TLIAW: Camelot Lost

[Enigma-Conundrum]

*****​

When it comes to the men on white horses who dot American history, John Fitzgerald Kennedy ranks highly among them. There’s plenty of reasons why this might be the case. Maybe it’s the seminal moments of his presidency: his steady leadership through the Cuban Missile Crisis, his advocacy for civil rights for Black Americans despite the perception of confronting the “Solid South” as political suicide, and his throwing down the gauntlet in the Space Race. Maybe it’s the cultural shorthand for his image. “Kennedyesque” is practically every politico’s byword for exuberance, youth, and charisma; John himself the inevitable comparison for any would-be leader with these qualities. Maybe it’s the mythology that’s followed in his wake. His assassination was a sore trauma for many, a moment that lived on in countless minds at the time. A combination of glowing histories of his unfinished term like Arthur Schlesinger’s “A Thousand Days” and the strife that followed throughout the sixties has led many, especially those who were young at the time, to view that first wound on the national psyche as the inciting incident. Maybe it’s all of these feeding an intense nostalgia. Things were better when President Kennedy was in office, they say. It was Camelot.

This is precisely where @Oliveia and I’s interests come in. Alternate history surrounding John F. Kennedy is hardly a trail left unblazed. It’s perhaps one of the most common America-centric bits of the genre, and so much focuses on how he’d handle the cruelties of the decade he promised new leadership for. Here, we’re not particularly focused on a longer life for Kennedy. Many words have been spilled on this, ranging from depressing realism to pure escapism. In their own way, all of these are influenced by the myth. We chose to take the moment of idealized perfection that an entire generation views the Kennedy years as and strip it away entirely. This isn’t a world where Camelot survived, nor will it be one where that interminable villain of American history Kennedy is often contrasted with, Richard Milhous Nixon, wins the first battle on behalf of the Orthogonians. The Kennedy machinations in this world will have collapsed a year before the convention. This is a world where, come 1961, Camelot was little more than the dream of a bitter old patriarch in Hyannisport. That is our goal.

Or, if that justification for this overindulgence doesn’t satisfy, I offer you the words of Graham Chapman: “On second thought, let’s not go to Camelot. It is a silly place.”

 

[Oliveia]

And with my friend’s very flowery and beautiful introduction out of the way, let me provide a bit more of a technical question-and-answer.

Q: So, how is this going to work?
A: This is not going to be too dissimilar from “All Along the Watchtower” or “What It Took” by Vidal and Enigma—in fact, this was first pitched by Vidal as a three-way, but he got too busy with work-stuff. Essentially, we alternate presidents, never knowing the direction our co-author is going*

Q: What’s with that asterisk?
A: Well, it’s a bit more complicated than that—well, more lax anyways. You’re about to get the backlog. We started this project a month or two back and finally have enough of a backlog to start posting this for-realsies. We also might have, eh, collaborated a little bit. We’re not going into each-other’s turns entirely blind, that’s all. Sorry Enigma, I had to ruin the mystique a little.

Q: Is there a POD?
A: This was initially pitched as “WI JFK was Stevenson’s VP in 1956 instead of Kefauver?” by Vidal, but Enigma and I are perfectionists and the idea that there’d even be a little variance from IRL and TTL was enough for us to avoid mentioning it. If you want a concrete POD, that’s what you can work off of—I edited my first post to be vague on purpose!

Q: How often are you going to update?
A: Because of the backlog, we can pretty reliably say around twice a week presuming we keep the momentum up -- Saturday/Sunday and then Wednesday! We might not be able to wholly keep up once we're out of backlog but we're gonna try like hell!

Q: And who are you, by the way?
A: Oh, right, I’m a bit of a lurker on the site. Just wait until January—oops! That’s my cue, gotta get this all up and tidy. See you on the other end! Be ready for The Election of 1960 and make sure to have fun! Here we go!

 

[Oliveia]

35. Adlai Stevenson II (Democratic-IL)
January 20, 1961 - July 14, 1964

“Eggheads of the World arise — I was even going to add that you have nothing to lose but your yolks.” [1]​

Publicly, Adlai Stevenson was insistent that he was not interested in running a third time—although he would gladly accept the nominee if he were drafted. Nobody bought the story, and they knew he wanted it. Wanted it badly.

When he called Chicago mayor and political operator Richard Daley asking if the Illinois selection were willing and able to pledge their support behind him, Daley begrudgingly agreed to whip the votes. Who else was there, really? The Democratic Party had had two rising stars looking towards the race in 1960, both of them having duked it out for the vice presidential slot just four years prior: Estes Kefauver and John F. Kennedy.

Kefauver wanted to be in the running, and had prepared a bill in ‘57 that would draw the press’ attention and act as the perfect vehicle towards finally—finally—securing the nomination. This bill, a federal switchblade ban, died almost immediately. His Senate colleagues had long grown tired of presidential grandstanding and what was supposed to be an explosive entrance into the new decade ended up the weak sputtering of a dying engine. In 1959, Kefauver backed out of a bid, and spent the remaining four years of his life in the Senate. Finally content with his political career, the Tennessee senator was finally able to attract the admiration of his coworkers, and his final years before passing away at the age of 60 were spent developing a fruitful legislative agenda.

Kennedy, too, wanted to be in the running, but unlike his one-time vice presidential rival, chose to drum up support with a tour of Western Europe in ‘59, in the hope of cementing himself as the internationally recognized frontrunner. It was, initially, a successful operation, the charismatic young senator shaking hands with Prime Ministers MacMillan and Debré, Presidents Valera and De Gaulle. It all seemed like it was going perfectly, until the rumors started to drift out. Apparently, while touring France, the frontrunner had had a run-in with a French lady. A very pretty French lady. Indeed, the senator’s scheduling showed him to be elusive a fair few nights. The idea of John F. Kennedy shacking up with a French mistress immediately caught the public’s attention, and already the façade of the everyman John Doe had cracked and the public began seeing him as a womanizing King John. It was damaging, although not necessarily unrecoverable, until Bobby Kennedy spoke to the press. The bullish Kennedy brother was recorded as shouting “It’s all lies! Fabricated by the machines of Stevenson or—or [Lyndon] Johnson to try to discredit us!” Future historians would note that this startling outburst was a rather calm accusation, as behind closed doors he promised to “destroy” who was behind these lies. When the alleged mistress came forward and revealed that she was pregnant, Kennedy the Candidate finally broke his silence on the matter and revealed that the accusations were true, and in a speech famously gaffed that it was a “crime of passion.” Despite apocrypha to the contrary, the public did not in fact think that John F. Kennedy had committed murder, but the poor wording and walking back of flippant denials by the Kennedy campaign sunk the Massachusetts dynast’s prospects, and John F. Kennedy never lived up to his father’s lofty vision of a President Kennedy.

There were other bids, of course, but most of them were relatively subdued. Lyndon Johnson, the Senate Majority Leader, made a weak bid for the nomination. He refused to spend too much time campaigning nor too much time hunting for the bid, with some postulating that this stemmed from a fearful recognition of a potential political loss. He was popular with the party establishment but had a tough time channeling that support into delegates. He was distant and imposing, nowhere near as charismatic as the fading stars of Kennedy and Kefauver. That base of starry-eyed dreamers would not find a candidate to flock to. There was Hubert Humphrey, the Minnesota senator, but his campaign apparatus was too underfunded, his style too rustic. He had a few impressive primary wins under his belt, but not enough to secure the nomination. There were others, too, like Stuart Symington, Al Gore, and Wayne Morse, who had potential but nonetheless never broke through.

By the time the Convention met in Los Angeles, nobody was quite sure how it would go. Humphrey had performed admirably in the primaries, but the dejected dreamers of Camelot didn’t turn out and favorite sons were able to win out in a few of the Great Lakes states. Likewise, Johnson had the support of the establishment, but he was not approachable by any measure. There were, too, the drafted candidates and the favorite sons—Governor Brown in California, Senator Smathers in Florida, and of course Governor Stevenson of Illinois. The Convention floor was divided amongst these candidates. Humphrey was too pro-civil rights for the Southern delegates, who flocked to Johnson; Johnson was too unfriendly with labor for the Northern delegates, who stuck by Humphrey. The first ballot was a draw, and who would end up the winner was anyone’s guess.

That was when Mayor Daley got the call. Illinoian delegates had mostly voted in line with Humphrey, but between the ballots it had become clear that a compromise candidate was needed. Some floated Symington, who had netted the endorsement of President Truman, but he was too pro-civil rights for the Southern delegates; others proposed Al Gore, who was widely seen as too much of a flip-flopper on the issue of civil rights for either faction of the party. Therefore, all eyes settled on the elephant in the room: Adlai Stevenson. The Southern party bosses practically saw him as one of their own, the past two elections seeing the Illinoian solidly entrench himself in the Solid South; the Catholic party bosses of the big Northern cities felt much the same, especially as he resecured the tepid approval of Boss Daley. Thus, the inoffensive compromise known as Adlai Stevenson II was successfully launched into his third bid for the White House.

The press made the obvious historical comparison: William Jennings Bryan, another perennial Democratic candidate who, the press hypothesized, would similarly never ascend into the White House. A few cartoonists took to revamping Harper's Weekly’s “One Hundred Years Hence” cartoon, replacing the long-bearded populist Democrat with a spoiled egg, a grinning facsimile of the Illinois governor’s face impressed upon it, swarming with flies, a billboard reading “STEVENSON FOR PRESIDENT—2060!” as Uncle Sam looked on in bemusement. Democrats similarly had some fun with the repetition—blue and yellow buttons declaring “THIRD TIME’S THE CHARM!” sprouted from the chests of Democratic voters nearly the moment the 1960 Convention drew to a close.

Republicans returned in kind, with slogans like “I’M FOR NIXON” and “NIXON NOW!” The vice president had been nominated in a cakewalk, only facing token opposition from New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller from the moderate wing. The oddball maverick senator from Arizona, Barry Goldwater, did not challenge Nixon’s nomination but did cry out at the Republican Convention at Chicago that it was high time for the conservative wing to “take back” the party. Nixon did consider placating the radical wing by nominating conservative Walter Judd, but decided to follow President Eisenhower’s advice and choose a member of the Boston Brahmin, Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge Jr.

The election of 1960 was not one of particular glamor. The promise of radically new politics to start the new decade had failed, and neither candidate seemed particularly exciting. Nixon was younger, sure, but he lacked some of the charisma that people wanted (“The Republican party makes even its young men seem old,” quipped Adlai). The year saw the first televised debates in American history, utilizing the explosively popular medium that had taken over America over the past decade. In that first debate, famously, Richard Nixon appeared haggard and tired, while Adlai—not quite the looker either—appeared stoic and inquisitive. Neither had the charisma that had attached itself to the bygone John Kennedy, but Stevenson simply seemed more presidential. He stood tall, spoke eloquently. However, that wasn’t enough to win.

In truth, Stevenson’s victory in 1960 was less about his victory so much as it was about Richard Nixon’s failing. Both Nixon and Stevenson embarked on cross-country campaigning (technically, Nixon was aping Stevenson’s style here, as the candidate from Illinois had trekked across the country in 1956), but only Nixon got an injury-turned-infection that pulled him off the campaign trail for two weeks. Stevenson was mocked as a perennial candidate by the press, who seemed allergic to not combining the word “bid” with the adjective “quixotic.” Nixon, however, was not mocked by the press so much as he fought with the press, and President Eisenhower wasn’t helping things. Likable Ike had spent most of his administration apathetic towards his vice president. The General was not a party man, and Nixon was. A famous quip about this from the President circulated through the airwaves, as after being asked by a reporter if he “could give… an example of a major idea [from Nixon] that you had adopted,” Eisenhower replied “If you give me a week, I might think of one.” Before Nixon—or even Eisenhower—could clarify that this statement was taken out of context (which both of them eventually did), the damage had been done. Political ads aired the soundbite to the American public, and soon the Stevenson campaign had adopted a new slogan—”Experience counts!” Additionally, the Democratic campaign began recirculating articles from Stevenson’s world tour in ‘53, and buying out ads showing crowds gathering to him in celebration in South Korea—some even included his famous quotation from that event, “Don’t they know I lost the election?” The message was clear: Stevenson had the experience, he had the international acclaim, and he would soon be the President of the United States.

And he was. The blunders of the Republican campaign, although they did not sink it, definitely leveled the playing field. By the end of the election, when the voting booths closed the night of November 8, and after the votes had all been tallied, Adlai Stevenson II was the next president of the United States. He had won by slim margins, and a couple of his wins—especially in the vicinity of the Great Lakes—were won by margins so thin that some Republicans cried foul play. Nixon, however, did not. He didn’t want a long debacle over ballot recounts to ruin America’s prestige internationally, and as such Richard Nixon receded into the Californian wilderness for awhile.

Besides, said the Republicans, ruining America’s international prestige would be Adlai Stevenson’s job.

​

Rhyming with Roosevelt’s New Deal and Truman’s New Look, the coalition that chose him in ‘52 and ‘56 (and, with depressed turnout, ‘60) was ordained “New Politics.” The crowd behind New Politics was seen as part of the vibrant youth counterculture of the day, with heavy associations tying the movement to the beatniks. Despite the fact that most of the beat generation were altogether uninterested with electoral politics, the two became inseparable in the popular culture, with many magazines in the early months of the Stevenson presidency nicknaming Adlai Stevenson “The Beat President.” And while Stevenson was not a beatnik, he did share some of their beliefs—he definitely was not entirely opposed to the countercultural connotation of “free love,” seeing that his girlfriend, Marietta Tree, was a married woman. The fact was no secret, but it never really was deemed important to the public eye. Perhaps it was the fact that Stevenson was a divorcee, or perhaps that Ronald and Marietta Tree had divorced each-other in everything but name. The most likely explanation is just that Stevenson was an old, bald guy. He didn’t have the sexual charisma of John and Jackie Kennedy, so his peculiar relationship never captured the public imagination in an era where politics was becoming more superficial.

Stevenson himself famously resented this new superficiality. In 1956, he vented about how “The idea that you can merchandise candidates for high office like breakfast cereal—that you can gather votes like box tops—is… the ultimate indignity to the democratic process.” He only occasionally partook in the practice of retail politicking, as most people agreed that he was less of an “of the people” politician as he was a “for the people” politician. Supporters and detractors alike would often compare him to the philosopher-kings of Plato’s imagination. Those beatnik-adjacent countercultural tendencies extended to his feelings towards consumerism writ large—he often spoke of the American concepts of freedom being bastardized to mean “the freedom to stagnate, to live without dreams, to have no greater aim than a second car and another television set.” The decrying of the superficiality of the Television Age was echoed by Stevenson’s Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Newton Minow, in a speech most often remembered as the Wasteland speech. A defining moment of the Television Age, Minow asserted that if you were to “sit down in front of your television set when your station goes on the air and stay there for a day without a book, without a magazine, without a newspaper, without a profit and loss sheet or a rating book to distract you. Keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that what you will observe is a vast wasteland.”

Although the movement that rallied around Stevenson was described as New Politics, the President’s self-described title for his platform—again styling itself like Wilson’s “New Freedom,” T.R.’s “New Nationalism,” F.D.R.’s “New Deal”—was “New America,” a name that was both deeply generic and deeply radical, befitting the policy planks that it entailed. Adlai Stevenson’s administration—and New America by extension—is today mostly associated with its foreign policy, remembered as either naive or forward-thinking depending on who you ask. However, Stevenson still had a domestic agenda. Most of his agenda was aided with the collaboration with Majority Leader Johnson, who although definitely harbored some resentment towards Stevenson for what happened in Los Angeles, maintained a polite and professional relationship with him while he was President. It was a platform that wasn’t altogether unexpected for a Democrat, mostly based in singing the praises of FDR’s New Deal. However, he pledged both in ‘56 and ‘60 to expand the New Deal agenda to the areas of education, health, and poverty.

Stevenson’s agenda was popular among many Democrats—Lyndon Johnson in particular was a fan of Adlai’s promise to fight poverty. However, there was one thorn in his side in the House of Representatives—Congressman Adam Powell. The two had bad blood, Stevenson describing him as one of the “wild men” threatening the country with his combative rhetoric on race relations; Powell returned in kind, famously crossing the aisle to endorse Eisenhower in 1956 and Nixon in 1960, going so far as to state that any black person who voted for Stevenson was a “traitor to their race.” At the inauguration of the 87th United States Congress, Powell secured the chairmanship of the Education and Labor Committee, which immediately put the two at odds. On paper, Powell and Stevenson were in agreement on many things—the President proposed a bill that would create a government-sponsored program for teacher education; Congressman Powell was a proponent for vocational training. The President proposed a bill that would make the government responsible for the construction of new schools to combat school overpopulation; Congressman Powell was a proponent of aid programs for schools and school libraries. The crux of the problem circled around civil rights.

As the civil rights war continued to grow louder and louder, sucking up more and more oxygen in the national conversation, Stevenson held tightly to the rapidly-shrinking middle. He was not antagonistic towards the plights of African-Americans, however he advocated for the duration of the ‘50s and into the ‘60s a sort of well-meaning moderation that, in the words of biographer Jean Baker, “asked more sacrifices of blacks than of whites.” He saw Northern opinions of the South as hypocritical, several times reciting the Christian trope of “he who is without sin, cast the first stone.” His girlfriend, Marietta Tree, expressed that he struggled to “understand the urgency” of the movement, that for most of his life “he thought of all Negroes as being loveable old family retainers and not as individuals like you and me who were longing to get educated and who had aspirations and dreams just like the rest of us.” He supported the desegregation of schools, absolutely, but he thought that the use of force and governmental might would only inflame tensions—as would the ceaseless picketing of the rambunctious NAACP. Instead, he preferred a gradual desegregation, specifically pointing towards school desegregation by 1963 (the hundred-year anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation), and not by military might as Eisenhower had done, but rather through the wishy-washy process of schooling, understanding, and “sociological resources.”

Naturally, none of this appealed to Powell—or the many Northern Democrats who became more vocally supportive of the plights of Black America as the ‘60s marched on. A senator once told him, in the midst of conversation, that his stance made him no better than the segregationists he allegedly disliked so. He replied with a curt “No” and changed the topic. In April of 1963, when Martin Luther King Jr. wrote of the “white moderate… who lives by the myth of time; and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a ‘more convenient season’” while in a Birmingham jail, many assumed that he was making a thinly-veiled allusion to President Stevenson. Like most things pertaining to the civil rights movement, if President Stevenson had any thoughts about the letter and the implied insult contained therein, he never expressed it and actively avoided doing so—in one occurrence cutting off a reporter who was about to ask about it.

Despite the boisterous infighting between Stevenson and Powell, many of the New America policy planks were popular enough that they were able to pass over Powell’s objections. At every turn, though, the chairman would use his position to further condemn the President—at one point going so far as to say that “his white, round head might as well be a white, pointed cap!” Stevenson’s bald head—often referred to both pejoratively and affectionately as an “egghead”—soon became the source of a nickname used by civil rights protestors to make fun of a complacent Democratic government—”Humpty Dumpty.” In fact, the nursery rhyme was often sung by protestors across the country, but particularly in the many cases where their protests passed the White House.

The remarks from Chairman Powell had a definitive effect on the presidency of Adlai Stevenson. His chief of staff famously relented once that “Every time we pass popular legislation, we just become more unpopular!” Indeed, while the Stevenson Administration passed the twin acts that redefined the education system, the Assisted Training in Education Act of 1962 and the Scholastic Infrastructure Act of 1962—the former creating the aforementioned government program for teacher education and the latter the aforementioned promise for government assistance in the construction of new schoolhouses in overcrowded districts—the public opinion of President Egghead continued to lower. Adlai Stevenson experienced a shellacking on the airwaves, predominantly from the American Medical Association that rattled on about the President’s plot to install “socialized medicine” onto the American public, meanwhile Congress fought over his proposals to decrease the age of retirement to 62 (a decrease of 3 years). He lost the healthcare fight and won the retirement fight, but the damage was done. The 1962 midterms saw the Republicans regain the House for the first time in a decade, while the retained Senate’s majorities shrunk. Speaker of the House Charles Halleck stonewalled any of the remaining legislative agenda of the Stevenson administration

At least Halleck was still on speaking terms with Stevenson. J. Edgar Hoover refused to talk to the President, and left the Presidency in the dark as often as he could. The disagreement dated back to Adlai Stevenson’s time as Governor of Illinois, where his stark defiance against McCarthyism and a minor quarrel about denying an FBI man a place in the Illinois government made the Director and the future President lifelong enemies. Throughout the Fifties, the FBI spread rumors of Adlai Stevenson being a sexual deviant—a homosexual, a lavender, a transsexual or transvestite. FBI agents let the rumors slip—”Adlai Stevenson went to Peru to look at the genitalia of statues,” one agent would whisper. Another would add that “He likes to go by Adeleine at gay bars.” When Stevenson had done the impossible and beaten Richard Nixon, Hoover allegedly was furious. One agent would later recall that “He was damn near like one of those cartoons, where the face goes all red and you see steam out the ears. He was callin’ damn near everyone he could think of, just screaming about it. He had to be talked out of black bagging him, or worse.”

Adlai Stevenson was tired of more than a year of silence, and in the early months of 1963 relieved Hoover from duty. The Director did not take kindly to that, and almost immediately began rattling off every insult he could think of to everyone who would listen. He had hundreds of pages of misinformation and he rattled them off everywhere he could. He was a notorious homosexual, he frequented gay bars so frequently in Chicago that they could recognize his footsteps or the knock on the door, he wore wigs and lisped his voice to sound like a girl.

For his part, Stevenson never gave the accusations the time of day. He’d dodge questions from the press, and when he mentioned the Director only discussed him briefly and curtly. The longest responses would be some brief Biblical sermon which implied a certain ghoulishness to the former Director. The process of finding a replacement was a tough one, and in the interim the acting director, Clyde Tolson, continued his predecessor’s refusal to cooperate with the White House. Sensing the weakening grip of the Hoover machine, however, a new rumor began to leak out of the cracks alleging that Tolson and Hoover slept with one-another, were homosexual lovers. Some Republicans expressed concern at this “lavender infiltration” into the upper echelons of Washington. And on and on the fighting went. Ironically, firing Hoover had done very little to the White House approval ratings—the public seemed apathetic towards the issue, seeing the mudslinging as annoying at best and dangerous at worse: Keep in mind, they seemed to think, the world is watching!

Foreign policy is what the Stevenson Presidency is most remembered for in the present day. The revealing of FBI muckraking and Hooverite mudslinging also spring to mind, naturally, and maybe the judicial nerds could recall the two judicial appointments Stevenson was allotted during his presidential stint (thus adding to the Warren Court the Illinois Supreme Court Justice Walter Schaefer and the D.C. Circuit Judge George Thomas Washington), but Stevenson is largely remembered for his oddly pacifistic foreign policy.

Bucking the trend that most presidents followed, Adlai Stevenson was always internationally interested, and most of his key foreign policy decisions came incredibly early on in his presidency. Staffing his State department ended up being one of the most important. His close friend, George Ball, received the exalted position of Secretary of State, meanwhile the lower echelons of the State Department went to diplomats that he was less personally friendly with but proved to be stalwart allies—Harland Cleveland and Charles Yost among the most important. The former was appointed the representative to the United Nations, whereas the latter was shuffled through a couple of embassies over the years, but predominantly was Stevenson’s go-to guy on everything ongoing in Southeast Asia.

Southeast Asia’s affairs would prove deeply important—and controversial—but the first major flashpoint was close to home, in the Caribbean. In 1959, Fidel Castro and his band of rebels had successfully ousted the antidemocratic Batista, and for a brief moment in time Washington was friendly to this new development. As Castro began enforcing his vision of post-Batista Cuba, Americans grew more and more concerned. As Eisenhower’s Secretary of State described succinctly in 1960, Cuba had begun “following faithfully the Bolshevik pattern,” and had immediately entered the Soviet sphere. Despite it being a major debate in the 1960 election, Adlai Stevenson never explicitly addressed his opinions, allowing his party’s colleagues to take to the attacks—that Eisenhower was weak on communism, that Nixon would continue the lax enforcement, that the Republican proposal of embargoes would do nothing to stop the spread of devilish Stalinism.

A Cold Warrior Stevenson was not. He called the ‘50s, and with his election, the ‘60s, an Age of Rising Standards—particularly in Asia, but pretty much all parts of the world still sore from the pains of imperialism. As standards rose unilaterally, “the future belongs to those who understand the hopes and fears of masses in ferment,” for better or for worse. His policy, therefore, was one of compassion and understanding. He was anticommunist, despite what his critics would say, describing it as a “corruption of the dream of justice.” Above all else, though, he was a dreamer. He dreamed and prayed for a world free of the nuclear fear that, to borrow a Marxist phrase, weighed like a nightmare on the brain of the living.

Naturally, when he heard of the CIA’s plot to invade Cuba under the pretense of helping rebels that scarcely existed, he scuttled it. There was some support sent the way of those anticommunist partisans—mostly some weaponry—but it scarcely whetted the appetites of a war-hungry public. The Adlai Administration tried to sell the sending of munitions and the passing of a Cuban embargo as a reasonable retaliation, but nobody was buying it.

And then the nukes showed up. In 1962, reconnaissance showed an increase in Russian presence on the island republic, and with that some began to worry about missiles being brought with. In October, the missiles were confirmed and the White House was in a frenzy. What few war hawks Stevenson had allowed to sneak into State and Defense were apoplectic, and their list of responses included—Invasions, air strikes, and blockades. Fence-sitters proposed doing nothing, seeing as the threat of nuclear war would still be existent with or without missiles in Cuba. Even among the ranks of Stevenson’s inner circle there was indecision. Secretary Ball supported the calls for a blockade, saying it was the most reasonable solution proposed, wincing at the calls of direct invasion and comparing such an offensive to the attacks on Pearl Harbor. President Stevenson, however, had an even bolder idea. Leaving the room after he made his proposal—and made up his mind on the effectiveness of said proposal—he confided in his body of advisors as he headed for the door that “I suspect you all will consider me a coward for the rest of my days, but perhaps we need a coward in the room when we are talking about nuclear war.” A few days later, Stevenson delivered his address to the American public and the world at large. It is considered one of the most important—and in equal measures controversial—speeches in the 20th century:

“I speak to you all,” it begins, “not as Democrats and Republicans, nor even as Americans, but instead as humans. Within the past week, unmistakable evidence has established the fact that a series of offensive missile sites is now in preparation on the island of Cuba… As our understanding of the situation grew clearer, only one avenue remained sufficiently open: Diplomacy. Our nation currently sits—or, at least, in the eyes of the world it ought to sit—at the head of the struggle for peace. For in this nuclear age peace is no longer a visionary ideal. It has become an absolute, imperative, practical necessity—the condition for survival. On this shrunken globe men can no longer live as strangers. Men can war against each other as hostile neighbors, as some are determined we must do; or they can co-exist in frigid isolation, as we are currently doing. But our prayer is that men everywhere will learn, finally, to live as brothers, to respect each other's differences, to heal each other's wounds, to promote each other's progress, and to benefit from each other's knowledge. Humanity's long struggle against war has to be won and won now, for the sake of life itself. I believe deeply that we are able to finally vanquish this ancient foe, and that it is our God-given right to do so. It is the patriotic duty of every American to secure the rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and the threat of nuclear war jeopardizes all three. There can be no true happiness in the shadow of the nuclear missile, there can be no life in the shadow of death, and we cannot secure liberty under the threat of war. With all of this in mind, over the past days I have been in long discussion with Mr. Khrushchev of Soviet Russia, and Mr. Castro of Cuba, and with the end goal of peace in mind, we have created a compromise that benefits all parties.” [2]

The speech continued from there, but the fallout from the speech could not be overestimated, nor could it easily be explained. Many Americans were horrified to know that nuclear warheads sat so close to American shores, targets locked on every major city in reach, but also were relieved to know they would soon be gone. Many others were upset at the President for kowtowing to the Communist hegemons of the Second World, for not even attempting to resist. One anonymous quote that would haunt Stevenson for the rest of his life—often assumed to come from Senator John Kennedy—read that “The President’s peace makes him fast friends with [Prime Minister Neville] Chamberlain,” further comparing his proposals as being “his Munich.”

To Stevenson, though, diplomacy was the only satisfactory option. He was horrified of accidentally starting a nuclear apocalypse, and likewise felt that the missiles stationed in Cuba were not dissimilar to American missiles in Turkey and Italy. That was all part of the negotiations between the three leaders. The United Nations (an organization that the peacenik Stevenson loved dearly, and utilized greatly in his years in office) would oversee the inspection and removal of the nuclear warheads from Cuba, Italy, and Turkey—all on television. It didn’t just end there, as Stevenson was able to leverage for the “neutralization” of Cuba—in exchange for that promise, the island nation was returned the United States exclave at Guantanamo Bay and Washington pledged to both the Soviets and the Cubans that the United States would not invade Cuba unless if it was directly and undeniably attacked first. As he explained to George Ball, “The neutralization and demilitarization will immediately and drastically remove the troublemaking capability of the Cuban regime, and will probably result in its early overthrow.” This assumption was based on his reading of what occurred in postwar Austria. These intentions, due to obviously being kept classified from the general public for decades, were unknown at the time and in their absence many war-hawks continued to yell about this utmost betrayal.

The second major foreign policy flashpoint that began to rear its head in the ‘60s was Vietnam. Its splitting into two in the ‘50s was a major rallying point for Stevenson and the Democrats at the time, with Stevenson going so far as to say that for many of the North Vietnamese, the choice had been between White colonialism (represented by the France and the United States) and communism—and that in their rejection of colonialism they embraced a misguided and corrupt ideology. By the 1960s, however, Stevenson’s tone on American involvement had become softer (and, in the eyes of many Vietnamese people, incorrect). He held a firm belief in the beliefs of what many in the foreign policy field called the policy of containment, but as the situation in Vietnam worsened the voice of dissent from one actor in particular influenced him above all others—George Ball. As he fretted to Stevenson in ‘61, if America sent troops to the Southeast Asian nation, then “within five years we'll have 300,000 men in the paddies and jungles and never find them again. That was the French experience. Vietnam is the worst possible terrain both from a physical and political point of view.” Neither man was pro-communist by any means, but instead together they elected to continue the Eisenhower Administration’s policy of distant support for the South Vietnamese.

In 1963, the Buddhist crisis in South Vietnam boiled over. The presidential administration of South Vietnam, headed by President Diem, was Catholic, a scant minority in the predominantly Buddhist country, and over the years the anti-Buddhist government sentiment had strained relations between South Vietnam and the United States. In the late days of August, under the orders of the President of South Vietnam’s brother, a massive campaign was set out to demolish countless Buddhist temples. Thousands of monks were arrested and hundreds of Buddhist citizens across the country were beaten and killed. This proved the final straw, and when two generals approached the American embassy in South Vietnam asking for American support of a coup against the Diem government, the Stevenson administration discussed it at length. Defying his otherwise anti-Vietnam escalation posturing, Secretary Ball was an avid supporter of the coup. Stevenson, however, was less than sure. Recalled Ambassador Yost, “[Stevenson] feared, very deeply, that we were getting too involved with Vietnam. Of course he supported trying to stem a Communist take-over of the south, but only up to a point. He was adamant against any bombing campaigns [that had been proposed by the more hawkish members of the Administration].” Ball, however, was eventually able to convince Stevenson into supplying the basics to the anti-Diem military coalition, mostly some weaponry and a few strategizers. In the subsequent two-day coup at the start of November, the military was able to effectively oust the Diem government, in a divisive yet decisive moment for the Stevenson Administration.

It only got more divisive when the former government officials—including President Diem—were executed. However, within South Vietnam there was much jubilation—American nationals compared the festivities to a New Orleans Mardi Gras. When Secretary Ball (correctly recognized as the leading voice of American support in the coup) arrived to talk to the new military junta and its new chairman, “Big” Minh, he was met in the streets with cheers and celebration. However, the response from the junta was lethargic.

This would form the backbone of the Vietnam foreign policy headache for Americans for the remainder of Stevenson’s term. The new military junta was ineffective and uninterested in governmental affairs, and rapidly the North Vietnamese ravaged the countryside. From there, the South Vietnamese government was wracked with corruption, cronyism, and coups. Deemed inefficient, the government junta would be overthrown by a new coalition of upset military men, who would then replace the old political infrastructure and cease up government functions again, making them again ineffective and inefficient. “Q: Did you hear what the Chairman said today? A: Which Chairman?” was a common joke in South Vietnam. The foreign affairs wing of the Stevenson Presidency would repeat the joke and laugh.

Adlai Stevenson II was a massive proponent of the United Nations, often praising it as one of the most important missions in human existence—the ultimate harbinger of peace and the organization that could successfully trumpet in the final annihilation of war. He made fast friends with the Secretary-General who was sworn in ten months after Stevenson was, U Thant of Burma. Thant had been the one who helped organize the behind-closed-doors meeting between the United States, Soviet Union, and Cuba during the missile tensions, and as the Vietnamese crisis rolled into 1964 he proposed a similar measure—talks between North and South Vietnam. Stevenson enthusiastically agreed, but negotiations would drag on a long while.

First, was the matter of if the parties would agree. Through the Soviets, Thant was able to confirm North Vietnamese interest. Through the Americans, he was able to confirm South Vietnamese interest (primarily through newly-reinstated Chairman Big Minh). South Vietnamese instability necessitated the United States also be present, as a surrogate—but then the North Vietnamese requested a Soviet statesman be present, too. The United Nations reached out and the Soviets signaled that they would be on board. Then came the venue. Thant proposed his native home of Burma, due to its neutrality but proximity. All parties agreed. But then came the curious arrangement of seating—the North Vietnamese demanded a roundtable, so that all parties present were treated equally. By the time all that had been settled, Big Minh had been ousted from power in an internal coup, and the new Chairman of South Vietnam was unfriendly to negotiations. By the time they were again persuaded to join the table, the Soviets got cold feet and almost walked out—only for North Vietnam to ask for them to stay. Reluctantly, they did. By this point, the South Vietnamese intended diplomat to be in attendance was deemed too inhospitable for the North Vietnamese delegation, so he was sent back. They were okay with the next choice, but another internal coup deemed the new diplomat “too Catholic” and he was fired from the government. The next diplomat was deemed alright, but now the South Vietnamese opposed the circular table idea, claiming it to be communist grandstanding—no, they insisted, it should be a normal rectangular table. The North Vietnamese refused to even pretend to entertain the idea. The United Nations’ delegate halfheartedly suggested several square tables arranged in a circle, to which everyone agreed to—other than the American delegate, who thought the whole arrangement was patently absurd. He strong-armed the South Vietnamese into accepting the round table proposal, which they reluctantly did. And on and on it went.

This whole diplomatic episode—unrivaled in its pettiness for decades to come—happened simultaneously to a third foreign policy flashpoint, this time in Africa. The Congo Crisis, however, is nowadays scantly remembered as an episode of American history, in no small part because of Stevenson’s ability to utilize the United Nations’ mission statement so well.

The Belgian Congo was a prime example of Stevenson’s model of the “Era of Rising Standards” where, spurred on by rising Africanist sentiments, the long-suffering people of the Congo rioted for independence from Belgium. The Belgian government accepted this, with the King proclaiming proudly that this was the natural outcome of Leopold II’s mission of spreading civilization to the people of Africa. One of the leading men of this Congolese independence movement, Patrice Lumumba, followed this royal proclamation by delivering a passionate and incendiary speech decrying colonialism in all its forms. The stark divide in worldview only grew worse from there—black soldiers mutinied when their Belgian commanders refused to treat them as equals; Lumumba backed the black soldiers, promoting many of them through the ranks. From there came ethnic violence and a mass-exodus of Belgian soldiers and citizenry, which prompted a military response from Belgium. Things only devolved from there, as Belgian mining companies sponsored the secession of two countries in mineral-rich parts of the Congo: Katanga and Kasai. As things continued to fall apart, the United Nations decided to become involved. Lumumba, the leader of the newly-independent Republic of the Congo, first attempted to to acquire assistance from the United States, before he was swiftly rebuffed; he then turned to the Soviet Union who were more than happy to help. Due to this, the Eisenhower Administration soon saw it pertinent to deal with this “African Castro,” as many of the more hawkish types started labeling the first Prime Minister—by any means necessary. Time and resources were spent trying to concoct a precise method by which to get rid of the headache-inducing Soviet sympathizer: poisons synthesized, timings considered. However, before long President Kasa-Vubu took the hint and booted out Lumumba and his supporters out of power. Naturally, this only made things worse as the Lumumbists fled out east and set up a claimant regime in Stanleyville. When the ex-prime minister fled to join them, he was promptly arrested.

While under arrest, he was planned to be executed. Internal documents declassified decades later would support this. It was not, despite previous attempts, the United States’ plan—although they did heartily endorse it. Some later historians posit that, indeed, they endorsed it too heavily, and in the process made the guards who tortured and beat the former Prime Minister fear some sort of set-up. The reason for the CIA being so heavily invested in his death was the ascendant Adlai Stevenson II, who seemed poised to adopt a more lenient position on Lumumba and advocate for his release. President Stevenson did just that, and pressured the Washington-friendly Kasa-Vubu to release him—which he reluctantly did. As expected, the tortured ex-P.M. fled to the Stanleyville government and was welcomed with open arms.

The United Nations’ role to play in this whole crisis was prevalent from the start. It was widely seen as an opportunity for the peacekeeping organization to keep the peace, and soon a mission was established and blue-helmeted troops popped up. They were not to engage militarily, simply encourage a maintenance of order in what was largely seen as an internal squabble. “The only way to keep the cold war out of the Congo is to keep the United Nations in the Congo,” President Stevenson said in a speech shortly thereafter. He was proven both correct and incorrect in a baffling turn of events. The Soviets had pledged recognition to the government in Stanleyville, and a whole slew of communist-supporting governments did the same. Despite this, the United Nations had overwhelmingly supported the government in Leópoldville. This was a source of major tension, as the Soviet Union seemed keen to call the United Nations a tool to secure Western interests, and were even planning on refusing to pay the organization—thereby threatening to bankrupt the United Nations and forcing its dissolution.

And then Stevenson publicly criticized President Kasa-Vubu. In a speech, delivered to the United Nations like so many of his speeches were, he proudly proclaimed that to him, “The first principle of a free society is an untrammeled flow of words in an open forum,” that “a free society is one in which it is safe to be unpopular.” He further discussed the difficulties of democracy—reprising an old line from 1952, that “to citizens of democracy, you are the rulers and the ruled, the law-givers and the law-abiding, the beginning and the end. Democracy is a high privilege, but it is also a heavy responsibility.” Although he never even mentioned the crisis in the Congo—not the split government, nor the question of federalism or confederalism that defined the split governments—his messaging was clearly that the current government in Leópoldville was acting in defiance to those most admirable and important standards.

Future speeches would advocate for the United States’ new position, one of compromise and consensus uniting the divided country—a new constitution, a remerging of the two dissonant factions, and the promise of a stronger Congolese future. Although the Soviets much preferred the Stanleyville government, the shift in messaging was well-appreciated. There was still the matter of secessionist entities to attend to, however, and it was a mission that the United Nations lost men in the attempt to attend to it peacefully. The bottom line under the Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld was that these pesky rebels were, too, an internal matter. Unfortunately for him, a plane trip to Rhodesia to meet with the Katanga rebel organization crashed and killed all United Nations officials on board. His replacement, the aforementioned Thant, was much less amicable to Katanga, and considered it an external threat that needed the United Nations to pacify.

Adlai Stevenson would not live to see the resolution of the crisis, or even the Vietnamese crisis. He was walking through the Rose Garden with Marietta Tree. They had been talking about finally getting married—after all, Adlai quipped, it would help him keep the White House. They shared a laugh about it, and then as the two admired the bushes, Adlai grew pale and fell over, a loud crack emanating as he collided with the ground. He had died, ten days after Independence Day, of a heart attack. He was declared dead at the scene, with Marietta only able to write in her diary that “Adlai is dead. We were together.” And the nation mourned.

The legacy of Adlai Stevenson II is forever one impressed by controversy. He was the face of the Democratic party for over a decade. His foreign policy, deemed “soft” to the people of the time, meant that his reelection had always been unlikely. However, it precipitated a period of the Cold War known generally as the “Stevenson-Khrushchev Thaw” as the two countries’ relationships warmed for the first time since the collapse of the Nazi regime two decades earlier. His domestic policy has also been praised and reviled in equal measure—of the schools in America named after U.S. Presidents, Adlai Stevenson II is overwhelmingly the one most named after; meanwhile in the raising tensions of an America divided over civil rights, his apathy brought out many liberal critiques. While his New America improved schools and health, the President never was able to figure out what to do about poverty besides vague platitudes, and indeed his New America left many behind. “Little attention,” wrote Jean Baker, “went to blacks, women, migratory workers, Native Americans, or the poor” in Stevenson’s agenda. Conspiracies likewise maintain Adlai Stevenson’s legacy far after death—rumors of an assassination taking Stevenson’s life were circulated for decades, with the long list of potential culprits including the FBI, the CIA, Cuban spies, Soviet spies, the Mafia, etc. Additionally, the belief that the Cubans still held W.M.D.s was a fringe yet pervasive belief among stalwart conservatives and cold warriors.

There are many quotes one could choose to put a bookend to the eventful life of Adlai Stevenson II. Critics could point to his quote of “It's hard to lead a cavalry charge if you think you look funny on a horse” to describe his foreign policy, or “Words calculated to catch everyone may catch no one” by those who disliked his waffling domestic policy. Perhaps the most fitting, wrapping up nicely his wit (both in humor and in intellect) is the phrase Via ovum cranium difficilis est—”The way of the egghead is hard.”

— — —​

[1] I cannot stress enough that this is a real quote from Adlai Stevenson II, a joke during a speech in Oakland, California in 1956.
[2] Parts of this speech are stitched-together from Kennedy’s real-life speech on the situation in Cuba, as well as various other quotes and speech excerpts from Stevenson’s long career.

 

[Enigma-Conundrum]

36. J. William Fulbright (Democratic-AR)
July 14, 1964 - January 20, 1969

“Power confuses itself with virtue and tends also to take itself for omnipotence.”​

Going into re-election, Adlai Stevenson seemed like a dead man walking. Then the dead man stopped walking.

When President Stevenson was pronounced dead, the Vice President was mere miles away, speaking at Georgetown University. As those in attendance recounted, the Secret Service rushed to the podium, whispered in Fulbright’s ear, and the Vice President quickly apologized before hustling out of the room. Then, as he was driven to the White House, he wept.

Adlai Stevenson was determined to not repeat 1956. He had handed his running mate’s selection to the convention, leading to a dramatic fight between Kefauver and Kennedy, neither of whom Stevenson particularly liked (though he had privately preferred Kennedy). Upon his return, he wanted to ensure that the ticket was one he could truly live with should he win what looked to be the closest election of his career to date. He knew that, despite his popularity with the Solid South, his support primarily coming from northern machine bosses like Mayor Daley and pro-civil rights northerners like Eugene McCarthy meant that he would need a southerner. But it couldn’t be some firebrand, and it’d have to be someone Stevenson could see eye to eye with. As such, there was only ever one name that truly made sense. A key surrogate of Stevenson’s from 1956 and the junior senator from Arkansas, James William Fulbright - though virtually everyone called him by his middle name, or Bill for short - was his man.

There was much Bill Fulbright and Adlai Stevenson agreed on. Stevenson was a staunch supporter of the United Nations, and Fulbright had authored a resolution backing what would become the so-called “blue helmets” as early as 1943. Stevenson hated McCarthyism even when it was incredibly politically popular, and Fulbright had sparred with McCarthy on the Senate floor at the height of the Red Scare. Stevenson was so utterly academically-minded to attract his “egghead” moniker, and Fulbright the Oxford-educated professor had fought tooth and nail to establish the pre-eminent cultural exchange scholarship system bearing his own name. The only thing truly worrying was Fulbright’s support of the Southern Manifesto potentially undermining Democratic support in the northern cities, but a meeting with Stevenson assuaged fears that he was a raging racist, and besides, to Stevenson Fulbright’s genuine agreement with what would become New America was more important anyhow.

Fulbright proved relatively valuable on the ticket. His support from oil moguls back in Arkansas translated to meetings with executives and industry-wide support, filling the Stevenson campaign’s coffers and helping to keep the Texas establishment onboard despite Lyndon Johnson’s passivity (privately, Johnson thought Stevenson was doomed to failure, and saw himself as the natural candidate to defeat Richard Nixon in 1964). Given Richard Nixon’s attempts to fight to claim the Eisenhower-voting chunks of the south, Fulbright campaigned vigorously across the region. Though the Stevenson-Fulbright ticket owed its victory to a string of narrow midwestern state victories, the ticket won the entire south apart from Virginia and Florida, and a string of single-digit margins in Texas, Louisiana, and Kentucky proved equally vital if not as close to the wire.

In direct contrast with Eisenhower basically treating Nixon as a spare tire, Stevenson pioneered “the most powerful vice presidency in history” for his choice. Fulbright was the first vice president to have an office in the White House, and both men’s tendency towards long-winded academic discussions of policy led to the continuing tradition of weekly dinners between the president and vice president. The modern activist vice presidency was born as Fulbright found himself an advisor, ambassador, and confidante for Stevenson, aiding in key decisions relating to everything from defense to healthcare policy and representing Stevenson in a number of international meetings. By 1964, both men regarded each other as genuine friends, especially as Washington grew increasingly hostile towards Stevenson. Upon the return of Tecumseh’s curse, Fulbright’s televised address was a fitting sendoff, equal parts emotional eulogy and a call to action for Stevenson’s unfinished work. Even though some thought it a bit dry and philosophical, that was likely what Stevenson would’ve wanted anyways.

The brief calm was more akin to the eye of a hurricane than a pacifying of the partisan rancor eating up Washington. Despite a handful of challenges from the party liberals, Barry Goldwater had emerged as the Republicans’ likely candidate. “Adlai Chamberlain” was an easy punching bag for the uber-hawkish conservative, and there was certainly much for an anti-communist to be angry about in 1964’s world. The continuation of the “southern strategy” dating back to Robert Taft seemed all too easy to Goldwater, who routinely polled well throughout the “Eisenhower-Stevenson” parts of the region.

But Stevenson died, and the calculus changed, especially in regards to civil rights. Fulbright had routinely won over black leadership in Arkansas with pleas to the necessity of certain symbolic actions to avoid primary losses, but national leadership was far different. This, combined with the nomination of the broad opponent of an activist federal government Goldwater, was intolerable to one Adam Clayton Powell Jr., the “wildman” who wore that term as a badge of honor. Powell and Stevenson had been in barely-concealed combat over civil rights, and now here was a replacement who “actually has the guts to say what he thinks out loud.” So Powell made clear his intent to not only not go to Atlantic City, but also the launching of the independent “Human Rights” ticket with him at the helm. Privately, Powell had been orchestrating the new party’s ballot access for months with the burgeoning student movement and had implied earlier in the summer that he would have run against Stevenson all the same, but Fulbright’s outright segregationist views provided an even better foil in his eyes.

Despite the walkout, the Democratic convention was made memorable by Fulbright. His selection of running mate, New York City’s mayor Robert F. Wagner Jr., proved a shrewd choice that both mended fences with northeastern Catholics and subtly pushed back on the lavender brush Stevenson was painted with given Wagner’s recent crackdown on gay bars. Rumblings of a convention challenge by the spurned Senator Kennedy quickly fizzled in mourning, and Fulbright’s first-ballot victory led to his delivery of a very typically himself address to evening press cameras. Calling upon the nation to continue the work of its great Democrats from Wilson to FDR to Stevenson, Fulbright heavily emphasized his predecessor’s new ideas: “We must learn to explore all of the options and possibilities that confront us in a complex and rapidly changing world,” he declared, “and we must explore those self-evident truths about the world around us to build a better foundation for peaceful co-existence with all our fellow man.” It was, in a sense, very typical of Bill Fulbright, but also gave clear definition to what New America sought. It sought peace, it sought freedom, and it sought to strengthen the bonds between all nations.

In making the election a referendum on foreign policy, attention was drawn away from Powell and towards what, at that moment, seemed to be Goldwater’s greatest strength. But, as Nelson Rockefeller privately groused, “only Barry could snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.” Goldwater’s loose lips led to a joke about lobbing a nuke in the Kremlin men’s room, which horrified onlookers and quickly led to a slate of attacks from Fulbright. Fulbright’s first state visit - a trip to meet with newly elected British Prime Minister George Brown in what would be a successful effort to convince him to join the EEC - drew favorable press coverage, but only led to Goldwater intensifying his attacks on Fulbright’s apparent apathy towards ordinary Americans. Suggestions that Cuba still held Khrushchev’s WMDs were all the rage with the John Birch Society, but the idea of an outright invasion of a smaller neighbor over such suspicion - as Goldwater himself seemed to imply in an interview - led to Fulbright condemning his opponent as “the closest thing to American Stalinism,” a remark that drew harsh condemnation in its own right. Back and forth it went, with both candidates proclaiming the other reckless and dangerous to not only American interests but even American lives. Powell’s focus on civil rights, while popular with student organizers and quietly with a spurned Kennedy clan which sought to help Powell and his student army kill Fulbright’s chances to vindicate their own in four years, saw less purchase with the general electorate. Instead, the election was quickly dominated by what more sensationalist reporters claimed was a referendum on Cold War policy itself. Would America choose to fight, or to thaw?

The answer was apparently more complicated on election night. As states turned yellow and blue respectively, it seemed clear that Fulbright would carry the south overwhelmingly, due in no small part to Powell’s candidacy peeling a number of civil rights-minded Republicans uncomfortable with Goldwater and southern surrogates underhandedly pointing to Goldwater’s ties to the Arizona NAACP helping to win over southern conservatives who at one time were weighing Goldwater over Stevenson. Much in the same fashion, Goldwater swept across the west, the attacks on him as a nuclear cowboy resonating as not necessarily such a bad thing. A true shock came when Powell carried D.C. in its first federal election, one quickly surpassed when he claimed Massachusetts by the skin of his teeth, raising the specter of a hung electoral college. Jubilation filled the Goldwater camp as Michigan and Connecticut both flipped, then despondence as Mayor Wagner's old-school whistle-stop tour from Pittsburgh to Newark paid dividends in holding Pennsylvania and New Jersey for the Democrats. The atmosphere in the White House grew bleak as it became clear Goldwater had both won a plurality of the popular vote by nearly a million votes and New York remained the last state uncalled for. Whoever won its 43 electoral votes would become president, and Powell’s vote share was nothing to scoff at in the Empire State. Back and forth it went into the morning, but by daybreak the result was clear: by just 3,407 votes, New York had broken for President Fulbright.

The Republicans were faced with a gut-wrenchingly narrow loss, but Goldwater also didn’t have the heart to fight it out in the courts or in New York. Perhaps it was an expression of his own rock-solid principle and patriotism, as admirers tend to say. Less charitable coverage, like that of Rick Perlstein's epic biographical series of Goldwater as a lens into rising conservatism in the New America, points to his knowledge that the overseers of any challenge within New York would a spurned primary rival with everything to gain from Goldwater losing and the Democratic vice president-elect. Whatever the case, he bitterly conceded two days after the result was called, marking Fulbright’s ascent into a term of his own right.

​

Fulbright’s mandate was sorely lacking, though. The Democrats had a razor-thin majority in the house hardly befitting a re-elected president. This would normally have been no concern to Fulbright, an internationalist at heart, but he had one major item on his domestic bucket list: education. Though Adlai Stevenson had sought the massive expansion of teacher training and schoolhouse construction, less mind was paid to higher education. Fulbright, the former professor, saw this as intolerable. What he proposed and virtually all Democrats could agree on was no less than the redefining of college in America. The Higher Education Act, as it was plainly dubbed, did many things: it opened up a glut of federal money for colleges and universities, for one, but the crux of it came from its federal scholarship program. Dubbed “Fulbrights” - not to be confused with the Fulbright-Hays Scholarship exchange program that was folded into the HEA - the needs-based federal scholarships became a method of broadly funding higher education. Though priority was often given to high academic performers and state governments had much authority in distributing Fulbrights (to the detriment of nonwhite students), the beginning of their availability led to the opening of college access to many lower-class students. The debate took the better part of a year to win enough support to clear a filibuster, including some brutal carve-outs and Fulbright consenting to a Republican tax reform bill's passage, but by January 1966 Fulbright signed his signature legislation at the University of Arkansas, his academic and professorial alma mater.

Despite Fulbright’s advocacy for students of all stripes, the student movement had no love for him. Fulbright was, to them, worse than “Humpty Dumpty” - he was the representation of everything they hated in politics, the old southern relic stubbornly holding back true equality in America. So the students made the plight of civil rights their moment. As MLK Jr. penned letters from Georgia State Prison and Free King signs became commonplace outside the White House, both the black-led SNCC and the white-led SDS sought to bring about real change. For its part, the SNCC sought to take the fight to the south. They had, as early as 1963, conceived of the “Freedom Vote,” a project wherein activists would go and help black southerners register to vote over the literacy tests and poll taxes. Though initial versions of the program focused heavily on the 1964 race, the Powell campaign sapped much student attention, depleting the resources of the SNCC to launch such a project. As such, come 1965 and the return of Fulbright to the White House, both the SNCC and SDS revisited the Freedom Vote. Through both organizations, a number of suitable volunteers arose, so much so that the operation was expanded to three states: Mississippi, for its large unregistered black population; Georgia, for Dr. King’s continuing incarceration; Arkansas, due to the thorn that such a focus would be in President Fulbright’s eye. The Freedom Summer of 1966 was a brutal affair as white residents of all three states violently resisted the outside activists. The discovery of multiple missing students’ mutilated bodies in a shallow grave outside Savannah horrified the nation and brought further attention to local black community activists like Julian Bond and national white student activists like Tom Hayden alike.

President Fulbright was increasingly caught in a bind. As then-staffer William J. Clinton put it in his accounts of his time in the administration, “[Fulbright] spent a lot of days agonizing over what to do, hearing what his fellow Arkansans were capable of… he wasn’t a hateful man, he thought we needed more time to heal.” The crowds of protesters grew outside the White House for every passing day of inaction, and with them Fulbright’s misery grew exponentially. Ultimately, Fulbright’s choice rings out in the history books as perhaps the best encapsulation of a complicated, often contradictory man. In a speech given in front of a special session of Congress, Fulbright spoke on his past support for segregation. He saw it as a necessity to advance in the politics of his home, a minority position that was a prerequisite to advance the greater good. He insisted that his involvement kept the Southern Manifesto from endorsing violence, and that he thought he was doing good. Now, though, times had well and truly changed. He could not abide by such violence, and though he did not blatantly call his past views wrong, he stated that he believed “all Americans must come to take their rightful place in our society over time.” In his eyes, there must be peace and understanding if we are to progress, and the violence the peaceful students faced was a bridge too far. Therefore, “it is time that I call upon this body to, with all due haste, pass a law against lynching to bring those perpetuating this violence to justice.”

Fulbright’s pivot on the lynching law faced mixed reactions. While many northern Democrats and Republicans alike saw it as a fundamentally positive step forward, pro-civil rights figures in both parties also saw it as a half-measure. Though they praised its importance as a long-overdue protection against mob violence, many also echoed the idea that it shouldn't have waited for this long. Malcolm X memorably condemned it as “half of the least they can do, all because it was white kids who died this time” and much of the SDS echoed this sentiment. The southern filibuster was truly fierce in a way it hadn’t been in years, but shrewd whipping by Lyndon Johnson and the overwhelming bipartisan support of such a measure in response to the violence brought about cloture after a handful of days. President Fulbright signed the bill into law to applause, but many noted all of the civil rights leaders not in attendance or even given cursory mention by Fulbright.

All of this was a distraction from what truly mattered to Fulbright. Other than one Supreme Court appointment, on which he deferred to party leaders and nominated Solicitor General Cyrus Vance, he hardly cared for domestic horse-trading. He was a man of international affairs through and through, and in his eyes the deteriorating situation in Southeast Asia was of the utmost importance. The legendarily petty negotiations were always within minutes of unraveling, and despite Fulbright’s continual involvement throughout 1965, they seemed in danger of collapse. Fulbright’s assessment of the Cold War was rather unique for its time, though. He saw the conflict through the lens of an imperialist Russia imposing its will, not any special ideological conflict. As such, treating the Soviets as the sole representatives of communism was misguided at best and tied one hand behind America’s back. So Fulbright did something unprecedented: he exploited the cracks in the Second World. China was by far one of the largest military supporters of North Vietnam, and despite this the mainland was hardly involved in the peace talks. Quietly, Secretary Ball made overtures to Mao, organizing a potential meeting to discuss the situation in Vietnam. Though the mainland was initially uncertain, Fulbright’s talk of normalization was far too sweet for the People’s Republic to evade, and Mao agreed to a publicized meeting with President Fulbright. Fulbright’s arrival in Beijing in February of 1966 was a major affair, and the image of him sitting across from Mao was even more groundbreaking and elicited comparisons to FDR at Yalta with Stalin, though this was not always meant as a compliment. Nikita Khrushchev was said to have turned beet-red and upturned an entire table upon seeing the footage, not just from watching his enemies fraternize but also from the sheer realization that he had been put on the backfoot.

During the weeklong trip, Fulbright and Mao came to a genuine agreement. Mao would pare back military aid to North Vietnam in exchange for the US allowing the mainland to take its seat on the UN Security Council as the sole legal Chinese representative as well as beginning the phased implementation of the “New Open Door,” as Fulbright dubbed the lofty aims that he had for the overtures to Mao. With the stroke of a pen, the North suddenly became far more desperate for an agreement. Instantly, the ceasefire they had become so utterly squirrelly about had turned into a must-sign deal, and by the spring they had hammered out a total agreement. Americans were far less happy about Fulbright “selling out,” though. Newly returned Senator Richard Nixon put it in terms most Americans could appreciate. “I’m not surprised that Bill Fulbright went to China. I’m just disappointed that he came back.”

Though the Fulbright administration had brought about some small amount of real, substantive change, civil rights opposition to his reluctance to go any amount further than this kept civil rights organizations as vibrant as ever. Nonetheless, the continuing disorder only inspired voters to flock to the Republicans, as the party increasingly focused on his ineptitude in maintaining order as every scuffle between pro-civil rights and pro-segregation protesters dominated the headlines. Though it was hardly an end to Jim Crow, some white southerners contemplated defection, though this only truly lowered the margins of victory rather than cause states to change hands. Pro-civil rights Democrats felled moderate incumbents in the north, but most of all the Republicans rode a six-year itch founded in anti-communist fury and condemnations of “President Halfbright” to a returned house majority as voters seemingly demanded the old order restored. The new speaker, Thomas B. Curtis of Missouri, was a prime example of the new strain of the party - a Lincolnian through and through, a supporter of civil rights as upholding national virtue, someone who was deeply concerned with Fulbright’s inability to quell the protests sweeping the nation or to protect all people equally. In the eyes of these new Republicans, America could not win the war of ideas without a strong sense of purpose and adherence to those ideals in full, and Bill Fulbright was the number one obstacle for those ideals.

With Congress so firmly against him, potential plans to pursue healthcare reform stalled out immediately. Investigations into Fulbright’s foreign policy by the Senate turned into an outright crucifixion of the president. Secretary of State Ball was put on the defensive in arguing for continuing to allow the UN to drive the intervention in the Democratic Republic of the Congo despite the clear gains by the Simbas in the east against an unstable Leopoldville government, trading barbs with hawkish Republicans and even muted criticism from Senator Kennedy. Fulbright’s decision to cut aid to Israel in the wake of a mishap where trigger-happy Israeli troops fired upon their American counterparts drew harsher condemnation across the political spectrum, so much so that the debate over whether Fulbright was an antisemite remains one of the more salient questions of his legacy. The entire administration was effectively brought to a standstill as a heavily opposition Congress brought hearing after hearing and near-constant debate of House bills on everything from counter-proposals for educational reform to farm policy to international aid.

This was of little concern to Fulbright, though. Despite a mountain of evidence to the contrary, Fulbright believed he had won one full term through his foreign policy, seeing the fact that Barry Goldwater had only netted 47% of the popular vote as proof that Americans had an appetite for peace. He could surely take it further, especially when the Republicans rejected his overtures. First was, Europhile that he was, a long trip throughout Western Europe designed to help rally continental cooperation and resolve the Empty Chair Crisis in the EEC that he had helped to create with Britain's entrance. Though this was broadly successful in its aims, Americans were broadly apathetic as well - the internal matters of European integration hardly concerned them, after all. Fulbright was practically a nonentity domestically, a recluse in a dour White House who only emerged to hop a plane to some faraway land. His visits designed to mollify East Asian anti-communists angry with the overtures to Beijing were similarly fruitful in a way that didn't make good headlines, not even when his facilitation helped to bring about normalization between South Korea and Japan and saw pictures of him smiling between Prime Ministers Chang Myon and Eisaku Satō sent back to the press room. Often was the case that Bill Fulbright did something highly useful and even praiseworthy abroad, but his neglect of the American audience it could be aimed to negated any political use it may have had. Instead, attacks on an "absentee president" tended to stick, and his approval ratings suffered for it.

Fulbright returned to Americans' focus when he returned to North America, but not necessarily home. Instead, his trip to Panama drew significant attention as he stated his intentions to cut a Gordian Knot. The Canal Zone Treaty was woefully outdated, and the Panamanian government was not shy about the pressure being placed on it. Fulbright was a firm believer in the idea that the United States had every moral imperative to cede some ground on the issue. As he put it in a televised interview about the ongoing negotiations, “we must disabuse ourselves of the myth that there is something morally sacred about our control of the Canal.” This statement brought fury from Republicans, but the Panamanians saw room for negotiation. By the end of 1967, Fulbright and Roberto Chiari had come to an official revised treaty, one that would provide equal control between the United States and Panama, with nominal United Nations control and mediation. This sparked a firestorm in conservative circles, with Republicans lining up to decry Fulbright giving away American power and prestige. Amidst rare heckling towards a State of the Union, in 1968 Fulbright simply offered up the defense “the real test in Panama is not of our valor or our military might but of our wisdom and judgment and common sense.” The treaty failed in the Senate a week later.

Heading into the 1968 elections, Fulbright was confident, yet his vulnerability was obvious. He had, after all, won 1964 by the skin of his teeth, and that was against a conservative firebrand with plenty of flaws. But as Kremlin functionaries grew tired of Nikita Khrushchev and replaced him in a bloodless coup with Yuri Andropov of Hungarian Revolution fame only for Andropov to send the Red Army into Czechoslovakia to halt the Dubcek reforms and more broadly send a message to independently-minded leaders across the Warsaw Pact, Fulbright’s take on the Cold War seemed foolish at best to Americans. Civil rights tensions remained high as the Federal Lynching Act remained controversial to hardliners within the south and the lack of a major civil rights act through eight years of Democratic government controversial to liberals in the north, especially as Speaker Curtis picked the height of the primaries as the perfect time to shepherd a Republican bill through the House. Though Fulbright would be renominated, it was not without challenge in the primaries - Georgia Governor James Gray to his right and a returned Adam Clayton Powell Jr. to his left, even if Powell’s legal troubles and his break with the party hampered his effectiveness - his style seemed naive at best and inept at worst. Despite a fierce campaign on his record of sustainable diplomacy and the unfinished business of Adlai Stevenson, Fulbright would suffer the consequences of a public once more scared of Soviet aggression and increasingly divided over his seeming disinterest in the affairs of America at home.

Even as he awaited his successor, Bill Fulbright never wavered. His farewell address had a quality to it reminiscent of Eisenhower’s warnings about the military-industrial complex, a scathing critique of American foreign policy as a whole: “We are clinging to old myths in the face of new realities, and we seek to escape the contradictions by narrowing the permissible bounds of public discussion, by relegating an increasing number of ideas and viewpoints to a growing category of unthinkable thoughts. The core myth is that the devil resides immutably in Moscow, though the devil has betrayed us by traveling abroad and worse still, by dispersing himself, turning up now here, now there, and in many places at once, with a devilish disregard for the laboriously constructed frontiers of ideology.” It received nary a peep at the moment, though in the coming decades those reflecting upon the failings of American foreign policy at the height of the Cold War would cite Fulbright as a modern Cassandra.

Though he left office relatively unpopular and his handling of civil rights remains a black mark upon his record, in the years between 1969 and his 1995 death Bill Fulbright has received a modest historical recovery from that of an ill-equipped distant leader to a statesman ahead of his time. He was emblematic of New America, of its new policies and its new outlook, even of its new contradictions. Overall, though, the best summary of Bill Fulbright does not come from historians, not from pundits, not from biographers, not even from his friends. Rather, it comes from a constituent letter concerning his outspoken foreign policy sent to his Senate office. “This old world has always nailed its prophets to trees, so don't be surprised at those who come at you with hammers and spikes.”

 

[Oliveia]

37. Thomas Kuchel (Republican-CA)
January 20, 1969 - January 20, 1977

“I think it is not only permissible but, indeed, vital that the Senate of the United States lead public opinion instead of following it. That is the difficult path but the only one to tread if our republic is to remain.”​

From the outset, 1968 was seen—finally—as the reckoning of the Conservative Republican, a righting of wrongs decades in the making. President Fulbright’s mandate had practically evaporated, and now it was time for that stalwart knight Barry Goldwater to deliver the killing blow—a rematch to end all rematches, a comeback rivaling Adlai Stevenson’s!

For his part, Goldwater was actually excited to run. He did not need to be goaded, or drafted, he enthusiastically prepared for a rematch, boasted frequently how he’d “kick a boot so far up [Fulbright]’s ass that that hippie sonuvabitch will see stars!” Goldwater, however, was incredibly temperamental. His mood was liable of swinging wildly and his ability to connect to voters was seriously questionable. Since 1964 he also had burned basically every bridge possible in the sphere of campaigners. Those who drafted him had seen themselves pushed to the sidelines, those who weren’t had to wrangle him in so much that their arms were sore from pulling and hands red from rope-burn. Thus, that invisible yet pervasive veil of “The Establishment” saw it fit to rally around someone more presentable, more electable.

Thomas Kuchel wasn’t their first choice. The first choices could have packed a football stadium—Governors Romney and Rockefeller and Scranton and Hatfield; Senators Lodge and Fong and Morton; Representatives Judd and Ford. Some of them ran, most of them didn’t—knowing the race was too crowded and the chances too slim. Kuchel wasn’t unpopular, and some press buzzed around him with such a packed primary field, but he wasn’t particularly interested in running for a position away from California.

It was Earl Warren’s suggestion.

* * *​

Despite the degrees of familiarity—friendship, even, if Tom was to be so bold—between the Senator and the Chief Justice, the busy timetables of Washington made mostly everything non-professional an impossibility. Heck, one of his chief staffers, good ol’ “Pop” Small (who had a resemblance so much like his old boss Warren that it was uncanny), had been urging him to return to California A.S.A.P. for fear of a successful primary challenge. And he wanted to, he really did. It just was so inconvenient. He was the Republican whip, and it was basically his life for the time being.

Not helping things was the fact that Earl Warren was something of a distant fellow. He never hosted guests back in California, but despite that it was clear that he cared about Tom and his political climb. He was, after all, the man who promoted him from State Senator to Controller, from Controller to US Senator.

So the chance to get a lunch together was surely something of a rarity in both men’s lives. But, early in 1968, they had managed to arrange their schedules to make it work. Poor Pop had to hurry himself to and fro to work it all out, but he was friendly enough with the both of them to not mind too much, God bless him.

That January had been remarkably kind for a stroll in the park—gray, damp winter as opposed to a strong white snow sheet. It wasn’t perfectly amicable to the two Californians, but it was good enough. They both had plenty of time to soak in the offices of Capitol Hill, anyway. So here they sat, on a mostly-damp bench, both buttoned up in shapeless dark winter coats. Tom smoked on a cigarette, while Earl didn’t—he’d given up smoking many years back, but never seemed to let that impede Tom.

After catching up a bit the conversation flowed to one of their most prominent similarities: politics.

“Well, Tommy,” Earl said, cheeks a warm pink in the cool air, “the election.” Here he was referring to the primaries.

“You know how I feel about Goldwater,” Tom stated simply. The two men had a good chuckle about that. “If they nominate him again, I think it’s a death wish. It’d be suicide.”

“And the opposition?”

“Oh, I doubt any one of them has a real chance. Rockefeller could’ve, but then there was—well, you know.” And here Tom was referring to Nelson Rockefeller’s divorce and remarriage several years previous, which had long ago made him damaged goods for moderates and liberals in the party.

“And with Rockefeller gone—?”

“I don’t think there’s anyone left to fill that void,” Tom said. “Not for a lack of trying, though. The big-wigs have asked darn near everyone about running against [Goldwater].”

“You included?”

“Me included.”

There was a bit of an awkward pause after that. There was nothing else to add to that conversation. The day was chilly, the sky was gray, and Thomas Kuchel was approached to run against Barry Goldwater. Earl breathed into his gloved hands, warming them. The second his head raised from his hands, Tom felt his heartbeat go faster, faster, faster. Anticipating the next question.

“Have you considered?” Earl asked. Others would have asked it with an air of innocence, or intrigue. But Earl Warren knew the weight of those words. He had been a margin of error away from being the vice-president, he had ran on his own accord afterwards. He knew what came with the territory. And Tom took a long drag on his cigarette, his heartbeat not slowing.

“I’ve—considered it.” He exhaled deeply, not proud of the answer. “It’s suicide, having Barry Goldwater on the ticket. We both know it. We also both know that I’m a soft touch,” a bitter half-chuckle escaped his throat, and then he sighed deep again. “I just—I want to be a good citizen, so I guess I’ll do it, but I really can’t afford the time.” [1]

* * *​

More welcome than Goldwater, Kuchel wasn’t universally beloved by The Establishment either. He famously refused to endorse Republicans he didn’t get along with politically. Perhaps the most damning example of this was in 1962, when his refusal to endorse Richard Nixon likely single-handedly cost Republicans the Governor’s seat—it was a close race, decided only by a couple thousand votes.

But the field was divided and Kuchel’s maverick attitudes towards the Republican infrastructure won him a lot of love; he truly was something of an everyman, enough of an anti-establishment figure to annoy the Party, not enough of one to turn away the voters. Perhaps more importantly, though, he was everything that Stevenson-Fulbright Democrats weren’t. Kuchel paired a lucid but hawkish view of foreign policy with a heartfelt belief in civil rights—and he had a long history of bipartisan consensus making, to boot (here was the man who was responsible for assembling the coalition of moderate Republicans required to pass Stevenson’s proposal lowering the age of retirement).

By the end of the Convention, he had secured the nomination. It had been taxing and long and Kuchel cringed thinking about all the bills he missed, but it was part of the sacrifice for that sacred Greater Good, and that goal allowed the hesitant Senator to march onward.

In the age of the television, Kuchel was a bit of an oddity. His voice was deep and commanding, but in the black-and-white glare of the camera’s eye he was not particularly photogenic. His forehead seemed to unflatteringly bulge as he talked, he’d blink irregularly—here a minute without, here ten seconds with twenty blinks—and a general air of hesitancy befitting a politician and not a presidential contender. As such, when Fulbright made no mention of televised debates for 1968 Kuchel made no effort to argue against him. He much preferred commercials—short, effective, well planned and well executed. He preferred the radio, too.

An old guard of the newly-founded “Lincoln Republican” coalition, he was immediately popular as a bipartisan figure. But accolades from liberals across the aisle was not what sealed the election, but rather the brutal sweeping of Czechoslovakia in “Operation Danube.” After years of a hesitant thaw, it seemed that the chill breath of war had again frozen the politics of the era. “We believe strongly that bullies should be dealt with,” Kuchel’s voice echoed out of radios across America; those increasing numbers with television watched as he gently pounded his fist against the prop-desk to make his point, punctuating the word dealt. “Fulbright is too busy acting as President of the United Nations, not the United States.” The attack line had been floated by him, a scrapped attack meant for Stevenson before his expiration, but now seemed perfectly apt for the current moment. What went unsaid, naturally, was Kuchel’s history of policy approaching internationalism—he had been a key voice in making sure that the United States signed onto the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty during Stevenson’s Presidency, the kind of move that would have incensed some of his more hawkish supporters.

​

For most commentators, the results of 1968 were decided weeks in advance—a blowout victory for the Gentleman from California. Fulbright’s margins had been whittled down to the Solid South, but even there it was not perfectly guaranteed—a few of the most ardently anti-segregationist governments refused to pledge their electors to Fulbright, still burned from his endorsement of the anti-lynching bill. Instead they pledged their delegates to former governor George Wallace. (Wallace was, incidentally, himself a victim to the moderate backlash—his wife, Wallace’s surrogate while he was term-limited, lost the primary to the young moderate Ryan deGraffenried.) The landslide is not what stuck with Kuchel, though. Rather it was Fulbright’s final months as president. “When a politician doesn’t get elected, he usually takes the junket around the world… President [Fulbright] though, he stayed there until the very end. Defended himself, his positions, all the way to the last. I really respected him for that, leaving with a good taste in his mouth,” he recounted in an interview years later.

Unlike his beleaguered predecessor, Kuchel was greeted on January 20 1969 by a Congress that was friendly with him—both houses were suitably Republican (even if the Senate still remained stubbornly Democratic-majority) and suitably moderate enough to begin the shaping of his domestic agenda. The fight for a new civil rights act would be trying and difficult, but with the trust of the Senate leadership (Leader Johnson and Whip Humphrey, as well as Leader Dirksen and Whip Scott) he began the process of figuring out this new act. However, the first dances Kuchel would need to play vis-a-vis civil rights began not with legislation, but with the judiciary.

Chief Justice Earl Warren’s retirement was no secret. He had been vocal that he would retire as soon as the winner of 1968 was sworn into office. Naturally he had hoped that Kuchel was the winner, and despite Kuchel knowing this already he could not help wiping a tear from his eyes when the Chief Justice called him to say that “There is no man I am happier to have appoint my successor than you, Tommy.” It was well-appreciated, but the quest for a new Chief Justice was hard—especially one that was befitting of Earl Warren’s legacy. After a period of back-and-forths, Kuchel was able to convince Eisenhower Attorney General Herbert Brownell to head the Judiciary. There was some kerfuffle with his nomination, what with his use of office to enforce Brown v. Board of Education, but once it came to a vote those objections became quiet murmurs and the Brownell Court was sworn in. The runner-up to the Chief Justice position, Eisenhower’s second Attorney General William P. Rogers, was appointed to the Court to replace the Associate Justice George T. Washington when he died in 1971.

Shortly after the end of Election Day, Kuchel began making plans with the Senate leadership (though not including Pennsylvania senator Hugh Scott, who had not yet replaced Kuchel as Republican whip) on how best to codify civil rights in an attempt to quell the dissent of the ‘60s. Although Humphrey was an idealist (and later historians would note that Kuchel seemed receptive to Humphrey’s expansive proposals), his robust dreams of a massive Civil Rights Act were quickly watered down by the moderate Dirksen and the weary Johnson. Despite the lack of a strong Dixiecratic tendency in the hearty Republican minority, there still was a strong conservative underbelly and Dirksen expressed fears at his ability to whip them in line for an expansive bill. Johnson privately feared the same, although he would never admit aloud that his vote-collecting skills had waned with age. As such, the plan that would eventually become the Civil Rights Act of 1969 was radical on paper. Technically, the act enforced voting rights, forced businesses to desegregate, and made segregation as a whole illegal in public spaces—all while allowing an avenue for the Justice Department to aid in the desegregation process. In reality, though, most of these measures were lip service. Very few of the provisions of the CRA-1969 had any real power without a willingly liberal interpretation, and even then aspects of it were far more liberal than intended. The House of Representatives was responsible for tacking on the provision making segregation in public spaces illegal (a provision which did not spend much time indicating with “public spaces” or “segregation” were in the eyes of the law). Similarly, the clause desegregating the private sector gave businesses two years to start the process before the government was to get involved (a caveat added by Dirksen). Although technically a win for the Civil Rights Movement, most of its most vocal leaders called it what it was—toothless; too little, too late. Indeed, even in the 91st United States Congress it was late, having been introduced in February and signed into law in September.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. had become well accustomed with prisons. It was natural for civil disobedience to be met with hostility—indeed, that was part of the point. In the age of television and news cameras, violent reactions to nonviolence helped change hearts; challenge minds. Georgia, however, was different. In other prisons, he was bailed out by sympathetic organizations. On his return trip to Georgia State Prison, that was not the case. He had not started any demonstrations, hadn’t organized any sit-ins or protests; he had simply arrived in Georgia and was swiftly arrested. He received no trial, read no rights, and sent to a jail cell with no trial. Attempts to pay his bail were met with silence—there was no prisoner, there was no bail to be paid. He was a political prisoner, a non-person. This was all according to the calculations of Governor James Gray, controversially elected by a fluke in the gubernatorial electoral process in Georgia who proceeded to adopt a powerful grip over the state. As President Fulbright rolled out his federal anti-lynching bill, Governor Gray roared from his podium that “They will not make a [EXPLETIVE]-lover outta me!” As Fulbright’s power declined, as a new wave of liberals found their home in the House, as Tommy Kuchel became the likely next president, Governor Gray watched in horror. He abolished the term limits of Georgia governors, promising that he was “the only thing standing between Washington and our laws and society!”

President Kuchel was different from President Fulbright in many ways, including a level of care for internal matters unlike the internationalist Fulbright. His father had waged a war against the Klan when it had invaded his home of Anaheim, California; in this way the fight for civil rights was especially personal for him. He demanded the release of Reverend King from Georgia State in strong language, and threatened punishment if no action was taken. Governor Gray, a former newspaper publisher, got a coalition of segregationist newspaper to publish in tandem the searing headline of “KUCHEL TO GEORGIA: DROP DEAD.” Despite this, the punishments from Washington were rather lackluster, if only because Kuchel feared causing rioting in the streets. However, after a year of these threats, a prayer was answered in the form of a peanut farmer.

“Jimmy” Carter was an unassuming small politician; he had run in 1966 for the governorship and had lost, but in the wake of increasing antagonism between Atlanta and Washington, in the wake of increased protests and ugliness, his slightly softer stances on segregation were seen as a blessing for the weary electorate. He did not campaign as against segregation, merely slightly to the left of the rabid Governor Gray. In an upset, Carter unseated the incumbent in the primary and won the general election handily (though a sore-loser run on Gray’s part made the Republicans perform abnormally well that year comparatively). Carter, however, was quick to reveal after assuming office that his segregationist stances were a front, declaring proudly that “the time for racial discrimination is over!” and released Reverend King from Georgia State. Carter then signaled that he would continue to follow Washington’s example. A similar coup occurred in nearby Mississippi, where outsider Bill Waller (himself a moderate like Carter) promised to move past the prickly relationship with Washington.

Dr. King returned quickly to the realm of activism, though in a more specialized field. He met with President Kuchel only two weeks after being released to talk with him about the progress the administration had made on civil rights. Although the exact specifics of this conversation has eluded historians, and is often discussed due to the conflicted civil rights record of Tommy Kuchel, future collaboration between the two shows that regardless of the conversation the two were on similar enough pages. In particular, King’s newfound activism on housing reform was quickly reciprocated by Kuchel, who spent no time in trying to jockey the House and Senate into passing a Housing Reform Act, and create a corresponding Department of Housing and Urban Affairs (HUA). Although still a controversial bill, forcing the desegregation of housing, it was able to pass both houses of Congress. Governor George Romney was swiftly appointed as the inaugural Secretary of Housing and Urban Affairs, and began his secretaryship by commanding a policy of “Open Communities,” a program to encourage open housing and desegregation. Seen by many detractors as rather piecemeal, it still helped begin the process of desegregation.

Despite the beginnings of reform, very little would quell that great throbbing beast of resistance that stretched from coast to coast. Its blood cells were agitators—college students, black activists, leftists and militants and a million others. They took heavy inspiration from the Beat culture of the early 1960s, although many key figures considered the beatniks a naive movement. They still adopted their anti-consumerist positions, though, synthesized with Marx and Lenin and Mao, spoken to life by Huey Newton or Malcom X. The nation felt kinetic, every day—every hour—ever minute there was a protest. Here a poor black kid got shot for walking the wrong side of the road, here a college student was beaten to death for a pro-civil rights picketing, here the televisions were making people complacent and drooling, here corporations were censoring the revolution. And on and on it went. Not all of them—not even most of them—were violent, but the ones that were found themselves plastered in black-and-white on newspaper pages and news programs. Three men died in clashes following the election of Bobby Seale of the Black Panther Party to Oakland City Council. Smoke rose over an Atlanta street where a gunman had attempted to open fire on Dr. King. “It was truly something unholy,” recalled prominent Georgian student activist Clarence Thomas, “All this violence against us—all because we wanted the laws of man to reflect the laws of God.” And it wasn’t just in the South. Cities north of the Mason-Dixon similarly struggled with the issues of race. Ted Kennedy, soon-to-be Mayor of Boston, recalled an incident wherein he tried to encourage peaceful dialogue about bussing (near the end of his life he would admit with a great deal of shame that this was before he became a civil rights warrior in his own right) only to be assaulted by the crowd. He escaped with only a black eye and some sore muscles, but he would recall the incident often in interviews as being one of the key motivators in his running for mayor.

Outside of his domestic reforms, Kuchel sought to redefine the American foreign policy vision. Tired of the dovishness of the Stevenson-Fulbright Administrations, Kuchel promised a responsible and tough foreign doctrine—hawkish but not offensively so. Eager to separate himself from what he saw as the disgraces of the GOP, that caucus of Bircherites and Goldwaterites, he pledged to be tough but fair. “I will follow the intelligence gathered by the government, not wild fantasies of Chinese invasions.” Fittingly to that quotation, China was one of his quickest reversals from President Fulbright. A loyal benefactor of the China Lobby, Kuchel was quick to reaffirm US recognition of “Free China,” stationed in Taiwan. The speediness of this reversal was both personal and due to the internal happenings in Beijing. Shortly after China helped broker the Vietnam peace, Chairman Mao grew to fear that in the stagnation of Communist rule, that China had begun to calcify—that the Revolution had merely replaced the Qing aristocracy with a Communist aristocracy. To relieve this, Mao enacted his vision of a “continuous revolution,” one where the people shedded their old shells to ensure that the revolution never ended. Thus began the Cultural Revolution, a ghastly and bloody affair that involved the purging of disloyal government agents, the massacring of citizens, and the destruction of cultural relics.

The violent international reaction to the Cultural Revolution sounded alarm bells for some of those more conservative elements Mao was paranoid of. The fact that any President of the United States who was not Fulbright would have severed ties regardless of Chinese affairs was lost on them, and in their fear they concocted a coup plot. Lin Biao was their reluctant figurehead, having been conscripted by his son Lin Liguo. Scatterbrained and poorly thought out, Vice Chairman Lin was able to provide some sense of strategic thinking to the plot and in 1971 the act was successful in ousting Mao Zedong, who fled northwards to Mongolia.

Now-Chairman Lin Biao was an interesting fellow, and when Soviets began saber-rattling along the Manchurian border he made quick work of the empty threats, assembling an army along the border so fierce that the Soviets blinked in the game of chicken and backed down. However, his heart was not really in it—he had gotten his legitimacy from Mao, he had gotten his interest in politics from Mao; without Mao he was a good general with an Army that doubted his legitimacy. And while the United States was pleased that the Cultural Revolution was slowed down, it would reluctantly notice that Lin Biao was not particularly interested in stopping the sporadic bits of violence and destruction still done in its name. And it sat there, baffled and confused, when only two years later Lin Biao invited Mao Zedong back into the country—went one step beyond that, crowned him with the title of “Father of the Revolution,” a title that de jure meant nothing but in reality gave him much of the prestige he had lost in his coup. And, as Lin Biao began to rehabilitate Mao Zedong, the United States found it easier than ever to leave the People’s Republic in the dust.

While all of that conundrum was going on, the United States’ most pointed attacks against the People’s Republic of China was in the United Nations, where they contested heavily Fulbright’s allowing of the admission of Communist China and the dismissing of Nationalist China from the Security Council. It was a major offense to the conservative side of the United States, and the Cultural Revolution and subsequent instability made it seem undesirable to maintain its membership to the United Nations, to the permanent membership to the Security Council. Nationalist China, for its part, said that the method of voting was against the UN’s Charter. Despite picketing by the United States and her most fervent allies, the overwhelming opinion of the United Nations held that Communist China was overwhelmingly seen as more fitting for membership than Nationalist China. It was a staggering loss for Kuchel, but he took it in stride, accepting the opinion of the UN begrudgingly and moving instead to better relationships with Taipei over Beijing.

The PRC sitting in the Security Council was seen by many in the Third World as a major success, China being seen as a bastion of third-worldism. In fact, when U Thant moved to retire in 1971, China was an enthusiastic backer of Chilean Felipe Herrera, who would eventually be elected (not without some interrogating by the United States) as the next Secretary-General of the United Nations.

While Kuchel put distance between Washington and Beijing, he made sure to reverse course elsewhere—Tel Aviv. Adlai Stevenson, for all his flaws, tried to be more supportive of Israel than Eisenhower had been. But his meager weapons supplying was paired with the persistent pleading to play fair with Palestinians. “REPATRIATION OF ARAB REFUGEES,” internal memos in the State Department said in 1961, “IS THE BOTTOM LINE FOR THE ADMINISTRATION -- PRACTICAL SAFE PROGRAM; REPATRIATION - RESETTLEMENT - COMPENSATION.” Israel did not feel amicable to those conditions, naturally. The Americans did not understand what it was like, enemies all around you—did not understand the threats poised by Egypt and Jordan. But Stevenson was more acceptable than Fulbright, at least. Fulbright was silent, refused to treat Israel as anything more than a nation among many, as opposed to an ally in a strategic region. Kuchel didn’t feel that way, and once he got C. Douglas Dillon in charge of State he made sure that the State Department let Israel know that Washington saw it as a key ally.

The rumor came from somewhere, some apparatchik whispered to some diplomat whispered to President Nasser about an Israeli build-up along the Egyptian border—a war on the horizon. By all accounts, Nasser doubted the authenticity of those reports, but knew that with the Kuchel Administration sending munitions and materials to Israel that calling that bluff was a gamble. He returned in kind, sending men to the border. And with that escalation, the great beast of war reared its head in the Middle East once more.

The war put President Kuchel at a complex crossroads—he wasn’t afraid of war, like Stevenson or Fulbright. However, he wasn’t frothing at the mouth for blood, either. The State Department estimated that the war would only take two weeks at most, before both sides burned through their munitions and the war ground to a halt. So, it was decided that sending men out would be a waste of resources and time. Peace was far more important in such an unstable region, so a council of peacemakers—headed by Ambassador to Israel Malcolm Toon—were sent out to Tel Aviv to try to hash out a deal. He also discussed with John S. Cooper, his Ambassador to the United Nations, the ability to mobilize UN peacekeepers into the region to try to control the flames.

As it would turn out, there was nothing to be done to control the flames. The two week estimate proposed by the Department of State was mostly accurate. Within days the two forces were stalemated in a tit-for-tat, with Israel capturing most of the Sinai Peninsula after heavy fighting. However, nearing the end of the second week, the Egyptian forces seemed poised to re-occupy, building up all their military might for one last push. Prime Minister of Israel Yoself Serlin was adamant that it would not come to that. It was time to show something to the world.

A test.

* * *​

“And the angel of the LORD appeared unto him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush: and he looked, and, behold, the bush burned with fire, and the bush was not consumed.” (Exodus 3:2)

And in the desert of the Sinai, a great burning appeared, a pillar of light and flame turned the desert floor to glass and the Earth quaked with the power of the LORD out of Heaven. It was not a burning bush, but instead a tree or perhaps—a mushroom.

“And the LORD said unto Moses, Get thee up into this mount Abarim, and see the land which I have given unto the children of Israel.” (Numbers 27:12)

And from that great Mount Sinai, where the Prophet Moses was given the Commandments that would forever govern the Jewish faith and the Children of Israel, one would have been turned to a pillar of salt seeing the proof that the Children of Israel had not just been given their land, but had the power required to defend it.

* * *​

It had caught the world by surprise. There had been whispers for ages about an Israeli nuclear war program, but it was just that—whispers. There were no casualties, that was not the point. The point was to make a point.

Thomas Kuchel, upon hearing the news, put his head in his hands and sighed. He wanted to say something, but there was nothing to say. He felt a pit in his stomach, felt like a part of this outrageous development was his fault. As an opponent to nuclear weapons testing, the development in the Middle East was deeply troubling. To the press the morning after, he said with a strong voice—though his words would briefly warble once or twice, betraying his fear: “The United States has been a firm supporter of Israel and her people, and that is a fact that I am very proud of. But that does not excuse the reckless actions that have occurred over the past two-four hours. Nuclear weapons are not play-things, and it is the express opinion of the United States that the continuation of an Israeli nuclear weapons program would herald a new and ominous chapter in the nuclear arms race.”

The New York Times would call the incident “THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL,” but for the Middle East it was not a day—it was weeks, months even. The Sinai Peninsula stayed in a territorial limbo, the Suez Canal shut down, the nations holding their breaths. There was something pulsing underneath, that primal fear—a nuclear arms race, as Kuchel warned.

Eventually, the Earth ceased to stand still. The world was already fearful of nuclear armageddon, after all, so what difference did one missile make?

Within the shadow of the atom bomb, Washington turned its eyes southerly, to Africa. As the continent wrestled with the depths of imperialism and its legacy, the President felt it time to flex the new “Kuchel Doctrine” of foreign policy—ironically taking a page from President Truman.

Like his predecessors, Kuchel was not particularly opposed to the United Nations. In fact, he saw it particularly well-suited to build international coalitions pursuing American foreign policy goals. Detractors would well remember the Korean War and sneer at the use of “international coalitions,” but that did not matter to Tommy. His eyes were set primarily on the twin uprisings in Angola and Mozambique, which had gone without American input for far too long.

The fears in many American foreign policy circles was that during the Stevenson-Fulbright “revolution” in foreign policy, the United States had lost its edge in sponsoring movements like those rising up against the Portuguese empire—that in that vacuum, Soviet-backed communism became the face of resistance as opposed to America-backed liberalism. And indeed, many of the insurgencies in Angola and Mozambique were some stripe of leftist—Marxist-Leninist, Maoist, etc. Indeed, the primary insurgent organization in Mozambique was explicitly communist. In Angola, however, the United States was able to find an in. Holden Roberto was one of the most outspoken proponents of a certain independence from Portugal relatively early on—early on enough that Eisenhower had sent him money, and when Stevenson moved away from direct involvement in the region countries like Ghana picked up the slack. They also found assistance in the form of eccentric leader Jonas Savimbi, who initially proclaimed himself and his splinter organization Maoist but swiftly changes his tune on the back of the United States dollar. The two men, now opposed, had originally been part of the same insurgent organization, but Savimbi had quickly split off after finding Roberto’s north-exclusive organization damaging to the cause. Roberto, a Bakongo nationalist, disagreed. The United States didn’t much care about these doctrinal disagreements, so long as they won out over the repressive Portuguese and the Soviet-backed Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola.

In pursuing Kuchel Doctrine, John S. Cooper—Kentucky Republican and now Ambassador to the United Nations—unofficially became one of the most powerful members of Kuchel’s administration. And in the wake of US interest focusing back to Africa, it became Cooper’s job to try to sell intervention. The argument itself was very simple, that in suppressing local movements and disenfranchising the indigenous populaces of her colonies, Portugal was in violation of the Charter, thus necessitating UN intervention. The fallout from this proposal was intense: Soviet ambassador Yakov Malik questioned why the United States’ proposal said that it would support “any indigenous movements rising against Portuguese oppression” but did not include the most prominent one—the Popular Movement; the Portuguese ambassador (who was not a member of the Security Council but, due to the nature of the crisis, was present nonetheless) strongly condemned the attempted assault on Portuguese “domestic policy” in clear violation of United Nations’ policy of being a peacekeeping organization. Perhaps most strongly, though, was Syrian representative George Tomeh who served as that month’s President of the Security Council, who lauded the Angolans’ fight for decolonization but reprimanded the United States for “attempting to turn the decolonization of Africa into imperialist grandstanding.” Although Kuchel was eventually able to create a non-UN coalition of allies to chip in in Angola, his attempt to bend the United Nations’ will to the US proved unsuccessful.

Back home, the midterms rebuked the temporary Republican revolution. Losing their razor-thin margins in the House, the Republicans receded to the minority position. There, they went through a chaotic couple years in terms of leadership, infighting between moderates and conservatives in the Party. The Democrats, returning in full force, replaced the ineffective Carl Albert with Louisiana representative Hale Boggs, who was willing to work amicably enough with the Republican administration but held on hope for a Democratic administration sooner or later. His hopes were dashed in 1972, however.

The 1972 Democratic primaries are remembered primarily for their tragedy. The apparent frontrunner for much of the election season was Massachusetts Senator John Kennedy, whose old ghosts from Europe had faded with age. But also with age came health problems, and on May 6, 1972 he collapsed after a campaign event and was pronounced dead the morning after. In his absence, many of the star players in the Democratic Party were unable to run. Hubert Humphrey feared his own health issues and stayed out, Lyndon Johnson floated a last-hurrah run but obviously was considered too old by party bosses. The Segregationist wing, dulled with the rising annoyance towards that particular caucus, was unable to field a successful candidate—but so too were the New South, as their new sweetheart Jimmy Carter considered himself too inexperienced to run. So then did the stars align for North Carolina Governor Terry Sanford, who was broadly appealing to both halves of the party. He was something of a born-again when it came to civil rights, he was well-respected in his state and abroad; he was inoffensive and kind and he secured the nomination without much fuss.

The 1972 Republican primaries are remembered primarily for their dramatic nature.

* * *​

Leon Panetta, a White House staffer imported from California, hurried into the Oval Office. Thankfully for him, the President was in a regular meeting with Secretary of State C. Douglas Dillon. Nothing important was being discussed, more of a check-up than anything. It could wait.

“What is it?” asked Kuchel, an eyebrow raised. He knew his staff well enough to know the expression on his young staffer’s face—nervousness.

“Ronald Reagan has announced his intention to run in the primary.” There was an awkward beat. “Against you,” he clarified.

Kuchel deflated—not out of loss, but out of annoyance. “That son-of-a-gun” he muttered. “Maybe [President] Stevenson was right about television.”

* * *​

Ronald Reagan was the face of the scorned Goldwater Wing who, despite Kuchel’s relatively high popularity in 1972, saw him as an embarrassment to the Party. He was soft, he kowtowed to the rioters who were tearing up the country. (“If a person is looting and he’s ordered to stop and he doesn’t, I think the law enforcement officer then can make a value judgment as to whether to proceed to arrest them—and surely he ought not to be ordered under all circumstances to kill him,” a response he made to reports of police violence in response to protests, was played as a political ad by both pro-Kuchel and anti-Kuchel camps.) He didn’t fight hard enough against Communist China, he didn’t fight the United Nations when it spat in America’s face. Although not officially affiliated with the movement, Reagan’s core support base was the John Birch Society, who were already heavily opposed to Tommy Kuchel and worshipful of Ronald Reagan.

Publicly, Kuchel’s response to the primary challenge was swift and brutal. “A fanatical neo-fascist political cult of right-wingers in the GOP, driven by a strange mixture of corrosive hatred and sickening fear, is recklessly determined to control our party,” he announced. Smooth-voiced Reagan was offended—or, at least, seemed offended. (A slave to his own quotes, as an actor he too spent half his waking hours in fantasy.) “I am shocked and appalled that the President compares a movement as patriotic as ours as something approaching Nazism. We are a movement representing the ideals of those same poor souls who died to stop the Nazi Empire.” Kuchel—an angry, fed-up, tired Kuchel—gave newspapers the curt response of “I am sure Ronald Reagan’s movies fought valiantly in Europe.”

And soon came the attacks. The first were expected, policy-related; primarily focused on Kuchel’s reinstating of the Bracero program undone under President Stevenson. Although Kuchel saw the program as a necessity, saw it as more sound fiscally—declaring once that “If we were to import our fellow human beings from the elsewhere in the United States and only offer them a few months work each year in California, what is to happen to them during the remainder of the year? Are they to become welfare burdens on the property taxpayers of that State?” [2]. He still saw opposition from further-right Republicans, who saw the relationship as hurting native-born citizens and being too kind to immigrants who disturbed suburban America. He was attacked for the creation of the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) and the conservation of many tens of thousands of redwood forests via the Redwood National Park (which was soon joined by several state parks that increased the acreage into the hundreds of thousands). And here Kuchel was in his flow, defending his policies.

And then came the whispers, the personal attacks. The first target was the “Communist infiltration of the current Administration,” exemplified through the attacks on White House Chief of Staff “Pop” Small. Small was no communist, but his father had been one—had supported Eugene Debs at the start of the century. Kuchel called the attacks deeply insulting, and although Small offered to quit, Kuchel considered him too valuable a friend to leave to the wayside. In short order the attacks on Small would be forgotten, because Birchers tried to dig up a different avenue of attack, taking a page from decades previous. Conservative newspaper outlets along the East Coast—predominantly in New York and New Jersey—as well as outlets along California’s suburban publication landscape began publishing a story alleging that Tommy Kuchel had been arrested decades previous while having sex with another man, and that he was a homosexual. Almost immediately, Kuchel got in contact with the L.A. District attorney Evelle Younger and U.S. Attorney for D.C. Oliver Gasch, asking them to investigate, and almost immediately the LAPD was with one less officer and a New Jersey conservative publisher was sued for libel. The incident did not last long in the papers or on the airwaves (although some of the more radical radio shows would continue to insinuate sexual impropriety on the President’s part for years to come), but by all accounts Tommy Kuchel took the slanderous attacks poorly. For at least the next year he felt no joy in politicking and at numerous points he considered retiring altogether.

With time he would regain some of his faith in the political world, but the whole episode made his campaigning apparatus lethargic and slow, an apparatus already damaged by Kuchel’s disdain for fundraising. Personal popularity helped tremendously, and gave his machine some fat to burn when it came to a decline in appearances and a refusal for anything beyond a few radio debates against Reagan. In those debates he would alternate between generalized statements and pointed attacks on Ronald Reagan. This unpredictable debate style (though “style” is too generous a word for Kuchel’s treatment of those radio debates) proved difficult for Reagan to manage, trying to eloquently weave together rebuttals, attacks and defenses to an opponent that had no care about the theater of debates anymore.

In 1972, candidates Kuchel and Sanford were able to agree to a presidential debate—Sanford seeing a chance to give his underdog campaign new life and Kuchel not caring enough to deny the offer. (Several prominent campaign operatives told Kuchel that the debate presented an opportunity to “shake off” a lot of the hesitancy towards politicking that Reagan had elicited.) Sanford’s hunches were proven well-grounded when he had a surprisingly successful debate night, Kuchel saying shortly afterwards that his performance was “something less than brilliant.” While the North Carolina governor was alert and lucid, the President seemed by all accounts distant, only making generalized statements and often refusing chances to respond to his opponent. Although Kuchel’s voice was far more presidential, Sanford’s way of speaking created a sense of calm collectedness that created a sense of security (according to supporters) or put people to sleep (according to detractors).

Even though Sanford was undoubtedly the debate winner, and Kuchel’s performance left much to be desired, it did not matter much in the end. Much of the public simply took the President at his word when he later explained that his uninspiring performance was due to him being tired. He may have been unpopular amongst the most radical of Republicans and Democrats, but among the vast middle-ground he was well-loved. Sanford did do some good, though, for the Democratic Party—regaining key states in the North that had chosen Kuchel over Fulbright four years prior while also being competitive in a great many states that Democrats hoped to make inroads with.

It was not universally a great time for Democrats, though. Only two days after Thomas Kuchel was sworn into his second term, Majority Leader Johnson passed away at the age of 64. Although Hubert Humphrey succeeded his boss without much fuss, he was never able to whip votes quite as efficiently as Johnson—perhaps nobody ever could. In Humphrey’s on words, “He knew everything about everybody in Congress and he knew their prejudices, their hopes, their fears, and their aspirations… He wasn’t tagged liberal or conservative. He refused to be southern or northern. He said I am an American and some people used to think of that as a bit corny.” For all of his skills, Humphrey was never Johnson, and he never could have been. He was a social-democratic reformer, a civil rights warrior, the golden boy of the Liberal North. He was not apologetic for it, but it still made Southern moderates and conservatives more unruly. As a sort of retaliation, the Democratic Whip position went to Louisiana dynast Russell B. Long, who had a complicated history with the civil rights movement in his own right.

That unstable split seemed to be a pattern in the Senate. When Everett Dirksen of Illinois passed away in 1969, the liberal Pennsylvanian Hugh Scott replaced him as the Republican leader in the Senate—but that didn’t stop conservative Nebraskan Roman Hruska from filling in the whip position. Even then, some pointed to Hruska’s election as a sign of the shifting tides within the Republican Party, how even though he was among the conservative Republicans that he had been in favor of Kuchel’s civil rights agenda.

Other than the unexpected reshuffling of the majority leadership, Kuchel’s second term started off slow: a trickle of news about the goings-on in Angola (where, in a few years’ time, the United States would welcome a new ally in the form of Holden Roberto’s Kongo—a nationalist anticommunist bastion with a curious reinstallation of the old Bakongo monarchy and political hierarchy; it would also welcome an enemy in socialist-adjacent Angola, where the Popular Movement won out but would be harassed by Savimbi for years to come), while the cogs of the Senate slowly turned as Humphrey began reassembling some of the power that Johnson had put together after decades in leadership. This suited President Kuchel just fine, as he slowly started healing the bruises inflicted by Bircherites and Reaganites.

And then something beyond words happened. Not like the Israeli weapons testing, but something far greater, far more important, far more incredible and beautiful and infuriating and damning all wrapped into one. The newspapers had been there since the beginning, writing of the event’s beginnings—there was video, then, too. But the video footage would only be released afterwards, after success had been assured. And then, on the night of July 3rd, 1973, television channels across the globe almost immediately cut to live footage.

* * *​

A suited man, climbing down a ladder. The landscape behind him a dusty gray. He mutters something under his breath, but it’s not audible. At the bottom rung—the audience, not knowing the full length of the ladder, has to assume it’s the bottom rung—he hesitates, as if the weight of this indescribable moment has just hit him at that moment. (Years later, he would admit in an interview with a laugh that the primary reason he had stopped was because he had to hold back a sneeze.) After an eternal pause, he finally lets go of the handles of the ladder, and floats like a feather off that last step. And then a pause, as he thinks of the words to name the feeling of his feet upon lunar soils. And then he speaks.

Moments later, a translation of his words appears at the bottom of the screen. It is simple and eloquent and carry so much weight with so few words:

MAN IS NOW ON THE MOON

* * *​

The two-man mission of Alexei Leonov and Valery Bykovsky in 1973 is perhaps one of the most known moments in all of human history. No words can do justice just how deeply the event was felt, how powerful its ripples affected day-to-day life.

Too, nothing can be said to describe the boiling rage that many Americans felt that emblazoned on the cosmonauts’ helmets were the letters CCCP; that the words to herald in this new era of human history were spoken in Russian and not English; that the banner planted on the Moon’s surface was red and not red-white-and-blue. The vast majority did not feel that way, at least not wholly, but many did feel it. Tommy Kuchel did, at least a little. Eisenhower had started the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and while a few since then had paid it lip service, few had given it the nutrients it needed to grow and prosper. Kuchel was never on the committee working with NASA, but he visited its meetings with a consistent regularity that outshone some of the bona-fide members of it. But then the procession came around—Stevenson spent a little time with NASA, but saw it mostly as a novelty, far too busy concerned with Spaceship Earth than he ever was with making actual spaceships to explore the world outside of Earth; Fulbright treated most things domestic as a curse rather than an interest, and if he even knew that the Administration existed he paid it no attention. Kuchel, then, had to take on the Herculean effort of derusting the machinery and getting NASA back in some semblance of shape.

And then the Soviet moon landing happened and suddenly all of the world was staring at the inadequate and poorly-funded space apparatus of the United States, constantly lagging behind the Soviets at every step. The added attention at least allowed the Administration to channel Department of Defense money into the starving NASA. Despite that, Kuchel and Ambassador to the USSR Malcolm Toon reached out to the Soviets and made it known internationally that both the US and the USSR would avoid the militarization of space, a declaration that was met with its usual broad support and pointed criticism among the hard-conservative flank.

However, by 1976 there had been no big groundbreaking thing for the Americans yet. The Soviets had been still, too, trying to help shore up enough money to keep the expensive business of spaceflight alive. The next step was oft-debated, however: a moonbase, men to Mars—Venus, maybe even! None were selected as final targets, but all experimented on over and over again, tweaked here and there as new ideas and new conundrums came up in research. Administrator George Low described the work, perhaps derogatively, as “tinkering.”

In 1975, Kuchel made his fourth and final appointment to the Supreme Court, replacing the Honorable William Douglass. (His third appointment, to replace Hon. John Marshall Harlan II, had been the controversial Frank Minis Johnson; Southern radicals opposed him vocally for his help in enforcing desegregationist policies in Alabama, but with key whipping by Lyndon Johnson eventually the segregationist filibuster was shattered.) Finally, in 1975, Kuchel felt ready to make a momentous appointment—the first Black Justice to the Supreme Court. After much vetting he finally selected the man he felt most well-suited for the job, the Ohioan judge Robert Morton Duncan.

The shockwaves were felt immediately, and very early many prominent Dixiecrats and right-wing Republicans complained about a lack of experience; however, as Roman Hruska pointed out, Duncan’s half a decade in judicial politics made him more experienced than Associate Justices like Harlan II. After very heated backs-and-forths, eventually both Democrats and Republicans were able to gather the votes to ensure that the Brownell Court had the first African-American Justice in American history, to much rejoicing among Black America.

Before that, though, back in ‘73 and ‘74, the Democratic House and Senate began suggesting a piece of legislation designed to make good a promise that Democratic presidents had made for decades yet had always fell short of resolving—the health sphere. With a humanitarian heart and a wide bipartisan mandate, Tommy Kuchel seemed perhaps the most well-suited man to finally make pushes that had been denied to predecessors. The legislation would expand the Social Security program to include programs for impoverished families and the elderly, to lessen the burdens of health insurance on them. However, those robust dreams would never survive the grueling process of fiscal restraint and ideological concerns. In the end, Kuchel was able to sign into law “Eldercare,” which provided a voluntary government financial services to cover physician care, surgery costs, drug prices, nursing home costs, and lab services like X-ray scanning. Although a sister program for impoverished Americans died in conservative backlash and well-meaning all-or-nothing progressive stances among Democrats, Kuchel was still be all accounts immensely proud of the Eldercare program, saying that “If it weren’t for Eldercare today, there would be tens of thousands of American elders living in the poorhouse, with no care.”

Those robust promises of Senate Majority Leader Humphrey, though, led something more to be desired for Kuchel. And here is when conservatives decry the devil-on-the-shoulder John W. Gardner, Secretary of Health-Education-and-Welfare and public advocate for the rights of urban poor and electoral reform. Gardner, so says the right wing, whispered sweet little nothings in Tommy Kuchel’s ear, scarlet words in red-velvet whispers about socialized medicine and Bolshevik government models. Regardless of those conspiracies, Kuchel by all accounts seemed to have uncovered an insatiable itch in those promises of healthcare reform and after years of hard politicking, in the final months of his presidency, he was miraculously able to sign into law the system of Childcare, designed to alleviate the money problems associated with youth. It passed in December 1976, and in that way shows Kuchel’s odd aberration:

In keeping of his future compliments of former President Fulbright, Kuchel seemed particularly engendered by the final stretch of his presidency, and it was through that odd relationship with the lame-duck era that Kuchel was able to pass one of the most groundbreaking acts of his presidency. Fellow progressive conservatives lauded it as being exactly the principles that Tommy Kuchel swore to protect—giving all young Americans the same opportunities in youth to allow them to follow the principles of rugged individualism in their middle age, only to return back to the care of others in old age. To arch-conservatives, however, they saw something more malicious. “Tommy Kuchel,” wrote conservative pundit William Buckley, “has made sure to cover welfare in the cradle and in the grave so the next Democrat can fill in the middle!” [3]

Historiography has played with Tommy Kuchel in interesting ways, but he has always been seen as one of the better presidents—typically earning a spot around Number 10. He was immensely popular by Middle America, he passed legislation that was—although in its time controversial—immensely popular in hindsight. He stood for a model of progressive conservatism that was contrary to the far-right flank of the party that was represented by Goldwaters and Reagans, citing the British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli when he said that “The main purpose of government is to distribute the amenities of life on an ever-increasing scale to an ever-increasing number.” But, too, as the years have gone on, critiques of Kuchel have grown more common. His civil rights legacy, many will say, is overblown and he was too cowardly to pick the right fights; despite his grandstanding about making public opinion as opposed to following it, he still would scurry out of harm’s way when push came to shove. The right-wing of America will forever hold him with contempt, it would seem, ever since his snubbing of Goldwater and rebuke of Reagan, ever since his big-government domestic policy. But to that comfy, mindless middle ground, he is remembered as one of the greats. Despite him leaving office with his approval ratings the most divided in his presidency, his image was repaired in no small part by his fleeing from politics.

On January 20, 1977, Thomas Kuchel was free from his burden. With a hand on a Bible and a swearing of an oath, a parade and promenade, the 38th President of the United States of America had come into power, and Number 37 never had to take on the burdens again. Tommy hurried himself back to his home in Anaheim, California, and elected to return to the family trade and became the editor and owner of the newly-revived Anaheim Gazette. He didn’t necessarily remove himself from politics, but chose instead to watch from the distance. He would die almost twenty years later, in 1994, of cancer. He refused much of the exorbitant funds given to former presidents, was gifted a modest presidential library not far from his hometown. His funeral was a private affair and in accordance to his will he was buried in Anaheim, not in Arlington nor in his presidential library. He left behind no memoir, endorsed no biography, and only occasioned himself to a couple interviews.

---

[1] The end of this sentence is adapted from a wildly different context, taken from EARL WARREN: FELLOW CONSTITUTIONAL OFFICERS, a collection of interviews as part of the Earl Warren Oral History Project. Page 4 of Kuchel’s interview. Again, a wildly different context but it is very fitting for how Kuchel’s administration goes.

[2] Adapted almost wholesale from Kuchel’s testimony defending the Bracero program—yes, he did subtly imply that Mexicans weren’t human beings. Welcome to the 1960s!

[3] Thanks Vidal for this one—his spitball of a quote that I felt worked way too well to leave in the dustbin.

 

[Enigma-Conundrum]

38. Jack Gilligan (Democratic-OH)
January 20, 1977 - May 29th, 1981

“Any real accomplishment in the world reflects the efforts of a lot of people… for an individual to claim personal responsibility is the height of arrogance.”​

Virtually every American of a certain age can see it. A neatly-kept wave of graying red hair. A lean, craggy grin and sharp eyes capable of disarming virtually any opponent. A florid face that seemed to redden several shades at the drop of a hat. A demeanor equal parts charming and irascible, witty and acerbic, passionate and aloof. A feverish tone that made every speech sound a bit like a sermon. The image of President Gilligan - of Jack - remains burned into a generation’s collective consciousness.

John Joyce Gilligan never wanted to be a politician. His ultimate goal in life was, devout Catholic he was, the seminary. But after Pearl Harbor, the would-be Jesuit followed the calling of Uncle Sam like so many others and enlisted in the Navy as a gunnery officer. Upon returning from the Pacific, Silver Star in hand, the Gilligans - Jack had married his childhood love Katie while on leave from the war - settled down in their native Cincinnati, where Jack taught literature at his alma mater, Xavier University. So it seemed that the Gilligans would enter into the quiet homecoming of many GIs to their families.

What drew him into politics was Adlai Stevenson's 1952 presidential campaign. Though the eventual president’s first campaign faced long odds and a general public fatigued with twenty years of Democratic rule, like countless other liberals of the era it ignited within Gilligan a firm belief in politics as public service. Soon after, he elected to run for a city council seat in Cincinnati, which he won despite the city’s Republican leanings. After Adlai Stevenson’s victory, Gilligan decided then and there that he would follow his idol to Washington. 1962 was no year for Democrats, though, especially not in a typically Republican environment like the Taft family’s hometown, and Gilligan’s first congressional bid fell short as voters seemingly rejected New America. Dejected but defiant, Jack Gilligan immediately turned his focus to a campaign for 1964, a race he privately labeled as do or die for his burgeoning ambitions for high office. Despite a slate of Republican victories statewide, a bare margin of just a thousand votes sent Jack Gilligan to Washington.

There, Representative Gilligan quickly made a name for himself within the Ohio delegation. This was not due to his effectiveness - the Democrats were only in the barest of majorities during his first term, and this was often overshadowed by Bill Fulbright’s seeming disinterest in the affairs of Capitol Hill beyond his pet education reforms. Instead, it was due to his work at home. Apart from being an effective representative for people who had sparsely been represented by a Democrat, he was unique within the Ohio Democratic Party. Dominated by Frank Lausche’s conservative multi-ethnic machinery, the Ohio Democrats were often beholden to his independent style and “small-d democrat” approach. Jack Gilligan was having none of this, a liberal Stevensonian through and through. He privately offered many, many tempestuous rants against “Frank the Fence,” and often ignored calls from his representatives among the Ohio Democrats. Instead, Gilligan spent his time wooing three key lobbies that would guide his career - the activists, the unions, and the racial minorities. At first, this seemed suicidal, but amidst a Democratic Party torn asunder by issues of import to these exact groups, Gilligan displayed a crossover strength that continued his career in a nominally Republican district. Even so, he was decidedly in the minority in Ohio, and Lausche and his minions consistently reminded him of it.

Then, on November 5th, 1968, Frank Lausche lost. His fence-sitting had cost him vital labor support, and his focus on white ethnic groups may have worked well in the past, but it made him seem an out of touch machine boss when Republicans promised real action on civil rights and the disorder caused by it. Not only had Lausche lost, he had lost because the exact voter blocs in Ohio that loved Jack Gilligan had sat on their hands. The results were clear to every single Ohio Democrat: Gilligan the iconoclastic liberal was right, and Lausche the small-d democrat wrong.

Once scorned for his oddities, now Gilligan was the savior of the party. He acted as if the party courted him to run, but the truth is he knew he wanted to chase freshman Senator Robert Taft Jr. seat in 1970 ever since he realized Lausche’s grip had slipped. When he did run, he was virtually unopposed in the primary, even despite a relatively light legislative record in the minority. Taft tried to hit him on this, treating him as a do-nothing liberal lightweight, but Gilligan debuted a prototype of the campaign strategy that would become so familiar in the future. An army of student volunteers canvassed the state, getting voters registered and engaged with the Gilligan campaign - and where the campaign didn’t have resources, Gilligan’s labor point man Bill Kircher wrung cash, manpower, and materials out of the AFL-CIO to compensate. The first of his memorably quirky ads, “Inferno,” saw Gilligan standing on a bridge, behind him a backdrop of the Cuyahoga River on fire (as it often did in those days due to oil slicks), pointing out that Senator Taft had voted against multiple bills aimed at cleaning up the blaze he gestured at behind him due to lobbying by the owners of the manufacturing plants behind the flaming river. Evidently, Ohioans agreed with his closing question “Isn’t it time we elected someone who puts out fires?” as Gilligan beat Taft fairly decisively.

Now a rising star in the Democratic caucus, Jack Gilligan focused on keeping his name out there. He ensured his most notable campaign promise was paid off when sponsoring the bill authorizing the Department of Environmental Protection, discussing with President Kuchel its use to break down pollution in the Cuyahoga and even giving a televised press conference from the very same bridge the ad was shot on when cleaning began. He helped to maneuver some of the glut of new NASA spending to a new research & development facility outside Cleveland, authored a bipartisan bill dealing with the transition from mental institutions to more humane treatment plans, and aided in the drafting of regulations on strip-mining. None of this, except maybe the DEP, was the type of action that made a contender for the presidency. But Gilligan had risen through the ranks because he knew how to cultivate relationships with the liberal grassroots, and cultivate he did. He was, after Wayne Morse’s passing, the only incumbent Democratic legislator to routinely address the SDS’ annual convention. A highly publicized meeting with Cesar Chavez after President Kuchel revived the Braceros raised eyebrows, and the UFW’s negotiated entry into the AFL-CIO later that year had Senator Gilligan’s fingerprints all over it to anyone in the know. ADA lawyers and policy wonks practically lived out of his office, helping him draft expansive legislation on everything from tuition fees to healthcare reform to labor law. Though he was not necessarily the most prominent member of the body, often outshined by veterans like Hubert Humphrey and Richard Nixon, in the young countercultural bastions of activist left-liberalism Jack Gilligan got approving mentions.

This was exactly what Gilligan wanted. By the time he had entered the Senate he knew his goal was the White House. The 1972 race had confirmed his greatest suspicions - the Democratic Party was rudderless, on one hand lacking leadership due to Tommy Kuchel’s apathetic popularity but on the other lacking much of the machinery that propelled it through the 1960s. Come 1974, as the race geared up in earnest, the party had few candidates actively seeking the office, especially once Leader Humphrey and his protege Governor Mondale both ruled out a bid. Richard Daley was seemingly the only one of the old bosses left, with Jesse Unruh’s scandals locking California in for the right for another generation and men like John Moran Bailey succumbing to their advanced age. As such, the only candidate fielded by the smoke-filled rooms was one from the dying Daley, a repeat of his last intervention: the Governor of Illinois, Adlai Stevenson. Adlai the Third was young, he was a liberal-minded reformer, and he looked enough like the old egghead that he was sure to excite the very people who voted him in sixteen years prior.

The name Adlai Stevenson was a double-edged sword, though. While it was true that many of the old-timers adored the old man - he was practically Saint Adlai to Jack Gilligan - the younger crowd, those who had been students during the bloody 60s, saw him as the epitome of more of the same. Adlai the Third’s anti-corruption reforms and his high-concept focus on the nuts and bolts of banking and scientific policy sounded nice on a brochure, but it looked an awful lot like tinkering around the edges, the other side of a coin with Tommy Kuchel’s face on the front. The movement didn’t want that, they didn’t want his obvious overtures to the presidency two years out, they wanted something real. As Gilligan noted to his aides at the SDS convention in November 1974, “you’d think [Adlai Stevenson III]’s Jim Gray the way they’re talking about him.”

So it was that, early in 1975, Jack Gilligan went home to Xavier University to announce his bid for the nomination. Throngs of Cincinnatians came to see their favorite son off, supportive but considering him an unlikely candidate, especially in the face of the heft of Adlai Stevenson’s son. What they - and virtually everybody - didn’t know was that Gilligan’s political team had been single-mindedly focused on replicating his Ohio operation. The primaries had long since been considered window dressing as a show of strength before the convention. Few candidates contested all of them seriously, but few candidates were Jack Gilligan. Gilligan’s campaign team, led by longtime in-house operator Mark Shields and his politically minded daughter Kathleen, reasoned that the primaries could be used to throw a relatively obscure candidate into the national spotlight. A candidate with a devoted activist base - like Jack Gilligan, the student movement’s favorite - could theoretically turn a string of primary wins into an aura of inevitable momentum. So the Gilligan campaign focused on getting college students throughout the early states out and canvassing throughout the back half of 1975, having practically every single door in New Hampshire be knocked on by a twenty-year-old hand. Though Adlai the Third put his name into contention for the first in the nation primary, as is tradition, he didn’t think twice of it - after all, too much campaigning early was a sign of desperation in the eyes of the traditionalists.

The Stevenson camp absolutely thought twice of it when Jack Gilligan carried New Hampshire by three points. His people had earnestly engaged with voters, talking about concrete things Jack Gilligan would do while Stevenson barely found the time to even come to Manchester. Realizing that repeating his father’s aloof intellectualism didn’t play the same with television cameras following Jack Gilligan all around sleepy New Hampshire hamlets, Stevenson quickly moved to salvage it by heading north. But Gilligan was prepared for that eventuality too - his victory in Wisconsin, buoyed by the Madison SDS chapter being one of the most active in the nation, was so total that he managed to defeat Stevenson in wards of Milwaukee thought to be in the bag for the party regulars. Though his own home of Illinois provided some respite, the media had picked up on Jack Gilligan’s smashing victories, proclaiming his momentum as the voice of a generation. This new aura of seriousness as a contender, only aided by Hubert Humphrey’s endorsement, threw open the individual donation floodgates. Stevenson would only carry his home state, making a last serious stand in West Virginia on the basis that a practicing Catholic would lose out in the heavily Protestant Appalachian state. The attempts at using Gilligan’s faith failed brutally. When asked point-blank about the rhetoric coming from Stevenson supporters in West Virginia, Gilligan’s complexion went tomato-red as he held up a flier distributed by said surrogates implying that Gilligan’s Catholicism would be a hindrance to his potential victory. “This sort of backwards trickery,” he practically spat to a reporter’s camera, “has no place here. I didn’t fight for this country in the Pacific to be accused of disloyalty. Governor Stevenson should be ashamed of himself.” Ultimately, the voter backlash to the dirty tricks brought Gilligan the win in West Virginia, and the national media felt comfortable coronating him as the frontrunner and declaring the matter of his faith settled.

Jack Gilligan came to Chicago a conquering hero. Thousands of young people gathered in Grant Park to see the candidate, the man who had not only fought the party establishment but won multiple bouts. Even so, the convention would not be easy, as Gilligan’s blunt rhetoric on civil rights ruffled feathers within the southern delegations. The Gilligan campaign sought to pacify the concerns quickly to avoid a long fight. Florida had been won by favorite son Lawton Chiles in the primaries, after all, so their loyalties seemed up for grabs instead of directly tied to Adlai the Third. After a brief address to the crowds outside the convention hall, Gilligan found his way to a private meeting with the highest southern grandees of the moment - the fucking Louisianans, as his younger staff called them. The haggling with Senator Long and Speaker Boggs took nearly five hours and covered virtually the entire Gilligan campaign platform, but by the time voting started he had emerged with a deal (including the vice presidency for a southerner and key platform planks), ensuring the frontrunner’s first-ballot victory. Though the nominee said a great many things to Chicago in his prime-time acceptance, the most memorable phrase came at the end: “I know what I advocate is bold, and some may not agree. There are those who say that the equal rights of all Americans to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is a noble goal, but one that must simply wait for a better time. To those who insist that we wait for what Martin Luther King called a more convenient season, we’ve come here as one to tell the nation that it’s time!” Soon, posters of Gilligan with the simple words IT’S TIME were plastered across dormitories throughout America, and the campaign plastered one of the most iconic campaign slogans in American history across ads, signs, buttons, and banners.

At the time, though, Gilligan seemed like more of an oddity. Conservative figures like William F. Buckley gleefully proclaimed his inevitable loss, being no fans of the Kuchel administration but despising the uncouth kids seemingly running the show on the other side of the aisle. Despite a quickly-fizzling challenge from former Indiana Governor Earl Butz as an extension of Reagan’s actor-turned-conservative television host longshot bid, Vice President John Lindsay had emerged as the Republican nominee, effectively promising four more years of Tommy Kuchel’s reasonable progressive conservatism. Given the president’s approval rating, why wouldn’t he? By and large, middle opinion seemed to like the nation as it was in the summer of 1976. Lindsay seemed the clear choice, the respectable centrist compared to the agitations of a network of angry kids.

The election was not defined by the feelings of the summer, though. It would be defined an ocean away. The Bretton Woods system had broadly functioned to make a postwar international economy, but the cracks had begun to show. Privately, officials at the Treasury Department raised alarm bells about how the US dollar was overvalued and as such no longer had enough gold reserves to pay up its theoretical obligations. Kuchel, in his establishmentarian sensibilities, sought to maintain the existing system as best as possible, and focused more on fighting the overvaluation pressures to hopefully normalize the situation. In September 1976, a run on the banks began in Paris but rapidly spread through Europe, and the worst-case scenario came to pass.

The ensuing stock market panic was the worst single-day crash since 1929. Investor confidence plummeted in such an unprecedented situation, leading the nation into deep recession. While President Kuchel shakily addressed the nation urging Congress to pass an economic relief package (incidentally allowing for Childcare’s creation), he took an unprecedented step. Instead of going to Brussels to negotiate with the G10 leadership behind Bretton Woods, he announced his intent to send Vice President Lindsay as the administration’s representative. The move, a political ploy designed to prove Lindsay’s mettle as much as it was a symptom of Kuchel’s depressive episodes where he declared himself “the next Hoover” to any staff who’d listen, was one of unmitigated disaster. Lindsay was a good voice for the administration at home during good times, especially on civil rights and urban affairs, but he was no skilled negotiator. Coverage of the Brussels Summit seemingly showed Lindsay out of his depth next to longstanding giants of the western bloc like Reginald Maudling and Francois Mitterrand, leading to much fodder for MADtv skits. When a harried Lindsay emerged with a tentative deal in the wee hours of the Belgian morning, he seemed to not realize just how much Americans viewed him as having one pulled over on him.

Though the excitement of the volunteer base hadn’t led to much movement in the polls before, stubbornly stuck at 48 for Lindsay to 45 for Gilligan with 7 percent undecided for virtually the whole summer, the entire Brussels debacle was perfect for the Gilligan campaign. First, Lindsay had skipped out on their agreed-upon first debate to fly to Europe, which Gilligan filled with an ad of him next to an empty podium. Next, Lindsay’s announced deal included massive giveaways for the growing economies of the G10, combining massive devaluation of the dollar with incentives for West Germany and Japan on a whole host of things. Gilligan haughtily referred to these trade deals as “Lindsay’s thirty pieces of silver,” which he received a bit of mockery for, but the average blue-collar worker wasn’t laughing. German auto was already eating America’s lunch, and now John Lindsay was here practically begging GM to declare bankruptcy! The textile plants left in the south were keeping much of the local economy going after so much social turmoil, and giving that away to Japan might as well be a death blow! While the union leaders loved Gilligan from the get-go, the blue collar rank-and-file that were the New Deal Coalition started joining their kids as Gilligan made more sense. Finally, Lindsay had been premature in his announcement, eager to hit prime time in America to salvage the situation, and he didn’t realize how furious his negotiating partners were with his taking credit before anything was officially written down, leading to the French, West German, Japanese, and Italian delegations going home later that day. The next morning, Americans awoke to learn that the deal was dead.

A rescheduled debate two weeks before voting went predictably horribly for Lindsay, who tried to stick to the script but sounded hollow as he reiterated the administration’s successes given his failure. Gilligan preached exactly how his economic stimulus plan was designed to not sell America’s economic competitiveness down the river to save finance, and the average middle-class voter who liked Kuchel but was scared of this recession was paying attention. The talk of reckless moves on civil rights, the supposed radicalism of his campaign in supposed associations with Cesar Chavez and Bobby Seale and Michael Harrington, it didn’t matter to anyone who didn’t have enough money to think about those kinds of things. The economy was falling apart, and only one candidate seemed poised to pull America out of this mess better than ever.

​

The ensuing party at Gilligan’s headquarters was the stuff of legends, the political version of the Longleat festival. Though so much looked bleak, for once the younger generation felt in control of their destiny, that they had something to believe in. Jack Gilligan himself didn’t have time to partake in the festivities, though. Even as TIME proclaimed Gilligan its person of the year with a cartoon of him donning FDR’s glasses and pipe, Gilligan’s longtime friend, in-house economist for Americans for Democratic Action, and Secretary of the Treasury-designate John Kenneth Galbraith shuttle-hopped his way across Europe, making clear his boss’ intentions and practically begging a second G10 summit to truly resolve the issue. Kuchel and Gilligan’s Oval Office meeting went well enough, though the former was clearly a bit grumpy over rebukes of his slow-and-steady approach by the impatient President-Elect. By the time of the inauguration, the Gilligan administration already had a summit at Camp David planned and a relief package practically drafted by Galbraith.

The stimulus bill, born completely of Galbraithian dirty Keynesianism, was a bundle of sticks for the G10 with a brief offering. Wage and price controls, authorized by the act, were to be implemented immediately, and the glut of funding towards infrastructure, government programs, and investments in the very American industries Lindsay had been accused of selling out was praised as a speedy reaction. Internationally, it ordered the temporary floating of the dollar from the gold standard and moderate devaluation of the dollar, meeting some of the core demands of the moment to prove the administration’s seriousness. Memorably, Galbraith himself called the administration approach to the international system “everyone needs to eat their vegetables,” setting the tone for the G10 leaders’ arrival that May.

*****​

John Hansan hated this part of his job. Jack was a good man, someone who believed in what was right and would grab the bull by the horns to get it, and hell, Hanson admired his friend for that. He was willing to break a few dozen eggs if it made things better. But when you’re the arrogant son-of-a-bitch’s Chief of Staff, and the entire global economy rests on keeping him from running his mouth… it was tiring. Fucking exhausting, even. He preferred those moments in the Oval when it was just them, where he didn’t have to worry about keeping Jack in check and the loose cannon could just let loose on whoever wasn’t in the room. But that wasn’t the job right now. As it stood, Jack Gilligan was puffing up, beet-faced as always when launching into one of his sermons. The Germans were talking about more favorable trade terms, about market liberalization, and Chancellor Strauss had gone and made the mistake of mentioning BMW. Hanson had to stifle a groan at that one, and he could see Canadian Prime Minister Robert Stanfield shuffling uncomfortably in his chair.

“Is that what this is about? Some jobs for your hometown and money for your friends in Munich? You might as well cut my balls off right here and present them to the assembled press outside, Chancellor. We’ve given you a lot of ground here, hell we’ll do another round of devaluation, but you can’t seriously be thinking that we’re going to just give away the crowning achievement of American industry. If that’s the breaking point, then dammit we might be done-”

“Mr. President, you have an urgent message from Treasury. Galbraith’s got updated projections from yesterday’s discussion.” An aide burst in and interjected, slicing a white-hot knife through the growing tension exuding from the surly Bavarian across from his boss. Hansan smiled to himself as he knew those non-urgent projections had been ready for an hour. That defusing trick had worked too many times to count.

“Yes, very well, this’ll just be a moment.” Both the President and Hansan stood and walked outside the Camp David cabin they had been in.

“Can I speak candidly, Jack?” Hansan asked as Gilligan read the message.

“Get on with it.” Gilligan scowled.

“We were about to kill the negotiations again, I could see it. Strauss was about to leave and he was definitely going to take Tanaka with him-”

“To hell with them all, John! If they can’t see that I’m in office because the American people rejected their… their… their EXTORTION” - to which the President punctuated with a jab of his index finger into Hansan’s chest - “then I don’t know if we can save this!”

“You’re right we can’t give those jobs up, but we won’t get anything done at home if we can’t fix this mess first. Mark [Shields] was showing me the polling this whiz kid named Pat Caddell ran for us. People are disaffected, his words, and they need to see decisive action from us to trust that things are working. We lose all credibility if this fails.”

Some of the ruddiness faded from Gilligan’s complexion as he talked. It was how Hansan had survived all of those years, after all. “We’re fucked either way, aren’t we John?”

“Not necessarily.” Hansan cut it short, once the President was prompted it was better to let him figure it out on his own. Gilligan was clearly mulling it over in his head anyways.

“We need a new angle, that’s the only way out of this. Think Warnke” - by this he meant their pitbull of a Secretary of Defense - “could drum up some numbers on NATO spending, see if we could redirect some of the money from those useless projects Kuchel handed out like candy to our defense contractors? Christ, Lockheed’s basically got Strauss and Tanaka on their payroll” - to this he let out a low, harsh laugh - “I’m sure they’d be all over the chance to grease the wheels a bit more. Mitterrand wouldn’t mind either, I’m sure.”

Hansan straightened his tie. “I’ll call the Pentagon, see what they can do.” Gilligan simply nodded and walked back in.

*****​

After nine days of talks, a framework for the rebuilding of the international economy was created by the Camp David Agreement, wherein all parties agreed principally to the transition to a floating currency regime. Gilligan’s proclamation that “let me be clear: what we have done here today will not cost a single American job” earned accolades given the memories of the failed round in Brussels months prior. Though much of the western world remained mired in varying degrees of recession - with America most badly hit - the situation was seemingly resolved, and the gold standard for international currency dead.

Gilligan could finally turn his eye to domestic reforms, something the Democratic majorities in Congress at last seemed receptive to. Throughout the Kuchel years, the old segregationists had simply aged out of office - men like Strom Thurmond and James Eastland passed away throughout his term, and the ensuing vacancies made ideal opportunities for the New Southerners. In his unlikely campaign for the open seat, future Senator Cliff Finch summarized the dynamics of the generational turnover best after being accused of unserious behavior by roaring "If they call you rednecks, clowns, or whatever, then I'm proud to be one!" Similar populist antics crested throughout the region, with Jimmy Carter ally Zell Miller and anti-Wallace Alabaman Al Brewer taking their seats as Richard Russell and Lister Hill left office in caskets. By the time Jack Gilligan was in office, Majority Leader Hubert Humphrey - long a bête noire of the segregationists - had built enough relationships with freshman southerners more concerned with diverting stimulus money to their constituents than anything else. Humphrey may not have had LBJ’s ability to speak to their culture, but he could speak pork. While turnover in the House was much smaller simply due to the lower median age of the southern incumbents, Speaker Boggs’ conciliatory, consensus-driven approach to liberal politics continually helped to mollify them, even if the House proved to be the more difficult of the two bodies to push things through.

Congress had its own machinations in mind before working on Gilligan’s pet issues. First came a longer-standing desire of its social-democratic wing. A number of significant reforms to the American government had been tinkered with on their side of politics, though failing to gain significant traction within the ideological consensus of the past two decades. One man had kept the movement for constitutional review on life support: Birch Bayh of Indiana. Running the Subcommittee on Constitutional Amendments, Bayh had brought in countless legal scholars to determine what was most viable, hoping to do to the Constitution what had seemed denied by the federal electoral process. Bayh’s failed bid for the nomination in 1972 regardless, his relentless lobbying at that year’s DNC saw the party offer a very Stevensonian theoretical endorsement of “review of our Constitution and appropriate amendments aimed at the modernization of our government” that the Gilligan campaign specified into a “Bicentennial Review” four years later. Come 1977, Bayh wanted to act, and Jack Gilligan couldn’t agree more.

In the end, three amendments received a vote. First, a relatively non-controversial procedural reform on the presidential succession was drafted, wherein the president would have the power to appoint a new vice president via Senate confirmation in the event of a vacancy, as well as codifying that presidential succession would flow through the cabinet secretaries in the event that there was no president or vice president. Then came the DC Home Rule Amendment, a similarly bipartisan proposal which turned over self-government in its entirety to the federal district and provided it with congressional representation equal to the smallest state. Finally was the Civil Rights Amendment. A modification of the Equal Rights Amendment proposal that had failed under Kuchel in 1970, this was, unbelievably, a compromise with the south during the platform negotiations - Gilligan had endorsed a new civil rights bill to supplement the 1969 bill, but when Long and Boggs demanded that be tamped down on he counter-offered an amendment as a compromise. The logic was that the federal party would be seen as less totally responsible to local constituents, it met the mantra of “states’ rights,” and it was implicitly easier to beat. It was just one simple sentence: “No political, civil, or legal disabilities or inequalities on account of race, color, religion, sex, and national origin shall exist within the United States or any territory subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” This was the narrowest of the bunch, yet it still saw significant cross-party approval as it even forced the Goldwaterites to eat their usual words where they theoretically supported civil rights but doubted the constitutionality of whatever proposal was being debated that day. Gilligan had naturally endorsed all three proposals, but observers noted the slight displeasure in being asked about those renovations instead of his own work, the way he pursed his lips ever so slightly and seemed to pinken just a little bit when talking about the “great work done by Senators Bayh and Humphrey to make a more perfect union.” Indeed, Gilligan was legendarily self-assured to the point of arrogance, creating a sort of moral impatience in every discussion he had about policy. Though Humphrey pleaded with him that this was how Washington works and Speaker Boggs demanded more time to whip Dixie into shape by “starting off slow with [the amendments],” President Gilligan’s certainty in his own righteousness chafed against their sensibilities and drove him to consider what could come next.

Seeking to flex his own mandate instead of voicing support for Congress’ machinations, Gilligan leapt directly into one of the greatest political footballs of the past two decades. In a highly publicized address from the South Lawn, President Gilligan announced his support for a major slate of electoral reforms. Elections had long been a decentralized process in the United States, and a voting reform bill had long been a demand of the civil rights crowd. Gilligan wholeheartedly agreed: “ever since the days of Thomas Jefferson, the Democratic Party’s aim has been to let the people rule. What I’m proposing is nothing less than the realization of that goal of our Founding Fathers.” The Gilligan proposal as submitted to Congress was a radical step in line with this. It mandated the lowering of the voting age to 18 nationally, the implementation of same-day registration, the creation of Election Day as a federal holiday, stringent campaign finance regulations, a ban on poll taxes, some sly amendments to the Civil Rights Act of 1969 to give the Department of Justice more teeth in enforcing discrimination cases, the withholding of federal elections funding from states who did not comply with these provisions, and a Federal Elections Agency given power to oversee the implementation of all of this. Privately, Gilligan also voiced his support for the abolition of the electoral college, quipping “what’s one more amendment?” but that proposal was quickly scrapped in the early negotiations due to lacking support from within the Democratic caucus.

Gilligan’s proposal set off a firestorm in Congress. Old segregationists saw it as the death of their power, and they fought tooth and nail to strip out any serious power to impact their elections. More moderate southerners were hesitant as well, many of them not personally opposed but worried about how their constituents would react and too unsure in their power to yet cast such a vote. They wanted something they could talk about back home, and this bill wasn’t it no matter how much easier it also made it for the rednecks to vote too. In response, Gilligan left Washington to tour the impacts of his stimulus bill. He went with local officials to tour oil rig construction in Texas, shipbuilding in Mississippi, thriving poultry farms in Arkansas, coal mines in Kentucky, a new NASA launch facility based in North Carolina’s research triangle, and a plethora of new bridges, railroads, and highways being administered under the new Department of Transportation. The message was crystal clear to all the south’s delegations as they saw Jack Gilligan speaking in their states: “I’ve given all of this to you, and I can keep it up if you give me what I want.” The Federal Elections and Campaigns Act broke through the Senate after 39 days of debate with not a vote to spare, after the President conceded that the first Supreme Court vacancy would be filled by a southerner. At last, equal voting rights before the law existed in America, even if voting rights litigation would occupy federal courts for the next decade.

As if by fate, Supreme Court Justice Tom Clark passed a mere two months after the passage of the FECA, just as 1978 began. True to his word, Gilligan deliberated for a bit before settling on an unconventional choice: Georgia Chief Justice Phyllis Kravitch. She, like many others in the often-personalist Georgia political environment (a direct result of Jim Gray’s near-dictatorial hold on the state) was an ally of Jimmy Carter’s and a quietly liberal moderate. She seemed the best compromise between Gilligan’s tastes for a more supportive court and his debts to the south. Nominating the first woman to the Supreme Court and reviving the “Jewish seat” that seemed to have quietly died set off quite a bit of coverage, including glowing profiles of the new nominee. Kravitch’s performance in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee was practically a pre-emptive celebration. Even prominent Republicans spoke highly of her, with the arch-conservative Senate Minority Leader Roman Hruska praising her as “a true representative for average Americans… I’m glad President Gilligan made such a sensible choice instead of bending to his radical friends.” Quickly, Kravitch was confirmed, making her the first woman on the Supreme Court.

As winter gave way to spring in 1978, as the Presidential Succession Amendment was made the 24th, as Attorney General Terry Sanford brought more and more voting rights cases before the courts as perhaps the only man suited to do so without causing a southern revolt like that of 1948 or 1968, and as the administration geared up for its next major reform, nearly half a world away a deep boom reverberated from a small island off East Asia. As both American and Soviet satellite monitors picked up the telltale double flash, a mushroom cloud illuminated the heavens over the Straits, alarming citizens who could see it from both sides. Then, a few hours later, a state broadcast from President Chiang Wei-kuo crackled over the television and radio in Taiwan, announcing the nuclear test and taking credit for “the ensuring of the security of the Republic.”

The nuclearization of Taiwan was a bridge too far for the mainland. Chairman Lin immediately accused Washington of giving the nuclear warheads to them, of aiding the secret Taiwanese nuclear program. After all, the United States still recognized the Republic of China as the legitimate government of the nation, what reason did they have to not provide aid to Taiwan? The truth, naturally, was far more complex. The Kuchel administration had been providing copious military aid to Taiwan, and when an assassin’s bullets felled Chiang Kai-shek the Kuchel-era CIA engineered the rise of his adoptive son from the military to the presidency under the Eisenhower-era doctrine of “it doesn’t matter if they’re our S.O.B.s.” Officially, no nuclear sharing had occurred, though the United States had not yet ratified the Non-Proliferation Treaty due to opposition to Bill Fulbright’s dovishness. Unofficially, decades later, Ambassador Anna Chennault had served as a proxy for the dissemination of nuclear technologies in East Asia, aiding Taiwan with their issues with delivery mechanisms that plagued their secret program. The details didn’t matter, though - Beijing was convinced America was responsible for this, and they had an ultimatum: withdraw the warheads from Taiwan or we “denuclearize” the island.

Immediately, the administration saw itself enter into crisis mode. The United States entered DEFCON 2 as a nuclear war seemed imminent. This was no Israel - both sides had nuclear warheads, and both would be prepared to use them if the situation wasn’t defused. A Chinese blockade of Taiwan only exacerbated the situation, seemingly confirming the worst impulses of all actors. President Gilligan pulled together an emergency broadcast to the nation explaining what had happened and “our intent to pursue a peaceful resolution to avoid the very real possibility of a nuclear conflict,” his usual emotion replaced by a ghastly intensity that belied the seriousness of the situation. Panic set in amongst the populace as Americans rushed the grocery stores for bread, milk, and anything canned. The world looked on in horror as the doomsday clock went from minutes to seconds.

The White House seemed the epicenter of the storm. More broadly principled disarmers like Secretary of Defense Paul Warnke came into direct conflict with pragmatists like Secretary of State Harland Cleveland, and meanwhile the Joint Chiefs - represented by General John Hennessey, a man experienced himself in nuclear preparedness - seemed terrified of the prospect of losing military operations in Taiwan and what that would mean for all operations in Asia. Admiral Noel Gayler, the chief of USTDC in Taipei and a closet disarmer, only worsened the situation upon reporting back from an emergency meeting with President Chiang. Chiang was ardently opposed to giving up his nuclear warheads, believing them to be the only thing standing between Taiwan and annihilation. Not only did he reject Gayler’s overtures to the idea that the PRC would invade them for real if they didn’t concede, he implied that he would go public with Ambassador Chennault’s aid, fully knowing that it would render the situation unsalvageable and force the US to come to his defense. The situation seemed well and truly hopeless, and a near-skirmish between PRC and American ships saw one wary officer be the only line of defense between a first strike.

But the People’s Republic hardly wanted war either. Chairman Lin was always a reluctant leader, and his rehabilitation of Mao meant that many of his hardline allies stuck around. In particular, his wife Jiang Qing, a longtime Lin ally and Cultural Revolution leader, held significant sway over state decision-making. Jiang’s popularity with the CCP rank and file was never particularly high to begin with, but amidst the crisis, their dissatisfaction hit a fever pitch. Using a complex dance of trusted intermediaries from the Fulbright years, Harland Cleveland and Zhou Enlai were able to meet in Hanoi to discuss the matter face to face.

There, both diplomats came to understand one another’s desire for avoiding war: China could not suffer such a humiliation publicly, and America could not be seen abandoning its allies. The former needed to look like they won, and the latter needed to be able to explain away any concessions made by Taiwan as not stripping away an American ally’s right to defend itself. With this in mind, a resolution arrived soon after. Publicly, the United States would recognize China as the legitimate government of the mainland and China would withdraw the blockade, allowing Taiwan to maintain its nuclear arsenal. Privately, the United States also agreed to a two-year timetable for the withdrawal of all troops from Taiwan and the shuttering of USTDC. Though never agreed to, privately Beijing saw to it that Jiang Qing was dragged out of power, placing Zhou and his allies “the three Hus” - Yaobang, Keshi, and Qili - as the strongest clique in Lin Biao’s inner circle. Celebration filled the streets as President Gilligan addressed the nation, announcing the end of the crisis even as Chiang fumed, knowing he’d effectively become a rogue state in the western bloc.

In the immediate aftermath of the crisis, Gilligan’s approval rating leapt to 68%, mostly from a nation grateful to have not been subjected to armageddon. While his cool, collected leadership through the situation made great movie fodder years down the line, in the moment he was aching to capitalize on the rallying around the flag. As he jokingly put it too close to a microphone, “we never waste a good crisis around here.” Even as right-wingers feigned outrage at the comments, Gilligan set to work using the crisis to finally make the push prophesied by William F. Buckley: healthcare reform. The current proposal snaking its way through Congress was the Humphrey-Griffiths Bill. Named for two midwesterners of sterling social-democratic credentials, the proposal was as simple in aims as it was complicated in actuality. It was the merger of the wildly successful Eldercare and Childcare programs into a single “Medicare” system, one that amounted to a universal national health insurance plan in the United States. After all, its advocates reasoned, America already had government-funded healthcare for those under 18 and over 65, if those worked so well then it should apply to working people too.

The only flaw was Hubert Humphrey’s death. Humphrey had been suffering from bladder cancer since his diagnosis in 1973, the reason he had forfeited a bid for the White House in 1976 despite his intense desire to hold the office. He knew his time was limited, and after collapsing during floor debate on the healthcare bill he was rushed to Walter Reed, where he rapidly deteriorated and died the next day. All across the country, America’s politicians paid their respects to the “lion of the Senate,” a man not just known for his idealism but also his geniality and infectious personality. At his funeral, President Gilligan’s eulogy simply offered Humphrey’s own words, the words engraved on the memorial of him in Minneapolis: "It was once said that the moral test of Government is how that Government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; and those who are in the shadows of life, the sick, the needy and the handicapped. This is what Hubert Humphrey died fighting for.”

Gilligan’s citations of Humphrey’s words about how the government treats the sick and needy did not go unnoticed. Though new Senate Leader Russell Long had many more qualms with the idea of such a universal healthcare system, a flurry of White House pressure descended on him about supporting the president going into the midterms and about how the optics would look if the party couldn’t even deliver on Humphrey’s dream after he collapsed talking about it on the Senate floor. In the end, Long gave, but not without his pound of flesh, and the bill cleared both houses without a single Republican vote. Gilligan chose to sign the Humphrey-Griffiths Act with Muriel Humphrey by his side, a reminder of who wasn’t there to see it.

The lack of Republican votes belied a more interesting phenomenon. The party, fearing a new Roosevelt after 1976, quickly and desperately searched for a new line of common attack. They had settled on a crusade begun long before by Representative Howard Jarvis against taxation. Jarvis had proudly noted in his campaign fliers that he had “never voted for a single tax hike,” even when it was controversial like opposing the stimulus. The shlubby Jarvis had long been a laughingstock in Washington, but amongst conservative dissidents his talk of “King Pork,” the high spending by this administration, and the supposed high tax rates imposed by Gilligan - Christ, look at Medicare, that’s a black hole of money you’re not getting back, they’d say - hit a sweet spot. More and more Goldwaterites latched onto the anti-tax fervor, talking a big game about the Founders’ resistance to taxation without representation. When House Minority Leader Dick Obenshain, the highest-ranking Goldwaterite in the Republican Party, got up on his soapbox and pledged to cut down on the mass of wasteful spending to put that money back in Americans’ pockets, it was clear what tack they’d take for the midterms.

It almost worked, too. They broke the liberal majority in the House, whittling Speaker Boggs down forty seats to just 229. They flipped a handful of Senate seats on an otherwise bad map, at bare minimum dropping Russell Long’s caucus below 60 seats. This included a surprise victory in Texas for staunch Goldwaterite Hank Grover over Lyndon Johnson’s successor Walter Jenkins, aided in no small part by the Grover campaign outing Jenkins as a closet homosexual. Privately, John Hansan admitted that the national press that the Grover-Jenkins race earned scuttled plans for a federal law decriminalizing homosexuality after the midterms, disappointing gay activists who felt they had a more sympathetic president in Gilligan. It wasn’t just the number of victories, though - it was where they happened. Since the Baby Boom the south’s suburbs had been growing as out-of-staters moved into the areas around the big cities, and these migrants were often very conservative and less ancestrally Democratic than their more rural, traditional counterparts. Though Kuchel had failed to make inroads, the right-wingers’ ascendancy after his departure from office activated these otherwise apathetic voters, flipping a number of suburban districts from Atlanta to Houston blue for the first time. The New South seemed to have two faces to it.

The losses were far more devastating within the White House. Gilligan wouldn’t publicly admit it, but he was furious that the coalition that propelled him to the White House seemingly didn’t work. He had followed instructions, why, then, did he lose so much? In a White House often designed to insulate a volatile president as much as it was to function under him, his close-knit staff started to blame the very political staff that got him there. Under Hansan’s direction, Mark Shields, Peter Hart, and Bob Shrum cleared out their desks, and in their place came a veteran campaigner for the Gilligan operation, someone who’d had no problem reaching out to the youth in previous years: his daughter, Kathleen. Conservative columnists howled nepotism in the pages of the National Review, but Kathleen was reliable. She was someone Gilligan would trust, who wouldn’t blow the whole thing the way all of his “one-hit wonders” did.

Regardless of the change in direction in the political staff and the “Thanksgiving Massacre,” as some dubbed the massive staff change, the Gilligan White House soldiered on. In his State of the Union that year, Gilligan indicated his next targets: labor and education. The latter was far easier to approach, as Gilligan simply wanted a greater expansion of the HEA. His vision was not a total system of university merit as Bill Fulbright saw, but one where everyone who wanted could obtain higher education. As such, the Higher Education Act Amendments of 1979 were born, a smorgasbord of funding increases, the creation of a federal Department of Education split from the Department of Welfare, and the shifting of the distribution model to provide Fulbright funds more directly to state universities, community colleges, and vocational schools. Though tuition was by no means free - a compromise made with more liberal Republicans - the funding model set up by the amendments cut costs significantly for working and middle class Americans. Labor law was far more difficult. Though the minimum wage had been raised in 1977 to some fanfare, Gilligan’s Secretary of Labor Bill Kircher was a longstanding ally of the UFW, and a priority of both his and Gilligan’s was fairer working conditions for Bracero workers. A law intending to modify the program reinstated by Kuchel to provide equal work protections set off a far larger mess than expected in Congress as even moderate Republicans and southern Democrats raised opposition, finding the proposal objectionable at best and dangerous to the system of farm work. Representative Raul Hector Castro’s bill quickly died over a staggeringly large vote-down by both southern Democrats and virtually all Republicans, dealing an embarrassing blow to Gilligan and proving the difficulty of domestic reform going ahead. Apart from the nomination of a successor for the retired Justice Walter V. Schaefer - Frances Farenthold, a Texan judge propelled upwards by Lyndon Johnson - Gilligan had little to do at home.

The White House’s response was that Jack Gilligan ought to go look magnanimous elsewhere, and where better after the Braceros than Latin America? After all, Latin America had suffered mightily over the past two decades under CIA meddling and various military coups. Chile fell to an impeachment of Salvador Allende followed by a deeply rigged election all stage-managed from Langley, a pro-American coup in Panama designed to clamp down on the failure of the Canal Treaty went sideways quickly, and no shortage of other efforts to stop Soviet influence had proliferated throughout the continent. The result was a mess of distrust and instability that Gilligan could not abide by, true Stevensonian that he was. So, as the State Department worked to assure stability whether it be by renegotiating international debt in Latin America or withdrawing tacit support for regimes like that of Anastasio Somoza Debayle and, Pope Martin VI (formerly Argentina’s Eduardo Francisco Pironio until his election in 1980) became perhaps the only public critic who dictators like his homeland's José López Rega could not ignore or imprison, new democracies sprung up throughout the OAS, and Gilligan intended to show his gratitude. Gilligan’s tour saw him given a hero’s welcome, his Catholic faith a unifier with many of the people of the region and in meetings that included Mexico’s Carlos A. Madrazo, Brazil’s Leonel Brizola, and even new revolutionary governments like Nicaragua’s Carlos Fonseca Amador. Given a brief respite to look like a statesman and to forget about Congress, Gilligan’s talk of a new Pan-American ideal - even ensured by simple moves like issuing official recognition of the Pan-American Highway within the United States - reverberated throughout the continent’s returning democracies.

Not all was well abroad for the administration in its lull with Congress. If South America was becoming more vibrant, southern Africa was a much larger headache. Though the fighting in the Democratic Republic of Congo had finally ended with the fall of Léopoldville in 1975, ensuring Patrice Lumumba’s total control over the country, Angola was another story. Angola had largely fallen to the communist MPLA except for Holden Roberto’s strange mishmash of tradition and cronyism in Kongo (not to be confused with the Republic of Congo or the Democratic Republic of Congo), and Jonas Savimbi had responded by turning to more unsavory allies - South Africa and Rhodesia in particular. Though the latter was engaged in its own complex war for survival against all its neighbors and a furious new Prime Minister Peter Shore in London, they were still all too willing to lend arms and funds to Savimbi to stick a thorn in their enemy’s eye. South Africa had only grown more radical, finding the declaration of an “Era of Rising Standards” to mean an assault on their way of life and seeing the increasingly large Soviet checks given to the SACP. They were all too happy to join the fight in Angola. Meanwhile, Lumumba was willing to lend his own support to the MPLA, more out of fury towards the settler-colonialist intervention from the south than anything. Angola had quickly become a complex web of proxy wars, with South Africans with Rhodesian guns confronting DRC troops and their shipments of the infamous “Andropovka” (a state-run consumer vodka created by the leader of the same name). The American government quickly developed a migraine just looking at the situation, and their public call for a global suspension of all military aid to Savimbi and South Africa only bonded the two closer together. The Angolan mess surely wasn’t going away anytime soon.

That quickly took a backseat to the Gilligan administration, though, as 1979 turned to 1980 and led to election season. For the Republicans, it seemed at first that there were few willing candidates, with only Representative Jarvis and Senator Dole in the race in any meaningful capacity. Then the race was upended by a remnant from primaries past: Barry Goldwater. The prickly conservative icon had returned in 1970 with a successful run for the governorship of Arizona (privately tired of national politicking given his losses in those areas in quick succession), taking over from Stewart Udall and driving Arizona to the right. He had never lost his star power with the right-wing grassroots, and now here he was able to talk about what Goldwater in the big chair would look like because he’d done it! Quickly, he surged to the front of the pack - time heals all wounds, including those Goldwater inflicted on many a campaign staffer in the 60s - and never looked back, not even when Tommy Kuchel hopped from retirement to endorse late entrant Pennsylvania Senator Ray Shafer for the nomination instead, warning against the capture of the party by Goldwater once more. Paradoxically, this only made Goldwater more popular with the right-wing base, the people who were reluctant with Kuchel and despised Gilligan’s total upending of the America they wanted, and he never looked back. It seemed that both nominations would be coronations, battles of the ideological tendency of both parties. It was the type of matchup that horse-race journalists salivated over, the Old America versus the New America.

At first, it seemed the Old might finally be able to pull it off. While the economy had finally begun to rebound, many of Gilligan’s changes had been too much to swallow for the white suburbanites, the people who made up the natural electorate for Goldwaterites. The first shock to the race came when, in a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court elected to uphold the Humphrey-Griffiths Act, with Justices William Brennan, Cyrus Vance, William Rogers, Phyllis Kravitch, and Frances Farenthold in the majority. The closeness of the decision infuriated Goldwater, who called for “an immediate lowering of the obscene tax rates needed to fund this monstrosity” and pointed to his own severe property tax cuts in Arizona. Matters were made worse when Gilligan visited a sheep farm in Missouri, joking to the farmers “I don’t shear sheep, I shear taxpayers.” Those words were plastered all across Goldwater ads for the duration of the campaign as a sign of his apparent disdain for the people.

Midway through August, noticing Goldwater closing in, Kathleen Gilligan began to truly reach out to the student organizations once more. Their work in 1976 had delivered Gilligan, and Goldwater was as much a villain to even the older activists as any. Their work injected new life into the campaign, taking the lackluster messaging of the White House and supplanting it with major attacks on Goldwater. Goldwater was a dinosaur, someone who’d sold off the entire state of Arizona to its biggest corporations, and no doubt he’d do the same to America. The AFL-CIO, now fully dominated by reformists like Eddie Sadlowski, Jock Yablonski, Tony Mazzocchi, and Thomas Donahue, poured all it could into salvaging the campaign, portraying Gilligan as a pro-labor president who cared about American jobs instead of selling off the family jewels like Goldwater. Two debates between Gilligan and Goldwater were contested, with the former held to a draw with a clearly unprepared Gilligan and the latter a decisive victory for the President, who memorably quipped that “we don’t run on horse and buggy anymore, Governor” in response to a muddled Goldwaterism about the bloat in pork disguised as military spending over the past hundred years. Though Gilligan no longer seemed like the fighter he was in 1976 or even 1978, the rebuilding of his organization in time for the election by his daughter and a small quiet Gilligan vote amongst southern white populists who saw their community’s revitalization as more important sealed the deal.

*****​

Kathleen Gilligan was on top of the world.

It was easy to say that in Washington and then lose it all, so most folks didn’t. It was a bit like saying Macbeth in a theater. But here she felt she could finally think it. Why wouldn’t she? She got a glowing profile in the Washington Post - for heaven’s sake, the Post! - about her efforts to revive a stalled-out Gilligan campaign. She was being courted by Democrats around the nation, seen as the genius behind the throne - literally after she sat damn near right behind her father at his second inaugural. She had an office for “political operations” in the White House, was invited to practically every other major meeting - over John Hansan’s objections - and to top it all off she was a shoo-in for virtually any office she wanted after the term ended. She was on top of the world.

And then there was the ceremony now. It was one to honor her, in a way, an affair in the White House so grand because one hadn’t been seen in ages there. It was just for her and one of the other campaign miracle-makers, the young Arkansan ex-representative who ran the campaign in “redneck country,” as he often put it with an exaggerated drawl in their Cincinnati offices. Even something that stupid made her laugh a bit.

Her father was there too, beaming, taking time away from his job to see the grand strategist of his own bloodline celebrated. Sure, the Republicans complained about the wasteful spending in it all - they always did. She bet it was Dick Obenshain up to it, the insufferable ass. No matter, though. The President of the United States walked her up to the front himself, and it was hard for her not to tear up a bit. She blinked and realized she had lost focus at the most important moment.

“I do.” She said, looking at the young man across from her.

“William Jefferson Clinton, do you take Kathleen Gilligan-”

“I do.” He cut off the line with a sly grin, and it was official.

*****​

The second term wasn’t all just White House weddings, though. A shock came when Yuri Andropov passed away that February, leading to a messy succession wherein the party elder Nikolai Tikhonov emerged a toothless General Secretary but cosmonaut-turned-politician Valentina Tereshkova asserted her reformist bloc’s influence in the Politburo, leading international observers to take notice of her. Then, Prime Minister Enrico Berlinguer’s Eurocommunist experiment - elected in 1978 over the worsening economic and social crisis of the Years of Lead - saw an increasing political deadlock between the PCI-controlled Chamber of Deputies and the coalition Senate end with President Giovanni Leone ordering his dismissal and appointing Count Edgardo Sogno Prime Minister in his place. The golpe bianco effectively ended the “First Republic” and led to a number of constitutional reforms towards a semi-presidential “Second Republic” directly inspired by de Gaulle, whom Sogno was a heavy admirer of. Later, it was revealed that Berlinguer’s overthrow was based on two panics. First was the CIA, whose NATO stay-behind operations had dominated Italian politics. Upon their suspicion that Berlinguer intended to publicly reveal Operation Gladio’s existence, only heightened after PCI bank nationalization kicked a hornet's nest of corruption that was implicitly linked to them, they decided self-preservation was more important than waiting for orders from Langley and leapt into action (though some theorize that CIA Director Charlie Wilson and President Gilligan were aware and even supportive of the move). Second was President Leone, who had been implicated in the Lockheed bribery charges that had toppled Franz-Josef Strauss in West Germany and Kakuei Tanaka in Japan and was now in a fight to avoid conviction. Regardless of the rationale, the PCI and MSI were swiftly banned by the new government, and Sogno consolidated under a new constitution even as outrage filled the streets and militants brawled with police.

But this was small potatoes compared to the Middle East. In April 1981, though, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia awoke to Mecca burning as protesters led by Juhayman al-Otaybi seized the Grand Mosque of Mecca, demanding a bevy of unreasonable goals for the fundamentalist cult surrounding al-Otaybi. The Kingdom had grown repressive as it ossified under King Faisal’s increasingly-doddering and often corrupt quasi-constitutionalist rule, with a public feeling that he spent more time modernizing to make nice with the West than caring about their suffering. The people simply needed an inflection point after years of an economic slump, and watching the military move in on the Grand Mosque was too much to bear. After a massive crowd of Meccans confronted the military, a skirmish started between them and French Foreign Legionnaires working with the Saudi government. Though al-Otaybi and his followers died, protests sprung up across Saudi Arabia, bringing the country to its knees as thousands swarmed every city. The House of Saud elected to stay at first, but then a young princeling named Faisal bin Musaid al-Saud saw the moment as the perfect time to dispose of the old king, who he hated for cutting his allowances. So, as the King left for his plane with members of his family, the spoiled nephew pulled a revolver and shot him five times before being subdued. Images of King Faisal’s dead body were jet fuel for the protests, who not only saw the elderly Westernizer dead but a vacuum to fill. His immediate family began to flee to the United Arab Emirates, leaving behind an uncertain fate.

The Saudis falling sent shockwaves through the oil market. Gas prices spiraled in the United States amidst the uncertainty. Gilligan called a special session of Congress to ask for authorization for controls and rationing as well as a federal Department of Energy to coordinate the response, something he was granted within the next few days. The southern economy, which already rested on subsidized oil to a ridiculous extent, saw massive booms amidst the immediate price-gouging, an issue that would have to be resolved in the near future. But Jack Gilligan wouldn’t be the one to do it.

Jack Gilligan’s tone about taxation and government growth was especially infuriating to a certain subsect of radicals who subscribed to the Christian Identity, a white nationalist interpretation of Christianity popular among the far-right fringe that reads the Aryan race as the natural successors of the ancient Israelites. One of these disciples was Richard Snell, a militiaman and drifter who had previously contemplated half a dozen terrorist acts and assassinations, been in and out of the Elohim City Christian Identity compound in Oklahoma, as well as been a frequent visitor to Richard Girnt Butler’s “Aryan Nations World Congress” in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. During one of his stints in Elohim City, Snell learned that President Gilligan would be visiting New Orleans to meet with the state government to discuss becoming the 38th ratification for the Civil Rights Amendment. Furious in general, an unstable Snell hopped in an Elohim City truck to drive his way to New Orleans. Gilligan, who always believed in meeting with the people where he went, made no exception for this trip as he walked the French Quarter with his daughter and Governor Moon Landrieu. Richard Snell emerged from the crowd as the President’s troupe approached and fired three times. The first shot hit a building, the second grazed Kathleen’s arm, and the third landed fatally in the President’s chest.

Jack Gilligan’s legacy is that of a giant of American history. Most rank him highly among the presidents - generally, the only ones who consistently outrank him are Lincoln, Washington, both Roosevelts, and Eisenhower. Though liberals cheer and conservatives sneer at much of what he actually did, he remains responsible for a paradigm shift nonetheless. His response to the 1976 crash is given high marks on its own. A level-headed handling of the Taiwan Straits Crisis is nothing to be scoffed at, especially once the revelation of just how close the world was to nuclear war came out. Three constitutional amendments were passed with his direction; Louisiana voted to ratify the CRA as the 26th Amendment in mourning. Medicare remains one of the most popular government programs in America, with privatization a fringe position. Finally, his work on finishing the job on civil rights as the penultimate president of an era beginning with Harry Truman is perhaps his most enduring legacy, though he often shares that distinction with Thomas Kuchel. Most of all, though, an entire generation remains touched by the man they supported in their youth as the face of hope for a better society. The image of Jack Gilligan seems synonymous to most with one of a brighter future, and his daughter hunched over him as he lay dying remains one of the most poignant scenes of tragedy in American history.

 

[Oliveia]

39. Martha Layne Collins (Democratic-KY)
May 29th, 1981 - January 20, 1989

"We know that we can compete with anyone, anywhere, anytime, and win."
​

The position of President of the United States was not initially to be thrown onto the shoulders of Martha Layne Collins as a sort of morbid surprise; she was not initially Jack Gilligan’s vice president. In 1976, voters pulled the lever for Gilligan/Hill, and sent into the White House a ticket comprising of the charismatic generation-defining Ohio Senator and the forgettable Texas Governor John Luke Hill.

Hill’s position in history is mostly condemned to the margins—he is a trivia question answer, not a vice president. An old rumor is that, in those smoke-filled rooms where Jack Gilligan had to bend to the demands of some of the last major party bosses in American history, those withered husks of once-great men, JLH was conscripted as a way to tide over the South while getting a gaffe-prone Governor out of a competitive seat. An old piece of apocrypha states that when he stepped down, a majority of Americans didn’t even know who he was.

That does a disservice to former Vice President Hill, though. Although easy to ignore, he played a key role in negotiating Gilligan’s energy policy, and made sure that even with continued American production of coal and oil, that the new high-tech field of solar farming be included in US energy policy, paving the way for the United States to be one of the great solar panel-powered nations of the 21st century. And although confined to the margins, Hill’s presence on the ticket—as well as his radical farming policies regarding parity—gave Democrats their best margins in the Great Plains since Harry Truman was on the ticket. However important he was in the margins of history, though, it is absolutely correct that John Luke Hill was not a man who was comfortable in Washington; he was a Texas boy at heart, and did not feel at place presiding over the Halls of Congress or discussing policy with President Jack. When Gilligan cleaned house and shuffled the bureaucracy of the White House, Hill asked if he could leave with them. The calculus was a bit tricky, even someone averse to the conformities of politicking like Jack could see that, but John was insistent that he was more of a dead weight to the Administration than a suitable man to be that one-heartbeat-away; that he wasn’t the man on whom Gilligan could find a successor after his two terms were up.

And so, Gilligan agreed to let him go. John Luke Hill gave the speech announcing his retirement (a suggestion on his part to make sure that it did not seem like there was instability in the White House); it was apologetic, mostly, and he wiped his eyes slightly as he said that he did not feel he was a good fit for the vice presidency, that he would very much like to return to his home in Texas, and so on. Gilligan and Hill remained good friends, right until the end. An anecdote Hill would tell years later was that the Gilligan family were planning on having a nice dinner together at the Hill household the day after he would have left Louisiana. Another was that Frances Farenthold’s appointment to the Supreme Court was his idea, after Gilligan suggested an Associate Justice John Luke Hill. (Laughing like only a friend who has mourned can laugh, Hill recalled in an interview telling Jack that “Even someone with a head the size of a grape could tell ya I’m a bad fit for that Court!”)

Jack Gilligan needed a replacement, and the Irishman did not need to look far or think hard to find his second-in-command. While he had been touring the renovated America, with freshly-paved highways and silver bridges shining in the sun, he had the pleasure to stop by Kentucky. The Governor, Wendell Ford, told him about a wonderful Kentuckian he needed to do something with one-a’-these-days.

Martha Layne Collins was something of a Democratic superstar in the Bluegrass State; she worked for Henry Ward as a vote-getter in the ‘67 governor’s race, and in that position he pushed her to run for something bigger; after consulting with her husband, they made a leap of faith and ran for the House of Representatives, unseating Goldwaterite Gene Snyder. The move to Washington was a bit uncomfortable, but she made sure to return to Kentucky whenever she had the chance. This made her an infamous character to schedule meetings for, as she would often be back in her Kentucky home every couple weeks. In this way, she was able to keep herself humble—something she never said but always implied. In 1972, as Terry Sanford flipped Bluegrass Kentucky gold in a proud reclamation for the Democrats, Collins again promoted herself upward to the United States Senate, defeating Commissioner Bob Gable by comfortable-enough margins.

Gilligan had some passing familiarity with her, in their shared time in Congress; he knew her from his time in the presidency, too, where she had supported his emphasis on local industry and lauded his educational policies. He also saw a bit of himself in her, in the climb from local politics to the national scale; that interest in grassroots politicking, in knowing where you were campaigning and utilizing it with such a force. However, she was never particularly interested in running for president—not as far as anyone, herself included, knew. But when the President of the United States invited the Senator from Kentucky to a dinner, interviewed her there, asked her the week after if she wanted a place in the White House, how could anyone say no?

Gilligan and Collins were incredibly friendly with one-another, perhaps the most friendly since Adlai Stevenson and Bill Fulbright first enshrined the importance of fondness between president and vice president. They shared backgrounds in education, the regional similarities between neighboring Ohio and Kentucky, their childrens’ interest in politics (although Steve Collins was not as active in politics as Kathleen Gilligan Clinton, he still asked questions and entertained guests and expressed minor interest in his mother’s field of work). Vice President Collins ruthlessly advocated for the education reforms proposed by the Administration, collaborated closely with the Congressional machinery to whip up the votes necessary, gave interviewers and television cameras impassioned speeches about the necessities of educational reform.

So, naturally, when Gilligan was murdered in Louisiana, she was heartbroken. Pressing a hand on the Bible, she recited the Oath to Office and became the historical first woman president in the history of the United States. Without much more than a moment to allow the weight of that accomplishment rest on the mourning nation, President Collins marched with a solemn sense of duty up towards the miked-up podium, and gave a brief speech punctuating the tragedy of the moment. Made short out of the shock and trauma of it all, it’s not a particularly well-remembered speech in American history—that is, except the ending of it. With a deep breath stiffening her shoulders and resetting her posture, her voice strong and Southern and yet the slightest bit shaky, the façade of determination only threatening to break out once or twice, she stated simply: “Let history record that we did not tarry but immediately engaged the future, stronger and more determined than ever before.”

And although history does record they did not tarry, it records that they mourned and then puttered as they healed. The struggles internationally seemed a world away, at least for a time—long enough to try to heal. The first order of business, once the tears had dried, was to find a replacement for Vice President. Among her advisors, everyone seemed in agreement that the best choice would have to be a Northerner, keeping the balance that Democratic tickets had aimed to balance for decades now. Although some of the most ardent supporters of Gilligan pressed Collins to make her second-in-command fill that populist furor that Gilligan represented in his rise to power, Collins refused. “We need cool heads in times like these,” she stated simply.

The ideas of cooler heads would play prominently in her administration as it progressed, as it slowly began to move out of the enormous shadow of the larger-than-life Jack Gilligan. Gilligan got things done by pressing, harder and harder and harder—until something either snapped or the other party relented. “Presidency by [playing] chicken,” some commentators would say. Martha Layne Collins was not a “hardass” like Gilligan, she thrived in compromises and in-betweens, and in her stint at the White House mastered a sense of triangulation that was astoundingly effective. Congress, sensing this shift from above, was more than grateful to not have to deal with red-faced temper tantrums, and gladly accepted incoming Vice President Walter Mondale. Mondale was a liberal, a prodigy and friend of the late Hubert Humphrey, but most importantly he did not feel the siren’s song pull of the White House—not initially, at least. Much like Collins he was more than happy to serve his state with no expectation of promotion, but when push came to shove he would reluctantly accept the slot as number two.

As the nation slowly began to heal, President Collins was able to give the former President one final send-off in the form of the Supreme Court, when Associate Justice Potter Stewart retired in the middle of 1981. Collins, seeing the absence only a few months after Gilligan’s passing as the perfect opportunity to honor her friend, appointed the fellow Ohioan Lloyd O. Brown, who was imported from the Buckeye State as Gilligan’s Solicitor General.

Education had always been a closely-valued subject for Collins, a former teacher; predictably, this meant that her first major legislative push was in regards to education. Although previous administrations had created a robust and affordable pathway through academia and higher education, she felt that a gaping absence was felt in those earliest years of education. Calling back to her time in House and Senate, she was able to reconnect with a network of education reformers often nicknamed the Young Turks. Led by North Carolina Senator Jim Hunt, Congress whipped through the Early Education Act of 1981, which established a national funding of kindergarten and prekindergarten programs across the nation. Many of the states had begun doing this on their own decades previously, but the act helped boost education rates in the South and the Pacific Northwest, where state governments had lagged behind in kindergarten programs.

Half a world away, two great revolutions occurred—the first metaphorical; a revolution in foreign policy—wherein Iran’s King of Kings, the Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (a Cold Warrior and increasingly-unpopular monarch) had declared war on the Republic of Iraq. Iraq had situated itself at an interesting in-between, a socialist republic that was pan-Arab enough for its moderates and against pan-Arabism enough to appease communists. It was long a black sheep in the Arabic world, still in the firm grasp of the Pan-Arabic ideal (headed by Egyptian president Ali Sabri, an ardent Nasserist). It also had long bothered the Iranians, who again felt that enough was enough and sought to invade and replace.

Ironically, the Iran-Iraq War was supported by a curious coalition. Subscribing heartily to the old mantra of “The enemy of my enemy,” Iran received support from both Egypt and Israel. Iranian troops with Egyptian weaponry stormed into Kurdish northern Iraq to meet up with Israeli soldiers. That sort of era-defying collaboration was mostly confined to Kurdistan, where both Israeli and Iranian interests had backed the Kurds for decades at that point; the brunt of the fighting was held in the southernmost portions of Iraq—the Governates of Kuwait and al-Basrah. Iranian strategy was simple, a push to cut off Iraq from the ocean and swarm it when resources dried up. It was simple to execute, too, but fighting swiftly ground to a halt as Iraq and Iran had vicious back-and-forth exchanges in the lowland coasts of the Persian Gulf.

And it was in that grueling slowness of war that that second revolution occurred. While Iranian soldiers struggled to surpass the Zagros Mountains of the north, and Iranian troops won and lost the same turned-to-rubble towns, the disliking of the King of Kings turned volatile in the form of Revolution. The Iranian Revolution was short and bloody and hectic; about a year and some change before the Shah had been deposed and fled to Europe. (He would die before his plane landed in a Swiss airstrip, at the age of 61. It was probably a cocktail of diseases that afflicted the Shah that did him in, but conspiracies of poisoning and many more enticing ways of dying lingered far after.)

So it was that Martha Layne Collins, the 39th President of the United States, phoned the newly-founded state before even her first year as the incidental president passed. Her conversation with President Mehdi Bazargan of the Islamic Democratic Republic of Iran was short and courteous but laid the seeds for future cooperation between the two countries. Bazargan (affectionately nicknamed by many Iranians as “Grandfather” for his advanced age of 74) was a reformist Islamicist—devout but not as extreme as some of the fringes that treated any Western thing as being of-the-Devil. He saw a synthesis of Islamic faith and democratic governance, and sought to use this vision to shape and reform Iran as it abolished its millenia-old monarchic reign. However, there was one aspect of this new I.D.R.-Iran that caused some concern in Washington: the People’s Mojahedin. The P.M.O.I. was a Marxist Islamic organization that had initially been part of Bazargan’s Freedom Movement; through those connections they had found a way to have outsized importance in the new Republic.

In that first call, President Collins had discussed briefly the hesitancy the U.S. felt collaborating with a country with such an outsized communist presence, but President Bazargan had assured her that it was only an issue in stability and power that would be resolved with time. By the time Martha Layne Collins was out of politics in 1989, the P.M.O.I. had not at all lost their power in the Islamic Democratic Republic. Despite that, though, Iran and the United States made decent allies throughout the ‘80s, with Iranian oil curbing off the edge from the sudden shut-down of Arabian oil fields.

Arabia would not reunite during Collins’ administration, it would remain fractured—a mosaic of tribal entities, petrostates, and Islamic fundamentalists; a collage of constitutionalists and monarchists and socialists and filibusters. They were armed by Iranians and Egyptians, Iraqis and Israelis, the Soviets and the CIA. As the Saudis fled to the other Arabian monarchies, some would return to stake their claim; strongmen would remain, too. So entrenched the Saudi aristocracy stayed in some places that a common apocryphal story was that when journalists asked some desert-dwelling tribe what their stances were in the civil war, they replied asking “Are they finally overthrowing the Ottomans?” Another rather famous story from the hectic Arabian ‘80s was that for a brief period an independent group of eclectic mercenaries claimed a little strip of the Hejaz and began using the fertile strip to grow vineyards. Only a few bottles of the Hejazi wine were ever produced before the whole compound was destroyed by the Ikhwan—the Islamist followers of Juhayman al-Otaybi—due to the great dishonor of using such a holy land for such haram activities.

With the situation on the Arabian Peninsula not getting better, the precarious Southern economy was able to continue its explosive growth as Great America needed to sate its appetite for oil. However, Martha Layne Collins knew that the situation was never going to be permanent, and wanted to try to buff up other sectors such that when the oil glut died down, the Southern economy didn’t collapse. To this end she began to workshop a policy program to industrialize the South, develop a strong manufacturing industry in Dixie. A task force was assembled to begin making plans to this effect, comprised primarily of herself, Vice President Mondale, Secretary of Commerce Dennis Shaul (a Buckeye who was brought from Ohio by Gilligan), and Secretary of Labor Bill Kircher. Collins and Shaul would be representing the company-side and Mondale and Kircher would be representing the labor-side as they started to chart out a policy that would benefit both sides.

But as the White House schemed an economic overhaul in the South, the Republican Party began to duke it out to challenge Martha Layne Collins in 1984. Like virtually every primary since the 1950s, the Republicans had trouble reconciling the Progressive-Conservatives of Tommy Kuchel’s legacy with the Conservatives of the Barry Goldwater tradition. Although the beloved memory of Jack Gilligan kept his vice president afloat, Republicans sensed a sort of weakness to her—both out of good-old-fashioned sexism, but also because of a lack of legislative successes. She had gotten a deal through on education, sure, but her administration seemed almost like it was sleep-walking through the prosperity and successes of Jack Gilligan, rudderless. That imposing shadow of Gilligan even cast the Republican Party into the shadow, though, because the eventual nominee was almost as close to Jack Gilligan a man could be.

Joe Biden was a rising star in Republican circles for almost a decade. He had run for the United States Senate in 1972, replacing the retiring J. Caleb Boggs. Despite it previously having been a Republican seat, it was seen as an incredibly vulnerable seat. Despite losing the election to Wilmington mayor Tom Maloney, the Democrat’s hundred-and-seven-vote victory was seen as especially impressive in the wake of Terry Sanford’s victory in that state by 9-percentage points. As the recount was observed eagerly by Republican circles, Biden’s unique charisma made him remembered despite his electoral loss. In the wake of that heart-shattering electoral loss, Kuchel looked at the bright young guy and inducted him into the administration as the Deputy Attorney General—and would, in the final 100 days of the Administration, take on the position of acting Attorney General. And shortly before Jack Gilligan was sworn into the White House, Joe Biden was sworn into Woodburn, becoming the 68th Governor of Delaware.

Governor Biden being the Republican Jack Gilligan was both a blessing and a curse—to a great many Americans, Jack Gilligan was a force for radical change after years of complacency. He represented the rising standards of America. To a great many Republicans, he represented narcissistic politicking, a radical agenda, and a brazen un-presidentness. Too, any discussion of Joe Biden the Candidate seemed immediately choked-out and overshadowed by the discussion of Jack Gilligan the Republican. A political sketch from MADtv from election season had a fat Irishman scratching his head at the ballot box; when a ballot worker asks him what the issue is, he asks “Where the hell is Jack Gilligan? Everyone was sayin’ he was running again!” Cue audience laughter.

The Biden campaign was not without faults on its own merits, too. A key member of the machine was Delawarean Pete du Pont, a representative who retired to work extensively on the campaign trail—du Pont was something of a friend of Biden’s, and the policies of the one were the policies of the other. This was unfortunate because many of the policies of Biden-&-du Pont were eclectic and unpopular at best. Policies like de-subsidizing farming, phasing out Social Security, and mandatory random drug tests in high school and college all made their way onto the Biden platform. He was notorious for his mouth, too—he would often ramble on in talks with voters, and he practically had a cavalcade of campaign reporters just waiting for the next odd tangent or gaffe. A proud member of Cec Heftel’s Democratic National Committee proposed a fundraising drive via Joe Biden dolls with voice boxes and string—pull the string and a different gaffe comes out!

Perhaps the most memorable Biden Gaffe occurred during the presidential debate. Collins was always known as a slow and methodical speaker, her years as a schoolteacher making her language clearly enunciated, simple to understand, and with specific and precise wording. In one of the most memorable debate moments in American history, Joe Biden answered a question directed at Martha Layne Collins due to a perceived tardiness in the incumbent’s response time. Collins retaliated by stating simply, with a bit of snappiness, “You answer your questions, and I’ll answer mine.”

What made the gaffes worse was the running mate. While Biden’s rambling style was charming in its unique way, his vice presidential choice of Californian Bob Dornan was far from charming. On paper he was perfect—a strong proponent of civil rights, a representative from California, a proud supporter of military spending; everything that marked the glories of the Progressive-Conservatives. But he was also abrasive and mean; on several occasions he’d mock the idea of a lady president, on several occasions he implied the President was a lesbian, on one occasion his wife slurred out a gay man in New York City. The death knell, however, came with the 1984 Vice Presidential debate. When the topic of trade came up, Walter Mondale defended the administration’s record as they began to signal that new home-grown industrial encouragement was on the way. Bob Dornan’s response was legendary in how shocking it was, as he called Mondale “a lying little Jew” who was selling out the American worker for cheap products out of Japan and out of India. Although Bob Dornan and his spokespeople would claim that he had meant to call Mondale a Judas, the gaffe basically destroyed the momentum of the Biden-Dornan machine.

Come Election Day and the only upset victories for the Republicans were in Texas and Pennsylvania, practically a given due to Biden’s heritage from the Keystone State and his strongly protectionist message. Texas’ flip was perhaps a bit unexpected but could be similarly understood as revolving around heritage. Martha Layne Collins had replaced a Good-Ol’-Texan-Boy, for one, and she never quite seemed able to repay the people of Texas in a way they appreciated. Secondly, though, Biden was able to flaunt his faith among the slowly-growing demographic of Hispanic voters in Texas. (Not to be confused with the Chicano voting bloc of Arizona and New Mexico and California, a much more radical bloc. In communities with high Chicano populations, a controversial Republican tactic included spreading misinformation in Spanish claiming that immigration officials would be present at polling stations to check for citizenship.)

* * *​

The atmosphere in the campaign headquarters down in Wilmington was impossible to describe, a gloom hanging over the rainy November afternoon. The big players of the campaign were meeting together for perhaps one last, final time. It was Bob Dornan’s suggestion, he said he had something up his sleeve—an ace, a hole-in-one.

“It’s Michigan,” he said with a fire in his eyes. “Think about it—Indiana was ours, Pennsylvania was ours, and Michigan? That was only by a handful of votes. A goddamn gust of wind would’ve flipped that sonuvabitch our way.” He was not entirely wrong, Michigan was the closest race in the Great Lakes—which should’ve been locked in with Mondale.

Joe Biden gave a sigh, rubbing his nose like a disappointed father. By his side was his wonderful wife Neilia. He liked calling her the brains of the operation. He had plenty of brains too, of course, but she was the brains. Every big hit, every big campaign success, every good speech—she had helped with that. She rubbed his arm affectionately, trying to ease his tense shoulders. He did, and then pointing a pen at the rusty-haired Californian sitting across from him: “We—we’re not contesting Michigan. We’re not contesting anything. Collins won fair and square, you know that.”

“I never said she cheated,” Bob offered with a nonchalant shrug. “I’m just saying it’s the closest one. I have some reports of irregularities, too—from my guys.” Joe had to suppress another groan. He muttered to his wife in a whisper quiet enough to evade Bob, “Ah great, his guys.”

“His guys” was a code for Charles Keating’s guys. Keating and Dornan were not especially close—not as far as Joe could tell, at least. But they had some connection, some political organization or other. He didn’t trust them. Keating was big-money in a way that made him uncomfortable, the kind of big-money where you knew there was something shady going on just beneath the surface. He didn’t trust those guys, like he said. Some—what’s the word?—ratfuckers. Couldn’t trust ‘em.

“I think your guys,” he put a sort of venom into the phrase, “should have reported you the biggest source of irregularity that cost us the election.” He paused for a second, and then added a “You,” for clarity.

“Oh my God, this again?” Bob said, his composure loosening a bit. Joe had seen him like this sometimes—well, many-a-time, frequently. He could go from this suave deep voice to a gravelly roar like that. “I made one goddamn mistake and you act like it was some—”

“It was a big fucking deal!” Joe snapped back, another pointed jab towards Bob’s direction with a pen. “If you didn’t call Fritz a goddamn Jew we could have won Michigan—we could have won New York! You saw the kinda money we were getting from New York! And guess what kinda people live out in goddamn New York?” When Joe meant “the kinda money” he was mostly referring to a crop of money from some rich Republicans of the Nelson Rockefeller persuasion. Perhaps the friendliest one, Joe thought, was one Howard B. Dean III, a stockbroker rich kid who saw Joe as the best-thing-to-happen-to-this-country. Flattery can get you some places, it must be said.

Bob just gave a sigh and shook his head, trying to calm himself down. “We’ve had this conversation before.” He offered no apology, which made Joe even angrier, frankly. He had squeezed one goddamn apology out of him for that whole debacle, and he clearly didn’t even mean it. “You seem to think this is a goddamn walk through the park, Bob,” Joe stated. “People really believed in this campaign, really put their livelihoods on the line—Pete quit to work for us!” he gestured over to Pete du Pont, who currently was looking very uncomfortable being in the room right now, and who very much did not look pleased being brought into this argument. “For all your work as an actor, Bob, you’d think you’d learn when to shut up, man!”

And Bob looked just about as mad as anything else. Could practically see smoke rising out of his ears like in those old cartoons. “I should’ve chosen Mitch,” Joe added as a final point—referring to Mitch McConnell, a friend from Kuchel’s Justice Department that had been elected into the Senate a few years back. He was a bit quiet, a bit geeky, which is why Joe didn’t end up picking him—was gonna make him Attorney General, though. Would’ve been one of the best the country had ever seen, really.

At that, the California Republican stood up at such a speed that his chair tipped over behind him, and he stormed over to Joe. He grabbed him by the collar of his shirt and yanked him up to eye level, eyes angry and face rigid in rage. “You’re a goddamn slimy coward, Joe. You’re a fucking wimp.” He turned to see the security guard by the doorway (a new safety precaution in the wake of Snell’s gun) starting to move toward him. He dropped The Candidate into his seat and stormed his way to the exit. “It's good you're being protected by security. If I saw you outside, it would be a different story,” he said as he left.

The atmosphere in the campaign headquarters down in Wilmington was impossible to describe.

* * *​

With a mandate all her own and a vision guiding her forward, Collins finally felt proud of her industrialization policy—enough to send it out to the wider world. It was a bit unorthodox, a chain of command starting from the top and trickling down bottom-ways. The Government would be the instigators of discussions between the states, the companies, and the unions, and through the Government deals would get made. That was the vision, at least, although it went far from perfectly. It wasn’t a disaster by any means, but also the desires of state governments, manufacturing companies, and unions rarely coincided. It was a very involved process, and as such a lot of Collins’ time in her second term was spent working as The Great Compromiser. Not that she was complaining, though—in fact, she was thriving! Collins lived for the art of compromising, was effortlessly effective at striking up conversations during negotiations, was readily able to find common ground. It didn’t always work, but when it did it worked well. By the time Collins was out of office, almost a dozen manufacturing plants had sprung up across the Southern U.S., no small feat.

Collins was not blind to the outside world, either. She was not as active as Gilligan had been, but then again very few political situations required as much intervention as the Taiwan Missile Crisis had. She mostly delegated the foreign policy to Secretary of State William vanden Heuvel (who had replaced Cleveland shortly after Collins’ reelection was ensured). It was through this chain of command that Collins first learned of the Soviet Union’s great shift.

The actual mechanics did not much matter—Tikhonov was so toothless that every layer of Soviet government was sharpening knives just waiting for the opportunity. They didn’t strike, though—Valentina Tereshkova did. She was a reformer, a visionary, rising through the ranks. Many Kremlinologists saw her as the power behind the wheel to such a degree that some were confused when they learned that Tikhonov hadn’t been deposed already. She had been the first woman to space, and now she was the first woman to lead the Soviet Union. So impactful was it that 1985 was declared The Year of the Woman, where both poles of the Cold War World were run by females. Tereshkova and Collins saw to a major thaw in relations, comparable almost to the one overseen two decades before between Stevenson and Khrushchev. The competition between West and East was not a fight for civilization, they argued, but rather a playful competition. A game for schoolchildren, not the most important conflict in world history. One of the most defining photos of this era was taken shortly after Tereshkova assumed power, where the first in-person meeting between the leaders of the United States and Soviet Union occurred in years.

With a strong grip on Soviet leadership and a powerful vision of a revitalized and reformed socialist power, Western media quickly took to calling Tereshkova “the Iron Lady,” a not-so-subtle pastiche on Stalin’s nickname. Unlike Stalin, she was not a strong idealogue and her lack of proper Communist rigor brought her gaze towards a very interesting little country—Chile.

Chile had had a turbulent decade. President Kuchel, responsible cold warrior that he was, had allowed the CIA to return to some shadow of the power they had held under the Eisenhower Administration, and in that capacity they had dealt with the socialist President Allende, long-beleaguered and an easy target. However, years of neglect under Stevenson-Fulbright had left them much less powerful, at least in the Americas; Allende was simply thrown into jail, with his successor being the Minister of the Interior Carlos Prats, as per the Chilean constitution. Some operatives allegedly would complain about the lack of blood in the coup, how the successor was a rather apolitical man who even had defended Allende throughout his controversial reign. But Prats would do until 1976, when Patricio Aylwin would win the presidency under the banner of the Christian Democratic Party—Aylwin having been a very vocal critic of Allende who was very vocal about his support of the former president’s impeachment. And he would make a stable centrist administration for six years, before a surprise return of socialism from friends in high places: the United Nations. In 1981, Chilean Secretary-General Felipe Herrera stepped down after serving the traditional two terms, and the following year he returned to his home country with an eye to restore the socialist legacy of the imprisoned Allende. With the prestige of running the United Nations supporting him, Herrera trounced the incumbents. (In the United Nations, Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan became the next Secretary-General; an attempt by the Big 5 to appease the Third World without relinquishing the whole of the UN election process to them.)

It was in the policies of Allende and Herrera that the Iron Lady found a peculiar little foot-note that she would inflate well beyond the margins of history. Allende was a dreamer, that much was abundantly apparent, and one of his most ambitious (and, said detractors, most pie-in-the-sky) projects was Synco (or, as it was named by the British that helped it at its inception, “Cybersyn”). It sought a total redefinition of government, a technological revolution, a radical synthesis of cybernetics and governance. It was a project of five component parts: Cybernet, a network of telex machines dotting the country, nestled into factories, etc., all fed into a central terminus in Santiago; Cyberstride, a program that would look at the data input into the Cybernet and use it to model the industrial economy and predict possible crises before they occurred; CHECO, a program that would forecast the outcomes of specific economic policies; and Opsroom, that central hub of information, a control room in the heart of it all. Fittingly, the Opsroom looked like it came straight from Star Trek’s S.S. Yorktown. Remarked one American journalist: “In walking into the operation room, I was surprised I didn’t see Robert April and his motley crew sitting in those chairs.”

The project was nurtured by Allende until his arrest. It was kept dormant under Prats, and before Aylwin could do anything with it, he was forced into a border conflict with Argentina that quickly devolved into a brutal-yet-brief conflict that left his presidency scarred. As such, Herrera was able to get the program back up and running very swiftly. The idea of a computer-controlled economy would have made hardliner communists cringe, would make Stalin roll in his grave, but Valentina Tereshkova saw something more: she saw the future of socialism, the ultimate realization of the planned economy—no, no, call it a programmed economy. In the absence of the Britons who helped workshop the program a decade previous, a caravan of Soviet technicians and engineers and investors arrived in Santiago and began buffing up the program, learning how it worked, getting into conversations.

Those conversations turned to talk and those talks settled into deals and contracts. And with Soviet approval came some more discussions. Other socialist third-world countries, particularly Egypt, took some interest in aspects of Cybersyn. Perhaps not as much as Valentina, who seemed to think of it like a child she loved oh-so-dearly, but a great many countries saw a fair few benefits it could bring. It was a groundbreaking change, and created for a period a sort of tripolar computer system, a symbol of the Cold War in its own way—Western ARPANET, Eastern Akademset, and Southern Cybersyn. Oddly though, even then these systems were interconnected in their own convoluted little way. Akademset—the Soviet system that created a digital connection in the world of academics and the civil sphere—was compatible both with ARPANET and with Cybersyn. ARPANET was in store for big things soon, too, as investors started seeing the potential in commercial properties of the ‘net, especially as they caught wind of the “poor man’s ARPANET” that had sprung up in nerds’ dormitories and computer labs: Usenet.

Tereshkova’s computer crusade also created an opening in another sci-fi setting: Space. The Soviets had, for a while, been attempting another great step forward in the Space Race, Mir-2. It was to be a space station, manned permanently as it orbited the Earth. That was the plan, but Tereshkova saw something greater. Saw a massive new opportunity—an international station, not just a Soviet one. It would be Soviet-owned, it would mostly be staffed by the red countries dotting the world, but on a technical level it would be the World’s space station. Too, as a high-tech dreamer she wanted to connect the hypothetical space station to Akademset, envisioning a system where data collected out past the upper atmosphere could be transferred to university students and to science labs down on Earth. These visions were feasible, and with the weight of a technological juggernaut like the Soviet Union behind her it was not a matter of if—only when. And although not a powerhouse player on the tech side, the United States was more than willing to make deals in time.

It was in 1986 that the first breakthroughs in the Collins Administration’s sponsored negotiations occurred, and among the first was perhaps Martha Layne Collins’ most ambitious. Goodyear agreed to a plant in North Carolina, but it was not just for tire-and-rubber purposes. Plans had been kicking around in NASA for years at that point of a moonbase, and in those previous years Goodyear had made proposals of a model of inflatable habitat that would provide a good basis for a US moonbase. In the verbiage of the famous fast-food slogan, Collins now wanted Goodyear to put their money where their mouth was. Goodyear agreed and thus began Project Mene, with the hope of a successful operating moonbase by a decade’s time. This would turn out to be accurate, as despite a few setbacks over the years an American moonbase was successfully constructed in 1995, named Moonbase Lovelace after the NASA Director who oversaw the brunt of Project Mene.

Back in 1986, back on Earth, back in the United States of America, something more important was happening—at least, that’s how it felt at the time. In 1985, Chief Justice Herbert Brownell finally retired from the Court, long-tired of the Bench and having announced that come-rain-or-shine he would retire at the beginning of the new presidential term, no matter who won. (His colleague from the Eisenhower Administration, William P. Rogers, would follow suit two years later and be replaced by Connecticut Attorney General Joseph Lieberman.) He, obviously, had been betting on Biden, but he was true to his word and stepped down without a fight. His replacement was Vermont jurist Pat Leahy, thus inaugurating the Leahy Court. And as the new Court stared down the barrel of the 1986 judicial calendar, there was one case that those with a finger on the pulse knew would stir up something. In the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, a poor mother had died during childbirth in Dauphin County. This was a tragedy, but it was not a surprise—doctors had told the woman that she had very low chances of surviving her pregnancy; however, under state amendment at the time, any procedure to terminate a pregnancy was unlawful. The pregnant lady was poor and not well-connected, and as such was unable to find a back-alley peddler in cheap abortion tactics. The family had sued for such a clear infringement on the principles of human dignity, and over the course of a year or so the case climbed higher-and-higher, finally settling at the doorstep of the Leahy Court.

Cynics say that Justice Brownell sensed the case on the horizon and sought to get the hell out of Dodge, and although no evidence of this has ever been found, it is abundantly clear that the Chief Justice had a great discomfort in dealing with such sensitive subjects, avoiding putting them on the calendar at every opportunity.

The Honorable Patrick Leahy and his motley crew of a court had a difficult time with Doe v. Cherry, as the case came to be called. The liberal court swiftly knew that the Pennsylvania law, its verbiage, was horrific. But Leahy, hesitant to rock the boat so soon behind the wheel, did not feel it was the Court’s place to decide national doctrine based solely on the most repressive state in the union on those counts. As such, the Court quickly drafted a very odd ruling: the family of the dead mother-to-have-been (anonymized as Jane Doe) were right, that rights had been violated. The Court further went on to say that abortion was a guarantee in any instance where the mother’s life was at risk. This was, altogether, not a particularly groundbreaking decision; outside of Pennsylvania that was already the case. However, there were two aspects of the Court ruling that were—the first was part of the majority ruling, that the Court implored state governments and potentially Congress to define further protections outside of that. The other was the concurring opinion of Hon. Frances Farenthold, who proudly proclaimed that “that uniquely personal decision, that most fundamental right of women — the decision as to whether to bear children or not” was a necessary battle for United States, that she would welcome a case to enshrine it into the law of the land and encouraged Congress to enshrine it first.

This concurring opinion seemed poised the calculus of the 1986 midterm elections—then only a few months away. The decision itself was, to most Americans, reasonable and responsible, the right thing to do even if abortion was a tricky subject. But that concurring opinion lit a fire in the Halls of Congress, where New York Senator “Battling” Bella Abzug immediately called for Congress to act on Associate Justice Farenthold’s request. Collins, not one to stir the pot, neither condoned such an act neither condemned it—although as a particularly devout Baptist the whole conversation made her deeply uncomfortable. That silence further strained the relations between feminists and the first female president, the latter distancing herself from the former by calling herself “not one of those marching types.” Those loud proclamations, though, of an act enshrining abortion rights as a cornerstone of feminist thought brought conflict to the White House, spelled the makings of a P.R. nightmare. The White House Press Secretary quit to avoid dealing with the potential fallout. Joe Lockhart, a part of the 1984 campaign machinery, was promoted to the Press Secretary slot, and he would serve the position through thick and thin for years to come.

The midterm results, despite the noise and the fears, seemingly continued as expected. The Republicans gained back a majority of the House and, for the first time since 1880, the United States Senate was a perfect split, 51-51. But the following battle would mark one of the defining points in not just the Collins presidency, but perhaps all American politics. Without the stress of campaigning, the feminist grouping of Congress set the agenda to include discussion on a national bill codifying a more expansive abortion baseline than Doe v. Cherry. The coalitions that settled around the ensuing “Mothers’ Rights Act” were unstable and odd. Southern Democrats, still beholden to evangelicals of the Bible Belt, were hesitant supporters. Much of the Southern support for abortion (and, indeed, Southern states had some of the strongest abortion protections outside of the West Coast) came from a perceived neutrality on the issue of abortion in the Bible, as well as a general appreciation of small government. That latter part is what caused so much hesitancy in the Southern Democrats, although to their constituents they rationalized any perceived discrepancy with a simple reassurance: the bottom line of this bill, should it pass, would be no more expansive than the laws preexisting in the South.

* * *​

Richard Milhous Nixon was many things—the press never got enough of him, all their muckraking. It made him sick, frankly. Nosing around in his business, like he was another little no-name in the gutter. He was not! He was the Senate Majority Leader! After years of shaking hands and kissing babies and all that other hanky-panky nonsense, he had finally gotten back to the vestiges of power. He was too old now to claw his way back into the White House, but this would do, it would. (He still kicked himself some days for not running back in ‘68—that was an opening. Instead it went to Tommy Kuchel, a real ratfucker. He hid it well, but Dick knew a ratfucker when he saw one. He talked nice, but he was a ratfucker.)

But then these technicalities kicked in. “The Vice President counts as a member in a deadlock,” whatever that rule was—it was a pile of nonsense. But the press ate it up! If that had happened while he was vice president (and he clinged to that; sometimes he almost forgot he was vice president. But you could never forget the taste of power under your tongue) then the press would have ripped him alive. Called him corrupt, called him a crook. But because the White House was Democrat and the President was a woman—he still scoffed at that one, sometimes. What a bunch of nonsense, that one. Jack Gilligan was an Irish idiot, and that choice cemented it—but because he made that choice, the press would never say that it was nonsense.

But it was, he was the Majority Leader! The Majority Leader as far as anyone who was anyone was concerned. His party had won those midterms, he had won the leadership, and now here he was. Lucky for him, though, how the number-punching nerds said 1988 looked—good year for Republicans, they were saying. And he liked how that sounded, like music to his ears. Why be President when you can have just as much power with half as much scrutiny, anyways?

So this bill, it comes snaking through, plops its way on his desk: it’s about abortion, and, oh, he supposes he’s fine with it, yes he does. Plenty of reasons a lady might need to get rid of a pregnancy, understandable and unfortunate, all that junk. He’d allow the discussions to happen, hell he’d even convince some of the guys dragging their feet to sign onto it. He wasn’t like Lyndon, that bastard was a ball-twister if there ever was one. Couldn’t even keep it in his pants. Nixon, though. Nixon spoke a language more powerful than threats—what they call it, here in The Town? Pork. That was his language. You-scratch-my-back-and-sonuvabitch-I’ll-scratch-yours. So yes he’d sign on, yes he’d try to see if the votes could be collected. There’d be a transaction, though, a payment returned. Maybe with interest, who knows.

* * *​

The battle lines were shoddy, because most Republicans (outside of that conservative flank) and a fair few Democrats were fine with the idea. One group, though, would make a stink about it—the Catholics. Headed by Massachusetts Senator “Bobby” Kennedy, a wing of rather socially conservative Democrats would howl about such an infringement of rights. Although their complaining—and attempt at a filibuster—would be for naught, Bobby Kennedy was anything but a forgiving and forgetting man, and for his combative nature he became the namesake of the sect of the Democratic Party that he represented. “Kennedy Democrats,” those proudly Catholic Democrats who could back civil rights, could back a large government that looked out for people, but was fiercely anti-abortion and some other pet positions along those lines. Despite the picketing of Kennedy Democrats, the finalized Abortion Act of 1987 was a tempered piece of legislation that reflected the supportive-but-hesitant nature of abortion support in the United States. It allowed a 20-week allowance in cases of rape and incest, and necessitated parental consent in minors; no federal money was allotted to abortion clinics. Shrewd politicking by some Northern Liberals and Southern Democrats created a minor loophole in verbiage that, if exploited, allowed states to go further in their allowances—maybe even go as far as to allow full coverage in all three trimesters. However, the likelihood of a state acting upon that loophole so soon was microscopic (and, frankly, well outside the scope of the median American).

Half a world away, the shifting sands of history made the political battleground in the United States look docile.

For almost a decade, the United Kingdom and the United States had basically shut down all trade with the white supremacist hotspots of South Africa and Rhodesia. Under this fiscal pressure, the two countries were on the verge of collapse. South Africa seemed to be pulling ahead in the race for the bottom, when in the later half of the ‘80s, apartheid juggernaut P.W. Botha suffered a near-fatal stroke and resigned himself from National leadership. He could only watch as his hand-picked successor, Barend du Plessis, was bested by Chris Heunis. Heunis was a reformer at heart, who wanted to make South Africa palatable again. Heunis, one of the great pushers of the tricameral system, had created a manifesto promising to allow “limited” African participation in the central government. Although the wording raised eyebrows in London and in Washington, they both saw Heunis as a more cooperative figure than the ailing Botha. After much vicious debate in the pro-apartheid party, the meager provisions of the Chris Heunis manifesto were accepted. This would lead to a domino effect that Collins herself would be out of office before the resolution of—but come the 1989 South African election and for the first time in the independent South Africa’s history, National was belittled into a minority slot. An unwieldy coalition of anti-apartheid parties united for the briefest window of time to win a scant majority, thus making socialist Joe Slovo the State President. With a mandate so small, it was impossible to tell how far anti-apartheid forces would go. This question would never get answered, either, as early in 1990 a bullet tore a hole in President Slovo’s torso and a caravan of military vehicles headed by Botha ally Magnus Malan installed an embattled military dictatorship in a conflict that the pro-Apartheid forces would soon name the South African Bush War.

The prickly apartheid state to the north, Rhodesia, would fare only a marginally better fate in the Collins years. After years of guerilla conflict, the African forces were finally able to gain the upper hand and decapitate the Rhodesian leadership in Salisbury. The following ethnic flight was something to behold, as most trickled into South Africa where in a few short years many would join paramilitaries protecting the Afrikaner people from yet another African insurrection. The defeat of one of the major apartheid regimes was celebrated in Free Africa, although the fledgling Zimbabwe was soon to become something of a proxy in the Cold War. For a brief couple years, at the tail end of the ‘80s, the country of Zimbabwe was functionally two—Zimbabwe and Matabeleland. The former a Marxist state supported by Kinshasa-Congo and run by Robert Mugabe; the latter a Georgist-reformist entity supported by Kongo and run by the reluctant Joshua Nkomo.

Back home, as the abortion debacle died down, the Collins Administration (though not Martha Layne Collins herself) toted the financial successes of industrial policy. Over the past several years a number of deals had been hashed out, and it seemed as the Southern economy was being weaned off of oil refining that the economy was not fragile. Plants dotted the South—Ford in Fayetteville, General Motors in Mobile, etc. So large the surplus that some of these companies began dabbling in ways to use spare parts and extraneous materials. The United States had become a machine-exporting power keeping its own against fellow manufacturing nations like Japan or India, and those that did not make the jump overseas created a new system of contracting trams and trains to use up the excess on materials and labor. Although it was not necessarily the hugest piece of economic news in U.S. history—in fact, outside of occasional investments in public transport, most non-southern Americans did not notice much difference at all—it was still an important facet of Democratic success and the Party took great pride at patting themselves on the back. The nation seemed to be prospering after a period of post-Gilligan malaise! All was good.

But someone had to mess it all up eventually—why not the “cheap catch-all for fuckoffs and misfits,” in the words of counterculture icon Hunter S. Thompson? With all that money flying around, it was easy for local reporters to dig up some corruption. Here misplaced money, there a suspiciously wealthier commissioner. That was small potatoes, though. Washington Post writer Bob Woodward felt like there had to be something bigger, looming over all of this. It was a hunch, but it was also a “hunch” that helped him unravel a seedy corruption deal encircling the Mayor-Commissioner of D.C., Edward Bennett Williams. He just knew there was something going on.

* * *​

It was a late night in the Herbert Hoover Building. As far as Kathleen Blanco, Under-Secretary of Commerce, was concerned, late nights were when all the worst things happened. She was working on a report—some grunt work, really. She rubbed a little sleep from her eyes, eyed the clock up on the wall—2 A.M. Just the reality of the job. Would be lucky if she got even four hours of sleep, after finishing this up.

She heard a stumbling gait waltz its way up the hallway. She would be lucky if she got even an hour of sleep, after finishing this paperwork up. The doorway had been half-opened, but she had hoped he would feel unwelcome as he approached. No such luck, though, because in he came like a hurricane, pushing open the door with the force of a well-meaning giant.

Bill Clinton stood in front of her, cheeks rosy from (breath stinking of) booze. He had a dopey grin on his face, and while standing he stirred slightly, the teeniest bit dizzy in his stupor.

“Get out,” Kathleen muttered as she threw a crumpled-up wad of paper at him. He flinched a beat after the ball had hit him on the cheek. “What I do?” he said with an air of innocence, leaning over the desk in a way that he thought was smooth and she thought was corny.

“We’re not—not again,” Kathleen spat out, cringing at the thought. It had been awkward, he was the— it would have been impolite to—

She regretted it, obviously. It was a one-night thing, not a pattern by any means. Him stumbling in like a divorced dad didn’t make her regret it any less, thankfully. He flinched again, seeming like her venom had actually hit his face like a chaser for the paper ball. “No, no, we don’t have to,” Bill agreed with a burp that, judging by his expression, seemed to have almost been a bit more. A pang of remorse, she guided him to one of the seats near the desk. In the off chance that some other interloper was in the building this late in the night, she closed the door, too.

“Jesus, how much did you drink?” she asked, allowing a bit of the venom back into her words. He was an adult, not a fraternity jock. He responded with a chuckle: “Ah, I forgot.” His gaze turned then to the window, and he sort of stared meditatively out at it, at the few cars speeding past, the dark blue clouds streaming past the pale moon. She got lost looking out there, too, for a second.

When Bill returned his attention, he seemed far more serious. “I think I fucked up,” he said with such a sober tone that it sent a shiver down her spine. Regaining her composure, though, she replied “By coming here? Yeah, you did.”

“No, it—I shouldn’t be talking about this. I think there’s something goin’ on. Over me.”

She didn’t follow. He seemed lost in that moment, staring up at the glowing ceiling light as if the words he was thinking of were floating up there waiting to be snatched. Kathleen allowed herself a minute or two to finish up her paperwork—only a few things left, after all.

“I think there’s a scheme. Kickback.” He let the last word slip out smooth, inquisitive. They both allowed it to be silent for a minute, before Kathleen finally initiated: “What?”

* * *
​

Bob Woodward had, miraculously, found a lead. “An anonymous one, naturally,” some would quip. He was quickly joined by fellow journalist Helen Thomas, at the imploring of The Washington Post owner Kay Graham—if you’re going after the first woman president, you better have a woman on the team. Woodward didn’t know, yet, but he was convinced that he had stumbled on a thread weaving its way all the way up to the top, all the way to the Oval Office. And if he was right…

He couldn’t afford to be wrong.

The scope of the conspiracy inspired the title of the book detailing the investigative findings: All the Way to the Top, written by the joint team of Woodward and Thomas and released to a startled public right at the start of summer, 1987. One interview described it as “mostly rambling, often dry, and always important.” It detailed a scheme perpetrated by Dr. Bill Collins—the first gentleman. He was always a real power in the White House, it had been obvious for years. That was not seen as malicious initially, and many at the time would imply that it was just the necessity of a man to run things. Dr. Collins, the book revealed, had concocted a series of intricate kickback schemes that included himself, corporate CEOs, minor members of the cabinet, and even a state governor (Jim Guy Tucker, Arkansan governor). After more digging, the journalists found evidence that the Mr. Collins had further been involved in extortion dating back to his wife’s time in the Senate, tax fraud, and money laundering disguised as campaign donations. (Following his trial, he would further gain a charge for jury tampering.)

The shockwaves were immediate—within a day the First Husband was under arrest, and a procession of lower cabinet members were placed in front of Congress as they were quizzed on what went on in the White House and how involved they were. Infamously, some of the interrogated were incredibly skittish, one going so far as to have all records in his office shredded. The nation was shocked as Bill Clinton was forced to testify before Congress, a testimony where he almost immediately admitted to wrongdoing. He would clarify that he had been an unwitting participant of the sprawling scandal, and perhaps in recognition of this his punishments ended up far less severe than some of the lower-ranking members of government caught in the conspiracy.

While all of this was going on, there was one word that floated through Congress like a specter, in the weeks following the bombshell report: Impeachment? Despite the report’s clear portrayal of Bill Collins as being obviously guilty, the book skirted around directly implicating the President. Many hardline Republicans, despite this, demanded an impeachment—the first the nation had seen since Reconstruction. Radical senators like Dick Lugar and Evan Mecham were joined by Kennedy Democrats—specifically, Bobby Kennedy himself—in their calls for an impeachment trial. The vote in the House was close, but with the shrewd whipping of Speaker Obenshain, the articles of impeachment were passed and a once-in-a-lifetime trial was set up to see if the president herself had been caught up in the scandal.

Democrats would, for years later, call the impeachment of Martha Layne Collins a show trial. Camera angles were vetted, congressmen fighting behind the scenes for turns in the lime light. With 1988 right around the corner, some of those hungriest for a shot at the White House treated the impeachment like an ad spot. The “show trial” idea was easier to create in hindsight, because while it was absolutely true that Republicans tried to manufacture a watershed moment for the party, the innocence of President Collins was far from guaranteed. Just how Martha Layne Collins felt about the whole debacle is a mystery—despite theories and accounts, in the years that followed the President never addressed it in interviews and her memoir is mostly spent on international relations, industrial policy, and her educational reforms.

During the trial itself, she remained firm in her own innocence but would never go as far as to outwardly claim her husband’s innocence—consensus says out of fear of drawing ire from Congress or upsetting the court proceedings against her husband. She defended her actions as one of a loving marriage—her husband would, she said, occasionally input advice on a particular deal being hashed out; implore her to try to negotiate this deal or that, occasionally tell her what talks to allow drop to the wayside, etc. (MADtv would spoof this by depicting the First Gentleman as a parody of Rasputin, whispering into the ear of his wife while holding comically large bags of money behind his back.) Even Woodward and Thomas would come out and say there was fairly strong evidence that Martha was unaware of the sins of Bill—that she had allowed some deals to fall through despite her husband’s stake in their success. After months of hearings, the Senate failed to convict her on any counts. Despite vocal support from more fringe Democrats like Bobby Kennedy, moderate Republicans like Wayne Angell of Kansas and Mitch McConnell of Kentucky refused to back it, and without the support of Progressives and mavericks the whole trial was doomed.

Despite such a crisis, Martha Layne Collins refused to allow it to damper the final months of her presidency. She would celebrate her final month in office by visiting the various plants she had helped set up across the South, one final show of the good she thought she had brought the country. Her predecessor would always have outshined her, the only moments she managed to escape the massive and boisterous shadow of the liberal icon of Jack Gilligan was during her impeachment. Perhaps a part of this boiled down to her refusal to advertise much—she once expressed that she figured most press saw her as a “cold, icy blonde” because of her want to show her policy goals in actions as opposed to words. That unwillingness to advertise damaged her reputation, in its own way. She accomplished much in her time in Washington, and those things are often taught and thought about, but very rarely is her name attached to them. After she was out of power, after her husband was released from jail, the couple remained married in a relationship that, near as reporters could tell, remained loving and caring. With time she would be allowed back into the pantheon of The Ex-Presidents, inducted as a sort of mother figure of U.S. history. Although many would decry the sexism of that appraisal, Collins for her part never tried to stir that part. Whenever she is not needed in a Washington photo-shoot, she returned to her home in Kentucky and stuck around in the education system that she so loved, working occasional jobs as a professor.

 

[Enigma-Conundrum]

40. Roy Cohn (Republican-NY)
January 20, 1989 - January 20, 1997

“I bring out the worst in my enemies and that’s how I get them to defeat themselves.”​

Conservatives had been denied one too many times. It had happened when they went to bed expecting President Nixon and woke to find Adlai Stevenson, that limp-wristed pinko egghead, had beaten their darling by nearly three percentage points after the polls told them it was a tie. It had happened when Barry Goldwater cried invisible bitter tears onstage after New York cast three thousand too many votes for Bill Fulbright. It had happened when the Establishment cloaked that maverick traitor Tommy Kuchel in an aura of inevitability with big-dollar donations from friends of the Rockefellers and powerful endorsements. It had even happened when the world turned upside down and Jack Gilligan, that sanctimonious icon of the rowdy masses, plowed his way through Washington and reshaped the nation like putty in his hands. Walter Cronkite’s famous proclamation of “a political revolution tonight” when that 270th electoral vote was called for Gilligan was felt all too keenly by them, and it was the last indignity they could handle in the long slouch towards Gomorrah, to borrow a phrase from the arch-conservative Yale law professor and Collins impeachment lawyer Robert Bork. The suburban squares, the consumers instead of those aghast at rampant consumerism, the folks more worried about the increasing power of the Soviet Union than far-off atrocities by some petty warlord, they didn’t want to hear about well-meaning reform and the righted wrongs of the old society. They were far more concerned about the very thing that felt slipping through their fingers with every news story about rising crime rates, cutting-edge Soviet advancements, and liberalizing social mores: control.

On an individual level, this dovetailed neatly with the desires of one Roy Marcus Cohn. Cohn had been a household name for years back in the 1950s as Joe McCarthy’s legal counsel. He used to be the type of man those accused of communist sympathies trembled before in hearing rooms, a Richelieu beside the tailgunner’s throne. But that had passed with time, as do all empires. McCarthy made a fool of himself targeting the Army, and he had died a morose drunk with little to his name but a censure by the body that he once dominated. Cohn had fallen with him - the hearings had stopped, and though he returned to New York City for his law practice he no longer had cameras to strut before and reporters to give bombastic comments to. Roy Cohn’s control over the evening news cameras and the next day’s headlines was reduced to nothingness.

Even without that, Cohn’s access was unrivaled - having once, in 1959, forced then-Vice President Richard Nixon to wait on him for a phone call for no reason other than he had the ability to get away with it. He turned this access into a booming legal business back in New York City, the type of lawyer one hired when they wanted someone who’d lie, cheat, and bluff their way through whatever big-ticket crimes they had the misfortune of being caught committing. Even the federal government couldn’t keep him down, and yes, in his mind, it was an attempt to keep him down as revenge for McCarthyism. He was indicted three times through the 1960s for bribery, perjury, and obstructing justice, but each time he managed to swagger his way through the charges and emerged scot-free, his aura of invulnerability strengthened by every case. But Cohn wanted more. The ascension of Stevenson and Fulbright, two men who had explicitly rejected his legacy and in his eyes were little more than stooges for the communists he rooted out, only further lit a fire under that burning desire he had for the halls of power. Even as he had made himself a power-broker in New York and integrated himself into the political circles of the right, he was still just a normal lawyer past his public prime.

Fortunately, his chance was coming, though he wouldn’t have expected it. When Kuchel-Lindsay won its landslide, that meant Lindsay - the junior Senator from New York, as it were - vacated his seat, leaving it open until the next election in 1970. Governor Rockefeller, seeking to support the aims of the Kuchel administration in more ways than just sending his brother David to serve as its Secretary of the Treasury, appointed a Republican of sterling Lincolnian credentials to the seat in the form of Ogden Reid. But Reid was as much a maverick as the new president, and his strong support for environmental conservation, anti-poverty measures, and fighting housing discrimination quickly earned him the ire of the Republican Party at large. Even so, Nelson Rockefeller’s dominance in the state all but assured him re-nomination, much to the ire of conservatives.

The ire of conservatives had other means of expressing itself. Due to New York’s ballot fusion laws, the state had a bevy of smaller third parties, and one of these was the Conservative Party. Founded in 1962 and brought to fame by William F. Buckley’s near-miss campaign for mayor in 1965, the party was perhaps the perfect vehicle for dissident conservatives hoping to make their voices heard. To that end, they needed a candidate. The rank Goldwaterites bounced many names around: William F. Buckley, Mayor Mario Biaggi, football player Jack Kemp, and state senator John J. Marchi. All of them refused. Before the party was about to renominate Buckley’s brother James from his quixotic bid against Jack Javits, one of the men of the operation suggested asking Roy Cohn. It seemed a bit foolish to the rest given his previous legal troubles, his Democratic registration, and his known bachelor status, but it was surely worth a shot before settling on the famous conservative’s brother.

Surprisingly, Cohn was interested. For whatever reason Roy Cohn’s desire to be something, to sit at the helm of American public life once more overwhelmed potential concerns. Biographers theorize that the recent death of his mother, whom he had a complex and unusually tender relationship with, had something to do with it, but Cohn himself never indicated anything of the sort. After a second meeting, Cohn agreed to run, and his name was the only one placed for the Conservative nomination against Senator Reid. He was flamboyant on the campaign trail, drawing bemused attention from the state press as he swaggered his way across the state, singing God Bless America - “my favorite song” - at multiple rallies and shaking virtually every hand in reach. The turning point came at the one televised debate, in which he was invited due to the Conservative Party’s performance in 1968. Cohn was the breakout star on camera, pointedly drilling into Reid for his voting record being “as liberal as Hubert Humphrey’s” and Democratic nominee, Manhattan Representative Paul O’Dwyer, for his defense of allowing books written by communists on library shelves. Signs reading O.R. = OCCASIONALLY REPUBLICAN held by incognito Cohn staffers dogged every rally Reid held, and a detour of his to march in Atlanta for Dr. King’s freedom drew him away from New York for a crucial part of the campaign and allowed Cohn to paint him as an absentee Senator. Come election day, Cohn had gone from third place to winning by two points. Roy Cohn was back.

As a senator, Roy Cohn - who quickly elected to caucus with the Republicans - was an instant star for dissident conservatives. His legislative record itself was relatively light, mostly voting down liberal bills and signing onto right-wing proposals on tax reform, crime, and foreign affairs. However, Cohn had long since learned that the real power of the body for a man like him was not in drafting bills but in the camera. He was a regular guest on Firing Line and Meet The Press as a voice for the right wing, so much so that a running joke in Congress (intended as a double entendre for the open secret in his closet) was that Roy Cohn was the man to ask for male makeup tips for going on camera. His public lobbying for Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn led to the Kuchel administration approving the Soviet dissident’s refuge in the United States, infuriating Yuri Andropov but also reminding the public of Cohn’s anti-communist bona fides. The new CAN cameras - the Capitol Affairs Network having been created by an act of Congress in 1977 as a federally-administered independent live feed of Congress during sessions - had a significant amount of open mic time, during which Cohn would often make bombastic and accusatory speeches to an empty room. His relentless self-aggrandizing and snappy advertising of his accomplishments in spite of the liberal bent of Congress helped to endear him to his constituents, seeing him surprisingly easily nominated by both the Republicans and Conservatives and subsequently re-elected in 1976 and 1982.

If all of this wasn’t comfortably enough to make Roy Cohn one of the most visible conservative Republicans in the nation, Dr. Collins absolutely did. The man who prosecuted the Rosenbergs dashed from network to network, bluntly laying out the allegations against the administration and making clear the dizzying scale of the scandal. The novelty came when he shied away from tying his political fortunes to the impeachment, instead looping the distrust from the scandal into the glut of federal projects in recent years. Of course, when billions flowed through infrastructure, contracting, and negotiations with manufacturers, eventually men like the president’s husband would profit off of them. It was a structural problem with big spending. Someone needed to go in there and clean the mess up, cut things down to their proper size and get the graft all under control.

*****​

1985 was a rough year for Republicans, still smarting over another lost opportunity. That June, it was also time for another one of Roy Cohn’s parties. His D.C. townhouse had become a regular hotspot for the right-wing electeds, the media guys who made ‘em all up presentable, the ruthless mass of wealth behind them, the folks on the ground with axes to grind, all of it. It was a night for the congregation of the upper crust of conservative society - the dissidents, as Roger liked to call them. But Roger Stone was Roger Stone, and his zeal shaded his view. Didn’t matter to Roy either way. His guy was a ratfucker, but he was take-a-bullet loyal, and that’s just what Roy wanted in a consigliere, as his seedier clients back in New York called their Rogers. When they first met, Roger had bragged about telling the kids at his elementary school that Adlai Stevenson was for school on Saturdays. “My first political trick,” he let out from behind a grin that Roger thought was sly but just looked like he had a frog in his mouth. That’s the type of guy Roy liked. Well, to hire.

Roger was on his mind because he was currently in the process of trying to haul New York’s senior senator up the stairs. Roy was mingling as usual, rubbing elbows with the big names of the American right, and he’d gone and gotten himself trapped in one of Ron Reagan’s aphorism-riddled neverending stories. He just finally let out a “Ron, it’s been great talkin’ to ya, but Roger here’s telling me I gotta go meet with some folks. Something big going on.”

As they climbed the stairs, Roger grimaced a bit. “Christ, that guy’s head needs to be checked out. I’ve eaten Jell-O with more awareness than him.”

Roy just let out a forced chuckle. “He’s the biggest name our side’s got on the news. Millions of people watch that talk show of his, doesn’t matter if the lights are on upstairs. Our folks love the guy, so we love the guy.”

Roger just huffed a little as he opened the door to the second bedroom that Roy had turned into a “study.” It wasn’t for much work, though. It was really a monument to Roy Cohn’s power, a place designed entirely for him to meet with other people and exert himself over them for the entire interaction. And in it this time was Roy Cohn’s future assembled neatly before him. Roger had gone and gathered the biggest names in the movement into one room at one party. They had the money in Charles Keating, Nelson Bunker Hunt, and Joseph Coors, three men with a CEO’s checkbook and politics a shade right of Attila the Hun; they had the media in Rupert Murdoch, the Australian owner of half a dozen big tabloids and papers as well as the fast-rising fourth network STN that aired, among other things, The Reagan Report; they had the grassroots with Paul Weyrich and Richard Viguerie, the former the king of the YAF-coined “anti-activism” and the latter an innovator in political campaigning and fundraising; they even had an influential chunk of Congress in the right-wing Republican Study Committee’s chairman John Ashbrook. That room might well have been the beating heart of conservatism in America, if you didn’t count William F. Buckley and the National Review, which Roy didn’t - Bill was a useful friend, but that lightweight was too stuck up his own ass pretending to be a philosopher to entangle himself in anything like this. Bill had probably gotten a couple drinks in him and was probably off skinny-dipping with some interns anyways[1]. Not that Roy was one to judge.

Roy shook hands and wasted some time on brief, rehearsed pleasantries. But as his impatience got the better of him, he threw himself down on the grandiose high-backed yellow chair that the waiting couches were all not-so-subtly turned towards and sat upright in his throne. “No more wasting time. I’ve got you all here tonight because we need to talk about our plan for the next election.” And as Roger shut the door and closed them all in the room with him, the shark’s grin that scared pinkos shitless inched its way across his face.

*****​

Predictably, that someone was Roy Cohn. Though he had passed in the past three cycles - 1976 because of Lindsay’s institutional backing, 1980 because of Goldwater’s folly, and 1984 once it was clear that the institutional support just wasn’t there - he knew now was a moment practically designed for him. More than that, though, biographers indicate that Roy Cohn’s resentment over being “blacked out” had only grown with his return to glory, the fact that he had returned from exile to his onetime soldiers taking up arms for him like Napoleon as proof that he could truly defeat them, that he could reshape the face of America in his image if he’d just keep pushing. So, instead of pursuing a third Senate term, Roy Cohn held a rally in his native Bronx, announcing that he’d be pursuing the presidential nomination.

Cohn’s bid was immediately the talk of the national media. In his typical swaggering style, Cohn’s stump speech excoriated twelve years of Democratic government while working the crowd up into a fever about what they could bring America back to. And why wouldn’t conservatives be upset? The administration was corrupt, the Soviet Union seemed stronger than ever, crime rates seemed to only go up every passing year, and the economy was only seemingly booming in the incredibly regionalist president’s favored areas. Elsewhere, inflation was at a major high, and Friedmanite economists penned columns and gave interviews pointing directly to the glut of federal spending as the source. As perhaps one of the most prominent conservative Republicans and a personal friend of many of the key backers of right-wing politics, Cohn quickly managed to consolidate the party’s biggest names behind him and, after a relatively strong victory over maverick Iowa governor Terry Branstad in the primaries, never really looked back.

Thus he came to face the consolidated nominee of the Democratic Party, Vice President Mondale. Mondale was hesitant at first, but after private urging from President Collins he made clear his intent early to be the Democrats’ candidate. Frankly, few Democrats wanted the nomination that year, and Mondale’s nomination came virtually by acclamation. His suggestion of House Minority Leader Hugh Carey as his running mate saw a minor bit of embarrassment as the cameras caught the dissent within the voice vote from southern delegates who had grown accustomed to regionally balanced tickets and feminists who disliked Carey’s anti-abortion stance. Mondale, for his part, saw the controversy in Collins’ impeachment and tried to run from her, instead focusing his campaign on the continuation of popular Democratic policy and attacks on Cohn. The DNC aired a number of ads with clips of Cohn’s time with Joe McCarthy juxtaposed with his assertion that “Joe McCarthy was quite liberal in a number of things… I am not like Joe McCarthy.” One memorable campaign billboard showed Roy Cohn as John Wayne and saying “DON’T LET HIM TAKE US BACK TO THE 1950s.”

All of these had the exact opposite effect of what was expected, though. Most younger voters barely cared about McCarthy, and a good chunk of people who remembered him thought he was right given the rising USSR. Furthermore, the idea of going back to the 1950s was actually quite appealing to a number of suburbanites who saw the prosperous pre-counterculture era as when America was at its strongest, and ironically the particular pastiche even helped to mollify rural westerners wary of an urbane Jewish lawyer. Televised debates between Mondale and Cohn were, simply put, a massacre. Mondale came off as a nice enough fellow, but Cohn simply had too much experience making nice enough fellows look hapless and confused on the stand. Every brazen attack seemed to stick with little protest, every muddled reference to McCarthyism coolly addressed with a handwave, and by the end of it all Cohn had practically eaten his opposition alive. More than that, though, he had spoken right past the screeds about McCarthyism and to the anxieties of Middle Opinion, the folks who thought that twelve years in power had sapped the Democrats of new ideas, that they couldn’t deal with the things that matter like the high crime and inflation rates the way Cohn could.

​

Though the labor belt of the Great Lakes had largely stayed pat for Mondale - a labor man in his own right - Cohn swept his way from coast to coast nonetheless. The Democrats even saw their margins in the “Solid South” decrease off the backs of conservative suburbanites and the increasingly Republican drift of the white middle and upper class of the south, flipping South Carolina blue and giving the Republicans their best margins in the pivotal state of Texas since Eisenhower ran. Liberal critics had little to make of it - while they could blame Mondale sleepwalking his way through the election, clearly there was more to it. Evidently, Roy Cohn’s anti-communist braggadocio and tough rhetoric towards the ailments plaguing America had resonated with a number of people, giving him a Republican Congress to work with as well. Regardless of the post-mortems, on a cold January morning in Washington, with a hand on the Bible - though Cohn was Jewish, he knew the importance of performance - and a simple oath, Roy Cohn was the 40th President of the United States. Though his inaugural address was hardly long-winded, it contained one notable quotation that seemed cast to define his presidency, an aping of Milton Friedman: “what we do may not always be universally popular, but when it comes to restoring our strength, building our prosperity, and protecting our freedoms, I know that there is no alternative way.”

That air of inevitability seemed even more potent when Roy Cohn got to work. The administration was quickly staffed with a veritable who’s who of right-wing figures, from the combative former Ambassador Anna Chennault as Secretary of State to even the inflexibly pro-business former Illinois Governor Donald Rumsfeld as Secretary of Labor. It rang true again when Speaker Obenshain and Senate Majority Leader Nixon stage-managed the quick passage of the Latta-Dole Act, or more simply the Tax Reform Act of 1989. The proposal, a mainstay of right-wing circles in Congress lended new legitimacy, effectively took a knife to the federal budgeting process. While it did significantly lower federal taxation and defunded a number of programs, the most notable provisions related to special projects. The torrent of federal funds that went into southern communities, part of a short-term goal to get Democratic priorities on other issues past the new crop of populists replacing the old conservatives and a long-term goal to shift the regional economy to more sustainable industry, ended in an instant as Cohn preached a “new era of government within its means.” Most controversial with southern representatives was the withdrawal of oil and coal supports effective January 1, 1990. Within a matter of weeks, the inflated oil market collapsed, beginning the regional depression that the previous administration had been working to avert. While this ensured that Roy Cohn would never be forgiven in the Gulf Coast, elsewhere the decision saw sighs of relief as gas prices plummeted to their lowest in years.

The economic situation had two heads, in the minds of the administration, and the second was inflation. The logic used by Republicans was simple: due to the volatility of the economic system after the Camp David Agreement and the Arabian Shock, inflation had been driven to a breaking point, only made worse by the federal government’s high spending to locally mitigate the downturn. Secretary of the Treasury Alan Greenspan - a monetarist icon in his own right and, combined with John Kenneth Galbraith, responsible for the increasing visibility of the Department of the Treasury as a public-facing spokesman for federal economic policy - made clear that he viewed this as a persistent cause of ever-increasing inflation rates through the 1980s, and that he fully intended to bring this under control. So came dizzying Federal Reserve interest rate hikes at the Treasury’s implicit direction, constricting the money supply and setting off a quick and brutal recession even as inflation began to drop.

This did not sit well with organized labor. The inflationary environment had also hurt wage growth, and it was only skillful mediation by the Collins administration - based on their eternal motto of “if everyone is equally unhappy, it’s probably a good compromise” - that stopped serious strikes from plaguing the nation, apart from one brief coal miners’ strike in 1983 that was quickly resolved. Now, with the decidedly middling economy of the late 1980s kicked into outright recession and the government not determined to stave off strikes by any means necessary, it was inevitable that something would give. That something, as it seemed, was the result of the breakdown of negotiations between the Big Three auto companies and the UAW. As Ray Majerus led an unprecedentedly large strike across the industrial Midwest, it seemed that the already-poor economy would suffer even more as projections shaped up for the most expensive strike in American history.

Cohn shocked the press when he took to the South Lawn, flanked by Attorney General Bennett and Secretary Rumsfeld, to announce to them that he would not be tolerating this kind of “recklessness.” Instead, the sheer scale of the economic damage caused by this strike constituted a national emergency, and he would be invoking the Taft-Hartley Act to send the strikers back to work. Images of tense standoffs between stone-faced auto workers and furious officers graced the front pages, but Cohn remained defiant in his enforcement even as the calls against him grew louder from the halls of Congress and union supporters in regional state governments. In one notable instance, the administration assumed control of the Wisconsin National Guard to order them towards strikebreaking activities after Governor Ed Garvey, a former NFLPA lawyer, blatantly refused to comply.

This was, of course, all deeply controversial, and approval of the Cohn administration quickly began to slide into the gutter. Though the economy was by no means vibrant before he took office, “Greenspanomics” had effectively traded an inflationary spiral for a recession, and stories of union men scuffling with cops were hardly befitting a nation in renewal like he had promised. Roy Cohn was never one to hide from the cameras, not even in bad times, but even so he still took the nadir of the situation as the best time to go abroad. A visit to Europe helped somewhat as Cohn met with his ideological compatriots in the “Three Princes” - referring to men like France’s President Michel Poniatowski, Sweden’s Prime Minister Carl Bildt, and the giant of the Italian Second Republic Edgardo Sogno, all figures deeply evocative of the western world’s right-wing shift in the 1980s - and reaffirmed NATO commitments. A summit with Valentina Tereshkova in Vienna was famously icy, with Cohn publicly needling the Soviet leader on a host of internal issues. But, as the midterms rolled around and the Democrats reclaimed the House even as the Senate remained stubbornly out of reach, it wouldn’t even draw the most attention. That dubious honor would go to Iberia.

Spain had long been described as “the perfect dictatorship,” as Peru’s liberalizing President Mario Vargas Llosa put it. In a sense, it was. Francisco Franco had been a fascist without the Axis and a regent without a king. He had consolidated Spanish political life behind him, but yet avoided much of the hatred due to his hardline anti-communism and the “Spanish miracle” of the 1960s. But not all was well in a caudillo’s paradise. Franco himself privately suffered from Parkinson’s disease, and the Alfonsist-Carlist conflict over who would take the throne once his eternal regency ended was as of yet unresolved. As the royalist spat simmered and Franco knew his health faded, he had to make a choice. Normally, he would have chosen the Alfonsists, but the head of their household, Don Juan, was a closet liberal who Franco feared would undermine his rule. His son would have been perfect, but Juan Carlos had tragically gone missing after a rip current dragged out to sea while swimming with a woman who, incidentally, was not his wife. With no sons left under Don Juan’s name, Franco was forced to turn elsewhere.

Nobody expected Otto von Habsburg, but in hindsight it made sense. With the Carlists a joke after Prince Carlos Hugo had endorsed Titoist socialism and the only Alfonist option unpalatable, Franco’s personal friend in the fiercely anti-communist Habsburg prince was his best option. The choice was deeply frustrating to many Spanish monarchists, whose expectation had been for the new king to have come from Spain at least. Otto’s charm offensive throughout state-run media helped mollify concerns somewhat, as did mentions of his longest residence as a stateless man being within Spain, but even so upon Franco’s passing King Otto was still not particularly beloved by the populace. But he persisted nonetheless. His new Prime Minister - Luis Carrero Blanco, Franco’s right hand man - broadly continued the reforms toward pluralism, forming a sort of dominant one-party state with theoretical opposition and more civil liberties than Franco’s peak. Then Blanco passed in 1984, and a brief succession struggle within the party saw Carlos Arias Navarro’s appointment to the Prime Ministership. Nicknamed “Old Pusillanimous” by many, Arias was a supposedly reformed hardliner, one who’d simply carry on the functions of the state as it were.

Come 1990, the miracle had long since run dry, and instead of the leadership of Francoists with a devoted following there was a man viewed as a sniveling butcher, propped up by an illegitimate foreign king. Spaniards had well and truly had enough. A Catalan anarchist riot saw hundreds dead in the streets when authorities cracked down, sparking outrage throughout the country. A speech by King Otto in Madrid with Arias by his side aimed at calming the situation saw one brave soul shout over a pause in the speech, which then led to a cavalcade of boos, only exacerbated by Arias’ squeamish expression. The people of Spain began to flood the streets.

In the immediate hours after the revolution began, King Otto managed to flee to Switzerland, where his residence would become a controversy for future Spanish governments. The situation grew dire when Alfonso Armada, a hardline Francoist opposed to Arias from the right, seized control of Madrid and pledged no mercy for the dissenters. Ad-hoc Catalan and Basque separatist governments made a run for it, and as Armada’s forces were brutal but ineffective in resisting the people, the rest of the west watched in horror. The Cohn administration had a different concern, one of ensuring that the chaos wouldn’t end in some sort of anarchist or communist-aligned resolution. After weeks of haggling, eventually all sides involved were able to be brought to Venezuela as guests of President Oswaldo Álvarez Paz. The US-led negotiations that became the Caracas Accords effectively sold out the quasi-independent Catalan and Basque republics who had been closest to the fire as Spain burned, but many analysts credit the hard-charging style of Secretary Chennault for allowing Íñigo Cavero to rise to the Spanish presidency, even if critics allege that electioneering a la Italy in 1948 stopped the PSOE from taking power until the new millennium and “de-Francoization” remains incomplete to this day.

The Spanish crisis fundamentally changed the Cohn administration’s outlook as well. The collapse of one of the worst offenders in the western bloc was propaganda gold for the Soviets, nevermind the quick takeover of the Spanish Sahara - now proclaimed the SADR - by the Polisario Front. More than that, though, many in Cohn’s inner circle saw this as one of the biggest failures of American operations in the Cold War, leaping to conclusions that the Soviets were behind it and that it was only last-minute diplomatic intervention that stopped a full socialist takeover. If Francoism was not invulnerable, much weaker anti-communist regimes were not either. So - not that Cohn or his staff needed much incentive - a new Cold War policy was adopted entirely. Before, it was split between Democratic internationalist “victory through debate” and Republican pragmatic hawkishness. Thomas Kuchel was perhaps the best example of the latter. Though he enforced his “Light Touch Policy” in Latin America and Europe, preferring subtle meddling like that of Allende’s impeachment and electoral interference, in Asia it was another story. Indonesia’s Abdul Haris Nasution overthrew Sukarno in a quick and bloody coup designed to prevent PKI power (and still resulted in countless crimes against suspected PKI members), Cambodia’s Norodom Sihanouk survived dozens of attempts on his life with only Lon Nol’s attempted coup coming particularly close, and Thailand’s brief experiment with constitutional democracy fell by the wayside with a military intervention against mass demonstration, and on it went through the 1970s. So far, it had generally worked, with these repressive distant allies seemingly containing communism.

It’s unclear specifically when the Cohn administration developed its new intelligence policy. By 1991, Director of Central Intelligence John K. Singlaub was promoted to cabinet rank, a position that was maintained for the DCI in successive administrations. A somewhat-redacted document known simply as the “Kirkpatrick Memo” - named for the meeting taking place at the home of the then Virginia Senator - was leaked by journalist Gary Webb years later, in which records of a discussion between senior administration officials laid out the shift in policy. Within it, they effectively discussed a massive expansion of “Gladio-style programs” throughout shaky American allies using private organizations and drifting anti-communist forces, many of whom were “German, Italian, and Spanish gentlemen.” Whatever the case, the fledgling Western Goals Institute, a think tank founded in 1982 with such figures on its board of directors as Professor Newton L. Gingrich, Dr. Edward Teller, and General Daniel O. Graham, became incredibly closely tied to the administration. In practice, the WGI was little more than a private intelligence organization, funded by right-wing billionaires like Edgar Prince and used to coordinate more unsavory operations.

This first came into practice most effectively in South Africa. In accordance with the Anti-Apartheid Act of 1980, the South African government was officially under embargo by the United States, making support to the apartheid regime a political non-starter. However, when Joe Slovo looked like he had achieved government, WGI-funded ex-Rhodesian troops were among those aiding in Magnus Malan’s overthrow of the government and execution of Slovo. As Chris Hani’s SACP launched a general revolt against the dictator, the United States joined in in the condemnation of Malan’s regime at the United Nations even as they smuggled funding and anti-communist filibusters to help the Malan government and the various petty right-wing ex-bantustan warlords fighting the SACP from kwaZulu to Namibia to Bophuthatswana. All around the world, purveyors of fascist atrocity found new homes as tentative allies in the battle against communism.

Most Americans had no way of noticing the WGI or, even if they did, had little reason to care about the reports of exiled Italian neofascist terrorists fighting a guerrilla war against the SACP or Falangist exiles giving “counter-insurgency training” to Atnafu Abate’s Christian chauvinist Ethiopian government or even the reviled Nazi criminal Klaus Barbie taking refuge in Saigon (longtime dictator Nguyễn Cao Kỳ was infamously an admirer of Adolf Hitler[2]). Some took notice when Edgardo Sogno resigned office amidst mass demonstration, leaving the erstwhile political manipulator and late convert to the Second Republic Giulio Andreotti to clean up the mess as the new president, but even this was only mildly notable in America. Internationally, once the Spanish situation was resolved, the biggest concern was on China. The “three Hus,” a bloc led by Chairman Hu Yaobang, had undergone a number of liberalizing reforms, and this did not sit well with a number of old hardliners. More freedom to express dissent combined with the fledgling Usenet had made state suppression far more difficult, and Hu’s reform towards the rule of law was the last straw for many hardline Maoists in the PLA. On July 17th, 1991, tanks rolled into Beijing as the Central Committee held a forced vote to oust Hu and replace him with Mao Yuanxin, the leader of the hardliner faction and orchestrator of the coup. The idea of a new Chairman Mao was concerning to many in the west to say the least, especially when he made clear his intent to - in a subtle jab to Moscow’s economic reforms and increasing pragmatism - support the people’s revolution throughout the Third World. As it turned out, Mao Yuanxin’s China would be a significant headache for both Washington and Moscow in the years following, especially as Prime Minister David Owen over in London immediately withdrew from negotiations with the Hu government for the handover of Hong Kong.

Even with that distraction, Americans were growing more confident. Far from the low point of 1989-1990 for Roy Cohn, by late 1991 the recession was clearly not just ending but developing into a boom. Forced into a somber combativeness by circumstance, now Roy Cohn could flaunt himself before the nation, proof that “no alternative way” was correct and that his way had brought much-needed stability back. Focus for the policy debate was naturally able to shift to other things. Cohn got his first Supreme Court nomination with the retirement of William Brennan, replacing him with the Ninth Circuit’s rigidly right-wing Edwin Meese. Educational reform came once again with the Kennedy-Prince bill, an ostensibly bipartisan proposal named for Democratic Senator Robert F. Kennedy and Republican Representative Betsy Prince, pushed for the longstanding goals of countless religious and conservative educational groups in supporting private schools, especially religious schools, a cause for the intensely Catholic Kennedy. Though critics lambasted the bill for being tacitly supportive of the practice of “Jim Crow academies” in the south - often-religious private schools designed around affluent white suburbanites’ desires to keep their kids out of now-integrated public schools - in practice it was a major victory for the conservative movement that had long attacked underfunded public schools as being detrimental to educational outcomes.

The largest debate came with crime. Crime rates had been steadily increasing since 1976, with many badly-hit cities seeing a surge in gang violence and drug crimes. Increasing heroin smuggling from Southeast Asia - especially South Vietnam, where the trade had become a lucrative industry - had also led to a major boom in drug use on the West Coast first, gradually spreading throughout the country, especially in places with high layoffs. During the 1989-1990 recession, this had grown to a fever pitch, and the administration knew something had to be done. Thus the Drug & Violent Crimes Act of 1991, or simply the 1991 Crime Bill, was born. It made charges towards drug crimes and gang violence far more severe, expanded federal death penalty usage, increased funding for prison creation and police hiring, and consolidated previous drug laws - from the turn of the century to the Gilligan administration - into one federal drug classification program under the Department of Justice’s Office of Drug Enforcement. Opiate enforcement was, naturally, given the highest enforcement, and President Cohn declared that “we will remove this scourge of crime and addiction from our society” from the Oval Office.

But there was no time for more. 1992 had come around, and though Roy Cohn’s popularity had picked up as the economy did, Democrats’ antipathy towards the man had hardly faded. He had so neatly picked fights with so many core Democratic constituencies such that they were all practically begging for the opportunity to run against him. Furthermore, following Jack Gilligan’s effective takeover of the DNC, reforms had been ensured to create a new primary process, one that would ensure some democratic legitimacy while still retaining party power. The end compromise was one where half of the convention delegates would be decided by the voters of the Democratic Party, with each state receiving a number of delegates and presidential primaries to be held on a single unified day on the first Tuesday of May. That way, if there were only one real candidate, the nomination would be all but assured to them. This new system had not been used in actuality through the 80s, as Gilligan, Collins, and Mondale all remained unchallenged. Come 1992, half a dozen candidates all threw their hats into the ring, and the vote confirmed the party leaders’ worst fears as to what letting the membership take control might look like.

*****​

Tom Hayden knew he was this close to the top, but something didn’t quite sit right. He had won the primary resoundingly - he should know, he had been in the room negotiating the new system, and he knew that the proportional system was really quite powerful. While other candidates buzzed around regionally, hoping to take a solid block of delegates to haggle with, Hayden announced early in 1991 to a roaring crowd at the SDS’ annual convention, then embarked on a whirlwind fifty-state tour. He knew that you didn’t need to win to be powerful, just have a good enough chunk of the vote to peel things off.

It looked like it had worked, at first. He had taken a majority of the people’s choice, winning big in his native Great Lakes - though he had contemplated a move to California, in the end a run for Congress in a new district firmly centered on the University of Michigan seemed just right for him - and through the northeast and west coasts. It wasn’t just there, too. He’d peeled a couple of delegates here in North Carolina, a couple there in Missouri - no doubt the result of campaigning hard towards the colleges and new manufacturing communities. Being in politics in Michigan helped you make union connections, after all.

But there was still a problem. The convention floor down in Houston seemed unhappy with the idea of Tom Hayden as their frontrunner. He’d come to expect that, as the party didn’t tend to appreciate the radicals, even if the youth wing made Jack Gilligan happen. He thought that voting on principle was the whole reason the good people of Michigan had sent him to the Senate back in ‘78, but evidently the party still had some bones to pick.

Next to Tom, Joe Trippi had been madly scribbling the delegate counts on his notepad, and each one up to the current - lucky ballot number 7 - showed the same picture. Tom Hayden was stubbornly in front, yet still three hundred and thirty-seven delegates short. The real shuffling was down below him.

First they had tried to rally behind the popular-vote runner-up, Governor Bob Casey. Casey was reliable, they thought. A good-old-boy with a shtick for “activist government” in Pennsylvania, one who’d expanded upon popular federal programs on the state level. But Casey was resolutely opposed to abortion as a bit of a Kennedyite, and RFK had ruffled a lot of feathers with social liberals. The Womens’ Caucus, as Bella Abzug called her folks, just wasn’t willing to get behind him.

So it was that, on the second ballot, Casey’s support collapsed and spread out. A good chunk found its way to Missouri’s Tom Eagleton, another nice centrist in the Catholic machinery who had been an early frontrunner before collapsing. Eagleton had tried to duck the abortion issue, so, the party reasoned, he must be more palatable to the feminists and activists. But his attempt at addressing the convention was abruptly cut short by a rambling, confused mess of a speech. Tom Hayden knew he was drunk, the party knew he was drunk, but nobody was ever going to say anything. It’d ruin the poor man’s career. More importantly, it’d embarrass them all.

So, from ballots three through five, Trippi’s map showed a - what’s that word the kids liked - a clusterfuck. Delegates zigged and zagged from Eagleton to any number of low-level primary rivals. One odd movement on ballot five saw an attempt to draft Kathleen Gilligan Clinton, even. Though she was gracious to the floor, she made clear “this is not my time to run for office.”

The majority went to Zell Miller, though. Zell was a colleague of Tom’s in the Senate, one from Georgia. He was a good enough man, pretty resolutely liberal on economic issues but a bit more to the center on the cultural flashpoints. Pretty tough on crime, too. Looked good for dealing with Roy Cohn, who gleefully tied the crime rates to the past twelve years of Democrats at every chance. On ballot six, Miller actually overtook Hayden, though he remained stubbornly short. His guys Ham Jordan and James Carville had adopted a wait-and-see approach, holding their southern delegates that netted them third in the primaries. Then, after it was clear the convention was desperate to stop Hayden, they muscled their way to the podium.

“I know what Roy Cohn means when he says it's best for children to have two parents. You bet it is! And it would be nice for them to have trust funds, too. We can't all be born rich and handsome and lucky. And that's why we have a Democratic Party. My family would still be isolated and destitute if we had not had F.D.R.'s Democratic brand of government. I made it because Franklin Delano Roosevelt energized this nation. I made it because Harry Truman fought for working families like mine. I made it because Adlai Stevenson and Bill Fulbright brought their rising standards of honor and integrity to our time. I made it because Jack Gilligan, God rest his soul, knew it was time to lift all of us up. And I made it because a woman with whom I served in the Senate, a woman named Martha Layne Collins, brought good values and common decency to public service.”

The delegates ate it up - Hayden could hear the cheers from the room he and Trippi were camped out in. On ballot six, Miller even overtook Hayden, though he still remained eighty-six short. But before they could rush out to fight the movement, in came Midge Costanza, the veteran Democratic activist turned floor leader for Team Tom who had seemingly sprinted all the way there.

“Abzug’s with us. She’s-” upon which Costanza took a deep breath “-she’s going to swing Pat Schroeder’s delegates behind us. The Mississippians are mad, too - some old fight between Miller and Finch” - referring to the prickly Mississippi Senator whose near-fatal heart attack had likely killed his presidential ambitions - “that the spiteful bastard hasn’t forgiven. They’re willing to talk.”

Hayden couldn’t help but smile. “Let’s go see what Cliff wants.”

*****​

Though his nomination was shaky and deeply embarrassing, taking seven ballots and forcing his acceptance speech to the next day, Tom Hayden had no intention of just rolling over. Though the polls showed him at a major deficit compared to the President, Joe Trippi thought that micro-targeting small pockets of disaffected Americans could work to build that revolution Trippi liked to talk about. Cohn had, after all, seemingly targeted Democratic communities with almost surgical precision - or at least not minded their pain. This, of course, was a divide-and-conquer strategy from Cohn, who saw the tensions in the opposition and figured he could get them all killing each other to get the chance to go against him, a strategy vindicated by eight ballots.

Regardless, Hayden campaigned fervently to bring it back together. Union leadership helped keep the lights on in the Midwestern parts of the campaign, especially as the UAW’s fight continued. Campaigning to the urban cores saw some success - though younger professionals tended towards Cohn, many “over-policed” minority communities impacted by the crime bill welcomed Hayden’s preaching of more community-based solutions. A well-publicized meeting with UFW leadership saw harsh commentary from conservative allies in the press, but it helped to galvanize Chicano voters behind this oddity of a candidate. Every chance he could, Tom Hayden got himself in front of the public, suit jacket off and an earnest smile plastered across his face, trying his best to look like the platonic ideal of a Hollywood underdog candidate.

The focus changed thanks to the running mate. Senator William Allain seemed an inspired pick to win back the south in recession, even if the junior Mississippi Senator was a peace offering to swing Mississippi’s delegates behind Hayden. But of course, Roger Stone had done some good old fashioned skullduggery and hired informants to act as both candidates’ drivers. While they got nothing on Hayden from this, they ended up catching photos of Allain meeting up with multiple Black transgender prostitutes, and with it they knew they had struck gold. A package of evidence of Allain’s solicitation anonymously found its way to the New York Post, chosen specifically because the tabloids wouldn’t resist a story like this. Sure enough, it became national news overnight, spreading throughout the Murdoch empire and forcing reporting from the older established media as well. The scandal dominated the race for days, and though Allain offered to leave the ticket, Hayden blatantly refused. As he memorably put it in an interview, “personal indiscretions” should have no bearing on whether someone can be our vice president. The whole saga was deeply embarrassing, and Cohn and his surrogates largely used it to point to the Democrats’ ineptitude as well as subtle jabs at Hayden’s “radicalism” when it came to passing civil rights protections for gay Americans. “The guy’s a joke!” shouted Cohn at every opportunity, “and not a funny one either!” Smoothly-made Cohn ads pointed to the nation’s rejuvenation, one talking about the soaring economic growth and another representing a communist bloc on the march and Cohn standing in their way. Two debates ended in a strong Cohn victory, the incumbent having lost none of his fighting edge and Hayden seeming whiny in his attempts to fight the smears. In the end, not even sidelining Allain and a vigorous campaign schedule were enough to change the narrative that the floundering Hayden campaign was a radical mess that couldn’t even keep its own house in order.

​

The landslide’s impact on the Democratic psyche couldn’t be overstated. Not only had Tom Hayden lost all but the most ardently Democratic states, he had effectively lost everything except the most economically hard-hit oil-and-coal parts of the “solid south” and the heavily unionized upper Midwest. As it seemed, the racial and cultural overtones of the Allain scandal had deeply damaged Democratic turnout in the white south (apart from Mississippi, which was more annoyed about the slander towards a popular senator). Illinois and Hawaii flipping was bad, but the fact that Roy Cohn had carried Alabama and Arkansas off the backs of the size of his landslide and white suburbanites, never mind having come within one percent of doing the same in Tennessee, was a cause for alarm. The Democrats figured they had some soul-searching to do.

Regardless of the state of the opposition, Roy Cohn had been returned to office, with a narrow Republican Congress behind him once more. The aftershocks of the 1992 race had come to the forefront though - the homophobic rhetoric perpetuated by Republican candidates throughout the election had come home to roost. Early in 1993, California Representative William Dannemeyer first proposed the Protection of American Values Act, a bill aimed at outlawing the anti-discrimination statutes passed on the state and local level for Gender and Sexual Minority groups (GSMs or GSM groups, more commonly). At first, the bill was treated as an oddity, born straight from the Republican Study Committee’s membership. Then Vice President Hank Grover, the aging Texan who had cut his national political teeth in railing against Walter Jenkins’ time at the YMCA, offered a throaty endorsement of the legislation. Soon enough, Richard Nixon, the aging Senate Majority Leader, decided to introduce the Senate version of PAVA, and within a matter of weeks the question of support for PAVA was asked to President Cohn in a press conference. Cohn simply responded “absolutely.” Now with its supporters emboldened, Cohn was given the chance to sign such a bill in a number of weeks, with some bipartisan backing even as more culturally centrist Democrats lambasted the violation of states’ rights.

Roy Cohn’s public homophobia is one of the more complicated aspects of his public career. During the 1990s, sodomy laws remained enforced in a number of states, though homosexual conduct had been decriminalized by nearly as many. Same-sex marriage had been largely halted in Baker v. Nelson in 1971, with the Supreme Court’s finding that restricting marriage licenses to opposite-sex couples only is not in conflict with the Constitution and does not require justification, and as such no states had permitted anything of the sort. Gay individuals were barred from military service, and California had even banned them from being teachers, a rule emulated by a handful of states. PAVA was perhaps the greatest step against GSM rights on the national level, and truly it was the last step that could be taken to halt the barest sign of momentum towards gay rights. This all came in conflict with missing time in evening schedules, rendezvous in Roy Cohn’s Senate office, and the reports of a handful of interns with the White House. By all accounts, despite all of this, Roy Cohn was gay.

Of course, none of this was known during his term. He had been unmarried in the White House, which raised some eyebrows, but he had clearly publicly had relationships with women during his time in the Senate. He had been quite clear in flaunting his girlfriends in front of the cameras as he walked down the streets of Manhattan, even. The closest the somewhat-open secret came to public attention was Senator Fritz Hollings memorably calling him “that little queer gentleman from B’nai B’rith” during floor debate in 1982, a remark which was stricken from the record after Cohn struck Hollings. That sort of violent reaction to a potent mix of antisemitism and homophobia towards Cohn seemed as much of a shut-down as any.

Reports of Cohn’s sexuality wouldn’t come up publicly until years later. A thoroughly-sourced biography interviewing multiple young men who interned in the White House as well as numerous junior staffers who had happened upon Cohn in an indecent moment written in 2013, provided the clearest window into Roy Cohn the intensely closeted yet informally known homosexual. The book ignited a firestorm, naturally, though Cohn was not there to shout “ROY COHN IS NOTTA QUEEUH!” as he did to Fritz Hollings. During an interview after the book’s release, Roger Stone offered up the explanation that "Roy was not gay. He was a man who liked having sex with men. Gays were weak, effeminate." Stone's statement could be the basis of an entire sociological study on its own, but it further points to one core truth: Roy Cohn's relationship with his own homosexuality was defined by the intense machismo and bigotry of the spaces he frequented politically and socially. He hated the idea of being identified as gay even though he was homosexual, and this often manifested itself in an intense public-facing homophobia, whether that be jabs at his opponents’ masculinity or even signing PAVA.

Regardless of Roy Cohn’s personal life, the world carried on. Roy Cohn got his second and final Supreme Court Justice when Cyrus Vance tearfully announced his diagnosis with Alzheimer’s disease, replacing him with the conservative D.C. Circuit Judge J. Michael Luttig. Massive deregulatory packages, aimed at everything from the airlines to the banking industry, sailed through Congress as a further part of Cohn’s economic liberalizations. A second round of crime legislation, mostly aimed at police training and hiring as well as further crackdowns on heroin use, passed with flying colors, especially with state-level administration compromises introduced by some Democrats. Labor unrest in the Great Lakes began to die down, with the UAW having suffered greatly and union influence seemingly cowed. An attempted welfare reform package by Cohn that would have gutted Medicare and Social Security as they stood collapsed in the face of major public opposition and contributed heavily to the loss of both houses of Congress in 1994. Life seemed to be going on as normal.

Life was nowhere near normal in the Middle East. Though the Arabian warlordism had largely ended in 1991 with the unification of various Sahwa - meaning Awakening - causes behind the State of the Two Mosques (often referred to by an anglicization of its Arabic name, Harayman), a faction ironically funded by billionaires like Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden whose corrupt dominance over the Saudis drove the nation to revolution in the first place. Its leader, Safar al-Hawali, was a diehard fundamentalist who largely wished to isolate Harayman from the western world and pursue a spiritual revival. Though he would not be declared Grand Mufti until 1999, after the Grand Mufti Abd al-Aziz ibn Baz passed, his control was largely uncontested even behind the old man. The same could not be said for within the Middle East, where the new state was intent on flexing its muscles - both against the more “culturally Islamic” secular Nasserist states and, much more importantly, Israel.

Israel had been engaged in something of a political spiral ever since it became a rogue state. The people of Israel had largely felt under siege, with their own national ability to defend themselves in a more apocalyptic fashion as the only thing standing between them and being overrun. Meir Kahane, a fanatical rabbi from Brooklyn who had immigrated in 1968, had consistently railed against this. In the wake of the most recent war, despite Israel’s victory most in the country did not feel victorious, and Kahane exploited this to great success. His new Kach party won him a seat in the Knesset in the wake of the war, horrifying onlookers but only gaining him popularity. His speeches were often boycotted in the Knesset, but his popularity only grew with every vitriolic comment against him by nearby Arab governments and every time he was seen aiding settlements in the West Bank. A sort of push-and-pull effect took hold, where Kach gained seats every election, creating more international condemnation, which in turn only increased their popularity. By 1991, Israel was ruled by an emergency anti-Kach coalition led by Gahal’s Ezer Weizman, but as the coalition collapsed the election looked more and more likely to be Kahane’s rise to power.

And rise Kahane did. After an attempt to invalidate his victory by the incumbents, a major march by Kach supporters on Tel Aviv ended up seeing them relent. His ascent to the Prime Ministership quickly saw harsh condemnation as occupation of the West Bank turned into outright attempts at colonization. Talk of “voluntary emigration” by Palestinians that was quite forced in practice was scuttled as Israel’s neighbors all shut their borders, publicly condemning Kahane’s rhetoric but privately not wishing to deal with the headache that was the PLO as Jordan had until their expulsion in 1971. Instead, Kahane’s “relocation” of West Bank residents to allow Israeli settlements simply saw people deported to other contained regions of Israel, most notably the walled-off Gaza Strip. The press was bent to Kahane’s will, political opponents were often harassed by authorities, and opponents of Kach were often branded “Hellenists” in a reference to Jews who assimilated into Alexander the Great’s empire that Kahane was quite fond of using.

For the US’ part, the government had grown to increasingly disapprove of Israel. The Cohn administration actually revoked Kahane’s American citizenship upon his election to the Prime Ministership. Of course, in private it was different. Director Singlaub frequently sent lower-level CIA emissaries to meet with Kahane’s government, as well as routinely interfering in the Egyptian nuclear program. This was not done out of any particular love for Israel - Cohn was not fond of mentioning his Jewish heritage - but rather a desire to see the Soviet-aligned Arab socialists torn down a peg. Notably, some conservative Orthodox Jewish communities, especially “refusenik” emigres from the Soviet Union permitted entry to the United States via agreement between Collins and Tereshkova, often vocally supported Kahane and raised money within their communities to support Kahanist yeshivas.

It seemed inevitable, under these circumstances, that conflict would come to the Middle East. Even so, in 1993, when Kahane announced a “special operation” in southern Lebanon to clear out the PLO camps, it shocked international observers. Even so, Lebanon had been in the midst of a decade-long civil war, and there was little capacity for factions intending to resist Israel’s incoming massacres. It was more shocking when, under the pretense of aiding the Maronites, IDF forces marched on Beirut, effectively occupying most of Lebanon with the aid of the Phalange. Scuffles with Syrian forces aiding the Amal Movement saw tensions growing between the two countries throughout the end of 1993. The revelation that December that Alois Brunner, Adolf Eichmann’s right-hand man, was a significant advisor to Akram al-Hawrani’s government in Syria pushed the situation past the brink. Demands that Brunner be handed over to Tel Aviv to face justice were rejected and Brunner’s presence denied, further infuriating Israel. The propaganda coup was unrivaled for Kahane, and as public support for war grew under Kahane’s co-opting of “NEVER AGAIN,” come the New Year Israeli troops began to flood across the Syrian border. Within days, Egypt, Iraq, and Jordan had similarly declared war on Israel.

Predictably, the Great Powers did not appreciate this. The Middle East was always a delicate balance, one where the slightest slip meant nuclear war, and all involved knew it. Here was the sole nuclear-armed state pursuing an aggressive strategy of seeming territorial conquest, only further confirmed when Kahane’s rhetoric began incorporating the phrase Eretz Israel HaShlema - Greater Israel. To talk of Israel from the Sinai to the Euphrates was, to the outside world, to talk of inching towards armageddon.

*****​

“It’s a-it’s a bitch, Yevgeny.” These were the first words out of Jeb Bush’s mouth, looking at the dour Russian in front of him. To this the noise out of Yevgeny Primakov’s noise was clearly one of assent, but it also very much said get on with it.

The American United Nations Ambassador only continued. “My government’s, well-my government’s prepared to offer… take a look at this. We want to make sure that this situation in the Middle East, just terrible, gets handled just as much as anyone else.” Bush slid a file of papers over across the table.

Primakov leafed through the papers. “This is very intricate, Mr. Bush. If we were to do this, it would be unprecedented.” To this, Primakov arched an eyebrow. “We would need some assurance.”

“Of-of course!” Bush practically rushed out. He genuinely hadn’t expected it to be that easy.

“Many people in our government do not trust your president. While I am not among the hardliners, and my president sent me precisely because she knows this, plenty of members of our Central Committee would be furious if it seemed we were joining any sort of force like that of Korea. Or Congo.”

Bush had been briefed on this. He might have been new at the United Nations, but he had been told what to expect. “Naturally. We’ll have to, well, we’ll have to set some clear guidelines for this. The protection force should mostly be focused on stopping Kahane from killing every Arab in the Levant and the Arabs from destroying Israel.”

Primakov simply nodded once again.

*****​

The UN’s vote to form the UN Protection Force (UNPROFOR) to deploy for peacekeeping purposes in the Middle East was a turning point in the Cold War. Though many of the forces were European, at least on paper American and Soviet forces had effectively banded together to deal with the situation in the Middle East, signaling a form of cooperation unseen since Yalta. President Cohn even hosted President Tereshkova in Washington to hold a joint summit on the matter, an unusual step given their icy relationship at the beginning of his term. Additionally, sanctions on Israel conditional on regime change were agreed to by both powers, setting the stage for Kahane’s effective isolation from global affairs - a move an increasingly-erratic Kahane responded to by withdrawing from the UN altogether.

By 1995, the so-called Blue Helmets had deployed to the Middle East, staging in Turkey, Jordan, Iran, and Iraq, aimed mostly at halting any sort of genocide. Their arrival was none too soon, either - reports of horrendous war crimes by IDF soldiers and chemical weapons usage by Arab forces permeated the entire conflict. Israeli soldiers had been practically leveling entire villages, and Arab forces had been cleansing Kurdish communities as well once Israeli armaments seemed to keep ending up with Kurdish separatist groups. Quickly, UNPROFOR found themselves creating unexpected “safe zones” throughout Kurdish territory as well as near more active zones of combat as expected. Though UNPROFOR was stretched thin, its presence at all provided a significant boost and aid to countless refugees created by the conflict.

As 1995’s summer ended, Israel was at its breaking point. The IDF had long been perceived as the invincible army of the Middle East, but all-out war against four Arab armies had pushed them to the brink. Even as Kahane’s army made up for losses with sheer brutality, the overextension of occupying the Sinai, the West Bank, Lebanon, and a large portion of Syria was simply too much for even a supposedly-invincible army to maintain. A brutal counteroffensive through the fall saw Israel effectively pushed back to the Syrian border and out of the Sinai by Egypt, and from there troops crossed the Golan Heights to enter Israeli territory. Meir Kahane felt the fury course through him in Tel Aviv.

All the people of Damascus felt was fire and death.

For one moment, the war seemed perfectly still. Nuclear weapons had been used in anger only once, against Japan. Now it seemed the taboo was broken by a state too desperate to worry about mutually assured destruction. Kahane made clear that he would do so again to protect his people, to ensure that it could never happen again to them. All was quiet. But no amount of overwhelming force could stop the war. The United States simply moved the DEFCON level up to DEFCON Two, a clear sign of what they thought Kahane might cause. Soviet nuclear readiness was less subtle but all too noticeable. All Kahane had done was cut off any prayer of negotiation, any hope of mercy. UNPROFOR worked hard to prevent retaliatory massacres in Israeli territory, but they were tragically unsuccessful. Too many people had known someone in Damascus, and too many knew they’d be next.

In the end, it wasn’t the Syrians, or the Egyptians, or the Jordanians, or even the Palestinians who ended Meir Kahane’s rule. It was the Israelis themselves. Israelis saw their home invaded, saw that the war was on Kahane’s vainglorious irredentism no matter how much it was cloaked in the specter of the Shoah, whose wartime powers were crushing their freedoms as much as anything. Protests in Jerusalem, that holiest of cities, saw even some semblance of unity with the Palestinian residents of the city in opposition to all of their deaths. The people began to march on Tel Aviv as well, taking over the Knesset to make their voices heard. In the end, Meir Kahane resigned quietly and tried in vain to flee, but it was no use as he was quickly detained and eventually extradited to The Hague to stand trial.

The part of the United Nations was now not only to rebuild, but to ensure that this would never happen again. To that end, not only did they have to prevent a total takeover of Israel, but they had to settle a lasting peace. A round-table summit on the matter in Jerusalem as a symbol of the new cooperation was difficult to say the least. The Americans were perhaps the strongest supporters of lenience towards Israel, much to the consternation of the Arab states and the Soviets. The latter seemed to view the 1948 partition as as good a place to start as any, but that was quickly treated as unacceptable by even the interim government of former Jerusalem Mayor and rock-solid democrat Teddy Kollek, despite his attempts towards reconciliation. Over the period of months, a complicated deal was eventually arrived at. Though the details of such are far too arcane to discuss in any short-form manner, in a broad territorial sense a Palestinian state comprising the West Bank and Gaza would be established. Sinai and the Golan Heights were to be returned to Egypt and Syria as well. Israel’s existence would be recognized as legitimate by the nations involved in the conflict - a clause that Egyptian President Boutros Boutros-Ghali had to fight heavily for with his Arab state compatriots - and Israeli aid would go directly towards rebuilding efforts in Damascus. Jerusalem’s administration would be joint between Israel and Palestine, with continuing UN oversight for the time being while the whole situation was put together. Even so, there would be no shortage of conflict in the Middle East, especially not as Israel recovered from and continued to grapple with the war’s place in the national psyche.

With the war in the Middle East behind them, all other issues seemed almost trivial to the Cohn administration. The war had taken up virtually an entire year, even if it was far-off to many Americans. As Roy Cohn marched towards leaving office, the face of the Cold War itself had changed. Despite his tough rhetoric, American-Soviet cooperation had continued, seemingly pivoting even closer to an end to the grand conflict that consumed so many lives and led to constant fear of nuclear war. Israel seemed the greatest sign of this, but this was further reflected in two areas - Korea and Albania.

North Korea had long been a powerhouse amongst Asia’s communists. When Kim Il-sung passed in 1979, O Jin-u seized power rather than let Kim’s dilettante heir Kim Jong-il take power. Marshall O had ruled much more traditionally as the “Asian Bulgaria” until his death in 1995, upon which the elder reformist Yon Hyong-muk had orchestrated a rise to power. Similarly, longtime military dictator of South Korea Kim Jae-gyu, who had taken power in a 1973 coup against the exuberant People’s Party Prime Minister Kim Dae-jung, finally acceded to democratic elections after a referendum on his constitution failed spectacularly. The new government of Lee Hoi-chang, elected in 1996 as both an anti-corruption reaction to the Kim years and an acknowledgement of the tacit support for many of Kim’s right-wing economic policies, saw the opportunity for dialogue with the North given Chairman Yon’s genuine overtures towards liberalization. For the first time, a nation divided by the Cold War seemed on the edge of potential reunification.

Albania was another story. Post-Hoxha leadership had attempted to largely maintain the status quo with limited economic reforms, but the sheer scale of Albanian poverty was too much to overcome. Criticism of the communist government spread quickly as the liberalizer Ramiz Ali took power in 1993, and though Ali did not wish to overthrow the order of things in Albania the public demonstrations quickly spiraled beyond his control. With revolution seeming inevitable, Ali quickly consented to the will of the people for democratic elections, the first of which were to be held in 1996. For the first time, a communist European state - if an isolated and particularly unreliable one to Moscow - was transitioning away from one-party rule, and the handling of Albania by the western bloc would define what a theoretical end to communism might look like in the first place.

Cohn had just over a year left on his term, and there was always more to do. Even as the “Cape Republic” collapsed and Magnus Malan was executed (contrary to popular belief, the SACP didn’t initially plan to put him to death for his crimes in the war, but as the scope of abuses by Cape troops towards civilian women, the intensely feminist Hani saw no other way), the Gaborone Accords negotiated by American mediators secured the independence of Namibia, kwaZulu, and Bophuthatswana from the new People’s Republic of South Africa. A series of talks with India on trade liberalization bore fruit, inspiring some controversy in the manufacturing sector in the US but overall heralded as a positive step for global trade. Concerns bubbled up when Reimei won its first national election in Japan, placing Shintaro Ishihara as the first non-LDP Prime Minister since Saboru Eda in the 1970s and the Tatenokai militia far too close to the government for comfort, leading Cohn to base additional troops in the tiny island nation of Ryukyu. Libya descended into a tri-factional civil war after the death of its longtime dictator Abdul Aziz Shelhi, fracturing the longtime American ally in North Africa into three breakaway states and forcing difficult policy decisions. A new Non-Proliferation Treaty with teeth was set to be negotiated in 1997, definitively aimed at preventing another Damascus.

Come January 20, 1997, Roy Cohn was at last able to withdraw back into the New York social scene he had thrived in for so long. He remains controversial though, to say the least. Though he received a more measured analysis by historians after his passing in 2006, at first it was hard to find an opinion about the man that wasn’t particularly intense. Conservatives adored his tough-talking image as well as his relentlessness in pursuing a right-wing agenda after so long under the “New Deal Consensus,” as the period from 1932-1988 is often dubbed. Liberals despised him for the exact same reasons, nevermind pointing to his regressive social politics and his support for all manner of foreign atrocity. The aggressive, flamboyant president inspired as much adoration as he did disgust, and he liked it that way. No summary comes closer to the truth about Roy Cohn than the ending of the very biography that exposed his double life, though. “Roy Cohn was always preening and combative, look-at-me lavish and loud. It was an act. The truth was he hated what he was - a politician who hated politicians, a lawyer who hated lawyers, a Jewish person who hated Jewish people, and a gay person, fiercely closeted if haphazardly hidden, who hated gay people.” Above all, though, as the nation prepared to hurtle itself forwards into an uncertain future without the bulldog it had called its president for the past eight years, Roy Cohn was able to look back at last and see what he had done. Though he was not always popular, at the end of the day he knew America looked a bit more like Roy Cohn now.

— — —​

[1] I cannot stress enough that Bill Buckley actually did have a habit of skinny-dipping with National Review interns. I wish I was making this up.
[2] In 1965, Kỳ told Brian Moynahan: "People ask me who my heroes are. I have only one: Hitler.” When the Johnson administration tried to cover for him and said the remark was fabricated, Kỳ shouted it again over their objections.

 

[Enigma-Conundrum]

Hello there! Apologies for the lack of post this fine weekend, we promise your regularly scheduled programming will be coming back shortly. But who are we to deprive you of any content? So I got to work, and here we have 30 different countries of the world of Camelot Lost, with their leadership all plotted out for you to consume. It's all broken up by region, and I'll tack on a very brief explainer. Let's do this!


NORTH AMERICA

UNITED STATES
1961-1964: Adlai Stevenson II (Democratic-IL)† / William Fulbright (Democratic-AR)
1964-1969: William Fulbright (Democratic-AR) / Robert F. Wagner Jr. (Democratic-NY)
1969-1977: Thomas Kuchel (Republican-CA) / John Lindsay (Republican-NY)
1977-1979: Jack Gilligan (Democratic-OH) / John Luke Hill (Democratic-TX)
1979-1981: Jack Gilligan (Democratic-OH)† / Martha Layne Collins (Democratic-KY)
1981-1989: Martha Layne Collins (Democratic-KY) / Walter Mondale (Democratic-MN)
1989-1997: Roy Cohn (Republican-NY) / Hank Grover (Republican-TX)

If you don't know what's going on in the United States... HOW?

CANADA
1957-1966: John Diefenbaker (Progressive Conservative)
1966-1975: Paul Martin Sr. (Liberal)
1975-1985: Robert Stanfield (Progressive Conservative)
1985-1991: John Crosbie (Progressive Conservative)
1991-????: Bob Rae (Liberal)

Dief the Chief manages to hang on grimly through a better campaign in '62 as the Stevenson administration announces that it's killing the Bomarc Plan during the Cuba negotiations, meant as a slight nudge to help Pearson (a kindred spirit to Adlai, really) but really just blowing up in the Grits' face as Dief rallies popular frustration at the perceived glibness the US is taking towards nuclear war. His next term is a bit of a disaster, though, and by 1966 the 72 year-old Diefenbaker is old news to the electorate. After some tense negotiations, the "Martin-Douglas" government is a massive expansion of the welfare state and a quiet revolution in public policy, but sectional tensions - especially in Quebec against the extremely Anglophone Grits - erode at the momentum behind upper-class social democracy. Everyone's Favorite Nova Scotian catches the football and hangs on grimly for ten years, becoming a renowned leader through no shortage of crises, but the constitutional reform efforts are his undoing as he steps out humiliated by their failure. Crosbie's got a foot in his mouth but he manages to salvage the reforms and with it his government, but a mild economic downturn and controversial trade agreements with the new Cohn administration destroy his remaining goodwill. Instead, the resurgent Grits find their way to a young MP from Ontario, a rising star who chose them over the Dippers way back when and built a profile in long-term opposition. Though his government's had its hits and misses, Canada's strong leadership in UNPROFOR gave him the boost he needed for re-election, and now we enter 1997 wondering whether time will vindicate the Rae of hope...

MEXICO
1958-1964: Adolfo López Mateos (PRI)
1964-1970: Gustavo Díaz Ordaz (PRI)
1970-1976: Alfonso Corona del Rosal (PRI)
1976-1982: Carlos A. Madrazo (ARD)
1982-1988: Porfirio Muñoz Ledo (ARD)
1988-1992: Elba Esther Gordillo (PRI)
Impeachment of Elba Esther Gordillo
1992-1994: Fernando Gutiérrez Barrios (PRI)
1994-????: Manuel Clouthier (PAN)

A largely-similar PRI rule goes through the early stages, but as popular opposition becomes galvanized it's hard to find a middle ground. Corona's crackdown is a bit like taking a sledgehammer to quicksilver, especially when the Madrazo faction - the "Democratic Current," as it were - splits the PRI in two to run its own campaign promising pluralistic reforms. Madrazo largely succeeds in democratizing, though his attempts at renovating the more permanent state are time-consuming and undermine other efforts. Allegations that Madrazo and Muñoz are simply the second head of the PRI seem unfounded at first but are much more so in the latter's term as a slow trickle of influence-peddling stories dominate the eternal power-seeker's attempts at reform. The PAN seems poised to finally rise to the occasion, but Elba's maneuvering manages to portray the ARD as little better than the old machine while simultaneously portraying her PRI as a new party. A controversial result sees institutional alquimistas effectively ensure her victory, but it seems an old dog can't learn new tricks as Gordillo is eventually impeached due to truly dizzying corruption and flees the country. Her successor cut his teeth in the "Dirty War" of the 1970s, and it shows as protests and uprisings are suppressed with sheer brutality. By the end of it, the people are exhausted, and the eternal anti-corruption opposition has its star candidate, so the result is hardly surprising but still heralds a newfound political pluralism...


SOUTH AMERICA

BRAZIL
1961-1961: Jânio Quadros (PTN)
1961-1965: João Goulart (PTB)
1965-1970: Juscelino Kubitschek (PSD)
1970-1980: Carlos Lacerda (UDN)
1980-1990: Leonel Brizola (PTB)
1990-????: Antônio Carlos Magalhães (UDN)

The core distinction comes when the United States refuses to send aid to putschists within the military. As Jango assumes presidential powers at last in 1963, they're still growing anxious, but their brief attempt at a direct overthrow sees a number of the colonels arrested by their superiors and Goulart's power protected. All is well in the wholesome South American democracy, right? Not quite, because while Stevenson-Fulbright aren't fans of coups they're no stranger to funding opposition campaigns, and JK is a familiar face in a sea of chaos. His return goes over well enough and sees some reform to cool the tensions, but by the end of it he's an old man and knows he's once again seen as a model of corrupt developmentalism. The military finds its time once again by throwing its tacit weight behind the outsider conservative governor, and Lacerda's Anos de Chumbo remain an infamous time of state repression, even if it had enough democratic legitimacy behind it. By its end, with the national economy in the toilet and the people furious, Brizolismo is just what the doctor ordered. A government grant for all of you! Post offices and hospitals in every favela! Combined with debt obligation negotiations between Brizola and Gilligan, the economic roar is felt by the end of the 80s. Even so, that civil-military-business alliance on the right is not to be denied, and Bahia's own ACM becomes a quintessential diplomatic triangulator (though UDN stalwarts will scream, only Tony could go to Havana) during Brazil's rise as an economic power in its own right...

CHILE
1958-1964: Jorge Alessandri (Independent)
1964-1970: Eduardo Frei Montalva (PDC)
1970-1974: Salvador Allende (PS)
Impeachment of Salvador Allende
1974-1976: Carlos Prats (Independent)
1976-1982: Patricio Aylwin (PDC)
1982-1988: Felipe Herrera (PS)
1988-1994: Orlando Letelier (PS)
1994-????: Sebastián Piñera (PN)

Chile's one of those cases where we probably spared a lot of heartache. Life continues as per the norm, with anti-Allende candidacies once again bankrolled by the US in lieu of extragovernmental action. By 1970, naturally, the cup of discontent runneth over, and no amount of frantic anti-Allende action can stop his victory. Life goes on, things go down to hell, but Rene Schneider's military remains stubborn (though Kuchel does try, dammit), and instead the coup is won through a stage-managed impeachment process. The developmentalism comes back after bloody instability under Aylwin (including a war with neighboring Argentina over the Beagle Islands, as mentioned in the TL) with the former UN SecGen as a popular candidate of the left with too much personal prominence to properly overthrow. Herrera and Letelier pick up where Allende left off, albeit less radically as to avoid his fate, but even then by the end of twelve years of it party fatigue and mounting inflation drive a certain young senator branded a huckster by the left and an optimist by the right to a rise far more meteoric than OTL...

ARGENTINA
1958-1963: Arturo Frondizi (UCRI)
Military coup overthrows Frondizi government
1963-1968: Gen. Raúl Alejandro Poggi
1968-1974: Juan Perón (PJ)†
1974-1988: José López Rega (PJ)
Mass protests result in end of López regime and open elections
1988-1994: Fernando de la Rúa (UCR)
1994-????: Domingo Cavallo (APR)

Sometimes, even a better man in Washington can't avert tragedy in Latin America. The horrendously unstable Argentine democracy sees even more controversy with the resolution in Cuba given Frondizi's overtures to Castro, and during the putsch against him the less democratic forces win. General Poggi's dictatorship is relatively brief as far as juntas go but is no less brutal, and by the time he's forced into direct elections even an attempt at meddling to stop the validity of the man in exile can't slow-walk his return. Peronism 2.0 is no kinder, and by the time the big man has his heart attack his stalwart deputy is here to kick in the last standing veneer of popular rule that Argentina has left. "El Brujo" rules like the occultist-fascist madman he is, even kicking off the Beagle Islands War and establishing a strong contender for the most brutal regime in the Western Hemisphere. By 1988, after war, repression, poverty, and the pariah status earned by the López regime takes its final toll, mass democratic action topples "Orthodox Peronism" once and for all. The democrats are no better at managing the fallout, though, and as we approach a new millennium the right's dour banker turned Cassandra is given his try at managing hyperinflation instead of the unpopular de la Rúa...


EUROPE

UNITED KINGDOM
1959-1963: Harold Macmillan (Conservative)
1963-1964: Quintin Hogg (Conservative)
1964-1969: George Brown (Labour)
1969-1977: Reginald Maudling (Conservative)
1977-1979: Edward du Cann (Conservative)
1979-1991: Peter Shore (Labour)
1991-????: David Owen (Labour)

Life goes as normal, with Supermac tossed out for much of the same reason - a better bit of campaigning puts Quintin Hogg in the seat he hoped to attain out of Macmillan's retirement. Even so, the split and wounded Tories are doomed in '64, and Labour's new leader - a rank Gaitskellite with a drinking problem - makes his way to No. 10. Brown's decision to join the EEC was deeply controversial and plenty of Eurosceptics blame American meddling (which is honestly correct, Bill Fulbright being himself), but the continuing economic and social strife combined with Brown's deeply uninspiring persona ultimately hobble his government. Maudling is a plodder but damned good at propping himself up, maneuvering his way between crises like Zimbabwe and the Bretton Woods recession alike. His chessmaster persona works quite well, but the ticking time bomb of scandal underneath him forces him into an early retirement, and the ineptitude of the arch-conservative du Cann all but assures defeat. The Labour Left being finally in control - having reconciled its image issues by propping up a socialist arguably more patriotic than 90% of the Tories - makes it a tad bit more narrow, but as Shore pulls Britain out of malaise and surges to historic popularity for his defense of Belize during the Guatemalan invasion in '84, his brand of leftism seems all but vindicated. Even so, his stubborn Euroscepticism and reneging on compromises made with the Labour Right during the early phases of his miinistry leads to David Owen's bad little fairies taking control for a brutal intraparty challenge. Though Owen fought his way from a major polling deficit to a mild victory in 1994, it's uncertain where Dracula - as opponents are fond of calling the severe, gaunt Owen - intends to go from here...

FRANCE
1958-1971: Charles de Gaulle (UNR)†
1971-1971: Alain Poher (CD)
1971-1978: Francois Mitterrand (FGDS)
1978-1992: Michel Poniatowski (FNRI)
1992-????: Jacques Delors (PGD)

France is a curious case, because we'll always have de Gaulle being de Gaulle. No matter what, that's a constant. What can change, though, is how long he hangs on. A slower boil amongst the student protest sections helps the General stay in power through the 60s, being his same erratic self even as the left unifies and grows more tired. His death in 1971 seems to many to be the moment to go for the top, and go for the top they do in the post-de Gaulle election. The Socialist-Communist alliance propping up Mitterrand is one that leads to a great many reforms, but is also not one without significant controversy. The economic crisis ultimately does him in, though, especially as strikes continue to cause trouble and the expulsion of the PCF mere months before the vote only serves to cause great strife in the left's coalition. Communists preferring to stay home instead of voting Judas only serves to get Michel Poniatowski in office, and the princely republican only turns up the unrepentant conservatism. The slow disintegration of the barrier between the National Front and the rest of the right is indeed controversial, but if the left can have communists than the right can add the far-right, some folks suppose. Eventually, though, a nation sick of the arch-conservative president and misadventure in promoting French hegemony in a rapidly-decolonizing Africa sees Delors as a different kind of social democrat, one of the gauche démocrate and a Christian leftist to boot, and elects to select his vision of a closely-knit social-democratic Europe over Poniatowski's hand-picked succession...

WEST GERMANY
1949-1963: Konrad Adenauer (CDU-CSU)
1963-1968: Ludwig Erhard (CDU-CSU)
1968-1976: Willy Brandt (SPD)
1976-1980: Franz-Josef Strauss (CDU-CSU)
1980-1986: Johannes Rau (SPD)
1986-????: Lothar Späth (CDU-CSU)

West Germany is largely a study in similarity, really. Though Erhard is able to plod along for longer than reality ever let him without Vietnam, by 1968 the impending fall of the government forces an election, and Willy Brandt rises much the same. Ostpolitik is no less controversial in our world, though with a more pliable GDR (more on that later) it goes over rather well, truth be told. The revelations around Guillame ruin the Brandt government in an otherwise-layup election, and the CSU's first Chancellor takes office... just as the Bretton Woods economy explodes. Not a great time for him. His role in the negotiations as a hard-charger for German interests win him some favorability at home, but in the end it's effectively undone when the glut of new defense projects unveils a staggering international Lockheed bribery scheme he's very much implicated in. Brother Johannes' intense religiosity makes him seem honest, a trait he plays up rather well campaigning against an embattled Strauss, and it nets the SPD a solid return. The return is not to last, though, as a gridlocked coalition leads to collapse and the popular Union candidate in Roman Herzog nets them a narrow government. From there, through crisis and calm alike, as the centrist Chancellor enters his eleventh year in office, he's effectively become an indispensible man at home and abroad...

ITALY
1960-1963: Amintore Fanfari (CD)
1963-1963: Giovanni Leone (CD)
1963-1971: Aldo Moro (CD)
1971-1975: Giulio Andreotti (CD)
1975-1976: Giovanni Leone (CD)
1976-1978: Francesco Cossiga (CD)
1978-1981: Enrico Berlinguer (PCI)
Second Republic established after “Golpe Bianco,” power shifted to presidency
1981-1991: Edgardo Sogno (PPI)
1991-????: Giulio Andreotti (PPI)

There are two men responsible for Italy in its current state: Count Edgardo Sogno and Aldo Moro. The former seems obvious, but the latter arguably heralded the Second Republic in his own right. As Moro negotiated a coalition of the center-left as Prime Minister, becoming one of the most long-lived leaders of the parliamentary system in the process, Italy prospered and Moro's popularity grew with it. Come time for a new presidential election in 1971, the Prime Minister was not shy about his desire to take the office, and the ruling coalition could absolutely back him as well. However, as the coalition melted down in his absence, slowly at first under the wily operator Giulio Andreotti then moreso under Leone and Cossiga, Enrico Berlinguer's rising PCI finally rose to a strong plurality, entering government in its own right. Moro's support for the Historic Compromise was essential in swearing Berlinguer in as the first Eurocommunist experiment. The right screamed when he targeted the banks their corrupt dealings flowed through, when the left-CDers in the coalition aided and abetted the Italian model of socialism, and when everything seemed to be going to hell with the neofascist brigades ramping up their attacks. As President Leone - Moro's replacement, and a more traditional Christian Democrat - sought to avoid indictment in the Lockheed scandal, his consulting with Count Sogno led to the controversial move to dismiss Berlinguer and appoint Sogno in his place at the helm of a broad government of the opposition. Sogno's constitutional reforms saw mass chaos as the Years of Lead came to their crescendo, but by the mid-eighties the presidential Second Republic had settled out with its new parties, most notably the big-tent right-wing People's Party. Even so, as a general strike over controversial economic reforms brought Italy to its knees, Sogno resigned office, allowing the ever-wily Andreotti - the leader of the Christian Democrats behind Sogno - to rise to the occasion in the ensuing presidential election, finally reaching the kind of power he had so desired...

SPAIN
1936-1974: Francisco Franco (FET)†
1974-1984: Luis Carrero Blanco (FET)†
1984-1990: Carlos Arias Navarro (FET)
Overthrow of Falangist regime, new constitution established
1990-1994: Íñigo Cavero (UDC)
1994-????: Miguel Herrero de Miñón (AP)

Though we talked about the long-term Falangist regime in the TL, it's worth reiterating just how much longer and bloodier the dissolution was here - instead of a gradual reform process engineered by a liberal king, we have a sort of zombie Francoism carrying Spain on until the public just can't take it anymore. The end result, a new Spanish republic - King Otto having engendered a much stronger anti-monarchist sentiment - is one still ruled by the right in this moment, with critics alleging that remaining Francoist elements and attempted electioneering by the United States helped to lock the PSOE's opposition leader Felipe González out of power. For his part, González has been unclear on whether he intends to contest the next election in 1998, though polls suggest that he's the most popular politician in Spain...

SOVIET UNION
1953-1968: Nikita Khrushchev (CPSU)
1968-1981: Yuri Andropov (CPSU)†
1981-1985: Nikolai Tikhonov (CPSU)
1985-????: Valentina Tereshkova (CPSU)

As Khrushchev remains in a stronger position in 1964, he's able to largely notice Brezhnev's attempted coup and put it off before it can begin. This lets Nikita continue doing what he loves best - being a tempestuous bastard. Even so, as he's routinely frustrated through the latter half of the 1960s, the space program seems a bit of a white elephant, and the Warsaw Pact develops a mind of his own, he's eventually deposed by the hardliners in favor of the KGB's new director Yuri Andropov. Andropov is a skilled operator, and though he invades Czechoslovakia to halt Alexander Dubcek's attempts at conducting independent diplomacy, he's able to largely break through institutional issues with sheer brutality. Routine corruption and inefficiency purges are horrendous to the average Soviet but do the job in keeping the country together (as well as the surge in national pride following the moon landing), but before Andropov can designate any sort of succession he passes away rather suddenly. With the knife-fighting between factions at a fever pitch, the party decides on a toothless idiot to fill the seat. It's a miracle Tikhonov survives any amount of time without doing anything ridiculous, but as the country seems on the brink of stagnating the first woman on the moon is able to leverage her status as a patriotic hero to rally a coalition of oddball reformists and kick the moron out. From there, the Tereshkova economic reforms - focused on high-tech innovation and limited deregulation - have seemed to work wonders in revitalizing the USSR, and the cosmonaut-turned-leader is an admired woman even as the western world recoils at the idea of such prominent communist leadership...

EAST GERMANY
1950-1967: Walter Ulbricht (SED)
1967-1979: Willi Stoph (SED)
1979-1990: Horst Sindermann (SED)
1990-1990: Hans Modrow (SED)
1990-????: Wolfgang Schwanitz (SED)

Ulbricht brings the wall up and draws Khrushchev's wrath as per the expectation. By 1967, Khrushchev tires of the old man and muscles him out of East Berlin, fearing that potential inter-German negotiations will be halted by Ulbricht. Willi Stoph proves an able successor and negotiator with Willy Brandt, and though the division seems here to stay the German situation is markedly less problematic by the time Stoph has also grown to retirement age. His chosen successor, an economic liberalizer, does just that in the face of mounting state debts and a serious slump, but this remains controversial with more conservative elements led by a grumpy aging Honecker. By 1990, Tereshkova hopes to build a new rapport with the west, and the end result is her stage-managing of Hans Modrow's rise to power to genuinely liberalize East Germany. Stasi elements are not pleased by the talk of social reform, though, and quickly engineer a scandal surrounding Modrow's alleged treason and depose him in favor of their leader. Now, it seems, East Germany is simply a Stasi playground...

POLAND
1957-1969: Władysław Gomułka (PZPR)
1969-1982: Edward Gierek (PZPR)
1982-1985: Czesław Kiszczak (PZPR)
1985-1996: Edward Babiuch (PZPR)
1996-????: Leszek Miller (PZPR)

The antisemitic crackdowns of the later part of Gomułka's time in office are a horrendous look for Poland and the Soviet Union overall, and as such the Gierek faction quickly rises to remove the hardliners and antisemites. Gierek's liberalization helps to promote Poland's image as a relatively prosperous Eastern Bloc nation, especially with the west suffering during the bitter late 70s recession. Like all not-as-terrible things, though, it must come to an end, and sure enough Gierek's decisions to negotiate with oppositionist factions brings the hardliners back to the forefront. The period of martial law only galvanizes the oppositionists, though, and through hardship it really begins to look like Poland is teetering. In one of her first moves towards being a "different kind of Soviet," Tereshkova quickly condemns Kiszczak's tactics and encourages leadership to turn over. Babiuch is unapologetically puppeted by Gierek, but this is alright with Moscow and the Polish people alike as Poland becomes something of a breeding ground for a new model of Warsaw Pact governance. By 1996, as Babiuch grows old, a young man in his image seems set to perpetuate the legacy of Gierek and Babiuch...

ROMANIA
1947-1965: Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej (PCR)
1965-1982: Ion Gheorghe Maurer (PCR)
1982-1990: Silviu Brucan (PCR)
1990-1996: Nicolae Militaru (PCR)†
1996-????: Ion Iliescu (PCR)

Yes, a lot of the NSF leadership ends up onsides with the PCR here, but that's what you get without Ceausescu. That's the true difference here - when Gheorghiu-Dej passes, Bucharest's approximation of Dick Cheney does a much better job rising to the occasion and sidelines Ceausescu the compromise candidate. Romania remains independently-minded in the bloc but is by no means outright flaunting Moscow's policies, which makes it at least acceptable to the Soviets compared to the strains of OTL. Brucan is one of the easiest lanes of communication between east and west as a diplomat by training, but when he retires after a health scare it takes the military's representation in the central government stepping in to stop the hardliners from asserting themselves. Militaru hangs on grimly through a bit of a crisis of confidence for Romania, but the level-headed leadership goes on until he's in the grave. From there, a young socialist with ideas he's dubbed "the Swedish model" is seeking to prove that the Warsaw Pact need not be a dour place...

ALBANIA
1944-1981: Enver Hoxha (PLA)†
1981-1993: Mehmet Shehu (PLA)†
1993-????: Ramiz Alia (PLA)

And now we have a case of failed-state communism. Hoxha is as quirky and independent as ever, Mao's favorite European and a true backwater of the Warsaw Pact (and only nominally involved to begin with). Bunkers dot the landscape, and eventually it's all too much to bear - so much so that his erstwhile deputy Mehmet Shehu poisons his mentor and takes his place. Shehu is no liberal, though, and now the crackdowns are simply aimed at keeping Albania's communists in power. It works for a while, even if the people are extremely unhappy and deathly poor. By the time Shehu himself is a dying old man, Ramiz Alia maneuvers himself to the big chair and looks at just how bad the situation is. By 1997, he's officially negotiating a transfer of power, and nobody knows what a "post-communist" state could possibly look like...

YUGOSLAVIA
1953-1979: Josip Broz Tito (SKJ)†
1979-1983: Edvard Kardelj (SKJ)†
1983-1993: Džemal Bijedić (SKJ)
1993-????: Ivan Stambolić (SKJ)

Josip Broz Tito is often seen as the only thing holding Yugoslavia together. Otherwise, what else does it have? Here, as Yugoslavia continues on much the same path as OTL, it doesn't seem like much. Tito's death going much faster through his health failure helps somewhat, as does the survival of his planned successor. Even so, the rumblings of Yugoslavia as a Serb state and local Serbs as feeling oppressed are very much felt. The rise of the Bosniak governor Džemal Bijedić to the big seat after Kardelj too succumbs to ill health seems precarious as well, but Bijedićism is a relatively simple doctrine - the stronger the economy goes up, the more stable a state is. His successes in reforming Bosnia to relative prosperity are brought nationwide, and while evenly-distributed investments don't remove the underlying contradictions that make up Yugoslavia it does lessen the pressure for secession short-term. By the mid-90s, the pressure for constitutional reforms has reached a fever pitch, and Stambolić and his cadre of pluralists (most notably "Buca" Pavlović) have their work cut out for them...


ASIA / OCEANIA

PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF CHINA
1949-1971: Mao Zedong (CCP)
1971-1983: Lin Biao (CCP)†
1983-1991: Hu Yaobang (CCP)†
1991-????: Mao Yuanxin (CCP)

Maoism has always been a complicated beast in the leftist world. The Mao-Fulbright talks infuriated Mao's own devotees, so much so that many argue that Mao felt that a Cultural Revolution was virtually the only way around the internal pressure (instead of the more complicated set of ideological motives). Regardless, the cut-off of the Open Door that more moderate leaders salivated over as a way to thumb their nose at the Soviet Union drove a ramshackle putsch, placing Lin Biao in charge against his will and ending the Revolution. Though Mao was quickly rehabilitated, the influence of his factionalists never truly was after the Taiwan Straits Missle Crisis, especially with his once-proxy Jiang Qing hauled out of power. The "Three Hus" moved to fill the vacuum, and their leader Hu Yaobang became undisputed in his rule of China after Biao's passing. Hu Yaobang's rapid liberalization was controversial to say the least, though the economic revitalization caused by it was undeniable. The problem was internal stability, with dissent spreading through China's variant of Akademset technology and rallying in universities around the country. Hu's attempts to dialogue with the students instead of sticking to the Maoist line infuriated conservatives, who plotted with the "magic name" behind Mao Yuanxin - the only unpurged member of Jiang Qing's faction - to stage a coup against Hu. Hu's death in custody sparked national protests, protests which were swiftly cut down by the unrestrained authoritarianism of Mao Yuanxin. Between the dynastic nature of its new leader and the rigidity of censorship in the newly-revolutionary China, many in the West feel comfortable calling it a "Hermit Empire..."

NORTH KOREA
1948-1978: Kim Il-sung (WPK)†
1978-1995: O Jin-u (WPK)†
1995-????: Yon Hyong-muk (WPK)

North Korea could have veered towards significantly worse. Kim Il-sung intended to pass power to his sons, but once Kim Jong-il became the only option the military was none too pleased by this development. Marshal O, the only man with comparable power to the Kims, hated the dilettante Kim Jong-il, and upon the elder Kim's death he moved to deny the boy his ability to seize power. The O Jin-u regime was a much more traditional communist state, one intensely nationalistic in its approach to neighbors like Japan and South Korea but also one designed around maintaining the relative prosperity North Korea had seen first and foremost. Kim having largely given up his dreams of power for himself, the succession instead went to the powerful premier - and moderate leader - Yon Hyong-muk. Now, Chairman Yon seems most concerned with negotiating with a newly-democratized South Korea, hoping to at last achieve the reunification that has eluded the peninsula for so long...

SOUTH KOREA
1960-1966: Chang Myon (Democratic)†
1966-1968: Yun Posun (Democratic)
1968-1971: Yu Chin-san (Democratic)
1971-1973: Kim Dae-jung (People’s)†
“Kim constitution” instituted via military coup, moved power to presidency
1973-1996: Gen. Kim Jae-gyu
1996-????: Lee Hoi-chang (New Korea)

Timely intervention by senior military leadership against General Park may have saved Korean parliamentary democracy, but it still remained unstable under near-unified Democratic Party rule. An ailing economic situation put diplomatic successes to shame, and the continual reshuffling of the Democratic Party's leadership saw them seen as largely ineffective rulers. The young new leader of the People's Party, Kim Dae-jung, was an electrifying presence in comparison to aging independence activists, and his "mass economy" was a deeply popular idea though ill-defined. Fearing socialism and his overtures to North Korea for reunification, though, a CIA-backed coup placed General Kim Jae-gyu - the only survivor of the purge against pro-Park generals - in power in South Korea, killing Prime Minister Kim in the process. Though General Kim ruled by decree for twenty-three years, following a referendum on the continuation of his government in 1995 being resoundingly rejected he opted to step away peacefully, allowing the anti-corruption conservative Lee Hoi-chang to lead South Korea's return to democracy...

INDIA
1947-1964: Jawaharlal Nehru (INC)†
1964-1971: Lal Bahadur Shastri (INC)†
1971-1982: Morarji Desai (INC)
1982-1983: Jagjivan Ram (INC)†
1983-1991: P. V. Narasimha Rao (INC)
1991-????: Sharad Pawar (INC)

Following Nehru's death, the Shastri government seemed poised for great things. Its agrarian reforms, ending of a border war with China, and overall popularity semeed to have it locked into place. Tragically, though, after seven years in power and multiple attempted killings - most notably a failed poisoning in Tashkent - Shastri passed away in a plane crash, leaving a power vacuum. Though some insiders resisted it, the conservative faction leader Morarji Desai managed to overpower the aging INC bosses with the connections he had built during the Shastri years, rising to the Prime Ministership in his own right. A platform of radical deregulation proved controversial in some sectors, but it also arguably set loose the Indian economic boom of the seventies and eighties. By the time an aging Desai was ready to retire, India's prosperity was high and its intervention in the Bangladesh Independence War had proven its regional influence, but the rising corporate economy was not popular in all sectors. To that end, the rural agrarian base had one man it wished to propel forward - Jagjivan Ram. Long a left-wing voice for the farmers, Prime Minister Ram's agricultural policy helped to continue the revolution started by Shastri two decades prior. It was not meant to be, though. Babu was cut down in perhaps the most infamous example of Khalistan liberationist violence, making a martyr for the Indian left and enshrining the rightwards tilt of the nation. Prime Minister Rao, elected in a hurry as a senior unifier, sought to dispatch the Punjab violence, and though he largely did manage to suppress it, he also continued Desaist reforms to the economy. Now, with a prominent dynast of the INC in office and India considered a rising "third pillar" due to its prominent economy, high population, and non-aligned politics, the sky seems the limit...

JAPAN
1960-1964: Hayato Ikeda (Liberal Democratic)
1964-1972: Eisaku Satō (Liberal Democratic)
1972-1979: Kakuei Tanaka (Liberal Democratic)
1979-1981: Saburo Eda (Socialist)
1981-1986: Kakuei Tanaka (Liberal Democratic)†
1986-1989: Noboru Takeshita (Liberal Democratic)
1989-1989: Kōzō Watanabe (Liberal Democratic)
1989-1991: Ryutaro Hashimoto (Liberal Democratic)
1991-1993: Michio Watanabe (Liberal Democratic)
1993-1996: Yōhei Kōno (Liberal Democratic)
1996-????: Shintaro Ishihara (Reimei)

It seems inevitable that Liberal Democratic hegemony would fade. Though the 60s saw a relatively popular and long-lived leadership, the controversial decision to allow Bill Fulbright to go ahead with his "self-determination" plan for Okinawa (a plan carried through by Kuchel for the purpose of maintaining the US military presence in the region) saw the current government largely rejected in favor of the insurgent Kakuei Tanaka. Tanaka would go on to be a giant of Japanese history, ruling through the controversial period of intense social repression after the Red Army fired upon the Emperor. In the end, though, his corruption would be undoing, as the scheme of almighty kickbacks with Lockheed led to the Tanaka government falling at the ballot box. The anyone-but coalition, led by the aging social democrat Saburo Eda, was not to last, and after its collapse a hastily-called election saw the very same Tanaka returned to power after controversially evading charges. Tanaka's rule would continue, the dizzying scale of corruption only growing under the construction mogul until his fatal stroke in 1986. From there, his faction - the effective majority of the LDP - carried on his legacy, burning through a number of new Prime Ministers for various kickback schemes and corruption scandals. The emergency of the 70s had awoken something, though, and as social reforms continued at home and the economy slumped, a sense of lost purpose seemed answered by the controversial nationalist party of Shintaro Ishihara and a faction of hawkish former Liberal Democrats: Reimei, or Dawn...

NORTH VIETNAM
1945-1967: Ho Chi Minh (CPV)†
1967-1985: Phạm Văn Đồng (CPV)
1985-1988: Trường Chinh (CPV)†
1988-????: Nguyễn Cơ Thạch (CPV)

After the Fulbright-Mao talks, North Vietnam was badly split. One faction wanted to negotiate a ceasefire to sort the new reality out, and another wanted to seek out increased Soviet aid in winning the war. Ultimately, the former prevailed, sending rising star Lê Duẩn out from his post and placing Ho Chi Minh loyalists in the old man's former seat. From there, the DRV's gerontocracy ambled onwards, largely withdrawing inwards apart from continuing tacit support for the Viet Cong in their ongoing rebellion against Saigon. By the time Phạm Văn Đồng's blindness had overcome him and Trường Chinh had passed, the reformist faction propelled upwards by the latter had firmly seized control with a relatively younger man. Now, as the Sino-Soviet split seems wider than ever, Nguyễn Cơ Thạch has begun to pursue a pragmatic - arguably neutralist - foreign policy while engaging in limited reform at home...

SOUTH VIETNAM
1955-1963: Ngô Đình Diệm (Cần Lao)†
1963-1964: Gen. Dương Văn Minh
1964-1964: Gen. Nguyễn Khánh
1964-1964: Gen. Dương Văn Minh
1964-1964: Gen. Nguyễn Khánh
1964-1965: Gen. Dương Văn Minh
1965-????: Nguyễn Cao Kỳ (Đảng Dân-chủ Tiến-bộ)

The fall of Diem was a hassle, to say the least. South Vietnam had become a mass of instability and corruption held together at the seams, and the constant switcheroo between generals running the dictatorship did not inspire confidence to say the least. As Washington tried its damndest to negotiate between the two sides, the struggle between old officers and young may have proven that instability is better than a cruel stability. Though the new government of the sixth-time's-the-charm coup of Nguyễn Cao Kỳ, firmly entrenched and with a fraught election behind it, was able to negotiate the ceasefire (with private assurance from Fulbright that the United States might get off his back a bit for human rights if he went through with it), the new Kỳ government was hardly one that could be considered likable. Broadly considered one of the most repressive dictatorships in the western orbit, Nguyễn Cao Kỳ's crackdown on dissent, "corrupt officials" who often just happen to be his opponents (though it did have the impact of purging much of the institutional rot that paralyzed the era before him), and belligerence due to seeming isolation as a pro-western dictatorship in a pink region, the thirty-year anniversary of Kỳ's coup has come and went with no signs of leaving the backwater of Southeast Asia...

AUSTRALIA
1949-1961: Robert Menzies (Coalition)
1961-1963: Arthur Calwell (Labor)
1963-1973: Harold Holt (Coalition)
1973-1979: Jim Cairns (Labor)
1979-1987: Joh Bjelke-Petersen (Coalition)
1987-1992: Mick Young (Labor)
1992-1993: Bill Hayden (Labor)
1993-????: Alexander Downer (Coalition)

A bit of a black sheep in the Anglosphere, Australia is often a rather right-wing country. Amidst a downturn in 1961, longtime Prime Minister Robert Menzies fell from power at last, resigning his leadership of the Coalition shortly after. Arthur Calwell's government proved fractious as divides between new and old within his party over a host of issues, from Calwell's socialist quasi-pacifism to the continuing of the White Australia policy, seemed like echoes of Adlai Stevenson and Bill Fulbright to American observers. The debonair Holt, long a minister for Menzies and a far more popular figure personally, was able to sweep this dissent aside to form a long ministry of his own, beating back the Labor reformer Gough Whitlam twice despite feverish campaigns from the latter. The Cairns government, by contrast, seemed the best of both worlds - the economics of Calwell and the social reformer's attitude of Whitlam. Dr. Cairns managed to bring a great many reforms to Australia, but was often hampered by an instransigent Senate and a fierce opposition. The right, long feeling that they were the natural party of government, was furious to say the least. Queensland's torrid Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen saw his moment as a figure with the adulation of businessmen everywhere, and converted his natural constituency into a campaign for the hearts and minds of desperate Liberals and Nationals everywhere. The Bjelke-Petersen government is nothing if not controversial for a bevy of reasons, whether it be intensely racialized quasi-totalitarian policing or obscenely right-wing economics, but the electoral malfeasance has to be the largest part of it. Though Joh refused to go down easy, a revolt by more moderate Liberals in the Coalition brought about an election and felled the beast. However, Mick Young's own skeletons - questionable donations, mostly - led to his own premature resignation just fourteen months before the next election, and his fellow moderate successor seemed no match for a resurgent Coalition with a young, smiling - if gaffe-prone - upper-class face attached to it...
AFRICA

EGYPT
1956-1970: Gamal Abdel Nasser (ASU)†
1970-1985: Ali Sabri (ASU)
1985-1991: Hussein el-Shafei (ASU)
1991-????: Boutros Boutros-Ghali (ASU)

Sometimes, it seems that Nasserism is just whatever Egypt does, and the more Egypt does it the more Nasserist it is. After Nasser himself passed in 1970, famously leading both Ali Sabri and Anwar Sadat to suffer heart attacks at his funeral, the former ultimately emerged victorious as a seeming vindication for the socialist wing of Arab Socialism. Most importantly, though, as the face of the Middle East changed in nuclear fire and the Muslim Brotherhood gained a foothold in revolutionary Arabia, the Nasserists grew fearful of their own loss of power, especially if the long-term goal of developing an Egyptian Bomb to counterbalance Israel was to be achieved. As such, when an ailing Ali Sabri sought to step down as to not die in office like Nasser, a term limit was put in place, hoping to ensure something akin to a Nasserist party dominance instead of a personalist one (privately, as well, Sabri wished to prevent the right-wingers from holding long-term power just by having a right-winger in the hot seat). After two peaceful successions, first from Sabri to the largely-agreeable Hussein el-Shafei and then to the right-wing at last with the Foreign Minister Boutros Boutros-Ghali, Egypt is poised to continue the tradition despite the relative instability in the Arab states...

DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF THE CONGO
1960-1990: Patrice Lumumba (MNC)
1990-1995: Jean Nguza Karl-i-Bond (MNC)
1995-????: Marcel Lihau (MNC)

The Democratic Republic of the Congo is an interesting case study in decolonization. For nearly 15 years, a civil war unfolded between the two dueling governments, with Lumumba in the east and Kasa-Vubu in the west. The western world's lacking support for Kasa-Vubu, only made worse with a protracted power struggle between civilian government and General Mobutu's attempted coup, largely brought down the western government, while meanwhile Lumumba was a unifying figure for African revolution and one easy for Soviet and Chinese funding to flow to. By 1975, the western government had totally collapsed, ensuring that Lumumba was the undisputed master of the DRC. Though western detente with the DRC was slow due to the conflict in Angola and the building of state apparati in the country has been difficult, Lumumba's developmentalism and non-alignment has largely seemed to pay dividends in making the DRC a regionally influential nation. With the aging revolutionary's retirement in 1990 and death shortly after, the MNC's big-tent nature and unofficial term limit of five years (part of a delicate inter-factional balancing act) has ensured relative political stability in one of the hotbeds of colonial conflict...

SOUTH AFRICA
1958-1960: Hendrik Verwoerd (National)†
1960-1969: C. R. Swart (National)
1969-1978: Connie Mulder (National)
1978-1986: P. W. Botha (National)
1986-1989: Chris Heunis (National)
1989-1990: Joe Slovo (Congress Alliance)†
Military coup overthrows Slovo government
1990-1995: Gen. Magnus Malan
People’s Republic of South Africa established following fall of Cape Town and Gaborone Accords
1995-????: Chris Hani (SACP)

For ages, South Africa claimed some semblance of democracy amongst its white citizens. This, of course, was no democracy, but even it proved to be a sham. For decades, the National Party ruled, changing the authoritative face - Swart after Verwoerd was assassinated (only lethally shot by accident, the assassin purports), then Mulder once Swart stepped out due to age, then Botha once Mulder's truly heinous security state was revealed to the public, then finally Heunis once Botha the aging "human face" on apartheid was incapacitated. After the Heunis Plan for limited democratization took effect, the National Party was booted from office, replaced by the pieced-together Congress Alliance. The Alliance's leader, Joe Slovo, was a previous SACP member and avowed socialist, and this combined with talk of ending apartheid was too much to bear for National. Thus the facade ended and General Magnus Malan seized power, leading an even more unabashed authoritarian regime of enshrined white supremacy. The people rose in revolt behind the SACP, and the protracted civil war only ended when the "Cape Republic" Malan had proclaimed in a last-ditch effort for recognition fell to communist forces. Though the peace talks split the nation into four and the PRSA has few allies, at long last apartheid has ended it seems...

GLOBAL/OTHER

UN SECRETARIES-GENERAL
1953-1961: Dag Hammarskjöld (Norway)†
1961-1971: U Thant (Burma)
1971-1981: Felipe Herrera (Chile)
1981-1991: Sadruddin Aga Khan (France/Iran/Switzerland)
1991-????: Salim Ahmed Salim (Tanzania)

As much as the first two converge, the new presence of the PRC on the Security Council led to an emboldened bloc of support behind the "Global South" candidate, Felipe Herrera. Though the Kuchel administration refused to give Allende any support, the impasse refused to resolve itself, and eventually it seemed clear that the United States was lobbying for the PRC's removal to end the blockade. This, naturally, infurated the body, leading to a major backlash and forcing Kuchel to accede to Herrera's ascent with his tail between his legs. Even so, as tensions had cooled through the decade and a kinder, gentler America suggested a candidate, other negotiations saw to it that the Soviets and Chinese let the pick fly through. Finally, though, as Aga Khan's term came to an end, the movement for an African Secretary-General had only grown in its fervor, and after Malan's coup the intransigent Cohn administration knew it couldn't deny the African bloc. So it was that Tanzania's Salim Ahmed Salim making history by gaining what he had failed at attain ten years prior...

PAPACY
1958-1963: John XIII (born Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli)†
1963-1980: Benedict XVI (born Franz König)
1980-????: Martin VI (born Eduardo Francisco Pironio)

Upon John XIII's death, many thought Cardinal Montini would be his successor. The rebellion of the reformists during the curia only led Montini to wish to withdraw, and though his backers tried quite hard to stop him it was no use. With their gambit successful, the reformists proposed their original candidate once again - a non-Italian Pope, the Austrian Franz König. Though this was a narrow and controversial vote, König was able to take the name Benedict XVI, hoping that he too would pursue peace like the last Benedict. His actions remain controversial with more conservative Catholics, such as his acceptance of the report of the Pontifical Commission on Birth Control, effectively allowing Catholics to use contraception (though Pope Benedict XVI still made clear the Church's staunch opposition to abortion). His missions through the Eastern Bloc, meant as a dialogue for peaceful coexistence, were inspiring to millions even as Nikita Khrushchev seemed to be watching the Pope's every word for any insult. Attempts at further reforming the Church were often stonewalled by conservatives in the institutions of the Vatican, frustrating the man who so hoped to make a modern Catholicism. This is why, citing a non-fatal heart attack, Pope Benedict XVI took the unusual step of resigning the office before his death, leaving in his wake the election of the first Latin American Pope, one who was close enough to Benedict for reformers and moderate enough for conservatives. Pope Martin VI has primarily focused on evangelism and humanitarian work, though he has spent some time quietly aiding in negotiating dictatorships in his home continent out of power. As Pope Martin VI grows old and sickly, though, it has become clear that a successor will likely be named soon to lead the Church into the new millennium...

 

[Oliveia]

41. Dick Cheney (Republican-WY)
January 20, 1997 - January 20, 2001

“I always felt it was important to have somebody around here who isn’t writing a book.”​

Roy Cohn was a cocky bastard. He had in his iron grip the reigns of power and yet treated it like a toy. He was bitter and angry and resentful and lashing and never really in control. His emotions, though, they were in control. And Dick Cheney resented that.

Dick Cheney was not a big name in conservative spaces before Cohn, though. A cruel irony. He was a powerbroker, a name for those who could place names to the voices in shadow box rooms, who knew a man by how he lit a cigar and how he puffed out its smoke, what made him tick and what didn’t. Face-blind, perhaps, but only the face. Never mind-blind. Dick Cheney held power, felt it pulse through his being, all without ever being elected. To the layman he was another no-name face, the kinda guy you’d bump into in the Congressional offices and go oh-so-sorry-have-a-nice-day. And he’d just nod and do a little grin you might remember afterwards, a little memento, and he’d just say not-a-problem.

Cohn didn’t know him, not at first. Why would he? Cheney wasn’t a young guy, didn’t dunk in his swimming pools, didn’t make himself stupid on beer and wine and whatever delicacies conservative egoists glutted themselves on in Cohn’s ivory tower. Cheney was not particularly God-fearing, but the irony of a sodomite screeching about a modern coming of Sodom and Gomorrah was too much to bear sometimes. And of course he knew, why wouldn’t he? The man’s closet might as well have been made of glass, but suburbanites didn’t give a damn so long as he sang music in their ears. But Cohn knew guys who knew him, that glorious old alliance of invisible hitmen and ratfuckers that Cheney was known to dabble with. And those guys, they saw Cheney and knew he had It. One of them—and he would never know who—went begging at the feet of Cohn and said oh please, oh please bring this Richard B. Cheney on as the N.S.A. And then Cohn probably took a long drag on a cigar, not thinking about it as a cigar, and licked his lips and said why tell me about him.

And it was through there that Dick Cheney got his place in the White House, as the National Security Advisor. He hated about fifty percent of the guys in there, but Cheney doubted half of them knew. Unity was important to him, and one of the rumor mills that constantly had churned through the ‘80s was the bickering between Gilligan guys and Hill guys and then Collins guys. Had no unity, why they all fell apart so quick. A house of cards, a gust of wind, simple math. Cheney, though, knew to keep things kept under wraps. When Cohn died, Cheney doubted he ever had an inkling that he hated his guts. At minimum, though, he definitely didn’t know when Mrs. Chennault stepped down and Mr. Cheney was sworn in in her place. A good portfolio, an agreeable and unexciting guy, a couple vouches from the congressmen he helped out, and it was a quick in-and-out. Congress still had a migraine from the vicious fight over Chennault—it had taken damn near a week of Cohn ranting and raving and screaming on the television before the Senate finally threw up their hands and let her through. Cheney, though, Cheney was clean. He wasn’t responsible for a nuclear crisis. (Although they didn’t know it yet, some Democrats had started following the crumb trail of that whole conspiracy. Cheney already knew about it, though. Was only a matter of time before they found her fingerprints on the cookie jar.)

Cheney’s tenure in State was a revolving door of catastrophes, but despite his private hatred of the mercurial Cohn, he quickly found himself forming a few tight bonds under the constant shadow of the larger-than-life Roy Cohn. Rumsfeld was one of them. The rest of the guys, they were nutjobs who were high off of Cohn’s farts—Don, though, Don got it. Cheney liked guys who knew power, and Don knew power. When the unions got uppity, Don slapped them down and gave ‘em a black eye. That was the kinda guts he liked in a guy. The Ambassador to the United Nations, Jeb Bush, was not like Don though. Jeb was a clutz, he stuttered over his words like he was an idiot. He had a brain to him, though. He had a vision, he had a desire for a kind of power. Kid was nice, too; a little gullible, maybe, but Cheney could overlook it. And that always bothered him—not that he overlooked it, but that nobody believed that he could. Journos who wanted to pen the next big tell-all about the nightmare of Roy Cohn’s America (and later those same but for Cheney’s Administration), they painted him as a goddamn robot. Like the idea of him having interests was an impossibility. He knew they would never get it—understand him. The guys with camera flashes on were allergic to the ways of the shadow box. Couldn’t picture them as anything more than fat cats with cigars, liars and shitheels. Thankless job, greasing the gears of the goddamn country.

Not that running the goddamn country was much better. Cohn associated himself with wingnuts, like with the Kirkpatrick memo. He nodded along with it, of course, when that little policy point got hashed out, of course he did. But it was so—simple. It saw everything as a chessboard. Black-on-white, us-versus-them. It was simple terms, it was layman's terms, but anyone who knew anything knew everything was in the grays. It wasn’t stupid because it backed dictatorships and crackpots, those were useful idiots. But it was so naive. It was like those chomping-at-the-bit types actually believed in the bullshit they were spewing—and after the whole Israel debacle, Cohn burying the hatchet with the Soviets, he knew that they really only were occasional believers in their own nonsense.

The naivete of the whole administration, that foolish chess-piece world, that was why Cheney knew he had to run. The Republican Party had a good set-up, perhaps the best since Dwight D. Eisenhower, and he wanted the guy to have the power to be someone who knew how to use it. And in This Town, the only goddamn guy you can trust is yourself. Cheney was a longshot fella, on the outset. That much was obvious. He was, on a technical level, top of the food chain in the Administration—State was the highest position, after all—but Cohn was the kinda bastard who picked favorites, and his little crush was good-old Attorney General William Bennett. Also in the field was the pathetic little gasps of the Progressive-Conservatives, that Rockefeller-Kuchel wing that represented a softness that Cheney felt queasy thinking of. Thomas Kuchel, he was given power and all he did was pussyfoot around whether or not he wanted it. (He was reminded of a quote he heard from a Soviet ambassador: “Take power, you son of a bitch, when it is handed to you!”) The new poster child of the Progressive-Conservatives was, naturally, Jay Rockefeller—riding a horse funded by his dad and his granddad and his uncle and grand-uncle and great-great-granddad and a billion other moneybags trickling it down like warm piss. Cohn sang to high heaven his love of Bennett, his excitement at the prospect of a Bennett Presidency. Cheney got the muted endorsements of his friends, Rumsfeld and Bush. Rockefeller netted a hefty portfolio of endorsements, too, but Cheney never saw him as more than a buzzing little mosquito. It would be a mistake to count out that little wing of the Party, but it was their off-season. They were soft and saggy. They had a champion, they had Biden, and they spent him out before his time and they had lost their chance. Pathetic nonsense, really.

Bill Bennett, though, Bill Bennett was the frontrunner. The giant of the race, strutting around like he owned the goddamn place. So Cheney went back into the woodwork, got some old friends and associates to dig through it all like lice until they found It. Every politician had It, that little thing they tucked away. His usual friends in the shadows were joined by a younger hatchetman, vouched by Rumsfeld as instrumental in collapsing a few Democrat campaigns over in Illinoian races—Karl Rove. Cheney never quite liked Rove, not like Don did, but with time he’d learn to trust him with a box of matches. The attack on Bennett was his first trial, and in short order the boys dug up something that worked well enough—a wholesome gambling addiction, the kinda guy whose losses in Vegas were in the six digits. Bill was a moralizing little shit, anyways, so the revelation that he was two-faced burned out his momentum. There was a brief moment to conscript the cowboy wingnut of V.P. Grover, but Grover was so old that he made bald and wrinkly Roy look like a newborn. So when he said hell no, everyone shut up and lined behind the guy more ostensibly tied to the prosperity of Roy Cohn—Dick Cheney. When the big guy himself gave him the endorsement, the voters (and, more importantly, the delegates) lined up behind him.

Across the aisle, a coronation turned rocky. Ever since that hippie activist won the nomination and doomed ‘92 (not that Cheney was complaining), Zell Miller was seen as the next to bat. All Democratic papers whined about the need of a responsible moderate, how Miller was finally gonna sock a blow against the new realization of America under Roy Cohn. But in came Little Jim—what they called Jim Folsom, Jr. Folsom was a bit of an odd duck, frankly. He was a moderate southern governor, had been one of the highest endorsers of Collins and her industrial revolution down south, had surprisingly made it through the kickback scandal unharmed despite years of whispers of corruption. Despite his moderate—some called it even conservative—record, he had amassed a lot of those starry-eyed dreamers who had flocked to Hayden in ‘92, to Gilligan in ‘80. Mike Ford, Pat Caddell, Joe Trippi—all of those pie-in-the-sky hippies—they lined up to kiss the feet of this bland no-name, to give him slogans and stunts. Karl Rove would report with glee on the infighting between Folsom’s Alabaman inner sanctum and his radical campaign operators. Come Primary Day (as the Democrats called it—the system made no sense to anyone but a rabid activist, makes sense why Gilligan slobbered all over it) and Ziller snuck out with a win, as the polls showed. But Folsom had almost won, the margin had been so close that a gust of wind could’ve flipped the popular vote to Little Jim.

Cheney felt self-assured, against Miller. As far as he was concerned, assuring he was on the top of the Republican ticket was all he needed to win. That’s not to say he was complacent, not at all, but he had been near the glow of the Republican Sun, he knew how rabidly the foot soldiers of the Republican Revolution would protect the nation against a Democrat. It wasn’t guaranteed to work, of course, not when all of the brightest stars were barely keeping the ship together. (Ronald Reagan retired shortly before election season after he spent five minutes on-air trying to remember who the President was, looking genuinely distraught as he stared out behind the camera lens and realized how far his memory had left him.) Cheney did not want to be an active campaigner, it wasn’t his scene. He knew his strengths and he knew they weren’t in front of the camera. The vice president-to-be, sure, have him go out and shake hands and wave to the cameras from parades, but that wasn’t Cheney’s scene.

Soft touch.

* * *​

The ad was set to An der schönen blauen Donau, or, The Blue Danube, the waltz by Johann Strauss II. It was simple, but effective. It was not flashy, it was not narrated by anyone other than Georgia senator Zell Miller. The name most ascribed to the ad, “Zell’s changed his tune,” comes from one of the first headlines to show up. For the trick of the ad, the beautiful idea of it, was setting up the idea that Zell Miller was nothing more than an opportunist. He had been representing Georgia for years, at that point, and the ad made extensive use of both political ads developed for Miller’s campaign, footage from the Capital Affairs Network, and newspaper headlines from Georgia local papers and some national newspapers like the Times.

The beauty of the ad was this. Zell Miller speaks, and then a headline shows up saying the opposite. Here, Zell Miller says he supports the idea of term limits for Senators, that he will only run for two terms—and then comes headlines, one from 1972, one from 1978, one from 1984, one from 1990, one from 1996, saying he will run for reelection. (The numbers are highlighted). The rest of the dialogue is done mostly through headlines, interspersed by that speech dictating his vision of anticorruption and term limits: he supports tough punishment on crime, Georgia still has a high crime rate; etc. And as the music reaches its crescendo, Zell Miller proudly proclaims how he represents the new fight against political corruption. And then, at that musical peak: A headline showing that he supports abolishing Amendment XVII—the direct election of Senators.

Thus ends the ad. [1]

* * *​

Soft touch. Soft touch as ads rattled the TV networks at a volume near-incomprehensible. Soft touch as the Republican machine bent over the Miller campaign, spanked it on the ass like a disobedient little shit, red and raw and stinging. Soft touch as the crosstabs and polling turned a Miller lead to a neck-and-neck to a Cheney lead. Soft touch as the Activists opted to stay home. Soft touch as reformers opted to stay home. Soft touch as the Democrats opted to stay home.

In the end, ironically, it almost wasn’t enough.

Maybe Karl had been right, after all, that Cheney needed to be on the airwaves more than just showing up on the debates. But also, what did it matter—Dick Cheney projected winner, the next President of the United States, says the ticker. Maybe Don had needed to bail him out in the Great Lakes, but regardless he did. Illinois had flipped for him, Missouri and New York and South Carolina. Miller outperformed Hayden in the South, had made Cohn’s margins turn to a mirage, but that was always expected. Cheney had won, and that was all that mattered. The White House, the seat of power, was safely in good hands—the correct hands—Dick Cheney’s hands.

Most of the loyal conservatives of Cohn’s persuasion (politically, that is to say) would always whine about how Cheney never wielded the blade of culture warrior that Cohn slung so easily. Cheney thought that they were, frankly, morons to the highest goddamn degree. Cohn had spoiled them all rotten; he was the exception, and Cheney hated him for that. His foreign policy wins had been Cheney’s work, goddamnit. Chennault was high off her ass on under-the-table money and the rest of the idiots at State and the Pentagon pissed their sheets at night thinking about the fact that socialists existed. They would fight a windmill thinking it was the Soviet Union, and if they got chopped to bits by the spinning blades then good riddance, frankly. The President was the hands at the wheel, he controlled the ship. If the crew wants to split the haul four ways or five ways then that was on the goddamn crew to decide. If Congress passed a law and it was popular, then he’d goddamn sign it. The fact that Cohn’s cronies didn’t know what politics was didn’t mean that he was somehow supposed to throw away the book and listen to a bunch of idiots who still foamed at the mouth about Mexico.

Naturally, the only people who he listened to domestically were his friends. And why wouldn’t he? If Don said it was a good idea, then Cheney would have said it was a good idea. They were like brothers. So when Don—now promoted to the Treasury—suggested a tax break for oil companies and the like, Cheney signed on immediately and got the ball rolling there. He liked the power of those guys already, so he probably would have gotten around to it eventually. He ascended a few other friendly faces of the Cohn Administration up, too—Paul Wolfowitz, a professor who crunched numbers like a madman on the foreign policy side of things was immediately promoted into the inner sanctum. His former student and lawyer prodigy, “Scooter” Libby was elevated into the role of White House Chief of Staff. They were a motley crew and they all had a deep respect for each other, like military boys. They knew how to run a goddamn country, not like loud-talking Roy Cohn and his crew of cranks and nutjobs.

Libya was the first thing the Cheney Administration had its sights trained at—it was a region close to Cheney’s heart, in that it was an American ally with a lot of oil. It was an area he already had to deal with while he was in State. An American ally died, and then an American ally died. The first was a person, the second was a nation. It was a tragedy. The country now was a patchwork of armies and warlords. The guys Cheney backed were, well—it made sense to Cheney. To him, Libya needed a uniting figure. Why not the old monarchy? Well, that wasn’t entirely true—he mostly signed onto the Senussi restorationist kick in the war torn country because the warlord generals in the oil-heavy regions of Eastern Libya already had been inviting him back for months. Secretary of State Cheney promised Prince Mohammed comfy relations with the U.S. if he so chose to reclaim the throne.

Unfortunately, the heir to the Senussi throne was sitting on the fence for too goddamn long before another goddamn thing happened in the goddamn Middle East.

* * *​

Damascus was a crater. Almost 4000 years of history, evaporated into ash and flame and scarred brick. A death toll nearing 820,000 as the days marched forward. It was scary—understatement. It was scarring. Horrifying. Humiliating. It was panic and apocalypse and armageddon rolled into one. Something needed to be done.

That was the initial flush of rosy blood on shrub and sand. Blue helmets tried to stop it, but found the rules of bureaucracy impossible to restrain the throbbing beast of hurt and rage. But that bloodshed was a temporary measure—one of necessity, the masses believed as one—but temporary nonetheless.

The first domino to fall was Egypt. The President of Egypt, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, had been the one to sign off on the U.S.’s desperate attempt to bail out their guilty ally, that invasive species of the Levant. Boutros-Ghali tried to make his allies understand, but his popularity never recovered. Israel obliterated Damascus, turned the thriving metropolis into ruins in the desert, and making peace with that enemy was a grievous insult.

Mohammed Bassiouni, the Right-Nasserist heir to Boutros-Ghali, was defeated in the next election, a revolution in which Left-Nasserist Hamdeen Sabahi won in a landslide typically indicative of undemocratic nations. But, miraculously, no major voting irregularities were found in the Arab Republic of Egypt.

And then there was a great meeting. A summit. President Sabahi of Egypt, President Hassan Abdelazim of Syria, and President Fuad al-Rikabi of Iraq, all met in Aleppo. The venue had almost had been the wreckage of Damascus, sun-bleached and bomb-scorched, but the background radiation was considered too high still for the meeting.

The three parties met in one place for a single purpose, an ideological promise that had shaped the contours of the Middle East landscape: pan-Arabism.

In the wake of such a great trauma, such a great reckoning, what else was there to do? The people hungered for it. It was a necessity of this new chapter of life. A Second United Arab Republic, formed from nuclear fire, fixed of the inefficient impurities of the first iteration of the state, and the final actualization of the empowerment of the Arab in a world controlled by the uncaring Western Man.

The ripples were immediate, as a new nation set itself up: Egypt, Syria, and Iraq. All one nation, all one powerhouse. And now so many of the remaining nations had to evaluate what to do with this. The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan would not submit, firmly in the pockets of the United States. The Islamists in the Holy Cities would never join a nation controlled by secular socialist Nasserists. And what of Palestine? The people finally granted the legal rights to their homeland were now stuck pondering what part they played. They were Arabs, true, but after so long under the heel of Tel Aviv did they want to submit so readily to a new power? Did the wearer of the boot matter? Would the U.A.R. count as a boot? In a nation so use to violence, the Palestinians entered a war of words over pan-Arabism.

The Arabs in Africa, too, felt the ripples. In Libya, the ripples of a pan-Arab state were felt strongly: movements were formed in the ripples, reviving the words of Muammar Gaddafi (a military man who had briefly become a political philosopher, assassinated by the old regime). Thus came a new wave of pan-Arabist movements in the mosaic of Libya.

In Sudan, President Muhammad Ibrahim Nugud considered the question deeply. A historian and Marxist intellectual, Nugud was remarkably popular in his country despite the Communist Party being controversial in its coming into power. Nugud had negotiated an autonomous body out of the southern portion of the nation, a region far less Arabic and far less Muslim than the nation as a whole. The autonomy was the Communist Party’s pride and joy, so the prospect of joining the ostensibly socialist and ostensibly socially liberal United Arab Republic was appealing (the Communist Party was the oldest nation in Sudan to allow women membership), but the concept of negotiating a separation of the country held Nugud back.

And too the ripples were felt further out—were there not Arabs in Iran? Arabs in Somalia and Yemen, Tunisia and Algeria? Would the monarchies of Morocco or Oman, Dubai or the U.A.E. ever find their home in the new golden eagle of the United Arab Republic? They would find out together, enter this new chapter of history together, hand-in-hand and arm-in-arm, as they pieced together a future of their own making.

“I am alive, and even if I die, all of you are Gamal Abdul Nasser!”

We are alive, and even though they died, we are all the people of Damascus.​

* * *​

The unveiling of a United Arab Republic was a goddamn nightmare. Not for the reasons everyone thought it was. The conservative media empire fell over themselves as a red country populated by brown people made proud demands in defiance of the United States; whipped up fear about Quran-toting extremists and socialists sucking up to the Soviets. That’s not what pissed off Dick Cheney though.

They had oil. They had a lot of oil. They had an asset of great importance to the United States—immediately they became one of the largest oil economies overnight—and they were not content on sharing it with the United States—or Europe, for that matter. (Not that Cheney cared particularly hard. It knocked down that smug sonuvabitch David Owen over in England down a peg, so frankly it was welcome. Paranoid, proud-of-himself little shit.) Hell, the whole goddamn country had made a big fuss about how they were only going to provide aid and assistance to the Third World. Big fuckin’ whoop, Dick Cheney had a country to run and its blood was oil!

At least there was goddamn Iran, but he didn’t trust it. Especially not with the People’s Mojahedin still running around behind the scenes. He didn’t hate that for the reason other people did though. Others hated it because the P.M.O.I. were communist Islamic something-or-others; Cheney hated it because it showed how disloyal Tehran was. If Iran was truly as close to the U.S. as they pretended they were, then they would have moved heaven and earth to get rid of the P.M.O.I. But they didn’t. And to Cheney that meant they did not actually care. He needed someone friendlier with oil, somehow, somewhere.

He needed to pull some strings. The rest of these ratfuckers, when they talked “ratfucking” they meant a political campaign. Calling a candidate a homosexual, exposing an affair, a scandal or money-laundering. It was small shit, little shit. The kinda thing that naive little shits thought that was all they needed in life. But that wasn’t what Dick Cheney meant. Cheney was on a scale above them, a summit higher than their goddamn imagination. He had friends in the C.I.A., connections he established from a particularly colorful Senator he was a chief staffer for. Those guys, when they said ratfucking, when they said fucking-over, they were on national scale.

He needed friends in low places. And, coincidentally, he had an idea. He could kill two birds with one stone—there was an old doc lying around that would be perfect. He could see it now. Could hear the gears turning. The vision, the plan, it all unfurled in front of him, just like that.

The Philippines were another display of the weakness of the Democrats, he was convinced of that. It was a weird confluence of factors—a particularly bold Filipino president (in this case, the otherwise unimportant Lorenzo Tañada), a particularly cooperative Filipino Senate, and a particularly incompetent American president (Bill Fulbright, that sissy of an intellectual); when President Tañada demanded President Fulbright release the U.S. naval bases on Filipino soil, President Fulbright shrugged his shoulders like a goddamn idiot and rolled over. Through his eggheaded idiocy, Fulbright lost the U.S. a faithful ally. The Philippines still remained close—at an arms length, it would seem—but through this all it had allowed this current goddamn predicament.

The latest Filipino election was between a rock and a hard place, and when given two bad options it would seem that they had unintentionally chosen the worst (at least, worst for Cheney)—Chavit Singson. Singson was a boisterous loudmouth of an idiot, bickering and screaming at the legislature every hour of every day. He also, coincidentally, had gotten hooked in by the idiotic nonsense China was spewing about being the sole defender of the Third World. All of this made Singson deeply unpopular, but that wasn’t what Cheney wanted. Dick Cheney didn’t need a Chinese ally to get defeated at the ballot—he needed to send a message, goddamnit.

So, one of the plans that was plopped on his big wooden desk by a C.I.A. guy was the perfect way to get rid of him permanently. It wasn’t an Eisenhower plan, that would be paying some guys to blow a hole in his skull. It was about a little—nudge. Power of persuasion. See, there were these guys down in the southernmost islands of the Philippines who were Muslim, and they thought the Christian government was treating them something awful. Therefore, a hearty militia movement had built up under the surface. The largest Cheney could find was the Moro Islamic Liberation Front—M.I.L.F. It seemed perfect, and shortly after all the debacle involving the Middle East he jettisoned some of His Guys out to Mindanao (that southernmost island). They were able to strike up a deal, that the U.S. would funnel in some under-the-table money and all they had to do was something big. Something to push the public to a breaking point, something to make the military lose faith in Singson.

And then like all things perfect, something had to get in the way. Justice Bob Duncan finally wanted to retire, and it was supposed to be a whole goddamn headache. Well, Cheney thought it was really goddamn simple.

Scooter Libby was in front of his desk, prepared to talk about the latest little minutiae of the presidency—how were the Indonesians dealing with Abdul Nasution? The strongman of the past several decades was finally getting too old and too incompetent and now there was a whole headache (“and I swear to God if there’s any more goddamn communists, Scooter, then—I don’t know what I’ll do.”). And then, right near the end, Cheney sat Libby down and said: “So, the Supreme Court?” And Libby sort of sat there, nodding along, and said “We do need to get along writing that shortlist. There’s not a lot of black law-guys who wanna work for us, but I’m sure—”

“Well, Scooter,” Cheney began, adjusting his collar a little bit. “I need someone there we can trust. And, well—ah, the hell with it. Would you want to be the next Justice on the Supreme Court?”

“If you nominated me, I would serve,” Libby said with determined face.

Naturally, like all things that would go right for Dick Cheney, Congress hated it. Congress whined that Libby was elusive, that he had a bunch of missing information (“For Chrissakes, we don’t even know his first name!” Joe Biden whined), all of that noise—as if those were flaws. That’s why he liked the guy. He got Cheney, they understood each other. Reporters years later would whine about how he would dine with his Chief of Staff instead of his Vice President, shirking years of tradition. What did it matter to those freaks? Poor Scooter, he didn’t make it past the confirmation hearings. “Ah well,” he said on his first day back at the White House, “I prefer this job to the Bench anyways.” Whatever, it was all bullshit. He picked a random name from the shortlist that someone-or-other vouched for, making Mel Martinez of Florida the first Hispanic Supreme Court Justice—yawn. It bored him even thinking about it. This was babysitting, not a duty worthy of the United States of America’s Presid—what do you mean there’s another opening?

Ironically, the other black Justice. Died unexpectedly. Shame, he was going to retire when the next Democrat came in. Cheney didn’t care much, frankly. Picked the name advisors floated to him: Welcome to the Supreme Court, Sheriff Frank Cousins of Massachusetts—chosen for your bipartisan accolades, etc. etc.

The more important stuff, to Cheney, was this MILF plan. It was honestly shockingly simple—send over one of his guys to an embassy in Manilla (he chose Dick Armitage, a fellow man from the staffer field), include a little stipend in the budget for repairing a few embassies in poor state, and send most of that money down to the Philippines. Let Armitage do the rest.

Cheney couldn’t help but let out one of his lopsided grins when he heard the death count. Double digits. A whole town vacated in a hurry—it was all over Filipino news stations! And the protests, the protests!

Singson didn’t even last another two weeks. Quickly booted into prison, replaced according to the line of succession—it didn’t matter who it was, nobody gave a shit about cozying up to China other than Singson.

And with that crisis under wraps, Cheney’s attention quickly re-trained to that great quagmire in the Middle East. He wanted a safe and secure ally in the region. He didn’t trust Iran to side with Washington when the cards were down, and he wasn’t enough of an idiot to try messing with ex-Saudi Arabia. The whole dilemma was this: Nobody really liked the U.S.

In a normal region of the world, the solution would be easy—fund a dissident buncha veterans into stirring the pot and raising hell. But that was the issue. Any veterans in the Middle East just hated the U.S., while anyone who didn’t hate the U.S. and wanted to cause a stir in the newly-founded unitary republic were not veterans. They needed training. And thus initiated Phase II of Cheney’s plan: why not kill two birds with one stone? He needed a reason to justify funneling a bit more money into the MILF—insurance, frankly—and he needed to cause some shit in the United Arab Republic. Synthesis: Use the MILF as a way to train potential dissidents in oil-rich Iraq.

And that’s why Cheney felt so much bigger than the cronies of the previous Administration. They would have thrown a fit at the idea of using commies to get their way. But that’s just the way the world was going. Anyone with eyes knew that the Cold War was over—probably for good. Cohn just put it on life support, and Cheney didn’t feel particularly like dispelling the corpse either. It was useful to keep in the back pocket just in case it was ever needed. Not that he figured he would, but you can never be too safe.

And somewhere in there, 1998 kicked around. The midterms were what anyone with half a brain expected—Democrats increased their margins even though 1996 had been a meager wash electorally. There were a few things that got him a bit worried, sure—Rove bitched up a storm when Gloria Molina became the first Democratic governor of California since Pat Brown: something about rebuilding coalitions with the activist politicking of racial minorities. The details only interested him in passing, but the picture of the West getting a bit competitive again was scary, he’d give Karl that.

He probably hadn’t helped with the midterms. Journos had been shoving mikes in his face about some book—Woodward, that little shit, thought himself a bigshot because he took down one presidential spouse—about the Cohn Years. He documented from one of his no-name sources that one Dick Cheney was one of the hardliners pushing for treating South Africa soft, in particular that he opposed continuing embargoes. And the hidden implication of that—that this stance was somehow morally reprehensible, made him unelectable—that really pissed him off. So he told them that, that this was “Trivia.” And after a pause, he elaborated: “Unilateral sanctions almost never work. Why would I have told [Roy Cohn] to pursue them, then? Of course I think what ended up happening in South Africa was a tragedy.” Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

And after that he continued to piss people off—and again it was people he didn’t particularly care about keeping happy. When the Democrats got reinforcements in the House and Senate, some of those urban activist types got it into their head to try to overturn the PAVA. It was a minor thing, Cheney hadn’t even heard of the motion before one of the journos asked him about it. And he paused for a second, thought through it, and gave a noncommittal supportive answer: “If Congress put that bill in front of me, I’d sign it, sure.” He didn’t get into it much but, well, he always felt that those types of people were given a bit too much shit—he had a daughter, and she, well…

But that didn’t matter. No reason would have mattered to the footsoldiers of Murdoch’s Empire. Very few people cared about it, outside of the T.V. airwaves. Roy Cohn signing onto it so avidly in the first place was so bizarre, a president doing the opposite was basically nothing. But not to the pundits and the talking heads. They had to “make it mean something.” Didn’t everyone have more important things to do!?

Well, apparently, Dick Cheney needed to learn to keep his mouth shut. Not even two weeks after Congress hashed out the “GSM Anti-Discrimination Act” (GADA), someone stumbled on It. It was a wild little quirk—a journalist doing an expose on a small but powerful anti-pan-nationalist militia movement in the lowlands of Iraq had stumbled on two fighters conversing about the differences of philosophy between Iraqi and Southeast Asian Islam. It was a fascinating conversation for the both of them, probably, but that journalist had gotten a whiff of something big and followed that trail all the goddamn way to Manilla, and from Manilla to Washington.

And then suddenly everything felt like it was falling apart. Congress was pissed—furious, saying that Cheney had funded terrorist attacks behind their backs; that he had acted in an unpresidential manner, broken his vow to follow the decorum befitting of the most powerful man in the world. That this, somehow, was unbecoming. Cheney was furious about this, all of this. Dick Cheney was doing what was goddamn necessary. What was he supposed to do? Let a country get sucked up into the nonsense promises of Beijing? Allow oil security to become a thing of the past? This entire Town had lost its touch, forgotten that they weren’t trying to make schoolchildren get along, they were trying to make sure a country kept running. They were all performative hacks, all of them. This was what you did with power. You goddamn used it! He had power, and god dammit if he wasn’t going to bend the world over and make it his bitch! They were scared of that, scared of a President with the goddamn guts to make the tough choices. And this whole circus, it only stopped briefly when Justice Johnson kicked the bucket. Another name from the list—Frank Easterbrook, why not—and then Congress got back on his ass. It was almost comical, how fast they pushed through the Court Justice just so they could rip Cheney a goddamn new one.

And they were talking a trial. They were talking impeachment. They started setting up a line of “conspirators,” from State to Defense, from Armitage to Wolfowitz, trying to interrogate the truth out of them. Half of ‘em wouldn’t crack, and whoever did was gonna get what they deserved anyways. Thick as thieves. Cheney didn’t regret a goddamn thing. Why, it was making him so angry that—that—

That he felt faint.

* * *​

It was a dark night at the Rose Garden, cameras trained as the dark night was an off blue. Dick Cheney lumbered towards the podium. Reporters bit their tongue, wanting to ask so much. Why are you remaining so silent about the MILF Scandal? Did you authorize these programs? What do you regret?

They would have to wait. In fact, they would never learn. He refused to say. He took a look around, a sigh, and then he spoke. “Hello, ladies and gentleman. I am here today to announce that, despite my great eagerness to run for a second term, that my health is a concern that I require time to attend to that the campaign trail does not accommodate for. I will not be running for a second term, although my vice president… will continue to run, as he has told me he has great interest in being the next President of the United States.” And then, with another look around the audience, he practically licked his lips and smirked that smirk. It was smug and sharp and Cheney. And then he added, finally, “There will be no further questions. Thank you for your time,” before sauntering off the stage. He had played them. He had won. He was not going to answer their questions.

And Cheney was true to his word. He would, soon after, be impeached for the alleged funding of a terrorist organization. The MILF Scandal scarred a presidential administration that was otherwise fairly unimpressive. And through it all, Cheney’s refusal to help cooperate with the Congressional inquiry added further strain and stress to the whole process. And it worked, the process of collecting evidence having dragged out so long that Election Day 2000 came and went. Some of his colleagues were not so lucky—like Dick Armitage, for example. And it could not be overstated just how angry the United Arab Republic and the Philippines were, learning they were played as pawns for some inscrutable purpose.

* * *​

Roy Cohn left the White House to a United States that looked a bit more like him. Dick Cheney knew that, despite being demonized to hell and back, that he had saved his country. That he had bettered it. That he regretted nothing, and would do it all over again.

---

[1] Based on a real ad from the 1994 Georgia gubernatorial election.

 

[Enigma-Conundrum]

42. Maynard Jackson (Democratic-GA)
January 20, 2001 - October 15, 2003

“Politics is not perfect but it's the best available nonviolent means of changing how we live.”​

When Dick Cheney announced his withdrawal from re-election, it was purportedly due to health reasons - a heart attack he had suffered earlier that week, as medical records and a visit to Walter Reed showed. Very little of the public bought it as the sole reason, though. His approval rating at that moment - after his near-miss acquittal by the Senate - sat at just 13%, according to Gallup. A fairly commonly early piece of Usenet political satire showed Cheney edited in place of Al Capone, giving his trademark grimace as he held a “Cheney/Bush For Cellmates 2000” sign.

And what of the Vice President? It was true that Cheney had clearly passed the baton to the young Jeb Bush, the ambassador whose work in the Levantine Wars had earned him accolades at home and a spot on the ticket, but to many it looked like just more of the same. The core question that dogged his new campaign seemed simple - what did Bush know, and when? That was why, when given the opportunity, not one but three candidates leapt into action. There was Joe Biden, the 1984 nominee, Delawarean Senator, and self-appointed leader of the Progressive tradition in Republican political circles. There was Dick Armey, the Texan darling of right-wing academic circles like the Mises Foundation, emphasizing the way that Greenspanomic policies responsible for the great boom of the 1990s had fallen by the wayside as Cheney mired himself in scandal. There was even Evan Mecham, the Arizonan demagogue whose fiery attitude towards cultural issues saw his detractors labeled him outright reactionary. All three of them hopped into the primaries quickly, determined to save the natural party of government from itself.

All three of them, as a consequence, took what was a unified bloc of anti-Cheney voters and scattered it to the winds. Though the Republican primaries were little more than window dressing compared to the Democratic “Primary Day,” they showed the nature of the chaos. Bush carried New Hampshire by the skin of his teeth, then Wisconsin went for Mecham, then Pennsylvania for Biden, then Massachusetts for Bush, then Nebraska for Armey, and on and on it went. By the convention, Bush was in the lead, but only with a plurality. The delegates, for their part, could tell the party was doomed to a loss, and honestly they couldn’t be bothered to have strong feelings about any of the candidates. What did it matter when all four of them were polling at a double-digit deficit with the Democrats anyways? Once Bush came out announcing an agreement with Armey and Biden, it was all over but the shouting.

But the shouting didn’t seem to want to stop. Some of the Mecham delegates, hurt by their being “blacked out,” wanted to flex their muscles with the electorate. Their newfound organization, the Heritage Party, had been slapped together by James Dobson and Howard Phillips back in 1999 as a means of electoral pressure following Cheney’s repeal of PAVA. It hadn’t been projected to have much of an influence, but retired three-term Representative Larry Pratt of Virginia made clear his intention to stand for the party’s first presidential nomination following the debacle at the RNC. Pratt’s campaign, though gaining some traction in right-wing circles - and some controversy for its meetings with hardline anti-immigration groups, the controversial right-wing radio host Pat Buchanan, and Christian Identity churches - was routinely strapped for cash and shut out of the main race, with the major parties ignoring him as little more than a gadfly. No matter how much or how eloquently he complained or tried to draw controversy, not much changed. Everyone knew he wasn’t going to be the next president, and for that matter neither was Jeb Bush.

*****​

Before, this room in Atlanta might have been smoke-filled. But cigars were going out of fashion - some studies, it seemed, talking about the harms of smoking and finally bringing Big Tobacco to heel. So instead, the room was just another meeting room, and the party bosses talked over Ethiopian takeout - the situation over there in the eighties and nineties was tragic, but at least the refugee communities made brilliant food. The topic was simple: times were changing, and the party seemed to need to change too.

Al From spoke up first. “I’ve been saying it since Fritz crashed and burned. Times are changing. The workingmans’ party doesn’t get a majority anymore. But another party does - the one that our good friend here in Atlanta, Governor Jackson’s, been talking about. A handful of others too - Tony Earl, John Kitzhaber, Ed Markey, Lu Hardin. Folks like that poll a hell of a lot better.”

Bob Shrum chuckled. “If Pat was here” - referring to the populistic pollster and strategist - “he’d be throttling you for suggesting that. He hates that kind of politics.”

“Pat’s not here, though, and frankly fuck ‘im. Smug sonuvabitch can rot for all I care. He got lucky twenty years ago and still thinks he can milk it like he’s some kinda prophet.” This one came from James Carville, the doomed leader of the Miller campaign.

“Oh, don’t pretend you’re above it Jim. Not like you did much better last year.” Dick Morris couldn’t help himself, even though he really should have.

“We did our jobs! That little shit Rove they’ve got workin’ comms for the White House could turn the Little Sisters of the Poor into a demon if he wanted! I told ‘em to hammer jobs, jobs, jobs, it was the number one issue for people, especially against such an insider ticket. We knew it’d work.” That last statement from Carville seemed more like personal denial than a rebuttal.

The room was silent for a minute. The folks talking about reforming the party towards the center, towards the professional classes and even some suburbanites swayed by Cohn and Cheney, they didn’t expect to get this bogged down. They were all here for that idea of reforming the party they loved - New Democracy, for the party that had once been called The Democracy - but when even the strategists and bosses had to fight like cats, what did it say about them?

“Enough of that crap, Jim, Dick, really. Doesn’t matter why your guys lost unless you can tell us how to fix it. Onto business.” This came from the House Minority Leader Gary Hart - he was poised to take the gavel at last in 1998. He had ideas, after all, for what New Democracy could genuinely look like.

*****​

Maynard Holbrook Jackson Jr. was seen as a rising prospect for the party, and had been since his governorship began. But then again, he had always seemed destined for public service. His father Maynard Sr. had been a Baptist minister and civil rights activist in Dallas, leaving a lasting impression on his son. When Jackson was fifteen, his father died, and from that point his grandfather John Wesley Dobbs, an early civil rights leader in Georgia responsible for the end of the “white primary” in the state, became a primary influence on his grandson. A prodigious student, Jackson graduated from Morehouse College at the age of eighteen, then went on to graduate law school at Boston College in 1961, upon which he joined the National Labor Relations Board as a lawyer.

But Beltway life wasn’t for Jackson. He knew he was doing good work with the NLRB, but as civil rights increasingly dominated the national conversation, President Fulbright’s attempts at dodging and delaying only further weighed on his conscience. Furthermore, his native Georgia had descended into a sort of provincial authoritarianism under Jim Gray’s boot, what with MLK's continuing political imprisonment and repeated attempts at resisting any sort of federal or judicial influence over Georgian segregation. So Jackson returned home to fight the good fight on the local level. As fate would have it, Jackson the activist met a young state senator named James Earl Carter, altering the paths the two men would take. Jackson would prove an invaluable surrogate and advisor for Carter, and Carter would prove a powerful backer for the young lawyer hoping to break into politics in his own right.

The politics of civil rights in the 1970s made this difficult to say the least. As the main political processes yielded slow and often halfhearted progress (the 1969 Civil Rights Act being the best example of this, legally ending segregation even though litigation surrounding those refusing to comply continued throughout the 1970s), a significant number of civil rights organizations found other ways of applying pressure. The Black Panther Party won city council elections from Chicago to Los Angeles, even notably electing Bobby Seale as Mayor of Oakland until his removal and arrest on trumped-up terrorism charges. Civil rights marches throughout the country were commonplace, occasionally resulting in scuffles with police and counter-protesters. The NAACP’s litigation related to noncompliance with federal civil rights laws was as effective as it was reviled in those communities. Every bit of ground was hard-fought.

The final universal extension of the franchise to all Americans 18 and older in 1978 changed the calculus. Voting rights were accessible to Black southerners for the first time, and given that much of the radical segregationist energy had fallen to the wayside, replaced by slow-and-steady compromise with Washington and the glut of economic benefits, proposals for genuine obstruction of their access to the voting booths had largely been ignored or - in an extraordinary case by Mississippi’s Bill Waller - vetoed in their entirety. It seemed voting rights, at least practically, had been accepted by the populace.

This did not automatically mean large-scale minority participation in politics. In Waller’s case, his veto went a long way in reconciling the divide between the Loyalists and Regulars in the split Mississippi Democratic Party, but the party was still fundamentally dominated by the crop of white populist that had come up as the energy behind strident segregationist politics tired itself out. Critics, especially in Black activist and academic circles, were the first to note that the idea of the “raceless populist” that so many southern Democrats used almost exclusively campaigned to white voters, as if to convince them that civil rights passing wouldn’t lessen their favoritism. This is not to imply the situation was better outside of the post-segregation south. The momentum of Black radicalism throughout the 1970s had largely waned, but as municipal politics in highly nonwhite cities began to trend more towards electing leadership more reflective of its community, those leaders often faced significant hurdles. A conflict-riddled Philadelphia was dubbed "Beirut on the Delaware" in the 1980s as Mayor Lucien Blackwell was routinely stonewalled by white Democrats aligned with ex-mayor Frank Rizzo on the city council. Countless others, from New York’s Percy Sutton to Detroit’s Kenneth Cockrel, faced intimidation and outright violence over hot-button issues like busing and housing integration as they sought to lead the way.

All of this was ongoing as Maynard Jackson was simply a man of Jimmy Carter’s inner circle, now a State Representative from Atlanta. Jackson had made a name for himself within his community for strong local services, often overlooked by statewide press but well-regarded in Atlanta. To him, this local strength in the state’s largest city was the perfect launchpad for a run for the state governorship in 1978, after Carter made clear his intent to return home to Plains (even though he would return to serve as the inaugural Secretary of Energy in 1981). Though he ultimately lost to Carter’s chosen successor Bert Lance, he won the entirety of Atlanta in the primary, which was notable in its own right. Jackson’s profile from that run paved the way for his 1981 bid for Atlanta’s mayorship, having made significant inroads in his time out of office. His victory received attention from the national press, as it seemed too perfect - the 26th Amendment had passed months prior, and now here was the first Black mayor of a major southern city. It seemed a sign of true progress and healing.

Mayor Jackson was many things to many people. His agenda seemed to eschew the historic nature of his election, for better or worse. His marquee public works projects both related to transportation in the form of a major expansion of the MARTA rapid-transit rail system and the groundbreaking on the Atlanta International Airport (later dubbed Jackson-Carter), both of which helped to draw public investment to Atlanta. A model vision for equitable distribution of other infrastructure funds helped to keep thriving minority communities together instead of paved over by freeways. Heavy lobbying with President Collins even led to BMW granting its planned first assembly facility in the United States to Atlanta, a major accomplishment for both Collins and Jackson. Jackson’s hiring of the first Black police chief in 1983 drew some initial controversy from white Atlantans, exacerbated when his choice was revealed to have been complicit in a police exam cheating scandal. Some tend to view this - and his selection’s subsequent firing - as the start of Jackson’s “overcompensation” on crime, though the truth is always more complicated. By 1982, Atlanta had the highest murder rate of any city in America, and the clamor for a crackdown was simply unavoidable. Regardless, Jackson’s personal oversight of the Atlanta Child Murders cases helped to allay tensions and build his reputation as a tough-on-crime leader, even personally overseeing convicted suspect Wayne Williams’ execution. Come 1989, Jackson’s second term as mayor had come to a close. He had attained a relatively strong profile as the man who turned Atlanta, once seen as a hotbed of crime and racial resentment, into a city that lived up to its motto of “too busy to hate.”

Jackson, naturally, saw this as a launchpad, and in his last year in office made clear his intent to run for the governorship. To a number of those in Democratic circles in the state, this was met with incredulity. Jackson had been a swell mayor, there was no denying that, but the idea of a Black man as governor of the whole state? It seemed unthinkable. There were still Gray supporters in the state legislature, for chrissakes! The people just weren’t ready for that yet - hell, a decent chunk of the suburbs of his own city had voted for Cohn, and that trend didn’t seem to be going away anytime soon. But Jackson hardly cared. He knew that in Atlanta itself, it was a different story - he could win virtually any Democratic primary in the city. Furthermore, the bloc of enfranchised Black voters had hardly been seized upon in primary campaigns, and Jackson reasoned that high Black turnout plus a sizable minority of white Georgians would put him over the top. Former Governor Carter and former President Collins’ endorsements went a long way too, as Carter was perhaps the best-respected governor of Georgia in living memory and Collins no slouch in Democratic politics despite her failed impeachment. A slate of strong campaigns around how Jackson had made job growth go up and violent crime rates go down resonated deeply with a number of white liberals and populists. Despite a deeply split primary between Jackson, Governor Mike Bowers’ handpicked successor Ham Jordan, and flamboyant state Attorney General McCracken Poston, Jackson’s dominance in the state’s largest cities combined with a non-trivial performance in rural southern Georgia handed him the victory. Though his campaign against Representative Paul Coverdell in the general was the closest it had been statewide in Georgia in decades, the Democrats’ dominance combined with Roy Cohn’s brief unpopularity in the south lent Jackson an expected history-making victory.

Governor Jackson, now the subject of national attention as the first Black governor of a formerly segregated state (though New Jersey’s Ken Gibson was the first Black governor overall), sought to make good on his promises, reasoning that potential backlash could be mitigated the same way he had largely done so in Atlanta. True to form, proposals focused on public investment and new industries in Atlanta - hoping to create a localized version of the “Silicon Lakes,” as the tech hubs stretching from Minneapolis to Buffalo were dubbed - flew through the legislature and were earnestly touted by Jackson. A measured crackdown on crime - including a focus on harsh penalties for drug dealers and repeat offenses - had its expected supporters and detractors, but in the environment of the Cohn years it seemed a welcome alternative to the overarching view of Democrats as “weak on crime.”

But it wasn’t those issues that propelled his national star. It first came to note when Jackson offered his official apologies on behalf of the state of Georgia to Martin Luther King. The father of the civil rights movement would die of a heart attack in 1997, and as he lay in state in Georgia the national press took note of just how far the nation had come that a man once held as a political prisoner in a state could now lie in its capital. Jackson’s eulogy of the deceased icon as a time not just for reflection on a great man’s life but how the nation can honor his memory earned him high praise, and his steps in the immediate aftermath seemed like earnestly following through on this. His call for the redesign of the state’s 1956 flag - one of the Deep Southern flags to incorporate the Stars and Bars - led to a major picketing by the Sons of Confederate Veterans and a serious controversy. Jackson’s talk of reconciliation, how the flag doesn’t represent all the people of Georgia and how it’s time for the state to move on to a brighter future, didn’t necessarily quell the firestorm but certainly showed him as a calm and thoughtful leader through it all. An odd alliance of urban Democrats and moderate Republicans against suburban Republicans and rural Democrats ultimately narrowly passed the change, reverting the state flag to the pre-1956 one and cementing the idea of Atlanta as the capital of progress in the South. As Jackson also became the first Georgia governor to run for a third term since Jim Gray’s ill-fated attempt, plenty worried about whether the cultural issues and true national profile afforded to Jackson would doom him, but these were ultimately unfounded, even as former Governor Mike Bowers attempted to launch an ill-fated primary off of supposed Democratic discontent (derailed by revelations of an extramarital affair he had been conducting). It seemed the Jackson treatment had been vindicated by the people after all.

Now with the national spotlight on him and an unpopular incumbent, Maynard Jackson was determined to keep the narrative. Privately, he hadn’t been so sure about the presidency, but the Cheney years and the resounding success of the multicultural coalition in breaking the Republican stranglehold on the west was proof enough to him. So, in 1999, Jackson announced his intent to contest the Democratic nomination. Paradoxically, while party insiders were antsy about the dynamics of nominating a Black candidate, the media couldn’t get enough of the idea of the “first serious Black candidate” - a phrase that surely made Adam Clayton Powell turn over in his grave. Jackson blitzed his way through the news shows and late-night talk shows, coolly explaining his pitch towards a focus on the domestic instead of causing far-off scandals. While he fielded some awkward questions, most infamously “do you think America is ready for a Black man as its president?” (to which he responded by saying “I think Americans care more about whether their president cares about them than whether they’re Black or white. They want a president who fights for good-paying jobs, safer streets, and better schools for their kids - which our current president has not”), overall Jackson’s empathetic pitch seemed to resonate with a public who knew Dick Cheney didn’t have an excess of empathy.

The factionalism in the Democratic Party was another story. Tom Hayden’s crushing loss had vindicated the idea of going rightwards to many - Alabama hadn’t voted Republican in eons, and yet it broke because of him! But even then, Zell Miller’s attempt at doubling down on the sort of workingmans’ populism that had crossed the Democratic South hadn’t done much good either. The party’s roots, both in radical reformism and appeals to the common man, hadn’t seemed to go much of anywhere in Roy Cohn’s America. A new sort, the “New Democracy” as it were since their formation in 1991, seemed to have a different view of where it needed to go. In their eyes, the view of the Democratic Party as one of bloated inefficient government and out-of-touch social politics was damaging the party. Jackson had affiliated himself with this strain, as had countless others vying for the nomination in 2000. Speaking directly to a conference for the New Democracy, Jackson laid bare his plans for “a party of the center-left” - one of reasonable reformism, efficiency, and largely accepting of certain Cohnite doctrines. After all, what had he done in Georgia if not followed their agenda? To the rest of the DNC leadership in attendance watching him speak, it was clear that Jackson was no radical, and they could rest easy.

All of this combined with an energetic campaign and his high profile led Jackson to a solid victory on Primary Day. He had always been the most high-profile candidate, but by no means was assured victory, and while securing just over 50% of the vote was strong, it still only meant about a quarter of the delegates were pledged. To this end, he pursued the second-place candidate - a similar New Democracy supporter, but one of a different persuasion and demeanor - and fashioned an agreement. Announcing his vice-presidential pick before the convention was relatively gutsy, but given his victory it helped to solidify the idea that Jackson was the frontrunner, nevermind securing the delegates of the runner-up - and the only person who seemed reasonably close to him as a challenger - behind him. The party also saw this as proof that he’d be ultimately reasonable, and as such effectively nominated him by acclamation.

Now in the general election, Jackson chose to ape Adlai Stevenson and go abroad soon. Positive headlines of his meetings spanning multiple continents, whether it be with Argentine opposition politician and future president José Octavio Bordón, Italian President Walter Veltroni, Australian Prime Minister Geoff Gallop, Iranian President Muhammad Khatami, or in the most publicized instance, an extremely thoughtful discussion with Nelson Mandela. Mandela had come to be regarded as an icon of anti-apartheid while also being deeply critical of the SACP’s anti-democratic turn, so much so that his work as a continental figure for human rights seemed almost a form of unofficial exile. Jackson being seen with Mandela on clearly good terms seemed to only reinforce the idea that he was committed to the same sort of foreign policy of human rights, and he returned home with a boosted profile and his face on the front of newspapers from Brasilia to Bonn.

While the Bush campaign tried to keep up, presenting Jeb as a strong defender of American values, it simply couldn’t keep up. Jeb was an awkward campaigner, prone to tripping over his sentences when he got fired up. While he hadn’t been implicated in the MILF Scandal, enough voters were upset about it to bring Republican enthusiasm dangerously low compared to the high marks on integrity that Jackson got. Matters were made worse when Hurricane Gregory made landfall in Florida and southern Georgia, flooding the region and causing significant damage. At first, as Jeb Bush met with Governor Tom Feeney to deal with the flooding in Tallahassee, it seemed a moment of genuine compassion and active leadership from the Vice President. Unfortunately, Bush was photographed laughing boyishly at a joke cracked by one of the other state government leaders, and the picture’s circulation only seemed further proof that Bush didn’t care much about Americans at home. Jackson largely declined to comment, knowing the damage was done for Bush and withdrawal from campaigning to focus on the damages in Georgia was getting him enough good comparisons in the press anyways. Debates came and went, with Jackson seeming like an eminently reasonable and compassionate leader next to, as Jeb was unfairly branded by left-leaning pundits, a stuttering dork. An infamous moment in the vice-presidential debate where John Andrews, Colorado Senator and Bush’s running mate, branded allowing women and GSM people to serve in the military as “fundamentally at odds with American values” earned immense controversy in its own right, even if it had the side effect of cutting Heritage’s momentum and denying them the 5% needed for federal funds. Even with all of this, plenty were still surprised at the scale of Jackson’s victory.

*****
I, Maynard Holbrook Jackson, do solemnly swear…
​

The young law professor shivered in the cold January air. He had been used to this kind of weather in Chicago, but somehow the day was even more bitter when you expected it to be warm. But it didn’t matter much to him, and it didn’t seem to matter much to anyone else there. It was one of the highest attendance inaugurations in history, with over a million people expected to be there. They were all willing to suffer the rare snow in Washington to see this kind of moment.

…that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States… ​

He had been invested early on in the campaign. Though he was just a professor at the University of Chicago, he had still donated, gotten involved in the local chapters of Jackson for President. The idea of bringing all the people out of the shadows, showing America as the tapestry of people of all colors and creeds that it was, the idea was alluring to him. It had been to countless others, too - not many primary campaigns have little room for a connected professor, but the Jackson campaign was stuffed to the gills.

…and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States…​

Some said it was because they were friendlier with big money than the Democrats of yore. It might be true, even. But even then, the focus on young professionals - like that professor - was one that bore fruit, and it was something he deeply appreciated. After all, plenty of people had come from little like him and come out in a solid spot, yet still felt second-class in the America of old. Maynard Jackson had seemed the first politician to truly speak to it, to speak to skinny kids with funny names like the professor in God knows how long.

…so help you God?​

Even that wasn’t really why he was there, though. Nobody liked thinking of their identity as an obligation, but if he was being honest, Barack Obama just knew he was supposed to be at this kind of historic inauguration.

So help me God.

*****​

Now firmly in office and with sizable - though unfortunately smaller than expected - majorities behind him in Congress, President Jackson could set to work in earnest. While some commentators gripe about the missed opportunity for sweeping change, often-moderate congressional leadership embodied by Speaker Gary Hart and Senate Majority Leader Cliff Finch knew their caucus simply wouldn’t support such proposals. Jackson himself was inclined to agree - he and his running mate had been elected as staunch New Democracy believers, and that’s exactly what they were. They had explicitly rejected sweeping state controls in favor of a more regulatory approach, one with government as guidance. So, while proposals to re-nationalize the TVA and universalize free higher education were little more than fodder for left-wingers’ meetings, the administration pursued other means. GSM activists cheered when the ban on homosexuality in the military was lifted by the Milk-Biden Act, passing with a respectable amount of bipartisan support. Education funds were significantly increased to focus on “low-access communities,” ranging from the Rio Grande Valley to working-class towns in the Steel Belt to poor inner city neighborhoods and helping to send a new generation of kids to college. Similar small mercies in the grand scheme of things came through in that mythic first Hundred Days.

The big proposal was a natural focus - immigration. It was, after all, the multicultural coalition that won 1998 and 2000 for the Democrats, and it was Chicano activists who the party had to thank for its breakthrough in the west. Plus, immigration reforms had been a mainstay of left-wing circles ever since the glaring inequities of the farm-work system had become clear. Now seemed as good a time as any to finally help to lay the issue to rest. After weeks of deliberation, the end proposal - the Immigration Reform Act, or Anaya Bill for the New Mexican Senator behind it - would be a genuine revolution. Those admitted for short-term work visas would have a path to citizenship, with the option to bring immediate family with them if they so wished. Labor and minimum wage laws would also be extended to cover short-term contract workers in their entirety with actual teeth, helping to prevent the cycle of abusive working situations for meager pay that was seemingly inherent to the Bracero Program. Furthermore, in a direct sop to the Sanctuary Movement, points of high entry would enter into a sanctuary program as places of first resettlement and processing for refugees, with willing support from previous sanctuary institutions. It was the type of bill President Jackson took to the Rose Garden to announce, something that’d “let all colors shine brightly in our great American rainbow.”

The IRA’s resistance was extremely stiff, unexpectedly so. Big agribusinesses out west did not take kindly to the massive costs and ran an ad campaign focused on exaggerations of ways the IRA would pass costs onto the consumer, with one notable ad showing a couple despairing as they read off their receipt for a meager amount of food. Furthermore, anti-refugee pressure groups like American Citizens for Legal Entry sprouted up with huge funding, platformed by STN - now the SKY Network - and the rest of the Murdoch empire. Bombastic right-wing performers grew in the public consciousness as the IRA seemed a perfect proposal to channel latent anxieties surrounding not just the race of the president but further access for non-white people to American society as equals. The White House panicked when a special Senate election in bright-yellow West Virginia yielded a narrow victory for Republican businessman John Raese off the backs of white anxiety. Even stripping the Sanctuary proposals, in no small part due to the intransigence of populist southern Democrats demoralized by the West Virginia results, couldn’t save the IRA as it was reluctantly scrapped following its failure in the Senate in late 2001.

Even though the immigration debacle had blown up in Jackson’s face, there was far too much to consider on the global scale. The Asian Spring, as it was broadly dubbed, was a collection of floating issues from Taipei to Bangkok. In short, a number of authoritarian governments had simply run out of time, and combined with a regional economic slump, their transition to the new millennium was far rockier. This naturally led to a new wave of refugees reaching the shores of everywhere from Australia to India to even the United States and significant headaches for the authoritarians’ patrons in Washington.

In South Vietnam, though mass protest could not force Nguyễn Cao Kỳ from office, a palace assassination certainly did so, destabilizing the country significantly as the knife-fighting between lower-level cronies turned into a distinct lack of succession. The stickier issue came when the new ramshackle civilian government seemed set to elect the Democratic Revolutionary Party, the left-wing nationalist association of former Viet Cong fighters, as the new government. The tense standoff between Ky-supporting military elements and President-Elect Trương Như Tảng ended in a forty-four hour military government followed by a daring Viet Cong rescue of Tảng from the Saigon prison he had been taken to, allowing him to take power in earnest. Privately, an order to stand down from Langley helped significantly in ensuring a peaceful transfer, though a North highly comfortable in the status quo didn’t quite know what to make of it.

Taiwan was a similar story, as the “Green Revolution” coursed through the streets and brought the KMT down at long last. Though Chiang Wei-kuo would flee the country before facing justice, his compatriots were largely able to stand trial for their actions as the new longtime-opposition DPP government of Hsu Hsin-liang focused on reconciliation and peace for the fraught people of Taiwan. Talk of gradual denuclearization was welcome, but also deeply contentious within the Taiwanese public - especially with conservatives who still backed the KMT and those who felt reconciliation across the straits was an unworthy goal with the current Mao Yuanxin regime’s sheer revolutionary fervor.

In Indonesia, one of the largest countries on earth, the addled and aging General Nasution had finally passed away in his sleep, leaving the nation at a crossroads for the first time in decades. All sects of the populace seemed to have a vendetta, whether it be the peasant militias who had suffered the general’s “Shock Therapy,” Islamists who saw the pro-western leanings of the general’s Indonesia as a betrayal, regionalists who had felt the neglect all too keenly, or even nationalists who had tired of his facade of a true Indonesian patriot. As one, the people of Indonesia rose in their demand for change, and even through the anti-dictatorship movement’s deep divides they found one woman to agree upon: Megawati Sukarnoputri, a sanctioned opposition figure due to her notoriety as the daughter of the beloved Sukarno, whom Nasution had overthrown with US support all those years ago. Though Indonesia would descend into chaos in a matter of years during its transition for all of the exacerbated divides in its society, as the rats fled the sinking ship Sukarnoputri’s indirect election to the presidency seemed the start of a new era.

And of course, there was Cheney’s folly in the Philippines. The collapse of the Singson government had, at first, seemed cause for relief, but as the ensuing government seemed woefully unequipped to deal with the rising tensions in Mindanao. Come the next election in 2002, the election of Raul Roco to the presidency terrified hardliners in the military, who saw Roco as a reformist who’d give it all away to MILF. Quickly, the Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces engineered a pre-emptive coup against President-Elect Roco. As Roco fled to Cambodia, newly sworn in military President Angelo Reyes declared “a total war on MILF” in his first address. It seemed that, as Cheney sowed the wind, the people of the Philippines were the ones who would reap the whirlwind.

For the United States, this posed a much larger problem. A new wave of Asian refugees, especially from the Philippines and Thailand, quickly became a tough political football. Many long nights in Washington were spent agonizing how best to handle the situation given the political circumstances post-IRA. Eventually, though, the decision was simple: it was a moral imperative to help. Jackson made clear in a primetime address that the United States was committed to building a framework with local nations to take in the refugees, as well as taking a number into the United States. If the IRA had infuriated many, then the United States aiding a wave of refugees practically revived Yellow Peril rhetoric. Right-wing fury turned towards strain on our welfare systems, housing capabilities, and virtually every social service they could use as a cudgel. Canada’s Prime Minister Stockwell Day became a darling of American conservatives for his tough negotiation to reduce his nation’s commitments, though it did little to improve Day’s standing at home. Republican candidates for the midterms added the new refugee wave to the list of Jackson’s sins, alongside high taxes and the disastrous rollout of the IRA.

In the end, those Republican candidates came out ahead. Robert S. Walker’s “Radicals,” new to House leadership given the Pennsylvanian’s acerbic style, emerged from that November with a number of high-profile Democratic scalps, reversing in an instant many Democratic gains in the west and cutting into the southern suburbs to a level not seen since Roy Cohn’s peak. Now-Speaker Walker - with Gary Hart’s caucus firmly pushed to the minority after a staggering fifty-eight seat loss - could run the House as he saw fit. Though the Senate narrowly stayed in Democratic hands, to many the House results alone seemed a stinging rebuke for the White House.

Even with the domestic agenda mostly halted, the Jackson administration’s real prize had finally come in 2003. It was to be a historic moment, the type of thing that presidents salivate over as a chance to carve their legacy in stone. Back in 2000, Valentina Tereshkova - the Iron Lady herself - had announced her intent to retire from the leadership of the Soviet Union. Though many of the old men of her decade and a half of power vied for the top role, she made clear that her successor was to be a similarly radical departure - Grigory Yavlinsky. The young Ukrainian Finance Minister was perhaps the most radical reformist in Moscow, a rare case of a Soviet official challenging bureaucratic inefficiencies and winning. His reforms had been instrumental in the USSR’s transition towards what proponents called “market socialism” and more orthodox communists sneered at as “state capitalism,” but relative economic prosperity had certainly helped to smooth over many of the tensions and contradictions of the Union. Yavlinsky had his eye on more, though. He wanted the Soviet Union as a genuine player in the global economic system.

The Cheney administration, at its tail end and hampered by the MILF Scandal, largely ignored these overtures. Jackson and his team - especially Secretary of State Nancy Pelosi and Secretary of the Treasury Bradford DeLong - saw the idea, and thought it was good. Damn good, even. Opening trade with the Eastern Bloc had long been a point of anti-communist rhetoric, and trade with the Soviets was seen as beneficial to all sides in the free-market mentality of many of the economic minds of the center-left. So they moved cautiously at first - an aside here, an unofficial ambassador sent to the other nation there - but once it was abundantly clear that both sides were damned serious, the plans for something greater began. A summit aimed at finally winning the peace.

Plenty of moments have been pointed to as turning points away from a bipolar Cold War. The UNPROFOR situation in the Levantine Wars was certainly an unprecedented kind of cooperation between Washington and Moscow. The rise of the Usenet had similarly helped to connect people across the globe, making it easier to see the opposing side as people and not a ravenous enemy. There were other moments, too - India’s intervention in Burma during Saw Maung’s attempted crackdown on mass demonstrators against his repression, including a battleship at the mouth of the Yangon River, seemed like the type of power exertion that only one of the two global superpowers could carry out. Ghanaian President Kofi Annan famously proclaimed the 21st century “the African New Millennium” in a speech to the United Nations, and as the leader of one of the “Lion Economies” of Africa he certainly seemed to have weight to throw around behind that. Times certainly seemed to be changing. There was no denying, though, that the Cold War definitively ended in Stockholm in 2003.

Stockholm was only the natural choice, after all. Ion Iliescu over in Romania called his reformist independent line “the Sweden Model,” and meeting as the aggressively democratic-socialist Prime Minister Bosse Ringholm’s guests seemed symbolic of that sort of future of genuine reform. The first round of talks, just between Jackson and Yavlinsky, seemed the type of moment pop historians were waiting for to declare the conflict between East and West dead and buried. On February 11th, 2003 - chosen specifically as the end of the Yalta Conference in 1945 - President Jackson and Premier Yavlinsky left Stockholm with an agreement allowing Warsaw Pact accession to the global economic order, a change that seemed all but certain in September with the first meetings announced for the negotiation of the “Arctic Nations Trade Agreement” between the United States, Canada, Denmark, Norway, and the Soviet Union.

Conservatives in both countries howled, naturally. The American right stoked anxieties about the trustworthiness of the Soviets as a negotiating partner, currency manipulation, and continuing imperial domination of Eastern Europe. Former New York Representative turned SKY host Gordon Liddy made headlines when he controversially outright accused President Jackson of being a KGB agent, seeming like a callback to the usual trope of calling civil rights movement leaders communist assets. The Soviet right, focusing similarly about bowing to the capitalist hegemony and tossing final revolutionary victory (with them at the helm, naturally) overboard, immediately began machinations to attempt to dislodge Yavlinsky at the time in 2005 when his term as Premier was to be renewed, as while his kulturny-laden approach to government was popular with urban professionals and younger people, plenty of ardent communists saw him as an outright traitor. One young deputy - Vladimir Zhirinovsky from the Kazakh SSR - went into an antisemitic rant about the Jewish Yavlinsky on the floor of the Supreme Soviet, leading to a highly coerced resignation from his post. “You’d think they want us to not acknowledge that the sky is blue if Moscow said so,” groused Treasury Secretary Brad DeLong in an interview about his role in the groundbreaking agreement.

The idea the Cold War was over did seem about as obvious as the color of the sky outside of the big two superpowers and their closest allies, though. Other blocs had been proliferating for some time. The second UAR seemed perhaps the most potent example of this as a direct integration of multiple aligned regionalists, especially when more pro-western governments in the region - Iran, Pakistan, Turkey, Jordan, and a smattering of petromonarchies - formed their own strategic pact seemingly specifically in opposition to its growing influence. The EEC grappled with the accession of neutral nations like Austria and Sweden, as well as the idea of a hypothetical application by Warsaw Pact reformists and even Yugoslavia. The Indian-led South Asian Community had slowly begun to absorb democratizing states from New Delhi to Saigon, especially as the new democrats wished to reject the legacy of American-backed dictatorship. OAS summits grew in profile as whispers of Pan-American integration spread through the hemisphere, with the New Democracy and Cohnite Republicans dreaming of a bicontinental trade zone alike, with both left-populist and far-right opposition. Beijing had founded the “Fifth International” fully intending to thumb their nose at the Soviets for their increasing pragmatism, drawing in a motley crew of third worldists and bankrolling a number of revolutionaries in the Global South. Africa was not to be dominated again, though - ECOWAS stretching from Senegambia to Biafra and the DRC-driven African Development Union both sought to find a way to hang together instead of letting African nations hang separately. The world had already seemingly changed, blocs had fractured and become more complicated. International theorists spoke of multipolarization, of the end of the simple distinctions between Capitalist, Communist, and Other that had driven the field for so long.

What, then, would American foreign policy look like in a changed world? To the Jackson administration, that question was answered as Rwanda burned. The country’s simmering tensions had boiled over with the assassination of its president, and as the Hutu military government sought to exact its revenge in blood, the Jackson administration saw the situation as deeply untenable. So, in a well-remembered address to the United Nations, President Jackson laid out a new foreign policy doctrine. The rising standards professed by Adlai Stevenson returned in full force, with American guns behind them. Genocidaires - like those of Rwanda - would not be tolerated. The move was broadly popular within that broad center of American politics Jackson had kept to - signing onto a Republican banking deregulation proposal to avert government funding drying up - but for very different reasons. Regardless, on October 1st, 2003, President Jackson signed the Authorization for Use of Military Force in Rwanda, officially entering into a peacekeeping anti-genocide operation.

But Maynard Jackson would not be the one to deal with a changing world in a new millennium. Nor would he be the one to preside over the growing talks after South Korea’s President Choo Mi-ae traveled to Pyongyang to meet with Yon Hyong-muk, an unprecedented step on the Korean peninsula. Nor would he be there in Northern Ireland as Prime Minister Michael Howard sought to make good on the mandate his argument for greater security had given him over David Owen. He wouldn’t even be the one to touch on the rising issues of big technological firms, early science pointing to pollution as an existential crisis, and further social reform. Just two weeks after signing the AUMF, President Maynard Jackson suffered a near-fatal heart attack en route to meet with soldiers flying out to Rwanda. He was promptly rushed to Walter Reed, where expectations of a full recovery within a matter of days were dashed by a second heart attack, this one fatal.

Maynard Jackson, being so close to living memory, remains somewhat controversial. Proponents point to “victory” in the Cold War, while opponents ask what that victory cost. Plenty of mainline Democrats espouse his less class-oriented multicultural coalition as the path forward for the left-of-center in the United States, though leftist-minded figures and southern populists - whose discomfort is, oddly enough, never specified much - grouse about missed opportunities and the eschewing of the class politics that built the New Deal Consensus. Republicans see much more of what he did as the undermining of America’s position and the end result of the politics of human rights over realpolitik. Regardless of the brevity of his tenure, Jackson remains iconic in his own right. The idea of a Black President in America - once a curiosity for television, such as Avery Brooks’ portrayal of Benjamin Marshall on Aaron Sorkin’s The American President - now seemed like a sign of changing times, both in a more diverse nation and in a world whose orientation was increasingly shifting towards the Global South.

 

[Oliveia]

43. Ed Markey (Democratic-MA)
October 15, 2003 - January 20, 2013

“There’s no place for cynicism when those around you are experiencing pain.”​

Ed Markey won Massachusetts over in the way that most Massachusetts politicians did—by being a young Irish guy. But it was more than that. More than anything else, he was a good advertiser. Virtually any Masshole remembers the Markey ad. Not an ad—the ad. “The one with the desk!” Because Markey wasn’t just any young Irish guy, he was a populist Irish guy. He had entered Beacon Hill a little older than 25, and he pushed hard to reform a legal loophole in the judicial system of Massachusetts. As the ad goes, as a punishment for this attempt to add transparency to the state government, his desk was moved into a hallway. And then out waltzes Ed Markey, no matter if he was running for the House in ‘76, the Senate in ‘84, or the Presidency in ‘04, and he crosses his arms and he states proudly that “The bosses may tell me where to sit. No one tells me where to stand.”

That was the ad. And Ed Markey represented that ad. He was a fighter, he was deeply in touch with the Gilligan generation, that network of student activists and used-to-be-student activists. He had that oratory prowess, he had that ability to speak to the crowds. And he believed in that cause, too. His father was a union man, he’d say, so he’d been taught from a young age that you “don’t beg for your rights, you organize and take them.” Protesting was in the blood of the Democratic Party, and it was in the blood of Ed Markey, too. He won his way into the House in the ‘70s, climbed into the Senate in ‘84, and there he remained a high-profile figure among the party activists. While Bobby Kennedy continued to humiliate the Activist Democrat with his overtures to conservative Republicans, Ed Markey gave them something to be proud of. He was an organizer, a firebrand, a guy who wore his heart on his sleeve.

And as soon as he became an activist sweetheart he soon found himself predictably making in-roads with the Moderate New-Englander, that broad base. While the Great Lakes thrived, while the South received the trickle of investment, New England’s industrial core had rusted over. Industry in Massachusetts and Connecticut and Rhode Island had hollowed out, leaving prosperity a phantom of the past. Senator Markey, though, fought like hell to get New England some investments again; he got the ailing region investments into rail and public infrastructure that saw the return of the B&M rail route. That these investments did little to actually fight back against the rusting-over of New England ultimately mattered little, it would seem.

It would be inaccurate to say, then, that Ed Markey was unknown before Roy Cohn and Dick Cheney—but they turned the obscure New Englander activist into a politician that was on the television, that became something close to a household name. Damascus made Ed Markey, in its own way. Senate Democrats—and a few of those old guards of Progressive Republicans—felt that the Cohn Administration had made severe lapses that had allowed the situation in the Middle East to escalate to that unfortunate conclusion. And the Senate leadership figured that avowed disarmament activist Ed Markey would be best suited for chairing that commission. Thus birthed the Markey Commission, often nicknamed the “D&D Commission” (short for “Damascus & Denuclearization”), which was complimented and derided in equal measure for its harsh tone towards the Cohn Administration. And then the Anna Chennault affair had come through, somewhere in the middle period of the Cheney Administration—that Madam Chennault had allowed nuclear secrets to leak into Taiwan, thus facilitating another near-miss nuclear crisis in Asia. Those revelations shook many Americans, who tuned on the television to see Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts harshly interrogate the former Secretary of State.

Ed Markey, despite what some conservative pundits would later posit, was not particularly interested in running for the presidency in 2000, but was compelled by a plucky coalition of campaigners including among them Mike Ford and Steve McMahon. They saw his forays in front of the camera, his strong dedication to his core values, and knew that he would be the perfect guy for the new millennium. And, true, he performed well in New England on Primary Day, but he fell far too short in the end.

It was no wonder when he was brought on board as Maynard Jackson’s number two. They both were of that activist generation of politics, they both had gotten along well during campaign season—it was a political marriage that, in the eyes of many, just made sense. It was not the first ticket to not feature a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (that would be Biden/Dornan in ‘84, a double-Catholic ticket in an odd bit of campaigning calculus that likely lost the Republicans that election), but it definitely represented new coalition for the New Millennium—more vibrant than ever, more bold than ever, more American than ever before. That’s what Maynard Jackson represented. That’s what Ed Markey represented. That what the Democratic Party represented, as it steamrolled Republican opposition in the face of the MILF scandal, in the face of Cheney’s unpopularity, his long shadow over Bush: a new day for America.

And through the highs and lows, Markey stayed loyal and quiet as Maynard Jackson made his mark. That is not to say that Ed Markey sat idly—he absolutely helped in foreign policy matters, and domestically he was often sarcastically called the Energy Czar for his interest in combatting the increasing scientific consensus of global warming via increased time and energy put into alternative energy. (His closeness with Secretary of Energy Charles B. Curtis—incidentally also a key face in the nuclear disarmament political wave—would see him become a major member of Ed Markey’s inner sanctum after he ascended to the Presidency.) Maynard Jackson was a friendly guy, and in spending so much time with him it was impossible to not see the man as a friend. As such, his passing was heartbreaking, though it was not necessarily surprising. Jackson was a big guy with a weak heart, and a combination like that made his struggles with health visible to those who were particularly close to him, such as Ed Markey. Thus, a tragedy but not a surprise elevated Ed Markey to one of the most powerful positions on the planet.

And what a planet he inherited—one embracing multipolarity, one now free of the shackles of the Cold War. Maynard Jackson left the world at a dozen crossroads, which Ed Markey could only hope to follow in the footsteps of. But here he was dwarfed in the shadow of that historic predecessor; though Ed Markey was no isolationist, he was no visionary. At least, the first trial that met him—as U.S. troops and blue helmets returned home after the scarring battlefield of Rwanda—was something close to home turf.

Ireland had been a region of instability for a long while—since the ‘60s, the region of Northern Ireland (under the jurisdiction of the United Kingdom) had been split between hardline Catholics who wanted to join Ireland and hardline Protestants who wanted to shut down pro-Irish sentiments. These enemies engaged in slow-burning yet omnipresent violence, mostly manifested in combat resembling gang warfare and occasional flare-ups of what would later be called “stochastic terror,” or acts of violence committed by individual actors largely unrelated to the militias and gangs of Northern Ireland. This was the norm until the ascendancy of Peter Shore. While the United Kingdom prospered under a wave of progressive policies—policies that Shore did not have strong feelings on, mostly following the Labour Party’s prerogative—the idiosyncratic patriot was a firm believer of Northern Ireland’s place in the United Kingdom, and his constant re-assertion of this belief enflamed the tensions in the delicate beneath-the-surface conflict in the region.

Shore’s disregard towards delicacy on the Northern Ireland situation alienated a key Labour demographic, and in response a short-lived “Catholic Labour Party” was formed and swiped a couple seats from Peter Shore’s party. The fallout from this led to a massive behind-closed-doors fight in the Labour government, and after the brutal infighting David Owen emerged the victor and courted back the Catholic voting bloc to the rank-and-file. All of this was not enough, though, and after one meager victory he swiftly lost to Tory Michael Howard, riding on a wave of dissatisfaction with decades of Labour leadership and a sprinkling of anti-immigrant sentiments (the irony that Michael Howard was the son of a Romanian immigrant was not lost on many commentators). After the chaos of Shore’s Ireland policy, however, one of Prime Minister Howard’s first prerogatives was to finally ease the situation that had been quietly simmering for nearly half a century. As a close ally to the United Kingdom, the United States was asked to arbitrate—first under Maynard Jackson, but following his unfortunate demise, Ed Markey was more than happy to help alleviate the troubles of his ancestral homeland.

There was initially a fair amount of skepticism on both sides of the pond, Irish-Americans having a long history of strong opinions on the status of the Fourth Province. However, by all accounts Ed Markey was not one of those. He sought to pursue a middle ground roughly comprising of the idea of “Hey, why can’t we just all be friends?” That made him the perfect mediator for the hotheaded tensions of the region. The stereotype was unfortunately true of the U.S. Ambassador to Ireland, former Boston mayor Ted Kennedy (picked as a thank-you by Jackson for years of service to both the Democratic Party writ large and the Activist Democrat in particular). Kennedy’s vocal support of the annexation of Northern Ireland into the Republic of Ireland almost immediately saw an end to the peace talks as a whole—and it was only made worse after Taoiseach Desmond O’Malley echoed Kennedy’s sentiments that the only solution to the many troubles that ailed the region was the creation of a United Ireland. The backlash was immediate, with Kennedy willingly agreeing to retire from his post and O’Malley getting ousted and replaced by Deputy party leader Mary O’Rourke. With this rotation, once more were talks able to resume. And, after around a year of on-and-off negotiations the Whit Monday Agreement came into fruition, in which the United Kingdom’s position in Northern Ireland was recognized by the Republic, as was the fact that a majority in Northern Ireland wished to remain that way—while both parties also recognized the significant minority that wanted unification. The Agreement allowed for a process by which reunification would occur should both a majority of both Northern Ireland and Republican Ireland individually wanted a united country. The Agreement also contained arrangements regarding people convicted during the Troubles, the normalization of relationships both North-South and East-West.

The negotiations took over a year, but the United States was not engaged solely in Irish affairs during that time. Ed Markey was, however, hesitant to engage with a large agenda; Congress was unfriendly still and he felt that he had no proper mandate, effectively being an acting president. To this end, however, Markey continued cementing his foreign policy view—finally helping take up the talks of strengthening the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty after the fallout of Damascus. It was still a ways away from coming into fruition, but at minimum Markey’s Administration enthusiastically supported Sri Lankan Jayantha Dhanapala, a key figure in denuclearization negotiations, for the Secretary-Generalship.

Markey was also present at another negotiation between two divided lands—although a far different context, this time. After several years of talks, Koreas North and South had found common ground to begin the process of federation and later outright unity—the South having drifted leftward over the decades and the North rightward, they approached each other in that great middle and wanted to celebrate the peace like newlyweds. Thus Markey’s participation showed that great shifting into that new world order, where the United States’ participation made it just one of many; indeed, the only absence was the firebrand Shintaro Ishihara, who only made note of the event by some passing derogatory statement about the Korean people that saw the routine demands for apologies that Shintaro was more than happy to never give. The guest list was otherwise many of the major players—and even many of the minor players—in the Pacific World: Presidents Markey of the U.S. and Megawati of Indonesia and Salleh Said Keruak of North Borneo chatted and ate and shook hands with Prime Ministers Gallop of Australia and Singh of India and Masahide Ōta of Ryukyu; most controversially was the inclusion of the Chairman Mao, whose proximity once or twice with President Markey set SKY Network types ablaze with talks of collusion.

The buzz was twofold—first because the coexistence with an American president and a dirty leftist was enough to make many in that media empire cringe (nevermind that Roy Cohn was the one who more-or-less buried the hatchet with the Soviets). But, also, the 2004 election was on the horizon and the Republicans hoped to capitalize on the suburbian turnover that had befallen Jackson’s midterm failure. But that was proving tough, in no small part because of Republican infighting. Many of the bigger names had backed out of running after the passing of Maynard Jackson—believing, perhaps correctly, that it was impossible to oust Markey after the passing of the President. There also was a candidate gumming up the works—former New York Governor Howard Dean, who hoped to awaken in the Republican Party the sort of youth outreach that Maynard Jackson made seem effortless. He utilized a Usenet-heavy campaign chaired by Mike Murphy as he tried to bill his campaign as the Straight-Talk Express, a tech-savvy campaign run by a rustic down-to-earth guy who was able to tell-it-like-it-is. And, surprisingly, it seemed to be paying dividends, creating a whole generation of Republican “Deaniacs” that seemed far more in line with the Progressive Conservative caucus; a potential second wind for a wing of the party that had seemed so close to a geriatric decline. This second wind, obviously, was deeply off-putting to the Republican Party of Roy Cohn, who rallied swiftly behind Wisconsin governor Tommy Thompson, who had won the governorship in 1994 as a combined fluke of low turnout and the suburbanite paranoia of the Hayden quagmire of two years prior. Although Thompson got reelected to a second term, he forewent running in 2002 to start preparing for a dark horse bid against Maynard Jackson—a smart piece of political calculus, seeing as Thompson’s chances of winning a third term in his home state had started shrinking slimmer and slimmer. Although not a conservative hardliner, Thompson was able to position himself decently enough as the guy for the right, and at a divisive convention he was able to sway the Deaniacs by promising to put California senator Leon Panetta onto the ticket as his running mate. (Panetta had been one of Governor Dean’s earliest endorsers.)

​

2004 was a boring year, electorally. Markey had a decent lead in the polls for basically the entirety of 2004 and Thompson was never able to capitalize on the contentious legacy of Maynard Jackson. The presence of a Southwest Senator as number-two was able to persuade states like California to stay Republican for the cycle, but Thompson was wholly unable to win back the South, where Markey was not hated but wasn’t loved. A Republican ad wave that had attempted to exploit the Irish Masshole’s faith blew up as many pundits used the ads as a mean to decry the backwardness of many modern Republicans. Markey’s reelection, although never entirely assured until Election Day, quickly became seen with hindsight as an inevitability—or, for others, the ultimate “if-only.” If only there had been a more passionate Republican candidate topping the ticket, maybe then the tides would have turned.

And half a world away, another major power elected its president. The United Arab Republic’s election structure, however, was far different than the United States’. With a National Assembly of 750 members (half of them needing to be common folk—industrial workers and farmers and everymen—in accordance to the Constitution), the President of the Republic was an internal matter primarily. The Assembly would debate amongst itself who the best person to lead the country would be, and eventually when enough of the Assembly agreed the public would decide in a referendum if the candidate was acceptable or not. Through the process of selection did the strain of factionalism take ahold. Although there was nothing in the Constitution specifically forbidding political parties, the largest in the Assembly was the Arab Socialist Union (ASU). (This ignores the wide array of independents, stemming from the non-career politicians’ outsized role in the legislature.) [1] Within the ASU there were two major competing visions: Left-Nasserists and Right-Nasserists. Left-Nasserists were expansionists, people who saw the best way forward for the United Arab Republic as increasing its membership count and becoming more vocally hawkish towards Israel; Right-Nasserists were not friendly towards Israel, meanwhile, but they tended to back away from the saber-rattling of Left-Nasserists and instead primarily concern themselves with internal improvements over external expansion. These two factions clashed hard in 2004, but eventually the Left-Nasserists won out, and selected a rather obscure member of their ranks to the Presidency…

* * *​

Saddam Hussein wanted to prove himself. He was an underdog of the Left-Nasserists, a compromise as far as everyone was concerned. The papers out of Cairo and Alexandria were a bit dismissive; he was a no-name, a dynast, a man who only got to this point off of family connections.

He was now the second President of the Republic—the first elected president had been the Syrian Safwan al-Qudsi. (It had to be a Syrian, of course. After everything that happened.) Thus, Hussein had big shoes to fill. He thought about it as he shook hands with al-Qudsi, he thought about it as he sat in his office in the Koubbeh Palace, he thought about it as the cameras flashed-flashed-flashed as he took the first photos of his presidency. He thought about the length of his term—six years. Heard the ticking of the invisible clock. Tick… tick… tick…

al-Qudsi was a success, he had overseen the recognition of the Second United Arab Republic. He had overseen its first expansion—when fellow philosopher President Nugud decided to petition Arab Sudan into the Republic. And Saddam Hussein, an avid member of the Left-Nasserists, one of the more vocal about the need of the Arab cause to grow. And he knew how the Western newspapers would talk about him—a dynast, a warmonger. Because he wanted to protect his people. Because he wanted them to grow and prosper. Because he wanted a world where the oppressed of the world had a true beacon, a power on par with Worlds First and Second, independent and powerful.

As the photographers left, he got to spend his first minutes in the Presidential Office, alone. No staffers, though they would arrive like a plague in short order; no advisors, not even his three vice-presidents. He was truly alone. And his thoughts traveled to the cornerstone of Left-Nasserist philosophy: growth. New memberships, new industries—growth.

He had a pet project. Khuzestan, a part of the Arab World yet tied to Tehran. That was his novel idea, to wrestle that land free. Expand the Arab control on the Persian Gulf. Yet, it would never come into fruition. It was wild, it was impossible, and it would never be; but yet he wished it was possible. He wished he could shape the world, could draw borders with the flick of a pen like Europeans were allowed to do 100 years prior. They had power, had privilege. That was why this country was so important.

Libya, too. Libya was feasible, they demanded a part. As the words of that lost philosopher Gaddafi filtered through the war-torn nation, the vision of Pan-Arabism seemed ready. There were rumors, intel reports, of Gaddafist and Nasserist militia movements in eastern Libya forming with intent of forcing their way into the Republic. And if they did, that was great. If they demanded it so quickly, he would welcome them in with open arms. In Tripoli, the ruling elites had already warmed to the vision of Arab Brothers united.

Yes, yes. Hussein reclined in his chair, gazed out the window. He fiddled with the knobs on his radio—an older model, in this new age of innovation and invention it was swiftly becoming an antique even in the Arab World—and smiled as the national anthem played. A beautiful song for a beautiful people:

It has been a long time, oh my weapon!
I long for you in my struggle!
Speak and say I am awake,
Oh war it has been a long time.​

* * *​

The inauguration of President Hussein was swiftly accepted by Libyans, still fractured although slowly solidifying—to that point, at least. Saddam Hussein was a vocal Pan-Arabist, a hardliner whose powerful rhetoric of a united Arab people engendered in many Libyans across the three regions of the war-torn country a deep yearning. In an odd twist of fate, militia movements in the Senussi Kingdom of Barca started a small invasion force into the U.A.R. to be accepted into the Republic. Hussein gladly opened the door to them, though this did have a weird legal fallout. The U.S. had recognized the nation of Libya as being dissolved—had since Cheney—but very few other nations followed that line of thinking. As such, when Saddam Hussein arrived in Tripoli and shook hands with President Abdurrahim El-Keib, the view was split: to much of the world, this was a cementation that all of Libya had become part of the United Arab Republic; to the United States, though, this was Tripolitania joining the United Arab Republic. As such, there was much confusion in the foreign policy sphere as to what to do when the Senussi king unceremoniously returned to Europe. Markey attempted to square the circle by shrugging his shoulders and allowing Barca to join the Republic, labeled by many conservative commentators as his “folly in Benghazi.” As a response to those asking about the importance of ex-Libyan oil in the United States economy, Markey sought to prove a point by visiting West Africa, a trail of photographs of him with Biafran president Chris Ngige and Benin president Chuba Okadigbo, both close allies of the U.S. who promised with a shake of the hand and a grin at the camera to carry the burden that Barca had left behind. That Biafra and its close ally Benin had a rough history of political transparency did not factor into Ed Markey’s brief little tour.

Besides, Ed Markey was more than happy to secure some spending into more renewable sources. The U.S. already had a large solar energy sector, and he was more than happy to indulge it.

Back at home, Ed Markey got to turn his attention to that bubbling new phenomena that fascinated him so—Usenet. The network had made leaps and bounds since its humble beginnings as a digital mailing list from universities. As the idea of this digital new frontier began to cement itself in the minds of Americans (and, perhaps more importantly, investors), new methods of streamlining created the World-Wide Web, a mythologized “global cafe” where anyone could meet with anyone. Gone were the redundancies of an archaic and hi-tech system, instead this new Usenet delineated “websites” interconnected by “webrings” [2]. Declaring the “new era of communications enhancement and technology advancement,” he revitalized the barebones White House website. This was not an aesthetic change solely, though, as Markey’s vision for a “new era” was just as much of a political promise as it was a promise of updates.

Markey had a long history as a reformer and regulator in Congress, and proudly declared an agenda of “ruthless Darwinian competition that would bring a smile to Adam Smith” in the User-Network Era. Wielding the bully pulpit like Teddy Roosevelt a century before, Markey oversaw a massive effort to trust-bust the consolidating web-companies. He similarly pushed for a policy of “net neutrality,” forcing USPs (Usenet Service Providers) into not discriminating between websites and addresses; Markey, in that vein, oversaw many interventionist measures to allow competitive capitalism to determine the US’s Usenet policy. Many leaders in Europe followed suit, with French president Bernard Kouchner singing high praises of Markey’s interventionist stance. (Kouchner, however, could not follow suit—unlike most of Europe, France had not switched over primarily to Usenet; the French system of Minitel was still leagues more popular as a means of long-distance telecommunication.)

The Usenet flourished under the Markey Administration, connecting corners of the country who had previously been much more fragmented. Perhaps the most explosive of these groups being the GSM community—who, almost immediately, rallied around the dissolution of “GSM” as proper terminology. It was sterile, clinical, professional. Although many different answers would crop up as a response to that base grievance, as the decades marched forward a majority would warm to reclaiming the idea of a Queer community; although the world of Heterosexual America would balk at openly using the word and would continue to fall back on the sanitized “GSM” label that many so-called “GSM” members disapproved of.

2004 had been good for Ed Markey, and had supplied him with friendlier margins than Maynard Jackson had dealt with after 2002—entirely because of his passing, ironically. This “sympathy bump,” however, did not allow Markey the room to renegotiate Jackson’s immigration reform. Despite many of these Democratic lawmakers owing their careers to the legacy of President Jackson, very few wanted to stick their necks out in an act of likely political suicide. 2006 was not the blowout defeat that 2002 had been for Jackson, but it definitively marked the high-water point for the Democratic composition under Ed Markey. But this brought with it an air of vulnerability that made a dozen different Republicans start sharpening their knives. A dozen men who wanted to be the next Tommy Kuchel, or the next Roy Cohn, or the next Dick Cheney, or the next all-of-the-above, or the next none-of-the-above. A governor or two, a few senators, a cabinet official here or there. And by the end there was one definitive winner, and surprisingly very few people minded that he was the victor.

* * *​

An oriental breakfast-for-dinner fit for an emperor sprawled the table in front of Jesse Benton in this small dining hall in this otherwise unimpressive hotel in the middle of Portland, Maine. It was said, oh so long ago, that Roy Cohn’s residence was the beating heart of Conservative America—and now, here, Jesse Benton sat in the presence of the greasers of Conservative America’s machinery. It was more than a meeting, though: it was a coronation. In the great clashes of ego that made up the Republican campaign operators, Benton had somehow found the One—the one candidate who everyone could swallow working for in the general election. (Well, excepting Mike Murphy, who was too busy whining about Republicans “abandoning their progressive roots.”) And here they sat, the day before the Convention, to celebrate their good fortunes.

The hotel was too small for the whole convention—Hell, Portland Expo was too small until Governor Lipman redirected enough dough to renovate the Expo. Which was ironic, since that kind of spending was the thing that His Guy would represent the end of. And there Benton sat, to steer His Guy all the way to the White House. To represent the greatest shift in the political landscape since sweet-talking conman Jack Gilligan.

But he was getting ahead of himself. Roger Stone was giving a wheezing laugh as he stacked fatty slices of bacon onto his plate, talking about what it reminded him of—Benton’s Guy. “Makin’ the Democrats the party of pork, that’s marketing to die for!” And from across the table, Karl Rove gave an affirmative nod and a quick grin. “He’ll make a good advertisement campaign. Loves a good stunt, I respect that.” And somewhere down the table, Dolan nodded and Black nodded with. They shared another laugh when Benton held his finger up, coughed a bit of food he ate to quickly as he rushed to explain this gimmick he had come up with, and then proudly declared that “The smartest idea I have is to make some Markey posters where the Democratic jackass is a prize pig instead!”

Stone gave a sly grin at that one, nodding with a glint in his eyes. “They’ll say their gold is for prosperity, but we know it’s what they keep in the party coffers. That’s beautiful, Jesse. Outdoing yourself, kid. Run this ship right and, goddamn, might be the best presidential campaign since Roy Cohn’s.” And Charles Black piped up then, politely chewing on a fried egg (a bit overcooked, the yolk was looking on the grayer side of yellow), “Oh, absolutely. You really did find a no-name and elevate him all the way to the top. I mean, nobody heard of the guy before you started running his ship. Beautiful stuff.”

“Hey, thank [Howard] Dean,” Jesse said with a wink that elicited another round of laughter, “it was his idea to run such a heavy net campaign. Really worked, really resonated with those folks. Lot of young outreach, too. ‘Specially in the schools down south, some of the unis.” He could see the dilation in Karl Rove’s eyes, as the number-fetishist got a rush of adrenaline imagining the crosstabs.

As the conversation lulled, Jesse grabbed a spoon—handed out at the beginning of dinner but unnecessary for basically all the dishes placed before the company of conservatives—and tapped it on his glass of water. “A toast,” he said. For a second he almost dedicated the toast to His Guy, but that was too easy. He immediately though of something much better, far more unifying, and far more important: “To kicking Ed Markey’s ass!”

And the table erupted into cheers.

The night fell hard in Maine. Even with the buzz of city life, even with Boston so close, the rusting-over had hit just hard enough for some pinpricks of starlight to illuminate the dim hallways of the apartment complex. Jesse had unfinished business, a few last bits of prep work before the start of the Convention. Nailing the intonations of the speech, shifting around a few sentences, a once-over on the guys heading his campaign as they entered the new chapter. Boring minutiae.

He found the room after a few minutes of groping around in the faded light of dim bulbs and moonbeams, knocked on the door—No response. He checked his watch, and while it was late it wasn’t that late. This was important stuff, too. He eyed some schedules for The Candidate in his manilla folder, tucked under his arm. He knocked a little firmer, jostled the doorknob, only to find that it was unlocked. Well, good thing he was here. That could’ve been a huge security issue. If some wingnut had crossed paths with him—

Jesse called His Guy’s name into the dark apartment room. No response, again. He cautiously flipped on the lights, only to find the main room empty. He relieved himself in the bathroom, real quick, trying to distract himself—to calm his nerves. Didn't work, still felt his heart sinking slowly into his stomach. He found the bedroom, after a few minutes, and opened it to find it empty.

* * *​

When the day broke that late August morning in 2008, there was a quick e-mail that made its rounds to the pressers and delegates and whatever miscellaneous attendees had brought laptops—then unfeasibly bulky for most—with them: “CONVENTION POSTPONED FOR 1HR.” Immediately the press began to float conspiracies to one-another, mostly suggesting intense vice-presidential politicking behind closed doors getting into overtime. Already an idyllic shortlist was being constructed by word-of-mouth, an unlikely-bordering-on-impossible list including Barry Goldwater Jr. and Hon. Ed Meese, high-profile right-wingers to really double down; even wilder suggestions included moderate sweethearts like Joe Biden or Howard Dean or even Hon. Frank Cousins—one journalist even tried starting the rumor that Dick Cheney would be Number Two. But the one hour extension stretched to two hours. Then five. Then tomorrow. Then two days. The Republican National Convention began fighting with the venue, who was more than displeased at the scheduling issues interfering with other events booked at the in-demand convention center.

And then, on the third day, right before authorities were begin to start an official investigation—a manhunt, even; like the Son of God returning from the dead, that glorious savior of the Republican Party waltzed onto the stage. And like a glorious wave, the Republican crowds roared as Mark Sanford stretched out his arms and flared his hands into Vs-for-Victory. His speech was flawless, a powerful condemnation in the corruption of bureaucracy, extolling the virtues of Alan Greenspan’s glorious vision of economics—and only disagreed in its scope, in its power. It was, Sanford boldly declared, the era of the small-government pro-American conservative; it was the dawn of a new day for the Libertarian Republican, shunted into the sideline for so long!

Immediately afterwards came the questions, of course they did. Sanford happily backed the narrative of his staffers: He had been stressed, in need of clarity, and as such he unceremoniously slipped out to meditate on why he was running, the stresses of the presidency, etc. His staffers had stated he’d driven out to the White Mountains to hike them, and he did not refute them—only when footage surfaced the next day of him arriving at the Portland International Jetport. Then he clarified that he had, indeed, considered hiking the White Mountains, but had “wanted to do something more exotic.” He had been coastal driving out-of-country; not unheard of for the Majority Whip, who had flexed his experiences with international travel throughout the primaries. What had tipped off some reporters to start digging deeper was his hesitance to say where he had gone.

Before the scandal broke, Mark Sanford had been a no-name who swiftly rose to capture the hearts of conservative Americans long-tired of government bloat—the kind of American who never learned to trust the Democratic Party after President Collins. Ads shared widely a certain stunt he pulled during the 2005 budget negotiations, where in an act of defiance against the politics of the pork barrel, he unleashed a horde of live pigs onto the House floor, where they made a mess of things until they were rounded up. It was the kind of stunt that really struck a chord with the Average Joe, who did not know much about what “pork” meant but understood its ties with corruption. It was that marketing that helped Sanford rise to the top.

But that was not what the people remembered, not for long. They would not remember the pamphlets and posters replacing the Democratic donkey with a pig, or the promise to bring transparency and libertarian efficiency to the Government. All they would remember is Argentina. Because when the reporters dug deeper, they found that that was where Sanford had been driving along the coast of. The issue, naturally, was that there was about two miles of coast to ride along in Buenos Aires, and any other coastal roads would take several hours of inland travel to reach, the kind of time-table unlikely for such a short stay—a stay where more than 24 hours had been spent in the air between Buenos Aires and Portland. As the week went on, the press grew more persistent in asking him about what he had been doing.

The lie was coming apart. The only way out was the press conference.

Mark Sanford had appeared in front of the flashing and shuttering of cameras. He seemed uneasy, not the confident speaker that so many knew him to be. And he spoke into his microphone, hesitant and choppily: “And so the bottom line is this. I’ve, uh, I’ve been unfaithful to my wife.”

He explained himself simply—that he had befriended a woman in Argentina, a close friend, many years back; that over the course of the past year or so, he had grown far closer to her; that in this process, he “hurt her, hurt you all, hurt my wife, hurt my boys, hurt my friends, I hurt a lot of different folks.” And thus rang that old motto from every newspaper office, from every cable news network, from every nook and cranny: Sex sells!

Ed Markey had secured a second term. It had not been guaranteed, not by a longshot, but Mark Sanford’s scandals cratered the chance of a Republican resurgence. The scandal had shaken many Republicans’ faith in Sanford, initially a charismatic critic of Markey. His campaign fell apart in vicious infighting soon after, and many polls showed that Republicans writ large wanted Sanford to step down from the ticket. He refused, though, seeing it as a chance to redeem himself in the eyes of America—plus the logistical nightmare of stepping down from the ticket post-Convention, basically unheard of. Sanford was also, ironically, a nice guy, refusing to go on the offense like Karl Rove wanted.

Markey took his reelection as a chance to start his project. Looking back at the old heritage of the Democratic Party, he soon unveiled his bold plan of “New Environment,” a wide-ranging agenda that sought to fundamentally redefine America’s relation to industry. For decades, the scientific community had begun sounding the alarm on unintended consequences of coal and oil—the burning of these elements had begun irrevocably warming the planet and disrupting the functions of natural ecology. These reports horrified Markey even way back when he was in the Senate, and as such he wanted it to be the last hurrah of his administration. He had begun the process, obviously, as soon as Libya had been annexed into the United Arab Republic, but that was before he had slogans and names for this important vision.

Reminded of Sanford’s initial success trashing bureaucracy as costly to the taxpayer, Markey’s administration rolled out a simple slogan that would seek to define the whole movement: “THE POLLUTER PAYS!” This would take from the big business wallets, not from the taxpayer; the markets would be incentivised to go greener, not get a way out from government favoritism. He, too, sought to protect more pristine wilderness such as the northernmost portions of Alaska. It was a massive overture to the Activist Democrat, which had its expected critics and fanatics. And when the critics, holed up in the House and Senate, began to fight against the Markey Administration, he wielded the Activists like a cudgel, used the bully pulpit to speak out against conservative apathy to the planet. These attempts, while not perfect, did soften the blow of the 2010 midterms well enough, as well as allowed a few provisions to pass that, for example, gave the DEP the directive to investigate lead-contaminated water across the Rust Belt and Rural South.

2010, too, brought another change to a competing power. Saddam Hussein’s term ended, and as according to the Constitution he stepped down happily. Hussein’s reign is controversial and divisive, especially his policy of turning a blind eye to violence against non-Arab minorities across the country (the Kurds of Iraq, the Fur of Sudan, the people of Fezzan, etc.), as well as his covert funding of rebel groups in eastern Saudi Arabia and Khuzestan. His successor was Sudanese Hatim al-Sir, a more moderate Nasserist, although fitting him in either the Left or Right of the party seemed impossible. His term saw, most prominently, the annexation of Palestine. This rung alarm bells in New York, where the United Nations swiftly began to reach out for fear of another conflict. The United Arab Republic was not Egypt, and had resumed its hawkish disapproval of the Israeli state. With news of a nuclear program in Cairo leaking, it seemed imperative to reach out and try to stop another nuclear wasteland in the Middle East. al-Sir’s demands were rather simple to understand: We will only stop our nukes if we know that we will stop being nuked. In essence, a quid-pro-quo, requesting the UN finally get the Israelis to cough up their nuclear weapons before the Arabs would do the same.

By that point, though, Ed Markey was a lame duck. He spoke about the needs of cooperation with the United Nations, strongly condemned the nuclear rhetoric of the United Arab Republic with his trademark fiery rhetoric, and did a few diplomatic tours of the Middle East. Thus displays the confusing nature of Ed Markey. His placement historically is odd, warped by proximity. However, there is a large sense among both academics and activists that Markey squandered a strong mandate; that despite his strong words, there was little he could actually accomplish. Perhaps that is because of his initial unwillingness to actually run for president, having to be conscripted by dreaming pollsters who saw him as the white knight he never could have been. He remains a thorn in the side of the conservative media empire, a history of attacks on Cohn and Cheney and Chennault creating a history of bad blood that time would never clot—would refuse to clot. But to that most diehard cohort, though, the Markey maniacs who still worship that platonic ideal of the Activist Democrat, he remains the greatest thing to happen to the country since Jack Gilligan. If only he had a cooperative Congress, if only he had a powerful mandate for his whole term, if only Republicans weren’t under the spell of Roy Cohn’s apathetic policies. If only, if only, if only.

---

[1] The structure of the 2nd United Arab Republic is an amalgamation of the Provisional Constitution of the United Arab Republic (1958) and the Constitution of the United Arab Republic (1964)—a misnomer, since in 1964 the United Arab Republic consisted solely of Egypt.
[2] Web rings were actually a part of the early internet in real life, fun fact!
Additionally—paying tribute to the Library of Congress for keeping archives of Ed Markey’s website from the early-2000s, the basis for many of the policy statements and quotes.

 

[Enigma-Conundrum]

44. Roger Goodell (Republican-NY)
January 20, 2013 - March 12, 2018

“Too much of our society looks for people to fail.”​

The Republican Party of the modern era seemed, for all intents and purposes, to be a party of shortsightedness, of unimaginative politics, of apathy itself.

This may seem harsh, but throughout the Jackson and Markey years, the party had earned this label from near-constant infighting. Gone was the unity behind Roy Cohn and his conservative vision. Even in a doomed year like 2004 they had torn each other to shreds all to nominate Tommy Thompson, a well-meaning conservative from a Democratic stronghold elected on a fluke scandal in 1994, and watched as Ed Markey’s inevitability was assured. The Radicals in the House, first behind Bob Walker but under his young erstwhile deputy Sam Brownback’s thrall as of 2011, seemed to revel in the chaos, in knifing their co-partisans to stick it to Markey’s motley crew. Then, over the objections of Deaniacs, they had gone and put up Mark Sanford for 2008. After all, he was at least buddy-buddy with Walker and Brownback, and even when he brought the convention hall to its feet it all came undone for him as well and Ed Markey, that sanctimonious so-and-so, had refreshed his mandate in their blood once more.

There was to be none of that for 2012. Already, as soon as November 5th, 2008, the Republican grandees had begun to scout out their next choice as well as ways to fix things. To that end, the Grand Old Party decided to enter the modern day and voted unanimously amongst its committeemen to join the Primary Day schedule for 2012, hoping to deal with the “legitimacy gap” that the young whiz-kids of the party system had begun to talk about as a flaw when comparing their candidates with the Democrats’. But this was not out of some desire to let the people rule. If anything, their man needed to look like a different kind of Republican, one that wasn’t just liked by the insiders and tolerated by the rank-and-file. A Modern Republican didn’t have to be an outsider, but he couldn’t look like a creature of the Beltway either. There was a delicate balancing act to all of this, but it helped that they all agreed on who was best suited to walk that tightrope: Roger Goodell.

Roger Goodell had come from Republican royalty. His father Charlie Goodell had been House Majority Leader in the 1980s, known for his outspokenness and integrity as much as he was for his partisanship. The ones who were old enough to have been around during the Collins and Cohn years knew Charlie and loved Charlie. And that meant they knew Roger too, had gotten to watch him go from high school football to the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business to a hot-shot twenty-something on Wall Street, and had cried with him at Charlie’s funeral in 1989. By the time his father had died, Roger had gotten in close with another well-connected young stockbroker named Howard B. Dean III. It was an odd coupling - the rich kid who spoke his mind on virtually every issue of the day, and the political heir with the sort of silent tenacity that only watching politicians cavort around one’s childhood home for their entire life could teach them. Even so, they made a good team, Dean the loudmouth hardball-player and Goodell the quiet negotiator. Howard moved fast and broke things, Roger came in to sweep up the pieces and make friends.

It was Roger’s political connections that got the two of them in good with the Republican Party. Cohnmania at its peak seemed perfectly aligned with Dean’s style, but Governor Ferraro’s expertise in appealing to Cohnite impulses on crime (so much so that her running in 1996 remains one of the great what-ifs of American politics) kept men like Dean out of the fray. This all changed with her late-term withdrawal from re-election due to an unexpected diagnosis with a form of blood cancer. With the Empire State’s Democrats scrambling, Dean quickly marshaled his resources to build a campaign, and who better to run it than his friend Roger?

*****​

It was a scene like so many others to them - the two men sitting on the back porch of a house in Jamestown, talking over a drink after a hard day of work. They had done this countless times in their young careers in business. As usual, Howard talked most, and he talked first.

“So, Roger. The election.” To this Howard B. Dean III, one of the kings of Wall Street, broached a topic of some sensitivity.

“Looking like a hell of a fight now that Ferraro’s out.” Roger Goodell, his partner who went local to Buffalo said.

“Yeah. I mean, I know folks don’t like Cheney-never met the man, don’t know if he’s a perfectly good guy, but he seems like an ass-but state level’s different. It’s winnable. Hope Gerry’s doing well. Cancer’s a tough diagnosis for anyone.” To this Dean sounded genuinely sorrowful, like it was a personal friend and not an acquaintance of business convenience.

“Let alone someone who sees a future President in the mirror every morning.” Goodell added somberly.

“Oh, please, Roger, she wasn’t-” Dean started to protest before being cut off.

“She played coy with it because it kept the speculation on her. Thought whoever our guys put up in ‘96 weren’t going to lose, so she was playing the next game. Wanted the cameras to follow her every day from Dick’s inauguration to hers.” Goodell added, his tone as neutral as possible.

“This is why I wanted to ask you, Roger.” Dean paused only to get blank silence from his friend, so he continued. “I’m running this time. You know I’ve wanted to get off the sidelines for ages, RNC thinks I’ve got what it takes.”

“They’re bleeding. Lot of Cohn’s donors aren’t as close with Cheney, holding back on the big bucks. They think you can self-fund.” Goodell added once again.

“...I know, Roger. Just because of that doesn’t mean I don’t have ideas to fix this. One of their younger strategy guys, Mike Murphy, he’s really keen on what I’ve got to say. Ran some polls, seems like my points about pension reform, middle-class tax cuts, corruption… they really resonate. Gerry’s husband looks like he’ll be in prison by next November. Screams of something shady to them.” Dean started, before realizing convincing Roger was deeply unnecessary.

“Why are you telling me, Howard?” Goodell cut right to the chase, even if he didn’t say it outright.

“Run my campaign. I need someone I trust, I don’t want to have to call all the shots. Hated doing that in the old days, I know we go well together, I know you can run things without needing me to tell you what to do. Hell, the party guys know you better. They still think of me as your uni roommate or something.” Dean said to Goodell’s silence. “They might help us more if you talk to them, keep some of Cohn’s crazies out of the mix. God knows we need it with the current state of our party.”

Goodell’s expression was inscrutable. After a tense moment, he spoke simply. “I’m going to have to make a lot of decisions you won’t like.”

Dean slowly affirmed this. “I want you calling those shots.”

Goodell offered up his glass to clink. “To Governor Howard Dean.”

*****​

After a narrow victory over the Democrats’ Stan Lundine, Howard Dean was Governor. Now Chief of Staff to the Governor of New York, Roger Goodell had truly returned to politics after a time in Buffalo-area business, including a brief stint as the owner of the Buffalo Bills during their legendary upset Super Bowl XXX win. Quickly, the reflexes Goodell had accrued over a lifetime of exposure to old Republicans came back in full force, helping to drive Dean's plethora of progressive proposals forward. Republicans saw this too, and they wanted more of it. By the third time then-RNCC Chair John Boehner had shown up to Goodell’s door crying and pleading with him about running against freshman Democrat Brian Higgins, Goodell finally broke his near-silence: “I’ll think about it, John.”

Think about it he did, tender his resignation to an understanding and wholly supportive Governor Dean he did, and announce his campaign for 2000 he did. The name Goodell was magic to local Republicans and national donors alike, quickly supplying him with a warchest unseen in most congressional races. The open seat was generally projected to be close with the favorable Democratic environment of 2000, but a lazy campaign by the incumbent and skillful attacks on Higgins over his Kennedyite positions on education and abortion access quickly narrowed the gap. It took nearly two weeks of recounting to figure out who won the race, but eventually, by a 1,011 vote margin, Roger Goodell was sent to the halls of Congress.

Representative Goodell was not a figure of particular note - he was mostly a backbencher, one who engaged in his committee work but not one to make waves or engage in the showmanship of the Radicals. What was more notable was what happened in his absence in Albany. Governor Dean’s tendency to delegate and let the office run itself worked quite well with Goodell. With Dean in charge more directly, it did not. His pushes to legalize civil unions and aid in refugee acceptance in New York, while both successfully passing and earning him adoration from Republican progressives and praise from the White House, brought on the ire of the right of the Republican Party in the form of a Conservative Party challenger. Democrats, eager to twist the knife, continued to praise the decision to stoke the flames of Cohnite resentment, causing considerable defections from Dean and aiding in his narrow defeat in the otherwise wave year for Republicans. His replacement, firebrand New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, was an unrepentant left-winger who seemed to relish in giving as good as he got from the right and was no stranger to controversy. In such a truly tossup state as New York, it seemed inevitable that big money would flow to whoever challenged Giuliani, even though he was technically the odds-on favorite for re-election.

Having firmly chosen politics over business at this point, Roger Goodell did not need convincing. He didn’t need to be begged and pleaded by the big names who saw a bit of the spark of his laudable father in him. Goodell made clear his intentions early, went through the entire rolodex of power and prestige that had landed him a seat in the halls of power in the first place, and rallied as much behind him as was possibly available. It wasn’t particularly hard - to them, Giuliani was a job-killer, he was a taxocrat, he was every insult the folks with deep pockets had for left-wingers. All it seemed to take was a smile and a handshake and he had a check. From there, it was all too easy to take anti-Markey backlash and put a smiling coat on those same criticisms, even when Giuliani tried to call him a “do-nothing rich kid” and link him to the Dean administration. The October revelation of Giuliani’s extramarital affairs and a bizarre press conference announcing his divorce seemed to seal the deal, to put a face on the fact that the governor was nasty and Goodell carried good feelings with him.

Now governor of the quintessential swing state with a cultural and financial hub of a city included to boot, many were curious what tack the young governor would take. He was, almost by definition, difficult to pin down - there was the usual Republican talk of stimulating growth, of good government, of well-meaning welfare reform, of toughening up criminal enforcement, but even then that was uniform throughout the tent. As it turned out, a Governor Goodell seemed equally laudable to all wings. Conservatives pointed to his welfare reforms and “no-tolerance” policing reforms aimed at New York City, progressives his efforts to target domestic violence and to raise teacher salaries, and the broad center just seemed happy that he had cut taxes for middle and lower-class New Yorkers off the back of the state’s budget surplus. It was his response to Ed Markey’s environmental policy, though, that catapulted the young governor from RNC circles to public attention. Goodell announced his own response, the type of thing that “wasn’t focused on punishing hard work.” It was a mishmash of economic incentives, encouraging electric retailers to purchase from renewable sources, and limited government spending pulled from other sources, but the end result was something Goodell could go on SKY Network and say that he had taken the issue just as seriously as Ed Markey “without putting the burden on the taxpayer.”

This, of course, was music to the ears of a party dejected by three straight losses. The pressure was on Goodell quickly, but after a smashing re-election victory he once again needed little convincing. His political team, run by the triumvirate of Mike Murphy, Steve Schmidt, and Ed Gillespie, had already been polling and found that a hypothetical Goodell bid would clear any other challengers nearly two-to-one. At this point, a talk with them was all the convincing he needed, and in early 2011 Goodell announced in an interview with SKY’s Ari Fleischer his intent to run for the Republican nomination in 2012.

This interview, a masterstroke in candidate PR, was mostly led with talk of a “Modern Republicanism,” something completely detached from the progressive-conservative divide with the best elements of both. It was a new way, “21st-century policies for a 21st-century nation,” not insulting the party of old but contrasting himself with a party largely perceived by the public as stuck in the past. It was an instant comparison between Goodell and any other would-be presidents. Here was a young governor of a large state articulating a vision that seemed to have something for everybody, a brighter future ahead for all. It also had the added effect of making other Republicans in the mix - most notably Nebraska’s Chuck Hagel, a veteran of US operations in Africa and the Levantine Wars - seem like relics of a bygone era. An energetic campaign combined with strong economic readings for New York amidst a minor national recession made Goodell the man to beat. In the end, they wouldn’t, and he would arrive onstage in Miami a conquering hero.

Though the Democrats had rumblings of a challenged primary, one by one potential candidates of interest like Senator Les AuCoin and Secretary of State Nancy Pelosi dropped, leaving only two: left-wing Minneapolis Representative Mark Dayton and Vice President Rick Perry. Perry, once a Senator from Texas, had been selected as Ed Markey’s Vice President, aiding in his capture of the state and more broadly serving as a translator for the administration to southern voters skeptical of the Markey agenda. While Dayton rallied some support, his personal oddities and staunch leftism largely left him within the margins, and Perry’s folksy compromise-oriented persona seemed like a welcome form of continuity.

With the candidates decided, it truly seemed like anyone’s game. Roger Goodell had a fairly light resume for a would-be president, with only six years at the helm of a large state like New York, and Perry surrogates had no problem trying to spin his modernization as inexperience. Perry, they said, had served in the Senate since 1990 and as Vice President for a decade, if anyone was qualified to maintain the good and deal with the issues facing the world it was him. Videos of him at OAS conferences, attending the Queen’s funeral, and talking to average Americans over the years proliferated as proof that “when others talk hard, Rick Perry works hard.” The problems for the Perry campaign were numerous, though. The small recession of 2011 had seemed to be over, but the perception was that it was a “jobless recovery,” a phrase Goodell had no problem reiterating as many times as it took. Furthermore, a dedicated contingent of ancestral Democrats in coal country were deeply irritated at accelerating mine closures, seeing Goodell’s business-friendly approach as worth consideration for the first time in decades. The Goodell campaign chose to play hard to these voters, blitzing from Richmond to Nashville to talk about regulations killing their jobs. An aspirational campaign about change and new ideas seemed to almost be a reappropriation of the language of the Activist Democrat, but optimism was also deeply effective to an electorate fatigued by twelve years of one party.

Much of the campaign was defined as much by both candidates’ shortcomings as well as their tones, though. “Goodellisms” became the byword for the sort of robotically meaningless statements the Governor was prone to making; these were such no-shit utterances as “I’m very fortunate, and I know that,” “you know that I’m always a proponent of doing things differently,” and “I talk to voters all the time.” While these were mostly fodder for late-night satire, the most famous line of the campaign didn’t come from Goodell. During the second debate, Vice President Perry memorably answered a question about budgeting with "We need to use our budget surplus to increase funding to three departments: Education, Environmental Protection, and the um, what’s the third one there? Let’s see. Sorry. Oops." In an instant, the notion of Perry as a steady hand on the wheel was in question, and “Oops” made a memorable refrain in an ad alleging financial impropriety by Perry’s office in an October surprise as well. Though the election was close - perhaps due to a bit of dissatisfaction with both candidates with median voters - at the end of the day, narrow yet uncontestable victories in Kentucky and, embarrassingly for Perry, Texas, swung the election towards the Republicans. Modern Republicanism had evidently worked.

​

With governing majorities - by no means expansive, but enough to evade fractious intraparty fights over policy - the newfound Goodell administration quickly set to work. First came the energy situation. The Markey plan, long dubbed a “pollution tax,” was subject to repeal within the first hundred days, replaced quickly by a national-scale version of New York’s plan. Tax breaks and other economic incentives were heavily afforded to wind, solar, and nuclear development, as well as paying significant lip service to coal miners and oil workers. While the former was attacked by the left of the Democratic tent as a giveaway to the bosses and the nuclear subsidies were a point of significant controversy for environmental activists ever since the movement had been galvanized against nuclear power by California’s San Onofre incident in 1983 and India’s Madras reactor meltdown as a result of the 2004 tsunami, overall there was enough support to pass Goodell’s energy plan within that mythical first hundred days, repealing and replacing the Markey plan.

The broader economic situation was more of a challenge to rally behind. Despite the bad economy, the United States had inherited a budget surplus, and Republican rhetoric over the lagging recovery was fairly simple: it was the bill coming due for twelve years of high taxes and mismanaged spending. To get the situation under control, the people needed that surplus money in their pockets and the government needed to get out of their way. To that end, Speaker Brownback quickly marshaled support for a bill he proudly portrayed as “a real experiment in the free market” at the White House press conference announcing its introduction. It slashed income and corporate tax rates, cut funding for welfare programs and agencies like the IRS, and overall seemed a Cohnite’s dream on economic policy. It was rare that a House Speaker so vocally and personally supported a piece of legislation, but then again it also seemed the first time the Republicans could get such an agenda through in years. Though Democrats naturally decried the proposal as a return to Greenspanomics, within months of heavy debate the “Economic Aid & Tax Reform Act” had sailed through both houses of Congress and landed in the Oval Office to be proudly signed by President Goodell.

While domestic debates puttered along and little other business seemed to be focal to the new administration, the unresolved situation with the UAR was another pressing situation. Republicans had excoriated Markey for selling out, for giving a bunch of anti-western socialist rabble-rousers’ demands any mind, but there had been no official deal. Of course, no small part of this was due to one of the quirks of American politics. Democrats, despite their overall big picture focus on international human rights and swords-into-plowshares, had often taken a softer line on Israel than their counterparts. Both parties had routinely been critical of Israel post-1973, but more Democrats than Republicans tended to think of Israel as a wayward ally than a rogue state. It was this exact approach that had seemingly doomed disarmament talks in 2011, leading to a UAR walkout over Markey’s perceived bias and unwillingness to implement the lofty goals of the non-binding Madrid Nuclear Agreement he had so vocally backed years before. Though some on the far-right had groused at the Madrid Agreement and wished to pull out, the overwhelming consensus was that the agreement didn’t force enough change to be worth fighting over, and Goodell was no exception.

Where he and his foreign policy staff differed was how they’d approach such talks. Markey had focused on carrots, and this was no good, they’d say. If America was one of the few superpowers in a world driven by the whims of superpowers and regional powers, it might as well act like it and remind the UAR and Israel both who the biggest fish in the pond was. As such, negotiations started discreetly in January 2013, culminating when Goodell and Secretary of State Jon Huntsman Jr. arrived to negotiate with Hatim al-Sir and Tzipi Livni in the summer of 2014. While al-Sir maintained his simple public stance, in private the UAR seemed to also want a lowering of US sanctions in exchange for such a high concession as the nuclear program. This point very nearly broke the negotiations on their own. Huntsman was unapologetic in his approach to the UAR and their countless abuses, especially in Kurdistan, Darfur, and towards defiant Jewish settlers in the West Bank, and he attempted quite heavily to push his president towards the same. Goodell didn’t budge, though. Though he was a hawk on UAR influence, same as everyone else in his party, tough rhetoric during the public negotiations combined with a sneaky under-the-table deal managed to get both Livni and al-Sir into a position to agree to a long enough denuclearization timetable with significant carve outs for passive uses like nuclear power plants. The secret deal was simple enough: unfreezing of millions of dollars of UAR assets, a cutoff of US aid to the Kurds, and a slate of defensive arms sales to Israel (even though it was not enough to stop Avigdor Lieberman’s Tkuma from defeating Livni’s Ihud in the 2014 Knesset election off of outrage at the deal). While the nuclear deal was lauded by the American press for what it seemed likely to prevent, Huntsman, in his post-hoc book about his time in the administration, was scathing in his condemnation of Goodell: “Roger Goodell might well have not been present until the end. He sat, waiting to see what everyone believed and how he could exploit that. The goal to him seemed to just be sealing a deal, no matter if our allies got pushed under the bus and our enemies reaped the benefits.”

The deal also had the added impact of aiding the administration in the impending midterms. While Goodell’s domestic agenda had seen no shortage of opposition from Democrats, middle opinion did not heed any such warnings but instead seemed to appreciate the lower tax rates. Overall, the economy seemed to be recovering, only occasional controversy had dogged the administration - the worst of it being the resignation of UN Ambassador Alan Keyes over a hot-mic incident - and now the world seemed a little bit safer from nuclear hellfire. As such, while there was some natural swing against the Republicans, their majorities in both houses were only lessened instead of lost, with the Democrats unable to make up lost ground in coal country and relegated to beating vulnerable incumbents in the Great Lakes and the New England Rust Belt. Overall, the White House shrugged and said it could have been worse, with most Democratic-leaning pundits blaming the “Ankara Effect” after the site of the negotiations.

Even with all signs indicating vindication for the Goodell administration, things seemed to move at a lackadaisical pace. Large new proposals seemed directionless, left untouched on the shelf by the White House after the clear unity the party had over the pollution tax and Speaker Brownback’s sheer drive to see EARTA passed helped smooth over the cracks. The most that had happened policy-wise was that, after a Supreme Court decision written by sole Markey appointee Justice Margaret McKeown ruled that 26th Amendment protections extended far more broadly to workplace discrimination than previously interpreted, a bipartisan amendment to the Civil Rights Act of 1969 defining workplace discrimination and penalties for such was passed during its reauthorization that year. But things still seemed quiet for the most part.

This was, in fact, due to one of Roger Goodell’s key selling points. The inoffensiveness of the president himself to any wing of the party meant that he had taken a similar unity tack to staffing an administration, seeing papering over the cracks as necessary. In practice, this caused frequent infighting between the majority conservatives and the handful of prominent progressives, led by none other than Howard B. Dean III, now Secretary of Welfare following Goodell’s passage of a bill splitting Health & Welfare into two. More often than not, conservative proposals would often become tabled when Dean and his allies picked a significant fight, gumming up the entire process and seemingly leaving the government rudderless. Something needed to be done, begged the RNC. Nobody wanted to be the one to alienate an entire wing of the party, but Dean’s intransigence was too much to bear. Roger Goodell once again seemed to sit on his hands, offering no defense of Dean, but he didn’t need to do the dirty work. His office had no issue ridding him of this troublesome secretary. The 2015 budget round would include significant cuts to Welfare, Labor, and Public Health, especially Medicare and Social Security benefits. This combined with Dean being cut out of the early negotiations led to him heatedly criticizing the budget off-the-cuff as undermining him during an interview, and from there Dean was promptly dismissed by Goodell for his insubordination. Allegedly, Dean didn’t even know he had been fired until he saw it on the news, and to this day the normally-candid politician refuses to discuss his dismissal or his last conversation with Roger Goodell. With him went Mike Murphy, Jane Swift, and Jon Huntsman in protest, and while it was embarrassing in the short term it was easy to brush aside editorials about the “progressive-conservative split” by pointing to Dean’s incident.

Even though the most difficult to manage faction had been removed, it would still take time to revive any significant action. While this was in one part due to the glum atmosphere fermenting in the West Wing - after all, hushed water-cooler whispers went, if Roger Goodell could twist the knife in his longtime friend so thoughtlessly, what could he do to us? - it was also due to events out of their control. The fighting over Department of Public Health cuts and the slow confirmation process of new Secretary Bruce Rauner left much of its function in disarray for a few key months. It was during these months that the first cases of AIDS began to emerge in the United States. Now it’s broadly accepted that the disease entered the United States from an American soldier in Rwanda, but given the years-long period between transmission of the AIDS RetroVirus (ARV) and diagnosis, for the first years it was unclear where the disease had emerged from. What was known was that increasing alarming reports of AIDS diagnosis spread throughout the United States’ major cities.

Despite the crucial first months of slow action, once the cabinet shakeup’s repercussions had largely settled out within Public Health, their ability to sound the alarm was quickly reinstated, to which the Goodell administration began to act. Though the press conferences about AIDS yielded another famous Goodellism - “It's always unfortunate when something gets misreported and the facts are not clear” - the announcement of an immediate spending package focused on starting up AIDS clinics in major cities around the country was welcome relief. Even so, many Queer activists, by far the majority of those affected by AIDS, saw the administration’s focus on mitigation only instead of prevention and curing as a sort of interest in genuinely helping them through a crisis decimating their communities. Research labs from San Francisco to Calcutta to Hamburg quickly began to pick up the slack, trying desperately to crack the code on AIDS.

Europe’s united front on the AIDS issue was not the only form of unity displayed within the continent. Quietly, the American line had been to encourage the growth of European integration, seeing such as a good way of resisting Soviet economic influence in the continent. To that end, throughout the 2000s, the EEC had welcomed Austria, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Iceland to their ranks. Crucially, a 2004 agreement between Ed Markey and Grigory Yavlinsky had given tacit Soviet permission to admit Albania provided NATO did not expand eastwards, enshrining the EEC as a distinctly pan-European project. While reformers within the Eastern Bloc had discussed attempting to join, they were softly rebuffed as their influence waned. The exception was, much like it was to the entirety of European Cold War politics, Yugoslavia. Yugoslavia had been solidly dominated by liberalizers ever since the 1980s, with its soaring economic status dubbed “the miracle on the Danube.” It was this very boom that had given a younger clique of reformers the leeway to settle constitutional disputes and create something approximating a multiethnic federal state. It was by no means perfect, as any of the dead of the Republic Square Massacre in 1998 would have said, but it had remained stable and relatively prosperous. In 2013, staunch economic liberal Boris Tadic had been elected as the new President, and the slow drift of Yugoslavia from non-alignment to outright European neutrality seemed all but complete.

Tadic wanted more though. He wanted to integrate Yugoslavia with the rest of Europe. This set the Europeans into all sorts of ethical questions - Yugoslavia was a valuable economic partner, but its human rights record was less than ideal, and while it talked a big game about its federal democracy its elections were widely known to be unfair at best. The United States saw differently. Yavlinsky was gone, replaced in 2010 by Alexander Rutskoy, a brash conservative seen directly as a repudiation of the Stockholm Consensus. While Rutskoy had by no means fired up the Cold War again in the five years he had held power thus far, he was still an ardent nationalist whose ambitions were still worrisome to the west. As such, “opening Yugoslavia” - though the nation had never been sealed, it didn’t seem a friend of the west either - seemed like a major coup, proof that isolating the Soviets as an enemy of the free world was eminently doable within the consensus. So the United States took the initiative, with Goodell and new Secretary of State Robert Zoellick taking a well-publicized trip throughout Yugoslavia with Tadic and his entourage, culminating in an agreement to lower trade restrictions between the two countries later that year. This sort of tacit US endorsement seemed the push needed to bring the holdouts over the edge, as was the unrelated defeat of key holdout Chancellor Kurt Beck in West Germany later that same year. Yugoslavia was welcomed to the EEC in early 2016 amidst significant controversy.

By then, though, the 2016 election process had kicked off in earnest in the United States. Despite some occasional internal quibbling, Roger Goodell was largely set to cruise to renomination by his own party - primary challenges were, after all, only a trend amongst presidents who had squandered their party’s mandate. The Democrats, in contrast, saw their field open up with a handful of promising candidates but none truly exciting. Partisans hoped that Kathleen Gilligan would run, having been talked up as a candidate in every open cycle since her 1998 election to the Senate, but she had a significant aversion to the White House due to both her father’s assassination and baggage from her messy divorce from William J. Clinton. Instead, after a back-and-forth campaign process with multiple candidates from Martin O’Malley to Jay Inslee to Mark Dayton to Don Siegelman, but at the end of the day it wasn’t any of them: O’Malley’s awkward and often high-minded campaign failed to connect with voters, Inslee was too tied to the Perry campaign for left-wingers yet too left-wing for many market-aligned Democrats, Dayton’s eccentricity limited his appeal to all but the most devout leftists, and Siegelman briefly surged before a corruption investigation brought him down to earth.

It would instead go to Jay Robert Pritzker, often simply referred to by his initials. Pritzker was a former Representative, Secretary of Commerce, and incumbent Governor of Illinois. Illinois - or more specifically Chicagoland - was the beating heart of the Silicon Lakes, the boomtown that was home to so many of the big tech companies at the heart of the 21st-century economy. The Pritzkers were old money there, yet J.B. had been a staunch supporter of Markeyite policies both within his cabinet and on the state level. Pritzker’s personal wealth and his support from the tech conglomerates that dotted the Chicago skyline made him a formidable opponent, with glitzy ads talking up Pritzker’s achievements on fighting discrimination and cost-of-living issues on the state level. The comparisons to the other wealthy scion who ran as a Democrat were subtle, but partisans got the message.

But 2016 was not 1932. For starters, the economic situation was quite strong, with high employment and skyrocketing GDP growth, the type of thing that Goodell and his surrogates campaigned on extensively. Their economic platform was working, they said, so why change horses? The conversation was further defined by OAS trade negotiations, as the administration had worked to take the existing bilateral trade agreements with Canada and Mexico of the Cohn years and expand them. The end result was the North American Continental Trade Agreement, or NACTA. The meeting in the Rose Garden between the heads of state of the 10 nations from Canada to Panama, all with Goodell at the helm, helped to reiterate the President as a strong negotiator and an able leader while also turning the discourse of the election into an effective referendum on NACTA’s passage.

This had the added effect of splitting the Democrats. While staunchly protectionist as a means of pro-labor politics, the Markey years had seen the party drift towards something closer to a middle ground, wherein liberalizing trade was good provided adequate labor protections and other regulations. It was the sort of regulatory guidance favored by Ed Markey, whose invocation of Adam Smith divided a social-democratic caucus as much as it made the average voter rave. Pritzker, being from the ancestrally unionized Great Lakes now producing semiconductors instead of steel, leaned towards the protectionist wing but knew a number of Jackson and Markey voters would be turned off by such talk. Pritzker’s attempted middle ground was “renegotiation,” a cautious support for NACTA provided such protections for key American industries. While New Democracy types nodded along, this sort of rhetoric combined with Pritzker’s attempts to play up his elite background as a form of Rooseveltian charm helped to effectively demoralize the labor vote.

NACTA was not uniformly supported on the right either. The Independence Party had formed out of the small parties of the dissident right for the 2012 cycle, most notably the Heritage Party. They had run hard-right radio performer and activist Rush Limbaugh, who hadn’t accrued a notable number of votes in 2012. This time, however, railed firmly against NACTA, not from a place of job protection but a place of immigration and national sovereignty. It was selling out our borders to our neighbors, allowing more guest workers to permanently settle in the United States to take hardworking Americans’ jobs. To a number of anxious middle-class voters and white southerners - especially in the manufacturing jobs created through the Eighties - it was a perfect encapsulation of the sort of unease they felt as the plants slowly but surely declined. America had lost control, and they had lost control. Limbaugh was largely ignored at first. He was first noticed when Harvey “Lee” Atwater, famed guitarist for the 1970s’ southern-fried rock group The Jalapenos and an outspoken right-winger in his old age, endorsed him and began to hit the campaign trail. Then he was truly paid attention to when the polls suggested he could hit double digits across the south and even pick up a few percent in the Rust Belt. Even so, Limbaugh was not invited to the debates, much to his roaring fury and driving of a bus in front of the debate venues reading “SHUT THIS OUT!” This would be perhaps the most eventful part of the debates. Even as both candidates were a bit dull, most viewers seemed to agree that the economy was good (no matter how much Pritzker argued about who profited most from that) and Goodell looked and sounded more like a president.

The October Surprise would not come from either campaign, but instead from Indonesia. The nation had undergone a rough transition from its longtime dictatorship to its current democracy, especially as the dictatorship’s divide-and-conquer strategies left ethnic and sectional resentment simmering. A close election won by right-wing strongman Prabowo Subianto with heavy allegations of fraud led to mass demonstrations, which the new president responded to with a major crackdown. Given Prabowo’s rhetoric demonizing non-Muslims as terrorists and rioters (in no small part due to the persistent low-level East Timorese insurgency), the crackdown quickly took on a repressive turn by design. Thousands of people from Timor to Bali fled by whatever means they could, often arriving in nearby Australia by raft or boat. At this point, Southeast Asian refugee politics were firmly defined via a Collins-era CANZUS agreement on resettlement, and the Goodell administration both did not wish to rock the boat and saw a method to reclaim the upper hand as a strong leader. In an Oval Office address to the nation, Roger Goodell offered up a now-famous justification for taking in Indonesian refugees met with equal praise and condemnation: “America is strong enough to handle this.” The results spoke for themselves on how the people felt, whether it be swing voters crucially breaking for Goodell or Limbaugh’s last-minute surge with white ancestral Democrats in Appalachia and the rural South.

​

Nobody could quite expect Independence clearing the federal funding limit, but the party had railed against Goodell’s acceptance of tens of thousands of Indonesian refugees in barely-concealed Yellow Peril terms - growing in acceptability with the refugee crises and Japanese belligerence following the fall of Prime Minister Makiko Tanaka’s government to a resurgent Reimei earlier that year - helping to break into the south more firmly. The ancestrally Democratic region had only reluctantly stayed with Jackson and Markey, and Pritzker wasn’t meaningfully different. While many of those voters would never vote Republican, Limbaugh spoke to a number of their more culturally conservative views in a way the national Democrats hadn’t in years.

Regardless, the Goodell administration had been returned, and it seemed to have a clear mandate to pursue NACTA ratification. Sure enough, the proposal passed Congress with near-unanimous Republican support and a handful of moderate Democrats, incensing the labor left and nativist right. With majorities slimmed to a narrow 224-211 in Sam Brownback’s House and 52-50 in Dan Lungren’s Senate, much of the more partisan-line based legislation of the early Goodell years was impossible. The most they could muster on that front was another wave of budget cuts in line with EARTA’s goals, and even they were trimmed in the interest of progressive Republican buy-in. In the fallout of Hurricane Michelle slamming into Puerto Rico and flooding San Juan, federal relief efforts earned accolades, but structural failures and delays in such refocused the political conversation on the island’s status, culminating in a bipartisan bill authorizing an up-down referendum on post-2020 census statehood for the Caribbean territory to be held in November 2018 being signed into law by Goodell. An expansion of the Domestic Violence Prevention Act to include greater legal protections for victims and to remove gun purchase loopholes from offenders sailed through after a failed attempt by rural representatives of both parties to scratch the latter part. But this wouldn’t matter much to the goings-on of the Goodell second term.

In fact, its reputation on womens’ issues would be its undoing.

*****​

It was supposed to be just another night.

That’s what the officer thought to himself anyways. He’d grown up in the District, lived here his whole life, he knew the place pretty well. Friday night patrols in Adams-Morgan weren’t supposed to be eventful. Deal with some drunk twenty-somethings, hopefully not too drunk, maybe make an arrest or two if things get really rowdy. Most of the time it was just a warning. Not tonight though.

The scene started innocently enough. Two people helping a third out of one of those hip local dance bars, the kind where they’d play that Brazilian crap that seemed to be taking the kids by storm. The officer didn’t get the craze, he was an old-school rock and Britpop man himself. But whatever. Two of them looked like… well, he wouldn’t beat around the bush. Angular faces, baggy eyes contrasting with social hyperactivity, all dressed up in crisp blue button-downs and slacks. Not an uncommon sight in Adams-Morgan on a Friday. All the tell-tale signs of politicos boozing up their weekend. Eighty-percent chance they were Republicans given the unnatural sharpness of the outfits, the uni basketball player’s build on the taller one, and the close-cropped squared-off hair on the other.

But the third. The officer’s gut was blaring sirens. The two guys were propping her up between them as her head waved to and fro, her eyes half-closed, makeup smudged, and her clearly-nice dress a bit ripped. His intuition was one of his best assets, his superiors had told him as much. He knew it was why they put him in bougie Adams-Morgan for night patrol instead of the mean neighborhoods. Any officer can spot a mugger, takes a good officer to notice more subtle issues quickly. And this wasn’t an uncommon sight, people walking their drunk friend home, but this one seemed… different. Maybe it was the way he couldn’t help but think of his own young daughter, bless her, being in this kind of situation in twenty years. So he kept watching.

And it only got more alarming from there. It was a lot of things, really. It was the urgency with which the taller of the two guys kept trying to call a cab in vain. It was the way it looked like the other guy was whispering to his friend, shooting occasional Freudian slips of glares towards the officer. It was, most of all, the way the woman’s lolling movements in her arms and legs looked more and more like she didn’t want to be there but was too disoriented to express that opinion more forcefully.

So the officer walked over, calmly as can be despite the circumstances. He couldn’t spook them. “Everything alright, gentlemen?”

The taller of the two responded, a flash of worry swallowed into a bulging neck vein. “Uh, yessir, yes. Our friend here had a bit too much to drink, so we’re just trying to get her home safe.”

The other guy chimed in with a slight grin. “Two-for-five shot night at Shenanigans, you know how it is.” To his attempt at casualness he weakly chuckled.

“Uhhh-huh. Alright, can I talk to your friend? I just want to make sure we’re all okay.”

This time the flash of worry wasn’t so concealed on the tall one’s face. “No, she’s-she’s very drunk, officer. Collapsed on the floor with no warning. We’re just really concerned and ought to be going.”

The officer flashed an effortless smile. “If she’s that drunk, we should get her to a hospital, right? C’mon, my car’s right here. You won’t be in any trouble.” And here was the test.

And now both of them looked like deer in headlights. “Uh-well-uh-sir-y’see-uh we really can’t-we need to go,” started the shorter one, but as if on cue the woman started to murmur something that distinctly had syllables like “let me go.”

This time, the officer wasn’t smiling. “Alright. I think I’ve seen enough.” He leaned into his radio. “Get an ambulance to my location, I think we have a possible drugging.” The officer turned back to the two men in front of him. “Hands where I can see them, fellas.”

As the short one complied, mouth agape in disbelief, the tall one tried something the officer thought was just hilarious. He dropped this so-called friend of his and tried to make a break for it. It was fortunate the officer was no slouch either - he was a serviceable enough linebacker in high school, and within seconds he had the runner. But when the tall one went down, the officer heard something rustling in his pocket like a maraca. Sounded like-sounded like pills. Confirmed the officer’s worst fears of what those guys were doing.

“Hey-get off me! Do you know what kinda shit you’re getting yourself into? Do you know who we work for?” The tall one shrieked, face on the sidewalk.

The officer didn’t know, but these types were always flaunting their ID badges, hoping this time it might impress some girl at the bar. Had to be around here-ah, got it. Hanging right off his side belt loop. Now, what’d that say?

EXECUTIVE OFFICE OF THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES.

Oh. Shit.

*****​

Initially, the arrest of the two White House staffers on attempted sexual assault charges that December was mostly just an embarrassment, a page-two story. It went to the bottom of the front page when the two of them told officers about a third coworker-slash-friend who had supplied them with the roofies. That staffer had a veritable pharmacy growing in his pockets, and from there it was something that had to be addressed. It seemed easy enough when Press Secretary Chris Wallace answered a stray question about it: “Their employment was terminated the second their arrest became known to us. A saying the president is fond of is ‘Respect for the law and the people who participate in its enforcement will not be compromised.’ This is no different.” One-and-done story, simple enough.

But it wasn’t one-and-done. It’s not known publicly who the first one to come forward was, one young staffer amongst a sea of them. But the first woman anonymously talked to the Washington Post, long the newspaper of choice for scandal-breakers, and what she described was a story and then some. This sort of behavior wasn’t inconsistent with the Goodell administration, she claimed. It was wholly fitting with the claimed atmosphere of pervasive harassment in the White House. The Post asked for corroboration, and did she have it for them. More of her female coworkers made their way to the same reporter, all with the same kind of stories - degrading comments, being reassigned to busywork to open up opportunities for junior male colleagues, a boorish sort of humor amongst the staff that seemed too crass for a high school locker room. One woman had more, though. A communications office staffer, she had presciently recorded Communications Director William O’Reilly making sexual advances towards her, clearly rebuffing her multiple rejections and alternating between promises of career advancement and threats of disciplinary action.

The story came out just after the New Year, and it was an instant bombshell. The public reaction was overnight a serious outrage, especially after the Post made the controversial decision to include censored audio of O’Reilly’s comments. It became even worse when Mary Matalin, Mike Murphy’s replacement as Counselor to the President, offered a tight-lipped confirmation of the “culture of sexism” in the White House offices. Both Matalin and O’Reilly were quickly fired by Goodell, who offered a now-infamous gaffe as an attempt to indicate his seriousness about the issue: “I am awake most nights.” One memorable political cartoon in the New York Post - a Murdoch paper, no less - showed Goodell in the Rose Garden saying this from behind a keg with the presidential seal on it. He stood in front of a partying White House with a fraternity chapter sign on it: Gamma Omicron Pi.

Firing both a serial harasser - multiple of the accusers had some sort of run-in with O’Reilly, even if only one had taped it - and a senior woman speaking out against the issue effectively made Goodell look blithe on the issue, no matter how much it was spun as insubordination. Even without that, the protests were swelling. Somewhat-dormant feminist organizations like the National Women’s Political Caucus surged in membership overnight, leading protests documenting their own experiences of harassment in the workplace. Men like O’Reilly weren’t uncommon, they said. That was the problem. It was refocused on the White House once again when Supreme Court Justice Alex Kozinski - Justice Kravitch’s 2014 replacement and Goodell’s only Supreme Court appointment - was credibly accused of sexual assault by multiple law clerks, feeling as if they could come forward given the swell in support.

Goodell, for his part, seemed once again nonexistent. Insiders described him as “waiting to let everything blow over,” hoping that he could assert himself on top of the situation after the flashy headlines passed. When this didn’t work, he tried to offer some change and his typical robotic responses. He reshuffled the EOP incredibly belatedly, but even this failed as his attempt at saying with a straight face “I keep my staff accountable” drew actual guffaws from the White House press pool and pushed Tonight Show host Al Franken to tears laughing. When Goodell was asked about Republican Caucus Chairwoman Hillary R. Reich’s break with the party to support Kozinski’s impeachment, his attempt to deflect with “I don’t get myself caught up in the rhetoric of any personal comments that are made” drew another round of groaning.

But it wouldn’t even be this who brought him down. Those who remembered Howard Dean’s fall included O’Reilly and Matalin, and both had their own reasons to believe they were being removed so publicly as well. Egged on by the cutthroat paranoia of the Goodell administration, spurned insiders still found time to discreetly hint at where the money he had found to pay off other accusers for the past five years had come from. The White House was leaking like a sieve at this point, so it wasn’t particularly difficult to figure out that the implication went back to Goodell’s friend-of-a-friend, the infamous lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Abramoff had been known as a shady figure for ages, but nobody had ever nailed him down on anything. He was just the kind of eminence grise opposition papers would bring up as being awfully close to Roger Goodell and his staff.

As it turned out, it was Abramoff’s money. “Casino Jack” had been grossly overbilling indigenous reservations for casino gambling - due to a quirk in indigenous law, this was often how many made their money in states with heavy gambling laws - and carving up the multi-million dollar profits among himself and his associates. In turn, he was taking this money to buy access, having given large gifts to a large number of key administration staffers. As his profile grew, so did his clientele, at which point it seemed he got in deep with Haraymani billionaires like Minister of Finance Osama bin Laden, who were paying Abramoff and his firm to the tune of tens of millions. Mary Matalin gladly testified to the Senate when called upon - partisan stonewalling broken by Senators Bill Walker of Alaska and Leon Panetta of California caucusing as “Independent Republicans” with the Democrats for the sake of the investigation - to explain just how Abramoff had tried to get her on the take as well. His gifts, as it turned out, had included the payouts to silence O’Reilly and Kozinski accusers. It seemed Abramoff had his hooks in virtually every power player in the administration, and he openly gloated about it in a digital message Matalin provided print-outs of.

After Matalin’s bombshell testimony, the Goodell administration seemed in a tailspin. Naming a special investigation into Abramoff’s actions did no good, especially when Special Counsel Ken Paxton was revealed within twelve hours to have been in Abramoff’s subpoenaed “black book” of clients, leading to Attorney General Jeannine Pirro’s resignation in a mix of protest and shame. Bill Moyers, the prominent NBC elder newsman, made waves with his choice to openly call for Goodell's resignation in his closing monologue. Kozinski’s resignation after articles of impeachment passed the House by a staggeringly large margin seemed a referendum on Goodell to many. Abramoff’s compelled interrogation by Senator Gilligan before the Senate yielded two reservations. The first was that he had paid for Goodell’s Jamestown home renovations while Goodell was Governor of New York, which promptly started House Democrats drafting articles of impeachment. The second revelation was that his lobbying had led to tacit support for Harayman-backed fundamentalist militias as an “anti-UAR counterweight;” the depth of the human rights abuses perpetrated by these groups from Sokoto to Mali to Fezzan infuriated American allies and led to immediate UN condemnations. After a grassroots pro-impeachment protest in D.C. drew near a million attendees and the Senate Oversight & Government Affairs’ Committee’s intent to subpoena a sitting president was not-so-subtly leaked, it all seemed clear what had to happen. On the evening of March 11th, 2018, Speaker Brownback, Leader Lungren, and Chief of Staff Gillespie went to meet with their president.

On March 12th, 2018, Roger Goodell would announce his resignation effective midnight after a brief speech from the South Lawn. On that day, polling showed only 6% of Americans approved of him, the lowest approval rating ever recorded in American history and a sign that the veneer of common sensibility that Roger Goodell had cloaked himself in for so long had been torn away to reveal that same ugly apathy. To say the emperor had no clothes seemed an exaggeration, though - there would have had to have been an emperor in the first place.

 

[Oliveia]

45. Rick Scott (Republican-MO)
March 12, 2018 - January 20, 2021

“I have no interest in looking backwards, I am going to look to the future.”​

Rick Scott was not a politician, he was a businessman. He was not, would not be, a great many things—a doctor, a scientist, an astronaut, a teacher; but above all he was not a politician. That was an important distinction for him, that there was a class of career politicians who knew nothing but politics, and then there was him who knew no politics.

Scott was also not born into money. He was born to a mother and an absentee father, who he never met. His surname was his step-dad’s. Scott was raised in North Kansas City (naturally, in the state of Missouri), had been raised by the archetypical struggling-on-by middle-class family, had gone into community college, spent over two years serving in the Navy in ‘70s—naturally, he saw no action; he did, though, use that experience in the form of the G.I. Bill of Rights to get a Bachelors in Business Admin. at UMKC and got admitted by the Texas Bar following a JD at Southern Methodist University. However, he did not stay long in Texas—just long enough to intermingle with the moneyed classes of Texas. And, a few years after graduating from SMU and working as a lawyer, Rick Scott moved out and settled into the world of business.

Moving back to Missouri would seem counterproductive, and perhaps to Rick Scott that was the genius of it. Off the back of great reformers like Zolton Ferency, architect of the Michigan Miracle, the Great Lakes made the great leap forward and turned their drying-up industries into new hi-tech capitals of industry. Missouri was not in the fabled Silicon Lakes country, but it was adjacent to it, and adjacency could pay dividends. Especially, as Scott did, if you made your wealth from health. With Texan philanthropist Richard Rainwater he started a for-profit health care facility conglomerate, Columbia Hospital Corporation, with the two lawyers splitting the costs to buy out three down-on-their-luck hospitals—one in Texas, one in Missouri, and one in Arkansas to cut the difference. Despite some initial difficulties, the two hospitals (the Arkansas hospital was too far gone to be recovered) started making back profits. A professional in the land of healthcare mergers, he was able to merge with a provider down in Florida and pick up a few failing hospitals in Missouri and Texas, before turning his attention to a bigger fish.

After a series of negotiations, Rick Scott became an emperor. An empire of, in the words of the New York Times, “about 350 hospitals, 550 home health care offices and scores of other medical businesses in 38 states.” He had annexed the Hospital Corporation of America, itself the pet project of the Tennessean Frist dynasty dating back some thirty years prior to the ‘60s. He had created a superpower juggernaut with a 20 billion USD pricetag, and ushered in an era of prosperity for Rick Scott, raised by a store clerk and a truck driver. C-HCA would continue to grow under the watchful gaze of Rick Scott, who soon adopted the cable channel America’s Health Network (AHN), which gladly brought forth to the airwaves a barrage of dramas and procedurals, as well as a sort of spiritual successor to that great definitional moment of Conservative America—a talk panel show nostalgically titled “Ben Carson Speaks Out.” Although the public opinion had shifted firmly on the side of Medicare over the years, a loyal contingent of conservatives—Rick Scott chief among them—still saw government meddling into the affairs of the average man an embarrassment. Unfortunately for Rick Scott, few minds were changed by the uncharismatic neurosurgeon sitting in a dull room, illuminated by buzzing fluorescent lamps with audio accompanied by the dim hum of interference.

The struggles of AHN were not the principle concerns of Rick Scott, though, as for nearly a decade the C-HCA would be intensely investigated by the FBI for claims of systemic Medicare fraud throughout the conglomerate. Scott would never be directly investigated in relation to these charges—despite claims by Missouri Democrats and, years later, national Democrats that he pleaded the Fifth seventy-five times in relation to those investigations. (The factoid is not inherently false, but Rick Scott’s pleading the Fifth was in response to a civil business case, unrelated from the criminal investigations.) Shortly thereafter, Rick Scott quit C-HCA after a row with the Board of Investors over what to do about the FBI investigations; Scott wanted to fight them, but investors wanted to settle. Thus, after Scott walked out, C-HCA would have to fork over two billion dollars to the government and various government agencies. “There's no question that mistakes were made and, as CEO,” Scott would tell reporters years later, “I have to accept responsibility for those mistakes… I learned hard lessons, and I've taken that lesson and it's helped me become a better business person and a better leader."”

Rick Scott spent a couple years in the wilderness, then. “The wilderness” being shorthand for the exciting world of venture capital; and then bleeding-heart Ed Markey became president, and Rick Scott got mad. He reemerged from the wilderness in 2004, richer than ever, and waged a bloody race for the Missouri governorship in a campaign with a price tag of almost 80 million dollars, a warchest made out of his wallet. Despite Markey comfortably retaining the suitably Democratic state, Scott won an upset and beat Bekki Cook, successor to the popular Vincent Schoemehl. As Governor of the Show-Me State, Rick Scott was showed off his business-friendly governing plan, hoping to foster a vibrant ecosystem of suburban business as Missouri swelled with Americans who worked in the Silicon Lakes but couldn’t afford rent along the cramped high-rise apartments. In part, Rick Scott’s deal to lower property taxes helped make Missouri a haven for that middle class exodus. But Scott had wider ambitions, wanted to show it to The Man (Ed Markey) more than just by governing one middle-of-the-road state. He wasn’t going to be flown over, he was going to be heard!

Rick Scott’s attempts to sue the federal government over its healthcare policy failed, naturally—and even if it had snaked its way up the ladder it would have doubtlessly been snuffed out by the majority-liberal Supreme Court—but that didn’t stop Rick Scott from catapulting into superstardom in conservative-libertarian circles; he was among the earliest and most enthusiastic backers of Mark Sanford shortly after he had stymied rumors of his own presidential aspirations in 2008. It’s no wonder, then, why Roger Goodell slotted him on as Number 2 in the presidential ticket. Scott represented a strong wing of the Republican Party that felt mistreated after Sanford’s flame-out disaster, but he also had the good sense to not go blabbering about and stick to the party line. He was from an important state for Goodell to win against Rick Perry, too, and as a two-termer governor his term was going to expire in 2012 anyways. The calculus just worked, and soon Rick Scott was the Vice President of the United States—nominally, at least.

To call Rick Scott the Vice President would have given Rick Scott a lot of credit. Scott consistently shunned the label of politician, even eight-odd years into elected office. Instead, Scott mostly settled for the odd-jobs where he felt most comfortable, as he siphoned off the most important duties from Commerce and the Small Business Administration—both positions that were swiftly filled by no-experience political appointees; in effect, Roger Goodell’s New York college friends (excluding Howard Dean, who had taken to his post at Welfare with a genuine passion). Thus, Rick Scott became the unofficial “Business Czar” as many critics called him. Not that Scott cared much, no, he was far too busy criss-crossing the country, shaking hands with business owners big and small (though mostly big). When trade deals were struck up in faraway lands, Rick Scott was often the first on the plane and the last to return home.

This gave him some plausible deniability when the scandals started to leak out, the allegations of a work culture that was demeaning at best to woman staffers. Scott tried his best to deflect. “I wasn’t there, so I don’t know exactly what happened. But, some people have been saying it wasn’t the way the media tried to portray it, but I wasn’t there, so I don’t know,” he told the press once. Following tepid mentions like that, Scott would begin outright avoiding journalists to avoid answering such hot-button issues. But then, naturally, the resignations started. When the other shoe dropped, Rick Scott had to be the one to catch it.

* * *​

Rick came as soon as he could. He had been having a wonderful reunion with an old Texas friend, Commissioner “Dubya” Bush of the NBA, when the phone rang and some acting-acting-acting member of the West Wing machinery, some no-name cog that Rick never learned the name of—never would need to— asked for his immediate return to the White House; there was an urgent something-or-other that required his immediate attention.

It was a short flight that felt like it lasted for far too long. He knew what it felt like, for a company to be on the brink—and he felt that same dread now. Bad press, bad publicity. As soon as he dashed his way into the White House he was sequestered into one of the countless antique rooms that reminded him of an old buddy’s Texan mansion… which friend had it been? He tried to think on it, but as soon as the thought had entered so too did Roger. And he looked, well—bad. Like he had been staying up most nights. Baggy eyes, veins around the pupils, shaking hands and a heavy sigh as he sat down on the sofa next to Rick.

“Jesus, man…” Rick said, trying to elaborate but failing to find the words. It went without saying, that he looked like shit.

“Yeah.”

“What were you summoning me to ask about—?”

“I’m stepping down.” And the room suddenly seemed so much less inviting than that old-money friend’s place. Rick felt slack-jawed; “What?”

“I’m stepping down,” he said it so casually, too. Like it was a bad break-up. Unfortunate, but normal. A fact of life. “This isn’t what I thought it’d be,” he added simply. And Rick repeated himself again, his voice almost cracking at that admission. “What do you mean?” he asked—demanded.

“This job, this place. They have a name for it. The Town, I think. Whatever it is, not cut out for me. Too many eyes, too much expectation.”

“And you’re just dumping that on me? I have a wife I need to talk to about this—a family! You can’t just—dump this on me all at once! You can’t quit the second bad news comes your way, that’s not what bosses are supposed to do. You’re the boss, you’ve gotta weather the storm!”

“If you didn’t want to be President, why were you on the ticket?”

“Why were you?” Rick punctuated this with an accusatory motion. Roger just made a noncommittal grunt and moved to get up. “No—wait! Rodge! You can’t just—” Rick said, starting to stand up to follow Roger, “What about the Party?”

“The party’s over,” Goodell said as he paced to the door, “I'm done.” And then he closed the door softly.

* * * ​

Rick Scott, finally, had to issue his condemnation of the workplace that Goodell & Co. had fostered, and as such in a conference shortly after he placed his hand on the Bible and pledged to do his duties as President of the United States he told the press that: “I was not following politics closely at the time, but what we have learned is terrible. I don’t agree with anyone doing things like that, ever.” But, he promised, “The future is bright and there are better days ahead.” Polling seemed to show agreement, that many Americans did think better days were ahead—not with Rick Scott at the helm, though.

There was no recovering from the gut-punch that Goodell’s ignorance had dealt the Grand Old Party, but they swiftly recovered from that absolute nadir. 2018 seemed tough—if not nigh impossible—but it was not going to be the absolute blowout that Roger Goodell’s approval rating threatened to deliver like a plague from the Bible. Bill Walker, pleased with himself, began caucusing with the Republicans once more (although not shedding the proud badge of the Independent Republican), whereas Leon Panetta reaffirmed an early promise he had made to not run for re-election. This turn of events was a brief moment where Lady Luck took a shining to Rick Scott, as shortly after his ascension to Commander in Chief, D.C. Senator Michael Brown was charged with corruption and put to trial. After a short deliberation the Senator confessed to the act and was placed under arrest. This created a vacancy that, for the period it took to find a replacement to be sworn in to finish the term, artificially granted the Republicans a senatorial majority.

Utilizing this brief window, Scott sought to try to cram through as much as he could before the assuredly Democratic senator was slotted in within the next two days—he got the new Vice President to keep as many Republicans seated as he could, to try to squeeze through some more controversial elements of the Republican agenda—most pressingly, a replacement for Alex Kozinski that the Democrats didn’t need to sign off on. Reportedly, Scott hurriedly shouted at a staffer to find whatever shortlists for the slot Roger Goodell had laying around. If there was truth to this anecdote, then it would appear the highest name on the list was Utah jurist Mike Lee, a powerful archconservative who Scott immediately flew to the capital to receive perhaps one of the shortest vetting periods in U.S. history. This plan almost immediately fell apart when several Republicans—most prominently objections from Senators Brian Sandoval and Jim Douglass, Progressive-Conservatives who were from opposite ends of the country—took umbrage with Lee’s strong comments against democratic principles, where he infamously proudly told the Judiciary Committee that “Democracy is not the objective of the country nor the Constitution—it often gets in the way of the values Americans hold dear.” This rhetoric was immediately attacked as dangerous and his chances were swiftly scuttled. There was no time to contact the runner-up on the shortlist before Karl Racine was sworn in to finish the term of his predecessor. Scott would have to play ball—and, more than that, would have to play ball against an enemy that was very unhappy at the Utah-sized Hail Mary he had tried to throw.

After a vicious series of behind-closed-doors backs-and-forths, a consensus was formed around lawyer and veteran Meg Ryan, who had served briefly in Rwanda and had later been promoted to the Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces by Roger Goodell shortly after he took office. She was, first of all, a woman—the kind of nomination that would help alleviate some of the stench of sexism that lingered in the White House after that massive scandal. She possessed, judicially, a rather unremarkable and moderate record that made her palatable for the Senate, who allowed her to join the Supreme Court without much trouble at all.

Perhaps the promotion of Hon. Meg Ryan helped cushion a minor scandal that passed by without much trouble beyond a few apologies—reports that Rick Scott himself practiced discriminatory staffing policies, culling individuals he did not deem particularly “photogenic,” mostly meaning that fat and elderly people were shown the boot [1]. This got a few days of coverage, but it was the kind of story that was always destined to be second-page news—in no small part because of societal views about the elderly and the obese, but also because of questions of what a discrimination suit in the White House would even look like. Thankfully, though, unlike with Roger Goodell this minor flareup of workplace discrimination did not ravage the Scott Administration.

Another crisis Scott inherited from his beleaguered predecessor was the AIDS crisis, to which Scott continued the party line that Goodell had adopted. In his addresses on the issue, he refused to address the issue of sexuality—a cudgel of the more decidedly right-wing punditry. Although not even Murdoch’s empire would go so far as to say “gay plague” aloud, a few of his more bombastic employees felt safe to come close as they could to saying it outright. Thus, Scott’s decision to not address that element of the virus was initially applauded as an attempt to shift the emphasis off and point out that AIDS was not a uniquely homosexual disease. That kindly narrative did not last forever; as time marched on, Scott continued to refuse to ever mention any dimension of sexuality in the disease’s virality. To many Queer activists, it stopped being an attempt to shift the narrative and more an attempt to avoid talking about the Queer community. To his final days in office, he would never utter the acronym “GSM” nor the radical Queer label—if a reporter asked him about it, he would start talking in generalities that included but never specified Queerness. While Roger Goodell’s policies created a begrudging respect from many Queer activists of the compassion of the Modern Republican, Rick Scott’s words made his actions seem hollow. Obligation, not genuinity. Actions to ensure that he didn’t make a fool of himself in the eyes of Middle America.

After all, the 2018 midterms were enough of a bloodbath without Rick Scott making a fool of himself.

It was some small solace to Republicans that they still had won races in 2018—a herculean success in no small part carried on the back of Rick Scott. They even managed to flip a seat, though this was more due to the oddity of Indiana politics: Senator Mike Pence, the torchbearer of the Kennedy Democrats following the namesake leader’s passing, had been defeated because he was more conservative than Republican Susan Brooks.

With the dawn of the new year and the swearing in of the 116th United States Congress, Rick Scott would need to try and negotiate with Congressional Democrats, bullish and aggressive after commanding victories in both houses. Rick Scott, for all his bluster on distancing himself from politics, ultimately still had deep political convictions and did not want to be a lame duck for the remainder of his term. The fact that he already was seemed beyond him, as he quickly sent out for the Democratic Congressional leaders to meet with him, to try to hash out some sort of deal.

* * *​

Three men sat in this conference room in the White House: President Rick Scott, who had called for this meeting in the first place, was joined by Senate Majority Leader Tim Walz and Speaker of the House Chuck Schumer. Walz was an oddity, a Democrat from Nebraska, the kind of state that rarely sent Democrats to the Capitol; and unlike many of the Democrats who did get sent, he was an out-and-proud left-leaner, who despite activist sympathies and a penchant for government intervention found himself reelected thrice—that odd dynamic was probably why he was promoted to Whip in the first place, and why he was relatively unopposed when he ran for Leader. Schumer was a loyal ally to Gary Hart, an apparatchik who was always the odds-on favorite to replace his dear leader when he eventually retired. This was not the first time that Rick Scott had met with either man, but it was never pleasant to be with them—especially not since the Mike Lee Incident, the kind of underhanded trick that neither leader forgave or forgot about.

Despite this, Rick adjusted his collar and addressed the two Democrats with a sort of cordiality that seemed futile in a context such as this. As if he did not feel the piercing of invisible daggers lodged into him by the two men sitting opposite of him. “Well, gentlemen,” he began. “I hope we have a productive meeting today.”

Chuck replied first—the veteran lawmaker in the room by a mile, a career spanning back to the last months Jack Gilligan was among the living—and he simply stated “Of course, Mr. President” in a plain tone. It held in it no promise, none of the cordiality that Rick had affected. Tim just kind of nodded to the affirmation of Chuck’s statement, remaining silent for now.

Rick stayed silent for a second, a bit taken aback at the coldness of the exchange. He couldn’t be surprised, naturally, but it was still an insult to him nonetheless. “I summoned you two here to discuss a few key points our administration wishes to truly hammer in on this year. These are sensible proposals, and I want you both to let these ideas be decided on the floors of Congress.” Another nod from both of the men in front of him, and he quickly bent over to pull up a posterboard chart of his proposal, broken down for his two guests and—down the line—the television camera. Perfect for a meeting and for an address, he figured. As he stood it up on its easel, he swore he saw Tim roll his eyes. He tried to ignore that.

“The name of the game, gentlemen, is downsizing. We’re trying to run a profit here, so we need to—lighten up the load a bit, as it were. The plan, as it currently stands, would see some of the checks cut to the Department of Education and the Department of Welfare be cut back a bit.” He sensed that that would be a bit of a fight, so to soften the blow he added that “you shouldn’t worry, programs for veterans and the like will be the top priority over at Welfare! It’s just the opinion of the government that the matters of education and the specifics of health-care be decided at the state level, you see? It’s just good business.”

“I think,” Tim Walz said, breaking his silence, “that you are misunderstanding something here, Mr. President. We are running a country, not a company. We’re in the ‘business’ of keeping our citizens safe and happy, not in the business of making a profit in the next quarter.” His voice was stern—stern as Rick feared it would be. The kind of tone that showed he was not interested in playing ball, or even playing nice. A cowboy ready to duel.

“But—but you have to agree,” Rick tried to counter, “that this kind of spending is reckless! Sure, we have enough money now, but if the economy dips or if any number of things go wrong, then we’d be dipping into the red! That’s just not the way to be running things, you get it?”

“You seem to be mistaken, Mr. President,” Tim said. “You didn’t win last year—we’re the ones the voters want making demands, and this—” he gestured towards the beautifully-designed (if Rick could say so himself) graphic, “is out of step with what Americans want.”

“Winners?” Rick asked, feeling his grip tighten against his sleeve as he sat arms crossed. “This isn’t about winners, Tim. This is about government. And the fact of the matter is this: I’m the boss.”

“We’re not the United Conglomerates of America,” wisecracked Tim again, “you’re the President, not the boss.”

“I’m the boss, Tim. I’m the one calling the shots—I’m the one here that tens of millions pulled the lever for. I’m the person Americans confided in to be the one heartbeat away. And god dammit I’m not going to let you boss me around like I’m a grunt. I’m the President of the United goddamn States and I will not be treated like this!”

* * *​

Rick Scott’s domestic policies had a tendency to fall flat. Most of his budget cuts were laughed out of the Halls of Congress even without the direct hostility from Speaker Schumer and Majority Leader Walz. Scott’s attempts to boost private health industry and double down on support for charter and private schools helped curry favor in some of the more socially conservative stretches of the South, but most operative Republicans flatly would tell Rick Scott (who was looking towards 2020 with a sort of optimism borne from nothing but a pure need for survival) that nothing would reawaken that coalition of Cohn Democrats barring the man himself resurrecting from the dead.

Thus, like most embattled presidents, Rick Scott sought to express himself in the one avenue not hampered by Congress—the wider world. The domestic side of international politics took form, naturally, in the “migrant crisis” as Indonesians fled to the United States away from instability. He began hammering Congress to “take immediate and extensive action” to create legislation that would set up “extensive evaluations” to ensure that Indonesian migrants did not pose threats to United States security—right-wing circles had clasped onto a narrative of a Chinese communist infiltration in Indonesia that would, if left unmitigated, allow for the complete destruction of U.S. security via espionage. These narratives were almost entirely false, naturally, but it served a good justification to try and lessen the amount of immigrants arriving at America’s doorstep, a source of anxiety among many Republicans and Democrats alike. In Congress that coalition was shaky, a mixture of conservative Republicans and Democrats—both the moribund Kennedyites and a handful of populist Southern Democrats—supported Scott’s legislative agenda, and were met with resistance from a coalition of Progressive-Conservative Republicans and Activist Democrats. On tight margins, the tougher immigration screenings passed despite Democratic majorities. To quiet down concerns of a humanitarian crisis, Scott tried to get other countries in the Anglosphere (mostly Australia and Canada) to help lessen the burden on the United States.

Although tying Indonesian immigrants to the People’s Republic of China was an obvious way to manufacture a justification for anti-immigration policy, Rick Scott held a poor view of the remaining socialist powers of the world. This ire was only drawn towards those that were wholly uncooperative with the United States—thus sparing the USSR’s Premier Nikolai Levichev a headache. This motley crew was mostly the United Arab Republic and “Communist China,” as Rick Scott referred to it as. He saw these two states as a unique threat to international stability—an “Axis of Danger,” whose sole intention was disruption. To this end he infamously moved to classify Communist China as a US-recognized “State Sponsor of Terror,” claiming that under Chairman Mao and his successor, Chairwoman Song Binbin (who, in the eyes of many Pekingologists, was the establishment made manifest without needing to rally behind the "magic name"), Beijing had begun exporting Maoist revolutionary ideology across the globe, transforming a Hermit Empire into a threat. Further, he said, classifying Communist China as a state sponsor served as a message “to the global community that the U.S. will not tolerate rouge nations that oppress their people.” Chairwoman Song predictably retaliated against the condemnation, especially drawing attention towards the United States’ ties to Harayman-backed terror cells in the Sahara.

Scott, for his part, publicly backed down from those under-the-table agreements, apologizing for the damages the United States had incidentally caused trying to contain what was assuredly the greater threat. The half-apology was considered disrespectful by Cairo, although they took more offense to being called a “dystopia and a human rights horror.” [2] (The latter comment being directed towards the flare-ups of violence against non-Arabs throughout the vast borders of the country, predominantly Fezzan and Darfur and Kurdistan.) President of the Republic Kamal Abu-Eita easily rejected the halfhearted apology issued by the United States, pointing out its culpability in the “human rights horrors” that it so decried (conveniently ignoring the regions where the U.S. was not to blame).

When not sparring with socialist superpowers an ocean away, Rick Scott frequently visited Europe. Although his political views would, to many a European conservative, seem to indicate a view that would be altogether hostile or unkind towards the EEC as a pan-European entity, this would be untrue. Sure, in talks with more fringe members of the United Kingdom’s political sphere he would dangle the carrot of embarking on a special economic friendship if London broke off from the rest of Europe—but far more importantly Scott saw the EEC as a perfect representation of a political bloc, a means of unity that was incredibly helpful to the United States. In his quixotic fight against China and the U.A.R., for example, he would occasionally call on Europe to side by Washington in its righteous crusade. Some nations would follow suit, many others wouldn’t pay much mind one way or another. Rick Scott also visited Europe for non-political reasons, and in fact visited the continent for leisure more often than he retired to Camp David.

As the 2020 election grew ever-closer, Rick Scott ceased to be a person and instead became a flag to rally around in Conservative America. As Democrats, empowered by the unimpressive policies of Rick Scott delivered on a wisp of a mandate and particularly spited at Scott’s attempts to circumvent the Democratic Party in his quest to pass key parts of his platform. SKY News went into overdrive, trying to inflate his meager wins on immigration and his clear dedication to the cause of fiscal responsibility and cutting bureaucratic red tape. The difficult tightrope of tying him to the highs of Roger Goodell’s America while exonerating him from the lows. As 2020 marched forward, Republican messaging started to sound more and more like the Democrats were already President, not Rick Scott. If the economy boomed, it was because of Rick Scott; if the economy had a rough week, it was Democrats’ fault. If a foreign leader insulted America, it was because Democrats made the country weak; if a leader praised the Good Ol’ U-S-A then it was because a Republican like Rick Scott was at the wheel.

Rick Scott would not win reelection, and his presidency is barely more than a footnote even with recency bias in mind—his two-odd years in power being an extended and humiliating lame duck period; reactive rather than formative. The Republicans tried to rewrite history on that, though—try to pin the successes of the Rick Scott era to the man as opposed to being by happenstance. In anticipation of Puerto Rico's statehood following 2020, there was even an attempt to pin the successful referendum onto Rick Scott and the Republicans writ large. That failed, though.

Most presidents turn to advocacy or activism, education or retirement after the end of their term. Rick Scott did not. Rick Scott returned to business, the one thing he had always been and would always be. He was never a politician, barely a president, yet always a businessman. Perhaps that is why he would be so soon forgotten. A president who never was.

---

[1] Real allegations made against Rick Scott while he was running Solantic.
[2] Quotes adapted from Rick Scott's actual quotes on Cuba and the PRC

 

[Enigma-Conundrum]

46. Bill de Blasio (Democratic-CT)
January 20, 2021 -

“We need an inspiring vision of equality that resonates in the hearts, minds, and souls of all Americans.” ​

Bill de Blasio’s admirers and critics seem to only agree on one thing. Both of them see him as the personification of a New America. To his supporters, this is a hopeful leader on white horseback charging valiantly ahead for a bright new future. To his opponents, this horse is not white but pale, its rider no hero but a harbinger of terminal decay for the nation and its people. The jury remains out on whether de Blasio is the former, the latter, both at the same time, or something else entirely.

Whatever the verdict on his tenure, Bill de Blasio the man has his roots firmly planted in the New Deal Consensus. His father Warren Wilhelm Sr. was an army man who lost his leg to an enemy grenade in Okinawa and his mother Maria de Blasio was an editor at the Office of War Information. With victory declared and Wilhelm discharged from the hospital, Wilhelm and de Blasio soon married and continued their lives as employees of the federal government. But their Georgetown home would be rocked by McCarthyism, with both called to their regional Loyalty Board with accusations of subversion - after all, Wilhelm had studied the Soviet economy earning his Harvard masters’ and de Blasio was an active union member. The investigation, which began in 1950, would dog the family at every opportunity as subordinates and colleagues issued all manner of allegations ranging from Wilhelm’s “ultraliberal thinking” at Harvard to de Blasio’s editing OWI propaganda to be favorable to the Soviets to more outlandish claims like the couple’s attendance of a Red Army orchestra. The family would ultimately relocate to Connecticut in 1953, with Wilhelm moving to the private sector as an analyst for Texaco and de Blasio to the Italian consulate. There the family would remain throughout the 1950s, relieved to have returned to New England. In 1960, Maria would unexpectedly become pregnant with her third child at forty-three. Despite worries of complications due to her age, in May 1961 Warren Wilhelm Jr., nicknamed Bill, was born into what he would describe as “the classic American dream.”

Much like the America of the 1960s “Years of Rage,” the classic American dream would not remain that way. The Red Scare had changed Warren Wilhelm Sr., who viewed the accusations as an ultimate insult. Though de Blasio’s older brothers remembered their father’s good days, for Bill family Red Sox games and playing catch with his father gave way to a distant and occasionally unfaithful man who drank two martinis after work then fell silent. As the years went on, two martinis became six martinis and the distance between Warren Wilhelm Sr. and his family only grew. In 1970, Maria de Blasio filed for divorce from her husband, citing “cruel and abusive treatment” over the psychological toll his behavior and abject refusal to seek therapeutic help had caused the family. At the tail end of the divorce process, the increasingly-isolated Warren Wilhelm Sr. drove to a motel and committed suicide. In the note delivered to his mother and brother, Wilhelm wrote of the happiest times of his life, including his service in the Army. No notes were delivered to his sons.[1]

Life went on even through the shocks of his family fracturing. Maria de Blasio’s family, southern Italian immigrants who owned a Manhattan dress shop just one quick train ride away from the family’s Norwalk home, became increasingly present in Bill’s life. Though he physically resembled Warren Wilhelm Sr., de Blasio soon began to identify more with his mother’s relatives. As he described in an interview during his first bid for elected office, “I felt very close to them. They made me realize how it is to start in a new country with all the odds against them.” As a teenager, Bill de Blasio had identified so thoroughly with his mother’s Italian heritage that peers nicknamed him “Senator Provolone” due to his penchant for politics only being outshone by his intense love for Italian sandwiches[2]. By the time he was graduating high school in 1979, he had asked that he be referred to as Bill de Blasio on his diploma.

Bill de Blasio’s love for politics would lead him to formative moments as well. As a delegate to Boys Nation in 1978, an awestruck Bill de Blasio would be personally introduced to President Jack Gilligan, whom he had proudly volunteered for in Connecticut in his spare time throughout 1976. The second would come a year and a half later. Due to a quirk in the 1979 Higher Education Act Amendments negotiated by the Gilligan administration, people like de Blasio would only receive their adjusted levels of scholarship and tuition assistance starting in the 1980 calendar year. As such, de Blasio chose to delay his admission to university until that January and used the remaining seven months to explore his political interests and, more broadly, travel off the beaten path.

*****​

The young American stood off to the side of the Roman road, still in a bit of disbelief about where he was and the parade he was seeing.

Bill had wanted to travel in the months he had between high school and university. It wasn’t uncommon, especially in the counterculture - not that Bill really thought of himself as some beat kid or anything, though his mother would argue he looked the part. It wasn’t like he was planning on going to Kampuchea or anything! Regardless of those protests, he had taken some money he had cobbled together working his tail off to fly across the Atlantic. In time, he would see the hits: he’d go to the UK for Longleat ‘79 and seen some of the best the British kings of rock had to offer, from the Rolling Stones to Joe Strummer to the Flowers of Romance to even Tony Blair’s glitzy solo that propelled Ugly Rumours from an opening act to their eighties stardom; he’d waltz across from the Mediterranean to Scandinavia the way a keen student of history would; he’d even spend some decent time in the Alps backpacking to his heart’s content and getting away from it all. It was wonderful, but it all came second to Italy.

Italy was different.

Sure, where Bill stood at this very moment was well-known: it was the Via del Corso, one of the main arteries of Rome. His family was from the south, and in time he’d be there too, but he knew he had to see the great city of empire on his way. It didn’t hurt that the beginning of his summer trip intersected neatly with Republic Day. The grand parade through Rome, a civic-military celebration of Italian culture and resilience, was a sight to behold on any day.

But this wasn’t any day either. This was Italy in 1979. The Communists’ electoral victory that previous autumn, in a NATO nation no less, had shocked the world. It seemed a direct repudiation of all things Cold War - here Berlinguer talked of moving past the need for blocs, leveling his criticism towards imperialist meddling of all stripes - condemning Soviet troops in Prague equally alongside America’s low-level mission in the Congo - and focusing on building a better world within the west. To Bill and a million other young American leftists, this was the resolution to the burning contradiction that fueled the Cold War.

Most of the troupes in the parade were the usual. Military regiments and marching bands, dancers and artists, everything of the culture he loved. But Bill noticed the labor regiments too, the union chapters and working people who made Italy function day to day. He noticed the red banners and partisans on parade as well. It was something truly unique, a celebration of the Italian Republic and freedom but also a celebration of this sort distinctly thrown by the current government - the communist government.

Then Bill saw them. Plain, simple, in the middle of all the political celebration, was a plain open-top white car flanked by a single military police group. Seated atop the back seats, beaming and waving to the crowds packed along the streets, were Prime Minister Enrico Berlinguer and President Giovanni Leone. Berlinguer, the wiry little sparkplug of a man whom western leftists had rested their hopes and dreams on; Leone, the old-school Christian Democrat and heir to Alcide De Gasperi. It was the Compromesso Storico in human form. It was proof.

Awestruck, Bill grinned as the two men drove by, briefly making a shadow of eye contact with Berlinguer. He broke out the pocket notebook he had been carrying with him, a personal journal of his travels. He began to write, then and there.

“At Festa della Repubblica, I noticed something very different from anything I had experienced. What Berlinguer, what the Communist Party had done, was weave together the musical tradition, the artistic tradition, the intellectual tradition, and the political tradition into one beautiful harmony…”

*****​

Soon after, de Blasio returned to the United States to attend Georgetown University, where he would graduate with a masters’ in international affairs in 1985. Soon after, he would quickly find work at the Assisi Center, a human rights advocacy organization founded by Fr. Robert Drinan. Though he traveled throughout the Americas with Assisi, he most notably spent weeks at a time in Argentina organizing humanitarian relief with the Montoneros, a group banned from US aid by a Collins administration compromise due to their communist sympathies yet a favorite cause of western leftists in opposition to the country’s outright fascist dictator José López Rega. Where before Bill de Blasio had molded his worldview in his experiences with the domestic and international left such that, according to a uni roommate, “he’d mention FDR, Karl Marx, and Bob Marley in the same sentence,” in Argentina belief turned into practice as de Blasio helped firsthand in their self-professed struggle to build a freer and fairer life for all Argentinians. An activist’s work abroad was never finished, though, and soon enough de Blasio wished to return home from the trenches. Though he contemplated multiple options, after a brief stint in Boston working in Mayor Kennedy’s office on his controversial housing revitalization-slash-desegregation initiative, a lucrative job offer as a field organizer for Governor Toby Moffett’s 1986 re-election campaign brought de Blasio back to his home state. This soon turned to policy work in Hartford, a place de Blasio was content with until 1989.

Roy Cohn’s victory was anathema to Bill de Blasio. It wasn’t just ideological - though an out-and-out democratic socialist had much to disagree with the arch-conservative Cohn over - but rather a clash of personality. To a man whose family disintegration was a legacy of the poison pushed by McCarthy and Cohn, the idea that a bruised ego like Roy Cohn wished to make America look a bit more like him was infuriating to de Blasio, a capital-m Movement man with little love for celebrity politics. So the young activist, now a senior staffer with Moffett, quickly made up his mind: if Roy Cohn could go to the White House, Bill de Blasio could at least go to the Capitol. But entering into Congress from a position of relative obscurity was a difficult task to say the least. The party regulars had fielded a seemingly strong candidate in Hartford’s Mayor John Droney, a Collinsesque Democrat aligned with the anti-Moffett factions. Furthermore, Moffett himself was far more concerned with his longtime protege and state Attorney General Bill Curry succeeding him in the governor’s mansion, so while support would be sent de Blasio’s way it wasn’t his first priority. Bill de Blasio was on his own in what seemed to be the most difficult race of his life.

Crucially, though, de Blasio’s campaign understood the dynamics of the Rust Belt. The de Blasio campaign quickly built a working theory: as much as the Roy Cohns of the world talked about the unheard conservative masses, similar left-wing voters were not so much unheard as unengaged. The party was focused on the traditional view of a campaign: pick a guy like John Droney who can shuffle to the center in the general and win over some crucial mass of independent centrists. This, of course, wasn’t as much of an option for a leftist like de Blasio, but where the moderates were seen as key de Blasio saw the disaffected and disengaged who needed to be registered and turned out. So they focused on building engagement and registration. The candidate held events at the University of Connecticut with the local SDS chapter, bringing voter registration materials as far as possible. He met with nascent local Queer groups, making clear his strong support for their equality as the issue first grew in salience on the national stage. He eschewed fighting for union leaders’ endorsements in favor of trekking through the union halls and speaking directly to the rank and file, a gutsy move for a spindly young leftist but one that earned him respect once he shed the cerebral rhetoric and talked about plant closures like Windsor Locks’ infamous “Black Monday.” Crucially, though, de Blasio’s guerrilla campaign brought him in contact with Black community leaders in Hartford. The city was nearly one-third Black, and intense fear of Hartford going the way of Philadelphia under Lucien Blackwell led to Droney’s sore-loser strategy of fielding white incumbents as independents in the general to peel off Republican votes.[3] This strategy, while not necessarily ineffective, had only increased simmering resentments, especially when a sanitation strike brought on by Droney’s refusal to negotiate with AFSCME seemed to only see cleanup denied to said communities first. The local NAACP quickly endorsed de Blasio once leadership realized he meant business, then soon after marshaled their resources towards his voter registration drives, seeing the opportunity for future engagement and beating the Droney machinery. The end result was, off the backs of galvanized turnout from students, racial and sexual minorities, and unionized voters, Bill de Blasio had given John Droney his first loss by nearly four percent.

Naturally, Droney immediately moved to implement his own strategy, but an ongoing municipal strike unrelated to the sanitation strikes earlier that year and state Democrats quickly rallying their endorsements behind de Blasio at Governor Moffett’s urging crushed his independent dreams. With that squared away, back and forth it went between de Blasio and his Republican opponent, freshman Representative John O’Connell. At the nadir of the recession, though, O’Connell’s proud backing of Cohn’s economic program and a snappy suggestion that people “just move” if the plant closes down were far more pressing than muddled references to the Montoneros. Amidst a national wave in the House, Bill de Blasio was sent to the halls of Congress for the first time at just 29 years old.

*****​

There weren’t words to describe Harar. None that seemed appropriate, at least. None of the people of the United States Congress dared try. But yet, here their mission was. Fact-finding, so the originator of the mission Mickey Leland called it.

But it wasn’t so much fact-finding as awareness-drawing. They knew what was happening in Ethiopia, anyone who was paying attention did. But that sure as hell wasn’t what the American public saw. They were apathetic, they saw Africa as a far-off battlefield of the Cold War hardly worth paying mind to. There wasn’t war in Europe, there wasn’t war on the homefront, there wasn’t even a far-off Asian war like Korea no matter how much Hanoi and Saigon rattled the sabers at each other. Relaxation, peace-minded individuals in both camps called it as they grinned and shook hands at arms control summits, like that famous picture of Martha Collins and Valentina Tereshkova in Geneva. Whether it was called “détente” or “разрядка,” paying attention to Africa would jeopardize the whole theory. Ever since Jack Gilligan had called the last troops home from Angola and Mozambique and the Congo, not so much declaring defeat as settling things where they were with popular fronts here and imagined nations there, it had been calm. Worth ignoring, in the eyes of America.

Heads in the sand didn’t make the truth disappear. The truth was that the Horn of Africa was in crisis. It had started with Haile Selassie, the unconquered lion of the African continent. Beloved he was the world over, the same couldn’t be said for him within an impoverished and slow-to-reform Ethiopia. That was why, amidst a hard-hitting famine laying bare the flaws in Ethiopia’s governance, a near-revolution was only stymied by Selassie’s abdication at gunpoint in 1973. While his grandson Zera Yacob went from Crown Prince to Emperor, he was quickly relegated to figurehead status. The real power rested with the newly sworn-in head of state, General Amon Andom. General Andom was a war hero, perhaps the only man with enough credibility to resolve the ongoing conflict at the time of the revolution. Andom’s reforms brought a tentative peace to Eritrea as an autonomous region of Addis Ababa’s patrimony, calm to a public weary of petty landlords exerting their power over them, and despite his distinctly illiberal rule he was a benevolent dictator, as some western coverage called him.

But not all was well within Andom’s regime. While he was personally popular, the military foundations of his regime quickly developed into something cancerous and toxic, a hodgepodge of junior officers both Marxist and nationalistic in nature. Where Andom negotiated with separatists, they saw them as threats to be crushed. Where he dealt with the Somali Democratic Republic - another hodgepodge of Marxism and third-worldist nationalism - as an equal and a neighbor albeit an unfriendly one, they saw an enemy to be suppressed. Most of all, though, the clandestine Military Council - “Derg” - underneath Andom saw the national hero going soft, weak, even traitorous. Some old hawk had gotten a senile Nikolai Tikhonov’s ear and convinced him to greenlight Soviet aid to the Derg. So it was that, in 1984, the Derg launched a quick, bloody coup, killing Andom where he stood when he refused to “give an inch of his country” for them. The Derg regime was bitterly divided, though. The hardline Marxists’ commander Mengistu Haile Mariam had died fighting to take Addis Ababa, and without his star weak collective leadership ensued. But famine had reared its ugly head once more, spooked separatists dug up their guns in preparation, opposition forces rallied in protest, and the Soviets cut and ran. It seemed the Derg was doomed if something didn’t change, and an internal “anti-bureaucratic reorganization” by Atnafu Abate was what did it. Abate was a bit of an Orthodox traditionalist and nationalist, an oddity among Marxist revolutionaries. But it was what drove him, and as he tossed Tafari Benti the nominal leader to the curb in 1988, he proclaimed a revitalized Ethiopia of the days of yore.

That was when the terror - shibir - began. It was a trickle of news at first. The revocation of autonomy from Eritrea, then Ethiopian troops occupying Ogaden, and so on. Some noticed, most didn’t. More noticed when the Eritreans restarted their war for independence, especially the reports of the sheer brutality of the Ethiopian campaign. But most chalked it up to the horrors of war. Then, finally, the Somalis invaded occupied Ogaden, claiming liberation for their brethren from the Ethiopian boot. Then came the separatists - the Tigrayans and the Ogaden Somalis and the Oromo nationalists - and down came the hammer of the Ethiopian government, dominated by Amhara Christians through and through. Talk of mass killings, of soldiers butchering entire towns over their ethnicity or what god they prayed to, that was just hyperbole, surely. That’s what press secretaries in Washington said when asked why aid money went to Addis Ababa, why Atnafu Abate was received at the White House in one rare instance. Just hyperbole in the fight against communism. The Somali Democratic Republic was a strong Soviet ally in Africa, after all.

It didn’t seem much like hyperbole to Harold Washington as he stood in Harar. The city was temporarily in a safe-zone as the United Nations tried desperately to carve a path to the sea to evacuate refugees, and the fighting between Ethiopia and Somalia had briefly ended in Dire Dawa. It was a rare window to see the fallout. The ancient city, perhaps the holiest site of Islam in Ethiopia, was a burned-out husk, piles of rubble and pillars of thick black smoke as far as the eye could see. Centuries-old mosques torn to stones, the city walls bombed out and shelled by a force of people seeking to break an entire group’s will to exist.

As the Congressional Black Caucus’ chairman, Washington had overseen the group’s advocacy on the topic to some controversy. Why, people asked, wasn’t the CBC talking about the issues faced by Black Americans, like issues of school segregation and police brutality? Washington’s deputy, the young Texan Mickey Leland, offered up his usual poeticisms: “We are as much citizens of this world as we are America. It isn’t just injustice anywhere in America that threatens justice everywhere.” Or, in Harold’s more simplistic terms: “We can walk and chew gum at the same time.” This was really why, though. What they had seen was worth a thousand puzzled expressions from reporters who didn’t get it.

It wasn’t just the CBC as well. The nascent Democratic Values Caucus, a group of leftists in Congress who had decently overlapping membership with the CBC’s younger generations, had also been key in this visit. Mel King, bless the young Bostonian, had facilitated the joint nature of the mission, being something of an ambassador between the CBC and the dissident left even though the older parliamentary types like Charlie Rangel were a bit uncomfortable with tying themselves down ideologically. Washington could see it worked like a charm, though. He saw it in the DVC’s chair, the Wisconsinite priest-slash-Representative Robert John Cornell, gazing out over the same devastation and soberly performing a sign of the cross. Washington was inclined to agree with the sentiment, looking at the same thing Fr. Cornell saw.

What they saw were piles. Those masses outside the city’s ancient walls, masses the representatives and their federal handlers realized with unease were bodies, seemed piled up that way solely because there were too many dead in too short a time to even bother with mass graves. A silence, much like the one on Ethiopia at home, fell over the fact-finders. The silence on Ethiopia would not last in the halls of Congress - the images of the Harar Massacre the fact-finders would bring back would eventually lead to the passage of the Moody Amendment banning arms sales to Abate’s regime, a deal the Cohn administration begrudgingly took as it let the WGI pick up the slack. Even so, by the. nearly 2 million Eritreans, Somalis, Tigrayans, Oromos, and Ethiopian Muslims had died in the purges or the infamous “hunger camps,” another million would die after, and millions more would be displaced. Though respite eventually came for those who remained, none of that could bring the generations lost back.

But at that moment in the hot summer of 1991, that ambassador’s somber talk of “the dead” was interrupted. “Not dead,” a scruffy-bearded man - a kid, really - bearing a nametag sticker with “Rep. de Blasio (CT)” scrawled across it interjected with an enraged tremble in his voice, “killed. Someone did this to them. We helped them do this.”

Harold Washington didn’t need to be psychic to know every single one of his colleagues was thinking the same.

*****​

Representative Bill de Blasio was hardly a notable member of Congress. Backbencher would be a more accurate term for him, though it wasn’t one in the United States’ legislative parlance. This wasn’t to say that he was doing nothing, just that what he wished to do was decidedly in the minority in both parties during the highly conservative environment of the 1990s. His advocacy for Ethiopian refugees didn’t stop with just the Harar mission, feverishly fighting for continued resettlement and humanitarian aid that was only occasionally granted. He cast a litany of votes against privatization schemes, such as the successful privatization of the Tennessee Valley Authority and the National Railroad Passenger Corporation as well as Cohn’s unsuccessful welfare reform. He aided significantly in the repeal of PAVA under Cheney, also advocating further protections for Queer rights by the government. All in all, he built up one of the most left-wing voting records in Congress throughout the 1990s.

But it wasn’t just Republicans who de Blasio was a left-wing gadfly for. Throughout the 2000s, he would cause similar issues. Despite his close ties with the Congressional Black Caucus - forged in the fires of Ethiopia and maintained in no small part by his wife Chirlaine McCray, a Black activist-turned-speechwriter for his colleague from New York David Dinkins - he irritated his CBC allies by choosing to back anti-poverty stalwart Senator Elizabeth Edwards in the primaries. His pointing to Jackson’s stances on criminal justice and messy history on Queer rights - Jackson having caused some controversy upon stripping a supermodel of honorary Georgian citizenship he had previously granted upon the revelation that she was transgender, callously claiming “I wouldn’t have given it to somebody whose claim to fame was being transsexual”[4] - did little to smooth over the frustrations of the older generation of Black politicians, especially when the Edwards campaign fell into disarray and sank below the waves.

Come 2001, naturally it was Jackson who was in charge, not Edwards or even de Blasio, and even though he campaigned heavily for Jackson in the general election the reach Bill de Blasio the backbencher had was limited. He helped to draft Biden-Milk, though it made more sense to naturally place Harvey Milk the Queer trailblazer’s name on the final bill. Lobbying for a broader recognition of refugee rights in the Anaya Bill by de Blasio and similarly-minded figures was paid some mind, though it was immaterial when the bill failed to pass anyways. Overall, though, Bill de Blasio was simply one of the handful of dissenters drafting broad proposals that would never see the light of day under the New Democracy. But two changes in leadership would further propel Bill de Blasio’s career.

The first was, naturally, that of Maynard Jackson’s death. Bill de Blasio had grown accustomed to a president he often disagreed with, and he mourned like the rest of America mourned. But this meant Ed Markey was president, and though one might think Ed Markey and Bill de Blasio might find some accommodation as Democrats from the Rust Belt, this wasn’t further from the truth. The reality of the situation was that Bill de Blasio had grown increasingly bitter towards Ed Markey. It had all stemmed from the NRPC privatization debate, it seemed. To Bill, where he had steered all of his energy towards saving the rail lines, Ed Markey had taken his thirty pieces of silver in exchange for the B&M turning a profit. To Ed, Bill de Blasio had been off tilting at windmills while he had been trying to take the world as it was and make the best of it for his constituents. From there, a dozen other petty squabbles had arisen until the Connecticut Italian and the Massachusetts Irishman found themselves at odds fairly consistently.

All of this meant that, when the longtime Democratic Values Caucus leader, Paul Wellstone of Minnesota, retired due to his diagnosis with multiple sclerosis, Bill de Blasio was one of the most notable left-wing firebrands in the Democratic caucus. His election to lead the DVC was hardly a surprise, though it did prompt another round of groaning from the mainline Democratic leadership somewhat tired of dealing with “the most rebellious Democrat in Washington.” Under de Blasio’s leadership, the DVC’s stances grew bolder and louder. When Ed Markey and Nancy Pelosi went to Copenhagen to finish negotiating the Arctic Nations Trade Treaty, Bill de Blasio was one of the first Democrats to announce opposition to an agreement he saw as furthering the shipping-off of New England manufacturing to automating Soviet factories, calling for an end to the arms race as the most valid form of rapprochement. When the White House agreed to continue the regulatory shifts and “efficiency reforms” pushed by Speaker Walker’s Republicans in exchange for his initiatives on the environment, de Blasio campaigned feverishly for the retention of the New Deal order. When Ed Markey called his ideal for Usenet expansion “competitive capitalism,” Bill de Blasio and his compatriots drafted a proposal suggesting outright federal ownership of such vital infrastructure. When Markey signed a compromise between the Republican House and Democratic Senate on GSM civil unions - leaving legalization to the individual states but prohibiting nullification of otherwise valid unions across state lines - Bill de Blasio rallied the DVC to its most pro-Queer stance yet, calling outright for total national legalization. All of this continued over the decade of Ed Markey’s administration, giving administration officials, Gary Hart, Chris Dodd, and all the other congressional leaders innumerable headaches.

But come 2013, Ed Markey was gone and in his place was Roger Goodell. While de Blasio had not devoted much energy to supporting Rick Perry, seeing him as the centrist conscience of an already-centrist administration, Goodell’s victory was significantly worse. The passage of EARTA infuriated the DVC, who de Blasio rallied behind a unanimous condemnation of the proposal as a defunding of vital social services to further the aims of the very wealthy. Pass it did anyways, and even as subtle signs suggested a growing cost-of-living crisis due to the combination of Markey and Goodell welfare streamlining mixed with the severe depletion of state capacity caused by EARTA, de Blasio was once again decidedly in the minority of public opinion as the average American appreciated the tax break more than any rumblings of socioeconomic catastrophe. But he was no longer in the minority of Democratic opinion, and his caucus’ growth in membership despite the overall Democratic flop in the 2014 midterms intrigued the new House leadership. In the beginning of the 2015 Congress, Minority Leader Schumer made an offer to his fellow northeasterner - if de Blasio would step down as leader of the Democratic Values Caucus, Schumer could offer him the ranking member slot on the House Education & Labor Committee. Though it was jokingly dubbed the Hell (HEL) Committee for the sheer antipathy the past four Speakers had held towards the post, de Blasio accepted regardless. Evidently, he saw an opportunity.

Bill de Blasio wouldn’t chair the Hell Committee until 2019, though. In the meantime, he would continue to do what he had done best for the past 20-odd years: raise hell instead of chairing it. As the AIDS crisis grew, Bill de Blasio became the first sitting member of Congress to volunteer at an AIDS clinic in 2017, working alongside the beleaguered nurses and caught on camera individually sitting with and talking to patients. These moments of compassion drew something rare to him: mainstream attention. Bill de Blasio wasn’t just known only to the most plugged-in politicos and leftist activists anymore. He was in the news, brought on for interviews across the “Big Four” (never SKY, though - talking about him meant talking about AIDS as a Queer disease). It was hardly long-term attention, but he reveled in it all the same, and the praise from the left-wing grassroots for his selflessness in public service fueled his ambitions. Apart from shaving his scruffy goatee in favor of a more “dignified” short-cropped look suited to the cameras, Bill de Blasio would also double down, unveiling a bill not just legalizing civil unions but marriage equality in America from the Capitol steps. The reactions towards this were heated, but they were reactions instead of silence.

Just as his star began to rise ever so slightly, so too did Roger Goodell’s fall end in his muted resignation. Congressional majorities seemed assured, including the first House majority for the Democrats since Maynard Jackson was in office. This gave Bill de Blasio, a backbencher whose contentment with the backbench had finally worn thin, a chance to prepare for his new role chairing the HEL Committee. Re-elected on the largest margin of his career, this preparation paid dividends, and Bill de Blasio sought to redefine what committee chairmanship looked like. Where such work had been capable of being bombastic for decades, first Ranking Member and now Chairman de Blasio took a neglected committee and saw an opportunity to put the entire Republican agenda on trial. Hearing after hearing raised alarms about the cost-of-living spike over the past decade, calling labor leaders and left-leaning economists to back up claims of wage stagnation and spiraling costs for housing, utilities, and simple consumer prices. Fiery arguments with administration officials and corporate executives alike were deeply polarizing as they were covered, but they also saw a significant number of people side with de Blasio as a champion for the millions of Davids against the Wall Street Goliaths. It all seemed to be building to something.

*****​

“There’s plenty of money in this country, it’s just in the wrong hands. People in every part of this country feel stuck, or even like they’re going backward, all as the rich get richer. There is inequality our leaders don’t see, there is poverty they don’t see, and there is despair they don’t see. I’m running for President of the United States because we need to end this tale of two countries and remind Washington that it’s only one country - your country.”

The clip cut out at this, with de Blasio beginning to field questions from reporters from the set of microphones he had set up in downtown Hartford. It was back to the NBC Newsroom with that.

Dee Dee Myers spoke first. “So there you have it, America. Bill de Blasio, a veteran Representative from Connecticut, just announced his campaign for the Democratic nomination for president. An unapologetic leftist, he’s seemingly centered his campaign on growing poverty. De Blasio is believed to be a longshot candidate compared to other potential entrants.” Myers turned to her co-anchor. “John?”

Her co-anchor, the longtime newsman John Kerry, chimed in. “Dee Dee, if I may ask just one question that I believe is on most of our viewers’ minds right now: just who the hell is Bill de Blasio?” Both laughed.

Though prescient in the moment and the NBC Newsroom would move on to more important matters, those words would be laid out neatly on history’s banquet table for Kerry to eat for years to come.

*****​

While it was broadly true de Blasio was a dark horse, the Democratic Party didn’t seem to have a clear nominee or dominant force. After a minor internal scandal surrounding the selection process in 2016, the party made the decision to transition fully to “one man one vote” for delegate selection. This, combined with the perceived weakness of the Republican Party, saw a plethora of also-rans slowly consolidate as three main candidates pulled away in the “dark primary” of endorsements, donations, and backroom support. There was Kathleen Falk, a Senator from Wisconsin since 2004 generally well-regarded for her work on family issues and criminal justice; Xavier Becerra, the Governor of California since 2014 made notable by virtue of his standing as the leader of the nation’s largest state (albeit one with a weak governorship and a right-wing history); as well as Andy Beshear, a young dynastic Senator from Kentucky whose main focus seemed to be on economic revitalization, especially in Appalachia and the south more broadly. The main connecting thread between the main candidates, though, was that they all seemed connected to the center-left strain that had dominated the party since 2000, with the distinction being more personality-focused. While this sort of primary was nothing new for the party, it left a lane outside the mainstream open.

This lane was where the de Blasio campaign picked up its steam and evolved from longshot to dark horse. The primary debates had been tradition for decades, but they had previously mostly served to reinforce the polling hierarchy, whether that be due to a strong performance by the frontrunner or the others onstage seeking to blunt momentum from a new candidate. The dynamic of the debates in 2020 was relatively unique. Relatively little focus was afforded to de Blasio compared to the other three “serious” candidates, and as such they seemed more focused on picking each other apart. However, the “equal time” rules adopted for primary and general election debates - directly modeled off the Fairness Doctrine that had driven the news media for decades, even through critics point to the ability for networks like SKY to effectively drive discourse by framing what differing viewpoints were acceptable and unacceptable - gave de Blasio just as much speaking time and ability to respond to questions as his opponents. In every response, de Blasio seemed the only person offering a different vision, though the most memorable line of the night came in his closing:

"Everywhere I’ve gone on this campaign, I see a tale of two cities. I see it when people sleep on the streets in Los Angeles and Philadelphia. I see it in Appalachia, where some people still live in sheds. I see in Connecticut, my own state, where thousands of unemployed factory workers wonder why we sent their jobs overseas. I see it when people dying of AIDS have to wait for months to even be seen because our leaders decided we needed the money more for a tax break for billionaires. Tonight, we’ve heard a lot about how we can do more with less, yet nobody once asked why we have less in the first place. I believe, and I believe that you at home all believe too, that we should act boldly to end the tale of two cities. That’s why I’m here - to fight inequality wherever it exists, and to come together as one country where all are created equal.”

The audience had to be told to quiet down at that, and polls showed Democrats overwhelmingly remembered de Blasio most vividly. However, the real genius of it was in the days following. Early on, the young, tech-savvy leftists working the de Blasio campaign office had figured out that there was vast potential to Usenet campaigning. Previous campaigns had utilized it to great effect, but their focus was traversing the layers of interconnected webrings to drum up small donations and get the word out. It was the de Blasio campaign that realized early on that there was a developing political undercurrent in the mass communications infrastructure of the Usenet, especially one for people who felt their views weren’t represented by the old mainstream. In short, the left wing of this seemed like a perfect base not just for donations but for people, of attention in an engagement-based environment and dedicated campaign volunteers.

As more and more people spread word of mouth and Usenet traffic on left-wing circles only grew, the momentum only grew. Videos of de Blasio’s debate moments, of the HEL hearings with executives and labor leaders and economists all backing up his points with simple clarity, all circulated with encouragement from the campaign. A 60 Minutes interview with de Blasio and his wife and children brought a wave of genuinely positive coverage, the image of a mixed-race family sitting around a modest suburban kitchen table talking frankly about their day-to-day lives coming off as deeply relatable compared to a millionaire president and dynastic opponents in the Democratic primary, no matter how much noise was made about his thirty-year career in the House. Concerted campaigning to minority-oriented spaces used to connect unheard communities only increased the energy. This connection was only furthered by de Blasio and his wife frankly addressing their unique relationship (Chirlaine McCray saying "In the 1970s, I wrote about my life as a Black lesbian, and in 1991, I met the love of my life and married him”) and the campaign being the only one to frankly discuss issues of lingering discrimination compared to the lip service offered by the rest of the party. Combined with his decades-long ties to Black, Chicano, and Queer activist groups, the endorsements and donations flooded in soon after.

The end result was a rapidly-growing grassroots momentum, something a fair bit of the Democratic Party was slow to notice. The crowds at his rallies had grown significantly, with tens of thousands of people turning out for rallies all across the country. “BDB FOR USA: THIS IS YOUR COUNTRY!” signs had proliferated from South Side Chicago to the Rio Grande Valley to college campuses in rusted-over cities. Nearly a hundred thousand people showed up in Boston for the largest of these rallies, but yet the party never quite thought it was even possible. Media profiles comparing de Blasio to Jack Gilligan and FDR were interspersed with panicked talk of his radical vision, a too-late attempt to smother the fire. A series of further debates only cemented his strong performances, even if the other candidates were ready for de Blasio’s momentum and tried to parry his bold talk on poverty. On Primary Day, Bill de Blasio was the odds-on favorite, but even so his entire campaign was shocked after winning just under 60% of the vote.

Though some party leaders talked about potentially denying de Blasio the nomination at the convention in direct violation of the new rules, there was little appetite for it, and Speaker Schumer’s personal intervention on de Blasio’s behalf shut the entire process down. Furthermore, de Blasio quickly pivoted to the selection of a running mate, settling on a truly unexpected yet mollifying choice - Senate Majority Whip Mary “Tipper” Gore of Tennessee. By virtue of her position in party leadership Tipper Gore wasn’t the biggest fan of Bill de Blasio, but her husband - “Reverend Al” Gore, a prominent Southern Baptist preacher of Jim Wallis-inspired humanitarian evangelicalism - was perhaps her closest political advisor and had been vital in encouraging the Appalachian populist leftwards over time. So it was that Bill de Blasio went to Madison Square Garden to accept his nomination in a convention so lively that even the archconservatives at the New York Post begrudgingly admitted that “to millions of Americans, Bill de Blasio is a voice of hope.”

*****​

Karl Rove pinched the bridge of his nose and cut right to the chase. “Who the fuck came up with that meeting, Rick?”

Rick Wilson, the campaign strategist for President Scott’s re-election campaign sat on the other end of the cameras of the teleconference from the Republican veteran, clearly prepared for the onslaught. “Look. Karl. Eric Adams was polling twenty percent against us-Eric Adams! That nut! He hasn’t even been in Congress for years and he was at twenty points against an incumbent! We had to do something-”

Rove’s next words were a roar, a sound distinctly unfamiliar from the pudgy po-faced campaigner. “AND YOU JACKASSES GAVE DANNIE GOEB FIFTEEN! ALL BECAUSE YOU PUT RICK SCOTT IN A ROOM WITH THE FUCKING OAKLAND RAIDERS!”

“Now look Karl, they won the Super Bowl, and we were thinking with the general election in mind-” Wilson protested.

Rove’s face was beet-red, and he had no intention of stopping. “Don’t interrupt, you good-for-nothing clown! Don’t you remember that meeting I” - at this Rove thumped his chest - “ put together with Harv Atwater? Limbaugh’s guys were our path to winning! But no, you had to shuffle to the center, you had to make Rick Scott look like some sort of enlightened moderate. And how’d that go for you?” Rove didn’t even need an answer. “Oh right, their fucking quarterback asked the President of the United States about over-policing, and he didn’t have an answer!”

“Don’t remind me,” was all an aghast Wilson could muster.

“The Raiders are city-owned, dumbass! The city of Oakland! Do you know anything about how they recruit players? Have you EVER seen a white person wearing a Raiders jersey?” Wilson grimaced a bit at such casual racism from Rove, but if Rove noticed he certainly wasn’t stopping. “They beat the Pioneers last Super Bowl, goddammit! The Memphis Pioneers! The whitest fans in the NFL! I’m impressed, Rick. You managed to make Rick Scott look like a racist monster while simultaneously making sure the actual racists would never vote for him.”

Wilson finally interjected. “A lot of moderates are spooked by de Blasio. We were trying to do a bit of image repair with Markey voters. Make us not look like the enemy. 40% of the Democrats didn’t vote for de Blasio. Limbaugh’s dead, it’s not like Independence Democrats will be voting for him. They have one option - us.”

Rove didn’t buy it. “Well now I can tell you they just won’t even show up. I was going to be reasonable, but you’re done, Rick. I know you know POTUS called me earlier today, yanked me out of semi-retirement to take over the campaign. He also told me I could choose if I kept you on or not. I've chosen, get the fuck out of my sight.”

Rick Wilson sat, mouth agape.

Rove acted as if he didn’t see him. “Fuck, I thought we could even win Pennsylvania if we played it right. Fuck!”

*****​

For a brief moment, to de Blasio supporters - “BDBros” on the Usenet - it seemed like he would usher in a new era for America. He was winning by solid margins, no small feat given his rise from obscurity to a presidential nomination. But it seemed that the real trial would be the general election. Rick Scott was not popular for a myriad of reasons, and the primaries reflected that - losing near forty percent between challengers both left and right. He seemed like an uninspiring, ineffectual hardliner, a business executive more concerned with tinkering with budget cuts and blundering his way through the remainder of the term than dealing with a moment of serious societal reckoning in America. Compared to the left-wing firebrand known for his hopeful presence, it seemed like an easy choice.

But plenty of people were disillusioned with politics as usual as well, and that was where the first wrench came in - Doug Burgum. Burgum was a well-known figure: in the 1980s he left his cushy consulting job in Chicago, used what savings he had and money he could borrow, and founded Burgum Systems. Starting as an early information systems pioneer modeled heavily off of early Chilean budgeting systems and soon branching out into secure telecom banking technology, Burgum Systems quickly grew into a major player in the nascent Chicago tech sector. In 2005, Burgum Systems masterfully rebranded itself to break into the newly-demonopolized Usenet, becoming BurgSys, an early provider of linked web-hosting software for personal use. Though not necessarily a computer-manufacturing giant like HP under Steve Wozniak (who made that year’s TIME Person of the Year), the timing made Doug Burgum a very rich man. He would channel his money into occasional political activities, building a profile as a strong leader especially on environmental conservation. As national political disillusionment grew, in late 2019 Burgum hatched a plan: he would run for President on his own as an independent. He would spend the next few months gearing up a shadow campaign, recruiting former Republican Senator Betsy McCaughey of New York as a potential running mate and formulating a detailed platform. When Bill de Blasio officially took the nomination that June, Doug Burgum officially launched his campaign a week later.

After his initial Tonight Show interview, the polls began to indicate something of a shift. Burgum had stressed a sort of centrist populism, a focus on low taxes for the middle class, technologically-driven policy including “American-made boots on Mars by 2030” and combating climate change with innovation, electoral reforms, and broad social reforms focused on decentralization and individual liberties. This, naturally, came off as quite popular to the most disaffected voters, and a number of previously-undecided voters indicated their preference for him seemingly overnight. Furthermore, Independence candidate and right-wing activist Colonel Allen West had none of Limbaugh’s personal flair, leaving a party mostly unified behind one bombastic showman floundering and shifting a number of Limbaugh 2016 voters to Burgum’s camp off the sheer appeal of a “Washington outsider.” Quickly, polls indicating twenty, twenty-five, even thirty percent for the tech mogul coated the race, moving from a likely Democratic victory to a confused mess.

Both major parties had their own reactions to the Burgum campaign. His coalition seemed primarily driven by young urban professionals, disaffected culturally conservative southern Democrats, and a handful of progressive - especially minority - Republicans. For de Blasio, he was a great punching bag who could make Rick Scott look like a joke contender. As such, his attacks quickly refocused on the notion of a billionaire spending hundreds of millions of dollars to buy his way to the White House as well as his support for EARTA and similar “austerity politics,” as de Blasio dubbed the post-Cohn era of limits during the primaries. For Scott, he was to be ignored at all costs. Scott would be a third-rate contender if Burgum was taken seriously, and he needed to ensure that “Burgumania” - as supporters jokingly dubbed the sudden polling surge, becoming a slogan Burgum himself would use - focused primarily on Democrats who disliked de Blasio. As such, the goal was to win back disaffected Republicans. Though the shuffle to the center in the primary failed disastrously, after Karl Rove took over the new plan was simple. Scott’s “Rose Garden strategy” focused on demonstrating him as a calm, competent leader ready to tackle the issues in a way the two wildmen were not. Everything from hosting NATO leaders at Camp David to reaffirm commitments to a non-political appearance at the 2020 Summer Olympics in Houston to even a humanizing interview with Sarah Heath where he discussed his lower-middle class childhood helped to dispel some notions about the incumbent, and the idea of steady leadership as the economy picked up seemed more and more appealing.

And then phase two of Rick Scott’s comeback began: an all-out assault on Bill de Blasio. While there had been rumblings about his past in the primaries, most of his opponents had held off for fear of damaging their credibility with the left when they were nominated. The White House and their allies in the press had no such qualms. The barrage of attacks began slowly, raising questions about de Blasio’s work with the Montoneros and alleging it was far more political than previously thought. Given the recent election of ex-Montonero commander Mario Firmenich as the President of Argentina in 2018, the idea quickly took off that de Blasio was sympathetic to militant leftist groups, and every headline about Firmenich’s strongman behavior only opened the wound further. Then came the references to his time in Italy, his parents’ grilling as suspected communists, and quotations from past early campaigns. In a 1989 interview to a University of Connecticut student paper, de Blasio described his ideal for society as “democratic socialism,”[5] and upon its rediscovery by conservative media outlets Republican surrogates feigned outrage and innocently asked if there was much difference between BDB and the KGB. Furthermore, in 2000 radio interview, he responded to a question about corporate influence in politics with “I am tempted to borrow from Karl Marx here. There’s a famous quote that ‘the state is the executive committee of the bourgeois’ and I use it openly to say, ‘No.' I actually read that as a young person and I said, ‘That’s not the way it’s supposed to be.’”[6] The line “I am tempted to borrow from Karl Marx here” became the introductory line to an aggressive ad buy by the RNC, one that seemed to resonate very deeply with latent anti-communist attitudes in the American public.

Some of the errors were unforced. Bill de Blasio only half-dismissed his “democratic socialism” as “youthful idealism” while also complaining that “an intellectual interest in communist theory” was being taken out of context. This prompted a number of sighs from Democrats, leading to even Senator Gore to resolutely declare herself “not a socialist” in an interview. During a rally with the UFW in southern California, de Blasio made matters worse with the choice to shout “¡Hasta la victoria siempre!”[7] The clip of him invoking Che Guevara’s slogan was soon aired on repeat all over the national news, a line that wasn’t particularly noteworthy to the crowd he invoked it to but was far more polarizing nationally, especially in the Hispanic community. There was a significant divide between Mexican-American Chicanos and Hispanic Americans, with the latter often having emigrated to the United States as a result of Cold War-style instability in their home countries. Memories of the FLN insurgency in Chiapas during Mexico’s Dirty War (incidentally where Guevara died in 1975), Fidel Castro’s government, Floyd Britton’s longtime RAM regime in Panama, the “Tupac Amaru” militias in Bolivia and Peru, and FARC guerrillas in Colombia were dredged up in an instant and egged on by Hispanic surrogates like Cuban-American Vice President Mario Díaz-Balart on the campaign trail. The conservative portions of the media grew so comfortable attacking him that an image of de Blasio eating pizza with a fork and knife while campaigning New York City[8] was a full page cover issue of the New York Post as if it was a major scandal.

All of this built up to, by October, what seemed to be a genuine recovery by Scott to a total three-way race. Negotiations over whether Burgum - who had multiple polls indicating him as the frontrunner - should be included in the debates, were quite long, stalling them such that only one was ultimately held instead of the customary two. Ultimately, Burgum was included, and a twist of fate - and an ankle - would be his undoing. Playing basketball with campaign staff the night before, Doug Burgum broke his ankle and was taken to a hospital. Though he was cleared to attend - and the podium would hide his cast - the painkillers he had to take ultimately altered his focus. Throughout the debate, the billionaire seemed loopy and inattentive, blinking slowly and asking the moderators to repeat the question twice in a row before giving a rambling answer. On foreign policy it was especially bad, with Burgum notably claiming that his investments in Yugoslavia prepared him to negotiate with the Soviet Union, a country very much outside of Soviet influence. No matter the post-hoc clarifications about Burgum’s painkillers and broken ankle, it was so legendarily awful that MADtv’s presidential debate sketch featured Sam the Eagle of Muppets fame portraying Burgum due to his stilted demeanor and sharp eyebrows alongside human sketch comics as de Blasio and Scott.

With Burgum’s collapse complete - only retaining about half of his numbers at his peak - it seemed virtually anyone’s game between Scott and de Blasio. De Blasio had been believed to have won the debate by most respondents polled, but economic reporting had also gotten more positive as a boon for Scott. For a brief, hopeful moment for the RNC, it seemed like maybe they could pull it out, that Karl Rove’s last hurrah had led to the de Blasio campaign crashing and burning under the weight of their candidate’s words and deeds, returning their rightful leadership to them. But it wouldn’t come to pass. On October 30th - “Mischief Night” in the Northeast - a Black fourteen year-old in Newark was placed in a chokehold and killed by a police officer for the heinous crime of running from his friend’s house after pulling a prank. The incident was captured on video, and memories of countless others - from Detroit in the 1980s to Oakland and Baltimore in the 1990s to Houston and St. Louis in the 2000s - saw a reaction like no other. Protests quickly sprung up all across the country, activist groups quickly sourced funding for any and all legal fees for the family, and the national conversation about so many other things was quickly put on halt. It was made worse when journalistic sleuthing revealed that the officer in question had been shuffled from municipality to municipality over multiple complaints against him for extreme violence, retained by the “lowered standards” involved in the hiring surges of the tough-on-crime 1990s and 2000s, and that his particular path was a racially-motivated patrolling expansion as part of the over-policing epidemic. With scarcely three days to Election Day, the onus was on the candidates.

Bill de Blasio’s approach came first. It was a quickly put-together vigil the night after, hosted by a handful of Black churches and community organizations in Newark. That night, he went to the crowds of people in Newark and delivered what may have been the single finest speech of his entire political career. It was simple and yet deeply emotional, focused strongly on his own family. It described when they clearly traveled as a family ans how his children were routinely harassed as if they were trying to rob their father instead of spending time with him. It described run-ins between aggressive police and his own children, the lecture on this topic he and his wife had given them around their old kitchen table about what to do when talking to police, and how “no parent should ever have that fear that their children won’t make it home safe because of the people sworn to protect them.” In a single address, de Blasio touched on a community’s grief, its fury, and its pain with his own, making clear that not only was this unforgivable and horrendous but also all too common. The rioting that was all too common in these cases - the kind that saw Dick Cheney send the national guard into Baltimore to “restore order” in 1998 - didn’t happen in Newark that night, and while ascribing that all to de Blasio is deeply inaccurate in hindsight there certainly were wide-eyed proclamations that it was his doing in the moment.

In contrast, Rick Scott’s approach was memorable for all the wrong reasons. Throughout his career in politics, he had routinely proclaimed the same phrase: “we must stop all efforts to re-imagine policing.” He had said it again and again to uproarious applause, but now that reputation was against him. He opted to organize a personal meeting with the family of the teenager to frankly discuss the issue with them and to express his sincerest regrets. This conversation was curt and cordial, but while the boy’s mother spilled emotionally about how preventable this all was and how it should have been prevented, President Scott looked at his watch. It was a brief glance, one that nobody he was talking to brought up, but to the cameras and those who remembered his years of unabashedly pro-police rhetoric it might as well have been a sign of total and utter disinterest with the entire conversation. The backlash was fierce and intense, with altered images mocking Rick Scott as being disinterested in all manner of important things - from the Hindenburg crashing to the Soviet moon landing to even a Hague trial with Rick Scott on the stand - spreading across the Usenet. As Karl Rove ruefully put it in the following weeks, “we would have won if he had taken his watch off.”

An eventful election season had come and went, and election day had come with little expectation. The polls indicated a close race. Doug Burgum was still a prominent player, but Burgumania’s death on the debate stage had effectively reduced his support to those diehard Burgumaniacs, a relatively evenly distributed electorate. It seemed for a brief moment that Scott could pull off the greatest comeback since the last Missourian to hold the office, but as results came in it seemed clear that the nation was in for a much longer night. The early states all acted as expected - Indiana quickly painted blue, Kentucky too close to call, Virginia and South Carolina blue, Georgia yellow (albeit with a number of rural Democrats and urban Republicans placing Burgum in second, a trend repeated across the yellow South). What was so curious was Vermont. Vermont had always been a blue state - it had never once voted Democratic. But there it was, uncalled even after everyone early but swing-state Kentucky was done. Though its streak would be maintained off the backs of rich New Yorker retirees, the high percentages for de Blasio out of Burlington were out of place and the hour-late call very odd. Pundits took note when de Blasio took swingy New Jersey fairly early on, tying it to the events of the past week and wondering about a potential electoral college sweep for de Blasio. This was quickly dashed as usual suspects painted themselves blue and yellow, the Great Lakes stubbornly yellow and the West ancestrally Republican despite Burgum as the same potential spoiler. Republicans cheered when Missouri and Texas were called for Scott, then Democrats celebrated when Pennsylvania and Tennessee swung for de Blasio. By nearly midnight on the east coast, de Blasio led the popular vote with only three states remaining uncalled: Kentucky, New Mexico, and New Hampshire of all places. Scott was at 258 electoral votes and de Blasio 263. Then, just after 1:00 am, the call came in Kentucky: Rick Scott had clinched the state and its eight electoral votes. Democrats groaned and the mood soured at de Blasio headquarters, their best shot of the remaining states at taking the White House gone. After all, both of the remaining states were a brutal pull for Democrats.

Then it happened, one after the other. New Mexico came through first. Despite the Hispanic overperformances by Scott, UFW organizers and Chicano sweated blood into canvassing the state, registering tens of thousands of new voters and forcing polling stations in Bernalillo County to stay open late. This effective revival of the sophisticated La Raza Unida turnout machine that broke the California Republicans back in the 1990s ultimately resulted in a 8,705-vote margin. It was a well-earned relief for the Democrats, but it wasn’t enough on its own as the count stood 268-266. Then the real shock came from the Rust Belt. New Hampshire had last voted Democratic for FDR in 1944. It was seen as practically ungettable, a state too entrenched in the right-wing tradition of upper New England. But New Hampshire had rusted over more than most, suffering massive job losses as mills closed down and factories moved from Manchester to Mostar. Furthermore, as one of the oldest populations in the nation, its usual “Live Free or Die” libertarian bent was often overridden by strong support for Social Security and Medicare. The defunding of hospitals in New Hampshire under Rick Scott and talk of cutting Social Security benefits combined with de Blasio’s talk of bringing jobs back to the dilapidated Granite State inspired something. People had called the campaign well and truly insane for taking the campaign bus from Portland to Boston, but at 2:38 am Eastern the Rust Belt focus was vindicated when New Hampshire broke a seven-decade streak and was finally called by just 1,626 votes for de Blasio. Over the noise of the greatest political party Hartford had ever seen, the candidate didn’t even notice that Rick Scott didn’t call to concede and wouldn’t until the following night out of bitterness. The candidate was too busy giving a victory speech much like his campaign - improbable yet eminently uplifting. “We have no illusions about the task that lies ahead. Tackling inequality isn't easy. It never has been and it never will be. The challenges we face have been decades in the making, and the problems we sought to address will not be solved overnight. But make no mistake, this country has chosen a bold new path, and tonight we set forward together on it as one country.”

​

With an oath and a speech on a cold Washington D.C. day, Bill de Blasio became the first President of the United States to take the post directly from the House of Representatives since James Garfield in 1880, the third Catholic President after Jack Gilligan and Ed Markey, the first Italian-American to hold the post, and in the eyes of a solid forty-to-forty-five percent of the country the first socialist President of the United States. It was a unique type of polarization unheard of in the modern era for a new president to barely even get a honeymoon period, but then again why would he expect one? Fifty-nine percent of America had not voted for him, and already there was talk of how de Blasio would have to temper his agenda to fit the whims of the Democratic leadership given his status as a “plurality president.”

Nonetheless, de Blasio had no intention of simply rolling over. While the Senate worked on confirming “the most radical Cabinet in history,” de Blasio set about enacting the parts of his agenda that could be done on his own. Within days, a new White House Task Force pledging to be “a Manhattan Project for AIDS treatment” was launched with the aim of coordinating disparate infectious disease research and providing regular updates to the public. New Attorney General Larry Krasner, previously Pennsylvania’s crusading state Attorney General against police misconduct, announced a sweeping review of policing standards around the nation by the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division. A total suspension of all aid to Harayman-backed Islamist militias drew typical fiery rhetoric from the Grand Mufti but significant praise from human rights organizations domestic and international. The first hundred days saw a flurry of action of this sort designed around seizing the moment to really substantively move policy before the realities of Washington kicked in.

The first real legislative push was relatively uncontroversial among Democrats: the repeal of EARTA. Though some had voted for the bill, at this point the harm done had polarized many of them against it. While some wished to use the opportunity to rein in spending, a simple up-or-down vote on a bill to end the austerity experiment and in its place especially restore funding for offices like the IRS to rebuild the ability of the state to collect funds passed on basically partisan lines. This was projected to, with the severe slashes to federal agencies over the past decade, provide a healthy amount of new funding to apply to new projects, including affordable housing and power subsidies to try and combat the very cost-of-living crisis that had seen de Blasio resonate so heavily in the first place.

And this new budgetary situation fed directly into the second goal: infrastructure. Though reversing privatization was deeply controversial within de Blasio’s own party, there were some areas where there was crossover support. One such area was railroads. Even some old progressive Republicans, like the Delawarean “Lion of the Senate” Joe Biden, were staunchly in favor of passenger rail for the economic benefits alone. Biden’s aid in drafting a bipartisan proposal with Senator Walz establishing the “Ameritrak” corporation as a national interstate railroad corporation as a competitor was instrumental in getting the proposal out of committee and through the halls of Congress. The other core section was electrification and digitization. Though the Usenet had spread far and wide, its accessibility was still somewhat limited, with connectivity and access often out of date or even missing in many rural areas. A platform point that de Blasio was fond of mentioning was seemingly inspired directly by New Deal rural electrification, with its focus most heavily on ensuring reliable Usenet service for all. This was a goal that virtually all Democrats agreed upon, but the devil was naturally in the details. The Markeyite focus on regulatory competition was far more appealing to a handful of Democrats. Meanwhile, de Blasio himself wanted direct federal ownership a la the TVA as an inch towards the undoing of privatization more broadly. This was a non-starter for a number of moderate Democrats, and they made their grievances known. The end compromise, negotiated over a series of weeks and near-walkouts, was an adaptation of an old alternate proposal for the TVA. The government would administer the new Federal Utilities Service Authority (FUSA), but it would be run for-profit as a market competitor to private institutions with the goal of paying its own debts off. Whatever the case, the end result was the Infrastructural Modernization Act, passed by Congress along virtually partisan lines and signed into law around the end of the summer, with projects to begin during the next calendar year.

Try as they might, the de Blasio administration could not simply focus on domestic issues, and it would be some foolish thing in the Middle East as always that forced their hand. In this case, it was Jerusalem. Jerusalem had been one of the main sticking points of the end of the Levantine Wars, only barely resolved for fear of nuclear hellfire. The joint administration scheme had worked rather well when it was Israel and Palestine, but upon Palestine’s annexation to the United Arab Republic the situation had devolved. Prime Minister Avigdor Lieberman, a barely-reformed ex-minister of the Kahane government, had withdrawn from the joint administration of Jerusalem in 2016. His citing that the Israeli government had made a deal with Palestine and not the UAR saw the two states nearly come to blows in the streets of Jerusalem, only being stopped by the United States’ threat to cut off the deal they had made in 2014 over the nuclear situation. The end result was a complicated agreement where the city would be divided, but free movement would be allowed between West and East with hard borders outside city limits on the doctrine of “no more Berlins.” Fresh off a crushing re-election victory, Prime Minister Lieberman sought to cut this Gordian Knot of the Zionist ideal. So it was that, in September of 2021, Avigdor Lieberman sent troops in to occupy West Jerusalem, declaring the city under martial law and expelling all UAR nationals in West Jerusalem. Naturally, this incensed Cairo, who quickly moved to expel Israelis from the East and to close the border fully between the two halves of the city.

The de Blasio administration looked at this and saw a major headache. It was true that Democrats tended to be more sympathetic to Israel - Ed Markey had spent the better part of a decade engaging the succession of Prime Ministers Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, Isaac Herzog, and Tzipi Livni in cautious rapprochement - but as Secretary of State Steve Kerr touched down in the Middle East his goal was simply to prevent a shooting war. A new round of non-military investments in Israel, the unfreezing of further frozen UAR assets ahead of schedule, and the return of a jailed UAR spy were all deeply controversial domestically, but it prevented Cairo’s overtures towards sending troops into West Jerusalem to put an end to the martial law and Tel Aviv’s talk of occupying the whole city. Even so, the conflict didn’t seem to be going anywhere anytime soon, especially provoked with Palestinian hardliner Marwan Barghouti’s election as the new President of the UAR in 2022.

Life went on as usual for a bit as 2021 turned to 2022, seemingly. President de Blasio and Treasury Secretary Jeffrey Sachs received a strong welcome at the Group of 25’s first annual summit of his term, even if relatively little of substance was achieved beyond outlining future goals. A first meeting between the new President and new Soviet Premier Sergey Baburin - a much more nationalistic kind of communist - revived internal discussions of policy towards Eastern European satellite states and the Soviet suppression of Central Asian dissidents, especially after the United Nations declared Moscow’s treatment of the Kazakhs violations of human rights. In response the Soviets caused as much trouble as possible in selecting a new Secretary-General that January, forcing it through the longest round of ballots in United Nations history until a compromise choice in the form of acclaimed former Korean President Choo Mi-ae emerged. This process also drew criticism of de Blasio’s seemingly vacillating and weak foreign policy, with experts like Stanford University’s resident Kremlinologist Condoleezza Rice called onto news shows to discuss the flaws in de Blasio’s pragmatism towards the Soviet Union after talking such a big game on human rights. However, this sort of criticism took a backseat when Patrick Leahy, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court for nearly 40 years and a quietly effective liberal whose opinions included abolishing the death penalty and sodomy laws, announced his intent to retire. Already faced with an extremely significant decision to ensure the continuation of such jurisprudence, in Leahy’s place de Blasio and his administration saw an opportunity to make history with their nomination.

The selection of Ninth Circuit Judge and former Assistant Attorney General Pamela S. Karlan was not necessarily surprising but trailblazing nonetheless. Karlan would be the first woman to lead the Supreme Court, but beyond that she was also an openly bisexual woman with a female partner. She would be the first openly Queer person to serve on the court, and her nomination as such sparked further discussions about Queer rights in American society that had never really faded since the AIDS crisis engaged a new generation of Queer people. Karlan’s questioning was intense in a way unseen for SCOTUS nominations in years, but the California judge wittily dispatched much of the worst of it, even snarkily quipping “I’d hate to think you were discriminating against us liberals, Senator” in response to a barely-concealed bit of homophobia from New Jersey Senator Samuel Alito. Even so, her confirmation as Chief Justice saw a 72-32 vote, a number of dissenting votes generally unheard of for a qualified SCOTUS nominee.

With the national conversation firmly turned towards Queer rights, de Blasio saw that moment of the spring of 2022 as the time to push forwards. In a major address from the White House flanked by the First Lady, President de Blasio made clear his total support for a bill legalizing same-sex marriage. This policy had passed in a number of western countries, having been legalized first by Sweden in 2003 and then spreading through western countries, most notably passed within the Anglosphere by Pierre Pettigrew’s government in Canada in 2011 and Harriet Harman’s government in the United Kingdom in 2014. The proposal by de Blasio, whose speech ended with him publicly urging a Congress wholly unaware of his intent to support the proposal, sparked a wildfire in the United States. A number of left-leaning members of Congress quickly announced their support, filing in behind Mark Takano’s proposed bill enforcing legalization of same-sex marriage. Bill de Blasio flew the Queer rainbow flag from the roof of the White House, a move which drove a number of conservatives nuts for reasons they couldn’t quite place. Queer groups bombarded Senators’ offices with protest campaigns demanding their support for the bill. However, the frustration at the way de Blasio had handled the unveiling of his support rankled Congress. Schumer and Walz had built an accommodation with him, getting things sorted out with him and Lamont before sending things to the floor. They had done well on EARTA and infrastructure, and why couldn’t he just have played ball on this one? Angry meetings with leadership over his public snubbing of their wishes to be consulted first saw the proposal nearly shelved, especially with religious groups pushing back hard on the initial Takano proposal. It looked, for a brief moment, like de Blasio had tilted at the wrong windmill.

The saviors in this case were two southerners - Tipper Gore and Doug Jones. Vice President Gore had a reputation as a bit of a social conservative, so much so that her crusade to get parental advisory labels on TV and movies had gotten those labels nicknamed “Tippers” under her signature law. But Gore was also an ardent - if quiet - supporter of the Queer community, and she hardly wished to see the issue of marriage equality blow up in the Democrats’ face. Furthermore, Senator Jones seemed like an average Alabama Democrat, but the pug-faced Birmingham liberal had a Queer son and had his views evolve over time accordingly. As the president tilted at windmills trying to push the Takano Bill, Gore quietly reached towards Jones as a voice in Congress. While the House debated the Takano Bill, the Senate could make an alternate proposal and seem more reasonable by contrast. So it was that the “Gang of Eight” assembled, six Democrats and two Republicans, to draft an alternate proposal in conjunction with the Gores. The Jones Bill effectively legalized same-sex marriage in all 51 states plus DC, but it held carve-outs for religious institutions to choose whether or not to perform Queer weddings. In effect, it made marriage as a legal institution accessible to all, but left the actual ceremony and its religious nature in a far more complex state of legal flux. A number of Queer activists disliked this, seeing Takano’s “force bill” as necessary for true equality and actual societal change, but the Jones Bill quickly picked up steam as a bipartisan alternative to the ongoing rancor. Soon enough, Speaker Schumer had admitted publicly that he supported the Takano Bill, but it was unlikely to pass and “the choice is Doug Jones’ idea or nothing at all.” Schumer had Ned Lamont relay that message to his boss, and though that meeting went understandably horribly, in the end de Blasio grumpily made clear that he would sign the Jones Bill if brought to his desk. Within a month, the Jones Bill had become the Marriage Equality Act.

With the same-sex marriage debate cleared, relations between de Blasio and Congress had cooled. Congress had made clear that they wouldn’t take being pushed around that way lying down, and de Blasio was unhappy at the watering down of such a core part of his platform. His attempts to bring up discussions of fighting private school segregation caused panic amongst the Democratic caucus given the proclivity of the issue to incite the wrath of white suburbanites like no other, leading only to some directives for the DOJ to file suit against the worst offenders. A tour of the new groundbreaking for IMA projects brought some good press at first as de Blasio joined in for breaking ground on high-speed systems in the Northeast Corridor and the Chicago area, but soon grew bogged down as a veritable landowners’ revolt sprung up against rural digitization in California. The administration drew bipartisan accolades for its handling of Hurricane Isaac, with images of President de Blasio and Florida Governor Joe Scarborough wearing rubber boots on the ground dealing with the damages washing away some of the talk of the president’s difficulties.

Even so, there was a curious phenomenon - no matter how much de Blasio tried, succeeded, or failed, there always seemed to be about a core of forty to forty-five percent of Americans who disapproved of him. It was a unique form of polarization for a country largely used to extreme highs and lows when it came to trust in their presidents. It manifested itself again in the midterms (the first elections Puerto Rico participated as a state) when despite a reasonably successful term a seemingly perpetual anti-de Blasio campaign funded by various irritated industry lobbies co-opting of cost-of-living talk against the IMA and EARTA repeal gave new Republican House leader Barbara Barrett of Arizona the Speakership by a 230-211 margin and reduced Tim Walz’s Senate majority to 58-46.

2023 would once again turn America’s focus to that chronically troubled region, East Asia. Japan’s rising nationalists had been a major problem for some time, a phrase that set off memories of atrocities in the minds of many of America’s other regional allies. For its second government, Reimei had elected Ichirō Matsui, a popular former governor of Osaka Prefecture, as Prime Minister, and he had secured a crushing re-election in 2020 that seemed to have kicked the last bits of the Liberal Democratic Party in. Off this sort of mandate, Matsui pursued his party’s white whale, scheduling a public referendum on whether Article 9 of the Japanese constitution should be repealed or not. This, naturally, set off alarm bells all across the region as well as kicking Japanese liberals and leftists into overdrive to campaign against it, viewing the referendum as their last chance to fight Reimei dominance. Fight valiantly as they did, though, in March of 2023 the Article 9 referendum passed 51-49 and the Matsui government moved to repeal it and rebuild a Japanese military. Quickly, Secretary Kerr shuttled around the Pacific Rim, meeting with American allies from Saigon to Seoul to reaffirm support for the neutral “third pillar” in East Asia. America’s presence in Ryukyu skyrocketed as the Okinawa base became a far more active security asset, further incensing Matsui and his government. A summit in Manila was quickly scheduled for the end of the year between the US and USSR, the South Asian Community, and other independent-minded states like Korea and Taiwan.

Later that year, the mainland would provoke similar troubles. The People’s Republic of China was a Hermit Empire, a nation obsessed with flexing its revolutionary muscles and blocking out the decadent liberalizing world order. This often amounted to backing leftist guerrillas and competing with the Soviets for allegiance from their African and Asian allies, but it was a significant issue given the size of the PRC. However, internally China was at a breaking point. The self-imposed isolation of Mao Yuanxin as a global helmsman for the revolution in the face of an interconnected world had done the nation no favors for economic growth, maintaining large swaths of intense poverty and dissatisfaction. Furthermore, the ossified and ideologically puritanical leadership - many of whom had roots in the Red Guards of the 1960s, like Chairwoman Song Binbin - focused more on use of an intrusive security state to fight dissent than reform. This even went so far as to effectively self-sanction the Chinese Usenet. However, it was difficult to keep young tech-savvy dissenters inside, especially dissenters with proximity to South Vietnam’s haven for digital piracy and the US-UK policy of propaganda smuggling via Hong Kong. As such, by 2023 the digital world leaked like a sieve, providing means for dissenters to illicitly organize and disseminate information about an outside world they had been barred from accessing. Amidst a food security crisis that grew into a regional famine, protests grew across China. They were slow going at first, but as tanks rolled in to crush the demonstrators they spread across the major cities of China, the revolution very much televised as young Chinese people climbed defunct tanks with megaphones to shout for their freedom. The autonomous provinces in Tibet and Xinjiang even began to talk about breaking free to hold independence votes, the mass actions even spreading to include longtime grievances by suppressed Tibetan Buddhists and Uyghur Muslims. The world was watching, and they saw something new - a digital revolution.

And in the midst of it all was Bill de Blasio. The PRC was reviled on all sides in Washington, but it had largely been treated as a mere nuisance based on the logic that it was a counterweight against the Soviet Union. The de Blasio administration deliberated quite heavily on the matter, but a human rights foreign policy was nothing new - it had been the Democratic line for nearly sixty years. But there was more to it. President de Blasio saw this moment as a chance to move towards the initial dream of a postwar world, the one that had been averted by a mentality of eternal struggle and grand diplomatic games designed around American hegemony.

*****​

Bill de Blasio took a brief pause, all the eyes of the United Nations on him.

He was in his third year as President of the United States now. It had been a trial - he had spent most of it in the trenches, battling out every last bit of policy he wanted. Every bit of ground had to be captured and held, and even then he was still losing half the time. It was a brutal, miserable job - his hair had started out a dark gray, and it was rapidly fading whiter and whiter by the day. SKY found new ways to call him a communist every day, it seemed. He was stubbornly stuck with the same-old same-old: forty percent approval, forty-five percent disapproval, the other fifteen malleable based on whether he was winning or losing at the moment.

It didn’t matter to Bill de Blasio, or at least he’d tell himself that. He was still the President until January 20th, 2025 at minimum, and looking at the Republican primaries, he wasn't overly worried about that. And the way things were shaping up in the fall of 2023, no matter whether he won re-election or not his decisions would be consequential for the whole world. And that was why he was here, at the United Nations.

They were calling it the Jasmine Revolution, a mass digital movement to throw out the communist gerontocracy, to let their people be free. It was the type of thing America was supposed to love, but yet there were people saying no. It was the American line to play Beijing off Moscow, to egg them on into fighting each other so neither of them could get the upper hand over us. Some of his advisors had told him that, and he scoffed. It might be the American line, but it wasn’t American. It was Cold War nonsense. The type of thing that we were supposed to have ended back in 2003. Republicans always talked about Sergey Baburin as if he were the second coming of Stalin, but Moscow was still a business partner, a neighbor, a key piece of a world infinitely more complex than a clash of ideologies. In this, the People’s Republic of China was seemingly the last relic of the old order, and now it teetered on the edge. This was one of those moments of history where the whole house of cards could come tumbling down if it wasn’t managed right. Truman had taken the cooperative postwar world FDR wanted and torched it in one such moment. Every single Democrat since then had been trying to aspire towards that dream from there. Bill de Blasio wanted to end it, finally.

The President of the United States cleared his throat and continued.

“In this sort of crucial moment, our children and grandchildren will look back on our actions. As China fought for its freedom, they’ll see whether we stood for what is right or what is convenient. I am reminded of a saying attributed to one of my predecessors. Adlai Stevenson said that ‘Change is inevitable. Change for the better is a full-time job.’ We can heed his words and work for the change that seeks to sweep across our global community as brothers and sisters, or we can be swept aside by it.”

*****

FINITO.
​

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[1] This is Bill de Blasio’s surprisingly depressing actual biography adapted to the contours of TTL.
[2] Real human beings nicknamed the actual Bill de Blasio this OTL. I needed to include it for obvious reason.
[3] You might recognize this strategy from OTL’s Connecticut! John Droney was a relentless advocate for it in 2006 as a party leader who was upset when Ned Lamont successfully primaried Holden Bloodfeast.
[4] Maynard Jackson did and said this OTL as Mayor of Atlanta.
[5] The actual Bill de Blasio said this in 1989 while he was volunteering for the Sandinistas. Yes, you read that right.
[6] The actual Bill de Blasio said this verbatim in a 2020 interview in NYC. This came off the top of the dome for no reason.
[7] The actual Bill de Blasio shouted this at a rally for striking airport workers in Miami in 2019. Yes, in Miami.
[8]