Deep Politics Timeline

[Tracy Riddle]

• 1962 defense budget was $51.6 billion. JFK allows federal employees right to organize and collective bargaining but not to call strikes.
  
• Fred Cook writes in The Warfare State (MacMillan 1962): "It is a curious phenomenon--and it can hardly be a coincidence--that the election of this Democratic President, sponsoring a mildly liberal program that included aid to education and medical care for the aged, whipped up all the latent forces of reaction in America. The Radical Right had been propagandizing for years, it had had its converts on the lunatic fringe; but, since the wave of McCarthyism receded in 1954, it had shown few signs of becoming a national menace. With the election of Kennedy, all this changed. The Radical Right acquired a new lease on life; millions of dollars, much of it contributed by some of the largest corporations in America, came flying into the coffers of wild-eyed promoters..."
  
• Project 112 was a biological and chemical weapons experimentation project conducted by the US Army from 1962 to 1973. The project started under John F. Kennedy's administration, and was authorized by his Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, as part of a total review of the US military. The name of the project refers to its number in the review process. Every branch of the armed services contributed funding and staff to the project. Experiments were planned and conducted by the Deseret Test Center and Deseret Chemical Depot at Fort Douglas, Utah. They were designed to test the effects of biological weapons and chemical weapons on service personnel. They involved unknowing test subjects, and took place on land and at sea via tests conducted upon unwitting US Naval vessels. The existence of the project (along with the related Project SHAD) was categorically denied by the military until May 2000, when a CBS Evening News investigative report produced dramatic revelations about the tests. This report caused the Department of Defense and the Department of Veterans Affairs to launch an extensive investigation of the experiments, and reveal to the affected personnel their exposure to toxins. See Deseret Chemical Depot. In a report issued in 2008, the General Accountability Office scolded the military for its lackluster effort to identify and find the victims of Project 112. According to the GAO report, in 2003 the military arbitrarily ended its attempts to find victims, even in the face of some veteran advocates' attempts to find hundreds of other veterans whose illnesses might have been caused or aggravated by their exposure to chemical and biological agent loaded munitions.
  
• Asbestos: Between 1930 and 1960, manufacturers did all they could to prevent the link between asbestos and respiratory diseases, including cancer, becoming known, so they could avoid prosecution. American workers had in fact sued the Johns Manville company as far back as 1932, but it was not until 1962 that epidemiologists finally established beyond any doubt what company bosses had known for a long time asbestos causes cancer.
  
• John George Gessner was an Army soldier who had been stationed at Los Alamos base in New Mexico; 1962 he traveled to Mexico City and met with the Soviets in their embassy and offered them secrets in return for going to the USSR. They sent him to the Cuban Embassy to get a transit visa, but he got the run-around. The CIA taped and photographed him repeatedly as he went back and forth between the two embassies. When he tried to return to the US, he was arrested and tried in federal court in Kansas City, Kansas. June 9 1964 in Federal Court in Kansas City, Kansas, army deserter George John Gessner, 28, is convicted of passing United States secrets to the Soviet Union. His conviction was later overturned. The CIA refused to allow the prosecution to use the photographic and recorded evidence because it would compromise their sources in Mexico City. (Hosty, Assignment Oswald p214)
  
• Author Michael Harrington, who spent two years with the Catholic Worker, wrote a book entitled The Other America: Poverty in the United States (New York: Macmillan, 1962), which had a powerful impact on JFK. Arthur Schlesinger recalled that the book helped crystallize Kennedy's determination in 1963 to enact an anti-poverty program (Thousand Days, p. 1010)
  
• National Strategy Information Center set up in 1962
  
• This Is Not a Test is an American motion picture released in 1962. Produced at the height of the Cold War, the film was one of a number of productions of the late-1950s and early-1960s based upon the premise of the outbreak of nuclear war. Starring a group of mostly unknown actors, This Is Not a Test begins with a lone police officer receiving orders to block a road leading into an unidentified city (dialogue indicates the location is somewhere in central California, however). Soon, he has detained several vehicles with a variety of occupants ranging from an elderly man and his granddaughter, to a man who has recently become rich and his alcoholic wife, to a trucker and a hitchhiker. The motorists and the police officer hear attack warnings over the police radio and begin to prepare for the inevitable bombing. The film focuses on the reactions to the impending attack by the motorists, and the officer's efforts to keep order. Complicating matters is the revelation that the hitchhiker is a psychotic who is wanted for murder. As the countdown to the missile attack continues, the men and women try desperately to convert a supply truck into an impromptu bomb shelter.
  
• 1962: The US government sprays florescent particles of zinc cadmium sulfide over Stillwater, Oklahoma, but reportedly does not monitor how the application affects the population. Leonard Cole, an expert on the Army's development of biological weapons, later explains to an Oklahoma TV news program: "Cadmium itself is known to be one of the most highly toxic materials in small amounts that a human can be exposed to If there were concentrations of it enough to make one sick, you could have serious consequences a person over a period of time could have illnesses that could range from cancer to organ failures." [KFOR, 4/25/03]
  
• In 1962, twenty-two elderly patients at the Jewish Chronic Disease Hospital in Brooklyn, New York were injected with live cancer cells by Chester M. Southam, who in 1952 had done the same to prisoners at the Ohio State Prison, in order to "discover the secret of how healthy bodies fight the invasion of malignant cells". The administration of the hospital attempted to cover the study up, but the New York State medical licensing board ultimately placed Southam on probation for one year. Two years later, the American Cancer Society elected him as their Vice President.
  
• Sometime between 1962 and 1973 the US government performs biological and/or chemical weapons tests in Florida and in Vieques, Puerto Rico, possibly exposing the civilian population to these agents. [Reuters, 10/10/02]
  
• "Too often in the past, we have thought of the artist as an idler and dilettante and of the lover of arts as somehow sissy and effete. We have done both an injustice. The life of the artist is, in relation to his work, stern and lonely. He has labored hard, often amid deprivation, to perfect his skill. He has turned aside from quick success in order to strip his vision of everything secondary or cheapening. His working life is marked by intense application and intense discipline." "The Arts in America," 1962 article by John F. Kennedy
  
• SR-71/A-12 testing begins at Area 51.
  
• 1/1962 The Texas School Book Depository acquires the 411 Elm St location, leasing it from D.H. Byrd (SS report CO-2-34030 12/7/1963) The Polk's criss-cross 1962 business directory shows that the TSBD was still listed as having an address on the first floor of 501 Elm St (Dal-Tex Bldg). The same directory lists the 411 Elm St building as vacant. The 1963 directory lists the book companies at 411 Elm. Also that year the first floor of the Dal-Tex become vacant. (William Weston)
  
• 1/1962 Oswald wrote letters to John Connally, who had recently been Secretary of the Navy, and to the Navy Dept explaining that his defection was "much in the same way E. Hemingway resided in Paris." (Folsom Exhibit 1) In January, Oswald mailed a handwritten letter to United States Senator John Tower. He wrote, "Since July 20, 1960 I have unsuccessfully applied for a Soviet exit visa to leave this country, the Soviets refuse to permit me and my Soviet wife (who applied at the US Embassy Moscow July 8, 1960 for immigration status to the USA) to leave the Soviet Union. I am a citizen of the United States of America (passport No 1733242, 1959) and I beseech you, Senator Tower, to rise to the question of holding by the Soviet Union of a citizen of the US, against his will and expressed desires." NOTE: In December 1963 Vladimir Petrov, head of the Slavic Language Department at Yale, read a copy of Oswald's letter and then wrote to Senator Tower. Petrov said, "I am satisfied that letter was not written by him (Harvey Oswald). It was written by a Russian with an imperfect knowledge of English."
  
• 1/1962 Publication of Irwin Suall's book The American Ultras: The Extreme Right and the Military-Industrial Complex (New America).
  
• Martin Luther King's biographer, David J. Garrow, has demonstrated rather conclusively that the origin of the Bureau's suspicion of King was its discovery in January 1962 that a wealthy New York businessman named Stanley Levison had emerged as King's closest adviser. And Levison, according to the Bureau's most trusted informants in the American Communist Party, code-named 'Solo' (Jack and Morris Childs), had been until about 1954 the American Communist Party's most important financier. Then he had apparently dropped out of the party. Now the Bureau learned that it had been shortly after Levison's supposed separation from the party when he had befriended King. The Bureau's conclusionbased on circumstantial logic rather than hard evidencewas that Levison represented an ambitious and apparently successful Communist plan to gain control over the Civil Rights Movement and its most prominent spokesman, Martin Luther King.
  
• Late 1961 or Early 1962: 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 station, in addition to about two thousand Cubans, a private navy of speedboats, and an annual budget of some $50 million. Task Force W carr ies 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. (A lleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders, 11/20/75, p. 140; Branch)
  
• Laos: In early 1962 General Phoumi built up the garrison of Nam Tha, only fifteen miles from the Chinese border. Phoumi used his reinforced base to launch provocative probes into nearby Pathet Lao territory. For a time the Pathet Lao ignored Phoumi, aware that he was trying to create an international incident. Eventually they did engage in a series of fire fights with Phoumi forces, but refrained from attacking Nam Tha. However, Phoumi's troops abandoned Nam Tha anyhow, claiming they were under attack, and fled across the Mekong River into Thailand. Then they waited for the United States to intervene in the conflict they had choreographed. As the Times of London reported, " CIA agents had deliberately opposed the official American objective of trying to establish a neutral government, had encouraged Phoumi in his reinforcement of Nam Tha, and had negatived the heavy financial pressure brought by the Kennedy administration upon Phoumi by subventions from its own budget. " Emboldened by his knowledge of his CIA backing, Phoumi was brazen in his defiance of President Kennedy's policy. The Times correspondent stated: "The General apparently was quite outspoken, and made it known that he could disregard the American embassy and the military advisory group because he was in communication with other American agencies. " The CIA's Phoumi ploy failed, however, to create a crisis that would push Kennedy to intervene and kill the developing coalition in Laos. Instead the president did nothing more than make a show of force, first to the Communists by deploying troops to neighboring Thailand, and second to his advisers by having contingency plans drawn up for a Laotian intervention that would never happen. But JFK also authorized Averell Harriman to transfer Jack Hazey, the CIA officer closest to Phoumi. Hazey had been the Agency's counterpart in Laos of David Atlee Phillips in the Caribbean, who would deploy anti-Castro Cubans in raids designed to draw JFK into a war with Cuba. In neither case did the president bite. Walt Haney, "The Pentagon Papers and the United States Involvement in Laos , " in Pentagon Papers, vol. 5 , p. 264. Hugh Toye summarizing the Times' articles of May 24 and 31 , 1962, in his Laos: Buffer State or Battleground ( London: Oxford University Press, 1968), p. 184 . The Times (May 31, 1962), cited by Toye, Laos, pp. 184-85 . Haney, "Pentagon Papers , " p. 264. Stevenson, End of Nowhere, p. 170 .
  
• 1/1/1962 The New Year's Day parade in Cuba provides U.S. intelligence sources with the first reliable intelligence on the extent of Soviet Bloc arms deliveries to Cuba. Aircraft in the possession of the Cuban Revolutionary Air Force are estimated to include around sixty Soviet-built jet fighters, primarily MiG-15 and MiG-17 aircraft with a limited number of somewhat more advanced MiG-19 planes. Small numbers of helicopters and light transport aircraft are also believed to have been provided to Cuba. (CINCLANT Historical Account of Cuban Crisis, 4/29/63, pp. 6-8)
  
• 1/1/1962 more than a year before the assassination, Cubans held a mock funeral for a still very-much-alive JFK, a reflection of tensions between Cuba and the United States. (Miami Herald 3/17/2012)
  
• 1/1/1962 JFK wrote to Diem via a State Dept bulletin, "We have been deeply disturbed by the assault on your country. Our indignation has mounted as the deliberate savagery of the Communist program of assassination, kidnapping and wanton violence became clear."
  
• 1/2/1962 Castro boasts of Cuba's military strength and says, "We reiterate we are Marxist-Leninists and we do not repent it."
  
• 1/3/1962 JFK ordered the activation of two Regular Army divisions.
  
• 1/3/1962 State Dept charges that Cuba "represents a bridgehead of Sino-Soviet imperialism and a base for agitation and subversion within the inner defense of the Western Hemisphere."
  
• 1/3/1962 Portugal announced that it might quit the UN.
  
• 1/3/1962 Vatican announces that Castro and other Cuban officials have been excommunicated for their actions against foreign-born Catholic priests and bishops, 136 of whom had been arrested and deported the previous 9/17.
  
• 1/4/1962 Fred Korth, a Fort Worth lawyer and bank president, is appointed as Navy Secretary by President John F. Kennedy on 4 January 1962 to replace John Connally. According to author Seth Kantor, Korth only got the job after strong lobbying from Lyndon B. Johnson. A few weeks after taking the post, Korth overruled top Navy officers who had proposed that the X-22 contract be given to Douglas Aircraft Corporation. Instead he insisted the contract be granted to the more expensive bid of the Bell Corporation. This was a subsidiary of Bell Aerospace Corporation of Forth Worth, Texas. This created some controversy as Korth was a former director of the company. Korth also became very involved in discussions about the TFX contract. Korth, was the former president of the Continental Bank, which had loaned General Dynamics considerable sums of money during the late 1950s and early 1960s. Korth later told the John McClellan committee that investigated the granting of the TFX contract to General Dynamics "that because of his peculiar position he had deliberately refrained from taking a directing hand in this decision (within the Navy) until the last possible moment." As I. F. Stone pointed out, it was "the last possible moment" which counted. "Three times the Pentagon's Source Selection Board found that Boeing's bid was better and cheaper than that of General Dynamics and three times the bids were sent back for fresh submissions by the two bidders and fresh reviews. On the fourth round, the military still held that Boeing was better but found at last that the General Dynamics bid was also acceptable." Stone goes on to argue: "The only document the McClellan committee investigators were able to find in the Pentagon in favour of that award, according to their testimony, was a five-page memorandum signed by McNamara, Korth, and Eugene Zuckert, then Secretary of the Air Force." Robert McNamara justified his support for General Dynamics because "Boeing had from the very beginning consistently chosen more technically risky tradeoffs in an effort to achieve operational features which exceeded the required performance characteristics." The TFX program involved the building of 1,700 planes for the Navy and the Air Force. The contract was estimated to be worth over $6.5 billion, making it the largest contract for military planes in the nation's history.
  
• 1/4/1962 US and South Vietnam announce that they are cooperating to boost Vietnam's economic and military strength.
  
• 1/5/1962 NBC Vietnam correspondent James Robinson told his colleagues on the program Projections 62: "American troops in battle uniform, fully armed, are being killed [by] and killing Communist-led rebels in South Vietnam. American officers are in full command authority of important military operations there. And our active military participation in this war is on the increase...We are involved in a shooting war in Southeast Asia."
  
• 1/5/1962 Oswald letter to Robert: "I really don't know how I'll feel to be back in the States." (H 16 862)
  
• 1/5/1962 JFK asked the Treasury Dept to look into expensive charity balls to scrutinize whether the participants were taking any unauthorized deductions.
  
• 1/5/1962 US embassy in Moscow wrote Oswald suggesting that he might want to go to the US first, with Marina to follow after her visa difficulties were straightened out. 1/16 he answered saying this was out of the question.
  
• 1/6/1962 US diplomatic ties with the Dominican Republic resumed.
  
• 1/7/1962 JFK met with Gen. Lucius Clay and announced "full agreement" with him on the handling of possible crisis situations in Berlin.
  
• 1/7/1962 A long-secret report was made public that warned JFK that failure to liberalize US trade policies would have serious "political consequences."
  
• 1/8/1962 SCLC released a report criticizing Hoover's FBI for not pursuing police brutality against blacks in Georgia.
  
• 1/8/1962 In a critical, prophetic letter to his friend W. H. Ferry, Trappist monk Thomas Merton wrote: "I have little confidence in Kennedy, I think he cannot fully measure up to the magnitude of his task, and lacks creative imagination and the deeper kind of sensitivity that is needed. Too much the Time and Life mentality, than which I can imagine nothing further, in reality, from, say, Lincoln. What is needed is really not shrewdness or craft, but what the politicians don't have: depth, humanity and a certain totality of self forgetfulness and compassion, not just for individuals but for man as a whole: a deeper kind of dedication. Maybe," Merton speculates in an inspired insight, "Kennedy will break through into that someday by miracle. But such people are before long marked out for assassination. " From Thomas Merton's January 18, 1962, letter to W. H. Ferry, in Letters from Tom: A Selection of Letters from Father Thomas Merton, Monk of Gethsemani, to W. H. Ferry, 1 96 1 - 1 968, edited by W. H. Ferry ( Scarsdale, N.Y. : Fort Hill Press, 1983)
  
• 1/9/1962 Laotian government complained of recent US pressure to form a coalition government as "intolerable."
  
• 1/9/1962 Macmillan and Adenauer ended talks in Bonn with an agreement to support future East-West talks on Berlin.
  
• 1/10/1962 The 87th Congress convened and elected John McCormack as Speaker of the House.
  
• 1/10/1962 USSR denounced US for "gross interference" in South Vietnam and for violating international agreements on Indonchina.
  
• 1/11/1962 JFK's state of the union address called for more presidential authority to cut tariffs, cut taxes during a recession and strengthen welfare programs.
  
• 1/11/1962 Dade County intelligence files: "At approximately 6:30 P.M., January 10, 1962, Detective A. L. TARABOCHIA was contacted at his residence by Secret Service Agent ERNEST ARAGON in reference to alleged plot to assassinate the President of the United States. Agent ARAGON revealed that, according to the information received by his agency, RAFAEL ANSELMO RODRIGUEZ MOLINS, a naturalized U.S. citizen of Dominican ancestry, was en route to Miami from Chicago to attempt to assassinate President KENNEDY next time he arrives in West Palm Beach. The subject also known as RAFAEL MOLINA is a W/M, 39, 5' 10", brown eyes, black receding hair, and wears glasses. RODRIGUEZ is known to disguise himself as a priest and carries a weapon concealed in a camera case. Since the subject has a badly infected foot, there is a possibility that he walks with a limp. Agent ARAGON added that the subject was to contact a Cuban male living in the Miami area before proceeding to West Palm Beach. The Cuban, ARMANDO PABLO LOPEZ ESTRADA QUINTANA, was a member of the forces that attempted the invasion of Cuba on April 17, 1961. LOPEZ is a W/M, DOB 3/15/39, 6ft, 200 lbs., last known address New York City, NY. LOPEZ is married and his wife's name is MERCEDES LOPEZ."
  
• 1/11/1962 US Air Force B-52H bomber set a record by flying halfway around the world without refueling.
  
• 1/12/1962 Merger of the country's two largest railroads - New York Central and Pennsylvania - was approved by their respective directors
  
• 1/12/1962 At the UN, Pakistan called for a Security Council on the dispute with India over Kashmir.
  
• 1/13/1962 The Joint Chiefs gave McNamara a memo to pass on to the President, arguing that US should send combat troops to South Vietnam. He forwarded the memo to JFK on 1/27, adding: "I am not prepared to endorse the views of the Chiefs until we have had more experience with our present program in South Vietnam." (In Retrospect p41)
  
• 1/15/1962 Tom Wicker recalled: "After long and solemn deliberations around [Scotty] Reston's desk on January 15, 1962, I was entrusted with a question for President Kennedy that perhaps ten Times reporters had honed to what we thought was a fine point. Kennedy could not entirely evade it, we were sure. So as soon as he recognized me later that day, I arose…and demanded in my sternest voice: Mr. President, are American troops now in combat in Vietnam?' Kennedy looked at me - six feet away and slightly beneath his elevated lectern - as if he thought I might be crazy. "No," he said crisply - not another word - and pointed at someone else for the next question." (On Press p92)
  
• 1/15/1962 US tanks were withdrawn from the Berlin Wall in an effort to improve relations with the USSR.
  
• 1/15/1962 South Vietnam: the Peoples Revolutionary Party is formed.
  
• 1/17/1962 Pat Eboli arrives in Italy from New York and tells Lucky Luciano that the mob leadership in the US had met and decided that Luciano would have to be killed. Carlo Gambino had already taken Luciano's place as de facto head of the Commission.
  
• 1/17/1962 The Soviets withdrew 12 tanks that had been stationed near the Berlin Wall.
  
• 1/18/1962 JFK sent his budget for FY 1963 to Congress; it emphasized defense and space spending. He forecast a half-billion-dollar surplus, and $92.5 billion in spending. The business community saw his projected surplus as wishful thinking or fiscal slight-of-hand.
  
• 1/18/1962 Edward Lansdale outlines "The Cuba Project," a program under OPERATION MONGOOSE aimed at the overthrow of the Castro government. Thirty-two planning tasks, ranging from sabotage actions to intelligence activities, are assigned to the agencies involved in MONGOOSE. The program is designed to develop a "strongly motivated political action movement" within Cuba capable of generating a revolt eventually leading to the downfall of the Castro government. Lansdale envisioned that the United States would provide overt support in the final stages of an uprising, including, if necessary, using military force. (The Cuba Project, 1/18/62; Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders, 11/20/75, p. 142)
  
• 1/18/1962 Dominican Republic: deposed Council of State retook control of the country; Rafael Bonnelly was named president.
  
• 1/19/1962 A meeting of the SGA is held in Robert Kennedy 's office. Notes taken by CIA representative George McManus contain the following passages: "Conclusion Overthrow of Castro is Possible...a solution to the Cuban problem today carried top priority in U.S. Gov[ernment]. No time, money, effort--or manpower is to be spared. Yesterday...the president indicated to [ Robert Kennedy ] that the final chapter had not been written--it's got to be done and will be done." McManus attributes the phrase "top priority in the U.S. government--no time, money...to be spared" to Attorney General Kennedy. (Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders, 11/20/75, p. 141)
  
• 1/20/1962 Lansdale wrote in a memo that he felt RFK had given the signal that "we are in a combat situation - where we have been given full command."
  
• 1/21/1962 Jack Anderson, in Parade magazine, reported, "Organized crime is under attack. For the first time, the full forces of the Federal Government have been thrown into the battle against it."
  
• 1/22-30/1962 A conference of the OAS is held in Punta del Este, Uruguay. At the close of the conference on October 30, the foreign ministers from the twenty-one American republics vote to exclude Cuba "from participation in the inter-American system." The measure is approved fourteen-to-one, with six abstentions. Another resolution is also adopted prohibiting OAS members from selling arms to Cuba and setting measures for collective defense against Cuban activities in the hemisphere.
  
• 1/22/1962 Sylvanus Olympio, president of Togo, was the target of an unsuccessful assassination attempt.
  
• 1/23/1962 Congressional hearings into the "muzzling" of military officers opened, appearing before the Senate Preparedness Subcommittee in 36 days of hearings. Gen. Walker was among the witnesses. He charged that "with this nation's survival at stake, our armed forces are paralyzed by our national policy of no win' and retreat from victory." He blamed Secretary of State Rusk and others in the State Dept.
  
• 1/24/1962 Mahendra, king of Nepal, was the target of an unsuccessful assassination attempt.
  
• 1/25/1962 After returning from a trip to the Congo, Sen. Dodd said, "The UN has brought the chaos and bloodshed of the North Congo into areas where there was complete public order so long as they were administered by the Tshombe government."
  
• 1/26/1962 Lucky Luciano went to Capodichino Airport in Naples to greet the film producer who had flown from the U.S. to meet with him about making a movie of Luciano's life. The mob boss stepped from his limousine and began walking across the runway toward the producer, his arm outstretched for a handshake, a wide smile on his puffy face. His features were suddenly twisted in a painful expression. Luciano grabbed his shirtfront and he then fell to the paved runway, dead of a heart attack.
  
• 1/26/1962 Bishop Burke of the Buffalo, NY Catholic Diocese bans the Twist in schools, parishes and youth events.
  
• 1/27/1962 McNamara sends a memo from the JCS to JFK urging deployment of US forces in Vietnam.
  
• 1/29/1962 Note from the head of the Administrative Regulations Division to the first and second assistants in the Criminal Division stated: "Our primary interest was in Giancana...apparently detective (Maheu) has some connection with Giancana but he claims was because of CIA assignment in connection with Cuba - CIA has objected, may have to drop." Assistant Attorney General Herbert Miller then asked the FBI to again speak with Edwards about the prosecution of Maheu. (Memo from Miller, l/31/62; Assassination Plots, Interim Report: Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders, pp129)
  
• 1/29/1962 Sen. John Tower said on the Senate floor, "I think it is naive and unrealistic to be preoccupied with the question of disarmament. We know that the communist conspiracy has no intention of co-existing with us."
  
• 1/29/1962 The nuclear test ban conference of the US, USSR and UK in Geneva deadlocked over a monitoring system for international control.
  
• 1/30/1962 Oswald letter to Robert expressing concerns that he may be charged with a crime upon his return to the US.
  
• 1/30/1962 Oswald writes to John Connally, former Secretary of the Navy, appealing his discharge. (CD82) The reader may recall that Fred Korth, an attorney from Fort Worth, represented Edwin Ekdahl in his petition for divorce against Marguerite Oswald in 1948. Also, this letter to John Connally is dated January 30, 1961 (not 1962)-prior to the date that Oswald met Marina. I attempted to verify the date of the letter by looking at the postmark on the envelope in which the letter was mailed from Minsk. The left side of the postmark, which shows the month and day of mailing, is in perfect condition. The right half of the postmark, which shows the year, has been removed. (Armstrong)
  
• 1/31/1962 Gen. Cabell retired as deputy CIA director; replaced by Army Major General Marshall Sylvester Carter.
  
• 1/31/1962 Letter from the INS to State Department denying request to waive the sanctions so that Marina Oswald could come to the US.