Deep Politics Timeline

[Tracy Riddle]

• 5/1975 US unemployment reaches post-war high of 9.2%.
  
• 5/1/1975 Communist forces secure control of Saigon.
  
• 5/1/1975 A SKELETON KEY TO THE GEMSTONE FILES is published by Bruce Porter Roberts.
  
• 5/2/1975 Saigon: the first Communist May Day celebrations are held here. Viet Cong flags are raised all over the city. Some fighting continues in the Mekong Delta. Communications with outside world are cut in Saigon.
  
• 5/3/1975 The communists proclaimed all of Vietnam under their control. Fighting begins between the new governments of Vietnam and Cambodia, over the border regions and offshore islands.
  
• 5/5/1975 Ford asks Congress for money to resettle over 100,000 Vietnamese refugees; the House would reject the bill and Ford would describe himself as "damned mad" about that decision.
  
• 5/5/1975 Not the sort of doctor to take his medicine lying down, Wecht went into action. He and two other well-respected forensic authorities [Dr. Robert Joling, then the President of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences, and Herbert L. MacDonnell, Professor of Criminalistics, Elmira College] publicly charged that, "the Commission has set up a panel of governmental sycophants to defend the Warren Report." In a May 5, 1975 press release, Wecht charged that "all the members of the panel appointed by the Rockefeller Commission have strong ties to the federal government and close professional relationships with individuals who have formerly participated in studies defending the Warren Report." Wecht emphasized Belin's Warren Commission roots. Wecht also charged that, "The (medical) panel itself is made up of people who have been associated with the Baltimore Medical Examiner's Office, the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, Department of Radiology, and the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, three facilities which either supplied the members of the original autopsy team or from which selected members of a previous panel had been appointed by the Justice Department in 1968 to defend the Warren Report." Wecht's unrestrained assertions were not without foundation. Rockefeller appointee Werner U. Spitz, MD, the Detroit Medical Examiner, was a close professional colleague of one of the Clark Panel members, Baltimore Medical Examiner Russell Fisher, MD, under whom Spitz had served for several years. Richard Lindenberg, MD, a Baltimore-based, State of Maryland neuropathologist, was described in a once-secret Commission memo as having provided "consultation to the Medical Examiner for the State of Maryland [Russell Fisher] but is subordinate to him." Panelist Fred Hodges, MD, a neuroradiologist, was picked from Baltimore's Johns Hopkins University, the institution that had contributed Russell Morgan, MD, the radiologist who had made the X-ray mistakes discussed above as a Clark Panelist. Pathologist Lt. Col. Robert R. McMeeken, MC was appointed from Pierre Finck's alma mater, the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology. The Warren Commission consultant who had failed to note the marked discrepancies between the test skulls he shot up and JFK's skull, Dr. Alfred Olivier, completed Rockefeller's team of independent and impartial consultants.
  
• 5/7/1975 Ford declared the end "of the Vietnam Era" and urged Americans "to close ranks, to avoid recrimations about the past." He also signed a proclamation terminating veterans' wartime benefits.
  
• 5/8/1975 The Khmer Rouge is reported to be uprooting millions of people in its efforts to de-urbanize the country.
  
• 5/10/1975 David Atlee Phillips, shortly after being awarded the Distinguished Intelligence Medal, the CIA's highest honor, announces he is taking early retirement from the CIA to start an association of former intelligence officials to lead a public campaign against critics of the Agency. (Fonzi chronology) This year, the Association of Former Intelligence Officers is formed. Clare Boothe Luce is on the Board of Directors. This organization is formed as an "independent" voice to defend the CIA against its critics. Its founder is the retired intelligence officer who, as the Agency's top psych-warfare expert, was instrumental in the CIA-backed 1954 coup in Guatemala; was the CIA's propaganda chief for the Bay of Pigs operation; and was eventually promoted to Chief of the Western Hemisphere Division, a post representing the highest rung on the Agency's career chart.
  
• 5/10/1975 Federal District Court Judge W. Arthur Garrity ordered the development of a comprehensive busing plan for Boston's public schools.
  
• 5/11/1975 50,000 people gather in NYC's Central Park to celebrate the end of the Vietnam war.
  
• 5/11/1975 Los Angeles Times story by former WC staffers W. David Slawson and Richard M Mosk: "There were always those who believed there was a conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy, and many of these persons brushed aside the report of the Warren Commission which found no evidence to support the conspiracy theory and concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. Recently, talk of plots to assassinate foreign leaders, and investigations into what role, if any, the American CIA may have had in such plots, has revived speculation over the Kennedy assassination. The conspiracy theory persists partly because some persons find it difficult to believe that such a momentous act could be done so capriciously, and by such an insignificant, hapless man as Lee Harvey Oswald. Few persons not familiar with the Warren Report realize the large number of chance occurrences underlying the action. It is very unlikely that Oswald would ever have killed Kennedy had the President not gone to Dallas when he did and passed the building in which Oswald was working...The night before the assassination, Oswald hitched a ride with a friend out to a suburb to see his wife, Marina, from whom he was then separated. He begged her to come back and live with him. He offered to rent an apartment in Dallas for the them the next day. She refused. The next morning Oswald left his wedding ring and almost all his money on the dresser, and departed with the same friend for work, with the rifle dismantled and concealed in a package. Kennedy might be alive today had Marina relented. Allegations concerning CIA activities in the late 1950s and the 1960s have created added doubts, because the CIA assisted the commission in its investigation. However, the CIA was only one such outside source of assistance, and it was not the most important one. (The most important was the FBI.) Moreover, the commission double-checked and cross-checked all significant information among a variety of sources - governmental and private. The principal reason for the criticisms and conspiracy theories, however, is the breadth of the Warren Report. The published materials comprise 27 volumes. The National Archives contains additional material, which has for the most part been made public. Critics of the report, by selective and inaccurate citations have turned this vast amount of material against the commission...X-rays, photographs and the autopsy show that the bullet came from the area where Oswald was located...Finally, he lied about a number of facts during his interrogation. Thus, the claims that the rifle was inaccurate, that the shot was difficult, that Oswald was a poor shot and that stress analysis tests of Oswald s voice allegedly show him to have been telling the truth when he denied his guilt are all unpersuasive in light of so much uncontroverted evidence. These claims, even in isolations are misleading: Oswald was a former Marine and hunter. He practiced with the rifle when he was a civilian. Tests showed that his rifle was sufficiently accurate. The shot was not particularly difficult. It was from a stable, prepared position at a target moving 1l m.p.h. almost straight away at a range to 266 feet. The rifle had a telescopic sight. The voice stress analysis has not achieved general acceptance as a reliable lie detector test...Since the time interval is that between the two shots which hit, Oswald had all the time he needed to fire the first shot...The evidence concerning the wounds conclusively dispels the idea of shots from the front, another part of the theory. The wounds both slanted downward from Kennedy's back. This is clear beyond doubt from the autopsy and from the photographs and X-rays of the body. The photographs and X-rays are still not open to public view, because of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis' wishes...The inward pointing of the threads of the back of Kennedy's clothing and the outward pointing of the threads in the front of his clothing demonstrate that the bullet which first hit him entered from the rear and exited from the front. Since the car was in a low underpass, a bullet from any direction would have to have been going downward, and would have hit the car after leaving Kennedy. All the bullet damage to the car was in front of Kennedy, which is consistent with a bullet entering from the rear. A great deal of publicity has been given recently to the claim that Kennedy must have been hit from the front because the Zapruder film shows his head jerking back. In fact, the head jerks back not when the bullet hits it but slightly later. Actually, at the time of the hit, the President's head appears to move slightly forward and the sprayed flesh also moves forward. The jerk, therefore, cannot have been a momentum reaction. It must have been a neural or muscular reaction caused by either bullet or by a reaction to some other stimulus. Many critics have pointed to a rough sketch of the location of the neck wound and to the location of the bullet hole in the President's shirt and suit jacket as proving that the rear wound was lower on the President's body than the wound in front. From this it follows, supposedly that some other gunman must have been firing in a downward direction from the front. But the best evidence of the wound's location are the autopsy records and the photos and X-rays of the body itself. These unambiguously show the rear wounds higher than the wound at the front...The fact that the recovered bullet that apparently through both Kennedy and Connally was not greatly distorted itself actually supports the single-bullet theory. In order that a bullet be recovered without being greatly distorted, it must be brought to a slow and gentle stop. By going through two and by tumbling end over end through flesh and muscle and by glancing off, rather than penetrating large bones, the bullet was brought to a slow and gentle stop and so was able to emerge relatively unscathed condition...We do not believe that a reopening of the inquiry, in the sense of establishing a new commission to carry on its own investigation or to hear argument from private investigators, would serve any useful purpose."
  
• 5/12/1975 Early today, the Khmer Rouge stationed a small marine force on the island of Puolo Wai, in a continuing dispute with Vietnam over who owned it. The Cambodians stopped all foreign vessels in the area. Later in the morning, the US merchant ship Mayaguez, very close to the island of Puolo Wai, was seized by Khmer Rouge gunboats. These gunboats were under the command of the Southwestern Zone army, and the operation was carried out without orders from Phonm Phen. Washington immediately demanded the release of the ship, but it wasn't certain if the demands were heard in Phonm Penh, since the Khmer Rouge had cut themselves off from the world. Even the Chinese claimed they had no way to communicate with the Cambodian government.
  
• 5/13/1975 Three Cambodian patrol boats were destroyed by US aircraft. Probably on this day, the government at Phonm Penh ordered that the Mayaguez be released.
  
• 5/14/1975 Early this morning, Cambodian information minister Hu Nim announced that the Mayaguez would be released. Thirty minutes after his broadcast, US marines landed on Koh Tang Island; 38 Marines die (most in a helicopter crash), with 50 wounded and 3 missing. The marines encountered heavy opposition on Koh Tang from Cambodians who were dug in expecting a Vietnamese attack. While this battle was going on, the Mayaguez and its crew were released unharmed. The US then bombed Kompong Som seaport on the mainland, plus the nearby Ream naval air base. This attack knocked out much of the Cambodian air force and navy, thus leaving the country vulnerable to a future Vietnamese attack, and the Khmer Rouge was forced to give up Puolo Wai. One administration official later admitted, "It wouldn't be a bad thing if the other side goes a step too far in trying to kick us while we're down. It would give us a chance to kick then back hard." (Time 5/26/75)
  
• 5/15/1975 Former Dallas Deputy sheriff Roger Craig dies in Dallas. He is 39 years old. He was a frequent critic of the Warren Commission's version of the Kennedy assassination. Craig is killed by a rifle bullet; his death is listed as suicide.
  
• 5/16/1975 Congress appropriates $405 million to fund a refugee aid program and authorizes resettlement of South Vietnamese and Cambodian refugees in the US. Over 140,000 refugess are flown to the US over the next few months.
  
• 5/16/1975 Dallas Morning News: OSWALD ON PAYROLL? CIA REPORTEDLY TIED WITH MURDER by Earl Golz. Author W.R. Morris of Loretta, Tenn., asserts the assassination was financed by the CIA which paid a Mafia boss to recruit at least three "trigger men: to shoot at Kennedy in a "crossfire." Morris has given the Rockefeller Commission the names of two of the gunmen, one of whom is now dead, and of a man whom he said "organized" the shooting. Most of the information came from a former CIA operative who claimed he had worked with Oswald. Oswald's CIA number was 107 and he was paid $400 a month plus traveling expenses from the time he returned to this country from Russia in June, 1962, Morris said. Morris said he met with the CIA operative early in the morning on Nov. 24, 1966, at Oswald's graveside at Rose Hill Burial Park in Fort Worth. Morris, who had been assigned by the Associated Press to interview people who visited the grave on the third anniversary of Oswald's death, said he surprised the CIA agent as he was placing a vase of yellow mums and a note on the Oswald headstone. The man, whom Morris refuses to publicly identify, has since left the CIA and is now in private law practice in California…Morris, who wrote the popular book, "The Twelfth of August" in 1971 that was made into the movie "Walking Tall," disputed Olsen's comment that his statement was not a sworn affidavit. He said the cover letter was notarized, although "every page wasn't certified."…Morris said the CIA agent was "shocked when he saw me" at Oswald's grave. He pleaded with him not print anything about the incident, but Morris told him he would because the scene was so unusual. However, he didn't identify the man or note any CIA ties, he said. The man was thankful he didn't print a description of him and "later on he and I got to be good friends," Morris said. He showed Morris his CIA credentials and said he was quitting the agency because it was "ruthless and dangerous...and nothing but hired killers on the taxpayers' payroll," Morris said. Mrs. Marguerite Oswald, Oswald's mother, said the same man sends flowers for her son's grave on each anniversary of his death. Kennedy was a CIA target, Morris claims, because he "was in the process of abolishing the CIA. He said the CIA had blundered the Bay of Pigs invasion" of Cuba.
  
• 5/16/1975 Thailand recalls its ambassador to the US, citing sovereignty violation in Mayaguez rescue.
  
• 5/19-20/1975 Kissinger talks with Gromyko in Vienna. 5/20 they agree to cooperate in reopening Geneva talks on the Middle East.
  
• 5/21/1975 William Colby testifies before the Senate Intelligence Committee about CIA assassination plots.
  
• 5/22-23/1975 NATO holds its semi-annual talks in Brussels.
  
• 5/23/1975 Lebanon: president Franjieh names a military cabinet in an attempt to restore order.
  
• 5/27/1975 Supreme Court rules that Federal judges do not have the power to block a congressional subpoena issued in connection with an authorized committee investigation.
  
• 5/28-29/1975 Ford attends NATO summit meeting in Brussels. This trip to Europe lasts until 6/3. He also visits Spain, Italy and Austria. In the latter country he met with Egyptian President Sadat.
  
• 5/29/1975 Ford vetoed a $5.3 billion jobs bill passed by Congress.
  
• 5/29/1975 Terry Sanford, president of Duke University, announces his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination.
  
• 5/30/1975 Rocca/CIA memo to Rockefeller Commission: "[Nelson] Delgado's testimony has the cast of credibility...says a lot more of possible operational significance than is reflected by the language of the Warren Report, and its implications do not appear to have been run down or developed by investigation." The memo says there was minimal cooperation by the Soviets and Cubans in the assassination investigation, "designed to cover up an admission of knowledge of, or connection with, Oswald."
  
• 6/1975 Sens. McGovern, Kennedy, Abourezk, Church, and Humphrey pushed through an amendment that allowed 400 Chilean exiles to enter the US.
  
• 6/1975 During this month, some two months before his death, mobster crony and CIA asset, John Martino, tells News Day reporter, John Cummings, that he himself "played a role" in the JFK assassination. "Two guns, two people [were] involved," Martino reportedly says -- adding that they were anti-Castro Cubans.John Martino is stricken with cancer. With only two months to live, he confides in his business associate and friend, Fred Claasen, as well as Newsday reporter, John Cummings, that it was the Cuban refugees who setup the JFK assassination. Anthony Summers reported in Vanity Fair, that Martino told Cummings that two anti-Castro Cubans were involved in the shooting. Author Mary LaFontaine eventually interviews Cummings who also reports that Martino talked about a woman in Dallas, "who knew a lot of things" about the assassination. According to Mary, Cummings believes that Martino was referring to Silvia Odio. Fred Claasen reports that Martino told him, "The anti-Castro people put Oswald together. Oswald didn't know who he was working for - he was just ignorant of who was really putting him together. Oswald was to meet his contact at the Texas Theater. They were to meet Oswald in the theater, and get him out of the country, then eliminate him. Oswald made a mistake..... There was no way we could get to him. They had Ruby kill him." After reporting this information to the HSCA, the skittish Claasen makes himself scarce and can not be tracked down for further questioning. It is also noteworthy, that Martino is never quoted as claiming that Oswald was innocent - only that he was ignorant of who he was working for/with. Martino dies shortly after his conversation with Claasen.
  
• 6/3/1975 Dept of HEW issues new regulations aimed at equalizing opportunities for women in college.
  
• 6/5/1975 The New York Times published details of the "family jewels" and revealed that Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) William Colby had briefed Rep. Nedzi about them in 1973, when Nedzi was chairman of the Armed Services Subcommittee on Intelligence. His fellow Democrats on the Nedzi committee, led by Harrington, revolted. Nedzi resigned as chairman of the committee on 12 June 1975.
  
• 6/5/1975 Egypt reopened the Suez Canal after eight years as a gesture of peace, though President Sadat still vows to "liberate" the Sinai, Golan and Palestine from Israel.
  
• 6/6/1975 FBI Report to Chilean Military on Detainee, June 6, 1975: This letter, one of a number sent by FBI attache Robert Scherrer to Chilean General Ernesto Baeza, provides intelligence obtained through the interrogation of a captured Chilean leftist, Jorge Isaac Fuentes. The document records U.S. collaboration with Chile's security forces, including the promise of surveillance of subjects inside the United States. Fuentes was detained through Operation Condor--a network of Chilean, Argentinian and Paraguayan secret police agencies which coordinated tracking, capturing and killing opponents. According to the Report of the Chilean National Commission on Truth and Reconciliation, he was tortured in Paraguay, turned over to the Chilean secret police, and disappeared.
  
• 6/6/1975 US government reports that unemployment peaks at 9.2% in May, a 33-year high.
  
• 6/71/975 US withdraws its last combat aircraft from Taiwan.
  
• 6/9/1975 TIME reported that NY mafia figures James Plumeri and Salvatore Granello had been recruited by the CIA in '60 or '61 to aid in logistical planning of the Bay of Pigs.
  
• 6/10/1975 Rockefeller Commission report presented to Ford. It concluded that the CIA engaged in scores of "plainly unlawful and...improper" activities including domestic break-ins, mail openings, drug experiments, and spying on Americans. It also blamed past presidents for allowing or encouraging the CIA to engage in wrongdoing. It also found "no credible evidence" that the CIA was involved in the JFK assassination, though it admitted that its investigation was limited to studying the tramp photos and the possibility of a grassy knoll gunman. The Commission explained the backward movement of Kennedy's head in the Z-film as "a seizure-like neuromuscular reaction to major damage inflicted to nerve centers of the brain."
  
• 6/11-12/1975 Israeli PM Yitzhak Rabin talks with Ford and Kissinger in Washington.
  
• 6/12/1975 Nedzi resigned as chairman of the House committee investingating the intelligence community. Rep. Harrington suspected that Nedzi's resignation was simply part of a plot to abolish the Select Committee and prevent a House investigation of the IC and the CIA. Accordingly, on 13 June, with a rump caucus chaired by Representative James Stanton, the Democrats tried to hold a hearing on intelligence with Colby as the first witness. At Nedzi's urging, however, the Republicans refused to attend, thus preventing an official meeting. The committee investigation then ground to a halt.
  
• 6/12/1975 Within days of its June 1975 publication, a crack appeared in the ultra smooth façade of the Rockefeller Commission's report. On June 12th, the New York Times reported that Cyril Wecht had complained that "his views of President Kennedy's murder were distorted by the Rockefeller Commission." In its June 23, 1975 edition, Newsweek Magazine reported that "the flap over the [Rockefeller Commission's] apparent fudging of [Wecht's] views seemed enough to ensure that this report on the JFK assassination, like the ones before it, would fail to lay to rest the suspicions of the conspiratorialists." In published interviews, Wecht proposed a simple way for the government to refute his charges of misrepresentation: he called for "the commission to release a transcript of his statements." "If that transcript shows in any way I have withdrawn or revised my thoughts of the Warren Report," Wecht challenged, "I'll eat the transcript on the steps of the White House." Thereafter, a fascinating and illuminating story unfolded. The Vice President stonewalled, resolutely refusing Wecht's repeated personal requests to see his own interview, a request that, if honored, would scarcely have threatened national security. The famed coroner waited 23 years to be vindicated. Only in 1998 did the JFK Review Board finally send Wecht a copy of his testimony, belatedly bestowing an official confirmation of Rockefeller's chicanery. Wecht wasn't the only respected authority who suffered from Rockefeller's peculiar passion for secrecy. Noted skeptic, Kansas University pathology professor John Nichols, MD, got much the same treatment. When Nichols wrote the Vice President for permission to see the then-secret files from Rockefeller's autopsy review panel, he got a letter from "White House counsel," saying, "These materials from the files of the Commission now belong to the White House, and are under the control of the President. As such, they are not subject to the Freedom of Information Act, and cannot be made available to you."[ White House letter quoted in: Nichols, John. The Wounding of Governor John Connally of Texas, November 22, 1963. Maryland State Medical Journal, October, 1977, p. 62-63.] With less irony than one might have hoped, for all the government's preoccupation with keeping Wecht's testimony and Rockefeller's autopsy investigation secret, it made an exception for a Warren Commission defender. It shared parts of it for use by one Jacob Cohen, a Warren-friendly author who used Wecht's material in an harsh anticonspiracy article published in Commentary Magazine in October 1975.[ Jacob Cohen, Conspiracy Fever. Commentary Magazine, 10/75. In a 12/5/75 letter to Professor Josiah Thompson, Jacob Cohen wrote that "(Rockefeller Commission counsel Robert) Olsen talked to me at length about Wecht's testimony." (Copy of letter made available to the authors by Cyril Wecht.)]
  
• 6/13/1975 Richard Helms told the Church Committee that he didn't tell McCone about the anti-Castro plots because "I was enormously busy with a lot of other things...I guess I must have thought to myself, well this is going to look peculiar to him and I doubt very much this is going to go any place, but if it does, then that is time enough to bring him in the picture...It was a Mafia connection and Mr. McCone was new to the organization and this was, you know, not a very savory effort."
  
• 6/13/1975 The annual inflation rate in England is reported at 25%, the highest in Europe.
  
• 6/15/1975 In a story by Bob Wiedrick, the Chicago Tribune reports that a CIA liaison man has informed Congressional leaders investigating the Agency that "(Kennedy) Presidential aides Kenneth O'Donnell and David Powers are reported to have told investigators soon after the Kennedy assassination that they thought they had observed what might have been shots coming from a location other than the Texas School Depository. But sometime before O'Donnell and Powers submitted their report to the Warren commission by deposition and affidavit either J. Edgar Hoover or his top aides prevailed on the men not to disclose their suspicions to the Commission."
  
• 6/15/1975 "Sometime in the mid-1960s - probably in 1965 or 1966 - dissidents in the de Gaulle government are said to have made contact with the CIA to seek help in a plot to murder the French leader...According to the CIA briefing officer, discussions were held on how best to eliminate de Gaulle, who by then had become a thorn in the side of the Johnson Administration because of his ouster of military bases from French soil and his demands that United States forces be withdrawn from the Indochina War...There is, however, no evidence the plot got beyond the talking stage." (Chicago Tribune 6/15/1975)
  
• 6/16/1975 The circus-like atmosphere continued on 16 June, when the House rejected Nedzi's resignation by a vote of 290 to 64. But Nedzi refused to continue as chairman.
  
• 6/16/1975 Italy: Communists win 33.4% of the vote in elections; Christian Democrats win 35.3%.
  
• 6/17/1975 The House abolished Nedzi's Select Committee and voted to establish a new Select Committee with Representative Pike as chairman. The new committee did not differ greatly from the old one. Enlarged to 13 members, the committee, led by Democrats, continued to provide a solid liberal Democratic majority even after it dropped Nedzi and Harrington from membership. Pike also retained Searle Field as chief of staff from the Nedzi Committee and brought in Aaron Donner from New York as his chief counsel. Despite the new start, the committee remained badly divided on ideological grounds. The majority was still hostile toward the CIA and the White House. Pike, like Nedzi, would have no mandate to develop an effective investigation, the expiration date for which was 31 January 1976. Unlike the Church Committee, which had carefully balanced younger staff with Hill professionals and ex-IC members, the Pike Committee had a predominantly young staff with little experience either on the Hill or in the Intelligence Community. This would cause major problems in dealing with the Agency and the White House.
  
• 6/17/1975 The people of the Northern Marianas Islands ratify the pact to become a US commonwealth by a margin of four to one.
  
• 6/19/1975 Chicago Mob boss Sam Giancana is shot to death with a .22 caliber pistol a week before his scheduled appearance before the Church Committee. Giancana was shot six times pointblank in his head - in the basement of his Chicago home. (1147 South Wenonah Avenue in Oak Park, Illinois) He is 65. He is slated to tell about CIA-mob assassination plots to the Senate committee. His executioner enters the basement through heavy steel doors that have been opened by Giancana - who is then shot with a .22 revolver pressed against the base of his skull at the back of his head for the first shot. He is then shot in the mouth with five more bullets under the chin into his brain. The .22 revolver is traced by the FBI to the Miami, Florida, territory of Santos Trafficante. (One suspect for the killing is Johnny Roselli.) Sam's brother, Chuck, writes that one week prior to Giancana's murder, Sam Giancana orders the execution of Jimmy Hoffa. At 11 p.m. on the top floor of the house are Sam's caretaker, Joe DiPersio, and his wife. Joe has seen three cars out front. It is suggested that Giancana is being watched by the CIA, the FBI and the Oak Park Police. Normally, when a group in one car goes on a food break, the other two groups continue their silent vigil. At this point, however, all three cars pull off and drive away together. Giancana goes down to the basement to cook a late night snack - sausages and escarole. His executioner shoots Giancana in the back of the neck with a .22 pistol, aiming in an upward direction to the left. Giancana dies almost instantly. The executioner nudges Giancana over onto his back and puts another bullet into the front of his neck; a third entering the lower lip; a fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh into the lower jaw and lower face. At 11:52, Joe DiPersio goes downstairs to check on Giancana and finds him dead. An ambulance arrives, picks up the body, and reaches the Oak Park Hospital emergency room at 1:40 a.m. on June 20, 1975. At 1:45 a.m., Sam Giancana is pronounced dead. The three cars - the CIA, FBI and Oak Park Police - return to the house and resume their silent watch.
  
• 6/19/1975 Church Committee staffers arrive in Chicago to accompany Sam Giancana to Washington, DC in order to testify at a hearing.
  
• 6/19/1975 The Chicago Tribune this morning has carried the headline REPORT CIA SCHEME TO POISON CASTRO. The short article states, "The assassination plot...was directed by Sam Giancana and John Rosselli, two alleged crime syndicate figures, recruited by the CIA as middlemen for the job. Sam Giancana was installed in a suite at the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami."
  
• 6/19/1975 Ford authorized establishment of the President Ford Committee to promote his election in 1976.
  
• 6/19/1975 Ford sent Congress a special message outlining a program to combat crime.
  
• 6/20/1975 Chicago Tribune reported that William Colby confirmed that "foreigners" had sought CIA help on a plot to kill De Gaulle in the '60s, but he said the agency refused to participate.
  
• 6/23/1975 Washington appeals court rules that a warrant is required for wiretaps by the executive branch.
  
• 6/24/1975 John Roselli testifies before the Church Committee and discusses his role as a CIA-Mafia liaison in the Castro assassination plots.
  
• 6/25/1975 Angola (or Mozambique) becomes independent from Portugal.
  
• 6/26/1975 Supreme Court ruled unanimously that mental patients are free to leave psychiatric institutions provided they are not dangerous. Justice Stewart asked, "May the state fence in the harmless mentally ill solely to save its citizens from exposure to those whose ways are different?"
  
• 6/26/1975 India: Indira Gandhi's election to parliament was invalidated by the high court of Allahabad on the grounds of election fraud; she is barred from any public office for six years. She had illegally retained the services of a government official as a campaign organizer in her 1971 election. Or the court invalidated it 6/12.
  
• 6/28/1975 Gordon Shanklin takes emergency early retirement from the FBI. James Hosty believes this was prompted by a story the Dallas Time Herald was planning on the Oswald note that was destroyed. Shanklin told director Kelley he knew nothing about the note, and Kelley told this to the Herald. (Assignment Oswald 188)
  
• 6/28/1975 TV and film writer Rod Serling died of a heart attack following surgery at the age of 50.
  
• 6/30/1975 Ford signed a bill extending the unemployment compensation program through 1975 for a maximum of 65 weeks of aid.
  
• 6/30/1975 Supreme Court rules that defendants have the right to conduct their own defense rather than accept court-appointed counsel.