Deep Politics Timeline

[Tracy Riddle]

• 3/1966 LBJ talked with Congressional leaders about the possibility of a small tax increase, but still wasn't honest with them about the full costs of the war. The congressional leaders said they opposed a tax hike. (Best and the Brightest 737-8)
  
• 3/1966 William Manchester turned in the manuscript of his book on the JFK assassination to his editor at Harper & Row, Evan Thomas, and to the Kennedy family for review in March 1966. He received an offer of $665,000 from Look magazine for serial rights; his agent had obtained an agreement that payments for a serial would go to the author. Both Jacqueline and Robert F. Kennedy had refused to read the manuscript, delegating the review to former Kennedy administration members John Seigenthaler, Ed Guthman, and Richard N. Goodwin. They believed that passages in the book "unflattering" to Johnson might damage Robert Kennedy's political plans for 1968, and requested changes. Pam Turnure, Jacqueline Kennedy's secretary, also read the manuscript; alarmed by many "personal revelations" from Kennedy's interviews with Manchester, such as the fact that she smoked (something Jacqueline Kennedy had successfully hidden in the White House), she also provided lists of changes. In addition, Jacqueline Kennedy believed that the proceeds from the Look offer should go to the Kennedy Library. She claimed that her interviews with Manchester had been intended for the library, threatened to block publication of the book unless the changes were made, unsuccessfully offered Look $1 million to cancel the serialization, and in late 1966 filed an injunction to stop the book's publication. Newspaper articles about her decision speculated on the contents of the book. Through an out-of-court settlement in January 1967, Manchester agreed to cut 1,600 words from the serialization and seven out of 654 pages from the published book. Although headlines called Jacqueline Kennedy the victor Manchester called the cuts "harmless", and retained the serialization fee.
  
• 3/1966 Dean Rusk spoke before a congressional committee about US policy toward China. He was perplexed that "At times the Communist Chinese leaders seem to be obsessed with the notion that they are being threatened and encircled." He spoke of China's "imaginary, almost pathological, notion that the United States and other countries around its borders are seeking an opportunity to invade mainland China and destroy the Peiping regime." (Dept of State bulletin 5/2/1966)
  
• 3/1/1966 Rolando Cubela and another ex-Cuban Army major are arrested in Havana, Cuba by state security agents, for plotting to assassinate Fidel Castro. A government communiqué charges that the plot was hatched in Spain with the help of Manuel Artime and the CIA. Nine days from now, Cubela will go before a revolutionary tribunal. No mention will be made of his pre-1964 involvement with the CIA. He will be convicted but not executed, serving some eighteen years in prison before being released. Cubela eventually resides in Madrid, Spain.
  
• 3/1/1966 LBJ calls for commitment to education that will permit everyone schooling "to the limits of his capacity to absorb it" as well as more emphasis on improved health care.
  
• 3/1/1966 Senate rejects attempt to repeal Gulf of Tonkin Resolution.
  
• 3/1/1966 DeLoach memo to Tolson noting that LBJ and Marvin Watson wanted information about Sens. Stephen Young and Fulbright, but "should not respond in writing by formal memorandum. Watson stated that what the President actually wanted was a blind-type memorandum which bore no government watermarks or no letterhead..."
  
• 3/2/1966 McNamara speech: "…how was it possible to carry through such a major military operation without invoking the usual emergency measures. The answer is that during the last five years we have greatly strengthened our military establishment for precisely this kind of a contingency…And, at the same time we were increasing our non-nuclear forces, we also increased our nuclear forces. For example, the number of nuclear warheads in our strategic alert forces will have increased from 386 in June 1961 to about 2600 in June 1966 and the total megatonnage of these weapons more than tripled. Moreover, by June 30, 1966 we will have doubled the number of tactical nuclear warheads on the soil of Western Europe, and large numbers of tactical nuclear weapons are available for use in other areas of the world, if required."
  
• 3/3/1966 LBJ signed the Cold War GI Bill of Rights, giving job training, health and education benefits to veterans who have served since 1955.
  
• 3/4/1966 London's Evening Standard published an interview with John Lennon in which he said, "Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn't argue with that; I'm right and I will be proved right. We're more popular than Jesus now; I don't know which will go first - rock 'n' roll or Christianity. Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It's them twisting it that ruins it for me."
  
• 3/5/1966 CIA plot to assassinate Castro discovered by the Cubans.
  
• 3/7/1966 DeLoach memo to Tolson; Sen. Dirksen told DeLoach that he felt Sens. Fulbright and Morse "were deeply involved and very much obligated to communist interests. He stated the information he had been furnished by me, if known to the American public, could obviously ruin Senator Morse..."
  
• 3/7/1966 Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the Voting Rights Act.
  
• 3/7/1966 One of the most astute and discerning of political observers in America,, Emmet John Hughes, in a remarkable essay on "The U.S. Government-in-Exile," published in Newsweek, March 7, 1966, thus appraised the relationship between Johnson and the Kennedy Clan: "There now has come to pass something stunningly new in the old story of America as a haven for men and governments shorn of power and banished from homeland ... But the politics of the 1960s has fashioned the most spectacular of anomalies, an American Government-in-exile: the Kennedys … Dynasty of ambition, cabal of power, challenge of the Presidency: these feeble or spiteful suggestions of the full historical fact. For this has now emerged as a movement a political design -- fitted with all the power and 'pomp and purpose of a government-in-exile. Quite literally, nothing is missing. It has its cherished heroes and its appointed heirs. It has its shining myths and its tragic memories. It has its historians to popularize its tale as poetically as Camelot, and its agents to recruit its forces as efficiently as Selective Service. It has its battles to plan and its scores to settle. And with discipline and discernment, it views the present as a menial pause between power wrecked and power reconquered …" Nothing that the first of the "Kennedy men" had already been "assigned their stations for the battle of 1972" [l968, as it turned out to be], Mr. Hughes, further on in his column, offers this exceptionally revealing and significant piece of comment: "… For here ( in the great cities and the liberal campuses) it is crucial that the opinion-leaders finally renounce their onetime hero, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, as a collaborationist with the usurping regime…"
  
• 3/8/1966 LBJ, through a State Dept memo, told Congress: "since the Constitution was adopted there have been at least 125 instances in which the President has ordered the armed forces to take action or maintain positions abroad without obtaining prior Congressional authorization..."
  
• 3/8/1966 McNamara told the House Armed Services Committee that "the Department of Defense supports nearly half of all the academic research in the physical sciences and engineering now being done in American universities and colleges."
  
• 3/11/1966 LBJ told dinner guests Oveta and Jim Hobby that he wanted to help the Vietnamese with health, education and agriculture. "I want to get out of there more than anybody, including the Marines...I'm like a prize fighter in the ring. The right fist is the military, the left fist is aid - medical, agricultural, educational." (White House Diary)
  
• 3/13/1966 LBJ met with Nixon at the White House. "Lyndon mentioned three names that some of his best people thought were the three outstanding military men in the country, capable of leading our forces anywhere - Westmoreland, Goodpaster, and Abrams. Everything he has to say of Westmoreland is filled with respect and pride." Nixon "said that opponents say we are risking World War III in Vietnam, that we are risking war with China in Vietnam, but that is not so, we are avoiding a big war. He said that the Chinese are cautious, and the Communists are cautious. If we are going to have any discussion with China, it should come now, rather than later, three or four years from now." Nixon also told LBJ not to take his campaigning for GOP candidates in the fall as a personal attack on the White House. (White House Diary)
  
• 3/13/1966 Washington - Senator Fulbright predicts consular treaty with USSR won't be brought up for ratification this session. Blames statement by J. Edgar Hoover during election year when senators "... would rather not have to defend it in an election year ..." J. Edgar Hoover had said mainstay of Soviet intelligence is their network of consular and diplomatic officials. AP
  
• 3/15/1966 Thomas C. Lynch, Attorney General of California, condemned the use of LSD and other drugs in a statement to the State Senate Judiciary Committee in Sacramento.
  
• 3/15/196 Congressman Rumsfeld entered into the Congressional Record an article from the Chicago Sun-Times entitled "Why U.S. Viet Policy Lacks FriendsOur Credibility Destroyed" Rumsfeld stated: "I do, however, believe it is important to the future of our Nation to recognize that there is a problem of credibility today." [Congressional Record, 89th Cong. Pg. A1454, 3/15/66; Chicago Sun-Times, 12/5/65]
  
• 3/16/1966 Gemini 8, with astronauts Neil Armstrong and David Scott, was the first US spacecraft to link up with another in flight (an Agena rocket). Problems soon developed as a thruster rocket turned on by itself and the mission had to be aborted. Armstrong and Scott docked with target rocket Agena (the first time this was ever done), but mission was aborted due to technical problems after only 7 of its 44 scheduled orbits.
  
• 3/16/1966 To the Shores of Hell, a film about Marines in Vietnam, is released by Crown International. It stars Marshall Thompson.
  
• 3/17/1966 In a telephone conversation today, LBJ tells Nicholas Katzenbach: "I have no objections to Bobby [Kennedy] becomin' president of this country. I just, by God, want to be a president myself. And I think it ill behooves the Kennedys, after all I've done for the Kennedys, to not reciprocate the treatment that I've given them. Everything they've ever asked - the father, the president, Bobby, and Teddy - I've done except put Bobby on the ticket for vice president! That's all."
  
• 3/20/1966 LBJ convenes Guam conference.
  
• 3/20/1966 Near Dexter, Michigan, farmer Frank Mannor and his son watched a car-sized, football-shaped object with a central porthole and pulsating lights at each end of its brown quilted surface rise from a swampy area on his farm, hover several minutes at a thousand feet, then depart. The following day eighty-seven women students at Hillsdale College in Hillsdale, Michigan, their dean, and a civil defence director all claimed to have watched for four hours a glowing football-shaped object hovering above a swampy area several hundred yards from the women's dormitory. At one point the object flew directly toward the dormitory, then retreated. On another occasion the object appeared to "dodge an airport beacon light". Its glow would diminish when police cars approached, and it "brightened when the cars left". The Michigan sightings made nearly every newspaper. Even "The New York Times" which normally declined to run a "flying saucer" story - gave it several inches. Major Quintanilla sent Dr. Hynek to Michigan to investigate. By the time I arrived, Hynek later wrote, "the situation was so charged with emotion that it was impossible to do any serious investigating. I had to fight my way through reporters to interview witnesses. Police were madly chasing stars they thought to be flying saucers. People believed space ships were all over the area" Hynek spent a week interviewing witnesses; he even pulled on a pair of hip boots to wade through farmer Frank Mannor's swamp. Pressure mounted for an explanation, and on March 27, Hynek held the largest press conference in the Detroit Press Club's history. Hynek later described the gathering of television reporters, newspapermen, photographers, and others, all "clamouring for a single, spectacular explanation of the sightings," as "a circus." Hynek said he provided "what I thought at the time to be the only explanation possible.....I made the statement it was 'swamp gas'," the phenomenon caused by decaying vegetation that has spontaneously ignited, creating a faint glow. "And even though I went on to emphasise I couldn't prove it in a court of law, that there was a full explanation...."Well," Hynek later said, "the press picked up the words 'swamp gas' even before I had finished the conference and that was all you heard or read about in the media for weeks." Hynek's 'swamp gas' explanation was met with ridicule, hostility, and increased suspicion that the government was engaged in a cover-up.
  
• 3/22/1966 LBJ tells the press, "If I get real depressed when I read how everything has gone bad here, I just ask for the letters from Vietnam so I can cheer up."
  
• 3/23/1966 The Medical Tribune (the journal of the American Academy of Forensic Scientists) reported on its recent annual meeting in Chicago. Many of the pathologists in attendance criticized the way JFK's autopsy was conducted. "Errors in judgement" and "lack of understanding of forensic problems" by Humes, Boswell and Finck were cited.
  
• 3/25-26/1966 nationwide demonstrations against the war in S.F., Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia and Washington.
  
• 3/25/1966 Dr. J. Allen Hynek, longtime consulting astronomer on the government's study of UFOs, gave a press conference in Detroit. He explained two recent sightings in Ann Arbor as being caused by "marsh gas." The public and media ridicule the explanation, and Congressman Gerald Ford expresses outrage with the suggestion that so many people in Michigan are being fooled by marsh gas.
  
• 3/27/1966 Attempted hijacking of Cubana Airlines plane foiled. Pilot and guard killed and copilot seriously wounded.
  
• 3/28/1966 Indian PM Indira Gandhi visited Washington.
  
• 3/28/1966 13 members of the White Knights of Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi were arrested by the FB in connection with the death of Vernon Dahmer, a black civil rights leader. Attackers had forced him by gunfire to stay in his house after they had set it on fire. Imperial Wizard Sam Bowers was arrested later.
  
• 3/28/1966 After the UFO "flap" in Michigan, retired Marine Corps major Donald Keyhoe again accused the Air Force of covering up its investigations of UFOs and ridiculing reports of their sightings.
  
• 3/30/1966 Air Force spokesmen called a press conference to refute Keyhoe, denying any "hushing" of saucer reports. They explained the recent Michigan sightings as "marsh gas." Secretary of Defense, Robert S. McNamara, had been well briefed by the Air Force before the subject was interjected into a hearing of the House Foreign Affairs Committee on March 30, 1966. Representative Cornelius E. Gallagher of New Jersey, a state where scores of UFO sightings had been reported that month, asked Secretary McNamara if he thought there was "anything at all" to the flying saucer mystery. "I think not," McNamara replied. "I have talked to the Secretary of the Air Force and the Air Force Director of Research and Engineering, and neither of them places any credence in the reports we have received to date."
  
• 3/31/1966 Four young protestors publicly set fire to their draft cards on the steps of the South Boston courthouse. The Supreme Court would later rule that this was not protected free speech.
  
• 3/31/1966 In a filmed interview with Mark Lane in Arlington, Texas, JFK assassination witness Lee Bowers said: "At the time of the shooting, in the vicinity of where the two men I have described were, there was a flash of light or...something I could not identify." On the afternoon of the assassination Bowers was "taken in a squad car to police headquarters" and placed alone in a small room. "Someone must have gotten slightly excited over it [his story], at least for a moment, because, after talking to others, I find that I was the only one accorded this treatment." He told them that the second and third shots were "almost on top of each other." When he said he didn't believe that the second and third shots came from the same rifle, "they reminded me that I wasn't an expert, and I had to agree."
  
• 3/31/1966 Sirhan Sirhan quits his job as a stable boy.
  
• 3/31/1966 Jack Ruby's lawyer, Sam Houston Clinton, say that on this day (he believes the date is correct) he is seated beside Ruby during a routine hearing. A reporter sticks a mike in front of Ruby, whereupon Ruby says that people just don't understand that if he ever gets a chance to tell his story, they will know that "if Adlai Stevenson had been vice president, Kennedy would still be alive today." There exists video footage of Ruby walking through a courthouse hallway, trailed by reporters. Ruby says to one of them, "When I mentioned about Adlai Stevenson, if he was vice president there would never have been an assassination of our beloved President Kennedy" Asked if he would explain further, Ruby continued, "Well the answer is the man in office now."
  
• 4/1966 William F. Buckley's televised political debate program, Firing Line, sponsored by RKO, makes its premiere.
  
• 4/1/1966 LBJ increased funding for family-planning programs (contraceptives for low-income families.)
  
• 4/2/1966 LBJ in a meeting remarked offhandedly that he might be "ready to make a terrible choice - perhaps take a stand in Thailand."
  
• 4/4/1966 In a State Dept bulletin, U. Alexis Johnson stated, "it is a travesty on the truth to allege that the present situation was brought about by the failure of the South [Vietnam] to carry out the 1954 accords. In fact, it was the North that was not willing to submit itself to the test of free elections under international control."
  
• 4/5/1966 Look article featured an interview with Gen. Matthew Ridgway: "We live in a world very unlike the one we were raised in. We have a potential for wholesale destruction so indescribably vast that many words, including victory,' lose their meaning. With no clear-cut limit upon our immediate military objective, we commit ourselves to an upward-spiraling course that may approach annihilation."
  
• 4/7/1966 LBJ speech at Johns Hopkins.
  
• 4/8/1966 Time magazine's cover story: "Is God Dead?" A previous article, from October 1965, had investigated a trend among 1960s theologians to write God out of the field of theology. The 1966 article looked in greater depth at the problems facing modern theologians, in making God relevant to an increasingly secular society. Modern science had eliminated the need for religion to explain the natural world, and God took up less and less space in people's daily lives. The ideas of various scholars were brought in, including the application of contemporary philosophy to the field of theology, and a more personal, individual approach to religion. The issue drew heavy criticism, both from the broader public and from clergymen. Much of the criticism was directed at the provocative magazine cover, rather than the content of the article. The cover all black with the words "Is God Dead?" in large red text marked the first time in the magazine's history that text with no accompanying image was used. In 2008, the Los Angeles Times named the "Is God Dead?" issue among "10 magazine covers that shook the world".
  
• 4/11/1966 Klan leader Samuel Bowers was quoted in Newsweek: "As Christians were are disposed to kindness, generosity, affection and humility in our dealings with others. As militants we are disposed to the use of physical force against our enemies."
  
• 4/13/1966 A 1966 article in the Chicago Tribune quoted young Congressman Donald Rumsfeld (R-Illinois) as saying the following: "The administration should clarify its intent in Viet Nam,' he said. People lack confidence in the credibility of our government.' Even our allies are beginning to suspect what we say, he charged. It's a difficult thing today to be informed about our government even without all the secrecy,' he said. With the secrecy, it's impossible. The American people will do what's right when they have the information they need." [Chicago Tribune, 4/13/66]
  
• 4/18/1966 Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in favor of two Tucson junior high school teachers who refused to sign a loyalty oath.
  
• 4/21/1966 Sen. Fulbright spoke before the Senate on "the arrogance of power...power tends to confuse itself with virtue and a great nation is peculiarly susceptible to the idea that its power is a sign of God's favor...My question is whether American can overcome the fatal arrogance of power..." He defended the right of Americans to protest against the war: "At the very least the student protest movement of the sixties is a moral and intellectual improvement on the panty raids of the fifties...it is an expression of the national conscience and a manifestation of traditional American idealism." Fulbright warned young people that in the US peaceful and sober dissent is more effective in reaching the public than violence and radical action. He urged that Congress assert itself more in foreign policy. "Past experience provides little basis for confidence that reason can prevail in an atmosphere of mounting war fever."
  
• 4/21/1966 Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie visited Jamaica. This event resulted in two profound developments within the Rastafarian movement, which worshipped the emperor as a god. First, Selassie convinced the Rastafarian brothers that they "should not seek to immigrate to Ethiopia until they had liberated the people of Jamaica." Second, from that time forth, April 21 has been celebrated as a "special holy day" among Rastafarians.
  
• 4/25/1966 The New York Times reported that after the Bay of Pigs JFK "said to one of the highest officials of his administration that he wanted 'to splinter the Agency in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.'" The NYT reported on the CIA's past efforts to build up a Nationalist Chinese army in Burma, how the Burmese government complained about it, and how the CIA had hoped that the Chinese Communists would be provoked into attacking Burma (thus forcing the neutral country to seek salvation in the Western camp).
  
• 4/25/1966 LBJ aide Jack Valenti becomes head of the Motion Picture Association of America.
  
• 4/27/1966 Interstate Commerce Commission allows merger of Pennsylvania and NY Central Railroads, the largest merger in US history.
  
• 4/27/1966 RFK spoke in the Senate against escalating the war. "We must face the fact that there is no quick or easy answer to Vietnam."
  
• 4/28/1966 Sen. Fulbright said in a speech before the American Newspaper Publishers Association: "America is showing some signs of that fatal presumption, that overextension of power and mission, which brought ruin to ancient Greece, to Napoleonic France, and to Nazi Germany." He feared that the US was succumbing to an "arrogance of power."