Deep Politics Timeline

[Tracy Riddle]

• Los Angeles authorities conduct a series of videotaped reenactments to prove that Sirhan fired all of the shots at RFK, but the tapes are suppressed until 1986.
  
• Markus Wolf, foreign intelligence boss for the GDR, awarded the "Red Star of the Interior Ministry of the Soviet Union".
  
• William L. O'Neill, Professor of History at Rutgers University, publishes an excellent overview of the Sixties, Coming Apart (1971). It contains the following on the JFK assassination: "Solitary maniacs who assassinate Presidents are a national tradition. The idea of a conspiracy, so logical to European minds, was alien to Americans. Then too, if even one more suspect was uncovered the whole ghastly matter would have to be reopened with unpredictable consequences. No one wanted that. It was much better all around to accept the Warren Report...For all its bulk, the report was a sloppy piece of work, carelessly researched and based on a priori judgements...Evidence that cast doubt on the single-killer hypothesis was ignored, so was material pointing to other possibilities...There was no proof that Oswald was such a marksman, considerable evidence that he was a poor shot, yet the Commission insisted that he was expert and the shot itself an easy one...There was much reason to doubt [the single-bullet theory], little to believe it, yet the Commission clung to it desperately."
  
• The San Antonio Contraceptive Study was a clinical research study about the side effects of oral contraceptives published in 1971. Women came to a clinic in San Antonio for preventing pregnancies and were not told they were participating in a research study or receiving placebos. 10 of the women became pregnant while on placebos.
  
• Daughter of conspiracy investigator Mae Brussell is killed in a suspicious car accident.
  
• E. Howard Hunt is hired by the White House to gather damaging evidence against Daniel Ellsberg, Edward Kennedy and other "enemies". Hunt hires Barker and other Bay of Pigs veterans to make a break in at Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office. Barker attempts to get plans to building that will house the Democratic Convention. Plumber Chief David Young, former Kissinger aide, contacts CIA for a psychiatric profile of Ellsberg. He is referred to Howard Osborn, a possible Oswald link. White House agent Segretti meets with FBI, Minutemen and others to plan kidnapping of radicals during the 1972 Convention, a plan later scrapped.
  
• 1/1971 Nixon faced a panel of reporters on an ABC broadcast; when asked why he had been unable to bring the country "the lift of a driving dream" he had promised during the primaries, Nixon looked at the reporters and then mumbled, "When you have inherited nightmares you are unable to bring the country the lift of a driving dream."
  
• 1/1 or 2/1971 Congress adjourns after banning all cigarette ads on radio and TV.
  
• 1/2/1971 A team of Israeli scholars announced the discovery in Jerusalem of a 2,000-year-old skeleton of a crucified male. Found in a cave-tomb, it was the first direct physical evidence of the well-documented Roman method of execution.
  
• 1/3/1971 The Los Angeles Times (story by Jack Nelson) reports that the government purchases a new limousine for J. Edgar Hoover every year, at a cost of about $30,000. By contrast, the Secret Service leases the president's bulletproof limo, for approximately $5,000.
  
• 1/3/1971 This month, Charles Colson requests that E. Howard Hunt and his wife, Dorothy, be invited to an after-banquet White House reception for Don Juan Carlos, the future king of Spain. Colson writes: "It is very important politically that we let him know he is in the family."
  
• 1/4/1971 Congressional Black Caucus is organized.
  
• 1/7/1971 Laird visits Thailand to assess the military situation.
  
• 1/7/1971 Mac Wallace, an old LBJ associate, is killed in a single-car "accident" in Pittsburg, Texas. He is 50 years old. His car drifts off the road and he dies of massive head injuries. An empty bottle for his medication for narcolepsy is found in the wreckage. Wallace's fingerprints will later be allegedly identified as being on one of the cardboard boxes found near the "sniper's" window in the TSBD. Billie Sol Estes will also implicate Wallace in the murder of JFK.
  
• 1/8-11/1971 Laird visits South Vietnam.
  
• 1/11/1971 Pat Buchanan memo reporting "real hostility on the right...I am getting inklings of a Reagan for President move..."
  
• 1/12/1971 Rev. Philip F. Berrigan and five others are indicted on charges of conspiring to kidnap Henry Kissinger.
  
• 1/13/1971 The Republican National Committee met in Washington. One committeeman, a longtime Nixon backer, asked rhetorically, "Who and what is Richard Nixon?" (Nixon in the White House p4)
  
• 1/13/1971 Interior Dept recommended construction of Trans-Alaska Pipeline System.
  
• 1/13/1971 Nixon signs bill repealing the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution.
  
• 1/14/1971 Nixon memo to Haldeman: "It would seem that the time is approaching when Larry O'Brien is held accountable for his retainer with Hughes....Perhaps Colson should make a check on this."
  
• 1/14/1971 Nixon memo to Haldeman recommending that Pat Buchanan give political briefings to Bob Dole.
  
• 1/14-19/1971 most of NYC's police officers go on a wildcat strike.
  
• 1/15/1971 Sen. Edmund Muskie talks with Soviet PM Kosygin in Moscow about the Middle East and Southeast Asia.
  
• 1/18/1971 Sen. George McGovern announces his campaign for the presidency in a televised speech.
  
• 1/19/1971 Kissinger was quoted as saying that "Power is the great aphrodisiac." (NY Times)
  
• 1/19/1971 Sen. George Smathers recalled that JFK had told him that he wanted to reform the CIA: "I remember him saying that the CIA frequently did things he didn't know about...He complained that the CIA was almost autonomous. He told me he believed the CIA had arranged to have Diem and Trujillo bumped off." (Jack Anderson column 1/19/1971 and "Cuba on our Mind", Tad Szulc, Esquire 2/1974.)
  
• 1/21/1971 The 92nd Congress convened.
  
• 1/21/1971 Washington Post reported Melvin Laird explaining continuing US air support in Cambodia; he said that Nixon had said only that "air support would not be used...during the termination of those sanctuary operations." Though Nixon had said no such thing, Laird ended by saying he did not wish to get into "semantics."
  
• 1/21/1971 Richard B. Russell died today. Senator Russell was a member of The Warren Commission. Russell, along with Hale Boggs were the two Commission members most vocal in their dissatisfaction with the Warren Commission's final Report. Russell had become so convinced that the Warren Commission wasn't obtaining all the intelligence needed to make a thorough report, he secured "outside counsel," secretly commissioning his own private investigation. All briefings of the Senator by Colonel Philip Corso, who conducted the inquiry, were oral. Nothing was to be kept on paper.
  
• 1/22/1971 Nixon's State of the Union address: proposed revenue sharing with the states. He called for a "new American revolution in which power is turned back to the people."
  
• 1/25/1971 Tom Huston memo to George Bell, compiling a list of "groups and individuals that may be catergorized as unfriendly." This included the Ford Foundation, Brookings Institution, "JFK Crowd," Common Cause, and Noam Chomsky.
  
• 1/25/1971 Supreme Court rules that companies cannot deny employment to women with preschool children unless the same criterion applies to men.
  
• 1/25/1971 Jack Anderson column reported an attempt on Castro's life 3/1961 with a poison capsule supplied by Johnny Roselli.
  
• 1/26/1971 John Dean memo to Haldeman on status of investigation into Larry O'Brien and Howard Hughes: "I have also been informed by a source of Jack Caulfield's that O'Brien and Maheu are long time friends from the Boston area, a friendship which dates back to early or pre-Kennedy days. During the Kennedy administration, there apparently was a continuous liaison between O'Brien and Maheu...it is alleged that Maheu offered O'Brien a piece of the Hughes action in Las Vegas...O'Brien apparentlly did not accept the offer...The Clark Clifford law firm has been the Washington representative of the Hughes legal interests in Washington for a number of years." (Secret Files 210)
  
• 1/26/1971 Charles Manson and three of his female followers are convicted of first degree murder in the slaying of actress Sharon Tate and six other persons.
  
• 1/29/1971 Nixon submits his budget for 1972 to Congress.
  
• 1/31-2/2/1971 Vietnam vets testify in Detroit about atrocities committed against Vietnamese (north and south, soldier and civilian) by US soldiers (including themselves). They described how their superiors did nothing to discourage the idea that the Vietanamese were inferior "gooks" who could be killed with impunity. Their statements were filmed and released as the documentary Winter Soldier later this year.
  
• 2/1971 Voice-activated tape-recording equipment is installed in the Oval Office, Nixon's office in the Executive Office Building, the Cabinet Room and the Lincoln Sitting Room, and Camp David. The Secret Service's technical division is ordered to install a super-secret recording system. The system eventually consists of a network of seven stations, mostly using noise-activated recorders. Nixon orders his chief of staff H. R. Haldeman to see to the installation, and to keep it extremely quiet. Haldeman delegates the installation to aides Lawrence Higby and Alexander Butterfield. Haldeman decides the Army Signal Corps should not install the system because someone in that group might report back to the Pentagon; instead he has the Secret Service's technical security division install it. The work is done late at night; five microphones are embedded in Nixon's Oval Office desk, and two more in the wall light fixtures on either side of the fireplace, over the couch and chairs where Nixon often greets visitors. All three phones are wiretapped. By February 16, the system in both chambers is in place. All conversations are recorded on Sony reel-to-reel tape recorders, with Secret Service agents changing the reels every day and storing the tapes in a small, locked room in the Executive Office Building. [Reeves, 2001, pp. 305] The system continues to expand as the months pass. LBJ's recording system had to be manually operated. Nixon's recording system is automatic. In May, 1972, Nixon even has the Aspen Lodge wired in the Camp David retreat. Altogether, more than five thousand hours of conversations are eventually taped.
  
• 2/1971 60 Minutes aired a story about the Hughes empire which included an interview with Maheu.
  
• 2/1971 By early 1971, Billy James Hargis had become more critical of Nixon, and began quoting from Gen. Curtis LeMay, who said in mid-1971 that "within 18 months Russia would demand our total surrender or would threaten to blow us off the face of the earth."
  
• 2/2/1971 John R. Brown memo to Haldeman; he expressed concern about Jack Anderson's acquiring presidential memos and private transcipts of White House meetings: "a question was raised as to what we are going to do about it."
  
• 2/6 & 8/1971 H.R. Haldeman wrote himself a memo: "[Billy] Graham wants to be helpful next year…Point him in areas where do most good. He thinks there are real stirrings in religious directions, especially re young people. I call him and set up date. No other level - can't have leak…Must mobilize [Graham] and his crowd."
  
• 2/8/1971 Nixon memo to Haldeman urging that Muskie's "moderate image" be unmasked in the South as that of a closet liberal.
  
• 2/8/1971 Haig orders the last 9 of the 17 wiretaps shut down in a call to Sullivan. They were shut down 2/10. Copies of the taping logs were put into Ehrlichman's safe.
  
• 2/8/1971 South Vietnamese troops with US air and artillery support launch a major offensive against the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos.
  
• 2/8/1971 Apollo 14 splashes down after nine days in space, including 33 hours on the moon.
  
• 2/11/1971 John Connally, Democrat and former Texas Governor, is sworn in as Treasury Secretary. He will serve until June 12 1972. Before agreeing to take the appointment, however, Connally told Nixon that the president must find a position in the administration for George H.W. Bush, the Republican who had been defeated in November 1970 in a hard-fought U.S. Senate race against Democrat Lloyd M. Bentsen. Connally told Nixon that his taking the treasury post would embarrass Bush, who had "labored in the vineyards" for Nixon's election as president, while Connally had supported Humphrey. Ben Barnes, then the lieutenant governor and originally a Connally ally, claims in his autobiography that Connally's insistence saved Bush's political career because the then former U.S. representative and twice-defeated Senate candidate relied on appointed offices to build a resume by which to seek the presidency in 1980 and again in 1988. Nixon hence named Bush as ambassador to the United Nations in order to secure Connally's services at treasury. Barnes also said that he doubted George W. Bush could have become president in 2001 had Bush's father not first been given the string of federal appointments during the 1970s to strengthen the family's political viability. (Ben Barnes with Lisa Dickey, Barn Burning Barn Building: Tales of a Political Life from LBJ to George W. Bush and Beyond, Albany, Texas: Bright Sky Press, 2006, p. 189) No mention of Connally in Bush's autobiography. On taking the Treasury post, Connally famously told a delegation of Europeans worried about exchange rate fluctuations that the American dollar "is our currency, but your problem." Secretary Connally defended a $50 billion increase in the debt ceiling and a $35 to $40 billion budget deficit as an essential "fiscal stimulus" at a time when five million Americans were unemployed. He unveiled Nixon's program of raising the price of gold and formally devaluing the dollarfinally leaving the old gold standard entirely, a process begun in 1934 by Franklin D. Roosevelt. Prices continued to increase during 1971, and Nixon allowed wage and price guidelines, which Congress had authorized on a stand-by basis, to be implemented. Connally later shied away from his role in recommending the failed wage and price controls. Connally announced guaranteed loans for the ailing Lockheed aircraft company. He fought a lonely battle too against growing balance-of-payment problems with the nation's trading partners. He also undertook important foreign diplomatic trips for Nixon through his role as Treasury Secretary. Historian Bruce Schulman wrote that Nixon was "awed" by the handsome, urbane Texan who was also a tough political fighter. Schulman added that Henry Kissinger, Nixon's National Security Advisor, noted that Connally was the only cabinet member that Nixon did not disparage behind his back, and that this was high praise indeed.
  
• 2/11/1971 Treaty forbidding the installation of nuclear weapons on the ocean floor is signed by 63 nations.
  
• 2/11/1971 Jack Caulfield memo on Jack Anderson to Haldeman: "Anderson does, indeed, have access to intelligence digests..." He advised more efforts to track down the source of the leaks.
  
• 2/12/1971 Patrick J. Buchanan memo to Nixon: "I think the President should give serious consideration to replacing Mr. Hoover as soon as possible...has already passed the peak of his national esteem...he has had nowhere to go but down; and he is going down steadily...with each of these new picayune battles in which he involves himself, his place is being sullied...Mr. Hoover stands today with the American people as an almost unvarnished symbol of what is right with American law enforcement...On more and more of these quarrels, Mr. Hoover is not totally right - and comes off as something of a reactionary...McGovern is making him a focal point of attack...if Hoover goes now he can be retired in full glory...and not let him...wind up his career a dead lion being chewed over by the jackals of the Left." He also recommended that Nixon appoint his successor rather than letting some future Democratic administration do it.
  
• 2/13/1971 Lon Nol leaves for Hawaii for treatment of a stroke.
  
• 2/21/19711 US and 20 other UN members sign an international treaty to end illegal drug sales.
  
• 2/22/1971 Haldeman memo: "We need to get a petition started in McCloskey's district demanding his resignation on the basis of his calling for the impeachment of the President."
  
• 2/22/1971 Eugene McCarthy speech in Boston to drum up more anti-war support on college campuses.
  
• 2/23 and 27/1971 CBS-TV broadcasts The Selling of the Pentagon.
  
• 2/24/1971 The U.S. Coast Guard vessel Cape York captures several Cuban fishing boats in international waters.
  
• 2/24/1971 Laird and Gen. Vogt displayed a length of gasoline pipe supposedly taken from the Ho Chih Minh trail by ground forces recently; a few days later, the Pentagon admitted that the pipe came from an earlier South Vietnamese raid into Laos, the first official confirmation that they had been crossing the border into Laos.
  
• 2/25/1971 Nixon makes his annual State-of-the-World address.
  
• 2/25/1971 and 3/9/1971 Gervais secretly taped conversations with Jim Garrison for the IRS, in which Garrison talked about the money Gervais was bringing, and assured him that Governor McKeithen would protect the pinball operators.
  
• 2/26/1971 US and France sign a protocol to crack down on organized drug trafficking.
  
• 3/1/1971 Weather Underground bombed a Senate bathroom in Washington, protesting the Laos invasion.
  
• 3/2/1971 George H.W. Bush becomes US ambassador to the UN.
  
• 3/9/1971 Memo from FBI supervisor Milton Jones: "The following summarizes all material concerning...McGovern as contained in Bureau files...A review of the personal records in the Director's Office failed to locate any additional pertinent material concerning McGovern."
  
• 3/10/1971 FBI memo from Asst Dir. D.J. Dalbey to Tolson on McGovern's comments against Hoover. "There is no act that would get political sympathy for McGovern than the belief of other politicians that the Director had used the power at his disposal against McGovern. There is no gain here to justify the risk."
  
• 3/12/1971 Pat Buchanan memo expressing concern about Nixon's public talk of a "full generation of peace" and Vietnam being "our last war" as possibly dangerous and naive.
  
• 3/12/1971 Carlos Marcello is released from the Medical Center for Federal Prisoners in Springfield, Missouri.
  
• 3/14/1971 The SPD gains an absolute majority in the West Berlin government. Ironically, this creates a need to bring all elements of the party into positions of power, including the far left wing. Leftists in the new city government obstruct policies, disrupt legislation, leading to a negative reaction against the socialists from the voters in the Mar 75 election.
  
• 3/15/1971 The fourth round of the US-Soviet SALT talks begins in Vienna.
  
• 3/15/1971 At Bien Hoa, a U.S. Army base in South Vietnam, a fragmentation grenade exploded; this time in an officer's barracks for an artillery unit, killing two lieutenants and wounding a third. All were white. The unit commander Captain Rigby and First Sergeant Willis decided they knew who did it: a black soldier from California, Billy Dean Smith. Smith was an outspoken critic of the rampant racism in the army and particularly objected to the segregated bars and clubs in Vietnam. Without any evidence, Smith was charged with two counts of murder, two counts of resisting arrest, one count of assault, and two counts of attempted murder. Smith proclaimed his innocence and pled not guilty to all the charges. If found guilty he would have faced the death penalty. Smith's lawyer, civilian Luke McKissack, went to Vietnam and investigated the situation, and petitioned to have the trial moved to Fort Ord in California. After a change in venue was granted, McKissack wrote directly to the president complaining of the treatment of his client. "I wrote a letter to (then President Richard) Nixon asking him to intervene on Billy's behalf and also asking why Calley (who had been convicted of 22 counts of murder by this time) was living it up in a bachelor type pad while my guy, who hadn't been tried yet, was confined to a 6 x 9 cage, seeing daylight one hour a day. I asked if it was because Billy was Black and Calley white, because Billy was an enlisted grunt and Calley an officer, and then I invoked the mere gook rule.' My guy had allegedly killed white people, Calley had blown away mere gooks.'" McKissack was stunned when he received a reply from a Nixon aide agreeing with him. "As you pointed out in your petition, the issues of Private Smith's case are in no way similar to the issues inherent in Lieutenant Calley's case," wrote Nixon aide General Lawrence Williams. The only "evidence" the army had against Smith was that he had hand grenade pins in his pocket when arrested. "I put G.I. after G.I. on the stand who not only said they routinely carried around grenade pins, but that they also saw what they felt was an ongoing need in their unit for drastic actions like fragging," said McKissack. After McKissack's vigorous defense and a campaign organized by G.I.s and antiwar activists, Smith was acquitted on all charges. After he left the military, Smith became an organizer for the American Servicemen's Union (ASU), one of the most serious attempts at organizing a trade union for military personnel. There were many more Calley-like cases, such as the Green Beret murder case and the Son Thang massacre.
  
• 3/18/1971 House voted against funding the supersonic transport plane (SST).
  
• 3/20/1971 Nixon Campaign Decides to Bug Democrats Two White House aides, Frederick LaRue and G. Gordon Liddy, attend a meeting of the Nixon presidential campaign, the Committee to Re-elect the President (CREEP), where it is agreed that the organization will spend $250,000 to conduct an "intelligence gathering" operation against the Democratic Party for the upcoming elections. [Spartacus Schoolnet, 8/2007] The members decide, among other things, to plant electronic surveillance devices in the Democratic National Committee (DNC) headquarters. LaRue is a veteran of the 1968 Nixon campaign (see November 5, 1968), as is Liddy, a former FBI agent. [Spartacus Schoolnet, 8/2007; Spartacus Schoolnet, 8/2007] LaRue decides to pay the proposed "Special Investigations Unit," later informally called the "Plumbers", large amounts of "hush money" to keep them quiet. He tasks former New York City policeman Tony Ulasewicz with arranging the payments. LaRue later informs another Nixon aide, Hugh Sloan, that LaRue is prepared to commit perjury if necessary to protect the operation. A 1973 New York Times article will call LaRue "an elusive, anonymous, secret operator at the highest levels of the shattered Nixon power structure." [Spartacus Schoolnet, 8/2007] The FBI will later determine that this decision took place between March 20 and 30, 1972, not 1971. In this case, the FBI timeline is almost certainly in error, since the "Plumbers" break-in of the offices of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist came well before this date.
  
• 3/21/1971 Oleg Nechiporenko and other KGB officials are expelled from Mexico.
  
• 3/22/1971 Nixon, in an interview with Howard K. Smith on ABC-TV, complained that the media was trying to exaggerate how poorly the South Vietnamese troops were doing in Laos. He explained that US air support in Cambodia was primarily to protect US forces. "I think the credibility gap will rapidly disappear. It is events that cause the credibility gap, not the fact that a President deliberately lies or misleads the people. That is my opinion."
  
• 3/23/1971 Nixon raised milk price supports; he would later get $2 million in campaign contributions from the dairy industry.
  
• 3/23/1971 Citizens of the District of Columbia elect their first (non-voting) congressman since 1875.
  
• 3/23/1971 Brian Faulkner succeeds as Northern Ireland Prime Minister after defeating William Craig in a Unionist Party leadership election.
  
• 3/24/1971 South Vietnamese, facing large losses, end their attempt to cut supply lines in Laos.
  
• 3/24/1971 The Senate votes against government sponsorship of the supersonic transport plane (SST).
  
• 3/29/1971 Charles Manson and three women are sentenced to death in the gas chamber.
  
• 3/29/1971 First Lt. William Calley convicted of murdering Vietnamese civilians at My Lai. This was an Army court-martial; he is sentenced 3/31 to life at hard labor, but 8/20 this is reduced to 20 years. Yet, his conviction began to win him support (and even sympathy) from many who were upset that the senior officers were not convicted, and many who felt Calley was being made the scapegoat. President Nixon even got involved. He transferred Calley from Ft. Benning (Ga.) to house arrest, and promised to give a final review to Calley after the appeals were completed (this never happened, as Nixon became sidetracked with Watergate). The officer who convened the court-martial (the Ft. Benning commander) exercised his power to commute Calley's sentence to 20 years. The Secretary of the Army reduced it to 10 years. Due to time already served, Calley was paroled 6 months after entering federal prison. By the time his conviction was upheld on September 10, 1975, he had been out of prison for almost 1 1/2 years.
  
• 4/1971 United Steelworkers President I.W. Abel attacked Nixon for being opposed to wage increase demands from unions; he called the administration's economic policies "disastrous."
  
• 4/1971 John Kerry of Vietnam Veterans Against the War testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and said that My Lai-style crimes were "not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command. Over 150 honorably discharged and many very highly decorated veterans testified to war crimes committed in Southeast Asia…[they] had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam." Kerry would later become a US Senator.
  
• 4/1971 Gen. Charles Cabell dies. CIA deputy director connected to anti-Castro Cubans. His brother was Earl Cabell, Mayor of Dallas in 1963. Fired by JFK after Bay of Pigs. Collapses and dies after physical at Fort Myers.
  
• 4/2/1971 Anthony Lewis editorialized that "as Americans are told by their government that the war is winding down, the number of Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians being killed and maimed and made homeless is at a record high level...Most of these casualties are caused, and people made refugees, by American and Allied military activity." (NY Times)
  
• 4/3/1971 Nixon announces he will personally review the case of Lt. Calley.
  
• 4/5/1971 House Majority Leader Hale Boggs delivered a speech on the House floor, declaring Hoover to be incompetent and senile. He said that the FBI had used "the tactics of the Soviet Union and Hitler's Gestapo." He demanded Hoover's immediate resignation. He charged that FBI agents had tapped his phone and those of other congressmen. He blasted Attorney General Mitchell, who "says he is a law and order man. If law and order means the suppression of the Bill of Rights...then I say 'God help us.'" (Washington Post 4/6/1971)
  
• 4/7/1971 Outtakes of the CBS documentary The Selling of the Pentagon are subpoenaed by a House subcommittee.
  
• 4/14/1971 Nixon relaxed the trade embargo against China.
  
• 4/17/1971 US table-tennis team leaves China after a week-long tour.
  
• 4/17/1971 E. Howard Hunt returns to Miami on the eve of the tenth anniversary of the Bay of Pigs. A memorial to the fallen members of Brigade 2506 is dedicated in Little Havana. Hunt retires from the CIA to the agency-connected Robert R. Mullen Company, a Washington public relations firm with clients of the solvency of General Foods and the Hughes Tool Company. Howard Hunt renews his acquaintance with Bernard Barker at a Bay of Pigs veterans reunion in Miami.
  
• 4/18/1971 White House Conference on Youth is held.
  
• 4/18/1971 John Kerry on Meet the Press: "There are all kinds of atrocities and I would have to say that, yes, yes, I committed the same kind of atrocities as thousands of other soldiers have committed in that I took part in shootings in free-fire zones. I conducted harassment and interdiction fire. I used 50-caliber machine guns which we were granted and ordered to use, which were our only weapon against people. I took part in search-and-destroy missions, in the burning of villages. All of this is contrary to the laws of warfare."
  
• 4/19/1971 Buchanan memo to Haldeman: "Is the Democratic Party providing staff assistance and/or financial assistance to the McCloskey campaign...If so, we can discredit McCloskey as not a man of principle, but as a party traitor..."
  
• 4/20/1971 Supreme Court, in unanimous decision, supports busing to end "state-imposed segregation" in schools. The ruling did not affect de facto segregation in Northern states.
  
• 4/21/1971 Hugh Gates of the University of Georgia did an interview with former WC member Sen. Cooper; he stated flatly that he and Sen. Russell did not accept the single-bullet theory.
  
• 4/24/1971 "Out Now" rally in D.C. against the war drew between 200,000 and 500,000. Hundreds of Vietnam vets threw away their medals.
  
• 4/26/1971 Retired Mexico City station chief Winston Scott dies of a heart attack in Mexico City while eating breakfast. The CIA's counterintelligence chief, James Angleton, immediately flies to Mexico from Washington to retrieve Scott's autobiographical manuscript and other personal files. It is reported that Angleton also seizes a tape of LHO's conversations in the Cuban Embassy in Mexico City. Cratefuls of material, referred to as "legendary", are removed from Scott's home by a CIA team. They have never resurfaced. (The CIA has previously informed Congressional investigators that they routinely destroyed the audio tapes prior to the assassination.)
  
• 4/27/1971 Robert Mardian delivered a Law Day address at a banquet of the Federal Bar Association in Washington. He spoke of the pressing need for increased internal security measures at both the federal and state levels. The New York Times reported that he also said "that the assassination of President Kennedy might have been made possible by what the Warren Commission called the Federal Bureau of Investigation's restrictive view of it's duty to investigate Lee Harvey Oswald." The same day, Hoover abruptly cancelled all COINTELPRO operations, which surprised the Nixon people. The Senate Intelligence Committee was interested in finding out if there was a link between the two events, but Hoover associates say that he had planned to cancel COINTELPRO for several weeks prior to Mardian's speech. (Coincidence or Conspiracy 536-7)
  
• 4/29/1971 Rev. Ralph Abernathy conducted a teach-in at HEW and led a mule train from the Department's offices to the White House. The next day he read a "poor people's bill of particulars" against the Justice Dept.
  
• 4/30/1971 Rev. Philip Berrigan and seven others are indicted for plotting to kidnap Kissinger and blow up heating tunnels in government buildings.