After the Assassination of Gerald R. Ford - a TL

[Onkel Willie]

So I've been working on a new project. I was reading up on the two assassination attempts on President Ford, neither of which succeeded. I decided to write a TL with this as the PoD because it has the real potential for a totally different 20th and 21st century. Without further ado I present the first chapter.

After the Assassination of Gerald R. Ford



Chapter I: Watergate and the Assassination of Ford, 1974-1975.​

The 1970s were a turbulent decade in the history of the United States for multiple reasons. Richard M. Nixon was the President of the United States at the beginning of this new decade, having been elected in 1968. His foreign policy has been deemed successful as his overture to China, culminating in his visit to Mao Zedong, led to a shift in the Cold War balance of power. Besides that, his détente policy towards the Soviet Union also bore fruit as the two countries signed the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT) and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.

His domestic policies were also positively received at the time, even though his Controlled Substances Act resulted in the war on drugs. His administration created the Environmental Protection Agency and passed legislation such as the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Air Acts, and the Clean Water Acts (although he vetoed the final version of the CWA). He implemented the ratified the Twenty-Sixth Amendment, which lowered the voting age from 21 to 18 and enforced the desegregation of Southern schools. Under Nixon, relations with Native Americans improved, seeing an increase in self-determination for Native Americans and his administration rescinded the termination policy. Nixon imposed wage and price controls for 90 days, began the War on Cancer, and presided over the Apollo 11 Moon landing, which signalled the end of the Space Race. He was re-elected with a historic electoral landslide in 1972 when he defeated Democratic candidate George McGovern.

Perhaps his most important decision was to end American involvement in the Vietnam War, which had begun with the major escalation under President Johnson after the Gulf of Tonkin Incident ten years prior. When Nixon took office, about 300 American soldiers were dying each week in Vietnam, and the war was widely unpopular in the United States, the subject of ongoing violent protests. The Johnson administration had offered to suspend bombing unconditionally in exchange for negotiations, but to no avail.

Further escalation in 1968 had no effect as the Tet Offensive demonstrated, which may have been a US and South Vietnamese tactical victory but was also a North Vietnamese strategic success. Negotiations resulting in the signing of the Paris Peace Accords in 1973, which led to the complete withdrawal of the US Army from Vietnam that year. The truce between North and South Vietnam unfortunately held only briefly.

The Watergate Scandal, however, threatened to ruin Nixon’s entire legacy and this was completely his own doing. The term “Watergate” has come to encompass an array of clandestine and often illegal activities undertaken by members of the Nixon administration. Those activities included “dirty tricks”, such as bugging the offices of political opponents, and the harassment of activist groups and political figures. The activities were brought to light after five men were caught breaking into the Democratic party headquarters at the Watergate Complex in Washington DC on June 17th 1972. The Washington Post picked up on the story; reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward relied on an informant known as “Deep Throat” – later revealed to be Mark Felt, associate director at the FBI – to link the men to the Nixon administration.

The scandal grew to involve a slew of additional allegations against the President, ranging from the improper use of government agencies to accepting gifts in office and his personal finances and taxes. Even with support diminished by the continuing series of revelations, Nixon hoped to fight the charges. But one of the new tapes, recorded soon after the break-in, demonstrated that Nixon had been told of the White House connection to the Watergate burglaries soon after they took place, and had approved plans to thwart the investigation. In a statement accompanying the release of what became known as the “Smoking Gun Tape” on August 5th 1974, Nixon accepted blame for misleading the country about when he had been told of White House involvement, stating that he had had a lapse of memory.

Nixon met Senate Minority Leader Hugh Scott, Senator Barry Goldwater, and House Minority Leader John Jacob Rhodes. Rhodes told Nixon he faced certain impeachment in the House. Scott and Goldwater told the president that he had, at most, only fifteen votes in his favour in the Senate, far fewer than the 34 needed to avoid removal from office. In light of his loss of political support and the near-certainty that he would be impeached and removed from office, Nixon resigned the Presidency on August 9th 1974 after a televised address.

Gerald Ford became the 38th President of the United States as a result. When Nixon resigned on August 9th 1974, Ford automatically assumed the Presidency, taking the oath of office in the East Room of the White House. This made him the only person to become the nation's chief executive without being elected to the Presidency or the Vice Presidency. Immediately afterward, he spoke to the assembled audience in a speech that was broadcast live to the nation, noting the peculiarity of his position. He later declared that “our long national nightmare is over”. He couldn’t be much further from the truth. On August 20th he nominated Nelson Rockefeller and, even though conservative Republicans weren’t pleased with this choice, they voted for his confirmation.

Ford had been in office for little over a month when he authorized the pardon of his predecessor Nixon for any crimes he might have committed as President, the Watergate scandal in particular. He felt the pardon was in the best interest of the nation, but the decision was controversial and critics derided it as a corrupt bargain: that Ford’s pardon was granted in exchange for Nixon’s resignation, elevating Ford to the Presidency. A more popular decision perhaps was Ford’s general amnesty for draft evaders.

With such a short time in office before the midterms and so shortly after the Watergate Scandal, there was little Ford could do to affect the outcome. The 1974 Congressional midterm elections took place in the wake of the Watergate scandal and less than three months after Ford assumed office. The Democratic Party turned voter dissatisfaction into large gains in the House of Representatives elections, taking 49 seats from the Republican Party, increasing their majority to 291 of the 435 seats. This was one more than the number needed (290) for a two-thirds majority, the number necessary to override a Presidential veto or to propose a constitutional amendment.

His Presidency remained challenging as he presided over the worst economy since the Great Depression four decades earlier, to which he responded with criticized tax cuts. His support for the Equal Rights Amendment and his pro-choice stance on abortion didn’t earn him support among conservative Republicans. He continued his predecessor’s détente policies vis-à-vis the Soviet Union, signing the Helsinki Accords, and China. He dealt with the Turkish invasion of northern Cyprus by suspending military aid to Turkey. His shuttle diplomacy between Israel and the Arabs in the wake of the Yom Kippur War was unsuccessful and he suspended further aid to Israel between March and September 1975.

President Ford wouldn’t complete his term as he became the fifth President of the United States to be assassinated after Abraham Lincoln, James A. Garfield, William McKinley and John F. Kennedy. There were actually two attempts on his life in the same month. The first was on September 5th. Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme – a member of the cult of Charles Manson, which was responsible for the murder of actress Sharon Tate and eight others – tried to shoot Ford in Sacramento, but she had failed to chamber a round and a Secret Service agent snatched the pistol from her hand.

The second attempt on Monday September 22nd was successful despite increased security around President Ford. At 3:30 PM, after speaking to the World Affairs Council, Ford emerged from the Post Street entrance of the St. Francis Hotel in Union Square, then walked toward his limousine. Before boarding the vehicle, he stopped and waved to the crowd that had gathered across the street. The 45 year-old Sara Jane Moore was standing in the crowd 40 feet (12 metres) away from Ford when she fired two shots with her .38 Special revolver. Even though the sights were off, she managed to hit him in the chest twice. She was overpowered and arrested while fruitless attempts were undertaken to save Ford, who died right there on the sidewalk within minutes of being shot.

 

[The Champion]

You forgot JFK.

 

[Nivek]

I'm surprised someone even wanted to assassinate gerry.

 

[Darth_Kiryan]

......I'm surprised someone wanted, or attempted to assassinate Gerald Ford...

Him falling down the stairs and breaking his neck, I can see...

 

[Onkel Willie]

And the story continues.

Chapter II: Poisoned Chalice, 1975-1977.​

Nelson Rockefeller was shocked, both by the fact that Ford had been gunned down and that he now completely unexpectedly became the new President of the United States after failing to obtain the Republican nomination in 1960, 1964 and 1968. Like Ford had done slightly over a year earlier, Rockefeller took the oath of office in the East Room on September 22nd 1975. Three days later he attended the funeral of President Gerald R. Ford which was also attended by leading figures from American society and heads of state from across the world. Among those present were British Prime Minister Harold Wilson, French President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing and Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin.

Rockefeller’s Presidency was fraught with difficulties from the beginning as he was considered liberal, progressive or moderate and was opposed by a growing conservative faction within the Republican ranks. That he fired Chief of Staff Donald Rumsfeld, who had blocked his attempts to exercise influence as Vice President, didn’t sit well at all. Moreover, the Democrats controlled both the House of Representatives and the Senate.

Rockefeller probably wouldn’t have agreed with his characterization as a liberal as he didn’t adhere to any particular ideology. He considered himself a practical problem solver, much more interested in defining problems and finding solutions around which he could unite support sufficient to ensure their enactment in legislation than in following either a strictly liberal or strictly conservative course. Rockefeller's programs did not consistently follow either liberal or conservative ideology. As a pragmatist he sought support from the Democrats when he couldn’t find enough backing among the Republicans, which however alienated him from the GOP establishment. Misgivings about him among conservative Republicans increased because of his choice for Vice President: former Texan Governor and former Secretary of the Treasury under Nixon John B. Connally Jr. (who had switched from the Democratic Party to the Republicans in 1973).

In the meantime, a nation in shock after the second Presidential assassination in just twelve years’ time, became captivated by the trial of the century. Sara Jane Moore’s friends said that she had a fascination and an obsession with Patricia Hearst. After Hearst was kidnapped by the far-left militant Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), her father Randolph Hearst created the organization People In Need (PIN) to feed the poor as a response to the SLA’s claims that the elder Hearst was “committing crimes against the people”. Moore, a volunteer accountant for PIN, had been serving as an FBI informant there until the moment she attempted to assassinate Ford. Even though she had adopted radical political beliefs, culminating in the assassination of Ford, the Secret Service had decided she was no threat after an evaluation (they were seriously criticized for this incorrect assessment).

She was arraigned on Wednesday September 24th at 10:00 AM, appearing before US District Judge Samuel Conti. San Francisco District Attorney John J. Ferdon intended to pursue the death penalty. He offered no deal to Moore because his case was a slam dunk given the amount of witnesses who’d seen her shoot and the photographic evidence present. After initially admitting to the crime and expressing regret only for being caught, she recanted on the advice of her public defender. She expressed regret and cited mental health issues in an attempt to seem less unsympathetic.

Her pro bono lawyer tried to argue that her radicalized political beliefs were in fact a sign of mental illness, making her not guilty by reason of insanity. Psychiatrists testifying for the prosecution, however, stated that they’d found her to be perfectly sane and didn’t see any reason why she couldn’t stand trial or why she should be sent to a psychiatric ward. The insanity defence therefore failed to convince the jury. After a six month trial, the jury was sequestered and within a matter of hours returned with a guilty verdict. Sare Jane Moore was sentenced to death on Wednesday March 10th 1976. Despite later rejecting her original political convictions and finding religion in prison, her pleas for clemency were rejected. Her execution was ultimately carried out in the gas chamber of San Quentin State Prison in July 1992, almost seventeen years after the assassination, when she was 62 years old. This was one of only fourteen executions carried out in California between 1976 and 2006. The execution was attended by President Ford’s widow Betty Ford.

In the meantime, Rockefeller had been struggling with the decision on whether or not he should seek the Republican nomination for the 1976 US Presidential Elections. Widely seen as a moderate, Rockefeller faced continued difficulty in securing the support of conservative Republicans for the 1976 presidential nomination and anticipated a challenge from the conservative California Governor Ronald Reagan. He therefore seriously considered not running. As Reagan had begun campaigning in January 1976, postponing out of respect for the murdered Ford, Rockefeller announced his decision not to run in March. He thought that that’d be in the best interests of the Republicans as an open split in the party could scare off swing voters.

Reagan experienced no major competition and made sure not to alienate the moderate wing of the Republicans by avoiding negative statements about Ford’s policies, instead speaking of the murdered President in almost hagiographic terms. The eloquent and charming Reagan easily secured enough delegates during the primaries and secured the presidential nomination at the Republican National Convention, which was held from August 16th to 19th 1976 in the Astrodome in Houston, Texas. He chose George H.W. Bush – incumbent Director of the CIA, former Chair of the Republican National Committee, former US Ambassador to the United Nations and former Texas Congressman – as his running mate for the Vice Presidential slot.

By then the name of his Democratic challenger was already known: Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter. Some hoped Minnesota Senator Hubert Humphrey might try again while others looked to pro-Israel Senator Scoop Jackson who, however, received hostility from the left wing of the Democratic Party because of his support for the Vietnam War. Jackson chose to run on social issues, emphasizing law and order and his opposition to race-integration busing. Jackson was also hoping for support from labour, but the possibility that Humphrey might enter the race caused unions to offer only lukewarm support.

The 1976 campaign was the first presidential campaign in which the primary system was dominant. However, most of the Democratic candidates failed to realize the significance of the increased number of primaries, or the importance of creating momentum by winning the early contests. Jimmy Carter, who was virtually unknown at the national level, leveraged his obscurity to run as an “outsider” to Washington. He was highly successful, easily securing the Democratic nomination with almost 75% of the delegates behind him. He chose the runner up, the liberal Arizona congressman Mo Udall, as his running mate.

Carter had hoped to use his status as an unknown maverick who’d been propelled to the national stage, emphasizing his status as a reformer who was “untainted” by Washington. Reagan, who had served in neither the House nor the Senate, could claim the same though. The country was saddled with a poor economy, the fall of South Vietnam and the controversial pardon of Nixon by the assassinated Ford. Both candidates danced around Ford’s legacy, but Reagan’s rhetoric was able to subtly secure the sympathy vote and that was boosted by the endorsement of former First Lady Betty Ford.

As to the economic squalor the country faced, Reagan favoured supply side economics and declared that Carter’s attacks on big business would scare major employers into more layoffs rather than more investments and loans that would lead to economic growth. He favoured economic deregulation and more tax cuts for big business and higher incomes to encourage investments, which he believed would result from the so-called “trickle-down effect”. Carter argued in favour of Keynesian economic regulation to stimulate demand, hoping to kickstart the economy with wage increases and improved social security. As to foreign policy, Reagan deviated from the course set by Ford and Rockefeller by denouncing détente with the Soviet Union, which he considered to be evil. Carter criticized his plans as unrealistic: tax cuts in combination with a heightened defence expenditure would only increase government debt.

The elections were a head to head race and even by election day, Tuesday November 2nd 1976, the competition for the White House was anything but a done deal. During the day exit polls started to indicate a slight Republican lead and that trend seemed to continue. Carter was able to carry several Midwestern and Northeastern swing states, as well as most states in the Democratic-dominated region of the South.

The Democratic Carter/Udall ticket carried 21 states plus DC, obtained 261 electoral votes and won 49.7% of the popular vote. The Republican Reagan/Bush ticket carried 29 states, gained 276 electoral votes and won 48.5% of the popular vote. After the fourth United States Presidential Election in history in which the winner lost the popular vote, Ronald Reagan became President-Elect. He was inaugurated on January 20th 1977 as the fortieth President of the United States, vowing to serve all Americans in his inaugural speech. Carter conceded defeat. The Republicans celebrated, but their victory in 1976 would prove to be a poisoned chalice.

 

[farmerted555]

Too bad TTL will never get this little gem:

 

[Onkel Willie]

Update time!

Chapter III: Oil Crises, Revolution and Stagflation, 1977-1979.​

Ronald Reagan became President at a time when the malaise the American people felt couldn’t have been much worse, which extended to their faith in politics. One President had been impeached only to be pardoned by his successor just as the country came out of the completely divisive Vietnam War. Said successor had been shot even though a few weeks before his death an attempt had failed, which fuelled speculations about a conspiracy. Furthermore, Rockefeller, who could perhaps gave governed through compromises with moderate Republicans and moderate Democrats, declined to run after merely 16 months in office. To top it all off, the latest of four Republican Presidents in the 1970s had been elected without winning the popular vote, which had only happened three times before. American faith in politics was historically low.

Another reason for the sense of malaise in the United States was the state of the economy. By the time Ford had become President, the country was in the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression and it hadn’t gotten much better by the time Reagan entered office. The first two years of his Presidency were a time of continuing recovery from the severe 1973-’75 recession, which had left fixed investment at its lowest level since the 1970 recession and unemployment at 9%. The economic issues of the early to mid-70s had their origins in the 1973 oil crisis – during which the Western world faced petroleum shortages as well as elevated prices – which resulted from the Arab oil embargo against countries supporting Israel in the Yom Kippur War. Another oil shock would follow later in Reagan’s Presidency.

Early in his Presidency Reagan recognized the oil crisis as a major cause of the recent economic troubles, and declared that the United States should reduce its dependency on foreign oil imports. He signed the American Alternative Energy Act, a piece of legislation that isn’t without controversy. For one, Reagan intended to increase the role of nuclear energy in the country’s energy production in order to be able to shut down oil-fired power plants. Besides that, Reagan’s Alternative Energy Act looked towards the potential of coal even though by then it was well established that this fossil fuel was particularly unclean. Not only did the US build more coal-fired power plants under Reagan than under the three previous officeholders combined, plants were built to produce synthetic oil from coal that were to be used in the case of an acute oil crisis. This piece of legislation also ordered an investigation into the possibilities of developing shale oil from the Green River Formation in Colorado, Wyoming and Utah.

By far the most controversial development resulting from Reagan’s desire to reduce American dependence on oil imports was the beginning of the construction of the Rampart Dam on the Yukon River in Alaska. The intention to build the dam was almost gone: owing to increasing public pressure, in June 1967, Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall announced he was strongly opposed to the dam, citing economic and biological factors as well as the drastic impact on the area’s native population. Though this effectively ended the project, planning continued to go ahead until the final Army Corps of Engineers report was released in 1971 and recommended the project “not be undertaken at this time”. Alaska Governor William Allen Egan protested the statement, saying the report was out of date due to population growth in Alaska and rising demand for electricity.

Reagan had experts of his own review the plans and revived the project, which would cost an estimated $2.1 billion at the time (roughly $10.7 billion in 2023 dollars). Once completed, the Rampart Dam would produce roughly 34 terawatt hours annually (much more than the Alaskan population needed) that could be distributed to the rest of the United States. He furthermore believed that the cheap electricity provided by the dam would be a strong enticement for electricity-intensive industries – such as the aluminium, titanium and magnesium industries – to move to Alaska, creating job opportunities and developing the sparsely populated state. The dam’s benefits would vastly outweigh the costs to the few residents who would be displaced according to its proponents. Besides all the electricity produced with the emission of zero greenhouse gasses, the large lake it created could become the basis of a thriving tourist industry.

Construction of the Rampart Dam began in 1977 and was projected to take at least twenty years as construction work could only take place for five months a year. During those five months a year, however, the work on the dam created jobs for thousands of people and plenty of unemployed construction workers, welders, electricians, engineers and so on made their way up north. By the time Reagan’s time in office was over, construction was already too far ahead and the sunk cost fallacy came into play: so much money had been invested that it justified completing the dam.

The mammoth dam consists of a concrete gravity structure with a structural height of 510 feet (155 m) and a hydraulic height of 430 feet (131 m). At the elevation of 660 feet (201 m), the dam stretches for 4.700 feet (1.43 km) from north to south. On the south bank is a concrete gravity spillway with a crest at elevation 600 feet (183 m) and a maximum flow of 603.000 cubic feet per second (17.100 m3/s) at maximum pool elevation. It required 15 million cubic yards (11.47 million m3) of concrete aggregate, 2.9 million cubic yards (2.22 million m3) of rock fill, and another 1.7 million cubic yards (1.3 million m3) of various other types of fill. Its installed capacity is almost 5.900 megawatts. The resulting reservoir, known as Lake Rampart, is about the size of Lake Erie or more than six times the size of the state of Rhode Island. It’s the largest human-made reservoir in the world.

The Rampart Dam eventually became operational in 1998 and did what its proponents said it would. It generated cheap clean electricity for America and attracted electricity-intensive industries to Alaska that created jobs and helped process locally produced minerals. During its construction, the dam also temporarily attracted a wood pulp mill to process all the timber from trees cut down before they disappeared below the reservoir’s surface. Some of that timber was used to build mountain lodges for mountaineers, climbers and hikers, ski lodges and hotels for tourists who visited Lake Rampart. During the short Alaskan summer, beachgoing tourists arrived while in the winter other tourists came for ice fishing, skating or skiing on nearby slopes. The town of Rampart, where less than fifty people lived in 1977, has a population of roughly 5.500 souls as of 2023 and most economic activity is related to tourism.

The Rampart Dam, however, came at a terrible ecological and social cost. It flooded the Yukon Flats, a large wetland area that provided breeding ground for millions of waterfowl and habitat for game and fur-bearing animals. Alaska Native groups objected to the project’s human cost – the forced relocation of more than 1.500 people and nine villages – and Native groups outside the reservoir area decried the devastation of the Yukon River salmon population. Though the dam produces green energy for millions of Americans, ecologists are largely negative about this lasting legacy of the Reagan Administration. By 1979, two years after construction began, it would prove to be an extravagance the treasury could ill afford.

The Iranian Revolution began with protests in January 1978 that had a wide array of deep-rooted causes that included policies and actions of the Shah, in addition to the mistakes and successes of a myriad different political forces: strong Westernization and close identification with the United States that conflicted with Muslim identity, the Shah being seen as a Western puppet because of the CIA sponsored coup in 1953 and the large number of American advisors he employed since then, unpopular disregard for Islamic tradition, extravagance, corruption, elitism, authoritarian tendencies, human rights abuses by the SAVAK secret police, the failure of his overly ambitious 1974 economic program, his neglect of governance to play the role of statesman, and the Islamic opposition growing as the SAVAK focused on left-wing opposition such as the communist Tudeh Party.

The result of the revolution was that Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi left the country and went into exile in January 1979 while Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini returned on the invitation of the Iranian government in February after spending years in exile in France. Several thousand people showed up to greet him as he landed in Teheran. By February 11th 1979, the monarchy was officially brought down and Khomeini assumed leadership over Iran while guerrillas and rebel troops overwhelmed Pahlavi loyalists in armed combat. Ayatollah Khomeini emerged as the Supreme Leader in December 1979. The revolution came a surprise and turned Iran from an ally into an enemy of the United States as the new Islamic Republic was vitriolically anti-American.

One of the immediate effects of the Iranian Revolution was the 1979 oil crisis and a subsequent energy crisis. Although the global oil supply only decreased by approximately 4%, the oil markets' reaction raised the price of crude oil drastically over the next twelve months, more than doubling it to $39.50 per barrel. The sudden increase in price was connected with fuel shortages and long lines at petrol stations similar to the 1973 oil crisis.

In the United States, the 1979 energy crisis ended a brief period of growth in the aftermath of the 1973-’75 recession and economic growth, job creation and consumer confidence declined sharply as inflation and interest rates rose. One industry that was particularly affected was the automobile industry as the “Big Three” automakers (Ford, Chrysler and General Motors) had to compete with mass-marketed Japanese car brands like Toyota, Honda and Mitsubishi. These displaced British and German cars due to lower manufacturing costs (resulting in accusations of price dumping) and the rising value of the British Pound and Deutsche Mark vis-à-vis the US dollar. Many imported brands utilized fuel-saving technologies such as fuel injection and multivalve engines over the common use of carburettors. Detroit was hard hit by the new recession, but American car producers eventually adopted these fuel saving innovations.

Meanwhile, the American government was confronted by the multiheaded hydra known as stagflation that economists had come to fear by the end of the seventies. The conventional view among economists is that higher interest rates lead to lower inflation. The rationale behind this view is that higher interest rates increase the cost of borrowing and dampen demand across the economy, resulting in excess supply and lower inflation. The drawback in a situation of stagflation, however, was that high interest rates would reinforce the decline in economic growth and potentially even lead to negative growth. This would in turn result in increased unemployment and lower purchasing power. Very difficult times were ahead.

Reagan’s approach to the economic crisis was unique, but also just partially effective, and it was based on his faith in supply side economics. Reagan passed across the board tax cuts that benefited the higher incomes in particular and also reduced corporate taxes, believing that this would result in increased investments by entrepreneurs and businesses. He believed that this would offset the effects of a sharp rise of the interest rate, which he enacted on the advice of Chair of the Federal Reserve William Miller. To keep government debt under control, austerity policies were enacted to match the reduced tax revenue. These policies included slashes in social security that were highly criticized because unemployment was high.

The ineffective economic policies of the Reagan Administration known as “Reaganomics” were derided and heckled by public opinion and by the Democratic Party. The recent tax cuts didn’t result in any serious increases in investment by businesses and wealthy entrepreneurs. They’d rather sit on their money until they saw a clear uptake in the economy before taking any risks, and there was no sign of change during 1979. Meanwhile, the increase in the interest rate had the effect that was to be expected: inflation was kept under control, but the economy’s stagnation continued and resulted in layoffs and even businesses closing their doors.

In the third quarter of 1979 economic growth rates became negative and Reagan’s approval ratings dropped to the twenty-fifth percentile. In a situation in which the rich didn’t feel these hard times and even paid less taxes than before, an image cultivated by the Democrats, polarization loomed as the left-wing of the Democratic Party became more prominent. In those last six months of 1979, Reagan increasingly became a lame duck President as less and less Democrats were willing to compromise and work with him. That was a problem given that the Republicans controlled neither the House of Representatives nor the Senate.

In an unexpectedly interventionist move, signalling how desperate he was, Reagan wanted to pass a $500 billion stimulus package. The Democrats would only agree if certain conditions were met: they wanted the tax cuts reversed and in fact even higher taxes on the upper incomes whilst reducing taxes on the middle and lower incomes. Reagan didn’t want to reverse what had been a campaign promise of his and the Democrats didn’t feel like compromising. A political deadlock was the result.

 

[SirHalifax]

Watched.

 

[Wendell]

Subbed.

 

[Onkel Willie]

And now Reagan's take on Iran.

Chapter IV: The Iranian Hostage Crisis, 1979-1980.​

While the economic crisis continued, Reagan also had to formulate a response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Communists under the leadership of Nur Muhammad Taraki seized power von April 27th 1978. The new regime signed a treaty of friendship with the Soviet Union in December of that year. Due to the regime’s improvement of secular education and redistribution of land coinciding with mass executions and political oppression, Taraki was deposed by rival Hafizullah Amin in September. Amin was considered a brutal psychopath by foreign observers and had lost control of much of the country, prompting the Soviet Union to invade on December 24th 1979, execute Amin, and install Babrak Karmal as president.

Reagan had other, more pressing concerns but did say the US remained committed to protecting the Persian Gulf. The US and many other countries boycotted the Olympics in Moscow, a move the Kremlin later called hypocritical given American actions in the Middle East. Eighty nations would still be present in Moscow, but 66 would boycott it.

In the meantime the US had something else to worry about: the entire country was surprised by the Iranian Hostage Crisis. On November 4th, 52 American diplomats and citizens were taken hostage in the United States Embassy in Tehran, Iran, by a group of Iranian college students belonging to the Muslim Student Followers of the Imam’s Line, avid supporters of the Iranian Revolution.

Reagan called the hostage-taking a “criminal extortionist act” and the hostages “victims of a vile, evil misinterpretation of God’s teachings” and also reiterated the US would not negotiate with terrorists. In Iran it was widely seen as an act against the US and its influence in Iran, including its perceived attempts to undermine the Iranian Revolution and its longstanding support of the Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who had been overthrown earlier that year.

Reagan demanded the release of the hostages and threatened that Khomeini’s regime would feel the consequences if any harm came to them. The regime declared that the hostage takers had acted on their own, but the Reagan Administration rejected that as a weak excuse and said that any government that respected the law would already have taken steps to secure the safety, well-being and ultimately the release of some or all of the hostages.

Reagan acted on the advice of Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who had also served in that capacity under Nixon and Ford. Kissinger believed Khomeini wanted to make America squirm and therefore advised against concessions as that would just make the US look weak. By January 1980, the State Department had severed diplomatic ties with Teheran. Facing elections and a breakdown in negotiations, Reagan ordered plans for a rescue to go ahead.

The ambitious plan was to be based on the use of elements from four branches of the US military: Army, Navy, Marines, and Air Force. The concept was based on an operation whereby helicopters and C-130 aircraft, following different routes, would rendezvous on a salt flat (code-named Desert One) 200 miles (320 km) southeast of Teheran. Here the helicopters would refuel from the C-130s and pick up the combat troops who had flown in on the C-130 transports. The helicopters would then transport the troops to a mountain location (Desert Two) closer to Teheran from which the actual rescue raid would be launched into the city the following night. The operation was further to be supported by an in-country CIA team led by Richard J. Meadows. On completion of the raid, hostages were to be shepherded to a captured Tehran airport from which they were to be flown to Egypt. Army Major General James B. Vaught was appointed taskforce commander, USAF Colonel James H. Kyle as the field commander for aviation and US Army Colonel Charles A. Beckwith as ground forces field commander.

Operation Eagle Claw commenced on Thursday February 21st 1980 and the first stage of the rescue plan went surprisingly well. To make sure there was more than sufficient room to take in all the hostages, sixteen RH-53D Sea Stallion helicopters were used even though a minimum of six was deemed sufficient. Three suffered from mechanical breakdown, still leaving thirteen choppers that reached Desert One from USS Nimitz and transported 132 Delta Force and Ranger troops from there to Desert Two. The Lockheed C-130s that had taken them as far as Desert One had been refuelled by KC-135 tankers. The arrival at Desert Two took place close to morning and the rescue would take place the second night.

The next phase was about freeing the hostages and getting them out of Iran, and this would prove to be the troublesome part. This second stage began at 09:00 PM local time on Friday February 22nd with the ground forces driving from Desert Two to Teheran with CIA agents using trucks clandestinely acquired in Iran by the latter. Managing to reach the embassy and the Foreign Affairs building undetected, Delta Force commandos and Army Rangers engaged the hostage takers. A number of hostages with a military background tried to help by attempting to overpower their captors and some paid for it with their lives, either by getting caught in the crossfire or because the hostage takers executed them.

After eliminating the last hostiles and with no casualties on their side, the rescuers took the surviving 45 hostages with them and proceeded to Amjadiyeh Stadium where helicopters awaited them. Of course the sounds of gunfire at the embassy and the Foreign Affairs building had been noticed and Basij paramilitary militiamen tried to intercept the truck convoy and it came under fire, resulting in the death of a hostage and injuries among both hostages and Delta Force and Rangers. The rescue force called in air support, which was provided by a Lockheed AC-130 gunship in the skies over Teheran. Using its two M61 20 mm Gatling-style rotary cannons, a 40 mm L/60 Bofors cannon and a 105 mm M102 howitzer the AC-130 was able to rain hell down on the Basij militants. Using an RPG, they nonetheless managed to shoot down a helicopter departing from Amjadiyeh Stadium and kill four hostages and thirteen rescuers. The hostages and soldiers were both evenly distributed over the thirteen helicopters to ensure as many as possible would survive.

In parallel to the rescue, an Army Ranger company had captured the abandoned Manzariyeh Air Base, about 100 km southwest of Tehran, to allow two C-141 Starlifter strategic airlifters flying from Saudi Arabia to arrive. With the Rangers holding the airport, the helicopters brought everyone from the stadium to Manzariyeh airbase. The helicopters were destroyed so the Iranians wouldn’t capture them.

In hindsight, given what happened after, it’s a miracle the two C-141s made it to the base in one piece. Radar had picked them up and a pair of F-14s of the Iranian Air Force was sent to intercept. The C-141s had a high top speed, 912 km/h or 567 mph, but that was not enough to outrun an F-14. One of the C-141s was shot down by these F-14s on the return trip to Egypt before American F-14 Tomcats and F-4 Phantom IIs from USS Nimitz and USS Coral Sea engaged them and shot both of them down. The remaining twenty rescued hostages and 56 surviving Delta Force operatives and Army Rangers, touched down on an Egyptian airbase after a harrowing night.

The response to Operation Eagle Claw was mixed after the printing presses had run that night for the newspapers to bring the American people the news on Friday morning. Reagan had hoped for euphoria and a rally behind the flag effect after bringing back the twenty survivors, though privately he too was disappointed by the death of 32 hostages and 76 Rangers and Delta Force operatives.

Those who supported Eagle Claw said that the alternative might well have been the execution of all 52 hostages and were partially successful in mobilizing public opinion against the shootdown of the C-141 carrying twenty of the forty hostages rescued from Teheran. Critics on the other hand called it a disaster for losing 60% of the hostages and rescuers and denounced the Reagan Administration for not continuing the path of diplomatic negotiations longer. Those who criticized Eagle Claw argued Khomeini might well have released the hostages after some token concession, for example expelling the exiled Shah and his family from the US. Expelling Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who was undergoing treatment for cancer in the US at the time, was anathema to Reagan anyway and therefore he and his family stayed. He wouldn’t concede on that matter and the Shah died in the US in 1981 as a result. His widow Farah and their children still reside in the United States.

And so the Iranian Hostage Crisis ended after 110 days and besides a topic of controversy also became entertainment. The three hour action-thriller Eagle Claw featuring an ensemble cast was released in February 2010 on the thirtieth anniversary of the rescue operation. It became a blockbuster and it starred Bruce Willis as Colonel Beckwith, Tim Matheson as Ronald Reagan, Cynthia Nixon as Nancy Reagan, Philip Baker Hall as CIA Director Stansfield Turner, Bryan Cranston as CIA Deputy Director Frank Carlucci, Bob Gunton as Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, Ben Affleck as Chief of Staff Hamilton Jordan, Ben Kingsley as Khomeini, Cliff Curtis as a lead hostage taker and Philip Quast as Saddam Hussein. Eagle Claw, with a $120 million budget, became a box office success by grossing $535 million.

Reagan was under pressure to respond and save face and decided on a punitive retaliatory attack, again advised by Kissinger who viewed inaction as weakness. Reagan agreed as he was irate that the Iranians had dared to shoot down an unarmed and defenceless C-141 cargo plane filled with innocent civilians. Fortunately for him many Americans in the immediate aftermath of the shootdown agreed the US had to respond, which was exactly what he intended to do. In the meantime, Iran didn’t do itself any favours by rounding up Western journalists in the country, holding them hostage and executing some.

The question what shape such a response ought to take. Only seven years after the end of the Vietnam War, American public opinion was opposed to the idea of an invasion, all-out war and lengthy occupation in order to overthrow the Khomeini regime. A naval quarantine was considered to prevent goods with military applications from entering Iran, but that would become a lengthy affair and the Iranians might attack the blockading vessels in a way that would still lead to war and threaten the world’s oil supply.

Taking into account all the evidence gathered by the CIA that Iraq was planning a major military move of its own aimed at toppling the Khomeini regime, the option for the American punitive retaliatory attack that was chosen was an aerial offensive to eliminate Iran’s air force. CIA Director Turner later said “our aerial offensive paved the way for Saddam Hussein to finish the job, and we gladly helped him out”. Indeed, diplomatic relations between Iran and Iraq were breaking down as Saddam Hussein feared Khomeini might incite the Iraqi Shias against him (the Iraqi Baathist regime, though officially secular, was dominated by Sunni Muslims). Iraq was therefore preparing a preventive war and in the months leading up to it US-Iraqi relations became noticeably warmer and the former removed the latter from the list of state sponsors of terrorism.

The US Air Force and US Navy launched Operation Talon on Friday February 29th 1980, unleashing one of the most intensive air bombardments in military history. The State Department and the Department of Defence justified the American aerial offensive as a means to smother the ability of a “savage, barbaric and erratic rogue state” to threaten the Persian Gulf and initiate a third oil crisis after those of 1973 and 1979.

For eight consecutive weeks American, British and French aircraft carried out sorties. HMS Hermes and French aircraft carriers Clemenceau and Foch arrived to provide support while USS Nimitz and USS Coral Sea were joined by USS Dwight D. Eisenhower (the number of carrier groups eventually increased to six) and land-based aircraft operating out of Oman and Saudi Arabia, including B-52s. Tens of thousands of tonnes of bombs were dropped on airbases of the Islamic Republic of Iran Air Force, anti-aircraft facilities, and command and communications facilities. Operation Talon ended on Saturday April 26th 1980 and left Iran’s air force obliterated.

Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was happy with the American move as he was indeed planning a war against in the hopes of toppling its regime, reclaiming the eastern bank of the Shatt al-Arab River ceded under the 1975 Algiers Agreement, and annexing the oil-rich and majority Arab province of Khuzestan. the Iraqi leadership had hoped to take advantage of Iran’s post-revolutionary chaos and expected a decisive victory in the face of a severely weakened Iran, something the American punitive aerial campaign had practically guaranteed.

 

[arrowiv]

Any thoughts on how a 1976-80 Reagan administration would handle the Rhodesia problem? Would Reagan really give recognition to the Ian Smith UDI government?

 

[Onkel Willie]

Any thoughts on how a 1976-80 Reagan administration would handle the Rhodesia problem? Would Reagan really give recognition to the Ian Smith UDI government?

I think it would be a bit too controversial for the US to back a white supremacist regime openly. Anyhow, I have a new update for y'all.

Chapter V: The Iran-Iraq War, the Iranian Civil War and US Presidential Elections, 1980-1982.​

The Iran-Iraq War commenced on September 20th 1980 with an airstrike by the Iraqi Air Force against ten airbases, using Su-20, MiG-23 and Tu-22 to destroy what was left of the Iranian Air Force. Six Iraqi divisions totalling 200.000 men, 2.800 tanks, 4.000 armoured personnel carriers, 1.400 artillery pieces and 350 helicopters invaded Iran along a front measuring 644 km in three simultaneous attacks. Two of the six divisions invaded along the northern and central part of the front to forestall an Iranian counterattack. The other four divisions invaded Khuzestan and two of them, one mechanized and one armoured, conquered Abadan and Khorramshahr in November.

On the central front, the Iraqis occupied Megran, advanced towards the foothills of the Zagros Mountains, and were able to block the traditional Teheran-Baghdad invasion route by securing territory forward of Qasr-e Shirin, Iran. On the northern front, the Iraqis established a strong defensive position opposite Suleimaniya to protect the Iraqi Kirkuk oil complex.

The southern theatre was by far the most important of the Iran-Iraq War and, benefiting from the fact that they had complete air superiority, Saddam’s forces managed to advance further into Khuzestan and capture Dezful and Ahvaz. Iran launched counteroffensives to recapture them, but their armoured spearheads were blunted by withering Iraqi air attacks with Su-20s and MiG-23s. The Iraqis also used artillery strikes and responded to counterbattery strikes with air attacks as well. Meanwhile, the longer ranged Tu-22s and Tu-16s, in the meantime, were used to bomb supply depots and fuel storage tanks further inland to deprive the Iranians of precious fuel, ammunition and spare parts. The Iranians could muster much more manpower as its population was nearly three times that of Iraq and managed to keep pressure on the Iraqis.

Iraq had the benefit that it received financial support from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates in the shape of loans while money collected by “charitable funds” in these countries intended to help victims of war was also primarily used by Iraq to buy more weapons. Meanwhile, the US, after reopening diplomatic channels, lifted restrictions on the export of dual-use technology, oversaw the transfer of third-party military hardware, and provided operational intelligence on the battlefield.

Much of this “third-party military hardware” came from France like Dassault Mirage F1s and even more from Eastern Bloc stocks after the so-called Leipzig Agreement. Using the money he got from his Arab sponsors, Saddam bought Soviet weapons systems as per the deal signed in Leipzig in the presence of Honecker and the Soviet ambassador: SA-7 portable surface-to-air missiles from Polish stocks, T-72 tanks from East German arsenals, Czechoslovakian MiG-23s and Su-20s, Soviet MiG-25s and Mil Mi-24 helicopter gunships, Cuban AK-47s and Bulgarian D-20 152 mm howitzers for example. Iran, which was under a weapons embargo, had much less support: Libya and Syria, breaking Arab solidarity, and North Korea backed up Iran and so did China (which sold weapons to the Iraqis too as they were just in it for the money). Israel, fearing what Iraq might become if it defeated Iran, also helped the Iranians.

In early 1981, the Iran-Iraq War entered a new phase in which the Iraqis literally dug in – establishing elaborate fortified trench systems with barbed wire and minefields stretching out ahead of them – while the Iranian counteroffensives grinded to a halt and incurred serious casualties for negligible territorial gains. The Iraqi Air Force focused on ground attack missions and short-range missions with Mig-25s and Su-22s to help stop Iranian attacks, but also engaged in a strategic bombing campaign with their longer ranged Tu-22s and Tu-16s: they hit power plants and substations, major dams, major pumping stations, sewage treatment plants, telecommunications installations, port facilities, oil refineries, railroads and bridges. Saddam Hussein also used terror attacks with Scud missiles again Iranian cities and bombed civilian targets with mustard gas, killing hundreds of civilians. Furthermore, the Iraqi Navy began blockading Iranian ports.

The position of Supreme Leader Ruhollah Khomeini started to become shaky and his prestige began to wane. In 1981, the Majles, dominated by the Islamic Republican Party, removed elected President Abolhassan Banisadr because he had become frustrated and was opposed to the role of the clergy and religious factions in Iranian politics. That was the trigger for protests, but there were much more reasons. The war’s prospects became dimmer, shortages of food, electricity, running water, heating and fuel became more and more acute, phone lines got cut and TV broadcasts were interrupted, and attacks with Iraqi Scuds and mustard gas could strike at any time. Besides that, educated urbanite elites were starting to resent the illiberal regime that persecuted, arrested, tortured and sometimes even summarily executed critics and dissenters (they also accused the Khomeini regime of alienating the one ally that could’ve stopped the Iraqis dead in their tracks: the US). At the same time, women began protesting against the restrictions of their rights as they’d hoped the revolution would lead to emancipation, a movement Iraq stimulated by dropping leaflets by air concerning Baath Party views on women’s rights.

In summer 1982, the protests had escalated and spread to the entire country. Iran began fracturing into a civil war as a result and Khomeini reluctantly signed a peace treaty in Baghdad that allowed Iraq to annex Khuzestan in April. With the war over, Khomeini focused on suppressing the protests against his regime. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps subsequently responded harshly to the protests, but these protests just increased in size and frequency and eventually turned violent as a result. Demonstrations and strikes began paralyzing the country and led to the three-way split that resulted in civil war that autumn. The war might be over, but Iraq never stopped supporting opponents of the Shah with weapons.

By the autumn of 1982 Teheran had become unsafe and Khomeini relocated his government as the loyal Basij militiamen were driven from the city and some army units defected to the rival government: Mehdi Bazargan – interim Prime Minister until his resignation over the US Embassy seizure, scholar, academic and a representative of liberal-democratic Islamic thought – had proclaimed a National Democratic Committee in September 1982 and invited other political parties to join him. He announced his plans for a new constitution, which would be liberal, democratic and explicitly secular: while Islam would certainly be mentioned in it and respected, religion would not have a leading role in his new constitution anymore. Bazargan’s government soon received diplomatic recognition from the United States and its Western allies and it controlled much of the north and west of the country. In the meantime, Khomeini’s house in the village of Jamaran just north of Teheran was overrun, ransacked and burnt to the ground.

Another rival to Khomeini to emerge was the Revolutionary People’s Committee proclaimed by Noureddin Kianouri, the First Secretary of the communist Tudeh Party, in the city of Sari in Mazandaran Province on the Caspian Sea coast in October 1982. It aspired to turn Iran into a Marxist-Leninist state and to that end began recruiting new members in the strikes and demonstrations that had begun in 1981 and organized regional committees first. The proclamation of the Revolutionary People’s Committee was the next step, unifying leftist forces for their revolution. In the areas under communist control all industry and banking, infrastructure and the public sector were nationalized and things like healthcare, public transportation and education were made free.

The Soviets abandoned their pro-Khomeini stance in favour of supporting Kianouri, who’s regional committees managed to take control in many cities in the northwest of the country. The Tudeh guerrilla movement was quickly complemented by conventional forces as communist militias were trained by Soviet officers and equipped with tanks, armoured personnel carriers, assault rifles and helicopter gunships while a number of defected Iranian airmen formed an air force for them with their handful of surviving F-4 Phantom IIs and F-14 Tomcats.

By December 1982, the communists had conquered Teheran and the country was split in three. Khomeini controlled the east and southeast and operated out of Bandar Abbas, still receiving support from Syria, Libya and North Korea. Tudeh controlled the Caspian Sea coast and the northwestern provinces bordering the Soviet Union, Turkey and northern Iraq. Bazargan’s government controlled the southwest and south, including most of the Persian Gulf coast and the important port of Bushehr that served as a provisional capital.

In the meantime, a massive shift in public opinion had taken place in the United States in the preceding years that now finally resulted in the Democratic Revolution of 1980, an electoral velvet takeover of the White House. The Republicans hadn’t had a majority in the House of Representatives since the 83rd Congress, elected in 1952, and had only controlled the Senate for a grand total of four years from 1947 to 1949 and from 1953 to 1955. Paradoxically, the White House had been occupied by Republican Presidents from 1953 to 1961 (Eisenhower) and from 1969 to 1981 (Nixon, Ford, Rockefeller and Reagan). That amounted to a total of twenty years out of thirty-six between 1945 and 1981 of which the last twelve had been consecutive.

Pundits emphasized that this Presidential election could turn the new decade into a completely different one, potentially starting with the first Democratic President since 1969. What was clear was that public opinion hadn’t been this leftist, anti-big business and pro-peace since the sixties. This was evidenced by a Gallup poll that showed Ronald Reagan was facing an uphill battle, with 58% of voters upset by his handling of the Presidency.

Reagan’s chances at re-election became even slimmer because of the Independent candidacy of former Republican John B. Anderson and former US Ambassador to Mexico and former Democratic Governor of Wisconsin Patrick J. Lucey (the Democrats, on the other hand, didn’t lose many votes despite a former Democrat being on the Independent ticket). In theory, Reagan had the white evangelical vote as his opponent was a Catholic, but in practice that didn’t generate a lot of extra votes for him.

Said Democratic candidate was Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy, the younger brother of the assassinated President John F. Kennedy and Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. Besides the fact that he had his last name going for him and the fact that he was on the left-wing of the Democratic Party in such a leftist phase, it helped that Jimmy Carter didn’t try again. Carter’s ties with top Democratic leaders were poor and he decided against a run for the nomination that’d split the party and potentially cost them the White House. Moreover, he didn’t want to become a perennial candidate, like a Democratic version of Harold Stassen. Ted Kennedy was far ahead of his rival California Governor Jerry Brown and all other competition. He had clinched the election by early summer 1980, securing enough delegates long before the Democratic National Convention was held between August 11th and 14th in Madison Square Garden, New York City. Kennedy chose Brown as his running mate to secure California.

The 1980 US Presidential campaign focused on three topics: the still worsening economy, defence spending and foreign relations, focusing in particular on Reagan’s handling of the Iranian Hostage Crisis and the resulting aftermath. Reagan emphasized that his economic policies had curbed inflation and that his austerity policies had resulted in a balanced budget, resulting in a minimal rise of national debt. As a proponent of small government, he advocated states’ rights. The fact that the budget deficit was small justified a higher defence budget in Reagan’s opinion, which was necessary to confront the Soviet Union’s threat to the Persian Gulf. He went above and beyond in his anti-Soviet stance, calling the USSR an “evil tyranny” and equating détente to appeasement. As far as he was concerned, Das Kapital and the Communist Manifesto were no better than Mein Kampf.

And of course Reagan brought up the 1969 Chappaquiddick incident, in which Kennedy left the scene of a traffic accident. The accident had led to the death of his automobile passenger Mary Jo Kopechne, a secretary who had worked on the campaign of his brother Robert. Ted Kennedy had plead guilty at the time and had received a two-month suspended sentence. Reagan asked: “Does the American really want a convicted felon to sit in the White House?” His Republican audience responded with “hell no” in what was clearly a staged event. Reagan digging up the skeletons of the past was seen as a desperate move seeing as he was trailing far behind in the polls.

Ted Kennedy’s views on the major topics in 1980 were completely different of course. As far as the economy was concerned, his campaign focused on the fact that in 43 years unemployment hadn’t been so high. Approximately 14% of all working Americans, roughly one in seven, didn’t have a job at the time. That was a figure unseen since 1937. Kennedy criticized Reagan for injecting “hate and racism” by the “rebirth of code words like states’ rights”. Furthermore, Kennedy turned the matter of the Soviet threat against the Persian Gulf around by accusing Reagan of an emotional inability to refrain from “plain old revenge” and facilitating de facto pro-Soviet dictator Saddam Hussein. Reagan’s revenge was the cause of the perilous Persian Gulf situation as far as the Democrats were concerned. After poor relations with the Soviets under his predecessor, Kennedy favoured normalization of relations with Brezhnev. As a major figure and spokesman of American Progressivism his main priority was universal healthcare. He called it the “cause of my life”. He would soon be provided with the opportunity to realize it.

The results of the 1980 US Presidential Elections were clear. The Democratic Kennedy/Brown ticket carried 27 states plus DC, gained 314 electoral votes and won 50% of the popular vote. The Independent Anderson/Lucey ticket had no real shot at winning the White House, ultimately winning just 5.5% of the popular vote and carrying zero states and therefore zero electoral votes. What Anderson’s Independent run did accomplish was to take away voters from the Democrats and Republicans, though the latter were much more affected. Reagan has been regarded as a below average President since then.

The Reagan/Bush ticket carried 23 states, gained 224 electoral votes and won 42.8% of the electoral vote. It’s believed that without Anderson’s run the popular vote would’ve been closer, though it’d still see Kennedy taking more votes. It’s estimated, however, that without Anderson at least four southern states representing 33 electoral votes would’ve gone to Reagan. Whatever the case may be, the end result was that Ted Kennedy became the 41st President of the United States and the first Democrat to occupy the White House since Johnson.

 

[Onkel Willie]

Update time. Let me know how you like it in your replies!

Chapter VI: Road to Recovery, 1982-1983.​

Kennedy had been inaugurated in January 1981 and the beginning of the new decade couldn’t have been better for the Democrats. Elections for the House of Representatives had been held simultaneously with the Presidential Elections and the Democratic majority there increased by thirteen to 290, with the Republicans dropping to just 144 (one more seat went to an Independent candidate and another one to the Conservative Party of New York State). That meant the Democrats now had exactly enough seats for a two thirds majority. Coinciding elections were also held for 34 Senate seats, with the Democrats holding all of the 24 seats of theirs that were in the race and winning in two Republican states for a total of sixty Senate seats. They won in New York and Pennsylvania and Elizabeth Holtzman and Peter Flaherty respectively became new Senators.

Long story short, the Democrats enjoyed a massive trifecta as they held overwhelming majorities in both houses of Congress and had the Presidency. Little changed in the midterms in 1982 and the end result of the 1984 US Presidential Elections was similar to that of 1980: three states switched with their electoral votes going to the Republicans, but that wasn’t enough. The Republicans knew they’d lose, which is evidenced by the fact that all household Republican names declined to run in ’84 except for George H.W. Bush. That made Ted Kennedy the first President to win a second term since Nixon’s re-election in 1972.

Putting to use his majority in Congress, Kennedy realized his dream of universal healthcare. The Universal Health Care Act, commonly known as Kennedycare, was intended to implement a single-payer publicly funded healthcare system inspired by Canada. Under this act’s provisions healthcare provided mostly by private entities would be free at the point of use while the government would ensure quality through federal standards. Under Kennedycare the government would not participate in day-to-day care or collect any information about an individual’s health, which was to remain confidential between a person and their physician. Administrative simplicity was to guarantee the system’s cost-effectiveness: in each state the doctor would handle the insurance claim against the state insurer. There wouldn’t be any need for the person who accessed healthcare to be involved in billing and reclaim. In general, costs were to be paid through funding from income taxes and there wasn’t a need for a variety of health plans under this act because all essential basic care would be covered.

Opponents, most of them Republican, had criticisms: they thought more money would partially and unnecessarily be personally spent on healthcare; they also thought the government would have “too much involvement in healthcare” despite the doctor-patient privilege guaranteed by this act’s clauses; funding through income taxes was criticized by Republicans as yet more “unfair squeeze the rich” taxes on “hard working Americans”; furthermore it was considered an intrusion on states’ rights; finally, the Republicans felt that health insurance was an individual responsibility instead of something the government ought to take care of. Kennedycare was passed in 1983 thanks to the overwhelming Democratic majority in Congress and in doing so virtually eliminated medical uninsurance and greatly reduced underinsurance. These critics were in the minority and couldn’t stop what is seen as the crowning achievement of Kennedy’s domestic policies.

The last resort of the Republicans to prevent the enactment of the Universal Healthcare Act was a filibuster. They hoped to use one of the most powerful legislative devices of the United States Senate to stop the US healthcare system’s most radical regulatory overhaul and expansion of coverage since the enactment of Medicare and Medicaid in 1965. Senate rules permit a senator or senators to speak for as long as they wish and on any topic they choose, unless “three-fifths of the Senators duly chosen and sworn” (usually 60 out of 100 senators) bring debate to a close by invoking cloture under Senate Rule XXII. They hoped one or two conservative Democratic Senators would switch to their side, but that didn’t occur and their filibuster only delayed the inevitable.

The Democrats considered a proposal to abolish the filibuster in the Senate, but decided against it. Under Senate rules, any modification or limitation of the filibuster would be a rule change that itself could be filibustered, with two-thirds of those Senators present and voting (as opposed to the normal three-fifths of those sworn) needing to vote to break the filibuster. Others argued that under Senate precedents, a simple majority could act to limit the practice (and had effectively already done so in the past) by overruling decisions of the chair. The Democrats chose not to enter this political minefield and save the filibuster for the day they might need it themselves.

Kennedy was unabashedly liberal and championed an interventionist federal government that emphasized economic and social justice. In the wake of Supreme Court decisions that limited the rights of employees who had sued their employers for discrimination, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1983 to modify some of the basic procedural and substantive rights provided by federal law in employment discrimination cases. It provided the right to trial by jury on discrimination claims and introduced the possibility of emotional distress damages and limited the amount that a jury could award. Congress passed the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act that same year, imposing sanctions on South Africa.

Kennedy demonstrated his liberalism early in his Presidency when PATCO organized a strike of air traffic controllers despite federal law prohibiting government unions from striking. Citing safety concerns, PATCO called for a reduced 32-hour work week, a $10.000 pay increase for all air-traffic controllers and a better benefits package for retirement. Kennedy involved himself directly in the negotiations between PATCO and the FAA. The end result was a 34-hour workweek and a $7.000 pat increase as well as a better benefits package for retirement. Kennedy called federal laws that prohibited strikes by government unions “ridiculous” and intended to remove those laws.

The Republicans criticized this as a period of recession was hardly the right time to be giving major increases in salary as both the government and private businesses had to economize. Kennedy, however, addressed the issue of the economy as early as 1981, resolved to strike the iron while it was hot. Reagan had left government finances in sound order with a fairly low government debt and Kennedy put that to good use by enacting a stimulus package for the economy: whereas a Democratic-controlled Congress had rejected Reagan’s package earlier because it favoured big business too much, Kennedy managed to pass an $800 billion dollar stimulus package favouring small to medium sized businesses so they wouldn’t go under.

Another Progressivist piece of legislation was the Federal Minimum Wage Act, which dictated that the minimum wage would be raised to the federal average nationwide and that social security doles should match. Many Republicans were predictably fiercely opposed because they believed a higher minimum wage would hurt business (as to social security, they called that a “handout”).

Likewise, they were opposed to Kennedy’s progressive taxes that spared the lower and middle class incomes and taxed the rich more heavily, his increase in corporate taxes, his higher budget for subsidized housing, the tripling of the federal cigarette tax, his expansion of labour and trade union rights, new antitrust legislation, improvements to the Voting Rights Act, new affirmative action legislation, his pro-LGBT stance, the establishment of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, new gun control initiatives, and his “Equal Access to Education Act”.

Kennedy’s education act led to de facto public education: adolescents, who had graduated from high school displaying the required aptitude and grades and whose parents couldn’t afford college tuition fees, would automatically get a grant. Kennedy denounced Republican opposition as plutocratic obstructionism aimed at unreasonably limiting access to an university education to those with pecunious and often conservative parents. The act was passed by Congress over Republican objections. The GOP simply didn’t have much to say in the 80s. They had no majority and they could only filibuster if they could get Democrats to side with them. They were politically impotent, resulting in an increasingly vocal conservative wing of the Republicans agitating against Progressivism.

By late 1982, the latest recession that had begun in 1981 was over and the economy showed growth though whether Kennedy’s policies had affected this recovery positively or negatively was subject of debate. Critics argue that his tax increases on the rich and the rise of corporate taxes had probably slowed down the recovery as it left them with less capital to invest, a recovery which these critics attributed to natural economic cycles. The Republicans used this to support their position that the bad late 70s and early 80s economy was nobody’s fault, that Reagan was unfairly blamed for the high unemployment, and that whoever had won the Presidency in 1980 would’ve presided over economic growth.

Those who defend Kennedy’s economic policies during the early 80s recession point out that his $800 billion stimulus package de facto subsidized many small to medium sized businesses, preventing their bankruptcy and keeping their employees from joining the army of unemployed. Secondly, while critics pointed out that the raised minimum wage led to higher salary costs and therefore higher prices, proponents of Kennedy’s economic policies countered that the increase in purchasing power more than offset that and hadn’t led to the dreaded wage-price spiral that Republicans had erroneously predicted. The country was on the road to recovery.

It was the beginning of the heyday of American progressivism, eclipsing the historical Progressive Era that had roughly lasted from 1890 to 1917. America had never been this liberal, although the term “liberal” soon required some clarification: US liberalism was left-wing and comparable to what Europeans would call social democracy, advocating progressive taxes, income redistribution, comprehensive public services, universal healthcare, social security, labour rights, antitrust laws, social justice, Cold War détente and so on. He’s also credited with allocating a serious budget to research aimed at the 80s AIDS epidemic.

Classical liberals in Europe, reincarnated as neoliberals, in turn favoured small government as well as supply side economics, an anti-Soviet foreign policy and could be either mildly socially conservative or moderately socially progressive. As a result Kennedy experienced fraught relations to a degree with UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl. His economic and foreign policies were significantly different.

In a unique role reversal the US was therefore more progressive, pro-détente and generally left-wing than Western Europe by the early 1980s and this would last for the entire decade. The difference in views was exemplified the most by the Kennedy-Thatcher rivalry. They disliked each other, despite the US offer to assist during the Falkland War. Her policies of deregulation, privatization of state-owned companies, reducing the power of the trade unions and austerity policies were heavily criticized in Britain because leftist American domestic policies seemed to result in economic growth on the other side of the Atlantic by the early 80s whereas Thatcher’s policies seemed to result in hardship.

Moreover, Thatcher became the leading head of government in Western Europe to label US policies toward the Soviet Union as too soft most often, gaining the support of Kohl as well as Dutch Prime Minister Lubbers and Belgian Prime Minister Martens. Kennedy in turn regarded her as an alarmist and warmonger standing in the way of reduced tensions and steps towards ending the (nuclear) arms race. Moscow hoped in a break in a US-European relations, but despite all their differences the Western democratic countries remained united. Moreover, West Germany and France chose to speed up Western European political and economic integration in response to these developments. The West’s lack of a coherent, joint foreign policy vis-à-vis the Eastern Bloc would nonetheless benefit Moscow for some time to come.

 

[Onkel Willie]

No replies? I hope a fresh update can change that!

Chapter VII: Détente and the Middle East, 1983-1989.​

Kennedy was a proponent of renewed Cold War détente, hoping to reinvigorate the détente that been initiated under Nixon and upheld by Ford as well as Rockefeller whereas Reagan’s tone had been much more confrontational. He wanted to root out the threat of nuclear war, improve US-Soviet relations that had been less than harmonious during his predecessor’s term in office, and ultimately wanted to define the safety of the world. He was opposed to any kind of arms race, both conventional and nuclear.

This became clear when he told Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin that he’d get the Senate, still controlled by the Democrats, to ratify SALT II if the Soviet government agreed to do the same (Reagan had withdrawn the treaty from consideration after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan). Andropov agreed – which had to do with the fact that by the early 80s the Soviet economy wasn’t in great shape – and thusly both Cold War superpowers ratified SALT II. The second Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty largely banned new missile programs and limited the number of MIRV-capable (multiple independently targetable re-entry vehicle) ballistic missiles to 1.320.

The Republicans criticized Kennedy’s renewed détente. Many of them calling it dovish, and some went so far as to equate the new détente to appeasement and denouncing President Kennedy. as a “modern Chamberlain”. They pointed out the resulting increase in communist influence in Latin America. The Marxist Sandinistas had risen to power in Nicaragua without the US doing anything about it.

Furthermore, Kennedy halted American interference in the Salvadoran Civil War: this civil war had begun after a military coup against President Romero – who had been unable to control a political crisis characterized by political violence and instability – after which a junta came to power that promised reform, but which primarily cracked down on political opposition. That stimulated left-wing militancy and Kennedy didn’t feel the US should help the ruling junta suppress an enemy that they had created themselves, despite Soviet support for said opposition. Kennedy in fact exerted pressure to get the Salvadoran government to talk to the opposition. The result was that by 1988 talks began between the Salvadoran government and the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, the umbrella organization for the leftist opposition. The Chapultepec Peace Accord signed that year led to the restructuring of the Salvadoran Armed Forces, replacing the National Police with the National Civil Police, the dissolution of the National Guard and the Treasury Police and the FMLN disbanding its armed wing and becoming a regular political party.

Another example was the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada: after becoming independent from Great Britain in 1974, the communist New Jewel Movement seized power in a coup d’état in 1979 and established the People’s Revolutionary Government with Maurice Bishop as Prime Minister. Strife within the government led to another coup in 1983 resulting in Bishop’s house arrest and execution as well as the establishment of the Revolutionary Military Council, with General Hudson Austin as chairman.

Some urged for a US invasion of Grenada, but Democratic and Republican views quickly became polar opposites. Whereas the Republicans felt American lives were in danger and urged Kennedy to intervene, he refused with the backing of a majority of his own party. And he pointed out how Reagan’s actions towards Iran had only made things worse in the longer run. He didn’t want to repeat that mistake.

As the incumbent President failed to see the urgency that Republicans felt, they pointed out the presence of an entire battalion of Cuban troops and a number of Soviet advisors. Kennedy rebutted that that meant nothing as there was no evidence that either Hudson Austin or his Cuban and Soviet backers had plans to target American civilians in his country. Moreover, Kennedy argued the coup was an internal affair and that a unilateral invasion would be widely condemned internationally and turn a majority in the UN General Assembly against the US.

Kennedy was proven correct that Austin wasn’t going to make a move against US civilians. The discussion that remained in the aftermath was whether or not the United States should have cited the Monroe Doctrine – which held that any intervention in the political affairs of the Americas by foreign powers was a potentially hostile act against the United States – as a justification to overthrow Grenada’s government through military action. Kennedy was disinclined to believe that, remaining unconvinced that a change in government in an island nation with a population of less than 100.000 people meant much in the greater scheme of the Cold War. Also, Kennedy didn’t see any evidence that the internal change in power was in any way related to the Cuban and Soviet presence on the island.

Kennedy considered a solution to the Lebanese Civil War, which had been ongoing for almost a decade, much more important (he hoped that the US acting as a peacemaker would bring détente with the Soviets closer and revive disarmament talks). Lebanon’s Civil War had begun in 1975 and the root issue was the dominance of Maronite Christians, a dominance that had come under threat as the Muslim population grew strongly, partially because Palestinian refugees changed the country’s ethnic mix (the dominant position of the Maronites stretched back to the days that the country was a French mandate).

Fighting between Maronite-Christian and Palestinian forces (mainly from the Palestine Liberation Organization) began in 1975. Leftist, Muslim, and pan-Arabist Lebanese groups formed an alliance with the Palestinians Over the course of this multifaceted civil war, alliances shifted rapidly and unpredictably. Furthermore, foreign powers, such as Israel and Syria, became involved in the war and fought alongside different factions. After the Iran-Iraq War ended, Saddam Hussein also interfered and backed the PLO against the Maronite Christians supported by the Israelis, ending up in an uneasy alliance with Syrian leader Hafez al-Assad with whom he had a poor relationship. Various peacekeeping forces, such as the Multinational Force in Lebanon and the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon, were also stationed in the country during the conflict (that led to the 1983 suicide bombings of the US Embassy and the Beirut barracks).

Kennedy proposed an international summit on Lebanon to be attended by representatives from the fighting parties in the country, the Arab League, the United States, the Soviet Union and France in 1985, at a time that sectarian violence seemed to worsen as other attempts at mediation had failed. The Saudi government offered to the host the summit at Taif and the talks commenced despite Syrian protests that Iran hadn’t been invited: that resulted from the US State Department sidestepping the issue of which of the three rivalling factions in the Iranian Civil War was Iran’s legitimate government. An agreement was reached thanks to the emphasis on continuing negotiations by Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and pressure exerted by Soviet Foreign Minister Gromyko on pro-Soviet Arab allies like Iraq and Syria.

The Taif Agreement signed in 1985 changed the Christian-to-Muslim representation in parliament from 55:45 to 50:50, increased political power for the Muslim-reserved prime ministerial position over the Christian-reserved presidency position and disarmed all militias save for Hezbollah, while hostilities with the PLO continued as they rejected disarmament. Additionally, Syria would continue to occupy the north and east of the country while Israel occupied the south. A fragile peace began in 1985 after a decade of civil war.

Convinced of American sincerity, the Soviets agreed to proposals for a successor to SALT II, an idea which Kennedy had proposed for the first in 1982 during a commencement speech at his alma mater Harvard. The first agreement to be signed, however, was the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. The 1986 INF Treaty banned all of the two nations’ nuclear and conventional ground-launched ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and missile launchers with ranges of 500-1.000 kilometres (short medium-range) and 1.000-5.500 km (intermediate-range). The treaty did not apply to air- or sea-launched missiles. This treaty was merely a stepping stone to Kennedy, who wanted a new agreement on strategic nuclear weapons building on SALT II.

He considered SALT III to be his crowning achievement, but the negotiations which began in 1985 proved tough and lasted for three years. Negotiations primarily concerned the respective strategic bomber fleets of the United States and the Soviet Union, in which the former had a commanding lead. The Soviet strategic bomber fleet numbered 1.200 medium and heavy bombers, but only 150 of them were Tupolev Tu-95s and Myasishchev M-4 bombers capable of striking at the continental US. That changed in 1984, when new Tu95MS and Tu-160 bombers appeared and were equipped with the first Soviet AS-15 cruise missiles. By limiting the phasing in, it was proposed that the US would be left with a strategic advantage for a time. Parity in that area was non-negotiable to Moscow and Foreign Minister Gromyko threatened that the Soviet delegation would walk out if the US didn’t agree to a rapid reduction of its strategic bomber force.

General Secretary Yuri Andropov eventually signed off on SALT III when the US agreed to the so-called “bomber clause” in 1988 even though by then things had evened out in that area anyway, which made this concession largely a symbolic one. The first phase would reduce overall warhead counts on any missile type to 5.000, with an additional limit of 2.500 on intercontinental ballistic missiles. Additionally, a total of 850 ICBMs would be allowed, with a limit of 110 “heavy throw” missiles like the SS-18 and additional limitations on the total “throw weight” of the missiles. The second phase introduced similar limits on heavy bombers and their warheads, as well as other strategic systems. The end result would be that its signatories were barred from deploying more than 6.000 nuclear warheads and a total of 1.600 ICBMs and bombers.

In the meantime, the main source of friction between the superpowers in the 80s was the Middle East, with two major ongoing conflicts involving the superpowers: the Soviet-Afghan War and the Iranian Civil War. In the former the mujahedeen received foreign support from the United States among others and in the latter case the Soviets armed, trained and financed the communist Tudeh Party and other leftist factions that sided with it against Bazargan’s government.

These conflicts had become largely stagnant. The Soviets were unable to completely subdue resistance to communist rule. In Iran, where three main factions fought to unify the country, the communist one that opposed the Western-backed and Western-recognized government continued to control the north and northwest (this included the capital of Teheran).

Kennedy wanted to secure a non-communist unified Iran by diplomacy, ending the bloody civil war there in the process. Iran wouldn’t become the next country split in two because of the Cold War as far as he was concerned. He had demonstrated his goodwill by beginning disarmament talks for SALT III and a genuine desire to reach peace by getting more hands-on in regards to Lebanon. This had convinced Soviet leader Yuri Andropov to be more trusting of Kennedy. Meanwhile, his own reasons for reciprocating tentative American diplomatic feelers were twofold: he wanted an accommodation that would result in the Soviet Army no longer having to haemorrhage so many resources in Afghanistan whilst also securing the USSR’s southern flank through a neutral Iran.

The “US-Soviet Convention on Mutual Middle Eastern De-escalation” was signed in the Soviet embassy in Teheran, the location of the historical 1943 Teheran Conference, in June 1987. It resulted from a diplomatic dance involving the United States, the Soviet Union, Bazargan’s government and the Tudeh Party, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India. The Soviets were willing to cut off their support to Tudeh leader Noureddin Kianouri, pressure him into laying down his arms and join Bazargan’s government on two conditions: no American forces stationed in Iran and an end to all military, financial and other support to the Afghan mujahedeen.

There already hadn’t been any US forces stationed in Iran for years so the first condition wasn’t difficult for Secretary of State Vance to agree to, which he told Soviet Ambassador Dobrynin. The second condition was more difficult as a vocal minority among the Democrats led by Texas Congressman Charlie Wilson objected, citing the terrible suffering produced by the heavy-handed tactics used by the Soviet Army in Afghanistan. Support to the mujahedeen was nonetheless halted abruptly because Iranian reunification under a generally pro-Western government was considered more important than overthrowing communism in Afghanistan.

Pakistani President Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq was alarmed by the prospect of a communist Afghanistan on his borders and wanted security guarantees from the US, which in turn alarmed Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and prompted him to seek similar assurances from Moscow. To reassure Pakistan, the US-Pakistan Security Treaty was signed which obliged the US to come to the latter’s aid if it became involved in a war against more than one power (such as India and Afghanistan). The provisions of the treaty also included arms sales by the US that included F-14 jets, M60A3 tanks, AH-1 Cobra attack helicopters and M270 self-propelled multiple rocket launchers.

India signed a treaty just like this one with the Soviet Union: it was guaranteed that the USSR would become involved if India became involved in a war against two parties or more (such as Pakistan and the United States) and became an export market for Soviet weapons like MiG-29 jetfighters, T-72 tanks, Mil Mi-24 helicopter gunships and BM-21 Grad multiple rocket launchers.

The balance in the Soviet-Afghan War swung in favour of the Afghan communist regime led by President Mohammad Najibullah despite a drawdown of Soviet troops that commenced in 1987. Najibullah passed reforms to achieve national reconciliation. He replaced communism with Afghan nationalism as the main ideology of the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan, made Islam an official religion, let non-communists join the government and engaged in dialogue with more moderate mujahedeen.

Simultaneously, the Afghan Army launched an offensive into the strategic Panjshir Valley with 20.000 men equipped with Soviet tanks, other armoured vehicles, helicopter gunships and so on while the Soviets provided intense air and artillery support. It began in 1987 and continued into late 1988. By then, the valley was secure and the draw down of the Soviet Army continued as part of a reduction of Cold War tensions in the Middle East, which in large part meant de-escalating the proxy conflicts there. The Soviet Army and Soviet Air Force would maintain bases in Mazar-i-Sharif, Kabul, Bagram and Kandahar and continued to provide air and artillery support, indirect military aid in the form of deliveries of weapons, ammunitions and fuel, as well as training and also logistical and financial assistance. Najibullah would largely subdue the mujahedeen by 1993.

The Iranian Civil War, in the meantime, ended in 1989 when Khomeini died and the last pockets of Islamist resistance either surrendered or were crushed by forces loyal to either Mehdi Bazargan or communist leader Noureddin Kianouri. These two now worked together as a result of the agreement of the superpowers, which had forced the Tudeh Party into a coalition with a wide range of democratic parties that had flocked to Bazargan’s liberal-democratic progressive banner. These parties ranged from left-wing and progressive to right-wing and conservative as well as everything in between.

The Federal Republic of Iran was born in 1989, a state with a democratic constitution that guaranteed liberties such as freedom of expression, thought, of the press, of religion, movement, assembly, expression and association as well as rights like the right of civil marriage, academic freedom, a fair trial, habeas corpus, dignity and so on. Furthermore, Iran became a federation in which its thirty provinces became constituent states. A federal system was chosen to prevent a too powerful central government headed by a strongman like Khomeini or the Shah before him.

The Majles was reorganized into a bicameral parliament consisting of a lower house called the National Assembly and an upper house known as the Federal Assembly. The former consisted of 500 deputies to be elected through proportional representation in elections in which all men and women aged 18 and above would be allowed to vote. The latter was composed of 443 deputies (one from each county in Iran) elected through a first-past-the-post system to ensure the representation of more sparsely populated regions. The cabinet was responsible and could be dismissed solely by the Majles. The President was to be elected in a joint session of both houses of parliament, resulting in Kianouri becoming the first President of the Federal Republic of Iran. Bazargan became its first Prime Minister.

 

[Nivek]

Andropov living is another massive butterfly,also seems indian and Pakistan tension are higher than ever

 

[Onkel Willie]

Update time again!!!

Chapter VIII: Eastern Bloc Crisis, 1989-1990.​

January 1989 saw the inauguration of President Jerry Brown. Kennedy’s universal healthcare reform had proven very popular, ironically even more so in traditionally Republican states. Moreover, his second term in particular saw the US economy show some strong growth, resulting in unemployment decreasing further. Eight years of progressivism had frustrated the Republicans, who had become even more conservative in their positions and denounced Kennedy’s policies as “communist”. This process was strengthened by conservative Democrats switching to the Republicans, most prominently Texas Senator Phil Gramm.

While Jerry Brown had faced token opposition in the Democratic primaries, Phil Gramm sought and got the nomination during the Republican primaries. Though Gramm had a full war chest, this hadn’t been easy as thirty others had made a bid as well, encouraged by the fact that no major household names had thrown their hat in the ring. To mobilize conservative America, Gramm chose Southern Baptist minister and televangelist Pat Robertson from Virginia – who was considered controversial due to his opposition to progressive causes such as LGBT rights, feminism and abortion – as his running mate.

The results seemed clear enough: Democratic nominee Brown and his running mate, former Governor of Arkansas Bill Clinton, carried 23 states plus DC, gained 285 electoral votes and won 50.2% of the popular vote. The Republican Gramm/Robertson ticket carried 27 states, obtained 253 electoral votes and won 48.7% of the popular vote. That made Brown the first incumbent Vice President to be elected President since Martin van Buren in 1836. There were also, however, elections for the Senate and for the House of Representatives. The Democrats maintained a comfortable majority in the House, but the Senate was now divided 50:50. Vice President Clinton could still use his tiebreaking vote, but now the Republicans had a chance to exercise some real influence through the filibuster.

Meanwhile, Andropov was concerned with domestic reforms at that time as the 80s were a time of economic stagnation for the USSR. These disarmament agreements helped in that regard as they allowed the Soviets to reduce defence spending in the middle to long term. The Soviet planned economy couldn’t detect consumer preferences, shortages and surpluses with sufficient accuracy and therefore was unable to efficiently co-ordinate production. There was corruption with people skimming off the top, nomenklatura resisting change to maintain control over their fiefdoms, and consistent underperformance as managers were reluctant to exceed government quotas as planning agency Gosplan might well raise said quotas if they did. The Soviet economy increasingly relied on oil and natural gas revenues as other sectors stagnated, suffered from corruption and showed little innovation, and unfortunately for the Kremlin prices for both were consistently rather low in the 1980s. Increased OPEC production offset the impact of the civil war in Iran.

Andropov’s response was a large scale anti-corruption campaign. In contrast to Brezhnev’s policy of avoiding conflicts and dismissals, Andropov began to fight violations of party, state and labour discipline, which led to significant personnel changes during an anti-corruption campaign against many of Brezhnev's cronies. During his first fifteen months in office, Andropov dismissed eighteen ministers and 37 first secretaries of obkoms, kraikoms and Central Committees of Communist Parties of Soviet Republics, and criminal cases against high-level party and state officials were started.

Andropov fought corruption for moral, ethical, ascetic, and ideological reasons, but it was also an effective way for party members from the police and security organizations to defeat competitors for power at the party’s senior levels. Corruption had been pervasive and tolerated implicitly under Brezhnev before though, in contrast to the official denials. In such an environment, anti-corruption campaigning was a way for police and security people to appear to be cleaning up villains’ malfeasance and coincidentally increasing their own power, when in fact one set of antiheroes was defeating another set in a morally grey power struggle. Corruption was definitely reduced by Andropov, but he also positioned likeminded individuals to succeed him such as Grigory Romanov, Yegor Ligachev, Nikolai Ryzhkov and Mikhail Gorbachev.

Goulash Communism – the Hungarian model, which made that country the “happiest barrack” in the socialist camp – was considered to be the next step to reforming the Soviet centrally planned command economy because Andropov was intrigued by it and thought it was applicable to the USSR. These reforms fostered a sense of well-being and relative cultural freedom as well as elements of regulated market economics in addition to a mildly improved human rights record.

Part of these reforms was the so-called “Modern Economic Policy” (MEP) promulgated in 1989. It was by far the most important element of the Soviet implementation of Goulash Communism: it eased foreign trade restrictions, gave limited freedom to the workings of the market, and allowed a limited number of small businesses to operate in the services sector. Market economics were now allowed on a small scale, though the resulting commercial activity was tightly supervised. MEP became the acronym under which all of the late 80s reforms enacted by Andropov became known in the USSR, reforms that were fairly popular as they led to something of a consumer economy (the exceptions were excise taxes on alcohol and tobacco).

In the late 80s and early 90s the Kremlin also had to deal with unrest taking place in its Warsaw Pact allies, starting in the Polish People’s Republic. A massive wave of strikes had erupted in Poland in April 1988 and these strikes, as well as street demonstrations, lasted until September. They shook the communist regime headed by Wojciech Jaruzelski, First Secretary of the Polish United Workers’ Party, which had been struggling with its legitimacy ever since the rise of the independent trade union called Solidarity earlier that decade (this had prompted martial law, lasting from December 1981 to July 1983). In February 1989, Jaruzelski was told by Soviet Foreign Minister Shevardnadze that if he didn’t restore order, the Soviet Union would invoke Warsaw Pact “assistance” to do it for him. As far as Moscow was concerned, Solidarity and its backers were “socio-fascists”. Censorship was tightened while the SB, the secret police, carried out a record number of arrests after martial law was imposed again in March 1989.

The Hungarian People’s Republic experienced a leadership change de facto dictated by Moscow. Over the course of 1989 the reformist faction of the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party headed by Prime Minister Miklós Németh, Rezsö Nyers, Gyula Horn and Imre Pozsgay increasingly sidelined General Secretary Károly Grósz, who theoretically was the leader of Hungary (until November 1988 he’d also been head of government as Prime Minister until his replacement by Németh). This quartet continued further economic liberalizations that started to break up monopoly industries, continued workers’ self-management experiments in collective farms and legalized private, artisanal and service activity. Despite these reforms Hungary suffered from inflation, ran a massive foreign debt and saw widespread poverty in the 80s.

Hungary opening its borders was the beginning of the end for the reformists. Németh saw a market economy as the only alternative to a “long, slow death” whilst also realizing how the Soviets would react to a quick economic transition and any negotiations with the anti-communist opposition. Relaxing immigration policies – allowing Hungarians to work abroad and send remittances back home – was taken as the next step instead, in the hopes of making it clear to Moscow how desperately in need of free market reforms Hungary’s economy was. This desperation was underlined by tens of thousands of Hungarian young women working as prostitutes in Western Europe.

Hungary’s decision on June 27th 1989 to remove parts of the electrified barbed wire fence along its 240 kilometre border with Austria drove the nail into the coffin of the reformists because it terrified the Soviet Union, prompting Andropov to order commander of the Southern Group of Forces Colonel General Matvey Burlakov to intervene against “the counterrevolutionary regime in Hungary”. Soviet troops marched through Budapest and tanks rolled right up to the parliament building on Kossuth Square. The Hungarian party leadership wanted to avoid a bloodbath like 1956 and ordered the Hungarian People’s Army to stand down. Németh, Pozsgay and the other reformists were stripped of their offices and placed under arrest by the AVH.

General Secretary Károly Grósz was restored to the position of Prime Minister by autumn 1989 and a gap in the Iron Curtain was prevented. To support Grósz, the Soviets provided additional oil and natural gas deliveries to ensure the Hungarians would enjoy electricity and heating throughout the coming winter. The earlier liberalizations as well as the immigration policies allowing Hungarians to work abroad for remittances were maintained. The communist regime and the border fence remained in place just as well, though. Repression against dissenters continued, thus stymying the fairly reformist spirit that had allowed the Queen concert in Budapest’s Nep Stadium in 1986.

East Germany, formally the German Democratic Republic, was experiencing unrest as well in 1989. This had started in May as a result of widespread public anger over the faking of local government election results. People attempted to apply for exit visas or left the country contrary to GDR law after news in late June that Prime Minister Németh was going to take down the electric fence, hoping to cross the border there. That gap in the Iron Curtain was never really open to begin with as it had prompted an immediate Soviet military intervention, affecting regime change in Hungary. The Central Group of Forces was mobilized while the Czechoslovak People’s Army carried out a partial mobilization to suppress unrest and guard the fence on the Austrian and West German borders. Some people made it to the West German embassies in Prague and Budapest, but few made it to Austria through the border fortifications on the borders of Czechoslovakia and Hungary.

Dissatisfaction in East Germany morphed into large scale peaceful protests that took the shape of picketing, marching, sit-ins, leafletting, protest art, protest music and civil obedience involving among other things the dissemination of censored works and the distribution of audiocassettes that weren’t commercially available in the Eastern Bloc. Hundreds of thousands of people were taking to the streets by October 1989 in the largest anti-communist demonstrations in the Eastern Bloc since the Prague Spring.

East German leader Erich Honecker tried to suppress these protests with riot police using batons, tear gas and mounted police charges. At the same time the Stasi carried out tens of thousands of arrests. This suppression only served as a catalyst for even greater protests. The protestors demanded improved living standards, economic reform, an end to corruption, fair elections, an end to censorship and democratic freedoms like freedom of speech and freedom of the press. During those autumn months of 1989, Honecker considered declaring martial law and ordering the National People’s Army to violently disperse these protests.

Aware of how the Chinese leadership had been condemned for suppressing the Tiananmen Square protests earlier that year, the Kremlin was not in favour of a military solution and decided to get rid of the obstinate Honecker. Machinations were set in motion, resulting in the Politburo of the Socialist Unity Party (the ruling German party, the SED) dismissing both Honecker and his right hand man Egon Krenz. The more moderate Hans Modrow replaced Honecker as SED General Secretary, Chairman of the State Council and Chairman of the National Defence Council in November 1989.

Modrow relaxed censorship somewhat, announced economic reforms consisting of workers’ self-management experiments as well as legalization of private, artisanal and service activity and relaxed visa policies for travel inside the Eastern Bloc. To grease the wheels of the East German economy further, the strongest of the Eastern Bloc, the Soviet Union gave economic aid. Part of that, however, was used to strengthen the fortifications on the inner German border even further so people’s couldn’t go to West Germany. The steel and concrete border fortifications, barbed wire and watchtowers were equipped with sensors and detectors that made escape virtually impossible.

The Eastern Bloc Crisis had an impact on the relations between the two Cold War superpowers. Though the United States had been committed to détente for much of the 80s, but President Jerry Brown felt he couldn’t remain silent in the face of suppression of peace protests and the silencing of voices demanding democracy. He called upon the Soviet Union to respect the sovereignty of its Warsaw Pact allies, allowing them to deal with the demands of their people on their own and to initiate democratic reform and economic liberalization. Standing with his back to the Inner German border at the village of Schlagsdorf and with East German border guards in sight – unnerving the Secret Service who thought one might take a shot at the President – he called the fortified border “a monstrosity, an abomination that has turned half a continent into an open air prison”. He called for the Soviets to “tear it down”. The Kremlin hadn’t been used to such terms from an American President in long time and relations soured.

Then Yuri Andropov finally died – he’d been suffering from hypertensive kidney disease, high blood pressure and diabetes for years – in February 1990 at the age of 75. The circumstances probably made it unlikely for a serious reformist and proponent of continued détente to take power in the Soviet Union. Gorbachev – the most significant proponent of greater openness, transparency and democratization – had had been sidelined by Andropov during his last few months.

Andropov feared that more radical reformist policies to this effect would weaken the power of the Communist Party, just like had happened in Hungary. A weakened hold by the CPSU in turn could awaken nationalism, resulting in separatism just like Russia had already seen after the Russian Revolution in 1917. He considered going further than “Goulash Communism” dangerous and anti-communist. Andropov had appointed Gorbachev Minister of Fishing Industry in November 1989, which people knew was a career dead end for someone who’d previously been a rising star in the Politburo although they didn’t acknowledge it publicly. Grigory Romanov was nominated by the Politburo and the Plenum of the Central Committee for the position of General Secretary. He was the next leader of the Soviet Union now. He immediately demonstrated his hardline stance by changing Volgograd’s name back to Stalingrad.

 

[Pangur]

Hi, I found this TL yesterday , excellent content! I`m curious as to how Eagle Claw worked in this TL, was that better luck or did I miss an important change?

 

[Tanner151]

Loving the story! Enjoying seeing this alt-Cold War. Glad to see a Democratic Iran and a U.S. with universal healthcare

 

[Onkel Willie]

A new update! Merry Christmas everyone!

Chapter IX: The Iraqi-Kuwaiti War and the Early 90s Recession, 1990-1992.​

Tensions were brewing in the Middle East. Saddam Hussein accused Kuwait of exceeding its OPEC quotas for oil production. In order for the cartel to maintain its desired price of $18 a barrel, production discipline was required. The United Arab Emirates and Kuwait were consistently overproducing and the result was a slump in the oil price – as low as $10 a barrel – with a resulting loss of $7 billion a year to Iraq. Saddam wasn’t going to put up with it for much longer and became even more cantankerous and angry after Iraqi intelligence had allegedly discovered “evidence” that the Kuwaitis had been slant drilling into an Iraqi oilfield at Rumaila. He denounced the overproduction of oil by Kuwait and the UAE as a form of economic warfare against Iraq.

The crisis entered a new phase when Saddam openly threatened to use military force, shortly after which the CIA reported 30.000 Iraqi troops on the Kuwaiti border, leading to the US naval fleet in the Persian Gulf being put on alert. On July 15th 1990, the Iraqi government laid out its combined objections to the Arab League, including that policy moves were costing Iraq $1 billion a year, and that Kuwait was still using the Rumaila oil field. Iraq subsequently demanded $20 billion in compensation to cover the lost revenues resulting from alleged Kuwaiti slant-drilling into the Rumaila oilfield and consistent overproduction of oil.

The crisis took on a Cold War dimension with the United States and the USSR each taking sides. Grigory Romanov, the new Soviet leader, had an ulterior motive in backing Iraq in its grievances: the Soviet economy remained stagnant and government revenue had become increasingly reliant on exports of oil and natural gas. That revenue had taken a real hit during the 1980s oil glut, during which prices for petroleum and natural gas were low. OPEC production discipline would go a long way in boosting the Soviet economy, and a crisis on the Persian Gulf even more so.

The US took the side of Saudi Arabia, a major American ally in the region, and Saddam responded by declaring US Ambassador April Glaspie persona non grata. Yuli Vorontsov, the Permanent Representative of the Soviet Union to the United Nations, denounced American support for what he termed “Kuwaiti thieving”. He went further to state that there wasn’t some moral or ethical reason for the West to defend Kuwait against its larger neighbour, only the economic reason of keeping oil prices low. He was acting like the pot calling the kettle black when he denounced American support for Kuwait as cynically self-serving, because the Soviet Union had an economic interest too: getting oil prices higher again.

In the event of war, Iraq had the muscle to simply steamroll the Kuwaitis. The Kuwaiti military at the time numbered 16.000 men, arranged into three armoured, one mechanised infantry and an under-strength artillery brigade. The strength of the Kuwait Air Force in 1990 was around 2.200 Kuwaiti personnel, with eighty aircraft and forty helicopters. The Iraqi Army was capable of fielding one million men and 850.000 reservists, 5.500 tanks, 3.000 artillery pieces, 700 combat aircraft and helicopters; and held 53 divisions, twenty special forces brigades, and several regional militias, and had a strong air defence. After the Israeli Defence Forces the Iraqi Army was probably the strongest in the region.

In June 1990, Saddam Hussein granted an audience to Soviet Ambassador Alexander Belonogov who, on behalf of the Kremlin, asked what the next steps against Kuwait would be if they continued to disrespect OPEC production discipline. The ill-tempered Iraqi dictator unleashed a longwinded tirade: he said Kuwait had been created by the British whereas previously it had been part of the Basra Vilayet of the Ottoman Empire which was now largely located in Iraq; because Iraq was a successor state of the Ottomans, Kuwait should be part of it on historical grounds. He even pointed out how in the 1930s many Kuwaitis were interested in annexation by Iraq, conveniently ignoring for the moment that a lot had changed in sixty years.

Belonogov was alarmed and quite bluntly told Saddam the Soviet government would throw him to the wolves if he decided to annex Kuwait. The Kremlin was willing to tolerate a lot, but the annexation of an entire country by another was a step too far even for them. Though Moscow was not very sympathetic to Kuwait, its annexation by Iraq could be construed as imperialist aggression by the USSR’s third world allies. The Soviets weren’t going to risk getting into a Third World War over this.

Aware of the results of appeasement in the 1930s, the question was who Saddam would go after next after annexing Khuzestan and Kuwait. Though agreeing with his arguments on Kuwaiti “economic warfare” against Iraq, Moscow felt he had to be kept in check. Furthermore, the Soviets were aware of the fact that only weeks before US Ambassador to the United Nations Madeleine Albright had compared the situation to the Anschluss in 1938.

Neither Belonogov nor Soviet Foreign Minister Shevardnadze knew if the US State Department would announce military guarantees to Kuwait. The Soviets proposed a “punitive military operation” to get Kuwait back in line. Though angry that his annexation plans were being thwarted by his Soviet partners, Saddam nonetheless gave in as he didn’t want to risk a war against the United States. He went along with proposals for this “more moderate” military response and gave orders to that effect to the Iraqi Army.

On August 2nd 1990, Saddam unleashed what he called “the military counteroffensive to halt Kuwait’s economic warfare against Iraq” with 88.000 men supported by armour, artillery and Mil Mi-24 helicopter gunships. Spearheading them were four elite Republican Guard Divisions. The Iraqi Air Force – composed of two squadrons of Su-22s, one squadron of Su-25s, one with Mirage F1s, two with MiG-23 fighter-bombers and two more equipped with newer MiG-29s – took out the bases of the Kuwait Air Force and established air superiority. The offensive was two-pronged, with one attack from the north and a second from the west, resulting in the occupation of Kuwait north of the capital of Kuwait City.

While it seemed like an invasion intended to conquer Kuwait, the Iraqis didn’t advance further south. The Iraqi Army made no move to take the capital and instead began carrying out its punitive mission. While Mil Mi-24 gunships and artillery suppressed the activities of the Kuwait Army, Mil Mi-8 and Mi-17 transport helicopters as well as Bell 412 utility helicopters deployed Iraqi commandos to set fire to hundreds of Kuwaiti oil wells. Furthermore, oil spilling from facilities resulted in oil lakes in low-lying areas and those were set on fire too. To create another obstacle to deny the north of the country to the Kuwait Army, Iraqi military combat engineers dug “fire trenches”. Each one was roughly a kilometre long, three metres wide and three metres deep and filled with oil that was set on fire. Furthermore, MiG-23 fighter-bombers bombed oil refineries, fuel storages and pipelines all over the country. The operation was over in 72 hours, with the Iraqi Army withdrawing back across the border on August 5th.

Weather patterns across the Persian Gulf and the surrounding region were affected. Lower atmospheric winds blew the smoke along the eastern half of the Arabian Peninsula, and cities such as Dhahran and Riyadh as well as countries such as Bahrain experienced days with smoke filled skies and carbon soot rainout/fallout. Thus the immediate consequence of the arson sabotage was a dramatic regional decrease in air quality, causing respiratory problems for many Kuwaitis and those in neighbouring countries.

Kuwait was cowed into submission by the destructive Iraqi attack and – after mediation by the US, the Soviet Union, the Arab League and OPEC – agreed to a one-time $10 billion USD compensation to Baghdad. This was in addition to the financial loss for Kuwait of roughly $100 billion USD caused by Iraq’s attacks on its petroleum infrastructure. The last of the Kuwaiti oil fires was finally extinguished in November 1991. Kuwait enacted conscription to boost its military strength and became even closer to the West, supporting Western sanctions against Iraq. The West’s universal condemnation and resulting sanctions and embargos resulted in far closer cooperation between Iraq and the USSR.

The United Arab Emirates – which had been a neutral party in this conflict, but had also been consistently overproducing – fell back in line with OPEC production agreements for fear of being next. Two Iraqi Kresta I-class guided missile cruisers had appeared close to UAE territorial waters, engaging in intimidating “naval exercises”. These had been purchased from the Soviet Union, with an upgrade package allowing them to launch P-500 Bazalt cruise missiles carrying a one tonne conventional warhead.

This caused a falling out between East and West as the Warsaw Pact and NATO backed opposing sides in this conflict, and this falling out led to further talks about disarmament being abandoned completely. The Warsaw Pact powers withdrew from the negotiations concerning the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe. The treaty, had it been signed and ratified, would have imposed ceilings on each bloc from the Atlantic to the Urals on key armaments essential for conducting surprise attacks and initiating large-scale offensive operations.

Collectively, the treaty participants would have been allowed no more than: 20.000 tanks, 20.000 artillery pieces, 30.000 armoured combat vehicles, 6.800 combat aircraft and 2.000 attack helicopters. To further limit the readiness of armed forces, the treaty set equal ceilings on equipment that could be deployed with active units. Other ground equipment had to be placed in designated permanent storage sites. The limits for equipment each side could have in active units would’ve been: 16.500 tanks, 17.000 artillery pieces and 27.300 armoured combat vehicles. Even though negotiations had begun in 1989, the Soviet Union pulled out in 1991. The reason was that the USSR didn’t want to give up its quantitative superiority in conventional weapons, particularly in the areas of armour and artillery, in this atmosphere of renewed Cold War tension.

Besides the end of détente, the subsequent oil crisis decidedly ended the 1980s oil glut and caused a severe economic recession that hit the Western world especially hard. It abruptly halted the steady economic growth the West experienced in the latter half of the 80s. This is no surprise as during the Iraqi attack on Kuwait oil prices quintupled to $50 a barrel before tapering off to $20 in the following years. In the meantime, whereas the petroleum import dependent Western economies stagnated, the Soviet economy saw some growth thanks to increased oil revenues. The early 90s are remembered as a period of relative affluence after the economic stagnation the USSR had experienced in the preceding decade.

In the United States, these issues affected the outcome of the 1990 midterm elections and later also the 1992 US Presidential Elections. The Republicans won two Senate seats during these midterm elections, establishing a 52:48 majority in their favour. In the elections for the House of Representatives the Democrats held onto a tiny majority of 220 seats versus 215 for the Republicans. The end of the Democratic trifecta that had lasted the entire preceding decade marked the quiet end of the most Progressivist era of the US in the twentieth century. President Brown now had to negotiate with the Republicans to get things done because, even if legislation passed through the House, they could still block it in the Senate.

Jerry Brown nonetheless decided to run for a second term and experienced only token opposition during the primaries, which made it certain he would be renominated during the Democratic National Convention held in Little Rock, Arkansas. In the meantime, consensus among the Republican Party was that they should choose a moderate nominee rather than a right-wing conservative to draw in the swing vote.

It’s no coincidence that Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter – a Democrat who had switched to the Republicans in 1965, who had staked out a spot in the political centre, and who had split his vote between the Democrats and the Republicans as a Senator – launched a bid for the Presidency. He held some moderate and progressive opinions for a Republican. He supported a woman’s right to choose abortion even though he was personally opposed to it and, despite being against gay marriage, he was not opposed to homosexual civil unions. The right-wing didn’t like that and neither did they like his vote for the Civil Rights Act of 1991, demonstrating his support for affirmative action, or his opposition to tax cuts. He didn’t want to abolish either the universal healthcare or the federal minimum wage either, something which would’ve endangered the Republican victory anyway (many poorer voters from Republican bulwarks benefited from the increased minimum wage). He did, however, strongly oppose any gun control measures.

The Republican nomination was anything but certain for Specter in 1992. Former Kansas Senator Bob Dole, former Tennessee Governor Lamar Alexander, conservative columnist Pat Buchanan and Texas Congressman George W. Bush all threw their hat into the ring. Dole was caught between a rock and a hard place because he was more conservative than Specter, but less conservative than Bush, Buchanan and Alexander. George W. Bush, son of former Vice President George H.W. Bush, was the only one to mount a credible challenge to Specter and in the end even he withdrew from the race. Specter was nominated by the Republican National Convention in Harrisburg. He chose New York Congressman Jack Kemp – a proponent of supply side economics who had positions spanning the social spectrum, ranging from a conservative opposition to abortion to libertarian stances on immigration reform – as his running mate. This was a strategic choice aimed at reeling in swing votes whilst trying to avoid alienating the conservative wing of the GOP.

During the 1992 campaign, Specter used the economy against incumbent President Brown and also levelled accusations against him of being weak on defence policy. Brown’s only effective defence on the economy was pointing out how the welfare state that had been built over the past twelve years functioned as a safety net regime that prevented the unemployed from sinking into poverty. As to defence, Brown defended SALT III and the attempt to negotiate an agreement on conventional forces as steps to prevent an expensive arms race.

After twelve years of Democratic control over the White House – and corresponding majorities in Congress for most of the 1981-1991 timeframe – the American populace was weary of Progressivism. Whilst not interested in a hard right turn as the likes of Buchanan advocated, the American public did like Specter’s moderate talk of a “return to normalcy”. Moreover, he’d promised to stand up to Moscow and that message was received well by American audiences because the Soviets looked like they were winning the Cold War.

Arlen Specter carried 31 states, obtained 317 electoral votes and won 50.8% of the vote and thereby secured electoral victory. The Republican majority in the Senate was maintained and they also finally gained a slight majority in the House of Representatives. The Democratic Brown/Clinton ticket carried 19 states plus DC, gained 221 electoral votes and won 48.4% of the popular vote. The result meant that the Republicans for the first time since the 1953-1955 83rd United States Congress and the Eisenhower Presidency enjoyed a trifecta. Specter was the 43rd President of the United States.

 

[Tanner151]

Loving the story so far. Great stuff!