Deep Politics Timeline

[Tracy Riddle]

• 5/1971 Israel: after the Black Panther riots of May 18, an Israeli-Yemeni policeman commented, "I only pray that there be no peace [with the Arabs], otherwise we shall destroy each other." The Black Panthers were Jews from who immigrated from Middle Eastern countries and felt they were being treated as second-class citizens in a country run by mostly European Jews. (O'Brien, The Siege)
  
• 5/1971 Cholera and smallpox epidemic in Bangladesh.
  
• 5/1/1971 The National Railroad Passenger Corporation (Amtrak), the government-run railroad passenger service, began operation.
  
• 5/3-5/1971 People's Coalition for Peace and Justice demonstrates against the war in D.C.; they attempted to shut down the capital. Local police, the army, marines and guardsmen were called in and arrested more than 7000 people at random. Many were herded into a football field and the D.C. Coliseum. The arrests and convictions were later overturned because of widespread violations of constitutional rights.
  
• 5/3/1971 James Earl Ray made a failed escape attempt from Brushy Mountain Prison, Tenn.
  
• 5/4/1971 Erich Honecker replaces Walter Ulbricht as First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Socialist Unity Party (SED) in the GDR (DDR). [Another source reports this as 3 May 71.]
  
• 5/5/1971 A race riot occurs in the Brownsville section of New York City.
  
• 5/9/1971 Secretary of State Rogers returns from his tour of the Middle East.
  
• 5/13/1971 (James) Charles Evers, brother of the slain civil rights leader Medgar Evers, becomes the first black mayor of Fayette, Mississippi.
  
• 5/21/1971 Secretary of the Army Stanley R. Resor resigns.
  
• 5/22/1971 Nixon joins LBJ in dedicating Johnson's presidential library at the University of Texas.
  
• 5/25/1971 Nixon signs bill ending production of the SST.
  
• 5/27/1971 Colson memo to Haldeman about Fitzsimmons becoming the new head of the Teamsters: "Fitzsimmons...told me that if elected...it was his intention to try to deliver the Teamsters [support] to us next year."
  
• 5/28/1971 US and Soviet negotiators finish the fourth round of SALT talks in Vienna.
  
• 5/30/1971 Mariner 9, a US space probe bound for Mars, is launched from Cape Kennedy.
  
• 6/1971 After re-submitting his welfare reform bill, Nixon saw it passed by the House but killed in the Senate.
  
• 6/1/1971 E. Howard Hunt joins the Nixon White House as a "consultant." The CIA's Technical Services Division assists him. He begins planning operations to discredit Senator Edward Kennedy and Daniel Ellsberg and to set up a disinformation scheme to blame JFK for the assassination of Diem. Hunt receives assistance from the CIA's Technical Services Division.
  
• 6/1/1971 Nixon pledges a national drive against drug addiction.
  
• 6/1/1971 Vietnam Veterans for a Just Peace condemn the protests of Vietnam Veterans Against the War as "irreseponsible."
  
• 6/3/1971 Jimmy Hoffa announces from prison that he is not a candidate for election as president of the Teamsters.
  
• 6/6/1971 Honduras: Ramon Cruz is elected President.
  
• 6/7/1971 A federal court issued a permanent injuction against Jim Garrison from prosecuting Clay Shaw, accusing him of bad faith.
  
• 6/8/1971 Memo from Colson to Klein: "Haldeman has asked that we get Jack Kemp operating as the 'truth squad' to refute McCloskey."
  
• 6/9/1971 US cites Israeli settlements in Jordanian Jerusalem as a violation of Geneva Convention.
  
• 6/10/1971 Nixon announced that the trade embargo on Communist China would be lifted.
  
• 6/10/1971 Riots in Mexico City kill ten students, injure 130.
  
• 6/12/1971 J Edgar Hoover informed author Victor Lasky that Robert Kennedy had wiretapped his phone for several weeks in the summer of 1963. "The FBI had not done the job, he said...it was done by 'outside people' whom he did not identify." (It Didn't Start with Watergate 77-9)
  
• 6/12/1971 David Hilliard, Black Panther chief of staff, is convicted of assault in connection with the 4/1968 shootout with police.
  
• 6/13/1971 France: Francois Mitterand is named head of the Socialist Party.
  
• 6/13/1971 In March, 1971, UFOlogist James McDonald's wife Betsy told him she wanted a divorce. McDonald seems to have started planning his suicide not long afterwards. He finished a few articles he was writing (UFO-related and otherwise), and made plans for the storage of his notes, papers, and research. In April 1971 he attempted suicide by shooting himself in the head. He survived, but was blinded and was wheelchair bound. For a short period, McDonald was committed to the psychiatric ward of a Tucson, Arizona hospital. He recovered a degree of peripheral vision, and made plans to return to his teaching position. However, on June 13, 1971, a family, walking along a creek close to the bridge spanning the Canada Del Oro Wash near Tucson, found a body that was later identified as McDonald's. A .38 caliber revolver was found close to him, as well as a suicide note.
  
• 6/13/1971 The New York Times begins publishing the Pentagon Papers. The headline of the three column story reads: "VIETNAM ARCHIVE: PENTAGON STUDY TRACES 3 DECADES OF GROWING U.S. INVOLVEMENT" Richard Nixon reads the story and tells aide H.R. Haldeman it was "criminally traitorous" for someone to turn over the papers and for the Times to publish them, but initially decides it is best for the Administration to "keep out of it." Later that day, Henry Kissinger begins urging Nixon to take action against the newspaper because the release threatened ongoing secret negotiations. The Pentagon Papers quickly provokes a legal battle, and a rise in anxiety in the White House about leaks. From the article by Neil Sheehan: "A massive study of how the United States went to war in Indochina, conducted by the Pentagon three years ago, demonstrates that four administrations progressively developed a sense of commitment to a non-Communist Vietnam, a readiness to fight the North to protect the South, and an ultimate frustration with this effort--to a much greater extent than their public statements acknowledged at the time…The study led its 30 to 40 authors and researchers to many broad conclusions and specific findings, including the following: That the Truman Administration decision to give military aid to France in her colonial war against the Communist-led Vietminh "directly involved" the United States in Vietnam and "set" the course of American policy. That the Eisenhower Administration's decision to rescue a fledgling South Vietnam from a Communist takeover and attempt to undermine the new Communist regime of North Vietnam gave the Administration a "direct role in the ultimate breakdown of the Geneva settlement" for Indochina in 1954. That the Kennedy Administration, though ultimately spared from major escalation decisions by the death of its leader, transformed a policy of "limited-risk gamble," which it inherited, into a "broad commitment" that left President Johnson with a choice between more war and withdrawal. That the Johnson Administration, though the President was reluctant and hesitant to take the final decisions, intensified the covert warfare against North Vietnam and began planning in the spring of 1964 to wage overt war, a full year before it publicly revealed the depth of its involvement and its fear of defeat. That this campaign of growing clandestine military pressure through 1964 and the expanding program of bombing North Vietnam in 1965 were begun despite the judgment of the Government's intelligence community that the measures would not cause Hanoi to cease its support of the Vietcong insurgency in the South, and that the bombing was deemed militarily ineffective within a few months. That these four succeeding administrations built up the American political, military and psychological stakes in Indochina, often more deeply than they realized at the time, with large-scale military equipment to the French in 1950; with acts of sabotage and terror warfare against North Vietnam, beginning in 1954; with moves that encouraged and abetted the overthrow of President Ngo Dinh Diuem of South Vietnam in 1963; with plans, pledges and threats of further action that sprang to life in the Tonkin Gulf clashes in August, 1964; with the careful preparation of public opinion for the years of open warfare that were to follow; and with the calculation in 1965, as the planes and troops were openly committed to sustained combat, that neither accommodation inside South Vietnam nor early negotiations with North Vietnam would achieve the desired result. The Pentagon study also ranges beyond such historical judgments. It suggests that the predominant American interest was at first containment of Communism and later the defense of the power influence and prestige of the United States in both stages irrespective of conditions in Vietnam.
  
• 6/13/1971 NYT article, by Hedrick Smith: "In June, 1967, at a time of great personal disenchantment with the Indochina war and rising frustration among his colleagues at the Pentagon, Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara commissioned a major study of how and why the United States had become so deeply involved in Vietnam…Their report runs to more than 7,000 pages--1.5 million words of historical narratives plus a million words of documents--enough to fill a small crate. Even so, it is not a complete or polished history. It displays many inconsistencies and lacks a single all- embracing summary. It is an extended internal critique based on the documentary record, which the researchers did not supplement with personal interviews, partly because they were pressed for time…Some important gaps appear in the study. The researchers did not have access to the complete files of Presidents or to all the memorandums of their conversations and decisions. Moreover, there is another important gap in the copy of the Pentagon study obtained by The New York Times: It lacks the section on the secret diplomacy of the Johnson period…But the Pentagon account and its accompanying documents also reveal that once the basic objective of policy was set, the internal debate on Vietnam from 1950 until mid-1967 dealt almost entirely with how to reach those objectives rather than with the basic direction of policy…The research project was organized in the Pentagon's office of International Security Affairs--I.S.A., as it is known to Government insiders--the politico-military affairs branch, whose head is the third-ranking official in the Defense Department. This was Assistant Secretary McNaughton when the study was commissioned and Assistant Secretary Paul C. Warnke when the study was completed. In the fall of 1968, it was transmitted to Mr. Warnke, who reportedly "signed off" on it. Former officials say this meant that he acknowledged completion of the work without endorsing its contents and forwarded it to Mr. Clifford…Because of its extreme sensitivity, very few copies were reproduced--from 6 to 15, by various accounts. One copy was delivered by hand to Mr. McNamara, then president of the World Bank. His reaction is not known, but at least one other former policy maker was reportedly displeased by the study's candor."
  
• 6/14/1971 This evening, John Mitchell requests that the NY Times stop printing the Pentagon Papers, saying it would cause "irreparable injury to the defense interests of the United States" but the Times refuses. If the paper refused, another Justice Department official said, the Government would try to forbid further publication by court action tomorrow.
  
• 6/14/1971 Memo from Chuck Colson called Edward Land (head of the Polaroid Corporation) "an extreme liberal though obviously brilliant...he is a member of the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board" and was appointed to that post by Nixon, though Colson suspected him of giving money to the Black United Front. (Secret Files 270)
  
• 6/15/1971 Nixon memo to Haldeman: "I have decided that we must take action within the White House to deal with the problem...under no circumstances is anyone connected with the White House to give any interview to a member of the staff of the New York Times without my express permission."
  
• 6/15/1971 After three installments of the NYT series, the Justice Department obtained a temporary restraining order against further publication, with the government claiming that if publication continued "the national defense interests of the United States and the nation's security will suffer immediate and irreparable harm." US District Judge Murray L. Gurfein ordered the paper to stop publication for four days; the Times complied.
  
• 6/15/1971 Haldeman memo on developing a strategy to deal with the Papers mess: "These should be referred to as the Kennedy/Johnson papers on the war...We need some hard-hitting speeches in Congress - that the Times is putting the press interest above the national interest...Kissinger should mobilize some of the old establishment to hit the Times."
  
• 6/15/1971 Ehrlichman memo to Nixon, saying that it doesn't matter that the Papers deal with JFK/LBJ policies, "The Times violated a very important law...paramount national interests supersede and preclude publication of secrets vital to national security."
  
• 6/15/1971 Justice Department Injuction Opens Landmark Case against New York Times At the behest of President Nixon, the Justice Department files a motion with the US District Court in New York requesting a temporary restraining order and an injunction against the New York Times to prevent further publication of articles stemming from the "Pentagon Papers". The landmark case of New York Times Company v. United States begins. The government's argument is based on the assertion that the publication of the documents jeopardizes national security, makes it more difficult to prosecute the Vietnam War, and endangers US intelligence assets. The Times will base its defense on the principles embodied in the First Amendment, as well as the argument that just because the government claims that some materials are legitimately classified as top secret, this does not mean they have to be kept out of the public eye; the Times will argue that the government does not want to keep the papers secret to protect national security, but instead to protect itself from embarrassment and possible criminal charges. The court grants the temporary restraining order request, forcing the Times to temporarily stop publishing excerpts from the documents. [Herda, 1994; Moran, 2007]
  
• 6/16/1971 US Conference of Mayors urged Nixon to withdraw all troops from Vietnam by the end of the year.
  
• 6/16/1971 Lyndon Johnson received Leo Janos, the Houston bureau chief for Time magazine, at the Johnson Library. The meeting occurred at a propitious moment. Three days earlier The New York Times had published the first installment in what would become known as the Pentagon Papers, a secret study of U.S. involvement in Vietnam. There was much to talk about, and Johnson was in an expansive mood. Over coffee after lunch the conversation turned briefly to President Kennedy. Confident that his former speechwriter would respect the ground rules (the conversation was off the record), Johnson not only reiterated what he had told Howard K. Smith in 1968 and Walter Cronkite in 1969 but went into more detail than he ever had before, making his pregnant "Murder Inc." remarkwhich Janos did not publish until after Johnson's death.
  
• 6/17/1971 Mack Trucks, an American firm, signs a contract to build a factory in the USSR.
  
• 6/17/1971 Maxwell Taylor, on the CBS Morning News, said, "One of the most serious wrongs, in my judgement, was our connivance at the overthrow of President Diem...we had absolutely nothing but chaos which followed...I would be sure that no American ever wanted Diem assassinated, you understand. And it was certainly a terrible shock to President Kennedy when...that developed. But the organization of coups and the execution of a coup is not like organizing a tea party; it's a very dangerous business. So I didn't think we had any right to be surprised when - when Diem and his brother were murdered." Taylor was asked, "Well, what do you make, General, of the principle of the people's right to know?" Taylor answered, "I don't believe in that as a general principle."
  
• 6/17/1971 US signs pact to return Okinawa to Japan.
  
• 6/18/1971 France: philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre is indicted for libeling police.
  
• 6/18-19/1971 Washington Post begins publishing articles based on the Pentagon Papers.
  
• 6/21/1971 Chou En-Lai announces that withdrawal of US support from Taiwan would result in better relations between the US and China.
  
• 6/22/1971 Haldeman memo on the Papers controversy: "The key now is to poison the Democratic well...start going through all the secret documents, especially the Cuban Missile Crisis as well as Korea, etc., and follow up on the demand that these be released....We must...get off the wicket of appearing to cover up for Johnson." (Secret Files 278)
  
• 6/22-23/1971 the Boston Globe and the Chicago Sun-Times publish their own articles on the Pentagon Papers.
  
• 6/22/1971 The Senate, partly upset over Richard Nixon's refusal to provide Congress with copies of the Pentagon Papers, for the first time votes for a unilateral withdrawal from Indochina, regardless of the consequences. For the first time, too, a Gallup poll records a majority favoring an end to the Vietnam war, "even at the risk of eventual Communist takeover."
  
• 6/23/1971 Daniel Ellsberg appears on CBS-TV news and discloses that he is the "leaker" of the Pentagon Papers and urges that Americans take responsibility to end the hostilities in Indochina which have caused the deaths of one to two million people in the last quarter-century. [Former hawk Ellsberg had become disillusioned while running a CIA "pacification" program in the 1960s. Back home and working at the Rand Corporation think tank with a high security clearance, he methodically photocopied the relevant Pentagon documents over a period of months.]
  
• 6/25/1971 Colson memo to Haldeman: "Ellsberg...is a natural villain to the extent that he can be painted evil...we can discredit the peace movement and we have the Democrats on a marvelous hook because thus far most of them have defended the release of the documents." He urged tactics to keep the Democrats "divided and fighting" including: "We could of course plant and try to prove the thesis that Bobby Kennedy was behind the preparation of these papers because he planned to use them to overthrow Lyndon Johnson..." (Secret Files 279)
  
• 6/26/1971 Justice Dept issues a warrant for Daniel Ellsberg.
  
• 6/271971 Max Taylor interview, recorded in early spring '71, is shown; he claims, "I did not recommend combat forces [in 1961]. I stressed we would bring in engineer forces, logistics forces...and help in the very serious flood problem in 1961. So this was not a combat force."
  
• 6/28/1971 Mob leader Joseph A. Colombo Jr. was shot and critically wounded; the assailant, a 25-year-old black man named Jerome A. Johnson, was shot dead at the scene.
  
• 6/28/1971 Los Angeles grand jury indicted Ellsberg on one count of theft of government property and one count of unauthorized possession of writings related to national defense. Ellsberg confessed to leaking the Pentagon Papers because he was convinced of the Vietnam War's immorality. Daniel Ellsberg, who has been evading the FBI, surrenders in Boston to federal authorities.
  
• 6/28/1971 Supreme Court rules 8-1 that state aid to parochial schools is unconstitutional, even if the aid is for non-religious purposes. Court also ruled that Muhammad Ali was improperly drafted because the Justice Dept misled the Selective Service in telling them that his claim to be a conscientious objector was unwarranted.
  
• 6/30/1971 Supreme Court Refuses to Block Publication of Pentagon Papers The Supreme Court rules 6-3 not to permanently enjoin the New York Times and other press organs from publishing articles derived from the Pentagon Papers. Three justices, William O. Douglas, Hugo Black, and Thurgood Marshall, insist that the government can never suppress the publication of information no matter what the threat to national security; the other three in the majority, Potter Stewart, Byron White, and William Brennan, use a more moderate "common sense" standard that says, though the government can suppress publication of sensitive information under circumstances of war or national emergency, this case did not meet the criteria for such suppression. Chief Justice Warren Burger is joined by Harry Blackmun and John Harlan in dissenting; they believe that the president has the unrestrained authority to prevent confidential materials affecting foreign policy from being published. The Times's lawyer says that the ruling will help ensure that a federal court will not issue a restraining order against a news outlet simply because the government is unhappy with the publication of a particular article. [Herda, 1994]
  
• 6/30/1971 Oval Office conversation; Nixon ordered Haldeman to break into the Brookings Institution, presumably to steal Vietnam-related documents: "Just break in. Break in and take them out!" (AP 11/21/1996)
  
• 6/30/1971 Nixon announces that Turkey has agreed to curb opium production.
  
• 6/30/1971 Jim Garrison is arrested at his home by agents of the Internal Revenue Service who charge him with accepting illegal payoffs from pinball machine operators. He will not go to trial for two years. Jim Garrison was arrested by IRS Agents on charges of taking payoffs on pinball gambling by the Mob, "the last of which - $1,000 in marked $50 bills that had been delivered by Gervais earlier that evening - was found in a drawer, where Gervais said it would be. Before he was fingerprinted, Garrison submitted to an examination of his hands, which showed traces of the luminous powder that had been used to mark the bills. (Garrison did not deny receiving the money, but maintained it had been to repay a loan he had made to repay a loan he had made to Gervais.)" The government's star witness against him was Pershing Gervais, and Garrison alleged that he had been bribed by the government.
  
• 6/30/1971 Soviets reported that the Soyuz spacecraft that made an endurance record for orbiting the earth had made a normal re-entry this morning, but its three Cosmonauts were found dead.
  
• 6/30/1971 26th Amendment to the Constitution is ratified.
  
• 6/30/1971 Twelve Black Panthers are cleared of charges of murdering a policeman and conspiracy to murder in a gun fight with police in Detroit 10/1970.
  
• 7/1971 The Pentagon Papers are published in book form by Bantam.
  
• 7/1/1971 Nixon inaugurates the new volunteer agency Action, which merges the Peace Corps, VISTA and seven other volunteer service agencies.
  
• 7/1/1971 David Young is brought to the White House to head the new Special Investigations Unit.
  
• 7/1/1971 Butterfield memo to Nixon stating that McGovern's war record is "routine and clean" and contains no useful dirt.
  
• 7/1/1971 Viet Cong agree to trade POWs for US withdrawal before the end of the year.
  
• 7/1/1971 Charles Colson records a telephone conversation he has with E. Howard Hunt at the end of which Colson asks: "Weren't you the guy who told me, maybe that last time we were up to your house for dinner, that if the truth ever came out about Kennedy and the Bay of Pigs, that it would destroy them?" Colson points out that Hunt was "the CIA mastermind on Bay of Pigs." Hunt: "We should go down the line to nail the guy [Ellsberg] cold."
  
• 7/1/1971 Black Panther David Hilliard is sentenced to a 1-10 year prison term.
  
• 7/1/1971 The new semi-independent Postal Service goes into operation.
  
• 7/2/1971 Colson and Haldeman talk about hiring Hunt.
  
• 7/3/1971 Indonesia holds first national elections since 1955.
  
• 7/3/1971 Doors singer Jim Morrison, who for a time lived in a home on Rothdell Trail, behind the Laurel Canyon Country Store, may or may not have died in Paris on July 3, 1971. The events of that day remain shrouded in mystery and rumor, and the details of the story, such as they are, have changed over the years. What is known is that, on that very same day, his father Admiral George Stephen Morrison delivered the keynote speech at a decommissioning ceremony for the aircraft carrier USS Bon Homme Richard, from where, seven years earlier, he had helped choreograph the Tonkin Gulf Incident. A few years after Jim's death, his common-law wife, Pamela Courson, dropped dead as well, officially of a heroin overdose. Like Hendrix, Morrison had been an avid student of the occult, with a particular fondness for the work of Aleister Crowley. According to super-groupie Pamela DesBarres, he had also "read all he could about incest and sadism." Also like Hendrix, Morrison was just twenty-seven at the time of his (possible) death.
  
• 7/5-9/1971 NAACP holds its 62nd annual convention in Minneapolis.
  
• 7/6/1971 Hunt is retained at $100 a day as a consultant at Colson's White House office. Hunt, in Undercover, would pretend that he was reluctant to take the job, though he had been pestering Colson for some time for work in the White House. Charles Colson is urging John Ehrlichman to meet E. Howard Hunt in order to "assure yourself the kind of man we're getting."
  
• 7/7/1971 Today Colson introduced Hunt to Ehrlichman. Hunt said he had been retired from the CIA for a year. Colson needs Ehrlichman's permission to hire Hunt. Files indicate that Hunt's employment records actually begin on July 6th.
  
• 7/7/1971 Ehrlichman phoned General Robert E. Cushman to request technical support for Hunt. Cushman was deputy director of CIA, and knew Hunt well. Cushman would later say he wasn't sure if it was Ehrlichman he talked to, or someone else in the Nixon administation.
  
• 7/7/1971 CIA memo discusses Ehrlichman arrangement for Hunt to work with Cushman.
  
• 7/7/1971 South Vietnamese General Ngo Dzu is accused in US Congress of engaging in heroin trafficking.
  
• 7/7/1971 Haig sent out a memo requesting the names and clearances of all persons in the government who had a "Top Secret" clearance to see the Pentagon Papers.
  
• 7/7/1971 Seven Black Panthers are indicted in NYC on charges of murder and arson.
  
• 7/8/1971 Frank Fitzimmons is elected president of the Teamsters.
  
• 7/8/1971 As Ehrlichman left for California, Hunt arranged for an interview with former CIA operative Lucien Conein. Hunt and Colson hoped Conein could provide information that JFK had ordered the overthrow and/or assassination of Diem. To record the interview, Hunt had the SS install a clandestine taping system in Ehrlichman's offices. The tape recorder, installed in the cushions of a couch, failed to operate because Conein sat on it throughout the interview. (Secret Agenda p33-34)
  
• 7/8/1971 Northern Ireland: during rioting in Derry, two Catholic men, Seamus Cusack (27) and Desmond Beattie (19), were shot dead by the British Army in disputed circumstances. The Army claimed the men were armed but local people maintained that they did not have any weapons at any time. The rioting intensified following their deaths. [The Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) withdrew from Stormont on 16 July 1971 because no inquiry was announced into the killings.]
  
• 7/9/1971 Rep. Paul McCloskey Jr. announces he will challenge Nixon in the GOP presidential primaries.
  
• 7/9/1971 US troops relinguish total responsibility for defense of the area just below the demilitarized zone to South Vietnamese troops.
  
• 7/10/1971 Morocco: soldiers fail to seize power in attack on king's palace.
  
• 7/11/1971 Nixon signs a $5.15 billion education spending bill.
  
• 7/12/1971 Nixon signs the Emergency Employment Act, providing $2.25 billion for public service jobs over the next two years at the state and local levels.
  
• 7/12/1971 In San Clemente, Nixon, Ehrlichman and Mardian discuss the Pentagon Papers.
  
• 7/12/1971 Miami-based Cuban exiles claim responsibility for an act of sabotage causing a railroad accident in Guantanamo.
  
• 7/13/1971 Morocco: Army executes ten leaders of the attempted coup.
  
• 7/14/1971 400,000 US phone workers go on strike in the US.
  
• 7/15/1971 Nixon announces that he has accepted "with pleasure" the invitation by Chou En-Lai to visit China.
  
• 7/15/1971 NBC Saigon correspondent Phil Brady told the audience of NBC Nightly News that Lt. Gen. Dang Van Quang was "the biggest pusher" in South Vietnam. He also claimed from "extremely reliable sources" that Thieu and Ky were using drug money to finance their presidential campaign that summer. Brady was expelled from Vietnam "for providing help and comfort to the Communist enemy."
  
• 7/16, 22/1971 representatives of US, UK, France and USSR meet in Berlin to discuss the area's future.
  
• 7/17/1971 Agnew criticizes US black leaders.
  
• 7/18/1971 Billy James Hargis writes in his newsletter that he is dismayed that Nixon's foreign policy is not much different than Kennedy's or Johnson's: "I am not a prophet nor a son of a prophet, but I am here to tell you that if President Nixon trusts this disarmament treaty with the Soviet Union and cuts back on our U.S. Safeguard Anti-Ballistic Missile System, this can amount to committing suicide as far as the United States is concerned."
  
• 7/19/1971 Nixon memo to Kissinger noting that his (Nixon's) character and attributes are very similar to Chou En-Lai's.
  
• 7/19/1971 Ehrlichman hires G. Gordon Liddy for the Domestic Council staff.
  
• 7/20/1971 Liddy was transferred out of the Treasury Dept to the White House Domestic Council.
  
• 7/20/1971 Dr. Fred Fielding refuses to discuss his patient, Daniel Ellsberg, with the FBI.
  
• 7/22/1971 Agriculture Dept issues new food stamp program regulations.
  
• 7/22/1971 Colson memo to Ehrlichman: "Liddy is an excellent man. Hunt can be very useful....I have assigned Howard Hunt the job of going through the Pentagon Papers, picking out those areas where we might be able to expose the Harrimans, the Warnkes, the Cliffords, the Vances, the McGeorge Bundys, the McNamaras, etc."
  
• 7/22/1971 Hunt goes to Langley in a White House limousine and met with Robert E. Cushman. Cushman secretly recorded their talk in his office. Hunt: "I've been charged with quite a highly sensitive mission by the White House to visit and elicit information from an individual whose ideology we aren't entirely sure of, and for that purpose they asked me to come over here and see if you could get me two things: flash alias documentation…and some degree of physical disguise for a one-time op in and out." Hunt was going to interview a man who claimed to know explosive information about Chappaquiddick. (Nedzi report p1125-31) Hunt and Cushman had shared an office together in CIA's Clandestine Division during the spring of 1950. (Nightmare p80)
  
• 7/22/1971 Weekly US death toll in Vietnam has dropped to its lowest level since 1965. 230,000 troops remain in the country, and the total number of US dead in Vietnam and Cambodia since 1961 is 45,384 so far; total South Vietnamese military deaths: 130,366; North Vietnamese and VC listed as 759,000 deaths.
  
• 7/23/1971 CIA supplies Hunt with a brown wig, thick glasses and I.D. in name of Edward Joseph Warren. He was also given devices to alter his voice and his gait.
  
• 7/23/1971 Sudan executes four charged in an attempted coup.
  
• 7/24/1971 Colson memo to Pat O'Donnell: "We should always consider using George Bush more often as a good speaking resource...he takes our line beautifully." (Secret Files 302)
  
• 7/24/1971 The White House Special Investigations Unit met for the first time. It had been approved by Nixon, who was in San Clemente.
  
• 7/24/1971 US and UK announce their support of Iran's military buildup.
  
• 7/25/1971 26th Amendment added to the constitution, giving 18-year-olds the right to vote.
  
• 7/26/1971 Apollo 15 is launched.
  
• 7/28/1971 Pat Buchanan memo to Haldeman, urging that Edith Efron's The News Twisters be given "broad circulation...columns should be encouraged...give it maximum publicity...Behind Miss Efron is a foundation on which W.F. Buckley and others are situated. They are the ones who tracked me to it."
  
• 7/28/1971 Hunt memo to Colson; it proposed that the CIA perform "a covert psychological assessment/evaluation" of David Ellsberg. It urged collection of all derogatory files on him, including "files from his psychiatric analyst."
  
• 7/28/1971 Agnew returns from his 32-day diplomatic tour of 10 nations.
  
• 7/28/1971 US suspends spy flights over Communist China.
  
• 7/29/1971 After discussing the matter with Helms, Howard Osborn instructed the CIA's Office of Medical Services to create a profile on Ellsberg.
  
• 7/29/1971 Yugoslavia: Tito is reelected to another term.
  
• 7/31-8/2/1971 two US astronauts drive an electric car on the moon as part of the Apollo 15 mission. Sharp color footage was transmitted back to Earth.
  
• 8/1971 Reverend Jerry Falwell started Lynchburg Baptist College with 154 students, four full-time faculty, and no campus. In 1976, the name was changed to Liberty Baptist College and was renamed Liberty University in 1985 after adding its seventh college/school.
  
• 8/1/1971 AP reported, "Evangelist Billy James Hargis, an anti-Communist crusader who says his emphasis no longer is concerned with conspiratorial problems but internal moral problems,' operates from his base here [Tulsa], convinced the influence in the Fundamentalist Capital of the World,' as he calls it, has meant the city has been virtually free of unemployment, racial tension, student dissidents or other Communist agitation.'…Hargis now strikes hard at drug use, the sexual revolution,' X-rated movies and Satan worship. We're convinced Satan worship is on the rise in this country,' he says…"
  
• 8/2/1971 Howard Hunt memo to Colson about "Kennedy Holdovers in the Nixon Administration."
  
• 8/2/1971 Railroad strikes by the AFL-CIO United Transportation Union end with a new contract.
  
• 8/2/1971 US announces its support for future membership of Communist China in the UN.
  
• 8/2/1971 CIA admits it has a 30,000-man army in Laos.
  
• 8/2/1971 Washington Post reported that G. Gordon Liddy was the administration's spokesman at the National Rifle Association's annual convention.
  
• 8/3/1971 Colson memo to Haldeman: "Is someone around here working on suggestions for what we might do to bring the conservatives back into line?...they can become intractable and vindictive."
  
• 8/3/1971 Hoover gives his approval to proceed in investigation of the Pentagon Papers.
  
• 8/5/1971 George Wallace announces he will run for president in 1972.
  
• 8/5/1971 Selective Service System conducts its third draft lottery since Congress authorized the random selection of men into the armed forces in 1969.
  
• 8/5/1971 Turkey opened relations with Peking and dropped its ties with Taiwan.
  
• 8/6/1971 A New Orleans jury acquits 12 Black Panthers of attempted murder of five New Orleans cops in a gun fight 9/1970.
  
• 8/6/1971 Jack Anderson reported that in 1968 Robert Maheu, acting on Howard Hughes' orders, had contributed $100,000 to the Nixon campaign and delivered it to Bebe Rebozo.
  
• 8/7/1971 Apollo 15 splashes down safely in the Pacific.
  
• 8/9/1971 Nixon signs a bill providing a $250 million government-guaranteed loan to Lockheed; also signs the public service jobs bill to provide 150,000 jobs for the unemployed, and a bill appropriating $20 billion for FY 1972 for the Depts of Labor and HEW.
  
• 8/9/1971 David Young met with Howard Osborn and John Paisley from the CIA at Langley headquarters, according to a memo Young wrote. "I reviewed the need for us to gain a data base on all leaks at least since January of 1969." Paisley's wife Marianne recalled that he and Osborn and the Plumbers met frequently in the following months. (Secret Agenda p40)
  
• 8/9/1971 Ulster invokes emergency powers as 12 die in Northern Ireland riots. Introduction of Internment. In a series of raids across Northern Ireland, 342 people were arrested and taken to makeshift camps. There was an immediate upsurge of violence and 17 people were killed during the next 48 hours. Of these 10 were Catholic civilians who were shot dead by the British Army. Hugh Mullan (38) was the first Catholic priest to be killed in the conflict when he was shot dead by the British Army as he was giving the last rites to a wounded man. Winston Donnell (22) became the first Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR) solider to die in 'the Troubles' when he was shot by the Irish Republican Army (IRA) near Clady, County Tyrone. [There were more arrests in the following days and months. Internment was to continue until 5 December 1975. During that time 1,981 people were detained; 1,874 were Catholic / Republican, while 107 were Protestant / Loyalist. Internment had been proposed by Unionist politicians as the solution to the security situation in Northern Ireland but was to lead to a very high level of violence over the next few years and to increased support for the IRA.]
  
• 8/9/1971 India and USSR sign a non-aggression pact.
  
• 8/10/1971 The CIA profile on Ellsberg was completed.
  
• 8/11/1971 Ehrlichman approves covert operation, as long as it is not traceable, to obtain Ellsberg's psychiatric file.
  
• 8/11/1971 NY Mayor John Lindsay switches from the GOP to the Democratic party.
  
• 8/11/1971 Defense Sec. Laird announced that from now on all ground operations in Vietnam will be conducted solely by ARVN.
  
• 8/12/1971 CIA's psychiatric profile on Ellsberg is sent to the Plumbers. A meeting attended by Hunt, Liddy, Young and doctors from the CIA discussed the report, which said that Ellsberg had problems with authority figures and might be suffering from a mid-life crisis. Hunt and Liddy were disappointed with the results. (Nedzi report p497)
  
• 8/12/1971 Syria severs ties to Jordan in support of the PLO.
  
• 8/13/1971 Nixon met with his economic advisers. Trade deficits had been appearing each month since April, and by the summer the US' gold reserve had shrunk from a postwar high of $25 billion to only $10.5 billion. Currency traders around the world began selling off their dollars.
  
• 8/13/1971 Atty General Mitchell drops the federal investigation of the Kent State shootings.
  
• 8/15/1971 Nixon announced to the nation his "Phase One" of a new economic program. The US was going off the gold standard; the US would no longer redeem dollars in gold. This momentous decision meant that foreign currencies would no longer be pegged to the dollar, as they had since 1946. Nixon also announced that he would also impose wage-price controls for 90 days to combat inflation; this latter action gained much more press attention than the more important ending of the Bretton Woods agreement. Nixon indicated that this would only be temporary, but it turned out to be permanent.
  
• 8/16/1971 John Dean prepared a memo ("Dealing with our Political Enemies") suggested ways "we can use the available Federal machinery to screw our political enemies."
  
• 8/17/1971 Nixon signed the Export Expansion Finance Act of 1971 into law.
  
• 8/18/1971 Hunt requested a CIA secretary he had worked with before to come to work at the Plumbers office, but the request was denied.
  
• 8/18/1971 Australia and New Zealand announce they will pull their troops out of Vietnam this year.
  
• 8/20/1971 Jimmy Hoffa is denied parole.
  
• 8/20/1971 Alex Butterfield memo to Security Assistant Miss Gertrude Brown: "you should instruct the FBI to proceed with the full field background investigation of Mr. Daniel Lewis Schorr..."
  
• 8/20/1971 Hunt went to the CIA safehouse on Wisconsin Avenue. There he met the CIA's Cleo Gephart, a TSD technician, who issued him a tape recorder concealed in a typewriter case.
  
• 8/20/1971 British authorities arrest leaders of terrorist group the Angry Brigade
  
• 8/20/1971 Lt. Calley's sentence for the My Lai massacre is reduced to 20 years.
  
• 8/21/1971 George Jackson dies, supposedly shot while trying to escape from San Quentin. George Lester Jackson (September 23, 1941 August 21, 1971) was an American convict who became a left-wing activist, Marxist, author, and a member of the Black Panther Party while incarcerated. Jackson achieved fame as one of the Soledad Brothers and was later shot to death by prison guards in San Quentin Prison under debated circumstances.
  
• 8/21/1971 FBI agents and local police foil a Selective Service office raid in Buffalo, NY, arresting five young men and women.
  
• 8/21/1971 Philippines: assassins tried to slay numerous members of the opposition Liberal Party in Manila.
  
• 8/22/1971 At Attica, inmates fast and hold a silent protest at breakfast in memory of George Jackson.
  
• 8/22/1971 FBI agents and local police prevent a raid on a Selective Service office in Camden, NJ, by 20 people.
  
• 8/22/1971 Bolivia: military takes over and installs Gen. Hugo Banzer Suarez. The leftist military regime of Juan Jose Torres was ousted. Banzer made a nationwide broadcast late today in which he said his government would make "an honest sacrifice" to improve Bolivia's notoriously impoverished life. Banzer, 43-year-old former head of the military academy in La Paz, said. "We were tired of chaos and anarchy, with the demagoguery which had become the bread of everyday life." The military leaders who overthrew Torres had charged when the rebellion began Thursday in Bolivia's eastern provinces that Torres was leading the nation towards Communism. Banzer led an unsuccessful coup attempt last January. Wednesday he was arrested in La Paz after Torres accused him of plotting against the government. The other members of the junta are Gen. Florentino Mendieta and Col. Andres Selich. Selich led Bolivian troops who wiped out the Cuban-supported guerrilla band of Ernesto Che Guevara in 1967. The junta named Mario Gutierrez, president of the Bolivian Socialist Falange, and Ciro Humbolt of the National Revolutionary Movement as co-ministers of state. Humbolt is a close friend of Bolivia's former President Victor Paz Estenssoro, who is living in exile in Peru.
  
• 8/25/1971 Nixon requested a 90-day freeze in wages and prices, asked Congress for a tax cut and a 10% surcharge on many imports; all to control inflation and strengthen the dollar.
  
• 8/25/1971 Hunt and Liddy went to a CIA safehouse in Washington and met with Steve Greenwood. Liddy was given alias documentation as "George Leonard," a resident of Kansas, plus a disguise and a small camera concealed in a tobacco pouch. This afternoon, they left for Los Angeles. By night, they had arrived at Dr. Fielding's office, though the doctor had left for the night. Hunt spoke to the cleaning lady in Spanish, and told her they were friends of Fielding's. They were allowed to enter his office, where Liddy photographed the interior. They then took the first flight back to Washington, arriving on 8/26 at 6am. (Will; Secret Agenda)
  
• 8/26/1971 Buchanan memo to Nixon, referring to an Atlantic article about heredity rather than environment determining how intelligent people will be: "And every study we have shows blacks 15 IQ points below whites on the average. This is a powerful and seminal article...it seems to me that a lot of what we are doing in terms of integration of blacks and whites...is less likely to result in accomodation than it is in perpetual friction..."
  
• 8/27/1971 The CIA developed Liddy's film, but his Tessina camera had failed to work properly. The CIA kept a set of prints, noticing that they were obviously "casing" photos. (Nightmare p102) Today, Gen. Cushman called Ehrlichman to say that the CIA would no longer provide assistance to Hunt. Ehrlichman was unaware that the CIA had been helping Hunt at all. (Nedzi report 331-42)
  
• 8/29/1971 Manila: opposition leader Benigno Aquino leaves on a campaign tour.
  
• 8/30/1971 William Sullivan has his last meeting with Hoover: "What I did tell him was that he ruled the bureau by fear and that men along in years who had served faithfully in the FBI lived in dread of him. I added that I no longer intended to be intimidated...When I finished, he grew red and began to sputter and stammer." Sullivan told him, "I think you'd be doing the country a great service if you retired." Hoover replied, "Well, I don't intend to...I've taken this up with Attorney General Mitchell and he agrees with me that it is you who should be forced out." The next morning, Sullivan found the lock on his office changed and his name removed from the door. (The Bureau p13-14) Reportedly, when Hoover called Sullivan a Judas, Sullivan responded, "Well, I'm no Judas Iscariot, and you're no Jesus Christ!" (Hosty, Assignment Oswald p187)
  
• 8/30/1971 NY Times reported that the Director of Customs in South Vietnam had stated that he "believed that planes of the South Vietnamese Air Force were the principal carriers" of heroin into the region.
  
• 8/31/1971 Gen. Cushman memo to Helms documenting his call to Ehrlichman that no further CIA help would be provided. Cushman felt that "Hunt was becoming a pain in the neck. John said he would restrain Hunt." (Nedzi report p9) But the CIA continued to help the Plumbers "well into 1972," as Liddy later wrote in Will.
  
• Fall 1971: Nixon Aides Develop Operation Sandwedge' A staff aide to President Nixon, former New York City police detective Jack Caulfield, develops a broad plan for launching an intelligence operation against the Democrats for the 1972 re-election campaign, "Operation Sandwedge." The original proposal, as Caulfield will later recall, is a 12-page document detailing what would be required to create an "accurate, intelligence-assessment capability" against not just the Democrats but "also to ensure that the then powerful anti-war movement did not destroy Nixon's public campaign, as had been done to Hubert Humphrey in 1968" (see November 5, 1968). Sandwedge is created in anticipation of the Democrats mounting their own political espionage efforts, which Caulfield and other Nixon aides believe will use a private investigations firm, Intertel, headed by former Justice Department officials loyal to former Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. Caulfield will later recall, "Intertel represented, in my opinion, the potential for both formidable and sophisticated intelligence opposition tactics in that upcoming election campaign." Sandwedge is turned down by senior White House aides in favor of the "Special Investigation Unit" (see March 20, 1971 and September 29, 1972) headed by G. Gordon Liddy. Caulfield resigns from the White House shortly thereafter. He will later call the decision not to implement "Sandwedge" a "monumental" error that "rapidly created the catastrophic path leading directly to the Watergate complexand the president's eventual resignation." Caulfield has little faith in Liddy, considering him an amateurish blowhard with no real experience in intelligence or security matters; when White House counsel John Dean asks him for his assessment of Liddy's ability to run such an operation, he snaps, "John, you g_ddamn well better have him closely supervised" and walks out of Dean's office. Caulfield later writes, "I, therefore, unequivocally contend that had there been Sandwedge' there would have been no Liddy, no Hunt, no McCord, no Cubans (see 2:30 a.m.June 17, 1972) and, critically, since I had personally decided to negate, while still on the White House staff, a developing intelligence interest by Dean in the Watergate's Democratic National Committee offices, seven months prior to the break-in! NO WATERGATE!" [John J. 'Jack' Caulfield, 2006; Spartacus Schoolnet, 8/2007]
  
• 9/1971 Cliff Carter, LBJ's aide who rode in the vice president's follow up car in the motorcade in Dealey Plaza where President Kennedy was gunned down, was LBJ's top aide during his first administration. Carter dies of mysterious circumstances this month. Carter dies of pneumonia when no penicillin can be located in Washington, D.C.
  
• 9/3-4/1971 White House aides E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy supervise the burglary (by Bernard Barker, Eugenio Martinez and Felipe DeDiego) of the office of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist. The Cubans smashed a window on the ground floor and used a crowbar to pry open the front door of the second-floor office. The office was ransacked and pills were scattered around the floor to make police think the burglary had been done by drug addicts. The three burglars later testified they found no file on Ellsberg, though Dr. Fielding would testify that the file was taken from his file cabinet and was laying on the floor, the pages clearly having been "fingered." DeDiego also said that the file was located and photographed, testifying that he held it while Martinez snapped shots with his Minox.
  
• 9/3/1971 Saigon: Nguyen Cao Ky, barred from the ballot, threatens a coup in the election proceeds.
  
• 9/3/1971 Signing of the Four Power Agreement, known as the Quadripartite Agreement on Berlin. This provided the framework for the subsequent Transit Agreement. Soviet Ambassador Abrassimov wraps up the process with the quote that could be translated as "All's well that ends well." [The Quadripartite Agreement is known as the Four Power Agreement on the Status of West-Berlin in GDR documents.] Lord Mayor Schuetz calls it "status quo plus" in describing it from the city's standpoint.
  
• 9/3/1971 USSR guaranteed to the US in writing Western access to West Berlin. The US guaranteed that West Germany would not try to incorporate that half of the city.
  
• 9/9/1971 Convicts revolt at Attica prison in NY, holding 32 guards.
  
• 9/9/1971 Colson sends Dean a "Priority List" of 20 "political enemies."
  
• 9/9/1971 Colson memo to Haldeman, asking him to encourage Bob Dole to "attack hard" in his speeches against Democrats.
  
• 9/11/1971 Ehrlichman memo to Nixon recommending "going forward with the proposed lawsuits" against the TV networks.
  
• 9/11/1971 Black Panther Bobby Seale is brought in to negotiate with the Attica convicts.
  
• 9/11/1971 Nikita Khrushchev dies in obscurity.
  
• 9/13/1971 NY Gov. Nelson Rockefeller sent police and troops into Attica. At 9:46 a.m., tear gas was dropped into the yard and New York State Police troopers and soldiers from the New York National Guard opened fire non-stop for two minutes into the smoke. Among the weapons used by the troopers were shotguns, which led to the wounding and killing of hostages and inmates who were not resisting. Former prison officers were allowed to participate, a decision later called "inexcusable" by the commission established by Rockefeller to study the riot and the aftermath. By the time the facility was retaken, nine hostages and 29 inmates had been killed. A tenth hostage died on October 9, 1972, of gunshot wounds received during the assault. The final death toll from the riot also included the officer fatally injured at the start of the riot and four inmates who were subject to vigilante killings. Nine hostages died from gunfire by state troopers and soldiers. The New York State Special Commission on Attica wrote, "With the exception of Indian massacres in the late 19th century, the State Police assault which ended the four-day prison uprising was the bloodiest one-day encounter between Americans since the Civil War."
  
• 9/14/1971 Arthur Bremer bought a 1967 Rambler for $800.
  
• 9/16/1971 Look magazine announced it was going out of business because of competition from Life and TV.
  
• 9/16/1971 In a news conference, Nixon says, "I would remind all concerned that the way we got into Vietnam was through...the complicity in the murder of Diem."
  
• 9/17/1971 Supreme Court justice Hugo Black resigns because of poor health.
  
• 9/18/1971 Egypt and Israel exchange fire over the Suez Canal after a 13-month truce.
  
• 9/19/1971 US Army announced it was changing its bayonet drill slogan from "Kill! Kill!" to "Yah! Yah." An Army training specialist said, "We're trying to keep things modern and in good taste."
  
• 9/21/1971 Federal agents seize personal papers and property belong to Daniel Ellsberg.
  
• 9/21/1971 Congress extends the military draft for two more years.
  
• 9/21/1971 US reveals the existence of 8 letters from Ho Chi Minh c1945 to the US requesting aid, though none were ever answered.
  
• 9/22/1971 US formally submits two resolutions to the UN bearing on the seating of the Chinese delegation in the UN.
  
• 9/22/1971 A military jury in Georgia found Capt. Ernest Medina not guilty of charges of murder in the deaths at My Lai.
  
• 9/23/1971 John Harlan retires from the Supreme Court.
  
• 9/24/1971 Fifth round of US-USSR negotiations over SALT ends in Helsinki.
  
• 9/24/1971 London expels 105 Soviets for espionage.
  
• 9/24/1971 Roscoe Anthony White dies after sustaining serious burns from the explosion of a welding tank. He is reported to have admitted his involvement in JFK's assassination in a declaration to a preacher, Reverend Jack Shaw, just before he dies. Shaw says that White confessed several murders to him, and that later Geneva White revealed what she knew about the affair. Shaw later states that "I am convinced that Roscoe White did shoot President Kennedy. I believe that Roscoe was telling the truth and had no reason to lie." According to Roscoe's son, Ricky, his father kept a diary in which he spoke of being a shooter on the Grassy Knoll, then later eliminating twenty-eight witnesses to the killing. The diary also placed White with J.D. Tippit on the day of the assassination when Tippit was killed during Oswald's flight to the Texas Theater. It is alleged that Tippit, who just happened to live cater corner to the White's, was part of the operation (whose mission was to take Oswald to Red Bird field to be flown to Houston -- and a waiting David Ferrie) but balked when he discovered Oswald was supposedly the one who was identified as the suspect in the shooting. Tippit did not want to be connected to the escape of the killer, or to harboring, aiding or abetting a fugitive. White, to keep the operation intact and do damage control, then had to eliminate Tippit. In 1975, the White's home is burgled and the diary is supposedly stolen.
  
• 9/25/1971 Former Supreme Court justice Hugo Black dies.
  
• 9/25/1971 Belgrade: Tito and Brezhnev sign a declaration asserting Yugoslavia's independence.
  
• 9/26/1971 Nixon greets Japanese Emperor Hirohito in Anchorage, Alaska, during a stopover on the Emperor's flight to Europe.
  
• 9/28/1971 After 15 years of sanctuary in the US embassy in Budapest, Cardinal Mindszenty accepts exile in Rome.
  
• 9/30/1971 Nine-member citizens committee appointed to investigate the Attica massacre. Gov. Rockefeller named the panel, and it will be headed by Robert B. McKay, dean of the law school at NY University. One member, Amos Henix, is a former convict.