McGoverning

[John Fredrick Parker]

Thanks for the question! I'll have to fire up Scrivener to see the details but that'd be either Missouri or Maine. Off the top of my head probably Maine, it was a squeaker.

Thanks; the reason I asked was because the thought occurred to me recently that Presidents seeking re-election basically either have to grow their margin of victory or have enough margin to spare; and at least where winning in the EC is concerned, McGovern doesn’t have the latter option TTL.

That’s not to say that TTL President McGovern who can’t grow his coalition is necessarily doomed to a single term; the Republican candidate would still have to pick up every state won by Wallace, which becomes practically impossible if there’s a viable 3PC in 1976 as well. But it does mean that the election going to the House is real possibility here...

 

[Yes]

Quick question - does anybody happen to remember which state had the narrowest McGovern victory TTL’s 1972, and by how much George won it?

To set the seal on this, thanks to the consistently invaluable @Wolfram who did the first and best truly quantitative work on TTL's 1972 presidential, it is indeed Maine, by a microbe or two over 1,500 votes. Tighter than a gnat's proverbial. Many, and really pretty constant, thanks to @Wolfram on that and thanks also for your own follow-on comment.

 

[Expat]

Another fascinating chapter! I might add that even if portrait monitors do wind up getting replaced in the long run by landscape, if they get to have a heyday it might make for a useful "this is taking place in the 70s/early 80s" shorthand in future entertainment.

I hope they don’t get replaced too quickly. With less ground to cover and more warning, they might actually make a version of Missile Command I have a shot at beating!

 

[Yes]

I hope they don’t get replaced too quickly. With less ground to cover and more warning, they might actually make a version of Missile Command I have a shot at beating!

Preach. Same for Asteroids and Galaga.

 

[wolverinethad]

I know more than one person that I've worked with who prefer working that way and rotate their monitors to do so.

 

[THE OBSERVER]

New update coming soon?

 

[Yes]

New update coming soon?

Asked and, shortly, answered.

 

[Yes]

Great Game Theory ​

You have to listen to adversaries and keep looking for that point beyond which
it’s against their interests to keep on disagreeing or fighting
- Cyrus Vance

He who knows all things and believes nothing is damned.
- Sargent Shriver

Comrades, this man has a nice smile, but he’s got iron teeth.
- Andrei Gromyko

A nation’s strength ultimately consists in what it can do on its own, and not
in what it can borrow from others.
- Indira Gandhi

​

To pass the time Norman Borlaug cupped the fruits of this wheat stalk gently in his hand and with his smallest fingers clipped them neatly off, off this hardy little soul that kept its head up over the rising muck. Though the voices grew louder as the ambassador plodded closer, with the habit of decades Borlaug took the time to sift the wheat berries, estimating like lightning the seed germination and feeling the quality of the yield. As his thumb went over the ripe, satiny surfaces of the wheat berries he could almost taste a sweetness, a kind of synesthetic answer to the little plant’s bounty and its kindred still hanging on, mostly, here where water and mire suffocated this corner of the world. In his head the voices of his dogged, practical Norwegian parents still spoke, saying these plants meant there was still something to work with, now the job was to sort that out and make it count. That needed the ambassador too, and he reckoned kindly that Foreign Service officers did not often roll up their pants and plod through the paddies. But Archer Blood came with a bit of a reputation that way, and as Director of the McGovern administration’s Food for Peace program Borlaug intended to count on it.

“Not the yield, Arch,” said Borlaug with his high tenor and precise Scandinavian consonants as Ambassador Blood schlepped through the last of the flood silt to Borlaug’s position. “I would’ve said it before I came here because I had that much confidence in the hypothesis. But it’s not the yield. They’re doing just fine. So too are the HYV strains doing just fine.”

“They are?” said Blood, his courtly joweled face and empathetic eyes open, hoping Borlaug would remember the Foreign Service man was not a plant pathologist.

“The HYV rice, Arch. We brought it in last year especially, from the International Rice Research Institute in Manila. Got it growing throughout the deltas. The numbers are up. Based on our seeding last year which anticipated some level of flooding, we’ve held on against this weather mess. The dwarf wheat and the rice both. Where the water table’s stayed down we’re up and we’ve held on to something even in places like this” he swept the cupped hand of wheat around him. Then Borlaug leaned his trim face in on itself to make a point, his voice low with the truth. “It’s not availability. It’s not. But I suspect you knew that which is why you’re hiding that look in your eyes.”

Archer Blood, the United States Ambassador to Bangla Desh, offered Borlaug an understanding smile, his very best non-denial denial. In these floodwashed fields among the great river deltas of the young Bengali Muslim nation, several great trends in American policy abroad converged — and if they didn’t do that out in the open, Blood reckoned, the old college wrestler Borlaug would grab hold of them and knock heads together just to make the point.

One trend, Blood reflected, was that they stood here at all, and that their actions caught anyone in Washington’s eye. Even just three years earlier both Borlaug and Blood had been in the neighborhood, Borlaug in India checking up on his super-hardy dwarf cereals that staunched the tide of hunger there, Blood downstream in Dhaka as United States Consul in what was then East Pakistan. Surely Washington hadn’t given a damn when Bengali Pakistanis voted in a majority government of their own, nationalist party and the jodhpured junta in Islamabad went mad. Richard Nixon’s kitchen cabinet, besotted already by the secret China opening and their favored Pakistani strongman Ayub Khan’s role as matchmaker with Peking, whistled past genocide as the Pakistani military’s purge of Bengali politicians widened out into the slaughter of a people. Blood and his young staff at Dhaka saved lives where they could, hiding activists in closets and roaming the streets at the risk of their own lives to learn the truth. In the end Blood brought them all together to write perhaps the most scathing telegram in Foreign Service history, that not only dissented from but shamed and condemned Dick and Henry’s readiness to trade perhaps hundreds of thousands of Bangladeshi lives for sweet words in Mao’s ear. When India had the guts to intervene, to end the killing and pave the way for a Bangla Desh — a free nation for Bengali Muslims — Nixon sent an aircraft carrier task group to intimidate Delhi.

The wild, twisting rush of political events in the States turned that policy on its ear. Shunted off to the Coventry of personnel administration back in the States, Arch Blood noted the language in the Democratic Party platform of ‘72 that urged a return to closeness with India, careful distance while Pakistan’s new populist government under Zulfiqar Bhutto found its feet, and pragmatism on China. Then all of a sudden the Brookings Institution was on fire, and George Wallace did the same to the presidential race, and next thing you knew George McGovern of all people was the president-elect. When Blood, now sat down in January opposite Secretary of State-designate Sargent Shriver, offered up that appointing one Archer Blood as the new American ambassador to Bangladesh would rub the Pakistanis the wrong way, the ex-consul watched the faintest tick of calculation cross Shriver’s eyes like the flap of a hummingbird’s wing. After that the Secretary trumpeted bonhomie as only he could, saying “Let us worry about that, it comes with the top jobs.” Despite a few such nagging questions from Gale McGee Blood’s Senate confirmation sailed through. In a parallel process so did Borlaug’s, alchemist of the “Green Revolution” and practical savior of food supplies from Mexico to South Asia, now to run the Food for Peace program that President McGovern himself helmed for Jack Kennedy. Blood suspected he and Borlaug might see a bit of each other.

In the rush of the next eighteen months they did from time to time. Some wag among the foreign correspondents came up with calling it the “Delhi Tilt” and so the McGovern administration’s rush to embrace India — and poor, young Bangladesh by extension — had a label. Grandees of the new regime and its friends and allies shuttled back and forth to Delhi starting with Teddy Kennedy, a firm and visible supporter of the Bengalis in ‘71, before George McGovern was even sworn in. Ken Galbraith, famously Kennedy’s ambassador to Delhi and confrere of the late and seemingly sainted Jawaharlal Nehru, popped on his Treasury Secretary’s cap and went back and forth weaving India’s economic ministers into the fabric of international consultation on floating currencies and foreign aid. Sarge Shriver toured the slums hard by new special economic zones in Bombay and elsewhere intended to gin up high-technology economic activity in the biggest, and ostensibly non-aligned, democracy.

Norm Borlaug widened the scope of ag extension and food aid across the subcontinent, sitting in on the Indian Cabinet and touring villages where new communal wheat fields were set up to guarantee basic nutrition and seeding reserves for the next season. President McGovern himself came over, spending two full days at Edwin Lutyens' wedding-cake tribute to Saracen architecture, Hyderabad House, where the professorial chief executive had marathon chats with Indira Gandhi, Nehru’s steel-eyed daughter and heir, over tea and geopolitics. When he joined the administration’s crew Federal Reserve chairman Andrew Brimmer, once a bright young Fulbright scholar in India, arrived for talks on commodity reserves and denominating foreign loans in rupees and inflation targeting before stagflation’s grim hand robbed India’s poor of the ability to make a living selling their staples or put rice in their bowls.

Bangladesh was a distaff branch of the same stream. Earnest young agronomists arrived, high-yield varietals of rice and millet and barley and such in tow. Back home the McGovern administration fought a nasty but successful battle to amend Public Law 480 — the bedrock of American foreign food aid — to allow waivers of its national-security riders in the national interest. Bangladesh was the test case, since Bangladeshi jute helped make burlap sacks in Cuba, among dozens of destinations, and nations that straddled the Cold War fence were exactly the places the White House wanted to woo with American abundance and technology. A quiet cultural attache who wasn’t really funneled satellite data from Pete McCloskey’s shop at Langley, on possible heat damage to Bangladeshi harvests and on Burmese troop movements against Muslim communities near the Bangladeshi border, to Dhaka. Dozens, then hundreds, of bright-eyed, earnest young Americans with glasses and bell bottoms and open faces flooded in to Bangladeshi schools and medical clinics and even factories, come to plunge into a culture and people different from their own, fired by political victory at home to go out and solve the world’s problems.

Their icon stopped by as well. Early in 1974, bearing the weight of the Oil Shock and talks with the Soviets, President McGovern swung through the south and east of Asia. It marked his second visit to India and preceded a stop off to praise and be praised by President Jovy Salonga, the slight and shrapnel-marked Filipino president lifted up by a nation-as-crowd that shouted down, and then out, the martial-law thuggery of another once-convenient Cold War strongman. (For the same reason Air Force One would skip Bangkok, where the generals had blocked the road to democracy with the bodies of enough students to foreclose such hopes in Thailand.) Both McGovern and the First Lady were there — Blood and his wife Margaret quite liked Eleanor McGovern, a prescient pixie of a woman with striking Scandinavian looks and what might be a cannier eye on the human element in politics than her husband’s. In the president Blood could see both the earnest professor fresh off tenure that McGovern once had nearly been, and the crisp, direct Army Air Corps officer, not always an easy fit between facets. McGovern wanted to hear more from others than he wanted to talk, which again could be a mixed bag. But when McGovern said directly that American diplomacy needed more “Blood telegrams” — more of the men and women in the field telling the political hires what they’d got wrong — McGovern seemed to mean it.

Now that would be tested. The drift into monsoon season brought trials along with it. The first shook India at its very foundations, domestic and diplomatic, to the tune of eight to ten kilotons worth of TNT. In May on the Western calendar, dovetailed with Buddha Jayanti as Indians of many faiths celebrated Gautama’s birth, the Indian government — that was generous, really it was Indira Gandhi and a scant few scientific and military advisers — detonated what spokesmen blithely called a “peaceful nuclear device.” Pete McCloskey had banged on for a few months already that things had gone quiet in the Indian nuclear program, that a great rush of apparent technical advances, personnel shifts at the top of the Babha Nuclear Research Centre, and development of plutonium-fueled pulsed fast reactors had died down all at once. American satellites that soared past towards the great Chinese nuclear test range at Lop Nur would tarry just a little to scan India’s western emptiness for any signs of construction or drilling, but Mrs. Gandhi kept a stony grip on the scale of operations and who was read in. Into a deep hole both Washington and Moscow missed, out in the trackless sand of the Thar Desert, the Indians lowered a vast canister with an implosion-chamber structure and the fissile materials to show Delhi had crossed Robert Oppenheimer’s Rubicon.

President McGovern’s loudest opponents in Congress reared right up about it, and praised at least three unlikely forces — Pakistan’s socialist premier Zulfiqar Bhutto, conservative Muslim Pakistani generals, and Maoist China — to hem McGovern in with words as naive and easily duped, a boyish nebbish playing a man’s game of global chess. Blood was at least glad to see the administration paid not a damn bit of attention to the rivers of press ink from Kissinger and Dean Rusk and Leo Strauss and all. Instead the McGoverners showed they were actual pragmatists, not ready to hue and cry and label and drive Mrs. Gandhi straight to her girlhood friends in Moscow. The administration had known for some time it was likely that, if the Indians could test a device, they would, not only to knock Bhutto back on his heels (and suck Pakistan’s shaky industrial base into a costly arms race), but also to make the superpowers declare how they would treat an India that knew the great open secret of the postwar world, that splitting the atom was the last true sovereignty.

The White House shored up food aid quotas against Congressional huffing and puffing along with metrics for technology transfers for heavy industry and electronics, levers President McGovern could push to signal responses from Delhi. Already committed to domestic experimentation, mostly at Oak Ridge, on liquid-sodium and thorium fueled reactor processes. Sarge Shriver returned to India to firm up a joint development project tied to India’s own vision for long-term energy sufficiency through nuclear power from its vast thorium reserves, largely harmless as fuel for bombs. India became the litmus test for the new United Nations Nuclear Energy Processing and Resale Commission drawn up by the US, several European powers, Canada, and Japan to collect dangerous spent fuels and supply new, all under safeguard conditions. It gave the Indians more in the short term, but also made them more dependent on resources Washington could withhold.

The bigger issue with India, despite the giddy furor in the press over a “Hindu Bomb,” rhymed boldly with American issues at home. When Indira Gandhi rolled to election victory in 1971 on the votes of the poor, with populist promises to nationalize banks, end poverty with Congress Party patronage programs among the farms and villages, and cut off India’s last princes from the public purse, she did not win unscathed. The victor of Bangladesh and hammer of the disadvantaged hadn’t kept her hands clean, or so said her opponent for her seat in the Lok Sabha, Raj Narain. Narain had filed charges through the courts that Mrs. Gandhi used public resources for campaigning, passed around bribes and illegal civil-service favors, spent more money than she was allowed, and manipulated polling and electoral officials. Larger than life — when, after the victory in Bangladesh, opposition leaders called her Durga, warrior goddess of the Hindu cosmos, it was a compliment and an insult all in one —the slow fuse of litigating election mischief set ablaze the debate about whether Indira’s great deeds and popularity meant she made the rules herself. The court charges struck at the seat of her power, too. According to the constitution an Indian premier was meant to be a member either of the lower Lok Sabha or the upper chamber the Rajya Sabha. If the courts ruled her election void, her grip on India would vanish — or she would hang on grimly above the law.

Flash traffic, a fair bit of it code-word level, through the Dhaka telexes about Mrs. Gandhi’s legal situation swamped Blood’s desk these days, baroque details from both open and managed sources, haggling over jobs and turf and horses to back in and out of the Congress Party, wry jabs in the margins at how Delhi’s gossip fodder danced and twined around some of the same subjects as the fix Dick Nixon was in back home. The volume mounted lately: the picture of public vigor as long as he could manage, Chester Bowles had battled Parkinson’s in secret as its grip stole over his nervous system. Now he needed time back in the States as the West Wing mulled a replacement and Blood together with Bowles’ charge d’affaires pulled tight the slack. It was almost a relief to deal with the mess closer to Dhaka. Almost.

In a nine-page report he banged out himself on an old portable, first for Roy Atherton the Under Secretary for Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs busy enough with the Israeli cease-fire, then Paul Warnke and Secretary Shriver, Blood called it “the persistence of Pakistan.” Bangladesh was a young nation, flush with victory, fueled by the chance to write on a fresh page of history and a young population that jumped into the modern world with both feet. There were practically roving young bands of Western idealists — commissioned by governments, hired by charities, lured by ego — who wanted to fix problems and charm locals and bum-rush poverty and hunger into the past. But on the ground Bangladesh’s economy was warped around decades of cronyism and divide-and-rule from Islamabad, by runs on spoils of war, foreign currency traded in place of the shaky local taka, by merchants and grandees who’d kept their heads down only to reemerge and corner the raw goods from the fields that drove the nation’s trade and fed its children.

There was great-man trouble too, Blood knew that intimately. Sheikh Mujibur Rahman — unquestioned boss of this young one-party state’s party the Awami League, father of the nation, helmsman of revolution if you listened to his stories too long to keep a critical eye, now president and premier too — was almost too large a presence to fit in Bangladesh’s modest field of view. When the Pakistani Army came with fire and blood the American consulate’s staff and the Bloods themselves had hidden parts of Mujibur’s own sprawling, charismatic, ambitious, grasping family at real risk to the Americans’ own lives. Blood had kept close touch with Mujibur through the struggle for freedom, come back to see him all but crowned as boss of the new state, sat through dozens of policy and cabinet meetings by his side, watched him sail on his grandiosity into dark waters. Mujibur was still personally popular, especially in the great cities like Dhaka and Chittagong, indivisible on the industrious streets from the Desh itself. But like many a one-man show he’d grabbed and gnarled the works of an inexperienced government with patronage hires and blind leaps to nationalization and a lot of looking the other way while the permanently wealthy got theirs and thanked him for it under the table. That spurred purists of the left to revolt: the Jashod militia of the Jatiya Samijtantrik Dal, the party that flanked Mujibur on the left. To the Jashod’s ambushes and sabotage and street brawls Mujibur answered with the Jatiya Rakkhi Bahini, on paper a paramilitary force but really just uniformed thugs of Awami rule, who visited on free Bengalis cruelties learned at Pakistan’s hand.

Now it rained too hard and despite that farmers upriver of the inundations turned in strong harvests and the new grains held fast and more came free-on-board by the shipload from the States. Despite that his kids — they arrived young at hardship posts like Dhaka and he and Margaret tended to treat them as their own, an affection that was returned — followed dour young British correspondents and cagey Indian freelancers to delta villages. There sweet new lives withered, then bloated, then vanished, or tired laborers with no land to till and no cash to buy walked halfway across the country so they could lie down and die in quiet. How the hell that went on when USAID and Food for Peace had laboratory programs — flagship lab programs, not gunnysacks shoved off a tailgate — that fed tens of thousands of flood victims in shelter camps got Blood’s dander up.

So here they were, Borlaug and Blood, the man who’d saved a billion hungry mouths and the conscience of the Foreign Service, in another boggy mess down the effluent from empires past and present. Borlaug was entirely right — Blood said so in genteel Virginian tones as he shook his head and leaned in close to the crop scientist so as to bury their words in the wind. Under a full head of steam Borlaug offered to fire off a memo of his own to Don Fraser, Secretary of Peace and Borlaug’s immediate boss. Blood shook his head. Stay in the field, said Arch Blood, grab a correspondent or two and haul them around with you and do your job. These people need you doing your job, if the practical approach can yield anything right now you’ll get it there and if not the world needs to see what stops you. I’ll get back to the city, Blood went on, and ask some favors. By this Blood intended to put some cats among the patronage hires when he told them the real problems by way of what he needed. We’ll see how he reacts, Blood said — neither man needed a prompt as to who “he” was. It’s the acid test, said Borlaug. Is Mujibur practical when you put him to it, or is he too busy cracking heads and lining pockets. Blood kept his face blank at that, a Southern reply that said Borlaug probably wouldn’t like the data.

Between the two men, too, there was something else. A fragile trust, not just in each other though they had that. A trust that this bunch in Washington, these men who held the levers of policy and jousted with Congress and plotted a new course, might see it different than most, that they might want results and probity, might put the souls of the ordinary ahead of an empire’s arithmetic. It wasn’t a sure thing: already voices cloaked in pragmatism talked about horses to back and alternative governments, points of pressure and international standards and the alchemy of revolt.

There were high stakes too, not just next door in India but even here where tens of millions wanted an industrial revolution and food security and a paved floor under their feet, where ambitious efforts to show that was possible might be dashed by a bad mood if Mujibur soured and kicked out the Americans, bolting to Moscow or even Peking. Blood knew much too well that deep in permanent Washington there were darker alternatives: to President McGovern’s great credit he had sworn there would be no Ngo Dinh Diems on his watch. But with the world’s largest democracy a step or two away from constitutional crisis and the administration’s favorite basket case a meal or two from a failing state, men like Blood and Borlaug would now find out just what a McGovern presidency would or would not do.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>​

Grechko wasn’t dead to begin with but once he was you could get somewhere. Before, despite ingenuity and idealism and sheer pragmatic need, there were only talks about talks and arcane position papers shuffled under grey Swiss skies. But when the grim old Cossack cavalryman clutched his chest and left to join the pure of Marxist-Leninist heart, conditions changed.

Both of the big men wanted it, that much was true right off. With the bloody bind of Vietnam cut loose at last, President George McGovern surely had no higher goal in foreign policy. Ever since his college valediction at Dakota Wesleyan McGovern had charted and studied the paths that led toward and away from nuclear destruction. Given the unlikely gift of the presidency, now all the strength of his conviction bore down on that end: an illogical and immoral arms race brought to heel; a durable, prosperous detente; weapons and tensions both wound down; the start of a reasoned, pragmatic approach to the world the superpowers could either destroy or share. The only sane and decent outcome George McGovern could divine for the world Hiroshima built. It was a keystone of his broader politics, too. McGovern meant to divert arms-race money to economic growth and social improvement, to tame the grim Templars of the national-security state with open and representative government, deliver results on the “McGovern moment” to his political faithful, land a haymaker right on the jaw of American conservatism and its “better dead than red” grotesques.

Leonid Brezhnev titled at the same windmills. More often than not the vodka-soaked commissar shared motives if not intentions with the lean, wry South Dakotan. Brezhnev wanted to energize the Soviet economy while oil money still ran hot and before heavy industry ground down, to transfer fiscal riches from intercontinental ballistic missiles to consumer goods. Brezhnev wanted too the love of a grateful public that feared death from the skies as much as the capitalists did, and political momentum to consolidate his personal power as the polite Sixties fiction of “collective leadership” dissolved around his sheer bulk.

There was more to it yet. Both men in the big chairs who faced the cataclysm that might come were possessed already by ghosts of war gone by. Some nights George McGovern could still hear the helpless screams of airmen trapped in burning Liberators that twisted like campfire embers to the ground, or saw cities on fire below his mind’s eye. He never lived a day safe from the memory of the mis-racked bomb, jammed so that it might have blown his own steel-and-canvas flying contraption apart, that he jimmied free only for the cold steel hand of fate to take it right down the chimney of an Austrian farmhouse where it blew the quiet family there to kingdom come. Leonid Brezhnev, like every Russian of his generation who yet lived, had watched the boundless bloody tide of Barbarossa crest the skies, and for four years after heard the deafening silent thunder of the Horsemen as twenty million died and a third of the Rodina lay in ashes. During a General Staff exercise not even a year before McGovern took office, several scientists had brought Brezhnev an elaborate remote-control button, a hollow prop to represent the physical launch of Moscow’s missiles. Brezhnev turned white as the Pale Horse itself, his voice faint and shaken, and asked if it were the real thing.

They knew what they faced. Get me a treaty, said the President of the United States and the General Secretary of the Politburo of the Soviet Union. A good one.

Aspiration landed in the mud fast enough. A few facts could be agreed, or at least reckoned into the same direction, by both sides. Apart from the general Cold War trend to build more, build bigger, and throw the full weight of each side’s arsenal into a “wargasm” of general release if the politicians gave the word, the arms-race spiral of the early Seventies had set out from a single point of departure: the anti-ballistic missile.

Since the moment each superpower hit on intercontinental rocketry as the most efficient, effective way to guarantee nuclear destruction of the other, scientists and engineers and the more knowing of their political masters had striven for a means to shoot those missiles down. By the early Sixties they’d found their solution: vast radar arrays tethered to a firing matrix made from two types of missiles and two sorts of warheads. There were, for the simple-minded, big rockets and little, or rather long-range anti-ballistic missiles that could carry heavier payloads, and fast point-defense missiles with shorter reach to pick off whatever the first atomic gauntlet failed to stop. The nuclear warheads for the ABMs were designed either, or occasionally both, to vaporize incoming warheads in a thunderous blast of their own, or to irradiate the warheads in ways that would destroy fusing mechanisms or neutralize components. Now the rain of heavenly fire might be stopped in its tracks.

Right from the start many keen students of Cold War apocalypse could see the strategic disaster born of the engineers’ triumph. One was a young research scientist named Jeremy Stone. The energetic, bespectacled son of famed author and essayist I.F. Stone, Stone the younger was a rising star in the study of nuclear war-making and the practical design of that war’s weapons. Just make more, he said. They can’t hit them all. So said other men too, experienced masters of the Bomb’s “big science” machinery and dissident Soviet physicists alike. More offensive missiles, or missiles with more warheads, or both. An infinite spiral of offense against defense until you hit a point where the marginal odds of catastrophic technical failure with just one of those missiles might light the spark of a “full exchange” that would blast much of the earth’s surface clean away. Active defense made you less safe. It just encouraged more effective offense.

In this case “more effective” that meant loading up large ballistic missiles with more than one warhead. Beyond this it involved some arcane wonders of practical engineering that the Americans mastered first, whereby the launch platform for those several warheads contained in the missile’s nosecone — the “bus” to those in the business — would be wired with advanced telemetry gear that would let the bus target multiple points in the other man’s country and push the warheads off on independent arcs at those targets. That was MIRV — multiple independent re-entry vehicles — in motion. With it you could saturate your enemy’s ABMs. In full flower a MIRVed offense would leave scarcely a town or missile silo or railroad crossing in the target nation immune from exponentially more warheads.

So what then? In whispered chumminess below the white noise of grand European hallways, the Soviets to their American counterparts even called it “the Jeremy Stone proposal.” You corralled the ABM mess by treaty. Not an outright ban, then angry defense-industrialists would sandbag you with bought senators or Presidium members, and the language would bog down in endless detail over what parts of the technical know-how could be repurposed, even the very meaning of what an ABM was. That would leave you nowhere. No: like Indian reservations of the apocalypse, each superpower would get one full ABM array to call its own, deployed in one discrete area, no less but absolutely no more. Thereby the ABM Treaty was born.

The momentum of the idea caught and pulled other proposals in its wake, ideas like difficult but encouraging discussions about a comprehensive nuclear test ban, and most successfully an interim agreement to cap stocks of “central systems” for delivering nuclear death — missiles and bombers — at a given level for most of the Seventies while the two sides tried to hash out a deeper, more lasting treaty. With Nixonian flair the jowled and brooding former president dressed the interim handshake up grandly as the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT, simple acronym of one syllable, easy to remember — Nixon could write copy for his Madison Avenue boys) and paraded as a sober man of peace while Indochina shook as Dick and Henry bombed their war grimly towards its end. All the goings-on with arms control meant that, when President McGovern’s hand left the leather-bound Bible at the Capitol rostrum, he inherited the second round of SALT talks in full swing.

Or, at least, it was pretty to think so. In practice for the best part of a year both sides were snared in caution, conservatism, and internal debate. American policy arguments were thick with unfriendly fire. At no small cost in time, effort, newspaper ink, acrimony, and mutual acts of retaliation, the McGovern administration kept Scoop Jackson from using Senate confirmation to pack the uniformed staff of the arms-control process with favorites and informants. Jackson, who saw in his mirror every morning the uncrowned king of sane and patriotic Democrats, was happy to keep swinging even after John Stennis of all people blocked the way. Scoop had his eye on the long game.

Elsewise, in debates where even the flies on the wall needed code-word clearance, earnest liberal reformers and wary four-stars each scored blows. With reams of technical and signals intelligence “the Chiefs” made clear that Soviet strategic systems were less ramshackle, and Moscow’s drive towards weapons that could match or beat the newest American generation much more advanced, than McGovern’s advisers had presumed on the campaign trail. At the same time, gadflies among the McGoverners led by Paul Warnke and McGovern’s old national-security hand from Senate days John Holum, now Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, shot back that the uniforms’ whole model for what a “SALT II” should look like, “essential equivalence,” fell apart on two grounds. By one argument it was so impossible to define that it was cooked up to torpedo the talks. By another it couldn’t be measured in the ways the Chiefs set out, first because the point was to offset Soviet strengths and wrong-foot them not “whip out our missiles and measure” as Warnke said in one terse confab, second because it wasn’t clear that the Soviets, in their own wordy think thanks that pondered Armageddon, thought true nuclear parity was a good idea or even possible.

After a few months of knocking heads the administration lost the summer to an ideal and the autumn to circumstances. In a war of memos, with thorough, careful refereeing around the margins by Cy Vance, civilian McGoverners came around behind a firm position from the campaign trail: a “MIRV freeze” where the US would hold MIRVed missiles at current levels and pause development of other such weapons, in return for Soviet restraint on development. The uniforms were firmly opposed, but in time Tom Moorer, as full of Southern etiquette as he was stubborn as all hell, soothed the service bosses into letting the administration have enough rope. The administration made its pass at the Soviets on an official visit by Cy Vance to the talks at the end of July; the result was silence, and otherwise misdirection as the Soviets pounded the table rather than the facts to say their new Tu-22M bomber, in flight tests that fueled nightmare fancies read into Congressional Record by folk like Scoop Jackson and James Buckley, lacked the range to be a strategic weapon.

Like the cool-headed teacher of a bright but naive student, Moorer calmly told two full National Security Council meetings that Moscow was never going to go for it. The newest version of the Soviets’ huge SS-9 intercontinental ballistic missile, redesignated SS-18 for the new bells and whistles (and nicknamed “Satan” in NATO naming conventions), was too dear for them. The wide diameter on its “bus,” and the massive weight of payload it could throw at targets when the nosecone separated, meant just one of them could fire more than a dozen warheads of normal size at that many targets, especially American Minuteman missiles caught napping in their silos. For the wearers of gold braid on both sides the SS-18 was the last argument of careerists: for the Soviets that it would give them the strategic advantage that Soviet theorists assumed would belong absolutely to one side or the other in a nuclear arms race, for the Americans that the Soviets would beat off all challenges to its development however pretty the counter-offers which meant a negotiated Cold War truce was a mirage.

The McGoverners were bright, and they could map their own hopes and principles on to the Kremlin in ways that didn’t fit. But they never lacked strategic vision. In the autumn efforts to circle back around and build in bits and pieces on proposals embedded in SALT bogged down as both superpowers turned their eyes mostly to the Middle East. There the fires of autumn made very clear that while Washington and Moscow eyed each other across the table and haggled over strategic stability, lesser powers now had means and more than enough willpower to throw the superpowers’ architecture sideways. Brezhnev was as dire as he was clear that one of these brushfires, with loose nukes in locals’ hands and energy fashioned into weapons in multiple ways, could light off like Sarajevo and take the world with it if the big boys weren’t careful. That gave a new momentum to talk, at the very least, to look at the big picture and regain control while that could still be done.

The response of several key figures in the McGovern administration came back at it. The problem isn’t that we’ve thought too big, they said. It’s that we haven’t thought big enough. Talks about one specific category of weapons will tend to get bogged down in bureaucratic chess, point-scoring, and endless detail, so said John Holum. We have a historic opportunity to talk about all of it, said Jeremy Stone: we ought to be just as concerned with deescalating the chance of conventional war in Central Europe, or with preventing the development and spread of bioweapons, as we are with ICBMs, because they’re all connected. Likewise if we want Moscow to take us seriously, maybe we should take them seriously when they say that British and French warheads matter too. Sargent Shriver, with his knack for the big picture and for the heart of the story, chimed in. This is not an ordinary moment, he said to the president and his colleagues and anyone else who’d listen including Eunice who put up with it like a trouper. And this is not an ordinary administration, and if we let the Soviets mistake us for one then we’ve lost the best chance there is to put the Cold War on its ear.

So as the days shortened and the green things of the world curled back into the earth, as gas was rationed and inflation warred with, they thought big. Ten days from Christmas they had what Cy Vance described as a strategic picture. Paul Warnke called it climbing to the top of the nuclear tree and looking out, so they could see how to walk Washington and Moscow back down a branch at a time. When a quarter of Senate Foreign Relations hopped off to Moscow on a junket Ed Muskie bore a message from the president, one he delivered to Aleksei Kosygin while the minders weren’t looking too closely. They had picked the fading stalwart of liberalization because it was Kosygin who’d first stuck his foot in the iron door, at the Jonesboro summit back in ‘68, when the walk back from that Cuban October to some kind of sanity first gained ground. In rolling New England vowels and craggy consonants Muskie laid it out for the bright-eyed Russian like a closing argument.

SALT, the ABM Treaty, the test-ban talks, these all have made a difference in relations between our nations, Muskie explained. They opened a door that had been shut, ended an angry silence that almost led to catastrophe. But President McGovern believes that if we only leave that door open a little way, if we talk in bits and pieces, if we pretend that SALT will solve all our problems or change the political landscape of the world, then we’re not only mistaken, we are also culpable for our failure to change the times we live in. We should talk. And if we talk, we ought to talk about everything. We should talk about nuclear weapons of every kind, about chemical and especially biological ones too. We should talk about our tank farms and artillery forests in Europe, and not just in circles at the Mutual and Balanced Force Reductions meetings. We should talk about trade, about food and currency and energy. We should talk about arms sales to third parties, about demilitarizing regions of the world. If we truly are superpowers we ought to act like it. Or we will lose that precious opportunity as other, newer, less predictable nations try to make their mark and steal the power of decision away from us.

Just after the holiday, at a luncheon for several valued members of the Washington diplomatic corps, Anatoly Dobrynin sidled away from the high table to his occasional postman Doug Coulter, who’d joined the West Wing attendees for just that purpose. Dobrynin passed Coulter a letter, handwritten by the General Secretary himself. In its weaving Cyrillic hand, shaky but dogged, between the Marxist-Leninist bromides, Brezhnev’s note said: now you’re serious. Now you’re talking. President George McGovern smiled as the translator read it out to a small clutch of his closest advisers, and composed a reply.

With January came a framework. The central deliberative process would deal with arms control. What arms? asked some policy analysts, to which Sarge Shriver grinned and said, what’ve you got? There would be the great terrors — nuclear, biological, chemical — and with that consultative talks on conventional forces in Europe and “foreign military sales” by the superpowers, the polite name for the arms trade that juiced proxy wars across the developing world. The United States would invite all five declared nuclear powers though they had not much expectation Peking would say yes, despite the chance for a direct voice in Cold War diplomacy and the chance to play Washington and Moscow off each other. On early inspection of the ask the French shrank back also, wary that an assigned role would dent their imputed authority as a sovereign party between the superpowers. There was pushback as well. In Washington the Chiefs let the proposal’s excess of ambition speak for itself, believing the Senate would land another blow on McGovernite idealism if needed. In Moscow a loose but clear conservative coalition put the brakes on any expansion or redirection of SALT.

Then Andrei Grechko died in harness as Soviet Minister of Defense, and the dogged persuasion of Sarge Shriver wore his pallid and jaundiced friend Georges Pompidou away with promises of a legacy outside the General’s shadow, and with spring came the thaw. Rather than kill the deal the French took the only other option worthy in their sight and offered to host the whole shooting match. The British, held fast to the McGovern administration by affinity and powerful Atlanticist officers of state, trudged along in company. The shuffling of pieces on the Politburo chessboard put Brezhnev’s brand of instrumental pragmatism on the high ground. The Maoists still played coy. But the four nuclear powers who bestrode Europe sat down in company amid the Baroque apartments of the Chateau de Rambouillet in the green Paris suburbs and got to it.

With China still absent, the Americans and Soviets drew up teams. Moscow stood alone in Marxist-Leninist exceptionalism, while on the other part the United States, United Kingdom, and France ganged together. American opponents of the project liked this setup — surely the French would sink the whole deal on some point of pride or duplicity. But Sarge Shriver knew his marks. Giving the French veto rights on negotiated proposals satisfied Paris’ vanity and made the system cohere. In times to come, up from the sea of ink and tweed where international-relations experts migrated from theory to theory, these became known as “Rambouillet sides” and as the “Rambouillet model” for arms talks, as though its smiths and masons were trying to do anything more than solve the problem right in front of them and then the next.

As the delegations thickened and talks got underway, for a little while it gave the stringers and paparazzi full rations at last. The McGovern administration lacked Kennedy’s mythic celebrity, Johnson’s grandiosity, and Nixon’s malice; like its current counterparts in London and Paris it mostly got on with business in difficult times which was very death for the wire-service boys who had to sell sizzle or find themselves adrift in the sea of facts, trapped in the dull interior pages between headlines and the horoscope. Now there were French palaces and warm weather, Eunice Kennedy at least in and out of Paris couturiers, heads of government who passed through to lounge on balconies and give encouragement to the tidy men with brief cases who’d do the actual work. Sarge Shriver charmed like always with that globe-spanning smile; Foreign Secretary Thorpe crackled and exhorted in a faintly nervous way; Monsieur le President Pompidou shook hands with Gallic calm that masked a slow, fatal agony of health; Andrei Gromyko smiled his odd half smile like the card sharp who knows what’s up the other fellows’ sleeves. Foreign correspondents bunked down in the nicer arrondisements and waited for it all to go south, comforted by the fact that at least this grand gesture had some style to it.

All the more shocking then, for the jaded palates of the press, when something came of it. The reasons why varied but in the end entwined. In part this was because the most active and dedicated members of the national delegations found ways to complement each other’s efforts rather than get crosswise. Much of that owed to two rather different elders of the United States’ effort who showed their best qualities by not getting in each other’s way. One was John Sherman Cooper, former Lincoln Republican senator and diplomat even before that, principled and shrewd, thoughtful, most of all able to make his work as Director of the United States Arms Control and Disarmament Agency about the care and feeding of his old Senate colleagues as he took questions, held freewheeling breakfasts for senators to pipe up (never a hard thing to ask of them), talked about hopes and concerns and constituents, and generally helped the high-chamber gasbags find a level with broader and more daring arms talks than they’d seen before. The other grey head who game through was Clark Clifford, appointed Special Ambassador to the talks and de facto boss of the Western “Rambouillet side.” With the languid, low-key, byzantine care of an old man who smiled as he welcomed a whole city to his chess table in the park and whipped them all hollow, Clifford acted as coach, confessor, and midwife to the processes that created a viable Western strategy for the talks and then settled on terms and means.

For Yanks and Brits and French the vision came together around a notion of nuclear peace, a set of conditions where effective deterrence would make space for the nuclear powers to walk back tensions at flashpoints like the Inner German Border, and preclude the need for any fresh arms race based on a sudden, dramatic change of strategy. Clifford’s patient work to build that concept squared a circle marked by at least three key figures on the Western side. One was John Holum, whose High Plains pragmatism revulsed at overkill and the byzantine folly of “counterforce” strategies — plans for nuclear war rooted in destroying the other side’s weapons rather than its cities — and who wanted a crisp and plain new nuclear reality based only on deterrence itself. Another was Jeremy Stone, given now as he was with the ABM crisis to let both sides walk down a strategic path and then fence them in, keep a bit of what they desired but constrained by scope and scale. The third was one of the fathers of France’s bomb, Pierre-Marie Gallois, still with his Armee de l’Air buzz cut in the age of sideburns, a bundle of energy who argued that effective deterrence provided not by two but by multiple parties to a strategic conflict could block its several paths to escalation and guarantee secure peace.

From common threads in those arguments — picked apart and cross-questioned by other actors in the play like Paul Warnke and the workhorse of the British delegation, Minister of State for the Foreign Office Bill Rodgers — Clifford brought together a united front. As in chess Clifford’s band of strategists and hagglers settled on the risk they took, the opening into which the Soviets would move. That rested on two hunches. The first was that the Soviets did indeed reject the iron faith of the United States Joint Chiefs of Staff — that “essential equivalence” in a nuclear arms race was possible. The other hunch was that, once you pared it down to who people were when the fears that stalked them woke them in the middle of the night, the Soviets were at heart a bunch of wily old commissars who’d survived the nightmare of one war of annihilation already and didn’t mean to truck with another unless the running dogs of capitalism forced it on them. The Westerners, then, would give Moscow some room to stretch out and move around in a few key areas that kept coming up in reams of NATO intelligence data, in return for which Clifford’s crew could probably get movement on other fronts.

The question then, after the first few weeks’ work that was as much internal as mutual, was what standards and benchmarks they meant to bargain for, and there it may have been President McGovern who saw it first. At least, as the years turned on from there, Jeremy Stone gave him the credit. Near the end of June President McGovern asked the principals of the American negotiating team back to Washington for a dinner and the chance to go through the details in person. As they talked about bioweapons labs and nerve gas stockpiles and containing the “modern large ballistic missile” threat — so broad and so deep was the SS-18 Satan’s influence it gained its own acronym — McGovern thought a second about a persistent frustration he had with the process then gave it voice.

Sometimes, said the president, it frustrates me — I can see why arms negotiators focus on the hardware because the militaries of both sides focused on the hardware — it still frustrates me that talks spend such time and spill so much ink about the capabilities of a given weapons system and then don’t knock down their numbers by much at all, while the god-awful stockpiles of warheads on both sides rise and rise.

As if he’d just walked into the middle of the street at the moment of discovering quantum theory, Jeremy Stone hovered on the edge of his seat. Mister President I’m very, very sorry if this interrupts you, Stone said with the rattling speech of a man half of whose mind wrote in midair at that moment with a pen of iron, but with great respect sir could you possibly repeat the last thing you just said? Just the very last thing, Mr. President. McGovern, glad to sit down with men of intelligence just as devoted to unwinding the stupidity of nuclear apocalypse as he was, did what Stone asked.

When Stone told the story later, he put it across that in a moment the basis for the nuclear element of the talks was transformed, and in two moments they had a framework for the proposal. The president, said Stone with the fierce energy of a few seconds to midnight when he buttonholed Clark Clifford later, had put his finger on the basis for talks that could work. I made the same mistake as everybody else, said Stone with the fervor of atonement. Ever since ABM we’ve been fixated on delivery systems. No, Stone went on. Delivery systems are secondary, they’ll fall in line, they give us all the line we need to hook the generals on freedom-to-mix — the persistent military desire not to be hemmed and hedged on what specific weapons within a given type they could wield or buy. All wrong, Stone said. Warhead numbers, said Stone. Warhead numbers are the key. So much are the key that we’ll do the military-industrialists a deal. Clifford, eternally the Beltway lawyer’s Beltway lawyer, couldn’t help but smile at Stone’s almost giddy vigor that danced like the streetlamp’s light off Stone’s glasses. What’s the deal, Clifford asked. We’ll give them newer but fewer, said Stone. They get the new stuff, yes. But only some of it, and most of that strategic systems that offer deterrence past the firewall. We let that in the front door. What goes out the back door? asked Clifford. Overkill and as many tactical systems as we can carry, Stone said with a grin.

Back in Paris Stone drew rave reviews. The other components of a proposed omnibus agreement had moved along, principles for outcomes on chemical weapons, biological ones, a couple of proposed avenues for the Soviets to offer up troop reductions in Eastern Europe in response to setting in stone the Humphrey-Cranston Amendment to the last defense appropriations bill that cropped down the numbers of GIs and airmen in Western Europe, along with guidelines for how many fresh uniforms could show up for major exercises and how long they’d be permitted to stay. It was nice on paper, made for bright communiques to the governments back home or for the press, but all that was made easier because both the optimists and the critics figured the whole thing would rise or fall on the nukes. So there Stone’s new yardstick and his locus of decision were quite a thing.

To frame the structure and terms of the treaty, negotiators from both sides divided qualifiers and limitations on nuclear weapons into two categories. Range marked the divide. All weapons whose self-propelled range, or the effective range of the vehicle that bore them (Clifford and France’s foreign minister Jean Sauvaugnargues, the tireless little sparkplug who wore his moods broad on his face behind the wisp of a mustache, nixed erector launchers from the vehicle restrictions so as not to vex the Soviets down a rabbit hole), or both together, ranged from no distance at all like land mines or “nuclear demolitions” in backpacks or briefcases, up to fifty-five hundred kilometers, ganged together as “theatre” weapons. Those that could reach out past the fifty-five hundred marker were classed strategic. With proposed warhead ceilings the Western crew gave and took: the strategic ceiling was up, actually, even a little above the present moment, but yet only about two-thirds the predicted arc for the MIRV race into the early 1980s. There they could cap the total and try to work back over time. The great breakthrough, if it were to come, was with “theatre” weapons. There the proposed ceiling was still large, thousands on both sides, but vastly lower than the tens of thousands of battlefield and battlefront warheads both sides had agglomerated by habit, industrial profit, and bureaucratic inertia.

Within several sub-limits, on MLBMs for example, each side could mix its systems to suit, though with limits on warhead stockpiles for each weapon system chosen (enough to arm a given number of “central systems” plus a factor for test warheads and spares.) Once the sides had haggled out the systems they preferred, those totals of warheads and means of delivery would be written into the subsections of the treaty, with limiting provisions for how many new weapons of what categories each party to an agreement would be allowed to develop on a replacement basis. In a nice turn of logic Clifford and Britain’s Bill Rodgers established an “end state” standard for enumerated weapons, so that missiles or jets or submarines still in development could count towards the total, provided they stayed within bounds and replaced an existing system.

Rodgers’ senior partner, the bright-eyed Sir Frank Parsons undimmed by age since his ambassadorship to Moscow in the Sixties, had a charming old time selling that to Dimitry Ustinov. Ustinov, grand commissar of the Soviet military-industrial complex now duly consecrated as Minister of Defense — “the enemy is inside the gates” said more than one general in Moscow of the free-spender Ustinov playing fox in the uniformed henhouse — doled out weapons contracts to Moscow’s “design bureaus” with the easy manner of a generous, manipulative father. The General Staff moaned over three different missiles or four different aircraft designed to do the same job in production; in a system where all was patronage and leverage, Ustinov saw it as a virtue. Clark Clifford was more than happy to use “end state” language to get Ustinov on side.

The arcane inner details on nukes took months, to be sure, not just the back and forth but endless internal debates within each side about appropriate means and measures. Paul Warnke summed up the aggregate Western position as a “comfort doctrine”: here exactly was the place to let the Soviets have as much or as many of the weapons they believed would give them advantages as possible, so long as the Western states could keep their “boomers,” the all but undetectable nuclear missile submarines, and the new long-range standoff cruise missiles still in field tests, both hard to kill with a preemptive strike and designed for a broader range of action than a frantic, suicidal bid to kill the other side’s missiles before they hit yours. Moscow could have plenty of ICBM orders for Ustinov’s clients to fill, even some of their mighty SS-18s. They might sneak refueling probes onto their shiny new Tu-22M bombers classed as theatre weapons — the terms of the theatre-nuclear treaty article limited the “Backfires” to what they could carry in their bomb bay which would be missiles whose range was short enough they would need a long, deadly time inside Western air defenses to hit targets.

Against the vaunted bolt from Moscow’s blue that drove the Goldwaters and Scoops and Helmses to hysterics Western states would either launch a “full release” or lean on the bulk of their capability afloat and in the air, thereby out of “Satan’s” reach. To that the treaty framework added a stronger role for British and French weapons, and for the “dual key” systems held by West Germans or Italians, Dutch or Belgians or Greeks or Turks, but padlocked with advanced electronics to which Americans held the key. Pierre-Marie Gallois called it “ambiguous deterrence”: it would be hard for Moscow to know whether joint NATO councils would let Bonn or Rome, Brussels or Ankara, answer the Warsaw Pact blazing a nuclear path into Western Europe with battlefield warheads by turning Minsk, or Kiev, or Leningrad, into a glowing crater. What the Soviets could not chart out clearly might give them pause. A true pause offered stability, and stability in turn a path away from girding for war.

For the crux of it Clark Clifford offered his best idea, or so he said anyway. Brains dessicated in tenure and think-tankery later called it game theory at its finest, but for Clifford it was just the way a good lawyer should strike a deal. The spreading chapters of ink and paper looked very fine, but again they could afford to because no one had written down yet how they would enforce all these happy notions. After a long debate among the stalwarts of the Western crew Clifford laid it out for them: they would call the Russians’ cards. Clifford himself would lay out the context into which enforcement language needed to fit and then he would dump that all in the Soviets’ lap, on Gromyko and Ustinov and the serried ranks of grey diplomats in boiler suits, on Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov who wanted to trim the nuclear tree so he’d have money to fit out the Red Army with modern technology, on the chekists and the lifers and Brezhnev most of all. Two things will come of this, said Clifford. We’ll find out if Moscow really wants this, which is to say more directly whether Brezhnev truly wants this. If they do, then they will have to write terms strong enough to ask what they really want of us, and those will bind them too, but not poison pills that will kill this in the United States Senate. Give them a few weeks; we’ll find out if this was all just a youthful fancy or if we have a tready.

So the Western players did as Clifford asked, and three and a half weeks later the Soviet negotiating team did as Clifford hoped. Mutual, enforced public inspection as each side dismantled or destroyed surplus warheads and proscribed systems. Central, published accounting for stockpiles with “knock and look” verification. Acceptance of the orbits and frequencies and other details of photographic and signals intelligence to determine compliance on tests of new systems and deployment of enumerated ones. Not perfect, but stricter than any diplomatic nod-and-wink before it and enough to say the wily, pickled old Slav at the top of the Politburo didn’t want anyone overturning the apple cart on appeal.

They called it the Comprehensive Arms Reduction Treaty — CART, simple, word of one syllable, sometimes Dick Nixon still had lessons to teach. Articles each on strategic and theatre nuclear reductions and limitations, on chemical and on biological weapons in turn, on initial permanent reductions in superpower forces deployed forward in Europe with language to let the long Mutual and Balanced Forces slog tinker with CART as needed to update those terms. As the first green hints of a new year arrived in Paris amid the grey early months of 1975, as Georges Pompidou clutched every breath he had left to see his hospitality rewarded, the names descended on the city and gathered at the Hotel Majestique to put it in ink. The treaty no one had entirely expected, a break thrown in the long spiral of cold-warring. Substantive language to put some teeth in the Biological Weapons Ban of ‘72, Britain and France forswearing chemical weapons, troop cutbacks, a true and iron ceiling at last on strategic arms and great swathes of battlefield nukes on the scrap heap: by the early Eighties, at its end state CART meant to reduce the signers’ 1975 stockpiles by roughly fifty-four percent.

It was, as Vice President Hart said, eyes bright, a hell of a thing. To which Clark Clifford, with his smile that clearly had eaten more than one canary already, answered, if you think that’s a hell of a thing, let’s try getting sixty-seven United States Senators behind it.

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Well it was a good day for it, at least. A little warmer than you’d expect so early in the year, even here in Calabasas, California, mild with sun as the Santa Ana winds died down. Whether it was the environmental regulations the new governor was so keen to trumpet or not, the smog lay thin enough you could make out the rolling backdrop of the Santa Monica Mountains that they’d set up for the photo ops when each man said their piece. Good day for the company, he reflected, bringing himself up to sound energetic and optimistic when his turn came at the lectern. Even as the goddamn directors had screwed him, screwed him for doing his job no less, it was a good day for Lockheed.

A good day, and they needed one. Hands stuffed firmly in his pockets while he looked around and nodded at the other VIPs, Carl Kotchian surveyed the circumstances. The Soviets had played their trump and sent Nikolai Podgorny himself, big and bluff and rolling with garrulous Russian laughter — given Kotchian’s Armenian roots, like a decent number of other kids who’d grown up in Long Beach, Kotchian reflected that he and Podgorny could pass for countrymen — to do what heads of state were supposed to and cut the metaphoric ribbons. The governor came, and Ron Reagan too since this whole process had started when he was still in Sacramento.

President McGovern was battened down at Camp David in a summit with that cigar-chomping AFL-CIO ogre George Meany, so in his place the White House had at least the courtesy to send the best of the rest. The Commerce Secretary — Secretary of Commerce and Industry now, Kotchian corrected himself — was the wiry, incisive spark plug of a former general that Kotchian had expected. He’d rather enjoyed meeting the Vice President, Hart was gracious and smart and gave you the sense he was a kind man as well, certainly not puffed up or full of himself. Those last qualities could be liabilities in business sometimes, but when you had something hard on the docket frankly a touch of goodwill had some value. Podgorny would lead, full of socialist vigor made more than a little ironic by the circumstances; the administration’s men had let Kotchian have the last say.

Sat there on the stage with a plain folding chair, looking out on the suited middle managers and sideburned shop stewards come over from the Palmdale plant, Kotchian — “A.C.” to the Lockheed community — thought about what he wanted to say. What was that? First of all what a hell of a pass it had been the last six years or so and how this company he’d given a generation’s worth of devotion made it through anyway. In ‘67 when they gave him the keys to the car, company president at last, Kotchian had looked out over the corporation with his pernickety accountant’s eye and pronounced it good. They had a raft of government contracts on aviation and defense electronics and more and more missiles of all kinds, production lines hummed in California and Georgia and elsewhere. They could keep churning out C-130s for the world over until God went home. They had the crown jewel, the “Skunk Works,” which led the planet in producing specialized aircraft and aerospace products twenty years ahead of their time. They were even getting back into civil aviation production and it was a good design too. Blue skies ahead.

Except of course they weren’t. The whole C-5 mess was the goddamn government’s fault, he wasn’t going to knock the guys on the line, it was what happened when you didn’t spec what you wanted and stick to it. And they’d been cut out of the F-X advanced fighter down-select even when Dick Nixon was still there, and sure enough even McGovern and his peaceniks were buying some F-15s off McDonnell goddamn Douglas because Stu Symington could put the fear of God in them on legislation. Getting back in the civil game cost and cost, too. The L-1011 was a wonderful product: automated guidance and landing capabilities that could put down in blind visibility, redundant hydraulics to give the best pitch control with the smoothest descents and maneuver in the game, fully redundant safety systems, automated monitors, and beautifully quiet engines. Sure it cost more than a DC-10, McDonnell Douglas had slapped the damn things together with leftover bits off the DC-8s, no wonder goddamn cargo doors kept flying off and worse. You bought a TriStar — they’d named the L-1011 in a company contest — and it was the safest thing in the air. But that cost money.

What cost even more had been the collapse of Rolls-Royce, the legendary and vaunted British maker of jet engines, put into receivership, Christ, right in the middle of things. Two years on the market that cost both companies. Thank God Eastern Air Lines and British Airways held fast otherwise they’d have had another junker. And that put Lockheed on its own Via Dolorosa, going through Congress like a kidney stone with the goddamn loan guarantee. It wasn’t even tax money! All the Congress had to do was co-sign and it became a platform for every closet socialist and every small-government Goldwaterite both to bitch about big American corporations each for their own reasons. It took that corrupt knuckle-dragger Ted Agnew to vote it out of the Senate on a tiebreaker for God’s sakes. What a needless, fruitless, brutal mess. And there was Ron Reagan over there, smiling like he was goddamn John Wayne when he’d tutted and frowned and said businesses needed to bear responsibility for their actions — and what part of the C-5 or Rolls Royce was our fault? Kotchian seethed — Reagan was probably on McDonnell Douglas’ payroll anyway. It’d keep Nancy in tranquilizers for years, at any rate.

But now here came opportunity. From the unlikeliest source, even. Off on the other side of the Iron Curtain it turned out the Russians had their own civil aviation woes. Biggest country on earth, and their flag carrier Aeroflot was the biggest airline on the planet by a long stretch, plus seven thousand-some passenger airfields but only about a sixth of them paved properly. And no priority on the logistics, no sign the commissars wanted to fork over rubles for grand new Socialist Realist terminals or automated baggage handling or a little more asphalt on the strips. That meant something that could carry a lot of people in one hull form with bags beside them, all other things being the same.

So the socialist planners drew up a big “aerobus” that could haul more passengers to the paved runways they had in hand, but that was a big leap for the design bureaus. In the end they’d even gone to goddamn Boeing about it, traded shop secrets in Paris when Boeing was still hot for the Supersonic Transport, but it wasn’t much help to Moscow. It was hard enough convincing Soviet engineers and bureau bosses that mounting engines under the wings wasn’t scientifically and ideologically incorrect. Even after that fight what they had was too damned dinky to do the job. So the grand aerobus project from Ilyushin that was going to give Moscow a wide-body twin aisle carrier that would port hundreds of good Socialist Men and Women at a time across that great big country just crapped out the Il-86, whose very blueprint came with engines too weak, avionics not up to snuff, and production jammed up behind the drive to beat the West at the military dog-fighter and strategic-bomber game. The poor fellows were almost too afraid to build prototypes.

But failure also smelled like opportunity. The Soviets’ aeronautics fix fit right in to great ambitions of the McGovern administration. The president’s coven of Ivy Leaguers who ran his foreign policy had all read their Norman Angell as kids: like their boss they were determined to dissolve Cold War borders, and Cold War tensions, by doing some brisk business. It’d started with food and farming because things seemed to with President McGovern. That deal with COMECON back in ‘73 where the communists bought a fixed sum from US stocks, whatever they needed that year plus the difference in Treasury bills, unless the Eastern Bloc had a bad year then they’d fill up on cereals and Washington would buy its own paper. It spread out from there, especially as the administration’s determination to have a deliberate industrial policy — Kotchian reflected that he’d have complained about it to everyone if it’d favored competitors, that was just fortunes of war — married up with the desire for economic stability and new markets for both of the big nuclear sides.

Now American commodity dealers were buying Soviet oil to screw the sheikhs, that had some nice irony to it, and Zenith televisions were set to be sold from Vladivostok to Minsk to spite the Japanese. The car guys were in on the game as well. On a bit of a streak lately, Ford would now license out production of its European Festiva design to the great GAZ factory — Henry himself had helped set GAZ up in the Thirties — plus discounted sales of the Econoline, in return for which AvtoVAZ’s new Lada 1600 would show up in boutique foreign-car showrooms here in the States. The French had scored a nice deal for Renault trucks, too, the price of letting Ford have their moment.

Now it was aviation’s turn. Moscow had an envious fascination with the 747, true, and a great interest in getting those humpbacked beasts in Aeroflot colors to trot around the world. But — and Kotchian could appreciate this — for all that everyone who moved in Kotchian’s circles talked about how McGovern was too nice, and thereby weak, for his own good, holding back a deal on Boeing jumbos was an admirable chance for the mild Midwesterner to ratfuck Scoop Jackson. Jackson who, besides being Boeing’s arch-whore even more than his senatorial partner Warren Magnuson, was clearly a burr in the administration’s ass on arms control. Instead discussions moved to the other American jet the commissars longed for, the TriStar. Kotchian reflected with satisfaction that the Russians really appreciated the L-1011’s technological and logistical virtues, and that it was a much better design for what Moscow wanted than the outsized Boeing birds. So when McGovern’s people talked arms control, the communists talked technology transfer, and both sides listened.

Everybody wins, is the nice thing, Kotchian reflected. Podgorny stood up and said it, then the governor banging on about Californian jobs — he tuned out Reagan because the grudge was personal — and then Secretary Gavin too. Despite the bucket of shit France had flung at the Allied Coordinating Committee on technology transfers, all because Moscow liked the TriStar better than that new “Airbus” wide-body the French and Germans and Spaniards built together, Secretary of State Shriver just smiled and wheedled in Paris and creaked open the deregulated US market a bit more for Airbus sales (Eastern was keen, which was a little worrying) which brought home the deal. Rolls Royce would build all the engines, which got champagne corks popping in Whitehall and on the London Stock Exchange, and despite some Soviet consternation because they wanted to figure out high-bypass engineering for themselves. Lockheed would turn out forty TriStars to Soviet specs down the road at Palmdale (”luggage on hand” style with the optional lounge and galley in the belly built in place of cargo space) then eighty more would be built in Ulyanovsk, the doughty industrial city redubbed for Vladimir Lenin’s christened surname. Options would follow if sales opportunities opened up with COMECON nations, although the Airbus partners would get the chance to bid competitively just to shut the goddamn French up.

This way, on this path, Aeroflot got its big hauler, Soviet workers got their share, and Lockheed would make enough money to quiet nosy Congressmen and get on with more and better work. First the -500 series of the TriStar, with new specially designed wings, more and better computerized avionics, and range to cross oceans. Then the -600, the shorter twin-engine that would race the DC-10 twin McDonnell Douglas had cued up. Now the airlines were deregulated the market was starting to sift into two categories. There were the low-cost guys who needed cheap and cheerful for lots of short hauls and there were the big “legacy” carriers whose market was trunk lines and good service. The “TwinStar” would jockey naturally with Airbus and McDonnell Douglas for the second market, especially since the -600 could go coast to coast with more than twice the passengers of a little 737 and more efficient engines. The new wide-bodies would muscle the Boeing boys out of the legacy market before Seattle even got its socks on. And with the McGovern folks buying fewer high-priced missiles, aircraft sales could help set Lockheed up for the future. For the White House? They could put the screws to Scoop and Maggie on Senate votes. They got a big American company that looked like a team player on detente. And they bought a lot of jobs in a state with forty-five Electoral College votes. Kotchian was an accountant; that math he could do.

Always, though, there was a catch. A catch, and it had Kotchian in its snare. He had to credit that the administration was thorough, those very same nice men Secretary Gavin and Vice President Hart had taken lead roles vetting the Lockheed books and Lockheed sales, a process that flowed naturally from the earlier Gavin Commission that rooted around in the norms of trade for big wheels like Lockheed who sold on global markets. It took no time at all to find the thirty-eight million because frankly he’d never felt any need to hide it. The payments, made to various governments and political figures of notes in what must have been half a dozen countries, most recently to get the Japanese on board with the TriStar but before that to grease the wheels of the “Sale of the Century,” when that fragile steel needle the F-104 put foreign outfits out of business or at least out of the market when the “Starfighter” spread around America’s allies like sowing corn in the Dakotas. None of it bothered him in the slightest. People could call the payments whatever they wanted to, from incentivization to bribery, he just had products and worked to sell them and in the places his company did business the money helped. In the tidiness of his numbered mind he never saw the need to label.

So the administration came to him first: frankly they were a damn sight kinder and more polite about it than his own treacherous board of directors, pissing themselves about stock value and scandal sheets in the newspapers. Why it was a problem still fuzzed him, and the president’s chief of staff, young lawyer fellow, another Hart but no relation Kotchian recalled, was direct and plain about it. Hart wanted to make clear that Lockheed would not be in any way singled out. “A.C.” didn’t have to tell McGovern’s chief of staff that upwards of three hundred other companies were up to the same damn thing, the papers knew it, the Federal Trade Commission knew it, the Gavin Commission knew it and guess where the eponymous commission’s chairman was now. This was not going to be a witch hunt. That said — Hart delivered the two words with the thin ink of a lawyer — there were matters to smooth over and this was a chance for Lockheed to get out in front before it was all phone calls from the Washington Post and Congressional committees and subpoenas. More than that, it was a chance for Kotchian to set his stamp on where the company would go from here. On a legacy. Lockheed would pay up sale price on one new TriStar to the FTC, that was, what, about two-thirds of the backsheesh? Enough to play well in the bylines. And Kotchian and Kotchian’s old friend and chairman of Lockheed’s board Dan Houghton would retire to enjoy their grandkids and pursue new ventures. Simple. Tidy.

Simple and goddamn tidy for whoever didn’t get screwed, Kotchian thought as his eyes narrowed while the Vice President delivered a smooth, friendly speech. Simple because the board, the board of his company, had already picked out their scapegoats to offer up to the feds. It did do just what Hart said, falling on his sword would let Lockheed get on with the Moscow deal and turn its fortunes clean around. There were other benefits too, for the White House anyway. Right-wing politicians in West Germany were snared in the mess and that served McGovern’s friends the Social Democratic government now in Helmut Schmidt’s hands. In the Japanese press this thing was set to blow up bigger than Brookingsgate, and conveniently kneecap the conservative Prime Minister whose circle of friends talked a little too loudly about whether Japan might need nuclear weapons to protect itself. Kotchian could do that kind of math, too.

Was it worth it? Yes. Yes it was, he thought as he fidgeted with his glasses with his right hand and shuffled paper notes with his left. He’d get up there in a minute and tell his people how they made the best damned wide-body jet in the world, so good even the Russians had to have it. And how that would bring trade, and trade would bring stability, and growth back to the economy, maybe even make things a little brighter when communist kids rode in American flying machines. For Kotchian it was a bloody business, no just or reasonable end to thirty-four years’ work. For the world? Perhaps not bad after all.

 

[Yes]

Desultory remarks:

(1) Like a number of recent chapters (hell, a number of chaps period) this is the first part of a paired set. Next one will tackle some of the same issues from different angles, or ones that can be grouped into the same subset(s) in terms of foreign policy, national security, where detente meets the road, etc. Also there will be a bit of Mr. McGovern Goes to SIOP which may get interesting. Much already plotted out or even written since the original end of this chapter has become part of the next when even I blanched at what that'd make the word count.

(2) Some careful readers may get through this, then desire that I get my Maimonedes on and guide the perplexed on arms control. Some of those same careful readers may feel that we got pretty deep in the weeds on health care and incomes policy. Ha! Sweet summer children. Ain't no party like an arms control party. We're gonna throw that weight (this is an arms control pun, even) tomorrow am.

(3) With recent high holy days past and spring pretty firmly sprung, I hope this finds everybody well.

 

[Usili]

Going to need to reread the arms control section a bit more to share my own thoughts on it in detail from what you mentioned.

I significantly enjoyed the bit on aviation, especially for the Soviet Tristar and also how you're going to be seeing the emergence of the Twinstar and DC-10 Twin... and in turn emerging as explicit competitors with the Airbus A310. Y'know, I'm weirdly surprised there wasn't anything talking about the Emergency Loan Guarantee Act and how it ties into how Lockheed is doing.

 

[John Fredrick Parker]

I am indeed looking forward to @Yes Maimonides on CART, agriculture in India and Bangladesh, and industrial policies (for Xerox, GM, Lockheed, etc).

Also, Jovy Salonga is President of the Philippines? When did that happen?

And the new Governor of California - do we take it that clip is from 1975, then?

 

[wolverinethad]

CART takes precisely the correct approach. It does absolutely nothing to restrict launchers when you can get more warheads loaded on a launcher than ever before. The SS-18, quite simply, was the deadliest ICBM in history. Its MIRV bus or its single-size 25MT warhead were both able to wipe millions off a map if properly placed. McGovern here unties the Gordian Knot enough to where a future effort might finally undo it entirely.

I know I owe you a piece of info for the back end of this, @Yes, and I think I've figured out where it is.

 

[King of the Uzbeks]

So M. Pompidou holds out for a bit longer. The OTL Election featured a chaotic fight to be the right's standard bearer, and was followed by quite a narrow win by Giscard. A little tap could turn it on its head. Either towards a larger (and possibly more Gaullist) right wing victory, or towards M. Mitterand at a time when the Socialists are not necessarily in the driver's seat on the left.

 

[Gonzo]

Obviously the mention of my boi Pompidou means that this update is prime Gonzo bait @Yes. As always I love McGoverning, and the fact it included some stuff with French politics related this time in the form of Pompidou, is something I really like. I don't really know if I like the idea of Pompidou living longer, I mean I do like that he is alive for longer, but the thought of him basically being in pain and discomfort for another year isn't nice at all. That being said I guess this'll have ramifications for the now 1975 Presidential race. Pompidou and those around him likely know the game is up, so he'll probably have work done to ensure that the Gaullists get to the runoff at the very least. That being said this is definitely to the benefit of Mitterrand and the PS, as the longer the election is delayed, the stronger the Union de la Gauche will be.

 

[King of the Uzbeks]

We stan Archer Blood's cool name and we stan his actions.

 

[Expat]

Wow. This is the kind of thing that makes me want to take back previous compliments on your writing so that I can offer them fresh with fuller impact. Really moved by some of the turns of phrase in that first section especially. And thanks for introducing us to Mr. Blood, embarrassed to say I hadn't been aware of his story before. What a guy...

So here's my thought on the big upside for greater ties to India: 1975 gives us Sholay and Deewaar, assuming butterflies leave them alone (the butterflies wouldn't frigging dare). Imagine the cream of cool/crazy Bollywood action cinema gaining the cultural penetration in the US that Enter the Dragon got IOTL- which, incidentally, is also happening in the early-mid 70s, and itself probably helps pave the way for American audiences accepting foreign action aesthetics.

 

[Yes]

Going to need to reread the arms control section a bit more to share my own thoughts on it in detail from what you mentioned.

I significantly enjoyed the bit on aviation, especially for the Soviet Tristar and also how you're going to be seeing the emergence of the Twinstar and DC-10 Twin... and in turn emerging as explicit competitors with the Airbus A310. Y'know, I'm weirdly surprised there wasn't anything talking about the Emergency Loan Guarantee Act and how it ties into how Lockheed is doing.

Glad you're having fun with it! The Carter-era haggling about a possible Lockheed-Soviet deal got close enough to produce tchotchkes for Aeroflot executives' desks, which is delightful for AH purposes:

There is one graf in there about the Loan Guarantee Act though it's not formally named, beyond that mostly just the backhanded implication that earning some serious rubles would be good for the company books and help get nagging congresscritters *glances sideways at Bill Proxmire* to lay off a little.

As for the great wide-body race that's coming ITTL yes, we get opportunities for Glorious Photoshopped Passenger Aviation Porn like, well, like this:

The DC Twin in the hands of a couple of likely customers

And a really very nicely done image of the -600 from Lockheed done up to look like one of their OTL advertisements for the trijet version

And if McDonnell Douglas can manage to, y'know, have not quite so many mass-casualty crashes with the big bird in the Seventies, so that it doesn't pick up that "Death Cockpit 10" rep it took years to recover from (and, along with some rather disastrous engine choices for the later models of the MD-80 commuter series, probably killed McDonnell Douglas' civil aviation business) we might get to see the Super Sixty that MD was dead keen to build, which is basically a premature Boeing 777 back when you still needed at least three engines over water (the politics of ETOPS might get interesting by the Eighties, with MD determined to dance with the trijets that brought them and other makers jockeying to get their mid-sized twins with modern, more reliable engines on routes bigger than the Caribbean or the Bay of Bengal.)

But we'll see. Interesting times. If Boeing's "N" and "X" projects turn into something substantively like the 757 and 767, respectively, of OTL, they will be substantively better-performing aircraft than the early wide-bodies jockeying in the McGoverningverse (of which the Lockheed L-1011-600 and late-model Airbus A300s are the better of the batch, ahead of the rather underpowered DC Twin that holds more bums in seats but can only go about two-thirds as far, if the cargo doors and other bits agree to stay on in flight...) But with earlier deregulation we're likely to see the -600 and Airbus and the DC Twin duking it out among the healthier members of the regulation-era "Big Four" (that'd be American, Eastern, United, and TWA) plus other emerging big players like Delta and Continental, getting in orders before the guys in Seattle can get out of wind-tunnel modeling. We'll see how all that goes. Also what comes of a potential European challenge to the 737/DC-9 end of things, since at this point "Airbus" really is just a consortium of anxious European companies looking for a sweet spot to stay in business by clubbing together. There are several other, variable ways such an organization might have come together, with several other members, on several different projects, not always under the same label. It's a fertile time to be interested in that kind of thing.

And, just to switch gears (ha see what I did there) onto the open road, soon to be a hipster favorite of be-sweatered Western junior academics and foreign-car mechanics, U CANNUT HANDEL TEH MARXIST-LENINIST SEXEH:

Wir machen Spass indeed.

 

[Yes]

Wow. This is the kind of thing that makes me want to take back previous compliments on your writing so that I can offer them fresh with fuller impact. Really moved by some of the turns of phrase in that first section especially. And thanks for introducing us to Mr. Blood, embarrassed to say I hadn't been aware of his story before. What a guy...

So here's my thought on the big upside for greater ties to India: 1975 gives us Sholay and Deewaar, assuming butterflies leave them alone (the butterflies wouldn't frigging dare). Imagine the cream of cool/crazy Bollywood action cinema gaining the cultural penetration in the US that Enter the Dragon got IOTL- which, incidentally, is also happening in the early-mid 70s, and itself probably helps pave the way for American audiences accepting foreign action aesthetics.

Someone's been hacking my Scrivener notes

I stand by my earlier mention of that formative gag line in The Muppet Movie I first heard aged seven, from Gonzo (not our @Gonzo, Jim Henson's version): "I'm headed for the movie capital of the world... Bombay, India!" Just like Ladas hip-checking Volvos and Volkswagen Rabbits in the foreign-car showrooms (with that cool Volga Viking longship badge, too, certainly the best-engineered of the classic Crappy Soviet Four-Doors, made with robots and everything), Indian cinema may get a real opening here in the States, and also a possible acceleration of Subcontinental Brain Drain visas for talented electronics engineers, doctors, early software designers, etc., once again McGoverning is sometimes OTL with the gas pedal down, accelerated into different cultural and historical contexts.

And thanks very kindly re: the writing. I recommend to all the readership the book The Blood Telegram, it's really very good and does a good job of getting down in the weeds of multiple POVs: Blood's and the gang at the Dhaka consulate, Indira Ghandi's cabinet, the Dick and Henry Show, Sydney Schanberg who was one of the first correspondents to blow the whistle on just how horrendous the slaughter was, etc. Great and important read.

And yes I'd love to see a martial-arts musical with cheesy Seventies special effects and a cast of actual thousands storm American theaters. I can just see the Raimi brothers, for starters, going ape over that kind of style and then recapitulating it with a big budget decades later...

 

[Yes]

We stan Archer Blood's cool name and we stan his actions.

We stan your stanning, good sir.

So M. Pompidou holds out for a bit longer. The OTL Election featured a chaotic fight to be the right's standard bearer, and was followed by quite a narrow win by Giscard. A little tap could turn it on its head. Either towards a larger (and possibly more Gaullist) right wing victory, or towards M. Mitterand at a time when the Socialists are not necessarily in the driver's seat on the left.

Obviously the mention of my boi Pompidou means that this update is prime Gonzo bait @Yes. As always I love McGoverning, and the fact it included some stuff with French politics related this time in the form of Pompidou, is something I really like. I don't really know if I like the idea of Pompidou living longer, I mean I do like that he is alive for longer, but the thought of him basically being in pain and discomfort for another year isn't nice at all. That being said I guess this'll have ramifications for the now 1975 Presidential race. Pompidou and those around him likely know the game is up, so he'll probably have work done to ensure that the Gaullists get to the runoff at the very least. That being said this is definitely to the benefit of Mitterrand and the PS, as the longer the election is delayed, the stronger the Union de la Gauche will be.

I'll group these two together here. Pompidou does indeed hang on grimly through, as @Gonzo empathetically points out, really pretty horrendous health conditions. But that keeps the UDR in Pompidou's vise-like if pallid grip. Which, as @King of the Uzbeks points out, could pretty much go one of two ways.

And yes, thisguy is going to want to have a lot more to say about the Union Gauche platform ITTL:

 

[Yes]

US Ambassador Archer Blood photographed in his ambassadorial office, Dhaka, Bangladesh

Director Norman Borlaug, of the United States Food For Peace Agency (a subordinate agency of the U.S. Department of Peace) inspects high-yield wheat varietals in Madhya Pradesh, India

France's foreign minister, Jean Sauvaugnargues, seen at a press conference during the Rambouillet Talks in late 1974

Former Lockheed CEO Carl Kotchian, seen here shortly before his retirement in the wake of both the Aeroflot Deal and revelations of corrupt practices in Lockheed sales abroad

Secretary of Defense Cyrus Vance, Special Ambassador to the Rambouillet Talks Clark Clifford, and Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency David Attlee Phillips* testify before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations' subcommittee on arms control about the Comprehensive Arms Reduction Treaty (CART)

*= Shh, spoilers. We'll get there two chapters from now.