Bicentennial Man: Ford '76 and Beyond
- Thread starter KingSweden24
- Start date
Holtzman would be putting up prime Wilt numbers in pissing of the religious right
I don't see it happening. We're a long ways off though. He said first black president by 2000, so probably Norm Rice. I can't see Holtzman beating Askrew in '88, I can see her primarying the more moderate Askrew in '92 and either forfeiting her seat before '98 or losing a primary to Andy Cuomo.
New Left figures would have their heads explode if McGeorge Bundy was invited back to any position of influence but Carey so far has listened to that wing of the party more on domestic matters than FoPo onesbasically lead to the massive expansion of them
Indian Gaming Regulatory Act - Wikipedia
en.m.wikipedia.org
Mcgeorge Bundy I think is an intriguing option for CIA director or SoS. He was a professor at NYU in 1979 so I’m sure he has connections with the Carey administration
Spoilers I guess but if Kean won in OTL's 1981 with Reagan in office during the early months of the brutal 1982 recession then he'll be just fine in TTL's 1981 with a Dem in the WH, but yes we'll cover that!
Very devout Catholic, became ardently pro-life later in life (like, in the 1990s when he was out of public office) as a result.
Yeah, ways to go on that one haha
Intrigue in Israel
Intrigue in Israel
By the late 1970s, Israel was in a curious position that confounded outside observers. On the one hand, it had survived a remarkable gauntlet of foreign policy crises, both in wars with its neighbors in 1967 and 1973 that it had decisively won (the latter had been part of the trigger for the Arab Oil Embargo that had brought the post-WW2 economic boom to an end across the world) as well as in the Munich Massacre, where the Israeli wrestling team had been held hostage in their hotel rooms by Palestinian terrorist group Black September and then slaughtered before the German police could free them. On the other, though, Israel was increasingly seen around the world, and domestically, as an economic basket case, plagued by chronically slow growth, hyperinflation, and increasingly elevated unemployment, and had been hit hard by the economic earthquakes of the late 1970s, particularly the sharp rise in oil prices beginning in early 1978 and peaking in the summer of 1980. It had a massive debt load, had been forced to devalue its currency, and was heavily reliant on Western direct aid and investment to keep solvent. [1]
This became a key incident in the Israeli elections of 1981, between Menachem Begin's Likud Party and Shimon Peres' Alignment, associated with the dominant Labor Party. Labor had essentially run Israel without interruption since the foundation of the state thirty years prior, which had made Begin's 1977 victory a decisive break from tradition thought to augur a new day in Israel, particularly as Begin had once been regarded as a figure of the hard-right fringe. The 1977 election had essentially boiled down to a question of whether to stick with the establishment Labor, which had won the Yom Kippur War but was now embroiled in corruption scandals and poor economic stewardship, or to roll the dice on the polarizing Begin, who despite suffering a heart attack that sidelined him from the campaign had led Likud to a historic victory. Begin had surprised observers by sealing the Rose Garden Agreement with Egypt, brokered by the United States, contrary to his reputation as a hardline conservative, thus removing Peres' argument ahead of polls in 1981 that Begin was a dangerous maniac, but Israel's economy had in the meantime not improved markedly, and by the end of his four-year term Begin's Likud was just as beset by corruption scandals and disputes with its coalition partners.
The 1981 polls were thus unique in Israel as they were seen as possibly the most competitive in recent history, with both major parties unpopular with key segments of the population and the votes expected to split down ethnic lines - Ashkenazim in support of Alignment, Sephardim in support of Likud, and Mizrahim likely to prove the decisive swing vote, as it had been in 1977. Begin leaned on his reputation as a humble, pious man standing against a corrupt and hapless establishment, taking advantage of the fact that he was by far more popular than anyone else in his party; Peres, after promising the key post of Finance Minister to his intraparty rival and immediate predecessor as leader Yitzhak Rabin [2], ran not againts Likud demagogy or perceived extremism but rather against "promises broken." Electoral violence was not uncommon as both sides attempted to intimidate their opponents and families broke apart into angry arguments; the combativeness of the leaders helped fuel the polarizing attitudes.
Likud's comeback from its polling nadir six months earlier was remarkable, and they gained one seat to end on 46; Alignment, however, ended with 47 after winning fifteen seats from their 1977 drubbing, giving them the first opportunity to form a government with minor parties in the Knesset, which Peres rapidly set about doing, including burying the hatchet with Moshe Dayan, who had been expelled from Alignment for joining Begin's government in 1977 but now ran his own party, Telem. The narrow results left Begin in a position of influence, however, and with Alignment looking over their shoulders for the term to come, particularly as Peres became concerned about keeping his small majority together. As he returned to the PM's office, he was briefed by the ailing Dayan (who would die in October) on a number of issues, including concerns about rising tensions with Iraq, and an operation to bomb its main nuclear reactor at Osirak that had been called off due to Begin's concern about losing key French and American support in the run-up to the election. [3] Peres was informed by Dayan, however, that Begin had intended to carry out the operation post-election and that the Israeli military was in support of an anticipatory attack, and that the view was consensus within the IDF that Osirak, contrary to Hussein's assurances, was capable of enriching plutonium sufficient to build a nuclear weapon, which would dramatically change the balance of power in the Middle East...
[1] Israel's economy looked very Latin American/Third World at this point in time, unlike the bustling tech/pharma knowledge economy of today
[2] A key mistake Peres made in OTL was not including Rabin in a potential Cabinet, splitting the party
[3] IOTL, Iran bombed Osirak first, leaving Israel with key intelligence on it; here, Israel, has no such intelligence, so the bombing is delayed.
Housekeeping Update: I’ve been trying to figure out how to position a couple of updates before we get into the meat of the late 1981 and onward content, so apologies for the slow pace of updates. There’s some stuff I want to cover because of A) butterflies and B) it’s interesting context, it’s more a question of how to streamline it into the narrative
John Fredrick Parker
Donor
@KingSweden24 Who, aside from Telem, joins Peres’ government, and how many seats did they win each (aside from Alignment, which you mentioned winning 47 as OTL)?
Oh god you’re gonna pin me down on that one? 😂
Mafdal - 6 seats
Telem - 2 seats
Shinui - 2 seats
Tami - 3 seats
Ratz - 1 seat
Note that Hadash has 4 seats and would generally support Alignment over Likud, but is not in the coalition
John Fredrick Parker
Donor
Where did Likud’s two fewer seats go TTL? Also if any of the other seats other than Mafdal had one extra seat, that would give Peres a little more leverage over said party, since he now mathematically speaking has the option of governing without them (again, I said “a little more” leverage -- nothing too crazy here).
Probably one of the more hard-edges Zionist/Haredi outfits
Highly unlikely - Osirak's design didn't lend itself well for weapons-grade enrichment and had so many French eyeballs on it at all times Saddam couldn't have snuck it in.
That being said, neither the Israelis nor the Iranians knew that IOTL, and they reacted accordingly, particularly the latter. So while Operation Opera very likely did little to prevent Saddam from getting the bomb (and may indeed have served instead to drive the fairly sophisticated Iraqi chemical weapons program underground), it did put everybody on notice as to what Israel's doctrine would be if they even got a whiff that there might be a nuke program somewhere.
G7 Number 7
G7 Number 7
Joe Clark had a tremendous amount of pride over the fact that he would be welcoming the other leaders of the G7 to Ottawa in July of 1981, and in many ways it would be a remarkable hour - France's Valery Giscard d'Estaing was the dean of the group's leaders, with nobody else having served as President or Prime Minister of their respective country for any earlier than 1979, when Clark himself had been elected - making him the second-most tenured leader in the group, a remarkable statistic, and suggesting that the period 1980-81 was if nothing else a great changing of the guard within the West as a new generation took the reigns to face down the new challenges of the 1980s.
The 1981 G7 conference in Ottawa is famous for its big personalities all getting together in one place - the gruff, old-school labor bruisers Hugh Carey and Denis Healey, who having met for the first time earlier in the spring grew much closer at the meeting; the bright Giscard and his close ally, the EU Commission President Gaston Thorn of neighboring Luxembourg; and the personality everybody was already dreading having to deal with, Germany's bombastic but cunning Franz-Josef Strauss, possibly the most colorful, charismatic and conservative Chancellor of Germany since... well, perhaps best not to mention him. Clark seemed like a minnow compared to these other sharp-elbowed men, but nonetheless impressed with his command of the issues and frequent appearances before the media during the summit. The summit's focus was on resolving issues outstanding between the various members, particularly on the matter of the slow recovery out of the 1978-80 economic malaise and how the G7's collective major economies could facilitate that. To what extent these matters were accomplished was debatable - for as much as Clark got on well with everybody and helped build prestige for Canada with his counterparts, it was lost on nobody the difficulty they had dealing with Strauss and West Germany was, all of a sudden, regarded as the weakest link in the chain for the first time in decades as Bonn's unpredictable new chief made his presence felt.
One issue which went somewhat unspoken at the G7 but still dominated the summer of 1981, though, was the remarkable collapse of the Italian government mere weeks before the fresh Prime Minister Giovanni Spadolini had arrived in Ottawa - indeed, Spadolini had been on the job a mere three weeks at the start of the summit. This was due to the what is known now as the "Propaganda Due," or P2, scandal in Italy, which had kneecapped the ruling Christian Democracy and thrust Spadolini into a unity government after the resignation of Arnaldo Forlani, a towering figure of the Italian right from the late 1970s to the early 1990s, after a mere nine months in office.
P2 was a complicated scandal which involved the revelation of a fiercely anti-communist Masonic Lodge within Italy that included the heads of its security services, media magnate Silvio Berlusconi, the Savoyard pretender to the Italian throne, and dozens of other major figures of Italian business, culture and politics - indeed, the whole thing had been uncovered in the first place during a relatively routine investigation of the financier Michele Sindona and his ties to the Sicilian Mafia. Freemasonry had an important role in Italy, having been a key component of both the Savoyard Kingdom's firm anticlericalism and disputes with the Catholic Church and then perhaps uncomfortably cozy with the Fascist government, as had its old rival the Vatican been. After the end of the Second World War, however, Italian Freemasonry had moved in a more conservative, anti-communist direction, especially since the global New Left uprisings of 1968 which hit as hard in Italy as anywhere else and then the "Hot Autumn" of strikes the following year that led to the Years of Lead, a decade-long internal conflict in Italy in which far-left and far-right groups performed assassinations, kidnappings and bombings culminating with the abduction and murder of statesman Aldo Moro in 1978 by the Red Brigades, a violent Communist paramilitary.
Conspiracy theorists found P2 salacious and juicy, understandably, what with its trappings of serving as a "shadow government" of powerful state and media figures as well as its connections to Freemasonry. What it really tipped its hand towards, though, was at least in Italy but increasingly throughout the world a gradual erosion of the fairly consensus-oriented post-WW2 economic and social order, often dominated by single parties that absorbed into them multiple factions in order to suppress the violent politics viewed as having contributed to the disaster of 1939-45. Christian Democracy in Italy was perhaps the most obvious and infamous example of this, containing both right-wing and left-wing factions that, with the party having sat in government unbroken since 1945, were more concerned about battling one another than any extarpartisan threat, which in 1981 was mostly the Soviet-skeptical Communist Party of Italy (PCI) of the ailing Enrico Berlinguer. The scandal brought down the Forlani government and with it the dominance of Christian Democracy over Italy; Spadolini hailed from the Republicans, a liberal part of the center, with the P2 Affair thus coming to be seen as a clear inflection point in Italian postwar history so soon after Moro's death. The age of the ideologically vague "party of government" was starting to come to an end as philosophies and interests became more complicated and sophisticated, in tune with the more culturally and economically sophisticated needs of an increasingly affluent global electorate.
Shockwaves in Italy aside, P2's reach was not limited to the Boot. Argentineans reacted negatively to the scandal what with the "list" of members of the secret lodge including a number of figures of not just the recently-collapsed military junta but also right-wing Peronists active in the paramilitary groups (for instance, the infamous "Triple A") that had destabilized the country in infighting between the Peronist right and left in the 1970s [1] such as Jose Lopez Rega and Rodolfo Almiron, men who had sat at the right hand of Juan Peron and his wife and successor, Isabel, right at the end before the 1976 coup. This opened a number of uncomfortable questions for Argentina's President, Italo Luder, who had briefly been acting President of the country during Isabel Peron's administration for about a month in 1975. Almiron in particular was regarded as the Triple A death squad's most fearsome commandant and the organization was held responsible for murdering perhaps as many as 1,500 persons between 1973 and 1976; Rega and Almiron both were now in the wind, their whereabouts unknown. [2] What, exactly, did Luder know about their activities during the increasing violence that had eventually led to the Videla era in Argentina? The question of potentially trying former members of the junta, Videla in particular, was in the early 1980s a live one in Argentina, and whether Luder would pursue such a case suddenly intermixed with his potentially unsavory ties to Peron-era thugs and led more than a few Argentines to wonder if the collapse of the junta and transition to democracy the previous year really did mark an end to two decades of coups, Peronist restoration and state and paramilitary terror against them...
[1] Really remarkable how many countries - Italy, Argentina, Turkey, etc - had something approximating the Years of Lead in the 1970s
[2] All true, for what it's worth, and why I find a potential Luder Presidency interesting. Argentina, despite being... well, Argentina, was probably much better off with Alfonsin at the helm during the 1980s as a genuine fresh start from Peronism and the junta alike. (And yes, I did just watch "Argentina, 1985." Ricardo Darin is one of my favorite actors!)
Nazi Space Spy
Banned
I’ve seen that before in another timeline and thought the same thing! Looking forward to more!
I think everyone's overrating the chance things spiral out of control in Italy. P2 and the Spadolini government were OTL, so it's not exactly like all this tension is new. If anything, I think it would be more interesting if he avoided the cabinet struggle that ended his government after less than 2 years. It could be interesting to see a different post DC dominace party system in Italy.
Yeah, the whole P2 thing is me just using an OTL event in the context of the TL (and to destabilize Luder in Arg a little). Italy is kind of a gaping black hole for me knowledge-wise so DMs are open if you have ideas on how I can perpetuate Spadolini a bit, I don’t really know the details on him or any of the other Italian PM musical chairs haha
With Aldo Moro still being killed in 1978, it’s difficult to allow the PCI to come to power IMO. Especially considering the PSI and PRI oppose working with the PCI. The best post 1978 POD would most likely to have Giorgio Napolitano succeed Berlinguer and defeat a scandal ridden Andreotti (maybe the Mafia stuff comes out earlier?). Under Napolitano it would maybe be possible to get a PCI-PSI coalition though it would certainly cause an earlier split within the PCI as Napolitano turns the PCI to the center-left.
John Fredrick Parker
Donor
Since every other G7 participant was mentioned -- is Zenko Suzuki still Japan's PM?