Deep Politics Timeline

[Tracy Riddle]

• 7/1968 Recorded in Nixon, A Life, by Jonathan Aitken, notes of Patrick Hillings, the former congressman accompanying the candidate's 1967 trip to Taipei, Nixon interjected just after an unexpected encounter with Anna Chennault "Get her away from me, Hillings, she's a chatterbox." Yet according to records of President Lyndon B. Johnson's secret monitoring of South Vietnamese officials and his political foes, Anna Chennault played a crucial role on behalf of the Nixon campaign which attempted to sabotage the 1968 Paris peace talks which could have ended the Vietnam War. She arranged the contact with South Vietnamese Ambassador Bui Diem whom Richard Nixon met in secret in July 1968 in New York. It was through Chennault's intercession that the Nixon campaign advised Saigon to refuse participation in the talks, promising a better deal once elected. Records of FBI wiretaps show that Chennault phoned Bui Diem on November 2 with the message "hold on, we are gonna win." "The tactic worked', in that the South Vietnamese junta withdrew from the talks on the eve of the election, thereby destroying the peace initiative on which the Democrats had based their campaign. "Before the elections President Johnson "suspected (…) Richard Nixon, of political sabotage that he called treason". In part because Nixon won the presidency, no one was ever prosecuted for this alleged crime.
  
• 7/1/1968 US, USSR and UK sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), followed by dozens of other nations. In Moscow, 36 nations, including the US and UK, sign a Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, forbidding efforts to help non-nuclear nations develop such systems. LBJ then announced that the US and USSR had agreed to begin talks "in the nearest future" on the limitation and reduction of offensive nuclear missiles and antimissile systems.
  
• 7/3/1968 During LAPD Sgt. Hernandez' polygraph testing of Jerry Owen, Hernandez says: "I've talked to twenty three people that say they saw a girl in the polka dot dress. They are all--they're all fibbing." (Tape #29272, July 3, 1968; Lt.Hernandez of SUS interrogation of Jerry Owen, page 46 of transcript).
  
• 7/4/1968 John Wayne's film The Green Berets is released. The only pro-Vietnam film to be released by a major Hollywood studio, it is widely panned by critics but does well at the box office.
  
• 7/4/1968 Beginning of Soviet-led military exercizes in Sumava, aimed at strengthening the hand of anti-reformist forces in Czechoslovakia.
  
• 7/8/1968 A former roommate of Dave Ferrie's, Raymond Broshears, said on a Los Angeles TV show that Ferrie was involved in the plot to kill JFK.
  
• 7/11/1968 In a press conference Garrison named the "shooting points" as the TSBD, Dal-Tex building and grassy knoll. There was no longer any mention of a gunman in the sewer. (Times-Picayune 7/13/1968)
  
• 7/12/1968 The Times-Picayune repoted: Jim Garrison accused much of the national media of being part of a "CIA-inspired campaign" against him. When part of Epstein's Counterplot was first published in The New Yorker in July 1968, Garrison responded in his customary style. Calling a press conference, the District Attorney announced that an "intelligence agency of a foreign country . . . successfully penetrated the assassination operation," and that the "detailed information" he had received from this unnamed intelligence agency had "corroborated" statements he had previously made that President Kennedy was assassinated "by elements of the Central Intelligence Agency." This was a veiled reference to the manuscript of Farewell America he had received.
  
• 7/13/1968 Edward Jay Epstein broke with Garrison and published an article critical of him in the July 13, 1968 issue of The New Yorker. That article then produced a CIA dispatch dated July 19, 1968, again to "Chiefs, Certain Stations and Bases." It included a copy of the New Yorker article, with instructions that it could be used "to brief interested contacts, especially government and other political leaders and to demonstrate to assets (which you may assign to counter [anti-U.S. attacks]) that there is no hard evidence of any such conspiracy."
  
• 7/14/1968 Five days after former intelligence agent Joe Cooper offers to testify for Jim Garrison, he and his wife are seriously injured in an automobile wreck in which it is claimed that the automobile's "steering post came loose."
  
• 7/15/1968 Representatives of the Communist parties of the USSR, Hungary, Poland, East Germany and Bulgaria meet in Warsaw. They send a strongly worded diplomatic note warning the new Czechoslovak leaders that "the situation in Czechoslovakia jeopardizes the common vital interests of other socialist countries."
  
• 7/16/1968 Abe Fortas, Johnson's nominee for Supreme Court Chief Justice, begins confirmation testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee (the first time this has ever been done).
  
• 7/17/1968 The Ba'ath party comes to power in Iraq in a bloodless coup, led by Saddam Hussein, Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr, and the right-wing of the Baath party. al-Bakr became puppet president for Hussein, who called the shots as vice-president.
  
• 7/18/1968 David Hirst in Beirut (The Guardian): In the first major Arab coup since the June war, Iraqi armed forces in the name of the Revolution Command Council this morning overthrew the regime of President Aref. The new President is Hassan Al-Bakr, a retired general and leader of a moderate form of Ba'athism. According to Bagdad Radio, the coup was a bloodless one, although first-aid teams were reported to have been instructed, in error, to report for duty. President Aref has been expelled from the country and may be on his way to London to join his wife. The Prime Minister General Taher Yahya and his Government have been dismissed. There have been changes in the military high command, the curfew is still in force and airports are closed, but the new rulers seem to have the situation well in hand. The customary cables of support are flowing in from army units throughout the country. For several years political power in Iraq has been built on the shifting alliances of many rival factions - Nasserists, Ba'athists, Iraqi nationalists and independents of one kind and another. Sometimes the factions have managed - or rather the army officers who dominate them have managed - by bargaining among themselves to bring about changes of Government tolerable, although not very attractive, to most of the parties concerned. But as today's events show, one of these groups, or an alliance of them, grew so frustrated with the way Aref and his Prime Minister monopolised power that they decided to resort to force to get their way. The appointment of Hassan Al-Bakr suggests that the Ba'athists, thought to be the best organised and most cohesive of the groups contending for power, have now come into their own again, but they will be unable to govern the country alone, and they seem to be aware of the fact. There is little doubt that the Ba'athists acted in concert with others, and it is being suggested here that the coup marks the emergence of a new and younger generation of officers who may well prove to have been the real driving force behind it. It is felt that the intemperate way in which the new regime has denounced the corruption and inefficiency of its predecessor reflects the deep disgust of the younger men with their seniors. Significantly, corruption and inefficiency are linked with the Arab defeat of last year. Aref's regime, they said was made up of "opportunists, thieves, illiterate ignorant people, Zionists, agents and spies." In other respects, the new rulers are anything but intemperate. Iraqi Ba'athism of 1968 is very different from that of 1963, when the party, with Al-Bakr himself as Prime Minister, first came to power with the downfall of General Kassem. It also has precious little in common with the wild variety of Ba'athism now practised in Syria. Judging by their first policy statement, the social and political philosophy of the new rulers is moderate and pragmatic. They seem to let little store by hallowed slogans and shibboleths. The word "socialism" is not even mentioned and, for the first time, a new regime has taken over which does not make a point of proclaiming its undying attachment to the principles of the 1958 revolution which overthrew the monarchy. Similarly, there is stress on the need for national unity and for healing the divisions between Iraq's various religious and ethnic communities. A more resolute attempt to settle the Kurdish problem may be in the making. For the first time, too, a new Iraqi regime has not laid claim to a special relationship with Egypt as the nucleus of a greater Arab unity. The concept of "Iraq first" seems to have gained ground. There is no doubt that Nasser and his regime fall within the general target area of the new rulers' indictment of the ills of Arab society, which led to the June defeat. And so, of course do the Syrian Ba'athists. In their denunciation of corruption and inefficiency, the new rulers are bound to strike a sympathetic chord among Iraqi people in general. Under the previous administration, these ailments seemed to have reached prodigious proportions. The Prime Minister had a particularly bad reputation, earning for himself the nickname of "The thief of Bagdad". The feeling that it was inefficiency and corruption which lost the Arabs the June war is also widespread. The dossier may now be opened in earnest - not only for Iraq, but for the Arab world as a whole.
  
• 7/19/1968 CIA memo. "DISPATCH TO: Chiefs, Certain Stations and Bases FROM: Chief SUBJECT: Warren Commission Report: Article on the Investigation Conducted by District Attorney Garrison....We are forwarding herewith a reprint of the article 'A Reporter At Large: Garrison' published in the New Yorker 7/13/1968. It was written by Edward Jay Epstein....It is forwarded primarily for your information and for the information of all Station personnel concerned. If the Garrison investigation should be cited in your area in the context of renewed anti-US attacks, you may use the article to brief interested contacts, especially government and other political leaders, and to demonstrate to assets (which you may assign to counter such attacks) that there is no hard evidence of any such conspiracy." (Destiny Betrayed 321)
  
• 7/19/1968 Ray was formally extradited to the United States
  
• 7/20/1968 In Honolulu, LBJ assures Thieu that US support will continue.
  
• 7/22/1968 James Earl Ray pleads not guilty to murdering MLK.
  
• 7/22/1968 The Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson column on July 22, 1968, stated that Ray was a lone gunman. It began: "It now looks as if the FBI has exploded the generally prevalent theory that the murder of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King involved a conspiracy." The column went on to confirm that the FBI had "found a robbery where Ray probably got his money." It continued, "The FBI has been checking very carefully, and one of the robbers answers the description of James Earl Ray. He had the same long hair, the same height and the same physical makeup."' Thus surfaced -- for the first time -- the Alton, Illinois, bank robbery story. This claim enabled the bureau in 1968 to explain how James covered his living expenses during his period as a fugitive. If he had obtained funds from this source, it could be contended that he had no help from anyone else. (Years later we would learn that not only had Ray nothing to do with this robbery but that there were other prime suspects.)
  
• 7/23-24/1968 Cleveland: a riot was sparked by a gun battle between police and a black militant group; 11 people, included 3 cops, were killed.
  
• 7/26/1968 Time magazine reported Nixon telling a group of GOP congressmen that if he was running for Congress in a tight district, he would vote against foreign aid, but he would support it if he came from a safe district.
  
• 7/27/1968 Freddy Plimpton FBI interview of 27 Jul 1968 about Sirhan: "...his eyes were narrow, the lines on his face were heavy and set and he was completely concentrated on what he was doing."
  
• 7/28/1968 Jackie Kennedy spends her thirty-ninth birthday at Hyannisport. Rose Kennedy has organized a family dinner. This evening, Jackie tells Ted Kennedy that she is going to marry "the Greek " [Aristotle Onassis] in August. Later, Ted calls Onassis and asks for a meeting in order to formulate a prenuptial agreement. Onassis invites him to Skorpios. According to Yannis Georgakis, Onassis offers three million dollars up front for Jackie, plus one million dollars for each of her children; he will be responsible for her expenses so long as the marriage lasts; after his death she will receive $150,000 a year for life, exactly the amount she would have received from the Kennedy trust (which she will have to forfeit if she remarries). Onassis writes out the agreement in longhand. Jackie's counteroffer is for $20 million up front - put forward by her financial adviser, Andre Meyer, head of the investment banking firm of Lazard Freres. (Nemesis)
  
• 7/29-8/1/1968 Negotiations are held between the presidiums of the Czechoslovak and Soviet communist parties in Cierna-nad-Tisou. Dubcek argues that reforms did not endanger the role of the party but built public support. The Soviets do not accept these arguments and sharply criticize the Czechoslovak moves. Threats of invasion are made.
  
• 7/29/1968 In Rome, a Papal Encyclical reaffirms the ban of the use of artificial birth control for Catholics.
  
• 7/31/1968 East Germany, Poland, Hungary and Soviet Union announce that they will hold military exercises near the Czech border.
  
• 8/1/1968 LBJ talked with Mayor Daley, who urged him to attend the upcoming convention. Daley expressed his doubts about continuing the war in Vietnam. (White House Diary)
  
• 8/1/1968 Antonio Veciana begins working as a banking consultant in La Paz, Bolivia. He is officially a US government employee salaried by the Agency for International Development. He claims the job was obtained for him by Maurice Bishop to better position him for anti-Castro activities throughout Latin America. The State Dept later confirms Veciana's statement that he never signed an application for the job. (Fonzi chronology)
  
• 8/2/1968 LBJ visited Eisenhower at Walter Reed Hospital.
  
• 8/2/1968 Time magazine runs an article entitled: "Jolly Green Giant in Wonderland" - still another article critical of Jim Garrison and his investigation into the JFK assassination.
  
• 8/2/1968 Alexander Dubcek stated, "One must frankly point to the good will and the effort of…[our] Soviet friends to understand our problems and also respect…the inalienable right of any party to settle its affairs independently…I was asked on my return [from a meeting with Soviet leaders] to the airport if our sovereignty was threatened. Let me say frankly that it is not." (Prague's 200 Days, Harry Schwartz)
  
• 8/2/1968 Sirhan pleads not guilty to murder of RFK.
  
• 8/3/1968 Billy James Hargis hosted a "debate" in Tulsa between himself and a supposed representative of the liberal establishment, Professor John Redekop (who actually described himself as an anti-communist conservative). The well-attended event also featured Gen. Edwin Walker as a guest. Hargis built up the debate as a great face-off between conservatism and liberalism. But Redekop articulately criticized Christian Crusade for its narrow-minded definition of anti-communism and Christianity and intolerant attitude towards anyone who disagreed with them.
  
• 8/3/1968 "I predict that with the next - within the next two months you will see, hear or read something relating to the Bobby Kennedy assassination that will snap your eyes open ... I've heard rumors about it already ... There's something hot in the wind, I'll tell you that." - Jim Eason, KGO, San Francisco [tape erased; transcript made from tape]
  
• 8/3/1968 A Warsaw Pact meeting (without Romania) is held in Bratislava. The meeting brings about a seeming reconciliation between the Warsaw Pact leaders and the Czechoslovak leadership. Here for the first time, the so-called Brezhnev doctrine of limited sovereigny is announced. Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev receives a handwritten letter from five members of the Czechoslovak Presidium who warn that the socialist order is under threat. They request military intervention.
  
• 8/4/1968 Gov. Spiro Agnew put Nixon's name in nomination at the GOP convention in Miami: "A nation plagued by disorder wants a renewal of order. A nation haunted by crime wants respect for law…If there is one great cry that rings clear, it is the cry for a leader." He endorsed Nixon as the man who "shared in the decisions which shaped for America the Eisenhower era of prosperity, untainted by war, dissension, fear, lawlessness, or the threat of fiscal and moral chaos."
  
• 8/5/1968 At the GOP convention in Miami, Ronald Reagan announces that he will seek the Republican nomination for president. (SF Chronicle 6/9/02) At some point this year Reagan stated that "I would have voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964." (The Last Days of the Late, Great State of California, Curt Gentry, 1968)
  
• 8/8/1968 Richard Nixon and Governor Spiro Agnew are nominated for president and vice president on first ballot by the Republican convention in Miami Beach. (H.L. Hunt had tried to persuade Nixon to pick Gerald Ford as his running mate.) At some point this year, Nixon told Congressman Donald Riegle of Michigan, "You know, Don, if I'm elected we'll end this war in six months." (Truth and Untruth: Political Deceit in America, Paul McCloskey, 1972) During the Republican national convention in Miami, the Paradise Island Casino's company yacht is put at Nixon's disposal. Both Bebe Rebozo and Nixon are friends of James Crosby, chairman of the board of Resorts International, a company that is repeatedly linked to top Mob figures. Rebozo's Key Biscayne Bank, which does a good deal of business with Resorts, is suspected of being a conduit for Mob dollars skimmed from the firm's Paradise Island Casino in the Bahamas. James Crosby also contributes $100,000 to Nixon's presidential primary campaign. Nixon appeared as Crosby's guest at the opening of the casino in January of this year. The previous year, Life had reported that it was to be controlled by "Lansky & Co."
  
• 8/8-10/1968 US killed 72 Vietnamese civilians in an "accidental" attack on a friendly Mekong Delta village.
  
• 8/9/1968 Wall St. Journal's Vermont Royster commented, "Mr. Rockefeller's initial half-hearted campaign seemed only to demonstrate that he expected to lose to Mr. Nixon..It was only after Sen. Robert Kennedy's assassination on June 5 that Mr. Rockefeller's campaign got rolling. By then, only a slim chance existed of stopping Nixon, but Rocky spared nothing..."
  
• 8/9/1968 Raymond Broshears was questioned by Garrison's investigators.
  
• 8/10/1968 Nixon and Agnew receive a foreign policy briefing in Texas by LBJ, Helms, Rusk, and Vance. "Lyndon was courteous and affable - even warm - and both Nixon and Agnew were the same way. I could see that Lyndon had considerable sympathy for Agnew..." (White House Diary) Sometime during the campaign Spiro Agnew pledged that "a Nixon-Agnew administration will abolish the credibility gap and reestablish the truth, the whole truth, as its policy."
  
• 8/13/1968 George Papadopoulis, premier of Greece, was the target of a failed assassination attempt.
  
• 8/15/1968 Hoover memo to Asst Directors; Humphrey wanted to know if the FBI could send a team to the Chicago convention as they had in 1964.
  
• 8/18/1968 The Kremlin decides to invade Czechoslovakia. The commander of Soviet Central Forces, General Aleksandr Mayorov, relates how Soviet Defense Minister Andrei Grechko stated to the assembled Soviet Politburo and military leaders: "the invasion will take place even if it leads to a third world war."
  
• 8/19/1968 Sen. George McGovern joins the presidential race.
  
• 8/20/1968 Gov. Shapiro of Illinois calls in the National Guard for protection at the Democratic Convention.
  
• 8/20/1968 Warsaw Pact night invasion of Czechoslovakia; Soviet, East German, Polish, Bulgarian and Hungarian forces (500,000 troops) occupied the country and deposed Dubcek. Large Soviet garrison remained.
  
• 8/21/1968 Czechoslovakia: 1am State Radio announces invasion by troops from five Warsaw Pact countries. It says the invasion took place without the knowledge of the Czechoslovak authorities. "The Presidium calls upon all citizens of the Republic to keep the peace and not resist the advancing armies , because the defense of our borders is now impossible." The army is given orders to remain in its barracks and not to offer resistance.
  
• 3am Czech Premier Oldrich Cernik, Dubcek, Jozef Smrkovsky and Frantisek Kriegel -- the four leading reformers in Czechoslovak leadership -- are arrested in the Communist Party's Presidium building by Soviet airborne troops. Occupation governments distribute leaflets saying the troops were sent in "to come to the aid of the working class and all the people of Czechoslovak to defend socialist gains."
  
• 5:30 am Tass says that Czechoslovak Party and government officials requested urgent assistance from the Soviet Union and other fraternal countries.
  
• 6 am Svoboda makes radio address calling for calm and for people to go to work as normal.
  
• 8 am Crowds and Soviet troops confront one another on Old Town Square and Wenceslas Square. Tanks appear at the Museum and start firing at nearby buildings and the National museum. Dubcek and other party leaders are flown to Moscow and are compelled to participate in talks with Moscow leadership. They sign a document in which they renounce parts of the reform program and agree to the presence of Soviet troops in Czechoslovakia. Invasion draws condemnation from Western powers as well as communist and socialist parties in the West. U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson calls on Soviets to withdraw from Czechoslovakia.
  
• 8/21/1968 The Soviet news agency Tass explained that "the party and government leaders of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic have asked the Soviet Union and other allied states to render the fraternal Czechoslovak people urgent assistance including assistance with armed forces...Soviet armed units together with armed units of the above-mentioned allied countries entered the territory of Czechoslovakia on 21 August...The actions which are being taken are not directed at any state and in no measure infringe state interests of any body. They serve the purpose of peace."
  
• 8/22/1968 DeLoach memo to Tolson stated that Democratic National Treasurer John Criswell requested a similar FBI operation at the Democratic Convention as in 1964.
  
• 8/23/1968 Svoboda flies to Moscow with large delegation of Czechoslovak Communist leaders to negotiate a solution.
  
• 8/23/1968 Surrounded by reporters, Jerry Rubin, a Yippie leader, folk singer Phil Ochs, and other activists held their own presidential nominating convention with their candidate Pigasus, an actual pig. When the Yippies paraded Pigasus at the Civic Center, ten policemen arrested Rubin, Pigasus, and six others. This resulted in Pigasus becoming a media hit.
  
• 8/24/1968 France tests its first H-bomb in the South Pacific. (Nat Geographic Aug 05)
  
• 8/25/1968 Czechoslovak leaders sign so-called Moscow protocol which renounces parts of the reform program and agrees to the presence of Soviet troops in Czechoslovakia.
  
• 8/26/1968 The 1968 Democratic National Convention was held at the International Amphitheatre in Chicago, Illinois, from August 26 to August 29, 1968.
  
• 8/27/1968 Svoboda returns to Prague with Dubcek, Cernik.
  
• 8/28/1968 In Guatemala, US ambassador John Gordon Mein is killed in an ambush.
  
• 8/28/1968 Democrats adopt a relatively hawkish stand on Vietnam. Humphrey is nominated while antiwar riots go on outside. More than 100 demonstrators and 119 policemen were injured. Chicago: August 28, 1968 came to be known as the day a "police riot" took place. The title of "police riot" came out of the Walker Report, which amassed a great deal of information and eyewitness accounts to determine what happened in Chicago. At approximately 3:30 p.m., a young boy lowered the American flag at a legal rally taking place at Grant Park. The demonstration was made up of 10,000 protestors. The police broke through the crowd and began beating the boy, while the crowd pelted the police with food, rocks, and chunks of concrete. The biggest clash in Chicago took place that day. Police fought with the protestors and vice versa. The chants of the protestors shifted from "Hell no, we won't go" to "Pigs are whores." Tom Hayden, one of the leaders of Students for a Democratic Society, encouraged protestors to move out of the park to ensure that if they were to be tear gassed, the whole city would be tear gassed, and made sure that if blood were spilled in Chicago it would happen throughout the city. The amount of tear gas used to suppress the protestors was so great that it eventually made its way to the Hilton Hotel, where it disturbed Hubert Humphrey while in his shower. The police were taunted by the protestors with chants of "Kill, kill, kill." They sprayed demonstrators and bystanders indiscriminately with Mace. The police assault in front of the Hilton Hotel became the most famous image of the Chicago demonstrations of 1968. The entire event took place live under the T.V. lights for seventeen minutes with the crowd shouting, "The whole world is watching." Meanwhile, in the convention hall, Connecticut Senator Abraham Ribicoff used his nominating speech for George McGovern to tell of the violence going on outside the convention hall, saying that "with George McGovern we wouldn't have Gestapo tactics on the streets of Chicago." Mayor Daley responded to his remark with something that the T.V. sound was not able to pick up, but it was later revealed by lip-readers that Daley had cursed "Fuck you, you Jew son of a bitch! You lousy motherfucker! Go home!" That night, NBC News had been switching back and forth between the demonstrators being beaten by the police to the festivities over Humphrey's victory in the convention hall. It was under the cameras of the convention center, for all of America to see. It was clear that the Democratic party was sorely divided. After the Chicago protests, the demonstrators were confident that the majority of Americans would side with them over what had happened in Chicago, especially because of police behavior. They were shocked to learn that controversy over the war in Vietnam overshadowed their cause. Daley claimed to have received 135,000 letters supporting his actions and only 5000 condemning them. Public opinion polls demonstrated that the majority of Americans supported the Mayor's tactics.
  
• 8/29/1968 Edmund Muskie is chosen as Humphrey's running-mate.
  
• 8/29/1968 Outside the National Democratic Convention in Chicago, more than 100 anti-war demonstrators (including elderly persons, children, and reporters) are punched, beaten, gassed and maced by Mayor Richard Daley's riot police.
  
• 8/30/1968 Chicago police raid the offices of McCarthy.
  
• 8/31/1968 Czechoslovakia: 14th Party Congress declared invalid, as required by the Moscow protocol. Censorship is reintroduced in the country.
  
• 8/1968 LBJ's popularity rating was 35%. A Gallup Poll showed that 46% of Americans felt that "big government" was the "biggest threat to the country." Only 14% had felt that way in 1959.