Deep Politics Timeline

[Tracy Riddle]

• 2/1975 In Mexico City, the exiled leaders of Chile's Popular Unity coalition met to discuss the situation in Chile.
  
• 2/1975 This issue of men's magazine Genesis contained an article called "The Forty Committee" by L. Fletcher Prouty
  
• 2/3/1975 Aristotle Onassis's heart condition becomes worse when he gets another bout of the flu. He has learned that he is suffering from myasthenia gravis, a progressive muscular disease.
  
• 2/6/1975 Senator Henry Jackson enters the presidential race.
  
• 2/6/1975 Jackie Onassis, Christina Onassis, Ari's sister Artemis and a team of doctors accompany Aristotle Onassis to Paris, where he refuses to go directly into the hospital. Instead, he proceeds to his apartment on Avenue Foch where he stays for three days. His condition quickly deteriorates and he has an operation to remove his gallbladder.
  
• 2/7/1975 Labor Dept reports that the unemployment rate is 8.2%, the highest since 1941.
  
• 2/7/1975 On NBC's Today program, Chuck Colson said that the FBI provided much information to Nixon about JFK's affair with Inga Arvad in WWII.
  
• 2/10/1975 Time's Hugh Sidney revealed that Lyndon Johnson greatly enjoyed listening to the FBI's tape recordings of Martin Luther King and reading their transcripts (which also included King's sexual liaisons.) Though LBJ told the press that Hoover was the "greatest living American...Without Hoover, this country would have gone Communist 30 years ago," privately he told cronies that "I would rather have him inside the tent pissing out that outside the tent pissing in." Johnson also joked that he didn't trust anyone except his wife, and "Sometimes I'm not too sure about her."
  
• 2/10-15/1975 Kissinger visited the Middle East.
  
• 2/10/1975 Bill Moyers in Newsweek recalled that LBJ was worried about what China and Russia might do if he was seen as being "soft" in Vietnam: "I'm not going to let Vietnam go the way of China."
  
• 2/11/975 Paul B. Fay, Jr., JFK's Navy Undersecretary, was quoted as saying: "If John F. Kennedy had lived, our military involvement in Vietnam would have been over by the end of 1964." (Santa Barbara News-Press)
  
• 2/11/1975 Richard Ratsimandrava, president of Madagascar, was shot dead in Tananarive.
  
• 2/12/1975 Aristotle Onassis is put on a respirator and is given massive infusions of antibiotics
  
• 2/14/1975 Northern Mariana Islands became a US commonwealth.
  
• 2/16/1975 About a week after photographs of the three "tramps" arrested in Dallas on the day of the assassination are published in many newspapers, the photographer Jack Beers dies of a heart attack.
  
• 2/16-17/1975 Kissinger meets with Gromyko in Geneva to discuss the Middle East.
  
• 2/16-7/21/1975 Mutual Balanced Force Reduction (MBFR) talks: attempt to reduce forces in Europe.
  
• 2/17/1975 Sen. Lloyd Bentsen enters the presidential race.
  
• 2/18/1975 The Congressional Research Service of the Library of Congress puts out a study of covert activities of the CIA to date. According to William Blum, thanks to the burying of information and obscuring of history, the Library of Congress was only able to come up with a small number of the actual overseas incidents the CIA has been involved in. (Killing Hope)
  
• 2/19/1975 The House voted 286 to 120 to create a House Select Intelligence Committee (the Nedzi Committee, which was replaced five months later by the Pike Committee) to investigate claims of CIA wrondoing. It was headed by Democratic Representative Otis Pike of New York. While the Church Committee centered its attention on the more sensational charges of illegal activities by the CIA and other components of the intelligence community (IC), the Pike Committee set about examining the CIA's effectiveness and its costs to taxpayers. Unfortunately, Representative Pike, the committee, and its staff never developed a cooperative working relationship with the Agency or the Ford administration. The committee soon was at odds with the CIA and the White House over questions of access to documents and information and the declassification of materials. Relations between the Agency and the Pike Committee became confrontational. CIA officials came to detest the committee and its efforts at investigation. Many observers maintained moreover, that Representative Pike was seeking to use the committee hearings to enhance his senatorial ambitions, and the committee staff, almost entirely young and anti-establishment, clashed with Agency and White House officials. The committee consisted of seven Democrats and three Republicans. Because it was a select committee, the House leadership appointed the members. Unlike the Senate Committee, which was carefully balanced politically, Speaker of the House Carl Albert and Majority Leader Thomas P. O'Neill, Jr., chose to give the committee a liberal Democratic majority. All Democratic members of the Nedzi Committee had strong negative feelings about the IC. Democratic Congressman Ron Dellums, for example, stated even before the creation of the committee that "I think this committee ought to come down hard and clear on the side of stopping any intelligence agency in this country from utilizing, corrupting, and prostituting the media, the church, and our educational system." Albert and O'Neill selected Nedzi as committee chairman. Nedzi, a 14-year veteran of the House, also had strong liberal credentials. He had opposed the Vietnam war, the development of the B-1 bomber, and the antiballistic missile system. Since 1971, he had served as chairman of the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Intelligence. As chairman, Nedzi had conducted a thorough investigation into the CIA's role in Watergate. CIA officials found Nedzi to be a solid choice, but other Democrats in the House and on the committee had major reservations. Harrington especially felt Nedzi had been "co-opted" by his service as chairman of the subcommittee on intelligence. He asked, "How could he investigate himself?" The party ratio on the committee upset Rhodes and the other Republicans. Nevertheless, Rhodes appointed three ideologically conservative and strong supporters of the IC and the White House to the committee. The 7-to-3 ideological division represented a broad spectrum of political thought from Dellums on the left to Republican Robert McClory on the right.
  
• 2/21/1975 (Miami, Fla.) Three days after announcing he intends to return to Cuba to challenge Castro to an election, liberal leader Luciano Nieves is gunned down in a hospital parking lot after visiting his sick son.
  
• 2/21/1975 John Mitchell, Haldeman and Ehrlichman are sentenced for their roles in Watergate.
  
• 2/22/1975 NYT: "J. Edgar Hoover sent a memorandum to the State Department in 1960 raising the possibility that an impostor might be using the credentials of an American defector named Lee Harvey Oswald, who was then in the Soviet Union. This memo from the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and two subsequent State Department memos related to it were apparently not shown to key investigators of the Warren Commission..."
  
• 2/24/1975 Mae Brussell interviewed Penn Jones Jr. on her radio show. She expressed optimism that with the advent of new media, the truth about the JFK assassination would soon come out. Jones was more pessimistic. He gave the opinion that the military was somehow behind the assassination.
  
• 2/27/1975 A House subcommittee reported that J. Edgar Hoover had collected improper material on various people that was used by JFK, LBJ and Nixon.
  
• 2/27/1975 From Daniel Schorr's "Staying Tuned" book: "On February 27, 1975, my long-standing request for another meeting with Director Colby came through. Over coffee we discussed Watergate and Operation Chaos, the domestic surveillance operation. As casually as I could, I then asked, "Are you people involved in assassinations?" "Not any more," Colby said. He explained that all planning for assassinations had been banned since the 1973 inspector general's report on the subject. I asked, without expecting an answer, who had been the targets before 1973. "I can't talk about it," Colby replied. "Hammarskjold?" I ventured. (The UN. secretary-general killed in an airplane crash in Africa.) "Of course not." "Lumumba?" (The left-wing leader in the Belgian Congo who had been killed in 1961, supposedly by his Katanga rivals.) "I can't go down a list with you. Sorry." I returned to my office, my head swimming with names of dead foreign leaders who may have offended the American government. It was frustrating to be this close to one of the major stories of my career and not be able to get my hands on it. After a few days I decided I knew enough to go on the air even without the identity of corpses. Because of President Ford's imprecision, I didn't realize that he was not referring to actual assassinations, but assassination conspiracies. All I knew was that assassination had been a weapon in the CIA arsenal until banned in a post-Watergate cleanup and that the president feared that investigation might expose the dark secret. l sat down at my typewriter and wrote, "President Ford has reportedly warned associates that if current investigations go too far they could uncover several assassinations of foreign officials involving the CIA..."
  
• 2/28/1975 First public revelation that CIA has plotted to assassinate foreign leaders. Daniel Schorr: "The two-minute "tell" story ran on the Evening News on February 28. While I had been mistaken in suggesting actual murders, my report opened up one of the darkest secrets in the CIA's history."
  
• 3/1975 A 58-month economic expansion in the US begins, lasting until 1/1980. Economy grows 6.1% in first year, 3.3% in second year.
  
• 3/1975 The Shah of Iran met with Vice-President Saddam Hussein of Iraq. The Shah cut off his aid to Iraq's Kurds; the next day the Iraqis launched a huge offensive against them. The Kurds appealed in desperation to the CIA and Kissinger for aid, but received no response. By the end of the month their forces had been defeated, and several hundred Kurdish leaders were executed. Over 200,000 refugees escaped into Iran. The US and Iran refused to aid them in any way. Kissinger told the Pike Committee: "Covert action should not be confused with missionary work." (NYT, Safire 2/12/1976, Pike Report)
  
• 3/1/1975 Science magazine predicted the possibility of "the approach of a full-blown 10,000-year ice age."
  
• 3/5/1975 Postmaster General Benjamin Franklin Bailar issues an order prohibiting the CIA from having access to the mail without authorization.
  
• 3/6/1975 The Zapruder film is shown to the US public for the first time on Geraldo Rivera's "Goodnight America" program; Robert Groden and Dick Gregory appear on the show. Gregory says that he thinks Howard Hunt and Frank Sturgis were two of the tramps arrested in Dealey Plaza. A group of students from the University of Virginia, including Andy Purdy and Mike Holm, see the program on television. They subsequently get in touch with the Virginia Congressional Delegation, and at 9:15 A.M., April 15, 1975, the Grodens show the film and other evidence at the Capitol to the Virginia Congressional Delegation. This will be the first time any Congressional group has ever seen the Zapruder film, or any of the other assassination film footage or slides.
  
• 3/7/1975 The Senate revised its filibuster rule, allowing 60 senators to limit debate in most cases, instead of the previously required two-thirds of senators present.
  
• 3/8/1975 Crewdson, John M. - "Rockefeller Unit Said to Check Report of CIA Link to Kennedy Assassination" - New York Times
  
• 3/10/1975 Seymour Hersh reported on CIA-Mafia attempts to kill Castro. (NY Times) This story would trigger the Senate Intelligence Committee to investigate. New York Times - "CIA Involvement Is Alleged in Plots to Kill 3 Dictators" - 3/10/1975
  
• 3/10/1975 Bill Moyers recalled that LBJ at times "personally feared J Edgar Hoover" but he "learned to use Hoover even as Hoover was using him..." Johnson also "was given to fits of uncontrollable suspicion, once lashing two of his aides for being as 'naive as newborn calves' about the Kennedys, Communists and the New York Times; that he sometimes found gossip about other men's weaknesses a delicious hiatus from work...from these grew some of our worst excesses..." Moyers also claimed that MLK was spied on only because LBJ wanted to know if he was involved with Communists. (Newsweek)
  
• 3/10/1975 Secretary of State Henry Kissinger told the Turkish Foreign Minister, "Before the Freedom of Information Act, I used to say at meetings, The illegal we do immediately; the unconstitutional takes a little longer.' [laughter] But since the Freedom of Information Act, I'm afraid to say things like that." He then explained how he would facilitate the illegal circumvention of a Congressional arms embargo.
  
• 3/11/1975 Commission on Civil Rights study showed that southern schools were more integrated than northern schools.
  
• 3/12/1975 Maurice Stans pleads guilty to charges that he violated federal campaign laws.
  
• 3/12/1975 In Paris, doctors tell Jackie Onassis that Aristotle Onassis is in no immediate danger of dying and that she can fly to New York for a few days to see her children.
  
• 3/14/1975 Frederick C. LaRue is sentenced to six months in prison for his role in Watergate.
  
• 3/15/1975 Aristotle Onassis dies. After his funeral, and for the remainder of this year, Jackie is mostly in America with her children and friends.
  
• 3/17/1975 Supreme Court rules that the federal government, not the states, has the exclusive right to exploit oil and reserves beneath the continental shelf seabed beyond the three-mile territorial limit.
  
• 3/22/1975 Kissinger suspends his efforts to achieve a second Israeli-Egyptian troop disengagement, announcing "irreconcilable differences" between the two countries.
  
• 3/23/1975 John O'Hare dies of a heart attack. According to Cuban exile sources, O'Hare was one of the most dangerous men alive. It is he who is credited with several assassinations, including Manuel Rodriguez Quesada and Gilberto Rodriguez Hernandez. O'Hare is described as a "CIA mercenary and assassin," by Robert Morrow in First Hand Knowledge.
  
• 3/25/1975 White House meeting on Vietnam; present are Ford, Kissinger, Scowcroft, Weyand, and Graham Martin. James Schlesinger was now out of the loop because he disagreed with Kissinger's Vietnam policy. Those present at the meeting agreed to abandon Cambodia, and stop pressing for more US aid to that country. US naval ships would be sent to aid in the evacuation of people fleeing from the Communist advance in Vietnam. Weyand was also to be sent to Saigon on a fact-finding mission.
  
• 3/25/1975 King Faisal of Saudi Arabia is assassinated by his nephew, Prince Raisal ibn Musad, in Riyadh.
  
• 3/27/1975 NYT reported that Haig had quietly flown to the US to meet with Nixon to discuss possible further congressional testimony.
  
• 3/28/1975 Southeast Asia: Ford announces he has ordered US transports to aid evacuation of refugees.
  
• 3/28/1975 Sen. Barry Goldwater (R-Arizona) wrote to Shlomo Arnon: "The subject of UFOs has interested me for some long time. About ten or twelve years ago I made an effort to find out what was in the building at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base where the information has been stored that has been collected by the Air Force, and I was understandably denied this request. It is still classified above Top Secret." Goldwater further wrote that there were rumors the evidence would be released, and that he was "just as anxious to see this material as you are, and I hope we will not have to wait much longer."
  
• 3/29/1975 Ford announced in an address to the nation his decision to sign the Tax Reduction Act of 1975, providing for a $23 billion tax cut.
  
• 3/31/1975 Ford's clemency program for Vietnam-era deserters and draft evaders ended, with 22,500 men taking advantage of the opportunity (about 1/6th of those eligible).