Deep Politics Timeline

[Tracy Riddle]

• 5/1970 Richard E. Sprague published the tramp arrest photos from Dealey Plaza in Computers and Automation magazine in May 1970. They had already been published in Penn Jones' book Forgive My Grief.
  
• 5/1970 A Gallup poll in May shows that 56% of the public believed that sending troops to Vietnam was a mistake.
  
• 5/1/1970 This night, at Kent State University in Ohio, a riot resulted in the ROTC building being torched. Gov. James Rhodes declared martial law at the University and sent in elements of the National Guard.
  
• 5/2/1970 Haig Orders Four More Wiretaps When the press reports the secret US-led invasion of Cambodia (see April 24-30, 1970) and the subsequent massive air strikes in that country, Alexander Haig, the military aide to National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger, notes that New York Times reporter William Beecher has been asking some suspiciously well-informed questions about the operation. Beecher's latest story also alerts Defense Secretary Melvin Laird to the bombings (Laird, whom Kissinger considers a hated rival, has been kept out of the loop on the bombings). Haig tells the FBI he suspects a "serious security violation" has taken place, and receives four new wiretaps: on Beecher; Laird's assistant Robert Pursley; Secretary of State William Rogers's assistant Richard Pederson; and Rogers's deputy, William Sullivan. [Reeves, 2001, pp. 212]
  
• 5/3/1970 Oil pipeline from Saudi Arabia to the Mediterranean Sea interrupted in Syria, creating all-time tanker rate highs from June to December. [In hindsight, this launched the Energy Crisis as an issue, as it demonstrated how easily Middle Eastern countries could gain attention or actual advantages by pressure on oil supplies. Not much later, these issues were to overlap into German events.]
  
• 5/4/1970 Wiretap placed on Beecher; it was removed 2/10/1971. Wiretap placed on William Sullivan (dep. asst for East Asian affairs); removed 2/10/1971. Wiretap placed on Richard Pederson (a State Dept employee), and a second tap placed on Pursley; both were ended 2/10/1971.
  
• 5/4/1970 Soviet PM Kosygin, in a public news conference, criticized Nixon for sending troops into Cambodia.
  
• 5/4/1970 At Ohio's Kent State University, National Guardsmen fire into a crowd of students protesting the Vietnam War, killing four and wounding eight others. J. Edgar Hoover privately says: "The students invited and got what they deserved." Upon hearing the news, Richard Nixon asks H. R. Haldeman, "Are they dead?" The guardsmen had been called in by Kent's mayor because of a night of rioting by drunken students and by Ohio's Governor. None of the four students who were killed were radicals. The Nixon administration's casual reaction to the shooting further enraged the students and campus violence escalated. The incident would inspire Neil Young to write the song "Ohio."
  
• 5/5/1970 Nationwide student strike protested the Kent State incident.
  
• 5/5-6/1970 More than 100 universities and colleges across the US are shut down by striking students. Gov. Reagan closes down the entire California university and college system until 5/11.
  
• 5/7/1970 Police informant William Somersett dies in Goldsboro, NC after a long illness. He is 68 years old.
  
• 5/7/1970 By the middle of this month, Aristotle Onassis is revisiting his former mistress, Maria Callas - spending almost a week with her in her Paris apartment. He has told his wife, Jackie: "I will do exactly as I please."
  
• 5/8/1970 More than 250 State Dept employees sign a letter to Sec of State Rogers protesting the Cambodia invasion.
  
• 5/8/1970 Earl Warren attended church services memorializing the dead students at Kent State.
  
• 5/8/1970 The Chicago Seven are freed with all charges against them dropped.
  
• 5/8/1970 Ten days after Nixon announced the Cambodian invasion (and 4 days after the Kent State shootings), 100,000 protesters gathered in Washington and another 150,000 in San Francisco. Nationwide, students turned their anger on what was often the nearest military facilitycollege and university Reserve Officers' Training Corps (ROTC) offices. All told, 30 ROTC buildings went up in flames or were bombed. There were violent clashes between students and police at 26 schools and National Guard units were mobilized on 21 campuses in 16 states. For the most part, however, the protests were peaceful if often tense. Students at New York University, for example, hung a banner out of a window which read "They Can't Kill Us All." The protests and strikes had a dramatic impact, and convinced many Americans, particularly within the administration of President Richard Nixon, that the nation was on the verge of insurrection. Ray Price, Nixon's chief speechwriter from 196974, recalled the Washington demonstrations saying, "The city was an armed camp. The mobs were smashing windows, slashing tires, dragging parked cars into intersections, even throwing bedsprings off overpasses into the traffic down below. This was the quote, student protest. That's not student protest, that's civil war." Not only was Nixon taken to Camp David for two days for his own protection, but Charles Colson (Counsel to President Nixon from 1969 to 1973) stated that the military was called up to protect the administration from the angry students, he recalled that "The 82nd Airborne was in the basement of the executive office building, so I went down just to talk to some of the guys and walk among them, and they're lying on the floor leaning on their packs and their helmets and their cartridge belts and their rifles cocked and you're thinking, 'This can't be the United States of America. This is not the greatest free democracy in the world. This is a nation at war with itself.'" Anti-war students marched through Wall Street, where Mayor Lindsay had ordered the flag at City Hall to fly at half-staff in honor of the students killed at Kent State; hard-hat construction workers beat up the students while police watched, shouting, "All the way, USA," then raised the flag to full-staff.
  
• 5/9/1970 UAW leader Walter P. Reuther, his wife May, architect Oscar Stonorov, and also a bodyguard, the pilot and co-pilot were killed when their chartered Lear-Jet crashed in flames at 9:33 P.M. Michigan time. The plane, arriving from Detroit in rain and fog, was on final approach to the Pellston, Michigan, airstrip near the union's recreational and educational facility at Black Lake, Michigan. In October 1968, a year and a half before the fatal crash, Reuther and his brother Victor were almost killed in a small private plane as it approached Dulles airport. Both incidents are amazingly similar; the altimeter in the fatal crash was believed to have malfunctioned. When Victor Reuther was interviewed many years after the fatal crash he said "I and other family members are convinced that both the fatal crash and the near fatal one in 1968 were not accidental." The FBI still refuses to turn over nearly 200 pages of documents pertaining to Walter Reuther's death, and correspondence between field offices and J. Edgar Hoover.
  
• 5/9/1970 President Richard Nixon had a middle-of-the-night impromptu, brief meeting with protesters preparing to march against the Vietnam War just days after the Kent State shootings. As historian Stanley Karnow reported in his Vietnam: A History, on May 9, 1970 the President appeared at 4:15 a.m. on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial to discuss the war with 30 student dissidents who were conducting a vigil there. Nixon "treated them to a clumsy and condescending monologue, which he made public in an awkward attempt to display his benevolence." Nixon had been trailed by White House Deputy for Domestic Affairs Egil Krogh, who saw it differently than Karnow, saying, "I thought it was a very significant and major effort to reach out." In any regard, neither side could convince the other and after meeting with the students Nixon expressed that those in the anti-war movement were the pawns of foreign communists. After the student protests, Nixon asked H. R. Haldeman to consider the Huston Plan, which would have used illegal procedures to gather information on the leaders of the anti-war movement. Only the resistance of FBI head J. Edgar Hoover stopped the plan.
  
• 5/10/1970 Haig met with William Sullivan about the taps.
  
• 5/10/1970 Cuban exiles and two U.S. citizens infiltrate Cuba and are captured.
  
• 5/11/1970 2000 construction workers marched through Wall Street supporting Nixon and the war.
  
• 5/11/1970 Senate takes first steps to approve an amendment by Sens. John Sherman Cooper and Frank Church forbidding any more US military operations in Cambodia.
  
• 5/12/1970 Murray Chotiner memo to Haldeman, saying he was looking systematically into O'Brien's activities.
  
• 5/12/1970 A race riot occurs in Augusta, Georgia. Six African Americans are killed. Authorities say five of the victims were shot by police.
  
• 5/13/1970 Wiretap placed on phone of William Lake (a Muskie adviser); removed 2/10/1971. Wiretap placed on Winston Lord of the NSC, removed 2/10/1971. At a meeting of Nixon, Hoover and Haldeman, FBI agrees to begin sending wiretap summaries only to Haldeman. Haig would later say he could not recall the Lord and Lake taps.
  
• 5/13/1970 Memo from Nixon to Haldeman on his visit to the Lincoln Memorial: he told the students that the problems of race, poverty and the plight of the American Indian had to be dealt with, the enviroment must be protected, nuclear arms must be limited, and China must be opened up to the rest of the world. "For the next 25 years the world is going to get much smaller...it is vitally important that you know and appreciate and understand people everywhere..." (Secret Files 127)
  
• 5/13/1970 Memo from Nixon to Haldeman complaining about news media bias, though "the President has taken all this with good grace." He also complained about Democratic policy makers "that got us into Vietnam" now criticizing his war policies.
  
• 5/14/1970 Colson memo to Nixon, assuring him that he had the constitutional authority to intervene in Cambodia.
  
• 5/14/1970 In the second day of violent protests at the mostly-black school of Jackson State College, Miss., state law enforcement officials fire into a crowd of bottle- and rock-throwing youths, killing two
  
• 5/15/1970 Congress is deluged with mail and telegrams opposing involvement in Cambodia.
  
• 5/18/1970 Hoover memo: "Spiro Agnew called...to see whether I could be of some assistance. He said he was really concerned about the continuing inflammatory pronouncements of Ralph Abernathy. I commented that he is one of the worst. The Vice President said he had seen some of the background material on him and he knows what that is, but it is beyond the pale as far as executive use is concerned...he thought he was going to have to start destroying Abernathy's credentials so anything I can give him would be appreciated. I told him I would be glad to. I said I was the only one who spoke out against Martin Luther King and I got hell, but I did not give a damn because it is more like bouquets than brickbats from some people."
  
• 5/20/1970 Colson memo to Harry Dent, urging that the South Dakota GOP work on getting "a constitutional amendment on the ballot this fall to provide for a recall...which means that as soon as it became law a petition campaign could be started to recall McGovern." (Secret Files 139)
  
• 5/20/1970 NYC: 100,000 construction workers, dockmen and office workers march in support of the war.
  
• 5/26/1970 22 union leaders, mostly from the building trades, met with Nixon at the White House and presented him with a hard-hat labeled "Commander in Chief."
  
• 5/29/1970 Pedro Eugenio Arambaru, former president of Argentina, was abducted and murdered by terrorists whose demands for freeing political inmates were denied.
  
• 5/31/1970 (AP 11/16/05): Even after Richard Nixon's secret war in Cambodia became known, the president persisted in deception. "Publicly, we say one thing," he told aides. "Actually, we do another." Newly declassified documents from the Nixon years shed light on the Vietnam War, the struggle with the Soviet Union for global influence and a president who tried not to let public and congressional opinion get in his way. They also show an administration determined to win re-election in 1972, with Nixon aides seeking ways to use Jimmy Hoffa to tap into the labor movement. The former Teamsters president had been pardoned by Nixon in 1971. The release Wednesday of some 50,000 pages by the National Archives means about half the national security files from the Nixon era now are public. On May 31, 1970, a month after Nixon went on TV to defend the previously secret U.S. bombings and troop movements in Cambodia, asserting that he would not let his nation become "a pitiful, helpless giant," the president met his top military and national security aides at the Western White House in San Clemente, Calif. Revelation of the operation had sparked protests and congressional action against what many lawmakers from both parties considered an illegal war. Nixon noted that Americans believed the Cambodian operation was "all but over," even as 14,000 troops were engaged across the border in a hunt for North Vietnamese operating there. In a memo from the meeting marked "Eyes Only, Top Secret Sensitive," Nixon told his military men to continue doing what was necessary in Cambodia, but to say for public consumption that the United States was merely providing support to South Vietnamese forces when necessary to protect U.S. troops. "That is what we will say publicly," he asserted. "But now, let's talk about what we will actually do." He instructed: "I want you to put the air in there and not spare the horses. Do not withdraw for domestic reasons but only for military reasons." "We have taken all the heat on this one." He went on: "Just do it. Don't come back and ask permission each time." The military chiefs, more than their civilian bosses, expressed worry about how the war was going. "If the enemy is allowed to recover this time, we are through," said Adm. Thomas H. Moorer, the naval operations chief who two months later would become chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Nixon told his aides to plan offensive operations in neutral Laos, continue U.S. air operations in Cambodia and work on a summer offensive in South Vietnam. "We cannot sit here and let the enemy believe that Cambodia is our last gasp." The papers also are thick with minute aspects of Vietnam war-making and diplomacy. They show growing worries about the ability of the South Vietnamese government years before it fell, but also seek encouragement wherever it could be found. One May 1970 cable marked "For Confidential Eyes Only" provided national security adviser Henry Kissinger with an inventory of captured weapons, supplies and food. It noted, for example, that the 1,652.5 tons of rice seized so far would "feed over 6,000 enemy soldiers for a full year at the full ration." The papers also show concern that superpower rivalry would take a dangerous turn if events in the Middle East got out of hand. Israel's secretive nuclear program quietly alarmed Washington. One U.S. official, reporting to Secretary of State William Rogers in 1969, said Israel's public and private assurances that it would not introduce nuclear weapons to the Middle East could not be believed. The memo by undersecretary Joseph J. Sisco said U.S. intelligence believed "Israel is rapidly developing a capability to produce and deploy nuclear weapons," and this could spark a Middle East nuclear arms race drawing Arab nations under a Soviet "nuclear umbrella." Sisco's memo foresaw a chain of troubles if Israel could not be restrained. "Israel's possession of nuclear weapons would do nothing to deter Arab guerrilla warfare or reduce Arab irrationality; on the contrary it would add a dangerous new element to Arab-Israeli hostility with added risk of confrontation between the U.S. and U.S.S.R," Sisco said. To this day, Israel officially neither confirms nor denies its nuclear status and the actual size of its stockpile remains uncertain. But it has long been considered the only nation in the Middle East with atomic weapons. "For a long time, the U.S. kept secret its assessment of the status of the Israeli nuclear program," said William Burr, senior analyst at the National Security Archives at George Washington University. The paper shows "Israel could develop nuclear weapons fairly quickly, something that isn't widely known." On the political front, the documents show the Nixon administration saw Hoffa as a potential help to the re-election campaign. A memo on March 19, 1971, from White House counsel John Dean to Attorney General John Mitchell spelled out the political calculation after Hoffa's wife and son requested a meeting with Nixon to ask for leniency. At the time, White House officials were concerned that Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., could mount a fierce challenge for the presidency. "If he is paroled, we may get some credit and he will start off with a constructive relationship with the president. He would be a dedicated factor to box in Kennedy, and he might eventually be key for us to organized labor," Dean wrote. Nixon pardoned Hoffa in December 1971 for convictions on jury tampering and mail fraud charges, then got the Teamsters' endorsement a year later. Critics have long contended that administration officials cut a deal in exchange for political favors, though that never has been proved.
  
• 6/4/1970 Ralph de Toledano commented, "Mr. Nixon [has] forgotten the prime rule of politics...Reward your friends and punish your enemies. The opposite has been true in this administration." (Houston Tribune)
  
• 6/5/1970 Oval Office meeting: Nixon, Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Huston, Hoover, Donald Bennett (director of the DIA), Noel Gayler (NSA director) and Richard Helms. Nixon establishes an ad hoc interagency committee to develop plans for better domestic intelligence, with Hoover as its head. Nixon Focuses on Domestic Intelligence Gathering President Nixon meets with FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, CIA Director Richard Helms, and the heads of the NSA and DIA to discuss a proposed new domestic intelligence system. His presentation is prepared by young White House aide Tom Charles Huston (derisively called "Secret Agent X-5" behind his back by some White House officials). The plan is based on the assumption that, as Nixon says, "hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Americansmostly under 30are determined to destroy our society." Nixon complains that the various US intelligence agencies spend as much time battling with one another over turf and influence as they do working to locate threats to national security both inside and outside of the country. The agencies need to prove the assumed connections between the antiwar demonstrators and Communists. The group in Nixon's office will now be called the "Interagency Committee on Intelligence," Nixon orders, with Hoover chairing the new ad hoc group, and demands an immediate "threat assessment" about domestic enemies to his administration. Huston will be the White House liaison. Historian Richard Reeves will later write: "The elevation of Huston, a fourth-level White House aide, into the company of Hoover and Helms was a calculated insult. Nixon was convinced that both the FBI and the CIA had failed to find the links he was sure bound domestic troubles and foreign communism. But bringing them to the White House was also part of a larger Nixon plan. He was determined to exert presidential control over the parts of the government he cared most aboutthe agencies dealing with foreign policy, military matters, intelligence, law, criminal justice, and general order." [Reeves, 2001, pp. 229-230]
  
• 6/5/1970 Hoover memo: "The President called...I said the court has several cases involving capital punishment and I would image the court is going to be 5-4 [in favor of declaring it unconstitutional]...unless we can get another vacancy to be filled by a real man...I said we have the same problem in obscenity...The President said...that the country is sick of that crap they see in the newsstands...that's what is getting kids on dope and everything else."
  
• 6/13/1970 As a direct result of the student strike, on June 13, 1970, President Nixon established the President's Commission on Campus Unrest, which became known as the Scranton Commission after its chairman, former Pennsylvania governor William Scranton. Scranton was asked to study the dissent, disorder, and violence breaking out on college and university campuses.
  
• 6/19/1970 Memo from Higby to Haldeman listing "our financial angels." The list includes: H. Ross Perot, Walter Annenberg, Henry Ford, Robert H. Abplanalp, Clement Hirsch, William Casey, A.C. Nielsen.
  
• 6/24/1970 NYT quoted Billy Graham: "I think we have allowed patriotism to slip. We have allowed the word patriotism' to get into the hands of some right-wingers. I don't guess anybody loves the flag more than some of the people that are against the war." Graham was furiously criticized by the far-right for this comment.
  
• 6/25/1970 Memo from Huston to Haldeman about "Coordination of Domestic Intelligence Information." The committee submitted its "Special Report Interagency Committee on Intelligence (Ad Hoc)" (the Huston plan) to Nixon; it recommended many activities that, it warned, are "clearly illegal."
  
• 6/26/1970 AMA votes to allow doctors to perform abortions for social and economic reasons.
  
• 7/1/1970 New York state adopted the most liberal abortion law in the country, allowing the woman to have one for any reason in the first 24 weeks of pregnancy.
  
• 7/4/1970 Honor America Day is staged on this Fourth of July in Washington. Billy Graham and Bob Hope appeal for national unity; some 300,000 people attend.
  
• 7/14/1970 A top-secret memo from Haldeman informs Huston that Nixon had approved his plan. Nixon approves the "Huston Plan" for greatly expanding domestic intelligence-gathering by the FBI, CIA and other agencies. Four days later he rescinds his approval. [Washington Post, 2008] Nixon aide Tom Charles Huston comes up with the plan, which involves authorizing the CIA, FBI, NSA, and military intelligence agencies to escalate their electronic surveillance of "domestic security threats" in the face of supposed threats from Communist-led youth agitators and antiwar groups (see June 5, 1970). The plan would also authorize the surreptitious reading of private mail, lift restrictions against surreptitious entries or break-ins to gather information, plant informants on college campuses, and create a new, White House-based "Interagency Group on Domestic Intelligence and Internal Security." Huston's Top Secret memo warns that parts of the plan are "clearly illegal." Nixon approves the plan, but rejects one elementthat he personally authorize any break-ins. Nixon orders that all information and operations to be undertaken under the new plan be channeled through his chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, with Nixon deliberately being left out of the loop. The first operations to be undertaken are using the Internal Revenue Service to harass left-wing think tanks and charitable organizations such as the Brookings Institute and the Ford Foundation. Huston writes that "[m]aking sensitive political inquiries at the IRS is about as safe a procedure as trusting a whore," since the administration has no "reliable political friends at IRS." He adds, "We won't be in control of the government and in a position of effective leverage until such time as we have complete and total control of the top three slots of the IRS." Huston suggests breaking into the Brookings Institute to find "the classified material which they have stashed over there," adding: "There are a number of ways we could handle this. There are risks in all of them, of course; but there are also risks in allowing a government-in-exile to grow increasingly arrogant and powerful as each day goes by." [Reeves, 2001, pp. 235-236] In 2007, author James Reston Jr. will call the Huston plan "arguably the most anti-democratic document in American history… a blueprint to undermine the fundamental right of dissent and free speech in America." [Reston, 2007, pp. 102]
  
• 7/16/1970 Huston memo to Haldeman, warning that the IRS was not controlled by Nixon-friendly officials and so should not be relied upon to quietly conduct investigations into opponents. (Secret Files 147)
  
• 7/20/1970 Newsweek featured a cover story about Billy Graham, calling him "The President's Preacher" and said he "holds a passport into the world of power politics of a kind that no other US preacher before him has ever been granted."
  
• 7/23/1970 President Nixon approves the Huston plan for expansion of domestic intelligence-gathering activities. It is apparently rescinded five days later. On or about this date, Huston tells the committee through a memo of Nixon's decision to okay his plan.
  
• 7/26-27/1970 After President Nixon approves of the so-called "Huston Plan" to implement a sweeping new domestic intelligence and internal security apparatus (see July 14, 1970), FBI director J. Edgar Hoover brings the plan's author, White House aide Tom Charles Huston (see June 5, 1970), into his office and vents his disapproval. The "old ways" of unfettered wiretaps, political infiltration, and calculated break-ins and burglaries are "too dangerous," he tells Huston. When, not if, the operations are revealed to the public, they will open up scrutiny of US law enforcement and intelligence agencies, and possibly reveal other, past illegal domestic surveillance operations that would embarrass the government. Hoover says he will not share FBI intelligence with other agencies, and will not authorize any illegal activities without President Nixon's personal, written approval. The next day, Nixon orders all copies of the decision memo collected, and withdraws his support for the plan. [Reeves, 2001, pp. 236-237] W. Mark Felt, the deputy director of the FBI, later calls Huston "a kind of White House gauleiter over the intelligence community." Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward will note that the definition of "gauleiter" is, according to Webster's Dictionary, "the leader or chief official of a political district under Nazi control." [Woodward, 2005, pp. 33-34]
  
• 7/26/1970 Hoover tells Mitchell about the Huston plan, and Mitchell is opposed to it. On this or the next day, Haldeman tells Huston to recall the 7/23 memo and get all copies returned to the White House.
  
• 7/27/1970 Portugal: Antonio Salazar, dictator since 1928, dies.
  
• 7/28/1970 Hoover and Mitchell's opposition to the Huston plan leads Nixon to abandon it.
  
• 7/30/1970 Columnist Paul Scott noted that "for the first time since World War II, federal expenditures this year for health, education, welfare and labor programs will exceed defense expenditures." This was roughly $74 billion for social programs, $73 billion for defense. (Yakima Eagle)
  
• 7/30/1970 Israeli jets met Soviet MiGs near the Suez Canal; 4 MiGs were shot down with no Israeli losses, but the involvement of USSR forces scared everyone into bringing about a ceasefire.
  
• 7/31/1970 Israel joins Egypt and Jordan in accepting the US Middle East peace plan.
  
• 8/1970 A Gallup Poll showed that 76% of the American people strongly disapproved of the KKK, a higher percentage than those who disliked the Viet Cong.
  
• 8/3/1970 Jack Anderson reported Sen. Mansfield as saying that JFK had intended a gradual withdrawal from Vietnam.
  
• 8/3/1970 JFK assassination researcher Harold Weisberg filed an FOIA suit against the government to gain the release of the FBI's spectrographic analysis tests performed in 1964 (Weisberg vs. Dept of Justice, #2301-70) 10/6/1970 Mitchell's Justice Department filed a motion to dismiss the suit, on the grounds that the release of the test results "would seriously interfere with the efficient operation of the FBI" and would also "create a highly dangerous precedent in this regard." A hearing was held 11/16/1970; Asst US Attorney Robert Werdig explained that Mitchell "has determined that it is not in the national interest to divulge these spectrographic analyses." The suit was dismissed, but this led to an amending of the FOIA to favor investigators like Weisberg.
  
• 8/4/1970 Bill Safire memo to Haldeman; he suggested that Larry O'Brien's new job as an international consultant could be portrayed as "lobbying for foreign governments...We could have a little fun with this and keep O'Brien on the defensive." (Secret Files 150)
  
• 8/4/1970 Apparently prompted by Cuban fears of an invasion by the United States, Soviet Chargé Yuli M. Vorontsov meets with National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger some eight years after the Cuban missile crisis in an attempt to reconfirm the Kennedy- Khrushchev understanding on Cuba. Without consulting others within the administration, President Nixon and Henry Kissinger decide to "reaffirm" the understanding. On August 7, Kissinger meets with Vorontsov, and both give their word that the understanding is "still in full force." This is the first time that U.S. leaders have unequivocally accepted the mutual commitments proposed in 1962. (Garthoff 1, pp. 141-42; Nixon, p. 486)
  
• 8/7/1970 Judge Harold Haley and three kidnappers are killed in an escape attempt by black militants from San Rafael, Calif., courthouse.
  
• 8/9/1970 NYT reported that during the Korean War, when US forces were being overwhelmed by "human waves" of Chinese, "the Army dug into captured Nazi chemical warfare documents describing Sarin, a nerve gas so lethal that a few pounds could kill thousands of people in minutes...By the mid-nineteen-fifties, the Army was manufacturing thousands of gallons of Sarin."
  
• 8/10/1970 LIFE reported that Jim Garrison had "managed to hush up the fact that last June, a Marcello bagman, Vic Corona, died after suffering a heart attack during a political meeting held in Garrison's own home."
  
• 8/11-14/1970 at its Annual Convention in Atlanta, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference adopted a resolution condemning Hoover and the FBI for "their attacks on Martin Luther King Jr. and their failure to meet their responsibilities such as protecting civil rights, stopping narcotics traffic and other organized crime..."
  
• 8/11/1970 Treaty between USSR and West Germany is signed by Brezhnev and Willy Brandt.
  
• 8/12/1970 Treaty of Moscow; FRG (West Germany) signs non-agression pact and acknowledgement of all the existing borders in Europe, including the Oder-Neisse Border between Germany and Poland and the boundary between the FRG (BRD) and GDR (DDR).
  
• 8/12/1970 Roswell Gilpatric, in a recorded oral history interview, recalled that "Resistance was encountered from [JFK] at every stage as this total amount of US personnel deployment increased" in Vietnam. (RFK and his Times 764)
  
• 8/14/1970 The Vienna phase of the SALT sessions ends.
  
• 8/15/1970 Paraguayan dictator Alfredo Stroessner was the target of a failed assassination attempt.
  
• 8/19/1970 After two years of undeclared war, Egypt, Israel and Jordan accepted a US-proposed cease-fire; it saw 721 Israelis killed, and an unknown number of Arabs killed.
  
• 8/20/1970 Nixon meets with Mexican president Diaz to discuss a treaty concerning border disputes.
  
• 8/24/1970 near 3:40 a.m., a van filled with ammonium nitrate and fuel oil mixture was detonated on the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the Sterling Hall bombing.
  
• 8/26/1970 In a demonstration organized by Betty Friedan, women across the nation marched to push for women's rights and mark the 50th anniversay of female suffrage.
  
• 8/28/1970 Vortex I: A Biodegradable Festival of Life: To avert potential violence arising from planned anti-war protests, a government-sponsored rock festival was held near Portland, Oregon from August 28 to September 3, attracting 100,000 participants. The festival, arranged by the People's Army Jamboree (an ad hoc group) and Oregon governor Tom McCall, was set up when the FBI told the governor that President Nixon's planned appearance at an American Legion convention in Portland could lead to violence worse than that seen at 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
  
• 8/29/1970 The Chicano Moratorium: on August 29, some 25,000 Mexican-Americans participated in the largest anti-war demonstration in Los Angeles. Police attacked the crowd with billyclubs and tear gas; two people were killed. Immediately after the marchers were dispersed, sheriff's deputies raided a nearby bar, where they shot and killed Rubén Salazar, KMEX news director and Los Angeles Times columnist, with a tear-gas projectile. LA Times columnist Ruben Salazar was killed and dozens of others were injured when an East Los Angeles parade and rally to demonstrate Latino opposition to the Vietnam War turned into rioting after clashes between officers and protesters. During the rioting, sheriff's deputies surrounded the Silver Dollar Cafe on Whittier Boulevard after receiving reports of a man carrying a gun inside, The Times reported. After ordering the building evacuated, "tear gas but no bullets was fired inside, deputies said, and two men, a woman and a child left the building through a back door." "At 5:30 p.m., nearly two hours later, deputies in the area were approached by a man who said, 'I think there's somebody in the bar.' It was Mr. Salazar," the newspaper said. Deputies found him sprawled on the floor, with "a bullet wound in the head," according to The Times. It was later determined that Salazar, "one of the city's leading spokesmen for Chicano rights," died after being struck by a deputy's tear gas canister. The parade and rally had been called "in support of a National Chicano Moratorium, which, its leaders said, was an effort to urge young Chicanos to resist military service abroad in favor of fighting for social justice at home."
  
• 8/30/1970 Abraham Zapruder dies of carcinoma of the stomach at Dallas's Presbyterian Hospital. He is buried on Sept. 1. He privately believed that LHO's main target was not JFK, but rather Governor John Connally.
  
• 8/30/1970 Agnew completes his tour of Asia.
  
• 8/31/1970 James McCord retired from the CIA, ostensibly to take a better-paying job so he could care for his retarded daughter.
  
• 9/1/1970 A Palestinian attempt to kill king Hussein of Jordan failed.
  
• 9/4/1970 Mexican president Gustavo Díaz Ordaz and U.S. President Richard Nixon rode in an open-car presidential motorcade in San Diego, California.
  
• 9/5/1970 Department of State, U.S. Embassy Cables on the Election of Salvador Allende and Efforts to Block his Assumption of the Presidency, September 5-22, 1970: This series of eight cables, written by U.S. Ambassador to Chile, Edward Korry, record the reaction and activities of the U.S. Embassy after the election of Salvador Allende's Popular Unity coalition. Known as "Korrygrams," his reports contain some of the most candid, and at times undiplomatic, opinions and observations ever offered by a U.S. Ambassador. With titles such as "No Hope for Chile," and "Some Hope for Chile," Korry provides extensive details about political efforts to block Allende's ratification by the Chilean Congress. The cables report on the activities of Chile's political institutions in response to Allende's election and provide Korry's explicit assessments of the character of key Chilean leaders, particularly the outgoing president, Eduardo Frei.
  
• 9/6/1970 In a confrontation with Frank Sinatra's entourage, the casino manager at Caesars Palace is arrested for pulling a gun to back up his order to cut off Sinatra's credit at the baccarat table. But the arresting sheriff also says of Sinatra, "He's through picking on little people in this town."
  
• 9/6/1970 On September 6, in the series of Dawson's Field hijackings, three planes were hijacked by PFLP: a SwissAir and a TWA in Zarqa and a BOAC in Cairo, on September 9, a British Airways plane at Amman, the passengers were held hostage. The PFLP announced that the hijackings were designed "to teach the Americans a lesson because of their long-standing support of Israel". After all hostages were removed, the planes were demonstratively blown up in front of TV cameras. Directly confronting and angering the King, the rebels declared Irbid area a "liberated region".
  
• 9/8/1970 Memo from John R. Brown to Ehrlichman, Finch and Haldeman, warning that the administration was listening too much to "D.C. press, social and intellectual set" and must "emphasize anti-crime, anti-demonstrations, anti-drugs, anti-obscenity. We must get with the mood of the country which is fed up with the liberals."
  
• 9/8/1970 Memo from Haldeman to Colson, saying that the president wanted him to take charge of improving relations with unions, especially "the Teamsters, the Firefighters, the Marine Union, the Carpenters, etc. There is a great deal of gold there to be mined."
  
• 9/9-12/1970 Young Americans for Freedom hold their 19th anniversary meeting at the University of Hartford, Conn.
  
• 9/9/1970 A Soviet flotilla, including special vessels used to support the operations of Soviet nuclear submarines, arrives at the port of Cienfuegos, Cuba.
  
• 9/10/1970 Agnew began his national speaking tour for the fall campaign.
  
• 9/15/1970 President Nixon orders CIA Director Richard Helms to prevent Salvadore Allende's accession to office in Chile. CIA, Notes on Meeting with the President on Chile, September 15, 1970: These handwritten notes, taken by CIA director Richard Helms, record the orders of the President of the United States, Richard Nixon, to foster a coup in Chile. Helms' notes reflect Nixon's orders: l in 10 chance perhaps, but save Chile!; worth spending; not concerned; no involvement of embassy; $10,000,00 available, more if necessary; full-time job--best men we have; game plan; make the economy scream; 48 hours for plan of action. This presidential directive initiates major covert operations to block Allende's ascension to office, and promote a coup in Chile. The CIA is to play a direct role in organizing a military coup d'etat. Helms puts David Atlee Phillips in charge of this involvement, known as Track II. Helms related to his impressions of the President's instructions: "The Director told the group that President Nixon had decided that an Allende regime in Chile was unacceptable to the United States. The President asked the Agency to prevent Allende from coming to power or to unseat him. The President authorized $10,000,000.00 for this purpose, if needed. Further, the Agency is to carry out this mission without coordination with the Departments of State or Defense." (Memorandum/Genesis of the Project 9/16/70)
  
• 9/15/1970 Over 340,000 members of the United Auto Workers go on strike against GM in both the US and Canada. It will last sixty-seven days.
  
• 9/15-20/1970 Golda Meir visits the US and talks with Nixon.
  
• 9/15/1970 Vice President Spiro Agnew announced that the youth of America were being "brainwashed into a drug culture" by rock music, movies and other elements of the counter-culture.
  
• 9/16/1970 CIA, Genesis of Project FUBELT, September 16, 1970: These minutes record the first meeting between CIA director Helms and high agency officials on covert operations--codenamed "FUBELT"--against Allende. A special task force under the supervision of CIA deputy director of plans, Thomas Karamessines, is established, headed by veteran agent David Atlee Phillips. The memorandum notes that the CIA must prepare an action plan for National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger within 48 hours.
  
• 9/16/1970 King Hussein of Jordan declared martial law.
  
• 9/17/1970 Columnist David Broder praised Nixon for "put[ting] the Pentagon on its leanest rations in years" and wanting to get out of Vietnam.
  
• 9/17/1970 Jordanian tanks (the 60th armored brigade) attacked the headquarters of Palestinian organizations in Amman; the army also attacked camps in Irbid, Salt, Sweileh and Zarqa. Then the head of Pakistani training mission to Jordan, Brigadier Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq (later President of Pakistan), took command of the 2nd division. The armored troops were inefficient in narrow city streets, and after first casualties they resorted to unobserved shelling. Soon, many city blocks were left with no electricity, food or water. Some Palestinians deserted from the Jordanian army. Brigadier Bajahat Muhaisein (a Jordanian who had a Palestinian wife) quit.
  
• 9/17/1970 Sen. George Murphy (Calif.) was quoted as saying he doubted the Warren Commission's investigation of JFK's death. (S.F. Chronicle)
  
• 9/18/1970 FCC Commissioner Nicholas Johnson attacked Agnew for ignoring legal drugs such as liquor and tobacco, and the politicians who support them.
  
• 9/18/1970 Syrian armored forces began invasion into Jordan. In three days, with support of Palestine Liberation Army (PLA), they were the size of a division and were met by the 40th armored brigade of Jordanian army. In light of the recent war, after unsuccessful attempts to avert the increasing danger diplomatically, Israel Air Force planes made low overflights over the Syrian tanks as a sign of warning. Soon Syrian troops began to withdraw. Hafez al-Assad, the Syrian defense minister at the time, later said that Syria invaded Jordan in order to protect the Palestinians.
  
• 9/18/1970 Jimi Hendrix, who reportedly briefly occupied the sprawling mansion just north of the Log Cabin in Laurel Canyon after he moved to LA in 1968, died in London under seriously questionable circumstances on September 18, 1970. Though he rarely spoke of it, Jimi had served a stint in the U.S. Army with the 101st Airborne Division at Fort Campbell. His official records indicate that he was forced into the service by the courts and then released after just one year when he purportedly proved to be a poor soldier. One wonders though why he was assigned to such an elite division if he was indeed such a failure. One also wonders why he wasn't subjected to disciplinary measures rather than being handed a free pass out of his ostensibly court-ordered service. In any event, Jimi himself once told reporters that he was given a medical discharge after breaking an ankle during a parachute jump. And one biographer has claimed that Jimi faked being gay to earn an early release. The truth, alas, remains rather elusive. At the time of Jimi's death, the first person called by his girlfriend Monika Danneman, who was the last to see Hendrix alive was Eric Burden of the Animals. Two years earlier, Burden had relocated to LA and taken over ringmaster duties from Frank Zappa after Zappa had vacated the Log Cabin and moved into a less high-profile Laurel Canyon home. Within a year of Jimi's death, an underage prostitute named Devon Wilson who had been with Jimi the day before his death, plunged from an eighth-floor window of New York's Chelsea Hotel. On March 5, 1973, a shadowy character named Michael Jeffery, who had managed both Hendrix and Burden, was killed in a mid-air plane collision. Jeffery was known to openly boast of having organized crime connections and of working for the CIA. After Jimi's death, it was discovered that Jeffery had been funneling most of Hendrix's gross earnings into offshore accounts in the Bahamas linked to international drug trafficking. Years later, on April 5, 1996, Danneman, the daughter of a wealthy German industrialist, was found dead near her home in a fume-filled Mercedes.
  
• 9/20/1970 Evangelical Christian George Otis visited Governor Reagan and talked about prophecy and the Rapture at the end of the world. Otis claimed he prophesized Reagan one day becoming President. (Visit with a King)
  
• 9/21/1970 Nixon memo to Haldeman, saying how "greatly impressed" he was with Colson and Edward Morgan.
  
• 9/21/1970 Article in New York magazine titled "Richard Nixon and the Great Socialist Revival," by John Kenneth Galbraith. "In the past the war power has been notoriously a cover for socialist experiment and, feeling that the end justifies the means, socialists have not hesitated, on occasion, to stretch the law...Certainly the least predicted development under the Nixon Administration was this great new thrust to socialism..." Galbraith predicted that a socialization of Wall Street - government subsidizing and insuring of firms - would occur. He theorized that tight money policies were being deliberately implemented to cause business failures and government bailouts.
  
• 9/22/1970 Nixon signed a bill giving the District of Columbia nonvoting delegate in the House of Rep.
  
• 9/23/1970 Agnew accused FCC Commissioner Nicholas Johnson of "backing the kind of radical-liberal philosophy of permissiveness and self-flagellation that has encouraged so many of our youth to turn to marijuana and worse."
  
• 9/23/1970 Sargent Shriver called Agnew "this nation's great divider...appeals to everything low and mean and bitter in the American character." (Hartford Courant)
  
• 9/24/1970 Memo from Hoover to Tolson, Mohr, Thomas Bishop, Nicholas Callahan: "I called Mr. Egil Krogh at the White House and told him...that I have been trying to do a little footwork around the Capitol to find out how our supplemental appropriation should be handled and get it through...[George] Mahon [chairman of Appropriations Comm.] is a very reasonable fellow and, in addition to that, I have a staff of agents who are assigned to the Appropriations Committee...to conduct investigations for them, so he is very cordially inclined toward that Bureau for that assistance and would respond very readily, and [John J.] Rooney is a Democrat but he is also cordially inclined toward the Bureau..."
  
• 9/25/1970 J. Edgar Hoover memo: "Haldeman...stated the President wanted him to ask, and he would imagine I would have it pretty much at hand so there would be no specific investigation, for a rundown on the homosexuals known and suspected in the Washington press corps. I said I thought we have some of that material. Mr. Haldeman mentioned [deleted] and some of the others rumored generally to be and also whether we had any other stuff; that he, the President, has an interest in what, if anything else, we know. I told Mr. Haldeman I would get after that right away..."
  
• 9/26/1970 Presidents Commission on Campus Unrest calls the gap between youth culture and mainstream society a threat to US stability.
  
• 9/27/1970 Both Jordan's King Hussein and Yassir Arafat attended the meeting of leaders of Arab countries in Cairo and on September 27 Hussein signed an agreement that treated both sides as equals and acknowledged the right of the Palestinian organizations to operate in Jordan. The next day, Egypt's Nasser died of a sudden heart attack.
  
• 9/30/1970 Columnist Scotty Reston commented that Nixon was trying to "liberate himself from his conservative and anti-Communist past, and work toward a progressive policy at home and a policy of reconciliation with the Communists abroad..."