Deep Politics Timeline

[Tracy Riddle]

• 7/1972 Northern Ireland: British army conducted sweeps through Catholic areas of Belfast and Londonderry.
  
• 7/1/1972 Nixon signed a bill increasing Social Security benefits by 20%; from now on, the program was automatically set to rise with inflation.
  
• 7/1/1972 The Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms Division (ATFD) of the Internal Revenue Service was separated from the Internal Revenue Service and given full Bureau status in the Treasury Department. It is now called the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (BATF).
  
• 7/3-7/1972 NAACP holds its annual convention in Detroit.
  
• 7/3/1972 David Young told FBI agents that Howard Hunt had a secure phone line installed in the White House so he could talk secretly with various officials at the CIA.
  
• 7/5/1972 US Attorney's Office in Washington agreed not to prosecute Baldwin in return for his complete cooperation.
  
• 7/5/1972 For the third time, the FBI searched the DNC headquarters for signs of electronic surveillance, and found none.
  
• 7/6/1972 CIA memo from Gen. Vernon Walters says that a review of CIA files "provided no indication that [McCord] was involved in Cuban matters and that he was not assigned to the Bay of Pigs operation." The memo did qualify this by saying that McCord may have been involved in ways not reflected in any records. (Secret Agenda p10)
  
• 7/6-17/1972 US and Soviet space planners meet at the US Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston.
  
• 7/7/1972 US and USSR sign an agreement detailing areas of science and technology in which scientists from both nations will cooperate.
  
• 7/8/1972 Nixon announces the sale of at least $750 million of US wheat, corn and grain to the Soviets.
  
• 7/10/1972 Alfred Baldwin gave two FBI agents a detailed account of his involvement in the Watergate break-in.
  
• 7/10/1972 CIA case officer Martin Lukoskie memo to Richard Helms: he had a meeting with Robert Bennett, president of the Robert R. Mullen Co. for lunch at the Hot Shoppes Cafeteria. "Mr. Bennett said that when E. Howard Hunt was connected with the incident, reporters from the Washington Post and he thought the Washington Star tried to establish a Seven Days in May' scenario with the Agency attempting to establish control over both the Republican and Democratic parties so as to be able to take over the country. Mr. Bennett said he was able to convince them that course was nonsense. He asked them why they should want to ruin himself, his Company and other innocent persons because the Company has innocently hired Hunt following his retirement from CIA. Mr. Bennett was aware that the original plan when Hunt was hired was for Hunt to become president of the Company after a few years. Instead, General Foods stated its wish to buy the Company whereupon Robert R. Mullen revealed that he had given an option for purchase to Mr. Bennett and that General Foods would need to negotiate with Mr. Bennett…Mr. Bennett said that the mission of the Watergate Five' was to rejuvenate the bugging apparatus in the Democratic National Headquarters in the Watergate. Hunt had told Bennett that they' had obtained such great stuff' from the bug before it failed to function that McCord et al were instructed to install new batteries, mikes, et cetera, to make it work again. Hunt never identified they' to Bennett…Mr. Bennett related that he has now established a back door entry' to the Edward Bennett Williams law firm which is representing the Democratic party in its suit…Mr. Bennett is prepared to go this route to kill off any revelation by Ed Williams of Agency association with the Mullen firm…" (Secret Agenda p330)
  
• 7/12/1972 George McGovern was nominated by the Democrats.
  
• 7/13/1972 McGovern chose Thomas Eagleton as his running-mate. McGovern said in his acceptance speech, "I think we learned from watching the Republicans four years ago as they selected their Vice-Presidential nominee that it pays to take a little more time."
  
• 7/14/1972 Jean Westwood is selected as the new chairman of the DNC.
  
• 7/14/1972 The NYT commented that the choice of Eagleton was "a casting director's ideal for a running mate."
  
• 7/16/1972 East Cost Mafia leader Thomas Eboli is shot and killed in NYC.
  
• 7/18/1972 Frank Sinatra gives evidence to a House commission investigating organized crime.
  
• 7/20/1972 Arsonists break into the empty Texas School Book Depository building in Dallas, Texas, spread gasoline on five floors and set it on fire. It is saved from destruction by the overhead sprinkler system as well as by a rapid response from the fire department. Damage from the blaze is minimal. "It was definitely arson," an assistant fire chief tells reporters, "we found gasoline cans on five floors and the smell of gasoline was all through the building."
  
• 7/22/1972 E. Howard Hunt visits CIA headquarters at Langley, Virginia to meet with General Cushman. Hunt requests alias documentation, a fake driver's license and "pocket litter." Cushman secretly records this meeting.
  
• 7/23/1972 At the height of bloodletting in Northern Ireland, the British government considered trying to end the sectarian conflict by forcibly moving hundreds of thousands of Catholics to the Irish Republic. But the top secret contingency plan, dated today, was rejected out of concern the government would have had to be "completely ruthless" in carrying it out, and that it would have provoked outrage at home and abroad, especially in the United States. Signed by Cabinet Secretary Sir Burke Trend, the plan called for a "massive reinforcement of troops" in the province accompanied by "searches, interrogation and possibly internment" against Catholic and Protestant paramilitary groups. If that failed, another suggested solution involved either redrawing the border or a "compulsory transfer of population" affecting more than a fourth of the province's 1.5 million residents. More than 200,000 Catholics would be moved from Northern Ireland to the Irish Republic or "into homogenous enclaves within Northern Ireland." A similar number of Protestants living in lands ceded to the Irish Republic would be moved into what remained of Northern Ireland. (AP 1/1/03)
  
• 7/25/1972 The Tuskegee syphilis experiment story broke first in the Washington Star on July 25, 1972. It became front-page news in the New York Times the following day. Senator Edward Kennedy called Congressional hearings, at which Buxtun and HEW officials testified. As a result of public outcry the CDC and PHS appointed an ad hoc advisory panel to review the study. It determined the study was medically unjustified and ordered its termination. As part of the settlement of a class action lawsuit subsequently filed by the NAACP, the U.S. government paid $9 million (unadjusted for inflation) and agreed to provide free medical treatment to surviving participants and to surviving family members infected as a consequence of the study.
  
• 7/26/1972 McGovern said he was "1000% for Tom Eagleton…no intention of dropping him from the ticket."
  
• 7/31/1972 Bremer's trial began in Upper Marlboro, Maryland.
  
• 8/1/1972 Eagleton withdraws as McGovern's running-mate.
  
• 8/1/1972 Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein reported in the Washington Post that a check for $25,000, given to Maurice Stans by Kenneth Dahlberg, had later ended up in the Florida bank account of Bernard Barker.
  
• 8/3/1972 Senate votes 88-2 to approve the strategic arms treaty with the Soviets.
  
• 8/3/1972 (AP 8/8/04) - Three months before the 1972 presidential election, Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger huddled together in the Oval Office to discuss when and how to get out of Vietnam. Despite a massive bombing campaign during the spring and summer in the north, the Republican president had concluded that U.S.-backed "South Vietnam probably can never even survive anyway." "We also have to realize, Henry, that winning an election is terribly important," Nixon told his national security adviser. "It's terribly important this year, but can we have a viable foreign policy if a year from now or two years from now, North Vietnam gobbles up South Vietnam? That's the real question." The conversation, recorded by Nixon's voice-activated taping system, was transcribed by the University of Virginia Miller Center of Public Affairs to be released Sunday, the 30th anniversary of Nixon's resignation. Some historians, including biographer Jeffrey Kimball, consider it evidence that Nixon sacrificed American forces in his quest for a second term, keeping them engaged to ensure that the South Vietnamese government wouldn't collapse before the election...Kissinger, now a foreign policy consultant, said in an interview with The Associated Press that Kimball and other historians are focusing too much on an informal conversation that he said did not reflect Nixon's policies. "Every once in a while he got discouraged and said 'chuck the whole thing,' but that was never his policy," Kissinger said. Historians said the conversation reflected Nixon's "decent interval" exit strategy in Vietnam. By propping up Saigon, the theory goes, the government could survive at least a few years on its own and Nixon would be able to distance himself from any political fallout when it collapsed...The Aug. 3, 1972 conversation, which was released in December by the National Archives with other recorded conversations, shows that Nixon did worry about how his administration would be viewed if South Vietnam fell. Kissinger, who would share the Nobel Peace Prize the following year with North Vietnam's Le Duc Tho for brokering a peace agreement, advised the president that they could avoid being seen as failures as long as South Vietnam held on for a few years. "If a year or two years from now North Vietnam gobbles up South Vietnam, we can have a viable foreign policy if it looks as if it's the result of South Vietnamese incompetence," Kissinger said. He added later in the tape: "But it will worry everybody. And domestically in the long run it won't help us all that much because our opponents will say we should've done it three years ago." "I know," Nixon said. "So we've got to find some formula that holds the thing together a year or two, after which after a year, Mr. President, Vietnam will be a backwater," Kissinger said. "If we settle it, say, this October, by January '74 no one will give a damn." Ken Hughes, who transcribed the tape for the Miller Center, considers the recording a "taped confession" by Nixon, who denied until his death in 1994 that the 1972 election affected his policies in Vietnam. Larry Berman, a Nixon scholar and director of the University of California Washington Center in Washington D.C., disagrees with Hughes: "It confirms that Kissinger certainly was an advocate for the decent interval, but my view was that there was always a difference between what Nixon and Kissinger thought. I believe Nixon was much more questioning of the decent interval than Kissinger." Kissinger told the AP that Nixon never seriously considered abandoning Saigon. "There are in my memoirs letters he wrote me while I was conducting the negotiations, which say the exact opposite of what's on this conversation, in which he says 'Go ahead and do what you need to do, but don't be affected by the election, and we want an agreement that lasts.'
  
• 8/4/1972 Arthur Bremer is found guilty of shooting Wallace and sentenced to 63 years in prison.
  
• 8/8/1972 R. Sargent Shriver, brother-in-law of JFK and RFK, is nominated by the DNC to become McGovern's running-mate.
  
• 8/8/1972 A proposal by Sen. Philip Hart of Michigan to prohibit the ownership of handguns except for military personnel, police and sportsmen's clubs was voted down 83 to 7. A proposal by Sen. Kennedy to require registration of all firearms and federal permits to own them was voted down 78 to 11. (Saturday Night Special, Robert Sherrill)
  
• 8/10/1972 Gore Vidal wrote in the New York Review of Books: "The not-so-poor do outnumber the poor but if the not-so-poor who are nicked heavily by taxes were to join with the poor they would outnumber the elite by 99 to 1. The politician who can forge that alliance will find himself, at best, the maker of a new society; at worst, in a hole at Arlington. To maintain its grip on the nation, the Property Party must keep actual issues out of political debate."
  
• 8/11/1972 John Evans memo on Nixon meeting with Don Johnson. Nixon complained that McGovern would make Ramsey Clark, "who has been giving aid and comfort to the enemy," FBI director if McGovern was president. Nixon expressed his absolute opposition to any amnesty for draft-dodgers.
  
• 8/18/1972 FBI agent Donald L. Parham asked the CIA to identify a "Mr. Pennington," who was believed to have connections with McCord. The CIA reacted nervously, and gave the FBI the name of a different Pennington Cecil H. instead of Lee R., Jr. Cecil Pennington had nothing to do with McCord or Watergate. (Secret Agenda p230)
  
• 8/21/1972 GOP convention in Miami Beach opens.
  
• 8/22/1972 Nixon is nominated for a second term by the GOP.
  
• 8/22/1972 Nixon San Clemente press conference: "But if he [Robert Kennedy] had had 10 more [wire taps] and as a result of wiretaps had been able to discover the Oswald plan it would have been worth it…Let me correct you, sir, I want to be sure that the assumption is correct. I said if 10 more wiretaps could have found the conspiracy, if it was a conspiracy, or the individual, then it would have been worth it. As far as I'm concerned, I'm no more of an expert on that assassination than anybody else, but my point is that wiretaps, in the national security area were very high in the Kennedy administration for a very good reason."
  
• 8/23/1972 Over 1000 anti-war protestors outside the GOP convention are arrested for trying to prevent delegates from entering.
  
• 8/23-24/1972 Cyril Wecht examines JFK autopsy photos and X-rays at the National Archives.
  
• 8/25/1972 Patman's investigators interviewed Maurice Stans at the GOP convention in Miami.
  
• 8/27/1972 New York Times' Fred Graham broke the story about JFK's brain missing from the National Archives.
  
• 8/28/1972 Colson memo to his staff: "let me point out that the statement in last week's UPI story that I was once reported to have said that "I would walk over my grandmother if necessary" [to get Nixon reelected] is absolute accurate."
  
• 8/29/1972 Nixon told the press that a special prosecutor was not needed, and that John Dean was coordinating all Watergate investigations for the White House.
  
• 8/30/1972 Patman's staff interviewed Maurice Stans about the money found on the burglars; at one point during the interview, Stans took a call from Nixon. GOP members on Patman's Committee advised Stans not to answer questions.
  
• 8/30/1972 The Louisville Courier-Journal quoted Richard Kleindienst commenting on a Justice Dept investigation which found no link between the Watergate burglary and the Nixon Administration: "No credible or fair-minded person is going to be able to say we dragged our feet on it."
  
• 8/31/1972 Ken Khachigian memo to Colson: "Have worked up a brief line on Shriver's Confederate ancestors, also included a note from Post story indicating that Shriver's family were slaveholders."
  
• 9/1/1972 Nixon and Japanese PM Tanaka met for two days in Hawaii for talks.
  
• 9/1/1972 Joanne Gordon memo to Colson: "if RN emerges from hiding, superiority of McGovern and Shriver will emerge...When Nixon appears, if he does, he will repeat his dramatic tendency to blow substantial leads in the polls."
  
• 9/5-6/1972 at the Summer Olympics in Munich, eleven Israeli athletes are killed by Arab terrorists.
  
• 9/6/1972 Democrats Joseph Califano and Larry O'Brien staged a news conference, and referred to an unnamed informant (Alfred Baldwin) in giving public details about the Watergate break-in and the conversations he had overheard through telephone bugs.
  
• 9/7/1972 Nixon promoted Al Haig over the heads of 240 senior officers to four-star general and to vice-chief of staff of the army.
  
• 9/7/1972 Ehrlichman told the press: "After the history of this first term is written and you look back, you're going to see that, compared to other Administrations or by any other standards you'd want to apply, that it has been an extraordinarily clean, corruption-free Administration, because the President insists on that."
  
• 9/8/1972 Rep. Garry Brown (R-Michigan) wrote a letter to Kleindienst suggesting that Stans not talk to the Patman Committee because he might prejudice future trials. Dean later testified that because of this letter "I began receiving increasing pressure from Mitchell, Stans, Parkinson and others to get the Justice Department to respond...as a vehicle that Congressman Brown could use in persuading others not to vote in favor of the subpoena."
  
• 9/8/1972 Israel responded to the killing of its athletes with air strikes on PLO bases in Lebanon and Syria.
  
• 9/12/1972 Patman Committee issued a report on the results of its investigation so far, and the need for formal hearings.
  
• 9/12/1972 Spencer Oliver's new secretary, Marie Elise Haldane, called the Chesapeake and Potomac Telephone Company to report a malfunction on the phones in Oliver's office. A repairman was unable to find anything wrong; Haldane then asked him to check the phones for bugging devices. The repairman said he wasn't qualified to do so, and she called the telephone company's security office this afternoon.
  
• 9/13/1972 The DNC telephones were checked for bugging devices by two employees of the Chesapeake and Potomac Telephone Co. They found a bug, but policy required that they inform their supervisor and the FBI before telling the customer. Secretary Marie Haldane seemed surprised that no bug was found. The FBI then came to the DNC and removed the bug, which looked cheap and homemade, not capable of transmitting outside the building. It also had a defective transmitter. Haldane was questioned by agents, and she giggled uncontrollably. The Bureau and experts who examined the bug suspected that it had been planted simply so that it would be found. Earl Silbert and the FBI began arguing about it, with Silbert claiming the FBI had just overlooked it in their previous searches.
  
• 9/14/1972 Senate approves pact with USSR, imposing freeze on offensive nuclear weapons.
  
• 9/14/1972 Stans tells Clark Mollenhoff that he is confident that Reps. Jerry Ford and Garry Brown could delay the Patman investigation until after the election. (The Man Who Pardoned Nixon 26)
  
• 9/15/1972 Meeting with Nixon, Haldeman and Dean in the Oval Office (5:27pm - 6:17pm) Before Dean joins the conversation, Haldeman tells Nixon that Dean is "moving ruthlessly on the investigation of McGovern people, Kennedy stuff, and all that too...through the IRS." Dean remarks that "the press is playing it just as we expected," concentrating on the fact that "two White House aides" were indicted. Nixon ordered them to "get Brown and Ford in and work something out...no use to let Patman have a free ride here."
  

Pres. Nixon: Just remember, all the trouble we're taking, we'll have a chance to get back one day.
John Dean: The resources that have been put against this whole investigation to date are really incredible. It is truly a larger investigation than was conducted against, uh, the after inquiry of the JFK assassination.
Pres. Nixon: We are all in it together. This is a war. We take a few shots and it will be over. We will give them a few shots and it will be over. Don't worry. I wouldn't want to be on the other side right now. Would you?
John Dean: Along that line, one of the things I've tried to do, I have begun to keep notes on a lot of people who are emerging as less than our friends because this will be over some day and we shouldn't forget the way some of them have treated us.
Pres. Nixon: I want the most comprehensive notes on all those who tried to do us in. They didn't have to do it. If we had had a very close election and they were playing the other side I would understand this. No - they were doing this quite deliberately and they are asking for it and they are going to get it. We have not used the power in this first four years as you know. We have never used it. We have not used the Bureau and we have not used the Justice Department but things are going to change now. And they are either going to do it right or go.
John Dean: What an exciting prospect.
Pres. Nixon: Thanks. It has to be done. We have been (adjective deleted) fools for us to come into this election campaign and not do anything with regard to the Democratic Senators who are running, et cetera. And who the hell are they after? They are after us. It is absolutely ridiculous. It is not going to be that way any more....The worst may happen, but it may not...basically the damn thing is just one of those unfortunate things, and we're trying to cut our losses.
John Dean: I learned today, incidentally, and have not confirmed it, that the GAO auditor who is down here is here at the Speaker of the House's request.
Pres. Nixon: That surprises me.
HR Haldeman: Well, (expletive deleted) the Speaker of the House. Maybe we better put a little heat on him.
Pres. Nixon: I think so too.
HR Haldeman: Because he has a lot worse problems than he is going to find down here.
John Dean: That's right.
HR Haldeman: That is the kind of thing that, you know, we really ought to do is call the Speaker and say, "I regret to say your calling the GAO down here because of what it is going to cause us to do to you."
John Dean: I understand too, or I have been told, that John Connally is close to Patman and if anyone could talk turkey to Patman, Connally could. Jerry Ford is not really taking an active interest in this matter that is developing so Stans is going to see Jerry Ford and try to brief him and explain to him the problems he has.
HR Haldeman: No, it has been kept away from the White House and of course completely from the President. The only tie to the White House is the Colson effort they keep trying to pull in.

• 9/15/1972 Barker pleads guilty in the Watergate break-in case. Federal grand jury in Washington returns an 8-count indictment against Liddy, Hunt and the five burglars. John W. Hushen, director of public information at the Justice Dept., announces that "We have absolutely no evidence to indicate that any others should be charged." Nixon critics charged that Hunt and Liddy were thrown to the wolves to make it look as though the White House was really getting to the bottom of Watergate.
  
• 9/16/1972 Woodward spoke on the phone with Deep Throat.
  
• 9/16/1972 Woodward and Bernstein reported that the money for the Watergate bugging operation came from a "secret fund" of more than $300,000 kept in the safe of Maurice Stans.
  
• 9/17/1972 Woodward spoke on the phone with Deep Throat.
  
• 9/17/1972 Woodward and Bernstein reported that Magruder and Herbert Porter had each withdrawn $50,000 from the secret fund.
  
• 9/18/1972 Time magazine gushed that Haig was "glamorous and politically sophisticated...just what the Army needed."
  
• 9/21/1972 Nixon signs into law a bill to improve the benefits program for widows, widowers and children of retired military personnel.
  
• 9/22/1972 The Philadelphia Inquirer quoted Spiro Agnew about Watergate: "Someone set up these people to have them get caught…to embarrass the Republican Party."
  
• 9/29/1972 Woodward and Bernstein reported that Mitchell had personally controlled the secret fund.