Deep Politics Timeline

[Tracy Riddle]

• 4/1974 Sen. Lowell Weicker reveals White House memos that show the IRS being used to give tax breaks to friends of the Nixon administration, including John Wayne. Wayne responds by calling Weicker a "cheap politician."
  
• 4/1974 Foreign Affairs magazine contained an article by Richard N. Gardner of Columbia University: "In short, the 'house of world order' will have to be built from the bottom up rather than from the top down. An end run around national sovereignty, eroding it piece by piece, will accomplish much more than the old-fashioned frontal assault."
  
• 4/3/1974 IRS stated that Nixon owed $432,787 in back taxes, and interest penalties of $33,000. Nixon agreed to pay it.
  
• 4/7/1974 The Conversation, a film about a professional audio surveillance man, starring Gene Hackman, is released.
  
• 4/8/1974 Nixon signs a bill increasing the minimum wage to $2.30 an hour in stages.
  
• 4/11/1974 Israeli PM Golda Meir resigned.
  
• 4/15/1974 Patty Hearst, now calling herself "Tania," takes part in a bank robbery, and is captured on security cameras wielding a gun.
  
• 4/16/1974 Sec. of the Army Howard Callaway cuts Lt. William Calley's prison sentence in half.
  
• 4/18/1974 OPEC (excluding Libya and Syria) members voted to resume exporting oil to the US.
  
• 4/19/1974 Nicholas von Hoffman reports hearing a congressman saying during the impeachment hearings: "We're going to impeach his ass. We're going to do it." (Washington Post)
  
• 4/21/1974 Gerald Ford conceded that a recent GOP defeat in a special congressional election in Michigan had been because of Watergate, but then stated that Nixon's trip to Michigan on behalf of the Republican candidate had made the race closer than it might have been.
  
• 4/28-5/2/1974 Kissinger talks with officials from the USSR, Algiers, Egypt and Israel to work out an Israeli-Syrian troop disengagement.
  
• 4/28/1974 Jaworski was flown to the White House by an air force plane sent by Haig; Haig accused him, in a threatening tone, of "manipulating the grand jury" and working from baseless evidence. Haig once again insisted that the tape transcripts would prove the President innocent. (Stonewall 276; General's Progress 278)
  
• 4/29/1974 New York magazine reported that Elliott Richardson recalled Colson and Nixon wanting J. Lee Rankin to review and "edit" certain "national security" segements of the Watergate tapes. Supposedly, Archibald Cox considered this idea but rejected it. (Nightmare, Lukas 425)
  
• 4/30/1974 Edited transcripts of the Nixon tapes are released by the White House. They showed that he often raised the idea of hush money for the Watergate defendants. The edited versions were not accepted by Congress, because they contained many deletions and questionable transcriptions from the tapes; Sen. Hugh Scott called the conversations "shabby, disgusting, immoral..." Nixon-friendly papers such as the Chicago Tribune and the Omaha World-Herald attacked the "low level of political morality in the White House..."
  
• 5/1974 Richard Condon (author of The Manchurian Candidate) publishes his latest thriller, Winter Kills. A fictional account of the JFK assassination, it portrays the Kennedy family in an unflattering light. Before the main story of the novel begins, U.S. President Timothy Kegan is shot in Philadelphia at Hunt Plaza. The ensuing presidential commission condemns a lone gunman as the killer. The book starts years later, when Kegan's half-brother, Nick, witnesses the death-bed confession of a man claiming to have been part of the 'hit squad'. As the protagonist attempts to find the plotter(s), he encounters numerous groups and persons that could have led or been part of the conspiracy. One person is Lola Camonte, a hostess, lobbyist and fixer. She recounts the story of President Kegan asking her about appointing a member of organized crime to the Court of St. James. The character "Joe Diamond" is the fictional representation of Jack Ruby. Condon's book describes the numerous intertwined threads of the conspiracy, from the Mafia, Cuba, even possible domestic police connections. Only in the final act, in which Nick meets with his vicious and perverse Joseph P. Kennedy-like 'father-figure', is the truth revealed with a twist ending.
  
• 5/1/1974 House Judiciary Committee refuses to accept White House transcript.
  
• 5/2/1974 Maryland Court of Appeals disbarred Spiro Agnew, calling him "morally obtuse."
  
• 5/3-9/1974 Kissinger holds talks with Middle East leaders to end Israeli-Syrian fighting.
  
• 5/4/1974 White House accused Dean of making "misstatements" before the Senate committee.
  
• 5/5/1974 Jaworski privately told Haig that a grand jury had months earlier secretly named Nixon an "unindicted co-conspirator." (Stonewall)
  
• 5/5/1974 Haig, on Issues and Answers, and St. Clair, on Meet the Press, said they felt sure Nixon would prevail in an impeachment inquiry.
  
• 5/5/1974 Column by long-time Nixon supporter William Randolph Hearst Jr.: "This is a very tough column for me to write," he confessed, stating that the tape transcripts showed that Nixon had a "moral blind spot" and made his impeachment inevitable. "The gang talking on the tapes...come through in just that way...a gang of racketeers talking over strategy in a jam-up situation."
  
• 5/6/1974 Nixon checked out some of the tapes to listen to them at the EOB.
  
• 5/6/1974 West German chancellor Willy Brandt resigned over a scandal.
  
• 5/7/1974 The White House announced it would not comply with any part of the subpoena.
  
• 5/9/1974 House Judiciary Committee began formal hearings on impeachment of Nixon.
  
• 5/10/1974 Haig was quoted in an AP interview of saying that Nixon might step down "if he thought that served the best interests of the American people...at this juncture, I don't see anything on the horizon that would meet that criterion."
  
• 5/11/1974 Ford, at a Houston GOP rally, said, "I am convinced that President Nixon knew nothing of the plan to break in and had nothing to do with it. And in my opinion, he had nothing to do with the cover-up." He also expressed fears that Democratic gains in the November elections could lead to a "legislative dictatorship."
  
• 5/11/1974 The NY Times reported that in the White House tapes Nixon had referred to Sirica as a "wop" and to persons in the US Attorney's office and Securities and Exchange Commission as "Jew boys."
  
• 5/11/1974 Haig told the press that Nixon would not be "pressured out of office...we just can't succumb to the fire storm of public opinion."
  
• 5/11/1974 Julie Nixon Eisenhower reveals that her father told her he wouldn't resign as long as one senator still supported him.
  
• 5/13/1974 Ford says that he has read the transcripts and that "the overwhelming weight of the evidence" proves Nixon "innocent of any of the charges."
  
• 5/15/1974 In executive session of the Ervin Committee, Haig expressed irritation at committee leaks of his earlier testimony. (The Power to Probe by James Hamilton, 1976, p282)
  
• 5/16/1974 Kleindienst pleads guilty to withholding information from a Senate committee. This involved the investigation into the IT&T antitrust case.
  
• 5/17/1974 South Los Angeles: two-hour gun battle between the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) and LAPD; the SLA headquarters is burned and six members died.
  
• 5/18/1974 India detonates an underground nuclear device, called Smiling Buddha, in the Rajasthan desert.
  
• 5/20/1974 LBJ aide Joseph Califano was quoted in the New Yorker about Watergate: "I've read about half the transcripts, and the contrast with the Johnson White House is enormous. I think it's an utterly amoral discussion...It really is a group of amoral people saving their own skins...It's not really comparable to anything that happened to Johnson."
  
• 5/21/1974 Jeb Magruder is sentenced to a prison term of 10 months to four years.
  
• 5/23/1974 Haig gathered the sub-Cabinet officials together and gave them a pep talk; he assured them that Nixon was totally in command and that Watergate "will be a very long footnote" in Nixon's presidency.
  
• 5/24/1974 Complaining of chest pains, Earl Warren entered the hospital.
  
• 5/29/1974 NYT reports: "Rev. Billy Graham has called his reading of the transcripts of President Nixon's Watergate conversations "a profoundly disturbing and disappointing experience" but added that, as Mr. Nixon's friend, he had "no intention of forsaking him now." Mr. Graham, who in the past has offered only infrequent public comment on the Watergate affair, made his remarks in a statement issued yesterday from his home in Montreat, N.C. Mr. Graham said "One cannot but deplore the moral tone implied in these papers." It was not clear, however, whether his comments referred solely to the use of what he termed "objectionable language" in the transcripts or to substantive matters in the conversations. A spokesman for the Baptist clergyman said yesterday that he was traveling and not available to add to the statement. In a seeming allusion to a defense of Mr. Nixon's use of profanity by a Jesuit priest who is a salaried member of the President's staff, Mr. Graham said: "'Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain' is a Commandment which has not been suspended, regardless of any need to release tensions." The priest, the Rev. John J. McLaughlin, in an unusual news conference earlier this month defended the profanity as a "form of emotional drainage.'" Graham also said, "What comes through in these tapes is not the man I have known for many years. Other mutual friends have made the same observation…A nation confused for years by the teaching of situational ethics now finds itself dismayed by those in Government who apparently practiced it. We have lost our moral compass. We must get it back. Nowhere is it more clearly or concisely stated than in the Ten Commandments. If this nation is destroyed, it will be the result of moral decadence within."
  
• 5/31/1974 Israeli and Syrian military officials sign a cease-fire agreement in Geneva brought about by Kissinger. Israel would withdraw to the 1967 ceasefire line in Golan, with a UN buffer zone.
  
• Early 6/1974 Alexander Haig ordered the Army's Criminal Investigation Command (CIC) to make a study of Nixon's alleged ties to organized crime and the smuggling of gold bullion to Vietnam. The results of that investigation, carried out by the CIC's Russell Bintliff at the direction of Col. Henry Tufts, was submitted to Haig in late July 1974. It is not known whether the results were presented to Nixon or not; Haig refuses to discuss the issue. (Secret Agenda p312)
  
• 6/5/1974 The Great Hughes Heist The private files and documents of the late Howard Hughes were reported stolen from his supposedly impregnable Hollywood headquarters on June 5, 1974. These files, including thousands of his private papers and verbatim transcripts of telephone calls, could expose illicit connections with the CIA, the Mafia, the White House, and private industry. It is said, for the first time, detailed knowledge of political bribes, financial "favors" to circumvent established government laws, and inner dealings within existing government agencies would become available to the American public. Yet, after more than two years of reportedly inept investigations by various police and governmental agencies and repeated accusations of a cover-up, the documents have not been recovered nor is the American public generally aware of their existence. The recovery and exposure of these papers could reveal to the American people the inner workings and structure of a national and international power elite. The dearth of coverage by the mass media of the burglary of these potentially explosive documents and of the. subsequent investigation qualifies the "Hughes Heist" for consideration as one of the "best censored stories" of 1976. SOURCE: New Times Magazine, January 21, 1977, "The Great Hughes Heist," by Michael Drosnin.
  
• 6/7/1974 Kleindeinst receives a suspended sentence.
  
• 6/8/1974 US and Saudi Arabia sign an agreement for economic and military cooperation.
  
• 6/10-19/1974 Nixon, Kissinger and Haig visited the Middle East.
  
• 6/10/1974 In a letter to the House Judiciary Committee Nixon says he must "draw a line" and refuse to provide them with any more Watergate evidence.
  
• 6/10/1974 Kissinger wrote a letter to Sen. Fulbright stating that he only suggested the names of people who might be responsible for leaks, and blamed the wiretaps on Nixon.
  
• 6/11/1974 Archibald Cox denounced the tactics of the Senate Watergate Committee as similar to those used by Joseph McCarthy. (New York Times)
  
• 6/11/1974 Kissinger, in Salzburg, told the press he will resign unless he is cleared of any involvement with wiretapping.
  
• 6/12/1974 Ford was given a CIA foreign policy/intelligence briefing.
  
• 6/12-18/1974 Nixon visits Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Jordan and Israel. 6/14 he and Sadat signed an accord by which the US would provide nuclear technology to Egypt for peaceful purposes.
  
• 6/12/1974 The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence by Victor Marchetti is published by Alfred A. Knopf. Marchetti is a former special assistant to the Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and John D. Marks, a former officer of the United States Department of State. The authors claim to expose how the CIA actually works and how its original purpose (i.e. collecting and analyzing information about foreign governments, corporations, and persons in order to advise public policymakers) had been subverted by its obsession with clandestine operations. It is the first book the federal government of the United States ever went to court to censor before its publication. The CIA demanded the authors remove 399 passages but they stood firm and only 168 passages were censored. The publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, chose to publish the book with blanks for censored passages and with boldface type for passages that were challenged but later uncensored. The book was a critically acclaimed bestseller whose publication contributed to the establishment of the Church Committee, a United States Senate select committee to study governmental operations with respect to intelligence activities, in 1975. The book was published in paperback by Dell Publishing in 1975. The book is partly censored, but it is printed to show which parts were blacked outit is perhaps the earliest published book to show its deletions. The book contains a list of list of foreign officials, including King Hussein of Jordan, who received clandestine payments from the CIA in return for "favors." "There exists in our nation today a powerful and dangerous secret cult -- the cult of intelligence. Its holy men are the clandestine professionals of the Central Intelligence Agency. Its patrons and protectors are the highest officials of the federal government. Its membership, extending far beyond governmental circles, reaches into the power centers of industry, commerce, finance, and labor. Its friends are many in the areas of important public influence -- the academic world and the communications media. The cult of intelligence is a secret fraternity of the American political aristocracy. The purpose of the cult is to further the foreign policies of the U.S. government by covert and usually illegal means, while at the same time containing the spread of its avowed enemy, communism. Traditionally, the cult's hope has been to foster a world order in which America would reign supreme, the unchallenged international leader. Today, however, that dream stands tarnished by time and frequent failures. Thus, the cult's objectives are now less grandiose, but no less disturbing. It seeks largely to advance America's self-appointed role as the dominant arbiter of social, economic, and political change in the awakening regions of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. And its worldwide war against communism has to some extent been reduced to a covert struggle to maintain a self-serving stability in the Third World, using whatever clandestine methods are available."
  
• 6/14/1974 The Parallax View is released. It is a political thriller film directed by Alan J. Pakula and starring Warren Beatty. The film was adapted by David Giler, Lorenzo Semple Jr and an uncredited Robert Towne from the 1970 novel by Loren Singer. The story concerns a reporter's dangerous investigation into an obscure organization, the Parallax Corporation, whose primary, but not ostensible, enterprise is political assassination. It opens with a scene clearly reminiscent of the RFK assassination, and the film ends with the protagonist being framed as a "lone nut" assassin.
  
• 6/24/1974 Colson was quoted in the Washington Post as saying that Nixon was a prisoner of the CIA.
  
• 6/25/1974 Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that the CIA's budget did not have to be made public; the majority justices were Burger, White, Blackmun, Powell and Rehnquist.
  
• 6/26/1974 Washington Star-News quoted Atty Gen. Saxbe as blaming J. Edgar Hoover for making the FBI unresponsive to attorneys general.
  
• 6/27-7/3/1974 Summit between Nixon and Brezhnev in Moscow over nuclear arms and world peace issues. An agreement on nuclear weapons is signed 7/3 but there are no major breakthroughs.
  
• 6/29/1974 Soviet ballet dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov defected to the US.
  
• 6/30/1974 A gunman stood up from a pew inside the Ebenezer Baptist Church and fatally shot Martin Luther King's mother, Alberta Williams King, as she played "The Lord's Prayer" on the organ during morning worship. A deacon was also killed.