direct travel to the United States." (CE 946) He filled out two separate passport applications, and it appears that on one that he had indicated that he had committed an act or acts which might expatriate him or make him ineligible for renewal. (H 5 286; WR 755-57; Accessories After the Fact 336-7) The US Embassy in Moscow interviewed the Oswalds; they recommended that the State Dept rule that Oswald had not expatriated himself, and that Marina should get a visa to enter the US.
  
• 7/11/1961 INS ruled that Carlos Marcello was an undesirable alien and once again ordered him to be deported.
  
• 7/11/1961 Dean Rusk memo about Oswald to US Embassy in Moscow.
  
• 7/11/1961 Motorcade in Arrival Ceremonies for Muhammad Ayub Khan, President of Pakistan 11 July 1961. In open car (Lincoln Continental with bubble top): Secret Service agent William Greer (driving); Military Aide to the President General Chester V. Clifton (front seat, center); Secret Service Agent Gerald "Jerry" Behn (front seat, right; mostly hidden); President Mohammad Ayub Khan (standing); President John F. Kennedy. Pennsylvania Avenue and 14th Street, Washington, D.C.
  
• 7/11/1961 Lee and Marina appeared at the Embassy. She filled out paperwork to obtain an entrance visa to the US. Marina told the Embassy that she had never been a member of Komsomol (Communist youth organization); this was supposedly at Lee's insistence. (Marina and Lee 135-6) This denial was later found to be false. Gerald Posner says that even if she had admitted it, "it was not an automatic disqualification, as some Russian wives of American citizens had previously been admitted to the US although they were Komsomol members." (Case Closed 69; H 5 321)
  
• 7/11/1961 Richard Snyder wrote the State Dept: "Twenty months of realities of life in the Soviet Union have clearly had a maturing effect on Oswald. He stated frankly that he had learned a hard lesson the hard way and that he had been completely relieved of his illusions about the Soviet Union, at the same time that he acquired a new understanding and appreciation of the United States and the meaning of freedom. Much of the arrogance and bravado which characterized him on his first visit to the Embassy appears to have left him." (CE 935) The letter also said that Oswald denied giving any secrets to the Russians or doing any propaganda work for them.
  
• 7/13/1961 Dallas Morning News reported that the administration had lent Poland $2.5 million to buy a US-made steel finishing plant.
  
• 7/14/1961 In The Worker, Gus Hall commented, "it would be a serious mistake to consider the Kennedy administration as embarked at present on the fascist road."
  
• 7/14/1961 Letter to Robert Oswald said that Lee was doing everything he could to get out of the USSR. (CE 301) Lee and Marina returned to Minsk on this day and began trying to get Soviet authorities to let them leave. Marina was pressured to change her mind.
  
• 7/15/1961 Oswald wrote to the Embassy that "there have been some unusual and crude attempts on my wife at her place of work...Then there followed the usual, 'enemy of the people' meeting, in which...she was condemned and her friends at work warned against speaking with her." (7/15 and 10/4/1961 letters, CE 115, CE 1122) He also stated that "as per instructions I am writing to inform you of the process and progress of our visas." In his diary that day he wrote that he was upset Marina had received a "strong browbeating." Marina recalled that it took Oswald a month to fill out the twenty forms without any errors.
  
• 7/16/1961 In a fierce battle, 169 guerillas are killed by South Vietnamese troops in the Plain of Jars marsh are 80 miles west of Saigon.
  
• 7/19/1961 JFK told reporters he defended the right of the Freedom Riders to travel anywhere in the country: "Whether we agree with the purpose for which they travel, those rights stand - providing they are exercised in a peaceful way."
  
• 7/19/1961 "At a Georgetown dinner party recently, the wife of a leading senator sat next to Gen. Curtis LeMay, chief of staff of the Air Force. He told her a nuclear war was inevitable. It would begin in December and be all over by the first of the year. In that interval, every major American city -- Washington, New York, Philadelphia, Detroit, Chicago, Los Angeles -- would be reduced to rubble. Similarly, the principal cities of the Soviet Union would be destroyed. The lady, as she tells it, asked if there were any place where she could take her children and grandchildren to safety; the general would, of course, at the first alert be inside the top-secret underground hideout near Washington from which the retaliatory strike would be directed. He told her that certain unpopulated areas in the far west would be safest." --Marquis Childs, nationally syndicated columnist, Washington Post, 19 July 1961
  
• 7/20/1961 At a National Security Council Meeting, the Joint Chiefs of Staff's Gen. Lemnitzer and CIA director Allen Dulles present a plan for a preemptive nuclear attack on the Soviet Union "in late 1963, preceded by a period of heightened tensions." President Kennedy walks out of the meeting, saying to Secretary of State Dean Rusk, "And we call ourselves the human race." (Brothers, Talbott) Arthur Schlesinger's Robert Kennedy and His Times gives this account: "...Kennedy received the Net Evaluation, an annual doomsday briefing analyzing the chances of nuclear war. An Air Force General presented it, said Roswell Gilpatric, the deputy secretary of defense, "as though it were for a kindergarten class.. Finally Kennedy got up and walked right out in the middle of it, and that was the end of it. We never had another one." (p. 483) McGeorge Bundy evidently refers to the same meeting in this passage: "In the summer of 1961 [Kennedy] went through a formal briefing on the net assessment of a general nuclear war between the two superpowers, and he expressed his own reaction to Dean Rusk as they walked from the cabinet room to the Oval Office for a private meeting on other subjects: "And we call ourselves the human race." (p. 354) (Dean Rusk's memoirs repeat Kennedy's remark, though they place the meeting "shortly after our assuming office." Richard Reeves, for his part, does not mention the July meeting, and attributes Kennedy's remark to a later briefing in September, 1961.) Numerous other apparent accounts of the meeting exist, though they do not refer to it by name or date. All agree on Kennedy's reaction. But none reveal what was actually discussed. Theodore Sorenson's Kennedy, published only four years later, presents an understandably benign version: "That briefing confirmed, however, the harsh facts [Kennedy] already knew: (1) that neither the Soviet Union nor the United States could 'win' a nuclear war in any rational sense of the word; (2) that, except to deter an all-out Soviet attack, our threat of 'massive retaliation' to every Communist move was no longer credible, now that it invited our own destruction; and (3) that a policy of 'pre-emptive first strike' or 'preventive war' was no longer open to either side, inasmuch as even a surprise missile attack would trigger, before those missiles reached their targets, a devastating retaliation that neither country could risk or accept." (p. 513) Unfortunately, the critical third point was not yet true. As UnderSecretary of State Roger Hilsman wrote in 1967: "As the intelligence community looked at their estimates in 1958, 1959, and 1960, and even through the first half of 1961, they saw a missile gap developing that would come to a peak about 1963." (p. 162) What Hilsman does not say explicitly is that the estimated missile gap was in America's favor. The Soviets had virtually no operational ICBMs in 1961, a fact known to American intelligence at least by the end of 1960. And it appears the Russians did not solve their fundamental technical problem, namely building a hydrogen bomb small enough to be carried by a missile of manageable size, until years later. (Sorenson, 524; Bobbitt, 61).Dean Rusk describes the meeting as an "awesome experience" in his memoirs, As I Saw It, published in 1990. "President Kennedy clearly understood what nuclear war meant and was appalled by it. In our many talks together, he never worried about the threat of assassination, but he occasionally brooded over whether it would be his fate to push the nuclear button... If any of us had doubts, that 1961 briefing convinced us that a nuclear war must never be fought. Consequently, throughout the Kennedy and Johnson years we worked to establish a stable deterrent..." (p. 246-7)
  
• 7/20/1961 The memorandum reproduced here was written for Vice President Lyndon Johnson, who did not attend the meeting, by Colonel Howard Burris, his military aide. TOP SECRET EYES ONLY (Declassified: June, 1993) Notes on National Security Council Meeting July 20, 1961 General Hickey, Chairman of the Net Evaluation Subcommittee, presented the annual report of his group. General Lemnitzer stated that the assumption of this year's study was a surprise attack in late 1963, preceded by a period of heightened tensions. After the presentation by General Hickey and by the various members of the Subcommittee, the President asked if there had ever been made an assessment of damage results to the U.S.S.R which would be incurred by a preemptive attack. General Lemnitzer stated that such studies had been made and that he would bring them over and discuss them personally with the President. In recalling General Hickey's opening statement that these studies have been made since 1957, the President asked for an appraisal of the trend in the effectiveness of the attack. General Lemnitzer replied that he would also discuss this with the President. Since the basic assumption of this year's presentation was an attack in late 1963, the President asked about probable effects in the winter of 1962. Mr. Dulles observed that the attack would be much less effective since there would be considerably fewer missiles involved. General Lemnitzer added a word of caution about accepting the precise findings of the Committee since these findings were based upon certain assumptions which themselves might not be valid. The President posed the question as to the period of time necessary for citizens to remain in shelters following an attack. A member of the Subcommittee replied that no specific period of time could be cited due to the variables involved, but generally speaking, a period of two weeks should be expected. The President directed that no member in attendance at the meeting disclose even the subject of the meeting.
  
• 7/21/1961 UPI story by David Burnham reported "Study Asserts Military Rightists Raise Obstacles to Kennedy Program."
  
• 7/21/1961 Nuclear conflict was very much in the air that week. Another document of the time indicates the directions Kennedy's nuclear thinking was actually taking - quite the Cold Warrior, but at the same time far removed from pre-emptive strikes and the inflexible all-out attack envisioned by the Joint Chiefs. This is a paper entitled "Nuclear Strategy in the Berlin Crisis," by the economist Thomas C. Schelling, which was sent to Hyannis Port over the weekend of July 21, 1961 and which, as Bundy noted, made a "deep impression" on the President. In it Schelling presented arguments for a capability, which did not then exist, to wage limited nuclear war: "the role of nuclears in Europe should not be to win a grand nuclear campaign, but to pose a higher level of risk to the enemy. The important thing in limited nuclear war is to impress the Soviet leadership with the risk of general war - a war that may occur whether we or they intend it or not....We should plan for a war of nerve, of demonstration, and of bargaining, not of tactical target destruction." (Foreign Relations, XIV, 170). Schelling also advocated centralization of the control of weapons in the hands of the President so as to "permit deliberate, discriminating, selective use for dangerous nuclear bargaining. This means preventing any use, by anyone, not specifically authorized as part of the nuclear bargaining plan...This is a controlled strategic exchange." (op. cit., 172) Schelling's paper thus called attention to a key concern: the diffuse character of nuclear command and control in 1961 did not assure that the President in fact enjoyed the full authority over the bomb which most Americans assumed to be the case. Establishing such control became a priority for Kennedy in the months that followed. (Desmond Ball, 193).
  
• 7/21/1961 Mercury 4 mission: Liberty Bell 7 sub-orbital flight; the capsule splashed down in the Atlantic, and astronaut Capt. Virgil "Gus" Grissom escaped before it sank. He was picked up by the carrier Randolph.
  
• 7/21/1961 TIME: "Death to the imperialist!" shouted Iraq's General Abdul Karim Kassem. "Return Kuwait to its homeland!" Sprinting from speech to speech on the third anniversary of his revolutionary regime, volatile Kassem repeated last week that he would not use force to "liberate" Kuwaitand in the next breath threatened force against Britain. "We shall launch a bitter war against the British if they do not heed right and abandon oppression!" he told the crowds after reviewing a 2½-hour parade of troops and weapons in Baghdad's Liberation Square. For all his brave talk, Kassem was in a tight corner. Britain announced that it was withdrawing 2,000 of the 5,000 troops it had rushed to defend Kuwait against Kassem, and Kuwait emphasized its eagerness to speed the evacuation. But in a barbed memorandum issued after a hurried visit to Nasser, the Kuwaitis declared that they would not ask the British to leave until either 1) Kassem drops all claims on their land, or 2) other Arab countries provide a police force of their own to replace the British, and themselves guarantee Kuwait's independence. The plan for an all-Arab force in Kuwait, on which Britain and the U.A.R. found themselves in rare agreement, would put Kassem in the ticklish position of opposing his fellow Arab Leaguers. At the start of his mammoth, six-day anniversary celebration, Kassem was plainly in no mood to back down. He flourished a note in which, he claimed, his oil-rich neighbor had offered him $112 million a year if he would drop his claims and guarantee Kuwait's independence. Rejecting the offer, Kassem snorted: "The issue is not a matter of money, oil or bribes, but of a holy land." He added: "Anyway, Iraq is rich." But he had not solved the dilemma he had talked himself into. As he put it with inadvertent candor: "I don't want to be the joke of the world, and I don't want to be thought of as another Hitler swallowing up people."
  
• 7/24/1961 A Cuban-born resident of the US hijacks a passenger plane on a Miami-Tampa flight, and forces the pilot to fly to Havana.
  
• 7/25/1961 JFK, in a major television speech on the crisis in Berlin, calls for additional $3.5 billion for defense and additional reserve troops, increasing draft calls, and recommending the construction of fallout shelters. "We cannot and will not permit the Communists to drive us out of Berlin, either gradually or by force" Yet Kennedy also stressed the dangers: "miscommunication could rain down more devastation in several hours than has been wrought in all the wars of human history" He asked for increased military appropriations and called out 150,000 reserve personnel. But he did not engage the Soviets. The wall was allowed to remain intact when constructed in August of 1961, a symbolic column of soldiers was sent through to West Berlin, and a fallout shelter program was undertaken in the United States. With the Burris memorandum, the reasoning behind the fallout shelter program now begins to fall into place. As a civil defense measure against a Soviet nuclear attack, the flimsy cinderblock shelters Americans were told to build were absurd. But they could indeed protect those in them, for a couple of weeks, from radiation drifting thousands of miles after a U.S. pre-emptive strike on the Soviet Union. It is known that Kennedy later regretted this program.
  
• 7/26/1961 Sen. Thurmond defended the anti-Communist views of the military in a speech before the Senate: "The military officers...are charged with defending our country from all enemies, foreign and domestic...the military leader must know the enemy in order to defend our country against him....There can be no truthful denial that our country and its leaders have, on many occasions in the past, accepted the most thinly-veiled Communist fronts for whatever they purported themselves to be."
  
• 7/26/1961 Washington Post Interview with Secret Service chief U.E. Baughman: "I will say emphatically that there is no Mafia in this country and no national crime syndicate. Why don't those who talk about the Mafia name its leader or leaders? There has been no Mafia in this country for at least 40 years. Now about a national crime syndicate: I say there is no such thing, and I say it not simply as a personal judgment but on the basis of talks with other enforcement officials."
  
• 7/26/1961 Memo for the Sec of State, JFK wrote on the Dominican Republic: "The CIA had a report that the Balaguer [faction] seemed distraught as they were counting on us to put pressure on Trujillo [brother of the slain dictator, whom Balaguer wanted extradited]. Should we asked Bob Murphy to go down there for a couple of days and talk to the powers that be and make a report on his findings?"
  
• 7/26/1961 The Sandinista guerilla force was formed to fight against the Somoza family rule in Nicaragua; it was named after 1920s rebel leader Augusto Sandino, supported by Cuba, and based in Honduras.
  
• 7/29/1961 Goldwater, in a speech to the American Legion, criticized "the repeated and growing attacks being made on our military leaders, and to the strenuous efforts being made to muzzle them and prevent them from telling their troops and the American people some of the facts which they should know...This is no pink tea we are engaged in - it is a grim battle to the death."
  
• Late July 1961 it was disclosed that Sen. Fulbright (D-Arkansas) had written a memo earlier in the year to the administration: "Fundamentally, it is believed that the American people have little, if any, need to be alerted to the menace of the cold war...the principal problem of leadership will be...to restrain the desire of the people to hit the communists with everything we've got, particularly if there are more Cubas or Laos..." This month, Sen. Fulbright, "noting the activities of General Edwin Walker, called for an investigation of the Institute for American Strategy, the Richardson Foundation, the National War College, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff all for subversive activity. Fulbright compared the mentality of some US military men to that of the OAS (Secret Army Organization) in Algeria…" (Webster Tarpley, Synthetic Terror) The Fulbright Memorandum was drafted in July 1961 as a personal communication between the Senate and the Secretary of Defense, who was Robert McNamara.[2] Entitled "Propaganda Activities of Military Personnel Directed at the Public," the memorandum began by noting that a 1958 National Security Council directive had made it the policy of the United States "to make use of military personnel and facilities to arouse the public to the menace of the Cold War." Fulbright reported that private organizations were preparing material that was then distributed by the military, material which was contrary to the President's policies. He noted that the actual programs being carried out under the 1958 directive "made use of extremely radical right-wing speakers and/or materials, with the probable net result of condemning foreign and domestic policies of the administration in the public mind." Fulbright's allusion to a military coup, came as follows: "Perhaps it is farfetched to call forth the revolt of the French generals as an example of the ultimate danger. Nevertheless, military officers, French or American, have some common characteristics arising from their profession and there are numerous military 'fingers on the trigger' throughout the world. While this danger may appear very remote, contrary to American tradition, and even American military tradition, so also is the 'long twilight struggle' [referring to President Kennedy's characterization of the Cold War as a conflict which may not be solved 'in our lifetime'], and so also is the very existence of an American military program for educating the public." Fulbright called for a review of the mission and operation of the National War Collegeas to whether it should operate under the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS)and also urged that the relationships among FPRI, IAS, the Richardson Foundation, the National War College, and the JCS, be reexamined "from the standpoint of whether these relationships do not amount to official support for a viewpoint at variance with that of the administration."
  
• 8/1961 The situation [in South Vietnam] gets worse almost week by week," journalist Theodore White reported to the White House in August. " The guerrillas now control almost all the southern delta-so much so that I could find no American who would drive me outside Saigon in his car even by day without military convoy. " (Schlesinger, 1000 Days)
  
• 8/1/1961 RFK memo on meeting with hawkish congressman; JFK and Douglas MacArthur were present. The General "said that we would be foolish to fight on the Asiatic continent and that the future of Southeast Asia should be determined at the diplomatic table." Alexis Johnson would later recall that while he himself disagreed with MacArthur's views, his thinking "tended to dominate very much the thinking of President Kennedy with respect to Southeast Asia. (RFK and His Times 759)
  
• 8/2/1961 Sen. Fulbright warned, "Military officers are not elected by the people and they have no responsibility for the formulation of policies other than military policies...the President is the Commander in Chief...military personnel are not to participate in activities which undermine his policies."
  
• 8/4/1961 Sen. Thurmond introduced a resolution to call upon the Senate Armed Forces Committee to investigate the "muzzling" of the military.
  
• 8/4/1961 Human Events magazine reported: "officials in the US Department of Agriculture and the Commerce Department agreed to sell surplus wheat to the Soviet Union for $.62 per bushel less than the baker who bakes your bread pays for it. Only quick action by an awakening public stopped this folly...The officials who initiated the program are still holding responsible government positions."
  
• 8/6/1961 NY Times quoted Billy James Hargis as saying, "We conservatives all agree on one thing - that our problem is almost entirely from internal subversion."
  
• 8/8/1961 Oswald wrote to the embassy asking for funds to cover travel expenses to the US. "I believe I could catch a military hop back to the States, from Berlin."
  
• 8/9/1961 An Algerian passenger hijacks a US plane and forces it to fly to Havana.
  
• 8/11/1961 NSAM 65: supplement to NSAM 52, dated 5/11/1961, to the Sec. of State. "SUBJECT: Joint program of action with the Government of Viet-Nam...the President on August 4 made the following decisions: 1.The President agrees with the three basic tenets on which the recommendations contained in the joint action program are based, namely: a.Security requirements must for the present be given first priority. b.Military operations will not achieve lasting results unless economic and social programs are continued and accelerated. c.It is in our joint interest to accelerate measures to achieve a self-sustaining economy and a free and peaceful society in Viet-Nam. 2.The United States will provide equipment and assistance in training for an increase in the armed forces of Viet-Nam from 170,000 to 200,000 men...the United States and Viet-Nam should satisfy themselves before the time when the level of 170,000 is reached on the following points: a.That there then exists a mutually agreed upon geographically phased strategic plan for bringing Viet Cong subversion in the Republic of Viet-Nam under control. b.That on the basis of such a plan there exists an understanding on the training and use of these 30,000 additional men. c.That the rate of increase...will be regulated to permit the most efficient absortion and utilization of additional personnel and materiel in the Vietnamese armed forces with due regard to Viet-Nam's resources...a decision regarding the further increase above 200,000 will be postponed until next year when the question can be reexamined on the basis of the situation at that time...the Ambassador should seek discreetly to impress upon President Diem that he should see the total US program for the greatest political effect in his achievement of maximum appreciation of his government by the people of Viet-Nam and the people of the world...McGeorge Bundy."
  
• 8/13/1961 Cuban authorities disclose plans for U.S. fake attack on Guantanamo naval base: attack on the life of Major Raul Castro, followed by fake attack on naval base marking the beginning a grand-scale armed struggle that would justify U.S. intervention in Cuba.
  
• 8/13/1961 A few minutes after midnight, the Berlin Wall began to be built between the Eastern and Western zones.
  
• 8/14/1961 Memo from JFK to Bundy: "Can you find out where the newspaper stories came [from] this weekend on the Vietnam military intervention into southern Laos. Those stories were harmful to us. Probably exaggerated. Makes it very difficult for us now to attack the Vietminh for its intervention in Laos."
  
• 8/16/1961 Entries in the FBI files indicate that the FBI vigorously pursued its investigation of the wiretap case. However, on August 16, 1961, the Assistant United States Attorney in Las Vegas reported his reluctance to proceed with the case because of deficiencies in the evidence and his concern that CIA's alleged involvement might become known. The Department of Justice files indicate no activity between September 1961, when the FBI's investigation was concluded, and January 1962, when the question of prosecution in the case was brought up for reconsideration. (Assassination Plots, Interim Report: Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders, pp127) There is no indication that the FBI concluded that the CIA had used the Mafia for assassination plots.
  
• 8/16/1961 Congressman Samuel A. Devine introduced a resolution in the House to investigate the firing of Gen. Walker.
  
• 8/17/1961 First meeting of the Alliance for Progress at Punte del Este, Uruguay. 20 nations sign the charter. Cuba attacked the Alliance, claiming the US wouldn't even be doing it if it weren't for Cuba. (Almanac of American History)
  
• 8/19/1961 Senate rejected 45-43 a measure that would have barred foreign aid to countries selling arms and strategic goods to communist countries.
  
• 8/20/1961 Oswald wrote in his diary "On August 20th we give the papers out they say it will be 3 1/2 months before we know wheather they let us go or not..." He repeatedly visited government agencies to speed the process along.
  
• 8/22/1961 A memorandum from Kennedy aide Richard Goodwin recounting his August 22, 1961 conversation with Ernesto "Che" Guevara in which Guevara thanks Goodwin for the Bay of Pigs invasion - which he calls "a great political victory" - but also seeks to establish a "modus vivendi" with the U.S. government.
  
• 8/25/1961 Congressman Thomas Pelly, in Human Events, complained that while the Berlin crisis was going on, the administration was approving aid in the form of synthetic rubber to the USSR and railway equipment and scrap iron to Bulgaria and Yugoslavia.
  
• 8/26/1961 "[Dave] Ferrie was booked in Jefferson Parish with committing a crime against nature on a 15-year-old boy and indecent behavior with three juvenile boys...authorities claim he used alcohol, hypnotism and the enticement of flying to lure the youngsters...A search of Ferrie's home turned up numerous maps of Cuba and seven or eight World War I rifles with a quantity of ammunition. A juvenile told officers he had flown to Cuba with Ferrie on several occasions." (New Orleans States-Item)
  
• 8/28/1961 White House meeting on the situation in the Dominican Republic
  
• 8/28/1961 Sen. Thomas Dodd, in Los Angeles, told the Southern California School of Anti-Communism, "There is a developing mood of anger and frustration in this country and there ought to be for we are losing round after round in the Cold War and our people do not like it...the last 16 years have witnessed a calamitous retreat from victory...Since the beginning of this year alone there has been the sealing-off of East Berlin, the disaster in Laos, the fiasco in Cuba, and only last week, the victory of Cheddi Jagan and his communist-dominated Peoples Progressive Party in British Guiana elections...The next five years will contain a series of decisive battles which will determine for centuries to come whether mankind is to live in freedom or live in slavery." (None Dare Call it Treason)
  
• 8/29/1961 John Kennedy contradicted his commitment to a peaceful settlement of the Laos crisis by his decision to deploy CIA and military advisers there and to arm covertly the members of the Hmong tribe (known by the Americans as the "Meos"). On August 29, 1961, following the recommendations of his CIA, military, and State Department advisers, Kennedy agreed to raise the total of U.S. advisers in Laos to five hundred and to go ahead with the equipping of two thousand more "Meos." That brought to eleven thousand the number of mountain men of Laos recruited into the CIA's covert army. From Kennedy's standpoint, he was supporting an indigenous group of people who were profoundly opposed to their land's occupation by the Pathet Lao army. He was also trying to hold on to enough ground, through some effective resistance to the Pathet Lao's advance, to leave something for Averell Harriman to negotiate with in Geneva toward a neutralist government. But he was working within Cold War assumptions and playing into the hands of his own worst enemy, the CIA. The Agency was eager to manipulate his policy to benefit their favorite Laotian strongman, General Phoumi Nosavan. Aware of this danger, Kennedy went ahead in strengthening the CIA- " Meo " army, so as to stem a Communist takeover in Laos, while at the same time trying by other means to rein in the CIA.
  
• 8/30/1961 The Soviet Union resumes atmospheric testing of thermonuclear weapons, exploding a IS0 (150?)-kiloton hydrogen bomb over Siberia. British PM Harold Macmillan recalled in his memoirs (At the End of the Day, 1961-1963) that he "knew the strong pressure being brought upon him [JFK] by the Pentagon and the atomic scientists to resume [aboveground nuclear] tests immediately...At the same time I knew that Kennedy was desperately anxious to postpone the day of resuming tests, which he regarded as a confession of failure in the diplomatic field." In 1961 the US had 450 nuclear missiles, the Kennedy administration was asking for 950, but the JCS wanted 3000. When JFK discovered that 450 was adequate for the military's needs, he asked McNamara why they were pushing for 950; McNamara replied, "that's the smallest number we can take up on the Hill without getting murdered." (The Best and the Brightest p91) "The alliance between the military and the right disturbed the Kennedys. This was why the President backed McNamara so vigorously in the effort to stop warmongering speeches by generals and admirals." (RFK and his Times p484) McNamara told Robert Scheer in 1982 that during JFK's presidency, the JCS was always pushing for a nuclear first-strike capability, which Kennedy and McNamara rejected. (With Enough Shovels p10) O'Brien recalled him complaining about the military: "They always give you their pitch about their instant reaction and their split-second timing, but it never works out. No wonder it's so hard to win a war." (No Final Victories p142)