Deep Politics Timeline

[Tracy Riddle]

• 6/1/1973 Antonio Veciana has a lengthy meeting with Maurice Bishop at the race track in Caracas. Veciana suggests a new plan to assassinate Castro. Bishop says the timing isn't right. (Fonzi chronology)
  
• 6/1/1973 In a June 1, 1973 memo written to Colby, Walter Elder, who had been executive assistant for John McCone, the CIA director in the early 1960s, outlined "activities which to hostile observers or to someone without complete knowledge...could be interpreted as examples of activities exceeding CIA's charters." One such activity, he noted, "involved chemical warfare operations against...." The target is redacted. This operation, according to Elder, never went beyond the planning stage. In the same memo, Elder reports that discussions within the CIA chief's offices were recorded and transcribed: "I know that any one who has worked in the Director's office has worried about the fact that conversations within the offices and over the telephones were transcribed. During McCone's tenure, there were microphones in his regular office, his inner office, his dining room, his office in East Building, and his study at his residence on White Haven Street. I do not know who would be willing to raise such an issue, but knowledge of such operations tends to spread, and certainly the Agency is vulnerable on this score." Secret transcripts of conversations involving CIA directors? According to Blanton, there's never been any public indication that McCone or other CIA directors bugged themselves. Transcripts of such discussions could contain plenty of jewels. The National Security Archive is already filing a Freedom of Information Act request.
  
• 6/2/1973 Lieutenant Colonel Lewis Hawkins, U.S. military adviser in Iran, was shot to death by those thought to be left-wing terrorists.
  
• 6/3/1973 Ervin writes to Cox, "The American people are entitled to find out what actually happened without having to wait while justice travels on leaden feet."
  
• 6/3/1973 Washington Post reported that Dean had told prosecutors and Senate investigators about conversations with Nixon regarding the coverup. Nixon recalled that this hit him so hard, he asked Haig if he should resign; Haig gave a "robust no" and urged him to listen to the tapes of the Dean meetings. (RN)
  
• 6/3/1973 The administration denied "categorically" that Dean had been discussing Watergate with Nixon between Jan. and April of this year.
  
• 6/3/1973 European news agencies report that Sihanouk had been trying to contact Nixon through third parties, but that his overtures had been rejected; the State Dept confirmed these reports.
  
• 6/4/1973 Cox asks the committee to suspend its hearings for a few months.
  
• 6/4/1973 Nixon listened to several of the tapes of the Dean conversations. He then called Haig to discuss them:
  

Haig: You see it's so good because nobody in Congress likes him. You know, you don't know whether he's [unintelligible].
Nixon: God damn it [unintelligible].
Haig: now, if he's going into a full-fledged perjury job, uh, of the greatest magnitude, then we can take the son-of-a-bitch on.
Nixon: That's right. Well, as I told you, we do have one problem: it's that damn conversation of March 21st due to the fact that, uh, for the reasons [unintelligible]. But I think we can handle that...Bob will handle it. He'll get up there and...say 'I was there; the President said - '
Haig: That's exactly right...You just can't recall. It was in a meeting [unintelligible]. [Haig would later claim he never heard the 3/21 tape]
Nixon: As you know, we're up against ruthless people.
Haig: Well, we're going to be in great shape now, 'cause we're going to prepare.

• 6/5/1973 The committee rejects Cox's request to suspend its hearings.
  
• 6/5/1973 The Los Angeles County grand jury begins hearings on the break-in at Fielding's office.
  
• 6/6/1973 It is announced that Haig will replace Haldeman, Laird will replace Ehrlichman and Wright will be the White House Counsel.
  
• 6/6/1973 White House agrees to give the committee the logs of Nixon-Dean conversations.
  
• 6/7/1973 An FBI man was quoted as saying, "This whole thing of the Teamsters and the mob and the White House is one of the scariest things I've ever seen...We don't know what to expect out of the Justice Department." ("The White House, the Teamsters and the Mafia," Jack Nelson and Bill Hazlitt, 6/3/1973 Los Angeles Times and Miami Herald) This article detailed how the Nixon administration had intervened on behalf of the mob in Teamster-Mafia criminal cases.
  
• 6/8/1973 McCord asked for a new trial, charging that the government withheld evidence and perjury was committed. Sentencing of McCord is postponed by Sirica.
  
• 6/9/1973 Watergate Committee announces it will expand its investigation into the ITT case and the Ellsberg break-in.
  
• 6/11/1973 Agnew attacks the "swelling flood of prejudicial publicity" and the "Perry Masonish impact" of the television hearings; they "can hardly hope to find the truth and can hardly fail to muddy the waters of justice beyond repair."
  
• 6/13/1973 Nixon announces a price freeze on all retail goods.
  
• 6/18-26/1973 Nixon summit with Brezhnev in D.C., Camp David and San Clemente, California; more US-Soviet cooperation on different issues.
  
• 6/9/1973 Haig complained to Richardson that Cox's public remarks were blatantly partisan.
  
• 6/20/1973 The Finance Committee of CREEP is found guilty on three misdemeanor counts of concealing a $200,000 cash contribution.
  
• 6/21/1973 In five separate Supreme Court cases, all decided by a 5-4 vote, the justices give local communities more leeway to decide what materials are considered obscene.
  
• 6/21/1973 NY Post story by Woodward and Bernstein: "Hunt Tells of Orders to Raid Bremer's Flat." Hunt had told Senate investigators that an hour after Wallace was shot, Colson ordered him to fly to Milwaukee and break into Arthur Bremer's apartment; Colson denied this. A "White House source" told the reporters that Nixon feared the shooting might have been done by someone with "ties to the Republican Party or the Nixon campaign."
  
• 6/22/1973 Goldwater condemned the media for only attacking Nixon's abuses, and ignoring those of Democratic administrations. "I'm convinced that Johnson had my television speeches before I saw them. They seemed to know everything I was going to do, everything I was going to say [in 1964]." (Washington Post)
  
• 6/23/1973 Los Angeles Times reported that when Colson "asked the whereabouts of E. Howard Hunt two days after the Watergate break-in...John Dean said Hunt had been ordered out of the country. Colson said that he objected strongly, partly on grounds the White House might be aiding a fugitive, and Dean then made a telephone call and claimed he got the order rescinded...he did not ask Dean or anyone else who issued it or why.
  
• 6/24/1973 Brezhnev addresses Americans via a television broadcast, the first Soviet leader to do so.
  
• 6/24/1973 Wayne Morse told the Boston Globe: "He'd [JFK] seen the error of his ways. I'm satisfied if he'd lived another year we'd have been out of Vietnam. Ten days before his assassination, I went down to the White House and handed him his education bills...I'd been making two to five speeches a week against Kennedy on Vietnam...I'd gone into President Kennedy's office to discuss education bills, but he said, 'Wayne, I want you to know you're absolutely right in your criticism of my Vietnam policy. Keep this in mind. I'm in the midst of an intensive study which substantiates your position on Vietnam.'" This study would emerge in the Pentagon Papers as the McNamara study.
  
• 6/25/1973 Brezhnev ends his visit to the US.
  
• 6/25/1973 Several programs for state aid to parochial schools were declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.
  
• 6/25-29/1973 John Dean testifies before the Senate and implicates the President in Watergate coverup, offering hush money to the burglars and hiding behind executive privilege. He also implicated himself, Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Mitchell and others in the coverup.
  
• 6/27/1973 Clarence Kelley is appointed as director of the FBI.
  
• 6/29/1973 Nixon announced establishment of a Federal Energy Office to promote conservation and look into alternative energy sources.
  
• 6/30/1973 George Bell, Charles Colson's assistant, dies. Colson says that George Bell was responsible for Nixon's "enemies list." This is a list of two hundred politicians and celebrities that Richard Nixon considers a political threat to himself and his reputation.
  
• 7/1973 The Trilateral Commission was founded in July 1973, at the initiative of American banker David Rockefeller, who was chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations at that time, and by Zbigniew Brzezinski. It is a private organization established to foster closer cooperation among the United States, Europe and Japan. The Trilateral Commission is widely seen as a counterpart to the Council on Foreign Relations.
  
• 7/1973 Leo Janos' Atlantic Monthly article, The Last Days of The President: LBJ in Retirement, which was printed in July of 1973just six months after Johnson's death, provides us with perhaps the starkest appraisal of Johnson's mindset in later life: "During coffee, the talk turned to President Kennedy, and Johnson expressed his belief that "the assassination in Dallas had been part of a conspiracy." A little later Johnson said "I never believed that Oswald acted alone, although I can accept that he pulled the trigger." Johnson said that when he had taken office he found that "we had been operating a damned Murder, Inc. in the Caribbean."" Atlantic Monthly published an interview Leo Janos had done with LBJ in 1971: "...the talk turned to President Kennedy, and Johnson expressed his belief that the assassination in Dallas had been part of a conspiracy. 'I never believed that Oswald acted alone, although I can accept that he pulled the trigger.' Johnson said that when he had taken office he found that 'we had been operating a damned Murder Inc. in the Caribbean.' A year or so before Kennedy's death a CIA-backed assassination team had been picked up in Havana. Johnson speculated that Dallas had been a retaliation for this thwarted attempt, although he couldn't prove it. 'After the Warren Commission reported in, I asked Ramsey Clark to quietly look into the whole thing. Only two weeks later he reported back that he couldn't find anything new.' Disgust tinged Johnson's voice as the conversation came to an end. 'I thought I had appointed Tom Clark's son - I was wrong.'" Johnson also said, "The damn press always accused me of things I didn't do. They never once found out about the things I did do."
  
• 7/1/1973 Colonel Yosef Alon, Israeli military attache in Washington, D.C., was fatally shot at his house in Chevy Chase, Md., and Arab terrorists were suspected.
  
• 7/1/1973 Antonio Veciana meets Maurice Bishop in the Ramada Inn in Dallas and has a two-day conference with him. Again he presses for a new attempt to assassinate Castro. Bishop rejects the idea. (Fonzi chronology)
  
• 7/2/1973 Haig called Richardson to say that Nixon was "furious" about a report that Cox was looking into the President's real estate dealings.
  
• 7/2/1973 Lou Russell suffered a second, and fatal, heart attack. Before he died, he told his daughter that he thought he had been poisoned. (Secret Agenda) Lou Russel, an old friend of Richard Nixon's, dies of a second massive heart attack. Russell works for James McCord and knows a lot about call girls used in Washington for political blackmail.
  
• 7/6/1973 A US consulate general is officially opened in Leningrad.
  
• 7/6/1973 Nixon writes Sen. Ervin that he will not appear nor open his files to the committee on the grounds of separation of powers.
  
• 7/8/1973 Ehrlichman testifies before the Los Angeles County grand jury that he had no knowledge of the Fielding break-in or that "consideration was given to obtaining information from Dr. Ellsberg's psychiatric file."
  
• 7/9/1973 Rep. Garry Brown wrote to Sam Ervin that Dean's allegations were false; he explained that his 9/1972 letter to Kleindeinst was only out of concern that testimony by Stans "could prejudice the rights of those who might be indicted as a result of the grand jury proceedings..." He insisted that this letter was not prompted by pressure from the White House.
  
• 7/9/1973 Steve Bull delivered the 9/15/1972 tape to Haldeman, who took it home and listened to it.
  
• 7/9/1973 Secretary of State Rogers and Czech foreign minister Bohuslav Chnoupek sign a consular convention in Prague to help normalize trade and travel between the two countries.
  
• 7/10/1973 Lou Russell's friend and colleague, John Leon, provided Republicans with allegations of Democratic spying and bugging in past administrations, and that these people (including Carmine Bellino) may have had advanced knowledge about the Watergate break-in. Attorney Jerris Leonard talked with RNC chairman George Bush; they felt there was the possibility of putting a new spin on the Watergate scandal. They arranged for a press conference at which Leon would be the star speaker.
  
• 7/13/1973 Butterfield reveals the existence of the White House taping system to Senate investigators. Their suspicions had been aroused by the White House's highly detailed version of the Dean conversations.
  
• 7/13/1973 John Leon suffered a fatal heart attack. Jerris Leonard remembered the news of his sudden death "came as a complete shock. It was…well, to be honest with you, it was frightening. It was only a week after Russell's death, or something like that, and it happened on the very eve of the press conference. We didn't know what was going on. We were scared." (Secret Agenda p311) John Leon - a Republican investigator - dies of a heart attack. He is scheduled to hold a Watergate press conference later today. Leon is "convinced that Watergate was a setup, that prostitution was at the heart of the affair, and that the ... burglary had been sabotaged from within."
  
• 7/13/1973 Juan Peron returned to Argentina.
  
• 7/16/1973 Butterfield publicly reveals the existence of the White House taping system in his Senate testimony. When he alleged that previous administrations had done the same thing, the Secret Service announced that no other administration had requested the installation of such a system. Butterfield did not think that Dean and Ehrlichman knew about the taping system.
  
• 7/16/1973 Senate Armed Forces Committee begins hearings into charges that the US made secret bombing raids into Cambodia in 1969-70 while that country was neutral.
  
• 7/16/1973 Antonio Veciana is arrested and charged with conspiracy to import cocaine. He claims he is innocent. His former business partner in Puerto Rico, previously charged, is the only witness against him. At first Veciana thinks he has been set up by Maurice Bishop, but later suspects it was Castro agents. (Fonzi chronology)
  
• 7/17/1973 Nixon forbids the SS from testifying before the Senate about the taping system; Ervin responds with a letter asking Nixon to make relevant tapes available.
  
• 7/17/1973 Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger tells the Senate Armed Forces Committee that the secret bombing of Cambodia (numbering some 3500 raids) were "fully authorized" and necessary to protect US troops.
  
• 7/18/1973 Nixon unveil's "Phase IV" of his economic program.
  
• 7/18/1973 Haig orders the taping system dismantled and custody of the tapes is transferred from the SS to the White House.
  
• 7/18/1973 Cox requests the tapes from Nixon. In a White House meeting today, the decision is made not to release the tapes.
  
• 7/19/1973 Newspaper columnist Andrew Tully publishes a quote from an interview with J. Edgar Hoover conducted a few years previous. Hoover had said, "By God, he's [Nixon's] got some former CIA men working for him that I'd kick out of my office. Someday, that bunch will serve him up a fine mess."
  
• 7/20/1973 Nixon claims that the whole scandal is "just plain poppycock...let others wallow in Watergate; we are going to do our job." Nixon is released from Bethesda.
  
• 7/21/1973 JFK supporter Marquis Childs admitted "that the Daley-controlled wards in Chicago supplied the 10,000 to put over the Kennedy-Johnson ticket [in 1960] can hardly be questioned." (Washington Post)
  
• 7/22/1973 Anderson wrote in Parade magazine that he had "run into" Frank Sturgis at Washington's National Airport less than 24 hours before the break-in; Sturgis told him he was in Washington on "private business," and introduced him to Virgilio Gonzalez. Anderson then visited Sturgis right after his arrest, finding that he had been booked under an alias. He found Sturgis "tight-lipped" and said that the break-in was only part of the struggle against Castro. Anderson tried to get him released to his custody, but the Justice Department refused. Anderson wrote, "My court appearance in Sturgis' behalf also disturbed the Democrats. After I printed details of Larry O'Brien's expense accounts, the Democrats issued a statement suggesting that I had received information stolen from their offices by the Waterbuggers. I had managed, as usual, to gain the enmity of both political parties."
  
• 7/23/1973 Cox subpoenas Nixon's tape recordings of conversations with Dean and others, and the Ervin committee asks for them as well; Nixon refuses, citing executive privilege.
  
• 7/23/1973 Haig called Richardson, telling him that Nixon "was very uptight about Cox" and his widening investigation. "If Cox does not agree, we will get rid of Cox." (General's Progress 246)
  
• 7/24/1973 Ehrlichman tells the Senate that Dean's charges are undermining Nixon's attempts to tell the public the truth about Watergate.
  
• 7/25/1973 Sirica is told by Nixon that he will not release the tapes Cox has requested because it jeopardize the "independence of the three branches of government."
  
• 7/25/1973 After Ehrlichman completes his testimony before the Ervin committee, Sen. Daniel Inouye, not realizing his microphone was on, muttered to himself, "What a liar."
  
• 7/25/1973 Federal court judge Orrin G. Judd ruled that the US bombing of Cambodia was illegal.
  
• 7/26/1973 AP quotes Gerald Ford as saying that Nixon's refusal to turn over the tapes had "no adverse impact whatsoever. In fact there has been a solidification of Republican support in backing up the President."
  
• 7/26/1973 Ervin committee unanimously decides to take the matter of the tapes to the courts.
  
• 7/26/1973 Maurice Bishop severs his relationship with Antonio Veciana, gives him a $253,000 cash payment for his services. (Fonzi chronology)
  
• 7/27/1973 Elliot Richardson told Haig that Agnew was under investigation for tax evasion, bribery and extortion.
  
• 7/31/1973 Rep. Robert F. Drinan (D-Mass.) introduced an impeachment resolution against Nixon.
  
• 8/1973 Defense Intelligence Agency, Biographic Data on General Augusto Pinochet, August/September 1973: This DIA biographic summary covers the military career of the leader of Chile's military coup, General Augusto Pinochet. The DIA, an intelligence branch of the U.S. Armed Forces, routinely collects "Biographic Data" on all high military officials around the world. The heavy deletions are likely to conceal Chilean sources providing information on Pinochet, his own contacts with U.S. officials, and commentary on his character, reputation, political orientation and actions during his career.
  
• 8/1/1973 Haig officially retired from the Army.
  
• 8/3/1973 Justice Dept reopens its investigation of the Kent State shootings.
  
• 8/6/1973 Haig and Bryce Harlow were sent by Nixon to ask Agnew to resign; he refused. Agnew did announce publicly that he was being investigated by the Justice Dept on charges of receiving kickbacks while an official in Maryland.
  
• 8/6/1973 Stewart Alsop column: "'When I am attacked,' Richard Nixon once remarked to this writer, it is my instinct to strike back.' The president is now clearly in a mood to obey his instincts…The new game plan calls for a strategy of striking back…rather than a policy of attempted accomodation…"
  
• 8/7/1973 The Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities recesses.
  
• 8/8/1973 Agnew branded as "damned lies" reports that he had taken kickbacks from government contracts in Maryland. He vowed never to resign.
  
• 8/10/1973 Dan Rather, on CBS News First Line Report, said in a commentary: "Lee Harvey Oswald...did he ever know or have contact with E. Howard Hunt or Gordon Liddy...Under normal circumstances, and in normal times, these questions would not be asked. Unfortunately for us all, circumstances are not normal. These are not normal times."
  
• 8/14/1973 Agnew makes his personal financial records available to the US attorney's office in Baltimore.
  
• 8/14/1973 Gallup poll showed that Nixon's approval rating was at 31%, disapproval at 57%.
  
• 8/17/1973 AP in London reported that former CIA official Miles Copeland was reported to have said that "senior agency officials are convinced Senator Edward Muskie's damaging breakdown during the presidential campaign last year was caused by...E. Howard Hunt or his henchmen spiking his drink with a sophisticated form of LSD."
  
• 8/22/1973 Nixon announces that Henry Kissinger is his new choice for Secretary of State. At the same press conference, he defended wiretapping on national security grounds by pointing to the Kennedy adminstration and its hundreds of wiretaps: "But if he'd had ten more, and as a result of wiretaps, had been able to discover the - discover the Oswald plan - it would have been worth it." A reporter asked him if he thought wiretaps might have prevented the assassination. Nixon replied, "No, what I said, let me correct you sir. I want to be sure that the assumption is correct. I said, if ten more wire taps could have the 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...to have the Oswald thing happen just seemed...so unbelievable, with his record...with everything that everybody had on him, that this fellow could have been where he was, in a position to shoot the President...seems to me to be - to have been a terrible breakdown in our...protective, security areas." He repeatedly stated that he thought the Kennedys' wiretapping was justified on national security grounds.
  
• 8/22/1973 Jim Garrison is put on trial in New Orleans federal court on charges of accepting bribes from pinball dealers tied to New Orleans crime boss Carlos Marcello. The charge originates with John Mitchell's Justice Department.
  
• 8/27/1973 Story on E. Howard Hunt in Time magazine; he told correspondent David Beckwith concerning Watergate: "There were just too many fishy things that occured. What was the Mod Squad [Shoffler's officers] doing out on the street some two or three hours after they were supposed to be off duty?...Baldwin was a very convenient fellow. He had a girlfriend at the Democratic National Committee, and he somehow came up with the floor plan of the DNC headquarters. He was never checked out at all - McCord got him off a job-wanted list of former FBI agents. He didn't do his job; he didn't alert anybody about the police until they were running around the DNC with their guns drawn." He called McCord an "electronic hitchhiker who shouldn't have been allowed on our operation...There were just too many things that went wrong for them all to be coincidence." He explained that he thought Ellsberg might be controlled by the Soviets, and that was one reason why they broke into his psychiatrist's office.
  
• 8/29/1973 Sirica orders Nixon to turn over to him for private examination the tape recordings involving Watergate.