Deep Politics Timeline

[Tracy Riddle]

• 3/1976 Carter told the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations that the US should "coordinate" its policies with other nations.
  
• 3/1976 In Playboy, Dick Tuck talked about who the Democratic nominee would be. "Well, I can tell you who it won't be…Jimmy Carter will get a little run for his money, but I can't help but think that to most people he looks more like a kid in a bus station with his name pinned on his sweater on his way to summer camp than a President on his way to the White House."
  
• 3/2/1976 Anti-Castro leader Antonio Veciana reveals to Schweiker Subcommittee investigator Fonzi that a CIA masterspy named Maurice Bishop was his secret control officer, initiated the founding of Alpha 66, instigated two Castro assassination plots, and planned anti-Castro raids during the Cuban missile crisis. Veciana also reveals that he saw Bishop associating with Lee Harvey Oswald. (Fonzi chronology)
  
• 3/6/1976 NY Times quoted Haig in a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation interview saying that detente "can never be a substitute" for military strength.
  
• 3/9/1976 Carter easily beat Wallace in the Florida primary.
  
• 3/16/1976 State Dept halts US-Soviet talks because of Soviet involvement in Angola.
  
• 3/16/1976 British PM Harold Wilson resigned after being harassed by British intelligence agencies.
  
• 3/17/1976 Ford proposes legislation to virtually end Federal electronic surveillance of US citizens.
  
• 3/18/1976 Carter went public with his born-again Christianity, in a speech in Winston-Salem, North Carolina: "I spent more time on my knees the four years I was governor in the seclusion of a little private room off the governor's office than I did in all the rest of my life put together because I felt so heavily on my shoulders the decisions I made might very well affect many, many people. I recognized for the first time that I had lacked something very precious a complete commitment to Christ, a presence of the Holy Spirit in my life in a more profound and personal way."
  
• 3/19/1976 at a press conference, Carter said, "In 1967, I realized my own relationship with God was a very superficial one…I began to realize that my Christian life, which I had always professed to be preeminent, had really been a secondary interest in my life…"
  
• 3/20/1976 Patty Hearst is found guilty of armed robbery.
  
• 3/20/1976 Thai government orders US to close all its military installations in Thailand and withdraw all US personnel except for 270 military advisers.
  
• 3/24/1976 CIA sponsored coup in Argentina which overthrew the government of Isabel Peron.
  
• 3/26/1976 Kissinger and Turkish foreign minister Ihsan Sabri Caglayangil sign an accord allowing the reopening of US military installations in Turkey in return for military and economic assistance.
  
• 3/27/1976 Ford declared today he will not "play Russian roulette" with national security by allowing Congressional Democrats to cut his military spending.
  
• 3/29/1976 Supreme Court rules 6-3 that states may outlaw homosexual acts, even if committed in private by consenting adults.
  
• 3/30-31/1976 King Hussein of Jordan visits Washington.
  
• 3/30/1976 Ford threatens to veto any military spending bill he believes is inadequate.
  
• 3/31/1976 Reagan made a nationally televised speech attacking the policies of the Ford administration: "Now, we are told Washington is dropping the word "detente, " but keeping the policy. But whatever it's called, the policy is what's at fault. What is our policy? Mr. Ford's new Ambassador to the United Nations attacks our longtime ally, Israel. In Asia, our new relationship with mainland China can have practical benefits for both sides. But that doesn't mean it should include yielding to demands by them, as the administration has, to reduce our military presence on Taiwan where we have a longtime friend and ally, the Republic of China. And, it's also revealed now that we seek to establish friendly relations with Hanoi. To make it more palatable, we're told that this might help us learn the fate of the men still listed as Missing in Action. Well, there's no doubt our government has an obligation to end the agony of parents, wives and children who've lived so long with uncertainty. But, this should have been one of our first demands of Hanoi's patron saint, the Soviet Union, if detente had any meaning at all. To present it now as a reason for friendship with those who have already violated their promise to provide such information is hypocrisy. In the last few days, Mr. Ford and Dr. Kissinger have taken us from hinting at invasion of Cuba, to laughing it off as a ridiculous idea. Except, that it was their ridiculous idea. No one else suggested it. Once again what is their policy? During this last year, they carried on a campaign to befriend Castro. They persuaded the Organization of American States to lift its trade embargo, lifted some of the U.S. trade restrictions. They engaged in cultural exchanges. And then, on the eve of the Florida primary election, Mr. Ford went to Florida, called Castro an outlaw and said he'd never recognize him…The Soviet Army outnumbers ours more than two-to-one and in reserves four-to-one. They out-spend us on weapons by 50 percent. Their Navy outnumbers ours in surface ships and submarines two-to-one. We're outgunned in artillery three-to-one and their tanks outnumber ours four-to-one. Their strategic nuclear missiles are larger, more powerful and more numerous than ours. The evidence mounts that we are Number Two in a world where it's dangerous, if not fatal, to be second best."
  
• 4/1976 China: thousands of people gather in Tiananmen Square to commemorate Chou En-Lai and criticize Mao's closest associates. Clashes between mourners and police result in the "Tiananmen Incident," which the government brands as a counter-revolutionary event.
  
• 4/1/1976 A last-minute settlement averts a NYC subway and bus strike.
  
• 4/2/1976 What is Project Desktop? Anyone who knows certainly isn't talking and those who have divulged some information have been silenced, in some way, by the government. According to various sources, Desktop could be an underwater missile system in direct violation with the SALT talks, the Seabed Treaty, and the U.S. Constitution; a Pentagon-White House spy ring; or an underwater intelligence system directed towards foreign countries. The government does admit Desktop is/was an actual program dealing with the highest level of national security and operated by the Navy. Evidence gathered to unravel the mystery is confusing, fragmented, and contradictory. However, there are two indisputable facts: Desktop is real, and it scares those who share its secret. Author/ researcher Michael Drosnin painstakingly documents his futile efforts to unravel Project Desktop in his article. The many censoring devices used to silence Drosnin's sources qualifies this story for nomination as one of the "best censored" stories of 1976. SOURCE: New Times, April 2, 1976, p.21, "A Military Mystery Story: Desktop" by Michael Drosnin.
  
• 4/3/1976 the trucking industry and the Teamsters end a three-day strike by signing a new contract.
  
• 4/5/1976 Howard Hughes died.
  
• 4/5/1976 FBI documents, released in response to a freedom of information suit, revealed that the government mounted an intensive campaign against civil rights organizations in the sixties. In a letter dated August 25, 1967, the FBI said the government operation, called COINTELPRO, was designed "to expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit or otherwise neutralize the activities of Black nationalists, hate-type groups, their leadership, spokesmen, membership and supporters, and to counter their propensity for violence and civil disorders." A later telegram specifically named the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference as organizations having "radical and violence prone leaders, members and followers."
  
• 4/6/1976 Colson testified that he had ordered no one to do anything to Jack Anderson; while he "never heard anyone discuss any plan to kill Jack Anderson," he couldn't "discount the possibility of having said something in jest" along those lines. Colson said that Nixon had asked him "many times" to do something to "discredit" Anderson. The Committee decided that the Colson-Hunt meeting took place 3/14/1972 and that Hunt and Liddy then met with a former CIA physician at the Hay-Adams Hotel in Washington to discuss various non-traceable drugs: "According to Hunt, they discussed various means of administering a drug: painting the steering wheel of a car 'for absorption through the palms of the hands,' switching bottles in a medicine cabinet, or dropping a pill into a cocktail." (Report 134-37) Victor Lasky wrote: "But an investigation of the story by the Senate Intelligence Committee produced 'no evidence of a plan to assassinate Jack Anderson.' The committee did ascertain that an effort had been made by Hunt to determine the possibility of drugging Anderson so as to render him incoherent before a public appearance. When Hunt learned of the impracticality of the venture, the matter was dropped. The question was whether Hunt had acted on the order of Colson. This Colson flatly denied. However he recalled Hunt 'on a couple of occasions coming to me with some hare-brained schemes, something to do with drugging involving Jack Anderson.' But he said he never authorized any such project. And there is no independent evidence he did." (It Didn't Start with Watergate 362-3)
  
• 4/7/1976 Bruce Wagner memo to Rogers Morton on Ford campaign tactics: "Ronald Reagan must not be mentioned or singled-out of the group of Presidential aspirants, but it must be implied that: He is an irresponsible and ambitious man. He has sacrificed his principles for ambition. He must be depicted as naive. He would commit our young men to another "Vietnam war" in Africa or elsewhere. His "eyeball-to-eyeball" diplomacy really means nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union. In a nutshell, we must go for the jugular and eliminate,the credibility of the Reagan candidacy...The Texas Primary offers us the opportunity to cut the Reagan candidacy down once and for all."
  
• 4/9/1976 Phil Ochs, folk singer/songwriter and political activist, was found hanged in his sister's home in Far Rockaway, New York on April 9, 1976. Throughout his life, Ochs was one of the most overtly political of the 1960s rock and folk music stars. A regular attendee at anti-war, civil rights, and labor rallies, Ochs appeared to be, at all times, an unwavering political leftist (he named his first band The Singing Socialists). That all changed, however, and rather dramatically, in the months before his death. Born in El Paso, Texas on December 19, 1940, Phil and his family moved frequently during the first few years of his life. His father, Dr. Jacob Ochs, had been drafted by the US Army and assigned to various military hospitals in New York, New Mexico and Texas. In 1943, Dr. Ochs was shipped overseas, returning two years later with a medical discharge. Upon his return, he was immediately institutionalized and didn't return to his family for another two years. During that time, he was subjected to every treatment' imaginable, including electroshock therapy.' When he finally returned to his family, in 1947, he was but a shell of his former self, described by Phil's sister as "almost like a phantom." Beginning in the fall of 1956, Phil Ochs began attending Staunton Military Academy, the very same institution that future serial killer'/cult leader Gary Heidnik would attend just one year after Ochs graduated. During Phil's two years there, a friend and fellow band member was found swinging from the end of a rope (I probably don't need to add here that the death was ruled a suicide). Following graduation, Phil enrolled at Ohio State University, but not before, oddly enough, having a little plastic surgery done to alter his appearance (doing such things, needless to say, was rather uncommon in 1958). In early 1962, just months before his scheduled graduation, Ochs dropped out of college to pursue a career in music. By 1966, he had released three albums. In 1967, under the management of his brother, Michael Ochs, Phil moved out to Los Angeles. Michael had begun working the previous year as an assistant to Barry James, who maintained a party house at 8504 Ridpath in Laurel Canyon. In the early 1970s, with his career beginning to fade, Phil Ochs began to travel internationally, usually accompanied by vast quantities of booze and pills. Those travels included a visit to Chile, not long before the US-sponsored coup that toppled Salvador Allende. In early summer of 1975, Phil Ochs' public persona abruptly changed. Using the name John Butler Train, Ochs proclaimed himself to be a CIA operative and presented himself as a belligerent, right-wing thug. He told an interviewer that, "on the first day of summer 1975, Phil Ochs was murdered in the Chelsea Hotel by John Train … For the good of societies, public and secret, he needed to be gotten rid of." That symbolic assassination, on the summer solstice, took place at the same hotel that Devon Wilson had flown out of a few years earlier. One of Ochs' biographers would later write that Phil/John "actually believed he was a member of the CIA." Also in those final months of his life, Ochs began compiling curious lists, with entries that clearly were references to US biological warfare research: "shellfish toxin, Fort Dietrich, cobra venom, Chantilly Race Track, hollow silver dollars, New York Cornell Hospital …" Many years before Ochs' metamorphosis, in an interesting bit of foreshadowing, psychological warfare operative George Estabrooks explained how US intelligence agencies could create the perfect spy: "We start with an excellent subject … we need a man or woman who is highly intelligent and physically tough. Then we start to develop a case of multiple personality through hypnotism. In his normal waking state, which we will call Personality A, or PA, this individual will become a rabid communist. He will join the party, follow the party line and make himself as objectionable as possible to the authorities. Note that he will be acting in good faith. He is a communist, or rather his PA is a communist and will behave as such. Then we develop Personality B (PB), the secondary personality, the unconscious personality, if you wish, although this is somewhat of a contradiction in terms. This personality is rabidly American and anti-communist. It has all the information possessed by PA, the normal personality, whereas PA does not have this advantage … My super spy plays his role as a communist in his waking state, aggressively, consistently, fearlessly. But his PB is a loyal American, and PB has all the memories of PA. As a loyal American, he will not hesitate to divulge those memories." Estabrooks never explained what would happen if the programming were to go haywire and Personality B were to become the conscious personality, but my guess is that such a person would be considered a severe liability and would be treated accordingly. They might even be find themselves swinging from the end of a rope. Phil Ochs was thirty-five at the time of his death.
  
• 4/11/1976 Sen. Richard Schweiker discovers that a police artist's sketch of Maurice Bishop looks very much like a high-ranking retired CIA officer who had testified before the Church Intelligence Committee. His name is David Atlee Phillips. (Fonzi chronology)
  
• 4/11/1976 It seems to be "news" when a state fails to pass the Equal Rights Amendment (E.R.A.). However, a report which suggested a national conspiracy to stop the E.R.A. did not seem to be news. An article, reviewing the report made by the National Organization for Women (which supports the E.R.A.), was buried in Part IV, page 120, of the April 11, 1976, issue of the New York Times. The article said, in part: "Stop E.R.A. leader Phyllis Schlafly talks of passing the hat for nickels and dimes to finance the movement, but it can hardly be so homespun. Among E.R.A. proponents,. there has. been much speculation that a helping hand comes from segments of the insurance industry, whose sex-differentiated practices might come under severe scrutiny if the amendment were passed. A NOW report traces in great detail a web of alleged interconnections among Schlafly, the John Birch Society, and a number of insurance company executives. NOW vice president for legislation, Elaine Latourell, whose office helped prepare the report says: "The industry giants are out to crush the E.R.A. We see connections winding covertly from their corporation board rooms, through their law firms, through their right wing leaders, through wives of insurance executives who crop up as heads of local anti-E.R.A. committees, through state legislators' offices, and back to insurance companies." She says that insurance lobbyists fought the E.R.A. heavily in Nebraska, Illinois, and Oklahoma. The main problem for insurance companies, if the E.R.A. should be ratified, appears to be their sex-differentiated practices in disability insurance and pension plans. The failure of the media to give equal coverage to the NOW report qualifies the report for consideration as on of the "best censored" stories of 1976.
  
• 4/12/1976 Patty Hearst is sentenced to 25 years in prison for her conviction on bank robbery charges and 10 years for using a weapon while committing a felony.
  
• 4/13/1976 Kissinger warned that Communist success in any West European country would result in a negative reaction from the US.
  
• 4/13/1976 Only days after police receive a message that another exile leader will die during Easter week, Ramon Donestevez, a liberal who has sailed to Cuba several times trying to gain the release of political prisoners, is found shot through the head in his boatyard. Dr. Orlando Bosch is thought to be responsible. Bosch is active in forging Cuban exile ties to the right-wing international terrorist network.
  
• 4/16/1976 Ford resolves inter-agency dispute in favor of a fast buildup of the country's first strategic oil reserve as a protection against another foreign embargo.
  
• 4/17/1976 a black legislator from Georgia, Julian Bond, wrote in The Nation that as a candidate for governor, "Carter courted the Wallace vote and said nice things about Lester Maddox…Carter let Georgia's white voters know he could win without a single black vote.' He won the primary with less than 10 percent of that vote." At the June 1972 Democratic Governors' Conference, Carter introduced resolutions urging that Vietnam not be an issue in the 1972 campaign, praising J. Edgar Hoover for his national service, and urging the racist governors of Mississippi and Alabama to come back to the Democratic party."
  
• 4/20/1976 Supreme Court rules that federal courts can order low-income public housing to be located in white suburbs.
  
• 4/20/1976 GNP for first quarter of 1976 has 7.5% growth, with inflation at 3.7%.
  
• 4/20/1976 "Ramos" -- Felix I. Rodriguez, the CIA agent who orchestrated the hunt for Che Guevara in Bolivia, retires. A brief ceremony, during which he is awarded the Intelligence Star for Valor, is held in him Miami home. He has refused to accept it from CIA Director George Bush at Langley because he considers Bush a political appointee who is still wet behind the ears when it comes to covert actions.
  
• 4/23/1976 At a top secret hearing held in a suite at the Carroll Arms Hotel in Washington, Johnny Roselli tells representatives of the Church Committee and Senator Richard Schweiker he believes Cubans associated with Fidel Castro and Santos Trafficante were behind the assassination of JFK. Senator Schweiker then asks him whether he knew about Trafficante meeting Jack Ruby in Havana, and Roselli tells him he knows about the meeting, that Ruby and Trafficante knew each other.
  
• 4/26/1976 the Church Committee report issued. Senate Select (Church) Committee on Intelligence Activities ends a 15-month investigation into the activities of the CIA, FBI, IRS and the Army and their infringement of the rights of citizens. The Committee recommends Congressional legislation to restrict future abuses. The Committee charged that the FBI had conducted illegal investigations into politicians and political groups who dissented against the government's policies.