Deep Politics Timeline

[Tracy Riddle]

• 7/1967 Polls showed that only 45% of the public approved of the Warren Court's performance.
  
• 7/1967 New Yorker's correspondent Jonathan Schell described the destruction of Vietnamese villages and relocation of peasants in "The Village of Ben Suc."
  
• 7/1967 Edward Jay Epstein article "Manchester Unexpurgated" in Commentary, July 1967. Manchester's original draft of his book, then entitled "Death of a Lancer," came close to blaming LBJ for the assassination. In his original manuscript which somehow fell into Epstein's hands while he was researching his own book on the Warren Commission, "Inquest," Manchester described Lyndon E. Johnson as "a chameleon who constantly changes loyalties"; "a capon" and "a crafty schemer who has a gaunt, hunted look about him,", among other well-placed barbs. The unexpurgated version also described Johnson as a full-fledged hypomaniac," and "the crafty seducer with six nimble hands who can persuade a woman to surrender her favors in the course of a long conversation confined to obscure words. No woman, even a lady, can discern his intentions until the critical moment." More importantly still, the unedited manuscript, according to Epstein, conveyed "the notion that Johnson, the successor, was somehow responsible for the death of his predecessor." "This concept," Epstein wrote, "gave the original melodrama much of its thrust and such structural coherence as it had." "The shattering fact of the assassination," the Lancer version states, "is that a Texas murder has made a Texan President." In his original draft, Manchester also quoted Kenneth O'Donnell, one of the late President's closest aides, as exclaiming: "They did it. I always knew they'd do It. You couldn't expect anything else from them. They finally made it." Then Manchester is quoted as commenting: "He didn't specify who 'they' were. It was unnecessary. They were Texans, Johnsonians ..." Now it is an acknowledged and uncontested fact that Manchester, in his research for this book, drew heavily on inside information supplied to him by the inner circle of the Kennedy Clan. Jackie Kennedy, at one ten-hour sitting, poured out her heart to the "official historian" and confided to him many intimate details not available from any other source. Robert Kennedy and many former aides of the President also talked freely to the author of "Death of a Lancer. It is a certainty, therefore, that the unflattering description of Johnson, as contained in the unexpurgated version, and the dire implications of the "shattering fact ... that a Texas murder has made a Texan President," were conveyed to Manchester by the Kennedys themselves. That the family subsequently moved heaven and earth to stop publication of their own outpourings to Manchester cannot alter the fact that they did give vent, in their conversations with the "official historian," to the darkest suspicions about that "crafty schemer," Lyndon B. Johnson nor can it detract in the least from the authenticity of these disclosures. That Epstein's "Manchester Unexpurgated" is based on a genuine copy of the unedited first draft has been candidly acknowledged both by the author and his publisher. Manchester, in a published statement, called Epstein's technique "equivalent to digging in a reporter's waste-basket" and added, "If someone offers to show me Epstein's first draft of his book on the Warren Commission I would refuse, because it would be unethical and a violation of his common law copyright." Manchester's righteous indignation is misplaced in the case. Epstein may have used unethical, or even unlawful means In securing this material, but he has nevertheless rendered a great service to historical truth while Manchester himself has trampled it shamefully underfoot in his published version. Evan Thomas, editor of Harper & Row, publishers of "The Death of a President," also confirmed the accuracy of Epstein's materiel in a statement issued, on July 5, 1967. Manchester's original draft was edited almost out of recognition by several teams of censors working on behalf of the Kennedy family. The first of these teams consisted of the Robert Kennedy advisers John Siegenthaler and Edwin Guthman who spent almost four months, with editor Evan Thomas expurgating the Lancer version. Latter, after Look magazine had acquired the serial rights, one of Robert Kennedy's closest aides, Richard Goodwin, went over the galleys with a fine comb, assisted by the historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.
  
• 7/2/1967 Israelis and Egyptians exhange fire across the Suez Canal.
  
• 7/4/1967 The Freedom of Information and Privacy Act (FOIA) goes into effect, one year after it was signed into law.
  
• 7/4/1967 Roger Craig is fired from the Dallas Sherriff's Department. Craig claims he saw Lee Harvey Oswald run from TSBD and get into Rambler station wagon. Some say his firing is due to his unyielding position on the assassination.
  
• 7/5/1967 In an interim decision, Lt. Col. Yerushalmi decides that as a "prima facie" fact, IDF Navy Commander Lunz (see 1100 8 June entry) may have committed an offense of negligence. The hearing was adjourned. Thereafter, as an accused, Lunz called three witnesses, made a statement under oath and produced five exhibits. [IDF Preliminary Judicial Inquiry, p. 8.]
  
• 7/6/1967 State Dept announced dispatch of three cargo planes and a small group of paratroopers to the Congo to help Mobutu quell an uprising by white mercenaries and Katangese gendarmes. Sen. Russell Long attacked the intervention three days later: "where we have no commitments and where we have no vital interests…Vietnam started out with a not much larger force than that. It can swell and it will swell if a few of our forces are killed. We should have enough sense to keep our people out of situations like this."
  
• 7/7-8/1967 In Saigon, McNamara, Katzenbach and Wheeler were given an optimistic briefing by Westmoreland and Ellsworth Bunker. Westmoreland asked McNamara for more troops.
  
• 7/7/1967 Nigerian troops invade Biafra to end attempted secession.
  
• 7/7/1967 Congressional Joint Economic committee estimates the war will cost $4-$6 billion more in '67 than the $20.3 billion requested by Johnson.
  
• 7/7/1967 Egypt's leading newspaper, Al Ahram, stated American officials had admitted that Israel got intelligence information from the Liberty. [UPI dispatch, Washington Post, July 8, 1967, p. A7.]
  
• 7/7/1967 The following article was written for The Associated Press by Micha Limor, described as an Israeli naval reservist who was serving on one of the torpedo boats that attacked the United States communications ship Liberty off the Sinai coast on June 8. Other accounts describe Limor as an Israeli journalist. Whatever Limor is, he does not appear to have been a witness to the attack as he claims. Not only does he describe things that did not happen, such as circling the ship several times before firing torpedoes, he claims to have hit the ""left"" (port) side with his torpedo. The torpedo struck the ""right"" (starboard) side of the ship, instantly killing 25 men. Limor tells us that the ship flew no flag. Not so. An oversize American flag flew throughout the attack. The torpedomen examined that flag from less than 50 feet away, then continued firing from close range on anything that moved. Limor tells us that the boatmen offered help. He does not mention that the offer came more than two hours after after the torpedo explosion. NYT: TEL AVIV, July 6--The torpedos were ready for firing when our three Israeli torpedo boats zeroed in on the gray ship moving slowly on a south-easterly course off El Arish. At that tense moment, not one of us on those torpedo boats could have suspected that this was the beginning of an incident that was to cause a long international wrangle. On June 8, the sun was already high in the sky when we received notification of an unidentified vessel some 12 miles off El Arish susoected of being an enemy craft. Within moments, the face of our torpedo boat changed. Sailors took their positions, engines were revved up, and in five minutes we were moving out in formation, torpedo boat, after torpedo boat, toward the deep sea. We spotted the objective once on the radar screen. She was moving on a steady course, southeast at about 10 knots. We sailed toward the objective at an increased speed, looking at her through binoculars in an effort to identify the vessel. Two of our planes flew over our heads a few minutes afterward. We saw them circle the ship several times, and then dive into the attack. They spat two rockets into the gray ship, and plumes of smoke rose from her. Then the two jets headed away toward the coast. About 2,000 yards from the ship, a strange spectacle met our eyes. The high masts and the many weird antenna showed that this was a warship. The side of the vessel was blotted out by smoke, and apart from three numbers along her side, which meant nothing to us, we could not discern a thing. We could see no flag on the mast, nor was anyone to be seen on the decks and bridge. We spent several minutes trying to contact the ship and demanding identification. We tried by radio and by heliograph, in accordance with internationally accepted means. But she gave no answer. It also seemed that she had managed to control the fires and continued on a stable course. It was decided to pass by her in battle formation and demand identification by firing across her bow. So we moved past at a tremendous speed, firing across the empty bridge and the bow. Suddenly, a sailor appeared in view and started firing at us with a heavy nachine gun from the bridge. We took the challenge and directed cannon fire against him. A moment later he fell together with the machine gun. Thus there was no doubt that we were faced by the enemy. The prolonged refusal to identify herself, the absence of any flag, the shooting at usm and above all, the weird contraptions on the ship left us without doubt. We wanted to make the ship surrender without sinking her. Once again we circled the vessel in battle formation, firing again and again. This had no effect. No one appeared. No one reacted. The shells caused little damage to the hull and the ship proceeded on her way. You could almost hear the men's teeth grinding aboard our boat. Nothing can annoy a torpedo boat crew more than being completely ignored, The order was given to prepare for a torpedo attack. We drew up along the left side of the ship and advanced at full battle speed. Just as in dozens of training exercises we reached the right angle and range--and let go. We thought only a miracle would save the ship. One of the torpedos hit amidships. There followed an enormous explosion and a huge water spout. And then fires broke out and the ship leaned sideways as if about to sink. We watched for survivors, as is customary, whether friend or enemy. But no one appeared on deck. Suddenly, something fell into the sea. One of our boats approached and picking it up from the waters, found it to be a rubber lifeboat with the lettering ""U.S. Navy."" That was the very first sign of identification. A moment later there arrived on the scene the helicopter that was to have picked up prisoners. He hovered over the ship and then signaled us: ""They are raising the American flag."" It was crystal clear we had hit friends. Dozens of shells, rockets and torpedoes were needed to drag a sign of identity from them, said one of my seamen who, like the rest of his mates, was bitterly upset at this turn of events. He was right. The showing of the Stars and Stripes at the first stage would have prevented all that happened subsequently. We received orders directly from the officer commanding the navy to give all necessary help. So we approached the Liberty and offered help through a loudspeaker, Then an officer appeared for the first time on the bridge and screamed, ""Go to hell!"" Learning they did not need aid, we left. And the Liberty returned to her regular operations. It seemed any other ship would have sunk. It was only later that we learned how many casualties had been caused by our torpedoes."
  
• 7/10/1967 One of the very last cases reported to Project Bluebook that was labelled as unidentified occurred in Meridian, Mississippi. Philip Lanning was driving south of town, on the evening of July 10, 1967, when his car coasted to a stop and the radio faded. Lanning got out and started to look at the car engine, when an enormous object flew over his head about 3 hundred feet in the air. The object was silent and moving to the east. Lanning thought the object was about the crash. Just before the object reached a group of nearby trees, it tilted upward, turned right and then accelerated at great speed straight up into the low-flying clouds. The object was described as being 'like a cymbal on a drum set and was a dirty metallic gray in colour on the underside'. He saw no portholes or hatches and said that it appeared to the size of house. Lanning wasn't sure who would be interested in the report, but he felt that it should be sent to someone in the US Government, so he forwarded it to a friend in Navel Intelligence. The Air Force eventually received it and began an investigation. They were impressed with Lanning as a witness as he was a former military officer who had received a great deal of training. After, extensive research and interviews the Air Force were forced to label this sighting as unidentified. This was one of the very last reports in Bluebook to receive that tag.
  
• 7/10/1967 FBI memo from DeLoach to Tolson; DeLoach reported his conversation with Marvin Watson about the administration's concern about individuals in the civil rights and anti-war movements being linked to Communists. LBJ suggested leaking derogatory information to the media and possibly holding HUAC hearings on them.
  
• 7/11/1967 US Government submits to the Israeli Government a corrected copy of its 10 June Diplomatic Note. It contains details learned as a result of the US Naval Court of Inquiry. [State Department Liberty file: Memorandum for the Secretary, July 11, 1967.]
  
• 7/12-17/1967: Newark, NJ riot: it covered 10 square miles, left 26 dead, 1,397 arrested. It began when police beat up a black man after a traffic arrest. The governor's commission would find that the police used "excessive and unjustified force" to put down the riot; cops and National Guardsmen vandalized black businesses and indiscriminately shot at blacks.
  
• 7/12/1967 LBJ complained to McNamara, "Are we going to be able to win this goddamned war?"
  
• 7/13/1967 James Earl Ray may have participated, possibly with his brothers, in the $27,000 robbery of the Bank of Alton, Illinois.
  
• 7/13/1967 FBI memo about JFK assassination researcher Harold Weisberg, who had made a FOIA request for an FBI press release. The memo called his books "vitriolic and diabolical" and recommended that "no acknowledgment should be made" to his request. (Never Again 10)
  
• 7/14/1967 Secretary of State Rusk testified before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. Questions were not only asked by the Chairman, Senator Fulbright, regarding receiving the complete transcript of the Naval Court of Inquiry on a confidential basis but also a full report of the Liberty attack. The transcript of the Senate hearing states: "The information referred to is classified and in the committee files." [Hearings before the Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate, Ninetieth Congress, First Session on S. 1872, A Bill to Amend the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961, as Amended, and For Other Purposes. June 12, July 14 and 26, 1967. US Government Printing Office, Washington: 1967, pp. 233-234; State Department Liberty file: July 24, 1967 letter from Secretary Rusk to Secretary McNamara.]
  
• 7/15/1967 NBC-TV gave Jim Garrison a half-hour of response time; he did not respond directly to their charges but instead accused the mass media of "thought control....as long as I am alive, no one is going to stop me from seeing that you obtain the full truth, and nothing less than the full truth, and no fairy tales." Garrison stated flatly that Oswald had worked for the CIA. "The people of this country do not have to be protected from the truth. This country was not built on the idea that a handful of nobles, whether located in our federal agencies in Washington, D.C., or in news agencies in New York, should decide what was good for the people to know and what they should not know. This is a totalitarian concept which presumes that the leaders of our federal government and the men in control of the powerful press media constitute a special elite which by virtue of their nobility and their brilliance empower them to think for the people." He stated that JFK was killed by people connected with the CIA because he was trying to end the Cold War.
  
• 7/16/1967 The most widespread rail strike in US history begins as members of the AFL-CIO's International Association of Machinists go out on strike, idling 600,000 railroad employees.
  
• 7/17/1967 LBJ signs bill for injunction to end rail strike.
  
• 7/18/1967 President Johnson receives from his National Security Advisor W. W. Rostow the "so called Clifford report" from the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board Chairman Clark Clifford. Rostow's cover memo states: Herewith Clark Clifford's brief but definitive analysis of the attack on the Liberty. It is based on the study of literally thousands of pages of evidence. The bottom-line conclusion from Clifford's investigation was: a. The information thus far available does not reflect that the Israeli high command made a premeditated attack on a ship known to be American. [LBJ Library: SC No. 07445/67 ("Clifford Report"); Clifford, Counsel to the President: A Memoir, pp. 445-447.] The Clark Clifford Report to Lyndon Johnson: "On the afternoon of June 8 (2:05 p.m., Israeli time), the USS Liberty while in international waters in the Eastern Mediterranean suffered an attack by Israeli aircraft and motor torpedo boats. When attacked the Liberty was approximately 15.5 nautical miles north of Sinai and was traveling in a westerly direction at a speed of five knots. The initial attack consisted of five or six straffing runs by jet aircraft and was followed twenty-four minutes later with an attack by three motor torpedo boats. The attack was executed with complete surprise, remarkable efficiency, devastating accuracy and deeply tragic results. Israel's explanation of the attack is summarized as follows: a. The attack was an "innocent mistake--no criminal negligence was involved." b. Israel's Navy and Air Force had received a number of reports that El Arish was being shelled from the sea. These reports were later determined to be erroneous but, at the time they were received, they were accepted at face value by Israeli Naval and Air Force headquarters. C. Israeli officers who knew the Liberty had been identified earlier the same day did not connect her with the unidentified ships said to be shelling El Arish (and apparently the fact that a U. S. flag vessel was in the area was not communicated to subordinate elements of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF)). d. A second "mistaken report" -- that the Liberty was steaming at thirty knots--was received by the IDF. When the Liberty was identified on the morning of June 8, the IDF determined from Janes Fighting Ships that the Liberty's maximum speed was eighteen knots. The second "mistaken report" led to the conclusion that the earlier identification of the Liberty was erroneous and that the vessel allegedly traveling at thirty knots was an enemy ship. e. ZDF standing orders provided that any ships in the area cruising at speeds above twenty knots may be brought under attack without further identification. Thus the air attack was launched. f. A third mistake" resulted in the execution of the second (motor torpedo boat) stage of the attack. This third error of the IDF was its mistaken identification of the Liberty as the Egyptian supply ship El Quseir. g. Immediately following the air attack, serious doubts began to arise concerning the true identity of the ship, but these doubts were not communicated to the commanding officer of the motor torpedo boats before he launched the second stage of the attack. h. Prior to launching the torpedo attack one of the Israeli boats sent an "A-A" signal (meaning "what is your identity?") to the Liberty. The Liberty, instead of identifying herself, responded with an "A-A" signal. Officers on the Israeli boats interpreted the return signal as an evasion and concluded that the vessel in question was Egyptian, whereupon the torpedos were launched. i. The Liberty acted with lack of care by approaching excessively close to shore in an area which was a scene of war, without advising the Israeli authorities of its presence and without identifying itself elaborately. The Liberty tried to hide its presence and its identity both before it was discovered and after having been attacked. Our Findings of Fact: Based upon a thorough review of all information on the incident which has become available thus far, I wish to submit the following findings of fact: a. At all times prior to, during, and following the attack, the Liberty was in international waters where she had every right to be. As a noncombatant neutral vessel she maintained the impartial attitude of neutrality at all times prior to the attack. b. Prior to the attack no inquiry was made by the Israeli Government as to whether there were U.S. flag vessels in the general area of the Eastern Mediterranean adjoining Israel and the United Arab Republic. c. The weather was clear and calm in the area at the time of attack and throughout the preceding hours of June . Visibility was excellent. d. At all times prior to the attack the Liberty was flying her normal size American flag (five feet by eight feet) at the masthead. The flag was shot down during the air attack and was replaced by a second American flag (seven feet by thirteen feet) five minutes prior to the attack by motor torpedo boats. The Liberty did not endeavor to hide her identity or her presence in international waters at any time prior to or during the attack. e. The Liberty's U.S. Navy distinguishing letters and number were printed clearly on her bow. The Liberty's number was painted clearly in English on her stern. (Egyptian naval ships such as the El Quseir, with which the Liberty was allegedly confused, carry their names in Arabic script.) f. The ship's configuration and her standard markings were clearly sufficient for reconnaissance aircraft and waterborne vessels to identify her correctly as the noncombatant ship Liberty. g. At the time she was attacked, the Liberty was making only five knots. Her maximum capability is eighteen knots, a fact which had been ascertained by IDF personnel when she was identified on the morning of June 8. h. Prior to the torpedo attack the Liberty neither received nor dispatched an "A-A" signal. The Israeli claim that the Liberty transmitted an "A-A'1 signal prior to the torpedo attack is demonstrably false. The Liberty's signal light capability was totally destroyed in the air attack which occurred some twenty minutes before the torpedo boats appeared on the scene. Intermittently prior to the attack Liberty personnel observed a flashing light coming from the center boat. The first intelligible signal received by the Liberty was an offer of help following the torpedo attack. i. The Liberty was reconnoitered by aircraft of unidentified nationality on three separate occasions prior to the attack--5 hours and 13 minutes before the attack, 3 hours and 7 minutes before the attack, and 2 hours and 37 minutes before the attack. Personnel on the Liberty, who observed and in some instances photographed the reconnaissance aircraft, were unable to identify them fully. Positive evidence concerning their nationality is still lacking, however, there are several grounds for assuming they were Israeli: (1) when the aircraft orbited the Liberty on three separate occasions the Arab-Israeli war was in its fourth day, the Egyptian Air Force had been substantially destroyed, and the Israeli Air Force was in effective control of the air space in the area; (2) [ ---- excised ----] received information from a reliable and sensitive Israeli source reporting that he had listened to IDF air-to-ground transmissions on the morning of June 8 indicating Israeli aircraft sighting of a vessel flying the U.S. flag; (3) in the course of advancing its explanation for the attack, the Israeli Government acknowledged that the Liberty had been identified by IDF officers early on the morning of June 8. 3. [ --- excised --- ] shortly after the torpedo attack, the Israelis began to have doubts as to the identity of the vessel and efforts were intensified to verify its identification. Ten minutes after the torpedo attack an Israeli ground controller still believed it to be Egyptian. Identification attempts continued, and forty-five minutes after the torpedo attack, helicopters were checking the masts, flag and bow number of the Liberty. By this time, there appears to have been no question in Israeli minds as to what had happened. The weight of the evidence is that the Israeli attacking force originally believed their target was Egyptian. Conclusions: Based upon a thorough review of all information on the incident which has become available thus far, I wish to submit the following conclusions: a. The information thus far available does not reflect that the Israeli high command made a premeditated attack on a ship known to be American. b. The evidence at hand does not support the theory that the highest echelons of the Israeli Government were aware of the Liberty's true identity or of the fact that an attack on her was taking place. To disprove such a theory would necessitate a degree of access to Israeli personnel and information which in all likelihood can never be achieved. c. That the Liberty could have been mistaken for the Egyptian supply ship El Quseir is unbelievable. El Quseir has one-fourth the displacement of the Liberty, roughly half the beam, is 180 feet shorter, and is very differently configured. The Liberty's unusual antenna array and hull markings should have been visible to low-flying aircraft and torpedo boats. In the heat of battle the Liberty was able to identify one of the attacking torpedo boats as Israeli and to ascertain its hull number. In the same circumstances, trained Israeli naval personnel should have been able easily to see and identify the larger hull markings on the Liberty. d. The best interpretation from available facts is that there were gross and inexcusable failures in the command and control of subordinate Israeli naval and air elements. One element of the Israeli air force knew the location and identification of the Liberty around 9:00 a.m. and did not launch an attack. Yet, hours later, apparently a different IDF element made the decision to attack the same vessel that earlier flights had identified and refrained from attacking. e. There is no justification for the failure of the IDF-With the otherwise outstanding efficiency which it demonstrated in the course of the war--to ensure prompt alerting of all appropriate elements of the IDF of the fact that a U.S. ship was in the area. There was ample time to accomplish such alerting because the Liberty had been identified as a U.S. flag vessel five hours before the attack took place. f. The unprovoked attack on the Liberty constitutes a flagrant act of gross negligence for which the Israeli Government should be held completely responsible, and the Israeli military personnel involved should be punished.
  
• 7/21/1967 IDF Preliminary Judicial Inquiry completed by Lt. Col. Yerushalmi. To the seven counts brought by the Chief Military Prosecutor, Yerushalmi declared (in closing): "... whoever peruses the ample evidence presented to me, may conceivably draw some lesson regarding the relations between the two arms of the Israel Defence Forces, which were involved in the incident, and the operational procedures in times of war, particularly between the different branches of the Navy but all this is certainly not within the scope of my inquiry. Yet I have not discovered any deviation from the standard of reasonable conduct which would justify the committal of anyone for trial. In view of what has been said above, I hold, that there is no sufficient amount of prima facie evidence, justifying committing anyone for trial. [IDF Preliminary Judicial Inquiry, 21 July 1967, pp. 18-19.]
  
• 7/23/1967 Westmoreland stated in Saigon, "We have made steady progress for the last two years, and especially in the last six months." (The Experts Speak)
  
• 7/23/1967 CIA's Desmond FitzGerald, David Atlee Phillips's former Agency boss, chief of the Cuban task force who personally organized at least three attempts to assassinate Castro, collapses on tennis court and dies.
  
• 7/23-30/1967 Detroit race riots, mostly by black militants, doing great damage; all month there had been race riots in major cities. In Detroit, 41 or 43 were left dead, over 2000 injured, 5000 arrested, 1,700 stores looted by blacks and whites, and 5000 homeless from 1,442 fires. It began when police arrested 73 blacks in a raid on an after-hours club. 7/24 LBJ called in federal troops.
  
• 7/24/1967 Colonel Shamgar, IDF Military Advocate General, endorses the Preliminary Judicial Inquiry findings. [IDF MAG Report, 24 July 1967.]
  
• 7/26/1967 Defense Secretary McNamara testified before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. In a wide-ranging exchange between a number of senators and McNamara, he states: "In the case of the attack on the Liberty, it was the conclusion of the investigatory body headed by an admiral of the Navy in whom we have great confidence that the attack was not intentional." As well as: "The attackers, so far as we could tell, had not recognized the ship and in any event, had not recognized it as a U.S. ship. "Beyond that, as best we can tell, there were inadequate communications between the aircraft and/or ships reconnoitering and the attacking vessels. I think it is an inexcusable weak military performance." [see 14 July for source; pp.266-270.]
  
• 7/26/1967 H. Rap Brown, chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, is arrested on charges on inciting a riot in Cambridge, Maryland. Brown had told an audience to "burn this city down."
  
• 7/28/1967 The National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, known as the Kerner Commission after its chair, Governor Otto Kerner, Jr. of Illinois, was an 11-member commission established by President Lyndon B. Johnson to investigate the causes of the 1967 race riots in the United States and to provide recommendations for the future. Lyndon B. Johnson appointed the commission on July 28, 1967, while rioting was still underway in Detroit, Michigan. Mounting civil unrest since 1965 had stemmed riots in the black neighborhoods of major U.S. cities, including Los Angeles (Watts Riot of 1965), Chicago (Division Street Riots of 1966), and Newark (1967 Newark riots).[1] In his remarks upon signing the order establishing the Commission, Johnson asked for answers to three basic questions about the riots: "What happened? Why did it happen? What can be done to prevent it from happening again and again?"
  
• 7/29/1967 Liberty, temporarily repaired, returns to the US, docking at the Little Creek Naval Amphibious Base near Norfolk, VA. Her Captain, Commander McGonagle, partakes in a press conference aboard ship. [Virginian-Pilot, July 30, 1967.]
  
• 7/29/1967 Fire broke out on the flight deck of the carrier Forrestal as aircraft were being readied for launch over Vietnam. Flames engulfed the fantail and spread below decks touching off bombs and ammunition. The fires burned for eight hours until heroic efforts of crew members brought them under control. Damage to aircraft and the ship was severe. The final casualty count was 132 dead, two missing and presumed dead, and 62 injured. 29 planes were wrecked.
  
• 7/30/1967 Polls showed a large drop in public approval for LBJ's handling of the war. Lady Bird: "Our own decision, our hope, our determination, is to leave when this term ends. But how to tell it to the world and when - in the fall, as John Connally suggested?" (White House Diary)
  
• 8/1967 Averell Harriman and McNamara agreed that only a coalition government in Vietnam would end the war. (In Retrospect 300)
  
• 8/1967 Chairman Fulbright introduced his Foreign Relations Committee's "national commitments resolution": "it is the sense of the Senate that a national commitment of the United States to a foreign power necessarily and exclusively results from affirmative action taken by the Executive and Legislative branches of the United States government through means of a treaty, convention, or other legislative instrumentality specifically intended to give effect to such a commitment." Hawkish Sen. Richard Russell was the first to speak for it on the floor.
  
• 8/1967 Jim Garrison met with Richard Billings to discuss the mob rumors; Garrison claims that Billings asked him about some obscure Louisiana racketeer that the D.A. had never heard of, though Billings says that the man he asked Garrison about was Carlos Marcello, "and Garrison replied he had never met the man." Blakey and Billings charge that while Garrison cracked down on minor racketeers, he avoided Marcello's operations.
  
• 8/1967 LBJ told reporters: "On instructions of ours we assassinated Diem and then, by God, I walked into it. It was too late and we went through one government after another." (Washington Post 6/23/1974)
  
• 8/3/1967 Administration announces it is sending 45,000-50,000 more troops to Vietnam, bringing the total to 525,000 by mid-1968.
  
• 8/3/1967 CIA Director Richard Helms establishes a new Special Operations Group hidden within the Plans Department's counterintelligence division to monitor the peace movement within the United States.
  
• 8/9-25 or 29/1967 closed hearings held by Senate Preparedness Subcommittee on the conduct of the war; chaired by John Stennis, it also included Stuart Symington, Henry Jackson, Howard Cannon, Robert Byrd, Margaret Chase Smith, Strom Thurmond and Jack Miller (R-Iowa), who took a hard-line on air power. They were furious when the JCS told them that McNamara had recommended to LBJ not to increase the bombing. A parade of military brass testified, each advocating greatly expanded bombing, and assured the committee that the air war was effective. They complained of meddling by civilians in Washington in their prosecution of the war. 8/25 McNamara testified and explained how ineffective the bombing was at stopping infiltration or slowing the North's war effort. Sen. Cannon blasted him for not giving the JCS everything they had asked for. McNamara replied, "the Constitution gives the responsibility of Commander-in-Chief to a civilian, the President, and I am sure it didn't intend that he would exercise that by following blindly the recommendations of his military advisers." Thurmond accused him of "placating the Communists...appeasing the Communists." The subcommittee's unanimous report strongly criticized McNamara's handling of the war.
  
• 8/13/1967 The Daughters of the American Revolution refuse to allow Joan Baez to perform at Constitution Hall, Washington because of her anti-war views.
  
• 8/13/1967 Lady Bird: "I think the most frustrated I've been lately is reading a speech that Senator Fulbright made in which he indicated that the country is damned because we are spending so much in Vietnam instead of spending it here to take care of the poor and underprivileged - this from a man who has never voted for any Civil Rights measure and who even voted against Medicare..." (White House Diary)
  
• 8/13/1967 Arthur Penn's film Bonnie and Clyde was released. It was immediately panned by American film critics; only a rookie reviewer, Roger Ebert, praised it, calling it "a milestone in the history of American movies, a work of truth and brilliance" and predicting "years from now it is quite possible that `Bonnie and Clyde' will be seen as the definitive film of the 1960s."
  
• 8/14/1967 When Dean Andrews repeated his statement that he didn't know Shaw to a New Orleans grand jury, he was convicted of three counts of perjury on this date. The evening of the conviction, Andrews' lawyer spoke with an ABC-TV reporter; the reporter asked him "How come Dean had to go to jail like a criminal?" He later commented that Andrews (who had just been convicted) had "allegedly" lied to a grand jury. (Citizen's Dissent 143) CBS didn't even report the conviction that night, though Walter Cronkite had expressed skepticism about Garrison's actions.
  
• 8/16/1967 On the Today show, Sen. John Tower (R-Texas) defended the Vietnam war while Democratic Sen. Joe Clark attacked it.
  
• 8/17/1967 Katzenbach testified before Fulbright's committee.
  
• 8/18/1967 LBJ held a televised press conference. "We stated then, and we repeat now, we did not think the [Tonkin] resolution was necessary to do what we did and what we are doing. Be we thought it was desirable." Johnson stated that the Senate could repeal the resolution if they no longer agreed with the conduct of the war.
  
• 8/21/1967 Katzenbach testified again before Fulbright's committee. He gave fuzzy, ambiguous responses to questions about whether the Tonkin resolution gave LBJ the authority to wage war. He began to argue about the definition of war. Sen. Hickenlooper: Do you consider we are at war today in Vietnam? Katzenbach: Will you tell me in what sense you mean the word Sen. Hickenlooper: I am not defining a sense. Finally, he admitted that he felt Johnson could have done what he did in Vietnam without the Tonkin resolution.
  
• 8/21/1967 Earl Warren privately told Drew Pearson that Gerald Ford hadn't wanted to agree with the Warren Report's conclusions: "Ford wanted to go off on a tangent following a communist plot" with Castro being the responsible party. Ford also didn't like the report's criticism of the FBI for failing to warn the SS about Oswald. The language in the Report saying that no evidence of a conspiracy had been found was intended as a compromise. (Chief Justice p427)
  
• 8/21/1967 Returning to the US from Montreal, James Earl Ray met with his brother Jerry in Chicago en route to Birmingham. Ray's story told to William Pepper: "One of these waterside taverns was the Neptune Bar at 121 West Commissioner's Street. Here in August 1967 he met the shadowy character Raul, who Ray insists was to coordinate and direct his activity from that day through April 4, 1968. The meeting at the Neptune was the first of eight or ten. Eventually, Ray told Raul that he needed identification and passage out of the country. Raul replied that he might be able to help if Ray would help with some smuggling schemes at the U.S. border. Ray had no way of contacting Raul at this time. They simply made arrangements to get together, usually at the Neptune. (Over the years, Ray's description of Raul has varied slightly, but he has basically described him as being of Latin extraction, weighing between 145 and 150 pounds, about 5'9" tall, and having dark hair with a reddish tint.) Eventually discarding the idea of finding a guarantor, Ray resumed meeting with Raul and tentatively agreed to help smuggle some unspecified contraband across the border from Windsor to Detroit. Raul promised him travel papers and money for this service. Ray said he expected to receive only a small payment for the operation, but he never negotiated or even asked about his fee. This was typical of Ray's behavior throughout. He didn't believe he was in a position to ask questions -- he was being paid to follow instructions. Ray was told by Raul that if he decided to become further involved he would have to move to Alabama, where Raul would buy him a car, pay his living expenses, and give him a fee. In return, Ray would be expected to help Raul in another smuggling operation, this time across the Mexican border. Shortly afterward he met Raul at Windsor, and in two separate trips smuggled two sets of packages across the border to Detroit. He thought the first trip was a dry run to test him. On the second trip he was stopped at customs, but the inspector was interrupted by his superior and sent elsewhere. The second official discontinued the search and simply had him pay the $4.50 duty for a television set he had declared. When he got to Detroit, Raul nervously asked why he had been delayed. Ray showed him the receipt from the customs officer. Raul gave him about $1,500 and a New Orleans telephone number where a message could be left. He told Ray that if he would continue to cooperate, he would eventually obtain not only travel documents but more money as well. Raul told Ray to get rid of his old car and go to Mobile, Alabama, where they would meet at a place to be decided. Ray said that he convinced Raul to go to Birmingham instead because it was a larger city and Ray thought he'd be more anonymous there. Raul. said that he would send a general delivery letter to Birmingham with instructions on where and when to meet. Some time after his arrival in Birmingham, Ray picked up a general delivery letter from Raul that instructed him to go to the Starlight Lounge the same evening. There Raul reminded Ray that he was going to need a reliable car. Ray saw an advertisement in the paper for a used Mustang, and Raul gave him $2,000 in cash to buy it. After this, Raul asked him to buy some photography equipment. He also gave Ray a new number in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, which he could call for instructions as a backup to the New Orleans number. Raul gave him $1,000 for the photography equipment and his living expenses, and at Raul's request Ray gave him a set of keys to the Mustang. He ordered the photography equipment by mail from a Chicago firm but didn't understand why Raul wanted it. Ray had previously received his driver's license and a set of Alabama tags under the name of Eric S. Galt. He kept the old Rayns license in a rented safe deposit box at a local bank, along with some of the cash Raul had given him and a pistol he had bought through a classified ad two or three weeks after he arrived in Birmingham.
  
• 8/22/1967 LBJ meets with the Shah of Iran in Washington. LBJ praised him for his measures against illiteracy and a booming economy, "progress without violence and without any bloodshed..."
  
• 8/23/1967 Rothermel memo to H.L. Hunt; he reported that Life magazine would soon publish an article attacking Garrison and trying to link him to Carlos Marcello. "In addition, Life will try to show that Bobby Kennedy and the Kennedy family are opposed to Garrison's probe." (Texas Rich 241)
  
• 8/25/1967 George Lincoln Rockwell, head of the American Nazi Party, was assassinated in Virginia by one of his own followers. Near his Arlington, Virginia, headquarters, he was shot and killed in ambush by a sniper. On June 28, 1967, the first attempt was made on Rockwell's life. Returning from shopping, he drove into the party barracks' driveway on Wilson Boulevard and found it blocked by a felled tree and brush. Rockwell assumed that it was another prank by local teens. As a young boy cleared the obstruction, two shots were fired at Rockwell from behind one of the swastika-embossed brick driveway pillars. One of the shots ricocheted off the car, right next to his head. Leaping from the car, Rockwell pursued the would-be assassin. On June 30, Rockwell petitioned the Arlington County Circuit Court for a gun permit. No action was ever taken on his request. On August 25, 1967, Rockwell was killed by gunshots while leaving the Econowash laundromat at the Dominion Hills Shopping Center in the 6000 block of Wilson Boulevard in Arlington, Virginia.[19] Two bullets crashed through his 1958 Chevrolet's windshield, and it slowly rolled backwards to a stop. Rockwell staggered out of the front passenger side door of the car, pointed towards the shopping center roof, and then collapsed face up on the pavement. The gunman ran along the shopping center roof and jumped to the ground in the rear. A shop owner and a customer briefly gave chase, but were unable to get a clear look at the fleeing figure. Other customers called the Arlington County police and checked Rockwell for a pulse. He had none; the one bullet that struck him had ripped through several major arteries just above his heart. The internal bleeding was so heavy that Rockwell died in two minutes. A half hour later, at a bus stop about a half-mile away,[21] John Patler, a former member of Rockwell's group, was arrested as the suspected murderer by a passing patrolman familiar with the Arlington Nazis.[20] Later that day, after hearing of his son's death, Rockwell's 78-year-old father commented laconically, "I am not surprised at all. I've expected it for quite some time." Matt Koehl, the number two man in the NSWPP, moved to establish legal control over Rockwell's body and all NSWPP assets. At the time of his death, the NSWPP had approximately 300 active members nationwide, and perhaps 3,000 financial supporters. Although Rockwell's parents wanted a private burial in Maine, they did not feel up to a public fight with the Nazis for his body. On August 27, an NSWPP spokesman reported that Federal officials had given verbal approval to a planned military burial of Rockwell at Culpeper National Cemetery, as an honorably discharged veteran of the U.S. Armed Forces. On August 29, several dozen NSWPP troopers and about 100 party supporters formed a procession and drove the 65 miles from Arlington to Culpeper. At the cemetery gates they were met by General Carl C. Turner and 60 MPs who had been rushed in from Vint Hill to enforce the U.S. Army's burial protocol. They were backed by dozens of police from various jurisdictions. No mourners bearing Nazi insignia would be allowed into the cemetery. The NSWPP troopers refused to remove their uniforms, which led to a day-long standoff. They unsuccessfully tried to force their way into the cemetery three separate times. Several arrests resulted. With daylight fading, General Turner declared that Rockwell could not be buried until the NSWPP made a new request to the Pentagon and agreed to follow protocol. The Nazis returned to Arlington with Rockwell's body. Plans were made to bury Rockwell in Spotsylvania County, but they fell apart when local Jewish organizations protested. Fearing that Arlington County officials might seize the body, the ANP had Rockwell cremated the next morning, and a memorial service was held that afternoon at party headquarters. On February 8, 1968, the NSWPP filed suit to obtain a Nazi burial for Rockwell's remains at any National Cemetery. On March 15, 1969, a Federal district judge upheld the Army Secretary's ruling that Rockwell was ineligible for a burial with full military honors in a national cemetery. Today Rockwell's ashes reside next to those of Savitri Devi in the memorial room of New Order headquarters in New Berlin, Wisconsin. Following psychiatric evaluation, John Patler was judged competent to stand trial. He pleaded not guilty at his preliminary hearing to the charge of first degree homicide. His trial began on November 27 amid tight security at the Arlington County Courthouse. On December 15, Patler was found guilty and released on bond to await sentencing. On February 23, 1968, Patler was sentenced to 20 years in prison, at that time the least amount possible for a first degree murder conviction. The Virginia Circuit Court postponed imprisonment[citation needed] pending his appeal. On November 30, 1970, the Virginia Supreme Court upheld Patler's conviction and 20-year sentence for slaying Rockwell, and ordered him to begin serving his sentence. On May 16, 1972, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously rejected Patler's appeal based on claims of witness contamination. In August 1975, Patler was paroled from the Pulaski correctional unit after serving less than four years of his sentence. Judge Charles S. Russell, who had presided over Patler's murder trial, wrote a lengthy letter to the parole board supporting Patler's release, the only time he did so in his career. The following year Patler violated the terms of his parole and was returned to prison for an additional six years. On December 30, 1977 Patler petitioned the Henry County Circuit Court to change his surname back to its original form, Patsalos. After serving out the remainder of his sentence, John Patsalos returned to the New York City area. The exact reason for Rockwell's murder is still a matter of debate. Patler's nasty feud with Rockwell and a family history of violence weighed against him at the trial. Despite being convicted of the crime, Patler has always maintained his innocence. The case against him was largely circumstantial and key evidence against him (e.g., whether he possessed the murder weapon at the time of the killing) was disputed by defense witnesses. The small strip mall where Rockwell was killed is still called the Dominion Hills Shopping Center, although it has since been refurbished and the laundromat replaced by a dry cleaners. After his death, admirers of Rockwell painted a white swastika on the blacktop surface of the parking lot, marking the exact spot where he died. Several attempts by the property owners were made to obliterate the emblem with a square patch of black paint, but the white swastika would always surreptitiously reappear, usually on or near the anniversary of Rockwell's death. It remained visible, off and on, well into the 1980s, until the NSWPP renamed itself New Order and moved their headquarters to Wisconsin. Since then the parking lot has been resurfaced and the swastika never replaced, however the spot where his body lay can be approximated today by using a crime scene photograph that appears on page 323 of William H. Schmaltz's biography of Rockwell. On August 27, 2007, the 40th anniversary of the assassination, a group of unidentified, non-uniformed Rockwell admirers appeared at the Dominion Hills Shopping Center to conduct a brief ceremony and lay a wreath. They carried a plain white banner with black and red lettering that bore the symbolic slogan "Lincoln Rockwell Lives!".
  
• 8/25/1967 Memo from J. Edgar Hoover to all offices: "COUNTERINTELLIGENCE PROGRAM BLACK NATIONALIST - HATE GROUPS INTERNAL SECURITY" - [...] The purpose of this new counterintelligence endeavor is to expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or OTHERWISE NEUTRALIZE [emphasis added] the activities of black nationalist hate-type organizations and groupings, their leadership, spokesmen, membership, and supporters, and to counter their propensity for violence and civil disorder. The activities of all such groups of intelligence interest to the Bureau must be followed on a continuous basis so we will be in a position to promptly take advantage of all opportunities for counterintelligence and inspire action in instances where circumstances warrant. The pernicious background of such groups, their duplicity, and devious maneuvers must be exposed to public scrutiny where such publicity will have a neutralizing effect. Efforts of the various groups to consolidate their forces or to recruit new or youthful adherents must be frustrated. NO OPPORTUNITY SHOULD BE MISSED TO EXPLOIT THROUGH COUNTERINTELLIGENCE TECHNIQUES THE ORGANIZATIONAL AND PERSONAL CONFLICTS OF THE LEADERSHIPS OF THE GROUPS AND WHERE POSSIBLE AN EFFORT SHOULD BE MADE TO CAPITALIZE UPON EXISTING CONFLICTS BETWEEN COMPETING BLACK NATIONALIST ORGANIZATIONS. [emphasis added] When an opportunity is apparent to disrupt or NEUTRALIZE [emphasis added] black nationalist, hate-type organizations through the cooperation of established local news media contacts or through such contact with sources available to the Seat of Government [Hoover's office]*, in every instance careful attention must be given to the proposal to insure the targetted group is disrupted, ridiculed, or discredited through the publicity and not merely publicized... You are also cautioned that the nature of this new endeavor is such that UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES SHOULD THE EXISTENCE OF THE PROGRAM BE MADE KNOWN OUTSIDE THE BUREAU [emphasis added] and appropriate within office security should be afforded to sensitive operations and techniques considered under the program. No counterintelligence action under this program may be initiated by the field without specific prior Bureau authorization. [Emphasis in orig.]
  
• 8/26/1967 The following is from a typewritten document in the Assassination Archives and Research Center in Washington, DC. It is dated August 26, 1967, and has the handwritten notation (presumably by AARC personnel) "Bud Finsterwald's notes." Notes on interview with Jim Garrison, District Attorney, New Orleans 1:00 to 4:00 P.M. at Criminal Courts Building, New Orleans. Also present part time: Louis IVON, Garrison's Chief Investigator. Garrison was extremely interested in our wiretap investigation. Feels strict legislation is very necessary. Says he only uses it against "guys like Sheridan." Feels his office and home phones are tapped by the Bureau but doesn't care.
  
• 8/28/1967 U.S. News & World Report: New Negro Threat August 28, 1967 U.S. News & World Report reports that Dr. King plans on using "civil disobedience on a massive scale," including marches, sit-ins and boycotts in "riot-torn" Northern cities.
  
• 8/28/1967 James Earl Ray buys a white Mustang in Birmingham, Alabama using the name Eric S. Galt.
  
• 8/30/1967 Senate approves Thurgood Marshall's appointment to Supreme Court; he is the first black justice.
  

[Tracy Riddle]

• 9/1967 Coup d'Etat November 22, 1963 by Medford Evans AMERICAN OPINION, September 1967, pp. 73100 This article is taken from the introductory chapter to Dr. Evans' forthcoming book on the Johnson administration. [The Usurpers, Western Islands Press, Boston, 1968, 249 pp.KAR]
  
• 9/1/1967 The National New Politics convention met in the Palmer House ballroom in Chicago and advocated organization of "white civilizing committees in all white communities to humanize the savage and beast-like character that runs rampant through America exemplified by George Lincoln Rockwell and Lyndon Johnson." (NYT 9/2)
  
• 9/1/1967 Jim Garrison writes a foreward for Harold Weisberg's upcoming book, Oswald in New Orleans.
  
• 9/4/1967 Peter Grose (NYT) WASHINGTON, Sept. 3-- United States officials were surprised and heartened today at the size of turnout in South Vietnam's presidential election despite a Vietcong terrorist campaign to disrupt the voting. According to reports from Saigon, 83 per cent of the 5.85 million registered voters cast their ballots yesterday. Many of them risked reprisals threatened by the Vietcong. The size of the popular vote and the inability of the Vietcong to destroy the election machinery were the two salient facts in a preliminary assessment of the nation election based on the incomplete returns reaching here. Pending more detailed reports, neither the State Department nor the White House would comment on the balloting or the victory of the military candidates, Lieut. Gen. Nguyen Van Thieu, who was running for president, and Premier Nguyen Cao Ky, the candidate for vice president. A successful election has long been seen as the keystone in President Johnson's policy of encouraging the growth of constitutional processes in South Vietnam. The election was the culmination of a constitutional development that began in January, 1966, to which President Johnson gave his personal commitment when he met Premier Ky and General Thieu, the chief of state, in Honolulu in February. The purpose of the voting was to give legitimacy to the Saigon Government, which has been founded only on coups and power plays since November, 1963, when President Ngo Dinh Deim was overthrown by a military junta. Few members of that junta are still around, most having been ousted or exiled in subsequent shifts of power. The fact that the backing of the electorate has gone to the generals who have been ruling South Vietnam for the last two years does not, in the Administration's view, diminish the significance of the constitutional step that has been taken. The hope here is that the new government will be able to maneuver with a confidence and legitimacy long lacking in South Vietnamese politics. That hope could have been dashed either by a small turnout, indicating widespread scorn or a lack of interest in constitutional development, or by the Vietcong's disruption of the balloting. American officials had hoped for an 80 per cent turnout. That was the figure in the election in September for the Constituent Assembly. Seventy-eight per cent of the registered voters went to the polls in elections for local officials last spring. Before the results of the presidential election started to come in, the American officials warned that the turnout might be less than 80 per cent because the polling place would be open for two or three hours less than in the election a year ago. The turnout of 83 per cent was a welcome surprise. The turnout in the 1964 United States Presidential election was 62 per cent. Captured documents and interrogations indicated in the last week a serious concern among Vietcong leaders that a major effort would be required to render the election meaningless. This effort has not succeeded, judging from the reports from Saigon.
  
• 9/7/1967 Barry Goldwater wrote in a syndicated editorial: "There are signs that the administration is getting fed up with the deceit, wrong decisions and dictatorial arrogance of Robert Strange McNamara, the man who never yet has been right about Vietnam or any other military matter...for the first time, military men seem free to voice the opposition to McNamara which always has been present..."
  
• 9/10/1967 NASA's Surveyor 5 landed on the moon and began testing lunar soil.
  
• 9/12/1967 Richard Helms told LBJ in a highly secret memo (that was recently declassified), CIA analysts predicted that if the US lost the war, it would be a short-term setback for the US and Southeast Asia, but not a catastrophic one, and US prestige and Asian stability would recover in the not-too-distant future. Only LBJ saw this memo at the time. (In Retrospect)
  
• 9/15/1967 Garrison included elements of "the invisible Nazi substructure" in the assassination plot. ("Joe Dolan Talk Back" Program, KNEW, Oakland, CA.)
  
• 9/18/1967 McNamara announces that the US will develop a "thin" antiballistic missile system (made up of Nike X and Spartan missiles) to defend against a possible nuclear attack from China; this program would cost $5 billion, whereas a rejected "heavy" system would have cost $40 billion.
  
• 9/20/1967 A CIA memorandum of 20 September 1967 describing the first meeting of a "Garrison Group" within the Agency. MEMORANDUM FOR THE RECORD SUBJECT: Garrison Group Meeting No. 1 - 20 September 1967 PRESENT: Executive Director, General Counsel, Inspector General, DD/P, DD/S, Mr. Raymond Rocca of CI Staff, Director of Security, and Mr. Goodwin. 1. Executive Director said that the Director had asked him to convene a group to consider the possible implications for the Agency emanating from New Orleans before, during, and after the trial of Clay Shaw. 2. General Counsel discussed his dealings with Justice and the desire of Shaw's lawyers to make contact with the Agency. 3. Rocca felt that Garrison would indeed obtain a conviction of Shaw for conspiring to assassinate President Kennedy. 4. Executive Director said the group should level on two objectives: (a) what kind of action, if any, is available to the Agency, and (b) what actions should be taken inside the Agency to reassure the Director that we have the problem in focus. The possibility of Agency action should be examined from the timing of what can be done before the trial and what might be feasible during and after the trial. It was agreed that OGC and Rocca would make a detailed study of all the facts and consult with Justice as appropriate prior to the next group meeting.
  
• 9/21/1967 The Salans Report DEPARTMENT OF STATE The Legal Adviser September 21, 1967 TO: U -- The Under Secretary THROUGH: S/S FROM: L -- Carl F. Salans SUBJECT: "The Liberty" -- Discrepancies Between Israeli Inquiry and U.S. Navy Inquiry -- INFORMATION MEMORANDUM As you requested, we have compared the decision of the Israeli Judge, dated July 21, 1967, with the findings of the U.S. Navy Court of Inquiry, and the Clifford Report, concerning the Liberty incident. The following discrepancies are noteworthy: I. Speed and Direction of the "Liberty" The Israeli report indicates that the torpedo boat Division Commander reported and reconfirmed the target's (Liberty's) speed at 28 to 30 knots and that it had changed its navigational direction shortly after 1341 hours. The U.S. Navy inquiry established that the Liberty had been on a steady course at 5 knots from 1132 hours until the attack. II. Aircraft Surveillance The Israeli report indicates that a ship was reported in the area by reconnaissance aircraft at 0600 and that another report was received of a contact between an Israeli aircraft and a surface vessel about 0900. The Navy Court finding of facts, plus testimony of various members of the crew indicate reconnaissance overflights of the Liberty at 0515, 0850, 1030, 1056, 1126, 1145, 1220, and 1245. III. Identification by Israeli Aircraft The Israeli report indicates that the fighter aircraft carried out a run over the ship in an effort to identify it. The Navy Inquiry reports no such identification run. Commander McGonagle testified that he observed one aircraft of similar characteristics to those on earlier reconnaissance flights approximately five to six miles from the ship at an altitude of 7,000 feet. He did not see it approach the ship. Within a couple of minutes, a loud explosion was heard from the port side of the ship, apparently resulting from a rocket, launched by a second aircraft. IV. Identification by Torpedo Boats The Israeli report indicates that the torpedo boats approached the Liberty in order to establish visual contact and to identify it, and that in addition, the Commander of the torpedo boats signalled the Liberty requesting its identification. The Liberty reportedly answered, "Identify yourself first," and opened fire on the torpedo boats. Commander McGonagle's testimony indicated that the only signals from the torpedo boats were those made during the high-speed approach from a distance of approximately 2,000 yards and that it was not possible for the Liberty to read the signals because of the intermittent blocking of view by smoke and flames. No reply signal was sent. Immediately after the Liberty was struck by a torpedo, the torpedo boats stopped at a range of approx- imately 500 to 800 yards and one signalled by flashing light in English "Do you require assistance?" Commander McGonagle testified that he had no means to communicate with the boat by light but hoisted "CODE LIMA INDIA". ("I am not under command", i.e., not able to control movements of ship.) V. Flag and Identification Markings The Israeli report indicates that the fighter aircraft which reportedly made an initial pass over the Liberty was looking for a flag but found none; likewise no other identification mark was observed. "...Throughout the contact no American or any other flag appeared on the ship...." (Elsewhere the report had indicated that at 1055 the ship had been identified as the Liberty "whose marking was GTR-5.") The Navy inquiry confirms by testimony of five members of the crew that they had personally observed the Ensign flying during the entire morning and up until the air attack. The Ensign was subsequently shot away during the air attack. Before the torpedo attack, a second Ensign was hoisted. The Navy report also found that "hull markings were clear and freshly painted." The Clifford report noted that "the Liberty's U.S. Navy's distinguishing letters and number were painted clearly on her bow. The Liberty's name was clearly painted in English on her stern. The ship's configuration and her standard markings were clearly sufficient for reconnaissance aircraft and waterborne vessels to identify her correctly...." The report noted that at all times prior to the air attack the Liberty was flying her normal size American flag (5 ft. by 8 ft.) at the masthead. Five minutes prior to the attack by the torpedo boats, the Liberty put up a flag measuring 7 ft. by 13 ft. to replace the flag which had been shot down in the air attack. VI. Identification of Ship as "El-Kasir" The Israeli report indicates that shortly before the torpedo boat attack the torpedo boat Division Commander reported the certain identification of the vessel as an Egyptian transport ship named "El Kasir". Identification of the target was made both by the Division Commander and the commander of another torpedo boat. The Israeli Judge indicated in his decision that "on examining photographs of the two ships, I am satisfied that a likeness exists between them, and that an error of identification is possible, especially having regard to the fact, that identification was made while the ship was clouded in smoke." The Clifford report noted "That the Liberty could have been mistaken for the Egyptian supply ship El Quseir is unbelievable. El Quseir has one-fourth the displacement of the Liberty, roughly one-half the beam, is 180 feet shorter, and is very differently configured. The Liberty's unusual antenna array and hull markings should have been visible to low-flying aircraft and torpedo boats. ...Trained Israeli naval personnel should have been able easily to see and identify the larger hull markings on the Liberty." Additional Observations Regarding Israeli Report I. Speed of Liberty and "El Kasir" as Identification Factors The Israeli report states that the initial speed of the target reported by the torpedo boat commander at 1341 hours as 30 knots was verified within minutes and confirmed as a speed of 28 knots. The report notes that it was the speed of the target which led to the final conclusion that there was no reason for surmising that the target could possibly be the Liberty. The reported speed would have ruled out the "El Kasir" as the target, as well as the Liberty since the top speed of the "Kasir", published in Janes Fighting Ships, is in the range of 14 knots. The Liberty's top speed is 18 knots. II. Failure to Relate "Liberty" to Bombardment Capability The Israeli report emphasizes that the attack originated with reports that the El Arish area was being shelled from the sea. The implication of such reports was obviously that a ship capable of such shelling was present in the immediate offshore area, i.e., within gun range of the shore. It would be clear to any trained observer that the armament aboard the Liberty was incapable of shore bombardment. It appears nevertheless that neither the aircraft, torpedo boats, nor the command headquarters to which they presumably reported evaluated the ship's capability for shore bombardment. III. Time Sequence of Attacks The Israeli report indicates that it had been agreed that as soon as the torpedo boats located the target, aircraft would be dispatched. At 1341 hours the torpedo boat located the target. "A few minutes later", the dispatch of aircraft was requested. The first air attack occurred at approximately 1400 hours. Assuming "a few minutes later" would mean four or five minutes, the request for aircraft must have occurred about 1345. One may infer from the fact that within a period of approximately 15 minutes, the request was transmitted, received, a command decision made, aircraft dispatched, and the attack launched, that no significant time was expended in an effort to identify the ship from the air before the attack was launched. IV. Attack by Torpedo Boat After "Do Not Attack" Order The Israeli report confirms that during the final attack by aircraft the marking "CPR-5" was noted on the hull and an order was transmitted to the torpedo boat division not to attack. The order was recorded in the log book of the flag boat at approximately 1420 hours. The torpedo boats nevertheless began their attack run at approximately 1428. The Division Commander later "claimed that no such message ever reached him." The Deputy Commander testified that "he received the message and passed it on to the Division Commander."
  
• 9/24/1967 Garrison accused Jack Ruby and certain members of the Dallas police of being involved in the plot. He charged that RFK was "without any question of a doubt...interferring with the investigation of the murder of his brother" and was making "a real effort to stop it." ("Page One," WABC-TV, New York)
  
• 9/24/1967 Sirhan Sirhan begins work at Organic Pasadena Health Food Store. Also of interest in this regard is the fact that in late 1967 Sirhan had virtually dropped out of sight. LAPD efforts to trace his location and activities for approximately three months in the period after he left his job at the Corona ranch drew a blank. In fact his mother began to be concerned as even she did not know his whereabouts for a period of time. And when he returned, his interest in the occult had seriously deepened.
  
• 9/25/1967 LBJ and Lady Bird "talked and talked and talked about when and how to make a statement that Lyndon is not going to be a candidate again." (White House Diary)
  
• 9/26/1967 A 26 September 1967 CIA memo describing the second meeting of the "Garrison Group." MEMORANDUM FOR THE RECORD SUBJECT: Garrison Group Meeting No. 2 - 26 September 1967 PRESENT: Executive Director, General Counsel, Inspector General, DD/P, DD/S, Mr. Raymond Rocca and Mr. Donovan Pratt of CI Staff, Director of Security, and Mr. Goodwin 1. General Counsel said that Nathaniel E. Kossack, First Assistant to the Assistant Attorney General, Criminal Division of Justice, had met with Shaw's lawyers. They gave him a list of questions and names of individuals that they believed might be implicated in the trial. Justice did not want the Agency to contact Shaw's lawyers, but rather to maintain the safety of our executive privilege. 2. Executive Director asked how complete our records are of contacts with Cubans. DD/P explained that they are adequate where contacts were with individuals but not when they were with Cuban groups. The Executive Director remarked on the impressive number of contacts we seem to have had who might now be implicated by Garrison. He said we should also think of what our course of action should be in the event our position on executive privilege becomes unstuck. 3. Rocca felt that McCone should be briefed, and perhaps also Hoover and Clifford. Executive Director said we should be prepared in the near future to bring the Director up to date and present him with alternative action. 4. Rocca noted that he had prepared a hypothetical scenario and given it to the General Counsel for comment. OGC will subsequently disseminate this with his comments. 5. DD/P said the Director complained of the lack of explanation as to where and how he is liable to get into trouble, and suggested that we ask the General Counsel to pinpoint this. Executive Director added that the Director also wanted to know how he could fight back. In this regard, Goodwin suggested the Director needed "conversational" material. 6. Pratt called attention to that part of Garrison's story which was based on alleged CIA involvement in a plot to kill Castro. DD/S suggested that Rocca might work up a graphic of the organization as conceived by Garrison. This was agreed. 7. Goodwin noted the Life magazine article linking Garrison to the Cosa Nostra in New Orleans. 8. General Counsel said that the judge should be setting the trial date this week.
  
• 9/26/1967 CIA memo from Raymond Rocca that was apparently the subject of considerable discussion at the September 27th "policy meeting." This is a survey of possible courses of action. There are arguments for and against action in each instance. The purpose is not to make an evaluation but to suggest the choices available. 1. The FBI representative from the inception of the Garrison investigation has strongly endorsed a course of action involving close and continuous interaction with the Attorney General or his designee. In effect, this has been done by Mr. Houston's office. 2. The following specific lines of action could be taken in complementing what has already been done in discussion with the Attorney General: a. File a specific bill of particulars on all aspects of the Garrison investigation that have become public. In effect this would mean making available to the Attorney General or his designee the substance Memoranda 1-7 in the Garrison investigation series. It would include a detailed consideration of those charges made by Garrison against the Agency growing out of the Oswald case and the Warren Commission Report. b. Initiate action with the Attorney General to bring charges of unlawful impersonation against Gordon NOVEL and Donald P. NORTON. Committees of Oversight in House and Senate. 1. Mr. Warner should be fully briefed on the entire background of Garrison's efforts to involve the Agency in his investigation. There are certain Congressmen who were members of the Warren Commission, and a specific effort should be made to stay alert and sensitive to Garrison's destructive reading of the Warren Commission Report. 2. Certainly an effort should be made to block or head off any attempts to put the Playboy article into the Congressional Record. 3. Who in the Senate or House would have the influence to induce Senator Long, who has endorsed Garrison, to consider the facts rather than the fanciful theories? 4. Consideration could be given to providing a designated group in the Senate and/or House with a White Paper summarizing the information that has already been provided to the Attorney General. 5. Consideration could be given to introducing formally in one of the CIA legislative committees a request for the extension of present federal legislation applicable to misrepresentation in situations not involving financial gain. It is our understanding that the Houma rule now deprives the Agency of any remedy except when it can be shown money is involved. In other words CIA does not have the same protection for its people in the U.S. as the FBI and certain other agencies have for their operations. Other Organizations and Individuals In and Out of Government. 1. The President's Board of Consultants on Foreign Intelligence Activities as a body, or Clark Clifford as Chairman, could be briefed in detail on all of the problems growing out of Garrison's false charges. 2. Mr. McCone could be fully briefed along the lines already discussed above. He is in a position to exert extensive influence in Catholic and Republican Party circles. The events under discussion took place during his Directorship. 3. Mr. J. Edgar Hoover is probably the single most important person to be considered in reacting to Garrison's false charges. Garrison has obviously made a play in the past four months to detach the FBI from CIA. (When he began his investigation, apparently he considered both the FBI and CIA equally vulnerable.) If Mr. Hoover can be persuaded of the basic merits of the Agency's position in the Garrison matter and if he will take a public stand thereon, we will have gone a long way toward preserving an overall favorable balance of opinion in the country. The facts of our case, therefore, should be pressed not only with the Attorney General and the Department of Justice but with the Director of the FBI as well. We have in the past months kept the FBI liaison fully informed of all aspects of our findings with respect to Garrison's charges. Mass Media Approaches. 1. Careful thought should be given to the extent to which Mr. Goodwin or the Director can assure that the newspaper outlets receive a coherent picture of Garrison's "facts" and motives. In anticipation of a trial, it would be prudent to have carefully selected channels of communication lined up in advance.
  
• 9/27/1967 In early fall, 1967, Attorney General Clark asked John Doar, Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights, to report on the Department's facilities for organizing information on individuals involved in civil disorders. On September 27, 1967, Doar recommended establishment of a 'single intelligence unit to analyze the FBI information we receive about certain persons and groups who make the urban ghetto their base of operation.' The FBI was to constitute only one source of information for the proposed unit. As additional sources, Doar suggested federal poverty programs, Labor Dept programs, and neighborhood legal services....the intelligence united of the Internal Revenue Service and perhaps the Post Office Department. The CIA was not among the proposed sources. (Rockefeller Commission report)
  
• 9/29/1967 MEMORANDUM FOR: Director of Central Intelligence SUBJECT: Clay L. Shaw's Trial and the Central Intelligence Agency 1. This memorandum is for information 2. The investigation of District Attorney Garrison of New Orleans into the assassination of President Kennedy, and his attack on the Warren Commission report, now focuses on one facet the trial of Clay L. Shaw, who has been indicted for conspiracy to assassinate the President. In his public announcements Garrison has been careful not to reveal his theory of the trial. Technically, he could restrict himself to an attempt to prove a conspiracy among Shaw, Oswald, the pilot Ferrie, and possibly others without involving CIA at all. As we understand Louisiana law, Garrison will have to prove at least one overt act in pursuance of the conspiracy, and with Oswald and Ferrie both dead, we do not at the moment know of such an act which he could prove. 3. We speculate, therefore, that he will try to involve others and bring out testimony that they were involved in such things as the movement of arms and money in pursuance of the conspiracy. Again, conceivably, this could be done without involving CIA. Indeed, in his most recent pronouncements, Garrison has been concentrating on an unidentified group of Dallas oil men of the extreme right-wing type, who he says were the instigators, backers, and real controllers of the conspiracy. He plays the recurring theme, however, that those who actually carried out the assassination were people who had been associated with CIA and that CIA had set up Oswald as the "patsy" to detract attention from the true assassins. He also says that CIA is a part of a giant conspiracy on the part of "the establishment" and the Dallas oil men to conceal the true facts. It would seem probable, therefore, that Garrison would attempt to involve CIA in the Shaw trial, and from what we know, he should be able to produce witnesses who can testify at least to some peripheral connection with his case. Despite the fact that Garrison's theories are basically and preposterously false, therefore, he may well be able to involve CIA in the Shaw trial. 4. Garrison has thrown out so many theories, names, and efforts in different contexts that it is difficult to construct a clear scenario, but the following speculations will serve to illustrate the problems with which we will be faced if Garrison pursues this course: a. A witness, Carlos Quiroga, might testify that Ferrie was a friend of Sergio Arcacha Smith, who was associated with the Cuban Democratic Revolutionary Front (CDRF) until January or February 1962 and that Ferrie and Arcacha Smith were involved in a cache of arms in 1961. Garrison attempted to extradite Arcacha Smith from Texas to testify before the Grand Jury but was not successful. The CDRF was funded by CIA in Miami, and Arcacha Smith was with the New Orleans branch. b. Rudolph Ricardo Davis might testify about a training camp across the lake from New Orleans, possibly at Lacombe, Louisiana, run by a Cuban exile group (MDC) not affiliated with CIA, and that connected with this camp were Victor Paneque and Fernando Fernandez. Davis claims he met Oswald in the fall of 1963 in connection with anti-Castro activities. Paneque was also identified by Quiroga, the possible witness mentioned above, as having been in charge of the training camp at Lacombe, which Garrison falsely asserts was run by CIA. Our Miami Station was interested in Paneque in August 1964 and requested a provisional clearance, but a report of 5 October 1965 stated that Paneque would be dropped at the end of that month for lack of any immediate operational use for him. The Fernandez mentioned by Davis was also identified by one Michael W. Laborde as being the head of the Cuban organization for which Laborde's father, Lawrence J. Laborde, had worked. Fernandez was a contact of the Miami Station. [SENTENCE REDACTED] Lawrence Laborde was a contact of the Miami Station in 1961 and 1962 and served as an officer on a ship used for CIA Cuban operations. c. Garrison has questioned a Cuban named Santana after which Garrison inferred that Santana owned a rifle like Oswald's. Garrison alleges that Santana was in Dealy [sic] Plaza at the time of the assassination on orders of the alleged conspirators Shaw, Oswald, Ferrie, and Arcacha Smith. In June 1964 Santana listed CIA as his employer on a loan application for purchase of a car. In fact, he was [ABOUT 10 WORDS REDACTED] a guide for an infiltration operation in Cuba which was carried out in May 1963. He was dropped by the Miami Station on 15 October 1963. He knew some CIA staff members and agents by their true names. d. Garrison's office has questioned a Carlos Bringuier, who denied any CIA contact. But, according to reports, Garrison will try to introduce evidence that Bringuier had knowledge of an alleged affiliation of Oswald with CIA. Also, according to the Warren Commission report, there was an altercation and fight between Oswald and Bringuier in August 1963 and a radio debate between them on 21 August 1963 when Oswald identified himself as a Marxist. Bringuier had some contact with the Domestic Contact Service's New Orleans office and was formerly the New Orleans leader of the Student Revolutionary Directorate, which was an anti-Castro organization [REDACTED] funded by CIA. e. Garrison has falsely stated that Gordon D. Novel was a CIA agent and that one of his lawyers, Stephen Plotkin, was paid by CIA. Garrison says he can prove that Novel, along with Arcacha Smith and others, robbed a munitions bunker at Houma, Louisiana at the instigation of CIA. Garrison may claim that this robbery was one of the overt acts of the conspiracy. Actually, Novel has never at any time had any association with the Agency nor has his lawyer, Stephen Plotkin. f. Donald P. Norton has been questioned at length by Garrison, and Norton has falsely claimed in a newspaper article that he worked for CIA from 1957 to 1966, and that in 1962 Clay Shaw gave him $50,000, which he took to Monterrey, Mexico and gave to Oswald. Here again Garrison may claim that this is the overt act in the conspiracy. There is no truth in Norton's story in any respect. 5. We could continue to speculate about some of the other names involved, but the forgoing is sufficient to illustrate the potential problem. Certainly, the story of CIA's connections and interrelationships would be enough to at least confuse a jury thoroughly. Shaw's lawyers have no way of refuting these stories except by attacking the credibility of the witnesses or introducing other witnesses to impeach their stories. They have so far no Government information which they can use for this purpose. The Government, and particularly CIA, is placed in a quandary. If it were to deny the Norton and Novel stories, which are wholly untrue, it would have to make some partial admissions at least in connection with Laborde, Santana, and possibly Paneque, Bringuier, and others. Shaw himself was a contact of the Domestic Contact Service's New Orleans office from 1948 to 1956 and introduced General Cabell, then Deputy Director of Central Intelligence, when he addressed the New Orleans Foreign Policy Association in May 1961. In view of this dilemma, the Department of Justice has so far taken the position that if any effort is made by either the prosecution or defense to involve CIA in the trial, the Government will claim executive privilege. This, too, can be turned by Garrison into a claim that it is part of the whole cover up by the establishment and particularly by CIA. No alternative to the claim of privilege appears to be available, however. To protect the Government's position on privilege, it would appear that the Government cannot take any action publicly to refute Garrison's claims and the testimony of his witnesses, as the Louisiana judge would almost certainly take the position that any such public statement would negate the privilege. 6. At the present time, therefore, there is no action we can recommend for the Director or the Agency to take. If during the trial it appears that Shaw may be convicted on information that could be refuted by CIA, we may be in for some difficult decisions. There is one positive aspect at the present time, which is that outside of Louisiana the U.S. press and public opinion appear to be extremely skeptical if not scornful of Garrison's allegations. We can only wait and see whether the trial will influence this attitude either way. LAWRENCE R. HOUSTON General Counsel
  
• 9/29/1967 A CIA memo from 29 September 1967 describing a September 27th "policy meeting on Garrison's investigation." MEMORANDUM FOR THE RECORD SUBJECT: Garrison Investigation 1. On 27 September 1967 there was a policy meeting on Garrison's investigation. [approximately four lines redacted] 2. The Legal Counsel discussed his coordination with the Justice Department. The DD/S developed the thesis that CIA should take no action against Garrison at this time because to do so would deny us the protection of executive privilege and also because Garrison has not shown his hand yet. 3. The [REDACTED] passed out copies of a memorandum dealing with possible lines of action and explained that these were not recommendations but rather suggestions for consideration. 4. The DD/S said that he found it difficult to follow the cast of characters in Garrison's case and asked whether a chart could be provided. The [REDACTED] agreed to do so.
  
• 9/30/1967 LBJ signed $70 billion defense bill (biggest in US history, with an income tax surcharge of 10% financing it).
  
• 9/30/1967 LBJ announced appointment of Dean Griswold as Solicitor General to replace Thurgood Marshall.
  
• 10/1967 Ray's story told to William Pepper: "Some time in late September or early October, Ray received a general delivery letter from Raul asking him to call New Orleans, which he did. This would be the first of several such calls he would make. Raul himself never got on the phone, but Ray instead always talked with a man who knew where Raul was and who relayed instructions. Ray never met the man he spoke to on the phone and didn't think he could now identify his voice, but he had the impression that the contact kept tabs on persons other than Raul. Ray was told to drive to Baton Rouge and make another phone call to receive instructions for a rendezvous in Mexico."
  
• 10/1967 Playboy interview with Jim Garrison; he stated "In over five years of office I have never had a single case reversed because of the use of improper methods..." "There is something very wrong today with our government in Washington DC, inasmuch as it is willing to use massive economic power to conceal the truth from the people." When asked by Playboy's Eric Norden for the evidence for CIA complicity, Garrison cited 1) a missing CIA photo of Oswald that shows him in the company of a CIA agent in Mexico; 2) classified files on Ferrie; 3)suppressed autopsy materials; 4) CIA files that allegedly would show that Oswald was involved in the U-2 project; 5) the fact that the CIA had destroyed a document requested by the WC; 6) the identification of Oswald's CIA "babysitter"; 7) the identification of a CIA "courier"; 8) "the consistent refusal of the federal government" to provide him with "any information" about the role of the CIA in the assassination. Garrison called this last item "the clincher." He also spoke of a "second Oswald" sent to impersonate the real Oswald during the assassination. Also, "...a number of the men who killed the President were former employees of the CIA involved in its anti-Castro underground activities in and around New Orleans. The CIA knows their identity. So do I. We must assume that the plotters were acting on their own rather than on CIA orders when they killed the President. As far as we have been able to determine, they were not in the pay of the CIA at the time of the assassination...The CIA could not face up to the American people and admit that its former employees had conspired to assassinate the president ...the Agency attempted to sweep the whole conspiracy under the rug..." He claimed that Ruby was a self-hating Jew who smuggled guns with neo-Nazis and that "Oswald would have been more at home with Mein Kamp than Das Kapital." He related Jones Harris' theory that a pickup truck shown in a photo hid two more gunmen. He also told Playboy that "some of the gunmen appear to have used frangible bullets." "I've taken unusual steps to protect the right of the defendant and assure him a fair trial. Before we introduced the testimony of our witnesses, we made them undergo independent verifying tests, including polygraph examination, truth serum and hypnosis. We thought this would be hailed as an unprecedented step in jurisprudence..." Internal files and memos at Playboy revealed that the editors were impressed with Garrison's intelligence and charisma, and found him mostly credible. Whether he was right or wrong, the magazine felt that Garrison would be "very big news." (Counterplot 157-9) "To facilitate the publication of his Playboy interview, Garrison provided the editors of the magazine with 'secret evidence,' which, he claimed, was to be used in his court case and was 'not for publication.'" When Gordon Novel sued Playboy for libel, the "secret evidence" was examined by Novel's lawyer, Elmer Gertz, and entered into the court record. "Virtually all of the 'secret evidence' consists of uncorroborated allegations of volunteer witnesses." (Ibid. 77-8)
  
• 10/1967 John Keel wrote for Saga magazine an article "UFO Agents of Terror" referring to the Men in Black phenomenon.
  
• 10/2/1967 Thurgood Marshall is sworn in as the first black justice of the Supreme Court.
  
• 10/5/1967 "Memorandum From the Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs (Warnke) to Secretary of Defense McNamara I-35994/67 Washington, October 5, 1967. SUBJECT: Daniel Boone As result of recommendations by the Joint State/Defense/CIA Study Group for Cambodia, CINCPAC was authorized on 22 May 1967 to conduct limited cross-border ground reconnaissance operations into the northeast corner of Cambodia, using U.S.-South Vietnamese Special Forces teams (Daniel Boone). The specified area of operations and other conditions for the initial Daniel Boone program are shown on the map at Tab A./2/ The map at Tab B/3/ shows a sampling of Daniel Boone operations June-September 1967. It illustrates that present restrictions result in Daniel Boone operations having limited value for tactical or other intelligence purposes. "
  
• 10/7/1967 LBJ complained to Wheeler, "Your generals almost destroyed us with their testimony before the Stennis Committee. We were murdered in the hearings."
  
• 10/7/1967 James Earl Ray drives to Mexico. Ray's story told to William Pepper: "When Ray got to Baton Rouge, Raul was gone, having left instructions for Ray to go directly to a motel in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, just across the border. Ray checked in there on October 7. Raul joined him and they went back across the border to the United States carrying some kind of contraband inside the spare tire. Ray surmised that it was drugs or jewelry. Raul gave him $2,000 and assured him that he would get the travel documents next time, along with enough money for Ray to go into business in another country. Raul gave him a second New Orleans number to replace the first and told him that his next operation would involve transporting guns and accessories. Raul said he would contact him again, when the time came, through general delivery. After traveling in Mexico for some time, Ray headed for the California border. Before crossing over, however, he went through the car to see if there was anything that might make customs agents suspicious. Down the left side of the front passenger seat he found a cigarette packet with a business card slipped into it. On the front of the card was printed a name that had been inked out, the name of a city (a two-word name that appeared to be New Orleans), and "L.E.A.A." Written on the back was the name Randy Rosen. There were some additional letters after Rosen that James couldn't identify (he later came to believe that the name was Rosenson) and an address, 1180 Northwest River Drive, Miami. Ray wasn't certain how the card got in the car but believed that somehow it was connected to Raul -- perhaps the cigarette packet had slipped out of Raul's pocket. Ray only threw it away in Los Angeles after copying the information. Subsequently Ray's brother Jerry and others spent a fair amount of time and energy trying to find Rosenson."
  
• 10/8-9/1967 Che Guevara is captured by government forces in Bolivia. He was executed in a mud-walled schoolhouse in the village of La Higuera in the south-central mountains. In a canyon near the hamlet of La Higuera, Bolivia, Che Guevara is ambushed and wounded in the leg. Felix Ramos, from the CIA's Operation 40, is with the Bolivian ambushers. Ramos immediately begins photographing the contents of the wounded man's knapsack. Although the Bolivian government announces that Che has been killed in the fire fight, he is actually taken to La Higuera and locked in the local school house. Bolivian military brass, including a rear admiral of the armed forces of this landlocked nation arrive by helicopter in La Higuera, Bolivia to view their captured "prize" -- Che Guevara. With them, according to eyewitnesses, is the CIA agent known as Gonzales. Later in the afternoon, Che Guevara is machine-gunned to death in the schoolhouse by a Bolivian Ranger. His body is strapped to a helicopter and flown to the larger town of Vallegrande where the two CIA Operation 40 agents (Felix Ramos and Eduardo Gonzales) supervise the embalming process. A Reuters dispatch from Vallegrande mentions that a CIA agent is present but this information does not appear in American newspapers. It will later be disclosed that the embalmers cut off Che's hands before he is cremated, to prove that he is dead.
  
• 10/8/1967 A secret memo by the CIA's Richard Helms shows that, in the fall of this year, the CIA's most senior analysts believe the U.S. could withdraw from Vietnam without any permanent damage to U.S. or Western security.
  
• 10/13/1967 LBJ signed an executive order to eliminate discrimination in government based on gender.
  
• 10/16/1967 Joan Baez and 123 other anti-draft protestors are arrested for blocking the entrance to the Oakland, Calif., induction center.
  
• 10/16/1967 Steve Roberts dies after a long illness. Roberts is West Coast coordinator for the Fair Play for Cuba Committee and a SWP functionary. According to his obituary in The Militant, he had made "many visits to campuses to talk about the Cuban revolution and to mix with the students as though he was one of them ..." Roberts had traveled to Cuba from Mexico City in 1962 "as a guest of the Cuban government."
  
• 10/16/1967 Paul Rothermel, a former FBI agent hired by H.L. Hunt as an investigator, writes the Hunts (H.L. Hunt and sons) that: "I have information tot he effect that (Jim) Garrison is referring to either you or Bunker as the wealthy oilman in his probe." In another memo a few months later, Rothermel writes, "The source of the information reports that Garrison is convinced that the assassination was carried out by General Edwin Walker with the financial support and backing of Herman and George Brown of Houston and H.L. Hunt of Dallas. He said that Garrison is a heavy drinker and lives extravagantly despite a modest salary as district attorney." Jim Garrison is referred to by Rothermel in another memo to the Hunts as: " ... a most vindictive left Winger, that he is bisexual and a clever blackmailer. Garrison understands public opinion, and can without introducing evidence of proof, harass, intimidate, and smear whomever he wishes."
  
• 10/17/1967 On file at the JFK Library in Boston was an exchange between Dr. George Burkley and an interviewer from this date; he was asked if he agreed with the WC "on the number of bullets that entered the President's body." Burkley responded, "I would not care to be quoted on that." (Reasonable Doubt) Despite that fact that Burkley was the only individual present at both Parkland and Bethesda, he did not testify before The Warren Commission.
  
• 10/18/1967 In a meeting, Rusk, McNamara, Katzenbach, Rostow, Taylor and Kissinger urged keeping open the Pennsylvania channel of contacts with Hanoi. Fortas and Clifford urged that it be abandoned. LBJ told Kissinger to impress upon Hanoi the US' willingness to talk. But the channel soon collapsed because of continued heavy bombing by the US.
  
• 10/18/1967 JFK researcher Harold Weisberg wrote a letter to Playboy, saying "He [Garrison] and his staff are dedicated, and sincere and, I am convinced from my own work, right."
  
• 10/19/1967 The trial of Sam Bowers, Cecil Price and others accused of murdering the three civil rights workers in 1964: it took place in a federal courtroom in Mississippi before judge William Cox, who had not been sympathetic to the government's case. Today, the jury reported that it was hopelessly deadlocked. Cox strongly urged the jury to reach a decision.
  
• 10/19/1967 NASA's Mariner 5 interplanetary space probe passes within 2500 miles of Venus and transmits data back to earth on the planet's atmosphere. Mariner reports that there is no appreciable amount of oxygen, which contradicts reports from the Soviet Venera 4, which touched down on the planet 10/18.
  
• 10/20/1967 Lady Bird: "At dinner there was much talk of tomorrow - the day of the big gathering in Washington of dissenters on Vietnam...there is a ripple of grim excitement in the air, almost a feeling of being under siege." (White House Diary)
  
• 10/20/1967 NY Times quotes Charles de Gaulle as saying that the JFK assassination was the work of the police and that Oswald had been framed.
  
• 10/20/1967 An all-white federal jury convicted 7 of 18 defendants in the slayings of three civil rights workers in Mississippi in '64, including deputy sheriff Price of Neshoba County and Klan leader Sam Bowers. They were convicted of conspiring to deprive their victims of their civil rights. As U.S. District Judge Harold Cox put it at the time of sentencing: "They killed one nigger, one Jew, and a white man. I gave them what I thought they deserved."
  
• 10/21-22/1967 between 50,000 and 150,000 anti-war protestors gathered on the Washington mall. A crowd of 20,000 activists demonstrated outside the Pentagon, vowing to shut it down. Trouble flared up as a smaller bunch, radicals led by David Dellinger and Jerry Rubin taunted military police, but the unarmed soldiers circling the building acted with restraint. Norman Mailer was among a handful that were arrested after breaking into the building. Eventually, the crowd dispersed. 647 were arrested. Smaller demonstrations were held on many campuses and in Los Angeles, Chicago and Philadelphia. 20,000 angry antiwar demonstrators march on the Pentagon, determined to shut it down. Robert McNamara decides to surround the building with troops armed with rifles, standing shoulder-to-shoulder in the middle of the asphalt ring, and to station U.S. marshals between them and the protesters. McNamara observes the scene from the roof of the Pentagon building - among other places. Years later, he will write "... had the protesters been more disciplined -- Gandhi-like -- they could have achieved their objective of shutting us down."
  
• 10/21/1967 LBJ and his aides are privately worried about McNamara's mental health. LBJ says: "We can't afford another Forrestal," referring to the first secretary of defense, James Forrestal who had jumped out of a hospital window in 1949.
  
• 10/26/1967 Mexican president Diaz Ordaz came to Washington.
  

[Tracy Riddle]

• 11/1967 Readers Digest published an article by Nixon in which he blamed the Warren Court for rising crime.
  
• 11/1967 Harold Weisberg's Oswald in New Orleans is published.
  
• 11/1967 Nixon told an interviewer, "I've always thought this country could run itself domestically without a President. All you need is a competent Cabinet to run the country at home. You need a President for foreign policy; no Secretary of State is really important; the President makes foreign policy."
  
• 11/1967 Josiah Thompson's Six Seconds in Dallas is published.
  
• 11/1/1967 Humphrey, on a tour of Asia, declared that the US was winning the war.
  
• 11/1-2/1967 LBJ met with Acheson, Clifford, Fortas, Bundy, Taylor, Omar Bradley, Robert Murphy, Lodge, Arthur Dean, Douglas Dillon, Ball and Harriman over Vietnam. Lovett and McCloy had been unable to attend. Gen. Wheeler and CIA analyst George Carver (an optimist on the war) gave them an upbeat briefing, and sentiment in the meeting was hawkish. Acheson reminisced about the dark days of the Chinese intervention in Korea. Bradley urged more patriotic slogans to cheer the public. Only Ball struck a gloomy note, and Harriman was mostly silent. They urged telling the public that the "light at the end of the tunnel" was near. LBJ then went off to Europe while his aides told the press that the light was at the end of the tunnel. Johnson visited the Pope in Rome, presenting the pontiff with a plastic bust of himself. (The Wise Men 676-81) McNamara faulted LBJ for presenting the Wise Men with a one-side briefing on the war. (In Retrospect 306-07)
  
• 11/7/1967 LBJ signed the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, establishing a corporation to use public and private funds for non-commercial TV and radio, focusing mostly on educational and news programs.
  
• 11/7/1967 Selective Service chief Gen. Hershey announced that college students arrested in anti-war demonstrations would lose their draft deferments.
  
• 11/7/1967 State and local elections are held; blacks win several mayors' and state legislators' races.
  
• 11/9/1967 Clark gave full approval to Doar's recommendation: "Planning and creation of the unit [to monitor dissident groups] must be kept in strictest confidence."
  
• 11/12/1967 The Johnsons attended the Bruton Parish Episcopal Church and endured a lecture on the Vietnam war by Rev. Cotesworth Pinckney Lewis: "...there is a rather general consensus that something is wrong in Vietnam...we wonder if some logical straightforward explanation might be given..."
  
• 11/14/1967 Congress passed, and LBJ signed, the Air Quality Act to fight air pollution.
  
• 11/14/1967 Garrison stated that certain elements of the CIA were involved in the plot (Los Angeles Free Press 11/17/1967)
  
• 11/16/1967 Garrison told the press at the Los Angeles Century Plaza Hotel, "The man who has profited most from the assassination is your friendly president, Lyndon Johnson."
  
• 11/19/1967 James Earl Ray arrived in Los Angeles and soon established contact with one or both brothers by mail and telephone. Ray's story told to William Pepper: "Ray arrived in Los Angeles on or about November 19, believing he was through with Raul. He had given up hope that Raul would get him the travel documents, and he was determined to try to get merchant seaman's papers on his own. He lived for a while in an apartment on North Serrano Street. He began looking for papers and a job, and he even placed a classified in the Los Angeles Times advertising himself as available for "culinary help." He didn't have a social security card, and because seaman's papers required fingerprints he was worried that his efforts could result in his exposure as a fugitive. He enrolled in a bartending course, took dancing lessons, and had psychological, hypnotic counseling for a period of time, spending about $800 on these activities. He also contacted a number of organizations he thought might help him to emigrate. He sent out photographs that weren't good likenesses (his face appeared fatter than it was), which later would be used by the media to accuse him of being on amphetamines. He also had plastic surgery on his nose to alter his appearance."
  
• 11/20/1967 LBJ signed a bill creating the National Commission on Product Safety.
  
• 11/20/1967 U.S. News and World Report claimed in its November 20, 1967 issue to have confirmation of the reality of the Report from Iron Mountain from an unnamed government official, who added that when President Johnson read the report, he 'hit the roof' and ordered it to be suppressed for all time. Additionally, sources were said to have revealed that orders were sent to U.S. embassies, instructing them to emphasize that the book had no relation to U.S. Government policy. ("Hoax of Horror? A Book That Shook White House", U.S. News & World Report, November 20, 1967)
  
• 11/21/1967 LBJ signs air quality act to fight pollution.
  
• 11/22/1967 Silver hits record $2.17 an ounce in New York
  
• 11/24/1967 Actors Robert Vaughan and James Garner, on a Los Angeles TV show, debate the role of actors in politics. Garner calls the idea of Reagan running for president "dangerous."
  
• 11/24/1967 James Reston article in NYT; he explained that the US "is fighting a war now on the principle that military power shall not compel South Vietnam to do what it does not want to do, that man does not belong to the state. This is the deepest conviction of Western Civilization…"
  
• 11/24/1967 Life magazine featured an article by John Connally, "Why Kennedy Went to Texas." He wasn't anxious for JFK to come to Texas, but the President wanted to raise money and mend political fences. "He wanted me...to arrange the trip for him, but for good personal reasons I had been delaying it...The national [Democratic] committee was $4 million in debt and yet Texas...had contributed little since 1960...in the fall of 1962, so unpopular was the Kennedy administration in Texas that my Republican opponent hardly ran against me at all but against Washington." In 62 and early 63 Connally was too busy with this campaign and legislative agenda to worry about a Kennedy trip to Texas. He also worried that he would expend a lot of political capital trying to help JFK, though he wasn't popular with Connally's supporters. The governor says he didn't want a motorcade in Dallas, but JFK's advance men insisted for political reasons, and they released the route to the Dallas newspapers.
  
• 11/27/1967 LBJ announces the Robert McNamara will become head of the World Bank. He makes this announcement without first informing McNamara.
  
• 11/29/1967 Robert McNamara resigned as Defense Secretary, and was chosen by LBJ to head the World Bank. McNamara formally left the Pentagon three months later.
  
• 11/30/1967 Sen. Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota announced he would challenge LBJ in the primaries as a peace candidate. "McCarthy's candidacy was not taken seriously by anyone around the President. It was regarded as a joke, an annoyance. At that time, it was Bob Kennedy...who worried Lyndon Johnson." (Larry O'Brien, No Final Victories)
  
• 12/1967 Harold Edward Holt, CH (5 August 1908 17 December 1967) was an Australian politician and the 17th Prime Minister of Australia. His term as Prime Minister was brought to an early and dramatic end in December 1967 when he disappeared while swimming at Cheviot Beach near Portsea, Victoria, and was presumed drowned.
  
• 12/1967 Ray's story told to William Pepper: "By early December he was short of cash. He called the New Orleans number and the contact suggested he go to New Orleans. Marie Martin, a barmaid at the Sultan Club in the St. Francis Hotel, hooked him up with her cousin, Charles Stein, who wanted a ride to New Orleans and back. Before leaving Los Angeles, Ray dropped Marie Martin and Charles and Rita Stein off at the local George Wallace independent presidential campaign headquarters so they could register to vote. Soon after, Ray and Stein set off. Ray described Stein as a sort of "hippie" type. In New Orleans, Ray checked into the Provincial Motel in the Latin Quarter at Stein's suggestion. He met Raul at Le Bunny Lounge. Raul told him that they would be running guns into Mexico and that Ray could end up in Cuba. There he could book himself passage to anywhere in the world. Raul gave him $500 and said that he would contact him in Los Angeles in a few months."
  
• 12/1967 The official invitation to the New Year's Eve Party at the US Embassy in Saigon read: "Come see the light at the end of the tunnel." (Best and the Brightest, Halberstam)
  
• 12/1967 National Review reacted to Eugene McCarthy's decision to challenge LBJ in the primaries: "Lyndon Johnson's long legs are very firmly wrapped around the Donkey, and nothing short of an A-bomb - somebody else's A-bomb - could knock him off."
  
• 12/1967 Jim Garrison gave a speech about the "rise of the Fourth Reich" in New Mexico. (Los Angeles Free Press 12/22-28/1967)
  
• 12/1967 Supreme Court ruled that wiretapping can be done only with a court order, though it left the door open to the President's need "to protect national-security information against foreign intelligence activities."
  
• 12/1967 Pentagon officials tried to dissuade Fulbright from pressing his Tonkin investigation, claiming that the evidence was solid and hearings would hurt the national interest. Fulbright refuses, and is supported by Sen. Dick Russell. Informants in the Pentagon aid Fulbright's investigation.
  
• 12/1/1967 Senate approved a resolution, by 82-0, calling upon LBJ to seek UN help in ending the war.
  
• 12/1/1967 James Earl Ray enrolls in dance course in Los Angeles, pays $364.
  
• 12/2/1967 Six Seconds In Dallas was previewed by The Saturday Evening Post, which featured the book's jacket on its December 2, 1967 cover along with the headline "Major New Study Shows Three Assassins Killed Kennedy." An editorial in that issue stated that it had now been "demonstrated fairly conclusively that the Warren Commission was wrong."
  
• 12/6/1967 Rothermel warned H.L. Hunt not to go to New Orleans because he might be "arrested or subpoenaed. On the basis of my discussion he called McConnell with [Sen. Russell] Long's office." (Rothermel memo, The Man Who Knew Too Much 591)
  
• 12/8/1967 Anti-war protestors in NYC tried to shut down the army induction center; among the hundreds arrested were Dr. Benjamin Spock and poet Allen Ginsburg. This was part of a week-long nationwide "Stop the Draft" movement organized by 40 antiwar groups.
  
• 12/9/1967 Jim Garrison announced that "the federal government knowingly participated in framing Lee Oswald. Lyndon Johnson had to know this." ("Face to Face with Murphy Martin," WFAA-TV, Dallas)
  
• 12/11/1967 Jim Garrison instructs his chief assistant, Jim Alcock, to prepare a complete case on the possibility that David Ferrie committed suicide by take an overdose of Proloid. Garrison is equally adamant about CIA involvement and complains about news coverage of his investigation. In a letter to a Dallas man, Garrison says that the press was never critical "until we stumbled across the fact that the federal investigation of President Kennedy's assassination was fraudulent." He goes on to say that "our federal government has reached a stage of such concentrated power that it is able to influence most of the media to do whatever it wishes." AC Vol. 1, Issue 3
  
• 12/11/1967 After researcher Allan Chapman convinced him that there was a gunman inside a storm drain, Jim Garrison told the New York Times that the head shot came from "a sewer manhole," fired by a gunman with a .45 caliber pistol. (New York Times 12/11/1967)
  
• 12/11/1967 Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, a Stanley Kramer film about an interracial romance, is released. It stars Sidney Poitier, Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracey. It is Tracey's last film.
  
• 12/12/1967 Walt Rostow was quoted in Look magazine about the communists in Vietnam: "Their casualties are going up at a rate they cannot sustain…I see light at the end of the tunnel."
  
• 12/14 or 15/1967 James Earl Ray cancelled an appointment with a psychologist, explaining that he had to meet his brother in New Orleans about a job. Ray called Jerry twice on his way to New Orleans. (American Assassins p247)
  
• 12/14/1967 The film In Cold Blood, directed by Richard Brooks and based on the Truman Capote book, is released. It deals with "motiveless murder" and young men who commit crimes due to feelings of personal worthlessness and sexual inadequacy.
  
• 12/15/1967 James Earl Ray and another man, Charles Stein, take a car trip from California to New Orleans. Ray meets with someone in New Orleans and receives money on the trip.
  
• 12/18/1967 Gen. Wheeler, in a speech to the Detroit Economic Club, warned that Hanoi might attempt a last-gasp offensive.
  
• 12/20/1967 Jim Garrison files a bill of information in New Orleans, charging that Edgar Eugene Bradley did "willfully and unlawfully conspire with others to murder John F. Kennedy." In October of this year, former Deputy Sheriff Roger Craig identified Bradley as a man in Dealey Plaza after the assassination of JFK who was posing as a SS agent. California Governor Ronald Reagan refuses to extradite Bradley. Bradley gives Reagan an affidavit stating that he was in El Paso at the time of the assassination.
  
• 12/21/1967 James Earl Ray returns to Los Angeles and tells his dancing instructor that he had just returned from visiting his brother in Louisiana. An anonymous witness later testified that Jerry had told him that he had been in New Orleans with his brother the third week of December.
  
• 12/22/1967 LBJ said in a speech about the war: "The enemy...knows that he has met his master in the field."
  
• 12/22/1967 The New Orleans States-Item reports that Jim Garrison, responding to Eugene Bradley's alibi says: "Our evidence indicates that he was in Dallas. Furthermore, I think I can say with assurance that the Federal government and the Federal investigative agencies know he was in Dallas and know precisely what he was doing."
  
• 12/22/1967 NY Times quoted Mac Bundy: "We had contingent drafts [of the Tonkin Gulf Resolution]...for some time prior [to August 1964]...We had always anticipated...the possibility that things might take a more drastic turn at any time and that it would be wise to seek an affirmation of the desires of and the intent of the Congress. But that is normal planning. I am not sure that my drafts were even known to others."
  
• 12/24/1967 LBJ ended a four-and-a-half day trip around the globe, visiting Australia, Thailand, South Vietnam, Pakistan, Rome (where he met with the Pope).
  
• 12/26/1967 L.A. District Attorney Eville J. Younger ordered Edgar Eugene Bradley's arrest, saying: "this does not indicate any opinion on our part as to the validity of the charge or the guilt or innocence of Mr. Bradley."
  
• 12/26/1967 Jim Garrison said in a press conference that President Johnson "must have known by the time of the arrest that Oswald did not pull the trigger." And that "President Johnson is currently the most active person in the country in protecting the assassins of John Kennedy."
  
• 12/27/1967 Josiah Thompson is interviewed on William O'Connell's radio show.
  
• 12/28/1967 Richard Nixon takes a trip to Key Biscayne. Three weeks from now, he will return home, having made what he tells his daughter Julie is "the most important decision of my life." He will run for president again.
  
• 12/29/1967 Jim Garrison announced that at Dallas, on Nov. 22, 1963, ''for the first time in American history, a coup d'etat had occurred, resulting in the carefully planned execution of a President of the United Statues …"
  
• 12/30/1967 New York Times article sited an old Army Medical Board Report saying that from 1950-1955 Jim Garrison had undergone treatment for a "severe and disabling psychoneurosis" that had "interfered with his social and professional adjustment to a marked degree. He is considered totally incapacitated from the standpoint of military duty and moderately incapacitated in civilian adaptability." Garrison responded that the Army had misdiagnosed the amoebic dysentery he was suffering from.
  
• 12/30/1967 Drew Pearson: "During the bugging or lobbyist Fred Black's hotel suite the FBI got an electronic earful about some of Washington's most prominent personalities,'' the columnist reported on December 30, 1967. There were titillating tidbits about everyone from Lyndon Johnson to the arch foe of eavesdropping himself, Sen. Ed Long … In their reports to J. Edgar Hoover, the G-men described the bedroom scenes with stilted rectitude. They carefully omitted all cuss words and merely substitute profane' or obscene' in their place..."
  
• 12/31/1967 US military personnel in Vietnam: 485,600; 16,021 killed to date (9,419 in this year alone). In 1967, there were 108,000 air sorties and 226,000 tons of bombs dropped on the North. Meanwhile, between 1965 and 1967, communist infiltration into the South increased from 35,000 in '65 to 90,000 in '67. According to the World Almanac of the Vietnam War, South Vietnamese regular forces number 200,000; VC/North Vietnamese regular forces number around 250,000 with at least as many in irregular units; since Feb 1965 1.5 million tons of bombs have been dropped on North and South Vietnam, and it is estimated that these attacks have cut North Vietnam's electrical-generating capacity by 85%; during this year alone, the US has lost 328 planes over North Vietnam; the US lost 9353 dead this year and 99,742 wounded; the US and South Vietnamese claimed to have killed 90,400 enemy soldiers and some 25,000 enemy civilians in 1967.
  
• 12/31/1967 Los Angeles Times quoted Nixon: "This is a terribly costly war...This cost can be justified if the war is about the United States and not just Vietnam. From a strategic standpoint, if the Communists won we would have the world cut in half. It's not worth killing American boys to have Vietnam have free elections."
  

[Tracy Riddle]

Posting an expanded version of 1968.

• This year Richard Nixon institutes Operation Integrity, the main purpose of which is to keep an eye on Illinois' voting practices. Nixon puts H. Louis Nichols in charge of this operation. Nixon is convinced that he was cheated out of the 1960 election by Mayor Daley, who allegedly tampered with the ballot boxes in Chicago, thus throwing Illinois' electoral votes, and the election, to JFK.
  
• Journalist Willem Oltmans films an interview with George de Mohrenschildt, in which the latter says Oswald "was an admirer of President Kennedy. We raised that question several times."
  
• Also this year, RFK will remark: "I have ... wondered at times if we did not pay a very great price for being more energetic than wise about a lot of things, especially Cuba."
  
• Pine Gap, a massive US intelligence base in the center of the Australian outback, designed to read data from spy satellites stationed over the Communist world, is set up in 1968. It also relays information to the nuclear submarine fleet. It was founded ostensibly to aid in the US' moonshot program. But many Australians were skeptical of its real usage, and PM Gough Whitlam was one of those opposed to the base. It was run by Richard Stallings of the CIA 1968-69, operating under cover of a Defense Dept job. The treaty creating the base was signed 12/9/1966.
  
• The "Roush Hearings", a strongly pro-UFO seminar, is held in Washington, D.C. This is James. E. McDonald's high point, and the nearest thing to a Congressional investigation of UFOs that has ever taken place.
  
• The NSA launches the first of seven satellites, code-named "Canyon," that can pick up various types of voice and data traffic from Earth orbit. Canyon will lead to a more sophisticated satellite intelligence system, code-named "Rhyolite" (later "Aquacade"see Early 1970s). [Federation of American Scientists, 7/17/1997]
  
• US Army Paper Details Plans for Rounding Up Militants' and American Negroes' Around the time of race riots in 1968, a paper is drawn up at the US Army War College detailing plans for rounding up millions of American citizens referred to as "militants" and "American negroes." The paper envisages holding these people at "assembly centers or relocation camps." At this time, or perhaps afterwards, the US maintains a list of suspected enemies of the state that are to be rounded up in the event of a nuclear strike by the Soviet Union (see 1980s or Before). [Radar, 5/2008]
  
• The US government sprays two types of bacteria, one of which is E. coli, on a Hawaiian rainforest hoping to determine how long the bacteria will remain on the vegetation. The project is known as "Blue Tango." [Associated Press, 7/1/03] The US government sprays bacillus globigii from a submarine "over part of Oahu, Hawaii, and over several boats off the coast to gauge how Venezuelan equine encephalitis would be carried by wind." The project is called, "Folded Arrow." [Associated Press, 7/1/03]
  
• An anonymous author at the NSA wrote a document about UFOs around 1968. It was released via the FOIA in 1984. " It is the purpose of this monograph to consider briefly some of the human survival implications suggested by the various principal hypotheses concerning the nature of the phenomena loosely categorized as UFO."
  
• 1/1968 police used clubs on 400 anti-war protestors outside of a dinner for U.S. Secretary of State Rusk.
  
• 1/2/1968 Hoover requested wiretapping of SCLC headquarters in Atlanta because of MLK's planned march on the capitol in the spring.
  
• 1/3/19687 Ramsey Clark declined Hoover's wiretapping request because "there has not been an adequate demonstration of a direct threat to national security."
  
• 1/4/19687 Lady Bird wrote in her diary: "Lyndon spoke of the simple fact that he feels older and more tired than he did ten years ago, or five years ago. And what of the next five years? Suppose he runs and wins? Would he be able to carry the load?...."
  
• 1/4/1968 the Literary Supplement of the London Times published one of those remarkable documents which quite inadvertently cast a glaring beam of light into the murky background of a well-concealed event of capital importance. This was a letter, written on White House stationery, by Mr. John P. Roche, Special Consultant to the President, commending the Editor of the Supplement for having published, on December 14, 1967 the "superb analysis" by John Sparrow of a number of books about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, including several by this author. Faithfully transmitting his master's voice, Mr. Roche heaped fulsome praise on the Oxford scholar who had crushed the "Dallas demonologists" and had restored the Warren Report to the historic pedestal from which it had been swept by a tempest of criticism. "Every one of the plot theories must necessarily rely on the inconceivable connivance of one key man: Robert F. Kennedy, then Attorney General of the United States " wrote Mr. Roche, President Johnson's "intellectual-in-residence" since September 1966. Then the former Brandeis University professor, a subdued egghead among the Texas hicks who crowd the White house, went on to say: "Those of us who have any knowedge of the relationship between President Kennedy and his brother have assumed from the outset that had there been the slightest trace of a conspiracy, the Attorney General would not have slept or eaten until he had reached the bottom of the matter. "And any fair analysis of Senator Robert Kennedy's abilities, his character, and of the resources at his is disposal as Attorney General, would indicate that if there was a conspiracy, he would have pursued its protagonists to the ends of the earth …"
  
• 1/5/1968 Czechoslovakia: Alexander Dubcek replaces Antonin Novotny as Party leader and declares his intention to press ahead with extensive reforms. Novotny was criticized by party liberals and intellectuals for his government's poor economic performance and his anti-Slovak prejudice. Dubcek is seen as the perfect compromise candidate, acceptable to both the orthodox party members and reform wing.
  
• 1/5/1968 Dr. Spock was indicted for his anti-war activitites.
  
• 1/7/1968 Israeli PM Levi Eshkol visited Washington.
  
• 1/8/1968 Newsweek magazine runs an article entitled: "A Law Unto Himself" - an article critical of Jim Garrison.
  
• 1/8/1968 A secret Council on Foreign Relations meeting between Douglas Dillon, Richard Bissell and other intelligence figures; Bissell told the group (which included Allen Dulles, Robert Amory, Jr., Thomas Hughes, Ted Sorensen, columnist Joseph Kraft) that he supported "covert action - attempting to influence the internal affairs of other nations...by covert means." He stressed the need for covert operatives, posing as businessmen, students, journalists, etc., inside the target country. "His aim is to penetrate the host government, to learn its inner workings, to manipulate it for the agency's purposes," he continued. These covert-action assets need to be safely in place long before they are needed. Bissell described eight different types of covert actions that the CIA uses: political advice; subsidies to an individual; support of political parties; support of private firms, unions, groups, etc.; covert propaganda; training of individuals and exchange of persons; economic operations; paramilitary or political action operations. (The Cult of Intelligence 30-35,38) In 1971 student radicals occupied the building in Cambridge that houses files for Harvard's Center for International Affairs, where they found the minutes to this meeting. Though the most sensitive parts of the meeting had been deleted, it still provided an intimate look at the inner workings of the CIA. The US news media paid little attention to it, though.
  
• 1/8-12/1968 Chester Bowles visits Cambodia to explore restoration of relations with US.
  
• 1/9/1968 NYT reported that Israeli jets had knocked out Jordanian artillery positions on the east bank of the Jordan River. LBJ was quoted as promising visiting PM Eshkol that the US would sell Israel "planes and other weapons." The Israelis wanted 50 Phantom jet fighter-bombers. In a related article, about a speech RFK made before at Manhattan Community College, Richard Witkin wrote: "Mr. Kennedy said he thought the United States should supply Israel with whatever weapons it needed to offset whatever Russia was supplying the Arabs so that Israel can protect itself. He specifically included the 50 supersonic jets the Israelis have been seeking."
  
• 1/10/1968 NYT reported that RFK had met privately with Eshkol at the PM's suite in the Plaza Hotel to assure him that "he favored supplying Israel with whatever assistance is necessary to preserve Israel's borders and protect the integrity of its people.'"
  
• 1/15/1968 Paris Flammonde writes that on this date, "Court Clerk Max Gonzalez asserted he had observed meetings at New Orleans's Lakefront Airport in either June or July 1963 between ... (Eugene) Bradley of North Hollywood and the late David W. Ferrie.'"
  
• 1/16/1968 San Francisco police, with a warrant, raid the home of Eldridge Cleaver; no arrests made.
  
• 1/16/1968 Colonel John D. Webber, Jr., commander of a U.S. squad in Guatemala, and Lieutenant Commander Ernest A. Munro were shot to death in Guatemala.
  
• 1/17/1968 In his State of the Union speech, LBJ calls for a 10% surcharge on income taxes to raise revenue; the cost of the war is now at $25 billion a year. The deficit for fiscal year 1968 would come in at $27 billion. John Connally recommended that LBJ announce in this speech that he wouldn't run again. (White House Diary 617) This speech was greeted with greater applause than last year's, especially when he said, "The American people have had enough of rising crime and lawlessness."
  
• 1/17/1968 Assassination researcher Harold Weisberg writes a letter to California Speaker of the Assembly Jesse Unruh, an ally of RFK, attacking him for supporting the Warren Commission. "The "dearly beloved brother", in the felicitous phrase of your President and mine (and he is mine, for I voted for him; I cannot disown him - yet), has begun to learn about turned backs and straight faces. Our President last March said that the former Attorney General, "dearly beloved brother", was in charge of the investigation, hence how could it be wrong? When he said this, he knew it was a lie. Then he again reappointed as head of the FBI the man really responsible, the government's only indispensable man and its only important one past the age of mandatory retirement. Ever since your government and mine has been responding to concerned citizens with the same false propaganda, pretending Goebbels-like repetition makes it true. Dutifully, the papers repeat it. And thus Robert Kennedy's bank is stripped…Instead, I suggest that, if you want to survive, you had best be the man you like to think yourself. If you are not, you and all like you will be out down, one by one."
  
• 1/19/1968 James Earl Ray enrolls in a bartenders school in Los Angeles.
  
• 1/21/1968 North Vietnamese army begins siege of Khe Sanh, which would turn out to be a diversionary move.
  
• 1/21/1968 A Strategic Air Command B-52 crashes off the coast of Greenland; it was carrying four unarmed hydrogen bombs, which leaked radiation over a large area. The incident outraged Denmark, which controls Greenland, and led to massive anti-US demonstrations.
  
• 1/22/1968 Westmoreland said he felt that the Communists were looking to stage a decisive battle at Khe Sanh.
  
• 1/22/1968 The Israeli submarine Dakar (ex-HMS Totem) disappears in the eastern Mediterranean while on its maiden voyage from the British shipyard where she had been refurbished after being purchased by the Israeli Navy. An extensive search is made by Israeli and American vessels, but the submarine is never found. The only trace ever found of Dakar was her Emergency Beacon, which was found washed up on a beach near Gaza. The Israeli government has gone so far as to offer a reward for her discovery. All 69 men were lost.
  
• 1/22/1968 NYT: Cambodia said today that equipment was abandoned on the battlefield by the "American-South Vietnamese" force that, Cambodia maintains, crossed into her territory Thursday....He said that the abandoned items included red scarves worn by paratroop commandos, a United States officer's helmet, weapons, and radio sets.
  
• 1/23/1968 North Korea seized US intelligence ship Pueblo in the Sea of Japan.
  
• 1/24/1968 NY Times: "More than 5000 United States marines have been concentrated at Khe Sanh amid indications that one of the major battles of the Vietnam war may be in the offing."
  
• 1/24/1968 Asked by Spann why Robert Kennedy and the Kennedy family had not asked for the JFK investigation to be reopened, said, "In politics as in war, a successful politician or warrior does not move until he knows he will be victorious, that he will win his point, and it maybe the case that Senator Kennedy has not moved because it has not been apparent to him that this issue has outstanding public support." Josiah Thompson, interviewed by Owen Spann, KGO, Tape No. 66
  
• 1/25/1968 Aircraft carrier Forrestal arrives in the Sea of Japan as a response to the Pueblo incident.
  
• 1/26/1968 Paul Rothermel memo to H.L. Hunt read, "The source of the information reports that Garrison is convinced that the assassination was carried out by Gen. Edwin Walker with the financial support and backing of Herman and George Brown of Houston and H.L. Hunt of Dallas. He said that Garrison is a heavy drinker and lives extravagantly...We have extended our cooperation to Garrison in his probe hoping to help guide his investigation. I think everyone would like the assassination solved, and certainly there is no member of the Hunt family or organization who has the least thing to hide. In spite of the above, there have been persistent stories to the effect that Garrison either suspects or is antagonistic toward the Hunts. We have no proof that this is the case. It is reported that Garrison is a most vindictive left winger, that he is bisexual and a clever blackmailer. Garrison understands public opinion, and can without introducing evidence of proof, harass, intimidate, and smear whomever he wishes."
  
• 1/26/1968 Letter from JFK autopsy Dr. J. Thornton Boswell to Ramsey Clark. "As you are aware, the autopsy findings in the case of the late President John F Kennedy, including x-rays and photographs, have been the subject of continuing controversy and speculation. Dr Humes and I, as the Pathologists concerned, have felt for some time that an impartial board of experts including pathologists and radiologists should examine the available material....in an attempt to resolve many of the allegations concerning the autopsy report...question the autopsy participants before more time elapses and memory fades...Dr Humes and I would make ourselves available at the request of such a board." (Post Mortem p574) The New York Times reported that Boswell's plea had worked; it led directly to the establishment of the Clark Panel. Though Boswell's signature is affixed to the request, behind him one again finds the Justice Department in motion. Under oath in 1996, Boswell told the Assassinations Records Review Board [ARRB], "I was asked by … one of the attorneys for the Justice Department that I write them a letter and request a civilian group be appointed by the Justice Department, I believe, or the President or somebody. And I did write a letter to him, Carl Eardley." (As we will see, Justice's Eardley was to play a recurring role in the Kennedy case, and a related role in the death of Martin Luther King.) Noted Warren skeptic Harold Weisberg saw the signs of Boswell's having been nudged more than thirty years ago. Commenting on Boswell's letter, which he reproduced in his 1969 book Post Mortem, Weisberg wrote, "I am suggesting that Boswell's letter was both inspired and prepared by the federal government." "Strangely for a man with an office and a profession," Weisberg reasoned, "[the letter] is typed and signed but on no letterhead, with no return address and, even more intriguing, on government-size paper, which is a half-inch smaller than standard." [It appears that after this episode Boswell became a Justice Department favorite. In JAMA, Boswell admitted that, "the US Justice Department … summoned me to New Orleans to refute Finck's testimony, if necessary. It turned out it wasn't necessary." The man at Justice who was pulling Boswell's strings was apparently no less than the Attorney General. Skeptic Milicent Cranor has pointed out[167] that shortly after Justice had quietly completed reinvestigating and reaffirming JFK's original autopsy findings in 1966 and 1967, Clark was still so fretful that he orchestrated yet another autopsy-related project in anticipation of what he feared was about to be published. Clark's continuing concern was revealed by one of the individuals who Clark selected to sit on what later came to be called the "Clark Panel": Russell Fisher, MD, the Chief Medical Examiner of the State of Maryland. In a March 1977 Maryland State Medical Journal interview, Fisher reported that Ramsey Clark, "became concerned about some statements he'd seen in the proofs of" the not yet published book by Josiah Thompson, Six Seconds in Dallas. "[Clark] decided to get a panel of people together to look at [the autopsy evidence], independently of all other investigations … The result of this panel review was that we found some minor errors in [JFK's autopsy] protocol, such as the site of the entrance wound as being just above the external occipital protuberance … ."[168] The Clark Panel Report was released "partly to refute some of the junk that was in [Thompson's] book," Fisher said.[169]
  
• 1/29/1968 LBJ presents his $186 billion budget to Congress.
  
• 1/30/1968 Tet Offensive begins in Vietnam; this massive, well-coordinated attack saw communist forces strike dozens of objectives through the South simultaneously. The capital city of Kien Hoa province, Ben Tre, was captured. It was retaken by US/ARVN forces using massive artillery fire and air strikes; this practically destroyed the town, killing 550 people and wounding 1200. An American major told journalist Peter Arnett, "It became necessary to destroy the town in order to save it." The Communist offensive was pushed back after 26 days of hard fighting. Though a military defeat for the communists, it was a psychological victory. It wasn't until this point that most of the mainstream media began to break with the government over support of the war. "What the hell is going on? I thought we were winning the war," Cronkite asked when the first bulletins came in. (Tet! 158) Now, reporters who felt betrayed and deceived by the administration began to react bitterly.
  
• 1/30/1968 300 student protesters from the University of Warsaw and the National Theater School were beaten with clubs by state arranged anti-protestors.
  
• 1/30/1968 Clark Clifford is confirmed as Defense Secretary.
  
• 1/31/1968 VC and NVA capture Hue. NY Times: "Vietcong commando units wearing South Vietnamese Army uniforms smashed into the grounds of the Presidential Palace and the United States Embassy here today behind a barrage of mortar fire and rockets. At the same time the United States mission reported that assaults had been made on the Bienhoa air base and the headquarters of the American II Field Force at Longbinh...Danang...came under heavy attack...The whereabouts of President Thieu and Vice President Ky could not be immediately determined."
  
• 1/31/1968 On Johnny Carson's show Jim Garrison said that the CIA "was deeply involved in the assassination" He produced grainy photos of five men talking to police in Dealey Plaza after the assassination: "Here are the pictures of five of them being arrested ...Several of these men...have been connected by our office with the Central Intelligence Agency." The people were only bystanders, had not been arrested, and had not been identified by Garrison's investigators. (Posner, Case Closed 447) "When Carson asked Garrison to reveal the new evidence that he claimed he had, Garrison reached into a black leather portfolio he held in his lap and pulled out some photographs, which, he said, showed suspects being arrested immediately after the assassination. 'Here are the pictures of five of them being arrested, and they've never been shown before... Several of these men arrested have been connected by our office with the Central Intelligence Agency.' The new evidence...had been found by Allan Chapman some weeks before, in the photographic department of the Dallas Times Herald. Robert Hollingsworth, managing editor of the Times Herald, has told me that he personally inspected with a magnifying glass the photographs...and that they showed nothing more than some bystanders, two of whom were employed in the building in which Oswald worked, being routinely questioned by policemen." (Epstein, Counterplot 74-5)
  
• 1/31/1968 Sirhan scrawled in his diary: "RFK RFK RFK RFK RFK Robert F Kennedy Robert F Kennedy RFK RFK RFK RFK RFK must die RFK must die…Who killed Kennedy? I don't know I don't know I don't know yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes no no no girl the girl the girl no no no no practice practice practice practice practice Mind Control mind control mind control 1234 1234 1234 1234 give me a Tom Collins were you drunk yes yes yes where is the [girl or gun] I don't know go home go hom home car car car car car I want coffee cofee cofee at the party at the party Kathleen Kathleen Kathleen Kathleen NO [illegible] NO Kathleen She did not tell me her name NO NO I don't know she wanted she wanted coffee NO NO NO NO"
  
• 1-2/1968 Gold-outflow crisis in US. In January 1968 Johnson imposed a series of measures designed to end gold outflow, and to increase U.S. exports. This was unsuccessful, however, as in mid-March 1968 a run on gold ensued, the London Gold Pool was dissolved, and a series of meetings attempted to rescue or reform the existing system. But, as long as the U.S. commitments to foreign deployment continued, particularly to Western Europe, there was little that could be done to maintain the gold peg.
  
• 2/1968 This month's issue of Playboy reviewed Sylvia Meagher's Accessories After the Fact, and called it "the best of the new crop of books--and the most chilling in its implications...the failure of the Warren Commission to investigate, evaluate--or even acknowledge--the huge body of evidence in its possession indicating the possible presence of more than one gunman...These new books lend weight to widening appeals by Congressmen and the press for an independent new investigation..."
  
• 2/1968 protests by professors at the German University of Bonn demanded the resignation of the university's president because of his involvement in the building of concentration camps during the war.
  
• 2/1968 students from Harvard, Radcliffe, and Boston University held a four-day hunger strike to protest the war.
  
• 2/1968 Czech Communist Party leadership approves enlargement of the economic reform program started in 1967. Journalists, students, and writers call for the repeal of the 1966 Press censorship law.
  
• 2/1968 News Clipping on Louisiana v. Clay Shaw MARINA IS ORDERED TO TESTIFY IN ORLEANS: A Dallas judge ruled today that the widow of Lee Harvey Oswald must come to New Orleans next week to testify in District Attorney Jim Garrison's Kennedy assassination probe. Texas District Court Judge John Mead told Mrs. Marina Oswald Porter at Dallas she is a "material and neccessary witness" in the New Orleans investigation of the slaying of President John F. Kennedy. Meanwhile, Thomas Edward Beckham, another out-of-town state witness sought by Garrison, appeared at Criminal District Court here today, but his grand jury appearance was delayed until Feb. 15. MRS. PORTER IS NOW SCHEDULED to appear before the jury Feb. 8 and 9. She appeared at the Dallas court with her husband, and would make no comment after the judge's decision. She had previously said she would return to New Orleans "if I have to." The court action today was a hearing on Garrison's subpena [sic] under the interstate agreement for return of witnesses. Judge Mead presented Marina with a check from Garrison's office to cover her traveling expenses to New Orleans. IN THE NEW ORLEANS COURT action, Beckham, 27, asked that his grand jury appearance be put off until he had a chance to confer with his local attorney, newly elected state Rep. Edward H. Booker. Assitant DA James L. Alcock agreed to the request and Judge Matthew S. Braniff told Beckham to appear before the jury at 9 a.m. Feb. 15 "without further notice." Beckham arrived in town shortly after midnight from Omaha, where a court had ordered him to return as a material witness at Garrison's request. The witness will remain in town at his own expense because the delay was at his own request. BECKHAM WAS accompanied to court this morning by three men with pistols. One was James Hauger, 32, who said he resigned from the OMaha police force two days ago to act as Beckham's bodyguard. The other two were an unidentified brother of Beckham's and Herman Henning, who carried credentials as an auxiliary sheriff here. Two other brothers of Beckham's were also with him....IN HIS ROLE as a cowboy singer, Beckham said he has an album coming out entitled "Material Witness." He first described it as a "kinda party record on Garrison," but later said it was "just a bunch of songs I've done and doesn't have anything to do with Garrison." Beckham said he needed the bodyguards because he has been threatened both in Omaha and here. He said his mother, who lives here, has had telephone calls from persons who warned Beckham would be harmed if he appeared before the jury....Garrison's original subpena [sic] for Beckham alleged that the singer was an associate of the late David William Ferrie, a key figure in the DA's probe of the slaying of President John F. Kennedy. THE SUBPENA [sic] SAID Beckman [sic] and Ferrie were both ordained priests in the "Old Orthodox Catholic Church of North America." The document also said that Beckham was reported to be in Dallas in November of 1963, the month the President was killed.
  
• 2/1/1968 In Saigon, Thieu declares martial law. Westmoreland gave a press conference in Saigon and told reporters that there was some evidence that the VC offensive was "about to run out of steam."
  
• 2/1/1968 A suspected NLF officer was summarily executed by General Nguyen Ngoc Loan, a South Vietnamese National Police Chief. Loan shot the suspect in the head on a public street in front of journalists. South Vietnamese reports provided as justification after the fact claimed that the suspect was captured near the site of a ditch holding as many as thirty-four bound and shot bodies of police and their relatives, some of whom were the families of General Loan's deputy and close friend. The execution was filmed and photographed and provided another iconic image that helped sway public opinion in the United States against the war.
  
• 2/1/1968 A NYT editorial on Tet remarked that "these were not the deeds of an enemy whose fighting efficiency has progressively declined' and whose morale is sinking fast,' as United States military officials put it in November."
  
• 2/1/1968 McNamara reports that the Soviets doubled their ICBM force in 1967.
  
• 2/1/1968 Nixon announces his presidential candidacy.
  
• 2/1/1968 Billy James Hargis addressed an audience of loyal followers from Oklahoma City. He announced, "We have lost the war in Vietnam….All we need is the funeral." After a long, uncomfortable silence, he slammed his hand down on the pulpit and yelled, "We patriots will never stand for this defeat! Never!" Wham! "Never!" Wham! "Never!"
  
• 2/2/1968 LBJ press conference: "We have known for several months now that the Communists planned a massive winter-spring offensive." Today, Westmoreland asserted: "The enemy is about to run out of steam."
  
• 2/4/1968 Rusk said on NBC-TV's Meet the Press that the communist offensive contained "North Vietnamese regiments..."
  
• 2/5/1968 In central South Carolina is the small city of Orangeburg, home to South Carolina State University, a predominantly Black public college. Today, students protested against an all-white bowling alley. The students organized another protest when white city officials refused to meet their demands.
  
• 2/7/1968 The students at South Carolina State began to rebel in the streets by attacking police cars. The rebellion lasted until the next day. The police along with the National Guard were called in to occupy the campus. The Guard began to fire upon the unarmed students as they sat around a bonfire seeking warmth. Three students were killed and 28 or 33 wounded. Many of them were shot in the balls of their feet as they were trying to run away and throw themselves on the ground to avoid gunfire. To justify the shootings, news accounts circulated the falsehood that a student had fired on a police officer. No gun was ever produced. The FBI falsified information about the students to help the troopers in their defense. After a federal investigation, nine members of the state police were indicted. But they were later acquitted on the federal charge of depriving demonstrators of their constitutional rights.
  
• 2/8/1968 RFK says that U.S. cannot win Vietnam War.
  
• 2/8/1968 Orangeburg massacre - On February 8, a civil rights protest in Orangeburg, South Carolina, turned deadly with the death of three college students.
  
• 2/8/1968 Marina Oswald testifies before Jim Garrison's grand jury in New Orleans
  
• 2/8/1968 George Wallace enters the presidential race on the American Independent party ticket; he pledged to keep order if it required "30,000 troops with 2-foot-long bayonets" and repeal "so-called civil rights laws."
  
• 2/8/1968 Eldridge Cleaver's book Soul on Ice is published.
  
• 2/12/1968 Memphis: the more than a thousand garbage men, nearly all blacks, went out on strike to protest the city's refusal to recognize their union. Mayor Henry Loeb refused their demands and began hiring white strikebreakers.
  
• 2/13/1968 US sends 10,500 more combat troops to Vietnam.
  
• 2/16/1968 The nation's first 911 emergency telephone system was inaugurated, in Haleyville, Ala.
  
• 2/16/1968 LBJ curbs draft deferments for graduate students.
  
• 2/16/1968 In New Orleans, Jim Garrison subpoenas former CIA Director and Warren Commission member Allen Dulles. Dulles refuses to appear.
  
• 2/16/1968 John Lennon, George Harrison and their wives fly to Rishikesh, India, for an extended study of transcendental meditation with the Maharishi. Paul, Ringo and their wives arrive four days later.
  
• 2/17/1968 New Republic editorialized about Tet: "A year before, President Johnson had said that the enemy was losing his grip on South Vietnam. With Tet, that prophecy seemed as broken as the policy it served."
  
• 2/18/1968 Boston Globe published a survey it had done of 38 or 39 major US newspapers; it found that not a single one had editorialized in favor of U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam. While millions of Americans were demanding an immediate pullout, such a concept was still viewed as extremely unrealistic by the editorial boards of big daily papers including the liberal New York Times and Washington Post.
  
• 2/19/1968 Dean Rusk in a State Dept Bulletin: "I get no comfort out of the fact that the defense budget of the United States this year is roughly equal to the gross national product of all of Latin America."
  
• 2/19/1968 Cesar Chavez, the trade union leader, began a hunger strike in protest against the violence being used against his members in California. Robert F. Kennedy went to the San Joaquin Valley to give Chavez his support and told waiting reporters: "I am here out of respect for one of the heroic figures of our time Cesar Chavez. I congratulate all of you who are locked with Cesar in the struggle for justice for the farm worker and in the struggle for justice for Spanish-speaking Americans." Chavez was also a strong opponent of the Vietnam War. Kennedy had begun to link the campaign against the war with the plight of the disadvantaged. Martin Luther King was following a similar path with his involvement in the Poor People's Campaign. As William F. Pepper has pointed out: "If the wealthy, powerful interests across the nation would find Dr King's escalating activity against the war intolerable, his planned mobilization of half a million poor people with the intention of laying siege to Congress could only engender outrage - and fear."
  
• 2/20/1968 During the Senate hearings on the Gulf of Tonkin incident, it is revealed that the navy's records of "extensive interrogation of all potentially knowledgeable [North Vietnamese] sources reveals that they have no info concerning a NVN attack on US ships on 4 August 1964. They state definitely and emphatically that no PTs could have been involved." Another cooperative source "who obviously has traveled in higher circles and has proved himself exceptionally knowledgeable on almost every naval subject and event of interest…specifically and strongly denied that any attack took place." McNamara testified today: "I must address the suggestion that, in some way, the government of the United States induced the incident on August 4 [1964] with the intent of providing an excuse to take the retaliatory action which we in fact took. I can only characterize such insinuations as monstrous." Looking at Sen. Fulbright, he continued: "I find it inconceivable that anyone even remotely familiar with our society and system of government could suspect the existence of a conspiracy which would include almost, if not all, the entire chain of military command in the Pacific, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Joint Chiefs, the Secretary of Defense, and his chief civilian assistants, the Secretary of State, and the President of the United States."
  
• 2/21/1968 NY Times reported, "An enemy force of about 300 today seized a village within easy mortar range of Tansonnut Airport and Gen. William C. Westmoreland's quarters."
  
• 2/21/1968 Jim Garrison described the CIA's executive action program and made comparisons to Nazism on a Dutch TV show: "The press has now reached the point of subsequent control by the Central Intelligence Agency that we literally can't get the truth out." (Counterplot 116-7) In February 1968, he unveiled what would be his final and enduring explanation during a Dutch television show hosted by a left-wing, anti-American journalist named Willem Oltmans.[50] According to Garrison, it was no longer the case that the CIA was an unwitting accomplice to the murder and then an accessory after the fact. No, the truth had turned out to be much worse. Garrison now averred that the Agency had consciously plotted the assassination, executing the plan in concert with the "military-industrial complex." Both had a vested interest in the continuation of the Cold War and the escalation of the hot war in Vietnam. President Kennedy wanted to end both conflicts; that was why he had to be assassinated. The shift in Garrison's line went largely unnoticed at firstexcept at the CIA, which was monitoring the DA's every utterance. As Rocca observed in a March 1968 memo, "Garrison has now reached the ultimate point in the logic of his public statements…. This is by and large the Moscow line." For a fleeting moment, Rocca, one of the Agency's most esteemed counterintelligence experts, seemed to be musing about the possibility of a Soviet hand in all that had happened, given that the statement fit so neatly with Moscow's known goals. But Rocca's insight never went further than this brief speculation. (Max Holland)
  
• 2/22/1968 Memphis garbage men on strike marched to the city council to make their protests heard, but they were dispersed with police using truncheons and tear gas.
  
• 2/22/1968 AP from Amsterdam: "District Attorney Jim Garrison New Orleans yesterday charged the CIA with killing President Kennedy and gagging the U.S. press. He also said "the next U.S. President who tries to put brakes on the war machine and bring peace to this country will also be murdered." "Garrison told his interviewer, Willem Oltmans, for the Dutch TV program' Panorama': President Kennedy was murdered by CIA elements. Those who were involved in the murder worked laboriously to give such a presentation that the suspicion would rest on others. This manner of organizing a murder is standard procedure with the CIA. "He said that he assumed that President Johnson know that the CIA killed Kennedy because he appointed an investigation committee of mainly pro-CIA persons."
  
• 2/13/1968 Memphis strikers held their first protest march. Police used mace and nightsticks to disperse the crowd. The city went to court and obtained an injunction against further marches.
  
• 2/24/1968 CBS-TV permits folk singer Pete Seeger to perform all the verses of his "Waist Deep in the Big Muddy" on the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. The song had been censored from the show the previous September because of its strong anti-war message.
  
• 2/24/1968 The government-censored transcripts of the 1964 Tonkin hearings was released, and published in newspapers Feb 25.
  
• 2/24/1968 Gen. James M. Gavin wrote an article in the Saturday Evening Post: "There has been much speculation about what President Kennedy would or would not have done in Vietnam had he lived. Having discussed military affairs with him often and in detail for 15 years, I know he was totally opposed to the introduction of combat troops in Southeast Asia. His public statements just before his murder support this view. Let us not lay on the dead the blame for our own failures."
  
• 2/25/1968 US and ARVN recapture Hue. Today, Westmoreland said in Saigon, "I do not believe the enemy can hold up under a long war." (The Experts Speak)
  
• 2/25/1968 Bobby and Artie Seale are arrested in their home by Oakland police without a warrant. Charges of "conspiracy to murder" against Bobby are later dropped.
  
• 2/26-27/1968: Ramsey Clark Panel convenes in Washington D.C. to examine JFK X-rays and autopsy photographs. Doctors on the panel include: William H. Carnes, MD, professor of pathology, University of Utah, Russell S. Fisher, MD, the famed Baltimore medical examiner, Russell H. Morgan, MD, the head of the radiology department at Johns Hopkins University, and Alan R. Moritz, MD, professor of pathology at Case Western Reserve University. Appointed by Attorney General Clark to study the autopsy material in 1968, mostly in response to Jim Garrison's investigation. Bruce Bromley acted as the panel's legal counsel, was present during the examination and collaborated on the final report. The report was released to the public 1/1969, and was published in Post-Mortem (p580). The following comes from that report, written Feb 27. "The panel's inventory disclosed x-ray films of the entire body except for the lower arms, wrists and hands and the lower legs, ankles and feet." Of the photographs, there were 10 of the "head viewed from above"; 9 of the "head viewed from right and above to include part of face, neck, shoulder and upper chest"; 7 of the "head and neck viewed from left side"; 4 of the "head viewed from behind"; 4 "cranial cavity with brain removed viewed from above and in front"; 4 of "back of body including neck"; 3 of "brain viewed from above"; 4 of "brain viewed from below." "The black and white and color negatives corresponding to the above were present and there were also seven black and white negatives of the brain without corresponding prints. These were numbered 19 through 25 (JTB)...All of the above were listed in a memorandum of transfer, located in the National Archives, and dated April 25, 1965." As for the X-rays, there was one of the "skull, A-P view"; 2 of "skull, left lateral"; 3 "skull, fragments of"; 2 "thoraco-lumbar region, A-P view"; 1 of the "chest, A-P view"; 1 of "right hemithorax, shoulder and upper arm, A-P view"; 1 of "left hemithorax, shoulder and upper arm, A-P view"; 1 "pelvis, A-P view"; 1 "lower femurs and knees, A-P view"; 1 "upper legs, A-P view." The panel inventoried "CE 399 - a whole bullet; CE 567 - portion of nose of a bullet; CE 569 - portion of base segment of a bullet; CE 840 - three fragments of lead." Concerning the photos of the back of the head, they reported that "the contours...have been grossly distorted by extensive fragmentation of the underlying calvarium. There is an elliptical penetrating wound of the scalp situated near the midline and high above the hairline...judged to be approximately six millimeters wide and fifteen millimeters long. The margin of this wound shows an ill-defined zone of abrasion." The top of the head had "multiple gaping irregularly stellate lacerations of the scalp over the right parietal, temporal and frontal regions....there was no exiting bullet defect in the supra-orbital region of the skull...extensive deformation with laceration and fragmentation of the right cerebral hemisphere. Irregularly shaped areas of contusion with minor loss of cortex are seen on the inferior surface of the first left temporal convolution. The orbital gyri on the left show contusion with some underlying loss of cortex. The sylvian fissure on the right side has been opened revealing a rolled-up mass of arachnoid and blood clot which is dark brown to black in color. The mid-temporal region is depressed and its surface lacerated....the left cerebral hemisphere is covered by a generally intact arachnoid with evidence of subarachnoid hemorrhage especially over the parietal and frontal gyri and in the sulei. The right cerebral hemisphere is extensively lacerated. It is transected by a broad canal running generally in a postero-anterior direction and to the right of the midline. Much of the roof of this canal is missing as are most of the underlying frontal and parietal gyri...the corpus callosum is widely torn in the midline...the back of the head was struck by a single bullet travelling at high velocity, the major portion of which passed forward through the right cerebral hemisphere, and which produced an explosive type of fragmentation of the skull and laceration of the scalp. The appearance of the entrance wound in the scalp is consistent with its having been produced by a bullet similar to that of exhibit CE 399. The photographs do not disclose where this bullet emerged from the head although those showing the interior of the cranium with the brain removed indicate that it did not emerge from the supra-orbital region...There is an elliptical penetrating wound of the skin of the back located approximately 15 cm medial to the right acromial process, 5cm lateral to the mid-dorsal line and 14 cm below the right mastoid process. This wound lies approximately 5.5cm below a transverse fold in the skin of the neck...A well defined zone of discoloration of the edge of the back wound, most pronounced on its upper and outer margins, identifies it as having the characteristics of the entrance wound of a bullet...measures approximately 7mm in width by 10mm in length...consistent with those of a wound produced by a [Carcano] bullet...At the site of and above the tracheotomy incision in the front of the neck, there can be identified the upper half of the circumference of a circular cutaneous wound the appearance of which is characteristic of that of the exit wound of a bullet. The lower half of this circular wound is obscured by the surgically produced tracheotomy in- ciscion which transects it. The center of the circular wound is situated approximately 9cm below the transverse fold in the skin of the neck described in a preceding paragraph...followed a downward course and to the left in its passage through the body." As for the X-rays, "there are multiple fractures of the bones of the calvarium bilaterally. These fractures extend into the base of the skull and involve the floor of the anterior fossa on the right side as well as the middle fossa in the midline. With respect to the right fronto-parietal region of the skull, the traumatic damage is particularly severe wiht extensive fragmentation of the bony structures from the midline of the frontal bone anteriorly to the vicinity of the posterior margin of the parietal bone behind. Above, the fragmentation extends approximately 25mm across the midline to involve adjacent portions of the left parietal bone; below, the changes extend into the right temporal bone. Throughout this region, many of the bony pieces have been displaced outward; several pieces are missing. Distributed through the right cerebral hemisphere are numerous small, irregular metallic fragments, most of which are less than 1mm in maximum dimension. The majority of these fragments lie anteriorly and superiorly. None can be visualized on the left side of the brain and none below a horizontal plane through the floor of the anterior fossa of the skull. On one of the lateral films of the skull, a hole measuring approximately 8mm in diameter on the outer surface of the skull and as much as 20mm on the internal surface can be seen in profile approximately 100m above the external occipital protuber- ance. The bone of the lower edge of the hole is depressed. Also there is, embedded in the outer table of the skull close to the lower edge of the hole, a large metallic fragment which on the anterior-posterior film lies 25mm to the right of the midline. This fragment as seen in the latter film is round and measures 6.5mm in diameter...The metallic fragments visualized within the right cerebral hemisphere fall into two groups. One group consists of relatively large fragments, more or less randomly distributed. The second group consists of finely divided fragments, distributed in a postero-anterior direction in a region 45mm long and 8mm wide...its long axis if extended posteriorly passes through the above-mentioned hole. It appears to end anteriorly immediately below the badly fragmented frontal and parietal bones just anterior to the region of the coronal suture...The projectile fragmented on entering the skull, one major section leaving a trail of fine metallic debris as it passed forward and laterally to explosively fracture the right frontal and parietal bones as it emerged...Subcutaneous emphysema is present just to the right of the cervical spine immediately above the apex of the right lung. Also several small metallic fragments are present in this region [These would have been deposited by the "pristine bullet"]. There is no evidence of fracture of either scapula or of the clavicles, or of the ribs or of any of the cervical and thoracic vertebrae...No bullets or fragments of bullets are demonstrated in X-rayed portions of the body other than those described above." They also examined JFK's clothing: "A ragged oval hole about 15mm long (vertically) is located 5cm to the right of the midline in the back of the coat at a point about 12cm below the upper edge of the coat collar...A ragged hole about 10cm long vertically and corresponding to the first one described in the coat, is located 2.5cm to the right of the mid-line in the back of the shirt at a point 14cm below the upper edge of the collar. Two linear holes 15mm long are found in the overlapping hems of the front of the shirt in a position corresponding to the place where the knot of the neck tie would normally be. In the front component of the knot of the tie in the outer layer of frabic a ragged tear about 5mm in maximum diameter is located 2.5cm below the upper edge of the knot and to the left of the midline." In conclusion, the panel concurred with the findings of the WC. They decided that dissection of the bullet track through JFK's neck would probably not "alter significantly the conclusions expressed in this report." The report was signed by the four doctors between March and April 1968. Howard Roffman commented that the fragment embedded in the skull could not have been produced by a bullet covered "with a hard metal jacket such as copper alloy. Such a fragment is, in fact, a not infrequent occurence from a lead bullet...or soft-nosed bullet." (Presumed Guilty) Dr Humes had testified that there were no metallic fragments in the neck region. (H 2 361) All of the Clark Panel doctors are now deceased. Posner's only mention of the Clark Panel is that it "reaffirmed the original autopsy report." (Case Closed 304,450) The panel found that the tracheotomy wound did not obscure the original throat wound, not even to the naked eye.
  
• 2/26/1968 RFK met with Larry O'Brien and told him he was seriously considering running against LBJ: "I don't want to do it, but I may have to. Johnson's Vietnam policy is a debacle...I don't understand Johnson. He scares me. I wonder if he will ever listen to reason." RFK did not have a high opinion of Eugene McCarthy. (No Final Victories 219)
  
• 2/27/1968 Walter Cronkite came back from Saigon and told the American people that it seemed the "the bloody experience in Vietnam is to end in stalemate." He said that the wise course of action was to admit we "did the best we could" and to begin a process of negotiation and withdrawal. LBJ felt that if he had lost Cronkite's support, he had lost the average American as well.
  
• 2/27/1968 Westmoreland requests 206,000 more troops. This was McNamara's last official day on the job; his last act was to oppose Westmoreland's troop request.
  
• 2/27/1968 Jim Garrison subpoenas the original print of the Zapruder film from Time, Inc. as evidence in the Clay Shaw trial.
  
• 2/28/1968 LBJ awarded McNamara the Medal of Freedom.
  
• 2/28/1968 The JFK conspiracy books Accessories After the Fact and Six Seconds in Dallas were reviewed by Fred Graham in the NY Times Book Review. Graham found it astonishing that there was such a degree of disbelief "in a document that has the endorsement of some of the highest officials in the Government." He contended that inconsistencies notwithstanding, "None of the critics have been able to suggest any other explanation that fits the known facts better than the Warren Commission's." Graham found Ms. Meagher's book "a bore," and he found that Thompson's scientific approach ignored "the larger logic of the Warren Report. Although it has seemed that the flow of anti-Warren Report books would never end," he continued, "these two may represent a sweet climax."
  
• 2/28/1968 Sen. Wayne Morse floor speech: "The time has come for a thorough study by objective civilians of the operations of the military establishment in the United States the military establishment of which we were warned by General Eisenhower as he left the Presidency."
  
• 2/29/1968 Appointed by Johnson to serve as the commission's executive director, David Ginsburg played a pivotal role in writing the Kerner Commission's findings. The Commission's final report, the Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders or Kerner Report was released on February 29, 1968 after seven months of investigation. The report became an instant best-seller, and over two million Americans bought copies of the 426-page document. Its finding was that the riots resulted from black frustration at lack of economic opportunity. Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., pronounced the report a "physician's warning of approaching death, with a prescription for life."[4] The report berated federal and state governments for failed housing, education and social-service policies. The report also aimed some of its sharpest criticism at the mainstream media. "The press has too long basked in a white world looking out of it, if at all, with white men's eyes and white perspective." The report's most infamous passage warned, "Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white-separate and unequal." Its results suggested that one main cause of urban violence was white racism and suggested that white America bore much of the responsibility for black rioting and rebellion. It called to create new jobs, construct new housing, and put a stop to de-facto segregation in order to wipe out the destructive ghetto environment. In order to do so, the report recommended for government programs to provide needed services, to hire more diverse and sensitive police forces and, most notably, to invest billions in housing programs aimed at breaking up residential segregation. The Commission's suggestions included, but were not limited to: "Unless there are sharp changes in the factors influencing Negro settlement patterns within metropolitan areas, there is little doubt that the trend toward Negro majorities will continue." "Providing employment for the swelling Negro ghetto population will require ...opening suburban residential areas to Negroes and encouraging them to move closer to industrial centers..." "...cities will have Negro majorities by 1985 and the suburbs ringing them will remain largely all white unless there are major changes in Negro fertility rates, in migration settlement patterns or public policy." "...we believe that the emphasis of the program should be changed from traditional publicly built slum based high rise projects to smaller units on scattered sites." One often overlooked recommendation of the report was for an expansion of police surveillance in order to better deal with further unrest. The Commission recommended that: "police departments...develop means to obtain adequate intelligence for planning purposes...An intelligence unit staffed with full-time personnel should be established to gather, evaluate, analyze, and disseminate information on potential as well as actual civil disorders...It should use undercover police personnel and informants." The Law Enforcement Assistance Administration released federal funding for local police forces in response. President Lyndon B. Johnson, who had already pushed through the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, ignored the report and rejected the Kerner Commission's recommendations. In April 1968, one month after the release of the Kerner report, rioting broke out in more than 100 cities following the assassination of civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. To mark the thirtieth anniversary of the Kerner Report, the Eisenhower Foundation sponsored two complementary reports, The Millennium Breach and Locked in the Poorhouse. The Millennium Breach, co-authored by former Senator and Commission member Fred R. Harris, found the racial divide had grown in the subsequent years with inner-city unemployment at crisis levels. The Millennium Breach found that most of the decade that followed the Kerner Report, America made progress on the principal fronts the report dealt with: race, poverty, and inner cities. Then progress stopped and in some ways reversed by a series of economic shocks and trends and the government's action and inaction. Harris reported, "Today, thirty years after the Kerner Report, there is more poverty in America, it is deeper, blacker and browner than before, and it is more concentrated in the cities, which have become America's poorhouses." Conservative critics of the Kerner Report argue that the basis and findings of the report are deeply flawed. They contend that the report exonerates rioters for their behavior and places the blame for their actions on the larger society. The notion that racism created pathological social conditions that lead to the eruption of racial riots, as the Kerner Commission argued, was not supported by the findings of many uncited sociologists. The major riots took place in cities where blacks experienced the least racism; although Los Angeles, Newark, and Detroit were certainly not without racism, it did not compare with that in the deep South. This last point, however, that it is in the South where "true racism" existed (in past tense) is a myth itself, created to absolve the North of its subtle and continuing racism. Abraham H. Miller, who won a Pi Sigma Alpha Award from the Western Political Science Association for his statistical refutation of some of the Commission's data analysis, stated, "There is considerable reason for rejecting the sociological and popular cliché that absolute or relative deprivation and the ensuing frustration or despair is the root cause of rebellion." At a 1998 lecture commemorating the 30th anniversary of the report, Stephan Thernstrom, a history professor at Harvard University, stated, "Because the commission took for granted that the riots were the fault of white racism, it would have been awkward to have had to confront the question of why liberal Detroit blew up while Birmingham and other Southern cities where conditions for blacks were infinitely worse did not. Likewise, if the problem was white racism, why didn't the riots occur in the 1930s, when prevailing white racial attitudes were far more barbaric than they were in the 1960s?" Critics of the report also attribute the cause of the riots to the size of the black community where the eruption occurred and the failure of the police force to respond swiftly and adequately.
  

[Tracy Riddle]

• 3/1968 Students in North Carolina organized a sit-in at a local lunch counter that spread to 15 cities. Students from all five public high schools in East L.A. walked out of their classes protesting against unequal conditions in Los Angeles Unified School District high schools. Over the next several days, they inspired similar walkouts at fifteen other schools. Italian students closed the University of Rome for 12 days during an anti-war protest. British students turned violent in their anti-war protests (opposing the Vietnam War), physically attacking the British defense secretary, the secretary of state for education and the Home Secretary.
  
• 3/1968 Israeli forces assault Jordanian village Al Karamah in retaliation for terrorist raids in the West Bank; they met heavy resistance by armed members of Al Fatah.
  
• Early 1968 Sirhan joins the Ancient Mystical Order of the Rosicrucians (AMORC). Sirhan begins to practice shooting his new pistol this month.
  
• 3/1968 Public rallies held in Prague and other cities and towns in support of reform policies voice growing criticism of Novotny's presidency.
  
• 3/1968 Johnny Meyer and Aristotle Onassis meet with Mahmoud Hamshari at the cafe in the Place de la Sorbonne in Paris. Meyer walks across the square to sit at a table outside a bar to wait for Onassis and Hamshiri to conclude their private meeting. Commuting under various aliases between Paris and Los Angeles, Hamshari appears to have become a sidelined figure in the Palestinian cause. During a meeting the previous June, Hamshiri had proposed that Fatah "kill a high-profile American on American soil."
  
• 3/1/1968 a clash known as battle of Valle Giulia took place between students and police in the faculty of architecture in the Sapienza University of Rome.
  
• 3/1/1968 The Kerner Commission publishes its Report on Civil Disorders, warning that "our nation is moving towards two societies - one white, one black - separate and unequal."
  
• 3/1/1968 UPI reported that Rep. L. Mendell Rivers (D-South Carolina) urged the possible use of tactical nuclear weapons at Khesanh if it becomes clear it cannot be held. Not to use nuclear weapons under those conditions would be unwarlike and un-Christian.
  
• 3/2/1968 RFK met with Larry O'Brien, and told him of the politicians, such as California's Jesse Unruh, who were urging him to run. (No Final Victories)
  
• 3/2/1968 James Earl Ray graduates from bartenders' school in Los Angeles.
  
• 3/4/1968 Hoover issued a memo on COINTELPRO ("Counter-Intelligence Program - Black Nationalist-Hate Groups - Racial Intelligence"): "1. Prevent the coalition of militant black nationalist groups...An effective coalition of black nationalist groups might be the first step toward a real 'Mau Mau' in America, the beginning of a true black revolution. 2. Prevent the rise of a 'messiah' who could unify, and electrify, the militant black nationalist movement...3. Prevent violence on the part of black nationalist groups...pinpoint potential troublemakers and neutralize them...4. Prevent militant black nationalist groups and leaders from gaining respectability, by discrediting them..."
  
• 3/5/1968 Senate voted cloture on the Civil Rights debate.
  
• 3/6/1968 500 New York University (NYU) students demonstrated against Dow Chemical because the company was the principal manufacturer of napalm, used by the U.S. military in Vietnam.
  
• 3/6/1968 C.R. Smith is sworn in as Secretary of Commerce.
  
• 3/7/1968 A NY Times article quoted high sources saying that LBJ would not enter any primaries; Ira Kapenstein had been the source of the article, and LBJ was not pleased. (No Final Victories)
  
• 3/7/1968 Sen. Fulbright began a Senate debate on the war, declaring in his opinion that the Tonkin Gulf Resolution was "null and void…The resolution has effectively been repealed because it was based on false representations…"
  
• 3/7/1968 Sirhan left his job at the Pasadena Health Food Store.
  
• 3/7/1968 Excerpts from a CIA memo: RELEASED PER P.L. 102-526 (JFK ACT) 7 MAR. 1968 MEMORANDUM SUBJECT: Garrison and the Kennedy Assassination: Cubans and Other Latin Americans Allegedly Involved 1. This memorandum provides a complete list of all Cubans and other Latin Americans who have come to our attention as involved or possibly involved in the Garrison investigation. It does not contain all the information available on these persons. As appropriate, references have been made to previous memoranda. Persons and organizations not previously brought to the attention of WG/COG have been underlined. Americans who had Cuban or Latin-American connections and who have been mentioned in previous reports are not reported herein. All personnel mentioned herein have been or are being traced in RID. 2. Cubans or possible Cubans,...c. Sergio ARCHACHA Smith. He is the former New Orleans delegate of the FRD. Garrison is attempting to extradite him from Texas. (R&A Memorandum, 28 September 1967, paragraph 3)... g. (1) Mario BERMUDEZ Nunez (201-283562) (2) Mario Enrique BERMUDEZ Quiones (201-054474). One Mario BERMUDEZ allegedly accompanied CLAY SHAW to Cuba on a gun-smuggling operation in 1959. (Playboy correspondence 23 July 1967) BERMUDEZ Nunez is a Cuban national who was recruited by JMWAVE for possible PM use. BERMUDEZ Quiones is a Colombian national associated with the New Orleans Municipal Government for many years [redacted] #67-302 27 September 1967)...i. Carlos Jose BRINGUIER (201-289248). He is a DRE leader who has been interrogated and polygraphed by Garrison. (R&A Memorandum No. 8, 12 January 1968, part II, paragraph 4a) j. Julian BUZNEDO Castellanos (201-289995). Garrison alleges he is one of the assassins and that he took part in the Houma burglary. He was an Agency PM maritime trainee from January 1961 to April 1962. (R&A Memorandum No. 3, 1 June 1967, paragraph 5d)
  
• 3/8/1968 Polish political crisis began with students from the University of Warsaw who marched for student rights and were beaten with clubs. The next day over two thousand students marched in protest of the police involvement on campus and were clubbed and arrested again. By March 11, the general public had joined the protest in violent confrontations with students and police in the streets. The government fought a propaganda campaign against the protestors, labeling them Zionists. The twenty days of protest ended when the state closed all of the universities and arrested more than a thousand students. Most Polish Jews left the country to avoid persecution by the government.
  
• 3/10/1968 Lady Bird: "This was a day of deep gloom - that is to say, gloom was purveyed in the newspapers and on TV." (White House Diary)
  
• 3/10/1968 The press broke the story about Westmoreland's secret request for 206,000 more troops. The public and congressional reaction was angry.
  
• 3/10/1968 Peter Edelman RFK aide and speechwriter: "There has been some confusion over when Robert Kennedy actually decided to run for president. In fact, Senator Kennedy decided to run at least two days before the New Hampshire primary. I went with him to California to visit Cesar Chavez on that Sunday, March 10, 1968. John Seigenthaler and Ed Guthman joined us en route. I wondered why Kennedy had asked Seigenthaler and Guthman to join us, and on the flight, I found out. RFK told Ed, John and me that he had decided to run for president. I was exhilarated, so I recall the moment with particular clarity. The following week was a blur of frenzied activity, as we began putting a campaign in motion, given that the announcement was to be made the following Saturday, March 16. I've always thought RFK would have been nominated and elected. Key party people like Mayor Daley of Chicago and Governor Hughes of New Jersey were moving in his direction, and I think many party professionals would have supported him for the nomination, although some (no doubt) would have done so out of self-interest rather than principle. And I don't think Richard Nixon was a very strong candidate on the other side, as is clearly indicated by the closeness of his actual contest with Vice President Humphrey. As President, RFK would have negotiated an early end to the Vietnam War and worked hard toward racial reconciliation and narrowing of income gaps at home. How much would he have accomplished? Even with the mandate he would have had coming into office, he necessarily had limited political capital every president does and he was addressing difficult and divisive issues, to say the least. We well know that the next challenges of civil rights good jobs, a good education for every child, and so on were and are even harder than ending state-mandated segregation and assuring equality before the law. Still, Robert Kennedy would have taken the country in a direction very different from what did transpire, and I think we would be in a different place today as a consequence."
  
• 3/10/1968 An HSCA document from the 70s says that Harold Weisberg and Jim Garrison met with an informant, a man in his 40s who is the son of famous show business parents, who warned them of a plot to kill Robert Kennedy.
  
• 3/12/1968 Eugene McCarthy won 42% of vote in Democratic New Hampshire primary, demonstrating serious divisions in the party, and embarassing Johnson, who won 50%.
  
• 3/14/1968 Memphis: 9000 blacks listened to speeches supporting the garbage strike by Bayard Rustin and Roy Wilkins.
  
• 3/15/1968 Charlie Company (Company C), 1st Battalion, 11th Infantry Brigade, many of whom lacked combat experience, for the last few months had been in the Quang Ngai Province to "sanitize" the area of VC. This evening, Commanding officer of Charlie Company, Ernest Medina, briefed the entire company, working them up for a confrontation that "looked like a tough fight", and that they would finally get their chance to "get even with the VC". The intelligence reports given claimed that one of the Viet Cong's top units was established in My Lai-4, a subhamlet of the village of Son My, about 6 miles NE of Quang Ngai City. The orders were to destroy the enemy battalion and the hamlet. By attacking at 7:30 AM, it was believed that the women and children would be on their way to market, leaving some 250-280 of the enemy troops. The plan was, following an artillery barrage west of My Lai-4, Lt. Calley (commanding the 1st Platoon) would come down from the north, moving south, moving the enemy to the east. The 2nd Platoon, led by Lt. Brooks, would clear out the northern area. Lt. La Crosse's 3rd Platoon (accompanied by Medina), would stay at the airstrip for communications, and later "mop up the area". In addition, helicopter gunships would be circling the area. Medina, urging the men to be aggressive, ordered that everything in My Lai-4 was to be burned or destroyed.
  
• Delivering a speech in mid-March 1968, President Johnson contended that as long as the foe in Vietnam "feels that he can win something by propaganda in the country that he can undermine the leadership that he can bring down the government that he can get something in the Capital that he can't get from our men out there he is going to keep on trying."
  
• 3/16/1968 LBJ decides to send 35-50,000 more combat troops to Vietnam. Around this time, there had been talk between LBJ and the JCS about the possibility of invading Laos or North Vietnam, but Johnson decided to keep the war limited.
  
• 3/16/1968 Senator Robert F. Kennedy announces he will seek the Democratic presidential nomination. Across the country, in Portland, Oregon, Richard Nixon watches the event from his suite in the Hotel Benson. After RFK has finished, he sits staring at the blank television screen. "We've just seen some terrible forces unleashed," he says. "Something bad is going to come of this ... God knows where this is going to lead." Jackie Kennedy tells Arthur Schlesinger: "Do you know what I think will happen to Bobby? The same thing that happened to Jack. There is so much hatred in this country, and more people hate Bobby than hated Jack. I've told Bobby this, but he isn't fatalistic, like me."
  
• 3/16/1968 The My Lai massacre. The soldiers found no insurgents in the village on the morning of March 16, 1968, although they had been psychologically prepared for a major attack. The soldiers, one platoon of which was led by Lt. William Calley, killed hundreds of civilians primarily old men, women, children, and babies. Some were tortured or raped. Dozens were herded into a ditch and executed with automatic weapons. At one stage, Calley himself turned a machine gun on a ditch full of villagers. The precise number reported killed varies from source to source, with 347 and 504 being the most commonly cited figures. A memorial at the site of the massacre lists 504 names, with ages ranging from as high as 82 years to as low as 1 year. According to a South Vietnamese army lieutenant to his superiors, it was an "atrocious" incident of revenge. A US Army scout helicopter crew famously halted the massacre by landing between the American troops and the remaining Vietnamese hiding in a bunker. The 24-year-old pilot, Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson, Jr., confronted the leaders of the troops and told them he would open fire on them if they continued their attack on civilians. While the other two members of the helicopter crew Spc. Lawrence Colburn and Spc. Glenn Andreotta brandished their heavy weapons at the men who had participated in the atrocity, Thompson directed an evacuation of the village. The crewmembers have been credited with saving at least 11 lives but were long thereafter reviled as traitors. - Lt. Calley's 25 men came off the helicopters firing into what they thought was an area infested with VC; none were found when they landed. An unarmed old man was then spotted and shot dead. About 20 minutes later, as the troops approached the hamlet some Vietnamese began to run across the open fields, and were shot down. It turned out to be women and children. Most of the villagers knew better than to run and get shot, and sat inside their huts, and waited in front as the soldiers came. The 1st Platoon began rounding up the villagers. The 2nd Platoon began killing as soon as they reached the western edge of the hamlet. Many soldiers yelled "Lai Day" ("come here"). When no one responded, grenades were thrown in. In some spots, huts were set on fire, and the villagers were bayoneted or shot when fleeing. Some were evacuated by grenades. Two young women were raped and then shot. Some 15-20 women and children, "praying and crying" around a temple, were shot in the head by troops walking by. Those who were rounded up were taken primarily to two spots; one group of 20-50 were taken to a clearing; a second group of nearly 80 were taken to a drainage ditch. Just after 8 AM, Lt. Calley told the men guarding the first group, "You know what I want you to do with them." The men watched over the group until 10 minutes later when Calley returned and said, "Haven't you got rid of them yet? I want them dead. Waste them." From about 10-15 feet away, Calley began shooting, and ordered the men to do the same. Some began to and stopped, one fired away, crying as he did so, some continued as they were told. It took many clips of bullets to finish off the group, some of whom had even shown identification that they were not VC. About 45 minutes later Calley came to the ditch where anywhere from 80-150 villagers were waiting. When some tried to crawl out of the ditch, once again Calley started shooting, and commanded his troops to do the same. One soldier reportedly refused, but the rest once again reluctantly followed orders. One source indicates that a 2-year-old avoided the bullets, crawled out of the ditch, and began to run to what used to be his home. Calley grabbed him, threw him back into the ditch, and shot him. Soon afterwards, he told his men to take a break. At some point someone in one of the helicopters overhead was heard over the radio, "From up here it looks like a blood bath. What the hell are you doing down there?" Word was relayed back to Captain Medina at the air strip that no VC were there. Medina reportedly told the men to continue what they were doing. During all this, Medina called headquarters to tell them that 85 VC had been killed and 20 suspects captured. By 9 AM all of Charlie Company had reached My Lai-4. Instead of rounding up the villagers, the men just began firing at the people. Many fled to bunkers, and when they were full, hand grenades were tossed in. After refueling at 8:45-9:00, Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson, piloting a helicopter doing reconnaissance in the area, noticed wounded villagers on the ground. He marked the location of the wounded and contacted another chopper to request aid for those wounded. At the same time, his crew chief , Glenn Andreotta (killed 3 weeks later), spotted the ditch where so many had been killed. Noting that some were still alive, Thompson landed between the ditch and Calley's defensive perimeter at 9:15-9:30. The response to Thompson's request for aid to the wounded was that the "only way to help them is to kill them." Thompson thought the respondent was joking, and took off. Andreotta observed a sergeant shooting into the ditch. When Thompson returned later, he saw all were dead. He then saw a small boy bleeding. Once again, he marked the spot with smoke, and watched as someone shot the child. He them came across yet another bunker filled with children, and observed soldiers approaching the area. He landed again, placing himself between the bunker, and the oncoming soldiers. He told his gunner, Lawrence Colburn, that he was to set his weapon on the soldiers, and that if the troops fired while Thompson tried to get the civilians out of the bunker, Colburn was to fire on the American soldiers. He asked a Lieutenant (reportedly Brooks) to help them get the civilians out, and was told, "The only way to get them out is with a hand grenade". Soon two helicopters landed and helped evacuate the people. Medina told Brooks (in the subhamlet of Binh Tay) at 9:30 to stop his 2nd Platoon from any more of the killing and raping going on (although the killing from the 2nd Platoon continued until 10:15). The remaining people of Binh Tay were then rounded up and moved out. Back in the My Lai-4 area, the heroics mentioned above by the helicopter crew were going on. Sometime past 10 AM, the only American casualty occurred. A PFC shot himself through the foot while clearing his .45 pistol (some reports claim it was on purpose to leave the madness). Sometime between 10:30 and 10:45, Captain Medina received an order from Colonel Calhoun to stop the shooting. Medina assumed it was as a result of Thompson's having observed Medina's earlier shooting of a woman. Still, some of the injured were killed with a bullet to the head. Soon before noon, the company moved out of the area. 3 weapons were found in the whole village. If VC had been there they would likely have found many more. No less than 175-200 Vietnamese were killed by Charlie Company. Another study put the figure at 347. Reports in newspapers years later put the total at 504. Army photographer Ronald L. Haeberle was present to record the massacre. Chopper pilot Hugh Thompson, door-gunner Lawrence Colburn and crew chief Andreotta happened upon the massacre and landed their helicopter in the line of fire, placing themselves between the attacking American troops and the fleeing Vietnamese villagers. They then trained their own weapons at the US soldiers to prevent further killing. Thompson confronted the leader of the American forces. Andreotta died in battle three weeks later, but the three men were honored in 1998 with the Army's Soldier's Medal for their efforts.
  
• 3/16 or 3/17/1968 James Earl Ray left Los Angeles, indicating his ultimate destination on a postal change of address order as Atlanta. He was actually on his way to New Orleans.
  
• 3/17/1968 NY Times reported that Jim Garrison angrily said that Lyndon Johnson "should be hanged for suppressing evidence."
  
• 3/17/1968 an anti-war demonstration in Grosvenor Square, London, ended with 86 people injured and 200 demonstrators arrested.
  
• 3/17/1968 MLK was in Los Angeles and spoke at the Second Baptist Church: he said that hatred had become a "national malady…Hate is too great a burden to bear. I can't hate."
  
• 3/17/1968 Ray's story told to William Pepper: "After returning to Los Angeles with Charlie Stein around the middle of January Ray moved into the St. Francis Hotel. On March 17, following instructions from Raul, he left for New Orleans, arriving a day late. He found that Raul had gone to Birmingham, leaving word that he would meet him at the Starlight Lounge the next day. Somehow Ray got lost on the way to Birmingham and wound up in Selma. Since it was dark by that time, he spent the night there."
  
• 3/17/1968 NY Times reported that US forces in Vietnam had killed 128 enemy soldiers in a successful "pincer movement" against communist forces. This story came from "American headquarters in Saigon" and was actually a cover story for the My Lai massacre. "While the two companies of United States soldiers moved in on the enemy force from opposite sides, heavy artillery barrages and armed helicopters were called in to pound the North Vietnamese soldiers." No civilian casualties were cited; no women raped were cited; no babies shot as they crawl for safety were cited. 128 Viet Cong soldiers were claimed to be killed in action, and that is what was sent to divisional and corps commanders. And yet only 3 weapons were captured. Also, different reports were given as to civilian casualties; one was 10-12, another 12-14, another 20-28.LBJ told a group of farmers, "The time has come when we ought to stand up and be counted, when we ought to support our leaders, our government, our men, and our allies until aggression is stopped..."
  
• 3/18/1968 NYT reports that an "Army Exhibit Bars Simulating Shooting at Vietnamese Hut." The Chicago Museum of Science and Industry had featured an exhibit where visitors could enter a helicopter for "simulated firing of a machine gun at targets in a diorama of the Vietnam Central Highlands. The targets were a hut, two bridges, and an ammunition dump, and a light flashed when a hit was scored." Protesters at succeeded in pressuring the Army to take out the hut.
  
• 3/18/1968 MLK flew east toward Memphis. James Earl Ray was driving his Mustang across the Southwestern desert, from Los Angeles to New Orleans. Reaching Memphis, King gave a speech in support of the 17,000 strikers. He announced that 3/28 he would lead a citywide demonstration in their support.
  
• 3/20/1968 MLK is in Mississippi. Ray arrives in New Orleans.
  
• 3/21/1968 Nelson Rockefeller announced that he would not be a candidate for the GOP nomination.
  
• 3/21/1968 Ray left for Birmingham.
  
• 3/22/1968 Westmoreland is named as Army Chief of Staff.
  
• 3/22/1968 Ray spent the night in Selma, Alabama. MLK had just left the area the day before.
  
• 3/22/1968 Czechoslovakia: Novotny resigns as president, after facing pressure by party liberals.
  
• 3/23/1968 James Earl Ray drove on to Atlanta. "Ray arrived in Birmingham on the following day, March 23, once again running somewhat behind schedule, and went straight to the Starlight, where he met Raul. Raul seemed to be in a hurry to go to Atlanta, though he didn't say why. They set out immediately. On arriving in Atlanta they drove to the Peachtree and 14th Street area, where Ray rented a room from the very drunk landlord, James Garner. After a meal at a local diner Raul left, saying he'd be back in the morning." (William Pepper)
  
• 3/24/1968 Los Angeles Times reported that Nixon had been working behind the scenes to pass an open housing bill.
  
• 3/24/1968 William Pepper: "The next morning, Ray took the room for a week. He was able to get his room free because he convinced Garner that he had paid him in advance the night before. Later, on the telephone, Raul told Ray not to get too far away in case he needed him quickly; he might be required to drive to Miami in a few days. Raul wanted to be able to come and go freely from his confederate's room without being seen by the landlord or anyone else. Ray was unable to duplicate a door key for him (though he had taken a locksmithing course), so he agreed to leave the side door open. This didn't work too well, however, because the landlord's sister kept locking it. Raul apparently left town, telling Ray he'd be back in a couple of days. Some six days later he returned, saying he was now ready to put the gunrunning operation into full gear. He instructed Ray to get a large-bore deer rifle fitted with a scope, plus ammunition, and to ask about the price of cheap foreign rifles. Raul originally wanted the gun to be bought in Atlanta, but Ray suggested that he could buy a rifle in Alabama more easily, since he had an Alabama ID. Raul agreed. With that part of the operation set, Ray packed up some of his belongings; he left other things behind at the rooming house: his pistol, some clothes, a television set, and a typewriter. He fully expected to return. Raul and Ray drove together to Birmingham, where Ray rented a room in the Travelodge motel. There Raul briefed him further on the gun purchase and gave him money: They went to a tavern, probably the Starlight Lounge, where Raul told him to go to Aeromarine Supply to buy the rifle."
  
• 3/25-26/1968 Senior Advisory Group on Vietnam (Harriman, Acheson, Ball, Clifford, Cyrus Vance, Matthew Ridgway, Bundy, Dillon, Rostow) recommends de-escalation, to Johnson's surprise.
  
• 3/25/1968 AP reported: Campaigning in Southern California, Senator Robert Kennedy met a barrage of questions today on whether if elected President he would open the United States archives to reveal details of the assassination of his brother, President John Kennedy. RFK is greeted at San Fernando State College with placards including one asking "Are you going to open the Archives up?" During question period students ask whether if elected he will open the archives. "I would not reopen the Warren Commission report". Mr. Kennedy told students at San Fernando Valley state college [California]. "I have seen everything that's in there. I stand by the Warren Commission." He did not elaborate on whether he would open the archives. Several times the senator, campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination, tried to ignore questions from students. He became obviously more distressed as they persisted. Finally, he said: "your manners overwhelm me. Go ahead, go ahead, ask your questions." A student shouted: "will you open the archives?" Mr. Kennedy said: "Nobody is more interested than I in knowing who is responsible for the death of President Kennedy." [UPI quotes him as saying "I have seen everything that is in the archives."] An aide says this is Kennedy's first public statement of this kind.
  
• 3/26/1968 In a letter, Eisenhower wrote about RFK: "It is difficult for me to see a single qualification that the man has for the presidency. I think he is shallow, vain and untrustworthy - on top of which he is indecisive. Yet his attraction for many people is extraordinary..."
  
• 3/27/1968 Sirhan is paid $2000 by the Argonaut Insurance Co. for injuries from his fall.
  
• 3/28/1968 the Military Police of Brazil killed high school student Edson Luís de Lima Souto at a protest for cheaper meals at a restaurant for low-income students. The aftermath of his death generated one of the first major protests against the military dictatorship.
  
• 3/28/1968 Memphis: a poorly-organized march was quickly taken over by black militants, who began breaking store windows; police responded violently. A 16-year-old black youth was shot and killed by police; 60 people were injured. MLK was so discouraged he didn't want to come back to Memphis again, but he was persuaded to change his mind.
  
• 3/29/1968 Ray is given $750 by "Raoul." Today he bought a .243 Remington rifle and telescopic sight at a Birmingham, Alabama gun shop. William Pepper: "At Aeromarine Supply, Ray told the clerk he was going hunting with his brother-in-law, looked at a number of rifles, and finally selected one and asked to have a scope mounted on it. He asked the salesman to "throw in" some ammunition. Ray purchased the gun under the alias Harvey Lowmeyer, the name of a former criminal associate in Quincy, Illinois. At the last minute he believed it would be safer to buy the gun under another alias. If the clerk requested identification, he would go elsewhere to purchase the rifle under his verifiable alias, Eric S. Galt. He took the rifle back to the motel and showed it to Raul. To Ray's surprise Raul said it wouldn't do. Ray had picked up some brochures in the store, so Raul marked the rifle he wanted and told Ray to try to make an exchange. Ray called Aeromarine Supply, said that his brother-in-law didn't like the rifle, and asked if he might exchange it for another; the store said the rifle could be exchanged but he would have to wait until the next day."
  
• 3/29/1968 Steve Burton, national chairman, Citizens Committee of Inquiry, writes open letter to RFK challenging his statement that he has read everything in the Archives. Says this is impossible to believe and tells why. LA Free Press
  
• 3/30/1968 Czechoslovakia: General Ludvik Svoboda is elected president. Svoboda was a war hero who had also served in the Czechoslovak legion at the start of the Russian Civil War in 1918.
  
• 3/30/1968 Ray exchanged the .243 for a 30.06 Remington Gamesmaster rifle. William Pepper: "The next morning, March 30, Ray picked up the new rifle (which we know was a Remington 760 Gamemaster. The salesman threw in some ammunition free of charge. Raul approved. (At the time of our interview, Ray appeared to be genuinely ignorant about the brand, type, and make of the gun bought on the 29th, as well as the one obtained in exchange on the 30th -- even now, long after the details have been publicly revealed, Ray seems not to recall these details). Before leaving the motel Raul instructed him to check into the New Rebel Motel on Lamar Avenue in Memphis on April 3 and to bring the gun with him."
  
• 3/31/1968 LBJ gave a televised address to the nation: "The Joint Chiefs of Staff have recommended to me that we should prepare to send during the next 5 months support troops totaling approximately 13,500 men. The tentative estimate of those additional expenditures is $2.5 billion in this fiscal year and $2.6 billion in the next fiscal year." But then he said, "Tonight I have ordered our aircraft and our naval vessels to make no attacks on North Viet-Nam, except in the area north of the demilitarized zone where the continuing enemy buildup directly threatens Allied forward positions...I call upon President Ho Chi Minh to respond positively and favorably to this new step toward peace." At the end of his address, he dropped a bombshell that surprised nearly everyone: "I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your President." LBJ claimed this would allow him to spend his last year negotiating with the North Vietnamese and not have to worry about a political campaign. A Gallup poll published today showed that only 26% of Americans approved of LBJ's handling of the war. Only 35% approved of his performance overall. "In retrospect, it would seem probable that the operative cause [of LBJ's decision not to run again in 1968] was less the much advertised student unrest than a revolt of big business and corporate finance, frightened by the damage Johnson's policies were inflicting on the US economy and on its economic position abroad." (Geoffrey Barraclough, New York Review of Books, 8/7/1975)
  
• 3/31/1968 When RFK heard the news, his aides were euphoric. William vanden Heuvel recalled, "He was the one who understood the dangers ahead. He said, with that tight smile of his, The joy is premature.'" (American Melodrama p6) RFK's plane is just landing at La Guardia in NYC as LBJ's announcement is being broadcast. An aide rushes to RFK with the news that LBJ is not going to run. "You're kidding," is RFK's reply. He is unusually quiet for the rest of the evening.
  
• 3/31/1968 Also on this day an article by Mike Dorman appears in Ramparts magazine that is extremely critical of LBJ. The article describes how LBJ had been "bought off" years ago by Carlos Marcello to look out for his interests in federal gambling legislation. Jack Halfen, a well-known bagman for Marcello, states that he personally passed $100,000 a year - for ten years - to LBJ. LBJ reportedly has read the manuscript of the article prior to it being published. (RFK has been very helpful to Dorman in researching LBJ's Senate voting record - and met with him personally to discuss the article.)
  
• 3/31/1968 William Barnet also publishes an article in the Dallas Times Herald today that reads: "Two years ago this month, convicted swindler Billie Sol Estes told a startling tale to a grand jury in rural Robertson County. The legendary con man claimed Lyndon B. Johnson, about to become vice president, had ordered the 1961 murder of U.S. Agriculture Department agent Henry H. Marshall. Estes said the future president was fearful Marshall, of Bryan, could link Johnson aide Clifton Carter - and thus Johnson - to Estes' fraudulent activities. Testifying with immunity, Estes even named a hitman: Malcom E. "Mac" Wallace, a former University of Texas at Austin student body president. Wallace had been convicted of murder with malice in the 1951 killing of Austin golf pro J. Doug Kinser. After hearing Estes, the grand jury changed the official cause of the death of Marshall - who had been found with five bullet shots to the side - from suicide to homicide but said there was no one alive to indict..."
  
• 3/31/1968 This afternoon, MLK said in the National Cathedral in Washington, "I don't like to predict violence, but if nothing is done between now and June to raise ghetto hope, I feel that this summer will not only be as bad, but worse than last year."
  
• 3/31/1968 William Pepper: "Ray set out from Birmingham and proceeded as instructed toward Memphis at a leisurely pace, spending the night at a motel in Decatur. On the 31st he stayed at another motel in the Tuscumbia-Florence area."
  
• 4/1968 Easter: Shooting of student radical leader Rudi Dutschke leads to bloody student unrest in West Germany and West Berlin.
  
• 4/1968 Spanish students protested at the "fascist regime" of Franco sanctioning a mass for Adolf Hitler. At the beginning of spring the University of Madrid was closed for thirty-eight days due to student demonstrations. Students protesting against the military dictatorship were killed in Brazil.
  
• 4/1968 A series of articles in the Chicago Daily News by Richard Billings reported: "Contending with Garrison has been Washington's problem for some time. Officially, the federal government won't admit he's worthy of concern, while in fact the FBI watches every move he makes. Agents trail him whenever he leaves New Orleans."
  
• 4/1/1968 Hiram Ingram, a Dallas sheriff, falls today and breaks his hip. Three days from now, he will be dead of "cancer." He is 53 years old. Penn Jones Jr. insists that Ingram had knowledge of an assassination conspiracy. Ingram was a friend and former colleague of Roger Craig.
  
• 4/1/1968 Ray left some clothing at the Piedmont Laundry. Ray later denied making this trip back to Alabama. William Pepper: "On April 1, he spent the night in a motel in Corinth, Mississippi (which he subsequently identified as the Southern Motel)."
  
• 4/2/1968 so-called Marian sightings in Zeitoun, Cairo, Egypt. Numerous passers-by observed figures like white doves, which had fluid outlines and slowly met in a mist, above the domes of the old Coptic church in the Cairo suburb of Zeitun. In a ghostlike metamorphosis the mist assumed the aspect of a human figure. It was so radiant that the spectators were blinded and could only follow the phenomenon with their eyes screwed up. The vision showed itself at the same place in the same way on other evenings.
  
• 4/2/1968 Wisconsin primary. McCarthy won 56%, while 6% voted for RFK.
  
• 4/2/1968 Larry O'Brien met with LBJ, who told him, "there'll always be those who will say all I care about is politics. So now I've done the one thing that proves it's not politics. Larry, I've done everything you fellows urged me to do and more: I've cut back the bombing and I'm trying to negotiate and I won't be a candidate again. I still doubt that it'll work, but I've gone the distance." (No Final Victories)
  
• 4/2/1968 Ray left Atlanta and drove to Memphis. William Pepper: "He spent the night of April 2 in the DeSoto Motel in Mississippi, just south of Memphis. (Harold Weisberg told me some years later that in 1974, while working for attorneys Bud Fensterwald and James Lesar in preparation for an evidentiary hearing for Ray, he spoke to the manager and some cleaning staff, who confirmed that Ray was at the DeSoto Motel as he claimed. The manager claimed that the records had been turned over to FBI agents when they visited shortly after the assassination.)"
  
• 4/2/1968 The St. Louis Globe-Democrat, using information fed to them by the FBI, ran an editorial calling MLK "one of the most menacing men in America."
  
• 4/2/1968 Hoover memo to Ramsey Clark: "In view of the recent developments in Memphis, Tennessee, where King led a march that ended in a riot, it is reasonable to assume the same thing could happen later this month when King brings his 'Poor Peoples March' to Washington D.C." Hoover said that King's "long-time secret Communist Party member, Stanley Levison" was urging King to go ahead with the march. Hoover again asked for wiretap authority, and Clark refused it.
  
• 4/3/1968 (Wed) William Somersett calls Miami Police Detective Lt. C.H. Sapp and informs him that he has learned through his connections of a plot to assassinate Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in Memphis tomorrow.
  
• 4/3/1968 RFK meets with LBJ at the White House - hoping to set up a sort of truce. LBJ tells RFK that he intends to stay out of the campaign. RFK isn't fooled. LBJ is secretly throwing all his support behind Hubert Humphrey. LBJ is also leaking unfavorable reports about RFK to the press.
  
• 4/3/1968 RFK speech: "We've had difficult times in the past. We will have difficult times in the future. It is not the end of violence; it is not the end of lawlessness; it is not the end of disorder."
  
• 4/3/1968 Today, David Karr and Drew Pearson meet with LBJ in the Oval Office. Karr tells LBJ that Aristotle Onassis and Jackie Kennedy are going to eventually wed. Shortly after this visit, Eugene McCarthy sees LBJ, and when he brings up the subject of RFK's presidential run, "The president said nothing; instead he drew a finger across his throat, silently, in a slitting motion."
  
• 4/3/1968 North Vietnam, via Hanoi radio, offers to participate in peace talks.
  
• 4/3/1968 King returned to Memphis to address a gathering at the Mason Temple (World Headquarters of the Church of God in Christ). His airline flight to Memphis was delayed by a bomb threat against his plane. With a thunderstorm raging outside, King delivered the last speech of his life, now known as the "I've Been to the Mountaintop" address. As he neared the close, he made reference to the bomb threat: "And then I got to Memphis. And some began to say the threats... or talk about the threats that were out. What would happen to me from some of our sick white brothers? Well, I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn't matter with me now. Because I've been to the mountaintop. [applause] And I don't mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land! [applause] And so I'm happy, tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!" MLK arrives in Memphis and checks into room 306 at the Lorraine Hotel; he had returned to give more support to the garbage workers' strike. That night, he spoke before an enthusiastic crowd of 2000 at the Mason Street Temple Church: "Well, I don't know what will happen ahead. We've got some difficult days ahead. I've been to the mountain top. I won't mind. Like anybody, I'd like to live a long life...but I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will, and He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you, but I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the Promised Land. So I'm happy tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man." Andrew Young recalled thinking that the speech seemed "almost morbid."
  
• 4/3/1968 US Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit ruled "that the evidence introduced by the Government is not sufficient to sustain the conviction" and ordered Richard Case Nagell set free.
  
• 4/3/1968 Ray checks into the New Rebel Motel in Memphis using the name Eric S. Galt. William Pepper: "On April 3, Ray drove across the Mississippi-Tennessee state line and checked into the New Rebel Motel in Memphis. Late in the evening, Raul appeared at the doorway wearing a raincoat, and Ray let him in. Ray didn't know where he came from or how he got there. Raul told him they were going to rent a room near the river. There they would work the first stage of the gunrunning deal. At the time, Ray figured that Raul wanted the room in a rundown part of Memphis because they'd be less conspicuous. As usual, he didn't ask Raul any questions. Raul wanted Ray to rent the room using the Galt alias, but Ray was uncomfortable with this and suggested using an alias he had used previously -- John Willard. Raul then wrote out the address of a tavern named Jim 's Grill and instructed Ray to meet him there at 3:00 the next afternoon. Earlier in the day, Ray had brought the rifle in its box into the room wrapped in a sheet or bedspread. Just before Raul left, Ray gave him the gun, and Raul left with it under his coat. He had no idea why Raul wanted to take the gun. James Earl Ray has remained adamant that after turning the gun over to Raul at the New Rebel Motel on the evening of April 3 he never saw it again."
  
• 4/3/1968 Rothermel memo to H.L. Hunt: "A CIA agent in Houston, Texas has indicated that an effort is being made to have a lunacy hearing on Jim Garrison, the New Orleans District Attorney. The informant said he did not know who would push the lunacy charges but that the CIA seems concerned enough to be behind the movement." (Texas Rich p241)
  
• 4/3/1968 At 11:09 tonight, LBJ's daughter, Lucy, calls "asking her father if we wanted dinner sent over." LBJ declines.
  
• 4/4/1968 (Thursday) Rothermel memo to H.L. Hunt: "Bill Wood, former CIA man and investigator for Jim Garrison, came to see me today. He said that he had heard that I was incensed with him for having made investigations which tended to indicate that he Wood was checking on Mr. Hunt as involved in the assassination...Wood was here with hat in hand to try to explain that Garrison was in no way concerned with H.L. Hunt and that Garrison further wanted my personal cooperation as I had given valuable information to him in the past. He said that Garrison will prove that the assassination was a plot by officials in the Federal Government and consisted of CIA, Secret Service, FBI and one or two military men...he hoped that we realized that Garrison had to come forward with statements which would bring him both leads for investigation and throw off the CIA which was trying to thwart his investigation..." (Texas Rich 241; The Man Who Knew Too Much)
  
• 4/4/1968 King spent the last day of his life in the Lorraine Motel talking with aides and planning strategy for the upcoming demonstration. He planned to have dinner at the home of Rev. Samuel B. Kyles that evening at six. APRIL 4, was the fifty-third day of the strike. While Dr. King slept, Judge Bailey Brown began to hear arguments on whether the temporary restraining order should be made permanent, thus making it illegal for the march which had been rescheduled for April 8 to go ahead. The legal team representing Dr. King and his colleagues requested a dismissal or a modification of the existing order and proposed a series of restrictions on the march, acceptable to Dr. King. Around 4:00 p.m. that afternoon, Judge Brown announced that he was going to let the march proceed, subject to those restrictions.
  
• 4/4/1968 In the late morning Dr. King met with some of the Invaders and then met with Abernathy over lunch in their room, 306. Abernathy recalled that after the meal, Dr. King and his younger brother, Alfred Daniel "A. D." King, who had arrived unexpectedly, joked with their mother on the telephone to Atlanta, probably from A.D.'s room, 201. Shortly afterward the executive staff meeting began in room 306. Hosea Williams has told me that at that meeting Dr. King took him to task for attempting to put some of the Invaders on the SCLC's staff (Hosea was always a keen strategist, and he saw the usefulness of co-opting some of the Invader leadership to their side). Dr. King said that he couldn't appreciate anyone who hadn't learned to accept nonviolence, at least as a tactic in the struggle if not in one's way of life. He said he didn't want the SCLC to employ anyone who didn't totally accept nonviolence. The meeting was in full swing when Andy Young returned from court to give his report. He was later than expected and had also neglected to call in and give a report on how the proceedings in court were going, as King had asked him to do. He was jokingly taken to task. Hosea remembers Dr. King tussling with him in the room, saying, "I'll show you who the leader is." Just about the time that the staff meeting was heating up in the motel, less than three hundred feet away a man calling himself John Willard was registering for a sleeping room in the rear of the South Main Street rooming house whose back faced the Lorraine. Also during this time, one of the SCLC's senior field organizers, the Rev. James Orange, went off to do some shopping, driven by Invader Marrell McCollough. On the way back to the motel they picked up James Bevel at Clayborn Temple. About two hours later, J. Edgar Hoover was about to have the first of his predinner martinis at his usual table at Harvey's Restaurant in Washington. The fact that he attended Harvey's for dinner as usual on that day would be cited by defenders of the FBI as indicating a lack of knowledge of the events that were to take place in the next half hour.
  
• 4/4/1968 William Pepper: "After checking out of the New Rebel Motel on April 4, Ray stalled for some time, did some shopping, changed a slowly leaking tire, and then drove downtown. He left the car in a parking lot and proceeded on foot to look for Jim's Grill. He first went into a tavern on Main Street called Jim's Club and noticed a fellow in the. tavern who looked at him "kind of funny," then eventually located Jim's Grill down the street, at 418 South Main Street. Not seeing Raul inside, he retrieved the car and parked it at the curb just outside the grill around 3:30 p.m. By then Raul had arrived. Ray remembers Raul asking him where the car was. Ray pointed to it. Ray rented a room in the rooming house above the grill for a week, using the name John Willard. There Raul told him to get a pair of infrared binoculars; the people who were buying the guns wanted them too, he said. When Ray asked for them at the York Arms Store on South Main Street, he was told they could only be bought at an army surplus store, so instead he bought a pair of regular binoculars. When he returned, he noticed that the man whom he had first seen at Jim's Club was inside the grill. He apparently didn't notice Ray, who didn't go inside but went up to the room where Raul was waiting. Ray tried to tell Raul about the man downstairs, but Raul ignored him and told him he was going to meet a very important gunrunner and that they were going to the outskirts of town to try out the rifle. Raul told him to bring his stuff upstairs, so Ray got his bag out of the Mustang. He also brought a bedspread up in case he had to spend the night there, because he didn't want to sleep on the one in the room. Raul gave him $200 in cash and told him to go to the movies and come back in two or three hours. Ray was instructed to leave the Mustang where it was because Raul said he would probably use it."
  
• 4/4/1968 3pm Reverend Kyles stated that he arrived at the motel around 3;00 p.m. and went from room to room for a period of time, visiting with various people. Dr. King and about fourteen other aides were to go to his house for a buffet dinner organized by his wife, Gwen. In At the River 1 Stand, [4] Joan Beifuss records in detail Kyles's comments on his activity during the last hour of Dr. King's life, which have now become accepted as fact. In light of what I learned later, I believe it useful to quote verbatim from her transcription of Kyles's story: "Ralph was dressed when I got in [to room 306] and Martin was still dressing. ... Ralph said, "All right now, Billy. I don't want you fooling me tonight. Are we going to have soul food? Now if we go over there and get some filet mignon or T-bone, you're going to flunk. ..." Martin says, "Yeah, we don't want it to be like that preacher's house we went to in Atlanta, that great big house. We ... had some ham -- a ham bone -- and there wasn't no meat on it. We had Kool Aid and it wasn't even sweet. ..." I said, "You just get ready. You're late." I had told them 5:00 and I told my wife 6:00. I said, "Hurry up. Let's go." He was in a real good mood. ... It may have been from what they accomplished in the staff meeting. ... When Martin's relaxed he's relaxed. ... He'd put his shirt on. He couldn't find his tie. And he thought that the staff was playing games with him, but we did find it in the drawer. When he put the shirt on, it was too tight. And I said, "Oh, Doctor, you're getting fat!" He said, "Yeah, I'm doing that."...Ralph was still doing something. He's very slow. And we went back out together, Dr. King and myself, and stood side by side. ... Solomon Jones [King's local driver] said something about it was getting cool and to get your coat. ... I was greeting some of the people I had not seen. ... Martin was leaning over the railing ....I called to Ralph to come on. They were getting ready to load up. I said, "I'll come down. Wait a minute. Somebody can ride with me." As I turned and got maybe five steps away this noise sounded. Like a firecracker."
  
• 4/4/1968 5:20 PM William Pepper: "Ray went downstairs for the last time around 5:20 p.m. He had talked to Raul for about forty-five minutes. Back in the street, he looked in at Jim's Grill and didn't see the man he suspected had been following him. He remembered that the Mustang had a flat spare tire and decided to have it fixed so that Raul wouldn't have any trouble if he used the car later. Ray said he was uneasy about the man, who he thought had followed him, and concluded that he was either a federal narcotics agent or the "international gunrunner" Raul had mentioned."
  
• 4/4/1968 5:30pm Rev. Kyles walked into King's motel room and announced, "OK, Doc, it's time to go."
  
• 4/4/1968 5:50-6:00PM William Pepper: "Ray drove to a gas station to have the tire repaired, arriving there sometime between 5:50 and 6:00 p.m. Since there were a lot of customers, he simply waited, because he was in no hurry. Finally an attendant came over and told him that he didn't have the time to change his tire. Ray remembered that an ambulance raced by with its siren blaring. Driving back, he was confronted by a policeman who had blocked off the street about a block away from the rooming house. The policeman motioned to him to turn around. The policeman's presence told him that something was wrong, and his inclination, as always in such circumstances, was to get out, so he drove south toward Mississippi, intending at first to get to a telephone and call the New Orleans number. It wasn't until he had almost reached Grenada, Mississippi, that he heard on the radio that Martin Luther King had been killed. When he heard that the police were looking for a white man in a white Mustang, he realized he might have been involved with a man or men who had conspired to kill King. He took back roads rather than the interstate highway because he was afraid he might be the object of a search. On his way he stopped and threw away the photography equipment and then drove straight to Atlanta, where he abandoned the car."
  
• 4/4/1968 5:59pm King and Kyles stepped out onto the balcony; MLK talked with several people in the parking lot below, most of them his aides. Ralph Abernathy was inside the motel room. Kyles left the balcony. King was smoking a cigarette, something he never did in public.
  
• 4/4/1968 6:01pm A single shot rings out and tears into the right side of King's face, knocking him violently backward.
  
• 4/4/1968 Some minutes after the shot, photographer Joseph Louw snapped the picture flashed around the world that showed a group of SCLC staff, including Andy Young, standing on the balcony pointing in the direction of the back of the rooming house. In the photograph a person is kneeling at the feet of the others, apparently checking Dr. King for life signs. At the time no one seemed to know who this person was.
  
• 4/4/1968 6:03 pm The first call for help to the police department's dispatcher was recorded at 6:03 p.m. Calls went out from police dispatch and fire station 2 diagonally opposite the Lorraine, where patrolman Willie B. Richmond had sounded the alert. Lt. Judson E. Ghormley of the Shelby County Sheriffs Department commanded TACT unit 10 (TACT 10) that afternoon. They were in place with three cars at fire station 2 on South Main and Butler. The TACT units each consisted of twelve officers from the MPD and the Shelby County sheriffs department. All, except officer Emmett Douglass, who was sit- ting in the unit's station wagon monitoring the radio, were inside the fire station drinking coffee, playing ping-pong, making phone calls, or talking. When the shot rang out and Richmond called out, "Dr. King has been shot!" all of the men ran out the north exit of the station and around to the rear of the building. Ghormley said he stopped at the concrete wall at the rear of the fire station, turned around, ran back to the front of the station, and headed north up South Main toward the rooming house, arriving in front of the recessed doorway of Canipe Amusement Company at 424 South Main within two minutes of the shot. There he found a bundle that contained a gun inside a cardboard box and several other items, including nine 30.06 unfired rifle bullets. One of the two customers in Canipe Amusement Company and Canipe himself described hearing a thump as the bundle was dropped and said that they noticed a young man pass by and a white Mustang parked just south of the shop pull away.
  
• 4/4/1968 6:06pm An ambulance arrives for King. According to those present, Dr. King was lifted onto a stretcher and carried down the stairs to a waiting ambulance. Ralph Abernathy rode with him to St. Joseph's Hospital. Bernard Lee, Andy Young, and Chauncey Eskridge, King's personal lawyer, followed behind in a car driven by Solomon Jones, a driver for the R. S. Lewis Funeral Home who had been provided to Dr. King as his chauffeur when he was in Memphis. At that time Mayor Henry Loeb was on his way, driving south on Interstate 55 for a speaking engagement at the University of Mississippi. He spotted Sheriff Bill Morris's car. Morris told him what had happened. After the news was confirmed by MPD director Holloman, Loeb's car turned around and headed back to Memphis.
  
• 4/4/1968 6:08pm Police broadcast a local call to stop a white Mustang.
  
• 4/4/1968 6:35pm A phony CB radio broadcast causes police to go on a wild chase in northeast Memphis. Around 6;30 p.m. a police dispatcher, William Tucker, received a call from a patrol car that supposedly was chasing a white Mustang across the northern part of the city.
  
• 4/4/1968 Upon hearing about the shooting, Lorraine Bailey had screamed, run to her room, and collapsed on her bed. She suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and was rushed to St. Joseph's Hospital. She never regained consciousness and died the following Tuesday, just as the funeral for Dr. King began in Atlanta.
  
• 4/4/1968 Rev. A. D. King had been in the shower when the shooting occurred. He was dressing when the ambulance left, and he remained at the motel, waiting for word from the hospital and keeping in touch with his parents in Atlanta.
  
• 4/4/1968 At St. Joseph's, King was worked on feverishly by a team of five or six doctors in the emergency room while police sealed off the hospital. Early on it became apparent to the medical team that the high-velocity bullet had entered the right lower facial area around the chin, penetrated downward, and severed the spinal cord in both the lower neck, upper chest, and back regions. Andy Young and Chauncey Eskridge waited in a small anteroom. Ralph Abernathy and Bernard Lee stood against the wall of the small emergency room, waiting while the doctors worked. Finally, neurosurgeon Frederick Gioia approached Abernathy and told him that there was no hope. The only life function remaining was King's heartbeat. Finally, that too ceased.
  
• 4/4/1968 7:05pm Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was pronounced dead at 7:05 p.m. The hospital chaplain, Faith Coleman Bergard, reached the emergency room shortly afterward, and while Dr. King's aides prayed in the anteroom, he bent over the body, prayed, and closed the dead man's eyes.
  
• 4/4/1968 After hearing of the shooting, LBJ cancelled a scheduled trip to Hawaii for meetings about the war. Walter Cronkite had almost finished broadcasting the "CBS Evening News" when he received word of Martin Luther King's assassination. His report detailed the shooting and the nation's reaction to the tragedy. He reported that a "well dressed young man" was seen running from the scene. Officers also reportedly chased and fired on a radio-equipped car with two white men.
  
• 4/4/1968 8:15pm Fear and uncertainty prevailed in Memphis that evening. Telephone communications broke down in the central city. Though a curfew had been imposed and the meeting at Mason Temple, at which Dr. King was to speak, had been called off, masses of blacks, some unknowing, some in defiance, converged on the temple. By 8:15 p.m. window-breaking and rock-throwing incidents were increasing. By 9:00 sniper fire was reported in northern Memphis, and by 10:00 a building supplies company, just north of downtown, was the scene of a major fire. Rioting and looting became rampant, with liquor stores the main target. The first contingent of a four-thousand-strong National Guard force moved into the streets, joining the police, sheriffs deputies, state highway patrol, and fifty Arkansas highway patrolmen. Eventually, Ralph Abernathy, Andy Young, Hosea Williams, and the other SCLC staff members regrouped at the motel and met into the early hours of Friday, April 5. All pledged loyalty to Ralph Abernathy as Dr. King's appointed successor.
  
• 4/4/1968 Riots broke out in 125 cities, causing 46 deaths, 21,000 arrests and 55,000 Federal and National Guard troops used in riot control. The biggest riots were in D.C., Chicago, Baltimore, and Kansas City. "For the first time in history, the situation room in the basement of the west wing of the White House was plotting the course of a domestic crisis." (American Melodrama p17)
  
• 4/4/1968 In Washington, DC, singer James Brown went on national TV to urge restraint and a positive channeling of anger. That night, musicians Jimi Hendrix, B.B. King and Buddy Guy gather in a New York club to play blues all night; at the end of the show, they took a collection for the SCLC, to which Hendrix personally donated $5000. California Gov. Reagan said that this was the sort of "great tragedy that began when we began compromising with law and order, and people started choosing which laws they'd break." He didn't go to King's funeral.
  
• 4/4/1968 RFK, against advice from his campaign workers, goes to a ghetto rally site in Indianapolis. His police escort peels off as he enters the ghetto. He is the one who tells the crowd that Martin Luther King is dead. Later that night, back at his hotel, RFK for the first time in the hearing of any staffer, mentions the name of his brother's alleged killer. He calls him "Harvey Lee Oswald," just as the gunman had been misidentified in the first radio reports from Dallas. Even later in the evening, RFK will say to Joan Braden in reference to MLK's murder: "That could have been me." Following King's death, the French novelist Romain Gary tells RFK "Somebody is going to try to kill you." Bobby replies, "I am pretty sure there'll be an attempt on my life sooner or later. Not so much for political reasons ..." To Pierre Salinger Gary says: "Your candidate's going to get killed." One day, RFK believes, people will no longer be able to mention "the Kennedy assassination" without specifying which one, and reporters covering his campaign share the premonition: He has the stuff to go all the way, but he isn't going to make it. "The reason is that somebody is going to shoot him," Newsweek's John Lindsay tells Jimmy Breslin. "I know it and you know it ... He's out there now waiting for him."
  
• 4/5/1968 (Friday) By Friday morning the autopsy by Shelby County's medical examiner, Dr. Jerry Francisco, had been completed at John Gaston Hospital. Dr. King's body was then taken to R. S. Lewis and Sons Funeral Home, where people came to pay their respects.
  
• 4/5/1968 Coretta King was on her way from Atlanta to escort the body home, and the SCLC staff gathered at the funeral home to take the body to the airport when she arrived. She and her children never left the private jet Sen. Robert Kennedy had chartered for her. Attorney General Ramsey Clark visited her on board and publicly announced, "All of our evidence at this time indicates that it was a single person who committed this criminal act." In a press conference, Attorney General Ramsey Clark announced that "we are getting close" to an arrest and said the evidence "indicated a single individual" was involved and there was "no evidence of a widespread plot." (NY Post 4/6)
  
• 4/5/1968 President Johnson met with twenty-one civil rights leaders called to Washington from across the country. He then went to the National Cathedral and attended a memorial service for Dr. King in the midst of the ongoing insurrection and civil disorder in the capital.
  
• 4/5/1968 Czechoslovakia: Action Program of the Communist Party is published, part of the effort to provide "socialism with a human face." It calls for the "democratization" of the political and economic system. The document refers to a "unique experiment in democratic communism." The Communist Party would now have to compete with other parties in elections. Document envisages a gradual reform of the political system over a 10-year period.
  
• 4/5/1968 RFK said, "We must recognize that this short life can neither be ignobled nor enriched by hatred and revenge. Our lives on this planet are too short and the work to be done too great to let this spirit flourish any longer in our land."
  
• 4/5/1968 [B]Rumours were already spreading that Kennedy would die during the campaign. The FBI had picked up reports of an overheard conversation betwe

[Tracy Riddle]

• 5/1968 Mark Lane writes this month that he has a copy of a letter written by Edgar Eugene Bradley to a young woman, in which he has written that he knows "facts about the [assassination] that the public will never know about ... ."
  
• 5/1968 The French May protests started with student protests over university reform and escalated into a month long protest. The trade unions joined the protest resulting in a general strike.
  
• 5/1968 Joachim Joesten publishes THE CASE AGAINST THE KENNEDY CLAN (In the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy), accusing the family of refusing to pursue the truth. He is particularly critical of Robert Kennedy.
  
• 5/1968 An Army intelligence document (declassified 2/1971) listed the NAACP, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and CORE as groups "attempting to create, prolong or aggravate racial tensions." Intelligence was to be gathered on these groups and people sympathetic to them. The plan was approved by then Maj. Gen. William P. Yarborough, asst chief of staff for Intelligence. (L.A. Times 2/28/1971)
  
• 5/1/1968 Czechoslovakia: May Day celebrations show huge support for the new reform movement.
  
• 5/1/1968 the San Francisco Chronicle, quoting certain "unimpeachable sources" of the Los Angeles Times, said that the FBI had found or obtained a map of Atlanta with "the area of Dr. Martin Luther King's residence and church circled and ... linked to accused assassin James Earl Ray." The article went on to state that "the map tends to support a theory by some investigators that Ray stalked Dr. King for some time before fatally shooting him on April 4." (On May 22, the Scripps Howard newspaper chain carried the same story across the nation.) So, shortly after being identified, a leak, clearly from the bureau, portrayed Ray in the national media as a killer who consciously stalked his prey and left behind tangible evidence of his stalking.
  
• 5/2/1968 LBJ grants Jim Bishop a thirty-minute interview for Bishop's book entitled The Day Kennedy Was Shot. LBJ hopes that Bishop's book may correct some of the unflattering things said by William Manchester in his book, Death of a President.
  
• 5/2/1968 Another man visits James Earl Ray at Dundas Street. Ray pays $345 for an airplane ticket to London.
  
• 5/2/1968 Sirhan met with a young radical friend of his, Walter Crowe. Crowe expressed his support for Arab terrorist movements such as Al Fatah. After the assassination of RFK, Crowe would anguish over his statements to Sirhan and whether or not they influenced him.
  
• 5/2/1968 The Poor People's March, led by Ralph D. Abernathy, begins as caravans from all over the country leave for Washington, DC., to protest poverty and racial discrimination.
  
• 5/3/1968 LBJ announces that formal peace talks on Vietnam will take place in Paris.
  
• 5/3/1968 Students and riot police clash violently at the Sorbonne university in Paris; 500 students are arrested.
  
• 5/4-5/1968 Czech leaders visit Moscow: Soviet leadership expresses dissatisfaction with developments in Czechoslovakia.
  
• 5/6/1968 Norman Mailer's Armies of the Night,' about the Oct 1967 anti-war demonstrations at the Pentagon, is published.
  
• 5/6/1968 James Earl Ray leaves Toronto for London.
  
• 5/6/1968 Praise for the bureau manhunt also appeared in print. It was widespread and appears to have first been declared by nationally syndicated columnist and Hoover friend Drew Pearson in a column written with Jack Anderson that appeared on May 6, 1968: "We have checked into the operations of the FBI in this respect and are convinced that it is conducting perhaps the most painstaking, exhaustive manhunt ever before undertaken in the United States. Its G-men have checked every bar ever patronized by James Earl Ray, every flop-house he ever stopped at, every cantina in Mexico he ever visited. It has collected an amazing array of evidence, all linking Ray with the murder."
  
• 5/7/1968 In Indiana, RFK wins his first presidential primary, taking 42% of the vote; Gov. Branigin, standing in for Humphrey, got 31% and Eugene McCarthy 27%.
  
• 5/7/1968 James Earl Ray arrives in London.
  
• 5/8/1968 James Earl Ray arrives in Lisbon, Portugal.William Pepper: "Ray flew to England on May 8 and from there he made a quick trip to Portugal to try to get to one of the Portuguese overseas territories -- Angola or Mozambique. Unsuccessful, he returned to England, planning to go eventually to Belgium to explore the possibilities of taking another route. As we know, he was apprehended at Heathrow Airport on June 8, 1968, and extradited to the United States on July 19, 1968."
  
• 5/10/1968 Peace talks begin in Paris with Averell Harriman representing the US and Xuan Thuy representing North Vietnam.
  
• 5/10/1968 Hoover signed a number of memos to formally launch a counter-insurgency intelligence program (COINTELPRO); its target was the anti-war and civil rights movements.
  
• 5/11/1968 Unions in France called a general strike.
  
• 5/11/1968 Jerry Rubin announces the formation of the Youth International Party (Yippies) and its plans for massive demonstrations at the Democratic National Convention.
  
• 5/11/1968 Nine caravans of poor people arrive in Washington, DC for first phase of Poor People's Campaign. Caravans started from different sections of the country on May 2 and picked up demonstrators along the way. In Washington, demonstrators erect a camp called Resurrection City on a sixteen-acre site near the Lincoln Monument.
  
• 5/13/1968 Hundreds of thousands of students jammed the streets of Paris, protesting against the government and "police repression." Aristotle Onassis says: "That's why I love Paris so much. The French understand that a little violence applied at the right time can solve a lot of one's problems."
  
• 5/14/1968 Nebraska primary; RFK won with 52% to 31% for McCarthy and 14% for Humphrey.
  
• 5/15/1968 While campaigning, Nixon rejected the idea of a guaranteed annual income: "it would have a very detrimental effect on the productive capacity of the American people..."
  
• 5/16/1968 Nixon paid radio address over the CBS network: he suggested that there could be a "new alignment" in politics, that "the Republicans, the new liberals, the new South, the Black militants...are talking the same language" in preferring individual action over more big government. He also mentioned Daniel Patrick Moynihan as a "thoughtful liberal." Nixon's radio speeches were considerably more liberal-sounding than his stump speeches (which tended to focus on law and order), but his advisers never considered them anything more than attempts to get friendly with the mainstream media. (Nixon in the White House p11)
  
• 5/17/1968 Jackie Kennedy boards Aristotle Onassis's boat, the Christina, at the Caribbean island of St. John. She is piped aboard as if she is visiting royalty and will remain aboard for six days and nights. LBJ sends a memorandum to J. Edgar Hoover asking for a full FBI report on Aristotle Onassis. (Nemesis)
  
• 5/17/1968 David Broder, in his column, wrote that Nixon "has been paying keen interest to Agnew as a Vice Presidential nominee."
  
• 5/18/1968 James Earl Ray arrives back in London.
  
• 5/18/1968 An entry in Sirhan's diary dated this day, reads: "My determination to eliminate RFK is becoming more the more of an unshakable obsession...RFK must die - RFK must be killed Robert F. Kennedy must be assassinated RFK must be assassinated RFK must be assassinated...before 5 June 68 Robert F. Kennedy must be assassinated I have never heard please pay to the order of of of of of of of of of of of this or that please pay to the order of..."
  
• 5/18/1968 Human Events reported that Nixon played a key role in the passing of the 1968 Civil Rights Act, persuading key swing votes in Congress to support the bill.
  
• 5/20/1968 By this date, millions of French workers had seized control of their factories. The country is nearly paralyzed. Young people and intellectuals in particular became convinced that the country was on the verge of radical, positive change; posters and graffiti appeared on the streets with slogans like "Demand the Impossible" and "Imagination is Seizing Power."
  
• In early May, as a matter of routine, the FBI asked the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) to examine its files to assess whether anyone resembling the fugitive James Earl Ray might have applied for a passport recently. (A similar exercise under way in the United States had been unproductive.) A task force of constables compared Ray's photograph with nearly a quarter of a million photographs submitted with passport applications from April 23, 1967 (the day of Ray's escape from prison). On May 20, a young constable saw a photograph that looked like Ray. It was attached to the application of one Ramon George Sneyd, a thirty-five-year-old native of Toronto. The passport had been issued on April 24, 1968, and sent on that date to Sneyd care of the Kennedy Travel Bureau in Toronto. Mr. Sneyd turned out to be a Toronto policeman who was clearly not the' man in the photograph accompanying the passport application. Sneyd said that around the first of May he had a call from someone who claimed to be with the passport division inquiring whether he had lost his passport. When he said he had never had a passport the caller apologized, saying that it must have been a mistake, and then hung up. The RCMP forwarded the passport application to the FBI laboratory in Washington for a handwriting comparison with the Galt signature. They matched. Backtracking Ray's movements, the RCMP discovered he had apparently arrived in Toronto on April 8 and explored using not one but two new identities: Sneyd and Paul Edward Bridgeman, a thirty-five-year-old man who had some resemblance to Ray. Bridgeman had also received a telephone call asking if he had lost his passport. (He had had one eight years earlier.) The RCMP also discovered that there was a Toronto citizen named Eric St. Vincent Galt who was the only Eric Galt listed in the Canadian telephone directories in 1968. He worked for Union Carbide, the U.S. defense manufacturer. The RCMP quickly learned from the Kennedy Travel Bureau that Ray, as Sneyd, had left for London on a BOAC flight on May 6. Scotland Yard was contacted and every port of entry into the United Kingdom was alerted. The official reason was that Ramon George Sneyd, traveling on a Canadian passport, had violated the Alien Immigration Act. If apprehended he was to be held for questioning. On the same day he flew to London, Ray flew to Portugal, where he obtained a new passport from the Canadian embassy that corrected a misspelling in the last name from "Sneya" to "Sneyd." He flew back to London on the 17th of May.
  
• 5/20/1968 RFK spoke before a crowd in the banquet room of Robbie's Restaurant in Pomona. A bartender who was acting as a security check at a stairway leading to the room stopped a young man and woman who claimed they were with the Kennedy party. The man looked a great deal like Sirhan. The couple left after being challenged. Two other onlookers witnessed the incident. A 400 person campaign luncheon was being held for RFK in the second floor dining area of the restaurant. Albert LeBeau, the night manager, was called on duty to act as ticket screener on the staircase leading to the function. William Schneid, a Pomona police officer, was assigned to security duty in the restaurant. Schneid encountered a young woman standing by the kitchen door of the restaurant, apparently trying to get inside through that door. He informed her that the door was locked and she then asked him which way Senator Kennedy would enter the luncheon. He told her that RFK would probably go up the stairs to the second floor. Later, Schneid observed the same young woman, along with a young man, cross over a brick façade adjacent to the stairs, climb over the stair railing behind people checking tickets at the foot of the stairs only to be intercepted by LeBeau at his position further up the stairs. LeBeau challenged the pair and the woman responded "we are with the Senator's party." LeBeau told her that they still needed tickets, to which she responded, "we are part of the Senator's party; he just waved us upstairs." Later, he observed them standing apart from the gathering, at the rear of the luncheon room on the second floor. At that point he was struck by the fact that the man had a coat over his arm, even though it was a very warm day, and he also appeared to be in what amounted to a "crouch". LeBeau challenged them as to why they were at the back of the room if they were really with the party and the young man turned on him and angrily asked "what the hell is it to you?" In addition to LeBeau and Schneid, the owner of the restaurant, Mrs. Felicia Maas, also recalled the incident with the young couple. However, she had not been close enough to them to offer any identification. LAPD records show that LeBeau was fairly certain the young man was Sirhan but would not swear it under oath. LeBeau had successfully picked Sirhan's photo from a sample set of 25 young dark skinned males but failed to pick out another photo of Sirhan taken from his Racing Commission ID. Schneid apparently did not participate in any photo reviews. Although there is no supporting information in LeBeau's files (portions of which are missing), the final LAPD report states LeBeau "initially stated the man was Sirhan, but later admitted he lied". There is also no remark about the importance of the man being with a young woman or about corroboration of the incident from police office Schneid and the restaurant owner.
  
• 5/20/1968 RFK spoke at a Los Angeles synagogue and spoke of his support for a US-USSR agreement to stop the spread of arms to the Middle East. But until such an agreement was reached, he felt the US must continue to support Israel, "with arms if necessary."
  
• 5/20/1968 Today, a television campaign documentary, "The Story of Robert Kennedy," was aired. The narrator described RFK's 1948 visit to Israel and how he had joined in to "celebrate" Israel's independence. With the Israeli flag waving in the background, the narrator said, "Bob Kennedy decided his future lay in the affairs of men and nations." Sirhan Sirhan watched the documentary, and was reportedly greatly disturbed by it.
  
• 5/20/1968 Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that states (in this case, Louisiana) could not discriminate against illegitimate children.
  
• 5/20/1968 In a Time article, "acquaintances" reportedly referred to Ray as "... an obsessive racial bigot, an abrasive patron, who belted screwdrivers, dozed on the bar stool and bickered with anyone around." Time carried the FBI line on the death slug, stating that "the unjacketed slug had been too badly marked for a definite comparison to be made."
  
• 5/20/1968 A Newsweek article cited the FBI's comments on an ad placed by Ray and another ad that he answered by sending a Polaroid photograph in which he looked fatter than usual. Newsweek reported that' 'bureau insiders said he was taking amphetamines off and on and his weight might well have fluctuated sharply as a result." The article noted that the bureau had released another photograph of Ray taken with a prostitute in Mexico, but she was "clipped out." The article continued: "Still, the fact of her presence -- plus Galt/Ray's pathetic try for mail-order romance-yielded telling insights, and thus helped fill out his emerging portrait as an ingrown, emotionally stunted loner. The more investigators find out about their man, in fact, the less they see him as the conspiratorial type. "You take five guys who don't know each other and put them in a room," said one. "Four of them would start talking small talk to each other. Ray would sit by himself." He picked up the suspect's mug shot. "This is our man," he said. "He killed King."" Hence, in this one leak to Newsweek the bureau conveyed to the American public, some two weeks before Ray's capture, that the man being sought for the killing of Dr. King was a vice-ridden loner and was certainly guilty. Jeremiah O'Leary, a frequent mouthpiece for the bureau, in an article in the Washington Star quoted unnamed convicts interviewed by unnamed investigators (who could only have been FBI agents tracking Ray) as saying that "Ray was a racist and a habitual user of amphetamines while in prison." O'Leary also maintained that "some of his fellow prisoners described him as an anti-negro loner who spent much of his time in jail reading sex books and girlie magazines." Other wire service syndicated pieces were equally damning. For example, one story under the leader "Ray Talked Of Bounty On King: Friend" put out by UPI quoted a convict named Raymond Curtis, allegedly a friend of Ray, as saying that Ray told him that if there was a bounty on Dr. King, he would collect it if he got out. Curtis also alleged that Ray used dope, bragged about picking up lots of women, and was a loner.
  
• 5/21/1968 GOP Senate Minority leader Hugh Scott said he wanted to introduce a bill to authorize the minting of "a gold medal to be presented to Dr. King's widow." The FBI soon persuaded Scott that King was an immoral degenerate, and he changed his mind. (5/22/1968 FBI memo)
  
• 5/21/1968 The USS Scorpion, a nuclear-powered attack sub, was last heard from on this date; it was eventually discovered lying on the bottom of the ocean southwest of the Azores. 99 lives were lost; details of the incident remain classified but it is assumed the sub was carrying four to six nuclear weapons. The Scorpion sank at 1844 GMT on 22 May, 1968 while 400 miles southwest of Azores. The wreckage was discovered in some 10,000 feet of water.
  
• 5/21/1968 An FBI document quoted Jack Anderson saying to the Bureau, "Kennedy should receive a death blow prior to the Oregon primary." Anderson proposed to the FBI that he write a column accusing RFK of initiating the wiretaps against MLK. (Unreliable Sources p122)
  
• 5/24-27/1968 students in Stockholm institute the occupation of the Student Union Building.
  
• 5/24/1968 Jim Garrison was quoted by the Los Angeles Free Press as saying that the JFK assassination "was precipitated by the Fascists and the rightist anarchists [who] are one and the same. I firmly believe that the rightist anarchists and the CIA can take over our country right now and it would be a Fascist state except for two things. They would have to demolish and destroy the conservative movement by the radical right. They would have to destroy organizations such as the John Birch Society...the other thing that is in their way is...Jim Garrison."
  
• 5/24/1968 Sirhan attended a rally for RFK at the Los Angeles Sports Arena. A psychologist in the crowd noticed Sirhan because he "appeared very intense and sinister."
  
• 5/25/1968 Nicholas Chetta dies of a heart attack. He was Coroner of New Orleans and a key witness in Jim Garrison's case against Clay Shaw.
  
• 5/26/1968 RFK made a speech in Portland, Oregon urging the sale of 50 jet bombers to Israel. The AP reported the story this night. Later that night KFWB "All News Radio" in Los Angeles reported that RFK had promised a Zionist audience in Beverly Hills that he would send jet bombers to Israel.
  
• 5/26/1968 Today, an editorial by David Lawrence called "Paradoxical Bob" (criticizing RFK's opposition to Vietnam while supporting aid to Israel) appeared in the Pasadena Independent Star-News. Sirhan clipped it and kept it in his pocket.
  
• 5/26/1968 The French government responded to unions' demands by raising the minimum wage by 35%.
  
• 5/26/1968 Eric Hoffer (LA Times): The Jews are a peculiar people: Things permitted to other nations are forbidden to the Jews. Other nations drive out thousands, even millions of people and there is no refugee problem. Russia did it, Poland and Czechoslovakia did it, Turkey threw out a million Greeks, and Algeria a million Frenchman. Indonesia threw out heaven knows how many Chinese-and no one says a word about refugees. But in the case of Israel the displaced Arabs have become eternal refugees. Everyone insists that Israel must take back every single Arab. Arnold Toynbee calls the displacement of the Arabs an atrocity greater than any committed by the Nazis. Other nations when victorious on the battlefield dictate peace terms. But when Israel is victorious it must sue for peace. Everyone expects the Jews to be the only real Christians in this world. Other nations when they are defeated survive and recover but should Israel be defeated it would be destroyed. Had Nasser triumphed last June [1967] he would have wiped Israel off the map, and no one would have lifted a finger to save the Jews. No commitment to the Jews by any government, including our own, is worth the paper it is written on. There is a cry of outrage all over the world when people die in Vietnam or when two Blacks are executed in Rhodesia. But when Hitler slaughtered Jews no one remonstrated with him. The Swedes, who are ready to break off diplomatic relations with America because of what we do in Vietnam, did not let out a peep when Hitler was slaughtering Jews. They sent Hitler choice iron ore, and ball bearings, and serviced his troop trains to Norway. The Jews are alone in the world. If Israel survives, it will be solely because of Jewish efforts. And Jewish resources. Yet at this moment Israel is our only reliable and unconditional ally. We can rely more on Israel than Israel can rely on us. And one has only to imagine what would have happened last summer [1967] had the Arabs and their Russian backers won the war to realize how vital the survival of Israel is to America and the West in general. I have a premonition that will not leave me; as it goes with Israel so will it go with all of us. Should Israel perish the holocaust will be upon us."
  
• 5/27/1968 Israel paid $3,325,500 in compensation to the next of kin of the 34 men of the Liberty killed.
  
• 5/28/1968 McCarthy beat RFK in Oregon primary, the first election defeat a Kennedy had ever experienced. McCarthy received 44%, RFK got 38%. A Drew Pearson column claiming that RFK had authorized wiretaps on MLK hurt Kennedy. McCarthy also had a well-organized campaign in Oregon, and RFK's message never resonated in the predominantly white, middle-class state. In the Florida primary today, McCarthy wins 29% to George Smathers' 46%
  
• 5/28/1968 RFK spends two hours in Oxnard, California checking out a reported lead to JFK's death. RFK attends a gathering at John Frakenheimer's Malibu beach house with some Hollywood glitteratie, including Shirley MacLain, Warren Beatty, Jean Seberg and Seberg's novelist husband, Romain Gary. Gary accosts RFK: "You know, don't you, that somebody is going to kill you?" RFK fends him off: "That's the chance I have to take."
  
• 5/28/1968 Sirhan attended a meeting of the Rosicrucian Society in Pasadena.
  
• 5/29/1968 A number of high-ranking Soviet military officials visit Czechoslovakia to lay the groundwork for Soviet military exercises.
  
• 5/29/1968 Evans and Novak reported in their column that "in recent days, Nixon has been in contact with CORE leaders Floyd McKissick and Roy Innis through intermediaries" over "economic black power..."
  
• 5/30/1968 Kennedy Campaign headquarters, Azuza California - Laverne Botting, a 41 year old RFK campaign worker, observed a young woman and two young men enter the Azuza campaign office. One of the young men approached Botting at her desk and said that he was from the RFK headquarters in Pasadena (Sirhan lived in Pasadena at the time). He wanted to know if RFK would be visiting that area. Botting told the young man that RFK would not. In an interview with the LAPD, Botting picked Sirhan out of a photo display as closely resembling the man who had spoken with her. She accurately described Sirhan's height, black eyes and kinky black hair. Independently of Botting, Ethel Crehan, another volunteer in the office, called police and told them that she was "fairly certain" that Sirhan had come into the office. She said she could be sure if she could see him in person, so was Botting. Neither women was offered the opportunity to view Sirhan in a line-up. The police did check with the Pasadena RFK office staff and were told that there would have been no reason for that office to send anyone to Azuza to check a schedule. For some reason, that seems to have played a part in the police decision to discount the importance of Botting and Crehan's observation. No transcript exists of the Botting interview, the officer in charge closed out her file with the remark that she "had obviously made an honest mistake." Although no one other than the police should have known of Botting's report, she later received a threatening phone call at home " I hear you think you saw Sirhan; you had better be sure of what you are saying!" [4] Crehan's report was closed because the officer noted that her estimate of the man's height was three to four inches above Sirhan's actual height (although still relatively short at 5'8"). For this reason he felt "it was doubtful she observed Sirhan."
  
• 5/30/1968 Westmoreland announced, while visiting LBJ in Texas, "The enemy's only victories in the last few years have been in the propaganda field…I am confident the enemy is receiving false reports from his field commanders…Time is on our side." (The Experts Speak)
  
• 5/30/1968 De Gaulle dissolved the Frency National Assembly, postponed a national referendum and went on TV vowing to use force to prevent what he believed was a Communist revolution.
  
• 5/31/1968 Is Jim Garrison Out of His Mind? By David Lifton published in the May 31 and June 6, 1968 issues of Open City, a Los Angeles underground newspaper.
  
• 5/31/1968 Camille Chamoun, president of Lebanon, was the target of a failed assassination attempt.
  

[Tracy Riddle]

• 6/1/1968 (Saturday) Sirhan spent two hours practicing at the Corona police shooting range. This afternoon, he buys two boxes of .22-caliber hollow-point bullets from the Lock, Stock and Barrel gun shop in San Gabriel, CA. Larry Arnot, the employee who sold Sirhan ammunition for the gun on June 1. Arnot worked at the Lock, Stock and Barrel and said that Sirhan had come in about 3 p.m with two other men. They were very serious, not talkative and left quickly after Sirhan bought two boxes of .22 caliber mini-mag hollow points. One of the other men had bought two boxes of Super-X Westerns and Arnot recorded the four boxes on one sales slip. He identified Sirhan Sirhan as the buyer and one of the young men with him as Munir Sirhan. He could not identify the third young man.
  
• 6/1/1968 Santa Ana Mountains, south of Corona, California: Dean Pack, a Santa Ana insurance executive was hiking with his son in a secluded part of the Santa Ana Mountains. After the assassination, he recognized Sirhan as "strongly resembling" a young man whom they had encountered during their hike. The young man was shooting at cans set up on a hillside, shooting with a pistol. The young man was in the company of a girl (in her early twenties with long brunette hair) and another man who was around six feet tall, with sandy colored hair and a ruddy complexion. The main thing that struck Pack "was how unfriendly they were." The shooter refused to reply or talk to Pack, standing and glaring at him. The tall young man was the only one who would even acknowledge his greeting. Their hostility was so strong that Pack had the "funny sensation that it would be possible for them to put a bullet in your back" and was relived to get out of their sight. Pack reported the incident to the FBI, offering to take them to the spot to recover bullets or shell casings and look for fingerprints on the bottles and cans being handled by the three. The FBI was uninterested. A two-sentence LAPD report on Pack states that he "was exhibited a photograph of Sirhan" and said that the man he saw "strongly resembled" Sirhan but that he "was not positive of the identification." When interviewed by Christian in 1969, Pack stated that he had only talked to the police on the telephone, had been shown no picture and still felt that the young man he and his son had seen shooting was Sirhan. The lack of police interest in Pack's report is particularly strange since they had developed considerable evidence that Sirhan was indeed in the Corona area on June 1, shooting his gun. Detective Chief Houghton described the "Corona Police Department Gun Range investigation" on pages 251 and 252 of Special Unit Senator. The range master, William Marks (a Corona policeman) identified Sirhan from a photo display, as did Harry Starr, the range assistant. In addition, the sign in log for the range contained Sirhan's signature and the District Attorney's handwriting expert gave an official opinion that it was indeed Sirhan's. The only issue with the Corona range sighting was that both men reported Sirhan in the company of another man and both apparently gave a description of Sirhan which would have had him a good deal too tall as well as too heavy (the height and weight of the second man would have been much closer to Sirhan). Because of the discrepancy in the descriptions, the police officially rejected the sighting. However, Chief Houghton himself seems to be of a different opinion on the incident, closing his own writing on the incident by stating that Sirhan probably had used up his bullets at the range, causing him to purchase the two boxes of ammunition that a sales receipt found in his car had recorded for that date. In fact, Houghton opens the third section of his book with a statement that Sirhan had spent time at the Corona practice range that day! In addition to the incidents noted above, there is an ongoing pattern of Sirhan "stalking" RFK at other public appearances. That pattern will be discussed at more length in an essay on Sirhan. However, his association with others, specifically a young girl, continued on to repeated sightings at the Ambassador hotel.
  
• 6/2/1968 (Sunday) Sirhan goes to the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, where an RFK rally is being held, but he does not get close to the Senator. Ambassador busboy Juan Romero recalled on this day seeing two strangers who had come into the kitchen looking for white coats similiar to those worn by the waiters.
  
• 6/2/1968 Karen Ross was interviewed by Ramparts Detectives on June 6, 1968. She stated that while attending a rally for RFK in the Coconut Grove room in the Ambassador Hotel, the Sunday before the assassination, she had observed a young woman in a polka dot dress at the rally. The woman was medium height, somewhat "husky" with dark blond hair worn with a "puff". Ross thought there was something unusual about the girl's nose, possibly it had been "fixed". Sirhan was also at the Ambassador that evening. He was positively identified as having been in the Coconut Grove room by Mrs. Susan Redding and later in the vicinity of the Embassy ballroom by Burt Blume. Blume knew Sirhan personally because he had worked next door from him and Sirhan had dropped by frequently, making small talk. In RFK Must Die!, Robert Kaiser wrote that at first Sirhan denied being at the Ambassador on Sunday, then admitted being at the hotel but specifically called two individuals who reported him in the area of the kitchen, liars.
  
• 6/3/1968 (Monday) Kennedy was scheduled to speak in San Diego at a rally at the El Cortez Hotel. Sirhan made the two-hour trip in his 1956 De Soto and returned that evening to Pasadena, failing to get to RFK.
  
• 6/3/1968 Preacher Oliver B. Owen claims that on this day he gave Sirhan a ride and saw him talking with other young people; Sirhan had him stop by the Ambassador Hotel for a few minutes, and they discussed Owen selling a horse to him.
  
• 6/3/1968 Before an audience of students at San Fernando State College, California, RFK said, "I now fully realize that only the powers of the Presidency will reveal the secrets of my brother's death." This is apparently a false quote; there is no contemporary record of his making this statement. John Davis mentions this quote in Dynasty and Disaster (p603) but gives no source for it. See March 25th.
  
• 6/4/1968 (Tuesday) Artist Andy Warhol is shot and wounded by crazed feminist Valerie Solanas.
  
• 6/4/1968 Eleven days before his 13th birthday, David Kennedy nearly drowned while he and his siblings were swimming in the Pacific Ocean near the Malibu, California beach house of a Kennedy family friend, Hollywood film director John Frankenheimer. Kennedy had been knocked over by a wave and was trapped on the bottom by the undertow. His father, Robert Kennedy, dove under the water and rescued him, scraping and bruising his own forehead in the process. Frankenheimer gave Senator Kennedy theatrical makeup to hide the bruise while appearing on television hours later. At just after Midnight on June 5, David watched on TV as his father claimed victory in the California presidential primary election; the 12-year-old then watched as the same broadcast reported his father's assassination moments later. The event left an emotional scar on David and he became a drug user shortly thereafter.
  
• 6/4/1968 11am Sirhan arrived at the San Gabriel Valley Gun Club, and rapid-fires his .22 pistol until late afternoon, and is seen in the company of an attractive blond girl. He also bought some .22-caliber Super-X "Long Rifle" ammunition. He blazed away at the target more rapidly than regulations allowed, but the rangemaster was impressed with his shooting ability and left him alone. At one point, Sirhan complained that some of the Super-X bullets were duds. The rangemaster sold him Mini-Mag hollow-point bullets. Sirhan seemed pleased that they inflicted more damage. "They spread a lot more on impact," he told another shooter.
  
• 6/4/1968 Harold Weisberg appeared on television in Washington where he discussed the possibility of Robert Kennedy being assassinated. Weisberg recalled a meeting with a Kennedy aide. Weisberg asked why Kennedy had supported the conclusions of the Warren Commission Report. He replied: "it is simple, Bobby wants to live." Kennedy's friend added that there were "too many guns between Bobby and the White House". Weisberg asked who controlled these guns. The friend replied in such a way that Weisberg got the impression that he meant the CIA.
  
• 6/4/1968 5pm After leaving the range, Sirhan drove to a Bob's Big Boy restaurant in Pasadena. There, he met an Indian exchange student he knew and the two of them went to the City College cafeteria to talk with some Arab students. About 7:30pm, he drove to downtown L.A. to see a "Jew parade" he had read about in the paper, but he had misread the story, for it was not scheduled until 6/5.
  
• 6/4/1968 An Edward Wegmann memo from this day reported that Gurvich recalled Jim Garrison wanting to "raid the local FBI office" to uncover "the secret recording room" that he believed monitored all of his discussions.
  
• 6/4/1968 Just before 9pm, Sirhan arrived at the Ambassador Hotel on Wiltshire Blvd. Kennedy supporters were everywhere, waiting for an appearance by the candidate. Sirhan wandered into a party for Republican candidate Max Rafferty, and after drinking two Tom Collinses, he was asked to leave the party he had crashed. Outside he met two Kennedy supporters; Sirhan said, "Don't worry about him if he doesn't win, that son of a bitch. He's a millionaire and he doesn't need to win. He just wants to go to the White House, but even if he wins he's not going to do anything for you or for any of the poor people." By 11pm he had downed two more Tom Collinses. He later claimed that his last memory of that night was going out to his car and deciding he was too drunk to drive. He actually retrieved his gun and left his wallet in the car.
  
• 6/4/1968 Three primaries today: California (McCarthy 42%, RFK 46%); New Jersey (McCarthy 36%, RFK 31%); South Dakota (McCarthy 20%, RFK 50%)
  
• 6/4/1968 The evening of the primary election, Irene Gizzi noticed a group of three people "who just didn't seem to be dressed properly for the occasion." The individuals were talking amongst each other and didn't fit in with the exuberant crowd. The young woman in the group had on a polka dot dress and was with a young man with a dark complexion, dark hair and a gold colored shirt. She felt that the third man might well have been Sirhan. Gizza was in the company of a friend, Katherine Keir, who corroborated her observation of the group and gave a very similar description of the individuals including the girl being in a polka dot dress and one man being in a gold colored shirt.
  
• 6/4/1968 Between 9:30 and 10pm, a Western Union telex operator talked to Sirhan in the Colonial Room. Judy Royer, a Kennedy staffer, was trying to clear unauthorized people out of the pantry and kitchen area; she twice asked Sirhan to leave the area. But by 11pm Sirhan was still in the serving pantry. He had the .22 pistol tucked in the wasteband of his trousers.
  
• 6/4/1968 10pm Sirhan asked a hotel electrician, Hans Bidstrup, how long the Senator would be staying at the hotel, and asked if his bodyguards were with him all the time.
  
• 6/4/1968 10pm Lonny Worthy had brought his wife and a friend to the Ambassador Hotel, hoping to join in the Kennedy victory celebration. Unable to enter the Embassy Room without official campaign or press credentials, they settled for mixing in a first floor room set apart for campaign workers. At about 10 p.m. Lonny went to the bar to get his wife a Coke and accidentally bumped into an individual he would later identify as Sirhan Sirhan. Lonny apologized but received no reply. Later he saw a young woman standing beside the same man; the two weren't talking with each other, they weren't talking with anyone. Worthy described this encounter in an interview with the FBI on June 7, 1968, two days after the attack in which Robert F. Kennedy was fatally wounded. His and several other FBI witness interviews were included in an August 1969 FBI Summary Report which remained classified until released after FOIA action in 1976. However, Worthy's observation about the woman and identification of Sirhan didn't make it into the LAPD's own Summary Report. Booker Griffin also lacked campaign credentials; he ended up in the same room as Worthy. Later Griffin recalled eventually noticing two people in the room who "seemed out of place…because everyone else but these two were celebrating." One was a small, shabbily-dressed man that Griffin would identify to police as Sirhan Sirhan; the second was a girl slightly taller, in a white dress with designs of another color, possibly polka dots. Sirhan and the girl were in proximity to each other but not speaking; Griffin simply had the feeling that they might have been together.
  
• 6/4/1968 10:30 PM Pauline Walker tried unsuccessfully to enter the ballroom beginning around 10:30 p.m. When blocked there, she tried the rear kitchen access but was blocked by guards before she could enter the ballroom. Returning to the lobby outside the Embassy room, she waited some time until she recognized a friend who eventually managed to get her into the ballroom. Walker's LAPD interview of June 6, 1968 relates that she observed a young woman in a polka dot dress, in the company of a young, dark skinned male. The woman was in her 20's, hair a bit unkempt and described as "busty". The man was in jeans, a windbreaker and sneakers with dark hair that appeared greasy. Walker's independent descriptions are noteworthy for being almost identical to those provided by Sandra Serrano.
  
• 6/4/1968 11-11:30 PM As the evening progressed, George Green began to look for his friend Booker Griffin, who he thought would be able to come up with credentials or passes. He found Griffin, who had gotten a press pass, but Griffin was unable to get anything for Green. However, Griffin found that he could enter the Colonial (Press) room by going down the adjacent hall, though the service doors and into the kitchen service hall which ran behind both the Embassy ballroom and the Colonial room. While in the hallway, he observed a group of photographers and press interviewing Frank Mankiewicz; this would have been between 11 and 11:30 p.m.. At that time he noticed the young man whom he would later identify as Sirhan (wearing jeans, a shirt and jacket) standing at the edge of the crowd, along with a taller, thin Caucasian (about 22 years of age) and a female Caucasian (good figure, wearing a polka dot dress). By 11 p.m., Booker Griffin had managed to obtain a press pass from Pierre Salinger, an acquaintance, which gained him access to both the Embassy ballroom and the Colonial (Press) Room on the second floor. Due to the crowds and heat in the ballroom, Griffin made several trips to the Colonial room which was much cooler and less crowded using the rear kitchen/service corridor to avoid the crowds trying to enter the ballroom. At around 11:30 he observed the same small man (Sirhan) in the kitchen corridor. Later, during the Senator's speech, Griffin encountered Sirhan, a taller white male and a young, blonde haired woman, all standing in proximity to each other. There was now a third person with the two a young man who was muscular and rather tall, over six feet tall. Griffin would notice Sirhan again a short while later and remark to a friend that he seemed to keep running across this same fellow. Griffin, Green and Worthy weren't the only ones that had noticed Sirhan that night or the young woman. There were also witnesses to the young woman in the company of other men, not identified as Sirhan.
  
• 6/4/1968 11:45pm By now it became clear that Kennedy had won the California primary (he received 46.3% to McCarthy's 41.8%) He and his entourage made their way down to the Embassy Ballroom by way of the serving pantry, though Sirhan made no move (if he was there). While RFK was addressing the crowd, Sirhan appeared in the pantry and asked employees Jesus Perez and Martin Patrusky, "Is Mr. Kennedy coming this way?" Neither were sure, but Sirhan looked the kitchen area over while he talked to them.
  

• 6/5/1968 (Wednesday) Just before RFK and his party entered the Embassy Room for his speech, campaign worker Susanne Locke had noticed a young woman standing between the stage and the main door. She described the woman as "expressionless" and "somewhat out of place," noting that she had no badge and wore a white dress with blue polka dots. Locke was concerned enough about the girl to report her to Carol Breshears, the woman in charge of the "Kennedy Girls" support organization. Breshears is said to have alerted a security guard on the matter, but there is no record that later investigators sought further information about the security guard and what he may or may not have done about this. Locke's observations on the polka dot dress girl, comprising about a third of her FBI interview, did not make it into the LAPD reports. TV footage from the Embassy ballroom and numerous other witness reports make it clear that there were multiple women in polka dotted dresses of various sorts in the hotel the evening of June 4th. Clearly this proved to be a distraction for the LAPD investigation, however there is also no indication that the police attempted to plot the observations, differentiate or collate them in any meaningful fashion. In fact, all follow-up of the various observations regarding a polka dot dressed girl were discounted from further investigation based on the highly questionable police rejection of a single witness Sandra Serrano.
  
• A few minutes after midnight, RFK delivered a short speech of thanks to the 1800 supporters in the Embassy Ballroom of the Ambassador Hotel. "We are a great country, an unselfish country and a compassionate country. I intend to make that the basis for my running."
  
• During Kennedy's speech, Roy Mills observed a group of five people (including a woman) in the hallway outside the Embassy room. He identified one as Sirhan, remembering him specifically for his baggy pants. Mills had the impression that one of the men was a hotel employee. Darnell Johnson, one of the pantry shooting witnesses, described four men and a girl in the pantry as RFK was entering. One of the men was Sirhan. The girl was in a polka dot dress. The girl and the men walked out of the pantry as everyone was rushing to RFK and wrestling with Sirhan.
  
• 12:15am (PST) Robert Kennedy now began his journey to the Colonial Room where he was to hold a press conference. Someone suggested that Kennedy should take a short cut through the kitchen. Security guard Thane Eugene Cesar took hold of Kennedy's right elbow to escort him through the room.
  
• "There was a wonderful spirit upstairs on the fifth floor of the Ambassador Hotel," Union official and RFK supporter Paul Schrade said. "I sat with Bob and Ethel. There came a point when the decision was made to go downstairs a little after midnight." After thanking supporters, Kennedy was diverted from his planned exit to move through the hotel pantry. Schrade remembers him shaking hands with two Hispanic employees of the hotel. "He turned and then I got hit. I got the first shot," Schrade recalled. "I thought I was being electrocuted. I fell right behind Bob. ... I was in and out of consciousness and when I came to and the doctor arrived, I said, `Take care of the senator.'"
  
• Karl Uecker was slightly ahead of the Senator and to his right. Uniformed security guard Thane Cesar walked slightly behind, also on Kennedy's right. (In 1968, presidential candidates weren't given secret service protection, so the hotel had hired eight private security guards. Kennedy had requested that the guards keep their distance, so he wouldn't be surrounded by uniformed personnel.) A young, dark-haired man began to approach Kennedy from the front. He was smiling, and bystanders thought he wanted to shake the Senator's hand. But the smile was betrayed by his words: "Kennedy, you son of a bitch!" High school student Lisa Urso saw the young man raise the gun and begin to shoot. "I saw the flash [from the gun] and then I saw the Senator .... He went forward, then moved backward...As Robert Kennedy moved towards Sirhan, witnesses reported a yell - "Kennedy, you son of a bitch!" and then two quick shots. Numerous witnesses saw a smiling Sirhan holding a pistol, others saw RFK slump after the initial shots. After the first two shots, Karl Uecker leaped towards Sirhan, grabbing his gun hand and pushing him back on the steam table. Freddy Plimpton described Sirhan: "...his eyes were narrow, the lines on his face were heavy and set and he was completely concentrated on what he was doing." It was a look of "intense concentration." Plimpton heard two rapid shots, then a pause, then three more shots. "I immediately grabbed the gun hand of the assailant and pushed him onto the steam table. During this time he, the assailant, continued to fire the gun," reported maitre'd Karl Uecker. Edward Mininsian, at RFK's right front and a little ahead of Uecker, pushed Uecker and Sirhan against the steam table. "I saw the fellow behind the Senator fall (that was Paul Schrade, shot in the top of the head), then the Senator fell."
  
• Even with his hand pinned, Sirhan continued to fire. Four more bystanders were wounded. Shortly there were half a dozen men wrestling with Sirhan, one jumped on the steam table and stomped on his gun hand. The gun squired loose on the floor even then, covered by bodies, Sirhan managed to seize the gun again and the struggle continued. Finally Roosevelt Grier managed to twist the weapon away from Sirhan. As more men rushed to pummel and beat at Sirhan, Jesse Unruh moved to prevent mob retaliation against him. Unruh then began trying to establish some sort of order in the pantry as others continued to struggle with Sirhan. Joseph La Hive managed to get Sirhan's feet off the floor, twisting his leg. Sirhan told him "stop, you're hurting my leg!" By that time Grier, at 290 pounds, had pinned Sirhan to the table; Unruh, Grier and Rafer Johnson continued to fight off people milling around him. Finally two policemen arrived accompanied by Unruh, led Sirhan out of the pantry and to a police car outside the west door of the hotel. Unruh jumped in the car along with Sirhan. Witnesses in the pantry reported Sirhan had either a smirk or a sort of smile on his face as RFK approached him -in the patrol car, officer Placencia felt that Sirhan's expression was "smirky." Placencia noted that Sirhan's eyes were dilated, suggesting either that he had been drinking or was possibly on some sort of drug. Witnesses to Sirhan's drinking at the hotel would turn up later, Sirhan had indeed been drinking to at least some extent prior to entering the pantry.
  
• An eyewitness, Donald Schulman, a runner for KNXT-TV in Los Angeles, went on CBS News to say that Sirhan "stepped out and fired three times; the security guard hit Kennedy three times." He'd been standing behind Kennedy as he walked through the pantry and had seen a security guard fire three times. Immediately after the shooting, Schulman reported his story on the radio and insisted that Kennedy was shot three times. Even though the early media reports and crime--scene witnesses generally asserted that the Senator was hit only twice, Schulman stuck to his story. The autopsy proved him right. (In later law-enforcement interviews, when Schulman was under pressure to be "absolutely positive" about what he saw, Schulman stated that he didn't see the guard shoot Kennedy, as his first statement seemed to imply. He did assert that he saw the guard fire three times and Kennedy hit three times, but admitted he couldn't necessarily connect the two events.)
  
• Scott Enyart, a high-school student, was taking photographs of Robert Kennedy as he was walking from the ballroom of the Ambassador Hotel to the Colonial Room where the press conference was due to take place. Enyart was standing slightly behind Kennedy when the shooting began and snapped as fast as he could. As Enyart was leaving the pantry, two LAPD officers accosted him at gunpoint and seized his film. Later, he was told by Detective Dudley Varney that the photographs were needed as evidence in the Sirhan trial. The photographs were not presented as evidence but the court ordered that all evidential materials had to be sealed for twenty years. In 1988 Scott Enyart requested that his photographs should be returned. At first the State Archives claimed they could not find them and that they must have been destroyed by mistake. Enyart filed a lawsuit which finally came to trial in 1996. During the trial the Los Angeles city attorney announced that the photos had been found in its Sacramento office and would be brought to the courthouse by the courier retained by the State Archives. The following day it was announced that the courier's briefcase, that contained the photographs, had been stolen from the car he rented at the airport. The photographs have never been recovered and the jury subsequently awarded Scott Enyart $450,000 in damages.
  
• In an FBI interview, RFK campaign worker George Green described following the Kennedy party into the service hall and pantry area. He had just entered the pantry as the shooting broke out, and immediately noticed a young woman in a polka dot dress and a man attempting to get out of the pantry area while everyone else was still moving in behind Senator Kennedy. The two were running away and had their backs to him at that point. Green's observation was supported by Evan Freed, a press photographer. Freed also observed a young woman and man rush out of the pantry immediately after the shooting.
  
• Booker Griffin had also trailed the Kennedy party towards the pantry; as he entered the pantry itself, he too observed a girl and a man rush out together, followed by a second man who seemed to be chasing them. Griffin recognized the first man and the woman as the same individuals he had seen earlier in the evening, standing in the corridor between the Colonial and Embassy ballrooms - along the man he later identified as Sirhan Sirhan. The LAPD Summary Report dismisses Griffin's information by stating that "the story of a male and female escaping was a total fabrication on his part." However, nothing in the tapes, transcripts or summaries of Griffin's interviews mentions any indication of this. In 1987, Griffin was shown the statement in the Summary Report and angrily rejected the charge; he described being a trained newsperson and his ability to note details. Since the report was held secret for some twenty years, Griffin and many other witnesses were in no position to know what had been done with their information at the time; as far as they knew, each of their observations was unique.
  
• Dr. Marcus McBroom had been standing outside the access doors to the service pantry corridor when he heard the first couple of gunshots. A young woman immediately ran past him into the Embassy room; she was wearing a polka dot dress and shouting something as she passed. McBroom thought it sounded like "We got him!" or "We shot him!" but at that instant he was not certain. It became clearer to him as he saw the girl quickly followed by a young man. The man had a newspaper over his arm, but McBroom could see a pistol underneath. McBroom and an ABC cameraman both drew away upon seeing the gun. McBroom described the young man as an "Arab looking person" wearing a blue suit and sweating noticeably; when later shown some mug shots, McBroom actually picked out one of Sirhan's brothers. (Evan Freed had also noted that the man he saw was similar in appearance to Sirhan.) The LAPD Summary Report does not mention McBroom's observations about the girl, but does mention that he retracted all additional statements he made other than his noticing that Sirhan Sirhan seemed "out of place." When interviewed in 1986 by Greg Stone, McBroom denied that he had ever retracted any statements and reviewed the details of the incident, including the partially hidden gun.
  
• A 1969 filmed and tape-recorded interview of Thane Cesar with journalist Theodore Charach (shown in The Second Gun):
  

Cesar: For some reason, I don't know why, I had a hold of his [Kennedy's] arm under his elbow here ... his right arm .... And I was a little behind Bobby.... When the shots were fired, when I reached for my gun, and that's when I got knocked down....
Charach: Did you see other guys pull their guns after you pulled your gun...in the kitchen?
Cesar: No, I didn't see anyone else pull their guns in the kitchen area.... Except for myself....
Charach: How far did you have it out?
Cesar: Oh, I had it out of my holster. I had it in my hand.

• Ace Guard Jack Merritt reported to both the LAPD and FBI that he had observed "two men and a woman leaving the kitchen," the woman wearing a polka dot dress and both of the men in suits: "They seemed to be smiling."
  
• Evan Freed, a part-time news photographer, was near Robert Kennedy when the shooting started. Freed had been in the fifth floor Kennedy suite, one of the newsmen covering the Kennedy party, and had come downstairs with the Senator. Kennedy had chosen to use the service elevator in order to avoid going through the crowds in the hotel corridors and ballroom. He entered the Embassy room through the kitchen service area at the rear of the ballroom. In Freed's first police interview, June 14, he described seeing two men and a woman leave the pantry in a hurry after the shooting; the woman was described as possibly wearing a polka dot dress. In a "re-interview" on August 1, his presence in the pantry is described but there is no mention of the three individuals. In a September interview by the FBI, Freed is described as identifying the man doing the shooting as Sirhan. Freed himself stated that he did describe the second man to the FBI but they were only interested in his identification of Sirham.
  
• 12:21 am Sgt. Paul Sharaga had arrived at Rampart Station shortly before midnight on June 4th, 1968. By sheer coincidence he happened to be almost immediately across from the Ambassador when the all units message was broadcast. He immediately took the 8th street entrance and entered the rear parking lot; at approximately 12:21 he slammed on his breaks about 150 feet from the hotel complex. He had just stepped out of the police cruiser when a woman ran past him yelling "He's been shot!" Sharaga turned to chase her down but at that point a middle aged couple ran up to him, also yelling that Senator Kennedy had been shot. Sharaga immediately asked them how they knew the Senator had been shot. The woman pointed toward the dimly lit backside of the hotel complex, to a fire escape ending in a concrete walkway. She said she and her husband had just come from the Embassy ballroom where Kennedy had spoken. They had taken a side door out and on to the fire escape balcony where they encountered a young couple rushing out of the ballroom. The young woman was yelling "We shot him! We shot him! The older couple was mystified, the wife asking "Who did you shoot?" The young man said nothing but the girl replied "Kennedy! We shot him! We shot him!" The young people proceeded on down the fire escape stairs, leaving the older couple terrified and in shock. Sharaga took notes on the couple (he recalled them saying they were the Bernsteins) and their basic descriptions of the young people, early 20's, medium height and build, the girl wearing a black and white polka dotted dress. And the older couple were certain about what they had heard, as the girl was talking, both she and the young man had big smiles on their faces they appeared absolutely gleeful. At 12:23 a.m. Sgt Sharaga radioed LAPD headquarters that Senator Kennedy had been shot at the Ambassador hotel, describing two suspects and calling available units to the rear parking lot. Eventually Sharaga received word that a senior officer (Remparts Detective Sgt William Jordon) had taken charge of the crime scene in the kitchen pantry of the hotel. Sharaga tore out the notebook pages with the Bernstein information and sent it off to be hand carried by one of his own officers to Jordon. Shortly afterwards he was approached by Inspector John Powers who told him the shooting suspect was in custody so radio alerts for other suspects were unwarranted. Sharaga didn't really agree with that and discussed it with Captain Carroll Kirby; Kirby told him to go ahead and continue radio alerts every ten minutes. However, about half an hour later, Inspector Powers (Acting Chief of LAPD Detectives) contacted Sharaga, told him the shooter was in custody so there were no other suspects. Powers himself called Control, instructing them to disregard Sharaga's earlier broadcasts the radio log records Powers instruction that there was only one man "and we don't want them to get anything started on a big conspiracy." Later, Powers would again call Sharaga, ordering him to return the officers that Sharaga had collected to active duty; Powers had brought his own personnel onto the scene. In the following days, Sharaga would hear more about the polka dot dress girl; he assumed the information he had passed to Sgt. Jordon that evening had become part of the suspect file on her.
  
• Officer Placencia read Sirhan his rights and Sirhan responded that he understood them and wished to remain silent. Upon arrival at the station, Sirhan was searched. He carried no billfold, no identification at all. The lack of a billfold or any sort of ID concerned police from the very beginning. Chief Houghton notes, in Special Unit Senator, that in a crime of passion its unusual to find the attacker taking the time to strip themselves of all forms of ID. [4] Among the items taken from Sirhan's jeans were four $100 bills, a car key and a copy of a May 26 Pasadena Independent Star-News article by David Lawrence; the column discussed RFK's opposition to the Vietnam war and his support for Israel. In addition, there was a copy of a newspaper advertisement for an RFK rally at the Ambassador hotel. The Krantz report noted that Sirhan had only $500 left over from a $1,750 workmen's compensation settlement paid to him only months before the assassination (the claim went back to his fall from a horse in mid-1966). The money was allegedly being held by Sirhan's mother and he "withdrew" almost all of it shortly before or on the actual day of the assassination. During the police search, Sirhan winced when his leg was touched. He told Sergeant Johnson that he had previously mentioned that his leg hurt. And he gave Johnson the complete badge number for the officer whom he had mentioned it to, demonstrating that during his arrest and transport Sirhan was alert enough to his surroundings to memorize the officer's badge number. Detectives joined Sirhan in the station homicide room, other officers came and went. Sirhan refused to answer any type of question, including his identity. Then Sergeant Patchett tried to probe him…."Are you ashamed of your name?" Sirhan responded to that, loudly and clearly, he said "Hell No!"
  
• 12:32am (PST) Kennedy is taken from the Ambassador in an ambulance to Central Receiving Hospital.
  
• 12:35am John Ambrose, LA Deputy District Attorney, was in the area of the Ambassador hotel when he heard a news bulletin on the Kennedy shooting. He arrived at the hotel in approximately 15 minutes. Upon entering the hotel's main entrance, a young woman (Sandra Serrano) came running up to him and asked for his help in informing the proper authorities in regard to an encounter she had experienced. She described meeting two young people in the vicinity of the emergency stairway outside the Embassy ballroom at the rear of the hotel. In passing her, the girl had stated "We just shot him! When Serrano asked who had been shot the girl replied "We just shot Senator Kennedy!" Ambrose immediately asked Serrano if the woman could have actually said "They just shot Senator Kennedy" and Serrano replied that she was sure the girl said "we" and used the name "Kennedy". Serrano gave Ambrose the following descriptions the girl a Caucasian, early twenties, very "shapely", wearing a black and white polka dot dress. The young man was Latin in appearance (Mexican-American as perceived by Serrano) with black hair and a gold sweater. In his follow-on letter to the LAPD, Ambrose stated that Serrano impressed him as a very sincere person and although she was very alarmed and excited, Serrano was positive about the girl's statements. Ambrose had taken down contact information on Serrano and had personally taken Serrano to the shooting scene and turned her over to investigation officers as a witness. Upon identifying himself to officers and presenting Serrano as a witness, the two were led to a room with LAPD detectives. The detectives talked with Serrano and another witness in the room (Vincent Diperro) listened to the conversation, Diperro commented that he had also seen a girl in a polka dot dress in the pantry at the time of the shooting. Not long after this, Serrano was interviewed on television by the press. Ambrose expressed his concern to the officers about this but they took the attitude that it was too late to do anything about it. Ambrose was informed by the police they were going to take Serranto to Ramparts for questioning; Serrano requested that Ambrose come along and he followed after calling her Aunt and Uncle with whom she lived. Upon arriving at Ramparts and identifying himself he was told he would not be needed; the following day he called Ramparts and gave detectives the information Serrano had given him. They took his number but made no further contact with him, resulting in his writing a letter to his supervisor on June 7th. In it he mentions being impressed by Serrano and felt that she was not at all impressed with publicity. He had called her at her home the following day and she had expressed regret that she had been interviewed on TV and was in fear for her safety. She told him she was actually about to leave the hotel when she saw him enter and felt compelled to tell someone her story. Over the next few days, additional witnesses would emerge. They would further corroborate the existence of this particular young woman in a polka dot dress. They would also place her in the vicinity of other people, including someone who looked a good deal like Sirhan Sirhan.
  
• 12:57am (PST) Kennedy is taken from Central Receiving to Good Samaritan Hospital.
  
• 1am (PST) RFK arrives at Good Samaritan Hospital.
  
• Shortly before 2 a.m., Doctor Lanz examined Sirhan in those areas where Sirhan complained of pain. Sirhan refused to tell the physician his name, and the physician told the officers present that Sirhan was not in need of any immediate medical treatment but that Sirhan should keep as much weight as possible off his left ankle as it was probably sprained. At this time Chief Deputy District Attorney Lynn Compton and Deputy District Attorney John Howard arrived, as did members of the District Attorney's investigative staff. In an interrogation room, Howard asked Sirhan his name. Sirhan did not answer, and at that time Sirhan and was advised by Howard of his constitutional rights. Sirhan nodded in the direction of Sergeant Jordon and stated I will stand by my original decision to remain silent." Sirhan asked no questions as to why he had been arrested and demonstrated no curiosity about recent events. During Sergeant Jordon's various contacts with Sirhan, including the four to five hours he spent with Sirhan at the arraignment and immediately prior and subsequent thereto, Sirhan never appeared irrational. While refusing to identify himself by name or place of origin, Sirhan engaged in banter with Sergeant Jordon. Jordon formed the opinion that Sirhan had a very quick mind', and that Sirhan was one of the most alert and intelligent persons' the officer had ever interrogated or attempted to interrogate during his 15 years experience on the police force."
  
• 2:35am (PST) Police interview witness Sandra Serrano, who tells them she saw a girl in a polka-dot dress with Sirhan; she ran out of the Ambassador after the shooting with a young man. "She practically stepped on me, and she said, "We've shot him. We've shot him." Then I said, "Who did you shoot?" And she said, "We shot Senator Kennedy." And I says, "Oh, sure." She came running down the stairs, very fast, and then the boy in the gold sweater came running down after her, and I walked down the stairs." The girl was described in the APB (All Points Bulletin) as follows: "Prior to the shooting, suspect observed with a female cauc., 23/27, 5-6, wearing a white viole dress, ¾ inch sleeves, with small black polka dots, dark shoes, bouffant type hair. This female not identified or in custody." - L.A.P.D. Sergeant Paul Shraga. APB from SUS files. This one was dated 6/5/68, and was not cancelled until 6/21/68
  
• Around 2:45am they began to operate on Kennedy. It lasted more than three hours.
  
• 3:10am (PST) Surgery began on RFK's head wound.
  
• Around 3:15 LAPD police officers took Sirhan to Interrogation Room No. 1. Howard and Jordan began an interview with their superiors watching through the one way mirror. Sirhan's first remarks were about his concerns with the clothing he had been given and his appearance. And he was willing to talk his subject of choice being a prior murder case (Kirschke), one in which the death penalty was reduced to life in prison. Within only two hours of the attack on RFK, Sirhan wanted to talk about crime and punishment in the California legal system. He also wanted to discuss the fairness of the death penalty. Sirhan's conversation included his concern over his pants and appearance. However, he also expressed his concern for the officers when Howard asked him why Sirhan was laughing he replied, "Your predicament. You're fencing." A few minutes later Sirhan asked the time and was told it was twenty minutes to four. "I'm allowed seventy-two hours before I'm brought before a magistrate." He had done some homework but was a bit off, Jordan corrected him; it was actually forty-eight.
  
• 3:31am (EST) LBJ was awakened and told the news of the shooting by Walt Rostow. His reaction to the news that Robert Kennedy had been mortally wounded on June 5, 1968, shortly after midnight California time, is revealing. Johnson was awakened almost immediately, and was not able to sleep the rest of the night. "There was an air of unreality about the whole thinga nightmare quality," Lady Bird Johnson wrote in her diary. "It couldn't be true. We must have dreamed it. It had all happened before."
  
• Between telephone calls to Ramsey Clark, J. Edgar Hoover, and James Rowley, the chief of the Secret Service, Johnson doodled on a memo from the previous day. In the first hours after the shooting virtually nothing was known about Kennedy's assassin. Johnson wondered if Castro had decided that his revenge would not be complete until both Kennedy brothers were dead. He scratched out a few disjointed words: "Costra [sic] Nostra ... Ed Morgan ... send in to get Castro ... planning." By late morning, however, it was clear that Sirhan Sirhan was a disturbed loner with no apparent ties to Cuba. Johnson dropped his idea of another Cuban-instigated conspiracy. (Max Holland)
  
• 3:46 (AP) - Ramsey Clark announces he has ordered FBI to investigate.
  
• Shortly after 4 a.m. PST Jordan and Murphey tried again, trying to probe Sirhan with his interest in the Kirschke case. After expressing his idea that truth and falsehood are relative, Sirhan began to lead them again, prompting Jordon to comment that he thought Sirhan was sharp; "You're sharp, you're very sharp." Later, Murphey would tell Sirhan that he thought Sirhan was "sort of matching wits with us." Sirhan quickly diverted the exchange to names of racehorses. Then he told them that if he talked too much they "might lose interest in the mystery." The Detectives got a good laugh out of that.
  
• 4:20am (EST) Lady Bird finds Lyndon with all the televisions on watching the news about the shooting. He got on the phone and gave instructions to put Secret Service guards on all the candidates. (White House Diary)
  
• 4:30am (PST) By four-thirty in the morning the interrogating officers were ready to challenge Sirhan because the key in his possession had been matched to what they believed was his car, parked outside the hotel. Sirhan found this to be very amusing since by coincidence his key had opened a different car than his (that of a hotel waiter) and obtained a name from it. Sirhan's interrogators never made any progress with him, no name, no identification, no sign that he was doing anything but playing games with them. In turn he showed no curiosity over what had happened none at all. The only interests he displayed were in regard to past criminal cases and how the police were progressing with trying to find out something, anything, about him. The only concern he displayed during a several hour period was about his clothing and how he would look when he went for arraignment; he seemed very much aware that he would be charged and asked no questions about that subject at all. It should be mentioned that Sirhan did eventually request legal counsel. A prominent ACLU member, A. L. Wirin, did appear to counsel Sirhan. Sirhan did talk to the lawyer initially but was taken aback when he found he was Jewish. Wirin did not legally represent Sirhan but did meet with him over a limited period of time. He also held a press conference in which he stated that a request had been made to the California Bar Association to appoint a "name" attorney to represent Sirhan, such attorney to be agreeable to Sirhan himself. Wirin eventually went on record stating that Sirhan had told him he had indeed shot Senator Kennedy; there is no corroboration for his statement and it certainly seems inconsistent with Sirhan's dialog with the police.
  
• 4:45am RFK begins breathing on his own and doctors are somewhat hopeful.
  
• 4:45 (AP) - Justice Dept announces that suspect's fingerprints had been sent to Washington by FBI in Los Angeles.
  
• 5:30am (EST) LBJ called Ramsey Clark.
  
• 6am (PST) Transcript of recorded LAPD interview of Sirhan B. Sirhan of 5 Jun 1968, 6AM, p. 7. Sirhan: "We're all puppets."
  
• 6:20am Doctors completed their surgery on RFK.
  
• 6:56 (AP) Ramsey Clark says that "according to information we have at this moment we have no evidence of conspiracy."
  
• 7am Sirhan, in a secret arraignment, is charged with six counts of assault with intent to commit murder.
  
• Around 9am, Sirhan's brothers recognize his face in the papers and head for the police station to identify him. Sirhan has still not told the police what his name is.
  
• On the morning of June 5th, only hours after the murder, amateur photographers John Shirley and John Clamente took photographs of the pantry and doorframes. Shirley provided a statement about the center divider: "In the wooden jamb of the center divider were two bullet holes surrounded by inked circles which contained some numbers and letters. I remember a manager pointing out those particular bullet holes to another person who appeared to be a press photographer. It appeared that an attempt had been made to dig the bullets out from the surface. However, the center divider jamb was loose, and it appeared to have been removed from the framework so that the bullets might be extracted from behind.
  
• 10:37 (AP) Sirhan identified in Los Angeles.
  
• 10: 41 (AP) LA Mayor Yorty says identification was made by Sirhan's brother, Adel, who was traced through gun.
  
• 12:30pm Los Angeles Police put out a nationwide bulletin: "In custody suspect Sirhan Bishara Sirhan AKA Sirhan Sharif Bishara...Prior to shooting, suspect observed with a female cauc. 23-27, 5-6, wearing a white voile dress, 3/4 inch sleeves, with small black polka dots, dark shoes, bouffant type hair. This female is not identified or in custody..."
  
• 1:15pm LA's Mayor Yorty told the press that Sirhan "was a member of numerous Communist organizations, including the Rosicrucians...It appears that Sirhan Sirhan was a sort of loner who harbored Communist inclinations, favored Communists of all types. He said the US must fall." He described the diary found with the passage that "RFK must die."
  
• 6:30pm RFK's heart is still beating but his brain waves show no response.
  
• Late in the afternoon, Oliver B. Owen tells his story about encountering Sirhan to the LAPD.
  
• 7am (EST) LBJ talked with Sen. Mansfield about gun control and action on a Crime Bill. (White House Diary)
  
• 9:30am Pasadena Police Dept. Report of Sep 19, 1968. "On June 5, 1968 at 9:3 A.M., Adel and Munir Sirhan contacted this office in the Detective Bureau....The Sirhan brothers were requested to wait for the arrival of the Los Angeles Officers for further questioning". George Erhard and Munir Sirhan interview, June 5, 1968, I-152. "....he (George Erhardt) sold it (the gun) to a person that works with him at the Nash Department Store....This person was known only to him as Joe and described as a Male Latin appearance that he thought he sounded like an Arab....Subject Erhard stated he could recognize and point out Joe, he was then taken to the Nash Department Store in Pasadena where Joe, who was later ID as Sirhan, Munir, was taken into custody. At this time officers received information that Adel Sirhan also in custody at the Pasadena Police Department." LAPD interview with Munir Sirhan, June 5, 1968, 9:30AM. "So George came up with the gun....and he gave it to my brother."
  
• Transcript of recorded LAPD interview of Joseph LaHive of 5 Jun 1968. LaHive described struggling with Sirhan and pulling his left leg up.
  
• Statement of Jerry Owen, University Detective Division, June 5, I-26. "He (Sirhan) said something was happening at the Ambassador Hotel and he would take the horse..."
  
• David Eisenhower wakes Richard Nixon, who is asleep in his New York apartment, and tells him the news.
  
• The Los Angeles Police question Jim Braden about his presence in L.A. on this particular day -- 100 miles from his home. Braden was also stopped and arrested in the vicinity of the Dal-Tex building in Dallas, Texas following JFK's assassination. Braden has definite Mafia ties.
  
• Gerry Patrick Hemming states: "On the night of Bobby's assassination, I was riding with a LAPD Sergeant supervisor in what is called an "X-Ray Unit" [Extra Unit] with the call-sign "4-X-Ray 10". If you are familiar with the old "Adam-12" TV series, you might have learned that an "Adam Unit" was a basic beat patrol car. "1-Adam-12" was the car in the series. The number "1" means that the unit is from the LAPD "Central Division". While the number "4" as a prefix meant that the unit was from the [East L.A./Washington Heights] Hollenbeck Division. [This is where the now famous author, Joe Wambaugh worked upstairs as a Robbery/ Homicide Detective or "Dick"] For some unknown [to me] reason, this Sergeant opted to unofficially [no radio check-in] drive over into the Hollywood Division's jurisdiction. We were only two blocks from the Ambassador Hotel when the radio dispatcher reported the shooting there. The Sergeant did a "180", and hauled-ass back to Hollenbeck Station, and that was where we got the news that RFK was one of the multiple victims in a shooting incident."
  
• In the White House later today, LBJ is pacing, demanding, "I've got to know. Is he [RFK] dead? Is he dead yet?" After RFK's death, LBJ questions whether RFK is entitled to be buried at Arlington Cemetery. LBJ's aides manage to convince the President that denying RFK a final resting place beside his brother is not only "cruel," but "politically reckless."
  
• During the last year of his life, RFK had told his son, Joseph Kennedy II, that the full truth about the Kennedy assassination will never be known. Young Kennedy has the impression that his father knows something others do not, though exactly what remains a mystery.
  
• Aristotle Onassis hears the news of the shooting while having breakfast in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. "Somebody was going to fix the little bastard sooner or later," Onassis remarks.
  
• San Francisco Examiner, combined reports of AP and UPI: "Before Sirhan's identification Attorney General Ramsey Clark said the Justice Department and the FBI were investigating every angle but that 'at the moment' there was no indication of a conspiracy."
  
• On June 5, an AP photo was published showing two police officers pointing at something in the door frame at the rear of the stage door of the Embassy room, the door through which RFK had exited to enter the corridor leading to the pantry. The photo's caption read, "Bullet found near Kennedy shooting scene." An LAPD exhibit of this photo is captioned "Bullet is still in the wood." The location of this "bullet" is very low in the stage door frame, on the side of the door facing down the pantry corridor.
  
• This evening, LBJ went on national television to say he was setting up the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence (Eisenhower Commission 6/5/1968-12/3/1969). "Two hundred million Americans did not strike down Robert Kennedy last night any more than they struck down President John F. Kennedy in 1963, or Dr. Martin Luther King, in April of this year. But those awful events give us ample warning that in a climate of extremism, of disrespect for law, of contempt for the rights of others, violence may bring down the very best among us." The Commission, headed by Milton S. Eisenhower, also contained: Archbishop Terence Cooke, Albert E. Jenner (former Warren Commission staffer), Patricia Harris, philosopher Eric Hoffer, Sens. Philip A Hart (D-Mich.), Roman Hruska (R-Neb.), Reps. Hale Boggs (ex-Warren Commission), William M. McCulloch (R-Ohio), A. Leon Higgenbotham Jr. (US District Judge); Dr. Walter Menninger (psychiatrist). The report of the Commission is issued in sections, that dealing with assassinations being made public 11/2/69. This section emphasizes that recent assassinations in the United States were non-conspiratorial, and says that historically "the evidence ... is overwhelming" that no Presidential assassination - with the exception of the abortive attempt on the life of President Truman - has been demonstrated to be the result of a conspiracy. The Commission says that before Robert Kennedy was killed, "it might have been hypothesized in 1968 that the next assassin to strike at a President - or presidential candidate, as it turned out - would have most of the following attributes …" With a few minor exceptions, the attributes listed conform to the official description of Oswald. It would present a psychological profile of assassins emphasizing their alienation and sexual dysfunction. It stressed the "critical importance" of maintaining an "overwhelming sense of the legitimacy of our government and institutions." It suggested that doubts about the lone gunmen were "a product of the primal anxieties created by the archetypal crime of parricide - not the inadequacy of the evidence of the lone assassin." "…most assassinations in the United States have been the products of individual passion or derangement…Despite this, the public…has sometimes attempted to tie the assassins to political movements or conspiracies…"
  

• 6/6/1968 (Thursday) Congress passed the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968 (banning the sale by mail of handguns), the first federal gun-control law in 30 years. Months later, the Gun Control Act of 1968 amended and enlarged it. Johnson and Sen. Edward Kennedy urged tougher restrictions. It also contained additional funding for police. The only previous federal gun control laws were passed in 1934 and 1938 to limit traffic in gangster-weapons - sawed-off shotguns and machine-guns, prohibit interstate shipment to felons, and federal licensing of interstate dealers.
  
• Attorney General Ramsey Clark announced that there was "no evidence of a conspiracy, only the evidence of this individual act" in the RFK killing.
  
• 1:44am (PST) Robert Kennedy's heart stopped beating; he was just 42 years old.
  
• 2am Press secretary Frank Mankiewicz announced RFK's death to the press.
  
• A companion asked Jerry Ray if he thought his brother had killed MLK; Jerry Ray later acknowledged saying, "If I was in his position and had 18 years to serve and someone offered me a lot of money to kill someone I didn't like anyhow, and get me out of the country, I'd do it…If he done it there had to be a lot of money involved because he wouldn't do it for hatred or just because he didn't like somebody, because that is not his line of work." (HSCA 7 462)
  
• Richard Cardinal Cushing was quoted in the NY Times as wondering if "there may be somebody behind all of this...no one can convince me that Oswald was alone responsible for...the assassination of John Kennedy."
  
• 3:00-9:15am: autopsy on RFK's body is performed by Drs. Thomas Noguchi (L.A. County Coroner), John Holloway and Abraham Lu. Noguchi removes one intact bullet, as well as fragments of another bullet, from RFK's body. He determines that the fatal shot entered through the mastoid bone, an inch behind the RIGHT ear and traveled upward to sever the branches of the superior cerebral artery. Another bullet has penetrated Kennedy's RIGHT armpit, traveled sharply upward and exited through the topmost portion of the chest. The third shot also entered the RIGHT rear armpit, one and a half inches below the wound caused by the second shot. This is the only bullet taken out of RFK's body intact. Sirhan Sirhan, the accused assassin, was standing one to three feet IN FRONT of RFK and slightly to his left.
  
• Costa Gratos calls Aristotle Onassis with the news. Onassis reportedly replies: "She's [Jackie Kennedy] free of the Kennedys. The last link just broke." Later, Onassis will remark: "I guess the kid [RFK] had everything but the luck." (Nemesis)
  

• 6/7/1968 (Friday) 4:25pm Sirhan indicted for the murder of RFK by a Los Angeles grand jury.
  
• It is alleged that, because of RFK's death, Jackie Kennedy and Aristotle Onassis immediately put off their plans to be married in the immediate future. Onassis, however, reportedly telephones a friend and says: "She's free of the Kennedys. The last link just broke."
  
• Karl Uecker FBI interview of 7 Jun 1968: "I immediately grabbed the gun hand of the assailant and pushed him onto the steam table. During this time he, the assailant, continued to fire the gun."
  
• June 7 FBI interview of Susanne Locke, a Kennedy volunteer who saw in the Embassy Room a girl in a polka dot dress who seemed "out of place" - not wearing a yellow press badge and "expressionless." She said she pointed out the girl to "Kennedy Girls" supervisor Carol Breshears, who in turn alerted a security guard. But note that Breshear's LAPD statement describes the girl as having a McCarthy dress (at an RFK rally!), and omits mention of contacting a security guard.
  
• Sander Vanocour, NBC correspondent, reported on the mood of mourners aboard the flight that brought RFK's body back to New York. They were angry about "the faceless men" who slew the Kennedys and King. Ted Kennedy "does not know whether this is the act of a single person or if this is the act of a conspiracy." (New York Post) New York - ... Sander Vanocur, an NBC television newsman and friend of the Kennedy family, ... on a network broadcast last night … described Edward Kennedy as angry over his brother's assassination [RFK]. ... "He does not know whether it is the act of a single person, or whether this is the act of a conspiracy." San Francisco Examiner. [* Edition] [UPI] From another version [**** Edition] of same story: "They don't know, they don't - they do not know, to put it clumsily. But from him, from others in the plane, one got the impression - it's no more than that - that there's a kind of a pattern, faceless men - that's the phrase I heard." The late Senator Robert Kennedy's press secretary, Frank Mankiewicz, later indicated the Kennedys were disturbed by Vanocur's reporting of events during the flight. "Everyone on the plane was there on the basis of friendship," Mankiewicz said. "There were only friends, colleagues and staff members. Nobody was there as a reporter. "The plane was private and that is how we view it. We are not going to comment on anything said on the airplane." San Francisco Examiner.
  
• Hong Kong [AP] - North Vietnam's army newspaper said today Senator Robert F. Kennedy was killed because he was leading the U.S. presidential race and, if elected, would have reopened the investigation into the 1963 assassination of his brother, President John F. Kennedy. … [From broadcast, Hanoi radio.]
  

• 6/8/1968 (Saturday) RFK's body is carried by a funeral train from New York to Washington. Perhaps a million people line the tracks. "Marvelous crowds, " says Arthur Schlesinger, staring out the window as the train slowly rocked south. "Yes, " replies Kenny O'Donnell. "But what are they good for now?" RFK is buried at Arlington National Cemetary, a few yards away from his brother.
  
• NBC's Sander Vanocur remained a silent witness, not reporting anything for 17 minutes as the camera covered the candlelit ceremony. "I didn't know what to say. I think it spoke for itself."
  
• James Earl Ray is arrested in London at Heathrow Airport as he disembarks from an airliner bound from Portugal to Belgium. ON SATURDAY, June 8, Ray, wearing a beige raincoat and shell-rimmed glasses, presented his Canadian passport at the desk at Heathrow Airport at approximately 11:15 a.m. He had been scheduled to fly on a British European Airways flight to Brussels at 11:50. Immigration officer Kenneth Human noticed a second passport when Ray pulled the first from his jacket and asked to see that one as well. It was identical except that it had been issued in Ottawa on April 4, and the last name was "Sneya." Ray explained the misspelling and stated that he had had no time to get it corrected before leaving Canada, requiring him to take care of it in Lisbon. Ray was approached by Detective Sgt. Philip Birch of Scotland Yard, who asked to see the passports. He took Ray (as Sneyd) to a nearby room and telephoned Scotland Yard. Detective Chief Superintendent Thomas Butler and Chief Inspector Kenneth Thompson were notified and headed toward Heathrow. Ray was searched by Sergeant Birch, and the officer extracted a .38 revolver from his back right pocket, the handle of which was wrapped in black electrical tape. The six-chamber gun was loaded with five rounds. Ray explained that he was going to Rhodesia and thought the gun might be needed because of the unrest there. Birch informed him that he was committing an offense for which he could be arrested. Shortly after 1:00 p.m., Butler and Thompson arrived, when Ray was placed under arrest for possession of a gun without a permit and was taken to Cannon Row police station, fingerprinted, and placed in a cell. Later

[Tracy Riddle]

• 7/1968 Recorded in Nixon, A Life, by Jonathan Aitken, notes of Patrick Hillings, the former congressman accompanying the candidate's 1967 trip to Taipei, Nixon interjected just after an unexpected encounter with Anna Chennault "Get her away from me, Hillings, she's a chatterbox." Yet according to records of President Lyndon B. Johnson's secret monitoring of South Vietnamese officials and his political foes, Anna Chennault played a crucial role on behalf of the Nixon campaign which attempted to sabotage the 1968 Paris peace talks which could have ended the Vietnam War. She arranged the contact with South Vietnamese Ambassador Bui Diem whom Richard Nixon met in secret in July 1968 in New York. It was through Chennault's intercession that the Nixon campaign advised Saigon to refuse participation in the talks, promising a better deal once elected. Records of FBI wiretaps show that Chennault phoned Bui Diem on November 2 with the message "hold on, we are gonna win." "The tactic worked', in that the South Vietnamese junta withdrew from the talks on the eve of the election, thereby destroying the peace initiative on which the Democrats had based their campaign. "Before the elections President Johnson "suspected (…) Richard Nixon, of political sabotage that he called treason". In part because Nixon won the presidency, no one was ever prosecuted for this alleged crime.
  
• 7/1/1968 US, USSR and UK sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), followed by dozens of other nations. In Moscow, 36 nations, including the US and UK, sign a Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, forbidding efforts to help non-nuclear nations develop such systems. LBJ then announced that the US and USSR had agreed to begin talks "in the nearest future" on the limitation and reduction of offensive nuclear missiles and antimissile systems.
  
• 7/3/1968 During LAPD Sgt. Hernandez' polygraph testing of Jerry Owen, Hernandez says: "I've talked to twenty three people that say they saw a girl in the polka dot dress. They are all--they're all fibbing." (Tape #29272, July 3, 1968; Lt.Hernandez of SUS interrogation of Jerry Owen, page 46 of transcript).
  
• 7/4/1968 John Wayne's film The Green Berets is released. The only pro-Vietnam film to be released by a major Hollywood studio, it is widely panned by critics but does well at the box office.
  
• 7/4/1968 Beginning of Soviet-led military exercizes in Sumava, aimed at strengthening the hand of anti-reformist forces in Czechoslovakia.
  
• 7/8/1968 A former roommate of Dave Ferrie's, Raymond Broshears, said on a Los Angeles TV show that Ferrie was involved in the plot to kill JFK.
  
• 7/11/1968 In a press conference Garrison named the "shooting points" as the TSBD, Dal-Tex building and grassy knoll. There was no longer any mention of a gunman in the sewer. (Times-Picayune 7/13/1968)
  
• 7/12/1968 The Times-Picayune repoted: Jim Garrison accused much of the national media of being part of a "CIA-inspired campaign" against him. When part of Epstein's Counterplot was first published in The New Yorker in July 1968, Garrison responded in his customary style. Calling a press conference, the District Attorney announced that an "intelligence agency of a foreign country . . . successfully penetrated the assassination operation," and that the "detailed information" he had received from this unnamed intelligence agency had "corroborated" statements he had previously made that President Kennedy was assassinated "by elements of the Central Intelligence Agency." This was a veiled reference to the manuscript of Farewell America he had received.
  
• 7/13/1968 Edward Jay Epstein broke with Garrison and published an article critical of him in the July 13, 1968 issue of The New Yorker. That article then produced a CIA dispatch dated July 19, 1968, again to "Chiefs, Certain Stations and Bases." It included a copy of the New Yorker article, with instructions that it could be used "to brief interested contacts, especially government and other political leaders and to demonstrate to assets (which you may assign to counter [anti-U.S. attacks]) that there is no hard evidence of any such conspiracy."
  
• 7/14/1968 Five days after former intelligence agent Joe Cooper offers to testify for Jim Garrison, he and his wife are seriously injured in an automobile wreck in which it is claimed that the automobile's "steering post came loose."
  
• 7/15/1968 Representatives of the Communist parties of the USSR, Hungary, Poland, East Germany and Bulgaria meet in Warsaw. They send a strongly worded diplomatic note warning the new Czechoslovak leaders that "the situation in Czechoslovakia jeopardizes the common vital interests of other socialist countries."
  
• 7/16/1968 Abe Fortas, Johnson's nominee for Supreme Court Chief Justice, begins confirmation testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee (the first time this has ever been done).
  
• 7/17/1968 The Ba'ath party comes to power in Iraq in a bloodless coup, led by Saddam Hussein, Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr, and the right-wing of the Baath party. al-Bakr became puppet president for Hussein, who called the shots as vice-president.
  
• 7/18/1968 David Hirst in Beirut (The Guardian): In the first major Arab coup since the June war, Iraqi armed forces in the name of the Revolution Command Council this morning overthrew the regime of President Aref. The new President is Hassan Al-Bakr, a retired general and leader of a moderate form of Ba'athism. According to Bagdad Radio, the coup was a bloodless one, although first-aid teams were reported to have been instructed, in error, to report for duty. President Aref has been expelled from the country and may be on his way to London to join his wife. The Prime Minister General Taher Yahya and his Government have been dismissed. There have been changes in the military high command, the curfew is still in force and airports are closed, but the new rulers seem to have the situation well in hand. The customary cables of support are flowing in from army units throughout the country. For several years political power in Iraq has been built on the shifting alliances of many rival factions - Nasserists, Ba'athists, Iraqi nationalists and independents of one kind and another. Sometimes the factions have managed - or rather the army officers who dominate them have managed - by bargaining among themselves to bring about changes of Government tolerable, although not very attractive, to most of the parties concerned. But as today's events show, one of these groups, or an alliance of them, grew so frustrated with the way Aref and his Prime Minister monopolised power that they decided to resort to force to get their way. The appointment of Hassan Al-Bakr suggests that the Ba'athists, thought to be the best organised and most cohesive of the groups contending for power, have now come into their own again, but they will be unable to govern the country alone, and they seem to be aware of the fact. There is little doubt that the Ba'athists acted in concert with others, and it is being suggested here that the coup marks the emergence of a new and younger generation of officers who may well prove to have been the real driving force behind it. It is felt that the intemperate way in which the new regime has denounced the corruption and inefficiency of its predecessor reflects the deep disgust of the younger men with their seniors. Significantly, corruption and inefficiency are linked with the Arab defeat of last year. Aref's regime, they said was made up of "opportunists, thieves, illiterate ignorant people, Zionists, agents and spies." In other respects, the new rulers are anything but intemperate. Iraqi Ba'athism of 1968 is very different from that of 1963, when the party, with Al-Bakr himself as Prime Minister, first came to power with the downfall of General Kassem. It also has precious little in common with the wild variety of Ba'athism now practised in Syria. Judging by their first policy statement, the social and political philosophy of the new rulers is moderate and pragmatic. They seem to let little store by hallowed slogans and shibboleths. The word "socialism" is not even mentioned and, for the first time, a new regime has taken over which does not make a point of proclaiming its undying attachment to the principles of the 1958 revolution which overthrew the monarchy. Similarly, there is stress on the need for national unity and for healing the divisions between Iraq's various religious and ethnic communities. A more resolute attempt to settle the Kurdish problem may be in the making. For the first time, too, a new Iraqi regime has not laid claim to a special relationship with Egypt as the nucleus of a greater Arab unity. The concept of "Iraq first" seems to have gained ground. There is no doubt that Nasser and his regime fall within the general target area of the new rulers' indictment of the ills of Arab society, which led to the June defeat. And so, of course do the Syrian Ba'athists. In their denunciation of corruption and inefficiency, the new rulers are bound to strike a sympathetic chord among Iraqi people in general. Under the previous administration, these ailments seemed to have reached prodigious proportions. The Prime Minister had a particularly bad reputation, earning for himself the nickname of "The thief of Bagdad". The feeling that it was inefficiency and corruption which lost the Arabs the June war is also widespread. The dossier may now be opened in earnest - not only for Iraq, but for the Arab world as a whole.
  
• 7/19/1968 CIA memo. "DISPATCH TO: Chiefs, Certain Stations and Bases FROM: Chief SUBJECT: Warren Commission Report: Article on the Investigation Conducted by District Attorney Garrison....We are forwarding herewith a reprint of the article 'A Reporter At Large: Garrison' published in the New Yorker 7/13/1968. It was written by Edward Jay Epstein....It is forwarded primarily for your information and for the information of all Station personnel concerned. If the Garrison investigation should be cited in your area in the context of renewed anti-US attacks, you may use the article to brief interested contacts, especially government and other political leaders, and to demonstrate to assets (which you may assign to counter such attacks) that there is no hard evidence of any such conspiracy." (Destiny Betrayed 321)
  
• 7/19/1968 Ray was formally extradited to the United States
  
• 7/20/1968 In Honolulu, LBJ assures Thieu that US support will continue.
  
• 7/22/1968 James Earl Ray pleads not guilty to murdering MLK.
  
• 7/22/1968 The Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson column on July 22, 1968, stated that Ray was a lone gunman. It began: "It now looks as if the FBI has exploded the generally prevalent theory that the murder of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King involved a conspiracy." The column went on to confirm that the FBI had "found a robbery where Ray probably got his money." It continued, "The FBI has been checking very carefully, and one of the robbers answers the description of James Earl Ray. He had the same long hair, the same height and the same physical makeup."' Thus surfaced -- for the first time -- the Alton, Illinois, bank robbery story. This claim enabled the bureau in 1968 to explain how James covered his living expenses during his period as a fugitive. If he had obtained funds from this source, it could be contended that he had no help from anyone else. (Years later we would learn that not only had Ray nothing to do with this robbery but that there were other prime suspects.)
  
• 7/23-24/1968 Cleveland: a riot was sparked by a gun battle between police and a black militant group; 11 people, included 3 cops, were killed.
  
• 7/26/1968 Time magazine reported Nixon telling a group of GOP congressmen that if he was running for Congress in a tight district, he would vote against foreign aid, but he would support it if he came from a safe district.
  
• 7/27/1968 Freddy Plimpton FBI interview of 27 Jul 1968 about Sirhan: "...his eyes were narrow, the lines on his face were heavy and set and he was completely concentrated on what he was doing."
  
• 7/28/1968 Jackie Kennedy spends her thirty-ninth birthday at Hyannisport. Rose Kennedy has organized a family dinner. This evening, Jackie tells Ted Kennedy that she is going to marry "the Greek " [Aristotle Onassis] in August. Later, Ted calls Onassis and asks for a meeting in order to formulate a prenuptial agreement. Onassis invites him to Skorpios. According to Yannis Georgakis, Onassis offers three million dollars up front for Jackie, plus one million dollars for each of her children; he will be responsible for her expenses so long as the marriage lasts; after his death she will receive $150,000 a year for life, exactly the amount she would have received from the Kennedy trust (which she will have to forfeit if she remarries). Onassis writes out the agreement in longhand. Jackie's counteroffer is for $20 million up front - put forward by her financial adviser, Andre Meyer, head of the investment banking firm of Lazard Freres. (Nemesis)
  
• 7/29-8/1/1968 Negotiations are held between the presidiums of the Czechoslovak and Soviet communist parties in Cierna-nad-Tisou. Dubcek argues that reforms did not endanger the role of the party but built public support. The Soviets do not accept these arguments and sharply criticize the Czechoslovak moves. Threats of invasion are made.
  
• 7/29/1968 In Rome, a Papal Encyclical reaffirms the ban of the use of artificial birth control for Catholics.
  
• 7/31/1968 East Germany, Poland, Hungary and Soviet Union announce that they will hold military exercises near the Czech border.
  
• 8/1/1968 LBJ talked with Mayor Daley, who urged him to attend the upcoming convention. Daley expressed his doubts about continuing the war in Vietnam. (White House Diary)
  
• 8/1/1968 Antonio Veciana begins working as a banking consultant in La Paz, Bolivia. He is officially a US government employee salaried by the Agency for International Development. He claims the job was obtained for him by Maurice Bishop to better position him for anti-Castro activities throughout Latin America. The State Dept later confirms Veciana's statement that he never signed an application for the job. (Fonzi chronology)
  
• 8/2/1968 LBJ visited Eisenhower at Walter Reed Hospital.
  
• 8/2/1968 Time magazine runs an article entitled: "Jolly Green Giant in Wonderland" - still another article critical of Jim Garrison and his investigation into the JFK assassination.
  
• 8/2/1968 Alexander Dubcek stated, "One must frankly point to the good will and the effort of…[our] Soviet friends to understand our problems and also respect…the inalienable right of any party to settle its affairs independently…I was asked on my return [from a meeting with Soviet leaders] to the airport if our sovereignty was threatened. Let me say frankly that it is not." (Prague's 200 Days, Harry Schwartz)
  
• 8/2/1968 Sirhan pleads not guilty to murder of RFK.
  
• 8/3/1968 Billy James Hargis hosted a "debate" in Tulsa between himself and a supposed representative of the liberal establishment, Professor John Redekop (who actually described himself as an anti-communist conservative). The well-attended event also featured Gen. Edwin Walker as a guest. Hargis built up the debate as a great face-off between conservatism and liberalism. But Redekop articulately criticized Christian Crusade for its narrow-minded definition of anti-communism and Christianity and intolerant attitude towards anyone who disagreed with them.
  
• 8/3/1968 "I predict that with the next - within the next two months you will see, hear or read something relating to the Bobby Kennedy assassination that will snap your eyes open ... I've heard rumors about it already ... There's something hot in the wind, I'll tell you that." - Jim Eason, KGO, San Francisco [tape erased; transcript made from tape]
  
• 8/3/1968 A Warsaw Pact meeting (without Romania) is held in Bratislava. The meeting brings about a seeming reconciliation between the Warsaw Pact leaders and the Czechoslovak leadership. Here for the first time, the so-called Brezhnev doctrine of limited sovereigny is announced. Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev receives a handwritten letter from five members of the Czechoslovak Presidium who warn that the socialist order is under threat. They request military intervention.
  
• 8/4/1968 Gov. Spiro Agnew put Nixon's name in nomination at the GOP convention in Miami: "A nation plagued by disorder wants a renewal of order. A nation haunted by crime wants respect for law…If there is one great cry that rings clear, it is the cry for a leader." He endorsed Nixon as the man who "shared in the decisions which shaped for America the Eisenhower era of prosperity, untainted by war, dissension, fear, lawlessness, or the threat of fiscal and moral chaos."
  
• 8/5/1968 At the GOP convention in Miami, Ronald Reagan announces that he will seek the Republican nomination for president. (SF Chronicle 6/9/02) At some point this year Reagan stated that "I would have voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964." (The Last Days of the Late, Great State of California, Curt Gentry, 1968)
  
• 8/8/1968 Richard Nixon and Governor Spiro Agnew are nominated for president and vice president on first ballot by the Republican convention in Miami Beach. (H.L. Hunt had tried to persuade Nixon to pick Gerald Ford as his running mate.) At some point this year, Nixon told Congressman Donald Riegle of Michigan, "You know, Don, if I'm elected we'll end this war in six months." (Truth and Untruth: Political Deceit in America, Paul McCloskey, 1972) During the Republican national convention in Miami, the Paradise Island Casino's company yacht is put at Nixon's disposal. Both Bebe Rebozo and Nixon are friends of James Crosby, chairman of the board of Resorts International, a company that is repeatedly linked to top Mob figures. Rebozo's Key Biscayne Bank, which does a good deal of business with Resorts, is suspected of being a conduit for Mob dollars skimmed from the firm's Paradise Island Casino in the Bahamas. James Crosby also contributes $100,000 to Nixon's presidential primary campaign. Nixon appeared as Crosby's guest at the opening of the casino in January of this year. The previous year, Life had reported that it was to be controlled by "Lansky & Co."
  
• 8/8-10/1968 US killed 72 Vietnamese civilians in an "accidental" attack on a friendly Mekong Delta village.
  
• 8/9/1968 Wall St. Journal's Vermont Royster commented, "Mr. Rockefeller's initial half-hearted campaign seemed only to demonstrate that he expected to lose to Mr. Nixon..It was only after Sen. Robert Kennedy's assassination on June 5 that Mr. Rockefeller's campaign got rolling. By then, only a slim chance existed of stopping Nixon, but Rocky spared nothing..."
  
• 8/9/1968 Raymond Broshears was questioned by Garrison's investigators.
  
• 8/10/1968 Nixon and Agnew receive a foreign policy briefing in Texas by LBJ, Helms, Rusk, and Vance. "Lyndon was courteous and affable - even warm - and both Nixon and Agnew were the same way. I could see that Lyndon had considerable sympathy for Agnew..." (White House Diary) Sometime during the campaign Spiro Agnew pledged that "a Nixon-Agnew administration will abolish the credibility gap and reestablish the truth, the whole truth, as its policy."
  
• 8/13/1968 George Papadopoulis, premier of Greece, was the target of a failed assassination attempt.
  
• 8/15/1968 Hoover memo to Asst Directors; Humphrey wanted to know if the FBI could send a team to the Chicago convention as they had in 1964.
  
• 8/18/1968 The Kremlin decides to invade Czechoslovakia. The commander of Soviet Central Forces, General Aleksandr Mayorov, relates how Soviet Defense Minister Andrei Grechko stated to the assembled Soviet Politburo and military leaders: "the invasion will take place even if it leads to a third world war."
  
• 8/19/1968 Sen. George McGovern joins the presidential race.
  
• 8/20/1968 Gov. Shapiro of Illinois calls in the National Guard for protection at the Democratic Convention.
  
• 8/20/1968 Warsaw Pact night invasion of Czechoslovakia; Soviet, East German, Polish, Bulgarian and Hungarian forces (500,000 troops) occupied the country and deposed Dubcek. Large Soviet garrison remained.
  
• 8/21/1968 Czechoslovakia: 1am State Radio announces invasion by troops from five Warsaw Pact countries. It says the invasion took place without the knowledge of the Czechoslovak authorities. "The Presidium calls upon all citizens of the Republic to keep the peace and not resist the advancing armies , because the defense of our borders is now impossible." The army is given orders to remain in its barracks and not to offer resistance.
  
• 3am Czech Premier Oldrich Cernik, Dubcek, Jozef Smrkovsky and Frantisek Kriegel -- the four leading reformers in Czechoslovak leadership -- are arrested in the Communist Party's Presidium building by Soviet airborne troops. Occupation governments distribute leaflets saying the troops were sent in "to come to the aid of the working class and all the people of Czechoslovak to defend socialist gains."
  
• 5:30 am Tass says that Czechoslovak Party and government officials requested urgent assistance from the Soviet Union and other fraternal countries.
  
• 6 am Svoboda makes radio address calling for calm and for people to go to work as normal.
  
• 8 am Crowds and Soviet troops confront one another on Old Town Square and Wenceslas Square. Tanks appear at the Museum and start firing at nearby buildings and the National museum. Dubcek and other party leaders are flown to Moscow and are compelled to participate in talks with Moscow leadership. They sign a document in which they renounce parts of the reform program and agree to the presence of Soviet troops in Czechoslovakia. Invasion draws condemnation from Western powers as well as communist and socialist parties in the West. U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson calls on Soviets to withdraw from Czechoslovakia.
  
• 8/21/1968 The Soviet news agency Tass explained that "the party and government leaders of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic have asked the Soviet Union and other allied states to render the fraternal Czechoslovak people urgent assistance including assistance with armed forces...Soviet armed units together with armed units of the above-mentioned allied countries entered the territory of Czechoslovakia on 21 August...The actions which are being taken are not directed at any state and in no measure infringe state interests of any body. They serve the purpose of peace."
  
• 8/22/1968 DeLoach memo to Tolson stated that Democratic National Treasurer John Criswell requested a similar FBI operation at the Democratic Convention as in 1964.
  
• 8/23/1968 Svoboda flies to Moscow with large delegation of Czechoslovak Communist leaders to negotiate a solution.
  
• 8/23/1968 Surrounded by reporters, Jerry Rubin, a Yippie leader, folk singer Phil Ochs, and other activists held their own presidential nominating convention with their candidate Pigasus, an actual pig. When the Yippies paraded Pigasus at the Civic Center, ten policemen arrested Rubin, Pigasus, and six others. This resulted in Pigasus becoming a media hit.
  
• 8/24/1968 France tests its first H-bomb in the South Pacific. (Nat Geographic Aug 05)
  
• 8/25/1968 Czechoslovak leaders sign so-called Moscow protocol which renounces parts of the reform program and agrees to the presence of Soviet troops in Czechoslovakia.
  
• 8/26/1968 The 1968 Democratic National Convention was held at the International Amphitheatre in Chicago, Illinois, from August 26 to August 29, 1968.
  
• 8/27/1968 Svoboda returns to Prague with Dubcek, Cernik.
  
• 8/28/1968 In Guatemala, US ambassador John Gordon Mein is killed in an ambush.
  
• 8/28/1968 Democrats adopt a relatively hawkish stand on Vietnam. Humphrey is nominated while antiwar riots go on outside. More than 100 demonstrators and 119 policemen were injured. Chicago: August 28, 1968 came to be known as the day a "police riot" took place. The title of "police riot" came out of the Walker Report, which amassed a great deal of information and eyewitness accounts to determine what happened in Chicago. At approximately 3:30 p.m., a young boy lowered the American flag at a legal rally taking place at Grant Park. The demonstration was made up of 10,000 protestors. The police broke through the crowd and began beating the boy, while the crowd pelted the police with food, rocks, and chunks of concrete. The biggest clash in Chicago took place that day. Police fought with the protestors and vice versa. The chants of the protestors shifted from "Hell no, we won't go" to "Pigs are whores." Tom Hayden, one of the leaders of Students for a Democratic Society, encouraged protestors to move out of the park to ensure that if they were to be tear gassed, the whole city would be tear gassed, and made sure that if blood were spilled in Chicago it would happen throughout the city. The amount of tear gas used to suppress the protestors was so great that it eventually made its way to the Hilton Hotel, where it disturbed Hubert Humphrey while in his shower. The police were taunted by the protestors with chants of "Kill, kill, kill." They sprayed demonstrators and bystanders indiscriminately with Mace. The police assault in front of the Hilton Hotel became the most famous image of the Chicago demonstrations of 1968. The entire event took place live under the T.V. lights for seventeen minutes with the crowd shouting, "The whole world is watching." Meanwhile, in the convention hall, Connecticut Senator Abraham Ribicoff used his nominating speech for George McGovern to tell of the violence going on outside the convention hall, saying that "with George McGovern we wouldn't have Gestapo tactics on the streets of Chicago." Mayor Daley responded to his remark with something that the T.V. sound was not able to pick up, but it was later revealed by lip-readers that Daley had cursed "Fuck you, you Jew son of a bitch! You lousy motherfucker! Go home!" That night, NBC News had been switching back and forth between the demonstrators being beaten by the police to the festivities over Humphrey's victory in the convention hall. It was under the cameras of the convention center, for all of America to see. It was clear that the Democratic party was sorely divided. After the Chicago protests, the demonstrators were confident that the majority of Americans would side with them over what had happened in Chicago, especially because of police behavior. They were shocked to learn that controversy over the war in Vietnam overshadowed their cause. Daley claimed to have received 135,000 letters supporting his actions and only 5000 condemning them. Public opinion polls demonstrated that the majority of Americans supported the Mayor's tactics.
  
• 8/29/1968 Edmund Muskie is chosen as Humphrey's running-mate.
  
• 8/29/1968 Outside the National Democratic Convention in Chicago, more than 100 anti-war demonstrators (including elderly persons, children, and reporters) are punched, beaten, gassed and maced by Mayor Richard Daley's riot police.
  
• 8/30/1968 Chicago police raid the offices of McCarthy.
  
• 8/31/1968 Czechoslovakia: 14th Party Congress declared invalid, as required by the Moscow protocol. Censorship is reintroduced in the country.
  
• 8/1968 LBJ's popularity rating was 35%. A Gallup Poll showed that 46% of Americans felt that "big government" was the "biggest threat to the country." Only 14% had felt that way in 1959.
  

[Tracy Riddle]

• 9/1968 The women's liberation movement gained international recognition when it demonstrated at the annual Miss America beauty pageant. The week-long protest and its disruption of the pageant gained the movement much needed attention in the press.
  
• Farewell America by James Hepburn (a pseudonym) was published in September 1968 in Belgium (it may have been published earlier elsewhere in Europe). Its French title was "America Burns." The book said that "President Kennedy's assassination was the work of magicians. It was a stage trick, complete with accessories and fake mirrors, and when the curtain fell, the actors, and even the scenery disappeared . . . the plotters were correct when they guessed that their crime would be concealed by shadows and silences, that it would be blamed on a 'madman' and negligence.'" "Ghosted by a veteran operative of the French SDECE, Farewell America purported to present then President Charles de Gaulle's views on Kennedy's assassination." Early 1968 the manuscript was offered to Jim Garrison for him to read. "We concluded that the breadth of knowledge the book contained about these varied interests meant that it could not have been the work of a single author." William Turner and Warren Hinckle sent Steve Jaffee to Europe to investigate the book; Herve Lamarr confessed to being its author. He used the name because he was a fan of Audrey Hepburn, and confirmed that the French government, all the way up to De Gaulle, was involved in producing the book. They also discovered that the French managed to steal the Zapruder film from Life for a few days early in 1968 and copy it. Lamarr also confided that the section on the Secret Service was based on information supplied by "a Kennedy insider" (presumably Patrick Moynihan). (Deadly Secrets p434,259) Early this year, according to Richard Lubic, at the time a staffer of Life magazine's sister publication Time, the Zapruder film of the JFK assassination disappears for several days from the vault in the Time-Life headquarters in New York. The FBI and CIA investigate. Although the obvious conclusion is that it was an inside job, no suspects are ever identified. William Turner: "He was slight and fidgety, with a wispy mustache and fingertips yellowed by countless Gitanes. He called himself Herve Lamarr, but in the twilight world of intelligence that may not have been the name on his baptismal certificate. The Frenchman had called the day before, long distance, saying he had to see me. It was September 1968, three months after the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy in Los Angeles. I was familiar with Lamarr's project: a book titled Farewell America, which contended that the assassination of John F. Kennedy at Dallas on Nov. 22 was a conspiracy that robbed America of her future. As we sat in the coffee shop of the Fairmont Hotel on top of San Francisco's Nob Hill, I wondered what the great urgency was. Lamarr chitchatted earnestly, but had no punch line. I introduced Lamarr to Jim Rose, who was driving me to the airport to catch a plane for New York. Rose was a pilot who had flown CIA missions against Fidel Castro and Belgian Congo insurgents in the early 1960s. He had come in from the cold and done some chancy investigative work for New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, whose damn-the-torpedoes-full-speed-ahead probe of the JFK murder had fascinated the world until it grounded on an evidentiary reef. The punch line came that night when Lamarr called Rose and instructed him to pick up a package at the St. Francis Hotel, at the bottom of Nob Hill. Rose approached the bell captain, gave a password, and was handed a sealed can of film. When I returned from New York we screened what turned out to be a motion picture version of Farewell America. As a sonorous narrator chronicled John Kennedy's political career, still photos of the President with kings and kids, pols and the people, rolled along with shots of his grim-faced enemies: Dallas oil croesus H. L. Hunt; the pro-Blue General Edwin A. Walker whom Kennedy had cashiered; the Big Steel executives he had forced to rescind price hikes; FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who considered Camelot subversive; Richard Nixon; and on and on. There were digressive interludes, as when Frank Sinatra was heard singing "It's the wrong face" while visuals suggested secret amours. Then the music became dramatically somber as actual footage showed John and Jacqueline Kennedy boarding Air Force I in Fort Worth for the short hop to Dallas. There was the motorcade to downtown, spliced together from the home movies of spectators lining the route. And then -the Zapruder film." Harold Weisberg: "It does not tell the truth. That truth is not known and now cannot be. It is a work of fiction. Even superficial examination by one not addicted to all theories of any conspiracy no matter how impossible on its face discloses that although the author claims to have been in personal contact with the assassins, it has virtually nothing at all about the assassination, only a page or so. It is a diatribe against a vast number of wealthy Americans all of whom, it says, a virtual brigade of them, conspired to have JFK killed, with the oil magnate H.L. Hunt one of the major alleged conspirators. On my previous trip Garrison had given me the chapter that supposedly deals with the assassination to read. I read it on the plane home and immediately wrote him it was a fake, with details. But like Livingstone and a multitude of others, he liked what it said so to him the clear fake was not a fake at all. That they like what it says is all that is necessary for the assassination nuts to love it. It was done professionally and although it was undoubtedly the most libelous book ever written and could not be legally imported into the United States, it got to be popular and is still sold by second-hand stores. But it is a fake. It was originally titled L'Amerique Brule, or American Burns. Garrison suggested the title Farewell America. Lamarre and SDECE adopted it."
  
• 9/1968 "Fortunate J. Edgar Hoover! who in his twilight years experiences the downfall and death, one by one, of his arch-enemies - John Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Robert Kennedy. He will live to be 150, on the strength of such juices." Minority of One, Sylvia Meagher
  
• 9/1968 Federal Reserve begins raising interest rates, until Sep 1969.
  
• 9/1968 C.W. Burpo's newsletter (The Bible Institute News): "The fact of the matter is, this nation is dying. It is sick unto death…The world hangs over an abyss, fearful to contemplate, and it hangs by a thread that only Divine Grace and Mercy keeps from breaking!" But five pages later, he wrote, "You hear a lot of talk these days about our country being sick. I don't buy it. America is still the greatest country in the world. America hasn't failed."
  
• 9/4/1968 California legislator and professor Samuel Hayakawa, in a speech to the American Psychological Association, explained the youth counter-culture as "an overdue negative reaction to television's message that material possessions are everything, that this headache remedy, this luxurious carpeting, this new model Camaro will bring all kinds of happiness."
  
• 9/4/1968 Cuban exile R.S. Vasudevo is arrested after it was proved that he had introduced a virus harmful to coffee into Cuba. The blight caused enormous damage.
  
• 9/7/1968 New carrier USS John F. Kennedy (CV 67) commissioned at the Norfolk Naval Base. The ship's keel was laid Oct. 22, 1964, at the Newport News Shipbuilding and Drydock Co.
  
• 9/8/1968 Black Panther leader Huey Newton was convicted of manslaughter for killing a policeman in a shoot-out.
  
• 9/9/1968 NYC teachers went on strike after the dismissal of teachers who had protested against the new policies of school decentralization and community control. The strike lasted until 11/19.
  
• 9/13/1968 Nixon said at a campaign stop in Cleveland, "I continue to believe that America's security requires the maintenance of the current oil depletion allowance."
  
• 9/13/1968 The dean of American University School of Law testified before the Senate that Fortas had been paid for a series of speeches that involved a conflict of interest.
  
• 9/17/1968 Rothermel memo to H.L. Hunt: "Jim Garrison made the statement for the news media that Clay Shaw ought to be tried. He said if Clay Shaw were tried, Garrison would show a link of conspiracy between Shaw and oil money in the Southwest."
  
• 9/17/1968 In Texas, the American Party nominates George Wallace for president.
  
• 9/18/1968 J. Edgar Hoover tells a government commission investigating violence in the US that "seemingly limitless excess of sex, sadism, degeneracy and violence is only too apparent in the offerings of the motion picture industry."
  
• 9/19/1968 Charlotte News reported that Billy Graham had said he sensed a significant rightward trend among "a big segment of the population," people who were not seen at protest marches but who were likely "to be heard from loudly at the polls."
  
• 9/24/1968 The first episode of CBS' TV news program, 60 Minutes, is broadcast.
  
• 9/25/1968 Humphrey began distancing himself from LBJ's policies by becoming more dovish on the war.
  
• 9/25/1968 Aristotle Onassis meets Jackie Kennedy's financial adviser, Andre Meyer at the Carlyle Hotel in New York regarding Jackie's proposed prenuptial agreement. Onassis says: "Your client could price herself right out of the market." Ted Kennedy is adamant that the upcoming wedding should not take place in the United States. Yannis Georgakis suggests a chapel on Skorpios. Jackie agrees. Her only proviso is that they find a priest who "understands English and doesn't look like Rasputin."
  
• 9/29/1968 James Reston noted in his column that there was little difference between Humphrey and Nixon, though the voters "are clearly leading the nation toward what they suppose to be - probably quite inaccurately - a quite conservative Nixon administration..."
  
• 9/30/1968 Stewart Alsop commented that Nixon would be a preferable alternative to "the mounting evidence that the election of Hubert H. Humphrey would be a national disaster...Nixon could negotiate without major political damage a Vietnam settlement that might get Humphrey impeached...this is the heart of the case for Nixon."
  
• 9/30/1968 Humphrey pledged to stop bombing North Vietnam if he was elected President.
  
• 10/1968 the Rodney Riots in Kingston, Jamaica, were inspired when the Jamaican government of Hugh Shearer banned Guyanese university lecturer Dr. Walter Rodney from returning to his teaching position at the University of the West Indies. Rodney, a historian of Africa, had been active in the Black power movement, and had been sharply critical of the middle class in many Caribbean countries. Rodney was an avowed socialist who worked with the poor of Jamaica in an attempt to raise their political and cultural consciousness.
  
• 10/1968 Shortly before leaving office, LBJ volunteered a piece of information to the veteran newsman Howard K. Smith, whom he deeply respected. "I'll tell you something [about John Kennedy's murder] that will rock you," he said. "Kennedy was trying to get to Castro, but Castro got to him first." "I was rocked all right," Smith later recalled; he begged for details. But Johnson refused to provide any, saying only, "It will all come out one day." Johnson was so obviously worn down by the bitterness of his years in office that Smith was left wondering if he had just witnessed a last bit of Johnson blarney. (Max Holland)
  
• 10/1/1968 The Senate was unable to stop a filibuster to prevent a vote on Fortas' nomination.
  
• 10/2/1968 LBJ withdraws his nomination of Abe Fortas after the Senate failed by a vote of 45 to 43 to achieve cloture. Warren wanted to withdraw his letter of resignation, but felt if he did so it would look like he was playing politics.
  
• 10/2/1968 Edward Daniels, an auto insurance specialist, told the American Society of Body Engineers that $1 billion of the $5-6 billion spent on auto repairs in the US in 1967 was because the industry had switched from bumpers that were functional to bumpers that were ornamental. 10/14/1969 a GM vice president, Mack Worden, acknowledged to congress that the bumpers met the company's standards of protecting sheet metal in a collision at a speed of 2.8 mph.
  
• 10/2/1968 Mexico City: student demonstrations against one-party government led to a massacre in the Tlatelolco Plaza. One of the protestors was future president Ernesto Zedillo, who was 16 then and photographed confronting police. The government always insisted that the shooting by 8000 soldiers and police was entirely provoked by the students, and the official death toll was between 27 and 30. 2400 protestors were arrested, but not one government official was ever held accountable for the deaths, which actually numbered around 300. For five hours the shooting continued; when it was over Army officials quickly cleared the bodies and blood and began a coverup. But there were too many witnesses, and the public's faith in the government collapsed. Documents that surfaced in 1998 showed that president Diaz Ordaz was behind the plan to crush the student demonstrations, because he didn't want them to interfere with the upcoming Olympic Games. (Sergio Aguayo, 1968: The Archives of Violence (1998); Elena Poniatowska, The Night of Tlatelolco (1971)
  
• 10/2/1968 George Romero's ground-breaking horror film Night of the Living Dead premieres. The movie reflected the darkness, confusion and sense of hopelessness many Americans felt.
  
• 10/5/1968 Northern Ireland: A civil rights march in Derry, which had been organised by members of the Derry Housing Action Committee (DHAC) and supported by the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA), was stopped by the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) before it had properly begun. Present at the march were three British Labour Party Members of Parliament (MP), Gerry Fitt, then Republican Labour MP, several Stormont MPs, and members of the media including a television crew from RTE. The RUC broke-up the march by baton-charging the crowd and leaving many people injured including a number of MPs. The incidents were filmed and there was world-wide television coverage. The incidents in Derry had a profound effect on many people around the world but particularly on the Catholic population of Northern Ireland. Immediately after the march there were two days of serious rioting in Derry between the Catholic residents of the city and the RUC.
  
• 10/6/1968 Walter Lippman wrote in his column, "It has become painfully clear that the Democratic Party is too disorganized to run the country...I do not shrink from the prospect of Nixon as president. He is a very much better man today than he was 10 years ago...Nixon is the only one who may be able to produce a government that can govern... do not reject the notion that there is a new Nixon who has outlived and outgrown the ruthless politics of his early days."
  
• 10/6/1968 Dean Rusk said, "We are not going to abandon Southeast Asia whoever is elected in November and Hanoi should understand that."
  
• 10/7/1968 The movie industry introduces a rating system: G' for general audiences, M' for mature audiences, R' is off limits to those under 16 unless accompanied by an adult, and X' restricted to those 16 and older. Supporters of a rating system were convinced that the public wouldn't want to see films rated R or X, and so the movie industry would only make G or M films. Instead, audiences flocked to see R and X films, and filmmakers were now free to introduce more nudity, violence and language, knowing that it would be restricted to adult audiences.
  
• 10/9/1968 LBJ announced that Warren was staying on through the new court term.
  
• 10/9/1968 New Zealand PM Holyoake visited Washington. He told LBJ, "You have truly know the ordeal of power, Mr. President." (White House Diary)
  
• 10/11/1968 Apollo 7 mission: Schirra, Eisele and Cunningham made 163 orbits in 3 days.
  
• 10/12/1968 LBJ signed a bill in the home of Harry Truman designating 10/24/1968 as UN Day.
  
• 10/12/1968 San Francisco: GI's and Vets marched for peace from Golden Gate Park to Civic Center.
  
• 10/12/1968 Mexico City: Olympic Games open.
  
• 10/15/1968 The Boston Herald-Traveler carries a page-one story: John F. Kennedy's Widow And Aristotle Onassis To Wed Soon. Kennedy son-in-law Steve Smith calls Pierre Salinger in Washington. "We have to figure out some kind of statement for the family to put out," he says. "Have you got any idea of what you want to say?" Salinger asks. Smith replies, "How about Oh shit!'" (Nemesis)
  
• 10/16/1968 Rev. Daniel J. Berrigan is convicted with 8 others of burning draft files.
  
• 10/20/1968 It rains today while Jacqueline Kennedy weds Greek millionaire and shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis. Jackie has had to leave the Catholic church in order to marry a divorced man. She and Onassis have a prenuptial agreement. She wears a 1.25 million dollar engagement ring. Jackie says: " I hate this country. I despise America and I don't want my children to live here anymore. If they are killing Kennedys, my kids are the number one targets. I want to get out of this country." Lady Bird Johnson, reflecting on her friend and predecessor says: "this complete break with the past might be good for her", " ... as a result of the wedding ... I feel strangely freer. No shadow walks beside me down the halls of the White House ... I wonder what it would have been like if we had entered this life unaccompanied by that shadow?" The public marriage announcement catches the world by surprise, and creates a negative reaction. Jackie's cousin, John Davis, says: "We all knew her mother and father had coached her to marry a very rich man." Gore Vidal says: "I can only give you two words - highly suitable." Senator George Smathers says: "I think she did it just so she'd never have to be beholding to the Kennedys again." Ari will spend 20 million dollars on Jackie during their first year of marriage. Jackie will spend 1.25-million dollars on clothes alone - helping local economies everywhere she shops. If a designer has a blouse she likes, she will order it in every color. It is also reported that Jackie eventually resells these clothes to Encore, an exclusive re-sell store, and pockets the extra cash. Jackie's marriage to Ari will last for seven years - until his death.
  
• 10/22/1968 Gun Control Act signed into law. After three decades of quiescence in the arena of gun control politics, the turmoil of the 1960s unleashed a wave of demand for new gun control legislation. The assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas on November 22, 1963, prompted the country to focus on the regulation of firearms. Then the urban riots beginning in 1964 and the 1968 assassinations of Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. and Senator Robert F. Kennedy fueled an inferno of outrage that demanded congressional action. In the wake of these acts of violence the U.S. Congress enacted the Gun Control Act (P.L. 90-618, 82 Stat. 1213) which President Lyndon B. Johnson signed in 1968. Although the Gun Control Act did not contain the owner licensing and gun registration provisions that President Johnson desired, the act, along with the Safe Streets and Crime Control Act passed by Congress months earlier, contained the most significant restrictions on firearms since Congress enacted the National Firearms Act (NFA) in 1934.
  
• 10/25/1968 In the Year of the Pig is a 1968 American documentary film about the origins of the Vietnam War, directed by Emile de Antonio. It was nominated for an Academy award for best documentary. The film, which is in black and white, contains much historical footage and many interviews. Those interviewed include Harry S. Ashmore, Daniel Berrigan, Philippe Devillers, David Halberstam, Roger Hilsman, Jean Lacouture, Kenneth P. Landon, Thruston B. Morton, Paul Mus, Charlton Osburn, Harrison Salisbury, Ilya Todd, John Toller, David K. Tuck, David Werfel, and John White. Produced during the Vietnam War, the film was greeted with hostility by many audiences, with bomb threats and vandalism directed at theaters that showed it. De Antonio cites the film as his personal favorite. It features the ironic use of patriotic music, portrays Ho Chi Minh as a patriot to the Vietnamese people, and asserts that Vietnam was always a single country rather than two.
  
• 10/26/1968 Soviet's Soyuz 3 made 60 orbits piloted by Georgi Beregovoi.
  
• 10/28/1968 Czechoslovakia becomes a federal republic, the only major objective of the reform process that came to fruition.
  
• 10/29/1968 Gen. Abrams was called in for a secret consultation on the bombing halt.
  
• 10/29/1968 LA Times on October 29 reported a news story from a Nashville paper: Ray's defense will claim that "Ray played only a small part in a master plot so complex and far-reaching that even Ray does not know who masterminded it...that he was promised $12,000 to $15,000 to lead police away from the real killers and become the lure in the greatest manhunt in history."
  
• 10/28-29/1968 October 28 and 29 were fact-filled days for those who attended the combination speech-question-answer events at San Diego State College and the University of California at San Diego (sponsored by the Assassination Inquiry Committee, the Experimental College at San Diego State, and Tuesday The Ninth Committee,: UCSD), featuring noted Warren Report critic, Harold Weisberg. The attendance each evening was approximately 400. Weisberg also appeared on two local TV shows, both on KFMB-TV (CBS in San Diego),' and participated on extended call-in sessions on radio stations KGB, KFMB, and KPRI. 'These appearances generated great enthusiasm and interest, involving audiences and studio staffs as well. Weisberg was repeatedly requested to revisit these shows on his next sojourn West, to answer numerous questions this time necessarily unasked due to time restrictions. As Weisberg's familiarity with Garrison's investigation became apparent to his audience, one listener at San Diego State was prompted to ask Weisberg about the incident reported above. Relevant exempts from Weisberg's reply are as follows: "On about November 6 or 7,1967, I was in New Orleans: Oswald In New Orleans had just appeared; and, I was with Jim Garrison...He (Garrison) said that man, one Charles Lind (spelled phonetically, ed.), who he knew to have been Bobby Kennedy's roommate in college, was in New Orleans, and while he,did not know if Mr. Lind was going to see him or not, it 'was conceivable that Mr Lind might, and on the chance that he,was an emissary from Bobby, what in my opinion ought Jim to tell him?-And up until this point Jim had had some pretty unkind things to say about Bobby Kennedy. Many of us had an opinion, that was an understatement of Garrisbn's„ hat Bobby was a little bit on the yellow side. I suggested to Jim that in order to accomplishwhat all of us wanted to do, we could use every ally we had, that events could force Bobby to take a position, that he could not conceivably ultimately not agree with us, and that pending that day we should not make his lot more miserable. But the best thing to do was to leave him alone and let him work out himself until such a time as he might conceivably come to us…On April 7 of this year I was investigating, in New Orleans and another man known to me- a friend of mine, a friend of Garrison's-- in New Orleans on entirely other businesss, also a friend of Bobby's, called me. He said he wanted to talk to me. This was right after Bobby's 'speech at San. Fernando Valley- remember the speech? where he said he had seen everything in the National Archives, and that was a complete lie, and that nothing there was inconsistent with the Warren Report, and that is perhaps the most total lie in history, and that he endorsed the Warren Report, and that may have been true, I know, But in any event, Bobby never saw all that trash, trivia, and junk. He didn't try, and he didn't. I know now from Frank Mankiewicz, his press secretary, that he didn't even read any of the books. So had a rather long and pointed, I guess you might call it "discussion",with this man, who I emphasize was not an emissary from Bobby, but was in New Orleans on other business"… The long and the short of it is this. He said that Bobby was buying time. He said that Bobby was afraid that there were already too many CIA guns between him and the Whitehouse. And he agreed with me that if Bobby were elected, his position would be untenable if a single unasked or unanswered question remained about his brother's murder. I'll tell you the rest of it. On-the 9th of June I was asked to go to New York and speak at a rally for Bobby in Central Park, and as you realize, that was four days after Bobby was killed. The next day I called this man who lives in New York, not in California, and we both recalled this New Orleans meeting. He said, 'I have to see you', and...we spent about three hours there (at dinner) and we were both pretty uncomfortable about it because this man knew that I had predicted Bobby's murder in a letter to your Speaker, Mr. Unruh, on January 17 of this year, saying that unless Bobby found his legs and became a man and spoke out, he would be assassinated. I regret that I was right. This man then told me (and the reason I say 'this man' is because he does not want his name used; I have asked him. I can understand his reason for not wanting his name used. I regret very much that the misuse of information has closed the mouths of too many of Bobby's people, some of whom might have helped us, and two of whom I was in touch with, and now they will not talk because they think that everything they say will be blabbed all over radio and television), this man then told me, 'It's worse than you know, because after I saw you I learned more.' Remember, he saw me in April. He said that three weeks before the assassination he had told Bobby's entourage that he had information an attempt would be made on Bobby's life in California and in a crowded environment. Because so much is out and because Bobby is now dead, I think it only right that I give you this much more of the rest of the story."
  
• 10/31/1968 Aristotle Onassis calls Yannis Georgakis and tells him that he has decided against making payments to Mahmoud Hamshari. The Palestinians have attempted to blackmail Onassis by threatening to bomb flights of his airline, Olympic, unless he pays them an initial sum of $200,000. (Nemesis)
  
• 10/31/1968 LBJ announces end of bombing of North Vietnam, starting the next day. He also said that the Paris peace talks would be expanded to include the Viet Cong.
  
• PRESS RELEASE, OCTOBER 31, 1968 (FROM THE DISTRICT ATTORNEY, PARISH OF ORLEANS) A Grand Jury subpoena was issued today in connection with the investigation into the assassination of President Kennedy for the appearance of an out-of-state witness, Mr. Fred Lee Crisman from Tacoma, Washington. Mr. Crisman has been engaged in undercover activity for a part of the industrial warfare complex for years. His cover is that of a "preacher" and a person "engaged in work to help gypsies." Our information. indicates that since the.early 1960's he has made many trips to the New Orleans and Dallas areas in connection with his undercover work.. for that part of the warfare industry engaged in the manufacture of what is termed, in military language, a "hardware" meaning those weapons sold to the U.S. government which are uniquely large and expensive. Mr. Crisman is a "former" employee of the Boeing Aircraft Company in the sense that one defendant in the case is a "former" employee of Lockheed Aircraft Company in Los Angeles. In intelligence terminology this ordinarily means that the connection still exists but that the "former employee" has moved into an underground operation. More often than not a "bad record"or evidence indicating that he has been "fired" is prepared for the parent company to increase the disassociation between the two. Mr. Crisman is being called as a witness because our office has developed evidence indicating a relationship on his part to persons involved in the assassination of President John Kennedy. For the information of the public, we want to reiterate that President Kennedy was murdered by elements of the industrial warfare complex working in concert with individuals in the United States government. At the time of his murder, President Kennedy was working to end the Cold War. By that time, however, the Cold War had become America's biggest business. The annual income of the defense industry was well over twenty billion dollars a year and there were forces in that industry and in the U.S. government which opposed the ending of the Cold War.
  

[Tracy Riddle]

• 11/1/1968 US launched Accelerated Pacification Campaign to expand Saigon's control over South Vietnamese territory before peace talks, with might have led to a "cease-fire in place," were held with the Communists. The results were mixed.
  
• 11/1/1968 The Distant Drummer (Philadelphia) quoted conspiracy researcher Mark Lane as saying that Jim Garrison "has substantially solved the assassination conspiracy....I've seen the evidence; I've talked to the witnesses."
  
• 11/1/1968 The new Motion Picture Association of America rating system goes into effect.
  
• 11/3/1968 LBJ told David Wise he thought that JFK had give the go-ahead for the coups that led to the deaths of Diem and Trujillo. (New York Times Magazine)
  
• 11/5/1968 Presidential election: Richard Nixon received 43.3% (31.7 million votes, 301 electoral; 2.5 million fewer votes than in 1960), Humphrey 42.7% (31.2 or 30.8 million votes, 191 electoral), Wallace 13.5% (9.9 million votes, 46 electoral); Henning Blomen (Socialist-Labor) 52,591 votes; Other 189,977. Voter turnout was 61.9%. Democrats still controlled Congress (he was the first president in 120 years to be newly-elected with the opposition controlling both houses.) Barry Goldwater won back his seat in the Senate. Newcomers include Sens. Alan Cranston, Robert Dole, Bob Packwood, Richard Schweiker. Shirley Chisholm (D-NY) is first black woman elected to Congress. Sen. Wayne Morse lost his re-election bid. This was the first time in US history that the people had switched administrations (as well as parties) during a war. In his victory speech Nixon pledged "to bring the American people together." Critics in his party blamed him for blowing a big lead over Humphrey and destroying any possibility of electing a GOP Congress that year. 60% voter turnout. The two parties spent a total of $100 million on the presidential race. Turnout stayed below 60 percent during the eight presidential elections after.
  
• 11/5/1968 LBJ says to an aide: "Tell Edgar Hoover that I have taken care of him since the beginning of my administration, and now that I am leaving, I expect him to take care of me ....There will be any number of crackpots trying to get at me after January 20, 1969."
  
• 11/5/1968 Warren Hinckle was the publisher of Ramparts Magazine, a leftist journal that published several articles alleging a conspiracy to kill Kennedy. The folks at Ramparts were certainly no fans of the Military-Industrial Complex, but when Jim Garrison started fingering the aerospace industry as assassination conspirators, even Hinckle was a bit bemused. Here is Hinckle's account of a November 5, 1968, conversation: "The caller was in no mood to inquire about the weather. "This is urgent," Jim Garrison said. "Can you take this in your mailroom? They'd never think to tap the mailroom extension." . . . Garrison began talking when I picked up the mailroom extension: "This is risky, but I have little choice. It is imperative that I get this information to you now. Important new evidence has surfaced. Those Texas oilmen do not appear to be involved in President Kennedy's murder in the way we first thought. It was the Military-Industrial Complex that put up the money for the assassination -- but as far as we can tell, the conspiracy was limited to the aerospace wing. I've got the names of three companies and their employees who were involved in setting up the President's murder. Do you have a pencil?" I wrote down the names of the three defense contractors -- Garrison identified them as Lockheed, Boeing, and General Dynamics -- and the names of those executives in their employ whom the District Attorney said had been instrumental in the murder of Jack Kennedy. I also logged a good deal of information about a mysterious minister who was supposed to have crossed the border into Mexico with Lee Harvey Oswald shortly before the assassination; the man wasn't a minister at all, Garrison said, but an executive with a major defense supplier, in clerical disguise. I knew little about ministers crossing the Rio Grande with Oswald -- but after several years of fielding the dizzying details of the Kennedy assassination, I had learned to leave closed Pandora's boxes lie; I didn't ask. I said that I had everything down, and Garrison said a hurried goodbye: "It's poor security procedure to use the phone, but the situation warrants the risk. Get this information to Bill Turner. He'll know what to do about the minister. I wanted you to have this, in case something happens . . . ." (Hinckle, If You Have a Lemon, Make Lemonade, 198-9)
  
• 11/6/1968 On a TV talk show, Theodore White and Walter Cronkite were discussing the election, and White spoke of voting fraud in Texas and Illinois. John Connally called up the program and criticized White's charges.
  
• 11/6/1968 Students at San Francisco State College began a strike demanding a Third World studies department and an open admissions policy. The strike lasted 5 months.
  
• 11/7/1968 Robert J. Donovan commented that Nixon would probably ignore the conservatives in his party and work with the liberals. (Los Angeles Times)
  
• 11/8/1968 Joseph Kraft, in his column, recommended that Nixon abandon "partisanship for a genuine move toward coalition with major elements of what is still the major party in the country - the Democrats."
  
• 11/8/1968 REAGAN RULES TO FREE-BRADLEY- DENIES EXTRADITION OF ACCUSED CONSPIRATOR AGAINST JFK NOVEMBER 8, 1968; SACRAMENTO - Governor Ronald Reagan became the first public official to free a man legally accused with the crime of unlawful conspiracy to assassinate President John F, Kennedy. The man is free without having had a trial to determine his guilt or innocence. Last Friday, the Governor ruled to deny the State of Louisiana's request to extradite Edgar Eugene Bradley.
  
• 11/10/1968 Russell Kirk commented that Nixon owed no one any favors, and could be a president of all the people: "If ever a President was free to lead the people, unfettered by promises to special interests, Richard Nixon is that man." (Santa Ana Register)
  
• 11/11/1968 Nixon and his wife lunched with LBJ, Rusk, Helms, Clifford, Wheeler, and Rostow for an impromptu foreign policy briefing. Nixon asked LBJ why he had kept so many Kennedy appointees instead of replacing them with his own people. Johnson explained that he hadn't done so out of loyalty to JFK. (White House Diary)
  
• 11/11/1968 James Earl Ray's defense will depict him as a decoy and the "dupe of a communist or possibly a Black Nationalist conspiracy." (Newsweek 11/11/68, p.92)
  
• 11/12/1968 Supreme Court voids Arkansas law banning teaching of evolution in public schools.
  
• 11/12/1968 Look magazine publishes William Bradford Huie article on James Earl Ray: "The Story of James Earl Ray and the Conspiracy to Kill Martin Luther King."
  
• 11/14/1968 Draft card burning occured in many cities and campuses for "National Turn in Your Draft Card Day."
  
• 11/15/1968 Nixon met with Richard Helms and told him he wanted him to stay on as director of the CIA.
  
• 11/16/1968 NYT: Since last July Cambodia has been holding eleven American crewmen from an Army river supply vessel that strayed inadvertently into Cambodian territory....Cambodia has finally recognized the two-sided nature of the border incidents and has asked the International Control Commission to investigate the Communist incursions that provoked allied attacks across the border.
  
• 11/16/1968 An unknown person was shot and killed while trying to escape into West Berlin. This turned out to be the final "original Wall" shooting, as replacement of the tossed-together barriers of 1961 with the scientifically thought out system of obstacles known as the "modern Wall" -- which lasted until 1989 -- was underway, making escapes clearly riskier than ever.
  
• 11/17/1968 Former Ike adviser Arthur Larson advised Nixon to govern from the center, in a moderate-to-liberal, bipartisan manner. (Los Angeles Times)
  
• 11/18/1968 Newsweek reported that Nixon might name Daniel Patrick Moynihan to the cabinet. Privately, Arthur Burns warned Nixon that bringing Moynihan into the administration was a bad idea. Nixon never really had a clear idea what he wanted to do with liberal Democratic intellectual. (Nixon in the White House p16)
  
• 11/19/1968 Nixon and his aides began receiving the same CIA information that LBJ was getting each day.
  
• 11/22/1968 An episode of Star Trek is not shown in many parts of the South because it depicts Captain Kirk and Lt. Uhura (who is black) kissing.
  
• 11/22/1968 Right-winger preacher Rev. Billy James Hargis supported Nixon, because Sen. Joe McCarthy had once told him, "Be slow to criticize Dick Nixon. I know him. He is one of the best friends that I have in Congress. He is as anti-Communist as I am…If Nixon can ever get rid of the Eisenhower influence, he will be a good president." (11/22/68 Weekly Crusader newsletter)
  
• 11/25/1968 James J. Kilpatrick commented in his column, "Nixon is getting tons of bad advice these days: He is being urged to turn to the left in his polices and appointments...What's the left done for him lately? And how is it conceived that he owes some 'debt' to Nelson Rockefeller?...Of course, Nixon will go generally to the right. His own deepest instincts will not let him go anywhere else." According to Evans and Novak, Nixon and his aides had spent little time putting together a detailed plan for governing, and so Nixon had no clear-cut agenda as he prepared to take office. (Nixon in the White House)
  
• 11/25/1968 Herb Klein, designated as Communications Director for the new administration, told the press that "truth will become the hallmark of the Nixon Administration." (NYT 11/26)
  
• 11/25-26/1968 Sirhan was given a battery of psychological tests by Dr. Martin M. Schorr. He deterimed that Sirhan had "paranoid psychosis," and "By killing Kennedy, Sirhan kills his father, takes his father's place as the heir to his mother."
  
• 11/26/1968 Look article by Huie on James Earl Ray: "I Got Involved Gradually and Didn't Know Anybody Was to Be Murdered."
  
• 11/26/1968 South Vietnamese government agreed to participate in peace talks.
  
• 11/1968 Gov. Reagan refused to extradite Edgar Eugene Bradley to New Orleans because Jim Garrison had failed to produce any witnesses to substantiate the charges against him.
  
• 12/2/1968 Nixon announced that he was appointing Henry Kissinger as Assistant for National Security Affairs.
  
• 12/4/1968 Nixon talked on the phone with Earl Warren. They agreed he should stay on until the end of the term in June.
  
• 12/11/1968 Unemployment is at 3.3%, the lowest in 15 years.
  
• 12/12/1968 NY Times commented that "as a group Mr. Nixon's men bear a much closer resemblance to the Kennedy-Johnson team they replace than to the Eisenhower Republican team..." The Washington Post also approved of Nixon's people so far.
  
• 12/12/1968 Ethel Kennedy gave birth to her 11th child, Rory Elizabeth Katharine Kennedy, whom she had been carrying when RFK was shot.
  
• 12/13/1968 LBJ commented that he had a "good opinion" of the people Nixon had picked for his administration. (UPI)
  
• 12/13/1968 Starting today and for the next ten years, Brazil lived under AI-5 (Ato Institucional No. 5Institutional Act Number 5), a presidential decree that suspended the constitution, disbanded Congress, and created the so-called previous censorship all in the name of "the defense of the necessary interests of the nation."
  
• Mid-December 1968 West Germany (BRD) calls for the assembly to select a Federal president for 5 Mar 1969 in West Berlin. Soviets and the East Germans (GDR) strenuously protest this as a "great provocation" since they do not consider West Berlin to be a part of the BRD. TASS, the Soviet news agency, reports that east bloc military maneuvers will take place in March, involving the Soviet and GDR armies. The GDR Interior Minister (in charge of police and internal security) says that he will ban Federal assembly members from the surface routes to West Berlin. Traffic is stopped on the Berlin-Helmstedt autobahn. The Soviets threaten the air routes. The western Allies assert their rights to protect West Berlin's integration with the legal, commercial and finance systems of West Germany.
  
• 12/15/1968 One of the reasons The Smothers Brother's Comedy Hour was cancelled was a show that aired on this date. During an appearance by Jefferson Airplane, Grace Slick, wearing blackface, raised her fist in a black power salute after singing "Crown of Creation."
  
• 12/16/1968 Sen. Fulbright formally ends Tonkin inquiry with release of a volume of supplementary documents.
  
• 12/16/1968 LAPD's Lt. Hernandez wrote a final report on the polygraph examination of Sandra Serrano. The report was addressed to Captain Hugh Brown, Homicide Division Commander. The final paragraphs of the report relate that Miss Serrano was interrogated extensively and she finally admitted that the story about the girl in the polka dot dress and gunshots was not true. Of course Serrano had consistently maintained that while she had heard sounds she assumed were car backfires, she never stated that they were gunshots and in fact consistently denied that she would even know what a gun shot sounded like. The reference to gun shots was an addition by FBI and police investigators, not Serrano, so representing that she had admitted they were not gun shots was misleading at best. Another element introduced to discredit Serrano was the fact that an LAPD fire department Captain had made rounds checking stairways and exits and had not seen Serrano on the flight of stairs in question. A close reading of Serrano's many interviews shows that she certainly was not constantly on the stairs but rather in a downstairs room, watching TV for a period of time, then returning upstairs and finally sitting on the stairs for a time. During the course of the interviews that period of time seems to be extended by her questioners, but the simple fact is that there is nothing to confirm that the Fire Captain had observed her location during the specific time frame in question, since the time frame itself was impossible to determine with any exact precision. The report goes on to state that she admitted that she had no personal knowledge of a woman in a polka dot dress and that she stated that she had heard that from a kid in the police holding area. "...she heard a kid making reference to a girl in a polka dot dress. She talked to the young man and each of them inquired of each other concerning the description of the dress and the girl. According to Miss Serrano, there must have been a mutual agreement between them as to the description of the girl and the polka dot dress."
  
• 12/16/1968 Paul Rothermel reported in a memo to the Hunts that "Garrison has, over the weekend, fired William Wood (also known as William Boxley) on the grounds of Boxley being a CIA agent. I am told that Boxley's theory is that H.L. Hunt was the key man in the assassination of President Kennedy, and that he has others underneath Mr. Hunt on a chart. I am making efforts to get this chart...I am reassured by Garrison's staff that he has no intention of embarassing Mr. Hunt." (Man Who Knew too Much 591)
  
• 12/19/1968 FCC commissioner Nicholas Johnson told the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence that children were watching hundreds of incidents of violence on television every week. He also complained about the amount of advertising children saw, which taught them that "the single measure of happiness and personal satisfaction is consumption."
  
• 12/19/1968 Nixon bought two houses at Key Biscayne.
  
• 12/19/1968 Aristotle Onassis, dining with Yannis Georgakis at his Glyfada villa, gets a call from his secretary in London informing him that a man has called on Onassis's private line to say that a bomb has been placed aboard the evening Olympic flight out of Kennedy International Airport to Athens - the flight on which Jackie Onassis, her two children, and four friends are booked to fly to Greece for the Christmas holidays. The aircraft is turned back just as it is taxiing toward the takeoff runway. The flight is delayed more than four hours while the NYPD bomb squad checks the plane and every piece of luggage. No bomb is found. Nevertheless, since Jackie's booking had been a closely guarded secret - until she arrived in the VIP lounge, only her own Secret Service people and the Olympic operations manager knew that she would be flying out of New York that evening - the incident alarms Aristotle because it exposes a serious breach of security. (Nemesis)
  
• 12/21/1968 Apollo 8 mission: first manned test of Saturn V rocket; Borman, Lovell and Anders made ten orbits around the moon.
  
• 12/21/1968 Kissinger receives his first formal CIA briefing. Mitchell, Eagleburger and Andy Goodpaster were also present; they asked the briefers difficult, probing questions, and were not satisfied with many of the answers.
  
• 12/22/1968 The crew of the Pueblo was released.
  
• 12/23/1968 In an interview conducted on behalf of the Johnson Library, Leon Jaworski, Special Counsel to the State of Texas during its inquiry, explained the circumstances of the WC's creation: "Here and in Europe were all kinds of speculations, you know, that this was an effort to get rid of Kennedy and put Johnson in, and a lot of other things. So he immediately called on Waggoner Carr, who was Attorney General of Texas, to go ahead and conduct a Court of Inquiry in Texas." That Johnson would call on Texans with right-wing political affiliations to investigate a crime many suspected was committed by Texans with right-wing political affiliations was not lost on Jaworski, who clearly saw the need for something with a more national flavor. In his memoir Confession and Avoidance, Jaworski, who met with Johnson in Washington a few days after the assassination, describes the circumstances of their meeting as follows: "a problem had developed. The city was seething with rumors and accusations surrounding John Kennedy's death. Some sources in Europe had jumped on the story that Johnson himself had disposed of Kennedy in order to ascend to the presidency. Any investigation that was localized in Texas would be, to put it gently, under suspicion."
  
• 12/27/1968 After a six-day orbital flight around the moon, the Apollo 8 mission returns to Earth.
  
• 12/27/1968 US agrees to sell 50 F-4 Phantom jets to Israel.
  
• 12/28/1968 In response to an attack in an El Al jet in Athens, on the night of December 28, 1968, Israeli commandos mounted a surprise attack on the airport and destroyed 13 aircraft belonging to the Lebanese carriers, Middle East Airlines (Air Liban had merged with MEA by this time), Trans Mediterranean Airways, and Lebanese International Airways. This caused serious devastation to the Lebanese aviation industry. Middle East Airlines managed to rebound quickly, but Lebanese International Airways went bankrupt and its employees were transferred to MEA.
  
• 12/28/1968 Black Panther Headquarters in Jersey City is firebombed by "two white men wearing police-style uniforms."
  
• 12/31/1968 US military personnel in Vietnam: 536,000, with 65,600 Allied troops; 30,610 US troops killed to date. US prime rate of interest: 6.3%. Minimum wage raised to $1.60 an hour.
  
• 12/1968 Nixon Aide Receives Martial Law Proclamations As President-elect Nixon's staffers set up shop in the White House, one of Nixon's aides, John Ehrlichman, is visited by an old college classmate, outgoing Deputy Attorney General Warren Christopher. Ehrlichman later recalls the visit: "He arrived in my office with a big package of documents and suggested we keep them at hand all the time. They were proclamations to be filled in. You could fill in the name of the city and the date and the president would sign it and declare martial law." [Reeves, 2001, pp. 14]