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Tracy Riddle · 16-03-2014, 02:54 PM

David Guyatt Wrote:Blimey Tracy, you must be working flat out 24/7 on this...

No, actually this is all stuff I did years ago. I'm just editing it down to a suitable format for posting.

Tracy Riddle · 22-03-2014, 01:18 AM

In 1961, in response to the Nuremberg Trials, the Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram performed his study "Obedience to Authority Study", also known as the Milgram Experiment, in order to determine if it was possible that the Nazi genocide could have resulted from millions of people who were "just following orders". The Milgram Experiment raised questions about the ethics of scientific experimentation because of the extreme emotional stress suffered by the participants, who were told, as part of the experiment, to apply electric shocks to test subjects (who were actually actors not really receiving electric shocks).
1/1961 Covert (ELSUR) FBI surveillance of Detroit Teamsters reveals close ties between Hoffa and the Mob; Hoover does not brief RFK about this intelligence. (RFK and His Times) In New Orleans, Miami and Newport, the FBI and IRS begin surveillance of mob gamblers Sam di Piazza, Eugene Nolan, Louis Bagneris, Charles Perez, Harold Brouphy, and Anthony Glorioso of Louisiana; Gilbert Beckley and Alfred Mones of Miami Beach; Benjamin & Robert Lassoff and Myron Deckelbaum of Newport; Alfred Reyn of NY; Peter J. Martino of Biloxi, Miss. All are members of Carlos Marcello's network. (NY Times 6/28/1961; Mafia Kingfish; Lansky)
1/1961 In the last few months of the administration of Dwight Eisenhower, the Air Force began to argue that it needed a successor to its F-105 tactical fighter. This became known as the TFX/F-111 project. In January, 1961, McNamara, changed the TFX from an Air Force program to a joint Air Force-Navy under-taking. On 1st October, the two services sent the aircraft industry the request for proposals on the TFX and the accompanying work statement, with instructions to submit the bids by 1st December, 1961. Three of the bids were submitted by individual companies: the Lockheed Aircraft Corporation, the North American Aviation Corporation and the Boeing Company. The other three bids represented team efforts: Republic Aviation & Chance Vought; General Dynamics Corporation & Grumman Aircraft; and McDonnell Aircraft & Douglas Aircraft. It soon became clear that Boeing was expected to get the contract. Its main competitor was the General Dynamics/Grumman bid. General Dynamics had been America's leading military contractors during the early stages of the Cold War. For example, in 1958 it obtained $2,239,000,000 worth of government business. This was a higher figure than those obtained by its competitors, such as Lockheed, Boeing, McDonnell and North American. More than 80 percent of the firm's business came from the government. However, the company lost $27 million in 1960 and $143 million in 1961. According to an article by Richard Austin Smith in Fortune Magazine, General Dynamics was close to bankruptcy. Smith claimed that "unless it gets the contract for the joint Navy-Air Force fighter (TFX)â€¦ the company was down the road to receivership". General Dynamics had several factors in its favour. The president of the company was Frank Pace, the Secretary of the Army (April, 1950-January, 1953). The Deputy Secretary of Defense in 1962 was Roswell Gilpatric, who before he took up the post, was chief counsel for General Dynamics. The Secretary of the Navy was John Connally, a politician from Texas, the state where General Dynamics had its main plant.
1/1961 Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in the Dixon-Yates case that a private power company was not entitled to damages when the government canceled a contract (7/11/1955) fashioned by a government employee who had an indirect financial interest in the enterprise. This all stemmed from an Eisenhower-era attempt to curb the TVA's authority in favor of private power companies. Ike had been personally involved in this deal which involved favoritism and insider trading.
1/1961 The Chinese Communists and the Burmese government cooperate to overwhelm the Chinese Nationalists' main military base in Burma (which had been created and backed by the CIA). Burma subsequently renounced US aid and moved closer to Peking. Many of the Chinese Nationalist troops signed up to help the CIA in Laos. (David Wise and Thomas Ross, The Invisible Government; Joseph Burkholder Smith, 'Portrait of a Cold Warrior')
1/1/1961 US called for an immediate SEATO meeting to deal with the Laotian crisis.
1/1/1961 Oswald writes in his diary that he spent New Years at the home of Ella Germain, a co-worker he has fallen in love with. He decides to propose to her.
1/1/1961 Indonesia: Sukarno launched an ambitious eight-year development program.
1/2/1961 Oswald proposes to Ella Germain, but she turns him down. "I am misarable!" he writes in his diary.
1/3/1961 The United States and Cuba sever diplomatic and consular relations.
1/3/1961 The idea to fabricate a pretext for war with Cuba may actually have originated with President Eisenhower in the last days of his administration. With the Cold War hotter than ever and the recent U-2 scandal fresh in the public's memory, the old general wanted to go out with a win. He wanted desperately to invade Cuba in the weeks leading up to Kennedy's inauguration; indeed, on January 3 he told Lemnitzer and other aides in his Cabinet Room that he would move against Castro before the inauguration if only the Cubans gave him a really good excuse. Then, with time growing short, Eisenhower floated an idea. If Castro failed to provide that excuse, perhaps, he said, the United States "could think of manufacturing something that would be generally acceptable." What he was suggesting was a pretext a bombing, an attack, an act of sabotage carried out secretly against the United States by the United States. Its purpose would be to justify the launching of a war. It was a dangerous suggestion by a desperate president. (Bamford, Body of Secrets)
1/4/1961 A memo titled Policy Decisions Required for Conduct of Strike Operations Against Government of Cuba concerning "Branch 4 of the Western Hemisphere Division was an internal task force created within the CIA in January 1960 to direct the Cuban project. J.D. Esterline became task force director on January 18, 1960. Esterline reported on the project to the Deputy Director for Plans, Richard M. Bissell, although Bissell's principal aide, Tracy Barnes, who acted for Bissell about 50 percent of the time. Branch 4 began with a staff of 20 and grew by April 1961 to a staff of more than 500 with its own communications, propaganda, and military sections. Marine Corps Colonel Jack Hawkins was assigned to Branch 4 in September 1960, with direct responsibility for military training operations." The memo stated: The purpose of this memorandum is to outline the current status of our preparations for the conduct of amphibious/airborne and tactical air operations against the Government of Cuba and to set forth certain requirements for policy decisions which must be reached and implemented if these operations are to be carried out. (Memorandum From the Chief of WH/4/PM, Central Intelligence Agency (Hawkins) to the Chief of WH/4 of the Directorate for Plans (Esterline), Washington, January 4, 1961. Source: U.S., Department of State, Foreign Relations Of The United States,1961-1963, Volume X, Cuba, 1961-1962)
1/4/1961 Minsk visa authorities asked Oswald if he still wanted to become a Soviet citizen, and he said no; he did ask that his temporary papers be extended a year. For January, Oswald wrote in his diary, "The work is drab the money I get has nowhere to be spent. No nightclubs or bowling allys no places of recreation acept the trade union dances I have had enough." Oswald's stay was extended for another year. Later Oswald would say that he never actually applied for Soviet citizenship, but a spokesman for the Soviet government informed the WC that his application had been submitted but rejected by the Presidium. (H 5 311) His KGB file shows that he was code-named Likhoy and kept under constant surveillance. He was put in contact with people who pretended to have secret information; this was to determine if he was a foreign spy. (Case Closed 59, based on Mostovshchikov article) Soon, though, his celebrity status began to wear off and he became "increasingly concious of just what sort of a sociaty" he lived in. (CE 24) Initially a good worker at the factory, he became less and less motivated. (Mostovshchikov article) In his diary he complained about the trade-union meetings, compulsory mass gymnastics, political lectures, and weekend crop work. (CE 24) In later writings, he would attack the regimented, bureaucratized Soviet system as savagely as any anti-Communist. (CE 92, H 16; CE 25, H 16 113-4) But he concluded that the Soviets were simply not practicing 'pure Marxism.'
1/4 or 1/5/1961 OAS voted to impose economic sanctions on the Dominican Republic for aggression against Venezuela.
1/6/1961 The electoral votes were counted in Congress and JFK was declared the winner.
The FRIENDS OF DEMOCRATIC CUBA was formed on January 6, 1961, a mere two weeks prior to the Bolton Ford Dealership incident where not only the name "Oswald" was being used, but in fact Oswald was being impersonated, and, W. Guy Banister, ex-FBI man who was once recommended by Hoover while he headed the Chicago FBI Office, was on the Board of Directors for this newly-formed organization.
1/6/1961 A federal court ordered the University of Georgia to admit two black students, Hamilton Holmes and future PBS reporter Charlayne Hunter.
1/6/1961 Khrushchev gave a speech on USSR support for "wars of national liberation" which included Vietnam.
1/6/1961 Nigeria breaks relations with France over continued nuclear testing in the Sahara.
1/7/1961 Hamilton Holmes drove from Atlanta to Athens to begin registration at the University of Georgia. His enrollment proceeds without incident, and a group of student leaders pledges to try to assist in the peaceful desegregation of the University.
1/8/1961 Georgia Gov. Ernest Vandiver called a special meeting of the State Board of Regents, University of Georgia president O.C. Aderhold, and other state officials. They met at the governor's mansion to discuss the federal court order directing immediate desegregation of the University. They also debate where to house Charlayne Hunter and decide to place her by herself in a Myers Hall dorm room.
1/8/1961 France: a national referendum overwhelmingly endorsed De Gaulle's Algerian policy.
1/9/1961 Hamilton Holmes and Charlayne Hunter arrived at the University of Georgia campus to complete the registration process. A special edition of the campus newspaper, the Red and Black, calls for calm and urges students not to attempt to interfere with the federal court order. While things were relatively peaceful in Athens, it was quite different in Atlanta. There, federal judge William Bootle had scheduled a hearing on the state's appeal of his integration order. At the state capitol, Gov. Ernest Vandiver announced that if the state's appeal for a stay of the federal desegregation order is turned down, he may close the University pursuant to a 1956 state law forbidding the co-education of black and white students. By chance, the 1961 session of the General Assembly had convened on this day, and what to do to keep the University of Georgia segregated occupied everyone's attention. Suddenly word reached the state capitol that judge Bootle had granted a stay, prompting tremendous cheering in each chamber. The celebration didn't last long, for two hours later, federal circuit court judge Elbert Tuttle overrode Bottle's stay. Georgia Attorney General Eugene Cook caught a plane to Washington D.C. to appeal to Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black to reinstate judge Bootle's stay. Back in Athens, the rumor had spread throughout campus that Gov. Vandiver was going to close the University the next day. That night after a basketball game, a crowd of about 1,000 students gathered in the streets to protest court-ordered desegregation scheduled to take place the next day. Two students were arrested, but there was no violence. A little after midnight, University president Aderhold announced that he had received no official order to close, so classes would proceed on schedule on Jan. 11.
1/10/1961 Hoover sends a memo to RFK warning him of the "menace" Communism poses to the nation.
1/10/1961 Charlayne Hunter and Hamilton Holmes become the first black students to enroll at the University of Georgia. Following registration, Hunter moved into her room in Myers Hall, while Holmes moved in with a black family in Athens. By night, various groups of white students shouting anti-integration messages had assembled outside Hunter's dorm window -- but there was no violence.
1/11/1961 Black students Charlayne Hunter and Hamilton Holmes attended their first day of classes at the University of Georgia without any serious incidents. That evening, however, the situation changed. After a Georgia-Georgia Tech basketball game on campus, a large group of students left the coliseum and marched on Myers Hall, where Hunter was staying. By the time they arrived, known Klan members had joined the group. Now, they were an angry mob shouting racial epithets and defiance to integration. Several students displayed a large banner saying "Nigger go home," while other students started fires or threw bricks at the dorm. Athens and University police tried to break up the demonstration, finally having to resort to tear gas and water hoses. Hunter was not injured, but Myers Hall received extensive damage. Fearing for their safety, University officials decided to temporarily withdraw Hunter and Holmes from school. That night, Georgia state troopers carried the two back to Atlanta.
1/12/1961 New Orleans FBI agent-in-charge sends message to Hoover that a source reported New Orleans mob boss Carlos Marcello being very "apprehensive and upset" about RFK's intentions. (HSCA 9 70)
1/12/1961 The University of Georgia chapter of the American Association of University Professors called for a faculty meeting to protest the suspension of Charlayne Hunter and Hamilton Holmes the night before. A petition calling for their reinstatement was signed by 340 University faculty. One member of the University System Board of Regents -- ardent segregationist Roy Harris -- then demanded to see a list of which faculty had signed the petition. Governor Ernest Vandiver condemned the violence, and though he continued to oppose integration he now conceded that Georgia would have to accept some integration of its public schools.
1/13/1961 Federal judge William Bootle again ordered the University of Georgia to admit Charlayne Hunter and Hamilton Holmes after they were temporarily suspended following a nighttime riot outside Hunter's dorm. Governor Vandiver announced that additional violence would not be tolerated, and that he would provide whatever protection was necessary to insure their safety.
1/16/1961 JFK met with Billy Graham to talk and have lunch in Key Biscayne. That evening, Graham told the press that he felt positive about the new president, and that his election had promoted a better understanding between Protestants and Catholics. (NYT 1/17)
1/16/1961 Their suspension lifted, Charlayne Hunter and Hamilton Holmes returned to Athens and attended classes at the University of Georgia. Various incidents continued, but there was no more violence or riots. They would continue their education, she obtaining a degree in journalism and he a degree in liberal arts.
1/16/1961 British intelligence uncovers the biggest Soviet spy network since the war.
1/17/1961 In his farewell address to the nation, Ike said, "We face a hostile ideology global in scope, atheistic in character, ruthless in purpose, and insidious in method. Unhappily the danger it poses promises to be of indefinite duration...Our arms must be mighty, ready for instant action, so that no potential aggressor may be tempted to risk his own destruction." But then he issued a surprising warning: "Our military establishment today bears little relation to that known by any of my predecessors in peacetime...we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions...We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations. This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence - economical, political, even spiritual - is felt in every city, every State House, every office of the Federal government...we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex...We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes...Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together...The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present--and is gravely to be regarded...we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite...you and I, and our government--must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering for our own ease and convenience, the precious resources of tomorrow."
1/17/1961 Patrice Hemery Lumumba, prime minister of the Congo (now Zaire), was arrested by agents of President Joseph Kasavubu, and slain, with the complicity of the CIA in the Congo's secessionist province of Katanga
1/18/1961 Billy Sol Estes goes to Washington to attend the inauguration and meet with LBJ; while there, he manages to get the Agriculture Dept to freeze his bond requirements at 1960 levels. (NYT 7/18/1962)
1/18-20/1961 LBJ aide Bobby Baker and North American Aviation lobbyist Fred Black (a next-door neighbor of Johnson's) meet Mafia functionary Ed Levinson at a party in Washington. (Green Felt Jungle)
1/18/1961 Miami FBI agent George E. Davis sends a report to Hoover on a Cuban exile group called MIRR; Davis and agent Paul Scranton deal regularly with informants in the local Cuban population. Hoover believes Castro is fomenting unrest among blacks in the South. (Washington Post 5/16/1976)
1/18/1961 Moscow: Central Committee approves Khrushchev's plan to decentralize agriculture.
1/19/1961 JFK met with Eisenhower again; also present were McNamara, Herter, Gates, Robert Anderson, Ike's staff aide Gen. Wilton Persons, Rusk, Dillon, and Clifford. Most of the discussion was about Indochina (particularly Laos). Rusk and Clifford recalled that Ike advocated US military intervention in Laos if absolutely necessary, but McNamara and Dillon remembered Ike sending mixed signals about that. (In Retrospect 35-6) Eisenhower warned him that if Laos fell, the US could "write off the whole area [Southeast Asia]." He also warned against a neutralist government that would permit Communists to share power. (Pentagon Papers) But JFK had long felt that neutralization was the only answer. (Promises to Keep p394) Ike also told him to support guerrilla operations against Cuba "to the utmost." Treasury Sec. Robert Anderson added, "Large amounts of United States capital now planned for investment in Latin America are waiting to see whether or not we can cope with the Cuban situation." (Portrait of Power 32) Ike also told JFK that there was no missile gap working against the US, and warned that he would publicly oppose him if he tried to recognize China and allow it a seat in the UN. (Ibid. 33) Ike and Herter told JFK that Laos was the key to the whole of Southeast Asia, and that if necessary, the US must be willing "to intervene unilaterally." He also warned against a coalition government there. (A Thousand Days 156) Eisenhower tells JFK that he must assume responsibility for the overthrow of Fidel Castro and his dangerous government, and recommends the acceleration of the proposed Cuban invasion. Says Eisenhower: " . . . we cannot let the present government there go on." (A Question of Character) When he was given a transitional briefing by President Eisenhower on January 19, 1961, the president-elect asked an unexpected question. It pertained to the rising conflict with Communist forces in Laos, Vietnam's western neighbor. Which option would Eisenhower prefer, Kennedy asked, a "coalition with the Communists to form a government in Laos or intervening [militarily] through SEATO [the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization, to which the U.S. belonged]?" Eisenhower was taken aback by his successor's gall in raising the possibility of a coalition with Communists. He said it would be "far better" to intervene militarily. As his Secretary of State, Christian Herter had already said, any coalition with the Communists would end up with the Communists in control. Even unilateral intervention by U.S. troops was preferable to that. It would be "a last desperate effort to save Laos." Kennedy listened skeptically. He thought he was hearing a prescription for disaster, from a man who in a few hours would no longer have to bear any responsibility for it. "There he sat, "he told friends later, "telling me to get ready to put ground forces into Asia, the thing he himself had been carefully avoiding for the last eight years." (Foreign Relations of the United States (FR US), 1961-1963, Volume XXIV, Laos Crisis (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1994), p. 21; Kenneth P. O'Donnell and David F. Powers, "Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye " (Boston: Little, Brown, 1970), p. 244) As The Pentagon Papers note, Vietnam was of relatively minor importance in 1961, compared to Laos: "Vietnam in 1961 was a peripheral crisis. Even within Southeast Asia it received far less of the Administration's and the world's attention than did Laos. " For example, The New York Times Index for 1961 lists twenty-six columns of items on Laos, but only eight on Vietnam. For Kennedy, Laos was a crisis from the beginning, whose settlement would raise the question of Vietnam.
1/19/1961 Eight inches of snow falls in Washington, D.C. tonight. Traffic is snarled all over the city. After a reception, a party, and a concert at Constitution Hall, the Kennedys attend a star-studded gala at the National Guard Armory planned by Frank Sinatra. Boxes cost ten thousand dollars apiece, while individual seats go for one hundred dollars. JFK gets to bed about 4:00 A.M. (A Question of Character)
1/19/1961 One day before he left the White House, Eisenhower signed a procedural instruction on the importation of residual oil that required all importers to move over and sacrifice 15 percent of their quotas to newcomers who wanted a share of the action. One of the major beneficiaries of this last-minute executive order happened to be Cities Service, which had had no residual quota till that time but which under Ike's new order was allotted about 3,000 barrels a day. The chief executive of Cities Service was W. Alton Jones, one of the three faithful contributors to the upkeep of the Eisenhower farm. Three months later, Jones was flying to Palm Springs to visit the retired President of the United States when his plane crashed and Jones was killed. In his briefcase was found $61,000 in cash and travelers' checks. No explanation was ever offered - in fact none was ever asked for by the complacent American press - as to why the head of one of the leading oil companies of America was flying to see the ex-President of the United States with $61,000 in his briefcase. (Drew Pearson & Jack Anderson, The Case Against Congress (1968))
1/20/1961 JFK was inaugurated as president, sworn in by Chief Justice Earl Warren. Despite the frigid temperature, he refused to wear an overcoat. In Washington, Admiral Arthur Radford, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs, arrives early for an F Street Club luncheon being given for Eisenhower after the inauguration. Watching JFK deliver his speech on television, Radford notices that, although JFK is standing without coat or hat in frigid weather, heavy beads of perspiration are rolling down his forehead. "He's all hopped up!" calls out General Howard Snyder, the retiring White House physician. Privy to FBI and Secret Service information, Snyder tells Radford that JFK is "prescribed a shot of cortisone every morning to keep him in good operating condition. Obviously this morning he was given two because of the unusual rigors he must endure, and the brow sweating is the result of the extra dose." Snyder adds that people dependent on cortisone move from a high to a low when the medicine's effect wears off: "I hate to think of what might happen to the country if Kennedy is required at three A.M. to make a decision affecting the national security." President Kennedy delivers his Inaugural Address, balancing Cold War statements with the hope "that both sides begin anew the quest for peace, before the dark powers of destruction unleashed by science engulf all humanity in planned or accidental self-destruction." "To those new states whom we welcome to the ranks of the free, we pledge our word that one form of colonial control shall not have passed away merely to be replaced by a far more iron tyranny. We shall not always expect to find them supporting our view. But we shall always hope to find them strongly supporting their own freedom-and to remember that, in the past, those who foolishly sought power by riding the back of the tiger ended up inside." "To those peoples in the huts and villages of half the globe struggling to break the bonds of mass misery, we pledge our best efforts to help them help themselves, for whatever period is required-not because the communists may be doing it, not because we seek their votes, but because it is right. " At the heart of his inaugural, Kennedy turned to the enemy and his own deepest preoccupation, peace: " Finally, to those nations who would make themselves our adversary, we offer not a pledge but a request: that both sides begin anew the quest for peace, before the dark powers of destruction unleashed by science engulf all humanity in planned or accidental self destruction." Again there was the warning: "We dare not tempt them with weakness. For only when our arms are sufficient beyond doubt can we be certain beyond doubt that they will never be employed. " And the hope: " Let both sides explore what problems unite us instead of belaboring those problems which divide us . . . " Let both sides unite to heed in all corners of the earth the command of Isaiah-to 'undo the heavy burdens . . . ( and) let the oppressed go free.'"
1/20/1961 During the inauguration, Cecil Stoughton, using his own initiative, works his way up to a good spot on the inaugural stand and manages to make a photo of JFK. General Clifton is impressed with Stoughton's photos and shows them to JFK, who is also impressed. Clifton suggests to JFK that it might be a good idea to have this photographer available to the White House. Prior to this time, there has never been an "in-house" photographer specifically assigned to the President. (POTP)
1/20/1961 "Oswald" visits a Ford dealership in New Orleans to buy trucks for Friends of Democratic Cuba. Two salesmen at the Bolton Ford dealership in New Orleans are visited by a "Lee Oswald" in the company of a powerfully built Latino. "Oswald" is looking for a deal on ten pickup trucks needed by the Friends of Democratic Cuba. The real Oswald is in the Soviet Union.
1/20/1961 JFK commented, "This is the worst one we've got, isn't it? You know, Eisenhower never mentioned it. He talked at length about Laos, but never uttered the word Vietnam." (The Diffusion of Power 265) Or: "This is going to be the worst one yet...Eisenhower never mentioned the word Vietnam to me." (The Diffusion of Power 264) Walt Rostow had just shown him a report written by Edward Lansdale showing the deteriorating situation in that country. (Rostow would later recall incorrectly the date Kennedy received the report as being 2/2/1961)
1/20/1961 Khrushchev and Brezhnev sent a message to JFK, expressing hope that "by our own joint efforts we shall succeed in achieving a fundamental improvement in relations between our countries and a normalization of the whole international situation."
1/20/1961 JFK is the wealthiest president in American history. His private income, before taxes, is estimated at about five hundred thousand a year. On his forty-fifth birthday, his personal fortune goes up an estimated $2.5 million, in 1962, when he receives another fourth of his share in three trust funds established by his father for his children. As President, JFK usually rises at 8:00 AM, and each day he enjoys a hot bath, a midday swim in the White House pool that sometimes lasts an hour (Joseph Kennedy commissions artist Banard Lamotte to paint a ninety-seven-foot mural around the pool), directs exercises in the gymnasium, and a nap or private time with Jackie that lasts at least an hour. Evenings are usually private and very often feature small dinners with friends that might be followed by a film. AQOC
1/20/1961 After the ceremonies the new president and his wife, the Lyndon Johnsons, and members of the cabinet go into the Capitol for a luncheon given by the joint congressional inaugural committee. Joseph and Rose Kennedy head for the Mayflower Hotel and a lavish luncheon for the Kennedys, Fitzgeralds, Bouviers, Lees, and Auchinclosses. AQOC Clare Boothe Luce and Lyndon Johnson sit together on a bus which will take them to one of the many inaugural balls during the evening. Luce asks Johnson why he ever took the Vice-Presidency. Johnson answers: "Clare, I looked it up; One out of every four presidents has died in office. I'm a gamblin' man, darlin', and this is the only chance I got."
1/20/1961 Vice President Richard Nixon, forced to surrender his official car and driver at midnight, goes for one last ride through the nation's capital. He takes a walk through the empty Capitol building. He is struck by the thought that "this was not the end, that someday I would be back here. I walked as fast as I could back to the car."
1/20/1961 At the inauguration parties that night, an old friend from PT-109 days, Paul Fay, escorted actress Angie Dickinson to the ceremonies; several times, Dickinson and JFK slipped away to a private room. The night of JFK's inauguration, JFK attends a ball at the Statler-Hilton. JFK slips out of the presidential box and goes upstairs to a private party given by Frank Sinatra. Angie Dickinson is there, along with actresses Janet Leigh and Kim Novak. (AQOC) Peter Lawford arranges a lineup of six Hollywood starlets to entertain the new President. JFK chooses two. "This menage a trois brought his first day in office to a resounding close," Lawford says later. When JFK returns to the ball he has a copy of the Washington Post under his arm, as if he has just stepped outside to buy a newspaper. Kenny O'Donnell later recalls, "His knowing wife gave him a rather chilly look." JFK finally attends the largest ball of the evening at the Armory. The president and first lady give the impression of being close and happy. AQOC
1/20/1961 Soon after JFK's inauguration, Castro moved to appease the new administration by demobilizing his militia. Khrushchev also cut back on censorship of Voice of America and released two captured US flyers. JFK responded by stopping US Post Office censorship of Soviet magazines, inviting the Kremlin to engage in civil aviation talks, and ordering Arleigh Burke to tone down his anti-Soviet speeches. Conservatives quickly attacked Kennedy.
1/21/1961 JFK ordered the secretary of agriculture to expedite and improve the distribution of surplus food to poor people.
1/21/1961 "The day after John Kennedy's inauguration in 1961, Lee's mother arrived at the White House to ask for help in locating her son. She was not the only one asking questions. No one had heard from Oswald for over a year. Recently released documents show that several government agencies began tracking Oswald in Russia." (Frontline, 1993)
1/21/1961 Robert McNamara becomes Secretary of Defense, head of an organization that has 2.5 million military personnel and 1.5 million civilians. He pulled enormous power into his office and away from the Service Secretaries, who bitterly resented what they considered an unlawful usurpation of power by the Defense Secretary. In January, Eisenhower had submitted a proposed Defense Dept budget for FY 1962 of $41.8 billion. Within two months, Kennedy and McNamara had added nearly $2 billion to the requests to provide more money for Polaris-armed subs, increase research in non-nuclear weapons and boost Army personnel. McNamara also wanted to cut funding for the B-70. (Mollenhoff, The Pentagon)
1/21/1961 Khrushchev, as a good-will gesture to the newly inaugurated JFK, releases Bruce Olmstead and John McKone (two RB-47 pilots shot down by the Russians in 1960) from their cells in the Lubyanka prison, where they have been held by the KGB for seven months. Besides Francis Gary Powers, these two men will be the only American fliers to get out of Moscow's infamous Lubyanka prison alive.
1/21/1961 Sekou Toure elected president of Guinea.
1/22/1961 Beginning today, calls begin between Judith Campbell and the White House. Seventy calls will be logged in during the next two months. Campbell is also seeing Chicago mafioso Sam Giancana on a regular basis. AOT
1/22/1961 ABC airs "The Red and the Black," a documentary on Soviet influence in Africa.
1/23/1961 Supreme Court rules that cities and states can censor a film before it is shown to the public.
1/24/1961 At a breakfast meeting with Democratic congressional leaders, Rayburn told JFK that he didn't think they had the votes to expand the Rules Committee. Kennedy and Larry O'Brien were stunned; they had assumed that Rayburn was going to be able to work it out somehow. Kennedy then asked Rayburn to postpone the vote. JFK told O'Brien, "We can't lose this one, Larry. The ball game is over if we do." Conservatives in the South were portraying the expansion of the Rules Committee as tearing down the last barrier to socialism and civil rights. (No Final Victories)
1/24/1961 A US B-52 fell apart in mid-air over North Carolina, killing three crew members; its payload of two 24-megaton nuclear bombs was dropped. One bomb parachuted to the ground and was recovered, but the other fell in waterlogged farmland and was never recovered.
1/24/1961 Clark Clifford memo about JFK's meeting with Ike; he recalled that Ike had said that the training of anti-Castro Cubans "be continued and accelerated."
1/25/1961 Kennedy's first press conference (the first-ever televised live) finds him in favor of an "independent" Laos, free of foreign domination by either side. He also requested legislation from Congress to focus on redevelopment of areas around the country suffering from unemployment; his proposal would increase job training and loans. JFK would do 64 televised news conferences. As Kennedy began to turn toward a neutral Laos, the Joint Chiefs of Staff stepped up their pressure for military intervention in support of General Phoumi. Their point was that the Communist Pathet Lao army, supported by the Soviet Union, China, and North Vietnam, would achieve complete control over Laos unless the United States intervened quickly. Pushed by Cold War dynamics and Pathet Lao advances, Kennedy was tempted yet skeptical.
1/25/1961 The CIA's William Harvey meets with Dr. Sidney Gottlieb. Harvey says "I've been asked to form this group to assassinate people and I need to know what you can do for me." The two men specifically discuss Castro, Lumumba and Trujillo as potential targets. Harvey's notes of the meeting show that he and Gottlieb talk of assassination as a "last resort" and as "a confession of weakness."
1/25/1961 Dept of Agriculture employee Henry Marshall rules at a meeting of Southwest farm aid officials that Billy Sol Estes' existing transfers of federal cotton allotments are permissible. (NYT 7/12/1962)
1/26/1961 Richard Starnes editorialized, "For all I know, Hoffa may be guilty of wholesale mopery. But is the Attorney General entitled to dedicate the immense power of the federal government to chucking him in jail? I've followed Hoffa's career with some passing interests, and all I can swear to of my own knowledge is that he makes lousy speeches. He may set fire to orphan asylums for kicks, but does this deprive him of the right to due process?" (New York World-Telegram and Sun)
1/26/1961 Deputy Chief of the Secret Service, Russell Daniel, retires from the number-two position after a thirty-two-year career. "Maybe it's time for me to retire. Maybe I'm getting old and soft." AOT
1/26/1961 State Dept memo reported that Marguerite Oswald thought her son might have defected on behalf of some US intelligence agency; a government official told her to "dismiss such an idea." (Plausible Denial preface) or this was 2/1961. CE 2681 "communications" between State Department and American Embassy, Moscow concerning Lee Oswald (H 26 39-40) "Mrs Oswald came in to discuss the situation with regard to her son, Lee Oswald, who had gone to the Soviet Union and attempted to renounced his citizenship in a visit to the Embassy on October 31, 1959. Mrs Oswald said she had come to Washington to see what further could be done to help her son, indicating that she did not feel that the Department had done as much as it should in his case. She also said she thought there was some possibility that her son had in fact gone to the Soviet Union as a US secret agent, and if this were true she wished the appropriate authorities to know that she was destitute and should receive some compensation. Mrs Oswald was assured that there was no evidence to suggest that her son had gone to the Soviet Union as an 'agent,' and that she should dismiss any such idea. With respect to her son's citizenship status, Mr. Hickey explained that he had not yet taken the necessary steps in order legally to renounce his citizenship. At the same time, we did not know whether he had taken any action which would deprive him of his American citizenship under our laws. Mrs Oswald conceded that there was a good possibility that her son was acting in full knowledge of what he was doing and preferred the Soviet way of life. If this were the case, she would respect his right to do so."
1/27/1961 Hoover receives the Vigilant Patriot Award' from the All-American Conference to Combat Communism.
1/28/1961 State Dept makes public plans for a Peace Corps project.
1/28/1961 In a letter to LBJ, Kennedy asked Johnson to "preside over meetings of the National Security Council in my absence and to maintain close liaison with the Council and all other departments and agencies affected with a national security interest...I am hereby requesting you to review policies relating to the national security, consulting with me in order that I might have the full benefit of your endeavors and your judgment."
1/28/1961 Hoover and Tolson were at the Bowie race track for the Burch Handicap. (Wash. Post 1/29/1961)
1/28/1961 First White House meeting on Vietnam; US aid linked to South Vietnamese reforms. A report from Lansdale recommended, "The US should recognize that Vietnam is in critical condition and should treat it as a combat area of the Cold War, as an area requiring emergency treatment." Kennedy decides to replace Ambassador Durbrow with Lansdale.
1/28/1961 JFK orders the Joint Chiefs of Staff to review the military aspects of an American-supported invasion. He also authorizes continued U-2 flights over Cuba and the continuation of the CIA operations already underway.
1/28/1961 Also in a meeting today -- six days after moving into the White House -- JFK and his National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy receive the first general instruction on Project Pluto from the Chiefs of Staff of the Armed Forces and the CIA. But the Kennedy team will only become fully aware of Operation Pluto at the end of February.
1/29/1961 White House reception for subcabinet-level officers, attended by JFK, LBJ and Hoover. For the first time, a bar was present in the State Dining Room, and guests were permitted to smoke. (Post 1/30/61)
1/29/1961 Rwanda declares independence from Belgium.
1/30/1961 JFK telephones his father to remind him to watch his first State of the Union address on television. Then he and Jackie ride to the Capitol. Evelyn Lincoln thinks JFK is in a particularly good mood. AQOC
1/30/1961 JFK's first State of the Union message to Congress. He painted a grim picture of the foreign policy and economic situation. In January, the unemployment rate was 7.7%, and in February it was 8.1%. Congress did little to respond to the economic situation, though administration officials prodded them to act to forestall a "real depression." But by the spring of '61, the economy began to improve.
1/30/1961 FBI's Rome LEGAT sent Hoover an article in an Italian weekly about a woman named Alicia Purdon who claimed to have had a relationship with JFK in 1951. Hoover forwarded the story to RFK. (The Boss 341) An Italian magazine publishes comments by Alicia Purdom, wife of British actor Edmund Purdom. She claims that in 1951, before either of them was married, she and JFK had had an affair. Had Joseph Kennedy not stepped in to end it, they would have been married. This story is not picked up in the American press. J. Edgar Hoover promptly informs Robert Kennedy. Allegations reach Hoover that the affair involved a pregnancy and that the Kennedy family had paid a vast sum of money to hush the matter up. As an FBI agent at headquarters, Gordon Liddy sees files on JFK. From mid-1961, while on a headquarters assignment that includes research on politicians, Liddy peruses numerous 5" x 7" cards packed with file references to JFK's past and present. "There was a lot," he recalls. "It grew while I was there, and kept growing."
1/30/1961 Lyndon Johnson writes a letter to the Secretary of Agriculture supporting Billy Sol Estes' practices with respect to his cotton land allotments. Estes is in the middle of a federal fraud scandal - by building grain warehouses and buying up federal cotton allotments to grow cotton on submerged lands. Johnson's letter eventually becomes the impetus for an Agriculture Department investigation involving both Estes and Johnson. (TTC)
1/30/1961 Dexter Scott King, third child of Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King, was born in Atlanta.
1/31/1961 Robert F. Kennedy becomes Attorney General.
1/31/1961 The House votes to expand the Rules Committee from twelve members to fifteen, thanks mostly to the efforts of Sam Rayburn. The vote was a close one: 217 to 212; a number of Republicans and Southern Democrats gave Kennedy their support. Rep. Overton Brooks (D-Louisiana) paid the price for his support by getting threatening phone calls and a cross burned on his lawn. (No Final Victories)
1/31/1961 LBJ wrote to Sec of Agriculture Orville Freeman on behalf of Estes. (A Texas Looks at Lyndon 117)
1/31/1961 Paul-Henri Spaak resigns as secretary general of NATO.
1/31/1961 In a Project Mercury suborbital test flight, the US shot a 37-lb chimpanzee, Ham, into space and recovered him successfully.

Tracy Riddle · (This post was last modified: 01-04-2014, 02:32 AM by Tracy Riddle.)

2/1961 Executive Action-ZR/RIFLE : William Harvey, chief of FI/D, was briefed by authority of Richard Bissell on phase one of the mob plots. That briefing was in connection with "Executive Action Capability;" i.e., a general standby capability to carry out assassinations when required. Harvey arranges to be briefed by Edwards.
2/1961 A 106-month long economic expansion began, which lasted until 12/1969. Growth in first year was 6.1%, in second year was 3.1%. Around this time, the Soviet economy was growing 6-10% a year.
2/1961 In 1958, Senator John Kennedy delivered a major speech attacking the Eisenhower administration for allowing a "missile gap" to open up between allegedly superior Soviet forces and those of the United States. Kennedy repeated the charge of a missile gap in his successful 1960 presidential campaign, developing it into an argument for increased military spending. When he became president, his science adviser, Jerome Wiesner, informed him in February 1961 that "the missile gap was a fiction " -to which Kennedy replied with a single expletive, " delivered, " Wiesner said, "more in anger than in relief. " (Gregg Herken interview of Jerome Wiesner, February 9, 1982. Cited by Christopher A. Preble, "Who Ever Believed in the 'Missile Gap ' ? John F. Kennedy and the Politics of National Security, " Presidential Studies Quarterly 33 , no. 4 (December 2003 , p.816) The United States in fact held an overwhelming strategic advantage over the Soviets' missile force. Whether or not Kennedy already suspected the truth, he had taken a Cold War myth, had campaigned on it, and now partly on its basis, was engaged in a dangerous military buildup as president. Marcus Raskin, an early Kennedy administration analyst who left his access to power to become its critic, summarized the ominous direction in which the new president was headed: " The United States intended under Kennedy to develop a war-fighting capability on all levels of violence from thermonuclear war to counterinsurgency. " (Gareth Porter, Perils of Dominance ( Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), p. 14. Marcus G. Raskin, Essays of a Citizen (Armonk, N.Y. : M. E. Sharpe, 1991), p. 52.
2/1/1961 First Boeing Minuteman ICBM is tested in Florida.
2/1/1961 Oswald in Minsk writes in his diary: "I mail my first request to American Embassy, Moscow for reconsidering my position. I stated, I would like to go back to U.S."
2/1/191 State Dept instruction to US embassy in Moscow, signed "Rusk": "Mrs. Marguerite Oswald called at the Department on January 26, 1961. She has not heard from her son, Lee Harvey Oswald, since December 1959, at which time he was residing at the Metropole Hotel." (H 18 130) Less than a week after Mrs. Oswald's Washington visit, the State Department sends a "Welfare-Whereabouts" memo to Moscow.
2/1/1961 JFK meets today with his National Security Council (NSC) to formulate National Security Action Memorandum 2 (NSAM2). The document calls for "an expanded guerrilla program," the addition of 3,000 men to the Army's 1,000-man Special Forces (the Green Berets), funded by a budget increase of $19 million, and a reallocation of $100 million within the Defense Department for "unconventional wars."
2/2/1961 JFK told Congress that he wanted to spur the economy by increasing unemployment benefits, increase social security payments, and raise and extend the minimum wage. GOP congressional leaders quickly attacked his ideas, but the business community saw Kennedy's program as a modest package.
2/2/1961 Walt Rostow gives JFK a memorandum about Vietnam written by Brigadier General Edward Lansdale. After reading it, JFK says: "This is the worst yet." He then adds, "You know, Ike never briefed me about Vietnam."
2/3/1961 NSAM 2 "TO: The Secretary of Defense. SUBJECT: Development of Counterguerilla Forces. At the National Security Council meeting on February 1, 1961, the President requested that the Secretary of Defense, in consultation with other interested agencies, should examine means for placing more emphasis on the development of counterguerilla forces. Accordingly, it is requested that the Department of Defense take action on this request and inform this office promptly of the measures which it proposes to take. McGeorge Bundy."
2/3/1961 Kennedy met alone with the U.S. ambassador to Laos, Winthrop Brown. The diplomat had a hard time believing his new president's desire to hear only the truth about Laos. As Brown was explaining the official policy, Kennedy stopped him. He said, "That's not what I asked you. I said, 'What do you think,' you, the Ambassador ? " (Winthrop Brown, oral history interview in 1968 by Larry J . Hackman, 14-15, JFK Library. Cited by Edmund F. Wehrle, '' 'A Good, Bad Deal': John F. Kennedy, W. Averell Harriman, and the Neutralization of Laos, 1961-1962, " Pacific Historical Review (August 1998) , p.355) Brown opened up. With the president concentrating intently on his words, Brown critiqued the CIA's and the Pentagon's endorsement of the anti-communist ruler General Phoumi Nosavan. The autocratic general had risen to power through the CIA's formation, under the Eisenhower administration, of a Laotian " patriotic organization," the Committee for the Defense of the National Interest ( CDNI ) . (Roger Hilsman, To Move a Nation: The Politics o f Foreign Policy i n the Administration of John F. Kennedy (New York: Delta, 1964), p. 115.) Brown told Kennedy frankly that Laos could be united only under the neutralist Souvanna Phouma, whose government had been deposed by CIA-Pentagon forces under Eisenhower. JFK questioned Brown extensively about the possibility of a neutral government under Souvanna that Britain, France, and the Soviet Union could all support, if the United States were to change policy. Years later, Brown recalled his hour-long conversation with the president on a neutralist Laos as "a very, very moving experience."
2/4/1961 Washington Post reported that JFK appointee to head the Export-Import Bank Charlie Merriweather had allegedly been involved in land-transaction fraud at the expense of the taxpayer; the article faulted the FBI for not catching this during its background check.
2/4/1961 JFK bans all trade with Cuba, depriving the Castro government of $35 million in annual income.
2/4/1961 Drew Pearson, in his regular radio broadcast, reports the first major battle between Robert Kennedy and J. Edgar Hoover: "The new Attorney General wants to go all out against the underworld. To do so, Bobby Kennedy proposes a crack squad of racket busters, but Edgar Hoover objects. Hoover claims that a special crime bureau reflects on the FBI, and he is opposing his new boss."
2/5/1961 Soviets launch Sputnik 5.
2/5/1961 Oswald wrote to Richard Synder at the US Embassy saying that he wanted to return to the US: "I hope that in recalling the responsibility I have to America that you remember yours in doing everything to help me since I am an American citizen." (CE 931)
2/6/1961 NY Times reported, "Kennedy Defense Study Finds No Evidence of a 'Missile Gap'." The source for this was a background interview McNamara gave the night before; he had told the reporters that if there was a gap, it was in favor of the US. JFK sent out Salinger to deny the stories about the missile gap: "These stories are incorrect. Absolutely wrong. No studies have been completed and no such finding has been made..."
2/6/1961 NSAM 10 "Memo for Mr. Bundy [from JFK.] Has the policy for Cuba been coordinated between Defense, CIA, Bissell, Mann and Berle? Have we determined what we are going to do about Cuba? What approaches are we going to make to the Latin American governments on this matter? If there is a difference of opinion between the agencies I think [it] should be brought to my attention."
2/6/1961 NSAM 12 "Memorandum for General Lemnitzer [from JFK.] Is it possible for us to distribute the available forces we now have in Vietnam more effectively in order to increase the effectiveness of anti-guerilla activities? Are there troops stationed along the border who could be made available for this activity? It is my recollection that the Vietnam army now numbers 150,000 and that we are planning to add 20,000 more, making a total of 170,000. Reports are that the guerillas number from 7,000 to 15,000. I would think that the redistribution of available forces immediately would make them more effective in this work and we would not have to wait for action during the training period of the new troops. Would you give me your judgment on this when we meet."
2/7/1961 29 major electrical firms, including GE and Westinghouse and 44 of their executives, were convicted of rigging bids and fixing prices in the sale of heavy electrical equipment.
2/8/1961 JFK said in a press conference that "it would be premature to reach a judgment as to whether there is a gap or not a gap." Then he wrote a memo to Bundy: "Could you let me know what progress has been made on the history of the missile gap controversy...I would like to know its genesis...how we came to the judgment that there was a missile gap." (Profile of Power 59)
2/8/1961 Soviets released two US Air Force officers who had crashed in Soviet territory when their RB-47 bomber went down 7/1960.
2/9/1961 Photographic data from the Vanguard 1 and 2 reveal that the earth is a slightly irregular ellipsoid.
2/10/1961 JFK met with some top liberal leaders; economist Robert Nathan argued for deficit spending to spur the economy, perhaps as much as a 60% increase in the federal budget. Kennedy felt that "Honkers" like Nathan were not living in the real world. (Profile in Power 63)
2/11/1961 JFK had a top strategy meeting with Harriman, Bohlen, Kennan and Llewellyn Thompson. All of them urged the president to ratchet down tensions between the US and Soviets. (The Wise Men 600)
2/13/1961 The U.S. embassy in Moscow receives a letter from Oswald dated February 5, stating: "I desire to return to the United States, that is if we could come to some agreement concerning the dropping of any legal proceedings against me." US embassy received a letter from Oswald asking for return of his passport. He claimed to have sent them a letter 12/1960 which he never received a reply to. "I desire to return to the United States, that is if we could come to some agreement concerning the dropping of any legal proceedings against meâ€¦I hope that in recalling the responsibility I have to America that you remember your's in doing everything you can to help me since I am an American citizenâ€¦"
2/13/1961 On this day, CIA Support Chief James O'Connell delivers poison pills to Mob liaison John Roselli who later claims to have given them to a Cuban official close to Castro. The pills are reportedly later returned after the official loses his position. In the spring of 1961, without the knowledge of the new president John Kennedy, the CIA's Technical Services Division prepared a batch of poison pills for Castro. The pills were sent to Cuba through John Rosselli. The murder plot failed because the CIA's Cuban assets were unable to get close enough to Castro to poison him. The CIA's purpose was to kill Castro just before the Bay of Pigs invasion. (Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders: An Interim Report; November 20, 1975 (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1975) As Bay of Pigs planner Richard Bissell said later, "Assassination was intended to reinforce the [invasion] plan. There was the thought that Castro would be dead before the landing. Very few, however, knew of this aspect of the plan. "(Richard M. Bissell, interview by Lucien S. Vandenbroucke, Farmington, Connecticut, May 18, 1984; cited in Vandenbroucke " 'Confessions' of Allen Dulles," p. 374.)
2/13/1961 CIA 's Technical Services Division records indicate that a box of Castro 's favorite cigars treated with lethal poison were delivered to an unidentified asset. The records do not disclose whether an attempt was made to pass the cigars to Castro. (Fonzi chronology p 415)
2/13/1961 JFK received a phone call with the delayed news of Lumumba's murder. Photographer Jacques Lowe took a remarkable picture of the president at that moment. Lowe's photo of Kennedy responding to the news of Lumumba's assassination is on the desk jacket cover of Richard D. Mahoney's book JFK: Ordeal in Africa. It shows JFK horror-stricken. His eyes are shut. The fingers of his right hand are pressing into his forehead. His head is collapsing against the phone held to his ear.
2/13/1961 FBI agent Regis Kennedy reports to Hoover on Carlos Marcello: "Continued investigation...since Dec. 1957 has failed to develop vulnerable area wherein Marcello may be in violation of statutes within the FBI's jurisdiction." (HSCA vol.9 70) Around this time, RFK informs White House aides that they are to go through him before arranging any meetings with FBI officials. (The Boss 326)
2/13/1961 Soviets fire rocket toward Venus from Sputnik 5.
2/14/1961 Washington Post reported that JFK has allowed Adm. Rickover to retain his post past retirement age.
2/14/1961 JFK's decision to appoint Edward Lansdale as Ambassador to Vietnam is scuttled. Frederick E. Nolting is chosen instead.
2/14/1961 Look magazine ran an article called "How To Steal an Election," which angered Kennedy.
2/15/1961 Memorandum for Mr. Landis [from JFK]. Senators Kefauver and Gore inform me that there have been five increases in rates in the Tennessee Gas transmission without any action by the Federal Power Commission. Are they getting away with murder? If so, what can we do about it?
2/17/1961 LBJ ordered his private plane to be flown in foggy weather to his Pedernales River Ranch; the plane crashed and its pilot and copilot were killed. News of the crash does not reach the media for over a week.
2/18/1961 Discoverer 21 was launched into orbit.
2/20/1961 Agriculture Sec. Freeman responds negatively to LBJ's letter about Estes: "there have been some abuses of the law in this regard." (A Texan Looks at Lyndon)
2/20/1961 Johnson's crashed plane is reported overdue and discovered. (It has not been reported overdue for three days.) As an end result, Johnson earns $700,000 in insurance money on the lives of the two pilots and on the plane itself.
2/22/1961 In a letter to Khruschev, JFK invited him to a summit later in the year; the letter was not declassified until 10/1984. It was rather conciliatory, and Kennedy suggested that they "make more use of diplomatic channels for quiet informal discussion..."
2/22-23/1961 birth control was endorsed by the National Council of Churches at a meeting in Syracuse, NY.
2/23/1961 NSC meeting reveals Kennedy unhappy with progress in developing counterinsurgency plans.
2/23/1961 The first off-the-record conference between JFK, RFK and J. Edgar Hoover takes place today at the White House. At a White House ceremony for presentation of the Young American Medal for Bravery, Hoover bitterly confronts JFK about RFK's attempts to control the FBI.
2/23/1961 The most costly airline strike in history which shut down Trans World, Eastern, Flying Tiger, American and National airlines ended.
2/24/1961 SECRET memorandum for the file. Essential points arising from JCS meeting with the President on Thursday, February 23, 1961. 1.The President wishes to have the maximum number of men trained for counter-guerilla operations put into the areas of immediate concern. 2.He wishes to have the matter of operations in Vietminh territory pressed. 3.The JCS ought to review policy guidance on Latin America and orient it towards a deterrence of guerilla operations and counter-guerilla operations. 4.The Departments of State and Defense ought to consider new instructions to the relevant ambassadors on the urgency of counter-guerilla operations. 5.The JCS should insure that the MAAGS are orienting their work in the relevant areas toward counter-guerilla operations, using maximum influence on the local military. 6.State and Defense should look into the character of forces in Iran and decide whether they are appropriate to the military dangers which exist there. 7. The SEATO meeting should be oriented around this problem; the matter should be discussed with Mr. Rusk. 8. The JCS should read the Holifield report and be prepared to discuss the problem of nuclear weapons control. Declassified in 1987.
2/25/1961 Memphis Commercial Appeal reports that the FBI had denied rumors that Hoover would soon resign because he was not getting along with RFK.
2/25/1961 Washington Post reports that mob figure Frank Costello "has just been stripped of his American citizenship by the Supreme Court and now faces deportation to Italy..."
2/27/1961 FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover sends a letter to the State Department Office of Security about Lee Harvey Oswald, announcing a dead end in its search for an Oswald impostor in Europe. Hoover mentions Oswald's August 17, 1960 undesirable discharge from the Marines, his old Fort Worth address, and asks "that any additional information contained in the files of the Department of State regarding subject be furnished to this Bureau."
2/28/1961 Dean Rusk told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that Latin America was going through a period of enormous change, and the US had a window of just a few years to influence its direction.
2/28/1961 The Second Secretary of the American Embassy in Moscow, Richard Snyder wrote Oswald saying that he should come to the Embassy to talk about returning to the US. The letter was dated 2/28, but Oswald's diary described him receiving it on this day. Albert Newman: "added proof that Oswald wrote his Historic Diary' well after the events it describes" (The Reasons Why 200)
2/28/1961 Oswald's Diary: Feb. 28th I recive letter from Embassy. Richard E. Snyder stated "I could come in for an inteview anytime I wanted."
3/1961 Early March - According to his 1964 Oral History at the JFK Library, JFK asks his friend Florida Senator George Smathers about the reaction throughout South America if Castro were to be assassinated. Smathers did not recommend the action.
3/1961 President Kennedy appointed E. Grant Stockdale, an old friend and fundraiser, as Ambassador to Ireland. This decision was criticised by some political commentators. Time Magazine pointed out: "On the campaign trail last fall, Jack Kennedy pledged that U.S. embassies would no longer be political plums for heavy campaign contributors, would be staffed solely "on the basis of ability." But last week, as reports of the Administration's favorites for diplomatic posts filtered through Washington, many of Kennedy's staunchest admirers wondered aloud where reward stopped and ability began.... Among the front runners for top ambassadorial assignments... Grant Stockdale, 45, a Miami real estate dealer and former administrative assistant to Jack Kennedy's old Senate pal, Florida Democrat George Smathers, will be Ambassador to Ireland."
3/1961 Project name ZR/RIFLE first appears in files, although the first recorded approval is dated Feb 19 '62. Its purpose is to develop killers for political assassinations. Harvey's master plan for the project includes the use of cover stories and phony 201 files. ZRRIFLE continued on a course separate from the Edwards/O'Connell/Mafia operation against Castro until Nov 15, '61 when Harvey discusses with Bissell the application of the ZR/RIFLE program to Castro. Harvey 's notes of the discussion state both Bissell and Helms place Harvey in charge of the operation against Castro.
3/1961 Notre Dame Law Review publishes an article by Hoover: "The FBI is a fact-gathering agency. It does notâ€¦make recommendations or evaluations."
3/1961 Kennedy rejected the CIA's current Trinidad Plan for "an amphibious/airborne assault" on Cuba, favoring a quiet landing at night in which there would be "no basis for American military intervention." "The Bay of Pigs Invasion: A Comprehensive Chronology of Events, " in Bay of Pigs Declassified, edited by Peter Kornbluh ( New York: New Press, 1998) , pp. 269-70.
3/1961 Around this time, the Philadelphia FBI begins obtaining verbatim conversations of local Mafia leader Angelo Bruno. "Bureau recordsâ€¦indicated that Marcello initiated various attempts to forestall or prevent the anticipated prompt deportation actionâ€¦According to the Philadelphia underworld leader, Marcello had enlisted his close Mafia associate, Santos Trafficante of Florida, in the reported plan. Trafficante in turn contacted Frank Sinatra to have the singer use his friendship with the Kennedy family on Marcello's behalf. This effort met with failure and may even have resulted in intensified Federal effortsâ€¦" (HSCA 9 p70)
3/1961 US Agriculture Dept employee William E. Morris is in Texas and meets Billie Sol Estes for the first time. Estes foe Dr. John Dunn prepares an anonymous report for the FBI on his dealings. He soon makes it available to radio commentator Dan Smoot. (Los Angeles Times 8/16/62; NYT 6/11/62)
Late March Sen. Fulbright warned JFK that the invasion plan was not a secret, and might fail. Even if it succeeded it would produce hard feelings against the US in the whole region. (The Perfect Failure 106)
3/1961 CIA Internal Information Report no. CS-3/467,630: "Many people in Camaguey [an important air base in Cuba] believe that the Castro regime is tottering and that the situation can at any moment degenerate into bloody anarchy." (The Bay of Pigs, Wyden)
3/1961 US Air Force Intelligence Report: "A great percentage ofâ€¦[Castro's] officers are believed ready to rebel against the government at a given moment, taking their troops with them." (The Bay of Pigs, Wyden)
3/1961 CIA Internal Information Report no. CS-3/470,587: "It is generally believed that the Cuban Army has been successfully penetrated by opposition groups and that it will not fight in the event of a showdown." (The Bay of Pigs, Wyden)
3/1/1961 JFK creates the Peace Corps by Executive Order. (Almanac of American History) This program would train volunteers to aid underdeveloped countries. Kennedy would ask Jawaharlal Nehru what he thought of the idea; Nehru replied that it was a good idea - privileged young Americans could learn a lot from Indian villagers. Congress passes enabling legislation six months from now. R. Sargent Shriver becomes the first director on March 4, 1961.
3/1/1961 Cable to US Embassy in Saigon: "White House ranks defense Viet-Nam among highest priorities US foreign policy."
3/1/1961 During this month, and at JFK's direct order, the Frente, the umbrella group of anti-Castro organizations organized by the CIA's political liaison E. Howard Hunt, is replaced by a more liberal Cuban Revolutionary Council. It now includes Manolo Ray, whom many consider a democratic socialist, (Silvia Odio's father was one of the key backers of Ray's organization, called JURE.) Hunt terms Ray's politics Fidelissimo sin Fidel (Fidelism without Fidel), is outraged at the appointment, and (either) resigns or is dismissed from his job as the CIA's political action officer for the Bay of Pigs operation.
March-April -- as the time for the Cuban invasion approaches, the principal counterrevolutionary leaders are arrested in Cuba and the groups in the Escambray mountains are disbanded. The CIA not only loses their major means of communication, but also their control over the internal networks, which increase the disorganization and shatter the parallel plans. This information is not passed on to JFK, and emergency meetings are held among CIA officials in Florida and in Langley, Virginia, in search of a solution. In a final attempt, the Agency decides to send a group of agents to try and rescue the detained leaders.
3/1-16/1961 Oswald's Diary: I now live in a state of expectation about going back to the U.S. I confided with Zeger he supports my judgment but warnes me not to tell any Russians bout my desire to reture. I understade why now.
3/2/1961 Emery J. Adams of the State Security Office (SY/E) requests several offices to "advise if the FBI is receiving information about Harvey [Oswald] on a continuing basis. If not, please furnish this Office with the information which has not been provided the FBI so that it may be forwarded to them."
3/3/1961 JFK dedicates the National Wildlife Federation Building and says "our future greatness and strength depend upon the continued abundant use of our natural resources." (Kennedys: Chronological History)
3/3/1961 JFK meets with PM Keith Holyoake of New Zealand to discuss raising living standards in poor nations, as well as the situation in Laos and the importance of checking Communism in Asia. (Kennedys: Chronological History)
3/3/1961 Brig. Gen. John W. White speech to the National Security Forum, Columbus, Ohio. The State Dept substituted the phrase "defeat of Communist aggression" for the word "victory" because it sounded too militaristic.
3/3/1961 Gen. Joseph M. Swing, director of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, secretly informs Hoover and the New Orleans FBI that "the Attorney General has been emphasizingâ€¦the importance of taking prompt action to deport notorious hoodlums. In this connection, the Marcello case is of particular interest. A final order of deportation has been entered against Marcello but this fact is being held in strictest confidence." (The Plot to Kill the President, Blakey, p243)
3/5/1961 Oswald answered Synder, saying he could not leave Minsk without Soviet approval and wanted to handle the problem by mail.
3/6/1961 Gerald Patrick Hemming is approved as a CIA contact. O&CIA
3/9/1961 Washington Post reports: "The FBI has begun a thorough probe of alleged illegal fund raising inside the Post Office during the last election. The money went to Republican campaign coffers."
3/9/1961 NYT reports that a film will be made about JFK's time as skipper of PT-109.
3/9/1961 A CIA officer assigned to the Mexico City Station meets in Mexico City with Rolando Cubela to sound out Cubela on his views pertaining to the Cuban situation. Although this meeting proves inconclusive, it leads to other meetings out of which will grow Project AMLASH. Cubela will repeatedly insist that the essential first step in overthrowing the regime is the elimination of Fidel Castro himself, which Cubela claims he is prepared to accomplish.
3/9/1961 JFK peppered his National Security Council with questions that exposed contradictions in U.S. policy and pointed the way toward a neutralist Laos. His questioning uncovered the uncomfortable truth that the United States had sent in much more military equipment in the past three months to aid Phoumi Nosavan than the Soviets had in support of the Communist Pathet Lao forces. The president then pointed out that it was "a basic problem to us that all the countries who are supposedly our allies favor the same person ( Souvanna ) , as the Communists do. " JFK was about to join them. The next day, Kennedy's Soviet ambassador Llewellyn Thompson told Nikita Khrushchev in Moscow that the United States was now seeking a "neutralization of Laos accomplished by a commission of neutral neighbors. " Khrushchev was surprised at Kennedy's turnaround. He said the new American position differed agreeably from the old one.
3/10/1961 The University of Michigan Band stops for three days in Minsk during its tour of the Soviet Union and is given a reception at the Minsk Polytechnical Institute. Katherine Mallory, a flutist, happens to meet Lee Harvey Oswald in a surging crowd of wellwishers. He offers to interpret for her. He manages to volunteer that he is "an ex-Marine who despised the United States and hopes to spend the rest of his life in Minsk."
3/11/1961 White House meeting about Cuba; present were JFK, Bissell, Dulles, the JCS, Bundy, Rusk, McNamara and Schlesinger. The CIA laid out a plan for a small invasion force landing on the south coast near the city of Trinidad after opening air strikes. Kennedy thought the idea was "too spectacular. It sounds like D-Day. You have to reduce the noise level of this thing." He made it clear there would be no US forces involved and the US must be able to plausibly deny any involvement. Dulles warned that the exile invasion force could not just be turned off and sent back to the States: "we can't have them wandering around the country telling everyone what they have been doing." He also said that Castro was having pilots trained to fly MiGs in Czechoslovakia, and the invasion had to take place before those pilots were ready to fight. (Bay of Pigs, Wyden) Both CIA officials argue strongly for prompt action against Cuba. The landing spot at the South Central coastal town of Trinidad is also favored by the Joint Chiefs. Of the Bay of Pigs invasion, General S. L. A. Marshall will later write: "The Joint Chiefs were never asked to approve any plan; they were not besought to analyze that final plan that became operative. They were figuratively put in a corner and given to understand they should not interfere or pass judgment."
3/11/1961 NSAM 31 "Memorandum of Discussion on Cuba, March 11, 1961. The President directed that the following actions be taken: 1.Every effort should be made to assist patriotic Cubans in forming a new and strong political organization, and in conjunction with this effort a maximum amount of publicity buildup should be sought for the emerging political leaders of this organization, especially those who may be active participants in the military campaign of liberation. Action: Central Intelligence Agency. 2.The United States government must have ready a white paper on Cuba and should also be ready to give appropriate assistance to Cuban patriots in a similar effort. Action: Arthur Schlesinger in cooperation with the Department of State....4.The President expects to authorize US support for an appropriate number of patriotic Cubans to return to their homeland. He believes that the best possible plan from the point of view of combined military, political and psychological considerations has not yet been presented, and new proposals are to be concerted promptly. Action: Central Intelligence Agency with appropriate consultation. McGeorge Bundy."
3/13/1961 JFK proposed the Alliance for Progress, a social and economic development project for Latin America.
3/14/1961 United Services Organization Inc. gives its annual award to J. Edgar Hoover for his "unselfish contributions to the American heritage."
3/14/1961 Santos Trafficante, Sam Giancana and Johnny Roselli meet in the Fontainbleau Hotel. They have contracted a Cuban hit-man to kill Fidel Castro. Bob Maheu brings cash for paying the hit-man and poison pills to do the job with. The hit-man may have been a cook in a restaurant frequented by Castro who was willing to poison the Premier's meal. A few days later, Castro is reported to be ill. Maheu says: "Castro's ill. He's going to be sick two, three days. Wow, we got him." But, Castro recovers. As Sheffield Edwards later reports: "Castro stopped visiting the restaurant where the "asset" was employed." The CIA will eventually tell the Church Committee that it was involved in nine Castro assassination plots in all, including those with the Mafia. Castro himself will later produce a detailed list of 24 plots against his life involving the CIA. What is significant is that both the CIA and Castro agree on when the plans began.
3/15/1961 Cuba's foreign minister tells the United Nations that the United States is guilty of "illegal, perfidious and premeditated" aggressions. He accuses JFK by name of encouraging "preparations for the invasion of Cuba," an invasion, he says a few days later, that is "imminent." AQOC
3/17/1961 JFK lifted a ban on importation and distribution of communist literature into the US.
3/17/1961 Nineteen-year-old Marina Nikolaevna Pruskakova first meets Lee Harvey Oswald at a dance at the Palace of Culture for Professional Workers in Minsk. They will meet again a week later at another dance and will be together for much of the evening. Oswald's Diary: March 17 -- I and Erich went to trade union dance. Boring but at the last hour I am introduced to a girl with a French hair-do and red-dress with white slipper I dance with her. than ask to show her home I do, along with 5 other admirares. Her name is Marina. We like each other right away. she gives me her phone number and departs home with an not-so-new freiend in a taxi, I walk home.
3/18/1961 Washington Post reported that President Kennedy ordered the Post Office to stop holding up Communist propaganda received in the mail from abroad. "A reviewâ€¦has disclosed that the program serves no useful intelligence functionâ€¦"
3/18/1961 Oswald's Diary: March 18-31-- We walk I talk a little about myself she talks alot about herself. her name is Marina N. Prosakoba.
3/18-24/1961 Hoover writes internal FBI memos expressing his concern that Hollywood producer Jerry Wald wants to make a film on RFK's book on organized crime, The Enemy Within. (Goddess, Summers, p497)
3/20/1961 A letter posted on March 5th, reaches the American Embassy in Moscow from Lee Harvey Oswald regarding his desire to return to the USA. It reiterates that he is unable to leave Minsk without official permission. Oswald asks that preliminary inquiries be put in the form of a questionnaire and sent to him.
3/21/1961 JFK meets with British PM Harold Macmillan at Key West.
3/22/1961 Cuban exile leaders held a final pre-invasion meeting, after which one told reporters: "We have the forcesâ€¦to overthrow Castro, and this year we are going to become the first occupied country to expel international communism."
3/22/1961 An asset of the CIA's Miami Station reports that Rolando Cubela and Juan Orta want to defect and need help in escaping from Cuba.
3/22/1961 J. Edgar Hoover and JFK have an off-the-record lunch meeting at the White House. RFK schedules a last minute appointment with JFK just before Hoover arrives. Hoover brings with him a folder detailing Judith Campbell's telephone calls to the White House. The folder also details her relationship with Sam Giancana. When Hoover leaves, JFK says to Kenny O'Donnell: "Get rid of that bastard. He's the biggest bore."
3/23/1961 At a March 23 news conference on Laos, Kennedy made his policy change public by stating that the United States "strongly and unreservedly" supported "the goal of a neutral and independent Laos, tied to no outside power or group of powers, threatening no one, and free from any domination." He endorsed the British appeal for a cease-fire between General Phoumi's army and the neutralist-communist forces arrayed against them. He also joined the British in calling for an international conference on Laos. The Russians agreed. Kennedy's new direction enabled the Russians to come together with the British, the Americans, and eleven other countries in Geneva on May 11 in an effort to resolve the question of Laos. In the meantime, however, Kennedy was being led to the brink of war. The Communist forces continued to advance in Laos. They seemed to be on their way to total victory before the Geneva Conference even convened. The president was determined not to let them overrun the country. At the same time, as his special counsel Ted Sorensen pointed out, he was unwilling " to provide whatever military backing was necessary to enable the pro-Western forces [of General Phoumi] to prevail. This was in effect the policy he had inherited-and he had also inherited most of the military and intelligence advisers who had formed it." (Theodore C. Sorensen, Kennedy (New York: Konecky & Konecky, 1966) , p. 641) These men kept pressing him to turn back from the neutralist coalition he was pursuing, which they saw as a foolish concession to the Communists.
3/24/1961 Washington Post reports that LBJ "doesn't want Secret Service agents following him around when he is in Washingtonâ€¦he didn't think it was necessaryâ€¦"
3/24/1961 The Embassy again wrote Oswald that he would have to come to Moscow. (CE 933,940)
3/26/1961 JFK meets with British PM Macmillan at Key West to discuss how to avert further escalation of the problems in Laos. (Almanac of American History)
3/26/1961 In a talk with Congressional leaders, JFK promised that Laos would not fall to the Communists.
3/27/1961 Dan Smoot forwarded to the FBI an anonymous 14-page memo on Billie Sol Estes' business dealings. (NYT 6/7/62)
3/27/1961 singer Paul Robeson, possibly drugged by CIA, attempts suicide after party in Moscow
3/28/1961 JFK told Congress, "Our arms must be subject to ultimate civilian control and command at all times...The primary purpose of our arms is peace, not war...to deter all wars...to insure the adequacy of our bargaining power for an end to the arms race. The basic problems facing the world today are not susceptible to a military solution. Neither our strategy nor our psychology as a nation - and certainly not our economy - must become dependent upon the permanent maintenance of a large military establishment...Our arms will never be used to strike the first blow in any attack." JFK told Congress that he had ordered McNamara to "reappraise our entire defense strategy, capacity, commitments and needs in the light of present and future dangers." Initially, the basic policies outlined by President Kennedy in a message to Congress on March 28, 1961, guided McNamara in the reorientation of the defense program. Kennedy rejected the concept of first-strike attack and emphasized the need for adequate strategic arms and defense to deter nuclear attack on the United States and its allies. U.S. arms, he maintained, must constantly be under civilian command and control, and the nation's defense posture had to be "designed to reduce the danger of irrational or unpremeditated general war". The primary mission of U.S. overseas forces, in cooperation with allies, was "to prevent the steady erosion of the Free World through limited wars". Kennedy and McNamara rejected massive retaliation for a posture of flexible response. The U.S. wanted choices in an emergency other than "inglorious retreat or unlimited retaliation", as the president put it.
3/28/1961 Memorandum for the Secretary of Defense. The President would like a brief memorandum giving the breakdown of what went into Laos, year by year from 1954 on, in the form of military aid and, if it is relevant, economic aid. He mentioned the sum of $340 million....He understands that we gave them the weapons, but the training mission...was a French responsibility. C.V. Clifton. (Declassified in 1988)
3/28/1961 A national intelligence estimate prepared for Kennedy reported that Diem's position in South Vietnam had grown precarious.
3/29/1961 The 23rd Amendment is adopted. Citizens of the District of Columbia will now have the right to vote in presidential elections.
3/29/1961 In the Cabinet Room of the White House, Richard Bissell, representing the CIA, presents a progress report of Operation Zapata, the top-secret plan to invade Cuba. According to Gaeton Fonzi in THE LAST INVESTIGATION, "the Bay of Pigs plan provided . . . the historic opportunity for the CIA to begin domestic field operations on an unprecedented scale." "The Agency's officers, contract agents, informants and contacts reached into almost every area of the community." "The preparation for the Bay Of Pigs invasion gave birth to a special relationship between CIA operatives and the Cuban exiles. That relationship would intensify into a mutuality of interests which transcended even Presidential directives and official United States policy."
3/30/1961 The first announcement of 73 base closings by Defense Secretary McNamara. He claimed it would result in the saving of $220 million a year. (The Pentagon, Mollenhoff)
3/30/1961 Oswald enters the Russian Fourth Clinical Hospital for an adenoids operation. Marina visits him daily. By the time he leaves the hospital he has asked her to be his fiancee and she has agreed to consider it.
3/30/1961 In spite of the president's turn toward neutralism at his March 23 press conference, on March 30 General Lemnitzer told reporters that the neutralist leader Souvanna Phouma was not to be trusted. While Souvanna might not be a Communist, Lemnitzer said, "he couldn't be any worse if he were a communist." (Chalmers M. Roberts, First Rough Draft: A Journalist's Journal of Our Times (New York: Praeger, 1973), p. 194) Lemnitzer and the Joint Chiefs were resisting the president's new direction. They urged him instead to support Phoumi with U.S. combat troops to halt the Communist offensive before it was too late. Otherwise there would be nothing left to negotiate in Geneva, even in the direction of neutralism. As the crisis deepened in March and April, Kennedy agreed to preparations for a military buildup. However, he emphasized to everyone around him that he had not given a final go-ahead to intervene in Laos. (Sorensen, Kennedy, p. 643) Moreover, the Joint Chiefs kept revising upward the number of troops they wanted him to deploy there: asking initially for 40,000; raising the number to 60,000 by the end of March; hiking it to 140,000 by the end of Apri1. (Charles A. Stevenson, The End of Nowhere: American Policy toward Laos since 1954 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972 ) , p.151) Kennedy began to balk at their scenarios. General Lemnitzer then cabled the president more cautiously from a trip to Laos, recommending a "more limited commitment" there. A suspicious JFK backed away from the entire idea of troops in Laos. As he told Schlesinger at the time, "If it hadn't been for Cuba, we might be about to intervene in Laos." Waving Lemnitzer's cables, he said, "I might have taken this advice seriously." (Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., A Thousand Days (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965)
3/31/961 CIA approves sending carbines to Dominican Republic dissidents to help in plot to assassinate dictator Rafael Trujillo.
3/31/1961 The deputy chief of the Passport Office writes to the Consular Section of the State Department regarding Oswald, stating: "...this file contains information first, which indicates that mail from the mother of this boy is not being delivered to him and second, that is has been stated that there is an impostor using Oswald's identification data and that no doubt the Soviets would love to get hold of his valid passport, it is my opinion that the passport should be delivered to him only on a personal basis and after the Embassy is assured to its complete satisfaction that he is returning to the United States."
3/31/1961 US Embassy memo from John T. White to Edward J. Hickey expressed the staff's satisfaction that Oswald had not renounced his US citizenship. (CE 970, H 18 367)
3/31/1961 Kennedy cancels Cuban sugar quota for 1961.
3/31/1961 Chester Bowles, appalled to learn of what he calls "the Cuban adventure" gives Dean Rusk a lengthy memorandum outlining his vigorous objections. Rusk seems unmoved, and discourages Bowles from making his case directly to the President. JFK does not see the memo.
3/31/1961 Jackie Kennedy and three-year-old daughter, Caroline, are spending the Easter holiday at the Kennedy estate in Palm Beach, Florida. The Secret Service surveillance teams are closely monitoring a group of four Cubans living in Miami known to have close ties to pro-Castro activists in Havana. One of the Cubans is heard to remark, "We ought to abduct Caroline Kennedy to force the United States to stop interfering with Cuba's Castro government."

Tracy Riddle · 01-04-2014, 02:24 AM

Early April 1961 Second Attempt: Rosselli passes poison pills in second attempt to kill Castro to Cuban associate of Trafficante in Miami, Manuel Atonio de Varona. Giancana is with him. Assassination attempt is "an auxiliary operation" (per Bissell) of the Bay of Pigs. De Varona is a prominent Cuban exile member of the "Revolutionary Democratic Front" put together by E. Howard Hunt. De Varona is also the former president of the Cuban Senate under President Carlos Prio. He is to be paid $150,000 if he succeeds in his role to pass the poison pills to Cuban official Juan Orta, Castro's personal secretary. Orta is later exposed and jailed.
4/1961 Allen Dulles told JFK before the Bay of Pigs: "I stood right here at Ike's desk and told him I was certain our Guatemalan operation [against Arbenz in 1954] would succeed, and, Mr. President, the prospects for this plan are even better than they were for that one." (The Bay of Pigs, Wyden)
4/1961 When a skeptical Kennedy finally approved the CIA's revised plan for the Bay of Pigs landing in April, he reemphasized that he would not intervene by introducing U.S. troops, even if the exile brigade faced defeat on the beachhead. The CIA's covert-action chief, Richard Bissell, reassured him there would be only a minimum need for air strikes and that Cubans on the island would join the brigade in a successful revolt against Castro. "The Bay of Pigs Invasion: A Comprehensive Chronology of Events, " in Bay of Pigs Declassified, edited by Peter Kornbluh ( New York: New Press, 1998)
4/1/1961 Hoover, in an FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin, wrote: "Attributing every adversity to communism is not only irrational, but contributes to hysteria and fosters groundless fears...The way to fight it is to study it, understand it, and discover what can be done about it."
4/1-30/1961 Oswald's Diary: Apr: 1st-30 We are going steady and I decide I must have her [Marina], she puts me off so on April 15 I propose, she accepts.
4/3-6/1961 The right-wing Manchester Union-Leader published a series of editorials defending the HUAC and attacking the students involved in San Francisco's May 1960 riots.
4/3/1961 State Dept White Paper called Castro's regime a Soviet satellite, urge him to "sever its links with the international Communist movement," admitted "omissions and errors" in relations with pre-Castro Cuba, and promised support for a democratic Cuba.
4/4/1961 INS agents abducted mob boss Carlos Marcello from the INS office in New Orleans, whisked him to the airport, and flew him to Guatemala. His attorneys complained that he was not allowed to call them or see his wife.
4/4/1961 This month, Life magazine calls JFK "the most accessible American President in memory" -- and runs a series of photographs documenting "the President's expressions and moods during a working day in the White House."
4/4/1961 JFK returned to Washington from a visit with his father; McGeorge Bundy recalled that before the visit, he had been dubious about the invasion plan, but after talking with Joe Kennedy, he "really wanted to do this...he had made up his mind and told us." (The Crisis Years 107)
4/4/1961 On this day, a key meeting on Cuba is held by JFK during which he asks everyone present whether they approve of the planned invasion. Senator Fulbright denounces the entire idea on the ground that it is inherently immoral. Everyone else in the room, including Rusk; McNamara, Adolf Berle, Thomas Mann, Bissell and Dulles appear to approve. Berle, in fact, is highly enthusiastic: "I say, let er rip!"
4/4/1961 Dean Rusk reassured Under-Secretary of State Chester Bowles, who opposed the Cuban invasion proposal: "Don't worry about this. It isn't going to amount to anything." (Bay of Pigs, Wyden)
4/5/1961 NYT reported RFK saying that Marcello's "deportation was in strict accordance with the law."
4/5/1961 On orders from RFK, Carlos Marcello, without luggage, and with little cash, is now temporarily stranded in Central America. He quickly regains his composure and soon, is installed in a plush suite at the Biltmore Hotel, as his brothers fly in cash and clothes.
4/5/1961 Cuban foreign minister Raul Roa claimed at the UN that the US was waging an "undeclared war" on Cuba.
4/7/1961 St Louis Globe Democrat reported that "fingerprinting of alien nationals entering the US was abolished. The State Department explained that the procedure had been 'an affront to communist newsmen and UN employees.'"
4/7/1961 Richard Bissell approves shipping weapons to Dominican conspirators who plan to kill Rafael Trujillo in the apartment of his mistress. The weapons are shipped via diplomatic pouch. (The Bay of Pigs disaster will change everything. The CIA will not want to risk another failure. The agency will eventually prevail upon Henry Dearborn, the U.S. consul in Ciudad Trujillo, to try to dissuade the conspirators, but the plot will have picked up momentum and will not be stopped.)
4/7/1961 Time magazine had a report from General Electric challenging the president's decision to cancel development of a nuclear-powered aircraft; they claimed they could build a nuclear engine for a test flight by 1963 "for less than one-fifth of the additional billion dollars mentioned by Kennedy."
4/7/1961 LBJ returned from his trip abroad.
4/7/1961 NY Times article ("Invasion Reported Near") was followed that night by a CBS story claiming that the invasion plans against Cuba were in "their final stages." JFK was very angry.
4/8/1961 Washington Post reported Marcello as saying "he wanted to go back to the United Statesâ€¦Local newspapers published reports from the tiny village of San Jose Pinula labeling as false' the birth registration produced with Marcello's name there. Guatemalan newsmen in the interior said the birth registration had been planted' in the records a few weeks ago by a young North American who arrived at San Jose Pinula in a sports car.'"
4/8/1961 Washington Post reported that "Kohei Hanami, the man who sank President Kennedy's torpedo boat in WWII, has received a bronze medal commemorating the Presidential Inauguration. When Mr. Kennedy was elected, Mr. Hanami and surviving members of his crew sent congratulations."
4/8/1961 Jose Miro Cardona called on all foes of Castro to rise up against him.
4/9/1961 Gore Vidal wrote in the London Sunday Telegraph of his relationship with JFK; he noted that the President's face "is heavily lined for his age...He is withdrawn, observant, icily objective in crisis, aware of the precise value of every card dealt him. Intellectually, he is dogged rather than brilliant...Yet the job [of the Presidency] today is literally killing, and despite his youth, Kennedy may very well not survive....He is fatalistic about himself...he is a pragmatist with a profound sense of history, working within a generally liberal context...He is restless; he wants to know everything...he reads continuously...he is capable of growth. He intends to be great."
4/9/1961 Fidel Castro appears on Havana TV warning, "the extremely vigilant and highly-prepared Cuban people would repel any invasion attempt by the counterrevolutionaries now massing in Florida and Guatemala who are sponsored and financed by the United States."
4/9/1961 William Shannon, in the New York Post, reported that Ike in late '59 had given the green light to the CIA to organize Cuban exiles to plan an invasion of Cuba.
4/9/1961 British PM Macmillan wrote to Eisenhower: "President Kennedy is under considerable pressure about 'appeasement' in Laos...I should however be very sorry if our two countries became involved in an open-ended commitment on this dangerous and unprofitable terrain. So I would hope...you would not encourage those who think that a military solution in Laos is the only way of stopping the Communists..."
4/10/1961 The Internal Revenue Service files an $835,396 tax lien against Carlos Marcello and his wife.
4/11/1961 Lee Harvey Oswald is discharged from the hospital in Minsk. NOTE: Oswald's brother, Robert, will eventually tell Jay Edward Epstein that his brother's hair texture had changed when he returned from the USSR, something he attributed to the possibility of electro-shock or other medical treatment. WWC
4/11/1961 NBC-TV broadcasts a 3/24 interview with JFK in the Oval Office; he was asked, "Why have there been no National Security Council meetings?" He answered, "These general meetings are a waste of time."
4/11/1961 Adolf Eichmann goes on trial in Jerusalem for crimes against the Jewish people, crimes against humanity and war crimes.
4/12/1961 Walt Rostow, in a memo to JFK, says that the time has come for "gearing up the whole Vietnam operation" with increased aid to Diem and more US Special Forces.
4/12/1961 McGeorge Bundy wrote a memo to Roswell Gilpatric: "Your account of the General Electric fudging on the ANP is conclusive, and the President asked that someone in your Department, perhaps Arthur Sylvester, write a letter promptly to Time Magazine straightening out General Electric. He feels very strongly about this..." (JFK Wants to Know 57-58)
4/12/1961 At 9:07am 27-year-old Soviet cosmonaut Yuri A. Gagarin left the Soviet launching pad at Baykonur, West Siberia, inside the 10,416-lb spaceship Vostok 1 on the world's first successful manned space flight. His words after launch: "I am in good spirits. The machine works perfectly." The spaceship completed a single orbit of the earth in 89.34 minutes and landed in a field near the village of Smelovka in the Saratov region of the USSR. As he walked across the field, Gagarin met a young woman caring for a calf who screamed when she saw the strange monster approaching her. He took off his space helmet and told her he was "a friend, a friend."
4/12/1961 JFK said in a press conference that "there will not be, under any conditions, any intervention in Cuba by United States armed forces. This government will do everything it possibly canâ€¦to make sure that there are no Americans involved in any actions inside Cuba."
4/13/1961 The State Dept decided to return Oswald's passport if he appeared at the embassy. (CE 971, H 18 368) The State Department instructs its embassy in Moscow that because of security reasons, Oswald's "passport may be delivered to him on a personal basis only" at the embassy, so identity can be confirmed.
4/13/1961 In Portugal, an attempted coup against AntÃ³nio de Oliveira Salazar failed. Salazar made himself Minister of Defense in response.
4/13/1961 CIA agents set on fire and destroy El Encanto department store in Havana, Cuba.
4/13/1961 Radio Moscow actually broadcast an English-language newscast on April 13, 1961 predicting the invasion "in a plot hatched by the CIA" using paid "criminals" within a week.
4/14/1961 Wire services and newspapers throughout the world carried a story quoting the independent Overseas Weekly to the effect that Gen. Walker had been indoctrinating his troops in West Germany with John Birch Society literature since last fall. The Weekly also reported that Walker had called Truman, Eleanor Roosevelt and Dean Acheson "definitely pink." Walker denied the charges.
4/14/1961 JFK summons Dr. William P. Herbst, Jr., a prominent Washington urologist, to the White House for advice and treatment of "burning" and "occasional mucus" while urinating. The president had suffered a similar flare-up [of chlymydia] three weeks earlier, according to Herbst's notes, and "responded rapidly" to penicillin. Six days after JFK's death, Janet Travell telephones and asks Herbst to turn over his Kennedy medical file to her for safekeeping. Herbst sends his notes to Bobby Kennedy instead. RFK decides that these medical records are to be regarded as "privileged communication" and are not to be kept in a federal archive.
4/14/1961 JFK today addresses the Council of the Organization of American States, declaring that the body "represents a great dream of those who believe that the people of this hemisphere must be bound more closely together."
4/14/1961 Just prior to the Bay of Pigs invasion, Senator George Smathers walks with JFK on the White House South Lawn. JFK discloses to Smathers what is about to happen. According to Smathers, JFK says: "There is a plot to murder Castro. Castro is to be dead at the time the thousand Cuban exiles trained by the CIA hit the beaches."
4/14/1961 A Chicago-based attorney, Constantine "Gus" Kangles - who is a friend of the Kennedys AND Castro says: "I told Bobby [that] Castro knew everything - he was waiting for them. Not only did Castro know, but he enjoyed huge popularity. As far as an uprising, I told Bobby, It ain't gonna happen.' But Bobby didn't care. He wanted him [Castro] out."
4/14/1961 The Cuban Brigade embarked at Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua, for the Bay of Pigs. Patrolling Cuban troops and a rocky shoreline caused the cancellation of an early-morning attack 30 miles east of Guantanamo by 164 soldiers aboard a CIA freighter.
4/15/1961 Lee Harvey Oswald proposes to Marina Prusakova. Marina will later testify that when she agreed to marry Oswald, she believed - based upon his statements to her - that he did NOT intend to return to the United States. This would have to mean that nothing was ever said to Marina by the Russian authorities when she applied for permission to marry an alien whom they knew was planning to leave the country.
4/15/1961 JFK flies to his Virginia retreat at Glen Ora.
4/15/1961 At dawn on April 15, 1961, eight B-26 bombers of the Cuban Expeditionary Force, launched from Nicaragua, carried out air strikes to destroy the Cuban Air Force on the ground, achieving only partial success. The planes carry Cuban Air Force insignia and are piloted by exiles and US civilians. It was meant to take out Castro's air force, but it did little damage. Two other exile bombers land in Florida as part of a plan to make it look as though disgruntled members of Castro's Air Force were defecting. Reporters soon noticed discrepancies in this story. Premier Castro then ordered his pilots "to sleep under the wings of the planes," ready to take off immediately. Castro rounds up 100,000 potential counterrevolutionaries, including nearly all CIA sources. Shortly after the attack started, Ambassador Adlai Stevenson at the UN flatly rejected Cuba's report of the attack to the Assembly, saying that the planes were from the Cuban Air Force and presenting a copy of the photograph published in the newspapers. In the photo, the plane shown has an opaque nose, whereas the model of the B-26 planes used by the Cubans had a Plexiglas nose. He derided the allegations as being "without foundation," and said that the planes "to the best of our knowledge were Castro's own air force planes and, according to the pilots, they took off from Castro's own air force fields." As David Atlee Phillips, the CIA's propaganda chief, monitored the events at the U.N., he was shocked by Stevenson's statements. As he later wrote: "As I watched Stevenson defend the deceitful scheme a chill moved through my body. What had we done? Adlai Stevenson had been taken in by the hoax! Had no one bothered to tell our Ambassador at the United Nations of the deception involved in the air strike?" In fact, Stevenson had not been briefed on the plans, and was later enraged to find that he had repeated the CIA cover story before the international community. Stevenson was extremely embarrassed a few hours later when the truth was revealed and he learned that Kennedy had referred to him as "my official liar." UN representative Conor Cruise O'Brien recalled, "Adlai himself was clearly conscious that this was not his finest hour...a dreadful speech, full of the kind of official lies that stick out in an unappetizing fashion. And Adlai read this stuff as if he had never seen it before, frequently stumbling over words, as he never stumbled over words of his own." (The Siege)
4/15/1961 David Ferrie is taking a three week vacation from Eastern Airlines. It is believed he is playing some role in the Bay of Pigs invasion -- perhaps as a pilot.
4/15/1961 Allen Dulles goes to Puerto Rico to speak at a meeting of the Young Presidents Organization -- a group closely affiliated with Harvard Business School and with the CIA. It is made up of men who are presidents of their own companies and under forty years of age. The CIA arranges meeting for them with young leaders in foreign countries for the purpose of opening export-import talks and franchising discussions. Why he has accepted and keeps this appointment at such a crucial time has never been properly explained. Because of the absence of its director, the CIA's secondary leaders -- officials with no combat or command experience -- made "the operational decision which they felt within their authority." For decisions above them, they were supposed to go to the President. Cabell and Bissell, in Dulles's absence, are inherently unqualified to carry the issue back to the President to "explain to him with proper force the probable military consequences of a last-minute cancellation."
4/16/1961 This night, General Edwin Walker leaves his command in West Germany -- he is in disfavor with the administration for indoctrinating his troops with right-wing propaganda. Says Walker: "My career has been destroyed. I must find another means of serving my country in time of her great need. To do this I must be free from the power of the little men who, in the name of my country, punish loyal service to it."
4/16/1961 1:45 P.M. After a bout of indecision on a local golf course, JFK approves a dawn air strike of Cuba.
4/16/1961 A ship named Seagull leaves from Key West to stage a fake invasion off the northwestern coast; Castro is fooled and sends in a large number of troops.
4/16/1961 Whiting Willauer was dismissed from the State Department after two months of being "frozen out" of the Bay of Pigs planning. (None Dare Call it Treason)
4/16/1961 During a lull in the fighting, Castro attends a funeral for victims of an air attack. Castro rails at the United States and announces, for the first time, that Cuba is a socialist state.
4/16/1961 This evening, John Kennedy, at his country house in Virginia for the weekend, cancels follow-up air raids on Cuban airfields. At least one CIA official immediately grasps the implications: "The Cuban Brigade was doomed."
4/16/1961 9:30 P.M. As the exile brigade prepared for its overnight landing at the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy's National Security Adviser, McGeorge Bundy, phoned CIA deputy director General Charles P. Cabell to say that " the dawn air strikes the following morning should not be launched until planes can conduct them from a strip within the beachhead. " Since no such opportunity came, this order in effect canceled the air strikes. Castro's army surrounded the invading force in the following days. "The Bay of Pigs Invasion: A Comprehensive Chronology of Events, " in Bay of Pigs Declassified, edited by Peter Kornbluh ( New York: New Press, 1998) This constitutes a total misreading and a complete reversal of the approved tactical plan. For years afterward, it will be believed that JFK canceled the air cover for the Bay of Pigs invasion. The man who actually does this is McGeorge Bundy. Dean Rusk gives Cabell and Richard Bissell an opportunity to speak directly to JFK by telephone in order to convince him to provide the needed air strikes. The CIA men see no point in speaking personally to the President and so inform the Secretary of State. The order to cancel the D-Day strikes is then dispatched to the departure field in Nicaragua, arriving when the pilots are in their cockpits ready for take-off. The Joint Chiefs of Staff learn of the cancellation at varying hours the following morning.
4/17/1961 On the night of 16-17 April 1961, when the relatively young President needed the advice of the armed forces as the Bay of Pigs invasion was turning into an unmitigated fiasco, the tension between President Kennedy and Admiral Burke was palpable. As told by Admiral Burke's biographer, the late E.B. Potter, in the early-morning hours of 17 April, President Kennedy, Vice President Lyndon Johnson, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, in white tie and tails, along with the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Lyman Lemnitzer and Admiral Burke, in dress uniforms with medals, left the East Room, where the annual Congressional Reception had just concluded, headed for the Oval Office. There, Richard M. Bissell of the CIA informed President Kennedy that although the situation was bad, it "could still take a favorable turn if the President would authorize sending in aircraft from the carrier." "Burke concurred," wrote Potter. "Let me take two jets and shoot down the enemy aircraft," he urged. But President Kennedy said "No," and reminded them that he had said "over and over again" that he would not commit U.S. forces to combat. Apparently, he did not want the world to find out what it already knew, that the whole expedition had been conceived, planned, and armed by the United States. According to Potter, "Burke suggested sending in a destroyer. Whereupon Kennedy explodes. Burke.' He snapped, I don't want the United States involved in this.' All in all, Mr. President,' Burke snapped back, but we are involved."' Admiral Burke continued as Chief of Naval Operations for three-and-a-half more months. On 1 August 1961, having completed an unprecedented third term, he relinquished his office to Admiral George W. Anderson. The change of command took place at the U.S. Naval Academy, where Admiral Burke had begun his naval service 42 years earlier.
4/17/1961 Cuban exile Brigade 2506 landed at Bahia de Cochinos (the Bay of Pigs) in Cuba. Castro had about 20,000 troops, with tanks, artillery and aircraft; the exiles numbered 1,300 (with 5 transport freighters, 12 landing craft, 5 tanks, 18 mortars, 15 recoilless rifles, 4 flamethrowers, 12 rocket launchers). Of the five freighters, 2 (the Houston and Rio Escondido) were sunk by Cuban planes. The exiles had been supplied with obsolete and poorly equipped B-26s by the CIA. The invasion went badly from the start; the invasion force barely got to the beaches before it was pinned down by government forces. The B-26s were supposed to be escorted to Cuba by unmarked US Navy jets, but the CIA's failure to coordinate this properly led to the B-26s going in an hour early: "...the B-26s were soon downed or gone, the jet mission was invalidated before it started, and without ammunition the exiles were quickly rounded up." (Ted Sorensen) The CIA had made numerous mistakes: the landing site was not suitable for guerilla warfare, most of the invasion force had not been given guerilla training, and the proposed escape route to the Escambray Mountains was an impassable swamp. Of the 1600 men, 114 are killed, 1,189 are captured by Castro's forces, and 150 either never land or make their way back to safety. It is a humiliating defeat for the CIA planned invasion. JFK is blamed for not coming to their aid. Head of the CIA, Allen Dulles, is out of the country during the invasion. Gen. Charles Cabell acts as CIA coordinator during this time. In the CIA and some military circles the President is accused of vacillation at the moment of crisis. The CIA's reaction following the Bay of Pigs fiasco suggests strongly that the Agency knew in advance the operation could not succeed without U.S. military support, and had banked on being able to pressure the President into direct intervention. Dulles had encouraged the President to believe the landing would be followed by a mass popular uprising -- a prospect CIA intelligence reports indicated was wholly improbable. CIA agents had earlier told their Cuban proteges that they should go ahead with the invasion even if the President called off the landing at the last moment.
4/17/1961 Dean Rusk told a press conference: "The American people are entitled to know whether we are intervening in Cuba or intend to do so in the future. The answer to that question is no." (NYT 4/18)
4/17/1961 US State dept spokesman Joseph W. Reap stated, "The State Department is unaware of any invasion."
4/17/1961 Pierre Salinger was quoted by the AP: "All we know about Cuba is what we read on the wire services."
4/17/1961 4:30 AM Gen. Charles Cabell, deputy director of the CIA, calls the White House, has Dean Rusk awaken JFK with a request for new air cover for Bay of Pigs invasion. The request is for U. S. planes -- which are not "deniable." Cabell is told no. (Despite the cancellation of the dawn air strikes, the B-26s actually did fly in from Nicaragua to cover the landing beach throughout the rest of D-Day. A total of 13 combat sorties were flown on D-Day, in the course of which 4 B-26s were lost to Cuban T-33 action.)
4/17/1961 JFK, LBJ, Rusk, McNamara, Lemnitzer, Burke, Bundy, Bissell, Walt Roston and Authur Schlesinger, Jr. meet today in the President's office. The reports are bad. Bissell and Burke propose a concealed U.S. air strike from the carrier Essex lying off Cuba. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. and James Reston lunch with JFK. Schlesinger remembers him as being "free, calm, and candid; I had rarely seen him more effectively in control." JFK says: "I probably made a mistake in keeping Allen Dulles on. It's not that Dulles in not a man of great ability. He is. But I have never worked with him, and therefore I can't estimate his meaning when he tells me things . . . Dulles is a legendary figure, and it's hard to operate with legendary figures . . . I made a mistake in putting Bobby in the Justice Department. He is wasted there . . . Bobby should be in CIA . . . It is a hell of a way to learn things, but I have learned one thing from this business -- that is, we'll have to deal with the CIA." RFK says: "The shit has hit the fan. The thing has turned sour in a way you wouldn't believe." Kenny O'Donnell remembers JFK being "as close to crying" as I've ever seen him. RFK privately tells JFK: "They can't do this to you. Those black -bearded communists can't do this to you." RFK remembers JFK as being "more upset at this time than he was at any other." To summarize the Bay of Pigs invasion: 1. The crucial D-Day dawn strikes are canceled, supposedly by the President, without the CIA attempting to consult him directly, because there would be "no point" in it. 2. The same strikes are made on D-Day evening, when it is too late, again without consulting the President. 3. The crucial D+2 ammunition resupply convoy is stopped, without consulting the President, because it would be "futile." 4. The resupply is attempted by air on D+2, when it is too late, this time consulting the President.
4/17/1961 Immediately following the Bay of Pigs disaster, the CIA begins to plan a second invasion, training Cuban exiles and soldiers of fortune, on No Name Key in Florida, in Guatemala, and on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain in Louisiana. The CIA, theoretically more tightly controlled under the eye of RFK, also sets up an extraordinary new center of operations. Code-named "JM/WAVE", and situated in Miami, it is, in effect, the headquarters for a very public "secret war" against Cuba. This is the most ambitious CIA project ever, and comes to involve seven hundred CIA and coopted Army officers recruiting, training, and supplying thousands of Cuban exiles. The nerve center of the new struggle is set up in Miami, where the vast majority of the exiles are concentrated. There, in woods on the campus of the University of Miami, the CIA establishes a front operation in the shape of an electronics company called Zenith Technological Services. In 1962, at the height of its activity, the "JM/WAVE" station controls as many as 600 Americans, mostly CIA case officers, and up to 3000 contract agents. Internally, the JM/WAVE station is also a logistical giant. It leases more than a hundred staff cars and maintains its own gas depot. It keeps warehouses loaded with everything from machine guns to coffins. It has its own airplanes and what one former CIA officer calls "the third largest navy in the Western Hemisphere," including hundreds of small boats and huge yachts donated by friendly millionaires. One of the more active sites, used by a variety of anti-Castro groups, is a small, remote island north of Key West called, appropriately enough, No Name Key. It is home to a group called the International anti-Communist Brigade (IAB), a collection of soldiers of fortune, mostly Americans, who are recruited by Frank Fiorini Sturgis and a giant ex-Marine named Gerry Patrick Hemming. (Like Oswald, Hemming has been trained as a radar operator in California. Hemming will later claim that OSWALD once even tried to join his IAB group.)
4/17/1961 Also at this time it is worth noting that Carlos Bringuier is the chief New Orleans delegate of the Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil, known simply as the DRE or the Directorio. The Directorio is headquartered in Miami under the wing of the CIA's JM/WAVE station. Bringuier and OSWALD will have several public encounters in the future. Also, following the disaster of the Bay of Pigs, McGeorge Bundy's status as national security adviser is sharply upgraded. He is moved from the relatively humble Executive Office Building, on the other side of West Executive Avenue, to the West Wing. There, much closer to the President's oval office, Bundy begins presiding over regular morning meetings of his National Security Council staff. In addition he extends his sway over the White House war room, with its huge maps and brightly colored telephones.
4/18/1961 Proposed Studies on the Implications of Peaceful Space Activities for Human Affairs, often referred to as "the Brookings Report", was commissioned by NASA and created by the Brookings Institution in collaboration with NASA's Committee on Long Range Studies in 1960. It was submitted to the Committee on Science and Astronautics of the United States House of Representatives in the 87th United States Congress on April 18, 1961. It was entered into the Congressional Record and can be found in any library possessing the Congressional Record for that year. The report has become famous for one short section, titled, "Implications of a discovery of extraterrestrial life," which examines the potential implications of such a discovery for public attitudes and values. The section briefly considers possible public reactions to some possible scenarios for the discovery of extraterrestrial life, stressing a need for further research in this area. It recommends continuing studies to determine the likely social impact of such a discovery and its effects on public attitudes, including study of the question of how leadership should handle information about such a discovery and under what circumstances leaders might or might not find it advisable to withhold such information from the public. The significance of this section of the report is a matter of controversy. Persons who believe that extraterrestrial life has already been confirmed and that this information is being withheld by government from the public sometimes turn to this section of the report as support for their view. Frequently cited passages from this section of the report are drawn both from its main body and from its endnotes.
4/18/1961 FBI records indicate that Robert Maheu informed the FBI that the Ballenti tap involved the CIA and suggested Edwards be contacted, Maheu informed the FBI that the tap had played a part in a project "on behalf of the CIA relative to anti-Castro activities," a fact which could be verified by Sheffield Edwards, CIA Director of Security. (FBI Memo Apr 20, 61; Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders, 11/20/75 p79)
4/18/1961 This morning, Castro headed to the battlefield to take personal command of the defenses.
4/18/1961 Art Schlesinger recorded in his journal that Kennedy complained, "I made a mistake in putting Bobby in the Justice Department. He is wasted there...Bobby should be in CIA...I have learned one thing from this business - that is, that we will have to deal with CIA." (RFK and His Times 486)
4/18/1961 JFK returns to Washington from Glen-Ora, the family Virginia home, where he has been able to exercise "plausible denial" concerning the invasion of Cuba. He attends a scheduled cabinet meeting. He is extremely upset and spends twenty-five minutes telling the cabinet what he feels went wrong with the invasion -- and why. Both Richard Bissell and Allen Dulles are visibly shaken.
4/18/1961 Andrew St. George writes: "Within a year of the Bay of Pigs, the CIA curiously and inexplicably began to grow, to branch out, to gather more and more responsibility for the Cuban problem.' The Company was given authority to help monitor Cuba's wireless traffic; to observe its weather; to publish some of its best short stories (by Cuban authors in exile) through its wholly owned CIA printing company; to follow the Castro government's purchases abroad and its currency transactions; to move extraordinary numbers of clandestine field operatives in and out of Cuba; to acquire a support fleet of ships and aircraft in order to facilitate these secret agent movements; to advise, train, and help reorganize the police and security establishments of Latin countries which felt threatened by Castro's guerrilla politics; to pump such vast sums into political operations thought to be helpful in containing Castro that by the time of the 1965 U.S. military intervention in the Dominican Republic both the bad guys and the good guys -- i.e., the radical' civilian politicos and the conservative' generals -- turned out to have been financed by La Compania. Owing largely to the Bay of Pigs, the CIA ceased being an invisible government: it became an empire."
4/18/1961 Kennedy wrote to Khrushchev about Cuba, assuring him that "the United States intends no military intervention in Cuba" but urged him to understand that the Cuban exiles wanted to oust the dictator Castro: "recourse to such struggle is the only means of achieving their liberties....While refraining from military intervention...the United States government can take no action to stifle the spirit of liberty." He also asked Khruschev not to let the Bay of Pigs worsen relations between the US and USSR, and expressed his desire for a "treaty for the banning of nuclear tests." (JFK Wants to Know 59-60)
4/19/1961 NSAM 149 "TO: The Secretary of State; the Secretary of Defense; The Director of CIA. SUBJECT: Withdrawal of certain military units from forward positions in Laos. 1.The President has authorized the Secretary of Defense to play for the withdrawal of those MAAG White Star teams in Laos which are located in forward field positions. Approximately seven or eight White Star teams would be withdrawn to the rear echelon and would remain in Laos until their normal tour of duty expired. Their replacement will be decided upon subsequently. 2.The withdrawal will take place at such time as the Secretary of State deems appropriate. It is not presently contemplated that this would occur before May 7, 1962. 3.The Secretary of State will prepare an appropriate public announcement of the action at the time the withdrawal takes place. Prior to such time every effort should be made to keep this matter confidential. McGeorge Bundy."
4/19/1961 Cuban rebels surrendered their beachhead at Las Villas and fled to join guerillas in the hills. The forces of Brigade 2506 lost 114 men on the beaches; 1,189 were captured. Castro had about 4000 casualties. Commander "Pepe" Perez San Roman sent a final message at 2:30pm: "We have nothing left to fight with. How can you people do this to us, our people, our country? Over and out."
4/19/1961 Nixon was invited to the White House for advice; he told JFK to "find a proper legal cover and go in."
4/19/1961 In a memo for the president, RFK warns, "if we don't want Russia to set up missile bases in Cuba, we had better decide now what we are willing to do to stop it." Robert Kennedy identifies three possible courses of action: (1) sending American troops into Cuba, a proposal "you [President Kennedy] have rejected...for good and sufficient reasons (although this might have to be reconsidered)"; (2) placing a strict blockade around Cuba; or (3) calling on the Organization of American States (OAS) to prohibit the shipment to Cuba of arms from any outside source. He concludes that "something forceful and determined must be done...The time has come for a showdown for in a year or two years the situation will be vastly worse." (RFK and his Times)
4/19/1961 RFK dictates a letter to JFK today: "Our long-range policy objectives in Cuba are tied to survival far more than what is happening in Laos or in the Congo or any other place in the world...The time has come for a showdown, for in a year or two years the situation will be vastly worse." RFK adds: "If we don't want Russia to set up missile bases in Cuba, we had better decide now what we are willing to do to stop it."
4/19/1961 Khrushchev writes to JFK, assuring him that the Soviet Union "does not seek any advantages or privileges in Cuba. We do not have any bases in Cuba, and we do not intend to establish any." Khrushchev, however, also warns against arming Cuban emigrÃ©s for future attacks on Cuba. Such a policy of "unreasonable actions," he writes, "is a slippery and dangerous road which can lead the world to a new global war." (Soviet Public Statements with respect to Cuban Security, 9/10/62)
4/19/1961 While visiting Richard Nixon's home, Allen Dulles is asked by Nixon if he would like a drink. He replies: "I certainly would -- I really need one. This is the worst day of my life." Dulles blames the invasion's failure on JFK's last-minute cancellation of air strikes.
4/19/1961 JFK's depression about the Bay of Pigs reaches such depths that he tells his friend LeMoyne Billings, "Lyndon [Johnson] can have it [the presidency] in 1964." JFK refers to the presidency as being "the most unpleasant job in the world." How else, he asked his friends Dave Powers and Ken O'Donnell, could the Joint Chiefs have approved such a plan? "They were sure I'd give in to them and send the go-ahead order to the [Navy's aircraft carrier] Essex," he said. "They couldn't believe that a new President like me wouldn't panic and try to save his own face. Well, they had me figured all wrong." (O'Donnell and Powers, "Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye, " p. 274.) At his death Allen Dulles left the unpublished drafts of an article that scholar Lucien S. Vandenbroucke has titled "The 'Confessions' of Allen Dulles." In these handwritten, coffee-stained notes, Dulles explained how CIA advisers who knew better drew John Kennedy into a plan whose prerequisites for success contradicted the president's own rules for engagement that precluded any combat action by U.S. military forces. Although Dulles and his associates knew this condition conflicted with the plan they were foisting on Kennedy, they discreetly kept silent in the belief, Dulles wrote, that "the realities of the situation" would force the president to carry through to the end they wished: "[We] did not want to raise these issues-in an [undecipherable word] discussion-which might only harden the decision against the type of action we required. We felt that when the chips were down-when the crisis arose in reality, any action required for success would be authorized rather than permit the enterprise to fail." Lucien S . Vandenbroucke, "The 'Confessions' of Allen Dulles: New Evidence on the Bay of Pigs," Diplomatic History 8, no. 4 (Fall 1984) : p. 369; citing Allen W. Dulles Papers, handwritten notes, Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library, Princeton University . Four decades after the Bay of Pigs, we have learned that the CIA scenario to trap Kennedy was more concrete than Dulles admitted in his handwritten notes. A conference on the Bay of Pigs was held in Cuba March 23-25, 2001, which included "ex-CIA operatives, retired military commanders, scholars, and journalists." News analyst Daniel Schorr reported on National Public Radio that "from the many hours of talk and the heaps of declassified secret documents" he had gained one new perception of the Bay of Pigs: "It was that the CIA overlords of the invasion, director Allen Dulles and deputy Richard Bissell, had their own plan of how to bring the United States into the conflict. It appears that they never really expected an uprising against Castro when the liberators landed as described in their memos to the White House. What they did expect was that the invaders would establish and secure a beachhead, announce the creation of a counterrevolutionary government and appeal for aid from the United States and the Organization of American States. The assumption was that President Kennedy, who had emphatically banned direct American involvement, would be forced by public opinion to come to the aid of the returning patriots. American forces, probably Marines, would come in to expand the beachhead. "In effect, President Kennedy was the target of a CIA covert operation that collapsed when the invasion collapsed." Noah Adams, All Things Considered, March 26, 200 1, hour I, National Public Radio. Even if President Kennedy had said no at the eleventh hour to the whole Bay of Pigs idea (as he was contemplating doing), the CIA, as it turned out, had a plan to supersede his decision. When the four anti-Castro brigade leaders told their story to writer Haynes Johnson, they revealed how the Agency was prepared to circumvent a presidential veto. The Cubans' chief CIA military adviser, whom they knew only as " Frank, " told them what to do if he secretly informed them that the entire project had been blocked by the administration: " If this happens you come here and make some kind of show, as if you were putting us, the advisers, in prison, and you go ahead with the program as we have talked about it, and we will give you the whole plan, even if we are your prisoners." Haynes Johnson with Manuel Artime, Jose Perez San Roman, Emeido Oliva, and Enrique Ruiz-Williams, The Bay of Pigs (New York: Dell, 1964), p . 74. The brigade leaders said "Frank" was quite specific in his instructions to them for " capturing" their CIA advisers if the administration should attempt to stop the plan: " they were to place an armed Brigade soldier at each American's door, cut communications with the outside, and continue the training until he told them when, and how, to leave for Trampoline base [their assembly point in Nicaragua]." (Ibid.) When Robert Kennedy learned of this contingency plan to override the president, he called it " virtually treason. " (Robert Kennedy in His Own Words, edited by Edwin O. Guthman and Jeffrey Shulman (New York: Bantam, 1988), p. 245. RFK also said, "In fact, we found out later that, despite the President's orders that no American forces would be used, the first two people who landed in the Bay of Pigs were Americans. The CIA sent them in." (Ibid.) John Kennedy reacted to the CIA's plotting with a vehemence that went unreported until after his death and has been little noted since then. In a 1966 New York Times feature article on the CIA, this statement by JFK appeared without further comment: " President Kennedy, as the enormity of the Bay of Pigs disaster came home to him, said to one of the highest officials of his Administration that he wanted 'to splinter the C.I.A. in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds. "' Tom Wicker, John W. Finney, Max Frankel, E. W. Kenworthy, " C.I.A.: Maker of Policy, or Tool?" New York Times (April 25, 1966) Presidential adviser Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., said the president told him, while the Bay of Pigs battle was still going on, " It's a hell of a way to learn things, but I have learned one thing from this business-that is, that we will have to deal with CIA . . . no one has dealt with CIA. " (Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, p. 486) The Bay of Pigs awakened President Kennedy to internal forces he feared he might never control. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas recalled Kennedy saying what the Bay of Pigs taught him about the CIA and the Pentagon: " This episode seared him. He had experienced the extreme power that these groups had, these various insidious influences of the CIA and the Pentagon on civilian policy, and I think it raised in his own mind the specter: Can Jack Kennedy, President of the United States, ever be strong enough to really rule these two powerful agencies ? " Cited by L. Fletcher Prouty, The Secret Team (New York: Ballantine, 1974), p.472.
4/20/1961 Kennedy unveiled his investment incentive plan, featuring a tax credit for new investment rather than accelerated depreciation allowances. He also asked Congress for a variety of tax reforms as a first step toward a projected broad revision of the income-tax laws. "A majority of the changes suggested by Kennedy directly affected the interests of business." (JFK and the Business Community p43) Liberal and labor groups opposed the tax credit; they argued that tax relief for the middle class would do more for the economy. Not until 10/1962 did an investment tax credit and modified tax reforms become law.
4/20/1961 The Senate passed JFK's minimum wage bill.
4/20/1961 Former Turkish PM Menderes was sentenced to death for violating the constitution.
4/20/1961 Radio Havana declares victory for Cuba.
4/20/1961 JFK told the American Society of Newspaper Editors that, concerning the Bay of Pigs, "We intend to profit from this lesson. We intend to reexamine and reorient our forces of all kinds..." He then said, "The complacent, the self-indulgent, the soft societies are about to be swept away with the debris of history. Only the strong, only the industrious, only the determined...can possibly survive."
4/20/1961 Carlos Marcello associate, David Ferrie, admits to the FBI that following the Bay of Pigs invasion he has severely criticized President JFK both in public and private. Ferrie also admits that he has said anyone could hide in the bushes and shoot the President. AOT
4/20/1961 Also on this day, JFK adopts the concept of counterinsurgency as the accepted program for Vietnam and directs Deputy Secretary of Defense Roswell Gilpatric to make recommendations for a series of actions to prevent the Communist domination of the government of Vietnam. Gilpatric and Lansdale head a task force established to carry out these instructions from the President.
4/20/1961 Angus McNair is executed on this date in Cuba as a suspected CIA agent. McNair is a close friend of Frank Sturgis, who will admit that McNair was part of the espionage network Sturgis is running in Cuba. McNair was captured while trying to create a diversionary action during the Bay of Pigs invasion.
4/20/1961 Cabinet Meeting on Cuba. Notes by Chester Bowles: "The President was really quite shattered, and understandably so. Almost without exception, his public career had been a long series of successes, without any noteworthy setbacks. Those disappointments which had come his way, such as his failure to get the nomination for Vice President in 1956 were clearly attributable to religion. Here for the first time he faced a situation where his judgment had been mistaken, in spite of the fact that week after week of conferences had taken place before he gave the green light. It was not a pleasant experience. Reactions around the table were almost savage, as everyone appeared to be jumping on everyone else. The only really coherent statement was by Arthur Goldberg, who said that while it was doubtful that the expedition was wise in the first place, the Administration should not have undertaken it unless it was prepared to see it through with United States troops if necessary. At least his remarks had an inherent logic to them, although I could not agree under any circumstances to sending troops into Cuba--violating every treaty obligation we have. The most angry response of all came from Bob Kennedy and also, strangely enough, from Dave Bell, who I had always assumed was a very reasonable individual. The discussion simply rambled in circles with no real coherent thought. Finally after three-quarters of an hour the President got up and walked toward his office. I was so distressed at what I felt was a dangerous mood that I walked after him, stopped him, and told him I would like an opportunity to come into his office and talk the whole thing out. Lyndon Johnson, Bob McNamara, and Bob Kennedy joined us. Bobby continued his tough, savage comments, most of them directed against the Department of State for reasons which are difficult for me to understand. When I took exception to some of the more extreme things he said by suggesting that the way to get out of our present jam was not to simply double up on everything we had done, he turned on me savagely. What worries me is that two of the most powerful people in this administration--Lyndon Johnson and Bob Kennedy--have no experience in foreign affairs, and they both realize that this is the central question of this period and are determined to be experts at it. The problems of foreign affairs are complex, involving politics, economics and social questions that require both understanding of history and various world cultures. When a newcomer enters the field and finds himself confronted by the nuances of international questions, he becomes an easy target for the military-CIA-paramilitary type answers which are often in specific logistical terms which can be added, subtracted, multiplied, or divided. This kind of thinking was almost dominant in the conference and I found it most alarming. The President appeared the most calm, yet it was clear to see that he had been suffering an acute shock and it was an open question in my mind as to what his reaction would be. All through the meeting which took place in the President's office and which lasted almost a half hour, there was an almost frantic reaction for an action program which people would grab onto."
4/21/1961 The Algiers putsch (French: Putsch d'Alger or Coup d'Ã‰tat d'Alger), also known as the Generals' putsch (Putsch des GÃ©nÃ©raux), was a failed coup d'Ã©tat to overthrow French President Charles de Gaulle (70) and establish an anti-communist military junta. Organised in French Algeria by retired French army generals Maurice Challe (55, former Commander-in-chief in French Algeria), Edmond Jouhaud (56, former Inspector General of the French Air Force), AndrÃ© Zeller (63, former Chief of staff of the French Ground Army) and Raoul Salan (61, former Commander-in-chief in French Algeria), it took place from the afternoon of 21 April to 26 April 1961 in the midst of the Algerian War (19541962). The organisers of the putsch were opposed to the secret negotiations that French Prime Minister Michel DebrÃ©'s government had started with the anti-colonialist National Liberation Front (FLN). General Raoul Salan argued that he joined the coup without concerning himself with its technical planning; however, it has always been considered a four-man coup d'Ã©tat, or as De Gaulle famously put it, "un quarteron de gÃ©nÃ©raux en retraite" (a quartet of retired generals). The coup was to come in two phases: an assertion of control in French Algeria's major cities Algiers, Oran and Constantine, followed by the seizure of Paris. The metropolitan operation would be led by Colonel Antoine Argoud, with French paratroopers descending on strategic airfields. The commanders in Oran and Constantine, however, refused to follow Challe's demand that they join the coup. At the same time, information about the metropolitan phase came to Prime Minister DebrÃ©'s attention through the intelligence service. On 4/21 all flights and landings were forbidden in Parisian airfields, and an order was given to the army to resist the coup "by all means".[2] The following day, President Charles De Gaulle made a famous speech on television, dressed with his 1940s-vintage general's uniform (he was 71 and long retired from the army) ordering the French people and army to help him.
4/21/1961 JFK took full responsibility for the Bay of Pigs disaster. His popularity reached its highest ever point, 83%. He remarked: "My God, it's as bad as Eisenhower. The worse I do, the more popular I get."
4/21/1961 JFK opens a breakfast meeting that precedes a scheduled press conference by remarking: "The happiest people in government today are the ones who can say they didn't know anything about it" (the Bay of Pigs invasion). According to notes taken by Richard N. Goodwin, JFK is "concerned that the entire blame for this not be placed on the CIA." JFK continues: "In my experience, things like this go along for a while, but memory is short, and if we just sit tight for about three weeks, things will cool off and we can proceed from there." Still, JFK's popularity goes to an all-time high of over 80 percent. "The worse you do, the better they like you," JFK remarks on seeing the poll results. Less than a week following the Bay of Pigs debacle, a meeting is held with JFK's Cuban advisors. Undersecretary of State Chester Bowles advises that nothing can be done about Castro - as he is now entrenched. Other aides such as Richard Goodwin agree. RFK simply explodes. "That's the most meaningless, worthless thing I've ever heard," he replies angrily. "You people are so anxious to protect your own asses that you're afraid to do anything ... We'd be better off if you just quit and left foreign policy to someone else."
4/21/1961 A Fair Play for Cuba rally is held at Union Square in New York and draws three thousand people.
4/22/1961 JFK had a private conversation with Eisenhower at Camp David. After conferring with Kennedy, Eisenhower announced publicly that he stood behind the president.
4/22/1961 JFK directs Gen. Maxwell Taylor, in association with Attorney General Robert Kennedy, Admiral Arleigh Burke, and Allen Dulles, to give him a report on the "Immediate Causes of Failure of Operation Zapata." "How did I ever let it happen?" JFK asks rhetorically, "I know better than to listen to experts. They always have their own agenda. All my life I've known it, and yet I still barreled ahead." Taylor will finish his report on June 13, 1961.
4/22/1961 St. Louis Post Dispatch reported: "The [Cuban] underground was never advised of the landing date and did not know whether the Bay of Pigs operation was a real or diversionary invasion. Radio SWAN, the CIA's mysterious short wave broadcast station which blankets the Caribbean, failed to broadcast the pre-arranged signals to trigger the underground into action."
4/22/1961 Retired French Generals Maurice Challe, AndrÃ© Zeller, Edmond Jouhaud, and Raoul Salan, helped by colonels Antoine Argoud, Jean Gardes, and the civilians Joseph Ortiz and Jean-Jacques Susini (who would form the OAS terrorist group), carried out a coup and took power in Algiers. This danger was so serious that de Gaulle ordered tanks to patrol the streets of Paris, to pre-empt a paratroopers' coup in the capital city, threatening to take over the French government buildings. This was the punctum saliens for Algeria as well as for the future of France and the leadership of President de Gaulle. During the night, the 1st Foreign Parachute Regiment (1e REP), composed of a thousand men (3% of the military present in Algeria) and headed by HÃ©lie de Saint Marc took control of all of Algiers' strategic points in three hours. The head of the Parisian police, Maurice Papon, and the director of the SÃ»retÃ© nationale, formed a crisis cell in a room of the ComÃ©die-FranÃ§aise, where Charles De Gaulle was attending a presentation of Racine's Britannicus. The president was informed during the entracte of the coup by Jacques Foccart, his general secretary to African and Malagasy Affairs and closest collaborator, in charge of covert operations. Algiers' population was awakened on 22 April at 7 am to a message read on the radio: "The army has seized control of Algeria and of the Sahara". The three rebel generals, Challe, Jouhaud and Zeller, had the government's general delegate, Jean Morin, arrested, as well as the National Minister of Public Transport, Robert Buron, who was visiting, and several civil and military authorities. Several regiments put themselves under the command of the insurrectionary generals. General Jacques Faure, six other officers and several civilians were simultaneously arrested in Paris. At 5 pm, during the ministers' council, Charles De Gaulle declared: "Gentlemen, what is serious about this affair, is that it isn't serious".[5] He then proclaimed a state of emergency in Algeria, while left wing parties, communist trade union CGT and the socialist supporter[6] NGO Ligue des droits de l'homme (LDH, Human Rights League) called to demonstrate against the military's coup d'Ã©tat.
4/22/1961 C. Wright Mills wires a Fair Play for Cuba rally in San Francisco: "Kennedy and company have returned us to barbarism. Schlesinger and company have disgraced us intellectually and morally. I feel a desperate shame for my country. Sorry I cannot be with you. Were I physically able to do so, I would at this moment be fighting alongside Fidel Castro."
4/23/1961 New reports today disclose that Carlos Marcello is being held in custody by Guatemalan authorities in connection with what are reported to be false citizenship papers he presented upon his arrival there on April 6th.
4/23/1961 "Dan Carswell" -- released from a Cuban prison in a prisoner exchange -- lands at Homestead Air Force Base in Florida, where he receives a hero's welcome. Carswell will later testify that he is at work in CIA headquarters in Langley on Nov. 22, 1963. Some researchers, however, believe Carswell was in Dallas that day and could well have been one of the tramps arrested near Dealey Plaza.
4/23/1961 Interior Secretary Udall pointed out that the Bay of Pigs operation had been planned under the Eisenhower administration; Republicans attacked him for his partisanship.
4/23/1961 President Charles de Gaulle went on French national television and did something that had never been done before. He resorted to Article 16 of the French Constitution, which gave him full emergency powers. De Gaulle presented himself before the nation in full military dress, stating in a dramatic and stern voice: "An insurrectional power has been established by military pronouncement. That power has an appearance. It has a reality: a quartet of retired generals and ambitious and fanatical officers. Now the nation is challenged, it has been humiliated, our position in Africa is compromised, and by whom? Alas, alas, alas, by the very men whose duty and whose honor it was, and whose reason for being it was, to serve and obey. In the name of France, I order that all the means, I repeat, all the means be taken to block the way to these men, until we reduce them. I forbid every French citizen, and most of all, every soldier to execute any of those orders.... Men and women of France, think of the risk for the nation. Men and women of France, help me." The following day, on Sunday 23 April, General Salan arrived from Spain and refused to arm civilian activists. At 8 pm, General De Gaulle appeared in his uniform on television, calling on French military personnel and civilians, in the metropole or in Algeria, to oppose the putsch: An insurrectionary power has established itself in Algeria by a military pronunciamento... This power has an appearance: a quartet of retired generals. It has a reality: a group of officers, partisan, ambitious and fanatic. This group and this quartet possess an expeditive and limited know-how. But they see and understand the Nation and the world only deformed through their frenzy. Their enterprise lead directly towards a national disaster ... I forbid any Frenchman, and, first of all, any soldier, to execute a single one of their orders ... Before the misfortune which hangs over the fatherland and the threat on the Republic, having taken advice from the Constitutional Council, the Prime Minister, the president of the Senate, the president of the National Assembly, I have decided to invoke article 16 of the Constitution [on the state of emergency and full special powers given to the head of state in case of a crisis]. Starting from this day, I will take, directly if needs arise, the measures which seems to me demanded by circumstances ... Frenchwomen, Frenchmen! Help me! Due to the popularity of a recent invention, transistor radio, De Gaulle's call was heard by the conscript soldiers, who refused en masse to follow the professional soldiers' call for insurgency. Trade unions decided for the next day a one hour general strike against the putsch, which met with widespread opposition, largely in the form of civil resistance.
4/25/1961 the French authorities in Paris ordered the explosion of the atomic bomb Gerboise Verte (lit. "green jerboa") in the Sahara to prevent it from falling into the putschists hands. Gerboise Verte exploded at 6:05 AM. The few troops which had followed the generals progressively surrendered. General Challe also gave himself up to the authorities on 26 April, and was immediately transferred to the metropole. The putsch had been successfully opposed, but the article 16 on full and extraordinary powers given to De Gaulle was maintained for five months. "The Battle of the Transistors"as it was called by the presswas quickly and definitely won by De Gaulle.
4/25/1961 Robert Noyce granted a patent for the integrated circuit.
4/25/1961 NSAM 42 "TO: The Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare; The Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. SUBJECT: Assistance to Cuban refugees....The President directed that levels of support for Cuban refugees should be reported to him for recommendations for their improvement (NSC Action 2406C). The President also expressed his desire that such support should be open and overt...the adjustment of Cubans to life in the United States should be given particular attention by the Department of Health, Education and Welfare....McGeorge Bundy."
4/25/1961 NSAM 45 "TO: The Attorney General; The Director of CIA. SUBJECT: Coverage of Castro activities in the United States...The President noted that the Department of Justice and the Central Intelligence Agency would examine the possibility of stepping up coverage of Castro activities in the United States...McGeorge Bundy."
4/27/1961 A day of crisis meetings; JFK's advisers gave him conflicting advice, with the JCS advocating a massive intervention in Laos to block China. Burke argued for intervention regardless of the circumstances: "...if we do not fight in Laos, will we fight in Thailand where the situation will be the same sometime in the future...Will we fight in Vietnam? Where will we fight? Where do we hold? Where do we draw the line?" Many others were adamantly opposed to intervention; LBJ supported Burke. (The End of Nowhere p152) Rostow said it was the worst White House meeting of the entire Kennedy administration. (A Thousand Days 315) Kennedy had already decided privately not to intervene.
4/27/1961 In a speech to the press, JFK mildly criticized the media for uncovering the US role in the Bay of Pigs. He attacked the idea of secret societies and closed societies.
4/27-28/1961 While at a Central Treaty Organization (CENTO) meeting in Ankara, Turkey, Dean Rusk privately raises the possibility of withdrawing the U.S. Jupiter missiles from Turkey with Turkish Foreign Minister Salim Sarper. Sarper objects to Rusk's suggestion, pointing out that the Turkish Parliament has just approved appropriations for the missiles and that it would be embarrassing for the Turkish government to inform Parliament that the Jupiters now are to be withd

Tracy Riddle · 01-04-2014, 02:54 AM

5/1961 Rusk told Sen. Fulbright that there was a risk that Khrushchev could put missiles in Cuba. (The Crisis Years 147)
5/1/1961 Earle Cabell, brother of Charles P. Cabell (deputy director of the CIA), becomes mayor of Dallas.
5/1/1961 A National Airlines plane bound for Miami was hijacked to Havana by an armed man.
5/1/1961 Oswald's diary: "Inspite of fact I married Marina to hurt Ella I found myself in love with Marina." He has not yet told Marina of his desire to return to the US.
5/1/1961 Castro declares that there is no longer any need for elections in Cuba.
5/2/1961 In a meeting of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Sen. Homer Capehart (R-Indiana) asked CIA and military officers, "Are you gentlemen telling us today that...our high military people who fought in World War I and World War II...approved this [Bay of Pigs], what would appear to me to be a Boy Scout operation?" Allen Dulles said that "most of the states of Central America" were confronted with "the insidious penetration of Cuban communism."
5/3/1961 President and Mrs. Kennedy motorcade following arrival ceremonies for H. E. Habib Bourguiba, President of Tunisia. Washington, D. C., Blair House.
5/3/1961 Edwards memoranda to FBI read that Giancana had been recruited "in connection with the CIA's clandestine efforts against the Casto government." No results yet, but "several of the plans are still working and may eventually pay off." Edwards stated, "he had never been furnished with any details of the methods used by Giancana and Maheu because this was 'dirty business' and he could not afford to know the specific actions." He also wrote that Richard Bissell had "told the attorney general that some of the [Bay of Pigs] planning included the use of Giancana and the underworld against Castro." (Rappleye and Becker, p 211-212
5/4/1961 Departing from Washington, black civil rights activists began their bus ride through the south as "Freedom Riders," testing new laws to see how many public facilities had been desegregated. Angry white mobs brutalized them while FBI agents stood by. In Anniston, Alabama, the first bus was overturned and torched by a crowd screaming "Let's roast em!" Riders barely got out before the bus exploded while newsmen watched in amazement. The second bus was boarded by eight thugs who beat the riders with clubs. "Goddamn niggers!" they screamed. "Why don't you white Communists stay up North?" The second bus continued on, and in Birmingham encountered 25 Klansmen dressed in regular clothes. The local police had told them they had 15 minutes "to beat them, bomb them, burn them, shoot them, do anything [they] wanted to do with absolutely no intervention whatsoever by the police." Among the Klansmen was an FBI informer who had reported all of this to the Bureau three weeks earlier, but the FBI did nothing to stop it. The presence of the informant was not made public until 1975. Finally, the police showed up to stop the beatings. Police Chief "Bull" Connor told reporters that it was Mother's Day and many officers were not on duty when the bus arrived. The Kennedy administration provided the riders with a new bus, and they continued on to Montgomery, where they again met a Klan-led mob swinging clubs and pipes.
5/4/1961 Robert Kennedy asked for federal injunctions against the leader of the Alabama Klan and the Montgomery police. He also dispatched more than 500 deputy federal marshals to Montgomery. Many Americans were not sympathetic to the Freedom Riders, feeling that they should not have gone South in the first place. Reporter Howard K. Smith was fired by CBS News for his too-accurate account of the Klan beatings. (The Fiery Cross p311-12)
5/4/1961 JFK revived the President's Board of Consultants on Foreign Intelligence Activities, renaming it the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. He appointed James R. Killian Jr. to head it. Other members of the board included: Edwin H. Land, Dr. William O. Baker, Lt. Gen. James H. Doolittle, Dr. William L. Langer, Robert D. Murphy, Gordon Gray, and Clark Clifford.
5/4/1961 Rusk told the press that the Vietcong had grown to 12,000 men; refuses to say whether the US will intervene militarily.
5/5/1961 The Fair Labor Standards Act, signed by JFK, raises the minimum wage to $1.15 in September of 1961 and to $1.25 by September of 1963. (Almanac of American History) It also expanded coverage to include 3.6 million more workers. This week he also signed into law the Area Redevelopment Act, a program of grants and loans to aid distressed areas such as West Virginia.
5/5/1961 Alan Shepard Jr. is launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, via the Mercury 3 rocket in the Freedom 7 capsule; this first manned US sub-orbital space flight lasted 15 minutes. The carrier Lake Champlain recovered Shepard.
5/5/1961 JFK tells press conference that the dispatch of US troops to Vietnam is "one of the matters Vice President Johnson will deal with" in his "communications with the government of Vietnam as to what further steps could be mostly usefully taken."
5/6/1961 M. Stanton Evans wrote in National Review: "'Operation Abolition' has become an unexpected best-seller. An estimated 700 copies of it are in circulation around the country, and a grand total of 15 million people are believed to have seen it. By and large, viewers react strongly to what they see; most find the film a startling presentation of what can happen in America under Communist auspices. The net effect is to alert the viewer to the dangers of internal Communismâ€¦Such conclusions are distasteful to various elements on the Left, which have long maintained as articles of faith that there is no danger from internal Communism.
5/8/1961 Task force headed by Roswell Gilpatric issued its report, calling for vastly increased US military personnel in Vietnam.
5/8/1961 JFK wrote a letter to Diem pledging his support to South Vietnam, and asked LBJ to deliver it in person. (Johnson, Vantage Point p53)
5/9/1961 Calling television a "vast wasteland," FCC chairman Newton Minow said of network programming, "It is not enough to cater to the nation's whims you must also serve the nation's needs."
5/9/1961 Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson depart for Saigon.
5/10/1961 On May 10, and again on May 18, the Joint Chiefs had recommended that combat troops be sent to Vietnam. (Pentagon Papers)
5/11/1961 Senate voted 43 to 36 to broaden US aid to Czechoslovakia and other Eastern European nations.
5/11/1961 JFK ordered 400 Green Berets and 100 military advisors to South Vietnam. The Green Berets (Special Forces) were trained in guerilla warfare at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Also ordered clandestine warfare to be waged against the North by South Vietnamese agents trained by the CIA and Green Berets; this includes infiltration of Southern forces into Laos to disrupt Communist bases and supply lines.
5/11/1961 The Johnsons arrived in Saigon.
5/12/1961 LBJ meets with Diem, and calls him the "Winston Churchill of Southeast Asia."
5/13/1961 Diem and LBJ issued a joint communique stating that aid would be provided to South Vietnam on a larger scale.
5/14/1961 Jack Anderson article in Parade based on interview with Frank Fiorini (Sturgis): "We Will Finish the Job."
5/15/1961 Cuba began its major Literacy Campaign.
5/15/1961 Trappist monk Thomas Merton saw the Bay of Pigs incident especially through the eyes of one of his Cold War correspondents, Evora Arca de Sardinia in Miami. She wrote to Merton saying that her husband, a leader of the anti-Castro forces in the invasion, had been taken prisoner in Cuba. Merton replied to her on the day he received her letter, May 15, 1961 , expressing his " deep compassion and concern in this moment of anguish. " In their subsequent correspondence, Thomas Merton gave spiritual direction to Evora Arca de Sardinia as she became concerned at the divisions and spirit of revenge in the Cuban exile movement. In January 1962 he wrote to her: "The great error of the aggressive Catholics who want to preserve their power and social status at all costs is that they believe this can be done by force, and thus they prepare the way to lose everything they want to save." While President Kennedy and his brother Attorney General Robert Kennedy were working to raise a ransom to free the Bay of Pigs prisoners, Merton was warning Evora Arca de Sardinia about the militant context in which she was living, which questioned the process of such a ransom. In the Miami Cuba colony, as she had written to Merton, paying a ransom to an evil force (the communist Fidel Castro) , even to free their loved ones, was considered a breach of ethics and loyalty. Merton wrote back: " One thing I have always felt increases the trouble and the sorrow which rack you is the fact that living and working among the Cuban emigres in Miami, and surrounded by the noise of hate and propaganda, you are naturally under a great stress and in a sense you are 'forced' against your will to take an aggressive and belligerent attitude which your conscience, in its depth, tells you is wrong. " Thomas Merton, Witness to Freedom: Letters in Times of Crisis, edited by William H. Shannon (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994), p. 77.
5/16/1961 JFK leaves for a three-day trip to Ottawa, Canada. McGeorge Bundy complains to him, "We do have a problem of management. We can't get you to sit still."
5/16/1961 President Kennedy's Back Pain Flares after Ottawa Lumbar Strain. On May 16, 1961, during a tree-planting ceremony in Ottawa, Canada, President Kennedy "strained his back." "Mr. Kennedy lifted a silver-plated shovel three times digging a hole for a red oak tree outside Government House. Mr. Salinger [the president's press secretary] said the president felt immediate pain' during the ceremonial shoveling. He did nothing about it for several days in the hope that it would go away," said one news article. Two weeks later, the president's back pain worsened and "Dr. Travell went to Hyannis Port [Massachusetts] to treat himâ€¦.Dr. Travell called the injury a lumbosacral strainâ€¦.Mr. Salinger said the point of the strain was between the lowest lumbar vertebrae, or section of the spine, and the sacrum." President Kennedy used crutches in private to offload strain from his back.
5/16/1961 South Korea: military coup led by Maj. Gen. Park Chunghee ousted the government of Chang Myon.
5/17/1961 President John F. Kennedy's Motorcade En Route to Wreath-laying Ceremony at the National War Memorial, Ottawa, Canada Description: Motorcade along Rideau Street, en route to wreath-laying ceremony at the National War Memorial in Confederation Square, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. President John F. Kennedy rides in back seat of car at left; White House Secret Service Agent, Gerald "Jerry" Behn, sits in front. Ottawa Union Station is behind crowd at left. [Photograph by Harold Sellers]
5/17/1961 After numerous appeals to spare their lives, Castro offers to exchange the Bay of Pigs prisoners for 500 US bulldozers.
5/19/1961 In the Cuba Study Group, Arleigh Burke apologized for the JCS by saying that because of the secrecy involved they were not able to use their staff to prepare their assessment of the invasion plan.
5/19/1961 The CIA reported on May 19, 1961: "Some extreme rightists believe that the only way that President DeGaulle can now be stopped from surrendering Algeria is to assassinate him...This attitude has reached fanatical proportions and those close to it believe that an assassination attempt against DeGaulle is certain to come in the near future...In May 1961 an attempt was made by two Secret Army Organization members to enlist United States Government (deleted) support in their operations against DeGaulle." [CIA F82-0184/1; Allen v. DOD #09787]
5/21/1961 Freedom Riders attacked at a bus terminal in Montgomery, Alabama. Presidential aide John Seigenthaler is knocked out and RFK orders in federal marshals.
5/21/1961 JFK publicly commits the US to sending a man to the moon by the end of the decade.
5/22/1961 FBI Director Hoover sent the Attorney General a memorandum about the Las Vegas wiretap.
5/22/19621 Memo from J. Edgar Hoover to Robert Kennedy: "On May 3, 1961, Colonel Sheffield Edwards, Director of Security, Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), furnished the following information. Colonel Edwards advised that in connection with CIA's operation against Castro he personally contacted Robert Maheu during the fall of 1960 for the purpose of using Maheu as a "cut-out" in contacts with Sam Giancana, a known hoodlum in the Chicago area. Colonel Edwards said that since the underworld controlled gambling activities in Cuba under the Batista government, it was assumed that this element would still continue to have sources and contacts in Cuba which perhaps could be utilized successfully in connection with CIA's clandestine efforts against the Castro government. As a result, Maheu's services were solicited as a "cut-out" because of his possible entree into underworld circles. Maheu obtained Sam Giancana's assistance in this regard and according to Edwards, Giancana gave every indication of cooperating through Maheu in attempting to accomplish several clandestine efforts in Cuba. Edwards added that none of Giancana's efforts have materialized to date and that several of the plans still are working and may eventually "pay off." Colonel Edwards related that he had no direct contact with Giancana; that Giancana's activities were completely "back stopped" by Maheu and that Maheu would frequently report Giancana's action and information to Edwards. No details or methods used by Maheu or Giancana in accomplishing their missions were ever reported to Edwards. Colonel Edwards said that since this is "dirty business", he could not afford to have knowledge of the actions of Maheu and Giancana in pursuit of any mission for CIA. Colonel Edwards added that he has neither given Maheu any instruction to use technical installations of any type nor has the subject of technical installations ever come up between Edwards and Maheu in connection with Giancana's activity. Mr. Bissell, in his recent briefings of General Taylor and the Attorney General and in connection with their inquiries into CIA relating to the Cuban situation [the Taylor Board of Inquiry] told the Attorney General that some of the associated planning included the use of Giancana and the underworld against Castro.' An attachment to that memorandum quoted Sheffield Edwards as saying that Bissell in "recent briefings" of Taylor and Kennedy "told the Attorney General that some of the associated planning included the use of Giancana and the underworld against Castro." Bissell told the Church Committee that he did not remember any briefing other than for the review of the Bay of Pigs - The Taylor Report. (Bissell, 7/22/75) Taylor told the Church Committee that no mention was made of an assassination effort against Castro. The summary of Edwards' conversation with the FBI was accompanied by a cover memorandum from Hoover stating that Edwards had acknowledged the "attempted" use of Maheu and 3 "hoodlum elements" by the CIA in "anti-Castro activities" but that the "purpose for placing the wiretap...has not been determined...." (FBI memo to Attorney General, 5/22/61) The memorandum also explained that Maheu had contacted Giancana in connection with the CIA program and CIA had requested that the information be handled on a "need-to-know" basis. RFK writes in the margin of the memo to his aide, Courtney Evans, "I hope this will be followed up vigorously," after being assured the alliance had been discontinued by CIA's Edwards. (Hoover memo to RFK and RFK's notation quoted in Assassination Plots, Interim Report: Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders, pp127-128) Note: Courtney Evans had worked closely with the then Senator John Kennedy and Robert Kennedy on the McClellan Committee which had investigated the relationship between organized labor and organized crime. During the McClellan Investigation Sam Giancana was one of the major crime figures examined. After becoming Attorney General, Robert Kennedy had singled out Giancana as one of the underworld leaders to be most intensely investigated. Anti-JFK columnist Victor Lasky: "the Kennedy brothers vowed to 'get even' with the Cuban dictator. After the Bay of Pigs the President himself spurred the CIA into an immense covert war against Cuba. It required the services of thousands of men and cost as much as $100 million a year." (It Didn't Start with Watergate 85; "The Kennedy Vendetta") "At the same time, the Kennedys covertly ordered several US agencies to find some sure means of 'eliminating' Castro. The CIA had been thinking along those lines for some time....even under Eisenhower, worked with Mafia leaders Giancana and Roselli in devising plans to bump off Fidel. Bobby Kennedy learned all this himself in the form of a detailed secret memorandum from J Edgar Hoover dated 5/1961...though the Hoover memorandum never mentioned the words 'assassination' or 'elimination'...the director did refer to the CIA's relationship with the mobsters as 'dirty business.' According to sources quoted by The New York Times [5/30/1975], Attorney General Kennedy jotted this note on top of the memorandum: 'Have this followed up vigorously.' The memo also bore his handwritten initials...A year later Kennedy was given a more precise briefing...Lawrence Houston, general counsel for the Agency from its founding in 1947, told the Attorney General about the planned effort to 'dispose' of Castro. More recently Houston disclosed that the briefing did not seem to surprise Kennedy. In fact he 'didn't seem very perturbed' about the plot, only about the CIA's use of organized crime. 'If you are going to have anything to do with the Mafia,' Kennedy said, 'you come see me first.'" (Time 8/4/1975) The meeting took place 5/1962. Hoover then wrote RFK a memo which was later found by the Rockefeller Commission; he voiced concern that Giancana could "blackmail" the government. "It was in the summer of 1962 that Robert Kennedy contacted Maj. Gen. Edward G. Lansdale and ordered him to begin work on a special CIA project to develop various operations for 'getting rid of' Fidel Castro. In an interview with the Washington Star, Lansdale emphasized that the Attorney General had not used the word 'assassination.' However, he added, there could be no doubt that 'the project for disposing of Castro envisioned the whole spectrum of plans from overthrowing the Cuban leader to assassinating him.'" Lansdale said he went to William Harvey to carry out RFK's instructions. (It Didn't Start with Watergate p85-87; 5/31/1975 Washington Star) Shortly after the first meeting of the Special Group Augmented, a memo written by George McManus (recently declassified), stated: "No time, money, effort - or manpower is to be spared. Yesterday...the President had indicated to him...that the final chapter had not been written - it's got to be done and will be done." (The Last Investigation 45) Shortly after the Bay of Pigs, JFK spoke publicly about a "new and deeper struggle" against Castro: "Cuba must not be abandoned to the Communists." Jonathan Kwitny: "There's no public record on whether he specifically ordered the murder of Fidel Castro...Kennedy's closest aides in those years have argued persuasively that he wasn't aware that during one period the CIA hired some Mafia bosses..." (Crimes of Patriots 24)
5/22/1961 MLK speaks at a mass rally at Ralph Abernathy's First Baptist Church in Montgomery while an angry mob surrounds the church and threatens violence.
5/22/1961 FBI memo from Rosen to Belmont discussed MLK; the memo noted that "King has not been investigated by the FBI." Hoover then wrote in the margin, "Why not?" (The Man and the Secrets 501)
5/23/1961 LBJ reports to Kennedy on his Asia trip; urges that US must aid Vietnam and Thailand or "pull back our defenses to San Francisco and a 'Fortress America' concept." JFK tried to reassure Diem by sending Vice President Lyndon Johnson in May 1961 to visit him along with other anti-Communist Asian allies who were dismayed by Kennedy's turn toward neutralism. Johnson's written report back to the president was a rebuke of his policy. Johnson described what he thought was the disastrous impact of the decision to neutralize Laos: "Country to country, the degree differs but Laos has created doubt and concern about intentions of the United States throughout Southeast Asia. No amount of success at Geneva can, of itself, erase this. The independent Asians do not wish to have their own status resolved in like manner in Geneva. "Leaders such as Diem, Chiang [Kai-Shek of Taiwan], Sarit [of Thailand], and Ayub [Khan of Pakistan] more or less accept that we are making 'the best of a bad bargain' at Geneva. Their charity extends no farther . . . "Our [Johnson's] mission arrested the decline of confidence in the United States. It did not-in my judgment-restore any confidence already lost. The leaders were as explicit, as courteous and courtly as men could be in making it clear that deeds must follow words-soon. "We didn't buy time-we were given it. "If these men I saw at your request were bankers, I would know-without bothering to ask-that there would be no further extensions on my note." Johnson then summed up for Kennedy a belligerent Cold War challenge to his policy that came not only from the anti-Communist allies whom LBJ had just visited but also from the Pentagon and from the vice president himself: "The fundamental decision required of the United States-and time is of the greatest importance-is whether we are to attempt to meet the challenge of Communist expansion now in Southeast Asia by a major effort in support of the forces of freedom in the area or throw in the towel. " (Pentagon Papers)
5/24/1961 LBJ said he arrived back in Washington on this day. (Vantage Point p54)
5/25/1961 JFK told Congress that "urgent national needs" required more spending for the military and a civil defense program. He also committed the US to "landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to earth" by the end of the decade. (Almanac of American History) Polls showed that most Americans opposed the idea because of the enormous cost involved.
5/25/1961 US embassy in Moscow receives a letter from Oswald (with nearly perfect grammar and no spelling errors). He again expresses the desire to be guaranteed that he will not be prosecuted upon his return, and also informs the Embassy that he now has a Russian wife. (H 16 705-7)
5/29/1961 A further measure by which JFK tried to keep the CIA from making foreign policy on the ground was his May 29, 1961, letter to each American ambassador abroad. The president wrote: "You are in charge of the entire U.S. Diplomatic Mission, and I expect you to supervise all its operations. The Mission includes not only the personnel of the Department of State and the Foreign Service, but also representatives of all other United States agencies." (Cited by Timothy N. Castle, At War in the Shadow of Vietnam: U. S. Military Aid to the Royal Lao Government, 1955- 1975 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), p. 54) That included, of course, the CIA, which Schlesinger notes was the particular target of JFK's letter. The Agency didn't like it. Its people were therefore pleased whenever Kennedy made a concession to their covert agenda, as he did in Laos to counter the Pathet Lao. That particular concession gave them the opportunity not only to strengthen General Phoumi's hand but also to encourage Phoumi to undercut the president's neutralist policy. Phoumi was happy to oblige.
5/2/1961 Decided - May 29, 1961 McGowan v. Maryland, 366 U.S. 420 (1961) was a United States Supreme Court case in which the court held that laws with religious origins are not unconstitutional if they have secular purpose. At the time of the case, the State of Maryland maintained laws which only permitted certain items, such as drugs, tobacco, newspapers and some foodstuffs, to be sold on Sundays. Seven employees of a department store in Anne Arundel County, Maryland were indicted for selling items in violation of Md. Ann. Code, Art. 27, Â§ 521, the afore-mentioned law. The Supeme Court was asked to consider whether the presence of such a law would be in violation of the Free Exercise clause of the First Amendment and the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
5/30/1961 JFK and Jackie left for a trip to Paris.
5/30/1961 Dominican Republic dictator Trujillo was assassinated by CIA-backed dissidents. His car was overtaken by gunmen in a Chevrolet, who blasted him with their small arms; the guns had been provided by US officials. The attack was led by Pedro Cedeno and Lt. Amado Garcia. Some theorized that the US was behind the killing, wishing to eliminate Trujillo and replace him with someone more acceptable before a revolution created another Castro. It is widely speculated that the CIA has provided weapons for the assassination, in hopes of helping to create a less reactionary government after the assassination. Their fears had arisen after the "revolutionary situation" that occurred in nearby Cuba. After his death, his son, Ramfi Trujillo, took over the dictatorship. He rounded up all those involved in the assassination and killed them all. However, Ramfi was soon exiled from the country.
5/31/1961 Gen. Walker's anti-Communist program, called "Pro-Blue," is discontinued by the Army.
5/31/1961 A young James Marshall (Jimi) Hendrix began his basic training at Ford Ord. He would later join the 101st Airborne as a paratrooper.
5/31-6/3/1961 JFK and Jackie were greetly by wildly enthusiastic Parisians. He met with Charles de Gaulle. The timing of President Kennedy's back strain "unfortunately corresponded with [his] planned first summit meeting with [the Soviet Union's leader, 1953-1964] Nikita Khrushchev," noted Hart. (18) The president's trip to Paris, Vienna, and London occurred between May 31 and June 7, 1961. "Kennedy made arrangements to have Dr. Travell and Dr. [Max] Jacobson travel to Europe as part of the presidential entourage and he was apparently administered one of Dr. Jacobson's injections prior to meeting with Mr. Khrushchev," wrote Hart. (19-21) Who was Dr. Max Jacobson? Dr. Max Jacobson was a New York physician "who had made a reputation for treating celebrities with pep pills,' or amphetamines, that helped combat depression and fatigue. Jacobson, whom patients called Dr. Feelgood,' administered back injections of painkillers and amphetamines that allowed Kennedy to stay off crutches, which he believed essential to project a picture of robust good health. All of this was kept secret," wrote Kennedy biographer Dallek. (22) Apparently, President Kennedy had been receiving injections from Dr. Jacobson as early as September 1960, administered before the Nixon-Kennedy debates. Even Drs. Janet Travell and Burkley during the president's trip to Europe in early June 1961 were unaware that "Jacobson flew on a chartered jet to Paris, where he continued giving the president back injections." (22) Dr. Burkley became increasingly concerned about President Kennedy's reliance on passive treatment (injections) for relief of his back pain. Dr. Burkley asked Dr. Travell to contact a new physician--physical medicine specialist Hans Kraus, M.D.--to evaluate and treat the president's current back problem. (18) She resisted, declared Dr. Burkley in a later interview. He continued, "I said if she did not call him personally I would call him. And at that point he was called, and from then on the President's exercise program was entirely under Dr. Kraus and Dr. Travell was instructed not to have anyto attempt to interfere in any way," averred Dr. Burkley. (18) Who was Dr. Kraus? Austrian native and avid outdoorsman Dr. Kraus (1906-1996) graduated from the University of Vienna Medical School in the 1920s, fled to the United States in 1938 in advance of the Hitler debacle, and became an American citizen in 1945. (23) His medical specialty covered physical medicine, rehabilitation, and physical therapy. Like Dr. Jacobson, Dr. Kraus became a physical therapist to celebrities. Dr. Burkley learned of Dr. Kraus from Dr. Eugene Cohen. (4) Who was Dr. Cohen? Dr. Cohen was an endocrinologist at New York Hospital. He had provided the endocrine care for Mr. Kennedy since January 1956 when then Senator Kennedy's usual endocrinologist, Dr. Ephraim Shorr, chief of the endocrinology service at New York Hospital, died suddenly of a heart attack at age 58 years. (4,24) Indeed, Dr. Shorr in 1955 had urged Dr. Travell to take charge of Senator Kennedy's care following his third failed back surgery and had personally conveyed the Senator, on crutches, to Dr. Travell's office in New York City in May 1955. (4) In November 1961, Dr. Cohen warned President Kennedy in a strongly worded letter about Dr. Max Jacobson's amphetamine-filled injections: You cannot be permitted to receive therapy from irresponsible doctors like M.J. [Dr. Max Jacobson] who by forms of stimulating injections offer some temporary help to neurotic or mentally ill individualsâ€¦this therapy conditions one's needs almost like a narcotic, is not for responsible individuals who at any split second may have to decide the fate of the universe. (25) Mrs. Evelyn Lincoln, the president's secretary, kept his files, which contained "a bill [showing] that Jacobson was seeing the president roughly once a week. Beyond that, the doctor gave favored patients doses that they could inject themselves. Many of his patients returned repeatedly delighted at the bounce they had in their steps when they left his office, but others ended up ravaged, emotionally destroyed when they tried to stop the injections," wrote Leamer. (26) Dr. Burkley secured additional space near the White House dispensary for the use of physiotherapy provided to the president by Dr. Kraus. (14) Dr. Burkley said, "It [the space for physiotherapy] was in the West basement at that time. We subsequently, in redoing the swimming pool area and the small area next to the swimming pool which had some gymnasium equipment, we established an area there were President Kennedy on a daily basis was very religious in his physical program [sic]." (14) Dr. Kraus started the president on "a regimen of aerobics, strengthening, and flexibility exercises and reduced Kennedy's reliance on procaine injections," stated Hart. "The exercises were carried out in the area of the White House swimming pool, which was refurbished at the expense of Kennedy's father in order to allow privacy. This shift toward active rehabilitation starting in October 1961 did apparently give Kennedy some pain relief, and he maintained the exercise regimen throughout the remainder of his life. (19)
Summer 1961: There are approximately 1,250 generals and admirals on active duty in all branches of the US military. "In the summer of 1961, irritation arose over irresponsible and unreasonable censorship of public speeches. High-ranking military officers expressed concern over changes made by the censors that did not seem to make sense, and for which they had received no explanation." By the fall of 1961 Sen. Strom Thurmond demanded an investigation. (The Pentagon, Clark Mollenhoff, 1967)
Late 6/1961 Oswald tells Marina that he wants to return to the US. (Historic Diary)
6/1961 Fortune magazine simultaneously criticized Kennedy for being insufficiently activist in foreign policy (i.e. not fully backing the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba) and all too activist in domestic policy. Luce's magazine then accused the President of having 'little understanding of the American political economic system', of pursuing policies that threatened to 'undermine a strong and free economy' and of attempting to implement controls which would 'erode away basic American liberties'. (Fortune, June 1961, 'Activism in the White House', pp. 117-18).
6/1961 Abraham Bolden joined the White House Secret Service detail in June 1961 . He experienced personally John Kennedy's concern for people. Kennedy never passed Bolden without speaking to him. He asked about him and his family, in such a way that Bolden knew he meant it. He engaged him in small talk about Chicago and its baseball teams. The president often introduced Bolden to his White House visitors. Bolden could also see in Kennedy's eyes a worry, a feeling that something was wrong around him. Abraham Bolden saw increasing evidence of the president's isolation and danger from the standpoint of security. Most of the Secret Service agents seemed to hate John Kennedy. They joked among themselves that if someone shot at him, they'd get out of the way. The agents' drunken after-hours behavior carried over into lax security for the president. Bolden refused to drink or play cards with them. The other agents made remarks about " niggers " in his presence. (Abraham Bolden, interview by James Douglass, June 16, 2001 . Also Fensterwald, " Case of Secret Service, " p. 41) As he had before in his life, Abraham Bolden spoke up. He complained to his superiors about the president's poor security. They did nothing. After forty days as a member of the White House detail, Bolden refused to take part any longer in a charade. He returned voluntarily to the Chicago office. He had demoted himself on principle from the highest position an African American had ever held in the Secret Service.
6/1961 RFK wrote a personal memo about the Bay of Pigs (RFK and his Times 477, 757): he estimated that it was about 4/12 he was informed about the plans, and he was briefed by Bissell. Bissell, the CIA and the JCS assured them that the chances of success were "extremely good," and RFK worried about what might happen if the Cuban exiles were brought back to the states without going through with the invasion. JFK wanted to use air power to support the invasion once it began to go badly, but Dean Rusk was opposed because the US had already pledged not to do so; RFK wasn't sure if air cover would help or not. He felt that poor communications was a big problem during the invasion. As part of the study team assigned to find out why the invasion failed, RFK decided that he and the President didn't know the people involved well enough to trust their judgment. In particular, he blamed the JCS for not anticipating the various military problems the invasion force would encounter. RFK also noted that "if it hadn't been for Cuba, we would have sent troops to Laos. We probably would have had them destroyed. Jack has said so himself...the only way really that we could win in Laos was drop the atomic bomb..."
6/3/1961 In 1961, State Agricultural Stabilization and Conservation official Henry Marshall was investigating a broad series of fraudulent government subsidies -- amounting to figures in the seven or eight digit range -- allotted to Billie Sol Estes, a close personal friend of Senate Majority Leader then Vice-President Lyndon B. Johnson. Marshall had uncovered a paper trail that was leading him closer and closer to Johnson himself. Someone (probably Malcolm Wallace) knocked Henry Marshall unconscious with a blunt object, fed the unconscious man carbon monoxide from a hose attached to Wallace's pick-up truck, then shot him five times with a bolt-action .22 caliber rifle and dumped him in a remote corner of Marshall's farm near Franklin, Texas. Justice of the Peace Lee Farmer pronounced the death a suicide and ordered Marshall buried without an autopsy -- over the protests of Marshall's widow. The verdict remained unchanged until 1984, when Billie Sol Estes, under a grant of immunity, told a grand jury that Wallace had been Marshall's killer, and that the order came from Vice-President Lyndon B. Johnson through White House aide Cliff Carter. Based on Estes' testimony and supporting evidence, the grand jury changed the earlier ruling of suicide to murder. Mac Wallace could not be indicted; he died in an automobile accident in Pittsburgh, Texas, on January 7, 1971.
6/3-4/1961: Summit between JFK and Khruschev at Vienna; little of substance agreed upon. After the summit, US News & World Report stated that Khruschev found JFK to be a "pushover." At one point, he recalled his "kitchen debate" with Nixon, who thought that a Miracle Kitchen would convert Russians to capitalism; Khrushchev said, "only Nixon could have thought of such nonsense." The only point of agreement was a "neutralist" coalition government in Laos; Khrushchev went out of his way to intimidate JFK, who said finally, 'It's going to be a cold winter.'" Khruschev was quoted as saying, "I think that I have taught that young man what fear is."At the June 3-4, 1961, summit meeting in Vienna, John Kennedy succeeded in negotiating with Nikita Khrushchev for their mutual support of a neutral and independent Laos under a government to be chosen by the Laotians themselves . (Stevenson, End of Nowhere, p . 1 54.) It was the only issue they could agree upon. Khrushchev's apparent indifference toward the deepening Cold War threat of nuclear war had shocked Kennedy. Kennedy had had to push Khrushchev at Vienna to get him to agree on Laos. At first Khrushchev taunted his American counterpart with Cold War history, saying Kennedy " knew very well that it had been the US government [under Eisenhower] which had overthrown Souvanna Phouma. " JFK conceded the point. He said, "Speaking frankly, US policy in that region has not always been wise." Nevertheless, he went on, the United States now wanted a Laos that would be as neutral and independent as Cambodia and Burma were. Khrushchev said that was his view as well. He then became as amused by the U.S. policy about-face on Laos as Kennedy's military and CIA advisers were upset by it. He said wryly to Kennedy, "You seem to have stated the Soviet policy and called it your own." Kennedy immediately ordered his representative at the Geneva Conference, Averell Harriman, to seize the time and resolve the Laos crisis peacefully. He phoned Harriman in Geneva and said bluntly, "Did you understand ? I want a negotiated settlement in Laos. I don't want to put troops in. " (Averell Harriman, interview by Charles A. Stevenson; cited in Stevenson, End of Nowhere, p. 154)
6/4/1961 A full-page ad in the Los Angeles Mirror-News ran, "The summit meeting has failed. What does that mean for you? A fantastic electronics boom. Billions of dollars, a healthy industry in Southern California employing 110,000 people."
6/5/1961 JFK, in a TV report to the nation, explained about the summit, "No new aims were stated in private that had not been stated in public on either side...Neither of us were there to dictate a settlement...no threats or ultimatums by either side." He had just met with Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev in Vienna . Late at night on the June 5, 1961, flight back to Washington, the weary president asked his secretary Evelyn Lincoln if she would please file the documents he had been working on. As she started to clear the table, Lincoln noticed a little slip of paper that had fallen on the floor. On it were two lines in Kennedy's handwriting, a favorite saying of his from Abraham Lincoln: "I know there is a God-and I see a storm coming; If he has a place for me, I believe that I am ready. " (Evelyn Lincoln, My Twelve Years with John F. Kennedy (New York: Bantam Books, 1966), p. 230.) The summit meeting with Khrushchev had deeply disturbed Kennedy. The revelation of a storm coming had occurred at the end of the meeting, as the two men faced each other across a table. Kennedy's gift to Khrushchev, a model of the USS Constitution, lay between them. Kennedy pointed out that the ship's cannons had been able to fire half a mile and kill a few people. But if he and Khrushchev failed to negotiate peace, the two of them could kill seventy million people in the opening exchange of a nuclear war. Kennedy looked at Khrushchev. Khrushchev gave him a blank stare, as if to say, "So what?" Kennedy was shocked at what he felt was his counterpart's lack of response. "There was no area of accommodation with him," he said later. (Hugh Sidney, Prelude)
6/6/1961 A memorandum from Evans to Alan Belmont, Assistant to the Director (FBI) dated June 6, 1961, stated: "We checked with CIA and ascertained that CIA had used Maheu as an intermediary in contacting Sam Giancana, the notorious Chicago hoodlum. This was in connection with anti-Castro activities. CIA, however, did not give any instructions to Maheu to use any technical installations. In connection with this information received from CIA concerning their attempted utilization of the hoodlum element, CIA requested this information be handled on a "need-to-know" basis. We are conducting a full investigation in this wiretap case requested by the Department and the field has been instructed to press this investigation vigorously. Accordingly, 'the Attorney General will be orally assured that we are following up vigorously and the results of our investigation will be furnished to the Department promptly."
6/9/1961 Life published a Gore Vidal interview with Barry Goldwater; "Well, I've known Bob Welch five, maybe six years...Of course all that stuff of his about Eisenhower being a Communist and so on was silly...Just the other day I sent somebody over to the Library of Congress to get me the bylaws of the Birch Society, and I was disturbed about this dictatorial thing, how he personally can chuck people out any time he pleases." Asked about JFK, Goldwater said, "I like him. Of course we disagree on a lot of things...I told Jack Kennedy: you could be president for life if you'd just lift some of those taxes so that businessmen - and I know hundreds of 'em - would have some incentive...to really start producing....Conservatism is pretty divided. Suppose I started a party. Then somebody would come along and say, 'Well, look here, you're not my kind of conservative'...That's the trouble with the conservatives. They've got this all-or-nothing attitude...A political party can only start around a strong individual."
6/9/1961 Diem asks for US advisers to increase the ARVN by 100,000 men. Diem sent Kennedy a June 9 letter with a more modest request, for "selected elements of the American Armed Forces to establish training centers for the Vietnamese Armed Forces." As the Pentagon Papers point out in this connection, " the crucial issue, of course, was whether Americans would be sent to Vietnam in the form of organized combat units, capable of, if not explicitly intended for conducting combat operations. " Kennedy would agree to send military support to Diem, such as U.S. advisers and helicopters. However, no matter what pressures were put upon him, he would always refuse to send "American units capable of independent combat against the guerrillas." The author of this section of the Pentagon Papers, Daniel Ellsberg, puzzled over why Kennedy took such a stand. Why wouldn't John F. Kennedy send combat units to Vietnam? The focus of Ellsberg's question in his Pentagon Papers analysis was the fall of 1961, when Kennedy had advisers on all sides urging him to send U.S. troops before it was too late to stop a Viet Cong victory. The pressure on the president began to build in late summer.
6/12/1961 Gen. Walker was reprimanded by the Army for "taking injudicious actions and for making derogatory public statements about prominent Americans while in command of the 24th Infantry Division in Germany." His planned assignment to command of VIII Corps in Texas is changed to assistant chief of staff for training and operations in Hawaii.
6/12/1961 California Senate's Fact-Finding Subcommittee on Un-American Activities charges in a report that UC President Kerr "had opened the campus gates to communists." (San Fran Chronicle 6/9/02)
6/13/1961 The Cuba study group led by Max Taylor delivered its report to JFK. Concluding that there is "no long term living with Castro as a neighbor" and that Cuban subversion "constitutes a real menace" to Latin American nations, Taylor calls for the creation of a new program of action against Cuba, possibly employing the full range of political, military, economic, and psychological tactics.
6/15/1961 A June 15, 1961 dispatch from the Canadian Embassy in Havana in which the ambassador characterizes the Bay of Pigs invasion as "a decisive point-of-no-return for the Castro regime," that "substantiated the Government's warnings against imperialist aggression from the United States."
6/16/1961 Discoverer 25 was launched; this satellite carried samples of various minerals to see how they would be affected in space.
6/16/1961 JFK agrees that US advisers will directly train and supervise Vietnamese troops.
6/18/1961 NY Times reported, "The Pentagon is having its troubles with rightwingers in uniform. A number of officers of high and middle rank are indoctrinating their commands and the civilian population near their bases with political theories resembling those of the John Birch Society. They are also holding up to criticism and ridicule some official policies of the US Government. The most conspicuous example of some of these officers is Maj. Gen. Edwin A. Walker..."
6/19/1961Supreme Court rules that illegal evidence cannot be used in prosecuting state court cases. (Almanac of American History)
6/19/1961 Torcaso v. Watkins, 367 U.S. 488 (1961) was a United States Supreme Court case in which the court reaffirmed that the US Constitution prohibited the states from requiring any kind of religious test for public office.
6/22/1961 President Kennedy Develops Upper Respiratory Tract Infection. Two weeks after President Kennedy returned from his European tour, Dr. Travell participated in a news conference to report on an upper respiratory infection that kept the president in bed for a day. She told the assembled press corps that she had called Dr. George Burkley to assist her at the White House with the president. He had a temperature of 101 degrees Fahrenheit, which rose to 101.6 degrees five hours later. Dr. Travel obtained a throat culture and blood tests, diagnosed a "one-or-two days virus," and gave the president an intramuscular injection of penicillin and started him on oral tetracycline at about 2 a.m. She also called Dr. Preston Wade, because she "didn't know exactly what was brewing" (so she told the reporters). Who was Dr. Preston Wade? Dr. Preston A. Wade was a surgeon at New York Hospital who irrigated and debrided the soft tissue abscess in Mr. Kennedy's midline operative scar in mid-September 1957. Dr. Travell had diagnosed and hospitalized Mr. Kennedy (Senator John F. Kennedy at that time) for the surgical procedure performed by Dr. Wade. Mr. Kennedy's midline operative scar was the result of a (failed) lumbar spine fusion procedure performed at another hospital in 1954. Drainage of the abscess was accomplished under general anesthesia and bacteriologic studies, directed by Dr. David E. Rogers, grew Staphylococcus aureus bacteria. The search for tuberculosis bacilli (though guinea pig inoculation) was negative. (28x) Dr. Travell subsequently had continued to rely on Dr. Wade's expertise in the management of the president's back. His trip to evaluate the president at the White House during his fever episode on June 22, 1961 was likely to rule out a recurrent abscess as the cause of the president's fever, which indeed was his finding. (14,27) Thus, when Dr. Travell told the press she had asked Dr. Wade to evaluate the president, the press became very interested about her linking the president's fever and his back. The press had not been privy to the president's previously infected back episode. (27) Dr. Travell tried to smooth this over. Another reporter asked if the president was taking corticosteroids. Dr. Travell answered, yes; the president was taking corticosteroids at the present time. The reporter followed up, "Well, how often, doctor?" She answered, "Well, I would like to say that the doses that are given from time to time are minimum, and in the present fever and viral infection, we would step it up a little bit, and I think this is something that is all in the textbooks." Another reporter then asked, "Corticosteroids are used for what, in the President's case?" Dr. Travell answered "mild adrenal insufficiency. There has never been any other statement on this matter." (27) Another reporter asked whether the president had a history of viral infections: "Is he prone to this sort of thing?" Dr. Travell answered, "I don't think he had had themhe was, years back, but he has been very free of them in the last four or five years." (27) The press seemed appreciative of Dr. Travell's candor and published a flurry of stories on Kennedy's June 1961 illness and recovery, but Dr. Travell never participated in another press conference while Kennedy was president. Neither did Dr. Burkley.
6/27/1961 After a Newsweek story about US planning in Germany, RFK ordered the FBI to investigate where the reporter, Lloyd Norman, got the information. The FBI wiretapped the reporter's phone.
6/28/1961 Chairman Khrushchev has compared the United States to a worn-out runner living on its past performance and stated that the Soviet Union would out-produce the United States by 1970. Without wishing to trade hyperbole with the chairman, I do suggest that he reminds me of the tiger hunter who picked a place on the wall to hang the tiger's skin long before he has caught the tiger. This tiger has other ideas...." - Presidential news conference Washington, D.C.
6/28/1961 NSAM 55 Signed by President Kennedy and sent to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Its subject was "Relations of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to the President in Cold War Operations." "I wish to inform the Joint Chiefs of Staff as follows with regard to my views of their relations to me in Cold War Operations: a. I regard the Joint Chiefs of Staff as my principal military advisor responsible both for initiating advice to me and for responding to requests for advice. I expect their advice to come to me direct and unfiltered. b. The Joint Chiefs of Staff have a responsibility for the defense of the nation in the Cold War similar to that which they have in conventional hostilities. They should know the military and paramilitary forces and resources available to the Department of Defense, verify their readiness, report on their adequacy, and make appropriate recommendations for their expansion and improvement. I look to the Chiefs to contribute dynamic and imaginative leadership in contributing to the success of the military and paramilitary aspects of Cold War programs. c. I expect the Joint Chiefs of Staff to present the military viewpoint in governmental councils in such a way as to assure that the military factors are clearly understood before decisions are reached. When only the Chairman or a single Chief is present, that officer must represent the Chiefs as a body, taking such preliminary and subsequent actions as may be necessary to assure that he does in fact represent the corporate judgment of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. d. While I look to the Chiefs to present the military factor without reserve or hesitation, I regard them to be more than military men and expect their help in fitting military requirements into the overall context of any situation, recognizing that the most difficult problem in Government is to combine all assets in a unified, effective pattern. cc. Secretary of Defense General Taylor" Fletcher Prouty would later say that this NSAM infuriated the CIA because it basically stripped away its war-making capability. (Plausible Denial 100)
6/28/1961 NSAM 56 from McGeorge Bundy to the Secretary of Defense. Subject: "Evaluation of Paramilitary Requirements." "The President has approved the following paragraph: 'It is important that we anticipate now our possible future requirements in the field of unconventional warfare and paramilitary operations. A first step would be to inventory the paramilitary assets we have in the United States Armed Forces, consider various areas in the world where the implementation of our policy may require indigenous paramilitary forces, and thus arrive at a determination of the goals which we should set in this field. Having determined the assets and the possible requirements, it would then become a matter of developing a plan to meet the deficit.' The President requests that the Secretary of Defense, in coordination with the Department of State, and the CIA, make such an estimate of requirements and recommend ways and means to meet these requirements. cc Secretary of State; Director, CIA; General Maxwell Taylor."
6/28/1961 NSAM 57 "TO: The Secretary of State, The Secretary of Defense, The Director, CIA The President has approved the following recommendation: The Special Group (5412 Committee) will perform the functions assigned in the recommendation to the Strategic Resources Group. - RESPONSIBILITY FOR PARAMILITARY OPERATIONS For the purpose of this study, a paramilitary operation is considered to be one which by its tactics and its requirements in military-type personnel, equipment and training approximates a conventional military operation. It may be undertaken in support of an existing government friendly to the U.S. or in support of a rebel group seeking to overthrow a government hostile to us. The U.S. may render assistance to such operations overtly, covertly or by a combination of both methods. In size these operations may vary from the infiltration of a squad of guerrillas to a military operation such as the Cuban invasion. The small operations will often fall completely within the normal capability of one agency; the large ones may affect State, Defense, CIA, USIA and possibly other departments and agencies. 2. In order to conduct paramilitary operations with maximum effectiveness and flexibility within the context of the Cold War, it is recommended that current directives and procedures be modified to affect the following: a. Any proposed paramilitary operation in the concept stage will be presented to the Strategic Resources Group for initial consideration and for approval as necessary by the President. thereafter, the SRG will assign primary responsibility for planning, for interdepartmental coordination and for execution to the Task Force, department or individual best qualified to carry forward the operation to success, and will indicate supporting responsibilities. Under this principle, the Department of Defense will normally receive responsibility for overt paramilitary operations. Where such an operation is to be wholly covert or disavowable, it may be assigned to CIA, provided that it is within the normal capabilities of the agency. Any large paramilitary operation wholly or partly covert which requires significant numbers of militarily trained personnel, amounts of military equipment which exceed normal CIA-controlled stocks and/or military experience of a kind and level peculiar to the Armed Services is properly the primary responsibility of the Department of Defense with the CIA in a supporting role."" Fletcher Prouty first described this NSAM in his book, The Secret Team, before it had been declassified." He tried to redefine the CIA's mandate and to reduce its power in his National Security Action Memoranda (NSAMs ) 55 and 57, which took military-type operations out of the hands of the CIA. Kennedy's NSAM 55 informed the Joint Chiefs of Staff that it was they (not the CIA) who were his principal military advisers in peacetime as well as wartime. Air Force Colonel L. Fletcher Prouty, who at the time was in charge of providing military support for the CIA's clandestine operations, described the impact of NSAM 55 addressed to General Lyman Lemnitzer, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs: " I can't overemphasize the shock-not simply the words-that procedure caused in Washington: to the Secretary of State, to the Secretary of Defense, and particularly to the Director of Central Intelligence. Because Allen Dulles, who was still the Director, had just lived through the shambles of the Bay of Pigs and now he finds out that what Kennedy does as a result of all this is to say that, 'you, General Lemnitzer, are to be my Advisor'. In other words, I'm not going to depend on Allen Dulles and the CIA. Historians have glossed over that or don't know about it. " JFK also "moved quietly," as Schlesinger put it, "to cut the CIA budget in 1962 and again in 1963, aiming at a 20 per cent reduction by 1966." (Schlesinger, Thousand Days, p . 428)
6/30/1961 JFK signed the Housing Act of 1961. (Almanac of American History)
6/30/1961 St Louis Globe Democrat reported that "Security investigations were waived on President Kennedy's orders for appointees to over 200 highly sensitive State Department positions."

**Dawn Meredith** · 01-04-2014, 02:18 PM

Magda Hassan Wrote:
Marlene Zenker Wrote:Truly incredible work, thank you so much Tracy.
Incredible indeed! Good work Tracy and thank you!

Wow Tracy I just now saw this. Great work.
This will be used by many in further research. You rock.
Dawn

Tracy Riddle · 03-04-2014, 01:38 AM

Thanks, Dawn, I hope everyone finds it useful.

7/1961 Defense Dept order went out restricting the right of military officers to express political opinions in public and participate in "information programs" critical of government policies. Strom Thurmond attacked it as an "attempt to intimidate the leaders of the United States Armed Forces and prevent them from informing their troops about the exact nature of the Communist menace."
7/1961 Dave Ferrie spoke at a meeting of the New Orleans chapter of the Military Order of World Wars and was asked to stop his ranting when he became "too critical of President Kennedy." (HSCA 10 107). Group members clearly recalled (and reported to the FBI) Ferrie boasting of his links to the CIA and how he had trained pilots in Guatemala for the Bay of Pigs. (Plot or Politics p46).
7/1961 The Milgram experiment on obedience to authority figures was a series of social psychology experiments conducted by Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram, which measured the willingness of study participants to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform acts that conflicted with their personal conscience. Milgram first described his research in 1963 in an article published in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology,[1] and later discussed his findings in greater depth in his 1974 book, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View. The experiments began in July 1961, three months after the start of the trial of German Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. Milgram devised his psychological study to answer the question: "Was it that Eichmann and his accomplices in the Holocaust had mutual intent, in at least with regard to the goals of the Holocaust?" In other words, "Was there a mutual sense of morality among those involved?" Milgram's testing suggested that it could have been that the millions of accomplices were merely following orders, despite violating their deepest moral beliefs.
7/1/1961 Gen. Maxwell Taylor became JFK's special military representative.
7/1/1961 In Boise, ID, the first community air raid shelter was built. The shelter had a capacity of 1,000 people and family memberships sold for $100.
7/2/1961 Hanoi captures at least three members of Lansdale's US-trained First Observation Group when their C-47 plane goes down.
7/2/1961 The right-wing Manion Forum radio show read a letter from the father of two Cuban exiles lost in the invasion: "all of us who once believed in the greatness of the United States feel that they and all of us have been the victims of gross, high official treason." (None Dare Call it Treason p60)
7/2/1961 South Korea: Maj. Gen. Park Chungee is named chairman of the ruling junta, the Supreme Council for National Reconstruction.
7/2/1961 Author Ernest Hemingway committed suicide.
7/2/1961 Jackie Robinson, who broke the color line in professional baseball, is the first African-American inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, in Cooperstown, N.Y.
7/3/1961 The FBI in Washington opened a new file on Oswald under the slug line 105 ("internal security"). John W. Fain was the FBI Fort Worth agent in charge of Oswald's file. (McKnight)
7/7/1961 The U.S. was far ahead in the arms race. Yet the military continued to press for a rapid build-up of strategic missiles. Curtis LeMay had asked for at least 2,400 Minutemen; Gen. Thomas Power of the Strategic Air Command had asked for 10,000. All were to be unleashed in a single paroxysm of mass annihilation, known as SIOP, the Single Integrated Operating Plan. SIOP was a recipe for blowing up the world, whether in a first or a second strike. As McGeorge Bundy wrote to the President on July 7, 1961: "...All agree that the current strategic war plan is dangerously rigid and, if continued without amendment, may leave you with very little choice as to how you face the moment of thermonuclear truth. We believe that you may want to raise this question with Bob McNamara in order to have a prompt review and new orders if necessary. In essence, the current plan calls for shooting off everything we have in one shot, and is so constructed as to make any more flexible course very difficult." (quoted in Kaplan, 297) During that summer of 1961, the Defense Secretary ordered an overhaul of SIOP carried out by RAND analysts (including Daniel Ellsberg) and quickly approved by the JCS. (Bobbitt, 48) Kennedy and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara eventually imposed a limit of 1,000 Minuteman missiles, angering the Chiefs. Kennedy also launched efforts to gain operational control of the nuclear force, then far from being securely concentrated in the President's hands.
7/7/1961 James Hoffa was reelected president of the Teamsters union overwhelmingly at their convention in Miami Beach.
7/8/1961 A Klan meeting was held in Indian Springs, Georgia, with representatives of several separate organizations attending. A new group, the United Klans of America (UKA) was formed, and Alabama's Robert Shelton was selected as Imperial Wizard. Imperial Headquarters was transferred from Atlanta to Tuscaloosa, Alabama.
7/8/1961 Oswald arrived at the Moscow embassy; in his diary he said he took a plane from Minsk. It was a Saturday, and he was asked to return on Monday.
7/8/1961 Khrushchev announced that the USSR would postpone its military cutbacks.
7/9/1961 AP reported that Billy Graham repudiated the idea that America's pulpits were filled with communists, noting that he had never met a single minister in the US whom he suspected of being a communist.
7/9/1961 Oswald calls Marina and tells her to come to Moscow.
7/10/1961 JFK wrote a memo to Robert F. Woodward in the State Dept about the recent turmoil in the DR. "Do we have any evidence of Communist activity or Castro activity in the Dominican Republic today? Have they infiltrated the 'popular Dominican movement?'...I also said that if we could not have a democracy with some hope of survival, I would rather continue the present situation than to have a Castro dictatorship...we want to make sure than in attempting to secure democracy we don't end up with a Castro Communist island."
7/10/1961 Oswald returned to the embassy. Marina then joined him in Moscow. He met with Synder again, and this time Synder found him remorseful. Oswald falsely told him that he had not applied for Soviet citizenship, had not made negative statements about the US, and was not a member of a trade union. He told Synder also that he had never given any secrets to the KGB and they had never interrogated him. Snyder had him fill out an application for renewing his passport (his was going to expire 9/10/1961). He gave him back his passport, and stamped it: "This passport is valid only for direct travel to the United States." (CE 946) He filled out two separate passport applications, and it appears that on one that he had indicated that he had committed an act or acts which might expatriate him or make him ineligible for renewal. (H 5 286; WR 755-57; Accessories After the Fact 336-7) The US Embassy in Moscow interviewed the Oswalds; they recommended that the State Dept rule that Oswald had not expatriated himself, and that Marina should get a visa to enter the US.
7/11/1961 INS ruled that Carlos Marcello was an undesirable alien and once again ordered him to be deported.
7/11/1961 Dean Rusk memo about Oswald to US Embassy in Moscow.
7/11/1961 Motorcade in Arrival Ceremonies for Muhammad Ayub Khan, President of Pakistan 11 July 1961. In open car (Lincoln Continental with bubble top): Secret Service agent William Greer (driving); Military Aide to the President General Chester V. Clifton (front seat, center); Secret Service Agent Gerald "Jerry" Behn (front seat, right; mostly hidden); President Mohammad Ayub Khan (standing); President John F. Kennedy. Pennsylvania Avenue and 14th Street, Washington, D.C.
7/11/1961 Lee and Marina appeared at the Embassy. She filled out paperwork to obtain an entrance visa to the US. Marina told the Embassy that she had never been a member of Komsomol (Communist youth organization); this was supposedly at Lee's insistence. (Marina and Lee 135-6) This denial was later found to be false. Gerald Posner says that even if she had admitted it, "it was not an automatic disqualification, as some Russian wives of American citizens had previously been admitted to the US although they were Komsomol members." (Case Closed 69; H 5 321)
7/11/1961 Richard Snyder wrote the State Dept: "Twenty months of realities of life in the Soviet Union have clearly had a maturing effect on Oswald. He stated frankly that he had learned a hard lesson the hard way and that he had been completely relieved of his illusions about the Soviet Union, at the same time that he acquired a new understanding and appreciation of the United States and the meaning of freedom. Much of the arrogance and bravado which characterized him on his first visit to the Embassy appears to have left him." (CE 935) The letter also said that Oswald denied giving any secrets to the Russians or doing any propaganda work for them.
7/13/1961 Dallas Morning News reported that the administration had lent Poland $2.5 million to buy a US-made steel finishing plant.
7/14/1961 In The Worker, Gus Hall commented, "it would be a serious mistake to consider the Kennedy administration as embarked at present on the fascist road."
7/14/1961 Letter to Robert Oswald said that Lee was doing everything he could to get out of the USSR. (CE 301) Lee and Marina returned to Minsk on this day and began trying to get Soviet authorities to let them leave. Marina was pressured to change her mind.
7/15/1961 Oswald wrote to the Embassy that "there have been some unusual and crude attempts on my wife at her place of work...Then there followed the usual, 'enemy of the people' meeting, in which...she was condemned and her friends at work warned against speaking with her." (7/15 and 10/4/1961 letters, CE 115, CE 1122) He also stated that "as per instructions I am writing to inform you of the process and progress of our visas." In his diary that day he wrote that he was upset Marina had received a "strong browbeating." Marina recalled that it took Oswald a month to fill out the twenty forms without any errors.
7/16/1961 In a fierce battle, 169 guerillas are killed by South Vietnamese troops in the Plain of Jars marsh are 80 miles west of Saigon.
7/19/1961 JFK told reporters he defended the right of the Freedom Riders to travel anywhere in the country: "Whether we agree with the purpose for which they travel, those rights stand - providing they are exercised in a peaceful way."
7/19/1961 "At a Georgetown dinner party recently, the wife of a leading senator sat next to Gen. Curtis LeMay, chief of staff of the Air Force. He told her a nuclear war was inevitable. It would begin in December and be all over by the first of the year. In that interval, every major American city -- Washington, New York, Philadelphia, Detroit, Chicago, Los Angeles -- would be reduced to rubble. Similarly, the principal cities of the Soviet Union would be destroyed. The lady, as she tells it, asked if there were any place where she could take her children and grandchildren to safety; the general would, of course, at the first alert be inside the top-secret underground hideout near Washington from which the retaliatory strike would be directed. He told her that certain unpopulated areas in the far west would be safest." --Marquis Childs, nationally syndicated columnist, Washington Post, 19 July 1961
7/20/1961 At a National Security Council Meeting, the Joint Chiefs of Staff's Gen. Lemnitzer and CIA director Allen Dulles present a plan for a preemptive nuclear attack on the Soviet Union "in late 1963, preceded by a period of heightened tensions." President Kennedy walks out of the meeting, saying to Secretary of State Dean Rusk, "And we call ourselves the human race." (Brothers, Talbott) Arthur Schlesinger's Robert Kennedy and His Times gives this account: "...Kennedy received the Net Evaluation, an annual doomsday briefing analyzing the chances of nuclear war. An Air Force General presented it, said Roswell Gilpatric, the deputy secretary of defense, "as though it were for a kindergarten class.. Finally Kennedy got up and walked right out in the middle of it, and that was the end of it. We never had another one." (p. 483) McGeorge Bundy evidently refers to the same meeting in this passage: "In the summer of 1961 [Kennedy] went through a formal briefing on the net assessment of a general nuclear war between the two superpowers, and he expressed his own reaction to Dean Rusk as they walked from the cabinet room to the Oval Office for a private meeting on other subjects: "And we call ourselves the human race." (p. 354) (Dean Rusk's memoirs repeat Kennedy's remark, though they place the meeting "shortly after our assuming office." Richard Reeves, for his part, does not mention the July meeting, and attributes Kennedy's remark to a later briefing in September, 1961.) Numerous other apparent accounts of the meeting exist, though they do not refer to it by name or date. All agree on Kennedy's reaction. But none reveal what was actually discussed. Theodore Sorenson's Kennedy, published only four years later, presents an understandably benign version: "That briefing confirmed, however, the harsh facts [Kennedy] already knew: (1) that neither the Soviet Union nor the United States could 'win' a nuclear war in any rational sense of the word; (2) that, except to deter an all-out Soviet attack, our threat of 'massive retaliation' to every Communist move was no longer credible, now that it invited our own destruction; and (3) that a policy of 'pre-emptive first strike' or 'preventive war' was no longer open to either side, inasmuch as even a surprise missile attack would trigger, before those missiles reached their targets, a devastating retaliation that neither country could risk or accept." (p. 513) Unfortunately, the critical third point was not yet true. As UnderSecretary of State Roger Hilsman wrote in 1967: "As the intelligence community looked at their estimates in 1958, 1959, and 1960, and even through the first half of 1961, they saw a missile gap developing that would come to a peak about 1963." (p. 162) What Hilsman does not say explicitly is that the estimated missile gap was in America's favor. The Soviets had virtually no operational ICBMs in 1961, a fact known to American intelligence at least by the end of 1960. And it appears the Russians did not solve their fundamental technical problem, namely building a hydrogen bomb small enough to be carried by a missile of manageable size, until years later. (Sorenson, 524; Bobbitt, 61).Dean Rusk describes the meeting as an "awesome experience" in his memoirs, As I Saw It, published in 1990. "President Kennedy clearly understood what nuclear war meant and was appalled by it. In our many talks together, he never worried about the threat of assassination, but he occasionally brooded over whether it would be his fate to push the nuclear button... If any of us had doubts, that 1961 briefing convinced us that a nuclear war must never be fought. Consequently, throughout the Kennedy and Johnson years we worked to establish a stable deterrent..." (p. 246-7)
7/20/1961 The memorandum reproduced here was written for Vice President Lyndon Johnson, who did not attend the meeting, by Colonel Howard Burris, his military aide. TOP SECRET EYES ONLY (Declassified: June, 1993) Notes on National Security Council Meeting July 20, 1961 General Hickey, Chairman of the Net Evaluation Subcommittee, presented the annual report of his group. General Lemnitzer stated that the assumption of this year's study was a surprise attack in late 1963, preceded by a period of heightened tensions. After the presentation by General Hickey and by the various members of the Subcommittee, the President asked if there had ever been made an assessment of damage results to the U.S.S.R which would be incurred by a preemptive attack. General Lemnitzer stated that such studies had been made and that he would bring them over and discuss them personally with the President. In recalling General Hickey's opening statement that these studies have been made since 1957, the President asked for an appraisal of the trend in the effectiveness of the attack. General Lemnitzer replied that he would also discuss this with the President. Since the basic assumption of this year's presentation was an attack in late 1963, the President asked about probable effects in the winter of 1962. Mr. Dulles observed that the attack would be much less effective since there would be considerably fewer missiles involved. General Lemnitzer added a word of caution about accepting the precise findings of the Committee since these findings were based upon certain assumptions which themselves might not be valid. The President posed the question as to the period of time necessary for citizens to remain in shelters following an attack. A member of the Subcommittee replied that no specific period of time could be cited due to the variables involved, but generally speaking, a period of two weeks should be expected. The President directed that no member in attendance at the meeting disclose even the subject of the meeting.
7/21/1961 UPI story by David Burnham reported "Study Asserts Military Rightists Raise Obstacles to Kennedy Program."
7/21/1961 Nuclear conflict was very much in the air that week. Another document of the time indicates the directions Kennedy's nuclear thinking was actually taking - quite the Cold Warrior, but at the same time far removed from pre-emptive strikes and the inflexible all-out attack envisioned by the Joint Chiefs. This is a paper entitled "Nuclear Strategy in the Berlin Crisis," by the economist Thomas C. Schelling, which was sent to Hyannis Port over the weekend of July 21, 1961 and which, as Bundy noted, made a "deep impression" on the President. In it Schelling presented arguments for a capability, which did not then exist, to wage limited nuclear war: "the role of nuclears in Europe should not be to win a grand nuclear campaign, but to pose a higher level of risk to the enemy. The important thing in limited nuclear war is to impress the Soviet leadership with the risk of general war - a war that may occur whether we or they intend it or not....We should plan for a war of nerve, of demonstration, and of bargaining, not of tactical target destruction." (Foreign Relations, XIV, 170). Schelling also advocated centralization of the control of weapons in the hands of the President so as to "permit deliberate, discriminating, selective use for dangerous nuclear bargaining. This means preventing any use, by anyone, not specifically authorized as part of the nuclear bargaining plan...This is a controlled strategic exchange." (op. cit., 172) Schelling's paper thus called attention to a key concern: the diffuse character of nuclear command and control in 1961 did not assure that the President in fact enjoyed the full authority over the bomb which most Americans assumed to be the case. Establishing such control became a priority for Kennedy in the months that followed. (Desmond Ball, 193).
7/21/1961 Mercury 4 mission: Liberty Bell 7 sub-orbital flight; the capsule splashed down in the Atlantic, and astronaut Capt. Virgil "Gus" Grissom escaped before it sank. He was picked up by the carrier Randolph.
7/21/1961 TIME: "Death to the imperialist!" shouted Iraq's General Abdul Karim Kassem. "Return Kuwait to its homeland!" Sprinting from speech to speech on the third anniversary of his revolutionary regime, volatile Kassem repeated last week that he would not use force to "liberate" Kuwaitand in the next breath threatened force against Britain. "We shall launch a bitter war against the British if they do not heed right and abandon oppression!" he told the crowds after reviewing a 2Â½-hour parade of troops and weapons in Baghdad's Liberation Square. For all his brave talk, Kassem was in a tight corner. Britain announced that it was withdrawing 2,000 of the 5,000 troops it had rushed to defend Kuwait against Kassem, and Kuwait emphasized its eagerness to speed the evacuation. But in a barbed memorandum issued after a hurried visit to Nasser, the Kuwaitis declared that they would not ask the British to leave until either 1) Kassem drops all claims on their land, or 2) other Arab countries provide a police force of their own to replace the British, and themselves guarantee Kuwait's independence. The plan for an all-Arab force in Kuwait, on which Britain and the U.A.R. found themselves in rare agreement, would put Kassem in the ticklish position of opposing his fellow Arab Leaguers. At the start of his mammoth, six-day anniversary celebration, Kassem was plainly in no mood to back down. He flourished a note in which, he claimed, his oil-rich neighbor had offered him $112 million a year if he would drop his claims and guarantee Kuwait's independence. Rejecting the offer, Kassem snorted: "The issue is not a matter of money, oil or bribes, but of a holy land." He added: "Anyway, Iraq is rich." But he had not solved the dilemma he had talked himself into. As he put it with inadvertent candor: "I don't want to be the joke of the world, and I don't want to be thought of as another Hitler swallowing up people."
7/24/1961 A Cuban-born resident of the US hijacks a passenger plane on a Miami-Tampa flight, and forces the pilot to fly to Havana.
7/25/1961 JFK, in a major television speech on the crisis in Berlin, calls for additional $3.5 billion for defense and additional reserve troops, increasing draft calls, and recommending the construction of fallout shelters. "We cannot and will not permit the Communists to drive us out of Berlin, either gradually or by force" Yet Kennedy also stressed the dangers: "miscommunication could rain down more devastation in several hours than has been wrought in all the wars of human history" He asked for increased military appropriations and called out 150,000 reserve personnel. But he did not engage the Soviets. The wall was allowed to remain intact when constructed in August of 1961, a symbolic column of soldiers was sent through to West Berlin, and a fallout shelter program was undertaken in the United States. With the Burris memorandum, the reasoning behind the fallout shelter program now begins to fall into place. As a civil defense measure against a Soviet nuclear attack, the flimsy cinderblock shelters Americans were told to build were absurd. But they could indeed protect those in them, for a couple of weeks, from radiation drifting thousands of miles after a U.S. pre-emptive strike on the Soviet Union. It is known that Kennedy later regretted this program.
7/26/1961 Sen. Thurmond defended the anti-Communist views of the military in a speech before the Senate: "The military officers...are charged with defending our country from all enemies, foreign and domestic...the military leader must know the enemy in order to defend our country against him....There can be no truthful denial that our country and its leaders have, on many occasions in the past, accepted the most thinly-veiled Communist fronts for whatever they purported themselves to be."
7/26/1961 Washington Post Interview with Secret Service chief U.E. Baughman: "I will say emphatically that there is no Mafia in this country and no national crime syndicate. Why don't those who talk about the Mafia name its leader or leaders? There has been no Mafia in this country for at least 40 years. Now about a national crime syndicate: I say there is no such thing, and I say it not simply as a personal judgment but on the basis of talks with other enforcement officials."
7/26/1961 Memo for the Sec of State, JFK wrote on the Dominican Republic: "The CIA had a report that the Balaguer [faction] seemed distraught as they were counting on us to put pressure on Trujillo [brother of the slain dictator, whom Balaguer wanted extradited]. Should we asked Bob Murphy to go down there for a couple of days and talk to the powers that be and make a report on his findings?"
7/26/1961 The Sandinista guerilla force was formed to fight against the Somoza family rule in Nicaragua; it was named after 1920s rebel leader Augusto Sandino, supported by Cuba, and based in Honduras.
7/29/1961 Goldwater, in a speech to the American Legion, criticized "the repeated and growing attacks being made on our military leaders, and to the strenuous efforts being made to muzzle them and prevent them from telling their troops and the American people some of the facts which they should know...This is no pink tea we are engaged in - it is a grim battle to the death."
Late July 1961 it was disclosed that Sen. Fulbright (D-Arkansas) had written a memo earlier in the year to the administration: "Fundamentally, it is believed that the American people have little, if any, need to be alerted to the menace of the cold war...the principal problem of leadership will be...to restrain the desire of the people to hit the communists with everything we've got, particularly if there are more Cubas or Laos..." This month, Sen. Fulbright, "noting the activities of General Edwin Walker, called for an investigation of the Institute for American Strategy, the Richardson Foundation, the National War College, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff all for subversive activity. Fulbright compared the mentality of some US military men to that of the OAS (Secret Army Organization) in Algeriaâ€¦" (Webster Tarpley, Synthetic Terror) The Fulbright Memorandum was drafted in July 1961 as a personal communication between the Senate and the Secretary of Defense, who was Robert McNamara.[2] Entitled "Propaganda Activities of Military Personnel Directed at the Public," the memorandum began by noting that a 1958 National Security Council directive had made it the policy of the United States "to make use of military personnel and facilities to arouse the public to the menace of the Cold War." Fulbright reported that private organizations were preparing material that was then distributed by the military, material which was contrary to the President's policies. He noted that the actual programs being carried out under the 1958 directive "made use of extremely radical right-wing speakers and/or materials, with the probable net result of condemning foreign and domestic policies of the administration in the public mind." Fulbright's allusion to a military coup, came as follows: "Perhaps it is farfetched to call forth the revolt of the French generals as an example of the ultimate danger. Nevertheless, military officers, French or American, have some common characteristics arising from their profession and there are numerous military 'fingers on the trigger' throughout the world. While this danger may appear very remote, contrary to American tradition, and even American military tradition, so also is the 'long twilight struggle' [referring to President Kennedy's characterization of the Cold War as a conflict which may not be solved 'in our lifetime'], and so also is the very existence of an American military program for educating the public." Fulbright called for a review of the mission and operation of the National War Collegeas to whether it should operate under the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS)and also urged that the relationships among FPRI, IAS, the Richardson Foundation, the National War College, and the JCS, be reexamined "from the standpoint of whether these relationships do not amount to official support for a viewpoint at variance with that of the administration."
8/1961 The situation [in South Vietnam] gets worse almost week by week," journalist Theodore White reported to the White House in August. " The guerrillas now control almost all the southern delta-so much so that I could find no American who would drive me outside Saigon in his car even by day without military convoy. " (Schlesinger, 1000 Days)
8/1/1961 RFK memo on meeting with hawkish congressman; JFK and Douglas MacArthur were present. The General "said that we would be foolish to fight on the Asiatic continent and that the future of Southeast Asia should be determined at the diplomatic table." Alexis Johnson would later recall that while he himself disagreed with MacArthur's views, his thinking "tended to dominate very much the thinking of President Kennedy with respect to Southeast Asia. (RFK and His Times 759)
8/2/1961 Sen. Fulbright warned, "Military officers are not elected by the people and they have no responsibility for the formulation of policies other than military policies...the President is the Commander in Chief...military personnel are not to participate in activities which undermine his policies."
8/4/1961 Sen. Thurmond introduced a resolution to call upon the Senate Armed Forces Committee to investigate the "muzzling" of the military.
8/4/1961 Human Events magazine reported: "officials in the US Department of Agriculture and the Commerce Department agreed to sell surplus wheat to the Soviet Union for $.62 per bushel less than the baker who bakes your bread pays for it. Only quick action by an awakening public stopped this folly...The officials who initiated the program are still holding responsible government positions."
8/6/1961 NY Times quoted Billy James Hargis as saying, "We conservatives all agree on one thing - that our problem is almost entirely from internal subversion."
8/8/1961 Oswald wrote to the embassy asking for funds to cover travel expenses to the US. "I believe I could catch a military hop back to the States, from Berlin."
8/9/1961 An Algerian passenger hijacks a US plane and forces it to fly to Havana.
8/11/1961 NSAM 65: supplement to NSAM 52, dated 5/11/1961, to the Sec. of State. "SUBJECT: Joint program of action with the Government of Viet-Nam...the President on August 4 made the following decisions: 1.The President agrees with the three basic tenets on which the recommendations contained in the joint action program are based, namely: a.Security requirements must for the present be given first priority. b.Military operations will not achieve lasting results unless economic and social programs are continued and accelerated. c.It is in our joint interest to accelerate measures to achieve a self-sustaining economy and a free and peaceful society in Viet-Nam. 2.The United States will provide equipment and assistance in training for an increase in the armed forces of Viet-Nam from 170,000 to 200,000 men...the United States and Viet-Nam should satisfy themselves before the time when the level of 170,000 is reached on the following points: a.That there then exists a mutually agreed upon geographically phased strategic plan for bringing Viet Cong subversion in the Republic of Viet-Nam under control. b.That on the basis of such a plan there exists an understanding on the training and use of these 30,000 additional men. c.That the rate of increase...will be regulated to permit the most efficient absortion and utilization of additional personnel and materiel in the Vietnamese armed forces with due regard to Viet-Nam's resources...a decision regarding the further increase above 200,000 will be postponed until next year when the question can be reexamined on the basis of the situation at that time...the Ambassador should seek discreetly to impress upon President Diem that he should see the total US program for the greatest political effect in his achievement of maximum appreciation of his government by the people of Viet-Nam and the people of the world...McGeorge Bundy."
8/13/1961 Cuban authorities disclose plans for U.S. fake attack on Guantanamo naval base: attack on the life of Major Raul Castro, followed by fake attack on naval base marking the beginning a grand-scale armed struggle that would justify U.S. intervention in Cuba.
8/13/1961 A few minutes after midnight, the Berlin Wall began to be built between the Eastern and Western zones.
8/14/1961 Memo from JFK to Bundy: "Can you find out where the newspaper stories came [from] this weekend on the Vietnam military intervention into southern Laos. Those stories were harmful to us. Probably exaggerated. Makes it very difficult for us now to attack the Vietminh for its intervention in Laos."
8/16/1961 Entries in the FBI files indicate that the FBI vigorously pursued its investigation of the wiretap case. However, on August 16, 1961, the Assistant United States Attorney in Las Vegas reported his reluctance to proceed with the case because of deficiencies in the evidence and his concern that CIA's alleged involvement might become known. The Department of Justice files indicate no activity between September 1961, when the FBI's investigation was concluded, and January 1962, when the question of prosecution in the case was brought up for reconsideration. (Assassination Plots, Interim Report: Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders, pp127) There is no indication that the FBI concluded that the CIA had used the Mafia for assassination plots.
8/16/1961 Congressman Samuel A. Devine introduced a resolution in the House to investigate the firing of Gen. Walker.
8/17/1961 First meeting of the Alliance for Progress at Punte del Este, Uruguay. 20 nations sign the charter. Cuba attacked the Alliance, claiming the US wouldn't even be doing it if it weren't for Cuba. (Almanac of American History)
8/19/1961 Senate rejected 45-43 a measure that would have barred foreign aid to countries selling arms and strategic goods to communist countries.
8/20/1961 Oswald wrote in his diary "On August 20th we give the papers out they say it will be 3 1/2 months before we know wheather they let us go or not..." He repeatedly visited government agencies to speed the process along.
8/22/1961 A memorandum from Kennedy aide Richard Goodwin recounting his August 22, 1961 conversation with Ernesto "Che" Guevara in which Guevara thanks Goodwin for the Bay of Pigs invasion - which he calls "a great political victory" - but also seeks to establish a "modus vivendi" with the U.S. government.
8/25/1961 Congressman Thomas Pelly, in Human Events, complained that while the Berlin crisis was going on, the administration was approving aid in the form of synthetic rubber to the USSR and railway equipment and scrap iron to Bulgaria and Yugoslavia.
8/26/1961 "[Dave] Ferrie was booked in Jefferson Parish with committing a crime against nature on a 15-year-old boy and indecent behavior with three juvenile boys...authorities claim he used alcohol, hypnotism and the enticement of flying to lure the youngsters...A search of Ferrie's home turned up numerous maps of Cuba and seven or eight World War I rifles with a quantity of ammunition. A juvenile told officers he had flown to Cuba with Ferrie on several occasions." (New Orleans States-Item)
8/28/1961 White House meeting on the situation in the Dominican Republic
8/28/1961 Sen. Thomas Dodd, in Los Angeles, told the Southern California School of Anti-Communism, "There is a developing mood of anger and frustration in this country and there ought to be for we are losing round after round in the Cold War and our people do not like it...the last 16 years have witnessed a calamitous retreat from victory...Since the beginning of this year alone there has been the sealing-off of East Berlin, the disaster in Laos, the fiasco in Cuba, and only last week, the victory of Cheddi Jagan and his communist-dominated Peoples Progressive Party in British Guiana elections...The next five years will contain a series of decisive battles which will determine for centuries to come whether mankind is to live in freedom or live in slavery." (None Dare Call it Treason)
8/29/1961 John Kennedy contradicted his commitment to a peaceful settlement of the Laos crisis by his decision to deploy CIA and military advisers there and to arm covertly the members of the Hmong tribe (known by the Americans as the "Meos"). On August 29, 1961, following the recommendations of his CIA, military, and State Department advisers, Kennedy agreed to raise the total of U.S. advisers in Laos to five hundred and to go ahead with the equipping of two thousand more "Meos." That brought to eleven thousand the number of mountain men of Laos recruited into the CIA's covert army. From Kennedy's standpoint, he was supporting an indigenous group of people who were profoundly opposed to their land's occupation by the Pathet Lao army. He was also trying to hold on to enough ground, through some effective resistance to the Pathet Lao's advance, to leave something for Averell Harriman to negotiate with in Geneva toward a neutralist government. But he was working within Cold War assumptions and playing into the hands of his own worst enemy, the CIA. The Agency was eager to manipulate his policy to benefit their favorite Laotian strongman, General Phoumi Nosavan. Aware of this danger, Kennedy went ahead in strengthening the CIA- " Meo " army, so as to stem a Communist takeover in Laos, while at the same time trying by other means to rein in the CIA.
8/30/1961 The Soviet Union resumes atmospheric testing of thermonuclear weapons, exploding a IS0 (150?)-kiloton hydrogen bomb over Siberia. British PM Harold Macmillan recalled in his memoirs (At the End of the Day, 1961-1963) that he "knew the strong pressure being brought upon him [JFK] by the Pentagon and the atomic scientists to resume [aboveground nuclear] tests immediately...At the same time I knew that Kennedy was desperately anxious to postpone the day of resuming tests, which he regarded as a confession of failure in the diplomatic field." In 1961 the US had 450 nuclear missiles, the Kennedy administration was asking for 950, but the JCS wanted 3000. When JFK discovered that 450 was adequate for the military's needs, he asked McNamara why they were pushing for 950; McNamara replied, "that's the smallest number we can take up on the Hill without getting murdered." (The Best and the Brightest p91) "The alliance between the military and the right disturbed the Kennedys. This was why the President backed McNamara so vigorously in the effort to stop warmongering speeches by generals and admirals." (RFK and his Times p484) McNamara told Robert Scheer in 1982 that during JFK's presidency, the JCS was always pushing for a nuclear first-strike capability, which Kennedy and McNamara rejected. (With Enough Shovels p10) O'Brien recalled him complaining about the military: "They always give you their pitch about their instant reaction and their split-second timing, but it never works out. No wonder it's so hard to win a war." (No Final Victories p142)

Tracy Riddle · 03-04-2014, 02:05 AM

9/1961 In September the number of guerrilla attacks in South Vietnam almost tripled from the previous months' totals. Saigon was shocked when Phuoc Thanh, a provincial capital nearby, was seized and Diem's province chief was beheaded before the insurgents retreated. (Pentagon Papers)
9/1961 By fall, Defense Undersecretary Roswell Gilpatric would acknowledge in a public speech that U.S. forces (with 185 ICBMs and over 3,400 deliverable nuclear bombs at that time) were vastly superior to those of the Russians.
9-10/1961 Congress passed a series of laws giving FBI jurisdiction to act against large-scale interstate gambling.
9/1961 JFK urges Americans to build fallout shelters. (Nat Geographic Aug 05)
9/1/1961 The Soviets resumed atmospheric nuclear testing with a series of 50 tests that continued for the next two months.
9/5/1961JFK signed legislation making airplane hijacking a federal offense. (Almanac of American History)
9/5/1961 The Agency for International Development is set up by the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961. (Almanac of American History)
9/5/1961 Soviets sentence US tourist Marvin Makinen to eight years in prison for espionage.
9/5/1961 JFK ordered resumption of atomic testing, suspended since 10/1958, in response to the Soviet testing of two more hydrogen bombs.
9/6/1961 Faced with an inflation rate of 4%, JFK had won an agreement from unions to hold wage demands down if the steel industry would agree to keep prices down. On this day he wrote the heads of 12 US steel companies asking that they "heed the clear call of national interest" and "forgo a steel-price increase in the near future."
9/6-7/1961 McNamara appears before Senate Armed Services subcommittee studying troop indoctrinating and the alleged "muzzling" of officers. He explains that Walker was only admonished for his behavior.
9/8/1961 Sen. Thomas Dodd declared that it "is not the business of the UN to go about overthrowing anti-communist governments..."
9/8/1961 The Journal of the AMA reported that there was a statistical link between smoking and heart disease.
9/8 or 9/9 this night, Charles de Gaulle was travelling with his wife in the Pont-sur-Seine district, near the village of Crancey. The car, driven by his favorite chauffeur, Francis Marroux, was speeding at 70mph toward a sandpile containing a napalm bomb that would be triggered by wires. The bomb exploded, and de Gaulle ordered the driver to speed through the flames; no one was hurt.
9/9/1961 Khrushchev vowed that the West must accept a German peace treaty.
9/10/1961 Oswald writes a letter to his brother Robert; it is remarkably free of grammatical and spelling errors. (H 16 838-39)
9/11/1961 RFK passed an FBI report along to JFK warning that security in Central America was "extremely deficient."
9/12/1961 Rep. Donald C. Bruce (R-Indiana) charged "the US State Department...is acquiescing in the communist takeover of the Congo...over a period of years the tragic growth of communism and its victories in one area after another of the world forms a consistent pattern. What is wrong with our State Department?"
9/13/1961 The UN, with logistical support from the US Air Force, attacked breakaway Katanga because it refused to rejoin the Congo.
9/15/1961 The US and UK resumed underground nuclear testing. In Washington, Big Four ministers meet to discuss Berlin. (Almanac of American History)
9/16/1961 Eisenhower criticized the Kennedy administration for "indecision and uncertainty" in dealing with Cuba and Laos.
9/16/1961 US announces support for UN military action in Katanga.
9/17/1961 Turkish leader Adnan Menderes was executed by the military high command
9/18/1961 UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold was killed when his DC-6B airline crashed in a jungle near Ndola in present-day Zambia (the Congo), shortly after midnight. He had been en route to Northern Rhodesia. The others on the plane were killed instantly, but Hammarskjold and an aide were thrown clear. Though the plane was several hours overdue and a police inspector phoned the airport to describe a mysterious flash, no search party was organized until 10am. The wreckage was sighted at 3:10pm. Hammarskjold had died during the night, but his aide, Sgt. Harold Julien, a security officer, survived for five days and raved about explosions and sparks in the sky. A postmortem established that two of the victims were riddled by bullets, officially from a box of ammo that had exploded on impact. The official verdict was "pilot error." Harry Truman commented, "Dag Hammarskjold was on the point of getting something done when they killed him. Notice that I said, when they killed him.'" (The Peoples' Almanac #3 p58)
9/18/1961 The NYT this morning (9/17 in the US) featured an AP dispatch headlined "Tshombe Confers with UN's Chief on Katanga Truce." The story said, "Hammarskjold and President Moise Tshombe of Katanga Province met for more than an hourâ€¦Separate planes brought Mr. Tshombe and Mr. Hammarskjold to Ndola, 130 miles southeast of the Katanga capital of Elisabethville...Mr. Hammarskjold's chartered DC-4 from Leopoldville landed about four hours after Mr. Tshombe arrived." None of this was true; Hammarskjold's plane never arrived from Leopoldville; the meeting described in the AP story never happened. The entire story was faked by someone at AP, and it got out on the wires before Hammarskjold's death was announced. (Unreliable Sources p33)
9/19/1961 A large crowd watches as the Presidential motorcade arrives at Blair House, Washington, D.C.
9/21/1961 US Army's 5th Special Forces Group, 1st Special Forces, is activated at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Kennedy authorizes the group to wear green berets, which became their symbol. One of Kennedy's worst decisions as president would be to develop the role of counterinsurgent warfare by enlarging the U.S. Army's Special Forces, then re-baptizing them as the Green Berets. Kennedy promoted the Green Berets as a response to communist guerrillas, failing to recognize that counterinsurgent warfare would turn into a form of terrorism. The idea that the United States could deploy Green Beret forces in client states "to win the hearts and minds of the people" was a contradiction that would become a negative part of Kennedy's legacy.
9/21/1961 An inter-agency report on Soviet nuclear capabilities, National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) 11-8/1-61, is disseminated within the government. The NIE and later intelligence reports show for the first time that the Soviet ICBM program is far behind previous U.S. estimates. Only some ten to twenty-five Soviet ICBMs on launchers are believed to exist, with no major increase in Soviet ICBM strength expected in the near future.
9/22/1961 JFK signs an Act of Congress formally establishing the Peace Corps. (Almanac of American History)
9/22/1961 The Interstate Commerce Commission, by the urging of Kennedy, ordered the desegregation of all facilities and terminals used in interstate bus travel. When a few cities pleaded local ordinances as an excuse for non-compliance, the Justice Dept brought suit and at the same time took action against segregated airports and railroad stations. An amazed black woman exclaimed, "Bless God! We now have a President who's going to make sure we can go anywhere we want like the white folks in this country." (The Fiery Cross p312)
9/23/1961 JFK nominated eight men, including Thurgood Marshall (a black man), to federal judgeships.
9/24/1961 CIA agent Luis Torroella, who had infiltrated Cuba with the mission to kill Castro, is captured. Cuban government announces it has smashed "AM/BLOOD" a Castro assassination attempt by exiles trained by the CIA on Guantanamo, the American naval base in Cuba. (Hinckle and Turner, pp106-107)
9/25/1961 Kennedy's Motorcade to United Nations Headquarters. After a summer of increasing tensions over Berlin, JFK was about to give his first speech at the United Nations. On the weekend before his UN appearance, as the Berlin crisis was continuing, the president and Pierre Salinger were staying overnight at a Manhattan hotel. Salinger agreed to an urgent phone request from Georgi Bolshakov, Soviet embassy press attache, that he meet in private with Soviet press chief Mikhail Kharlamov. When Salinger opened his hotel room door to his Russian visitor, Kharlamov was smiling. "The storm in Berlin is over," he said. A puzzled Salinger replied, on the contrary, the situation couldn't have been much worse. Kharlamov kept smiling. "Just wait, my friend, " he said. When Kharlamov was inside the room, his words came tumbling out. His urgent message to John Kennedy from Nikita Khrushchev was that Khrushchev "was now willing, for the first time, to consider American proposals for a rapprochement on Berlin." (Pierre Salinger, With Kennedy (Garden City, N.Y. : Doubleday, 1966) , p.191.) The Soviet premier hoped he and Kennedy could arrange a summit meeting as soon as possible. Kharlamov said Khrushchev was feeling intense pressure from the communist bloc to keep pushing Kennedy on the German question. However, the Soviet leader felt himself that it was time for a settlement on Berlin. He was afraid that a major military incident there could spark terrible consequences. Kharlamov ended Khrushchev's message to Kennedy with an appeal: "He hopes your President's speech to the UN won't be another warlike ultimatum like the one on July 25 [when Kennedy had said the U.S. was willing to wage war to stop the Soviets in Germany]. He didn't like that at all. "It was obvious that Khrushchev wanted Kennedy to know his more conciliatory attitude on Germany before the president made his UN speech. Salinger conveyed Khrushchev's message personally to the president at 1:00 A.M. Kennedy had been sitting up reading in his hotel bed. He asked his press secretary to repeat the key points carefully. Then he got up, went to a window, and stood for a long time in his white pajamas gazing at the lights of the Manhattan skyline. Finally he said, "There's only one way you can read it. If Khrushchev is ready to listen to our views on Germany, he's not going to recognize the [Walter] Ulbricht [East German] regime-not this year, at least-and that's good news. " He dictated a message to Khrushchev, for Salinger to give verbally to Kharlamov, that he was " cautiously receptive to Khrushchev's proposal for an early summit on Berlin. But first there should be a demonstration of Soviet good faith in Laos, "according to the agreement they had reached in Vienna . Berlin and Laos were linked. The Communist Pathet Lao army needed to back off and allow the neutralist Souvanna Phouma to form a coalition government, just as he and Khrushchev had agreed in Vienna. He would return to this theme repeatedly in his messages to Khrushchev. The president's more substantive response to the premier's secretly conveyed "good news" was the speech he gave on September 25 to the United Nations. The speech had been written before he received Khrushchev's message, but he reviewed it in his hotel room in that light. Like his opponent, Kennedy had already felt the need to back away from the brink in Berlin. He saw that he didn't have to revise the speech's text. His central theme, in contrast to his speech of July 25, was disarmament. He told the United Nations that disarmament was not an option but an absolute imperative: "Today, every inhabitant of this planet must contemplate the day when this planet may no longer be habitable. Every man, woman and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident or miscalculation or by madness. The weapons of war must be abolished before they abolish us. " . . . It is therefore our intention to challenge the Soviet Union, not to an arms race, but to a peace race-to advance together step by step, stage by stage, until general and complete disarmament has been achieved."
9/26/1961 President John F. Kennedy's motorcade travels to the airport, New York City, New York. Departure for Newport, Rhode Island
9/26/1961 JFK appointed Thurgood Marshall to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. Sen. Eastland bottled the nomination up in his Judiciary Committee for a year until he got his old college friend Harold Cox appointed as a federal judge in the circuit that handles most of the Deep South's civil rights cases. Eastland told RFK, "Tell your brother that if he will give me Harold Cox I will give him the nigger." (Gothic Politics in the Deep South p212) Cox would serve on the federal bench and call some Negro defendants "chimpanzees," and threaten to send Nick Katzenbach to jail for contempt. Cox would also throw out indictments against 17 men charged with the murder of Goodman, Chaney and Schwerner in 1964.
9/26/1961 Congress passed the Arms Control and Disarmament Act.
9/27/1961 Allen Dulles' resignation as CIA director accepted. JFK announced that his replacement would be John McCone; JFK praised Dulles' service and said he would continue to consult for him on intelligence matters. (Washington Post 9/28) Allen Dulles's own closely guarded feelings toward John Kennedy were revealed years later in a remark to a prospective ghostwriter. Harper's young assistant editor Willie Morris had gone to Dulles's Georgetown mansion in Washington to collaborate with him on a piece in defense of the CIA's role in the Bay of Pigs-a never-to-be-published article whose most revealing, handwritten notes would one day be cited in "The ' Confessions' of Allen Dulles." In one discussion they had about President Kennedy, Dulles stunned Morris with an abrupt comment. "That little Kennedy," Dulles said, ". . . he thought he was a god." "Even now," Morris wrote over a quarter of a century later, "those words leap out at me, the only strident ones I would hear from my unlikely collaborator." Willie Morris, New York Days (Boston: Little, Brown, 1993), p. 36
9/27/1961 Nixon announced he would run for governor of California.
9/29/1961 NYT review by Robert Shelton: "A bright new face in folk music is appearing at Gerde's Folk City. Although only 20 years old, Bob Dylan is one of the most distinctive stylists to play a Manhattan cabaret in months. Resembling a cross between a choir boy and a beatnik, Mr. Dylan has a cherubic look and a mop of tousled hair he partly covers with a Huck Finn black corduroy cap. His clothes may need a bit of tailoring, but when he works his guitar, harmonica or piano and composes new songs faster than he can remember them, there is no doubt that he is bursting at the seams with talent. Mr. Dylan's voice is anything but pretty. He is consciously trying to recapture the rude beauty of a Southern field hand musing in melody on his porch. All the "husk and bark" are left on his notes and a searing intensity pervades his songsâ€¦But if not for every taste, his music-making has the mark of originality and inspiration, all the more noteworthy for his youth. Mr. Dylan is vague about his antecedents and birthplace, but it matters less where he has been than where he is going, and that would seem to be straight up."
9/29/1961 Khrushchev had sent his first private letter to Kennedy on September 29, 1961, during the Berlin crisis. Wrapped in a newspaper, it was brought to Kennedy's press secretary Pierre Salinger at a New York hotel room by a Soviet "magazine editor " and KGB agent, Georgi Bolshakov, whom Khrushchev trusted to maintain silence. The secrecy was at least as much to avoid Soviet attention as American. As presidential aide Theodore Sorensen said three decades later, Khrushchev was " taking his risks, assuming that these letters were, as we believe, being kept secret from the ( Soviet) military, from the foreign service, from the top people in the Kremlin. He was taking some risk that if discovered, they would be very unhappy with him. " (Paul Wells, " Private Letters Shed Light on Cold War, " Montreal Gazette (July 24, 1993). The private letters between Kennedy and Khrushchev, known as the " Pen Pal Correspondence, " were published with the Cold War leaders' more formal, public letters in the State Department volume Foreign Relations of the United States [FR US], 1961-1963, Volume VI: Kennedy-Khrushchev Exchanges (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1996) . Khrushchev's first letter was written from a retreat beside the Black Sea. While the Berlin crisis was still not over, the Soviet premier began the correspondence with his enemy by meditating on the beauty of the sea and the threat of war. " Dear Mr. President, " he wrote, "At present I am on the shore of the Black Sea . . . This is indeed a wonderful place. As a former Naval officer you would surely appreciate the merits of these surroundings, the beauty of the sea and the grandeur of the Caucasian mountains. Under this bright southern sun it is even somehow hard to believe that there still exist problems in the world which, due to lack of solutions, cast a sinister shadow on peaceful life, on the future of millions of people. " Now as the threat of war over Berlin continued, Khrushchev expressed a regret about Vienna. He said he had "given much thought of late to the development of international events since our meeting in Vienna, and 1 have decided to approach you with this letter. The whole world hopefully expected that our meeting and a frank exchange of views would have a soothing effect, would turn relations between our countries into the correct channel and promote the adoption of decisions which would give the peoples confidence that at last peace on earth will be secured. To my regret-and, 1 believe, to yours-this did not happen. " "I listened with great interest to the account which our journalists Adjubei and Kharlamov gave of the meeting they had with you in Washington. They gave me many interesting details and I questioned them most thoroughly. You prepossessed them by your informality, modesty and frankness which are not to be found very often in men who occupy such a high position. " "My thoughts have more than once returned to our meetings in Vienna. I remember you emphasized that you did not want to proceed towards war and favored living in peace with our country while competing in the peaceful domain. And though subsequent events did not proceed in the way that could be desired, I thought it might be useful in a purely informal and personal way to approach you and share some of my ideas. If you do not agree with me you can consider that this letter did not exist while naturally I, for my part, will not use this correspondence in my public statements. After all only in confidential correspondence can you say what you think without a backward glance at the press, at the journalists. " "As you see," he added apologetically, " I started out by describing the delights of the Black Sea coast, but then I nevertheless turned to politics. But that cannot be helped. They say that you sometimes cast politics out through the door but it climbs back through the window, particularly when the windows are open. " In Khrushchev's first private letter to Kennedy, on September 29, 1961 , the Soviet premier had written: " I note with gratification that you and I are of the same opinion as to the need for the withdrawal of foreign troops from the territory of Laos . "
9/29/1961 tonight's episode of The Twilight Zone is "The Shelter," about a man who has built a bomb shelter in his home, and his neighbors want access to it when they fear a nuclear war is imminent.
Late Sep: State Dept issued a document entitled 'Freedom from War: The United States Program for General and Complete Disarmament in a Peaceful World,' which would ban nuclear weapons, keep space free of armed conflict, and "no state (including the U.S.) would have the military power to challenge the progressively strengthened UN Peace Force." (None Dare Call it Treason p81) This was based on a speech Kennedy gave 9/25.
10/1961 According to some sources, JFK meets Marilyn Monroe for the first time at a party at Peter Lawford's home in Santa Monica, at which Janet Leigh, Kim Novak and Angie Dickinson are also present.
Fall 1961 Notable among the "wild-eyed promoters" were the California right-wingers. Pres. Kennedy's Palladium speech came hard on the heels of a unique event: a coast-to-coast television program titled "Hollywood's Answer to Communism" and put on by the Christian Anti-Communism Crusade. The Crusade had many prominent Hollywood figures in its ranks, such as one-time General Electric pitchman Ronald Reagan, who had said in 1960: "Shouldn't someone tag Mr. Kennedy's bold new imaginative program with its proper age? Under the tousled boyish haircut is still old Karl Marx -- first launched a century ago." That was about the level of it. In the the fall of 1961 the head of the Crusade, Dr. Fred Schwarz, an Australian physician-turned-commie-hunter, had held a five-day "Southern California School of Anti-Communism" at which many prominent people in the military or industry spoke (including Reagan). A Marine color guard was dispatched to give the proceedings an apparent official sanction. Rear Admiral Charles Ward warned that the idea of disarmament was "a trap," that nuclear testing must resume at once, that Kennedy Administration policies were ruinous and must be changed from accommodation to belligerence. Former FBI agent W. Cleon Skousen wanted a Congressional investigation to root out "a small leftwing group in the State Department," severance of diplomatic and trade ties to communist countries, and withdrawal from the United Nations.
10/1961 At the Geneva Conference, Averell Harriman was trying to carry out the president's order to negotiate a settlement for a neutral Laos. JFK had been explicit to him that the alternative was unacceptable: "I don't want to put troops in." Harriman brought to the conference the asset of a mutual respect with the Russians. He had done business in the Soviet Union. The Russians regarded Harriman as a friendly capitalist. He and Nikita Khrushchev had visited each other for informal diplomatic exchanges, first at the Kremlin, then at Harriman's Manhattan home, during the year before Kennedy became president. JFK had recognized Khrushchev's confidence in Harriman and would use that relationship later to great effect when Harriman represented JFK in negotiating the test ban treaty with Khrushchev in Moscow. In Geneva, Harriman and his counterpart, Soviet negotiator Georgi M. Pushkin, were developing a wary friendship as they tried to find a way together through Laotian battlegrounds and Cold War intrigues. While representing opposite, contentious sides of the Cold War, Harriman and Pushkin respected each other and were inclined to conspire together for peace. A turning point at Geneva came in October 1961, when leaders of the three Laotian factions agreed to neutralist Souvanna Phouma 's becoming prime minister of a provisional coalition government. Then, as Rudy Abramson, Harriman's biographer, put it, the Soviets " agreed to take responsibility for all the Communist states' compliance with the neutrality declaration and accepted language declaring that Laotian territory would not be used in the affairs of neighboring states-meaning the North Vietnamese could not use the trails through Laos to support the insurgency in South Vietnam. " This largely unwritten understanding would become known in U.S. circles as the " Pushkin agreement. " A major obstacle arose, however, when the Soviets, the North Vietnamese, and the Pathet Lao insisted on the right of all three Laotian factions to approve any movements of the International Control Commission. The Pathet Lao would thereby be given a veto power over inspections to monitor violations of the accord. The communists wouldn't budge on the issue. With the Pathet Lao controlling the battlefield, Harriman became convinced that the Geneva Conference would collapse unless the United States was willing to compromise. Although the State Department was adamantly opposed, Kennedy reluctantly decided with Harriman that the critical compromise with the Communists was necessary. The negotiations moved on. But from then on, a "neutral Laos " would take the form of a partitioned country under the guise of a coalition government. Georgi Pushkin would soon die. The agreement named after him would never be honored by Soviet leaders, who lacked the power to tell the Pathet Lao and the North Vietnamese what to do. The corridor running down the eastern border of Laos would become known as the " Ho Chi Minh Trail" for its infiltrating North Vietnamese soldiers on their way to South Vietnam-or as State Department critics would call the same route, the "Averell Harriman Highway. " Kennedy, struggling to avoid both war and Communist domination of Laos in the midst of the larger East-West conflicts over Cuba, Berlin, and the Congo, was happy to get the compromise Harriman had worked out with Pushkin. The president's most bitter opponents to a Laotian settlement, in the Defense Department and the CIA, tried to destroy the agreement. They kept up their support of General Phoumi's provocations and violations of the cease-fire. Rudy Abramson, Spanning the Century: The Life of W. Averell Harriman, 1891-1986 (New York: William Morrow, 1992), pp. 586 - 87.
10/1961 In October 1961, the president's newly appointed personal representative in West Berlin, retired General Lucius Clay, tried to escalate the Berlin crisis to a point where the president would be forced to choose victory. In August, Khrushchev had ordered the building of the Berlin Wall, thereby ending a mass exodus of East Germans to the capitalist side of the city. In September, General Clay began secret preparations to tear down the wall. He ordered Major General Albert Watson, the U.S. military commandant in West Berlin, to have army engineers build a duplicate section of the Berlin Wall in a forest. U.S. tanks with bulldozer attachments then experimented with assaults on the substitute wall. General Bruce Clarke, who commanded U.S. forces in Europe, learned of Clay's exercise and put a stop to it. (Raymond L. Garthoff, " Berlin 1961: The Record Corrected, " Foreign Policy no. 84 (Fall 1991) , p.147) When he told Clay to end the wall-bashing rehearsals, Clarke looked at Clay's red telephone to the White House and said, "If you don't like that, call the President and see what he says." (Reeves, President Kennedy: Profile of Power, p. 249.) Clay chose not to. Nor did either man ever inform the president of what had gone on at the secret wall in the forest. While Kennedy remained unaware of Clay's provocative planning, Khrushchev was much better informed. Soviet spies had watched the forest maneuvers, had taken pictures of them, and had relayed their reports and pictures to Moscow. Khrushchev then assembled a group of close advisers to plot out step by step their counter scenario to a U.S. assault on the Berlin Wall. (Garthoff, " Berlin 1961, " pp. 147-48 , 152) However, Nikita Khrushchev doubted that John Kennedy had authorized any such attack. He and the president had already begun their secret communications and had in fact even made private progress in the previous month on the question of Berlin. Khrushchev strongly suspected that Kennedy was being undermined. (Sergei Khrushchev, Nikita Khrushchev and the Creation o f a Superpower (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University, 2000), p. 464.)
10/1961 Khrushchev's son, Sergei, in his memoir, Nikita Khrushchev and the Creation of a Superpower, has described from the Soviet standpoint how the two Cold War leaders had begun to conspire toward coexistence. His account has been corroborated at key points by Kennedy's press secretary, Pierre Salinger. At their Vienna meeting in June, Kennedy had proposed to Khrushchev that they establish "a private and unofficial channel of communications that would bypass all formalities." Khrushchev agreed. In September the Soviet premier made a first use of the back channel.
10/1961 the United Klans of America began sponsoring training seminars on how to build bombs, led by a former Navy frogman. (The Fiery Cross p321)
10/1961 Oswald pleaded with the US Embassy to do something to expedite the visas; "there have been systematic and concerted attempts to intimidate my wife into withdrawing her application for on visa. [sic]" (CE 1122) Marina's uncle feared for his position if his niece was branded an "enemy of the state," and her aunts told her that she would be forgotten about in the cruel USA. (Marina and Lee p159) He recorded in his diary the great strain Marina was under over the decision.
10/1/1961 Diem requests a bilateral defense treaty with US, while SEATO experts meet in Bangkok to discuss guerilla warfare in South Vietnam.
10/1/1961 The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) was created.
10/2/1961 Diem tells the National Assembly that the situation has developed into a "real war" with guerillas using "regular units fully and completely equipped."
10/4/1961 Arrival Ceremonies and motorcade for El Ferik Ibrahim Abboud, President of Sudan. In car (Lincoln Continental), back seat: President Abboud; President John F. Kennedy. Front seat: Secret Service Agent Gerald "Jerry" Behn (right); Military Aide to the President General Chester V. Clifton (center); others unidentified.
10/4/1961 Oswald wrote to the embassy demanding that the US government intervene with the Soviets to secure his visa, saying it was "in the interests of the United States government and the American Embassy in Moscow" to arrange this.
10/5/1961 NSAM 100, issued by McGeorge Bundy to Dean Rusk, directed assessment of potential courses of action "if Castro were removed from the Cuban scene."
10/5/1961 Castro assassination attempt planned by Antonio Veciana and CIA 's "Bishop" is discovered by Castro and Veciana is forced to flee Cuba; Reynol Gonzalez, one of Veciana 's co-conspirators, is later arrested hiding on the estate of Amador Odio, a wealthy industrialist and father of Silvia Odio. Gonzales, the elder Odio and his wife are arrested. (Fonzi Chronology p 416)
10/5/1961 Intelligence estimates that most of the Vietcong in South Vietnam are not relying on outside supplies.
10/10/1961 Kennedy arrived in Dallas to visit a very ill Sam Rayburn; only one public official greeted the President: the chief of police. (Death of a President p47)
10/10/1961 Joseph Heller's satirical anti-war novel, Catch-22, is published.
10/11/1961 At a NSC meeting, Kennedy is asked to accept "as our real and ultimate objective the defeat of the Vietcong." JCS estimated that 40,000 US troops could accomplish the job, and another 120,000 could deal with possible North Vietnamese intervention. JFK decides to send Max Taylor to Vietnam.
10/12/1961 JFK attacks the far-right in a speech at the University of North Carolina, saying that "we shall be neither Red nor dead, but alive and free..." (Wash. Post 10/13)
10/12/1961 President Kennedy had many medical problems and took many medications. Dr. Travell kept a list of his typical medications, which, on October 12, 1961, consisted of the following: * Ascorbic acid, 500 mg twice daily (Vitamin C), * Hydrocortisone, 10 mg daily (equivalent to 2.5 mg of prednisone daily), * Prednisone 2.5, mg twice daily (total 5 mg each day, add in the hydrocortisone, total daily intake of prednisone was 7.5 mg daily), * Methyltestosterone, 10 mg daily (anabolic steroid used to treat testosterone deficiency), * Liothyronine sodium, 25 micrograms twice daily (total 50 micrograms each day, for hypothyroidism), * Fludrocortisone, 0.1 mg daily, * Diphenoxylate hydrochloride and atropine sulfate, 2 tablets as needed (brand name: Lomotil), and * Vitamin B12 and B complex injections. (38)
10/13/1961 Washington Post reports that new Speaker of the House John McCormack has frequently opposed Kennedy's policies.
10/13/1961 NSAM 104 "SUBJECT: Southeast Asia....Subject to agreement with the government of Vietnam which is now being sought, introduce the Air Force 'Jungle Jim' squadron into Vietnam for the initial purpose of training Vietnamese forces. Initiate guerrilla ground action, including use of US advisors if necessary, against Communist aerial resupply missions in Tchepone area."
10/13/1961 Diem sends an urgent request for US combat units and aircraft.
10/15/1961 Maxwell Taylor is sent on a survey mission to South Vietnam, Laos and Thailand.
Mid-Oct Kennedy was so resistant to the military's demand for troops that he took a step he knew would further alienate them. He subverted his military leaders ' recommendations by planting a story that they were against sending combat units. In mid-October the New York Times reported erroneously: "Military leaders at the Pentagon, no less than General Taylor himself, are understood to be reluctant to send organized U.S. combat units into Southeast Asia. " The opposite was the truth. As we have seen, the Pentagon leaders and General Taylor were in fact beating their war drums as loudly as they could in the president's ears. They wanted combat troops. Kennedy fought back with a public lie. As the Pentagon Papers noted, " It is just about inconceivable that this story could have been given out except at the direction of the president, or by him personally. " The president was undermining his military leaders by dispensing the false information that they were against the very step they most wanted him to take. The ploy worked . As the Pentagon Papers observed, "The Times story had the apparently desired effect. Speculation about combat troops almost disappeared from news stories . . . " However, besides misleading the public, Kennedy was playing a dangerous game with the Pentagon's leaders. His misrepresentation of their push for combat troops would prove to be one more piece of evidence in their mounting case against the president. But Kennedy would do anything he could to keep from sending combat troops to Vietnam. He told Arthur Schlesinger, " They want a force of American troops. They say it's necessary in order to restore confidence and maintain morale. But it will be just like Berlin. The troops will march in; the bands will play; the crowds will cheer; and in four days everyone will have forgotten. Then we will be told we have to send in more troops. It's like taking a drink. The effect wears off, and you have to take another. "
10/16/1961 Kennedy responded privately to Khrushchev on October 16, 1961, from his own place of retreat beside the ocean, Hyannis Port: "My family has had a home here overlooking the Atlantic for many years. My father and brothers own homes near my own, and my children always have a large group of cousins for company. So this is an ideal place for me to spend my weekends during the summer and fall, to relax, to think, to devote my time to major tasks instead of constant appointments, telephone calls and details. Thus, I know how you must feel about the spot on the Black Sea from which your letter was written, for I value my own opportunities to get a clearer and quieter perspective away from the din of Washington . " He thanked Khrushchev for initiating the correspondence and agreed to keep it quiet: " Certainly you are correct in emphasizing that this correspondence must be kept wholly private, not to be hinted at in public statements, much less disclosed to the press. " Their private letters should supplement public statements " and give us each a chance to address the other in frank, realistic and fundamental terms. Neither of us is going to convert the other to a new social, economic or political point of view. Neither of us will be induced by a letter to desert or subvert his own cause. So these letters can be free from the polemics of the 'cold war' debate. " Kennedy agreed wholeheartedly with Khrushchev's biblical image: " I like very much your analogy of Noah's Ark, with both the 'clean' and the 'unclean' determined that it stay afloat. Whatever our differences, our collaboration to keep the peace is as urgent-if not more urgent-than our collaboration to win the last world war. " In his October 16, 1961, letter to Khrushchev, Kennedy said, as he had in his verbal message through Salinger and Kharlamov three weeks before, that any second summit meeting should be preceded by a peaceful resolution of Laos: " Indeed I do not see how we can expect to reach a settlement on so bitter and complex an issue as Berlin, where both of us have vital interests at stake, if we cannot come to a final agreement on Laos, which we have previously agreed should be neutral and independent after the fashion of Burma and Cambodia . "
10/17/1961 Paris Massacre, police crush peaceful demonstration of Algerians
10/18/1961 Because of increased rebel attacks and severe flooding in the Mekong Valley, Diem issued an "emergency decree" allowing him to suspend the constitution and "take any action necessary for national security." The National Assembly promptly ratified his decree.
10/18/1961 Maxwell Taylor's visit to Saigon 10/18-24; Diem does not renew his request for US combat troops, but asks for military support. Taylor wired Kennedy from Saigon that the United States should take quick advantage of a severe flood in South Vietnam by introducing six thousand to eight thousand U.S. troops under the guise of " flood relief, " including combat units that would then " give a much needed shot in the arm to national morale. " (Pentagon Papers) In a follow-up wire from the Philippines, Taylor acknowledged that those first eight thousand troops could well be just the beginning: " If the ultimate result sought is the closing of the frontiers and the clean-up of the insurgents within SVN, there is no limit to our possible commitment (unless we attack the source in Hanoi ) . " On the other hand, regardless of the number of troops needed, Taylor thought "there can be no action so convincing of U.S. seriousness of purpose and hence so reassuring to the people and Government of SVN and to our other friends and allies in [Southeast Asia] as the introduction of U.S. forces into SVN. " Taylor's enthusiasm for troops was seconded in a cable by Ambassador Frederick Nolting, who cited " conversations over past ten days with Vietnamese in various walks of life " showing a " virtually unanimous desire for introduction of U.S. forces into Viet-Nam. " (Pentagon Papers)
10/19/1961 James Reston wrote in the NYT: "Reportsâ€¦that the United States is about to plunge into the guerrilla warfare of Southeast Asiaâ€¦should be taken with considerable skepticismâ€¦General Maxwell Taylor is not only a soldier but a philosopherâ€¦He is not likely to favor plunging blithely into a jungle war 7000 miles from home."
10/20/1961 Soviets exploded a 58-megaton atomic bomb.
10/21/1961 In a major speech cleared by Rusk, Bundy and President JFK, Roswell Gilpatric publicly deflates the "missile gap" theory, telling his audience in Hot Springs, Virginia, that the United States actually possessed a substantially larger nuclear arsenal than the USSR.
10/22/1961 Oswald writes his mother a letter asking for "any booksâ€¦You needn't worry about my losing American citizenship I can only do that if I want to and I don't want tooâ€¦"
10/26/1961 JFK sent note to Diem pledging continued US aid to South Vietnam.
10/27/1961 On October 27, ten American M-4 8 tanks, with bulldozers mounted on the lead tanks, ground their way up to Checkpoint Charlie at the center of the Berlin Wall. They were confronted by ten Soviet tanks, which had been waiting for them quietly on the side streets of East Berlin. A well-briefed Nikita Khrushchev and his advisers had set their counterplan in motion. Twenty more Soviet tanks arrived soon after as reinforcements, and twenty more U.S. tanks moved up from the allied side. The American and Russian tanks faced off, with their long-nosed guns trained on one another, ready to fire. Throughout the night and for a total of sixteen hours, the confrontation continued. Soviet foreign affairs adviser Valentin Falin was beside Khrushchev throughout the crisis. Falin said later that if the U.S. tanks and bulldozers had advanced farther, the Soviet tanks would have fired on them, bringing the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. "closer to the third world war than ever . . . Had the tank duel started then in Berlin-and everything was running toward it-the events most probably would have gone beyond any possibility of control. " (Michael R. Beschloss, The Crisis Years: Kennedy and Khrushchev ( New York: Edward Burlingame Books, 1991) , p.335) An alarmed President Kennedy phoned Lucius Clay. Although Kennedy left no record of the conversation, Clay claims the president said, "I know you people over there haven't lost your nerve." Clay said his bold reply was: "Mr. President, we're not worried about our nerves. We're worrying about those of you people in Washington." At that point the president sent an urgent message to Khrushchev via the back channel. Robert Kennedy contacted Soviet press attache Georgi Bolshakov. RFK said that if Khrushchev would withdraw his tanks within twenty-four hours, JFK would do the same within thirty minutes later. (Robert Kennedy in His Own Words, edited by Edwin O. Guthman and Jeffrey Shulman (New York: Bantam Books, 1988) , pp. 259-60. See also Garthoff, " Berlin 1961, " p. 150, and S. Khrushchev, Nikita Khrushchev, p. 466.) The president then ordered Lucius Clay to be ready to carry out the U.S. side of such a withdrawal.
10/27/1961 Carrier USS Constellation (CVA 64) is commissioned.
10/28/1961 This morning the Soviet tanks backed away, and the U.S. tanks followed suit in thirty minutes. The Checkpoint Charlie crisis was over. Its resolution prefigured that of the Cuban Missile Crisis one year later. In both cases Kennedy asked Khrushchev to take the first step. The Soviet leader did so, in gracious recognition that Kennedy was under even more intense pressure than he was. In both cases a back-channel communication via Robert Kennedy was critical. And in both cases Khrushchev, in withdrawing his tanks and later his missiles, achieved his own objectives in exchange from Kennedy: the removal of U.S. threats to bulldoze the Wall and to invade Cuba, and the withdrawal of U.S. missiles from Turkey and Italy.
10/28/1961 Soviets exploded a 50-megaton bomb in an atomic test.
10/29/1961 NYT: Thus far, Southern California right-wingers have not been specific about their political preferences. It is plain to most observers that few, if any, are in sympathy with the Kennedy Administration... Mr. Welch [head of the John Birch Society] has also written that "the one man who comes closest to measuring up to all the needs and qualifications [of the office of President] is Barry Goldwater." [NYT, October 29, 1961, p. 43]
10/30/1961 Stalin's body is removed from the Lenin Mausoleum in Red Square.
10/30/1961 USSR explodes the world's largest nuclear bomb, with a yield of 50 megatons. (Nat Geographic Aug 05)
10/31/1961 Sen. Henry "Scoop" Jackson (D-Washignton) criticized JFK for delaying construction of the Boeing B-70.
10/31/1961 The Soviets climax their nuclear tests with a 57-megaton blast.

***Peter Lemkin*** · 03-04-2014, 07:39 AM

Quote:Thanks, Dawn, I hope everyone finds it useful.

It is amazingly useful! Great work! How much more time periods are coming?!

Tracy Riddle · 03-04-2014, 02:21 PM

Peter Lemkin Wrote:
Quote:Thanks, Dawn, I hope everyone finds it useful.
It is amazingly useful! Great work! How much more time periods are coming?!

Basically every year of the last century or so, though the period since WWII is more detailed.

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