Deep Politics Timeline

[Tracy Riddle]

Here is December 1963. I still have to post 11/22/1963 through the end of November, but I have a lot more cleaning up to do on that.

• 12/1963 North Vietnamese leaders decided to begin sending NVA troops into the South to shore up the Vietcong.
  
• Seven Days in May was originally scheduled for release in December 1963 but Burt Lancaster insisted the release date be postponed as it was too soon after the assassination. The same fate befell Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, which was also scheduled for a December 1963 opening.
  
• U.E. Baughman, Chief of the Secret Service who retired seven months into Kennedy's administration after 34 years in the agency (13 as chief), said in a December 1963 interview, "there are a lot of things to be explained" about the actions of JFK's protection detail in Dallas. He wondered why the Depository had not been searched and how Oswald could have escaped the scene.
  
• While the nation mourned, the FBI held a conference at the beginning of December to plan its campaign to destroy King and the civil rights movement. At that all-day meeting FBI officials put forward proposals that make G. Gordon Liddy's Watergate plan seem pale by comparison. Officials of the nation's number-one law enforcement agency agreed to use "all available investigative techniques" to develop information for use "to discredit" King. Proposals discussed included using ministers, "disgruntled" acquaintances, "aggressive" newsmen, "colored" agents, Dr. King's housekeeper, and even Dr. King's wife or "placing a good looking female plant in King's office" to develop discrediting information and to take action that would lead to his disgrace.
  
• Military contracts awarded to Texas companies climbed from $1.2 billion in FY 1963 to $1.3 billion in FY 1964 and $1.4 billion in FY 1965. (Mollenhoff, The Pentagon)
  

• 12/1/1963 This is the date that had been reportedly designated as the day there was to be a coup in Cuba. This secret plan known as the "Plan for a Coup in Cuba" was fully authorized by JFK and personally run by Robert Kennedy. (The Ultimate Sacrifice, Waldron; Legacy of Secrecy, Waldon & Hartmann) Other scholars believe the documents are merely contingency plans and not an actual plot that was set in motion.
  
• Venezuela: Dr. Raul Leoni was elected president.
  
• Today, Rolando Cubela returns to Cuba from Prague.
  
• U.S. Naval Forces, Eastern Atlantic and Mediterranean (CINCNELM) disestablished on December 1, 1963.
  
• Malcolm X was asked by a reporter about the assassination; he replied, "Chickens coming home to roost never make me sad, they make me glad."
  
• Letter From Jacqueline Kennedy to Chairman Khrushchev: "I send it only because I know how much my husband cared about peace, and how the relation between you and him was central to this care in his mind. He used to quote your words in some of his speeches-"In the next war the survivors will envy the dead." You and he were adversaries, but you were allied in a determination that the world should not be blown up."
  
• Orville Nix voluntarily turns over his film to FBI agent Joe B. Abernathy, requesting it to be returned immediately. Upon receipt of the film, the FBI field office has a copy of the film made at Jamison Film in Dallas. This copy is forwarded to the FBI laboratory in Washington, D.C.
  
• A replica bag - like the one Oswald used when he said he was carrying curtain rods - is made today from materials found on this date in the shipping room of the TSBD. This is done as an investigation aid since the original bag has now been discolored during various laboratory examinations and can not be used for valid identification by witnesses.
  
• On December 1, 1963, Buell Wesley Frazier showed FBI agents the space he recalled the bag occupying on the back seat of his car. By the FBI measurement, 27 inches was the maximum possible length.
  
• Jack Ruby told DPD lieutenants Jack Revill, F.E. Cornwall and inspector J.H. Sawyer that he didn't want to get any police officers in trouble.
  
• Secret Service interview with Marina; transcript in the National Archives stated that the rifle she saw in New Orleans apartment had no telescopic sight on it; she said she had never seen a rifle with a scope before until the day the Mannlicher-Carcano was shown on TV. Marina's English was still poor, and she spoke through an interpreter. The transcript stated "This recording is being made at the Inn of the Six Flags in Texas where Mrs Oswald is being held by [Secret Service] agents." She said that Lee had never owned a pistol and she had never seen him with one. (Commission #344 Basic Source Materials.)
  
• CIA received information that a 11/22/1963 Cubana Airlines flight from Mexico City to Cuba had been delayed 6-11pm (EST) awaiting an unidentified passenger, who arrived at the airport in a twin-engined plane at 10:30pm and boarded the airliner without passing through customs. The man travelled to Cuba inside the cockpit of the plane. One "source" told the CIA that the man might have been "involved in the assassination" and had reportedly been involved with the Tampa branch of the FPCC. (Church Committee Report)
  

• 12/2/1963 Ruth Paine turned over to the police some of the Oswalds' belongings, including a Russian book containing an undated note written in Russian, allegedly from Lee to Marina, before he allegedly shot at Gen. Walker
  
• Supreme Court ruled 8-0 that state courts were empowered to enjoin any labor-management agreement that violated right-to-work laws.
  
• LBJ presented the Enrico Fermi Award to atomic physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, who had been smeared during the McCarthy era. Congressional GOP leaders were not present for the ceremony. JFK had signed the citation for the award shortly before his death.
  
• New government in Saigon decides to temporarily halt the strategic hamlet program because of widespread resentment and non-cooperation by peasants.
  
• At 10:00 AM today, CIA Director McCone meets with LBJ and McGeorge Bundy. McCone's calendar reveals that, at 3 p.m., he has a secret meeting to discuss Cuba in the CIA's conference room.
  
• Edward Grant Stockdale died on 2nd December, 1963 when he fell (or was pushed) from his office on the thirteenth story of the Dupont Building in Miami. Stockdale did not leave a suicide note but his friend, George Smathers, claimed that he had become depressed as a result of the death of John F. Kennedy. At some point during his presidency, JFK was sailing off Palm Beach with Stockdale, an old friend and fundraiser whom he had appointed as ambassador to Ireland. JFK began shooting off rounds from a .22 rifle over the empty ocean, and urged his friend to join in. Stockdale was not willing to take a gun in his hands with all the Secret Service agents around. JFK then turned to him and asked, "Stock, do you think I'll be assassinated?" Stockdale said, "Chief, don't even think about such a thing. Of course you won't." (Talbot, Brothers; based on interview with Stockdale's widow)
  
• Warren Commission later states that Frankie Kaiser, an employee of the Book Depository, finds a clipboard hidden by book cartons in the northwest corner of the sixth floor at the west wall a few feet from where the Lee Harvey Oswald rifle had been found.
  
• Chester Boyers today prepares eight sections and six paraffin blocks of tissue from JFK's brain. Boyers will state that all of these materials were filed under Bethesda Naval Hospital number A63-272. He speculates that they could still be there or are possibly at the AFIP.
  
• Pedro Gutierrez Valencia story wrote a letter on December 2, 1963, to President Johnson, which caused him to then be interviewed multiple times by FBI agents during early 1964. He claimed he saw Oswald in Mexico City meeting with Cuban agents.
  
• Marguerite Oswald was quoted as complaining, "Why would Jack Ruby be allowed within a few feet of a prisoner - any prisoner - when I could not see my own son?"
  
• On December 2, 1963, Mrs. Ruth Paine turned over to the police some of the Oswalds' belongings, including a Russian volume entitled "Book of Useful Advice." In this book was an undated note written in Russian, supposedly written by Oswald before the Walker shooting. (WR)
  
• FBI carries out tests on the rifle to determine its muzzle velocity.
  
• An FBI envelope (FBI Field Office Dallas 89-43-1A-122) dated 12/2/1963 that was released in 1995 by the Assassinations Record Review Board had a cover that detailed the contents of the envelope as being a 7.65 mm rifle shell. The shell was allegedly found in Dealey Plaza after the shooting, though nothing was known about this envelope or rifle shell until the release of the 1995 records. The whereabouts of the 7.65 mm rifle shell is unknown. Researcher Anna Marie Kuhns-Walko first reported the envelope. The envelope had the following label: "7.65 shell found in Dealey Plaza on 12/02/1963 ... determined of no value and destroyed."
  
• FBI memo from Jevons to Conrad; it concerned the manufacture by Western Cartridge Co. of 6.5-caliber Mannlicher-Carcano ammo for the Marines in 1954. The memo pointed out that such ammo "does not fit and cannot be fired in any of the [Marine Corps] weapons. This gives rise to the obvious speculation that it is a contract for ammunition placed by the CIA with Western under a [Marine Corps] cover for concealment purposes." (Reasonable Doubt 106)
  
• Dallas Morning News (the Early City Edition): "The Communist party organ Pravda hinted Sunday that Lee Harvey Oswald...was an American spy during his 2 1/2 years in the Soviet Union. The following was only in the Early City Edition and was later dropped: "Soviet organs have been claiming all along that Kennedy was assassinated as a result of an "ultra-conservative" plot and that Oswald was murdered to "cover the traces."
  
• Aline Mosby, United Press International correspondent in Paris, who interviewed Oswald in Moscow in 1959 when she was stationed there, quoted him as saying, "I'm a Marxist... I affirm that my allegiance is to the Soviet Socialist Republic..."
  
• Dan Smoot's right-wing Dan Smoot Report theorizes about a communist conspiracy behind the assassination.
  
• Dallas Morning News: "Mexico City-The death of President John F. Kennedy put a serious crimp in what was to have been one of Fidel Castro's biggest propaganda circuses. The event was the military trial of a Canadian pilot, Ronald Lippert, who was allegedly in the employ of the CIA while flying to Cuba with explosives..."
  

• 12/3/1963 UPI reported: "An exhaustive FBI report now nearly ready for the White House will indicate that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone and unaided assassin of President Kennedy, government sources said today." AP quoted "government sources" about the FBI report; JFK and Connally were hit by separate bullets. When informed of these news articles, J. Edgar Hoover writes: "I thought no one knew this outside the FBI." Asst FBI Director William Sullivan told the Church Committee in the mid-70s that Hoover had leaked the secret FBI report to the press about ten days after the assassination to "blunt the drive for an independent investigation of the assassination."
  
• FBI interview of Douglas Jones, 3 Dec 1963. Douglas Jones of Jones Printing Company told the FBI he did not believe it was Oswald who had ordered the handbills.
  
• Marina Oswald says today that Oswald tried to kill General Edwin Walker. This is the first time this subject has been mentioned by Marina. FBI report of interview with Marina: "Marina said she had never seen Oswald practice with his rifle or any other firearm and he had never told her that he was going to practice." (H 22 763) Her statement comes about a week after a West German newspaper reports there might be a connection between the Walker shooting and the assassination.
  
• At a ceremony at the Treasury Department with his family and Mrs. Jacqueline Kennedy present, Agent Clint Hill is given the Exceptional Service Award by Treasury Secretary Dillon.
  
• On December 3, 1963, an article appeared in the Chicago American on Thomas Vallee's November 2 arrest, " Cops Seize Gun-Toting Kennedy Foe. " The unnamed detectives who disclosed Vallee's month-old arrest characterized him as "a gun-collecting malcontent who expressed violent anti Kennedy views before the assassination of the late President. " A similar article on Vallee's arrest, drawing on unidentified federal agents, appeared in the Chicago Daily News on the same day.
  
• The New York World-Telegram & Sun, Tuesday, December 3, 1963, p.25 - Truth Won't Out By Richard Starnes
  
• LBJ met with Martin Luther King. Johnson started having John McCormack attend important meetings since he was next in line for the presidency.
  
• OAS council voted 16 to 0 to investigate charges that Cuba had smuggled arms into Venezuela to promote terrorism.
  
• Sen. Stephen Young (D-Ohio) criticized the SS agents who were alleged to be out late drinking the night before the assassination. (AP)
  
• Sen. Kenneth Keating (R-NY) introduced legislation to give the WC broad subpoena powers. (AP 12/4)
  
• Letter from Belmont to Tolson, saying that the FBI was not going to send a liaison to the WC's meeting with Katzenbach present. "That would be very undesirable because there was really only one answer, that is, the question raised as to what the FBI is doing. There is a very simple answer, namely, we are pressing the investigation in the writing of the report. This is our major goal. Until that is completed there is nothing we can contribute."
  
• FBI report of interview: "Marina stated that when Oswald visited the Paine house on Thursday evening, November 21, 1963, he did not bring anything with him when he arrived at the house...She further advised that she does not know of anything that Oswald took with him from the Paine house to work the next morning...She examined this sack and said she had never seen anything like it and that she had not seen such a sack or such paper in the possession of Oswald on November 21, 1963, or at any time prior thereto." She also said that Oswald was right-handed. (CE 1401 pgs 272,297)
  

• 12/4/1963 After the death of JFK, Lyndon Johnson put on permanent hold any dialogue between the White House and Fidel Castro, who kept seeking it. On December 4, William Attwood was told by Carlos Lechuga at the United Nations that "he now had a letter from Fidel himself, instructing him to talk with me about a specific agenda. " Attwood asked the White House for its response to Castro. Gordon Chase said all policies were in the course of being reviewed by the new administration and advised patience. Attwood did not know that, with the lightning change of presidents, former rapprochement proponent Chase had felt a corresponding change in the political climate and was now among those who were already turning Kennedy's policy around.
  
• FBI interview of Myra Silver, 4 Dec 1963. Ms. Silver supplied additional details about the handbill order placed by "Osborne." She was shown a photo of Oswald and "stated she could not recognize the person represented in the picture as the person who placed the order for the handbills."
  
• Secret Service special agent William N. Carter receives testimony from Harold D. Norman, a Texas School Book Depository Building employee who was on the fifth floor of the building when the assassination took place. Carter's report quotes Norman as saying the shots came from directly above him and that he saw "dust falling from the ceiling" below the window where Oswald allegedly stood when he fired at the president. When questioned about this by the Warren Commission, Norman will deny making either of these statements.
  
• Orville Nix's film of the assassination is returned to him by the FBI. They have made a copy of it. Nix does not get his camera back until June 2, 1964. Nix is never called as a witness by the Warren Commission. Additionally, in Nix's film, JFK's limo is measured as traveling at 8.5 mph - as opposed to the Zapruder film - in which the limo is measured as traveling 11 mph. The Nix film shows JFK's limo traveling 22 percent slower than the Zapruder film.
  
• In a major change in the Roman Catholic Mass, the use of English in place of Latin for parts of the mass and sacraments was approved by the Ecumenical Council.
  
• FBI leaked to the press the results of its supposedly secret report ("No Oswald-Ruby Link, FBI Believes," Chicago Tribune) DeLoach memo to John Mohr, dated today, hinted that Ed Guthman of the information office was leaking to the press about the FBI report; Hoover wrote on the memo, "Again a leak somewhere...I thought no one knew outside the FBI...Certainly someone is doing too much talking." (Never Again 254)
  
• LBJ met with James Farmer of CORE.
  
• RFK returned to work after resting with his family. (NY Times) Early this month RFK told Arthur Schlesinger that the FBI was once again operating without any control from the executive branch. (RFK and His Times 657)
  
• Rep. Walter Rogers (D-Texas) called for an ongoing investigation "until every splinter of truth is revealed" about the assassination. "I cannot accept the theory that one single man, one solitary twisted extremist...could contrive by himself to bring death to President Kennedy..." He demanded to know "why security precautions failed so shockingly."
  
• FBI collected all remaining property of the Oswalds at the Paine house in Irving. (CE 1403) But the Imperial Reflex, a gray, box-type camera was not among these items.
  
• The Dallas FBI obtained Zapruder's camera and sent it to the FBI lab.
  
• 12/4/63, Secret Service report of interview with Marina: "The reporting agent interviewed Marina Oswald as to whether she knew of any place or of a rifle range where her husband could do some practicing with a rifle, and whether she ever saw her husband taking the rifle out of the house. She said that she never saw Lee going out or coming in to the house with a rifle and that he never mentioned to her doing any practice with a rifle." (23H393)
  
• An undeliverable package addressed to "Lee Oswald" was found in the dead letter section of the Irving post office on this day, where it has rested for an unknown length of time. It had been wrongly addressed to 601 W. Nassaus Street and had no postage; it contained a "brown paper bag made of fairly heavy brown paper which bag was open at both ends."
  
• FBI report of interview with Marina: "She cannot recall ever hearing Oswald state that he was going to fire the rifle in practice or that he had fired it in practice." (H 22 785) In four FBI/Secret Service interviews done 12/4-16/1963, Marina repeatedly said that she had never seen Oswald with a rifle or heard him talk about practicing with it. (CE 1785; CE 1401 286; CE 1790; CE 1403 735)
  
• Waggoner Carr arrives in D.C. to meet with Katzenbach.
  
• Jim Buchanan reports (Florida Sun Sentinel) that Frank Sturgis had claimed to have been in contact with Oswald once, when he tried to infiltrate Sturgis' organization in Miami. But Oswald was rejected because they couldn't determine enough about his background. (CD 395)
  
• AP reported that the Treasury Dept said that the SS agents drinking in a club before the assassination were all off duty. "White House aides and newsmen also were in the group."
  
• Dallas Times Herald editorial assured the reader that the truth about the assassination would be found: "If a nation cannot believe the findings of this investigation, then there is little it can believe."
  

• 12/5/1963 Senate-House conference committee agreed on a compromise foreign aid plan of nearly $3.6 billion.
  
• Dallas Secret Service ask FBI for copy of the Zapruder film for Dallas Police Dept.
  
• Surveyor Robert West creates a plat of Dealey Plaza for the Secret Service. Federal agents staged a filmed reenactment in Dealey Plaza again (New York Times 12/6/1963) to determine how Oswald could have caused an entry wound in Kennedy's throat. The Secret Service photographed a re-enactment of the assassination on December 5, 1963. A pair of cameras was used, one providing a wide field of view and the other a narrow "scope view." The photographs are in Commission Document 88. But the autopsy on Kennedy's body had already been done, and the Parkland doctors had already told the Bethesda physicians about the tracheotomy wound; according to the WC it was firmly established right away that Kennedy "was first struck by a bullet which entered at the back of his neck and exited through the lower front portion of his neck."
  
• The FBI's report on the assassination was delivered to the Justice Dept.
  
• Dean Andrews is interviewed by FBI agent Regis Kennedy.
  
• First Warren Commission meeting. Nicholas Katzenbach appears at the Commission's first executive session today and tells the Commission that although the FBI claims to be moving heaven and earth to discover who is leaking information from the FBI's forthcoming report, only the FBI could have done it since no one else has any copies of the report at the time of the leak. (These leaks, Assistant Director William Sullivan later says, have actually been ordered by J. Edgar Hoover.) Senator Russell then asks Katzenbach, "...how much of their findings does the FBI propose to release to the press before they present their findings to this Commission?"
  
• Sen. Richard Russell wrote a memo for his own records (which later surfaced in his Memorial Library in Georgia): "Warren asked about C.I.A. 'Did they have anything.' When I told of Mexico and Nicaragua NOT mentioning sums - He mention 5G as McCone had told me. He [Warren] knew all I did and more about CIA. Something strange is happening - W. [Warren] and Katzenbach know all about FBI and they are apparently through psychiatrists and others planning to show Oswald only one who even considered - This to me is untenable position - I must insist on outside counsel - 'Remember Warren's blanket endictment of South'" (The Man Who Knew Too Much 500)
  
• NYT editorialized that though the motorcade route "was not made firm until November 19...anyone with a knowledge of Dallas could have determined from previously published information that the logical route would take the President past the [TSBD]..."
  
• NYT quoted Earl Warren as saying, "We are deliberating somewhat in the dark...because we have no report as yet from any agency of the Government. The information we have now is little more than what we have learned through the news media."
  
• The New York Times reports: "Most private citizens who had cooperated with newsmen reporting the crime have refused to give further help after being interviewed by agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation."
  

• 12/6/1963 The supplementary autopsy report was signed by Humes and was dated this day. (CE 391, WR 544-45)
  
• FBI's preliminary biographical study on Lee Harvey Oswald, dated December 6, 1963 (NARA Document #104-10017-10037, declassified February 9th, 1996).
  
• J. Lee Rankin was tentatively selected over Warren Olney as Chief Counsel. There was also discussion of a letter from the Texas Attorney General regarding the Texas Board of Inquiry, as well as a proposed reply asking Texas officials to stop their investigation ("a public inquiry in Texas might be more harmful than helpful..."). Hale Boggs brought up the leaking of the FBI report to the press and described it as the "most outrageous leak I have ever seen."
  
• Rusk cabled Lodge that "The President has expressed his deep concern that our effort in Viet-Nam be stepped up to highest pitch." (RFK and His Times 783)
  
• In the Senate, Richard Russell and John Sherman Cooper introduced a resolution to give the WC "sweeping" powers to grant immunity to witnesses. Identical legislation would be offered in the House on Monday by Gerald Ford and Hale Boggs. (AP 12/7)
  
• FBI interview of Dean Andrews, 6 Dec 1963. This interview as recorded is a meandering review by Andrews of his story, not really a retraction in its details but is summarized by Andrews himself as "a figment of his imagination." FBI report finds Dean Andrews stating that the call from Bertrand was "a dream." (Andrews was a patient at Hotel Dieu Hospital when he received the call.)
  
• FBI interview of Eva Springer, 6 Dec 1963. Andrews' secretary confirmed the major aspects of Andrews' story, saying he had called her on the 23rd and said that Bertrand had contacted him about representing Oswald.
  
• A Gallup poll showed that 52% of Americans believed that others besides Oswald were involved in the assassination; hardly anyone seemed to be able to pinpoint which group might be responsible. Only about one in a hundred blamed Russia or Cuba or any other foreign communist conspiracy. Almost no one blamed the far-right, either. (Dallas Morning News)
  
• Jackie Kennedy and her two children move out of the White House today. She leaves Lady Bird and LBJ a vase of her favorite lilies of the valley.
  
• The American Civil Liberties Union comments: "It is our opinion that Lee Harvey Oswald, had he lived, would have been deprived of all opportunity to receive a fair trial by the conduct of the police and prosecuting officials in Dallas, under pressure from the public and news media. From the moment of his arrest until his murder two days later, Oswald was tried and convicted many times over in the newspapers, on the radio, and over television by the public statements of the Dallas law enforcement officials. Time and again high-ranking police and prosecution officials state their complete satisfaction that Oswald was the assassin. As their investigation uncovered one piece of evidence after another, the results were broadcast to the public... . . Oswald's trial would ... have been nothing but a hollow formality."
  
• On this date, JFK's brain receives a supplemental examination. Dr. Pierre Finck registers the brain as weighing 1,500 grams. It is eventually reported that the doctors do not section JFK's brain. It is suggested that they merely "cut some pieces from the brain"
  
• A onetime employee of Jack Ruby, William Abadie repairs jukeboxes and slot machines for Ruby's gambling operations. He also briefly doubles as a bookmaker in one of Ruby's clubs. On this date, Abadie tells FBI agents that Ruby was well connected with local racketeers and corrupt police officials in both Dallas and Fort Worth. He also claims to have seen local police officers hanging out in one of Ruby's bars while patrons were engaging in illegal gambling activities.
  
• Richard Helms today removes a veteran covert operations agent, John Whitten, from the CIA's investigation of the JFK assassination because Whitten has complained that information about OSWALD - on whom the CIA has maintained files for at least three years - and his Cuba-related activities is being withheld from him. (Brothers)
  
• Dallas Times Herald reported that Marina supposedly said that Oswald had boasted to her of trying to kill Walker. "M.W. Stevenson, chief of detectives for Dallas police, was asked whether Mrs Oswald had made such a statement. 'Not to my knowledge,' he said. Then he added, 'No comment.' A reporter asked to see the Dallas police report on the investigation of the Walker incident and was told the FBI had picked it up 'three or four days ago.'" Investigation continued into possible Oswald target practice at the Trinity River. "No mention was made of finding unfired ammunition in Oswald's Oak Cliff room or his Irving home after his arrest...in disclosing Oswald bought the rifle from the firm, investigators omitted reference to the scope and ammunition."
  
• NYT reported that Marguerite Oswald felt her son had been made a "scapegoat" for a plot to kill JFK.
  
• LIFE magazine ("End to Nagging Rumors: The Six Critical Seconds," by Paul Mandel) this day reported: "The doctor said one bullet passed from back to front on the right side of the President's head. But the other, the doctor reported, entered the President's throat from the front and then lodged in his body. Since by this time the limousine was 50 yards past Oswald and the President's back was turned almost directly to the sniper, it has been hard to understand how the bullet could have entered the front of his throat. Hence the recurring guess that there was a second sniper somewhere else. But the 8mm [Zapruder] film shows the President turning his body far around to the right as he waves to someone in the crowd. His throat is exposed - toward's the sniper's nest - just before he clutches it." The article also said, "Three shots were fired. Two struck the President, one Governor Connally. All three bullets have been recovered - one, deformed, from the floor of the limousine; one from the stretcher that carried the President; one that entered the President's body."
  
• NY Times reported that on 12/5, the Secret Service had done assassination reenactments in Dealey Plaza. "Thirteen days after the assassination of President Kennedy, Federal investigators were still reconstructing the crime on film today..." They put a film camera in the "sniper's nest" and placed a surveyor's transit on Elm, pointing up at the window. They were trying to find out "how the President could have received a bullet in the front of the throat from a rifle in the Texas School Book Depository Building after his car had passed the building...." "One explanation from a competent source was that the President had turned to his right to wave and was struck at that moment. The best authority presumably on the exact angle of entry of the bullet is the man who conducted the autopsy...Dr. Humes said he had been forbidden to talk. Most private citizens who had cooperated with newsmen reporting the crime have refused to give further help after being interviewed by agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Dallas city and county police withdrew their help the same way. One high officer said he wished he could answer questions 'because it would save us a lot of work'". (Story by Joseph Loftus)
  

• 12/7/1963 LBJ held his first press conference; he stated, "I feel like I have already been here a year."
  
• The administration announced that there would be savings in the Pentagon budget of $1.5 billion in the current fiscal year and $4 billion by fiscal 1967.
  
• The Johnsons moved into the White House. (White House Diary 14) LBJ and Lady Bird quarrel about the move. Lady Bird wants to delay; LBJ wants to move today. Jackie Kennedy and her children have only just moved out of the White House the previous morning. (LB)
  
• After J. Edgar Hoover has been overruled in his proposal to close off the murder investigation with a brief FBI report, the press publishes six of the Lee Harvey Oswald - V. T. Lee (national director of the FPCC) letters, apparently from copies given by Lee himself to the FBI, after the assassination.
  
• There is a rumor that Secret Service agents have a "burn party" today, at which many of the autopsy materials are consigned to the flames.
  
• LBJ talks with Sen. Russell three times today.
  
• GOP Representatives Melvin Laird (Wisconsin), Katherine St. George (NY) and John Rhodes (Arizona) issued a statement saying that "if it was hatred that moved the assassin, that hatred was bred by the teachings of communism" and urged Americans not to blame each other or doubt their institutions.
  
• The Chicago Sun-Times reported that "government sources said in Washington" on 12/6 that "a document found by FBI agents...a few days after Oswald was slain" implicated him in the Walker shooting. "Federal officials refused to disclose what Oswald had written about his attempt to shoot Walker...or where agents had come upon the document...It was pointed out...that the shot was fired at Walker only a month after Walker urged President Kennedy to invade Cuba with airborne troops." The slug found in the wall was too deformed to be conclusively identified: "The search for ballistics evidence...turned Friday to target ranges along Texas' Trinity River. On these ranges, Dallas police disclosed, Oswald perfected his marksmanship less than week before the murder of President Kennedy. Federal agents and police scoured the ranges in the hope of finding a bullet fired by Oswald...Secret Service agents were disclosed to have found witnesses who saw Oswald at the river rifle range between Nov. 10 and 16...The witnesses were reportedly in awe of Oswald's marksmanship..."
  
• AP (Bernard Gavzer): Floyd Davis, owner of gun range, said three of his customers had told of seeing Oswald practice firing there at three different times.
  
• Ruth Paine was quoted as saying that the FBI had known Oswald was working at the Depository; she had told agents this, but, "They did not seem particularly interested in Lee. They seemed to want to help Marina if any of her family was threatened after she came to this country." (AP)
  
• Marina's "friend said Secret Service agents had suggested to her that it might be safer and easier for her to return to the Soviet Union than to try to live in the United States. This distressed her...Mrs Oswald spends most of her time in her rooms, where the Federal Bureau of Investigation still occasionally questions her through an interpreter...She is now secluded from Oswald's relatives as well as the public." (NY Times 12/8)
  
• Jean Daniel reported in the New Republic that Castro, upon hearing of JFK's death, said, "This is bad news for Cuba." He asked of LBJ, "What authority does he exercise over the CIA?"
  
• The Nation reported that in 1963 the Russians arrested a Yale history professor and charged him with being a spy; JFK appealed personally to Khruschev to release the man, assuring him he was "clean"; when the professor was returned and met with Kennedy, the President was furious to find out that he had indeed been spying for the CIA. (This was also reported by Time 6/12/1964).
  

• 12/8/1963 Earl Warren called J. Lee Rankin in NYC and asked him to be general counsel for the WC.
  
• Joe Amsler, a 23-year-old former high school classmate and friend of Frank Sinatra's daughter Nancy, joined Barry Keenan, 23, and John Irwin, 42, in abducting Sinatra's son Frank Jr. from his hotel room in Lake Tahoe.
  
• Robert Oswald goes to the Paine residence to search for any remaining items belonging to his brother Lee Harvey Oswald. He finds an Imperial Reflex Duo Lens camera. He doesn't think this discovery is important enough to bring to the attention of the authorities.
  
• The New York Times today reports that "Secret Service agents suggested to her [Marina Oswald] that it might be safer and easier for her to return to the Soviet Union than to try to live in the United States. This distressed her ... She is now secluded from Oswald's relatives as well as from the public."
  
• NY Times reported that Ike had encouraged Henry Cabot Lodge to run for president.
  
• The Dallas Times Herald reported that an unidentified man arrested 11/22 in the railroad yards remained in jail, though he had been cleared of any involvement in the assassination: "The suspect was unarmed when arrested but booked, along with others arrested in the hectic hours following the assassination, on charges of 'investigation of conspiracy to commit murder.'" He continued to be held on "city charges." At least three people in the Dal-Tex building were detained. Another young man was led from the building wearing a black leather jacket and gloves, according to witnesses. There is no record of anything he might have said to police. (Six Seconds 132, 139; Cover-Up 84)
  
• Joseph Goulden wrote an article for the Philadelphia Inquirer, claiming that "a law enforcement officer in Dallas whom he declined to identify" had told him that Oswald "had been contacted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation to become an informant." He also noted that "witnesses had seen Lee Harvey Oswald in the [TSBD] 15 minutes before the shots were fired at the President. He stated he had received this information from the Dallas Sheriff's office." (CD 226, reproduced in Whitewash IV 142). How far these contacts went is indicated in "the revelation that the Federal Bureau of Investigation tried to recruit Oswald as an undercover informant in Castro groups two months before Mr. Kennedy's death." This report, which appeared in a Philadelphia Inquirer dispatch from Dallas December 8, went on: The FBI attempt to recruit Oswald as an informant, an informed law enforcement source said, was made in September just after he had moved to Dallas from New Orleans. Oswald's mother said an "agent named Hosty" came to the Irving house and talked to the young man at length in his car. An FBI agent named Joseph [sic] Hosty handles investigations of subversives for the Dallas field office. The source said he did not know if the FBI succeeded in hiring Oswald; and the federal agency would not discuss the matter.
  

• 12/9/1963 9:55am LBJ called former Gov. David Lawrence of Pennsylvania. He informed Lawrence that McNamara had decided that the Navy yards in Philadelphia, Boston, NY, and San Francisco would have to be closed due to budget cuts.
  
• Seventeen days after JFK's assassination, the FBI receives correspondence from an anonymous source in the Netherlands that asserts that Madame Nhu and the government of South Vietnam are responsible for JFK's assassination.
  
• DPD Lt. George Butler told fellow officers involved in an internal investigation into Ruby's background that 1) he had information that Oswald was Ruby's illegitimate son and 2) that he had information that Ruby had applied for a visa to Mexico at about the time of Oswald's visit to Mexico City. (CE 2249 p41)
  
• Arthur Schlesinger talked with RFK: "I asked him, perhaps tactlessly, about Oswald. He said that there could be no serious doubt that Oswald was guilty, but there was still argument if he had done it by himself or as part of a larger plot, whether organized by Castro or by gangsters...McCone thought there were two people involved in the shooting." (RFK and His Times)
  
• Secret Service report: the Cuban Revolutionary Council maintained an office in New Orleans at 544 Camp Street from 10/1961 to 2/1962. (Oswald in New Orleans)
  
• DeLoach memo to John Mohr, saying that the FBI's report "will be delivered today"; up to this time no one outside the FBI had a copy of the report. (Never Again 253)
  
• A five-volume report of the FBI's investigation of the assassination was submitted to LBJ and the WC; it would become Warren Commission Document 1 (CD1). It concluded that there was no evidence of anyone other than Oswald involved. Although the report is supposedly confidential, details are leaked to the press and made public. It stated, "Two bullets struck President Kennedy, and one wounded Governor Connally. Immediately after President Kennedy and Governor Connally were admitted to Parkland...a bullet was found on one of the stretchers. Medical examination of the President's body revealed that one of the bullets had entered just below his shoulder to the right of the spinal column at an angle of 45 to 60 degrees downward, that there was no point of exit, and that the bullet was not in the body." It also said that Tippit was shot three times. McWatters was reported as saying that when he commented to the passenger he thought was Oswald, "I wonder where they shot the president," the passenger replied, "They shot him in the temple." The Commission did not publish the report, instead relegating it to the National Archives (Commission #1, Vol #1, p18). It was publicly released in 5/1966, due to the efforts of Vincent Salandria and Paul Hoch. It was felt that bullet CE 399 had fallen out of the back wound. When this and the Supplemental Report were released to the public, FBI spokesmen fumbled to explain the discrepancy in the back wound, saying that it represented the "medical findings at that time." (Washington Post 5/29/1966) This three-hits-no-misses theory was also adopted by the Secret Service, and Weisberg has "seen no record of either agency changing its adherence to this theory. Both agencies just ignored the wounding of Jim Tague." (Never Again p3)
  
• Acting Atty General Nicholas Katzenbach wrote each member of the WC asking them to issue a press release stating that the FBI report said Oswald was the lone assassin. (Church Committee report)
  
• Fred Powledge, reporting from Dallas, said in the NYT (12/10) that the operator of the Irving rifle range, Mr. Davis, "said Mr. Slack and the other customers did not notify the [FBI] until it became known that investigators were looking for sites where Oswald might have practiced…" A thirty-four-year-old machinist named Malcolm Howard Price said he had looked through the telescopic sight of Oswald's rifle on a rifle range in suburban Dallas --- but "Mr. Price declined to answer further questions because, he said, the FBI had asked him not to talk. The FBI here [Dallas] denied this."...Mr. Slack said that Oswald was accompanied by another man on his first visit to the range. The two men brought three rifles with them, and, when they left, Oswald handed them over a wire fence to the other man in the parking lot, Mr. Slack recalled. He said one of the weapons was wrapped in a canvas or old quilt...The customers recalled that on the first visit the man resembling Oswald came alone in a battered automobile. On the second visit they said he came with another man." Federal authorities "have said privately that they believe Oswald was the sniper" who shot at Walker.
  
• Washington Post: "It now appears that Lee Harvey Oswald, the accused assassin, attended not only a rally addressed by Gen. Edwin Walker Oct. 23, but also one addressed by United Nations Ambassador Adlai Stevenson Oct. 24.
  
• NYT reported that FBI had given SS a "risk lisk" of individuals in Dallas that might be dangerous to the President, but Oswald was not on the list because there was nothing to indicate he was violent.
  
• Washington Post: "The FBI has obtained a series of letters written by the late Lee Harvey Oswald, accused assassin of President Kennedy, the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, two New York newspapers reported today.
  
• Newsweek reports that one day last June, Oswald applied for a passport and --- despite his record --- got it in a single day. He called himself a "photographer"; he said he planned to take a long trip abroad --- perhaps including Russia --- late this year. (Newseek, 12/9/63)
  

• 12/10/1963 Senate approved a $1 billion college-aid bill.
  
• At 10 AM, CIA Director McCone meets secretly in the CIA's conference room - subject: CUBA. There have been reports that Oswald actually visited Havana during his stay in Mexico City. These reports are being suppressed.
  
• President Johnson calls on Congress to pass Civil Rights legislation without delay, "the issue cannot be ignored for another 100 years or even another 100 days".
  
• Hoover wrote an angry memo to Tolson complaining about how FBI agents failed to keep a close eye on Oswald. It argues that based on Oswald's background, he should have been on the FBI's Security Index. (AP 11/10/98) Seventeen FBI employees were censured or placed on probation for "short-comings in connection with the investigation of Oswald prior to the assassination."
  
• Statement of David Ferrie, 10 Dec 1963. Ferrie with some equivocation denied knowing Oswald: ".....I have no records, or recollection, to my knowledge, to show that Lee Harvey Oswald was, or was not, a member of this particular unit of the Civil Air Patrol. To my best knowledge and belief I do not know Lee Harvey Oswald, and have no personal recollection of ever having met him. If I did ever meet him it was very casual and to my best recollection have definitely not seen him in recent years."
  
• Secret Service report: Marina again said she never saw Oswald practice with his rifle. (H 23 402) She said that to her knowledge he had never used the name Hidell. (CE 1789)
  
• Che Guevara is alleged to be under house arrest in Cuba for plotting to overthrow Fidel Castro, "according to "a Western diplomat." A formerly secret cable sent to the CIA director on December 10, 1963 - just nine days after the original date for the C-Day coup - reports "Che Guevara was alleged to be under house arrest for plotting to overthrow Castro," according to "a Western diplomat." Newly declassified documents and other research cast Che's growing disenchantment with Fidel Castro in a new light. These revelations include Che's secret meetings with three people close to the Kennedys, followed by yet another house arrest after a C-Day exile leader was captured in Cuba.
  
• Hoover sent a memo to Belmont about how to protect the FBI's image during the WC investigation. (Secrecy and Power 385, 574)
  
• NY Times reported, "Oswald Assassin Beyond a Doubt, FBI Concludes."
  
• Rankin told the press that Warren had hoped to get the report out by February: "The President and the Chief Justice want to get it resolved as soon as possible..." (NY Times)
  
• The Dallas Times Herald's editorial praised Waggoner Carr for dropping the state investigation of JFK's death: "Although it happened in Texas, it is proper that the investigation be conducted by a federal committee because the case involves the death of a president. There must not be any hint or question of whitewash or cover-up in the findings...It will be almost impossible to keep some people forevermore from reporting or believing that they have some super-secret 'inside' truth that is being suppressed about the President's death. But the wide majority of intelligent, open-minded American citizens will accept what the presidential fact finders record."
  
• Richard Dudman, in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, reported that the Parkland doctors had not been questioned by the FBI or any other investigative agency.
  
• The Federal Bureau of Investigation gave the Secret Service a "risk" list of Dallas individuals in advance of President Kennedy's fatal trip, but the list did not include the name of Lee H. Oswald. An official source explained today that Oswald's name, like many others in the Dallas file, had been omitted because the F.B.I. found nothing in Oswald's background to mark him as a potential assassin...Oswald was not under surveillance by the F.B.I. at the time of President Kennedy's visit to Dallas Nov. 21, the F.B.I. noted. Months of checking by the F.B.I. had indicated that Oswald was neither a spy nor a saboteur. That, it was said, covered the statutory area of F.B.I. responsibility. (The New York Times, 12/10/63.)
  
• 12/11/1963 Apparently on this date, the Secret Service visited Parkland and showed the autopsy report to the doctors, and got them to agree that all the shots came from the rear. (Richard Dudman article)
  
• Frank Sinatra Jr. was released by kidnappers after $240,000 ransom is paid.
  
• Mrs. Alma Cole writes LBJ about her son knowing Oswald in North Dakota.
  
• A memo signed today by Dallas Police Department Detective W.S. Biggio cites a report that Lee Harvey Oswald had driven Jack Ruby's car several times prior to the assassination. Even though the original source is an unidentified auto mechanic of Ruby, no one in an official capacity ever asks Donnell Whitter, who is known to be a mechanic of Ruby's, about this. A 14-page report on Donnell Whitter is still classified. This document was reviewed as recently as June 1993.
  
• Perhaps the strongest indication of deeper FBI knowledge is a CIA memo of December 11; this argued against the public release of the first FBI report on the case, "because the Soviets would see that the FBI had advance information on the reason for Oswald's visit to the Soviet Embassy." [Scelso memo of 11 December 1963 to Deputy Director (Plans), "Plans for the GPFLOOR Investigation;" NARA #104-10018-10103; PS #62-167. Cf. Newman, 406.]
  
• Paul C. Aebersold of the AEC wrote a letter to Herbert J. Miller at the Justice Department and explained how Neutron Activation Analysis (NAA) testing could be useful in investigating the assassination.
  
• DeLoach memo to John Mohr: "Since copies of the [FBI] report have been made available to members of the Commission, there is every indication leaks are coming from the Commission itself." (Never Again 254)
  
• A teletype from the New York FBI office to Hoover indicated that NBC had agreed not to report anything on the assassination that hadn't been cleared by the Bureau. The 8-page message detailed the substance of NBC's research, including the leads they had developed. The teletype also states: "NBC has movie film taken at some one hundred and fifty feet showing a Dallas Police Dept. officer rushing into book depository building while most of police and Secret Service were rushing up an incline towards railroad trestle." (Village Voice, 3/31/1992)
  

• 12/12/1963 NYT reports that GOP believes Baker scandal is being covered up by the Democrats. Sen. John Sherman Cooper was one of the Republicans on the committee investigating Baker.
  
• Stanley Kubrick's film Dr. Strangelove: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, was originally supposed to be released today. John F. Kennedy's assassination in Dallas occurred on November 22, making it inappropriate to release such a film so soon afterward. The release was pushed out to late January '64. Watch Major Kong's lips during his quip that "a fella could have a pretty good weekend in Vegas with all that stuff," referring to the survival kit. The word "Vegas" was overdubbed to replace the original "Dallas."
  
• The Presidential limo used in the Dallas motorcade is sent to Ohio to be taken apart and rebuilt.
  
• McNamara announced plans to cut 33 military bases that would save $100 million a year.
  
• Frank Sinatra Jr. was returned after being kidnapped.
  
• FBI visits Nagell in jail.
  
• 5:06pm LBJ meets with Gerald Ford. (Act of Treason 480)
  
• Kenya gains its independence.
  
• Internal FBI memo from Hoover aide Cartha DeLoach said: "[Gerald] Ford indicated he would keep me thoroughly advised as to the activities of the commission. He stated this would be done on a confidential basis, however, he thought it had to be done. He also asked if he could call me from time to time and straighten out questions in his mind concerning our investigation."
  
• DeLoach memo to Mohr: Gerald Ford complained to the FBI that Warren was "attempting to establish a one-man commission'" by appointing Warren Olney as his chief counsel.
  
• 11:35am Hoover memo to Tolson and other assistant directors: " I said I personally believe Oswald was the assassin; that the second aspect as to whether he was the only man gives me great concern; that we have several letters, not in the report because we were not able to prove it, written to him from Cuba referring to the job he was going to do, his good marksmanship, and stating when it was all over he would be brought back to Cuba and presented to the chief; but we do not know if the chief was Castro and cannot make an investigation because we have no intelligence operation in Cuba; that I did not put this into the report because we did not have proof of it and didn't want to put speculation in the report; that this was the reason I urged strongly that we not reach conclusion Oswald was the only man. As to Rubenstein, I said I did not want a statement about Rubenstein and Oswald; that we have no proof they were ever together. I stated Rubenstein is a shady character from the hoodlum element of Chicago, has a poor background, runs a nightclub in Dallas, and is what would be called a police buff; that the police officers in the precinct have been able to get food and liquor from him at any time they drop in; that while I think there was no connection between him and Oswald, I did not want the report to be 100% sure on that."
  

• 12/13/1963 Congress, in a Joint Resolution, empowered the Warren Commission to subpoena witnesses and to compel their testimony by granting them immunity if they pleaded the Fifth Amendment. The latter power was never used.
  
• 7:15pm Phone call between LBJ and McNamara. Johnson wants to replace the four White House military aides with one Gen. Chester Clifton. He uses this opportunity to get rid of Godfrey McHugh, who hadn't obeyed LBJ's orders on Air Force One on 11/22/1963.
  
• FBI Agent Hosty was placed on 90 days probation by Hoover; a letter he sent Hosty called his "recent handling of a security-type case...grossly inadequate...your judgement in connection with this aspect of the case was exceedingly poor." Hosty still wondered why he should have been expected to make Oswald a higher-priority case. (Assignment Oswald 102)
  
• CIA summary report on Oswald; in October the CIA guessed that the Lee Oswald who visited Mexico City was probably the same person as the marine defector. "As chance would have it, none of our several photo observation points in Mexico City had ever taken an identifiable picture of Lee Oswald." The Mexico City station had erased many of the tape recordings of Oswald's phone conversations "after the normal two weeks wait...To date there is no credible information in CIA files which would appear to link Lee Oswald with the Cuban government or the Cuban intelligence services...The very openess of his visits and the phone calls speak against any secret role...A particularly sinister aspect of Oswald's dealings with the Soviets in Mexico City arises from the liklihood that he met with...Kostikov...it is believed that he works for Department 13 of the KGB, the Department charged with sabotage and assassinations." But the report decided it was a "grim coincidence" that Oswald had talked to him. (Declassified 1995; Assignment Oswald 296)
  
• TIME reported that the FBI report showed that "Oswald, acting in his own lunatic loneliness, was indeed the President's assassin."
  
• Dallas Morning News carries a story with the following headline: "QUESTIONS RAISED ON MURDER BULLETS." The story's first sentence is "Did a bullet from Lee Harvey Oswald's rifle chip the curb on Min Street near the triple underpass." James T. Tague, who was struck and slightly wounded by slivers of concrete when a bullet hit the street curb near the triple underpass where he was standing, is not named in the story but there is mention of a shot that possibly "missed" the motorcade and hit the street curb. Two FBI agents will be sent to interview Tague tomorrow. (The investigation is currently proceeding under the premise that there were no missed shots.)
  

• 12/14/1963 USA Ambassador to Mexico Thomas Mann is recalled by LBJ and appointed to a high State Department post. (Mann has been investigating a possible Cuban connection to the assassination.) Thomas Mann, a conservative Texan who helped plan the Bay of Pigs, was named by LBJ as Assistant for Latin American Affairs. He replaced Edwin M. Martin in this position. Art Schlesinger and Averell Harriman noisily complain about the appointment.
  
• Eisenhower met with Gov. Scranton of Pennsylvania and seemed to encourage him to run for president.
  
• US recognized the military regimes of Honduras and the Dominican Republic after they promised to hold elections by 1966.
  
• FBI agents interviewed James Tague.
  
• Rex Basinger, forty-five years old, is arrested at Parkland Hospital in Dallas on a charge of vagrancy. On January 21, Rex will show up at his brother's house in Arkansas . There, Rex will tell his brother of being put in the same jail block with Jack Ruby. Ruby tells Basinger about "an invasion of Cuba which would take place on May 1, 1964. The invasion groups were to meet at Key West, Florida, and others were to meet in Mexico, place unknown."
  
• Larry Huff, serving as navigator, departs Kaneohe Base in Hawaii in a C-54-T aircraft, serial number 50855, for Wake Island, with Chief Warrant Officer Morgan as pilot. Huff states there are ten to twelve CID military investigators on this flight. They go to Atsugi to research Lee Harvey Oswald. This report disappears from Marine Corps files.
  
• Jean Daniel, "Unofficial Envoy: An Historic Report from Two Capitals, " New Republic (December 14, 1963) described his role in the back-channel talks between JFK and Castro.
  
• POST magazine has a series of photographs on the assassination. This photograph appears on page 22. The caption reads,"From the same building where Oswald lay in ambush, a telescopic lens reconstructs an approximation of what the killer saw at the moment of tragedy". The photograph, however, was taken from the Dal-Tex Building.
  
• Saturday Evening Post story about Dr. Perry: "The wound in the [front] throat was small and neat. Blood was running out of it. It was running out too fast. The occipitoparietal, which is a part of the back of the head, had a huge flap. The damage a rifle bullet does as it comes out of a person's body is unbelievable."
  
• Drew Pearson, in his column, called it a "shocking oversight" for the FBI to have not reported Oswald to the Secret Service when the president was going to Dallas.
  

• 12/15/1963 Art Schlesinger wrote to RFK about the appointment of Thomas Mann: "Johnson has won the first round. He has shown his power to move in a field of special concern to the Kennedys without consulting the Kennedys. This will lead people all over the government to conclude that their future lies with Johnson…" (RFK papers, Kennedy Library)
  
• Mrs. Ruth Paine, the woman with whom Marina was staying, said: "He seemed in exceptionally high spirits." [When he visited his wife the weekend prior to President Kennedy's arrival in Dallas.] Oswald told his wife "things are looking up" and that soon they would have enough to look for an apartment, buy furniture. (Sunday Bulletin, Philadelphia, 12/15/63.)
  

• 12/16/1963 The House passed a foreign aid bill with a restriction designed to prohibit the Export-Import Bank from financing loans for trade with any Communist country. The Senate later voted it down.
  
• LBJ signed into law the Foreign Assistance Act of 1963 (amounting to $3.6 billion).
  
• A file is opened on Gilberto Policarpo Lopez at CIA headquarters today.
  
• Alonzo W. Hudkins, a reporter for the Houston Post, called the Houston Secret Service office and told them he thought Jack Ruby's roommate, George Senator, may have had a connection to Oswald's murder, though he didn't elaborate except to say Ruby had a brother and a nephew who worked for Jimmy Hoffa in Detroit.
  
• FBI report: "[Marina] cannot recall that [Oswald] ever practiced firing the rifle either in New Orleans or in Dallas." "She never saw him clean it nor did he hold it in her presence [in New Orleans] as best as she can recall." (H 22 778)
  
• A Dallas police panel of eight officials cleared the DPD of any collusion with Ruby; they said they talked to 20 patrolmen, 21 reservists, 30 detectives, 19 supervisors. The 8 panel members included Jack Revill, who insisted on giving Blackie Harrison a lie-detector test. (Ruby Cover-up 146)
  
• Second Warren Commission Meeting
  
• Newsweek said "the [FBI] report holds to the central conclusion that Federal and local probers had long since reached: that Oswald was the assassin."
  
• Newsweek: ... And had he [Oswald] really acted alone? Only 29 per cent of the American people thought so, according to pollster George Gallup, while 52 per cent thought "some-group or element" shared the blame. The suspicion was formless. Few singled out a specific group; despite Oswald's eccentric left politics, only one person in 100 thought Russia, Cuba, or "the Communists" were involved.
  

• 12/17/1963 LBJ addressed the UN General Assembly; he called for an end to the Cold War and the need to address basic issues of human welfare. After being put off by Chase for two weeks, William Attwood finally had a chance to hear from President Johnson himself, when Johnson visited the U.S. delegation to the United Nations in New York on December 1 7. Attwood was simply told by Johnson at lunch that " he'd read my chronological account of our Cuban initiative 'with interest. "' "And that was it, " Attwood wrote two decades later in describing the end of "the Cuban connection. "
  
• Hudkins told the Secret Service he had just returned from a weekend in Dallas, where he had met with Chief Deputy Criminal Division Allen Sweat of the Sheriff's office. Sweatt had told him that Oswald was an FBI informant, paid $200 a month and assigned a code "S172" in connection with the FBI's subversive organizations investigations.
  
• Clean Air Act of 1963 signed into law by LBJ.
  
• Howard L. Brennan, assassination eyewitness, states he is sure that the person firing the rifle from the Book Depository Building window was Oswald.
  
• Letter from New York lawyer Mark Lane to Earl Warren recommending that Oswald have defense counsel to represent his interest.
  
• FBI agent Lansing Logan interviewed Lamar Hunt, who denied knowing Ruby and couldn't think of why his name was in Ruby's notebook.
  
• CIA saboteurs use underwater demolition equipment to sink a Cuban navy launch off the Isle of Pines.
  
• Alex Rosen FBI memo to Alan Belmont; Sam Papich had heard from the CIA, which had heard from Allen Dulles, that "Rankin is considering an investigative staff to conduct additional investigations [and] will consider relations between various federal agencies to see if there are defects..." The memo also put the onus on the Kennedy family as the reason why the FBI did not get the autopsy photos and X-rays "inasmuch as the President's family had indicated a desire the report be kept confidential." (Never Again 32, 252)
  
• An internal FBI memo listed the WC items Gerald Ford had passed to Cartha DeLoach. (Plausible Denial 43) DeLoach met with Ford that day; his memo said, "I again went over very carefully with Congressman Ford the fact the FBI had not had any 'leaks' whatsoever. I told him that we were well aware that the department had done considerable talking..." (Never Again 254)
  

• 12/18/1963 Treasury Secretary C. Douglas Dillon's Memorandum for Chief Justice Warren dated December 18, 1963 (which, by the way, predates the April 1964 SS reports): "… the President had frequently stated that he did not wish to have the agents riding on these steps [on rear of limousine] during a motorcade and had repeated this wish only a few days previously to agents assigned to him in Tampa [Florida, November 18, 1963].
  
• The FBI interviewed Sylvia Odio, but was not called to testify before the Warren Commission until the end of July 1964. Silvia Odio is visited at work by the FBI regarding her statements to her friend, Lucille Connell on November 28 regarding OSWALD. Odio tells the agents her story of a single encounter in her apartment hallways with an American named "Leon" who was in the company of two JURE Cubans.
  
• On this date, all FBI investigative work in New Orleans ceases completely. A team of agents has been in New Orleans since five days after the assassination. No mention of David Ferrie or Carlos Marcello is made in the FBI's supplemental report of January 13, 1964.
  
• Richard Dudman, correspondent for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, reports that two Secret Service agents visit the Parkland surgeons with a copy of the autopsy report from Bethesda Naval Hospital. Following this visit, the Dallas doctors change their opinion of the wound to "conform" to the Bethesda autopsy report. "Two Secret Service agents called last week on Dallas surgeons who attended President John F. Kennedy and obtained a reversal of their original view that the bullet in the neck entered from the front. The investigators did so by showing the surgeons a document described as an autopsy report from the United States Naval Hospital at Bethesda. The surgeons changed their original view to conform with the report they were shown. "There was no coercion at all," Dr. Robert N. McClelland told the Post-Dispatch. "They didn't say anything like, 'This is what you think, isn't it?'"
  
• The AP reported that the surgeons now support the official view that both bullets that struck the President were fired from behind, from the direction of the six...