Give Peace A Chance: The Presidency of Eugene McCarthy

I like how Rhode's cabinet is kind of a unity cabinet for Republicans after 16 years since the last administration, comprising all 3 wings of the Republican party and their standard bearers (Conservative:Goldwater, Moderate:Nixon, Liberals:Rockefeller). I wonder how long it'll stave off the liberal flight from the Republicans and it's rightward trend, or perhaps prevent it altogether. Also I find it funny how this TL shafts Reagan, seeing how he's won both of the last two primaries but was denied the nomination at the convention, and now has jack to show for it. Maybe no Reagan = no rightward shift, but I doubt McCarthy will be as cut and dry as that. Ill stay tuned :p
 
I wonder how long it'll stave off the liberal flight from the Republicans and it's rightward trend, or perhaps prevent it altogether. Also I find it funny how this TL shafts Reagan, seeing how he's won both of the last two primaries but was denied the nomination at the convention, and now has jack to show for it. Maybe no Reagan = no rightward shift, but I doubt McCarthy will be as cut and dry as that. Ill stay tuned :p
Well, there's three main reasons Reagan hasn't been included. One is that the political circumstances would've been blowing significantly against Reagan in 1972 with his crackdown on peace protesters and pro-war stance being followed up with McCarthy's "big reveal" of the Vietnam War scandals. Two is that in TTL's 1976, the liberal wing of the party has been discredited by Romney's campaign rather than the moderate wing being discredited by Nixon and Ford, mixed with the fact that Reagan wouldn't have quite the same star power if he's lost twice before. Third is that I really don't like using OTL world leaders in my Alternate History, even if it slightly undermines the "total historical predictive accuracy" component a little bit.

As for the Republican Party's trajectory, a 1968 PoD is too late to stop their rightward trend, but it's going to be several different flavours of right-wingedness compared to the general uniformity of Republican politicians today, being both economically and socially right to far right. The Democrats will also be looking at very different spins of the centrist 'Third Way' and 'left wing' factions of the party as we understand them.
 
Happy to see this TL back :)

Its weird and entertaining, just like Eugene McCarthy, and I'm honestly even more excited now that we're in the aftermath phase.

Rhodes has a lot of pressure especially after 16 years of D rule, should be fun.
 
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You don't prefer OTL world leaders? If that's the case, what's become of Brezhnev?
Brezhnev is still leader of the Soviet Union. What I mean is that if there is a plausible oppurtunity to have someone else as a leader, I'll take that oppurtunity only if there is a pre-existing PoD to use. The only thing I dislike more than using OTL leaders unless the writer has a particular reason to do so for the historical narrative is unceremoniously killing someone off without a particular PoD. Sure it's possible for Brezhnev to fall down some stairs and break his neck at any time, but unless there was a documented time that he fell down some stairs and broke his hip IOTL, I won't write something like that in. This writing philosophy will become more apparent as the TL progresses, but for now the most obvious examples are in the US and China, and with things beginning to shake up in Western Europe and the Middle East. In countries that aren't the primary focus of the story, I'm more willing to have world leaders in power at different times than they historically did (for example the early Mitterand Presidency that is underway in France), but as the butterflies spread out, countries like France will have increasingly divergent leaders as well.

To me, having a greater variety in leadership introduces more historical figures to the reader, and is more in the spirit of the butterfly effect than having the same few guys still coming to power, despite different circumstances that are becoming more and more divergent with each cascading decision.
 
Got it. You may have Brezhnev die earlier then he did OTL, as, from what I've read, in his later years, he grew quite ill with all sorts of issues. You should watch his 1979 speech. He was a train wreck by then.
 
When do you think its the pint of no return? 1960?
Good question.

One of the interesting things about studying up on Rhodes was what 'freedom' and 'ethics' meant to him compared to other Ohio Republicans. For the Ohio old-school like Robert Taft, freedom meant economic opportunity and ethics meant the individual industrious, self-made man of the 'Protestant Work Ethic.' For Rhodes, freedom meant economic security, and ethics meant having the economic means to participate in consumer culture, and in turn contribute to greater prosperity for all by buying stuff.

My point is, the Republicans always had a fiscally conservative streak, so it would be very difficult (but not impossible) to make them the 'left wing' party. In terms of keeping them a party that is moderate-conservative fiscally and socially liberal, I think that you're correct that 1960 was the last stop. I think the ideal PoD to keep them moderate would be Wendell Willkie defeating Not-Roosevelt in 1940, but Nixon's loss in 1960 put all the pieces in place for the conservative wing to finally get 'their guy' nominated in 1964, for the first time since 1924 (Hoover, Landon, Dewey, Eisenhower, and Nixon being moderates for their times, and Willkie being part of the party left).
 
Wait, Peru waging a war against Chile and killing its president?

Somehow you managed to make my Grandpa dreams true. Amazing. Something to feel guilt.

Interesting concept here
 
Wait, Peru waging a war against Chile and killing its president?

Somehow you managed to make my Grandpa dreams true. Amazing. Something to feel guilt.

Interesting concept here
Thanks!

There is an implication of the events in South America that Pinochet had Allende killed, then blamed the Peruvians, but the general world opinion is that the Peruvians actually did it.
 
Chapter Thirty-Three - Let's Put It Back Together Again
“Chuck, Dick, and Barry will sort it out.”

  • President Jim Rhodes, on foreign policy
As President Rhodes prepared to present his domestic policy, Secretary of State Richard Nixon took in the new foreign agenda. As he began to formulate his plans, he had to do so with the cooperation of Secretary of Defence Barry Goldwater, National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, and Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Charles Percy, who had made a deal with the President to be involved in foreign policy. The general consensus was that America was in a much weaker position, and that America would have to go through a military escalation before being on the equal footing to negotiate a more thorough détente. The failure of the McCarthy Administration, they thought, was that it had settled for coexistence without establishing respect from the Soviet Union, and no where was this more true than in the SALT negotiations.

McCarthy had resumed negotiations of nuclear de-escalation once he had been sworn in. Denuclearization had been inconclusive in the Kennedy Administration, and the Johnson Administration was just starting negotiations when they were cancelled indefinitely with the Soviet’s 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia. Going into the negotiations, the Americans and Soviets had asymmetrical development. The Soviets prioritized heavy ballistic missiles such as the ICBM while massively ramping up submarine based launchers. The general Soviet doctrine was based on the brute force idea of “throw-weight” and blanket obliteration in the event of firing off the nuclear arsenal. This was in contrast to the American plan, which was more based around the doctrine of mobility, sophisticated targeting, and heavily protected, or “hardened,” launch sites. To that end, the United States had been developing Multiple Independently-targeted Re-entry Vehicles, or MIRVs. MIRVs allowed a single missile to carry multiple warheads that would then break off to separate targets, as a sort of orbital nuclear shotgun. This was in conjunction with American long-range bombers, and a planned network of twelve anti-ballistic missile (ABM) complexes within the United States.


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Secretary of Defence Goldwater, seen here with two-term Congressman Newt Gingrich.

Leading into the negotiations, the Americans and Soviets disagreed on what “strategic” meant in the “Strategic Arms Limitation Talks.” The Soviets thought that the talks should have referred to weapons that were based in one that could reach the other. This would have included American weapons based in Europe, but not Soviet weapons pointed at America’s European allies. As negotiations reached a deadlock, the Soviets suggested that SALT be based on the restriction of ABM sites, while a seperate, follow-up treaty could focus on offensive capabilities. Not wanting to stop the negotiations in their tracks, McCarthy told the State Department to settle for the compromise and handle offensive capabilities later [1]. The deal was formalized in mid-1970 to a generally positive reception, as the complexity of the issue left the general public befuddled [2]. Regardless, it was denounced as a sign of weakness by Republican hawks and Democratic Neoconservatives, such as Henry Jackson. Following the SALT Treaty, SALT II negotiations commenced immediately for offensive limitations. But, while early talks were promising, the Soviets began to lose interest with the American withdrawal from Vietnam, and McCarthy not beating back the Soviet’s ally, India, when it came to Pakistan. Talks had remained stagnant throughout the rest of McCarthy’s term, as the Soviets easily surpassed America’s throw-weight, and began to approach America’s number of warheads.

With the first Rhodes budget seeing a massive increase in military spending, the Rhodes foreign policy team took a more offensive footing on the nuclear arsenal. The Sentinel ABM program was reactivated, having been nearly immediately deactivated by McCarthy upon taking office [3]. The Sentinel program was designed to offer a thin layer of ABM protection to the entire United States. The revised Sentinel II would go beyond that, and set up ‘hard points’ based around ICBM silos, in a borderline violation of SALT. On top of that, the foreign policy team approved and fast-tracked the production of the McCarthy-cancelled B-1 Bomber, which had never entered production, as a stop gap for the development of stealth bombers [4]. In reaction to the increases in Soviet tank production, the foreign policy team also advocated ramping up production of neutron bombs to be used against Warsaw Pact armoured formations in the event of a hot war in Europe.


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An early prototype of the B-1 Bomber. The B-1 never entered production under the McCarthy Administration, but was approved in the early Rhodes Administration through the efforts of Secretaries Nixon, Goldwater, and Percy, as well as National Security Advisor Kissinger.

Looking beyond the general agreement of the foreign policy team for nuclear matters, Nixon also had his sights set on the more conventional. In South America, the Peruvian military was getting ever-closer to the Chilean capital, Santiago, having secured the city of Copiapó. President Pinochet and his junta were already preparing an emergency re-location to Puerto Montt, and it seemed an inevitability that Peru would succeed in annexing the territory it had lost in the War of the Pacific. The foreign policy team were already preparing to choose who they would back as Pinochet’s successor if he lost control of the situation. Goldwater preferred Admiral José Toribio Merino, while Nixon, Kissinger, and Percy preferred air force commander General Gustavo Leigh. Along with that disagreement was the case of what to do with the other country that had fought the War of the Pacific. Bolivia remained in a state of civil war between the forces of the leftist, democratically elected President Juan José Torres, and President Hugo Banzer, who had taken control of the government in a botched military coup in 1971. The situation had been complicated by political fracturing in both camps, as the war dragged on without resolution. While Banzer had a clear advantage in strategic control and logistical control of the country, as well as military capabilities, he had been unable to adequately deal with Torres’ leftist guerillas in the Bolivian jungles. Banzer had become paranoid of conspiracy against him by the likes of his Secretary of the Interior, Andrés Selich, while the former Vice President of Bolivia, Juan Lechín Oquendo, had split from Torres to form his own Trotskyist guerilla movement in the mining communities of the Bolivian Andes. The foreign policy team came to their second disagreement not on who they would support in Bolivia, it was unanimous for Banzer, or at least his ideology, but which part of the US government would supply him with arms. McCarthy had almost entirely ended weapons sales, and those that continued were funneled exclusively through the Defence Department. Nixon wanted oversight from the State Department, while Goldwater wanted to keep it entirely within the sphere of Defence. With Rhodes declining to intervene for either side, it remained a political stand-off between the two, but with Goldwater having the de facto stronger position.


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The military dictator and President (according to some) of Bolivia, Hugo Banzer.

Regardless of how they got out, got out they did. American arms sales kicked back into pre-McCarthy levels, particularly to Banzerist Bolivia, Brazil, Thailand, and the Khmer Republic. In South-East Asia, Lon Nol’s pro-Thai, pro-American Khmer dictatorship was largely secured after the death of Pol Pot and the exile of Nuon Chea, but medium-intensity conflict continued with Laos and Vietnam, having consolidated their political positions.

As for the Middle East, well, not even Richard Nixon had found an immediately applicable solution for peace in the Middle East, but the gears were already turning on what to do with Israel and Egypt’s Second War of Attrition.

As America took a very different path to international diplomacy, the President remained focused inward. His team would handle all that other stuff, Rhodes had things to do. Americans didn’t care about Bolivia, they cared about jobs.

And jobs were what they were going to get.


“Archie Griffin could do more to help in the inner cities than a whole raft of welfare workers. The people in the inner city want more than a handout. There is no dignity in a handout. They want jobs.”

  • President Jim Rhodes, on welfare and employment


[1] IOTL, Nixon stood by the stance, and the Soviets eventually relented. SALT was a comprehensive ABM treaty, and a partial offensive limitations treaty. ITTL, it is simply an ABM treaty.

[2] IOTL, the more expansive SALT wasn’t settled until 1971.

[3] IOTL, Nixon closed down Sentinel after public backlash claiming that ABM protection of American cities would only encourage the Soviets to assign more warheads per city. It was replaced by the Safeguard program, which only defended ICBM silos.

[4] IOTL, the B-1 was in production throughout the Nixon Administration, before being cancelled by Carter, and revived by Reagan.
 
Chapter Thirty-Four - The Ballad of Jed Clampett
“It’s the economy, stupid.”

  • President Jim Rhodes, when asked what the most important issue to Americans was.

With the foreign policy team getting things under control on the international stage, Rhodes took to the field for his domestic agenda. The first order of business would be his budget.

The first Rhodes budget saw a dramatic shift in priorities. The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, as it was called, saw military spending way up compared to the McCarthy years to boost conventional arms, weapons sales, and the foreign policy team’s calls for investments in neutron bombs, anti-ballistic missile platforms, and the B-1 bomber. Social welfare spending was slashed, particularly Crusade Against Poverty legislation, and the Environmental Conservation Agency, already working on the smallest budget McCarthy could get away with giving them, was further cut. Part of the money, but not all of it, went to funding Rhodes’ job creation program, Jobs for Americans (JFA). The rest of the social spending money went to paying off part of the debt, despite the fact that the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act was itself a deficit budget plan. As the title suggested, there were tax cuts across the board, but were particularly focused on small business owners and the middle class. Despite opposition from the Congressional Democrats and the most hawkish of budget hawks, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act easily passed through the Republican majority in both the House and Senate.

With his budget, Rhodes worked to ingratiate himself to Congress in an unprecedented wave of pork barrel legislation. Although technically speaking, pork barrel is defined as legislation not requested by the President and favouring a particular riding, you wouldn’t know it from what Rhodes was covering. Dams were paid for across the Midwest, South, and Western Interior, funding was boosted for facilities that may have otherwise been on the budgetary chopping block, and road maintenance was given extra mileage. When expenditures began to balloon beyond the budget estimates, Rhodes called for the use of self-issued state bonds to cover the rest of the costs, a tried and true method in Ohio [1]. The most notable of these projects was one of Rhodes’ big dreams for Ohio. When he was Governor, Rhodes had proposed a bridge crossing Lake Erie, connecting Cleveland to somewhere in southern Ontario, in Canada. His plan had been dismissed as impractical and overly-costly when Governor, but as President, Rhodes had money put aside to look into the idea. The most direct route would be connecting Cleveland to Rondeau Provincial Park, but that would raise all sorts of complications on jurisdictions between Canada’s Prime Minister, Pierre Trudeau, and Ontario’s Premier, Bill Davis.


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The proposed location, in red, of Rhodes' Lake Erie Bridge, connecting Cleveland, Ohio, to Rondeau Provincial Park, Ontario, Canada.

Beyond the general pork barrel, Rhodes also put significant spending into building community colleges and the infrastructure to make them easily accessible. Rhodes was a high school graduate, but only attended Ohio State University for a semester before dropping out, a fact that he made sure as few people knew as possible. Because had always been self-conscious of his less-than-stellar education, and always put public and private education near the top of his list when it came to dole out funding.

Outside of the budget, Rhodes also made major changes to energy and infrastructure throughout his first year. Although, as of yet, there hadn’t been an economic war between the United States and the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OAPEC), Secretary of State Nixon advised that in the likelihood that the Second War of Attrition escalated between Israel and Egypt, that the US would have to side with Israel, and OAPEC would attempt an oil embargo, as they had during the Six-Day War of 1967, but with a much more damaging effect on the American economy. This aligned with Rhodes' plans for ramping up the domestic energy sector. Oil, coal, and natural gas subsidies were boosted, and massive hydraulic fracturing (or high-volume hydraulic fracturing) was encouraged to more economically extract natural gas from sandstone, while the government also began to invest in means of more efficiently extracting shale fossil fuel and natural gas deposits through hydraulic fracturing. Oil drilling was also opened up in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska, despite significant pushback from environmentalists, Democrats, and Secretary of the Interior Clifford Hansen [2]. Rhodes also put price deregulation into place to lower consumption costs for Americans, but several other plans were sidelined, including proposals for a government-mandated synthetic fuel corporation, and a consolidated joint government-private coal company similar to Amtrak. The only consolation for environmentalists was Rhodes’ personal fascination in the idea of hybrid, gas-electrical cars. Rhodes had recently heard from Len Immke, the Owner and President of Len Immke Buick Columbus, that a local man had made a functional prototype of a hybrid vehicle. Interested by the idea, Rhodes had Immke work with a federal commission to investigate the possibility of mass production [3].


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Secretary of the Interior Clifford Hansen was the most vocal opponent to drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska within the Rhodes Administration.

Speaking of Amtrak, Rhodes also met with the transportation sector and their unions. Rhodes had no strong feelings either way when it came to unions, acknowledging their role in worker safety, as long as they didn’t get too much in the way of productivity. Meeting with the General President of the Teamster’s Union, Frank Fitzsimmons (who had replaced the recently disappeared Jimmy Hoffa), Rhodes maintained he had no intention of deregulating the transportation industry. Likewise, Rhodes met with the big airline corporations, such as Eastern, Midway, Braniff, Pan Am, Continental, Northwest, and TWA to work out an agreement. Rhodes agreed to maintain the regulations that kept out new competitors, in exchange for them lowering ticket prices to an agreed upon competitive cartel rate, and accepting reform and reorganization of the Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB). The CAB was notoriously sluggish and stuffed with red tape, and Rhodes intended to streamline the process of opening up new airspace to accommodate the increasing popularity of civilian air travel through. The giants of the airline industry agreed, and an de facto cartel was formed between them and the CAB [4]. Rhodes’ cooperation with the airlines was due in large part of his economic philosophy that could best be described as ‘liberal corporatism.’ Under Rhodes, the CAB continued to regulate and set fares for the airlines in a controlled competition that kept the ‘Big Seven’ airborne, and the unions together, but America’s airlines remained uncompetitive internationally, and ticket costs remained high.


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An American airline first class lounge with open bar. Due to Rhodes coming to an agreement with the 'Airline Cartel,' air travel remained similarly extravagant and expensive, with large cushioned seats, plentiful legroom, and catering, despite attempts to lower costs for consumers.


But, transportation serves no purposes if there’s nowhere to go. Rhodes also worked to improve state and federal roadways to America’s cities, but caught a snag on the matter of New York City. In 1976, in one of his last acts as President, McCarthy had approved a sizable financial bailout of New York City, which had been facing bankruptcy. With the new money to work with, Mayor Abraham Beame was able to use austerity measures to keep the city solvent for the foreseeable future, but was in the midst of a political crisis from a series of riots that broke out in New York following a blackout. Once the riots were over, Beame tried to handle the city’s financial damages some more, and was able to do so with the bailout. Although he hadn’t been challenged within the Democratic Party, Beame was facing a narrow re-election compared to the Republican-Liberal Party alliance under the candidacy of Roy M. Goodman [5]. The question Rhodes was faced with was whether to continue with the precedent. Cities on hard financial times were now calling for similar bailouts, which Rhodes was inclined to grant for the sake of his own popularity, but he didn’t want every town in America calling for cash.


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New York Mayor Abraham Beame was facing a tough, but not impossible, re-election against the Rockefeller Republican, State Senator Roy M. Goodman in 1977.

It was indeed the very issue that he was mulling over in late 1977 in the Oval Office when Nixon burst in with news from the Soviet Union…



“We can’t all just cut each others’ hair.”


  • President Jim Rhodes on service economies

[1] Once elected IOTL, Jimmy Carter was notorious in Congress for cracking down on what he saw as wasteful pork barrel spending in legislation, even in Democratic ridings. Rhodes has basically done the opposite of that by relying on state bonds to pay for pork barrel.

[2] IOTL, Jimmy Carter, with the help of Mo Udall, passed legislation that protected the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge until OTL’s 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act passed by the Trump Administration, which put large parts of the refuge up for sale.

[3] In a possibly apocryphal story, Rhodes claimed that he, along with Len Immke and Wendy’s founder Dave Thomas, had been in touch with a man who built a working hybrid car in the 1970s, but that, ultimately, no investment was made into it. For the purposes of the TL, I am assuming the story is true.

[4] IOTL, Carter deregulated the airlines, making tickets much more affordable and air travel much more common, with new airlines popping up to compete with the old giants (who almost all eventually went bankrupt). The end of broad airline regulation also ended the lavish and 'living room' airplane design in place of the more compact seating we know today.

[5] IOTL, Gerald Ford didn’t give New York a straight bailout, with a famous headline claiming “Ford to [New York] City: Drop Dead.” To cover costs, Abraham Beame put incredibly harsh austerity in place, and got third place in the Democratic primaries, behind Ed Koch and Mario Cuomo, with Koch ultimately beating Cuomo in the general. ITTL, without the highly unpopular austerity measures, Beame was able to ward off any serious primary challengers.
 
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BP Booker

Banned
An American airline first class lounge with open bar. Due to Rhodes coming to an agreement with the 'Airline Cartel,' air travel remained similarly extravagant and expensive, with large cushioned seats, plentiful legroom, and catering, despite attempts to lower costs for consumers.
Damn Airline Travel was really crazy back then, must have cost a pretty penny
 
Instead of drilling for oil in Alaska there's a strong possibility a Republican President would listen to the mad ravings of Senator Mike Gravel on the subject and build the Devil's Canyon Dam—Senator Ted Stevens would certainly weigh in in favour of said project given his previous Rampart Dam plan got cancelled. Plus whatever juice Ernest Gruening has left along with tons of Alaskan support.

Damn Airline Travel was really crazy back then, must have cost a pretty penny

Inflation adjusted about twice as much as 2006 before prices started going back up. Kennedy wound up berating his staff over airline deregulation, since he felt they had lied to him versus what actually happened:

Washington Monthly said:
What both policymakers and the public generally missed, however, was that any positive effects that occurred would be temporary, and that many of them would have occurred without deregulation. The price of energy, for example, cratered in the mid-1980s, making it possible to cut fares and even expand service on many short hauls. But that wasn’t an effect of deregulation; it was the result of a temporary world oil glut. Indeed, after adjusting for changes in energy prices, a 1990 study by the Economic Policy Institute concluded that airline fares fell more rapidly in the ten years before 1978 than they did during the subsequent decade.

A study published in the Journal of the Transportation Research Forum in 2007 confirms that the pattern continued. Except for a period after 9/11, when airlines deeply discounted fares to attract panicked customers, real air prices have fallen more slowly since the elimination of the CAB than before. This contrast becomes even starker if one considers the continuous decline in service quality, with more overbooked planes flying to fewer places, long waits in hub airports, the lost ability to make last-minute changes in itineraries without paying exorbitant fares, and the slow strangulation of heartland cities that don’t happen to be hubs. Moreover, most if not all of the post-deregulation price declines have been due to factors that cannot be repeated, such as the busting of airline unions, the termination of pension plans, the delayed replacement of aging aircraft, the elimination of complimentary meals and checked baggage, and, finally, the diminution of seat sizes and legroom to a point approaching the limits of human endurance. (Eliminating seats altogether, however, remains an option.)
 
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This aligned with Rhodes plans for ramping up the domestic energy sector. Oil, coal, and natural gas subsidies were boosted, fracking was promoted as a means to access shale gas
Oops. No, the tech for what we now call fracking in shape just wasn't available then. Hydraulic fracturing at that point was limited to boosting production from existing vertical wells. Shale fracking requires horizontal wells and a different material pumped in. Also higher pressure.
In addition to which, the shortened form 'fracking' only dates to ~2000.


Rhodes’ personal fascination in the idea of hybrid, gas-electrical cars.
Hybrids.... Did a prototype exist? Sure. Was it practical? No. Ole. No way.

Battery tech was limited to lead acid batteries then. I don't believe the necessary power electronics had been developed, either.

Pushing a type of car that simply won't be viable isn't going to get him much props in the environmental movement.
 
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