Deep Politics Timeline

[Tracy Riddle]

• 11/1/1968 US launched Accelerated Pacification Campaign to expand Saigon's control over South Vietnamese territory before peace talks, with might have led to a "cease-fire in place," were held with the Communists. The results were mixed.
  
• 11/1/1968 The Distant Drummer (Philadelphia) quoted conspiracy researcher Mark Lane as saying that Jim Garrison "has substantially solved the assassination conspiracy....I've seen the evidence; I've talked to the witnesses."
  
• 11/1/1968 The new Motion Picture Association of America rating system goes into effect.
  
• 11/3/1968 LBJ told David Wise he thought that JFK had give the go-ahead for the coups that led to the deaths of Diem and Trujillo. (New York Times Magazine)
  
• 11/5/1968 Presidential election: Richard Nixon received 43.3% (31.7 million votes, 301 electoral; 2.5 million fewer votes than in 1960), Humphrey 42.7% (31.2 or 30.8 million votes, 191 electoral), Wallace 13.5% (9.9 million votes, 46 electoral); Henning Blomen (Socialist-Labor) 52,591 votes; Other 189,977. Voter turnout was 61.9%. Democrats still controlled Congress (he was the first president in 120 years to be newly-elected with the opposition controlling both houses.) Barry Goldwater won back his seat in the Senate. Newcomers include Sens. Alan Cranston, Robert Dole, Bob Packwood, Richard Schweiker. Shirley Chisholm (D-NY) is first black woman elected to Congress. Sen. Wayne Morse lost his re-election bid. This was the first time in US history that the people had switched administrations (as well as parties) during a war. In his victory speech Nixon pledged "to bring the American people together." Critics in his party blamed him for blowing a big lead over Humphrey and destroying any possibility of electing a GOP Congress that year. 60% voter turnout. The two parties spent a total of $100 million on the presidential race. Turnout stayed below 60 percent during the eight presidential elections after.
  
• 11/5/1968 LBJ says to an aide: "Tell Edgar Hoover that I have taken care of him since the beginning of my administration, and now that I am leaving, I expect him to take care of me ....There will be any number of crackpots trying to get at me after January 20, 1969."
  
• 11/5/1968 Warren Hinckle was the publisher of Ramparts Magazine, a leftist journal that published several articles alleging a conspiracy to kill Kennedy. The folks at Ramparts were certainly no fans of the Military-Industrial Complex, but when Jim Garrison started fingering the aerospace industry as assassination conspirators, even Hinckle was a bit bemused. Here is Hinckle's account of a November 5, 1968, conversation: "The caller was in no mood to inquire about the weather. "This is urgent," Jim Garrison said. "Can you take this in your mailroom? They'd never think to tap the mailroom extension." . . . Garrison began talking when I picked up the mailroom extension: "This is risky, but I have little choice. It is imperative that I get this information to you now. Important new evidence has surfaced. Those Texas oilmen do not appear to be involved in President Kennedy's murder in the way we first thought. It was the Military-Industrial Complex that put up the money for the assassination -- but as far as we can tell, the conspiracy was limited to the aerospace wing. I've got the names of three companies and their employees who were involved in setting up the President's murder. Do you have a pencil?" I wrote down the names of the three defense contractors -- Garrison identified them as Lockheed, Boeing, and General Dynamics -- and the names of those executives in their employ whom the District Attorney said had been instrumental in the murder of Jack Kennedy. I also logged a good deal of information about a mysterious minister who was supposed to have crossed the border into Mexico with Lee Harvey Oswald shortly before the assassination; the man wasn't a minister at all, Garrison said, but an executive with a major defense supplier, in clerical disguise. I knew little about ministers crossing the Rio Grande with Oswald -- but after several years of fielding the dizzying details of the Kennedy assassination, I had learned to leave closed Pandora's boxes lie; I didn't ask. I said that I had everything down, and Garrison said a hurried goodbye: "It's poor security procedure to use the phone, but the situation warrants the risk. Get this information to Bill Turner. He'll know what to do about the minister. I wanted you to have this, in case something happens . . . ." (Hinckle, If You Have a Lemon, Make Lemonade, 198-9)
  
• 11/6/1968 On a TV talk show, Theodore White and Walter Cronkite were discussing the election, and White spoke of voting fraud in Texas and Illinois. John Connally called up the program and criticized White's charges.
  
• 11/6/1968 Students at San Francisco State College began a strike demanding a Third World studies department and an open admissions policy. The strike lasted 5 months.
  
• 11/7/1968 Robert J. Donovan commented that Nixon would probably ignore the conservatives in his party and work with the liberals. (Los Angeles Times)
  
• 11/8/1968 Joseph Kraft, in his column, recommended that Nixon abandon "partisanship for a genuine move toward coalition with major elements of what is still the major party in the country - the Democrats."
  
• 11/8/1968 REAGAN RULES TO FREE-BRADLEY- DENIES EXTRADITION OF ACCUSED CONSPIRATOR AGAINST JFK NOVEMBER 8, 1968; SACRAMENTO - Governor Ronald Reagan became the first public official to free a man legally accused with the crime of unlawful conspiracy to assassinate President John F, Kennedy. The man is free without having had a trial to determine his guilt or innocence. Last Friday, the Governor ruled to deny the State of Louisiana's request to extradite Edgar Eugene Bradley.
  
• 11/10/1968 Russell Kirk commented that Nixon owed no one any favors, and could be a president of all the people: "If ever a President was free to lead the people, unfettered by promises to special interests, Richard Nixon is that man." (Santa Ana Register)
  
• 11/11/1968 Nixon and his wife lunched with LBJ, Rusk, Helms, Clifford, Wheeler, and Rostow for an impromptu foreign policy briefing. Nixon asked LBJ why he had kept so many Kennedy appointees instead of replacing them with his own people. Johnson explained that he hadn't done so out of loyalty to JFK. (White House Diary)
  
• 11/11/1968 James Earl Ray's defense will depict him as a decoy and the "dupe of a communist or possibly a Black Nationalist conspiracy." (Newsweek 11/11/68, p.92)
  
• 11/12/1968 Supreme Court voids Arkansas law banning teaching of evolution in public schools.
  
• 11/12/1968 Look magazine publishes William Bradford Huie article on James Earl Ray: "The Story of James Earl Ray and the Conspiracy to Kill Martin Luther King."
  
• 11/14/1968 Draft card burning occured in many cities and campuses for "National Turn in Your Draft Card Day."
  
• 11/15/1968 Nixon met with Richard Helms and told him he wanted him to stay on as director of the CIA.
  
• 11/16/1968 NYT: Since last July Cambodia has been holding eleven American crewmen from an Army river supply vessel that strayed inadvertently into Cambodian territory....Cambodia has finally recognized the two-sided nature of the border incidents and has asked the International Control Commission to investigate the Communist incursions that provoked allied attacks across the border.
  
• 11/16/1968 An unknown person was shot and killed while trying to escape into West Berlin. This turned out to be the final "original Wall" shooting, as replacement of the tossed-together barriers of 1961 with the scientifically thought out system of obstacles known as the "modern Wall" -- which lasted until 1989 -- was underway, making escapes clearly riskier than ever.
  
• 11/17/1968 Former Ike adviser Arthur Larson advised Nixon to govern from the center, in a moderate-to-liberal, bipartisan manner. (Los Angeles Times)
  
• 11/18/1968 Newsweek reported that Nixon might name Daniel Patrick Moynihan to the cabinet. Privately, Arthur Burns warned Nixon that bringing Moynihan into the administration was a bad idea. Nixon never really had a clear idea what he wanted to do with liberal Democratic intellectual. (Nixon in the White House p16)
  
• 11/19/1968 Nixon and his aides began receiving the same CIA information that LBJ was getting each day.
  
• 11/22/1968 An episode of Star Trek is not shown in many parts of the South because it depicts Captain Kirk and Lt. Uhura (who is black) kissing.
  
• 11/22/1968 Right-winger preacher Rev. Billy James Hargis supported Nixon, because Sen. Joe McCarthy had once told him, "Be slow to criticize Dick Nixon. I know him. He is one of the best friends that I have in Congress. He is as anti-Communist as I am…If Nixon can ever get rid of the Eisenhower influence, he will be a good president." (11/22/68 Weekly Crusader newsletter)
  
• 11/25/1968 James J. Kilpatrick commented in his column, "Nixon is getting tons of bad advice these days: He is being urged to turn to the left in his polices and appointments...What's the left done for him lately? And how is it conceived that he owes some 'debt' to Nelson Rockefeller?...Of course, Nixon will go generally to the right. His own deepest instincts will not let him go anywhere else." According to Evans and Novak, Nixon and his aides had spent little time putting together a detailed plan for governing, and so Nixon had no clear-cut agenda as he prepared to take office. (Nixon in the White House)
  
• 11/25/1968 Herb Klein, designated as Communications Director for the new administration, told the press that "truth will become the hallmark of the Nixon Administration." (NYT 11/26)
  
• 11/25-26/1968 Sirhan was given a battery of psychological tests by Dr. Martin M. Schorr. He deterimed that Sirhan had "paranoid psychosis," and "By killing Kennedy, Sirhan kills his father, takes his father's place as the heir to his mother."
  
• 11/26/1968 Look article by Huie on James Earl Ray: "I Got Involved Gradually and Didn't Know Anybody Was to Be Murdered."
  
• 11/26/1968 South Vietnamese government agreed to participate in peace talks.
  
• 11/1968 Gov. Reagan refused to extradite Edgar Eugene Bradley to New Orleans because Jim Garrison had failed to produce any witnesses to substantiate the charges against him.
  
• 12/2/1968 Nixon announced that he was appointing Henry Kissinger as Assistant for National Security Affairs.
  
• 12/4/1968 Nixon talked on the phone with Earl Warren. They agreed he should stay on until the end of the term in June.
  
• 12/11/1968 Unemployment is at 3.3%, the lowest in 15 years.
  
• 12/12/1968 NY Times commented that "as a group Mr. Nixon's men bear a much closer resemblance to the Kennedy-Johnson team they replace than to the Eisenhower Republican team..." The Washington Post also approved of Nixon's people so far.
  
• 12/12/1968 Ethel Kennedy gave birth to her 11th child, Rory Elizabeth Katharine Kennedy, whom she had been carrying when RFK was shot.
  
• 12/13/1968 LBJ commented that he had a "good opinion" of the people Nixon had picked for his administration. (UPI)
  
• 12/13/1968 Starting today and for the next ten years, Brazil lived under AI-5 (Ato Institucional No. 5Institutional Act Number 5), a presidential decree that suspended the constitution, disbanded Congress, and created the so-called previous censorship all in the name of "the defense of the necessary interests of the nation."
  
• Mid-December 1968 West Germany (BRD) calls for the assembly to select a Federal president for 5 Mar 1969 in West Berlin. Soviets and the East Germans (GDR) strenuously protest this as a "great provocation" since they do not consider West Berlin to be a part of the BRD. TASS, the Soviet news agency, reports that east bloc military maneuvers will take place in March, involving the Soviet and GDR armies. The GDR Interior Minister (in charge of police and internal security) says that he will ban Federal assembly members from the surface routes to West Berlin. Traffic is stopped on the Berlin-Helmstedt autobahn. The Soviets threaten the air routes. The western Allies assert their rights to protect West Berlin's integration with the legal, commercial and finance systems of West Germany.
  
• 12/15/1968 One of the reasons The Smothers Brother's Comedy Hour was cancelled was a show that aired on this date. During an appearance by Jefferson Airplane, Grace Slick, wearing blackface, raised her fist in a black power salute after singing "Crown of Creation."
  
• 12/16/1968 Sen. Fulbright formally ends Tonkin inquiry with release of a volume of supplementary documents.
  
• 12/16/1968 LAPD's Lt. Hernandez wrote a final report on the polygraph examination of Sandra Serrano. The report was addressed to Captain Hugh Brown, Homicide Division Commander. The final paragraphs of the report relate that Miss Serrano was interrogated extensively and she finally admitted that the story about the girl in the polka dot dress and gunshots was not true. Of course Serrano had consistently maintained that while she had heard sounds she assumed were car backfires, she never stated that they were gunshots and in fact consistently denied that she would even know what a gun shot sounded like. The reference to gun shots was an addition by FBI and police investigators, not Serrano, so representing that she had admitted they were not gun shots was misleading at best. Another element introduced to discredit Serrano was the fact that an LAPD fire department Captain had made rounds checking stairways and exits and had not seen Serrano on the flight of stairs in question. A close reading of Serrano's many interviews shows that she certainly was not constantly on the stairs but rather in a downstairs room, watching TV for a period of time, then returning upstairs and finally sitting on the stairs for a time. During the course of the interviews that period of time seems to be extended by her questioners, but the simple fact is that there is nothing to confirm that the Fire Captain had observed her location during the specific time frame in question, since the time frame itself was impossible to determine with any exact precision. The report goes on to state that she admitted that she had no personal knowledge of a woman in a polka dot dress and that she stated that she had heard that from a kid in the police holding area. "...she heard a kid making reference to a girl in a polka dot dress. She talked to the young man and each of them inquired of each other concerning the description of the dress and the girl. According to Miss Serrano, there must have been a mutual agreement between them as to the description of the girl and the polka dot dress."
  
• 12/16/1968 Paul Rothermel reported in a memo to the Hunts that "Garrison has, over the weekend, fired William Wood (also known as William Boxley) on the grounds of Boxley being a CIA agent. I am told that Boxley's theory is that H.L. Hunt was the key man in the assassination of President Kennedy, and that he has others underneath Mr. Hunt on a chart. I am making efforts to get this chart...I am reassured by Garrison's staff that he has no intention of embarassing Mr. Hunt." (Man Who Knew too Much 591)
  
• 12/19/1968 FCC commissioner Nicholas Johnson told the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence that children were watching hundreds of incidents of violence on television every week. He also complained about the amount of advertising children saw, which taught them that "the single measure of happiness and personal satisfaction is consumption."
  
• 12/19/1968 Nixon bought two houses at Key Biscayne.
  
• 12/19/1968 Aristotle Onassis, dining with Yannis Georgakis at his Glyfada villa, gets a call from his secretary in London informing him that a man has called on Onassis's private line to say that a bomb has been placed aboard the evening Olympic flight out of Kennedy International Airport to Athens - the flight on which Jackie Onassis, her two children, and four friends are booked to fly to Greece for the Christmas holidays. The aircraft is turned back just as it is taxiing toward the takeoff runway. The flight is delayed more than four hours while the NYPD bomb squad checks the plane and every piece of luggage. No bomb is found. Nevertheless, since Jackie's booking had been a closely guarded secret - until she arrived in the VIP lounge, only her own Secret Service people and the Olympic operations manager knew that she would be flying out of New York that evening - the incident alarms Aristotle because it exposes a serious breach of security. (Nemesis)
  
• 12/21/1968 Apollo 8 mission: first manned test of Saturn V rocket; Borman, Lovell and Anders made ten orbits around the moon.
  
• 12/21/1968 Kissinger receives his first formal CIA briefing. Mitchell, Eagleburger and Andy Goodpaster were also present; they asked the briefers difficult, probing questions, and were not satisfied with many of the answers.
  
• 12/22/1968 The crew of the Pueblo was released.
  
• 12/23/1968 In an interview conducted on behalf of the Johnson Library, Leon Jaworski, Special Counsel to the State of Texas during its inquiry, explained the circumstances of the WC's creation: "Here and in Europe were all kinds of speculations, you know, that this was an effort to get rid of Kennedy and put Johnson in, and a lot of other things. So he immediately called on Waggoner Carr, who was Attorney General of Texas, to go ahead and conduct a Court of Inquiry in Texas." That Johnson would call on Texans with right-wing political affiliations to investigate a crime many suspected was committed by Texans with right-wing political affiliations was not lost on Jaworski, who clearly saw the need for something with a more national flavor. In his memoir Confession and Avoidance, Jaworski, who met with Johnson in Washington a few days after the assassination, describes the circumstances of their meeting as follows: "a problem had developed. The city was seething with rumors and accusations surrounding John Kennedy's death. Some sources in Europe had jumped on the story that Johnson himself had disposed of Kennedy in order to ascend to the presidency. Any investigation that was localized in Texas would be, to put it gently, under suspicion."
  
• 12/27/1968 After a six-day orbital flight around the moon, the Apollo 8 mission returns to Earth.
  
• 12/27/1968 US agrees to sell 50 F-4 Phantom jets to Israel.
  
• 12/28/1968 In response to an attack in an El Al jet in Athens, on the night of December 28, 1968, Israeli commandos mounted a surprise attack on the airport and destroyed 13 aircraft belonging to the Lebanese carriers, Middle East Airlines (Air Liban had merged with MEA by this time), Trans Mediterranean Airways, and Lebanese International Airways. This caused serious devastation to the Lebanese aviation industry. Middle East Airlines managed to rebound quickly, but Lebanese International Airways went bankrupt and its employees were transferred to MEA.
  
• 12/28/1968 Black Panther Headquarters in Jersey City is firebombed by "two white men wearing police-style uniforms."
  
• 12/31/1968 US military personnel in Vietnam: 536,000, with 65,600 Allied troops; 30,610 US troops killed to date. US prime rate of interest: 6.3%. Minimum wage raised to $1.60 an hour.
  
• 12/1968 Nixon Aide Receives Martial Law Proclamations As President-elect Nixon's staffers set up shop in the White House, one of Nixon's aides, John Ehrlichman, is visited by an old college classmate, outgoing Deputy Attorney General Warren Christopher. Ehrlichman later recalls the visit: "He arrived in my office with a big package of documents and suggested we keep them at hand all the time. They were proclamations to be filled in. You could fill in the name of the city and the date and the president would sign it and declare martial law." [Reeves, 2001, pp. 14]