THIS FAR AND NO FURTHER
A Timeline of Events Surrounding the Radical Right's Attempt to Subvert American Democracy
Written and Compiled by Black Max
1897-1960
1959-1960
1959
- Economist and Yale graduate Richard Bissell becomes head of the CIA's Directorate of Plans.
Cold War
(While a doctoral candidate and lecturer at Yale in 1939, Bissell organized the America First Committee to oppose US involvement in World War II.) Bissell, a linchpin of the government's efforts to use new technologies to spy on the Soviet Union, is also responsible for, in Philip Taubman's words, "some of the CIA's most cold-blooded -- and boneheaded -- overseas plots, including a series of bizarre assassination schemes against Fidel Castro, the Cuban leader." Bissell's deputy is Richard Helms, who had successfully mounted a massive covert campaign against the Communist Party in Italy after the assassination of Benito Mussolini. Bissell's Directorate of Plans will become the center of the CIA's "black operations" programs. - One of the CIA's most successful black ops was the 1954 overthrow of the Guatamelan government after its newly elected leader, Jacobo Arbenz, initiated land reforms and nationalized the United Fruit Company; Bissell helped to direct propaganda operations that supported the coup. (The legacy of the Arbenz coup would be forty years of US-sponsored, brutally repressive dictatorships in Guatamala. Bissell would write in his memoirs, "As to the question of overthrowing a foreign sovereign government, I would approve the same action today without hesitation. With hindsight, however, I would be more cautious in estimating what would happen as a result of this kind of intervention and whether it was really in the best interests of the United States.")
- Other CIA black ops of the period include the deposing and sometimes assassinations of the Congo's Patrice Lumumba, the Dominican Republic's Rafael Trujillo, Iraq's Abd al-Karim Kassem, and South Vietnam's Ngo Dinh Diem. After the abortive 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, President Kennedy will reluctantly sack CIA director Allen Dulles and Bissell will be forced to resign his post in favor of Helms. Taubman observes that Bissell's blend of aristocratic idealism and arrogance, like many other senior CIA officials, gave the CIA "an enduring image where zealotry often substituted for sound judgment." According to Taubman, Bissell and his cohorts "tolerated a chilling disregard for democratic principles in many of the Agency's operations that cannot be excused by the exigencies of the cold war. They failed to recognize that the United States might damage itself if its intelligence services fought the cold war on Moscow's terms, using assassination, military coups, and other cutthroat techniques. They also underestimated how easily such operations could be bungled or publicly exposed -- to the great embarrassment of the CIA and the United States." (Richard Bissell Biography), Philip Taubman)
Castro overthrows Batista
- January 1: Castro's rebel forces take Havana. Batista flees into exile, leaving Castro in control of Cuba.
Cuban revolution
Thousands of Cubans who had enriched themselves under Batista suddenly find themselves fleeing to southern Florida, where many of them will settle into a community of "Cuban exiles" with plenty of Batista-era money and holdings, and a bitter grudge against Castro. These exiles quickly whip up American sympathies by their often-exaggerated or even falsified stories about the tortures and abuses they and their countrymen suffered under Castro, and the US government quickly slaps a trade embargo upon Cuba. One of Castro's first acts is to reinstate the 1940 Cuban constitution. Castro almost immediately moves to create ties between his government and the US; simultaneously, Che Guevara is opening talks with the USSR. Unfortunately for Castro's hopes of friendly relations with the US, his government's increasing bent towards a Marxist style of governance sours any (remote) chances of the US recognizing his rule. Castro did indeed execute many Batista supporters, but he also initiated real land and wealth redistriibution for the benefit of the Cuban peasantry; until the American embargo, Castro has little real interest in aligning his fledgling government with the Soviet Union. Faced with the possibility of economic strangulation at the hands of the Americans, in 1961 Castro turns to the Soviet Union, who is eager to buy Cuba's sugar and other exports, as well as establishing an ally in the US's backyard. This forced alignment of Cuba with the USSR will shape the following half-century of America's policy towards Cuba, and all of the political and economic fallout those policy decisions cause. (History Learning Site, History of Cuba) - February 10: Eisenhower, disturbed by reports that the US is falling behind the USSR in its efforts to build ICBMs and angered by attacks from Democrats, sounds off during a meeting with Corona spy satellite scientists.
Cold War
He is angered by the release of classified information, and incensed that private defense contractors are using the dissension to push for larger defense contracts. "The munitions makers are making tremendous efforts towards getting more contracts and in fact seem to be exerting undue influence over the senators," he says, pointing out that Democratic senator Stuart Symington is often seen in the company of a vice president of Convair, the maker of the Atlas missile. Eisenhower insists that improved intelligence gathering will not only put the Soviet threat in proper perspective, but will rein in the attempts of what he will term "the military-industrial complex" to cash in on the issue. Eisenhower hears a proposal for a new spy plane, the U-3 Archangel, designed to fly at upwards of 85,000 feet at speeds up to Mach 3. The plane will later be designated the A-1; subsequent versions include the A-12, which flew at Mach 3 for hours, and the better-known SR-71 Blackbird, used frequently by the Air Force during the 1970s and 1980s before being retired in 1990. (Philip Taubman) - February 24: A heated debate ensues in Britain's House of Commons over the policies of repression and brutality among the Kenyan detention camps.
Kikuyu, or Mau Mau, rebellion
By this point thousands of detainees have been released, partially to discredit the swirl of allegations of torture and cruelty. Even though by this point Labour Party politicians are virtually united in their opposition to the Conservative government's Kenya policies, they are unable to sway any Conservative MPs to their side, and the House votes along party lines to sqeulch an official inquiry. (Caroline Elkins) - March:
US foreign policy
Iran signs a military cooperation treaty with the US, giving Iran the opportunity to claim some terrority in the ongoing Iran-Iraq border dispute. (MidEast Web)
Second Indochina War
- March: North Vietnam's Ho Chi Minh declares a People's War to unite all of Vietnam under his leadership.
Vietnam War
His Politburo now orders a changeover to an all-out military struggle. Thus begins the Second Indochina War, known to most Americans as simply the Vietnam War. In May, the North Vietnamese establish the Central Office of South Vietnam (COSVN) to oversee the coming war in the South. Construction of the Ho Chi Minh trail now begins. The trail will eventually expand into a 1500 mile-long network of jungle and mountain passes extending from North Vietnam's coast along Vietnam's western border through Laos and parts of Cambodia, funneling a constant stream of soldiers and supplies into the highlands of South Vietnam. In the 1970s a parallel fuel pipeline will be added. In July, 4000 Viet Minh guerrillas, originally born in the South, are sent from North Vietnam to infiltrate South Vietnam. (Vietnam War Timeline) - March 4: News of the beating deaths of ten inmates of the Hola detention camp in Kenya finally forces colonial officials to admit that some Kenyan detainees have been physically abused.
Kikuyu, or Mau Mau, rebellion
Conservative prime minister Harold Macmillan is determined to keep the scandal at bay until after the October elections, and orders his own internal investigation to keep his critics at arm's length. Former Conservative MP Enoch Powell splits from his party's support of Macmillan and the British colonial policies in Kenya to lead an attack from the right on Macmillan. Macmillan cloaks his resistance to an official, non-partisan investigation into the Kenyan atrocities by claiming that any such investigation would merely play into the hands of Communists and anti-British elements in Africa. As stories of similar brutalities begin seeping out from other British colonies in Africa, Macmillan successfully avoids having to conduct an investigation, but realizes that it is becoming impossible to maintain British colonies in Africa, particularly in Kenya. Longtime Kenyan supervisor Alan Lennox-Boyd will quietly retire, and his successor, Ian MacLeod, will supervise the decolonization and eventual independence of Kenya. Macmillan and his Conservatives will retain power in the next elections. At its height, the British colonial government has detained somewhere in the neighborhood of 1.5 million Kikuyu, virtually the entire Kikuyu population. Due to the systematic destruction of British records, it is impossible to know how many of these detainees died in the camps. (Caroline Elkins) - April 22: A test of the Corona spy satellite misfires
Cold War
when it delivers its payload into Norway and is secured by Soviet troops instead of its American owners. The incident inspires Alistair MacLean to write his 1963 novel Ice Station Zebra, featuring a race between US and American intelligence operatives to recover a spy satellite from the polar ice cap. Following launches in June fail to reach orbit. (Philip Taubman) - July 8: Two US military advisors,
Vietnam War
Major Dale Buis and Sergeant Chester Ovnand, are killed by Viet Minh guerrillas at Bien Hoa, South Vietnam. They are the first American deaths in the Second Indochina War which Americans will come to know simply as The Vietnam War. (Vietnam War Timeline) - July 9: A U-2 flight takes off from a secret base in Peshawar,
Cold War
Pakistan and photographs the Soviet base at Tyuratam. The photos show that the Soviets are building a second launch pad, an alarming development, but cannot shed light on the Soviets' current missile capacity. Eisenhower bans further flights until the end of the year. (Philip Taubman) - September: Soviet premier Nikolai Khruschev visits Washington, DC and Camp David, and barnstorms around the US,
Cold War
visiting a Hollywood movie studio and an Iowa farm before sightseeing in New York City. He surprises Eisenhower by failing to mention the U-2 flights, possibly because he is embarrassed over his country's failure to prevent the flights, but openly boasts about Soviet missile capabilities. In November he says that within a year, the USSR will have 250 hydrogen warheads capable of striking any enemies of the Soviet Union; by that point, Russian SS-6 rockets have sent two spacecraft, Luna I and Luna II, to the moon. Air Force claims that the Russians already have 100 nuclear missiles are angrily denied by the CIA's Allen Dulles before the Senate in January 1960, but he is unable to use the secret U-2 photographs to support his claims. (By this time the secrecy of the U-2 project is crumbling. A New York Times journalist, Hanson Baldwin, is already aware of the existence of the plane; Dulles has had to appeal to the publisher of the Times not to print Baldwin's stories about the plane. Other publications, including the Washington Post and the Cleveland Plain Dealer, also know about the U-2 but have agreed not to publish stories.) (Philip Taubman) - September: France's Charles de Gaulle makes a landmark speech,
Algerian rebellion against France
for the first time referring to "self-determination" for Algeria. The French colons, or colonial settlers, feel betrayed by de Gaulle, and stage two unsuccessful insurrections, one in January 1960 and another in April 1961. The conflict between the colons and the de Gaulle administration is the basis for the famous novel The Day of the Jackal, which details a fictional assassination plot against de Gaulle by disaffected colons but incorporates numerous real-life historical details. (OnWar)
Saddam Hussein recuited by the CIA
- October 7: Ba'athists attempt a coup in Iraq;
CIA recruits Saddam Hussein
when it fails, many Ba'athists, including a young tough named Saddam Hussein, flee to Syria and later Egypt, aided by CIA and Egyptian agents. Qasim publicly breaks with the Communist party, though he buys arms from the USSR and puts his own Communist sympathizers in positions of power; the Kurds, more sympathetic to the Communists, revolt. The Kurds will continue to wage low-level war against Iraqi government for years to come. A CIA-sponsored assassination attempt on Qasim fails; it is later proven that Saddam Hussein tried to assassinate Qasim. Iraq withdraws from the Baghdad Pact, stunning many US observers, who view Iraq as a buffer and key asset in the Cold War. CIA operative Miles Copeland later states that the US had enjoyed a "close relationship" with the Ba'ath party. One former U.S. government official, who knew Saddam at the time, said that even then Saddam "was known as having no class. He was a thug -- a cutthroat." Over the next three years, Hussein will regularly visit the American embassy in Cairo and is recruited by the CIA. He quickly rises in the CIA's esteem because of his intelligence, his ruthlessness, and his loyalty to both the Ba'aths and the CIA. (UPI, MidEast Web, 1UpTravel)
Manuel Noriega recruited by DIA
- Manuel
DIA recruits Noriega
Noriega, later the strongman dictator of Panama, is recruited as an agent by the US Defense Intelligence Agency. (Bushwatch) - By the end of the year, only four FBI agents are detailed for duty in New York City to investigate the Mafia,
Cold War
while 400 agents comb the city for Communists. This is partly because of Hoover's determination to have his agency publicly seen as America's first line of defense against Communist infiltration, but it is also because of the US's wartime deals with the Mafia to work against Mussolini, and its postwar deal with gangster Lucky Luciano to pacify occupied Italy. As a result, the FBI loses decades' worth of time and effort in battling the Mafia's influence in the US. (Derek Leebaert)
1960
US military advisors enter South Vietnam in force
- The first US military advisors enter Vietnam, to help the French put down Vietnamese insurgents
Vietnam War
(organizing as the National Liberation Front, or more informally known as the Viet Cong, which itself grew out of the Viet Minh resistance). This will escalate into the largest undeclared war in US history, lasting until 1975. 1.2 million American troops are slain in Vietnam, and twice the US will covertly threaten to attack Vietnam with nuclear weapons, in 1968 and 1969. Anti-war protests in the US help bring about the resignation of Republican president Richard Nixon, who promised to end the conflict upon taking office in 1968 but instead dramatically escalated the conflict. The war is considered the US's worst military defeat, resulting in the forced reunification of Vietnam under the Communist North Vietnamese government's control. (ZNet, Chronology of US-Vietnam Relations) - OPEC
Oil profiteering and the "oiligarchy"
-- the Organization for Petroleum Exporting Countries -- is created in Baghdad. Members include Iraq, Iran, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela, with Qatar, Indonesia, Libya, the United Arab Emirates, and Algeria later joining. (CBS) - Vice President Richard Nixon,
US actions in Latin America
along with Deputy CIA Director Richard Bissell and others, plan the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, also known as Operation Zapata. The idea is to use Cuban emigres and mercenaries, with CIA support, to topple the regime of Communist ruler Fidel Castro. Rumors of George Bush's involvement are never proven; it is, however, known that Bush's Zapata Oil is affiliated with the CIA. (JFK Assassination Timeline, Bushwatch)
Operation Northwoods
- The blandly named Operation Northwoods is designed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff beginning in late 1960, and is first proposed to Defense Secretary Robert McNamara on March 13, 1962.
US actions in Latin America
It is a combination of provocations and ruses designed to inflame the American public and draw the US into a war with Cuba. The plans included the possible assassination of Cuban emigrants, sinking boats of Cuban refugees on the high seas, hijacking planes, blowing up a US ship, and orchestrating violent terrorism in US cities. The authors of the plans write, "We could blow up a US ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba... [C]asualty lists in US newspapers would cause a helpful wave of national indignation." The plans proposed using the potential death of astronaut John Glenn as a pretext for war: if by chance the Mercury rocket were to malfunction and cause Glenn's death, "the objective is to provide irrevocable proof...that the fault lies with the Communists et all Cuba [sic]." The plans call for establishing prolonged military, not democratic, control over the nation after the invasion. The Kennedy administration, and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara in particular, refuse to countenance the idea, and the plans are shelved. However, the Pentagon will continue to produce "pretext" operations proposals through 1963. One idea is to create a war between Cuba and another Latin American country so that the United States could intervene; another is to pay someone in the Castro government to attack US forces at the Guantanamo naval base. A third was to fly low level U-2 flights over Cuba, with the intention of having one shot down as a pretext for war. Other plans include the deliberate sinking of a boatload of Cuban refugees and blaming it on the Cubans; the assasinations of Cubans living in the US; and faking a Cuban Air Force attack on a US jetliner. Author James Bamford writes that Operation Northwoods "may be the most corrupt plan ever created by the US government." (Killtown, National Security Archives) - During his presidential campaign,
1960 presidential elections
John F. Kennedy will repeatedly insist that the US is on the wrong side of a "missile gap" with the Soviet Union, placing the US at risk in any military confrontation. In actuality, there is no missile gap, and Kennedy has received classified military briefings that confirm the fact. (David Corn) - Movie mogul Lew Wasserman encourages former SAG president Ronald Reagan to run for the post again.
Ronald Reagan
Wasserman and other Hollywood corporate executives need a friend in the job to help them during the upcoming negotiations with the actors over residual motion picture rights. Labor attorney Sidney Korshak, later proven to be the link between the Hollywood business world and organized crime, worked closely with Reagan and the studios in the final settlement. Reagan is ostensibly the actors' chief negotiator, but unbeknownst to the actors, Reagan is in the pockets of the corporate interests. The final contract is still known in Hollywood as "The Great Giveaway." The actors are locked into an agreement that gives them residuals only on films made after 1960. The agreement greatly benefits the production companies, most notably MCA, Reagan's own talent agency, which had purchased the film library of Paramount Pictures in 1959 and could now keep the profits. (Dan Moldea)
Greensboro Four protests
- February 1: Four black college students hold a "sit-in" at a whites-only lunch counter at a Greensboro, NC Woolworth's.
Minority rights
Police are called when the four refuse to move until they are served, but the four are not arrested. The four men return to the Woolworth's lunch counter again the next day and hold another "sit-in;" this time, there is news coverage. Word spreads of the incidents, and within days, similar sit-ins are held in Greensboro and surrounding communities. Officials of the Congress for Racial Equality (CORE) organize marches in support of the "Greensboro Four," and they are joined by CORE officials and other national civil rights figures in subsequent sit-ins. One of the four, Dr. James Bennett, recalls that while many whites were verbally abusive, not all were: one well-dressed white woman comes up to Bennett and says, "Why did it take you all so long?" The only violence is perpetrated by the white hecklers, who attempt to provoke the protesters by name-calling and racial taunts, and in one instance by throwing a glass of water on one of the protesters; the hecklers will later take to the streets shouting obscenities and throwing bottles. Eventually the protesters are taken to local police headquarters, where they are fingerprinted and released. The sit-ins lead to the integration of the nation's Woolworths, and is remembered as one of the key moments of the civil rights movement. Bennett says, "The sit-in made me realize if you don't resist wrong, you will keep getting what you are getting. I firmly believe the Greensboro Four were right in what they did. If I had the chance to participate in it again, I would." (Dunn Daily Record)
CIA destabilization of Castro begins
- March 17: Eisenhower approves a covert plan to destabilize the Cuban government of Fidel Castro.
US actions in Latin America
Spurred by an economic agreement between Cuba and the USSR, the plan includes a "powerful propaganda campaign" designed to overthrow Castro, as well as the termination of sugar purchases by the US, the end of oil deliveries, continuation of the arms embargo in effect since mid-1958, and the organization of a paramilitary force of Cuban exiles to invade the island. In addition, several CIA-sponsored anti-Castro radio stations begin broadcasting over the island in May. Partially in response to US pressure, Castro steps up his government's repressive tactics. (History of Cuba) - April: Eighteen distinguished nationalists in South Vietnam send a petition
Vietnam War
to President Diem advocating that he reform his rigid, family-run, and increasingly corrupt, government. Diem ignores their advice and instead closes several opposition newspapers and arrests journalists and intellectuals. (Vietnam War Timeline) - April 9: Four more U-2 flights are scheduled;
Cold War
the first takes off from Peshawar over Afghanistan and into southern Soviet airspace, bound for Tyuratam. The U-2 has air-to-air missiles fired at it, but none come close to striking it, mostly due to the failure of the Soviets to scramble their MiG fighters in time to close with the U-2. It is only a matter of time before a U-2 would be shot down. Program director Richard Bissell fails to concede the vulnerability of the U-2 to the new Soviet capability to down his planes, and he continues with the launch schedule. Worse, the White House mistakenly concludes that the Soviets have decided to tolerate the flights because of the lack of Soviet protest to the April 9 flight; Eisenhower's science advisor, George Kistiakowsky, later speculates that Khruschev might have deliberately refrained from protesting the flight in hopes of luring the US into sending another plane over Soviet airspace. Bissell, responsible for the U-2 flights, the Corona spy satellite program, and a myriad of CIA black ops, many centering on Cuba's Fidel Castro, is hopelessly overstretched, and his judgment is arguably at fault. (Philip Taubman)
Francis Gary Powers shot down over USSR
- May 1: A U-2 flight with pilot Francis Gary Powers is launched.
Cold War
The flight plan takes Powers clear across the central USSR, from Peshawar, Pakistan to a landing in Norway, and gives the Soviets ample time to track the flight and bring their latest antiaircraft missiles to bear. Powers is detected by Soviet radar even before leaving Afghanistan's airspace. (The US doesn't figure into its calculations that May 1 is a holiday in the USSR, and there is little military air traffic to distract defense air units; also, civilian air traffic is at a minimum. Powers is flying into what is essentially an aerial shooting gallery.) Four and a half hours into the flight, Powers is targeted by missiles at a previously unknown base near Sverdlovsk. An SA-2 ground-to-air missile detonates immediately behind Powers' plane, severely damaging the fragile craft and sending it spiraling towards the ground. Powers is able to parachute to safety, but is unable to activate the craft's self-destruct mechanism. The Soviets capture both plane and pilot. Khruschev cannily issues an announcement of the plane's downing, but does not mention Powers' capture, hoping that the US will lie about the nature of the flight. The US does so, claiming that the U-2 is actually a NASA weather observation plane gone astray. Khruschev recalls later that "As long as the Americans thought the pilot was dead, they would keep putting out the story that perhaps the plane had accidentally strayed off course and had been shot down in the mountains on the Soviet side of the border." - Six days later, Khruschev announces that Powers has been captured and has confessed that he is a spy on a mission to photograph Soviet military installations. A firestorm of media and public criticism ensues, fed by Eisenhower's reluctant admission that Powers was indeed flying an espionage mission but denying that the flight had been authorized by his administration. The US public is astounded by the blatant deceit of the Eisenhower administration; Philip Taubman observes that the handling of the U-2 incident ranks with the later governmental lies about My Lai and Watergate in its effect on Americans' faith in its government to be truthful. "It set a shocking new standard of deceit at the time," he writes, "and left many Americans wondering whether they could trust their leaders." The idea that such an audacious espionage mission could have been launched without the approval of Washington leads most to conclude that either the government is lying or that it is completely incompetent. Speculations that Eisenhower is "not minding the store" are rife, fueled by his untimely decision to spend the afternoon on the golf course.
- Of all people, Vice President Nixon leads the call within the administration to come clean, saying that the assertion that Eisenhower was unaware of the spy flights could create the impression that a war could start without Eisenhower's knowledge. Even a further admission that the US had sent out dozens of U-2 flights before this one was marred by a denial that Eisenhower had approved any of the flights. On May 11, Eisenhower gives a blunt and specific press conference detailing some of the specifics of the U-2 program and emphasizing the necessity of keeping such a program secret. On May 15, the New York Times publishes a long, detailed article about the U-2 program by journalist Hanson Baldwin, who has known for months about the program but has not been allowed to print anything up till now. The article confirms that Eisenhower personally authorized every U-2 flight, including the last mission. Eisenhower suspends any more U-2 flights after Khruschev angrily denounces the spy flights at a Geneva summit and walks out of the meeting. Even though the U-2 program essentially ends in disgrace, Eisenhower is not slow to praise the benefits of the U-2 surveillance, saying on May 25, "It must be remembered that over a long period these flights had given us information of the greatest importance to the nation's security. In fact, their success has been nothing short of remarkable." The U-2 will never fly again over Soviet airspace, but CIA director George Tenet will say in 1998 that the program "constituted nothing less than a revolution in intelligence." (Further U-2 flights will take place, mostly over Cuba.) In part due to the U-2 debacle, the emphasis of US surveillance shifts almost completely to the Corona spy satellite program. On August 19, Powers is convicted of espionage by a Soviet court and sentenced to ten years in a Soviet jail. (Philip Taubman)
- June 19: Japan's parliament, the Diet, ratifies the AMPO treaty which allows US military forces to remain in Japan.
US foreign policy
Japan's prime minister Kishi Nobuseke, a war criminal and CIA asset, rams the vote through by, among other tactics, having opposition members who would vote against the treaty forcibly carried out of the Diet building. The fraudulent treaty ratification galvanizes hundreds of thousands of Japanese protestors, resulting in the largest demonstrations in Japanese history and the eventual resignation of Kishi in favor of Ikeda Hayato. The incident helps the conservative LDP gain a stranglehold on Japanese politics for the next fifteen years. (Bestor on AMPO, Larry Kolb) - August 10: Discoverer XIII,
US space program
part of the Corona spy satellite program, successfully launches from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. It achieves orbit, completes 17 revolutions around the globe, and dispatches its payload to its target in the Pacific Ocean, which is recovered by the USS Haiti Victory. The Air Force's water recovery technique, long considered a fallback to a land recovery, later becomes NASA's method of choice for the manned space program. The recovery of Discoverer is front-page news, though the public does not realize that the Discoverer program is actually a spy satellite system. Nine days later Discoverer XIV successfully delivers a payload to its target; the payload is successfully snatched out of the sky by a C-119. The two satellites contain surveillance film that will prove critical to US estimates of Soviet missile capabilities. (Philip Taubman) - September:
1960 presidential elections
Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kennedy informs voters that, although he is a devout Catholic, he is not controlled by the Pope or the Catholic church. "I believe in a president whose religious views are his own private affair," he says. (Eric Alterman and Mark Green) - November: A failed coup against President Diem by disgruntled South Vietnamese Army officers brings a harsh crackdown against all perceived "enemies of the state."
Vietnam War
Over 50,000 are arrested by police controlled by Diem's brother Nhu with many innocent civilians tortured and executed. This results in further erosion of popular support for Diem. Thousands who fear arrest flee to North Vietnam. Ho Chi Minh will later send many back to infiltrate South Vietnam as part of his People's Liberation Armed Forces. Called Viet Cong by Diem, meaning Communist Vietnamese, Ho's guerrillas blend into the countryside, indistinguishable from South Vietnamese, while working to undermine Diem's government. (Vietnam War Timeline)
Kennedy defeats Nixon for US presidency
- November: After a famous television debate between Republican Vice-President Richard Nixon and Democratic contender John F. Kennedy,
Kennedy administration
where Nixon, suffering from a knee problem and refusing to be "made up" for the cameras, looks sallow and ill while Kennedy looks tanned and fit, Kennedy defeats Nixon in one of the closest elections in American history, with a margin of only 0.2%. Nixon's campaign claims election irregularities in Texas, Missouri, and Illinois (where Mafia influence and a number of dead Chicago voters supposedly gave the state to Kennedy), and contrary to present claims, contests the results in these states for weeks even after reluctantly conceding the election. Both sides claim the other has run an exceptionally dirty campaign. Under Nixon's prodding, the FBI provides some information on Kennedy's sex life, including allegations of a secret first marriage, that the campaign decides not to release over fears of it backfiring on them. Both sides claim the other is wiretapping one another's phones; in the last week of the campaign, Kennedy tells his speechwriter Richard Goodwin that Nixon is a "filthy, lying son of a b*tch, and a very dangerous man." ( BBC, JFK Assassination Timeline, David Fremon) - Investigative reporters Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson reveal during the campaign that in 1956
Richard Nixon
Nixon accepted a $205,000 "loan" from eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes's Hughes Tool Company to Nixon Incorporated, a company run by Nixon's brother Donald. The money was never paid back. Soon after the money was paid the Internal Revenue Service reversed a previous decision to grant tax-exempt status to the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Some political observers feel that the revelation helped Kennedy win the election. (Spartacus Educational) - Late 1960:
Vietnam War
Reports of Soviet backing of North Vietnamese troops and of Laotian insurgents concern Eisenhower; he will pass his concerns to the next president, John F. Kennedy. (D.J. Herda)
1960s
- One hundred government agencies set up clandestine surveillance of citizens protesting the Vietnam War, civil rights proponents, and women's rights advocates.
Minority rights
The Defense Department conducts warrantless searches of college dormitories to gather information later presented to President Johnson in its report, "Restless Youth." The Secret Service compiles a list of citizens to be rounded up and incarcerated in case of "national emergency." The CIA's numerous illegal investigations were placed under the umbrella acronym of CHAOS, while the FBI's no less illegal investigations were conducted under the auspices of the umbrella program CONINTELPRO. Several million Americans had secret files; 500,000 pieces of mail were illegally opened and read; thousands of mainly peaceful anti-war and civil rights organizations were infiltrated and spied upon; an unknown number of innocent citizens were threatened, intimidated, blackmailed, and jailed. The 1976 investigation headed by Democratic Senator Frank Church found that "Too many people have been spied upon by too many government agencies and too much information has been collected. The government has often undertaken the secret surveillance of citizens on the basis of their political beliefs, even when those beliefs pose no threat of violence or illegal acts or illegal acts on behalf of a hostile foreign power.... Investigations have been based upon vague standards whose breadth made excessive collection inevitable. Unsavory and vicious tactics have been employed -- including anonymous attempts to break up marriages, disrupt meetings, ostracize persons from their professions, and provoke target groups into rivalries that might result in deaths. Intelligence agencies have served the political and personal objectives of presidents and other high officials...government officials -- including those whose principal duty is to uphold the law -- have violated or ignored the law over long periods of time and have advocated or defended their right to break the law." (Lewis Lapham)
