Deep Politics Timeline

[Tracy Riddle]

• 11/1/1974 Haig left the White House for his new post in Europe.
  
• 11/5/1974 GOP lost 43 House and 4 Senate seats in elections; 85 newcomers to Congress. Democrats had a 61-39 margin in the Senate (soon increased to 62 by special election of John Durkin) and 291 in the House. Democrats won 27 of 35 state governors' races. 38% voter turnout. Newcomers in the Senate include Dale Bumpers (who defeated William Fulbright in the Arkansas primary), Paul Laxalt, John Glenn, Jake Garn, Gary Hart. Ella Grasso became the nation's first female state governor (Connecticut) elected in her own right (without succeeding her husband).
  
• 11/5/1974 SALT II sessions recess.
  
• 11/5-7/1974 Kissinger visits the Middle East to talk about the Arab-Israeli situation.
  
• 11/8/1974 Eight former Ohio National Guardsmen are acquitted of charges stemming from the Kent State shooting.
  
• 11/12/1974 South Africa suspended from UN General Assembly because of its racial policies.
  
• 11/13/1974 Karen Silkwood, labor union activist and chemical technician at the Kerr-McGee plutonium fields near Crescent, Oklahoma, died in a mysterious car crash. When a strike ended in failure, many of the workers had severed ties with the union. Not Silkwood, however , and as a member of the bargaining committee (the first female to hold the position in the union's history) was charged with investigating health and safety issues at the plant. In the summer of 1974, Silkwood testified to the Atomic Energy Commission that she had found serious violations of health and safety regulations including evidence of spills, leaks, faulty fuel rods and enough missing plutonium to make multiple nuclear weapons. She also alleged the company had falsified inspection records. Not long after, some strange things began happening. On November 5th, during a routine check, Silkwood discovered she had been exposed to over 400 times the legal limit for plutonium. She was sent home with a sample kit to conduct more self-tests. The following morning, despite having handled no dangerous materials as part of her job that day, she tested positive once more. On the 7th, plutonium contamination was found in her lungs and she was sent to Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico for further testing. Silkwood believed she was deliberately contaminated as a result of her whistleblowing efforts against Kerr-McGee. The company would later maintain in court that she willfully contaminated herself in an effort to make them look culpable. While radiation levels at her apartment were high, no radiation was detected either in her car or her work locker. By November 13, she had decided to go public with her story. She gathered evidence documenting the plant's wrongdoing and was enroute to meet a national representative of her union and a New York Times reporter in Oklahoma City when her car went off the road and struck a culvert, killing Silkwood. She was 28-years-old. The Oklahoma State Troopers ruled that she had fallen asleep at the wheel. But her family and supporters noted there were skidmarks in the road how could she have hit the brakes while asleep? Dents and paint scrapes on her rear bumper lead her supporters to believe that she was deliberately forced off the road by a trailing vehicle. The documents she'd planned to share with New York Times reporter were never found. The publicity surrounding the case led to a federal investigation of the plant, where many of Silkwood's allegations were proven true. Kerr-McGee closed Cimarron in 1975.
  
• 11/17 or 18-22/1974 Ford visits Japan, the first president to do so. He meets with PM Tanaka and also visits South Korea and the USSR.
  
• 11/21/1974 Sen. Walter Mondale dropped out of the 1976 presidential race.
  
• 11/21/1974 Congress overrode Ford's veto of the Freedom of Information Act, which added amendments to the 1966 act. He viewed it as further weakening the powers of the president. The Senate overrode it 65-27, the House 371-31; Ed Muskie commented, "The same President who began his administration with a promise of openness sided with the secret-makers on the first test of that promise."
  
• 11/23/1974 Rep. Morris Udall announces he will run for Democratic presidential nomination in 1976.
  
• 11/23-24/1974 Summit in Vladivostok, USSR; Ford and Brezhnev talk about limiting offensive nuclear weapons.
  
• 11/24/1974 Ford ends an eight-day world trip through Japan, South Korea and Russia; at Vladivostok he and Brezhnev signed a tentative agreement limiting offensive weapons until 1985.
  
• 11/24/1974 New York Times Magazine reported that Sen. Fulbright was disturbed by the role of the press in downfall of Nixon, and wondered where the press had been when similar wrongdoings had been committed by previous administrations. (Daniel Yergin, "Fulbright's Last Frustration")
  
• 11/25/1974 A coalition of right-wing groups (Liberty Lobby, National Right to Life Committee, the American Conservative Union), plus the liberal National Lawyers Guild, announced their opposition to Rockefeller as VP.
  
• 11/25/1974 Ford signs into law a bill providing $11.8 billion over the next six years for mass transit.
  
• 11/29/1974 Ford ordered Agriculture Sec. Butz to apologize for his joke about the Pope's position on birth control ("He no play-a the game, he no make-a the rules," he said with an Italian accent).
  
• 11/29/1974 Texas oil baron H.L. Hunt died at age 85 in Dallas. His fortune is variously estimated at between $3,000,000,000 and $5,000,000,000, with an income of more than $1,000,000 a week. Hunt is a bigamist with three separate families. He leaves seventy living direct descendants, including ten children, twenty-one grandchildren, and twelve great-grandchildren, accounting for forty-three members of the family.
  
• 12/1974 US inflation rate was 11%.
  
• 12/2/1974 Ford announces a tentative agreement with Brezhnev to put a "firm ceiling" on the arms race.
  
• 12/3/1974 At the trial, Haldeman denied that he tried to block the 1972 FBI investigation of the break-in.
  
• 12/3/1974 Rockefeller family financial adviser J. Richardson Dilworth told the House Judiciary Committee that the family members' total assets were over $1 billion; he said that the Rockefellers were simply investors and "are totally uninterested in controlling anything."
  
• 12/5/1974 24-day strike ends when United Mine Workers president Arnold Miller signs a new national coal contract.
  
• 12/6/1974 Robert Vesco was quoted as saying that "the forces that threatened me are the same politically that eliminated President Kennedy and then President Nixon and want to eliminate all of Nixon's associates." (Boston Globe 12/6/74) The Costa Rican government also announced that Vesco could stay in that country.
  
• 12/6/1974 Leonard Garment announced his resignation.
  
• 12/6/1974 The North Vietnamese launched a test offensive against Phuoc Long province, as a prelude to their 1975 offensive. The province fell in a month.
  
• 12/6/1974 Daniel Ellsberg said that once-secret government documents were stolen from his Mill Valley home 10/1; the police recovered the papers, but refused to say how. The burglar left a note: "Dear Daniel. Not a word of this to anyone. Much trouble will be avoided if you negotiate properly. Don't slip - soon you'll know."
  
• 12/9/1974 Stock market dropped to 570 points.
  
• 12/9/1974 Nat Hentoff criticized "Robert Kennedy's transmogrification of the grand jury system [in] his pursuit of Jimmy Hoffa" (Village Voice)
  
• 12/10/1974 Senate confirmed Nelson Rockefeller 90 to 7. The opposing votes were cast by conservatives and liberals: Goldwater, Jesse Helms, William Scott (R-Virginia), James Abourezk (D-South Dakota), Birch Bayh, Howard Metzenbaum, Gaylord Nelson.
  
• 12/10/1974 Ehrlichman testified that he told Nixon soon after the break-in not to ever pardon the Watergate figures, but in April 1973 Nixon said he would pardon them all eventually. In tears, Ehrlichman told how Nixon made him resign.
  
• 12/10/1974 The U.S. National Security Council under Henry Kissinger completed a classified 200-page study, "National Security Study Memorandum 200: Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for U.S. Security and Overseas Interests." The study falsely claimed that population growth in the so-called Lesser Developed Countries (LDCs) was a grave threat to U.S. national security. Adopted as official policy in November 1975 by President Gerald Ford, NSSM 200 outlined a covert plan to reduce population growth in those countries through birth control, and also, implicitly, war and famine. Brent Scowcroft, who had by then replaced Kissinger as national security adviser (the same post Scowcroft was to hold in the Bush administration), was put in charge of implementing the plan. CIA Director George Bush was ordered to assist Scowcroft, as were the secretaries of state, treasury, defense, and agriculture. The bogus arguments that Kissinger advanced were not original. One of his major sources was the Royal Commission on Population, which King George VI had created in 1944 "to consider what measures should be taken in the national interest to influence the future trend of population." The commission found that Britain was gravely threatened by population growth in its colonies, since "a populous country has decided advantages over a sparsely-populated one for industrial production." The combined effects of increasing population and industrialization in its colonies, it warned, "might be decisive in its effects on the prestige and influence of the West," especially effecting "military strength and security." NSSM 200 similarly concluded that the United States was threatened by population growth in the former colonial sector. It paid special attention to 13 "key countries" in which the United States had a "special political and strategic interest": India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines, Turkey, Nigeria, Egypt, Ethiopia, Mexico, Brazil, and Colombia. It claimed that population growth in those states was especially worrisome, since it would quickly increase their relative political, economic, and military strength. There were several measures that Kissinger advocated to deal with this alleged threat, most prominently, birth control and related population-reduction programs. He also warned that "population growth rates are likely to increase appreciably before they begin to decline," even if such measures were adopted. A second measure was curtailing food supplies to targetted states, in part to force compliance with birth control policies: "There is also some established precedent for taking account of family planning performance in appraisal of assistance requirements by AID [U.S. Agency for International Development] and consultative groups. Since population growth is a major determinant of increases in food demand, allocation of scarce PL 480 resources should take account of what steps a country is taking in population control as well as food production. In these sensitive relations, however, it is important in style as well as substance to avoid the appearance of coercion." "Mandatory programs may be needed and we should be considering these possibilities now," the document continued, adding, "Would food be considered an instrument of national power? ... Is the U.S. prepared to accept food rationing to help people who can't/won't control their population growth?"
  
• 12/11/1974 Ehrlichman testified that he was deceived by Nixon on Watergate in "at least four major instances."
  
• 12/11/1974 Harry Dent pleaded guilty to working with an illegal fund-raising committee that channeled money to candidates in 1970.
  
• 12/12/1974 Judiciary Committee voted 26-12 to send Rockefeller's nomination to the full House for a vote.
  
• 12/12/1974 Former Georgia governor Jimmy Carter, a complete unknown to most Americans, announces he will seek the Democratic presidential nomination in 1976.
  
• 12/13/1974 Attorney General Saxbe resigns.
  
• 12/13/1974 Mardian testified that he thought Nixon was running CREEP at the time of the break-in; he also agreed that if the RNC had been running the campaign, Watergate might not have occured.
  
• 12/13/1974 Combat between North Vietnamese Army and ARVN in Phuoc Long Province.
  
• 12/14/1974 Influential columnist Walter Lippmann died at age 85.
  
• 12/15/1974 Al Haig took over as commander of NATO.
  
• 12/16/1974 Ford met with French President d'Estaing in Martinique; they issued a statement saying that they hoped the parties in Cambodia would turn to negotiations "rather than continuing the military struggle." They also announced a plan for the US and France to coordinate energy policies.
  
• 12/17/1974 Following the U.S. Steel Corporation decision to raise prices 10 percent, Ford orders Wage and Price Control Council to investigate and obtain justification for such action.
  
• 12/17/1974 James Angleton is fired by CIA director William Colby after Colby was informed by Seymour Hersh that he was going to break a story about two Agency operations operations CHAOS and HT-LINGUAL. Angleton controlled both programs. (Fonzi chronology) Some sources say December 23 Angleton is asked to resign by CIA director William Colby. Angleton is thought by some to have been a "mole" for the KGB. Colby confirms to reporter Sy Hersh assertions that the CIA and primarily Angleton's units, have conducted illegal domestic operations. Colby also summarily fires Ray Rocca, Scotty Miler, and other Angleton loyalists within Counterintelligence. Angleton is quoted as saying: "A mansion has many rooms ... I'm not privy to Who Struck John." Some researchers have asserted that Angleton, having been fired for the first time in his life from a job that to him is his entire world, is in fact sending a warning shot across the bow to Colby of his own knowledge of the CIA's role in the JFK assassination.
  
• 12/18/1974 A major reshuffling of White House personnel is announced.
  
• 12/18/1974 A 20-day session of the North Vietnamese Politburo met to set policy.
  
• 12/19/1974 Ford signs into law a bill giving the federal government custody of the official tapes and papers of former President Nixon.
  
• 12/19/1974 House confirms Rockefeller 287 to 128. He was then sworn in as vice-president; it was covered live on television. For the first time in the country's history, neither the President nor Vice-President were elected by the people.
  
• 12/22/1974 New York Times' Seymour Hersh reported that the CIA had spied on domestic dissidents and kept files on 10,000 Americans in the late '60s and early '70s. The headline: "Huge CIA Operation Reported in U.S. Against Anti-War Forces, Other Dissidents in Nixon Years". The story quoted well-placed government sources, who also said that a number of break-ins, wiretaps and other crimes were committed inside the United States by CIA personnel in operations dating back to the 50s. "The Family Jewels" - a secret, internal CIA report on all potential CIA abuses during the CIA's entire existence, which had been commissioned by CIA Director James Schlesinger. Hersh, the Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist who had revealed the My Lai massacres and the bombing of Cambodia, reported: "The Central Intelligence Agency , directly violating its charter, conducted a massive illegal domestic intelligence operation during the Nixon Administration against the antiwar movement and other dissident groups in the United States, according to well-placed government sources." The CIA, forbidden to operate within the United States, had opened files on 10,000 American citizens and conducted illegal wiretaps, break-ins and mail openings under its "Operation Chaos". This was the beginning of a flood of information to the public about the darker doings of the CIA and would result in the establishment of three investigative groups: the Rockefeller Commission, the "Pike Committee" in the House of Representatives and the "Church Committee" in the Senate.
  
• 12/23/1974 US Steel backs off from its price increase.
  
• 12/23/1974 B-1 bomber makes its first successful test flight.
  
• 12/27/1974 Ford signed a bill creating a temporary Commission to study the paperwork generated by the Federal Government.
  
• 12/27/1974 Within days of Hersh's first story, Ford's aides recommended that he set up an executive branch investigative commission to avoid "finding ourselves whipsawed by prolonged Congressional hearings." In a draft memo to the president written on 27 December, Deputy Chief of Staff Richard Cheney explained that the president had several reasons to establish such a commission: to avoid being put on the defensive, to minimize "damage" to the CIA, to head off "Congressional efforts to further encroach on the executive branch," to demonstrate presidential leadership, and to reestablish Americans' faith in their government. Ford's aides cautioned that this commission, formally called the Commission on CIA Activities within the United States, must not appear to be "a 'kept' body designed to whitewash the problem." But Ford apparently did not follow this advice. His choice for chairman, Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, had served as a member of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, which monitored the CIA. Members Erwin Griswold, Lane Kirkland, Douglas Dillon, and Ronald Reagan had all been privy to CIA secrets in the past or noted for their strong support of governmental secrecy. Ford's aides cautioned that this commission, formally called the Commission on CIA Activities within the United States, must not appear to be "a 'kept' body designed to whitewash the problem." (Olmsted, Challenging the Secret Government)
  
• 12/29/1974 Three top officials of the CIA's counterintelligence division - Raymond Rocca, William J. Hood, and Newton S. Miller - resigned.
  
• 12/30/1974 The Watergate case went to the jury.
  
• 12/31/1974 Ford's victory rate in congressional votes in 1974 was 58%. By December, his popularity rating was 42%, with 41% disapproving.
  
• 12/31/1974 Cambodia: By this time, the Khmer Rouge had encircled Phnom Penh.