Deep Politics Timeline

[Tracy Riddle]

• 11/1961 At a meeting with newspaper executives, Dallas Morning News publisher E.M. Dealey told JFK: "We need a man on horseback to lead this nation, and many people in Texas think that you are riding Caroline's tricycle...We can annihilate Russia and should make that clear to the Soviet government." As the other publishers sat looking embarrassed, JFK blasted back, "I'm just as tough as you are, Mr. Dealey. I have the responsibility for the lives of 180 million Americans, which you have not..." When the News covered the story for the folks back home, it included tributes to Dealey from Bruce Alger and H.L. Hunt and favorable letters from readers. (Portrait of Power 271; Death of a President 49)
  
• 11/1961 The head of the CIA's Counterintelligence Branch from 1954 to 1974 was James Jesus Angleton, known as the " Poet-Spy. " As an undergraduate at Yale in the early forties, Angleton had founded a literary journal, Furioso, which published the poetry of Ezra Pound, e. e. cummings, and Archibald MacLeish. After he went on to Harvard Law School, Angleton was drafted into the U.S. Army. He became a member of the Counterintelligence Branch of the Office of Strategic Services ( OSS), World War II predecessor to the CIA. The OSS and CIA suited Angleton perfectly. Counterintelligence became less a wartime mission than a lifelong obsession. For Angleton, the Cold War was an anti-communist crusade, with his CIA double agents engaged in a battle of light against darkness. Investigative journalist Joseph Trento testified in a 1984 court deposition that, according to CIA sources, James Angleton was the supervisor of a CIA assassination unit in the 1950s. The "small assassination team" was headed by Army Colonel Boris Pash. (June 28, 1984, deposition of Joseph Trento to Mark Lane; in Lane's Plausible Denial: Was the CIA Involved in the Assassination of JFK? ( New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 1992), p. 164. Cf. Lisa Pease, "James Angleton, " in The Assassinations, edited by James DiEugenio and Lisa Pease ( Los Angeles: Feral House, 2003 ) , p. 164.) At the end of World War II, Army Intelligence Colonel Pash had rounded up Nazi scientists who could contribute their research skills to the development of U.S. nuclear and chemical weapons. (Evan Thomas, The Very Best Men: Four Who Dared: The Early Years o f the CIA (New York: Touchstone, 1995) , p. 85) The CIA's E. Howard Hunt, while imprisoned for the Watergate break-in, told the New York Times that Pash's CIA assassination unit was designed especially for the killing of suspected double agents. (" Hunt Says C.I.A. Had Assassin Unit, " New York Times (December 26, 1975), p . 9, cited by Lisa Pease in Assassinations, p. 164.) That placed Pash's terminators under the authority of counterintelligence chief Angleton. Joseph Trento testified that his sources confirmed, " Pash's assassination unit was assigned to Angleton. " (Trento deposition cited in Lane, Plausible Denial, p. 1 64.) In the 1960s, Angleton retained his authority over assassinations. In November 1961, the CIA's Deputy Director of Plans, Richard Bissell, directed his longtime associate William Harvey to develop an assassination program known as " ZRJRIFLE" and to apply it to Cuba, as the Senate's Church Committee later discovered. (David C. Martin, Wilderness of Mirrors (New York: Ballantine Books, 1980) , p.121.) Among the notes for ZR/RIFLE that Harvey then scribbled to himself were: "planning should include provisions for blaming Sovs or Czechs in case of blow. Should have phony 201 [a CIA file on any person "of active operational interest" j in RG [Central Registry] to backstop this, all documents therein forged and backdated. " (The CIA's Clandestine Services Handbook stated that a 2 0 1 file was one opened on a person " of active operational interest at any given point in time . " Clandestine Services Handbook, 43-1-1, February 15, 1960, Chapter III, Annex B, " PERSONALITIES- 2 0 1 and IDN NUMBERS, " p. 4 3 ; NARA JFK Files, box 13 , folder 29. Cited by John Newman, Oswald and the CIA (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1995) , p. 537 note 2 . William Harvey's notes for " ZRlRIFLE" are cited in Martin, Wilderness of Mirrors, pp. 1 22-24, and in Pease, Assassinations, p. 162) In other words, in order to blame an assassination on the Communists, the patsy should be given Soviet or Czechoslovakian associations. (Oswald's would be Soviet and Cuban. ) An appropriately fraudulent CIA 201 personnel file should be created for any future assassination scapegoat, with " all documents therein forged and updated. " Harvey also reminded himself that the phony 201 " should look like a C E [counterespionage] file," and that he needed to talk with "Jim A. " (Martin, Wilderness of Mirrors, p. 124.) William Harvey headed Staff D, a top-secret CIA department that was responsible for communications intercepts received from the National Security Agency. Assassinations prepared by Harvey were therefore given the same ultimate degree of secrecy as the NSA's intercepts, under the higher jurisdiction of James Angleton. Any access to Staff D could be granted only by "Angleton's men, " according to CIA agent Joseph B. Smith. (Joseph B. Smith, Portrait of a Cold Warrior ( New York: Ballantine Books, 1981), p. 389.) As we shall see in the Oswald project under Angleton's supervision, the CIA's Counterintelligence head blended the powers of assassination and disinformation. Deception was Angleton's paradoxical way toward a victory of the light. In the war against Communism, Angleton thrived on deceiving enemies and friends alike in a milieu he liked to call " the wilderness of mirrors . " His friend e. e. cummings suggested the contradictions in James Angleton in a letter he wrote to Angleton's wife: "What a miracle of momentous complexity is the Poet. " (Martin, Wilderness of Mirrors, p.16)
  
• 11/1/1961 Presidential advisor Richard Goodwin and CIA Deputy Edward Lansdale recommend the creation of Operation Mongoose as a coordinated effort to depose Castro 's government. (Fonzi chronology p 416) A November 1, 1961 memorandum from Goodwin to President Kennedy supported the concept of a "command operation" on Cuba, commanded by Attorney General Robert Kennedy. The reorganization of Cuban operations as described in the memo sets the stage for the decision to launch a new, multifaceted set of anti-Castro activities, codenamed Operation Mongoose.
  
• 11/1/1961 Before the OAS, the US accuses Cuba of trying "to subvert and overthrow the constitutional governments of the Americas."
  
• 11/1/1961 Gen. Taylor, writing from the Philippines, urges JFK to commit a "US military task force" to Vietnam to "reverse the present downward trend of events." Maxwell Taylor sent a top-secret cable to JFK after his fact-finding tour of South Vietnam: "The risks of backing into a major Asian war by way of SVN are present but are not impressive. NVN is extremely vulnerable to conventional bombing, a weakness which should be exploited diplomatically in convincing Hanoi to lay off South Vietnam." (Best and the Brightest, Halberstam)
  
• 11/2/1961 Gen. Walker submits his resignation to the Army and attacks critics in a statement to a Senate Armed Forces subcommittee. He refuses on principle to accept retirement benefits, and says he may enter politics.
  
• 11/2/1961 JFK announces preparations for the resumption of atmospheric testing.
  
• 11/3/1961 "Hollywood's Answer to Communism" aired over a network of 33 TV stations in California and also linked up to WPIX in New York. The three-hour program was broadcast from the Hollywood Bowl with a crowd of 15,000 in attendance and many Hollywood personalities present. C. D. Jackson of Time-Life appeared on the program and strongly allied Life magazine with the Crusade. This was a turnabout for Life which had initially criticized the head of the Crusade in a brief news item which poked fun at Schwarz and his "School of Anti-Communism," saying, "Schwarz preaches doomsday by Communism in 1973 unless every American starts distrusting his neighbor as a possible Communist or 'comsymp.' ...Schwarz . . . landed in this country with $10 in his pocket in 1953, but he has built the 'crusade' into a $500,000 business." The NYT expressed concern that the program was biased towards certain political views and called for networks to allot time for "differing opinions." The Crusade speakers advocated complete overhaul of the United Nations, and claimed it was folly to enter any kind of arms agreement with the Soviets.
  
• 11/3/1961 Taylor returns from Saigon and presents his final report; concludes that US aid will bring victory without America taking over the fighting for the South Vietnamese; advises JFK to send 8000 combat troops to Vietnam.
  
• 11/4/1961 The Army accepts Gen. Walker's resignation.
  
• 11/4/1961 Meeting between Ball, McNamara, Rusk and Gilpatric, Ball argued that sending troops to Vietnam would be a mistake; McNamara and Gilpatric replied, "But how else can the US stop Vietnam from being taken over by the Vietcong?"
  
• 11/7/1961 Judith Campbell called the White House.
  
• 11/7/1961 Cuban State Security reports on counter-revolutionary plan including acts of sabotage and attempt on life of Castro at the welcome for Cuban President Osvaldo Dorticos on his return from a tour of socialist countries.
  
• 11/7/1961 When Undersecretary of State George Ball warned JFK that getting deeper into Vietnam "could lead in five years' time to an involvement of 300,000 men," Ball told JFK that committing US troops "would be a tragic error. Once that process is started, there would be no end to it." JFK replied, "George, you're just crazier than hell. That just isn't going to happen." (Dynasty and Disaster 446-7; The Best and the Brightest)
  
• 11/7/1961 Diem wrote to JFK, "We must have further assistance from the United States if we are to win the war now being waged against us." He also added, "When communism has long ebbed away into the past, my people will still be here..." (Vantage Point 56)
  
• 11/8/1961 JFK told the public, "The Soviet Union prepared to test [nuclear weapons] while we were at the table negotiating with them. If they fooled us once, it is their fault. If they fool us twice, it is our fault."
  
• 11/8/1961 McNamara sent a memo to JFK saying he was "inclined to recommend" committing the US to preventing a communist takeover of South Vietnam and using whatever military means necessary to achieve this. On November 8, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, his deputy Roswell Gilpatric, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff all recommended to Kennedy in a memorandum that "we do commit the U.S. to the clear objective of preventing the fall of South Vietnam to Communism and that we support this commitment by the necessary military actions, " including Taylor's proposed "U.S. force of the magnitude of an initial 8 ,000 men in a flood relief context" and expanding to as many as six divisions of ground forces, " or about 205,000 men . " (Pentagon Papers) Kennedy rejected the virtually unanimous recommendation of his advisers in the fall of 1961 to send combat troops to Vietnam. Taylor reflected later on the uniqueness of JFK's position: "I don't recall anyone who was strongly against [sending ground troops] , except one man and that was the President. The President just didn't want to be convinced that this was the right thing to do . . . It was really the President's personal conviction that U.S. ground troops shouldn't go in. " (Maxwell Taylor, in recorded interview by L . J. Hackman, November 13 1969, 47; cited by Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, p. 761)
  
• 11/9/1961 JFK tells Tad Szulc that he is under pressure from unnamed advisors to order Castro's assassination. In November 1961, seven months after the Bay of Pigs invasion, John Kennedy asked journalist Tad Szulc in a private conversation in the Oval Office, "What would you think if I ordered Castro to be assassinated ? " The startled Szulc said he was against political assassination in principle and in any case doubted if it would solve the Cuban problem. The president leaned back in his rocking chair, smiled, and said he had been testing Szulc and agreed with his answer. Kennedy said "he was under great pressure from advisors in the Intelligence Community (whom he did not name) to have Castro killed, but that he himself violently opposed it on the grounds that for moral reasons the United States should never be party to political assassinations." "I'm glad you feel the same way," Kennedy told Szulc. (Tad Szulc, " Cuba on Our Mind, " Esquire (February 1974) , p.90. David Talbot has pointed out that, although " Kennedy critics charge that JFK staged this dialogue with Szulc to give himself cover in case the murder plots [against Castro] were later revealed, " others find this far-fetched. Kennedy adviser Richard Goodwin found it hard to imagine that, if JFK were in fact plotting to kill Castro, he would then bring up the subject to a New York Times reporter, "who the day after Castro was killed would be sitting on the biggest story in the world! " Richard Goodwin interview by David Talbot in David Talbot, Brothers (New York: Free Press, 2007), p. 94. Fidel Castro has assured both Tad Szuic and Ethel Kennedy that he knows John and Robert Kennedy " had nothing to do with the CIA attempts on his life . " Ibid., p. 94.)
  
• 11/9/1961 Khrushchev, in his second secret letter to the president, on November 9, 1961 , regarding Berlin, had hinted that belligerent pressures in Moscow made compromise difficult from his own side. " You have to understand, " he implored Kennedy, "I have no ground to retreat further, there is a precipice behind. "
  
• 11/10/1961 In Khrushchev's November 10, 1961 , letter to Kennedy, he dismissed the infiltration of North Vietnamese troops through Laos and emphasized the weakest link in U.S. policy in Southeast Asia, namely Ngo Dinh Diem: " I think that looking at facts soberly you cannot but agree that the present struggle of the population of South Vietnam against Ngo Dinh Diem cannot be explained by some kind of interference or incitement from outside. The events that are taking place there are of internal nature and are connected with the general indignation of the population at the bankrupt policy of Ngo Dinh Diem and those who surround him. This and only this is the core of the matter. "
  
• 11/10/1961 Judith Campbell called the White House.
  
• 11/11/1961 Venezuela broke relations with Cuba, accusing Castro of attacks on Venezuela's government.
  
• 11/11/1961 After some reflection, McNamara backed away from his 11/8 memo; he and Rusk sent a memo to the president: "If there is a strong South Vietnamese effort, [US troops] may not be needed; if there is not such an effort, US forces could not accomplish their mission in the midst of an apathetic or hostile population." In a meeting later that day, Kennedy "made clear he did not wish to make an unconditional commitment to prevent the loss of South Vietnam and flatly refused to endorse the introduction of US combat forces." (In Retrospect 39)
  
• 11/12/1961 Today's issue of The Worker features headline: "Gen. Walker Bids for Fuehrer Role."
  
• 11/12/1961 The Times expressed concern that the Christian Anti-Communist Crusade program was biased towards certain political views and called for networks to allot time for "differing opinions." The Crusade speakers advocated complete overhaul of the United Nations, and claimed it was folly to enter any kind of arms agreement with the Soviets, such as Kennedy was proposing and that led ultimately to his successful Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of which he would be very proud. While arguing for equal time, the Times concluded that "it was a program that should have been heard. The current growth of conservatism in the country is a matter of news importance and has not been touched on adequately in regular TV news documentaries." [NYT, Nov. 12, 1961, II p. 13]
  
• 11/13/1961 Schlesinger wrote in his journal that President Kennedy told him, "The troops will march in [to Vietnam]; the crowds will cheer; and in four days everyone will have forgotten. Then we will be told we have to send in more troops."
  
• 11/13/1961 William Harvey cables the Mexico City CIA Station to dispatch David S. Morales (Morales, a Mexican-American CIA agent from Phoenix, was well known as the Agency 's top assassin in Latin America. He had served in Cuba from 1958-1960 in the American Consulate in Havana. He had played a supporting role in Mexico City during the Bay of Pigs planning and afterward he openly described what Kennedy had done as traición betrayal. Nicknamed El Indio. Mahoney, p135) to JM-WAVE (the CIA base in south Florida) for permanent posting. (Cable 5816, CIA Station (Scott), 19 Nov 1961 to Base, confirming receipt of Harvey 's cable, AA)
  
• 11/13/1961 Two and a half weeks after the tanks confrontation that threatened a nuclear holocaust, its instigator, Lucius Clay, sent a telegram to Secretary of State Dean Rusk in which he stated: " Today, we have the nuclear strength to assure victory at awful cost. It no longer suffices to consider our strength as a deterrent only and to plan to use it only in retaliation. No ground probes on the highway which would use force should or could be undertaken unless we are prepared instantly to follow them with a nuclear strike. It is certain that within two or more years retaliatory power will be useless as whoever strikes first will strike last. " (Clay-Rusk telegram, November 13, 1 9 6 1 ; in FR US, 1 96 1 - 1 9 63, Volume XIV: Berlin Crisis, 1 96 1 - 1 962 (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1 994 ) , p. 5 8 6 ) To Lucius Clay's regret, the president had not been prepared instantly to follow Clay'S assault on the Berlin Wall with a nuclear first strike. Like his cohorts in the Pentagon at the height of the missile crisis, Clay wanted to seize the moment, so the United States could " win the Cold War by striking first.
  
• 11/13/1961 Judith Campbell called the White House.
  
• 11/13/1961 Right-wing Hearst newspaper columnist Fulton Lewis Jr. announced, "I wouldn't impeach [Warren]. I'd lynch him." (Boston Globe)
  
• 11/13/1961 US News & World Report stated: "US aid to South Vietnam may be stepped up. But no US combat troops are going into the jungle to engage in shooting war with Communist guerillas."
  
• 11/14-15/1961 South Korea's Park Chunghee meets with JFK in Washington.
  
• 11/14/1961 The Sexton company vacates the 411 Elm St building in Dealey Plaza. (William Weston; date from Ted Leon, former branch manager in Dallas 1961-64; he kept all his pocket calendars from work). According to Thomas Butler, who became the Sexton branch manager in 1964, the building remained vacant for about a year after his company moved out. Months of renovation for new offices would be necessary before the TSBD could move in. A dumb waiter is installed for the first four floors. A passenger elevator for the office floors is built. (Weston)
  
• 11/15/1961 ZR/RIFLE: Bissell orders Cuban Task Force head Harvey to implement the application of ZR/RIFLE assassination plan in Cuba. Harvey reestablishes the Agency contact with Mob liaison Rosselli. (Fonzi chronology p 417)
  
• 11/15/1961 Judith Campbell called the White House.
  
• 11/15/1961 In an NSC meeting, JFK expressed doubts about becoming deeply involved in Vietnam. (In Retrospect 40)
  
• 11/16/1961 JFK delivers speech at the University of Washington (Seattle) commencement: "We must face the fact that the United States is neither omnipotent nor omniscient - that we cannot impose our will upon the other 94 percent of mankind - that we cannot right every wrong or reverse every adversity - and that therefore there cannot be an American solution to every world problem." "We cannot as a free nation, compete with our adversaries in tactics of terror, assassination, false promises, counterfeit mobs and crises." JFK motorcade in Seattle. The program for the day is full. Welcome the President around noon, motorcade up Highway 99 and into downtown Seattle with a speech by Kennedy at Victory Plaza. Following a whirlwind drive-by tour of the 1962 World's Fair site, the motorcade heads back to Highway 99 (Aurora Avenue) and the University of Washington where he gives a speech at Hec Ed pavilion. Finally back downtown to the Olympic Hotel where the President is guest of honor at a dinner honoring Washington State's Senator Warren Magnusen. Kennedy spends the night at the Olympic and hits the air the next morning for a flight to Phoenix. We do not know whether or not President Kennedy saw two groups of "peace walkers" near Edmundsen Pavilion. At 15th Avenue NE and NE Pacific Street about 20 University of Washington students and residents picketed to keep the United States out of Cuba. They held signs that read FAIR PLAY FOR CUBA, NO MORE SUGAR TRUST INVASIONS, and DON'T FIGHT FOR UNITED FRUIT. Another group, about 75 strong, who called themselves Women Marching for Peace also picketed near Edmundson Pavilion. Many of the women marchers pushed baby buggies. They held signs that read END NUCLEAR TESTS NOW, MAN MUST PUT AN END TO WAR, PEACE FOR OUR CHILDREN, and MR. PRESIDENT, PLEASE STOP NUCLEAR TESTING. Both groups handed out leaflets. President Kennedy commented on the failure of the U.S. Congress to approve funding to convert Hanford Atomic Works into an electrical power plant. "All who say that the United States should not commit itself to being the leader in the peacetime use of atomic energy -- those who say we should waste this resource which we have now in the Pacific Northwest and which has been fought for by Senator [Henry] Jackson at Hanford -- those who say 'no' to this country I believe are going to find as time goes on in the next 5, 10, 15, 20, and 25 years that all their predictions of failure and disaster [to nuclear plants] will have been proven wrong as they have been in the last 25 years" (The Seattle Times).
  
• 11/16/1961 Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn died. From here on, JFK's relations with Congress would become even more difficult.
  
• 11/16/1961 NY Times reported that the Nike-Zeus anti-missile missile had had its first successful tests.
  
• 11/16/1961 JFK wrote to Khrushchev about Laos and Vietnam; this letter was not declassified until 1984. He disputed Khrushchev's stand that there was no attempt by the Hanoi regime to take over South Vietnam. Kennedy pointed out that from 1954 to 1959 "the situation in Vietnam was relatively tranquil. The country was effecting a limited recovery from the ravages of the civil war from which it had just emerged. The Government enjoyed the support of the people and the prospects for the future appeared reasonably bright. However, in 1959, the DRV, having failed in the elections which had been held in Vietnam and in the attempt to arouse the people against their legitimate government, turned to a calculated plan of open infiltration, subversion and aggression....Our support for the government of [Diem] we regard as a serious obligation..." Kennedy shrewdly bypassed Khrushchev's critique of Diem to reemphasize the " external interference " of North Vietnam: "I do not wish to argue with you concerning the government structure and policies of President Ngo Dinh Diem, but I would like to cite for your consideration the evidence of external interference or incitement which you dismiss in a phrase. " After drawing on a South Vietnamese government letter to the ICC, Kennedy concluded that " Southern Vietnam is now undergoing a determined attempt from without to overthrow the existing government using for this purpose infiltration, supply of arms, propaganda, terrorization, and all the customary instrumentalities of communist activities in such circumstances, all mounted and developed from North Vietnam. "
  
• 11/18/1961 Sam Rayburn's funeral in Bonham, Texas. JFK, Ike, LBJ, and Truman attended.
  
• 11/18/1961 JFK, in a speech in Los Angeles, said, "Now that we are face to face again with a period of heightened peril...the discordant voices of extremism are heard once again in the land…There have always been those fringes of our society who have sought to escape their own responsibility by finding a simple solution, an appealing slogan or a convenient scapegoat. Men who are unwilling to face up to the danger from without are convinced that the real danger comes from within. They look suspiciously at their neighbors and their leaders. They call for a 'man on horseback' because they do not trust the people. They find treason in our finest churches, in our highest court, and even in the treatment of our water. They equate the Democratic Party with the welfare state, the welfare state with socialism, and socialism with communism. They object quite rightly to politics' intruding on the military -- but they are anxious for the military to engage in politics… In the most critical periods of our nation's history, there have always been those fringes of our society who have sought to escape their own responsibility by finding a simple solution, an appealing slogan, or a convenient scapegoat. Financial crises could be explained by the presence of too many immigrants or too few greenbacks. War could be attributed to munitions makers or international bankers. Peace conferences failed because we were duped by the British or tricked by the French or deceived by the Russians. At times these fanatics have achieved a temporary success among those who lack the will or the vision to face unpleasant tasks or unsolved problems." (NYT 11/19) Two Republican Representatives from the urban districts of Los Angeles, John H. Rousselot and Edgar W. Hiestland, are avowed members of the JBS. Meanwhile, outside the Hollywood Palladium where he spoke, for nearly an hour, 3,000 persons paraded, carrying signs and chanting and singing their protests over a variety of issues. The demonstration, which started rather mildly five hours before the President spoke, was suddenly stepped up by an apparent influx of rightists. Some of the signs carried by men and women wearing red, white, and blue paper hats, read: "Unmuzzle the Military," "Clean Up the State Department," "Veto Tito," "Disarmament is Suicide," and "CommUNism is Our Enemy." The marchers sporadically chanted "Test the Bomb," and, "No Aid to Tito." They sang, among other things, "God Bless America" and "The Battle Hymn of the Republic."
  
• 11/19/1961 US fleet went to the Dominican Republic.
  
• 11/19/1961 New York Times - KENNEDY ASSERTS FAR-RIGHT GROUPS PROVOKE DISUNITY Attacks Birch Society and 'Minutemen' at a Party Dinner in Los Angeles Spread of Fear Scored President Says Real Threat Comes From Without, Not Within by Tom Wicker
  
• 11/19/1961 New York Times - RIGHTISTS PICKET KENNEDY SPEECH 3,000 Parade in Los Angeles in Orderly Demonstration
  
• 11/20/1961 Oswald letter to his brother, Robert (H 16 845-46): "Its allready four months since we put in our request for visas, It gives you an Idea how slow they can be…It'll cost about $800 to fly from Moscow to New York for two people, I don't have that much money, but I'm hoping that the Embassy will help us out…"
  
• 11/21/1961 Memo from McNamara to JFK informing him that the Air Force wanted to focus on developing a nuclear "first-strike capability" against the USSR. (Scheer, With Enough Shovels p216)
  
• 11/21/1961 Atlanta FBI office notified Hoover that they had found nothing on MLK "on which to base a security matter inquiry."
  
• 11/22/1961 NSAM 111 "TO: The Secretary of State. SUBJECT: First Phase of Viet-Nam Program. 1.The US Government is prepared to join the Viet-Nam Government in a sharply increased joint effort to avoid a further deterioration in the situation in South Viet-Nam....the US would immediately undertake the following actions...Provide increased air lift to the GVN forces, manned to the extent necessary by United States uniformed personnel and under United States operational control. Provide such additional equipment and United States military personnel as may be necessary for air reconnaissance, photography, instruction in and execution of air-ground support techniques, and for special intelligence. Provide the GVN with small craft, including such United States uniformed advisers and operating personnel as may be necessary for operations in effecting surveillance and control over coastal waters and inland waterways. Provide expedited training and equipping of the civil guard and the self-defense corps with the objective of relieving the regular Army of static missions and freeing it for mobile offensive operations. Provide such personnel and equipment as may be necessary to improve the military-political intelligence system beginning at the provincial level and extending upward through the Government and the armed forces to the Central Intelligence Organization. Provide such new terms of reference, reorganization and additional personnel for United States military forces as are required for increased United States military assistance...Provide...increased economic aid...Provide individual administrators and advisers for the Governmental machinery of South Viet-Nam...Provide personnel for a joint survey with the GVN of conditions in each of the provinces to assess the social, political, intelligence and military factors bearing on the prosecution of the counter-insurgency program...the GVN would initiate the following actions: Prompt and appropriate legislative and administrative action to put the nation on a wartime footing to mobilize its entire resources. (This would include a decentralization and broadening of the government so as to realize the full potential of all non-Communist elements in the country willing to contribute to the common struggle.)...Overhaul of the military establishment and command structure so as to create an effective military organization for the prosecution of the war and assure a mobile offensive capability for the army. McGeorge Bundy."
  
• 11/22/1961 Kennedy did agree in November 1961 to increase the U.S. commitment to South Vietnam. What he chose to send instead of combat troops were advisers and support units. According to the advice he was being given, Kennedy's military support program for South Vietnam would almost certainly fall far short of anything that could stop the Viet Congo This was what puzzled Daniel Ellsberg so deeply when he analyzed JFK's decision in the Pentagon Papers, as he has written more recently in his memoir, Secrets: " Kennedy had chosen to increase U.S. involvement and investment of prestige in Vietnam and to reaffirm our rhetorical commitment-not as much as his subordinates asked him to, but significantly while rejecting an element, ground forces, that nearly all his own officials described as essential to success. In fact, at the same time he had rejected another element that all his advisers, including [Secretary of State Dean] Rusk, had likewise described as essential: an explicit full commitment to defeating the Communists in South Vietnam. Why ?" While Ellsberg was trying to figure out JFK's odd stand, he had the opportunity to raise the question in a conversation with Robert Kennedy. As a U.S. senator in 1967, Kennedy had invited Ellsberg, a Pentagon analyst, to talk with him in his office about a mutual concern, the escalating war in Vietnam. Ellsberg had boldly seized the chance to question RFK about JFK's decision making in 1961. Why, Ellsberg asked him, had President Kennedy rejected both ground troops and a formal commitment to victory in Vietnam, thereby " rejecting the urgent advice of every one of his top military and civilian officials " ? Robert Kennedy answered that his brother was absolutely determined never to send ground combat units to Vietnam, because if he did, the U.S. would be in the same spot as the French-whites against Asians, in a war against nationalism and self-determination. Ellsberg pressed the question: Was JFK willing to accept defeat rather than send troops ? RFK said that if the president reached the point where the only alternatives to defeat were sending ground troops or withdrawing, he intended to withdraw. "We would have handled it like Laos , " his brother said. Ellsberg was even more intrigued. It was obvious to him that none of President Kennedy's senior advisers had any such conviction about Indochina. Ellsberg kept pushing for more of an explanation for Kennedy's stand. "What made him so smart ? " he asked John Kennedy's brother. Writing more than thirty years after this conversation, Ellsberg could still feel the shock he had experienced from RFK's response: " Whap ! His hand slapped down on the desk. I jumped in my chair. 'Because we were there!' He slammed the desktop again. His face contorted in anger and pain. 'We were there, in 1951. We saw what was happening to the French. We saw it. My brother was determined, determined never to let that happen to US. "' Ellsberg wrote that he believed what Robert Kennedy said, " that his brother was strongly convinced that he should never send ground troops to Indochina and that he was prepared to accept a 'Laotian solution' if necessary to avoid that. " (Daniel Ellsberg, Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers (New York: Viking, 2002 ) , p. 193)
  
• 11/23/1961 CBS Reports program broadcast an interview with Eisenhower; Ike commented that it had been a mistake for the US to deny the U-2 spy flight over Russia, but this remark was edited out at the insistence of his son, Lt. Col. John Eisenhower. (Politics of Lying 35)
  
• 11/24/1961 New York Times: Former President Dwight D. Eisenhower last night [in a TV interview] urged officers of the armed services to shun partisan politics. Speaking as a General of the Army, he declared it was "bad practice -- very bad" for an officer, even when testifying under oath before a committee of Congress, to express opinions "on political matters or economic matters that are contrary to the President's." ...The former President was blunt in discussing the recent "rise of extremists" in the country. "I don't think the United States needs super-patriots," he declared. "We need patriotism, honestly practiced by all of us, and we don't need these people that are more patriotic than you or anybody else." His definition of extremists embraced those who would "go back to eliminating the income tax from our laws and the rights of people to unionize... [and those] advocating some form of dictatorship." It also included those who "make radical statements [and] attack people of good repute who are proved patriots." At that point, Walter Cronkite of the C.B.S. news staff, who conducted the interview, asked about the "military man's role in our modern political life." He did not cite, but obviously referred to, the case of Maj. Gen. Edwin A. Walker, who stirred up a controversy that led to his "admonishment" for the political nature of the indoctrination of his troops. General Walker later resigned from the Army. "I believe the Army officer, Navy officer, Air officer," General Eisenhower said, "should not be talking about political matters, particularly domestically, and never in the international field, unless he is asked to do so because of some particular position he might hold." ...The general declared there was hope for disarmament and better East-West relations. As the Russian standard of living improves, the Russian people will begin to understand that there is another way of life, he said...
  
• 11/25/1961 JFK met at Hyannis Port with Georgi Bolshakov, who was identified as "a Soviet editor." Actually, he was a major in Soviet intelligence and Khrushchev's secret envoy to the Kennedys.
  
• 11/25/1961 Carrier USS Enterprise (CVAN 65) commissioned in Newport News, Va.
  
• 11/26/1961 George Ball replaces Chester Bowles as Under-Secretary of State.
  
• 11/26/1961 Cuba: literacy campaign teacher Manuel Ascunce Domenech is brutally tortured to death in Escambray Mountains by anti-Castro guerillas.
  
• 11/27/1961 Soviets proposed a nuclear test ban with no on-site inspections; the US rejected the idea because some nuclear tests were difficult to detect otherwise. But JFK would later sign a no-inspections test-ban treaty. (St Louis Post Dispatch 11/28/1961)
  
• 11/28/1961 McNamara told Adm. Harry Felt and Gen. Lionel McGarr (senior US military man in Saigon) that "we must adjust ourselves to a perennially unclear political framework and to...limits on military action." The next month, McNamara told the two men in Hawaii that US combat troops would not be sent to South Vietnam. (In Retrospect 40)
  
• 11/29/1961 John McCone becomes CIA director.
  
• 11/30/1961 JFK sends memo to Secretary Rusk ordering him to "Use our available assets to help Cuba overthrow the Communist regime." Memo from Kennedy to Rusk. It discussed the idea of using low-level guerilla methods to "help the people of Cuba overthrow the Communist regime." Operation Mongoose is launched by order of JFK. The new program will be directed by Lansdale under the guidance of RFK. A high-level inter-agency group, the Special Group Augmented (SGA) , is created with the sole purpose of overseeing Mongoose. Operation Mongoose: JFK authorizes a major new covert action program aimed at overthrowing the Cuban government. The new program, codenamed Operation Mongoose, will be directed by counterinsurgency specialist Edward G. Lansdale under the guidance of Attorney General Robert Kennedy. A high-level inter-agency group, the Special Group Augmented (SGA), is created with the sole purpose of overseeing Mongoose. (The Cuba Project, 3/2/62; Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders, 11/20/75, pp. 139, 144)
  
• 11/1961 Bissell is "chewed out" by both JFK and RFK at a meeting in the Cabinet room at the White House. Thereafter RFK pressed constantly for results from Mongoose.
  
• 11/1961 NSAM 115 "TO: The secretary of state; the secretary of defense. SUBJECT: Defoliant Operations in Vietnam. The President has approved the recommendation of the Secretary of State and the Deputy Secretary of Defense to participate in a selective and carefully controlled joint program of defoliant operations in Viet Nam starting with the clearance of key routes and proceeding thereafter to food denial only if the most careful basis of resettlement and alternative food supply has been created. Operations in Zone D and the border areas shall not be undertaken until there are realistic possibilities of immediate military exploitation....McGeorge Bundy."
  
• 12/1961 The Defense Department publishes a 47-page pamphlet for the US public called "Fallout Protection What to Know and Do About Nuclear Attack"
  
• 12/1961 McNamara established the United States Strike Command (STRICOM). Authorized to draw forces when needed from the Strategic Army Corps (STRAC), the Tactical Air Command, and the airlift units of the Military Air Transport Service and the military services, Strike Command had the mission "to respond swiftly and with whatever force necessary to threats against the peace in any part of the world, reinforcing unified commands or… carrying out separate contingency operations." 1961 defense budget was $49.6 billion ($195.2 billion in 1992 dollars); this was a 15% increase.
  
• Late 1961 or Early 1962 - Task Force W : William K. Harvey is put in charge of Task Force W, the CIA unit for Operation Mongoose. Task Force W operates under guidance from the SGA and subsequently will involve approximately four hundred Americans at CIA headquarters and its Miami JMWAVE station, in addition to about two thousand Cubans, a private navy of speedboats, and an annual budget of some $50 million. Task Force W carries out a wide range of activities, mostly against Cuban ships and aircraft outside Cuba (and non-Cuban ships engaged in Cuban trade), such as contaminating shipments of sugar from Cuba and tampering with industrial products imported into the country. (Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders, 11/20/75)
  
• 12/1961 OSWALD wrote a letter to Texas Sen. John Tower to seek his help; the letter did not reach Tower's office until 1/26/1962. (CD 1119, CE 1058)
  
• 12/1961 Defection of Anatoliy Golitsyn to the West.
  
• 12/1961 Trappist monk Thomas Merton was being blocked from publishing his thoughts on nuclear war by his monastic superiors. Merton, like Kennedy, decided to find another way. The words pouring out of Merton's typewriter were spilling over from unpublished manuscripts into his Cold War letters. As he wrote in one such letter to antinuclear archbishop Thomas Roberts, " At present my feeling is that the most urgent thing is to say what has to be said and say it in any possible way. If it cannot be printed, then let it be mimeographed. If it cannot be mimeographed, then let it be written on the backs of envelopes, as long as it gets said. " Cold War Letter 9, to Archbishop Thomas Roberts, S.J., London, December, 1 9 6 1 ; in Cold War Letters, p . 26 . Merton began a December 1 9 6 1 letter to Ethel Kennedy by noting a parallel between JFK's and his own thinking: "I liked very much the President's speech at Seattle which encouraged me a bit as I had j ust written something along those same lines. " Merton was referring to John Kennedy's rejection, like his own, of the false alternatives " Red or dead " in a speech the president gave at the University of Washington in November 1 9 6 1 . Kennedy had said of this false dilemma and those who chose either side of it: " It is a curious fact that each of these extreme opposites resembles the other. Each believes that we have only two choices: appeasement or war, suicide or surrender, humiliation or holocaust, to be either Red or dead . " Merton made an extended analysis of the same Cold War cliche, " Red or dead, " in the book his monastic superiors blocked from publication, Peace in the Post- Christian Era . There he observed: "We strive to soothe our madness by intoning more and more vacuous cliches. And at such times, far from being as innocuous as they are absurd, empty slogans take on a dreadful power. " The slogan he and Kennedy saw exemplifying such emptiness had begun in Germany in the form, " Better Red than dead . " "It was deftly fielded on the first bounce by the Americans, " Merton said, " and came back in reverse, thus acquiring an air of challenge and defiance. 'Better dead than Red' was a reply to effete and decadent cynicism. It was a condemnation of 'appeasement'. (Anything short of a nuclear attack on Russia rates as 'appeasement' . ) " What the heroic emptiness of " Better dead than Red " ignored was " the real bravery of patient, humble, persevering labor to effect, step by step, through honest negotiation, a gradual understanding that can eventually relieve tensions and bring about some agreement upon which serious disarmament measures can be based" -precisely what he hoped Ethel Kennedy's brother-in-law would do from the White House. In his letter to her, Merton therefore went on to praise John Kennedy, yet did so while encouraging him to break through Cold War propaganda and speak the truth: "I think that the fact that the President works overtime at trying to get people to face the situation as it really is may be the greatest thing he is doing. Certainly our basic need is for truth, and not for 'images' and slogans that 'engineer consent. ' We are living in a dream world. We do not know ourselves or our adversaries. We are myths to ourselves and they are myths to us. And we are secretly persuaded that we can shoot it out like the sheriffs on TV. This is not reality and the President can do a tremendous amount to get people to see the facts, more than any single person. " With inclusive language that did not single out JFK, but again with heavy implications for the president, Merton continued: "We cannot go on indefinitely relying on the kind of provisional framework of a balance of terror. If as Christians we were more certain of our duty, it might put us in a very tight spot politically but it would also merit for us special graces from God, and these we need badly. "
  
• 12/1/1961 Gus Hall and Benjamin Davis, officials of the US Communist Party, were indicted on 12 counts of violating the registration provisions of the McCarran Act. They were released on bail of $5000 each. The Hall-Davis Defense Committee was created 4/1962 on their behalf. The Committee's chief lawyer was John Abt.
  
• 12/1-2/1961 in a midnight speech over government radio and TV, Castro boasts that he has been a Marxist-Leninist for years, and hid those views for the sake of gaining power.
  
• 12/4/1961 Newsweek's cover story is "Thunder on the Right" with a photo of Maj. Gen. Edwin Walker. The story quoted Texas historian and author J. Evetts Haley saying of Earl Warren, "I'm for hanging him."
  
• 12/7/1961 Hoover spoke on NBC-TV: "The communist threat from without must not blind us to the communist threat from within. The latter is reaching into the very heart of America..."
  
• 12/7-8/1961 UN bombs and mortar fire hit hospitals, schools and homes in Katanga.
  
• 12/8/1961 Castro denounces Colombia and Panamanian regimes as governments of "traitors and accomplices of Yankee imperialism."
  
• 12/8/1961 Dean Rusk says that South Vietnam is in "clear and present danger" of going communist.
  
• 12/9, 11, 21/1961 FBI bug picks up Giancana conversation about "donation" to JFK campaign through Frank Sinatra and Joseph P. Kennedy. Hoover tells RFK about it.
  
• 12/9/1961 Colombia severs ties with Cuba.
  
• 12/10/1961 The Worker of this date has this headline: "Walker Defends American Nazis." Walker had said in a TV interview that the American Nazi Party and the Minutemen were basically just misguided patriots driven to extremism because of their concern over communism.
  
• 12/11/1961 US aircraft carrier Core arrives in Saigon with 33 US Army helicopters and 400 air and ground crewmen assigned to operate them for the South Vietnamese army.
  
• 12/11/1961 Work report on Oswald by the director of the radio plant in Minsk; it says that Oswald's work has been "unsatisfactory. He does not display the initiative for increasing his skill…reacts in an oversensitive manner to remarks from the foreman, and is careless in his work…"
  
• 12/12-16/1961 in Montgomery, Alabama, 737 were arrested in a march on city hall protesting the trials of 11 Freedom Riders.
  
• 12/13/1961 Retired Marine Colonel Mitchell Paige told an audience of right-wingers in Los Angeles that Earl Warren "seemed to stand with our enemies" and deserved to be hanged.
  
• 12/13/1961 The National Indignation Convention is held in Dallas. Mayor Cabell honors Gen. Edwin Walker.
  
• 12/14/1961 Panama breaks relations with Cuba.
  
• 12/14/1961 JFK letter to Diem, assuring him of US support and aid in maintaining South Vietnam's independence.
  
• 12/15/1961 Dr. King arrives in Albany, Georgia, in response to a call from Dr. W. G. Anderson, the leader of the Albany Movement to desegregate public facilities, which began in January 1961.
  
• 12/15/1961 JFK restates US commitment to independent South Vietnam. He leaves for a visit to Colombia, Puerto Rico and Venezuela, which lasts until 12/17. (Almanac of American History)
  
• 12/16/1961 The National Review reported that during the 1960 campaign, RFK aide Paul Corbin "was involved in an anonymous mailing of virulently anti-Catholic literature to Catholics from a mail drop across the line in Minnesota, with such success that many of them, with a sort of negative Pavlovian reflex, voted for Kennedy."
  
• 12/16/1961 MLK is arrested at an Albany demonstration. He is charged with obstructing the sidewalk and parading without a permit.
  
• 12/16/1961 US aircraft in Vietnam are authorized to fly combat missions as long as a Vietnamese crew member is aboard. US B-26 and SC-47 bombers are described as "reconnaissance bombers."
  
• 12/16-17/1961 JFK pays a state visit to Venezuela and Colombia, and then to Puerto Rico. He is warmly welcomed everywhere. He participates in a motorcade in Caracas, Venezuela, 9:25am on the 16th.
  
• 12/17/1961 Trip to South America: Bogotá, Colombia, motorcade, 11:17AM 1961 December 17. The photographers (including Cecil Stoughton) are in a car several lengths behind the president's car.
  
• 12/18/1961 In Montgomery, Alabama, the city and black groups reached an agreement to desegregate public facilities in return for ending black boycotts of white businesses.
  
• 12/19/1961 Joseph Kennedy Sr. had a severe stroke that left him paralyzed and unable to speak.
  
• 12/19/1961 St Louis Post Dispatch quoted Dr. Albert Schweitzer, a supporter of the UN and of independence for Katanga, criticizing the UN operation there: "One wonders how a civilized state can undertake such a thing...The mission of the United Nations is not to make war."
  
• 12/20/1961 NY Times reported that about 2000 uniformed US advisers were "operating in battle areas with South Vietnamese forces" and had the authority to fire back if fired upon.
  
• 12/21/1961 JFK met with UK prime minister MacMillan.
  
• 12/21/1961 Billy Graham, writing in Christianity Today, called the advance of communism as "almost surely a sign of the Second Coming."
  
• 12/22/1961 James Davis of Tennessee is first American serviceman killed in Vietnam.
  
• 12/25/1961 LBJ's sister, Josefa Johnson, was found dead in bed at her Fredericksburg, Texas home at 3:15 am. The cause of death was stated to be a brain hemorrhage. Josefa Johnson had returned home at 11:45 pm from a Christmas party at Lyndon Johnson's ranch. There was no autopsy and no inquest; the death certificate was executed by a doctor who was not present to examine the deceased. Ms. Johnson was embalmed on Christmas Day and buried on December 26th (Walt Brown, "The Sordid Story of Mac Wallace," *JFK/Deep Politics Quarterly,* July 1998).
  
• 12/25/1961 Marina was advised by Soviet authorities that she could leave with Oswald.
  
• 12/30/1961 A Board of Immigration Appeals upheld the deportation order against Carlos Marcello.
  
• 12/31/1961 US military personnel in Vietnam total about 3,200. In 1961 there were 14 US personnel killed or wounded in that country. $65 million in US military equipment and $136 million in economic aid have been delivered over the previous year.
  
• 12/31/1961 Trappist monk Thomas Merton wrote a letter anticipating the Cuban Missile Crisis ten months later. It was addressed to Clare Boothe Luce, the wife of Time-Life-Fortune owner Henry Luce, a Cold War media baron whose editorial policies demonized the communist enemy. Clare Boothe Luce, celebrated speaker, writer, and diplomat, shared Henry Luce's Cold War theology. In 1975 Clare Boothe Luce would lead investigators into the JFK assassination, working for the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), on a time-consuming wild goose chase based on disinformation. HSCA analyst Gaeton Fonzi discovered that Luce at the time was on the board of directors of the CIA-sponsored Association of Former Intelligence Officers. Even in the early sixties, Merton with his extraordinary sensitivity may have suspected Luce's intelligence connections. In any case he knew her as one of the wealthiest, most influential women in the world, with a decidedly anti-communist mind-set. He welcomed her, as he did one and all, into his circle of correspondents. In his New Year's Eve letter to Clare Boothe Luce, Merton said he thought the next year would be momentous. " Though 'all manner of things shall be well,' " he wrote, "we cannot help but be aware, on the threshold of 1962, that we have enormous responsibilities and tasks of which we are perhaps no longer capable. Our sudden, unbalanced, top-heavy rush into technological mastery, " Merton saw, had now made us servants of our own weapons of war. " Our weapons dictate what we are to do. They force us into awful corners. They give us our living, they sustain our economy, they bolster up our politicians, they sell our mass media, in short we live by them. But if they continue to rule us we will also most surely die by them. " Merton was a cloistered monk who watched no television and saw only an occasional newspaper. However, he had far-flung correspondents and spiritual antennae that were always on the alert. He could thus identify in his letter to Clare Boothe Luce the strategic nuclear issue that would bring humanity to the brink in October 1962: " For [our weapons] have now made it plain that they are the friends of the 'preemptive strike'. They are most advantageous to those who use them first. And consequently nobody wants to be too late in using them second. Hence the weapons keep us in a state of fury and desperation, with our fingers poised over the button and our eyes glued on the radar screen. You know what happens when you keep your eye fixed on something. You begin to see things that aren't there. It is very possible that in 1 962 the weapons will tell someone that there has been long enough waiting, and he will obey, and we will all have had it. " "We have to be articulate and sane , " Merton concluded, " and speak wisely on every occasion where we can speak, and to those who are willing to listen. That is why for one I speak to you, " he said hopefully to Luce. "We have to try to some extent to preserve the sanity of this nation, and keep it from going berserk which will be its destruction, and ours, and perhaps also the destruction of Christendom. " (JFK and the Unspeakable, Douglass)