THE 1970s: GOVERNMENT AND POLITICS: PEOPLE IN THE NEWS

On January 1975 after four and a half years underground, radical Weatherman Jane Alpert surrendered herself to police. Alpert received a twenty-seven-month sentence.

On 11 August 1970 the Reverend Daniel J. Berrigan, one of a group of peace activists known as the Catonsville Nine convicted of burning draft records in Catonsville, Maryland, in 1968, was seized by the FBI. Berrigan had been a fugitive for four months.

On 12 January 1971 antiwar activist, the Reverend Philip F. Berrigan, already imprisoned for burning draft cards, was indicted along with six others for conspiring to kidnap National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger and bomb the heating systems of federal buildings in Washington, D.C. The subsequent "Harrisburg Seven" trial ended in a hung jury. On 5 September 1972 the Justice Department dropped all charges.

On 4 October 1976, in the midst of President Gerald Ford's election campaign, Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz resigned following his "gross indiscretion" of racist jokes and remarks.

In 1977 Robert C. Byrd (D-West Virginia) became Senate majority leader. Byrd, a bluegrass fiddler and former member of the Ku Klux Klan, soon moderated some of his established conservatism and earned a reputation as a technician, deftly moving legislation through Congress.

On 29 March 1971 1st Lt. William L. Calley, Jr., was convicted of premeditated murder in the 1968 massacre of twenty-eight South Vietnamese civilians at My Lai. On 20 August he is sentenced to life in prison, a sentence which was reduced on appeal to twenty years imprisonment. He was paroled by the army on 8 November 1974.

On 8 April 1970 Judge G. Harrold Carswell of Georgia was rejected by the Senate for nomination to the Supreme Court. President Nixon, who had placed Carswell's name in nomination, responded by chastising the Senate for an act of "regional discrimination,"

In November 1975 presidential aspirant Ronald Reagan was attacked by twenty-year-old college dropout Michael Lance Carvin. Having assaulted Reagan with a plastic gun, Carvin was arrested and turned over to authorities for psychiatric care.

On 13 October 1970 black activist and former UCLA instructor Angela Davis was arrested in New York and charged with kidnapping, murder, and conspiracy in connection with an 7 August shootout in a San Rafael, California, courtroom. She was acquitted of all charges on 4 June 1972.

Thirteen-term Michigan Democrat Charles Diggs was censured in 1979 by the House for padding his payroll and taking public funds for personal use. Diggs had been reelected in 1978 despite accusations of corruption and became the first congressman since 1921 to be censured by the House.

Former representative Joshua Eilberg (D-Pennsylvania) pleaded guilty in 1979 to conflict of interest in a kick-back scheme.

On 5 September 1978 Representative Daniel Flood (D-Pennsylvania) was indicted by a federal grand jury for kickbacks and conflict of interest. The case ended in mistrial in 1979. Flood retired from the House in 1980.

Lynette ("Squeaky") Fromme, 26, attempted to assassinate President Ford in 1975. A member of the infamous Manson family, which had been responsible for a California murder spree in 1969, Fromme was sentenced to life in prison.

On 1 September 1974 Alan Greenspan succeeded Herbert Stein as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers. A controversial appointment, critics feared that Greenspan and his adherence to Ayn Rand's semi-philosophical "objectivist" economics would un-duly influence President Ford.

On 16 September 1974 President Ford nominated White House Chief of Staff Gen. Alexander M. Haig, Jr., to head North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) forces in Europe. During the last days of the Nixon administration, Haig was a stabilizing influence in the White House, in effect, according to some, "running the country." Although the nomination was controversial, Haig

Rep. Richard Hanna (D-California) was sentenced to prison in 1977 for taking $200,000 in bribes from South Korean lobbyist Tongsun Park.

On 25 May 1976 Rep. Wayne Hays (D-Ohio) acknowledged a personal relationship with his secretary, Elizabeth Ray, but denied that the fourteen-thousand-dollar-per-year salary she earned was for sexual favors. Ray had made the charge, adding "I can't type. I can't file; I can't even answer the phone." Hays responded by arguing that Ray had "emotional and psychological problems."

On 5 March 1975 the Senate confirmed Carla A. Hills as secretary of Housing and Urban Development. She was the third woman in U.S. history to serve in a cabinet-level post.

On 6 August 1975 Alger Hiss, former State Department official convicted of perjury in a sensational spy trial twenty-five years earlier, was reinstated to the Massachusetts bar.

On 24 July 1974 Rep. Barbara Jordan (D-Texas) earned national acclaim for her speech during the House Judiciary Committee's debate over the impeachment of President Nixon. The first black woman elected to Congress from the Deep South, Jordan began her address by remarking that she, as an African-American woman, was originally left out of the "We the People," compact of the Constitution. She went on to remark that the strength of the Constitution is its capacity for amendment. "My faith in the Constitution is whole, it is complete, it is total," she concluded, "and I am not going to sit here and be an idle spectator to the diminution, the subversion, the destruction of the Constitution." She voted to recommend to the House that they impeach Nixon on three counts, as did the majority of the committee.

In winter 1978 White House aide Hamilton Jordan became a nearly constant subject for Washington's tabloid press. First came reports of Jordan's sexual overtures toward the Egyptian ambassador's wife; then separation from his wife of seven years; then reports that he spat a drink down the dress of a woman in Sarsfield's, a suburban bar. The final report so incensed the White House that Press Secretary Jody Powell issued an eight-thousand-word, thirty-three-page denial of the Sarsfield's incident, including a de-position from the bartender. Despite the gossip, in August 1979 Jordan became President Carter's chief of staff.

On 21 September 1977 Carter presidential adviser Burt Lance resigned as director of the Office of Management and Budget. Lance was criticized for his "unsound and unsafe" practices as head of a Georgia bank, as well as suffering from charges that he had peddled influence for Arab banking interests.

On 10 December 1974 Arkansas Democrat Wilbur D. Mills resigned his post as House Ways and Means chairman. Mills had been linked to several well-publicized incidents with stripper Fanne Foxe, "The Argentine Firecracker."

In 1975 Sara Jane Moore, a middle-aged housewife and social activist obsessed with Patty Hearst, attempted to assassinate President Ford in San Francisco. At her trial Moore declared that "any government (that) uses assassination …must expect that tool to be turned back against itself." She was sentenced to life in prison.

In February 1970 a memorandum drafted for President Nixon by his adviser Daniel Patrick Moynihan was leaked to the press and ignited a firestorm of protest. The memorandum, which recommended to Nixon that he allow race relations in the United States to lapse into a period of "benign neglect," was denounced by liberals and black activists.

On 20 October 1976 the Justice Department announced an investigation of South Korean businessman Tongsun Park, a South Korean lobbyist. Park was suspected of making cash contributions of $500,000 to $1 million annually to influence congressional legislation. The scandal associated with Park became known as Koreagate. He was acquitted, but the IRS nonetheless sought $4.5 million in back taxes from him.

In September 1971 Gov. Nelson Rockefeller of New York refused to negotiate with Attica State Prison inmates who have taken over the facility and seized hostages to protest conditions within the prison. Rockefeller ordered the prison stormed by state police. The facility was retaken, but forty-three people were killed, including ten hostages. A subsequent investigative commission revealed that all were killed by police bullets.

On 30 July 1974 Peter W. Rodino, Jr., chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, submitted to the full House his committee's recommendation that it impeach President Nixon for three counts of "high crimes and misdemeanors." Although Nixon's resignation on 8 August rendered the vote academic, on 20 August the House approved the report 412-3—a measure of what would have happened on an impeachment vote had Nixon not resigned.

On 19 January 1977 President Ford granted a pardon to Tokyo Rose (Iva Toguri D'Aquino). She had been convicted of treason because of her broadcasts from Japan during World War II designed to demoralize U.S. troops

On 29 July 1976 Rep. Robert L. F. Sikes, Democrat of Florida, was reprimanded by the House of Representatives by a vote of 381-3 for financial misconduct.