Deep Politics Timeline

[Tracy Riddle]

• 9/1965 Fall 1965 the Hoover-approved TV series, The FBI Story, premiered on ABC. It was a glamorized account of the Bureau, controlled in almost every detail by Hoover, Tolson and DeLoach; yet several times Hoover tried to have the show cancelled when an episode didn't turn out just as he wanted it. Starring Efrem Zimbalist Jr., the show never once mentioned the Mafia.
  
• 9/1965 This month's issue of the JBS' American Opinion featured an article by Martin Dies called "Warren Report: The Strange Conclusions." He criticized the commission for being unwilling to look into "the International Communist Conspiracy."
  
• 9/1965 In a classified paper, Westmoreland spelled out the objectives of the war: to stop North Vietnamese aggression and force them to make a negotiated settlement.
  
• 9/2/1965 Chinese Defense Minister Lin Biao called on developing nations to rise up against the industrialized world, and ridiculed America's effort in Vietnam.
  
• 9/3/1965 LBJ announced the settlement of the steel strike.
  
• 9/3/1965 In a newspaper column item regarding the JFK assassination, syndicated columnist Dorothy Kilgallen writes: "This story isn't going to die as long as there's a real reporter alive -- and there are a lot of them." Dorothy Kilgallen's last public reference to the JFK assassination appeared on Sept. 3, 1965 when she challenged the authenticity of the famous Life magazine cover of Lee Harvey Oswald supposedly holding a rifle. She also chastised Marina Oswald for vouching for it. The incriminating photo has since been discredited by analysts who say Oswald's head was pasted on someone else's body. (By Sara Jordan, Midwest Today Magazine, October 21, 2007)
  
• 9/4/1965 Melba Marcades (Rose Cheramie) is found dead beside a highway near Big Sandy, Texas -- a small town in East Texas about midway between Dallas and Louisiana. A man tells authorities that Cheramie was lying in the roadway, apparently after being thrown from a car, and that he drove over hear head while trying to avoid her. Police can find no relationship between the woman and the driver and the case is closed. A later attempt to contact the driver indicates that his Tyler, Texas address is nonexistent.
  
• 9/6/1965 ... The Russian leaders who would like still further deterioration in relations have been aided, regrettably, by the Johnson Administration's surrender to J. Edgar Hoover and several insistent pressure groups of right-wing extremists on the Soviet American consular agreement. The decision not to press for Senate ratification of the treaty now supplies ammunition for peddlers in Moscow of the tired propaganda line that American foreign policy is not determined by President Johnson but by "fascists" and "imperialists." New York Times Editorial, More Cold war Chill
  
• 9/7/1965 After having terrible pains in his stomach, LBJ called over Dr. Burkley, who felt he was having kidney stones. (White House Diary 316)
  
• 9/9/1965 LBJ signed legislation creating Department of Housing and Urban Development at Cabinet level; its head, Robert Weaver, is the first black Cabinet member.
  
• 9/9/1965 THE STATE OF TEXAS vs. JACK RUBENSTEIN -- Today in Judge Louis Holland's court, Jack Ruby disregards his lawyers who are telling him to be quiet and declares that there was a conspiracy in high places behind JFK's assassination. As his lawyers try to push TV microphones away, Ruby says: "The world has the right to hear the truth." Second hearing before Judge Holland on defense counsel's petition to disqualify Judge Brown. Judge Holland passes the defense counsel's petition up to the Court of Criminal Appeals. Jack Ruby gave some notes to Elmer Gertz while in court in Dallas: "Elmer, you must believe me, that I am not imagining crazy thoughts etc. This is all so hopeless, that they have everything in the bag and there isn't any chance or hope for me. These hearings are just to stall for time. What chance to do I have, when I know at this time that they are killing are our people here now in this very building….you must believe me, as to what is happening they are torturing people right here…Why should I continually repeat all these things over and over."
  
• 9/13/1965 Columnist Joseph Alsop wrote about Vietnam: "At last there is light at the end of the tunnel."
  
• 9/16/1965 Most of NYC's major papers go out on strike; it will last three weeks.
  
• 9/18/1965 Roscoe White resigns from the Dallas Police Department.
  
• 9/19/1965 "Meet the Press" became the first network television program to broadcast a live satellite interview.
  
• 9/21/1965 Water Quality Act passed.
  
• 9/23/1965 Edward Jay Epstein interviewed J. Lee Rankin.
  
• 9/25/1965 Sen. Spessard Holland (D-FL), told his colleagues: "What I object to is imposing no limitation insofar as areas of the earth are concerned, but saying that we are throwing the doors open and equally inviting people from the Orient, from the islands of the Pacific, from the subcontinent of Asia, from the Near East, from all of Africa, all of Europe, and all of the Western Hemisphere on exactly the same basis. I am inviting attention to the fact that this is a complete and radical departure from what has always heretofore been regarded as sound principles of immigration." (Congressional Record, Sept. 22, 1965, p. 24779.) "
  
• 9/29/1965 Edward Jay Epstein interviewed Allen Dulles.
  
• 10/1965 Sylvan Fox's The Unanswered Questions about the Kennedy Assassination is published.
  
• 10/1965 Sirhan Sirhan takes a job as a stable boy at Santa Anita Racetrack, Calif.
  
• 10/1/1965 Congress passes an anti-pollution bill which empowers the Secretary of HEW to set emission standards on toxic pollutants in new diesel and gasoline powered cars.
  
• 10/1/1965 New Orleans: Clay Shaw, 52 years old, retires as director of the International Trade Mart, and a testimonial luncheon was held in his honor; the mayor presented him with the International Order of Merit medal.
  
• 10/3/1965 Liberty Island, NY harbor: LBJ signed the landmark Hart-Celler Immigration Bill that ended most ethnic quotas in effect since 1921, raised the ceiling on legal immigration; this led to a vast increase in immigrants from Asia, the Middle East and Latin America over the next few decades. Johnson said, "This bill we sign today is not a revolutionary bill. It does not affect the lives of millions. It will not restructure the shape of our daily lives." He criticized the old quota system: "This system violates the basic principle of American democracy -- the principle that values and rewards each man on the basis of his merit as a man. It has been un-American in the highest sense, because it has been untrue to the faith that brought thousands to these shores even before we were a country." Despite the noble words, the architects of the 1965 law did not see it as a means of significantly changing the immigration flow it was considered more a symbolic act, an extension of civil rights sentiments beyond our borders. Proponents repeatedly denied that the law would lead to a huge and sustained increase in the number of newcomers and become a vehicle for globalizing immigration. Many senators and representatives believed that the new, equal quotas would not be fully used by European, Asian, and Middle Eastern nations. In addition, they did not foresee the expansion of non-quota admissions (those not covered by numerical limits) under the act's strengthened provisions for family reunification.
  
• 10/4/1965 The original version of the immigration bill gave top preference to people with special skills, but that was changed in the final version to the current nepotistic emphasis on family relationship. A Washington Post editorial was no better at predicting the result than the bill's congressional supporters: "The most important change, in fact, was in direction, shuffling the preference categories to give first consideration to relatives of American citizens instead of to specially skilled persons. This had more emotional appeal and, perhaps more to the point, insured that the new immigration pattern would not stray radically from the old one." (The Washington Post, Oct. 4, 1965, p. 16.)
  
• 10/4/1965 Pope Paul VI addressed the UN General Assembly: "Listen to the lucid words of the great departed John Kennedy, who proclaimed, four years ago, Mankind must put an end to war, or war will put an end to mankind.' No more war, war never again! Peace, it is peace which must guide the destinies of peoples and of all mankind."
  
• 10/5/1965 Chalmers M. Roberts wrote in the Washington Post, "The FBI-Secret Service feud has long been well known. The Secret Service men have felt Hoover wanted to swallow their much smaller agency."
  
• 10/6/1965 LBJ signed a bill providing $340 million for regional medical centers fighting heart disease, cancer and stroke.
  
• 10/6/1965 "On Oct. 6, 1965, the Selective Service lifted its ban against drafting married men who had no children. Nine months and two days later, Mr. Cheney's first daughter, Elizabeth, was born." This quote comes from a Saturday NYTimes article -- "Cheney's Five Draft Deferments During the Vietnam Era Emerge as a Campaign Issue" -- discussing the lengths VP Dick Cheney went to in order to avoid serving during the Viet Nam war. It is apparent from the piece that Richard Cheney did everything humanly possible -- short of fleeing to Canada -- to avoid military conscription: He applied for and recieved 5 student deferments, a number described as "incredible" by professor David Curry of the University of Missouri in St. Louis. Curry has written extensively about the draft, including a 1985 book, "Sunshine Patriots: Punishment and the Vietnam Offender." The Times quotes Mr. Curry as observing: "That's a lot of times for the draft board to say O.K." Three weeks and a day after the Gulf of Tonkin resolution passed (giving President Johnson unlimited military force in Vietnam), Cheney married Lynn Cheney. Within a day or so of the end of deferment for "Married w/o children," Mr. and Mrs. Cheney conceived their first child.
  
• 10/8/1965 LBJ is operated on at Bethesda to have his gall bladder removed.
  
• 10/9/1965 Quotes Stouts "In a democratic country, J. Edgar Hoover is a completely impossible person to be in a position of authority …" Saturday Review, interview by Haskel Frankel with Rex Stout, author of The Doorbell Rang.
  
• 10/10/1965 Speaking at Coalinga Junior College, Ronald Reagan calls for an official declaration of war in Vietnam. (SF Chronicle 6/9/02) Reagan said in an interview with the Fresno Bee, "We should declare war on North Vietnam…It's silly talking about how many years we will have to spend in the jungles of Vietnam when we could pave the whole country and put parking stripes on it and still be home by Christmas."
  
• 10/11/1965 Study group headed by Tommy Thompson, with Taylor, Bill Bundy and McNaughton, issued its report; attacking Northern targets such as Haiphong harbor could bring the Chinese and/or Soviets into the war, and they recommended a bombing pause to encourage peace talks.
  
• 10/11/1965 Columbia releases the film The Bedford Incident, a Cold War thriller, starring Richard Widmark and Sidney Poitier. A Captain Ahab-type destroyer commander, armed with nuclear ASROC missiles, is obssessed with a Soviet sub armed with nuclear torpedoes. The screenplay by James Poe is based on the 1963 book by Mark Rascovich, which was patterned after Herman Melville's Moby-Dick. The film was directed by James B. Harris, who up to that time was best known as Stanley Kubrick's producer. Harris had recently split from a nine-year partnership with Kubrick. Just after the split, Kubrick would make Dr. Strangelove (1964), which raises similar issues to The Bedford Incident.
  
• 10/13/1965 Wesley Liebeler wrote a letter to Rankin about meeting David Lifton; he asked for an explanation of the splice and the missing frames in the Z-film. Rankin and Redlich soon replied that the missing frames couldn't possibly show a bullet hole in the Stemmons Freeway sign, because Oswald couldn't have hit the sign from where he was. Redlich added that the frames might have been deleted because "they were of little value because during those frames the Presidential limousine was almost completely hidden by the sign." Redlich also falsely claimed that the sign had not been replaced since the assassination. (Best Evidence p30) This year, the Stemmons Freeway sign is permanently removed from Dealey Plaza. Emmett Hudson, groundskeeper at Dealey Plaza, will later reveal that one of the two fixed points [the Book Depository window and the car positioned at the Stemmons Freeway sign] - the Stemmons sign is shifted from its place soon after the assassination and removed completely by early in 1965. Sylvia Meagher points out in her book, Accessories After The Fact, that "we do not know if the sign was moved before or after the FBI reenactment tests of May 24, 1964 or, for that matter, before or after the Secret Service reenactments of December 5, 1963. The repositioning and ultimate disappearance of the Stemmons sign is a mystery with ominous undertones. Having no interest in evidence which did not incriminate Oswald, the Warren Commission took not the slightest interest in the Stemmons sign and, needless to say, made no investigation into when and why it was moved."
  
• 10/15-16/1965 National Coordinating Committee to End the War in Vietnam sponsors nationwide demonstrations in the US. In New York, police made the first arrest under a new Federal draft-card-burning law. In Berkeley, marchers were attacked by the Hell's Angels.
  
• 10/15/1965 The Chicago Daily News quoted Nixon: "If the United States gives up [in Vietnam]…the Pacific Ocean will become a Red Sea."
  
• 10/17/1965 Imperial Wizard Robert Shelton testified before HUAC. The committee began by handing him a copy of the UKA's corporation papers and asking to identify them. Shelton pulled out a piece of paper and read haltingly from it: "Sir, I respectfully decline to answer that question for the reason that I honestly feel my answer might tend to incriminate me in violation of my rights as guaranteed to me under the amendments five, one, four and fourteen of the Constitution of the United States." Shelton took the Fifth a total of 158 times during his testimony. Walter Goodman commented in The Nation, "For a Kluxer to take the fifth like an ordinary Commie is poetry; for him to take the fourteenth is epic."
  
• 10/20/1965 AP: Washington - J. Edgar Hoover says Communist youth group [Dubois Club] is pulling the strings in anti Viet Nam war demonstrations. Rocky Mountain News, Denver
  
• 10/21/1965 Leaving Bethesda, LBJ stopped to meet with some wounded Vietnam vets.
  
• 10/22 or 29/1965 Time cover story: "The Turning Point in Viet Nam." It read, "Today, South Viet Nam throbs with a pride and power...The remarkable turnabout in the war is the result of one of the swiftest, biggest military buildups in the history of warfare..."
  
• 10/22/1965 Rep. John Bell Williams gave a speech in Congress: "The wave of demonstrations and civil disobedience that spread throughout the country last weekend have all the earmarks of a highly organized Communist plot...this same Communist influence and participation...that lately has been going on in the name of civil rights." He called Martin Luther King "the high mogul of all racial demagogues and racketeers."
  
• 10/24/1965 Washington Post (Stanley Karnow) reported that a Vietcong officer said to his American prisoner: "You were our heroes after the War. We read American books and saw American films, and a common phrase in those days was 'to be as rich and as wise as an American.' What happened?"
  
• 10/27/1965 Nixon stated in NYC: "We must never forget that if the war in Vietnam is lost…the right of free speech will be extinguished throughout the world."
  
• 10/29/1965 suicide of CIA's Frank Wisner
  
• 10/29/1965 NY Times quotes Nixon, warning that if the VC captured South Vietnam, it "would mean ultimately the destruction of freedom of speech for all time not only in Asia but in the United States as well." This was in response to Robert Kennedy's defense of the right of people to protest against the war.
  
• 10/29/1965 Diosdado Macapagal, president of the Philippines, was the target of an unsuccessful assassination attempt.