TLIACOH: Shuffling the Deck USA Edition (with apologies to Meadow and Roem)

I haven't posted one of these for a while, but I just had a notion. Some may recall a while back that Meadow and Roem did a very amusing TLIAD called "Shuffling the Deck", about Britain having the same people as its postwar Prime Ministers but in a different order. They also referred to the US having the same situation with its presidents, but that was just a background gag and the implied list didn't make that much sense even given the slight suspension of disbelief that a 'fun' TLIAD of that type deserves. But then that wasn’t the main focus of their TL. To that end, I decided to shamelessly steal their concept and see if I could come up with my own shuffled list of American Presidents.

To recap, the point of 'shuffling the deck' is to have the same people as leaders but in a different order, a timescale at least somewhat plausible (i.e. nobody becoming leader when they're sixteen or ninety-four...though I'm sure somebody will now cite OTL examples of that) and, crucially, their public reputations are very different from, and sometimes the opposite of, their OTL ones. For example on Meadow and Roem's original (which I would urge you to take a look at via the link above if you hadn't already), Gordon Brown is charismatic and popular while Thatcher had a Kim Campbell-like short and disastrous term full of missed chances.

With that out of the way, here is my take on Shuffling the Deck USA. I don’t have time to write a TLIAD right now, so this will have to just be a TLIACOH (TimeLine In A Couple Of Hours) with a paragraph or two after each President.

In 1944 many powerful figures in the Democratic Party opposed Henry Wallace being renominated for Vice-President. After some heated debate with the President in which names such as William O. Douglas and Harry S. Truman were thrown about, the eventual compromise reached was that Secretary of State Cordell Hull would become the vice-presidential nominee. The understanding reached by what was described as the 'Texas Cabal' (including the powerful sitting Speaker Sam Rayburn and former VP John Nance Garner, the latter getting revenge for his own deselection in 1940) was that Hull would in practice continue to run the State Department at arm's length, with the seat being warmed by yet another Texan...

FDR lived to see the founding of the United Nations in which Cordell Hull played a crucial role. However, he also lived to see Hull's assassination during his opening speech at the UN building by a Japanese extremist who had rejected the Emperor’s call for peace. America was outraged and shocked by what was dubbed ‘the Second Day of Infamy’. But not by the man who had named the original. Already on his deathbed, the news was enough to finish off the longest-serving President of the United States. And with the Vice-President having predeceased him, his successor would be a man no-one had expected.

Awww, here it goes.

Ooh, this will be fun..........
Subscribed!
Missing the card jokes though.

Awww yiiiis.

Let me guess... LBJ next?

Tsar Gringo said:

Let me guess... LBJ next?

Click to expand...

That or Eisenhower, everyone else is too young, and Truman would be too obvious.

Tsar Gringo said:

Let me guess... LBJ next?

Click to expand...

That's my guess. The Secretary of State who was "warming the seat" was described as "another Texan", after all.

I don't doubt Thande has done his research, but for those playing along at home, here's the availability dates:

Eisenhower, Truman, Reagan, and LBJ are all available from 1946 onwards.
Nixon and Ford both become eligible (35 years old) in 1948.
Kennedy reaches 35 in 1952.
Carter and George H.W. Bush both come of age in 1959.
Clinton and George W. Bush both won't be available until 1981.
And lastly, young Barack Obama turns 35 in 1996.

Having never looked at the dates of birth of the Presidents before, I'm actually quite surprised how many pairs born in the same year there are.

cpip said:

That's my guess. The Secretary of State who was "warming the seat" was described as "another Texan", after all.

I don't doubt Thande has done his research, but for those playing along at home, here's the availability dates:

Eisenhower, Truman, Reagan, and LBJ are all available from 1946 onwards.
Nixon and Ford both become eligible (35 years old) in 1948.
Kennedy reaches 35 in 1952.
Carter and George H.W. Bush both come of age in 1959.
Clinton and George W. Bush both won't be available until 1981.
And lastly, young Barack Obama turns 35 in 1996.

Having never looked at the dates of birth of the Presidents before, I'm actually quite surprised how many pairs born in the same year there are.

Click to expand...

How about we stop speculating and spoiling and just let Thande tell the story, and comment on his storytelling abilities?

Aged just 38 when he succeeded to the Presidency, Lyndon Johnson beat out Theodore Roosevelt’s record by four years to become the youngest President. Indeed, he was barely eligible under the age requirements of the Constitution, and some might say that the country would be better off if he had been passed over in the line of succession. But there is no profit in might-have-beens.

Johnson was first elected to Congress in 1938 for Texas’ 10th congressional district. He quickly became close to powerful figures in both the legislative and executive branches who shared his home state, including Sam Rayburn and John Nance Garner, and was regarded as a trusted aide by President Roosevelt, who doubtless never dreamed he would be his successor. In 1941 he won the special election to Texas’ Class 2 Senate seat; as was usual in the South in this era, the general election was effectively unopposed and the real contest was in the democratic primary. Johnson narrowly defeated sitting Governor of Texas W. Lee O’Daniel in a multi-cornered contest, Johnson taking 30.49% to O’Daniel’s 30.26%.[1] Dubbed the ‘Boy Wonder’ by some sarcastic opponents and ‘Landslide Lyndon’ by others in ironic appreciation of the closeness of his victory,[2] Johnson had alienated some figures in the Texas Democratic Party machines by his contest with O’Daniel and only narrowly survived a primary challenge when the seat’s regular election cycle came up in 1942 (only increasing the frequency of his nickname being used, of course). Johnson wanted to build a career in the Senate, but his seat being so vulnerable made him amenable to a cabinet position instead, and he readily agreed to the ‘Texas Cabal’s proposal to be Cordell Hull’s stand-in as Secretary of State. He was mocked as ‘the Embryo’ by Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov, but Molotov was not the only foreign politician to underestimate Johnson’s quick wit. Intended only to warm Hull’s seat, Johnson came into his own in the role and impressed many in the Roosevelt White House who had previously dismissed him.

However, popular history only remembers Johnson from that fateful day in 1946 onwards. With both President and Vice-President deceased, Johnson succeeded to the Presidency. His first priority was, of course, to deal with the fallout from Hull’s assassination, and this formed the centrepiece of his presidency for better or for worse. The actions of General MacArthur in Japan to suppress the uprisings remain hugely controversial to this day, as do the reopening of the internment camps on the west coast. President Johnson’s misguided bloodthirsty supporters cried the message of support he personally despised – “Hey, Hey, LBJ, how many Japs did we kill today?” – while his enemies instead chanted the question and answer “Adolf stopped at six thousand K, how far will we go?” “All the way with LBJ!”

Since that time some biographers have tried to rehabilitate Johnson, in particular pointing out that he was forced to deal with the first Republican Congress since the turn of the 1930s: Hull and FDR’s deaths had won some sympathy votes, but not enough. With isolationist Taftism taking over the Republican Party at the time, Johnson was forced to strike deals in order to prevent funding being cut from American troops in both Japan and Europe, and as part of these deals ended up gutting several popular programmes of the New Deal. But the need to oppose Communism and Japanese revanchism meets with little sympathy to the modern American voter, who is seldom old enough to have lived through either, but still remembers his parents’ or grandparents’ tales of ‘the Man Who Called Off the Deal’ or ‘the Destroyer of Society’.

After his truncated, disastrous term, it is small surprise that the Democratic convention rejected Johnson. An attempt to draft Senator Truman met with too much opposition from the Southern delegates and William O. Douglas finally became the nominee, despite a singular lack of enthusiasm on his own part: Douglas’ non-interventionist legal views were sufficient to satisfy the Southerners that there would be no serious civil rights plank in the Democratic platform. But even the finest campaign would have struggled to win a fifth consecutive Democratic term...





[1] In OTL these percentages were reversed. The margin was 1,311 votes with both candidates taking over 170,000 each.

[2] Johnson got this nickname in OTL after the even closer and dodgier 1948 Senate primary which he eventually won. Of course, it stopped being ironic in 1964...

LBJ is just screwed everywhere, isn't he?

Daltonia said:

How about we stop speculating and spoiling and just let Thande tell the story, and comment on his storytelling abilities?

Click to expand...

This is AH.com. Speculation is rather what we do here, no?

I fear Thande got the slip on us;


Look forward to seeing where you take this!

DTanza said:

LBJ is just screwed everywhere, isn't he?

Click to expand...

Every little thing he does is tragic, everything he do just turns us off...

I'm sorry; that's too funny. Would love to see your version as well, though!

Lord Roem said:

I fear Thande got the slip on us;

Look forward to seeing where you take this!

Click to expand...

Ha! I'd actually love to see more this (accidental) TL off: two or more writers take the same POD/WI/AHC/Idea and do different versions of it.

The popular General Eisenhower was an obvious choice for both parties, which repeatedly attempted to draft him in 1948. Though Eisenhower himself had never voted or expressed much in the way of coherent political views, his Kansas background lent him more of a sympathy for the Republicans. Nonetheless, it was not this but his sense of duty to his country that motivated him to side with that party. The great isolationist Robert Taft was riding high and seemed likely to gain the nomination, despite a spirited challenge from defeated 1944 nominee Tom Dewey. Only an Eisenhower draft could stop Taft, and the General entered the contest with an endorsement by Dewey. He was still unable to gain a majority of delegates on the first vote and was forced to cut a deal with Harold Stassen’s small but crucial faction, Stassen becoming the vice-presidential nominee. It was nonetheless a good fit in terms of the ideological issues, as Stassen was a man who had a record of taking on isolationism in his own state party.

After a sixteen-year gap of no Republican in the White House, Eisenhower crushed the lacklustre Democratic campaign of William Douglas and took office with the pledge to tackle the mess that Johnson had left in Japan. He did so, but by policies that met with some controversy from some of the more bloodthirsty armchair generals amid the voting populace, in particular his removal of MacArthur from his position in favour of Omar Bradley and the decision to release and pardon several suspected Japanese terrorists in order to secure a lasting peace deal. Despite history vindicating this stance—which Eisenhower always stated that he took in order to remove the ‘distraction’ of Japan from the containment of world communism, which had already led to the conquest of Southern Korea and West Berlin in the last gasps of Stalin’s rule—he was called the Chickenhawk General by opponents and conspiracy theories circulated about Eisenhower having been replaced by a doppelganger enroute to his inauguration. These were initially a joke, but became less so when Senator McCarthy began his famous and ultimately self-destructive campaign against Communist infiltration. Eisenhower was also responsible for the foundation of the American space programme with a well-funded rockets development agency created as early as 1949, rapidly catching up with the Soviets from the inferior position that the Johnson administration had left them in.

With the economy in a postwar slump and controversial foreign policy, most election observers and pollsters nonetheless predicted a narrow Eisenhower re-election victory in 1952. However, one of the first true electronic computers, UNIVAC I, disagreed—and was proved right...

Brilliant stuff so far.

I too would support a Meadow/Roem alternative TL to go with this.

Great stuff so far, Thande - LBJ can't seem to get a break in many TLs from what I see and this is no exception. And Eisenhower hasn't done much better trying to clean up the mess either.

Looks like this could be the dawn of a new type of TL as well to go alongside TLIADs...

So was Japan invaded and occupied rather than surrendering unconditionally?