Deep Politics Timeline

[Tracy Riddle]

• 2/1974 The Dreyfus investing firm established Dreyfus Liquid Assets, the first "money-market fund."
  
• 2/1974 Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein's book, All the President's Men, was published.
  
• 2/1974 Ballentine paperback edition of The Secret Team by Fletcher Prouty was "disappeared" soon after it came out in February of 1974.
  
• 2/1/1974 The Rev. Sun Myung Moon met with Nixon and reportedly told him not to "knuckle under to pressure."
  
• 2/3/1974 Ford appeared on Face the Nation and declared that all relevant tapes and documents should be made available to the House Judiciary Committee.
  
• 2/3/1974 Leon Jaworski appeared on ABC's Issues and Answers and sharply stated that Nixon had not cooperated with the Special Prosecutor. He also said he believed Dean's testimony.
  
• 2/4/1974 Harold Wilson becomes PM of Britain again. On the BBC television programme The Plot Against Harold Wilson, broadcast on March 16, 2006 on BBC2, it was claimed there were threats of a coup d'état, which was corroborated by leading figures of the time on both the left and the right . Wilson told two BBC journalists, Roger Courtiour and Barrie Penrose, that he feared he was being undermined by MI5. The first time was in the late 1960s after the Wilson Government devalued the pound sterling but the threat faded after Conservative leader Edward Heath won the election of 1970. However after a coal miners strike Heath decided to hold an election to renew his mandate to govern in February 1974 but lost narrowly to Wilson. There was again talk of a military coup, with rumours of Lord Mountbatten as head of an interregnal administration after Wilson had been deposed. In 1974 the Army occupied Heathrow Airport on the grounds of training for possible IRA terrorist action there, however Baroness Falkender (a senior aide and close friend of Wilson) asserted that it was ordered as a practice-run for a military takeover or as a show of strength as the government itself was not informed of such an exercise based around a key point in the nation's infrastructure.
  
• 2/4-5/1974 Gromyko talks with Nixon and Kissinger in Washington.
  
• 2/5/1974 Patricia Hearst, heir to the newspaper fortune, was kidnapped from her apartment by the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) in Berkeley, Calif. She soon announced that she had changed her named to Tania and joined the SLA.
  
• 2/5/1974 CIA's Thomas Karamessines testified before executive session of Ervin Committee.
  
• 2/5/1974 Sen. Harold Hughes (D-Iowa) urged an investigation of the Moorer Pentagon spy ring. The existence of this Pentagon spy ring was uncovered inadvertently when the Senate learned that in late 1971 David Young and the Plumbers had investigated the matter. Only five people were called to testify about it: Kissinger, Moorer, Welander, Radford and Buzhardt. Chairman of the Armed Services Committee John Stennis was not inclined to look very deeply into the issue. No one would ever be prosecuted in the case.
  
• 2/6/1974 Seymour Hersh story in NYT: "Adm. Thomas H. Moorer, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has acknowledged to the Senate Armed Services Committee that twice in 1971 he knowingly received documents that a Navy clerk had retained' while traveling to Asia and Southeast Asia with President Nixon's top national security advisers."
  
• 2/8/1974 Three astronauts complete a record 84-day space flight as the third and final Skylab crew.
  
• 2/11/1974 Department of State, Kubisch-Huerta Meeting: Request for Specific Replies to Previous Questions on Horman and Teruggi Cases, February 11, 1974: This telegram, written by Ambassador Popper and directed to the U.S. Secretary of State, reports on a meeting between Assistant Secretary of State Jack Kubisch, and Chile's foreign minister General Huerta on the controversy over two U.S. citizens--Charles Horman and Frank Teruggi--executed by the military after the coup. Kubisch notes that he is raising this issue "in the context of the need to be careful to keep relatively small issues in our relationship from making our cooperation more difficult."
  
• 2/12/1974 The trial of militant Indian leaders Russell Means and Dennis Banks in connection with the occupation of Wounded Knee begins.
  
• 2/12/1974 The SLA demanded that Randolph Hearst begin a massive program of food distribution to the poor.
  
• 2/12/1974 Federal officials in Buenos Aires detected a terrorist plot to murder Juan Peron, president of Argentina, and his wife, Isabel, and Uruguayan President Juan M. Bordaberry.
  
• 2/13/1974 Aleksander Solzhenitsyn was exiled from Russia to West Germany.
  
• 2/16/1974 Gerald Ford reveals in a televised interview that he has no clue who Mick Jagger is: "Mick Jagger? Isn't he the motorcycle rider?"
  
• 2/19/1974 Senate votes unanimously to end its public Watergate hearings and defer to the courts and House Judiciary Committee.
  
• 2/20/1974 J. Reginald Murphy, editor of the Atlanta Constitution, is kidnapped by the American Revolutionary Army. Murphy was released 2/23.
  
• 2/21/1974 A French radio program, France-Inter, broadcast an interview with Minister of Defense Robert Galley, who said, "I must say that if your listeners could see for themselves the mass of reports [of UFOS] coming in from the airborne gendarmerie, from the mobile gendarmerie, and from the gendarmerie charged with the job of conducting investigations...then they would see that it is all pretty disturbing." Galley stated that a department had been established in the Ministry of Defense for collecting reports and studying the UFO phenomena during the 1954 wave of sightings. He confirmed that there were "sightings reports from pilots, from the commanding personnel of various Air Force centers, with quite a lot of details, all of which agree in quite a disturbing manner - all in the course of the year 1954." (Above Top Secret 129)
  
• 2/22/1974 Around 7am at the Baltimore-Washington International Airport, Samuel Byck shot a security guard with a .22-caliber pistol, leaped over the security chain, and boarded Delta Flight 523 for Atlanta. He carried with him a gasoline bomb in a briefcase. He ordered the crew in the cockpit to take off; the pilot said he could not move until the wheel blocks were removed. Byck promptly shot the co-pilot and pilot. A police officer outside spotted Byck through the window and shot him in the chest; Byck then took his own life.
  
• 2/24/1974 "We need a programme of psychosurgery for political control of our society. The purpose is physical control of the mind. Everyone who deviates from the given norm can be surgically mutilated. The individual may think that the most important reality is his own existence, but this is only his personal point of view. This lacks historical perspective. Man does not have the right to develop his own mind. This kind of liberal orientation has great appeal. We must electrically control the brain. Some day armies and generals will be controlled by electric stimulation of the brain." Dr. Jose Delgado, February 24, 1974 edition of the Congressional Record, No. 262E, Vol. 118
  
• 2/28/1974 US and Egypt resume full diplomatic relations, which had been severed in 1967.
  
• 2/28/1974 Arthur Schlesinger was quoted as saying: "Unquestionably, one element in the Democratic drive for impeachment is a desire to humiliate Mr. Nixon, a politician Democrats have despised for more than a quarter of a century." (Wall St. Journal)
  
• 2/28/1974 Joseph Milteer, right-wing activist who had advance knowledge of the JFK assassination, died in a heater explosion.
  
• 3/1/1974 Grand jury indicts Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Mitchell, Mardian, Colson, Parkinson and Strachan for obstructing justice in their attempt to cover-up Watergate, with Nixon being named as unindicted co-conspirator.
  
• 3/6/1974 In a press conference, Nixon denies that his 3/21/1973 conversation with Haldeman and Dean was really about hush money for the burglars.
  
• 3/7/1974 Commenting on the SLA's ransom demand of free food for the poor, Gov. Reagan quipped, "It's just too bad we can't have an epidemic of botulism."
  
• 3/8/1974 The seven indicted presidential aides plead guilty. Nicholas von Hoffman, a staunch liberal and no fan of Nixon, wrote: "Nixon's right. The media has gone rabid, and pathologically arrogant. You can't hardly crack open a newspaper or turn on a TV without getting unsubstantiated garbage leaked out of a grand jury room, a barroom or some other place where rumors are trapped and collected." (New Times)
  
• 3/10/1974 A Japanese soldier from WWII, Lt. Onoda Hiroo, finally surrendered on the island of Lubang off the coast of Luzon. In 1945 he had been instructed to continue guerilla warfare, and at first with a few companions and then alone he did so for 29 years. He would not surrender until his former commander, Maj. Taniguchi Yoshimi, came from Japan and formally cancelled his orders.
  
• 3/13/1974 The US Senate voted to restore the death penalty.
  
• 3/15/1974 A federal grand jury concludes that President Nixon joined in a conspiracy to cover up White House involvement in the Watergate break-in of Democratic Party offices.
  
• 3/18/1974 Arab oil-producing nations agree to end the embargo imposed on the US.
  
• 3/19/1974 Sen. James Buckley calls on Nixon to resign.
  
• 3/21/1974 Ambassador Martin cabeled Kissinger to withhold "an honest and detailed answer" to a request by Sen. Edward Kennedy concerning Vietnam. He feared the Senator "will spearhead this effort [to cut aid to Saigon]," and detailed answers to his questions would give him "the tactical advantage" in the fight.
  
• 3/22/1974 A CIA memo about Iraq's Kurds: "We would think that Iran would not look with favor on the establishment of a formalized autonomous government. Iran, like ourselves, has seen benefit in a stalemate situation…in which Iraq is instrinsically weakened by the Kurds' refusal to relinguish semi-autonomy. Neither Iran nor ourselves with to see the matter resolved one way or the other." (Pike Report) The Kurds were not informed of this policy, and were encouraged to keep fighting.
  
• 3/23/1974 Jack Anderson column in Washington Post was that paper's first mention of ties between the CIA and the Mullen Company.
  
• 3/23/1974 Soviet Defense Minister Andrei Grechko arrived in Iraq to help the Iraqis reach a settlement with the Kurds. On the advice of the US and Iran, though, Kurdish leader Barzani refused to come to any terms. Earlier this month, the Kurds had rejected a law passed by the Iraqi government granting them limited autonomy. (NYT, Safire, 2/12/1976) The CIA believed that the Shah would abandon his support for the Kurds as soon as he reached some kind of agreement with Baghdad in their border dispute. (Pike Report)
  
• 3/24-28/1974 Kissinger talks with Brezhnev, Gromyko and other Soviet officals in Moscow.
  
• 3/24/1974 While Robert Vesco was hiding out in Costa Rica, Walter Cronkite interviewed him by a remote video hookup: Cronkite: Mr. Vesco, you said last January that six months before the Watergate break-in, the Democrats had come to you with a plan for impeachment of the President. Can you tell us what that plan was? Vesco: Well, let me just correct you for a moment. I don't think I said that the Democrats came to me. I said a group did. I don't believe I identified who. The plan was essentially as I have stated previously, where they were going to attempt to get initial indictments of some high officials, using this as a launching board to get public opinion and - in their favor and using the press media to a great degree. The objective was to reverse the outcome of the public election. Cronkite: Why would they have come to you with this plan? Vesco: Way before the Watergate affair got to the current state that it's at, there were - there was a - an article that appeared in the Washington Post alluding to the fact that there may have been a secret cash contribution made to the Republican Party. And it was that article that triggered their interest. Cronkite: And was the suggestion that you would help them finance their plans? Vesco: No, it did not come to a suggestion to help finance their plan. They were more interested in gaining the information from the details that I may have, with respect to the contribution and certain other things, and to exploit those. Cronkite: Now are they getting to the President, Nixon, through Mitchell and Stans and you? Is that the point? Vesco: That - that was the essential ingredients. And with the full knowledge that the grand jury process being what - that it - or being what it is, that with a limited amount of selected testimony and withholding, in effect, what might be countertestimony or cross-examination, they could achieve the indictments...If they can draw public opinion to a degree that they have, a conviction is almost irrelevant. Cronkite: Was the idea of the plot to neutralize the Administration in its - in its policies, or to secure Mr. Nixon's resignation, or to actually force the matter to impeachment? Vesco: I do not believe that that was their intention, at that time, to impeach the President but - or to force him to resign....because that would solve nothing. Cronkite: How many people involved in this plot? Vesco: I don't know how many were involved. I only dealt with three people. Cronkite: Were these people of importance? Vesco: They were names that everyone would recognize. Cronkite: Were they officials? They hold elective office? Vesco: No, but they had held extremely high posts in past administrations.
  
• 3/30/1974 Cox told the press: "The media certainly [are] turning gradually to a more active role in shaping the course of events...reflects the sort of notion that the press is the fourth branch of Government and it should play a major role in Government." (National Observer)