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Post by Paul Ernst on May 18, 2020 16:28:47 GMT -5
April 21, 1961:
JFK opens a breakfast meeting that precedes a scheduled pressconference by remarking: “The happiest people in government today are the ones who can say they didn’t know anything about it” (the Bay of Pigs invasion).
According to notes taken by Richard Nixon. Goodwin, JFK is “concerned that the entire blame for this not be placed on the CIA.”
JFK continues: “In my experience, things like this go along for a while, but memory is short, and if we just sit tight for about three weeks, things will cool off and we can proceed from there.”
Still, JFK’s popularity goes to an all-time high of over 80 percent.
“The worse you do, the better they like you,” JFK remarks on seeing the poll results.Less than a week following the Bay of Pigs debacle, a meeting is held with JFK’s Cuban advisors.
Undersecretary of State Chester Bowles advises that nothing can be done about Castro
- as he is now entrenched. Other aides such as Richard Goodwin agree.
RFK simply explodes. “That’s the most meaningless, worthless thing I’ve ever heard,” he replies angrily.
“You people are so anxious to protect your own asses that you’re afraid to do anything ...
We’d be better off if you just quit and left foreign policy to someone else.”A Fair Play for Cuba rally is held at Union Square in New York and draws three thousand people.
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Post by Paul Ernst on May 19, 2020 7:56:18 GMT -5
April 22, 1961:
JFK directs Gen. Maxwell Taylor, in association with Attorney General Robert Kennedy, Admiral Arleigh Burke, and Allen Dulles, to give him a report on the “Immediate Causes of Failure of Operation Zapata.”
“How did I ever let it happen?” JFK asks rhetorically,
“I know better than to listen to experts.
They always have their own agenda. All my life I’ve known it, and yet I still barreled ahead.” Taylor will finish his report on June 13, 1961.
C. Wright Mills wires a Fair Play for Cuba rally in San Francisco: “Kennedy and company have returned us to barbarism.
Schlesinger and company have disgraced us intellectually and morally.
I feel a desperate shame for my country.
Sorry I cannot be with you.
Were I physically able to do so, I would at this moment be fighting alongside Fidel Castro.”
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Post by Paul Ernst on May 20, 2020 21:34:18 GMT -5
April 23, 1961:
New reports today disclose that Carlos Marcello is being held in custody by Guatemalan authorities in connection with what are reported to be false citizenship papers he presented upon his arrival there on April 6th.
“Dan Carswell” -- released from a Cuban prison in a prisoner exchange -- lands at Homestead Air Force Base in Florida, where he receives a hero’s welcome.
Carswell will later testify that he is at work in CIA headquarters in Langley on Nov. 22, 1963.
Some researchers, however, believe Carswell was in Dallas that day and could well have been one of the tramps arrested near Dealey Plaza.
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Post by Paul Ernst on May 21, 2020 4:15:15 GMT -5
April 29, 1961:
A National Security Council meeting of this day deals with Vietnam.
Prior to this session there is a “brainstorming” meeting which includes: McNamara, Rusk, RFK, Bowles, U. Alexis Johnson, and other State Dept. officials.
There are repeated references to the use of nuclear weapons.
The use of nuclear weapons is discussed without reservations.
McNamara points out that if their decision is to intervene it has to be done right away.
The situation is deteriorating so rapidly that each passing day means a higher price in American lives.
Rusk also argues for a quick decision.
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Post by Paul Ernst on May 22, 2020 3:21:42 GMT -5
April 29, 1961
A National Security Council meeting of this day deals with Viet Nam.
Prior to this session there is a “brainstorming” meeting which includes: McNamara, Rusk, RFK, Bowles, U. Alexis Johnson, and other State Dept. officials.
There are repeated references to the use of nuclear weapons.
The use of nuclear weapons is discussed without reservations.
McNamara points out that if their decision is to intervene it has to be done right away.
The situation is deteriorating so rapidly that each passing day means a higher price in American lives.
Rusk also argues for a quick decision.
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Post by Paul Ernst on May 22, 2020 23:09:36 GMT -5
April 30, 1961:
Lee Harvey Oswald marries nineteen year old Marina Prusakova.
Also sometime during the last part of April, Dr. Alexis H. Davidson begins a tour of duty as the U.S. Embassy physician in Moscow.
In connection with this assignment, as Davidson later testifies, he receives some “superficial intelligence training.”
This training, he says, mainly involves lectures on Soviet life and instructions on remembering and reporting Soviet names and military activities.
In fact, for at least a year during his Moscow tour of duty, Davidson will serve as part of the signal system for a CIA agent who is a highly placed GRU officer, Colonel Oleg Penkovsky.
When the Soviets finally break the Penkovsky case in 1963, Davidson will be publicly declared persona non grata.
The name of Dr. Davidson's mother and her Atlanta address will appear in Oswald’s address book.
(When LHO and Marina eventually do return to the USA, their plane will make a stop in Atlanta .)
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Post by Paul Ernst on May 27, 2020 3:22:25 GMT -5
May 1, 1961:
Oswald’s Diary: 1st May Day 1961. Found us thinking about our future.
Inspite of fact I married Marina to hurt Ella I found myself in love with Marina.
Note:
Ella German was a Belarusian:
Is a Belarusian woman known for having a brief relationship with Lee Harvey Oswald after his defection to the Soviet Union in 1959.
She has lived most of her life in Minsk, the capital of Belarus;
In 2013 she was living in the Israeli town of Acre.
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Post by Paul Ernst on May 28, 2020 6:35:10 GMT -5
May 3, 1961:
JFK remarks: “It’s just like Eisenhower. The worse I do, the more popular I get.
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Post by Paul Ernst on May 28, 2020 6:37:29 GMT -5
May 4, 1961:
Judith Campbell makes the first of some twenty visits to the White House to continue her extramarital relationship with JFK.
Cuban Revolutionary Council President Jose Miro Cardona emerges, smiling, from a meeting today with JFK.
He will later say that the President personally formalizes “a pact which called for a new invasion [of Cuba.]”
Guatemalan President Miguel Fuentes orders that Carlos Marcello be expelled.
Marcello is driven to and released at the El Salvador border late this evening.
Two busloads of blacks and whites leave Washington, D.C. for the Deep South to challenge segregation in interstate bus terminals and facilities.
The riders encounter fights and arrests en route, and in Anniston, Alabama, a mob of whites burns one of the buses and beats its passengers
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Post by Paul Ernst on May 29, 2020 2:49:25 GMT -5
May 11, 1961:
Between thirty and forty Americans arrive in Miami from Texas on this date to train as volunteers for some future military action against Cuba.
The training camp they attend has been established by Gerald Patrick Hemming.
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