Deep Politics Timeline

[Tracy Riddle]

• 11/1967 Readers Digest published an article by Nixon in which he blamed the Warren Court for rising crime.
  
• 11/1967 Harold Weisberg's Oswald in New Orleans is published.
  
• 11/1967 Nixon told an interviewer, "I've always thought this country could run itself domestically without a President. All you need is a competent Cabinet to run the country at home. You need a President for foreign policy; no Secretary of State is really important; the President makes foreign policy."
  
• 11/1967 Josiah Thompson's Six Seconds in Dallas is published.
  
• 11/1/1967 Humphrey, on a tour of Asia, declared that the US was winning the war.
  
• 11/1-2/1967 LBJ met with Acheson, Clifford, Fortas, Bundy, Taylor, Omar Bradley, Robert Murphy, Lodge, Arthur Dean, Douglas Dillon, Ball and Harriman over Vietnam. Lovett and McCloy had been unable to attend. Gen. Wheeler and CIA analyst George Carver (an optimist on the war) gave them an upbeat briefing, and sentiment in the meeting was hawkish. Acheson reminisced about the dark days of the Chinese intervention in Korea. Bradley urged more patriotic slogans to cheer the public. Only Ball struck a gloomy note, and Harriman was mostly silent. They urged telling the public that the "light at the end of the tunnel" was near. LBJ then went off to Europe while his aides told the press that the light was at the end of the tunnel. Johnson visited the Pope in Rome, presenting the pontiff with a plastic bust of himself. (The Wise Men 676-81) McNamara faulted LBJ for presenting the Wise Men with a one-side briefing on the war. (In Retrospect 306-07)
  
• 11/7/1967 LBJ signed the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, establishing a corporation to use public and private funds for non-commercial TV and radio, focusing mostly on educational and news programs.
  
• 11/7/1967 Selective Service chief Gen. Hershey announced that college students arrested in anti-war demonstrations would lose their draft deferments.
  
• 11/7/1967 State and local elections are held; blacks win several mayors' and state legislators' races.
  
• 11/9/1967 Clark gave full approval to Doar's recommendation: "Planning and creation of the unit [to monitor dissident groups] must be kept in strictest confidence."
  
• 11/12/1967 The Johnsons attended the Bruton Parish Episcopal Church and endured a lecture on the Vietnam war by Rev. Cotesworth Pinckney Lewis: "...there is a rather general consensus that something is wrong in Vietnam...we wonder if some logical straightforward explanation might be given..."
  
• 11/14/1967 Congress passed, and LBJ signed, the Air Quality Act to fight air pollution.
  
• 11/14/1967 Garrison stated that certain elements of the CIA were involved in the plot (Los Angeles Free Press 11/17/1967)
  
• 11/16/1967 Garrison told the press at the Los Angeles Century Plaza Hotel, "The man who has profited most from the assassination is your friendly president, Lyndon Johnson."
  
• 11/19/1967 James Earl Ray arrived in Los Angeles and soon established contact with one or both brothers by mail and telephone. Ray's story told to William Pepper: "Ray arrived in Los Angeles on or about November 19, believing he was through with Raul. He had given up hope that Raul would get him the travel documents, and he was determined to try to get merchant seaman's papers on his own. He lived for a while in an apartment on North Serrano Street. He began looking for papers and a job, and he even placed a classified in the Los Angeles Times advertising himself as available for "culinary help." He didn't have a social security card, and because seaman's papers required fingerprints he was worried that his efforts could result in his exposure as a fugitive. He enrolled in a bartending course, took dancing lessons, and had psychological, hypnotic counseling for a period of time, spending about $800 on these activities. He also contacted a number of organizations he thought might help him to emigrate. He sent out photographs that weren't good likenesses (his face appeared fatter than it was), which later would be used by the media to accuse him of being on amphetamines. He also had plastic surgery on his nose to alter his appearance."
  
• 11/20/1967 LBJ signed a bill creating the National Commission on Product Safety.
  
• 11/20/1967 U.S. News and World Report claimed in its November 20, 1967 issue to have confirmation of the reality of the Report from Iron Mountain from an unnamed government official, who added that when President Johnson read the report, he 'hit the roof' and ordered it to be suppressed for all time. Additionally, sources were said to have revealed that orders were sent to U.S. embassies, instructing them to emphasize that the book had no relation to U.S. Government policy. ("Hoax of Horror? A Book That Shook White House", U.S. News & World Report, November 20, 1967)
  
• 11/21/1967 LBJ signs air quality act to fight pollution.
  
• 11/22/1967 Silver hits record $2.17 an ounce in New York
  
• 11/24/1967 Actors Robert Vaughan and James Garner, on a Los Angeles TV show, debate the role of actors in politics. Garner calls the idea of Reagan running for president "dangerous."
  
• 11/24/1967 James Reston article in NYT; he explained that the US "is fighting a war now on the principle that military power shall not compel South Vietnam to do what it does not want to do, that man does not belong to the state. This is the deepest conviction of Western Civilization…"
  
• 11/24/1967 Life magazine featured an article by John Connally, "Why Kennedy Went to Texas." He wasn't anxious for JFK to come to Texas, but the President wanted to raise money and mend political fences. "He wanted me...to arrange the trip for him, but for good personal reasons I had been delaying it...The national [Democratic] committee was $4 million in debt and yet Texas...had contributed little since 1960...in the fall of 1962, so unpopular was the Kennedy administration in Texas that my Republican opponent hardly ran against me at all but against Washington." In 62 and early 63 Connally was too busy with this campaign and legislative agenda to worry about a Kennedy trip to Texas. He also worried that he would expend a lot of political capital trying to help JFK, though he wasn't popular with Connally's supporters. The governor says he didn't want a motorcade in Dallas, but JFK's advance men insisted for political reasons, and they released the route to the Dallas newspapers.
  
• 11/27/1967 LBJ announces the Robert McNamara will become head of the World Bank. He makes this announcement without first informing McNamara.
  
• 11/29/1967 Robert McNamara resigned as Defense Secretary, and was chosen by LBJ to head the World Bank. McNamara formally left the Pentagon three months later.
  
• 11/30/1967 Sen. Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota announced he would challenge LBJ in the primaries as a peace candidate. "McCarthy's candidacy was not taken seriously by anyone around the President. It was regarded as a joke, an annoyance. At that time, it was Bob Kennedy...who worried Lyndon Johnson." (Larry O'Brien, No Final Victories)
  
• 12/1967 Harold Edward Holt, CH (5 August 1908 17 December 1967) was an Australian politician and the 17th Prime Minister of Australia. His term as Prime Minister was brought to an early and dramatic end in December 1967 when he disappeared while swimming at Cheviot Beach near Portsea, Victoria, and was presumed drowned.
  
• 12/1967 Ray's story told to William Pepper: "By early December he was short of cash. He called the New Orleans number and the contact suggested he go to New Orleans. Marie Martin, a barmaid at the Sultan Club in the St. Francis Hotel, hooked him up with her cousin, Charles Stein, who wanted a ride to New Orleans and back. Before leaving Los Angeles, Ray dropped Marie Martin and Charles and Rita Stein off at the local George Wallace independent presidential campaign headquarters so they could register to vote. Soon after, Ray and Stein set off. Ray described Stein as a sort of "hippie" type. In New Orleans, Ray checked into the Provincial Motel in the Latin Quarter at Stein's suggestion. He met Raul at Le Bunny Lounge. Raul told him that they would be running guns into Mexico and that Ray could end up in Cuba. There he could book himself passage to anywhere in the world. Raul gave him $500 and said that he would contact him in Los Angeles in a few months."
  
• 12/1967 The official invitation to the New Year's Eve Party at the US Embassy in Saigon read: "Come see the light at the end of the tunnel." (Best and the Brightest, Halberstam)
  
• 12/1967 National Review reacted to Eugene McCarthy's decision to challenge LBJ in the primaries: "Lyndon Johnson's long legs are very firmly wrapped around the Donkey, and nothing short of an A-bomb - somebody else's A-bomb - could knock him off."
  
• 12/1967 Jim Garrison gave a speech about the "rise of the Fourth Reich" in New Mexico. (Los Angeles Free Press 12/22-28/1967)
  
• 12/1967 Supreme Court ruled that wiretapping can be done only with a court order, though it left the door open to the President's need "to protect national-security information against foreign intelligence activities."
  
• 12/1967 Pentagon officials tried to dissuade Fulbright from pressing his Tonkin investigation, claiming that the evidence was solid and hearings would hurt the national interest. Fulbright refuses, and is supported by Sen. Dick Russell. Informants in the Pentagon aid Fulbright's investigation.
  
• 12/1/1967 Senate approved a resolution, by 82-0, calling upon LBJ to seek UN help in ending the war.
  
• 12/1/1967 James Earl Ray enrolls in dance course in Los Angeles, pays $364.
  
• 12/2/1967 Six Seconds In Dallas was previewed by The Saturday Evening Post, which featured the book's jacket on its December 2, 1967 cover along with the headline "Major New Study Shows Three Assassins Killed Kennedy." An editorial in that issue stated that it had now been "demonstrated fairly conclusively that the Warren Commission was wrong."
  
• 12/6/1967 Rothermel warned H.L. Hunt not to go to New Orleans because he might be "arrested or subpoenaed. On the basis of my discussion he called McConnell with [Sen. Russell] Long's office." (Rothermel memo, The Man Who Knew Too Much 591)
  
• 12/8/1967 Anti-war protestors in NYC tried to shut down the army induction center; among the hundreds arrested were Dr. Benjamin Spock and poet Allen Ginsburg. This was part of a week-long nationwide "Stop the Draft" movement organized by 40 antiwar groups.
  
• 12/9/1967 Jim Garrison announced that "the federal government knowingly participated in framing Lee Oswald. Lyndon Johnson had to know this." ("Face to Face with Murphy Martin," WFAA-TV, Dallas)
  
• 12/11/1967 Jim Garrison instructs his chief assistant, Jim Alcock, to prepare a complete case on the possibility that David Ferrie committed suicide by take an overdose of Proloid. Garrison is equally adamant about CIA involvement and complains about news coverage of his investigation. In a letter to a Dallas man, Garrison says that the press was never critical "until we stumbled across the fact that the federal investigation of President Kennedy's assassination was fraudulent." He goes on to say that "our federal government has reached a stage of such concentrated power that it is able to influence most of the media to do whatever it wishes." AC Vol. 1, Issue 3
  
• 12/11/1967 After researcher Allan Chapman convinced him that there was a gunman inside a storm drain, Jim Garrison told the New York Times that the head shot came from "a sewer manhole," fired by a gunman with a .45 caliber pistol. (New York Times 12/11/1967)
  
• 12/11/1967 Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, a Stanley Kramer film about an interracial romance, is released. It stars Sidney Poitier, Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracey. It is Tracey's last film.
  
• 12/12/1967 Walt Rostow was quoted in Look magazine about the communists in Vietnam: "Their casualties are going up at a rate they cannot sustain…I see light at the end of the tunnel."
  
• 12/14 or 15/1967 James Earl Ray cancelled an appointment with a psychologist, explaining that he had to meet his brother in New Orleans about a job. Ray called Jerry twice on his way to New Orleans. (American Assassins p247)
  
• 12/14/1967 The film In Cold Blood, directed by Richard Brooks and based on the Truman Capote book, is released. It deals with "motiveless murder" and young men who commit crimes due to feelings of personal worthlessness and sexual inadequacy.
  
• 12/15/1967 James Earl Ray and another man, Charles Stein, take a car trip from California to New Orleans. Ray meets with someone in New Orleans and receives money on the trip.
  
• 12/18/1967 Gen. Wheeler, in a speech to the Detroit Economic Club, warned that Hanoi might attempt a last-gasp offensive.
  
• 12/20/1967 Jim Garrison files a bill of information in New Orleans, charging that Edgar Eugene Bradley did "willfully and unlawfully conspire with others to murder John F. Kennedy." In October of this year, former Deputy Sheriff Roger Craig identified Bradley as a man in Dealey Plaza after the assassination of JFK who was posing as a SS agent. California Governor Ronald Reagan refuses to extradite Bradley. Bradley gives Reagan an affidavit stating that he was in El Paso at the time of the assassination.
  
• 12/21/1967 James Earl Ray returns to Los Angeles and tells his dancing instructor that he had just returned from visiting his brother in Louisiana. An anonymous witness later testified that Jerry had told him that he had been in New Orleans with his brother the third week of December.
  
• 12/22/1967 LBJ said in a speech about the war: "The enemy...knows that he has met his master in the field."
  
• 12/22/1967 The New Orleans States-Item reports that Jim Garrison, responding to Eugene Bradley's alibi says: "Our evidence indicates that he was in Dallas. Furthermore, I think I can say with assurance that the Federal government and the Federal investigative agencies know he was in Dallas and know precisely what he was doing."
  
• 12/22/1967 NY Times quoted Mac Bundy: "We had contingent drafts [of the Tonkin Gulf Resolution]...for some time prior [to August 1964]...We had always anticipated...the possibility that things might take a more drastic turn at any time and that it would be wise to seek an affirmation of the desires of and the intent of the Congress. But that is normal planning. I am not sure that my drafts were even known to others."
  
• 12/24/1967 LBJ ended a four-and-a-half day trip around the globe, visiting Australia, Thailand, South Vietnam, Pakistan, Rome (where he met with the Pope).
  
• 12/26/1967 L.A. District Attorney Eville J. Younger ordered Edgar Eugene Bradley's arrest, saying: "this does not indicate any opinion on our part as to the validity of the charge or the guilt or innocence of Mr. Bradley."
  
• 12/26/1967 Jim Garrison said in a press conference that President Johnson "must have known by the time of the arrest that Oswald did not pull the trigger." And that "President Johnson is currently the most active person in the country in protecting the assassins of John Kennedy."
  
• 12/27/1967 Josiah Thompson is interviewed on William O'Connell's radio show.
  
• 12/28/1967 Richard Nixon takes a trip to Key Biscayne. Three weeks from now, he will return home, having made what he tells his daughter Julie is "the most important decision of my life." He will run for president again.
  
• 12/29/1967 Jim Garrison announced that at Dallas, on Nov. 22, 1963, ''for the first time in American history, a coup d'etat had occurred, resulting in the carefully planned execution of a President of the United Statues …"
  
• 12/30/1967 New York Times article sited an old Army Medical Board Report saying that from 1950-1955 Jim Garrison had undergone treatment for a "severe and disabling psychoneurosis" that had "interfered with his social and professional adjustment to a marked degree. He is considered totally incapacitated from the standpoint of military duty and moderately incapacitated in civilian adaptability." Garrison responded that the Army had misdiagnosed the amoebic dysentery he was suffering from.
  
• 12/30/1967 Drew Pearson: "During the bugging or lobbyist Fred Black's hotel suite the FBI got an electronic earful about some of Washington's most prominent personalities,'' the columnist reported on December 30, 1967. There were titillating tidbits about everyone from Lyndon Johnson to the arch foe of eavesdropping himself, Sen. Ed Long … In their reports to J. Edgar Hoover, the G-men described the bedroom scenes with stilted rectitude. They carefully omitted all cuss words and merely substitute profane' or obscene' in their place..."
  
• 12/31/1967 US military personnel in Vietnam: 485,600; 16,021 killed to date (9,419 in this year alone). In 1967, there were 108,000 air sorties and 226,000 tons of bombs dropped on the North. Meanwhile, between 1965 and 1967, communist infiltration into the South increased from 35,000 in '65 to 90,000 in '67. According to the World Almanac of the Vietnam War, South Vietnamese regular forces number 200,000; VC/North Vietnamese regular forces number around 250,000 with at least as many in irregular units; since Feb 1965 1.5 million tons of bombs have been dropped on North and South Vietnam, and it is estimated that these attacks have cut North Vietnam's electrical-generating capacity by 85%; during this year alone, the US has lost 328 planes over North Vietnam; the US lost 9353 dead this year and 99,742 wounded; the US and South Vietnamese claimed to have killed 90,400 enemy soldiers and some 25,000 enemy civilians in 1967.
  
• 12/31/1967 Los Angeles Times quoted Nixon: "This is a terribly costly war...This cost can be justified if the war is about the United States and not just Vietnam. From a strategic standpoint, if the Communists won we would have the world cut in half. It's not worth killing American boys to have Vietnam have free elections."