Deep Politics Timeline

[Tracy Riddle]

• 7/1966 Britain: a six-month wage freeze was begun and the pound devalued.
  
• 7/1/1966 Medicare federal health program went into effect.
  
• 7/1/1966 Last known attempt on de Gaulle's life: he was being driven to Orly Airport to fly to the USSR. A group of students, formerly of the National Resistance Council, planted a car filled with almost a ton of dynamite in the Boulevard Montparnasse within inches of where the President actually passed. The dynamite never was detonated because the students were arrested the night before after a robbery attempt they had staged to raise money for their escape.
  
• 7/3/1966 Whitewash and Inquest were reviewed in the July 3 New York Times Book Review by the Times' Supreme Court correspondent, Fred Graham. The Times apparently saw no conflict in assigning Graham to review two books severely critical, implicitly if not explicitly, of the then Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. The review was largely a defense of the methods utilized by the Warren Commission under the direction of "the nation's most distinguished jurist." Graham called Weisberg a "painstaking investigator," but added that he "questions so many points made by the report that the effect is bluntedit is difficult to believe that any institution could be as inept, careless, wrong, or venal as he implies. Rather, the reader is impressed with the elusiveness of truth. . . ." Graham called Inquest superficial, and he criticized Epstein's use of the words "political truth," claiming that Epstein was actually charging deliberate fraud. Graham admitted: "Of course the single bullet' theory is porous, but no other explanation makes any sense" because if another assassin had fired from the Book Depository it would have been unlikely that he and his rifle could disappear without a trace. Graham avoided alternatives that did make sense, e.g., that an assassin or assassins had fired from the grassy knoll. He concluded that "a major scholarly study is not feasible now because the crucial papers in the archives . . . have not yet been de-classified." On the one hand he was ignoring the fact that the Times had lauded the Warren Report before any evidence was available, and on the other hand he was passing judgment in advance on any subsequent critical works, a fact that should have disqualified him as a reviewer of future books on the subject.
  
• 7/4/1966 LBJ signed the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) into law, praising it for making government more open and accessible to the people. Congress had passed FOIA unanimously; it was designed to facilitate the declassification and public release of government documents. Congressman John Moss (D-Calif.) was the main force behind pushing the bill through Congress. Bill Moyers recalled: "…what few people knew at the time is that LBJ had to be dragged kicking and screaming to the signing ceremony. He hated the very idea of the Freedom of Information Act; hated the thought of journalists rummaging in government closets; hated them challenging the official view of reality. He dug in his heels and even threatened to pocket veto the bill after it reached the White House. Only the courage and political skill of a Congressman named John Moss got the bill passed at all, and that was after a twelve-year battle against his elders in Congress who blinked every time the sun shined in the dark corridors of power." (PBS, 4/5/2002) The bill contained numerous exemptions, and did not work well at all until after Watergate, in 1974, when Congress strengthened the power of the FOIA considerably.
  
• 7/4/1966 Harry Truman made his last appearance as a speaker at the eighth annual 4 July celebration on the Truman Library grounds. His worsening health forced him to stop coming to his office at the library.
  
• 7/7/1966 Jimmy Hoffa was reelected to a five-year term as Teamsters president.
  
• 7/8/1966 After a 7/6 Syracuse, NY concert in which the Rolling Stones allegedly dragged a US flag across the stage, the group is accused by local authorities of desecrating the American flag.
  
• 7/10/1966 MLK began his campaign to make Chicago an "open city" by ending housing and job discrimination; a rally saw 40,000 people attend.
  
• 7/11/1966 The Vital Documents What the Warren Report Omits Jacob Cohen The Nation, 11 July 1966, pages 4349
  
• 7/11/1966 The Nation editorial: Juxtaposes stained glass window in Washington church dedicated to J. Edgar Hoover with newest charges of FBI bugging.... His annual budget is about as large as the State Department's and more than twice the size of that available to the Attorney General. Hoover commands the equivalent of an oversize army division - 16,000. No one, right up to the President, can deal with him as an equal, much less a subordinate. Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach once joked in private: "Sure I could fire him on Monday. The only thing is that I'd be looking for a new job on Tuesday." Newsweek once pointed out that J. Edgar Hoover is an "authentic folk hero." If any doubt remained on that score, it has been removed by the installation in the Capitol Hill Methodist Church in Washington of a stained glass window, 22 feet high and 33 feet wide … dedicated to the great G-man with the inscription, Statesmanship Through The Christian Virtues. When one contemplates the honors showered upon Mr. Hoover during his illustrious career and the lamentable fact that he resembles other men in one respect - mortality - one wonders what there will be left to say when he finally shuffles off this mortal coil. The Nation, The Christian Virtues, Editorial, p. 37
  
• 7/12-15/1966 black riots in Chicago's West Side; Mayor Daley calls in National Guard.
  
• 7/12/1966 In Look magazine ("A New Wave of Doubt") Fletcher Knebel provided further confirmation that the autopsy doctors changed their minds about Kennedy's wounds the next day. He cited "three Commission lawyers and one of the autopsy doctors" as his source, and said that "the Bethesda physicians then reconstructed and reanalyzed their autopsy work and came to the conclusion that the bullet passed through Kennedy, exiting at his neck." Fletcher Knebel published a spirited response to Epstein's challenge in this issue of Look, taking a swipe at Mark Lane along the way. Allen Dulles is also quoted, challenging assassination critics: "If they've found another assassin, let them name names and produce the evidence."
  
• 7/13/1966 Richard Speck murdered 8 student nurses at the South Chicago Community Hospital.
  
• 7/14/1966 A Democratic New Jersey Congressman charged yesterday in Washington that national Communist Party leaders had conducted a summer youth leadership school at a camp in Ringwood, NJ, in northern Passaic County. The lawmaker, Representative Charles S. Joelson, said he had been given his information by J. Edgar Hoover, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Mr. Joelson quoted Mr. Hoover as having said that students at the school, Camp Midvale, were given instruction last year from top Communist Party officials. They were said to have spent the rest of the summer working full time for the Party.... In making public the information given him by Mr. Hoover, Representative Joelson quoted the FBI director as having said that the Communist Party leader, Gus Hall, had been "extremely pleased" with the accomplishments of the school. Last night, Arnold Johnson, a spokesman for the Communist Party, said that "if they [the camp leaders] denied it, they are more truthful than J. Edgar Hoover ever was."
  
• 7/17/1966 Lady Bird wrote, "There's a sort of conspiracy by the press, by one's friends, I'm sure. For years they pitted Lyndon against Speaker Rayburn but that never worked. Now increasly, as John Connally is reaching a summit of prominence, they are trying to stir up a fight between him and Lyndon." (White House Diary)
  
• 7/18/1966 Gemini 10 mission: rendezvous and docking achieved by Young and Collins.
  
• 7/18/1966 Rocker Bobby Fuller's body was found laying across the front seat of his mother's 1962 Oldsmobile - parked in front of of his apartment near Grauman's Chinese Theatre - dead, apparently from swallowing gasoline. The fact that he had been beaten up and had ingested gasoline was not released to the public. Although police ruled his death a suicide, friends speculated that he was murdered, possibly by mobsters. Bobby Fuller, singer/songwriter/guitarist for the Bobby Fuller Four, was found dead in his car near Grauman's Chinese Theater on July 18, 1966, after being lured away from his home by a mysterious 2:00-3:00 AM phone call of unknown origin. Fuller is best known for penning the hit song "I Fought the Law," which had just hit the charts when he supposedly committed suicide at the age of twenty-three. There were multiple cuts and bruises on his face, chest and shoulders, dried blood around his mouth, and a hairline fracture to his right hand. He had been thoroughly doused with gasoline, including in his mouth and throat. The inside of the car was doused as well, and an open book of matches lay on the seat. It was perfectly obvious that Fuller's killer (or killers) had planned to torch the car, destroying all evidence, but likely got scared away. The LAPD, nevertheless, ruled Fuller's death a suicide despite the coroner's conclusion that the gas had been poured after Bobby's death. Police later decided that it wasn't a suicide after all, but rather an accident. They didn't bother to explain how Fuller had accidentally doused himself with gasoline after accidentally killing himself. At the time of his death, one of Fuller's closest confidants was a prostitute named Melody who worked at PJ's nightclub, where Bobby frequently played. The club was co-owned by Eddie Nash, who would, many years later, orchestrate the Wonderland massacre. A few years after Bobby's death, his brother and bass player, Randy Fuller, teamed up with drummer Dewey Martin, formerly of Buffalo Springfield.
  
• 7/19/1966 William Sullivan memo to DeLoach: "The following is set forth in regard to your request concerning what authority we have for 'black bag' job and for the background of our policy and procedures in such matters...'black bag' jobs have been used because they represent an invaluable technique in combating subversive activities of a clandestine nature aimed at undermining and destroying our nation..."
  
• 7/23/1966 In Kentucky, LBJ awarded medals to 22 vets of the 101st Division returned from Vietnam. He went to Jeffersonville, Indiana, for a motorcade, where he told a crowd, "It may be old-fashioned, but I still believe that my country does most things right."
  
• 7/24/1966 Meeting between Schlesinger, Galbraith and McGovern; they discussed the possibility of RFK running against LBJ in the '68 primaries. (RFK and His Times p798)
  
• 7/24/1966 In July 1966 Richard Goodwin, a former advisor and close associate of President Kennedy, reviewed Inquest for Book Week. He called the book "impressive" and called for the convening of a panel to evaluate the findings of the Warren Commission and determine if a completely new investigation was warranted. He later added that there were other associates of the late President "who feel as I do." (Book Week, July 24, 1966, p.1 20. New York Times, July 24, 1966) Arthur Schlesinger Jr. also called for a new investigation around this time.
  
• 7/28/1966 The Second Oswald: The Case for a Conspiracy Theory Richard H. Popkin The New York Review of Books, 28 July 1966, pages 1122
  
• 7/29/1966 Bob Dylan crashes his motorcycle while riding near Woodstock, NY; he is seriously injured.
  
• 7/31/1966 Washington - J. Edgar Hoover says Communists behind the "non-partisan" and "independent" candidates in the 1966 elections, infiltrating labor unions, college campuses, anti Viet Nam war demonstrations and civil rights organizations, and the new left, AP New York Times version, 8/1
  
• 8/1966 Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and his family are in the Seattle airport waiting to board a plane. A man approaches, shouting "Murderer!" and spits on McNamara. Years later, he will still remember the event vividly.
  
• 8/1/1966 During Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings, William Fulbright mused, "It is very interesting that so many of our prominent newspapers have become almost agents or adjuncts of the government; that they do not contest or even raise questions about government policy."
  
• 8/1966 Sen. Stennis, a conservative hawk, conducted hearings of his Preparedness Investigating Subcommittee. Dean Rusk testified, and Stennis expressed his doubts about having supported the Tonkin Resolution: "I think it is a bad precedent…when we get into a war like this, now approaching the size of the Korean War, as far as our men are concerned, and it is a great mistake to fail to be just frank about it…"
  
• 8/1/1966 President LBJ halts all congressional trips to Vietnam.
  
• 8/1/1966 Ted Kennedy strongly reiterated his faith in the Warren Report which he, too, acknowledged he had never read on August 1st, 1966, when asked to comment on the various books critical of the report which came out that year. He felt the findings of the Warren Commission were "correct," the Senator told an interviewer from UPI.
  
• 8/1/1966 24-year-old ex-Marine Charles Whitman occupied a clock tower at the University of Texas in Austin and shot at passerby with an arsenal of weapons; he shot 44 people, and killed 14 before police killed him. He had complained of compulsive violent thoughts and headaches. An autopsy determined that he had a brain tumor, but it could not conclusively be linked to his violent behavior.
  
• 8/1/1966 The Warren Commission, The Truth, and Arlen Specter By Gaeton Fonzi Greater Philadelphia Magazine, 1 August 1966
  
• 8/2/1966 The CIA had obtained a printer's copy of Mark Lane's book Rush to Judgement and a report on it from this day expressed concern about Lane's statements on the photo taken by the CIA in Mexico City. (Plausible Denial p74)
  
• 8/3/1966 Comedian Lenny Bruce dies of a heroin overdose.
  
• 8/4/1966 Drew Pearson - quotes in full letter from Frances Knight to J. Edgar Hoover expressing fear that Rusk may be about to put an end to embassies getting information on Americans abroad at FBI request. Asks to see J. Edgar Hoover because of "extreme urgency" of the situation and "I do not wish to commit too many details to paper, for reasons that will be obvious to you." San Francisco Chronicle
  
• 8/5/1966 After he and 600 black marchers were attacked by 4000 whites, MLK said he had "never seen such hate - not in Mississippi or Alabama - as I see here in Chicago."
  
• 8/9/1966 JFK assassination witness Lee Bowers is killed in a single-car crash. He was in the railroad control tower behind the Grassy Knoll and saw two men behind the fence and a lot of activity. He is killed at the age of 41 in a one-car crash near Midlothian, Texas. This particular morning, Bowers, now vice president of a construction firm, is driving south of Dallas on business. He is two miles south of Midlothian, Texas when his brand new company car veers from the road and hits a bridge abutment. A farmer who sees it, says the car was going about 50 miles an hour, a slow speed for that road. Bowers dies in a Dallas hospital. There is no autopsy and he is cremated. A doctor from Midlothian who rides to Dallas in the ambulance with Bowers notices something peculiar about the victim. "He was in some strange sort of shock." The doctor says, "A different kind of shock than the accident victim experiences. I can't explain it. I've never seen anything like it."
  
• 8/9/1966 An official University of Colorado memo by Robert Low discussed the research proposal they were getting ready to submit to the Air Force's Condon Committee on UFOs: "The trick would be to describe the project so that, to the public, it would appear a totally objective study but, to the scientific community, it would present the image of a group of nonbelievers trying their best to be objective but having an almost zero expectation of finding a saucer."
  
• 8/12/1966 Jack Ruby's lawyers file petition with the US Supreme Court to review Ruby's case.
  
• 8/15/1966 Newsweek magazine writes of the frustration of journalists and researchers concerning the JFK autopsy evidence.
  
• 8/15/1966 Mark Lane's Rush to Judgement is published. Arthur A. Cohen, editor-in-chief of Holt, Rinehart and Winston, agreed to publish the book even though the FBI had pressured him not to. (Plausible Denial p25) "... Of course, Mr. Hoover admitted, there would always be some extremists who would not yield to ... reasoning, but the Commission must not be misled by them. For instance, there was Mrs. Marguerite Oswald, Oswald's mother. She was 'emotionally unstable': she believed her son to be innocent and had gone about saying so 'for money': i.e. she had given public lectures. Mr. Hoover believed that she had made 'a substantial sum'. For these reasons Marguerite Oswald must not be heeded. On the contrary, Marina Oswald, Oswald's widow, was 'a far more reliable person': she believed that her husband was guilty. Mr. Hoover did not mention that she had made ten times as much money by insisting on Oswald's guilt as her mother-in-law had made by protesting his innocence. He preferred to rely on a knock-out proof of Marguerite Oswald's unreliability: 'the first indication of her emotional instability', he said, 'was the retaining of a lawyer that anyone would not have retained if they really were serious in trying to get down to the facts'. This lawyer was the author of this-book, Mr. Mark Lane. Rush to Judgment, Hugh Trevor-Roper, Introduction, Hugh Trevor-Roper, p. 8
  
• 8/16/1966 Senator McClellan announced a new intensified investigation into the TFX contract, which by now had produced enormous problems and cost overruns in the production of the F111.
  
• 8/19/66 Richard Stark and Paul-Michel Mielche said they were harassed and threatened in Dallas while working on documentary film Rush to Judgment. Police warned them "it might be dangerous" if they didn't get out of town. They said their impression was that the police "were more concerned about our footage on the death of Tippit .. than in the Kennedy shooting." San Francisco Chronicle
  
• 8/20/1966 LBJ said in a speech at Rhode Island University that violence and militance would achieve no positive end, and that stopping racism and poverty would take time. At a speech in Manchester, New Hampshire, he said, "Perhaps it reflects poorly on our world that men must fight limited wars in order to keep from fighting larger wars; but that may be the condition that exists today."
  
• 8/22/1966 In anticipation of William Manchester's book on the JFK assassination (and the reported unflattering statements made about LBJ in the manuscript) LBJ asks his secretary, Juanita Roberts, to collect everything in the files about his contacts with Jacqueline Kennedy following the assassination.
  
• 8/24/1966 Intrusion at Minot Air Force Base, 1966. A large UFO wave took place across the U.S. during the mid-1960s. This caused a good deal of publicity, congressional interest, and the eventual study of UFOs by the University of Colorado in the hopes of settling the matter once and for all. Although the Colorado Committee was supposed to have full access to classified UFO reports, in practice it received very little to go on, and instead conducted a number of ad hoc investigations of sightings as they became known. One of many classified reports that slipped through the cracks occurred at Minot Air Force Base, in North Dakota, on August 24, 1966. That night, an airman radioed to the base about a multicolored light, very high in the sky. A team went to the location, confirmed the original unknown, then saw a second, white object pass in front of clouds. The base radar tracked the object, which was as high as 100,000 feet (almost twenty miles). The object rose and descended several times; each time it descended, an air force officer in charge of a missile crew found his radio transmission interrupted by static, even though he was sixty feet below the ground. The object eventually descended to ground level ten to fifteen miles south of the area. The Air Force sent a strike team to check. Apparently, they saw the object either on the ground or hovering very low.
  
• 8/26/1966 Civil rights groups reached an accord with Chicago authorities for "open occupancy" in Chicago neighborhoods, though more militant black saws it as a sell-out.
  
• 8/28/1966 Mark Lane's Rush to Judgment and Leo Sauvage's The Oswald Affair were reviewed in The New York Times Book Review by Fred Graham. His review gave the false impression that both books relied mainly on eyewitness testimony rather than more tangible hard evidence. "Eyewitness testimony," noted Graham, "is far less reliable than it seems to be." He made the incredible observation that the main source of the Warren Commission's dilemma lay in the fact that it had to issue a report. The broad proof against Oswald and the lack of evidence pointing to any other possible assassin, according to Graham, gave the Commission no choice "but to smooth over the inconsistencies to the extent possible and brand Oswald the lone assassin." Graham concluded with the unsubstantiable claim that Oswald would easily have been convicted of murder by any jury faced with the material before the Warren Commission and in these books.
  
• 8/29/1966 LBJ, who is at his Texas ranch to celebrate his fifty-eighth birthday, organizes an extended group conversation over the telephone in an effort to find out what happened to the "missing" Kennedy Bible he supposedly used aboard Air Force One during his swearing-in ceremony. This action is undertaken due to reports of stories included in William Manchester's upcoming book on the assassination - that the Bible was stolen. It is eventually determined that the book was NOT a Bible, but a prayer book. Lady Bird Johnson had taken the book with her as a memento when she got off of the plane in Washington on the evening of Nov. 22, 1963. LBJ has refused to be interviewed for Manchester's book.