Oh dear, that certainly got out of hand... Oh well, that won't stop me from publishing a new update.
Chapter IX: Return of the Kennedys, 1979-1984
The year 1979 started with a tragedy for the US government. Vice President Nelson Rockefeller – with whom Nixon had established not only a working relationship, but also a warm personal relationship over the past seven years – died of a heart attack on January 26th 1979, aged 70. Nixon grieved for someone who he’d come to consider a friend, but also remained practical, knowing he couldn’t leave the office of Vice President vacant for too long. He selected his Secretary of the Treasury, former Governor of Texas, former Secretary of the Navy, and Democrat turned Republican John Connally as his new Vice President. George H.W. Bush, Congressman from Texas since 1967 and elected as Senator from that state in 1976, replaced Connally as Secretary of the Treasury. These changes were important as 1980 was an election year and Nixon, knowing this, tried to provide his intended successor with the best possible chance of success. The last thing the Republicans could use were highly divided primaries.
Against Nixon’s wishes, the Republican primaries were hotly contested and several forerunners were seen as having a serious chance at getting the nomination. Despite Nixon’s endorsement, Vice President Connally received serious competition from Secretary of the Treasury and former Texas Senator George H.W. Bush, Attorney General and former Kansas Senator Bob Dole, and Secretary of State and former California Governor Ronald Reagan. During the Republican National Convention held in July 1980 in the Texas Stadium in Dallas, Connally won the nomination and chose Reagan, one of his strongest competitors, as his running mate. Similar to the previous election, Bush and Dole were offered continuation of their cabinet positions in the event of a Republican victory. To appeal to increased religious observance in the post-war world, as the people turned to God for moral support, Connally tried unsuccessfully to copy some of Reagan’s conservative Christian rhetoric.
The 1980 Democratic primaries were the opposite of what their opponents experienced (much to Nixon’s envy). Senator from New York Robert F. Kennedy, former Attorney General during the administration of his still highly popular brother JFK, threw his hat into the ring. In a show of unity all prominent Democrats endorsed him and gave him a wide berth, resulting in only token opposition in the primaries. For the first time in years John F. Kennedy appeared at a major event by attending the Democratic National Convention in August in Midway Stadium in Saint Paul, Minnesota, and delivering a well-received speech on the opening night: “[…] During those terrible days in the fall of 1962 I said the country would be back on its feet before the decade was out. All of us together did just that, but there are still scars and open wounds in this great nation. Now I ask you to support my brother and heal this country together so that, by the year 2000, we can honestly say America is even better than before the war and our grandchildren can have what our children could not.” Robert Kennedy won the nomination in a landslide. He chose Minnesota Senator Walter Mondale as his running mate.
People noticed Kennedy appeared feeble, though this obviously didn’t impair his oratory skills. He walked with a cane for brief stretches and was wheelchaired to his car by his wife Jacqueline. This wasn’t a complete surprise as John had already made a brief televised appearance in a talk show six months earlier to discuss his recently published memoires, during which he’d gotten on stage with a cane. His health had plagued him all his life. He had Addison’s disease and suffered from chronic and severe back pain. During his presidential years Kennedy suffered from high fevers, stomach, colon, and prostate issues, abscesses, high cholesterol and adrenal problems. He died of a heart attack in 1987, aged 70. This was long enough for him to witness his brother’s re-election.
The war had destroyed much, throwing parts of the country back decades, and economic growth had peaked in the double digits around 1970. By the late 70s, however, economic activity had nearly returned to pre-war levels as reconstruction no longer fuelled growth. America was ready to export again, but in 1979 Western markets still had not recovered to the point that average Europeans could think about buying an American car or a TV set. In the longer term, the economy would reorient to Latin American, African and Asian markets with products matching the purchasing power of the consumers there. In the short term, a recession gripped the country starting in late 1979. The Federal Reserve had advised Nixon to lower the interest rate to increase the money supply, which would prop up the demand for goods and services.
The Federal Reserve initially dismissed inflation as a secondary concern under the belief that this recession would be “sharp but short”, but to their amazement and grave concern the economy continued to stagnate while inflation rose sharply. The interest rate was raised radically and this disinflationary policy did what it intended to do as it curbed inflation seriously. The raised interested rates, however, drew widespread criticism as the construction, farming and industrial sectors were heavily affected. Nixon could not be persuaded to adopt a large quarter trillion dollar Keynesian stimulus package proposed by the Democrats in Congress. His chief economic advisor Paul Volcker advised against it, pointing out that during his entire time in office Nixon’s economic policy had concerned itself with bringing government debt back under control. During his last year in office, Nixon stuck to a policy to keep government finances sound through high interest rates and austerity measures, while hoping to stimulate the economy further by further decreasing corporate taxes and the income taxes for the highest tax brackets. During his State of the Union in January 1980 before a joint session of Congress, Nixon announced that “government finances are fully sound and national debt is completely under control.” About the high interest rate and austerity measures he said “I know these are tough times for many Americans, but we must stay the course. I believe this crisis will end soon, and America will emerge stronger from it. Our great people have endured worse before, and I believe they can endure this as well. We all need to wait just a little while longer and then the burden will be lifted, yielding great economic rewards. Good things come to those who wait. As we know from the good book, patience is a virtue. Now is the time to be virtuous.” His address did not fall on deaf ears in a country in which Christian faith was resurgent on both sides of the political spectrum ever since the war.
Robert Kennedy nonetheless ran a highly successful campaign that attacked the incumbent administration on its counterproductive approach to this recession, which disproportionally affected working and middle class families. Kennedy pointed out America’s creditors still trusted her creditworthiness, giving the government sufficient leeway to engage in debt spending to combat this crisis. The US would easily be able to get a serious extension of payments under these circumstances. Kennedy accused the Nixon Administration of being “obsessed with the debt” while they “should concern themselves with the hardship the American people are experiencing.” He regularly cited the Christian value of solidarity. Despite the fact that Nixon campaigned heavily for his intended successor, Connally lost. The Kennedy/Mondale ticket obtained 50.3% of the popular vote, carried 26 states and gained 284 electoral votes. The Connally/Reagan ticket won 48% of the popular vote, carried 24 states and secured 251 electoral votes. Not only that, but the Democrats regained the House of Representatives as well. Robert F. Kennedy was inaugurated on January 20th 1981.
President Robert Kennedy had the support of the House, but not the Senate. After negotiations with a few Republican senators, he managed to pass a smaller stimulus package of $175 billion with Republican support on the condition that he wouldn’t raise taxes for the rich and major corporations. This changed in the 1982 US Senate elections, when the Democrats gained enough seats for a fifty-fifty divide. This meant President Robert Kennedy could be sure of the support of both houses of Congress. If all of his Senators voted in his favour, then he had the Senate too as his VP would cast the decisive vote in the event of a tie in the Senate. A second gargantuan stimulus package of $750 billion was passed.
The first instalment of the stimulus package was used to subsidize businesses on the condition that they didn’t lay off any more employees, resulting in millions of people keeping their jobs where they otherwise wouldn’t have. The result was that many people didn’t experience a serious decrease in purchasing power, allowing for the demand for goods and services to remain stable at a doable level. A second tranche was meant for the medium term to help the economy transition to production aimed at the US’s new virtually captive markets, for lack of major economic competition from other powers, in Asia, Africa and Latin America.
A third formidable slice containing $150 billion was solely intended for the European Reconstruction Program. Robert Kennedy declared in Congress that “the previous administration has made a promise to come to the aid of our friends in Europe, who’ve languished in a post-war malaise for far too long. Years ago we were still rebuilding our own country, but now there’s no reason not to keep our promise anymore. So I have faith Congress will approve of this recovery program, so no-one can say America doesn’t do as it says and so I can tell the poor people of Europe: hold on, help is on the way.” For comparison the 1948 Marshal Plan had transferred $12 billion worth of aid to Europe which, adjusted for inflation, amounted to $48 billion in 1982. The proposed European Reconstruction Program, passed by a Democrat dominated Congress was triple that. The goods delivered consisted of food, medicine, construction equipment, construction materials, coal, oil, steel, cars, trucks, trains, ships, aircraft and entire disassembled factory buildings and power plants to be put together at their intended destination. This much more than anything ended the recession of the early 80s in the US and the country would benefit doubly: by the beginning of the last decade of the twentieth century, many Europeans were finally in a position to buy consumer goods.
Even then, Europe in 1992, three decades after the war, still didn’t compare to the pre-1962 situation, but at least Europe’s despair ended: a population that had become numb and apathetic, believing God didn’t exist at all or that he’d abandoned them, saw a ray of sunshine. This didn’t lead to a religious revival: after the Pope had been killed in 1962 by the attack on Rome, many Catholics believed God didn’t exist because he wouldn’t have allowed the destruction of the tomb of Saint Peter, one of Jesus’s apostles and the first Pope. The general despair also affected the Protestant churches, as their pastors and reverends couldn’t satisfactorily explain why God would punish Europe so extremely. In America and Europe the war paradoxically had opposite effects: while secularization was contained in the United States, the war had sped it up in Europe. American scholars in religious studies attribute this by the outpouring of misery being much greater across the Atlantic.
This immense suffering is also cited as the reason why democracy struggled. Italy had split into a neo-fascist monarchy in the south and a market socialist republic in the north. In Spain, the attempt by Juan Carlos to restore democracy after Franco’s death was killed in the cradle by a coup d’état of colonels seeking to continue the conservative, Catholic military dictatorship. In Germany, a government of national unity tried to rule and there hadn’t been an election since WW III, and there were accusations of authoritarianism the longer practices like labour conscription continued. Germany was characterized as a benevolent dictatorship. In France, the Fourth Republic had been replaced by the Fifth Republic, which devolved into dictatorship as “emergency powers” to rule by decree were given to De Gaulle, who didn’t relinquish them but passed them on to his successor Pompidou. The Gaullist Union of Democrats for the Republic became the de facto ruling parting and would remain in power for decades. Nationalism and xenophobia seriously slowed down the progress of European cooperation and blame was mostly shifted to communism, though some blame how John F. Kennedy handled the war by refusing to launch a massive strike to prevent the Soviet launch. Nonetheless, American aid was welcomed of course.
In Britain, the first-past-the-post electoral system prevented any authoritarian party from muscling its way into power and democracy surprisingly survived, although the stringent post-war measures became more and more criticized in the late 70s, early 80s as dictatorial. The Liberal Party experienced a serious resurgence in the 1979 UK general election, mostly at the expense of Labour though the Conservatives lost seven constituencies too. In 1979, the Tories won 270 seats, Labour 269 seats and 68 went to the Liberals. The House of Commons had 635 seats, which meant 318 were needed for a majority and no party had achieved that, which meant that a coalition had to be formed. This was unusual in British politics. Labour and the Conservatives both had the option of siding with the Liberals, but instead entered a marriage of convenience to maintain the political status quo.
A significant minority within Labour was opposed to this, resulting in the 1981 split in which ten labour MPs briefly formed the Social Democratic Party in. In 1982, the SDP merged with the Liberal Party to form the Liberal Democrats. They’d attract the vote of the those angry with all the post-war restrictions that were still in effect two decades after the fact. Especially labour conscription caused outrage among Generation X, i.e. the post-war generation and youth leaders denounced it as “slavery”. By the 1983 UK general election the House of Commons had grown to 650 seats, which required 326 for a majority. The 1983 election was a watershed event for several reasons: firstly voter turnout in ’79 was only 69%, it rose to 85% in 1983 as the LibDems mobilized the festering resentment against the establishment, particularly among young voters. The Tories dropped from 270 to 250 seats and Labour from 259 to 199 while the LibDems number of seats increased by the whopping number of 82 to a total of 150. Recognizing which way the wind was blowing, Labour entered a Labour-LibDem coalition. This led to the abolition of the hated labour conscription in 1984 and the restoration of a number of other civil liberties.
Meanwhile, a final instalment of the 1982 US stimulus package was reserved to begin rebuilding the cities struck by Soviet nuclear weapons in the war. The Residence Act of 1982 adopted by Congress and signed into law by President Robert F. Kennedy provided for a national capital and permanent seat of government to be established at a location to be selected by Kennedy and his advisors. It was considered to rebuild Washington DC on its original location. The ruins of the original had almost completely been reclaimed by nature, with the partially collapsed dome of the Capitol Building being among the few structures sticking up above the vegetation. It was decided to leave this site, which many considered a massive war grave, undisturbed out of respect for the victims of the attack on Washington and rename it Old Washington DC National Park.
New Washington DC would be built on the Delmarva Peninsula, after Delaware, Maryland and Virginia had graciously donated the necessary land. It would be grander than the original to display America’s renewed self-confidence. New Washington didn’t copy the east-west grid with diagonal avenues of the old city. Instead, in the final winning plan the new city had wide avenues with four traffic lanes in both directions radiating out from the centre like spokes on a wheel. Smaller avenues with two traffic lanes in both directions were located in between. The avenues were intersected by a series of ring roads. The areas in between the “spokes” and the “rings” were roughly rectangular and these were subdivided further into rectangles with long and wide straight roads. At the heart of the city was the seat of government, which included a carbon copy of the White House based on surviving architectural plans and pre-war photographs. Exact replicas of monuments like the Washington Monument, the Lincoln Memorial and the Jefferson Memorial were also built and the WW III Memorial was added to that. It consisted of marble and granite steles with the names of the killed Washingtonians of 1962 inscribed into them with gold lettering, through which visitors could walk. A statue representing Columbia, the female national personification of the United States, was located in the centre. The new Capitol Building was most definitely not a mere replica of the original. The dome had twice the volume of the original and was gold painted on the outside and a copy of the “Apotheosis of Washington” fresco of the original was on the inside. The House and Senate wings were also twice as long as the originals and added to them were wings built crossways at each end, housing the Library of Congress and the Supreme Court. All three branches of government and the world’s largest library were united in one building. When seen from above, the building looks like two big T-shaped wings extending from the dome in the centre. The city was interspersed with very large parks and playgrounds to give the city a relaxing and family friendly appearance while the wide roads were meant to prevent congestion. Today half a million people call the city home, and 4 million people live in its entire metropolitan area.
After the planning stage, construction began in early 1984 and lasted eight years, after which the city would be inaugurated as the country’s permanent capital and seat of government in 1992. That was not the complete story though: all government departments had relocated to St. Louis, Missouri, after the war and plenty of its staff were reluctant to leave the city that had become their home. The result is that most departments retained part of their offices and staffs in St. Louis, ensuring its role as the second capital. The Secretaries and Undersecretaries with their senior staff mostly resided in New Washington and ran their departments by phone, though they were on-site once or twice a month. The middle and low level staff stayed in St. Louis. A second concern that led to this split were the two main threats to New Washington. Firstly, the Delmarva Peninsula was a flat, sandy area and the highest elevation was only 31 metres (102 feet) above sea level; seawalls were built to avert the threat posed by high water caused by storms. Secondly, the fear of a future nuclear war persisted, though the city was well protected: several air force bases were established with overlapping coverage and squadrons ready to take off at a moment’s notice, providing the city with jet fighters on stand-by 24/7. Besides that, several bases with anti-ballistic missiles protected the city. This monumental project was the crown to the reconstruction of America. The measures taken to protect it weren’t unwarranted as the US weren’t the only nuclear power anymore by the mid-80s.
Reconstruction began in several American cities, most prominently New York City. The state of New York hadn’t made the same consideration in rebuilding New York City as the federal government had with Washington: in other words, the city would be rebuilt on the exact same spot. In 1985, radiation levels had sunk to safe levels and it was decided to remove the wilderness that had covered much of the ruins and all the debris was cleared up as well, an effort that took two years. Like New Washington DC, it was a completely planned city from the sidewalks all the way up to the top of the skyscrapers and to the spaciously designed living areas with plenty of green and plenty of wide roads so rebuilt New York wouldn’t have such nightmarish traffic. The much more spread out nature of the “new” New York, like New Washington, had a safety aspect to it: a much more spread out city was less vulnerable to attack. Certain key buildings of course were restored as exact replicas: the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building and the Statue of Liberty among others. The World Trade Centre, by contrast, got a new and modern building that appeared from the outside to be made of glass and had on innovative twisted design. At 600 metres, it was the world’s tallest building upon completion in 1998. People moved in the moment the first housing was ready. New York City, being much bigger than DC, took much longer to complete though: the city was inaugurated in 2005.
The economic stimuli that were given in phases produced immediate effects, with the economy registering 2.5% growth in 1983 and 4% in 1984 as opposed to the near total stagnation of the 1979-1982 years. This success came at the right time for Robert Kennedy as the economy was always a hot item in Presidential elections, and 1984 was an election year. Besides that, the beginning of building a new capital to replace the temporary one, St. Louis, was seen as a restoration of national prestige.
The Kennedy/Mondale ticket won the nomination with token opposition and the Democratic National Convention repeated the successes of the past four years, and painted a picture of the next four years. Kennedy had a 70% approval rating. In the meantime, the Republicans had a sense of doom and gloom, believing they couldn’t win in ’84. What didn’t help was that their most popular figure, Ronald Reagan, declined to run because of health concerns, and after losing the election in 1968 and failing to win the nomination in 1976 and 1980 in the first place. He didn’t want to be the fall guy blamed for the Republican defeat in 1984 and didn’t feel anything for becoming the Republican version of William Jennings Bryan (a three time Democratic nominee and loser in the early twentieth century). A pair of paper candidates represented the Republicans: former Minnesota Governor Harold Stassen and former US Special Envoy to Paraguay Ben Fernandez from California constituted the Republican ticket (Fernandez was the first Hispanic Vice Presidential nominee). The end result was a total landslide victory in favour of the Democrats: 57% of the popular vote, 48 states and 478 electoral votes as opposed to 42.4% of the popular vote, two states and 57 electoral votes for the Republicans. This result mirrored John F. Kennedy’s victory in 1964.
