Deep Politics Timeline

[Tracy Riddle]

• 11/1966 Life Magazine published a series of photographs from the film that Abraham Zapruder took of the Kennedy assassination. Luis Walter Alvarez, an expert in optics and photoanalysis, became intrigued by the pictures and began to delve deeply into what could be learned from the film. The result of this was that Alvarez believed he had proved conclusively both in theory and experiment that the backward snap of the President's head was completely consistent with his being shot from behind, which would have been the case if Lee Harvey Oswald were the assassin. He also investigated the timing of the gun shots and the shockwave which disturbed the camera, the speed of the camera, and pointed out a number of things which the FBI photoanalysts either overlooked or got wrong.
  
• 11/1966 issue of The Progressive: Harrison Salisbury radically revised his early praise of the Warren Report. While reiterating his belief that Oswald acted alone, Salisbury wrote that his reading of "Inquest" and "Rush to Judgment," both of which he called "serious, thoughtful examinations," had convinced him that questions of major importance remained unanswered. He called for a new investigation. Like Wicker, he endorsed the Kupferman resolution, adding the principal areas of doubt. The nation no longer lives in the trauma which persisted for months after the President's death. The Warren Commission had good reason to concern itself for the national interest, to worry about national morale, to take upon itself the task of damping down rumors. But today and tomorrow the sole criteria of an inquiry should be the truthevery element of it that can be obtainedand a frank facing of unresolved and unresolvable dilemmas.
  
• 11/1966 NY Times editorial admitted that there were "Unanswered Questions" about the assassination. The NY Times quietly undertook, in early November 1966, a new investigation of the assassination under the direction of Harrison Salisbury. "We will go over all the areas of doubt." Salisbury told Newsweek (Dec 12), "and hope to eliminate them."
  
• 11/1966 New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison was on a plane trip to NY with Governor McKeithen and Sen. Russell Long when Long expressed his doubts about the Warren Commission's conclusions. This intrigued Garrison, who began to study the subject in detail.
  
• 11/1966 The Warren Commission Report and Its Critics by Jacob Cohen Frontier, November 1966, pages 520
  
• 11/1/1966 Humes, Boswell, Stringer, and Ebersole examine and create inventory of JFK collection at Archives. This was the first time they had seen the developed photos and X-rays. This examination was not made public for many years. The signatories pathologists James Humes, MD and J. Thornton Boswell, MD, radiologist John Ebersole, MD, and autopsy photographer John Stringer signed off on their review in an affidavit entitled the "Report of Inspection by Naval Medical Staff on November 1, 1966 at National Archives of X-Rays and Photographs of Autopsy of President John F. Kennedy." The affidavit, really more of an inventory of the autopsy materials, is the first known catalog of Kennedy's extant autopsy photographs and X-rays.
  
• 11/1/1966 Autopsy photos and X-rays, JFK's coat and shirt, turned over to National Archives.
  
• 11/2/1966 Larry O'Brien wrote LBJ in a memo that the Democrats would probably lose over 30 House seats in the upcoming election. (No Final Victories)
  
• 11/2/1966 The New York Times reported that the Justice Department "disclosed that photographs and X-Rays taken of President Kennedy's body at the autopsy after the assassination were turned over to the National Archives ... by the Kennedy family."
  
• 11/2/1966 LBJ spoke before the South Korean National Assembly; he pointed to the "modern miracle" of South Korea as an example of what could be done in Vietnam.
  
• 11/3/1966 LBJ signed truth-in-packaging bill, requiring standards in product labeling. Also signed Demonstration Cities and Metropolitan Redevelopment Act (Model Cities Act), providing aid to inner cities; and he signed the Clean Waters Restoration Act to clean up the nation's lakes and rivers.
  
• 11/3/1966 The NY Times reported that, concerning the JFK autopsy materials, "Mr. [Burke] Marshall said he would grant no requests from journalists, historians, biographers and researchers for at least five years...After the five-year period, selected scholars and researchers will be given access to the pictures and X-rays, he said, but the news media will probably still be excluded. These restrictions will continue as long as any member of President Kennedy's immediate family lives." No law states that this material was at any time ever owned by the Kennedy family; in fact, it is clearly the property of the Federal Government. Any limitations on the family wished to place on it were also not legal.
  
• 11/3/1966 Washington, [11/2] - ... The 65 X-rays, color transparencies and black and white negatives were placed in the National Archives by the Kennedy family on Monday [10/31]. New York Times, Fred P. Graham [No dateline - New York'?] - Senator Robert F. Kennedy when asked Tuesday night [11/1] why the executors of his brother's estate had placed the restrictions on the pictures and X-rays, said that "the reason is so obvious it shouldn't need spelling out." He said the items turned over to the Archives were things the general public would not be concerned about, that they would be of interest only to medical persons, Federal police officers and federally appointed investigators. New York Times
  
• 11/4/1966 LBJ is asked at a press conference about the "alleged mysterious disappearance of [the autopsy] photos [and] X-rays." Johnson replied, "I think that every American can understand the reasons why we wouldn't want to have the garments and the records and everything paraded out in every sewing circle in the country to be exploited and used without serving any good or official purpose." He said that the material had been available to the WC, and was available to the "the Government, the Justice Department, the FBI." "I know of no evidence that would in any way cause any reasonable person to have a doubt about the Warren Commission, but if there is any evidence that's brought forth, I'm sure that the Commission and the appropriate authorities will take action that may be justified." (New York Times 11/5/1966)
  
• 11/4/1966 Richard Levine article in the Baltimore Sun featured an interview with Dr. Boswell.
  
• 11/8/1966 Mid-term elections saw 48% voter turnout. Republicans won 47 House seats and 3 Senate seats (according to Roll Call 9/24/2001); Democrats still have margins of 65 in the House and 30 in the Senate, but conservatives in both parties are now emboldened to oppose LBJ's domestic policies. Many House freshmen were among those defeated. GOP also picked up 8 governors' seats, leaving them in control of half the state capitols (57% of the population). Edward Booke of Massachusetts is first black Senator since Reconstruction. Ronald Reagan is elected governor of California, defeating Gov. Brown by more than 1 million votes. Other Senate newcomers: Mark Hatfield, Howard Baker.
  
• 11/8/1966 Los Angeles Times reported that Hoover had addressed a graduation ceremony at the FBI academy and encouraged the new agents to "emulate" Efrem Zimbalist Jr., the star of the TV show The FBI Story.
  
• 11/8/1966 Memo by Hoover to the White House (response to a Marvin Watson request for dirt on WC critics): "[Mark] Lane has a long history of affiliation with Communist Party front groups and organizations which have been cited as subversive." It was alleged that Harold Weisberg had Communist sympathies. Sen. Richard Schweiker later reported, "Seven individuals listed, some of their files...not only included derogatory information, but sex pictures to boot." (Church Report 47,53,181) Hale Boggs remarked to his son, "If they have all this on some little guy who wrote a book, what about me?" (The Man and the Secrets 585)
  
• 11/9/1966 James R. Worrell, dies in a car-motorcycle accident, He is 23 years old. Said he saw the assassin run from the School Book Depository. The man did not fit Oswald's description.
  
• 11/9/1966 Paul McCartney is believed by some to have died in a car accident.
  
• 11/10/1966 Official sources have told U.S. News & World Report that the complete set of pictures and X rays was never made available to the Warren Commission, or its staff. Here is what these sources report: Robert F. Kennedy ... took charge immediately, and refused to let anyone else see the X rays and pictures.… Official sources say the X-rays and photographs remained under lock and key at Bethesda Naval Hospital until sometime in 1964. Then they were sent to the Secret Service, and turned over to Mrs. Evelyn Lincoln, the late President's longtime secretary. Mrs. Lincoln, at the time, was working on the Kennedy archives. The X-rays and pictures are said to be in this collection, located in the National Archives, but under direct control of the Kennedy family. U.S. News & World Report, Truth About Kennedy Assassination
  
• 11/10/1966 Carl W. Belcher of the U.S. Justice Department signs a document which reads: "On the afternoon of November 10, 1966, I took the original and one carbon copy of the document entitled Report of Inspection by Naval Medical Staff on November 1, 1966 at National Archives of X-Rays and Photographs of Autopsy of President John F. Kennedy' to the Naval Medical Center, Bethesda, M.D., where it was read and signed by Captain Humes, Dr. Boswell, Captain Ebersole and Mr. John T. Stringer. Certain ink corrections were made in the document before they signed it." Boswell, at the urging of the Justice Dept., will eventually ask for an independent reexamination of JFK's autopsy evidence. Humes will also say that there are two photos missing from the autopsy evidence. Thus although they affixed their signatures attesting to the completeness of the photo file in 1966, powerful evidence suggests that Humes, Boswell and Stringer are now fully aware the declaration is not true. The concluding sentence reads, "The X-rays and photographs described and listed above include all the X-rays and photographs taken by us during the autopsy, and we have no reason to believe that any other photographs or X-rays were made during the autopsy." This key sentence, which was apparently added, is absent in the unsigned inventory. Moreover, it is very probably untrue. Although the 11/10/66 affidavit attested to completeness of the inventory, it did not address the key question of whether the photographs and X-rays supported the Warren Commission's autopsy conclusions. Apparently to correct this deficiency, Justice moved again. It arranged for the second examination of the same material on January 20, 1967, "for the purpose," the autopsy team formally declared, "of determining whether they (the photographs and X-rays) are consistent with the autopsy report." In a once-secret memo, HSCA counsel, D. Andy Purdy, JD, reported that during an interview, chief autopsy photographer, "(John) STRINGER (sic) said it was his recollection that all the photographs he had taken were not present in 1966 (when Stringer saw the photographs for the first time.) [150] Among the missing pictures are those taken of the interior of JFK's chest. None survive in the current inventory. Yet every autopsy participant who was asked recalled that photographs were taken of the interior of JFK's body, as indeed they should have been to document the passage of the non-fatal bullet through JFK's chest: John Stringer told the HSCA he recalled taking "at least two exposures of the body cavity." A. Purdy.[151] James Humes, MD was reported in an HSCA memo to have, "... specifically recall(ed photographs) ... were taken of the President's chest ... (these photographs ) do not exist."[152] As already discussed, Humes had told the Warren Commission in 1964 that he had taken pictures of the interior of Kennedy's chest.[153] J. Thornton Boswell, MD, the second in command, backed up Stringer and Humes. The HSCA recorded that, "... he (Boswell) thought they photographed '... the exposed thoracic cavity and lung ...' but (he) doesn't remember ever seeing those photographs."[154] Robert Karnei, MD, a Navy pathologist who assisted but was not a member of the official autopsy team, told the HSCA, "He (Karnei) recalls them putting the probe in and taking pictures (the body was on the side at the time) (sic)."
  
• 11/11/1966 Gemini 12: docking maneuvers by Aldrin and Lovell; spacewalk by Aldrin. The craft's radar failed, and the primary propulsion system on the Agena rocket malfunctioned.
  
• 11/13/1966 U.S. plane drops three bombs on Raul Cepero Bonilla (former CUBANITRO) plant, in Matanzas, Cuba.
  
• 11/13/1966 ZANESVILLE, OHIO local barber and amateur astronomer Ralph Ditter took two spectacular UFO photos. Beyond their detailwhich to some skeptics is evidence itself of fraudthe importance of the photos lies in their similarity to the craft reported during a series of sightings that occurred throughout the year. At least two of these sightings were made by law enforcement officials, credible witnesses on everyone's list. In Toledo, on March 25, two Lucas County deputies, Robert Schultz and Stanley Nelepa, reported seeing a huge object floating at treetop level. Four days later, a glowing orange object was seen floating over the Ohio Turnpike administration building in Berea. Three days later it was spotted a second time, by Berea patrolmen Clarence T. Janowick and John R. Galik Jr. Because Ditter took his photos with a Polaroid camera, there are no negatives to investigate for signs of tampering. The jury remains outand perhaps may never be able to return a verdict on whether the Zanesville photos are spectacular evidence or spectacular frauds.
  
• 11/14/1966 US News reported that Robert Kennedy's office had stated that the WC "had not insisted on viewing the [autopsy] pictures." "Some of the government's legal authorities raise a question about the legal right to treat X rays and photographs related to the assassination of the late President as under the control of the Kennedy family, subject to conditions imposed by them, inasmuch as these pictures were taken when the late -President no longer was President and were part of the record of a government-controlled autopsy. Actually, it is said, the government itself is imposing these conditions." U.S. News & World Report, p34, Washington Whispers An account of how "those controversial X-rays and pictures of the Kennedy autopsy are now in government hands. But they're still under control of the Kennedy's …" Details on National Archives custody. U.S. News & World Report, Now U. S Gets JFK Autopsy Photos, p. 81 Last week ... three years after the fact, the 65 X-rays, color slides and black and white negatives were at last delivered to the National Archives. If the pictures still remained off limits to all but federal investigators for the next five years, the mystery within a mystery at least was soused: the pictures, in effect if not in fact, had been in the possession of the Kennedy family all along. … Newsweek -- Assassination: Missing Link
  
• 11/15/1966 THE STATE OF TEXAS vs. JACK RUBENSTEIN -- Texas Court of Criminal Appeals turns down the State of Texas' motion for a rehearing on court's October 5 decision.
  
• 11/15/1966 The first Apollo flight had been scheduled for this date, but numerous problems pushed the date back.
  
• 11/16/1966 LBJ was operated on at Bethesda for a benign polyp in his throat and a scar from his gall bladder operation.
  
• 11/16/1966 Clifton Daniel, then Managing Editor of the NYT, in addressing a public symposium on "The Role of the Mass Media in Achieving and Preserving a Free Society," defended the Warren Report and accused its critics of "dragging red herrings all over the place."
  
• 11/17/1966 Ronald Reagan, just days after being elected governor, decides to make a run for the White House in 1968. (America in Search of Itself p244)
  
• 11/17/1966 Ike came to visit LBJ at Bethesda.
  
• 11/18/1966 This was the last required meatless Friday for American Roman Catholics, in accordance with a decree made by Pope Paul VI earlier this year.
  
• 11/18/1966 US press quoted South Vietnamese foreign minister as saying, "the entire Vietnamese Army will switch to a pacification role in 1967 and leave major fighting to American troops."
  
• 11/20/1966 Sen. Russell did not criticize the Commission in public until November 20, 1966 in The Atlanta Constitution. There he said he harbored a lingering dissatisfaction with the Commission's work and that he disagreed with the Single Bullet Theory. In 1968, he went further and told Weisberg that the Commission had been deceived by the CIA and FBI in two key areas: 1.) Oswald's background, and 2.) the ballistics evidence. He publicly announced his "lingering dissatisfaction" with parts of the Report. Russell explicitly stated he could not agree that Oswald acted alone. He could accept the conclusion that Oswald fired the shots that killed JFK, but he could not rule out the possibility that Oswald was part of a conspiracy.
  
• 11/21/1966 Henry Cabot Lodge was quoted by US News & World Report: "Yes, we have reached a turning point…it is clear to all that the Viet Cong cannot possibly win and that we cannot possibly be defeated."
  
• 11/21/1966 Mark Lane [in taped interview over WABC-TV? said], "I know Robert Kennedy sent a message to Professor [Hugh] Trevor-Roper, who wrote the introduction to my book, in which he said to keep up the good work." Professor Trevor Roper ... reached last night in Oxford, England, said, "No such message from Robert Kennedy has ever been received by me." Mr. Lane could not be reached for further comment, nor could Senator Kennedy or spokesmen for him. New York Times, Peter Kihss
  
• 11/21/1966 Harris survey shows 5 Americans to 1 think JFK will go down in history as greater President that LBJ, and that 39 would choose RFK over LBJ as democratic nominee in 1968, with 37% choosing LBJ and 24% undecided. San Francisco Examiner
  
• 11/21/1966 Joe Dolan, commenting on assassination on his call-in program (KNEW Oakland) - "According to information I receive - I cannot vouch for its authenticity, it seems as if it might be reliable - but according to information I receive, there could be a sensational break in this case within a year, maybe within six or eight months, and it's possible that some of the highest people in our country might be implicated. But of course this is purely conjectural. We'll have to wait and see."
  
• 11/21/1966 Sen. Russell B. Long, D-LA. - AP 22 Nov 66: "Sen. [Long] said yesterday in New Orleans he has always thought a second person was involved in the assassination who was 'a much better shot than Oswald.' Long said he thinks there should be further investigation."
  
• 11/22/1966 Los Angeles Times quoted Sen. Richard Russell as saying he wanted his dissenting view included in the WR: "Warren was determined he was going to have a unanimous report. I said it wouldn't be any trouble just to put a little asterisk up here and then down at the bottom of the page saying: 'Senator Russell dissents to this finding as follows,' but Warren wouldn't hear of it. He finally took that part and rewrote it himself."
  
• 11/22/1966 NYT quoted Earl Warren: "If I were still a district attorney and the Oswald case came into my jurisdiction, given the same amount of evidence I could have gotten a conviction in two days and never heard about the case again."
  
• 11/22/1966 AP Washington - … The office of Senator Robert F. Kennedy … said he has no comment on the suggestions for a new investigation.
  
• 11/22/1966 AP Algiers -- Several hundred cheering Algerians broke through police cordons today to applaud Senator Edward M. Kennedy, D-MA, at a ceremony marking the third anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.... Some of the crowd had waited for several hours in biting cold to watch him lay a wreath in memory of his brother on Kennedy Square in suburban El Biar. The enthusiasm was in contrast to the official coolness toward the United States, described almost daily in Algeria's state-run press and radio as an "imperialist aggressor."
  
• 11/23/1966 NY Times quotes Sen. Russell Long saying that there must have been more than one gunman in the JFK assassination: "whoever fired that second shot was a better shot than Oswald and he was using a better weapon."
  
• 11/23/1966 AP New York - Democrats could do nothing "more stupid and self-defeating" than to run Senator Robert F. Kennedy, D-NY against President Johnson or vice-president Hubert Humphrey in 1968, Theodore C. Sorensen, former special counsel to President John F. Kennedy, said today, called for party unity and end to feuds within the party.
  
• 11/24/1966 The New York Herald tribune (Paris edition) remarked in an editorial entitled "Protecting Privacy:" "It is altogether unlikely, of course, that J. Edgar leaver, in the closing years of a long, honorable and exceedingly useful career of public service will be prosecuted for a crime. But the awkward truth in that, as director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, he has been responsible for conduct by agents of that bureau which, according to a Justice Department stipulation in federal district court the other day, violated the constitutional rights of Robert G. Baker. It is a crime punishable by ten years in prison and a $5,000 fine, for two or more persons to conspire to injure the constitutional rights of a citizen."
  
• 11/25/1966 Files reveal that Justice Dept had already discreetly completed two autopsy probes of its own. The first occurred in late 1966, the second in early 1967, the timing suggesting a possible link to published concerns. Perhaps predictably, the probes concluded the Warren Commission, and the Justice Department, had been right the first time. The bases for this determination were the findings of Department-selected reviewers whose own interests just happened to neatly coincide with the Justice Department's: JFK's original autopsy team. The Justice Department's agitation about unwanted public skepticism is apparent in a flurry of now-declassified memos that flew between former Commission staffers David Slawson and Wesley Liebeler, and then-Attorney General Ramsey Clark. In a once-secret memo dated 11/25/66, Clark laid out a plan: "We should carefully examine," he ordered, "all the criticisms, hypotheses and suggestions contained in the existing body of literature concerning the President's assassination and the work of the Warren Commission. The purpose is to inventory the contentions so we can evaluate their validity. I would like the task described above to be undertaken by a small group of lawyers within the (Justice) Department on an unpublicized basis ... ." (Obtained by Kathy Cunningham. Memo from AAG Ramsey Clark to "Vinson, Sanders and Rogovin," dated Nov. 25, 1966. Titled: "Warren Commission -- Re-evaluation of evidence". Obtained at the LBJ Library by Randy Robertso) Clark's directive didn't narrow the focus to JFK's autopsy. It is apparent, however, that he was responding to a memo written just three days earlier by David Slawson who had advised a strategy of keeping the focus narrowed to the autopsy evidence. Slawson, then working under Clark at Justice, was worried about questions that were being raised about the autopsy at the New York Times, questions that he got wind of through Liebeler. The Times' Harrison Salisbury apparently wanted non-government pathologists to review the autopsy photographs and X-rays, a request that Slawson said the Kennedy attorney, Burke Marshall, had resisted. Salisbury's ultimate goal, Slawson fretted in his memo, might be to have the Times endorse a wide-ranging reinvestigation. "There is still a reasonable chance of spiking this thing," Slawson added hopefully, "by a re-investigation limited to aspects of the autopsy. But if public opinion continues to develop as it has over the past few months we may soon be faced with a politically unstoppable demand for a free-wheeling re-investigation of all aspects." (Although the "Liebeler memorandum" has not been published, author David Lifton discusses the memo in detail in Best Evidence, New York, Carroll and Graff, 1980, 1988 & 1992. While Slawson refers to the memo's having been dated 11/16/66, Lifton claims it was written on 11/8/66.) When Clark wrote back three days later ordering an unpublicized examination of all the criticisms, he might already have grasped how a narrow reinvestigation might succeed in "spiking" calls for a wider reexamination. For the record discloses that the Department's, and so therefore Clark's, private pursuit of JFK's autopsy had not commenced with Slawson's appeal to the Attorney General, but sometime earlier. Before Slawson had written his memo on November 22, 1966, but well after Weisberg, Lane and Epstein had published, Justice, assuredly with Clark's approval, had already quietly arranged for the original autopsy team to conduct the first formal examination ever of JFK's autopsy photographs and X-rays. That examination took place on November 1, 1966. Thus, despite published attention given to numerous Warren Commission flat tires, it was apparently only the squeaking wheels of Kennedy's autopsy that the Justice Department felt the need to grease.
  
• 11/25/1966 FBI press release: "On November 21, 1966, J Edgar Hoover...received a letter from a newsman expressing concern over the rash of books, articles and statements which are 'creating confusion and doubts about the validity of the findings of the Warren Commission regarding the assassination of President Kennedy.' The newsman said that one of the 'conflicts' concerned the alleged variations of the results of the medical examination of the President's body...in FBI reports dated December 9, 1963 and January 13, 1964, and the official autopsy report. The newsman said he would appreciate any comment Mr Hoover would make concerning these matters....By letter dated November 23, 1966, to the newsman, Mr Hoover said he shared the concern of the newsman regarding the criticisms of the Warren Commission's findings. He pointed out that while the critics had every right to state their views, they 'should show more regard for the facts on record. They have ignored certain facts, misinterpreted others, and expressed pure speculation as truth.'...While there is a difference in the information reported by the FBI and the information contained in the autopsy report concerning the wounds, there is no conflict. The FBI reports record oral statements made by autopsy physicians while the examination was being conducted and before all the facts were known...Unknown to the Agents, the physicians eventually were able to trace the path of the bullet through the body. On the morning of November 23, 1963, Dr Humes contacted doctors who treated the President at Parkland...and confirmed his assumption that a tracheotomy had been performed using a bullet hole in the front of the neck...Recently the charge has been made that the FBI altered the film of the assassination taken by Abraham Zapruder. This is totally false. The FBI never had the original Zapruder film in its possession - it was purchased by a national magazine...Not one shred of evidence has been developed to link any other person in a conspiracy with Oswald..." (Post Mortem p541-5) Hoover implies that the doctors were able to "trace" the wound through Kennedy's body once they found out about the tracheotomy, but by that time they no longer had access to the body.
  
• 11/25/1966 Life magazine called for a new investigation into the assassination: "Did Oswald Act Alone? A Matter of Reasonable Doubt." Connally examined the Z-film frames for Life. He had never read the Warren Report. He said, "They talk about the 'one-bullet' theory and the 'two-bullet theory,' but as far as I'm concerned, there is no 'theory.' There is my absolute knowledge, and my wife's too, that one bullet caused the President's first wound, and that an entirely separate shot struck me." The magazine also featured an interview with Arlen Specter, who explained that the bullet that left JFK's neck had to hit Connally, since it didn't hit anything else. He claimed he could see Connally wincing in frame 230, but "Life's photo interpreters think he looks unharmed. Nor is there any medical evidence, despite Specter's claim, that Connally's right hand was in his lap when he was hit." Life pointed out that the position of his wrist was not important since the bullet could have been deflected after hitting the rib.
  
• 11/25/1966 Richard Billings, Life magazine's associate editor in charge of investigative reporting had been looking into certain aspects of the JFK assassination, particularly the "single-bullet" theory. Billings' staff had concluded after analyzing the Zapruder film that the one-bullet theory is untenable and, in today's issue "Life" magazine calls for a new investigation. However, in its November 25, 1966, issue, "Time" magazine - also a part of Time-Life Corporation - today editorializes against the "phantasmagoria" of Warren Commission critics and concludes: "...there seems little valid excuse for so dramatic a development as another full-scale inquiry." Asked about these conflicting editorial postures, Hedley Donovan, editor in chief of both "Time" and "Life," responds: "We would like to see our magazines arrive at consistent positions on major issues, and I am sure in due course we will on this one." This reconciliation occurs two months from now when Billings says he is told by a superior: "It is not "Life's" function to investigate the Kennedy assassination." The 11/25/1966 issue of Life quoted Specter as saying that "it looks like to me as if his face [Connally's] is wincing [in frame 230], indicating a probability he's been hit." The magazine responded, "Life's photo interpreters think he looks unharmed [in frame 230], as does Connally himself." Specter told Life, "We're pretty sure from the medical evidence that when Connally was hit, his right wrist was down in his lap...frame 230 the wrist is too high to be hit and throughout the rest of the sequence - all the way until Connally collapses - that wrist stays raised." But Life responded, "Nor is there any medical evidence, despite Specter's claim, that Connally's right hand was in his lap when he was hit."
  
• 11/25/1966 With their unpublicized investigation of the assassination already underway, the NY Times ran a carefully worded editorial, "Unanswered Questions," which maintained that there were enough solid doubts of thoughtful citizens to require official answers. "Further dignified silence, or merely more denials by the commission or its staff, are no longer enough." About a month into the investigation Salisbury received permission from the government of North Vietnam to visit Hanoi, and he quickly departed for Paris to complete final preparations for the trip. Shortly after his departure the Times investigation was ended.
  
• 11/25/1966 Arlen Specter was quoted by the Philadelphia Inquirer, "I don't think people are going to believe this [single-bullet theory]...this year, next year, or a hundred years from now...this thing will be challenged today, tomorrow and forever."
  
• 11/26/1966 J. Edgar Hoover issues an official statement saying: "While there is a difference in the information reported by the FBI and the information contained in the autopsy report concerning the wounds, there is no conflict ... The FBI and the Warren Commission each received a copy of the official autopsy report of December 23, 1963 ... Its contents were not repeated in an FBI report" (of January 13, 1964)
  
• 11/27/1966 Howard Hughes arrived in Las Vegas, Nevada by railroad car, and moved into the Desert Inn Hotel. Refusing to leave the hotel and to avoid further conflicts with the owners of the hotel, Hughes bought the Desert Inn in early 1967. The hotel's eighth floor became the nerve center of his empire, and the ninth floor penthouse became Hughes' personal residence. Between 1966 and 1968, Hughes bought several other hotels/casinos (Castaways, New Frontier, The Landmark Hotel and Casino, Sands and Silver Slipper) from the Mafia, transactions which ultimately ended mob control of the city's hotels and casinos. Hughes wanted to change the image of Las Vegas from its mobsters in gaudy silk suits and thousand-dollar-a-night call girls to a more glamourous image. As Hughes wrote in a memo to an aide: "I like to think of Las Vegas in terms of a well-dressed man in a dinner jacket and a beautifully jeweled and furred female getting out of an expensive car". A chronic insomniac, Hughes bought several local television stations (including KLAS-TV) so that there would always be something for him to watch in the early hours of the morning.
  
• 11/28/1966 US News & World Report quoted Gen. Westmoreland as saying, "Early in 1965 we knew that the enemy hoped to deliver the coup de grace by launching a major summer offensive to cut the Republic of Vietnam in two with a drive across the central highlands to the sea. I had to make a decision, and I did. I chose a rapid build-up of combat forces, in the full knowledge that we should not have a very fully developed logistic base to support those forces."
  
• 11/28/1966 The Paris edition of the New York Herald Tribune had a story called 'The Ghouls,' which charged that "the merchants of morbidity keep setting new highs in output and new lows in taste by refusing to let go of the horror of Nov. 22, 1963 - and refusing to let the memory of John F. Kennedy rest decently in peace." Many of the critics "seem motivated by a hunger for a buck, a thirst for publicity, a drive for circulation at all costs....We think it is time to ask the ghouls, the buckchasers, the sensation-mongers and the character assassins to desist - to shut up until or unless they can put up, as so far they have notoriously failed to do."
  
• 11/28/1966 NY Times quoted NY Congressmen Ogden Reid, John Wydler and William Ryan calling for a new investigation into the JFK assassination.
  
• 12/1966 Hoover, working through conservative Republican Rep. H.R. Gross, managed to publicize his claim that RFK had authorized FBI bugging as attorney general.
  
• 12/1966 Warren Commission critic Harold Weisberg's book Whitewash II is published.
  
• 12/1966 Clay Shaw was summoned to New Orleans D.A. Jim Garrison's office and asked where he was on the day of the assassination; he said he was en route to San Francisco and had never met Oswald. A few days prior to Christmas '66, Jim Garrison enlisted the services of private investigator William Gurvich, who seemed enthusiastic about the conspiracy probe at first, but would walk out six months later, denouncing the entire thing as a farce.
  
• 12/1966 Life editor Richard Billings, "the Time-Life journalist who actively worked to undermine Garrison's case, and who had strong ties to the CIA," as DiEugenio and Davy describe him, came aboard the investigation in early December 1966. (Jim DiEugenio and Bill Davy, "False Witness: Aptly Titled," Probe, Vol. 6, No.4, May-June, 1999. Garrison treats Billings quite sympathetically in his own memoirs, portraying him as a victim of Time-Life treachery rather than an infiltrator into the probe. (Garrison, pp. 132, 189-90.) "Dick Billings's personal notes on consultations and interviews with Garrison," p. 1. See also Patricia Lambert, False Witness (New York: M. Evans and Co., 1998), pp. 45-46.)
  
• 12/1966 WHO'S AFRAID OF THE WARREN REPORT? by Edward Jay Epstein (With annotations by K. A. Rahn) Esquire, December 1966, pp. 204 ff.
  
• 12/1966 Notes for a new investigation by Sylvia Meagher Esquire, December 1966, pp. 211 ff. The woman who indexed the entire twenty-six volumes of The Warren Report emerges from her task with this advice: reopen the hearings and finish the job.
  
• 12/1/1966 Mark Lane is a guest on William F. Buckley's "Firing Line," where they debate whether the Warren Report was correct. Lane easily holds his own against Buckley, who is only minimally informed about the subject. In 1951, like some of his classmates in the Ivy League, Buckley was recruited into the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA); he served for two years including one year in Mexico City working as a political action specialist in the elite Special Activities Division for E. Howard Hunt. These two officers remained lifelong friends. (William F. Buckley, Jr. (January 26, 2007), "Howard Hunt, RIP"; Tad Szulc, Compulsive Spy: The Strange Career of E. Howard Hunt (New York: Viking, 1974)) In a November 1, 2005, column for National Review, Buckley recounted that while he worked for the CIA, the only employee of the organization that he knew was his immediate boss E. Howard Hunt.
  
• 12/5/1966 THE STATE OF TEXAS vs. JACK RUBENSTEIN -- Judge Holland selects Wichita Falls, Kansas, as the site for the retrial of Jack Ruby.
  
• 12/7/1966 Bell & Howell transfers Abraham Zapruder's camera and leather carrying case to the National Archives.
  
• 12/9/1966 Jack Ruby is moved from the Dallas County Jail to Parkland Hospital after complaining of persistent cough and nausea. Doctors diagnose his problem as "pneumonia."
  
• 12/10/1966 Ruby's illness is identified as cancer. It was soon established that the cancer was far-advanced and fatal.
  
• 12/10/1966 Bill Moyers has just read the Look galleys of The Death of A President. He writes: "the book is permeated by a malignancy I find dishonest, disgraceful, and distorted ... I would sue the magazine to prevent publication of the serialization, and I would withhold publication of the book for many years to come ... I believe both of these proposals are feasible."
  
• 12/11/1966 AP Washington -- details of the Hoover-RFK controversy over FBI bugging was authorized.
  
• 12/12/1966 Newsweek quoted Harrison Salisbury of the NYT about the Times' new investigation of the assassination under his direction: "We will go over all the areas of doubt, and hope to eliminate them." About a month into the investigation Salisbury received permission from the government of North Vietnam to visit Hanoi, and he quickly departed for Paris to complete final preparations for the trip. Shortly after his departure the investigation ended.
  
• 12/12/1966 Daily Express: "AUTHORISED book about President Kennedy's assassination, by William Manchester, is being held back for a month while some last-minute revisions are made. Mrs. Jacqueline Kennedy is said to be dismayed by what he has writtenpersonal material he obtained from her in 10 hours of taped interviews. Someone who read the manuscript is quoted as saying Mrs. Kennedy " now regrets having poured out her soul to Manchester as if he were a psychiatrist."
  
• 12/13/1966 Gallup Poll #738 Field Date: 12/08/1966-12/13/1966 Question 22: Do you think one man was responsible for the assassination of President Kennedy, or do you think there were others involved? Options: One Man, Others, No Opinion 36% selected 'One Man' 50% selected 'Others'
  
• 12/14/1966 Jacqueline Kennedy petitions a state supreme court justice in New York to block publication of The Death of a President and its serialization.
  
• 12/15/1966 LBJ and Abe Fortas discuss the advisability of sending Jacqueline Kennedy a brief note regarding the controversy surrounding the publishing of The Death of A President.
  
• 12/15/1966 Post magazine publishes an editorial stating that it "is impossible to agree with the legal steps [Mrs. Kennedy] has taken" against William Manchester and his publishers.
  
• 12/15/1966 Bill Moyers announced he would be leaving the White House.
  
• 12/15/1966 Walt Disney died of acute circulatory collapse, caused by lung cancer, at age 65. Eric Sevareid commented on CBS Evening News, "He was an original; not just an American original…He probably did more to heal or at least to soothe troubled human spirits than all the psychiatrists in the world…what Walt Disney seemed to know was that…there is a lot of child in every grown-up…People are saying we'll never see his like again." Roy O. Disney, president of Walt Disney Productions, is named chairman. FBI director Hoover orders Walt Disney's name removed from the FBI's records as an active SAC contact.
  
• 12/15/1966 FBI memo from Charles Brennan to Sullivan summarizing all the wiretap and bugging efforts against King and the SCLC over the past three years.
  
• 12/15/1966 Harold Weisberg: "At one o'clock in the early morning of December 15 1966, in the Oakland, California, studios of Radio Station KNEW, I had just finished appearing on Harvard-educated lawyer Joe Dolan's lengthy phone-in radio program...There was a man on the line who had called toward the end of the program. He wanted to speak to me but not on the air. Further, he wanted the assurance that our conversation would be private....I took the call. The caller was disturbed by the 'beep' on the line. He associated that with the required signal for recording. I assured him that that the engineer was not on it, that it was not being taped, and that he could talk to the engineer to learn these things. Overhearing this, the engineer explained to me and I to the caller that, with phone-in programs, the beep is automatically built into the line so there can be no possibility of listeners not knowing the conversation is being broadcast. The stranger on the other end of the line was partly satisfied...This man had been in the Marine Corps with Oswald. From his personal experience, he did not believe a single word about the Oswald of this period that became public with the Report. He had agonized in silence for the three years between the issuance of the Report and our conversation because he knew things, he said, that had not been made public and were not in accord with what had been publicized - and he was certain what he knew was correct....He feared he or his business might be hurt or his family might suffer...he would talk only in anonymity. I respect his desires and will not reveal the few unintended clues to his identity that slipped out. I have made and will make no effort to trace him. Briefly, it is his story that Oswald was bright, not a kook of any kind, not a blantant or proselytizing Marxist, and really a quiet, serious guy. They knew each other socially and engaged in certain recreational activities together. He never heard Oswald say anything about Communism, for or against, in all this time...the unit in which both served...was one of three similar ones of which one was always in Japan and the others in the United States. Their function was classified. Every man in the outfit carried security clearance. They had a security designation of which I had never heard...Of all the men in the outfit, five had special 'top' security approvals. The entire complement carried a minimum of 'confidential'...above this there were 'secret,' 'top secret,' and a special one, 'crypto.'....only five were 'crypto.' One of these was Lee Harvey Oswald!...he was positive. He went farther when I questioned him about 'crypto,' which he indicated was 'black box' stuff. I took it to mean a connection with nuclear weapons....the caller specified that Oswald spent his last two or three weeks in the service 'with CID.'...Of the things he mentioned, 'Crypto' security clearance bothered me; I had never heard of it. From time to time I asked reporters about it. In February 1967, when I was in Boston, I mentioned this strange post-midnight telephone call to Bob Scott, newsman at WNAC, who has connections with people who had been in military intelligence. He soon phoned to report that there had been such a security designation." Certain parts of the man's story (whom he didn't hear from again) reminded him of Kerry Thornley's testimony. (Oswald in New Orleans 85-90)
  
• 12/16/1966 Jackie petitioned the court to enjoin the book's publication. Hours after Jacqueline Kennedy's lawsuit against Manchester is actually filed today, LBJ confers with Abe Fortas. Fortas is dubious about the likelihood of the Kennedys' winning a permanent injunction against publication.
  
• 12/16/1966 Word of Jacqueline Kennedy's being upset about negative passages in William Manchester's upcoming book The Death Of A President, regarding the Lyndon Johnsons, appears in newspapers. LBJ writes to her, as per his discussion with Abe Fortas: "Lady Bird and I have been distressed to read the press accounts of your unhappiness about the Manchester book. Some of these accounts attribute your concern to passages in the book which are critical or defamatory of us. If this is so, I want you to know while we deeply appreciate your characteristic kindness and sensitivity, we hope you will no subject yourself to any discomfort or distress on your account ... your own tranquility is important to both of us, and ... We are both grateful to you for your constant and unfailing thoughtfulness and friendship."
  
• 12/16/1966 Lady Bird: "The Manchester book and ugly stories about it are dominating the newspapers. Mrs. Kennedy is filing suit to block publication of the book." (White House Diary)
  
• 12/16/1966 New York - Rumor of rift between RFK and Jackie over publication of Manchester book. San Francisco Chronicle AP
  
• 12/16/1966 Sun Valley RFK and family arrive with party of 16 to spend Christmas. AP
  
• 12/18/1966 AP, Washington, [12/18] - Senator Joseph S. Clark, D-PA, today described the "military-industrial complex, the FBI and the CIA as major threats to American democracy. Clark charged the Federal Bureau of Investigation with posing a threat of ["blackmail, direct or indirect, on anybody who has the effrontery to say anything unkind about Mr. J. Edgar Hoover."]
  
• 12/21/1966 Jacqueline Kennedy drops her suit against Look magazine. The publication, in turn, agrees to excise a few pages from a serialization of "The Death Of A President." In William Manchester's original version Mrs. Kennedy is described as wrestling with a nurse to gain entry to her husband's hospital room after he had been shot.
  
• 12/23/1966 Clay Shaw got a call from Detective Ortillo in the New Orleans' D.A.'s office asking him to come down to answer a few questions. Shaw talked with Moo Moo Sciambra, "who told me they'd come across the fact that Lee Harvey Oswald had known someone named Clem Bertrand when he was in New Orleans...I'd almost met him when he'd come to distribute Fair Play for Cuba leaflets in front of the Trade Mart, but...my assistant had dealt with him...They wanted to know more about the Cuban consulate - it was the presence of the consulate in the building that drew Oswald to that point to distribute the leaflets..." He denied knowing Dave Ferrie. (American Grotesque p20)
  
• 12/23/1966 On WNYC-TV, New York City, former WC staffer Albert Jenner was asked if he would do anything differently if he could redo the Warren Commission investigation. "You know, I can't think of a single thing I can do. I had a responsibility for three major segments of this investigation, and I had a fine staff of very able lawyers. I had available to me any FBI agent in the entire United States, the CIA, the intelligence services of the Army, Air Corps, Marines and the Navy, and I used them, the State Department, the Secret Service, the Immigration and Naturalization Service - any request we made, never did we have a single demurrer." He also stated "...some members of the Commission saw both the film and the colored pictures [of the autopsy], and the X-rays. We did not, as staff members, introduce those before the Commission at any formal hearing. We of the staff saw them ourselves." Others on the WC had stated that they never saw the autopsy materials. Mark Lane later asked Jenner on TV about this contradiction, and he refused to answer the question. Jenner continued, "And the policeman [Marrion Baker] took him [Truly] by the arm and they rushed into that building to go where? The policeman wanted to get up to the sixth floor, to that corner, where he had--had reached the conclusion, as a trained man, that these shots, at least, had come from that window. Oswald, as we subsequently find, had jimmied the elevator door on the sixth floor by sticking a stick in it, to hold it back so as to disengage the electrical impulses, and that held the elevator up there on the sixth floor. Roy Truly and the policeman with his gun drawn rushed up, they were going to go all, right up those six floors, and they reached the second floor, who was the first man this policeman saw, was Oswald with a bottle of Coke. And he rushed over to him with his pistol. And held him. Roy Truly said that's one of our men, Mr. Oswald, there's nothing wrong with him. But these men, intent on getting to the sixth floor, where they thought the person--whoever he was--who had discharged this rifle." Jenner's story about Oswald jamming the elevators appears nowhere in the evidence, and Baker said he was heading to the roof of the TSBD because he thought the shots came from there, not the sixth floor. Jenner also made other statements totally unsupported by the WC's own evidence: "We found that on the Mannlicher-Carcano rifle were threads from the jacket that he wore that particular day," and that the pistol allegedly used in the Tippit murder "had his fingerprints on it in generous proportions." Jenner concluded by complaining that "none of these affirmative things are called to the attention of the public when they read these books." Therefore, their authors are "irresponsible." (Citizen's Dissent 127-32)
  
• 12/23/1966 John Connally issued a statement: "Simply because I disagree with the Warren Commission on this one detail [the single-bullet theory] does NOT mean that I disagree with the substance of their overall findings."
  
• 12/24/1966 A detailed explanation of the RFK-FBI feud over wiretapping, its background and political implications. The New Republic, The Wiretap War, Robert M. Cipes, p. 16
  
• 12/27/1966 After a flood of bad publicity regarding the Manchester book, it was announced that the Kennedys were conducting amicable negotiations with the author.
  
• 12/27/1966 Representative Theodore R. Kupferman of New York, who had previously expressed serious doubts about the accuracy of the Warren Report and who, three months earlier, had introduced in the House a Resolution calling for a new investigation of the Kennedy murder, wrote to Robert H. Bahmer, Chief Archivist of the United States, asking for permission to examine the autopsy photos and X-rays. "In order to have an informed judgment on the subject," Mr. Kupferman added, he would like to take Dr. Halpern and Dr. Wecht along with him to the viewing, as well as author Sylvia Meagher, a recognized authority on the contents of the Warren Report which she has indexed.