Deep Politics Timeline

[Tracy Riddle]

• 10/1972 Issue #94 of "The Realist" featured an article by Jerry Policoff: "How All the News About Political Assassinations in the United States Has Not Been Fit to Print in The New York Times." "The political assassinations of the '60s seem to have given rise to a most peculiar policy at The New York Times, a policy that maintains that the "official" line is the only line. In the process the Times has subjected its readers to distortion, misrepresentation, and outright deception. . . .Only The New York Times can answer why they have for nine years maintained a consistent policy of literary assassination of literature and deliberate management of news suggesting that three of the greatest crimes of the 20th century may, despite "official" findings to the contrary, be yet unsolved. But the unassailable fact is that in the process they have acted as little less than an unofficial propaganda arm of the Government which has maintained so staunchlyand in the face of all evidence to the contrary, great and trivialthat assassinations in the United States are inevitably the work of lone demented madmen. Justice Hugo Black in his concurring opinion in the Supreme Court decision favoring The New York Times in the case of the Pentagon Papers said, "Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government. And paramount among the responsibilities of a free press is the duty to prevent any part of the Government from deceiving the people. . . ." Far from preventing deception in the case of political assassinations, the Times has practiced it, and in the process defrauded its readers and violated every ethic of professional and objective journalism."
  
• 10/1/1972 Sunday Star and Washington Daily News reported that Eugenio Gonzalez had allegedly boasted that GSS guards had been bribed to permit more than 40 illicit entries into the DNC.
  
• 10/2/1972 Colson memo to Clawson: "I thought you might be interested that the quote in the Washington Post attributed to John Mitchell, 'if you print that crap, Katherine Graham will find herself in a wringer,' was not exactly accurate. What Mitchell said was that she would find her tit in a wringer."
  
• 10/2/1972 Haldeman action memo: "We need a leaflet for Defense plants that should...say, for instance, if at McDonnell Douglas: 'Save the B-1; Save your job; vote for Nixon.'"
  
• early 10/1972 McCord was told by his attorney Gerald Alch that Walter Bittman, White House attorney was offering executive clemency, money while in prison and rehabilitation for those involved in the Watergate break-in. In return, none of them would take the stand. (A Piece of Tape 46)
  
• 10/3/1972 Nixon and Gromyko end two days of talks in Washington by signing documents that put into effect the two arms accords reached in Moscow in May.
  
• 10/3/1972 Patman's committee voted on whether to approve subpoena powers; after lobbying by Reps. Ford and Brown, four Southern Democrats joined with all the Republicans to reject such a move.
  
• 10/4/1972 Helms memo to Kissinger cited 73 Jack Anderson columns he had written that were based on secret intelligence documents, forty from the CIA. (The Man Who Kept the Secrets)
  
• 10/8/1972 Woodward spoke on the phone with Deep Throat.
  
• 10/9/1972 Woodward met with Deep Throat in an underground parking garage. Alexander Haig was known to have been in Paris this day.
  
• 10/10/1972 Woodward and Bernstein reported that Watergate was only part of a large-scale campaign of spying, bugging and sabotage that been going on since 1971; they charged that Ken Clawson had forged a letter to the Manchester Union Leader that had been made to look like it was written by Muskie and expressed a racial slur against French Americans. This had hurt him in the New Hampshire primary.
  
• 10/12/1972 Kissinger returns to Washington with speculation buzzing that an agreement may be near.
  
• 10/13/1972 UAW begin a series of 17 "ministrikes" against 10 General Motors plants; this lasts til 12/14.
  
• 10/15/1972 Woodward and Bernstein reported that Dwight Chapin had been Donald Segretti's contact in the White House.
  
• 10/16/1972 Colson memo to Dick Howard: "if pressed, the ITT people are prepared to say they have given nothing to the Nixon campaign, but have given to McGovern."
  
• 10/16/1972 Nixon gloated publicly that the press and "opinion leaders" were wrong when they predicted that his Vietnam policies would fail.
  
• 10/16/1972 Hale Bogg's twin-engine plane vanished during a flight from Anchorage to Juneau, Alaska. Despite a massive search, no trace of the airplane or Boggs has ever been found. A Freedom of Information Act Request by Roll Call Magazine in 1992 unearthed an FBI telex indicating that the plane that carried Congressman Nick Begich, Sr. and Majority leader of the U.S. House of Representatives, Hale Boggs, was actually located in Alaska but never retrieved. The plane crashed on October 16, 1972. Information obtained by a government verified source described the location of the plane and stated that there were two survivors shortly after the plane disappeared. The information indicated an undisclosed "firm" involved in testing advanced surveillance equipment had located the crash. The informant had a military background, according to the FBI document obtained by Roll Call. The FBI telex was sent to the Washington, D.C. FBI headquarters where it was presumably passed to the Acting Director, L. Patrick Gray. The previous director, J. Edgar Hoover, had been in a significant conflict with Boggs, who called for his resignation on the floor of the Congress. Boggs was one of the most powerful people in the country at a time when misuse of power was just beginning to be seen, culminating in the resignation of the President of the United States Richard Nixon. Incidently, Boggs was taken to the airport for the first leg of the trip (from Texas to Alaska) by a young Democrat named Bill Clinton who later, as President, appointed Congressman Boggs' wife Lindy to the position of US Ambassador to the Vatican after she served eighteen years in the Congress after her husband's disappearance. Congressman Boggs was also on the Warren Commission and had some interest in reopening the investigation.
  
• 10/17/1972 Peace talks begin in Laos.
  
• 10/18/1972 US and USSR sign a three-year trade pact.
  
• 10/18/1972 "I am saying that if anyone was involved in that type of activity which I referred to, they would not be working here." - Ron Ziegler, press secretary to Richard Nixon, defending the presidential aide Dwight Chapin on Oct. 18, 1972. Chapin was convicted in April 1974 of perjury in connection with his relationship to the political saboteur Donald Segretti.
  
• 10/19/1972 Colson memo to Buchanan: "Some of the press comments in recent days suggest to me that the establishment is going down for its last dying gasp...through their hand-picked candidate, McGovern...They are about to be soundly repudiated...I think it is terribly important to the President that in the second term it be made clear that he won on the issues...we may at long last have a chance to strip the establishment of the power that it has had for so long."
  
• 10/20/1972 Nixon signed the $30.2 billion revenue-sharing bill.
  
• 10/20/1972 Sen. Henry Jackson called for a bipartisan commission to investigate Watergate.
  
• 10/20/1972 Nixon met with army chief of staff Gen. Westmoreland, who objected to many of the provisions of the nearly-completed agreement on Vietnam.
  
• 10/21/1972 Woodward met Deep Throat in the underground parking garage.
  
• 10/24/1972 CIA gave the Justice Dept a package of material relating to the Fielding break-in, including photos of Hunt and Liddy.
  
• 10/25/1972 Woodward and Bernstein reported that Haldeman was one of five "high-ranking presidential associates" authorized to make payments from the secret fund.
  
• 10/25/1972 Charles Willoughby dies, at eighty, in Florida. Willoughby was a master of intrigue who established Richard Case Nagell's Field Operations Intelligence unit in the Far East and played a major part in forming the basis for the Asian People's Anti-Communist League. Willoughby was in regular correspondence with Allen Dulles -- before JFK fired Dulles -- and with ex(?)-Nazis who ran the CIA's European-based spy network. Willoughby's domestic associations extended from the Cuban exile community to the H.L. Hunt family. He and other of General Douglas Mac Arthur's former top generals undoubtedly retained a strong bond with right-wing elements of the Pentagon.
  
• 10/27/1972 Woodward met with Deep Throat in the underground parking garage.
  
• 10/28/1972 Nixon signed a bill to expand consumer protection.
  
• 10/30/1972 Nixon signs amendment to Social Security Act to increase benefits. It also extended Medicare benefits to disabled persons under 65.
  
• 11/1972 Egyptian president Sadat apparently decided this month to go to war with Israel based on readiness estimates supplied to him by Minister of War Gen. Ahmed Ismail Ali. Sadat felt that only a war would upset the status quo balance of power and pressure the great powers to intervene, making Israel give up its 1967 conquests. (Dupuy)
  
• 11/4/1972 Memo from FBI supervisor Milton Jones to Asst Director Thomas Bishop; "Gray has requested the infinite details concerning our programs of collecting background information on Congressional and gubernatorial candidates."
  
• 11/6/1972 A story in The Washington Post today reports on a book by Aristotle Onassis' ex-butler, Christian Cafarakis. According to Cafarakis, a couple of months after JFK's assassination, Onassis hired a team of detectives to find out what happened. After nineteen months they presented a report giving the names of the "real" murderers. "On receipt of the study, Jackie gathered friends one evening for consultation and then decided to send it to President Johnson. The next morning, an anonymous phone call warned her to leave the report unpublished if she feared for her own and her children's safety. Now, says Cafarakis, the report is locked away in Onassis' private safe at Glyfada and protected at all times by guards and burglar alarms."
  
• 11/7/1972 Nixon won in a landslide (60.7%) to McGovern's 37.5% (he carried only Massachusetts and District of Columbia); young people did not turn out in the numbers McGovern had hoped, but the Democrats picked up 2 Senate seats and the GOP won 13 House seats. Nixon got 47 million votes (520 electoral) to McGovern's 29 million (17 electoral); John G. Schmitz (Amer. Independent) 1 million votes; Benjamin Spock (People's) 78,751; Other 216,196. 55% voter turnout. In states that Nixon took by storm, Democratic candidates for Congress also did well. This ticket-splitting is now common. Nixon was not impressed by his landslide; he felt it was more important that Southerners and ethnic voters were shifting toward the GOP. "The election was decided the day McGovern was nominated," he observed. "The question after that was only how much. McGovern did to his party what Goldwater did." (The Making of the President 1972) Newcomers included Sens. Sam Nunn, Pete Domenici, Jesse Helms; Rep. Andrew Young became the first black congressman elected from the South since Reconstruction. Soon after the election, Barry Goldwater consoled McGovern: "After Dick Nixon lost to Jack Kennedy in 1960 by only 120,000 votes, he regretted for years spending the last weekend of the campaign in Alaska instead of Chicago. With you and me it didn't make any difference where we went the last weekend -- Chicago, Alaska or Timbuktu. So we have nothing to regret except the judgment of the voters!" The first thing Nixon does is to demand signed resignations of his entire government. "Eliminate everyone," he tells John Ehrlichman about reappointment, "except George Bush. Bush will do anything for our cause."
  
• 11/10/1972 Buchanan memo to Nixon on the second term, the "Nixon Counter-Revolution....Our primary objective in the second term should be making of the President, the Republican FDR, founder and first magistrate of a political dynasty, to dominate American politics long after the President has retired from office...the President should use the mandate to impose upon the nation his own political and social philosophy...Shall we acquiesce forever in left-wing control of communications media...the furtherance of the policies and ideas in which we believe demand that this monopoly, this ideological cartel, be broken up...cleaning out public television of that clique of Nixon-haters who have managed to nest there at taxpayer expense...we have to begin to make permanent the New Majority that returned the President to office...the Nixon South, the ethnic, blue collar, Catholic, working class Americans of the North, Midwest and West." He advocated eliminating as many of the Great Society programs as possible, as quickly as possible. "Beyond the purging of the disloyal and recalcitrant and the infusing of new blood, there is an over-riding need for this Nixon Administration to create a new 'cadre' of Republican governmental professionals who can survive this Administration and be prepared to take over future ones...The integrationist philosophy of the fifties is proving a prescription for social chaos in the seventies...the President should move to get political control of the IRS..."
  
• 11/14/1972 The Dow Jones closed above 1000 for the first time in US history.
  
• 11/17/1972 Colson memo on Jack Anderson, claiming that he had information that Anderson had been paid money to write favorable articles about Batista in 1958 and Castro in 1961. "After his incredibly sloppy and malicious reporting on Eagleton, his credibility has diminished. It now appears as if we have the opportunity to destroy it."
  
• 11/20/1972 President Nixon asks for the resignation of Richard Helms as Director of the CIA. James Schlesinger, a professor, will become the new director. William E. Colby takes charge of the Directorate of Plans -- which is the clandestine side of the CIA.
  
• 11/22/1972 Haldeman memo to Kissinger: "The President is very disappointed in the lack of progress in the negotiations to date...unless the other side shows the same willingness to be reasonable that we are showing, I am directing you to discontinue the talks and we shall then have to resume military activity..."
  
• 11/24/1972 NYT quoted Pat Buchanan complaining that "Mr. McGovern described the President personally as a blob out there' of not constant principle except opportunism and political manipulation, a man up to his ears in political sabotage,' who was afraid of the people' and regularly favored the powerful and greedy' over the public interest. The president's defense programs were madness'; he had degraded the Supreme Court' and on three occasions at least, Mr. McGovern drew parallels between the president and his government and Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Reich. As for the Nixon administration, it was the most morally bankrupt, the most morally corrupt, the trickiest, most deceitful…in our entire national history.'"
  
• 11/28/1972 Nixon begins a major cabinet change; Romney and Laird are out, with Elliott Richardson becoming Secretary of HEW and James T. Flynn becoming Sec. of Defense. White House staff changes are also made.
  
• 12/4/1972 US and USSR agree to build new embassies in each other's capitals.
  
• 12/6/1972 White House announced that Secretary of Commerce Peter G. Peterson would be replaced by Frederick Dent.
  
• 12/7/1972 Philippines: Imelda Marcos, wife of president Ferdinand Marcos, was stabbed and critically injured, but survived, an attack in Pasay City.
  
• 12/7/1972 In The New York Times today, the following letter by Augustin F. Fortuno states: "Statehood for Puerto Rico was defeated in the recent election. For the second time it was an issue and was turned down. No other United States territory, colony, dominion or possession, given the choice, had ever rejected statehood. Why then our decision? Political theorists may speculate for years about the multiplicity and complexity of our reasoning, but one reason that comes to mind when I think of unbreakable union with the people of the United States is this: Who is in command in the United States? The last three elections in this country have been decided by a bullet. John F. Kennedy's assassination made possible Richard Nixon's narrow victory in 1968. And George Wallace's maiming paved the way for the recent landslide. Yet no law has been or apparently will be passed in the near future regarding effective weapons or arms control. Why? Who or what are the United States legislators afraid of? Before the 1.2 million voters in Puerto Rico decide on statehood we are honestly interested in knowing: Who is really in command in the United States?"
  
• 12/8/1972 Mistrial is declared in the Los Angeles trial of Ellsberg and Russo.
  
• 12/8/1972 Plane crash kills Dorothy Hunt, wife of Howard Hunt. United Airlines flight 553 from Washington to Chicago crashes at Midway Airport. Chicagoan Lawrence O'Connor, who had used United Airlines Flight 553 or its equivalent to fly from Washington to Chicago on Friday nights for years was warned by a White House source not to take this flight; Among the deaths were: Dorothy Hunt (Wife of E. Howard Hunt) carrying $50,000 in Watergate payoff funds and close to $2 million that she was attempting to place in foreign banks; Michele Clark, CBS newswoman who was to interview Mrs. Hunt on a story that could allegedly destroy Nixon; at least four people alleged to have knowledge of a large labor union "donation" to the Committee to Reelect the President who were paid to stop the indictment of a Chicago Labor hoodlum; a group of gas pipeline lobbyists, attorneys and gas company officials (Robert Moreau, Nancy Parker, Ralph Blodgett, James Drueger, Lon Bayer, Wilbur Erickson) who had allegedly gathered evidence against former Attorney General John Mitchell in an anti-trust case involving El Paso Natural Gas Co; also aboard was a "hit-man" using the cover of Harold Metcalf, of Drug Abuse Law Enforcement, who told the pilot, Captain Whitehouse, he was carrying a gun and was assigned a jump seat near the food galley and rear door. After the crash, Cpt. Whitehouse and six of the Watergate related passengers were found to have unexplainably high cyanide contents, although the other 35 passengers who were killed did not. Following the crash hit-man Metcalf, in a jump suit, walked out the cracked open fuselage. Up to 200 FBI and CIA agents took over the crash site immediately, beating the fire department to the scene, refusing to allow in a medical team, confiscating the control tower tapes, interviewing survivors and witnesses before the National Transportation Safety Board investigators had a chance to. CBS News requested immediate cremation of Michele Clark's body; evidence of sabotage includes possible tampering with altimeter and air data computer, malfunctioning of the runway visual range recorder and the Kedzie localizer which acted as the runway's outer marker, a series of misdirections from air traffic controllers and the failure of Flight 553's standby power system. An in-flight robbery gang known as the Joseph Sarelli Mob came into possession of some of the Hunt Money and Mitchell documents after the crash and sold them for $5 million. The day after the crash Nixon Aide Egil Krogh Jr is appointed Undersecretary of Transportation and is placed in charge of the two agencies investigating the crash (the FAA and the NTSB); ten days later Nixon assistant Alexander Butterfield, a CIA-Aviation liaison is appointed head of the FAA; a few weeks later Nixon Aide Dwight Chapin becomes a top aide with United Airlines.
  
• 12/8/1972 Mahmoud Hamshari, the primary official of Al Fatah and the Palestinian Liberation Organization in Paris died when a bomb exploded at his Paris apartment. Mossad members were allegedly responsible.
  
• 12/9/1972 In the Los Angeles Times today, Chief Justice Earl Warren is quoted as saying he "had never seen any convincing evidence to disprove the Warren Commission's finding that Lee Harvey Oswald was solely responsible for assassinating Mr. Kennedy."
  
• 12/11/1972 Robert Dole resigned as GOP National Committee chairman and Nixon replaced him with George Bush. Human Events reported that Republicans in Congress were "furious" with the "shabby" way the White House treated Dole after all his work for Nixon.
  
• 12/18/1972 Senator-elect Joseph Biden's family is involved in a car crash; wife and daughter killed
  
• 12/18/1972 Operation Linebacker II was a US Seventh Air Force and US Navy Task Force 77 aerial bombing campaign, conducted against targets in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam) during the final period of US involvement in the Vietnam War. The operation was conducted from 1829 December 1972, leading to several of informal names such as "The December Raids" and "The Christmas Bombings". It saw the largest heavy bomber strikes launched by the US Air Force since the end of World War II. Linebacker II was a resumption of the Operation Linebacker bombings conducted from May to October, with the emphasis of the new campaign shifted to attacks by B-52 Stratofortress Heavy bombers rather than smaller tactical fighter aircraft.
  
• 12/20/1972 Nixon pardoned New Jersey Mafia boss Angelo "Gyp" DeCarlo. (Washington Post 4/2/1973). The Post reported that various Justice Dept lawyers found DeCarlo's clemency to be very mysterious. One remarked, "This is Gyp DeCarlo. He is a very bad guy, with a history of political connections...something or someone just had to give that thing a push...who?" Angelo was notorious for his ties to brutal ganglang executions.
  
• 12/21/1972 Rev Carl McIntire said, "The Ghost of Senator McCarthy needs to ride again."
  
• 12/21/1972 McCord wrote a letter to Jack Caulfield, promising that if Helms should be replaced as CIA director, "Every tree in the forest will fall." Today, McCord had met with his lawyer, Gerald Alch, who suggested that the CIA might somehow have been involved in Watergate. This suggestion greatly unsettled McCord, who began reporting secretly by letter to the CIA's Gen. Gaynor.
  
• 12/23/1972 Massive earthquake destroyed the center of Managua, Nicaragua. Somoza's National Guard went through the rubble looting whatever it could find, while taking US relief packages from the airport for later resale. Companies owned by the Somoza cornered the market in demolition, construction and real estate. Managua was rebuilt to look like an American suburb, complete with a McDonald's.
  
• 12/26/1972 Harry S. Truman dies at age 88.
  
• 12/29/1972 LIFE magazine ends publication as a weekly magazine.