This in particular really strikes me, as McGoverning!HST seems to have gotten a brief glimpse into the troubles we here in OTL 2020 have wound up in (as one who takes powerful hallucinogens in a narrative can do). The real question is: can he get anyone to actually listen and do something about it?
McGoverning
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- Start date
Oh, even IOTL HST was more prescient than many other observers about how the Nixonian proto/paleo-Fox News mindset worked and to whom it appealed, who the "Silent Majority" were and how they viewed the world, even things to which other chroniclers of the period paid less attention or tried actively to dismiss -- HST had a strong sense of the potential in what we'd now typically call white nationalism and how you could appeal to chunks of the electorate with it, because he'd paid attention to that on the leading edge of backlash in the Sixties. He hated both men but he got Nixon, especially Nixon's appeal to a swathe of the electorate, and he got George Wallace. That knowledge told him a great deal about the taproots of more contemporary political... complications.
The trouble of course was not just getting people to listen but especially getting people to do something about problems that seemed inchoate at the time, or for which they believed there were other solutions (e.g. going back to the well on New Deal/Great Society economic policy, which wasn't totally off base given the degree to which that was very much not done IOTL's Seventies with the partial exception of the '76 Congressional stimulus package), or didn't have the mindset or disposition to go at. It is I suspect one of the things that wore him down over time.
I look forward to these 
"Oh, I don't have to outrun the bear..."
Teddy is to blame for so much and so few people know it, or these days even remember him. The man who brought courtier and horse-race journalism to the fore in presidential campaign coverage, not altogether surprising since he was one of Jack Kennedy's acolytes. Yes please to more Cramer.
My impetus, as I was bashing along on the keyboard at that point, to include the album - besides as you say the wild diversity of LPs at that point in time, it really was something - was that IOTL during the Senate Watergate hearings, Sam Ervin cut such an album that was an admixture of his folsky bit (the man graduated near the top of his class from Harvard Law and was actually a much decorated hero of the trenches in World War I, "simple country lawyer" my eye...) and also spoken-word versions of songs like "Bridge over Troubled Water." It's wild. There used to be a copy on YouTube, I'll have to bird-dog that and see if one's still there.
HST understood the lumpensuburbitariat all too terribly well, much better than most of his contemporaries. I believe it's one of the things that ate away at him slowly until he could bear no more.
Bradley had the right instincts. Full marks for "bilious glad-hander." Helms though was also a skilled artisan of what we could call "Fox News before Fox News," i.e. reactionary commenters and editorialists on local/regional-service news outlets with reactionary owners (at that time WRAL's owner was a noted segregationist winger.) The FCC actually pulled the license on a network affiliate in Jackson, MS for censoring national news broadcasts' civil-rights stories. If someone hasn't written the book on these phenomena they should, down at the granular, local level, even in the days of the vaunted Fairness Doctrine, winger broadcasting and opinion was vibrant during the backlash years. Roger Ailes' first idea for something like Fox News was to provide stock footage/stories/commentary direct to localized, winger-owned outlets so they didn't have to go through the "liberal" networks for stories and commentary.
On reflection it is, and it's quite possible that was one of the several hurdles of that nature Nixon faced.
What moves The Dick in the end is all the dirt, the personal dirt and the grubby finances and all the things that would erode his carefully-crafted public image (to call back a line from George Himself in the previous chapter "he grew up poor and pretending not to be," and that anxious artifice stayed with Nixon all his days), what it would do if that wide sea of paper discovery ended up in circulation among reporters. He could probably beat a Logan Act rap because its constitutionality had never been tried before especially on a man running for president, and he could muddy the waters on obstruction. Might even try on conspiracy to commit burglary ("blow the safe.") But the dirt, the dirt would cling and broke-down Nixon just isn't up for that anymore.
"Oh, I don't have to outrun the bear..."
Teddy is to blame for so much and so few people know it, or these days even remember him. The man who brought courtier and horse-race journalism to the fore in presidential campaign coverage, not altogether surprising since he was one of Jack Kennedy's acolytes. Yes please to more Cramer.
My impetus, as I was bashing along on the keyboard at that point, to include the album - besides as you say the wild diversity of LPs at that point in time, it really was something - was that IOTL during the Senate Watergate hearings, Sam Ervin cut such an album that was an admixture of his folsky bit (the man graduated near the top of his class from Harvard Law and was actually a much decorated hero of the trenches in World War I, "simple country lawyer" my eye...) and also spoken-word versions of songs like "Bridge over Troubled Water." It's wild. There used to be a copy on YouTube, I'll have to bird-dog that and see if one's still there.
HST understood the lumpensuburbitariat all too terribly well, much better than most of his contemporaries. I believe it's one of the things that ate away at him slowly until he could bear no more.
Bradley had the right instincts. Full marks for "bilious glad-hander." Helms though was also a skilled artisan of what we could call "Fox News before Fox News," i.e. reactionary commenters and editorialists on local/regional-service news outlets with reactionary owners (at that time WRAL's owner was a noted segregationist winger.) The FCC actually pulled the license on a network affiliate in Jackson, MS for censoring national news broadcasts' civil-rights stories. If someone hasn't written the book on these phenomena they should, down at the granular, local level, even in the days of the vaunted Fairness Doctrine, winger broadcasting and opinion was vibrant during the backlash years. Roger Ailes' first idea for something like Fox News was to provide stock footage/stories/commentary direct to localized, winger-owned outlets so they didn't have to go through the "liberal" networks for stories and commentary.
On reflection it is, and it's quite possible that was one of the several hurdles of that nature Nixon faced.
What moves The Dick in the end is all the dirt, the personal dirt and the grubby finances and all the things that would erode his carefully-crafted public image (to call back a line from George Himself in the previous chapter "he grew up poor and pretending not to be," and that anxious artifice stayed with Nixon all his days), what it would do if that wide sea of paper discovery ended up in circulation among reporters. He could probably beat a Logan Act rap because its constitutionality had never been tried before especially on a man running for president, and he could muddy the waters on obstruction. Might even try on conspiracy to commit burglary ("blow the safe.") But the dirt, the dirt would cling and broke-down Nixon just isn't up for that anymore.
One can never go wrong with Young Frankenstein. Thanks for that.
I'm working strictly off the top of my head here but I think one of those Diems was deliberate, as in "the guy Thieu didn't want to end up like," but the other likely was a slip of the brain, thanks for the pick-up. Also on ROLLING THUNDER. Very glad to see the readers back also.
Ahhhhh....so good to see this back in style.
Something a bit odd going on there. Missing word, probably. Or Thompson's just out of his gourd on exotic substances.
No just the usual sort of booze-and-reds cocktail for Hunter, the kind where he can still keep a train of thought on a track, albeit the twisty kind; that one's definitely a typo
McGoverning: Chapter 18
Ad Interim
We have, I fear, confused power with greatness.
- Stewart Udall
People are strangers to politics. They are not radical, not liberal,
not conservative, not reactionary; they are inactionary; they are
out of it.
- C. Wright Mills
Just keep stirring the pot. You never know what will come up.
- Lee Atwater
- Stewart Udall
People are strangers to politics. They are not radical, not liberal,
not conservative, not reactionary; they are inactionary; they are
out of it.
- C. Wright Mills
Just keep stirring the pot. You never know what will come up.
- Lee Atwater
She was warm. It … wasn’t right, even though he guessed she would be. But it just … wasn’t right. None of it was. As though he couldn’t get his feet under him on something solid, like it was all out of place, off, like he could turn around to find something where it should be and find it absent, walk purposefully into the job and find the numb disconcerting strangeness that things weren’t as he expected. This wasn’t like training, not like the war stories of some of the older guys in the division — it sure as hell wasn’t like Police Story, or like eating TV dinners in front of Adam-12 reruns in high school then deciding this was what he wanted to do. Off. Just… off. Dislocated and strange. Not right.
The body alone was enough to prove that, with her over-gaudy dress and twisted bangles and the long heel off one shoe like the kind of evidence he was meant to tag and observe, only now it was just dull leather and wood in a strange shape, out of place as everything else was. Her legs, lean like a dancer’s, smooth right up to the hip-hugging dress cropped at her knees but just… there. Splayed and still and human but with nothing to them. No substance, like … like meat, limp. Now he knew what lifeless meant.
More evidence: down those arcing calves purple suppurations had risen up even while he’d marked the scene and pulled them together with his partner. The furious bands where one of the guys who had seen her go in grabbed what he could and tried to haul her back out again. The tight curls of her perm sodden, matted where she’d hit — no gore, either, wasn’t going to gross out any probies with this one, nothing like it ought to be — and strangely twisted almost like it had scalped her before a little tug of thought in his preoccupied mind told him it was a wig. Face looked striking in an older lady’s way, a little like Rita Moreno when he thought about it. Like she’d catch a man’s eye but now just… somewhere else. Not where he could get to anything, make it fit like it was supposed to. Her fate, her self, gone where he couldn’t see.
He shoved his hands in his pockets a moment because he just couldn’t figure quite what to do with himself, and turned toward the men. There were three of them: his partner had taken such a lead on them while he checked the scene and marked it out around her body with quiet intent and that need to get a handle on what had happened that the guys had disappeared from his senses like an absence of mind.
He heard before he saw, the one guy distraught, pacing and spinning and crying and yelling, a lot of it not in English and so fast it had taken him some time to realize it was Spanish. The other one who wouldn’t look his partner in the eye even as his fellow officer squared up to the mug and talked in that stern voice of command they taught you about three weeks into the course. Gestures, shrugs, a different kind of confusion, and when his partner pressed the fellow the answers just dissolved like paper in this drizzle, the chill late-September damp that made it so much better to just stay in your squad car hard by the Tidal Pool and hope it was a dull night. No such luck.
Then there was that third guy, face mussed like he’d been in a scuffle, little guy, glasses, the round little balding pug face of an accountant. He just sat still on the curb, almost folded in on himself, a small man made smaller as the wide empty space of death overawed him. Maybe we oughta try that guy, he thought to himself. The one his partner had buttoned up was too shocked and too scared and probably too hammered to give a straight answer. The griever was half-wild with his own pain, he’d had to restrain the guy a couple of times when he rushed the body, the most real — most proper, said part of his mind — part of it so far. Maybe the little guy’s got something to say.
Just when he got himself squared up to go find that out the headlights arced across the crime scene like a welder’s torch. He saw the second squad car come in fast, no lights or siren, heard it stop hard as it shuddered into place, heard the gears ache as the driver threw it in park. The door flew open and the shouts sunk deep into him and weighed him down like cement. He knew that voice. Well, shit: Sarge was here.
His sergeant barreled solo out of the squad car. Sarge’s voice was a strangely masterful duet: he barked the two juniors’ names, orders to the suspects, all while a low long snarl of profanity poured from him between commands. Sarge was husky with a boot-brush mustache, a self-described tough Polack from up north unlike the lean, keen, terribly young guys from NoVa who thought the Park Police had all the glamor of the badge minus the tedium and violence and fear involved if you walked a beat in the District’s slums. Sarge did not suffer … anyone, really. And surely not now. Not now.
“Mother of fucking God,” said Sarge as he pulled the young partners in. “Mother of fucking God. Talk.”
So his partner, the more aggressive and earnest of the pair, did. They’d picked up the car’s tail weaving nearby, followed in quiet like the Park Police did. That was SOP for park cops because this was the District, not just some hick dormitory town either side of the Potomac. There were well-connected lawyers, lobbyists, under-secretaries of some department or other, congressmen, hell even big men with the Bureau, in and out of the restaurants and bars and gentlemen’s clubs up and down this town.
So you kept it soft, made sure nobody got hurt, rode herd. If you had to, you cut ‘em off and got names. Not citations, names. Names were currency in this town, the Park Police well-funded and trusted by the boys’ club in five-hundred-dollar suits that ran it. Keep people safe, keep ‘em quiet, keep those prized names in your patrol notebooks and out of the papers. That was the deal.
But then, said his partner, it happened. The tale tumbled out now, how she’d barreled out the passenger side with the car weaving at speed and run off to the right — toward the Basin they realized later but first there was the car to deal with. It swung wide, then hard left, and peeled out another way, which is when they flipped the patrol car’s lights for pursuit. It was a weaving chase, brief, before the car seemed to hesitate and then doubled back faster, back where she’d run off, to the Basin.
In the end they had to use the siren, and when the car screeched to a halt it seemed like they’d collared whoever it was. But then like a ship of fools everyone tumbled out of it confused, one of them shouting. His partner, himself, they’d gotten out of the car and walked out to flank the guys in the approved pattern for a stop and search. One guy scanned the basin, saw something, what wasn’t clear … then the screams started. The guy charged into the water, splashing and churning, grabbed something and started to haul back towards the bank. They were along one of the flatter stretches of the Basin, near where Congress had for a time set up a public beach in the Twenties. Whites-only of course, it was the District in the Twenties, but when more of the locals petitioned for a beach for colored folks too the grandees just shut it all down and boarded up.
After that it was just, really just, chaos. The trio of men who’d come out of the car spun and howled and fretted wildly. One just ran for it — his partner had chased the guy down, even unholstered his sidearm to make the point. Then it was like something gave way in the runner; he just slumped and turned back. After that they got the lay of the scene. Did the sobriety checks, which they almost didn’t need to, the trio from the car were so clearly gassed. Walked the Basin. Found her.
Jaw tight, Sarge walked with his two juniors to where they’d marked her body, then back among the unruly trio. Sarge closed his eyes a moment, pinched the bridge of his nose with thumb and forefinger, let out a deep breath. Then he spoke.
“You boys get what this is?” asked Sarge. “Do you? Because if you do not there is no fucking reason for you not to hand me those goddamn badges right now and go home because you do not fucking understand how this works. Do you get what this is?”
The young partners stood silent; Sarge carried on. “This,” said Sarge, “is why you stay in the fucking car. You fucking observe. You report. You keep the park — remember that? Perhaps they mentioned it while you were at the fucking academy — you keep the park safe. Bullshit you leave to the District mooks. Bullshit is not our job.” Sarge glared at the boys with badges — “do you understand what you have fucking done here? You have made bullshit our job!!”
Sarge kept up his interrogatory. “It breaks my fucking heart,” said Sarge, “that you boys lack the brains to fucking understand what you have got here. This is not some goddamn domestic, some kind of, of fucking argument or fucking caper where you get to play beat cops. Do you even know what fucking body you’ve got over there?”
He and his partner shook their heads, more scared of what would happen if they didn’t. Said Sarge, “that, gentlemen, is Ms. fucking Fanne Foxe who’s — who was — a gentlemen’s entertainer at the classiest strip joints in this town. Which is not even the half of it. Not the fucking half.”
Sarge swung his burly arm forward and stabbed a thickly-jointed finger at the small guy, the quiet one with glasses sat still on the curb. “Do either of you credits to the fucking service know who this gentleman is?!?” Sarge’s voice rose, finding more fury in the very substance of the air. Again the partners were silent.
“This, you goddamn geniuses, this is Mr. Wilbur Mills. And if you do not know who he is I swear to Christ you will be cleaning toilets in Wheeling by lunch. No? Wonderful. Mr. Wilbur Mills is the motherfucking Chairman of the Ways and Means Committee of the United States House of Representatives. On a quiet day he’s about the third-most powerful man in the goddamn federal government.”
Sarge thrust his biting stare at the younger officers again. “Either of you boys plan on collecting Social Security if I fucking let you live long enough?” Again they nodded for fear of worse. “He’s fucking why. And you thoughtful young men are why this whole fuckup is now our mess. Our crime scene. Our witness testimony. All because you chased a fucking car. Fuck. FUCK!!”
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
We shoulda seen Litton coming, said Karl Rove, mordant.
Lee Atwater, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, regarded his Young Republican partner between bites of the diner’s hash browns. We’re playin’ all the angles on this, Atwater answered. It’ll come right both races in the general. So lighten up, mushroom — you want that hot sauce?
The fuck’s “Mushroom,” Lee? asked Rove. Neither the tallest nor the manliest of men, Rove was quick to take offense but passed the sauce anyway.
You flower in shit, son, said Atwater, grinning through food. That’s real good for ops like us. Take the compliment, he added before a forkful of Tabasco-sodden scramble.
I’m saying the replacement candidacy came at us sideways, Rove added.
It’s all right — we did good son, Atwater opined. We did real good. We got our man. Only reason fellas like Tom Eagleton exist in the first place is ‘cause of goddamn Democrat machines anyway. Drink like a fish and drive like a lush, go hide at a sanatorium and get sizzled for yer nerves, act like a goddamn teenager in the United States Senate, and it all goes away because the St. Louis machine says so. Fuck that. We did this job to scalp his balls, and we got him good.
Atwater had a point, one Rove acknowledged. Especially given the start of the caper: they’d only come into the business after what you could call a political death by misadventure. Summer of the year before, back in ‘73, Rove had been locked in the political fight of his young life, a three-way brawl to become boss of the nation’s College Republicans, with Atwater his campaign manager. The two had barreled across the country from state to state, campus to campus, in a half-assed Ford Pinto, the artisanal ratfucking of college-chapter bylaws and constitutional niceties on their mind.
It was a three-way race and two of the contenders, Rove and a kid from Michigan, both were intent on playing king of the mountain by shoving the other guy’s delegates down the slope. As it was, by the time the process reached the Lake of the Ozarks in Missouri where the electoral convention would be held, the candidates had piled up enough rules challenges and procedural objections that nobody could tell who the hell was a proper delegate and the vote came out about four different ways. This put momentum behind the guy who seemed to have left the fewest rats fucked — the lean, charming, furiously evangelical Terry Dolan — but each candidate brought claims to the grown-ups of the party, the Republican National Committee itself.
Its chair at the time, the angular patrician George Bush who’d bagged his carpets from the Bush manse in Connecticut to the Texas oil patch in the late Forties and now held court in Houston, looked over the meshiver with displeasure. Not only had there been unacceptable levels of friendly fire in the process — the College Republicans had a thoroughly toxic rep for electoral bloodletting that went back almost to Eisenhower days — but now the whole mess had squirreled out to the papers. Someone had linked the play by play on procedural funny business to the press. More than that some character had sold a tale to the Post about Rove, the po-faced son of an earnestly broken home made good, telling recruits what not to do based on the dirty tricks of his own past. None of this improved George Herbert Walker Bush’s waspish temper.
In the end it came around a little, just enough probably, but not by much. Atwater swore up and down before notaries and the ghost of Abe Lincoln that Rove was just kidding around. Turned out the kid who’d leaked to the Post had been put up to it by parties unknown who said he could get in good with the Michigander for it. Bush, who was old school ties all the way down, abhorred a snitch more than the offense. Dolan won the election on Bush’s say-so, while the other two — Bush also had his eye on Atwater’s agile footwork — were told to get lost for a while and not to show up in any newspapers.
Of course every winner loves their war stories. In time the CRs’ grapevine yielded up a couple of Dolan’s body men who said he’d engineered the domino-fall of leaks, run the eager beaver tied to the Post through a couple of cut-outs to make it look like the Michigander’s play. Well fuck — had to respect a guy who was already wiping the knife down for prints while it was still stuck in you, the rest was fortunes of war.
In turn Rove and Atwater found themselves footloose in the Midwest, beyond the Republican pale for a stretch, with no special desire to get back to school (for Rove) or put on a suit in some bank or insurance adjustor’s office (for Atwater.) Amid the campaign farm teams of the Grand Old Party it was a fact well taken that a couple of bright young fuckers must be in search of a rat. As indeed they were.
They found him late in the autumn when Lee, eager as ever to show off his country boy’s ear for a good whisper — even though he’d grown up lower-middle-class in Aiken, South Carolina — got in good with a couple of dive bars east of Warrensburg, gigging on his guitar for motel money. There he heard the first murmurs of a primary campaign rising up to the southeast. Missouri’s most reactionary congressman — Richard Ichord, a lean, chiseled pillar of reaction, a Democrat of a type about two degrees off Tom Watson, a man who’d give the breath from his own lungs to keep the House Un-American Activities Committee on life support — wanted to tilt and had found himself a windmill.
Ichord, in his sixth term with the House of Representatives, chair of HUAC (renamed the Internal Security Committee to get Joe McCarthy’s lingering stench off), had raised his eyes above the horizon line towards a new goal. Faced by the abhorrence of a Got-Damn Hippie Lover who wore his party’s label in the White House, who strove for socialism and free love and God knew what else and bent over for Moscow every chance he got, Ichord meant to seize a more visible national soapbox and battle for the Lord, or at least Brother Hargis’ Anti-Communist Crusade.
In that pursuit he sized up the race for Missouri’s Class 3 United States Senate seat. It was held by freshman Thomas Eagleton, the boyish ex-district attorney of St. Louis County, product of St. Louis’ burly and still well-oiled Democratic political machine, a socially-staid Catholic and economic liberal with an environmentalist streak. Eagleton had flexed the machine’s muscles already when he queue-jumped the sitting senator, fellow Democrat Ed Long — a man rather more open-minded on the race question than folks in St. Louis’ white-flight suburbs or the Ozarks strictly liked — in a nasty primary fight back in ‘68. Richard Ichord thought that what came around might could go around.
When Atwater sat Rove down over cheese fries and spilled the fact pattern, Rove was lukewarm. At the same time, young Karl also looked to the ‘74 campaign season and the potential blank spot on his short resume with some concern. Atwater just saw the chance to help two Democrats fight like cats in a sack and breathed deep the rich iron tang of blood in his nostrils.
Rove clung to his doubts. Hush up and breathe deep, said Lee. Bush said stay out of the papers, right? You get into the real cousin-fuckers out here and they’re still settlin’ scores from the Civil War; Ichord doesn’t want to talk about any College Republican kids in his back office. We work hard, act modest, Ichord’s got plenty of old boys who’d prefer the spotlight, so let ‘em have it. What we need to do is grab some petty cash out of Ichord’s fish bowl and get around this state, meet some people. Get ‘em comfortable. Hear what they have to say.
For the next four months they laid down miles on shoe leather and the odometer that would’ve made a Fuller Brush man proud. Sometimes they trailed after Ichord’s old district hands, the bush-beaters and bagmen. Atwater was the keener student: you want to win the South and middle America for our party? he asked Rove. Watch what these old boys do then do it better. Other times they were out on the road, to Columbia, Rolla, St. Charles, St. Louis.
They got their Mutt and Jeff down quick. Atwater liked to call it “good cop, fun cop.” Though both men had dirtied eager hands in the past, now Rove played the square and Atwater the Devil’s old friend at the end of the bar. Rove, in the wide lapels of the moment’s fashion and a paisley tie, hairline creeping back past his sideburns, looked like a pained cross between an Oklahoma accountant and a junior televangelist. Atwater, with top two shirt buttons nearly always undone, feathered haircut, and bell-bottomed slacks on tight, looked every bit the Southern Rock rhythm guitarist he might well have been but for a happenstance or two. Thus arrayed, from courthouse steps to dive bars to cop bars to Elks Lodges to the favorite diners of the local press, they went about their business.
The drinking showed up first. It didn’t take long, especially once you hit the cop-bar circuit in the St. Louis ‘burbs, before you found the tales of Eagleton tanking up, then using most of the lanes on the road in a lazy weave before the local traffic beat took him aside and sent him home. It wasn’t much by itself but it was a start — Lee, Rove observed, wanted the why of it. They put in what both of them called their Ichord time too, prosyletizing, the bit Rove actually did best. Young Karl talked up Ichord and the politics of personal integrity so well that Lee liked to say he’d buy it if he’d never gotten out of Aiken or spent a moment’s time in the game. This gave Lee time to size up a given source or mark, and decide whether he should ease them in the direction of the fun stuff.
It ate through many an hour but they breathed this stuff: raised a little money, Atwater even played a benefit or two behind dive-bar fencing to keep the tossed bottles from landing, got to know Missouri’s in-state community of shoe-leather journalists, all the best bartenders, every serving or retired cop worth a chat in St. Louis metro. Had to know what the pieces are before you could play them, Atwater said. Rove thought that was right enough, and kept detailed notes.
It didn’t take forever to reach the good stuff. There was the route through the ex-cop to the bartender to a senior secretary in the St. Louis District Attorney’s office, or you could go through the defrocked courthouse-beat guy to the nervous former desk sergeant turned city bureaucrat, or really why not both. After that it was just fun, figuring out who’d be the cutout, who the source, how they could get just the best dirt, until the secretary turned up the chauffeur who knew the name of the charge nurse, and once they had a name for the ex-state patrol private eye who’d make the approach on the nurse they were golden. When Rove tidied it up and laid it all out on a map Atwater said it even looked pretty.
It was thence a manila envelope leapt over the Mississippi back east, to the in-box of no less than Jack Anderson, national investigative reporter of record, much given to turn over the larger rocks and step on whatever crawled out. That was really all they needed, said Atwater. After that everything took care of itself. All the St. Louis scribblers who’d sat on second-hand versions for years rushed in to make sure the Post-Dispatch didn’t get scooped by the eastern guys, and a bunch of would-be Woodwards and Bernsteins from a host of vectors — even, God help them, local television — dove in after the newest dirt that would make them America’s latest investigative heroes. Karl and Lee hotfooted it to Joplin to knock on doors while it kicked off, good Christian campaign work as Atwater observed.
It really hit home the first week of February, a cruel enough month already. Anderson had his two sources by then and neither the Post-Dispatch nor even the Kansas City Star were going to let him hog the stage. Eagleton, given to an earnest, jittering flopsweat at the best of times, came forward with a boyish grin like Jack Lemmon on the edge of a breakdown and talked about an “episode of nervous exhaustion” some years ago. Over a McDonald’s hamburger in a Joplin motel Lee Atwater fairly giggled with joy unconfined. He’s lyin’ too small, said Lee — you’ve got to lie the big lie or get it all out when someone like Anderson hits you, if you just lie in bits and pieces like your heart ain’t in it people will figure the truth the whole time.
Events proved the young man from Aiken right enough. Nervous exhaustion lasted the better part of two days, before the shock treatments hit the press. Rove and Atwater wrote up byplay for Ichord for the cameras, then passed it up by hand along the back highway towards Ichord’s district through one of his old boys who’d be all to eager to take credit for the bons mots. It was all stern integrity and concern for national security — if you had a cracked-up senator on your hands, did the Soviets know? Had they got to him already? — and just the littlest hints, subtlest of word choices, not to dance but at least tread firmly on Tom Eagleton’s cracks and scars.
They’d timed it perfect too, few if any state primaries yet, just enough of a moment’s lull on the national political scene for this to blow up like a trash can of lit gasoline. So all the big Missouri Dems, Warren Hearnes, the full gaggle of Symingtons, the Ozarks precinct captains who went back to Woodrow Wilson, all bundled up together and looked it over. Eagleton hauled his modest, harried wife and James Symington out to the city hall rotunda in St. Louis and proclaimed a new day of openness, vigor, and the shining optimism of tomorrow with an energy that really did feel like the ragged wing of a crashing jetliner as it sheared along the deck. Atwater had got his call in to the St. Louis CBS affiliate — always CBS, said Lee au fait to young Rove, that way it’ll be on Uncle Walter’s desk by supper — through a guy he’d jammed with at a barbecue shack near The Hill, to make sure they set up the camera down low and shot up, so all that sweat dazzled in the spotlights. It did the trick. One presser later and all the local affiliates had tipped to it. Two pressers after that, a long time in politics after all, Eagleton was done.
Being young fellas and a bit proud of themselves, Atwater later observed, they did rest on their laurels a little. Got back into the gory details lining up small donors, wheedling for mailing lists, or running advance on stump speeches. They’d made the chaos and now that chaos would take care of itself. Neither of them, any more than most other folks in Missouri politics at that moment, had quite expected the next turn of events.
While the state Democratic establishment hemmed over who they could back to put down Ichord’s rebellion, even whether they could manage at this late hour, a youngish fellow over around St. Joseph jumped in with both feet. Jerry Litton was a House freshman, a bright new face in front of the cameras to whom the grandees had not, before that moment, paid much mind. But he was a man of parts. A smart poor farm boy who’d done good, self-made cattle baron, distinguished former journalist, tall with a mellow, baritone Missouri twang, even a little handsome in a down-home way. He’d bootstrapped his entire, inaugural campaign two years back in ‘72 and bid fair to do the same again.
That was not, as it turned out, the half of it. What made Litton deadly, said Atwater in retrospect, was that he got it. When it came to Litton, Rove got the feeling as the race went on that Lee liked the guy. At least as much as Lee liked anyone who didn’t play the blues, which was to say it was good-natured professional courtesy. First, Litton was a goddamned natural on television. Not only that but he had made it a weapon in his own hands with this little public-access show called Dialogues With Litton, in which he sat down with his own constituents, brought in distinguished guests, showed his grasp of issues yet talked to people at their level like that easygoing smart fella in town, humble — all while he fine-tuned and directed the whole damn thing from the big chair at the center of the screen. Litton ran every facet of the show from the center ring, making these Missouri folks feel like it was a chat down at the local soda fountain… Atwater watched “Jerreh” go, Rove observed, with a look on Lee’s face like Lee was the Devil’s own John the Baptist.
Atwater and Rove did their due diligence the rest of the way, braced precinct captains, made calls, organized mailings and ran the little beehived ladies who licked the envelopes, wore out their knuckles on farmhouse doors. Ichord came second which was a decent show. But that Litton fella was thirty yards downfield of the rest. He had the TV — had the TV, knew how to make it reach out and grab folks who didn’t much like to think politics — and that was gonna be enough. When it came to it Richard Ichord didn’t really want to make it big on television, so they kept their mouths shut and put in their time.
In the glassy morning quiet of the diner, though, as Atwater shoveled in brown food and spice, Rove could line it all up down a more analytical angle. We built the book while we were at it, Rove said; that was worth the effort. Indeed Rove and Atwater had built two three-ring binders worth of data about confirmed conservatives in Missouri who were registered Democrats, from small donors to civic activists, housewives and cops and Bible-study groups and truckers and precinct captains and all manner of folk especially in rural and suburban areas. Once done they’d boxed it up and shipped it to a reliable friend in the direct-mail business, from whom it could find its way back to the GOP.
That i’n’t the half of it son, Atwater replied through a muddle of bacon. Let’s line these ducks up — always ready to stage a show, Atwater gripped the fork lone between his teeth like a cigar, grabbed the condiments, and laid them out as he wanted them.
So our boy — Atwater removed the fork and pointed it at the mustard — didn’t come through. All right, then. We, ah, encouraged him to his backup plan — indeed the two had drawn up a complete document bashed out on a portable cribbing from “the book” and Ichord’s internal polls to convince the congressman he could turn back around and hold his own seat, if only he skipped over to the Missouri nominating convention for the American Independent Party in July, a chance, Rove said, to put an experienced conservative imprint on an inchoate body — so that’s one more cat among the pigeons. Keeps the Democrats busy and he shows his district he’s his own man which is all the fashion right now.
Then — Atwater grabbed the pepper — we’ve got the Senate race. Yeah Litton whipped our boy but that’s all right too and I’ll tell you why, it’s ‘cause the Missouri Republicans went and shit the bed and nominated Tom Curtis. Atwater raised a theatrical eyebrow for this. Curtis, a former congressman from the St. Louis area, was a “Lincoln Republican” of the old school and fervent advocate for civil rights who’d lost a painfully close decision to Eagleton last go-round. Against Litton’s regularly-televised easy smile with the rural folks, Curtis’ chances now looked a great deal dimmer.
Atwater was insouciant: that’s good too, it’s good too. We play the long game ‘round here. You get Litton in there, he’s gonna be a darling for moderates which will make all those McGovernite longhairs’ skin itch. They’ll get so upset about moderation it’ll drive more people our way. And hell if those good folk on the rural routes think Jerry Litton’s the Left, we’ve about got ‘em already. Curtis? Atwater flicked a finger across his neck — one less GOP liberal.
That’s all good stuff Lee, said Rove. I don’t know yet how it gets us back in with the party, though. We can string on this cycle and dine out on Eagleton but that long game won’t do much good if we don’t get it in with the right folks up at Committee level.
At least working for Ichord was consistent with conservative principles, Rove added, a little more solemn than he meant to be.
Atwater screwed up a funny face, then replied. Ichord’s shithouse-rat crazy on internal security, and we both know it. Good brother of Mister John Birch. But — Atwater dabbed an egged-up fork at Rove — if you c’n put lipstick on a pig like that in a primary, then what we really want in the general starts to look like Sophia goddamn Loren, tits and all. Atwater paused; Tabasco rained down like a hurricane on his whole plate now.
And what’s that really, Lee? asked Rove. I mean we know who all we’ve worked with and I’ll talk about what I stand for. What do you want in the general?
Well, mumbled Atwater through his toast — also splashed with hot sauce — well, let’s see. Someone who’s for opportunity, order, prosperity, good business. Someone who knows — I mean really knows — how to talk to regular folks because he can think like ‘em. Or at least somebody who can fake it real good. Atwater grinned again. He tilted his head and finished the train of thought: someone who’s gonna lead where I want to follow.
Well that does sound pretty, criticized Rove in an uncommon episode of nerve. But I get worried folks at the top think this is gonna be easy, that it’s that obvious why people ought to hate McGovern, that they don’t really have to have a plan.
Son you were born worried, opined Lee mid-scramble.
I don’t know that RNC or the electeds take the policy stuff as seriously as they should, said Rove. I mean long term, yeah George McGovern can hang himself up on his “right to be different” bullshit. And yeah, sure he’s a pinko or a hippie-hugger or such, but look at the legislation, Lee. Look at the bills. The man’s buyin’ votes fit to compete with Lyndon Johnson. All those farm bills. Minimum wage. Tax credits. Fucking MECA, that’s gonna be a black hole of money and he got his best favorable/unfavorables ever on it because they’ve been bangin’ on about health insurance since FDR. He’s gonna have practically half the country on his payroll one way or another.
Yeah, seems like plenty of folks like MECA, Atwater offered.
Of course people like MECA, offered Rove. Most folks always like something for nothing.
You know what, Karl — Atwater winked now — that’s not always a bad thing. Not always a bad thing. These big conservative wheels you know, Goldwater and the Buckleys and such, they don’t always know so well what the poor shit-kickers want. But the person who does, Karl — someday soon they’re gonna be runnin’ the goddamn country.
Where does that leave us? said Rove.
Atwater furrowed his brow a minute. Then his face widened again, into the open boyishness that hid so much. Mushroom, said he, it leaves us with a whole hell of a lot to get done
Atwater stood up, as Rove followed, then Atwater grabbed a fistful of cash from his wallet for tab and tip and laid it on the booth’s melmac table. But, said Atwater. But. We don’t have to fly blind. Atwater picked up his pace as they headed out the diner’s door, at which point Atwater fished out his car keys and tossed them to Rove.
Get on in the Pinto and let’s get to Georgia, son, said Lee to Karl. I might have commenced to have a plan.
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It was a straight shot out of the alpine womb of Colorado across the great flatness to the Cow Palace, so Hunter S. Thompson drove himself. He’d picked up one of those doughty little Yugo 101s, new on the American market, purely as a lark for a third car, just for over the hill into Aspen on booze runs where it did well in bad weather even if the gearshift was sticky as hell, and also to see for his editors’ sake in this age of detente how the socialist half lived. Now he thought fuck it, let’s open her up yonder to Kansas City, where everything was up to date even if Serbo-Croatian technology wasn’t. Sure some Freak Power compadre could’ve chauffeured him down to Denver where he could’ve hopped a quick Braniff jolt to KC and been halfway down a fifth of Wild Turkey by now. But he would always prefer the open road, especially in the West and even on the prairies.
Hard as hell to get the 101, a stolid simulacrum of a Fiat on its best day, up over seventy on the interstate; he could hear all three hundred car parts rattling in close formation as he went. But it kept his attention in balance after the nerve-calming bowl he’d smoked before departure and all without uppers — who knew? That was worth some kind of two-paragraph fantasia on Yugoslav beer commercials in his next Rolling Stone piece. And there would be a next Rolling Stone piece, it had financed the journey in the first place.
Right in Kansas City the Democrats intended to throw themselves a shindig. Not any proper convention, no, not bunting and whores and back-alley tabs of acid and professionally curated listening devices in every hotel’s rooms. This would be a grand conference on policy, held by and for the Democratic National Committee. Part of the reforms to which the current president’s name was attached, the whole McGovern-Fraser deal, mandated such a meeting before the midterm cycle of any presidential term. The attendees were the whole panjandrum of intensively plugged-in legislators, lobbyists, and managerial party hacks.
While Thompson could barely stand to be downwind of eleven-twelfths of them, the goings on at this function would be the purest kind of uncut political inside baseball injected right through the eyelids, the stuff that really got his rocks off. More to the point of his bank account, it was both a natural and an essential continuation of the political beat that had landed him since George Stanley McGovern — a man who, though it puzzled Thompson daily, he might even call a personal friend — made the unlikeliest transition to the Oval Office.
In the polyester hallways of convention hotels Thompson found his way to folk he could stand, notably his boyish former body man Tim Crouse, now raised to dizzy heights with a bestseller, dinners with Redford, a script optioned and all that jazz. But who plays me, was Thompson’s lead question — Crouse kept mum. Together the two, like old times, quizzed their way through buffet lines of press flacks and staffers until they came upon a well-loved face: Gene Pokorny, now Frank Mankiewicz’s deputy and a low-key administration presence at the goings on, senior enough to matter yet not quite senior enough to intrude, or look like a bespectacled thumb laid on the conference’s scales.
With Crouse off on his customary beat watching the scribblers, Thompson and Pokorny made a decent set. Thompson the old sports-beat guy respected the hell out of young Pokorny’s native skills at election time, while in the role of Frank Mankiewicz’s lieutenant, to Thompson that made Pokorny a kind of adoptive nephew. Young Gene, by turns, knew both Thompson’s avid if vicarious taste for political grunt work and Thompson’s sentimental core; Pokorny liked both so long as the sunglassed duffer behaved mostly.
For Pokorny’s seat at the forty-yard line Thompson behaved more often than not the first couple of days, mostly even quiet except to get the color commentary straight from Gene sotto voce. Other than the Chiefs’ season opener the Sunday afternoon, when Thompson talked at Tim Crouse through four separate hot dogs while Joe Namath looked young again at KC’s expense, Thompson glued himself to Pokorny’s side for the duration.
The conference got to brass tacks quick. It was largely a three-cornered deal. Corner one was the McGovern partisans, who Thompson recognized either because he knew them face to face from ‘72, or had learned their identities when he plied on occasion through the lobbies of Capitol Hill, or simply because they were usually younger, not kids but not grey-hairs either, and certainly more heterodox — more open collars with longer haircuts, more women, more brown and tan and almond faces — than the flush-faced drones who scowled in corners or puffed up at the lectern, fat old ghouls who’d bombed for peace and worked hard to keep the coloreds and the womenfolk out of the AFL-CIO and wouldn’t know the great unwashed public if they stepped on them, which they did often. To hate them kept Thompson’s spirit up.
That crowd, in the second corner, these days mostly that was Scoop Jackson’s mob. Scoop’d gone and built himself a homonculus — part Congressional caucus, part think tank, part establishment fishbowl of sharks and lobbyists — then went and called it the Coalition for Democratic Values. As he usually did Thompson figured that most people who talked about values and weren’t personally named George McGovern, or a select handful of others, were selling something cheap, and the more they talked the cheaper that thing got. Scoop had, to Thompson’s way of thinking, a rare mastery of pointless blather, high-sounding oatmeal that spread out over his audience like a bowl tipped over by a petulant kid. The kind of guy who made Hubert Humphrey sound original, a tobacco-leagues Boeing whore who thought he was Pericles — Thompson folded the leaf on that phrase for when he could grab his Selectric.
The CDV mob, as such mobs usually did, brought with them an agenda. Or at least it was polite to call it an agenda, Thompson thought to himself, and not an episode of bad temper about those crazy kids and lost privileges. As he could do, Gene Pokorny one lunchtime early in the shindig laid out neatly the platform CDV endorsed and the angles they were working with each item. In reply Thompson boiled it down to a three point slogan: nukes, whites, and bribes.
Sure there was high-minded filler, like a slice of bologna, on Soviet Jews and making America a land of opportunity once more, they were even polite about Medicare-for-all now that the big unions had worked their sweet supplemental insurance deals into the mix. But the essence was nukes, whites, and bribes. Let the military-industrial complex be unconfined and screw all this arms-control palaver over in France. Fuck busing, and heaven forbid you give minorities or the ladies an actual leg up in anything, just a whole lot of “opportunity” language so white guys on third base can walk home. Especially don’t tell anyone to their face that bigotry was, maybe, a moral evil: Thompson the heretic Southerner bristled at that one especially. And hand the Democratic Party — the party Thompson had prayed nightly in Miami a good two years ago that George Stanley McGovern would burn down, then hose the charred remains into the sewer drain with the rest of the effluent — back over to the grandees, the Humphreys and Scoops and Meaneys and the Boll Weevils and the Fucking Texans — not the great good ones like Sissy Farenthold or Barbara Jordan, but Lyndon’s boys or even fucking Connally’s by one remove.
Thompson felt more comfortable with the proceedings, and Pokorny more comfortable with Thompson’s ability to control his opinions, when they all settled down to make the sausage. Really the whole contest was about who could move, pry away enough of, the folks in that elusive third corner, who on Pokorny’s advice Thompson called the biddable pragmatists. That was how you scored the game, but the strategy was to grab enough of ‘em on individual platform planks that together those planks worked an angle toward the ultimate goal of McGoverners or Valuers. Sometimes you’d even bob or give a little, to get the other side off balance with the enthusiasm of a local success, or too focused on a plank to see the whole deck of the ship. That was the art of the thing and it mattered because this was the first big fight over the long term, the effort to make a McGovern Moment more than momentary.
The points of conflict were various. The McGovern crew wanted uniform national standards, and open proceedings for the selection — they could bend on whether it came to a vote — of precinct captains. The McGoverners even brought along something they were ready to trade away, state-level affirmative action quotas on captaincies, but the Southerners and George Meany’s top boys still bristled and filibustered. Bob Drinan, the country’s only elected radical priest, got in a slanging match about it with Meany’s creature Lane Kirkland and the two had to be separated. In the end the McGoverners came away with statewide standards that would have to be submitted to the DNC for approval. Half a loaf at least.
The Valuers came right at McGovern’s chin with their two biggest proposals, a unitary “national primary” for ninety percent of convention delegates in a closed-party vote — based on the bet Scoop’s mob laid down that they still had enough registered hard-hats and rednecks to outvote the left — and its corollary, to give ten percent of convention delegate slots over to unpledged “professionals,” in other words elected and unelected party lifers. This time, more than they had on precincts, the Values crowd overplayed their hand. They’d walked right into getting crosswise with the small states, and as luck of membership would have it a lot of those biddable pragmatists came from there. Thompson thought it was tighter than it ought to have been, but after a pledge to double the number of direct-vote state primaries over ‘72, the McGovern team swatted both votes down.
Thompson thought the neatest little pirouette of the meet was a deal he watched Gene Pokorny help broker. The McGoverners pulled a putative plank to put the DNC in charge of mandating closed-party or open primaries and left that with the states, while they also gave preferential committee slots to Southerners for writing agricultural policy language in the ‘76 platform, in return for shifting the primaries calendar so that several Deep South contests came later and more Midwestern ones came early. Thompson, at the back of the room in a stick-straight chair while he nursed an Old Fashioned, liked the way Pokorny lined up his billiard table three or four shots ahead of the run of play.
Thompson especially disliked one of the McGovern team’s losses. With disturbing smoothness the Vapid Valuers — he tucked that page corner again for a late night bashing away against deadline in his hotel room — pushed through a motion that the Democratic Party would set up an “independent” commission of experts to “assess and advise” the party on any official positions about arms control. Of course that clown car was to be packed full of Scoop’s reactionaries: “neoconservatives” some of them called themselves now and how in the hell you could let someone with a mouth like that into FDR’s party Thompson wasn’t sure, they looked to be mostly Jewish and Catholic ex-Trotskyites who’d slipped through the ideological event horizon on over to the other side, vanguarding for reaction now. Pokorny demurred about how it was advice not veto power but Thompson didn’t like how many pragmatists seemed to be running scared on the Bomb. On the very best of days George had gotten maybe half of what he wanted on defense reform so all this talk in Paris damned well needed to amount to something.
Then, at last, on the Monday morning that inexplicably ushered in the close of events, came the top of the fight card: the vote for the next Chairman of the Democratic National Committee. In good McGovernite fashion George’s crew backed a Kennedy alum, that tight-arsed solon of environmental rectitude Stewart Udall. Thompson entirely preferred Stewart’s wry, winking, humane brother Mo, but the McGoverners wanted someone who’d Look The Part and Be Taken Seriously which was the kind of cheap shit that happened when you didn’t tear the Democratic Party down the moment you had the chance — Pokorny cast Thompson a sideways glance when Thompson muttered most of that out loud at the back of the auditorium. But you also could do worse. Straight-laced Stu wanted breathable air for all and green, wide-open country for the common folk, which as a happily naturalized Coloradan Thompson could get with.
Against him came just the sort of fellow Thompson lived to loathe: Tom Foley, angling for the chair of House Agriculture and a man who had spent his whole political life in the right hand of Scoop. A son of eastern Washington state’s high country, the burly, butcher-faced Foley looked to Thompson more like a Boston pub bouncer or an ex-left tackle for the Buffalo Bills gone to seed. Foley was even more establishment than Stu Udall and, far worse in Thompson’s estimation, had never even thought to bother with an iron rod of principles stuck up his sphincter as the environmentalist Mormon did. Foley was back rooms and backhanders and whitebread caution and better-dead-than-red and dull procedure all the way. Pokorny tried to talk up the blow-by-blow on whipping a convention-floor vote but Thompson was too revulsed and stepped outside for half a pack of Marlboros.
Events turned up a little better, at least for a while. As the fellow could do when he wasn’t too far up his own righteousness, the elder Udall brother impressed a lot of floor-level voters as a serious, sensible sort, more keen to talk policy than Foley who wanted to talk process and not much of that unless his interlocutors showed their hands about what kind of deals they wanted. The farm-staters liked that Udall liked trains and the urban-reform crowd including several key figures from the Congressional Black Caucus swung into line behind McGovern’s guy. Pokorny yet again did, to Thompson’s mind, a masterful job getting out of the way of a rumor that ran swiftly through the Southerners, otherwise good customers of Scoop’s, that Foley was there to screw the good ol’ boys’ angle on ag planks in the ‘76 platform in the name of Western ranchers. It looked promising.
Then, just short of a motion for a vote, it all ground to a halt. A couple of good McGovernite soldiers played parliamentary procedures for time while confused Udall partisans murmured amongst themselves. Thompson was more direct: the fuck, Gene? he asked through a hallway cigarette.
There’s a hold-up, said Pokorny. We’ve got some matters United Auto Workers want to get seen to. We would move for a vote but they feel they need to get a word in first.
I thought UAW were the good guys, said Thompson. I mean sure they coughed up Leonard Woodcock but these are Reuther’s guys, right?
They are, replied Pokorny: they are but they have concerns.
I’ll tell you their concerns, said Thompson. They’re concerned that if too many people take the bus or an, an electric people-mover or can breathe the air, like, anywhere in California or New Jersey, then they won’t be making six bucks an hour grunting on the line, all for a tract house and a muscle car to get under on weekends and a whole twenty-minute halftime break in which to beat their wives on Sunday afternoons.
Pokorny looked disappointed; Thompson mumbled expiations.
Pokorny talked back: we can’t run a party on whims. If we don’t bring along enough people, keep things in balance and get people on a page together, then this was all for nothing. The President likes to say — Thompson noted again how nobody called the most down-to-earth man in American politics George, except maybe Bill Fulbright — that “Paris is worth a Mass.” It’s a historical reference; he was a professor, it comes with the territory.
I might even be old enough to remember St. Bartholomew’s Day, Henri the Fourth was just a pup back then, said Thompson with a raggedy smile.
Thompson, joined by Tim Crouse who’d already caught the network guys’ standard line of patter, waited around the fringe while young Pokorny played concierge for the meet. Into a small conference room off the hotel mezzanine went Stewart Udall, his brother Mo — Thompson could spot Pokorny’s influence there, working in the easier-tempered brother who was also an accomplished haggler — the craggy-faced yet cheery Douglas Fraser who was now president of UAW, plus John Dingle and Hosea Williams.
From what Thompson and Crouse could tell at not much remove, the haggle ran thus. Pokorny and Mo Udall made clear that the administration wanted to see everyone in the room contribute something to a deal. Doug Fraser then asked casually why the Auto Workers shouldn’t walk out and take their chances with Scoop if their position on who wrote certain planks was firm. To that Gene Pokorny replied that Scoop was George Meany’s new pet Democrat — the feud between the decaying AFL-CIO boss and UAW was ancient and rich with bitter flavor — so that might not turn out as they planned.
Mo Udall proffered that brother Stewart would recuse himself from editorial decisions about platform material on highway transportation, emissions standards, and labor-law issues. In return, added Udall and Dingle, the UAW could turn about on wildcatters. In ‘71 supporters of UAW leadership had put down a wildcat action on workplace safety with baseball bats because it breached a larger union-management concord; that would no longer do. Again Stewart played devil’s advocate. Hosea Williams spoke up that a broader mind about how to listen to and coordinate with such movements — often led by black workers of a more militant disposition — would help get black organizers and forces like the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, along with white churchmen too, involved fighting against the Big Three’s own “Southern strategy” to build new non-union assembly lines in the Sun Belt and undercut UAW. After a half-hour chat about those issues, the parties to the confab came around to a deal.
With that the groups came back into the auditorium, angled young Les Aspin — noted defense reformer but also a vigorous acolyte of CDV — to yield the balance of his time on floor debate, and moved the vote. Soon enough they had Udall in the big chair. Scoop of course would have exactly none of it, and spoke up at the lectern about a corrupt bargain on undemocratic side deals and quotas, saying the McGoverners had shown themselves up as one more interest group as ready to bend rules to get their way as any other.
He’s one to talk, said Pokorny.
To that Tim Crouse responded, Trouble is that gets the columnists and the network guys what they needed for balance. It’s their Joni Mitchell bit, said Crouse in a moment of wit: “I’ve Looked at Graft From Both Sides Now.”
I’ll agree we have got to get the media figured better, said Pokorny. But meanwhile we’ve got a Chairman now and we have a party to run.
Gene, that may be the problem, said Thompson.
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Jake was weak, was the essence of the thing. None of it — none of it in the entirety — would have happened in the first place without Jake’s weakness. It was right therefore, even proper, to slam a lid down on the whole damned thing by holding that weakness to account.
Jake Jacobsen was a specific kind of weasel, who’d worked his way as a bagman, flunky, legal facilitator, even a glorified valet, in the grand networks of patronage that nested with one another in mid-century Texas politics. Jake built a wide resume as he flitted from one main chance to the next: a flack, a confidante, a bagman, a cut-out, a fixer, a facilitator, even a glorified valet, always ready to wheedle and desperate to please, who’d suck up to power whenever it made itself known, all to act the big man in silk suits and French cuffs. First to curry favor and first to skitter down the ropeways if the ship took on water, Jacobsen crept and curried with the top ranks of Texan power: Price Daniel, Sr. to start, Lyndon himself for a time, John Connally. Jake made hay also with the national patronage networks to which these men gave access, anywhere he could cut a dash and bathe in emoluments.
Like so many other folks, Jake got too deep into the high cotton of the Nixon years, during which his instinct for self-preservation seemed to desert him far into a broad landscape of corruption. Hitched himself to the infamous milk money, notably the mighty AMPI combine out of San Antonio for whom Jake carried bags at all hours as the milk men bought influence everywhere it could be had including the very top. Caught out in the open when all that high cotton was mown down, Jake found himself short when he had to pay up on the career he’d built. There was a separate issue with a couple of Texan savings-and-loans who Jake had skimmed to solve his current-account problems and the bigger, federal, issue that he’d been an unreliable narrator on purpose — had perjured himself — to save both his own skin and any other that might do him a favor in grand jury proceedings about the milk men.
As he reflected on Jake’s bold yet sorry tale, this was the moment of decision. Pinned between state and federal charges, here was the place Jake could’ve shown his inmost quality. He could’ve taken it on the chin like Bobby Baker had a few years back, done his time, and emerged a figure of backhanded honor and new importance, who’d squared things up both with the law and with old acquaintances Baker hadn’t dragged down with him. Jake, instead, was weak. Ready to spin out any thread he could that might draw him to safety. So he’d pled with the feds that there were names to name.
That hadn’t worked out for the old boy, which seemed only just. These federal questions tied to the Nixon machine, all of them crossed the desk of Solicitor General John Doar who’d been made, more or less, grand inquisitor for the muck and mess of the previous administration. Doar liked his cases tight, his evidence thorough. Far worse, thought Doar, to chase a lead and lose, bring even a hint of disrepute on the larger enterprise, than to leave some little fish in the stream while Doar ran down the great whales themselves. So they sweated Jake good, twice over, but in the end all they had was Jake Jacobsen, pallid in an Italian sportscoat and desperate for his fate, ready to turn hours of earlier sworn testimony precisely on its head just to cut a deal. It was a flimsy thing. So the feds cut the string and ol’ Jake fell towards his fate.
That was not enough. If Jake had not caved, hadn’t made a mockery of his oath in court yet again, they might still correspond, might remember better days and trade war stories about the witness stand. But that wasn’t the case. Jake had turned, turned on evidence so flimsy there truly was no forensic trail to follow but his own sullied word, turned for craven survival against those he claimed to serve. That wouldn’t do.
The slander suit hit the District’s court nine days after Justice cut Jake loose. It was… regrettable, but very much part of how things had to be done. You couldn’t let a man like that — if you could call Jake Jacobsen a man ever — take your reputation with him, not with so much loose talk in the press, flimsy scandals piled on each to one-up another. You hit back, and made sure people saw. You set an example — made one, too.
He brought a flying squad of lawyers into that courtroom, which was part of how you pinned Jake down like a bug on some young scientist’s display paper. District fellows who could operate the pleadings and make process run smooth, young risers from his own, Houston firm of Vinson Elkins who would clerk the case dog’s hours to show their loyalty as much as their ingenuity. But the key to the whole matter was Leon. Leon Jaworski, a senior partner of a rival firm but a fast friend of many years, as upright a man as ever stood up in court, relentlessly thorough. A character witness of his own kind but more than that a grand strategist, someone who could look into the essence of the matter and decide just how to gut Jake wide open.
Which is, then, just what Leon did. Leon shaped the space of Jake’s cage with character witnesses, grand figures of both parties and even beyond who said the character issue was hooey, that the only character at issue was Jake’s own. Then the boss of the federal interrogation, one of Doar’s deputy counsels; Leon knew how to get the essence of Jake’s perfidy from the fellow without a fight over privileged details. Then, in the end, after the buildup of much anticipation, Jake himself. Mordant, almost sheepish Jake, who Leon worked over for nearly two hours on the stand, quiet and methodical, Leon who breathed integrity, who pared away every little fiddle and angle and artifice from the testimony until all you were left with was Jake’s word and what could anyone do with that?
As he reflected, it seemed to him Leon’s best trick was his own honesty, the way Leon made a judgment on the case, a verdict, as inevitable as his own rectitude. Jake’s defense team made their own case but all they could do was beat on the walls Leon had built around them and that just made them look a little desperate, when you thought about it at the end of the day. He’d hoped the District jurors, half of them respectable older Negro women in their Sunday best, would feel the same, share Leon’s world view. Given a nervy little time for deliberation, they had. They had quite taken to the plaintiff’s preferred judgment as well: one dollar plus court costs. Calculated to catch the newsmen’s eyes it made clear his intent, that Jake Jacobsen be found guilty, seen guilty, by the public. This was not about reparations; it was about just desserts, for all concerned.
The year had scarcely started. Once the feel of it started to come together, as people began to guess the verdict, the old clients reappeared — old patrons, too — who’d tag along to the courthouse, sit in the lobby to plead their points and receive counsel, trade a bit of information, transact. It was an off year for the Senate in Texas, no vote to be had, and he wouldn’t have wanted one if there was, that gussied-up talking shop was no kind of career for a man who meant to get things done.
His old home, though: it was gonna be rough on the other side, his old side where the Democrats warred among themselves in the old ways. Sissy Farenthold was a formidable woman it had to be said, and the liberals were stirred up like a fire-ant mound, had been ever since Sharpstown. Ol’ Dolph, well, he had the old boys with him and the incumbency but Briscoe always was a slow-moving target and hadn’t done a bit of good with President McGovern on the oil depletion allowance, so Dolph was fixed up to catch it from both sides. But, Jim Granberry? Friendly sort of fellow but couldn’t the party… he had a hard time getting the words “Governor Granberry” out over his teeth. Just didn’t seem right.
He walked out, with a sense of timing and occasion that hummed in his very marrow, to catch the sea of flashbulbs and questions just as anticipation in the press pack reached a peak. He smiled with confidence, let the verdict and good posture speak for him as a couple of Jaworski’s juniors cleared the way, ears pricked up as he waited for the right question. Two-thirds of the way down the courthouse steps he heard it: Given this verdict, what’s next for you now, sir?
I intend to think very hard on that, said John Connally: for the moment we’ll just have to wait and see. With that anticipation baited, the best-dressed man in the District of Columbia gripped a jet-black English umbrella tight in case the weather turned, popped his grey Stetson homburg on his head, and turned that famous nose — the aquiline nose of a Roman triumvir coming into his own — up a little and to the right, big chin squared up beneath it. Yes, said Connally. I think folks will want to watch and see.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Had it even been a year? he thought to himself. Another thudding hand clap landed on his back amid the cheers and motion and he thought to himself that no, it had not. As late as last Christmas, his first with family, inside a parish church at midnight, in eight long years, everything had been much as he’d expected when at last he came home. Still in the service, returned to duty with a chestful of medals and a clean bill of health, keen to see out his thirty years continue to give to his country so younger men who wore the uniform could see how it should be done, perhaps even make flag rank. A good life of Christian service for himself and his family, with Hanoi far behind.
Yet Christian service, it seemed, had other plans. Already after he walked off that C-141 in Hawaii there had been enthusiasts, families of other POWs, clean-cut young idealists back home in Alabama or among the enterprising Young Americans for Freedom. It flattered but also bewildered. You did not do as he had done, at least in his own world, for gain. Not in that nine by three, in dank and muck and bugs and mice and chains. It was an act of expiation, for God and for country. Hell was the most honorable place in which to serve. But he understood these folks thought well of him and that was a consolation, a sense that despite the world to which he’d returned, some folks still understood the old truths.
Soon enough, between Christmas and Epiphany — he smiled at the irony — that had changed. He received an unexpected invitation to dinner from an out-of-town visitor: George Herbert Walker Bush, among other things the present Chairman of the Republican National Committee. He’d been leery but Bush with upper-crust bonhomie said it could be just one old Navy pilot sitting down with another to enjoy some company.
Of course Bush hadn’t mentioned the third party he brought to the actual and metaphorical table. Bush talked the wide smile and soft, earnest Tidewater drawl of Pat Robertson into coming along for the occasion. Bush knew he’d met Robertson during the whirl of appearances after he cleared medical. Himself, he was that rare being among Southerners with an English name: a conservative Catholic from Mobile’s big Catholic community. But Robertson understood, understood the state of the country, the need to make a change, raise up sober, godly government that served godly ends and national renewal. It was, if he was strictly honest, a treat to see the Reverend again.
Bush had guessed as much. Had imagined he and Robertson would get one another talking. Had known that, because the Navy assigned such a distinguished former prisoner of war to a post in his home state during the period of evaluation and recovery that he met basic residency requirements as they were written in Alabama election laws. That all this really was waiting, perhaps fated, to happen — with a little bit of Providence, added Robertson through that boundless smile.
So he’d prayed upon it, summoned those resources and disciplines that got him through eight years’ confinement, thought on a nation so confused, corrupted, and divided against itself that a fellow like George McGovern could end up president — McGovern himself seemed to be an upright yet profoundly misguided man, but God save us from his followers! — and the United States of America could walk away, simply walk away, from the long struggle against godless Communism when so many had given so much. So much.
So he did it. Took retirement. Traded undress whites for a grey Botany 500 suit. Walked out from the long confinement and decades of service within the naval community, to knock on doors, shake hands, open himself to new faces. It surprised him, how he’d taken to it. But none of the people who gathered closest around him, from his wife to his campaign manager to his newfound colleagues in the Alabama Republican Party, seemed a bit surprised.
It was a battle on several fronts, all of them coordinated, and all with a goal: replace the corrupt, festering political machine George Wallace had used to get the good people of Alabama in his grip, sweep it out the door so those same good people could enjoy government that was truly honest, truly conservative, true to principle. It wasn’t the front lines against Moscow but if you couldn’t win the war at home, how could you hope to prevail in the larger struggle? They would drive straight at the strategic goal, try to stake the heart of the Wallace movement and unify a principled, conservative political force across the nation that would roar into 1976 like the Bible’s everlasting stream, and with its righteousness wash the nation clean.
Now here they were on this fine night, on this happy hunting ground at the end of the quest with all those delightfully corny American affectations of election time, noisemakers and confetti and brass bands to strike up the tune and lead the way. Everything his captors had loathed unbound, triumphant. Young Fob — the nearly dashing Forrest James, Jr. — had come so close. So close. He’d taken up the cudgel against George Corley Wallace himself and, by God you know, when Fob ran to Wallace’s left on race — at least promising “a responsible process of integration” — and to Wallace’s right on economics Fob damned near treed the slippery devil. Late in the game the picture looked so bright that, in a struggle against a mutual enemy, even the civil rights folks up to the likes of Morris Dees had piled on. It looked like Fob himself was just short: the rural counties in the east and north were just enough they gave Wallace a cushion against Fob’s inroads in the suburbs, the lesser cities, and even parts of the Black Belt.
But the rest of the night had its share of highlights, joys and satisfactions for all this very different hard work. That personable young fellow Bob Riley, another one sweet-talked into politics, had stolen away with the Alabama Third, truly a David and his slingshot that caught the Wallace machine square in the eye. There were state legislative successes. Over to the west out of state it looked like that drunken old reprobate Wilbur Mills was in plenty of trouble against his doughty female opponent Judy Petty, a lady of strong conservative temperament and character — once you got counting in the Little Rock suburbs she could do it yet. Way off in President McGovern’s home state Leo Thorsness, a comrade in arms — comrade in chains, who had born the years in Hanoi with grit and dignity — was on his way to winning the president’s old Senate seat. It wasn’t all roses, elections never were, but there were things to cheer clear across the nation. Portents for what was next.
Then of course there was his race. His outcome. James Martin and the rest of the old crowd, who’d been at this fifteen years some of them, were fit to burst, went on and on about how this was the greatest thing to happen in Alabama politics, how this was the start of a new day. He didn’t seek that spotlight for his efforts; really he wanted to hug his family and get some shuteye before the new work began. But people wanted to celebrate and he’d seen enough sunlight, enough home, in the last nineteen months to entertain a sense that sometimes there was a time to be merry. Very merry indeed. What unexpected paths the Lord had summoned him along. Unexpected gifts as well.
Bob Riley got up on the ballroom stage and grabbed the microphone with that big, friendly businessman’s voice of his. Riley and the whole crowd, roaring away, wanted him up there. In the end he dipped his head a little, smiled, and offered a hand held up to say okay, fair enough, I surrender. Kathryn, beaming as he’d only seen her when their children were born, bustled him up there as Riley’s voice barreled out into the crowd.
“Ladies and gentlemen!” Riley thundered. “Y’all wanted to see the old boy all night, well now here he is! Your newest United States Senator from the great state of Alabama! The pride of our night! Let him hear ya, ladies and gentlemen ‘cause he’s gonna make Washington year ya too!
“Ladies and gentlemen! I give you Captain! Jeremiah! Denton!”
The roar shook the building. He could promise them young Riley was right, too: soon enough Washington would hear.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
It was a good night in Boulder. Fine, bright, and clear — good weather even, for the time of year, crisp and bright just days past Halloween. That had been a key part of the closing pitch of course, the natural dovetail has he and Wren made the rounds with their sweet, young, blonde kids, bags held out proud for sugary loot, while their old — of course not old at all but young and from the right angle perhaps even dashing — father smiled and knocked on doors with election pamphlets in hand. Campaign workers did the same, most often with their kids, low-key, relatable, people of and for their own neighborhoods, people ready to remake their towns, their state, the country, co-create a brighter future.
Timothy Endicott Wirth glanced through the crack in the back office door of his campaign headquarters at the rising murmur of the crowd beyond. They’d worked the whole time from Boulder, where he and his family lived now, proud citizens of Colorado’s growing and upwardly mobile suburbs. No grand show at a Denver hotel, holding hands in the air with Dick Lamm and the rank-and-file of Colorado’s straight Democratic ticket on down to city counselors.
No, their campaign had a different … aesthetic, different culture, different intent. Not that he wasn’t a team player, all the above had received his warm congratulations this very Democratic night in Colorado; the graduate of Phillips Exeter and Graland Country Day had plenty of respect for team spirit and school ties. But the way he’d made this leap, jumped right from a quiet professional life into the battle for a United States Senate seat, all that depended on how close he could stay to the streets of home, the familiar suburban America where his most significant voters lived, the realm he hoped to enliven and transform.
They had to stay close to home because that was the essence of the effort, what his campaign manager reminded him daily they sold to curious voters: authenticity, that ineffable something that everyone right or left now craved in politics, the thing you had to have, had to show, lest you get effed yourself. Wirth, it seemed, had it in spades, not just authenticity though that was the coin of the realm but — nostalgia? He hoped not something quite so crave. But definitely familiar, something from before, when a bright, civic-minded young man with a strong resume could try to do good in the world.
Wirth came to it certainly with those ingredients, just thirty-four himself, past public service done on fellowships with the Johnson and early Nixon administrations, a high-flying stint in management with the Great Western Sugar conglomerate, and a doctorate from Stanford where his older brother was a professor of Latin American history. That reflected both skills and ambition, and as a fresh young face he could draw out tribal Democrats who thought new blood would do well against the Republican incumbent, sober but uninspiring Peter Dominick.
Yet for Wirth and his campaign staff the real key to the kingdom was the new voting bloc he could bring into the fold: younger, ambitious suburbanites, professional people who hoped to rise in the world and that the world would rise around themselves, their neighborhoods, their kids. The environmentally conscious, the tolerant or even inclusive, people who valued ingenuity and personal integrity, along with not a little bit of professional-class charm.
They’d grabbed them in spades, too. Organized campaign workers subdivision by subdivision like a military organization, neighbors who talked to neighbors over Little League and fondue, a stream of contacts fed into the campaign’s computerized database system, then on into a small-donor direct mail network like the one President McGovern himself had leveraged for the nomination two years back. With it Wirth touched people where they lived, brought out new voters, leapfrogged from an acquired taste of a name in Colorado’s business community to a primary victory back in the spring.
From there it was full steam ahead. Internals had him up on favorable/unfavorable and public trust by the late summer though no one wanted to jinx anything, but the Gallup lead widened and stuck after Labor Day. From there he leaned into the campaign as a celebration of Colorado’s part in a bright American tomorrow: he toured technology-based startup companies, shook hands with ranchers interested in solar power, rafted crystal clear snowmelt rivers, held babies in college towns. The New York Times said he looked like Richard Chamberlain and while the Grey Lady was a flatterer when it came to politicians like him, he had to admit it was a nice touch. Even the White House played an adept partner hand as they sent out Frank Mankiewicz, hummed over in the quality press as the dean of administration moderates and an obvious link to the old Kennedy magic. The autumn’s weather stayed bright for family fun, and even the Broncos had decided to have a banner year.
Dick Lamm had called already; Wirth had been collegial and bright but also made Lamm wait a little, for after all it was his coattails Lamm looked to have ridden to the governor’s mansion. Soon after came the big one, Wren had picked up first and waved the kids over to listen in as she crooked the receiver so they could hear a President of the United States talk on the phone. McGovern of course had a bevy of grown kids himself, and played along kindly. Then Wirth picked up the phone and listened to that plane-level Dakota drawl call him a credit to the state and a fine addition to the Senate. He couldn’t agree more.
He heard a cheer go up out in the main hall of the offices, as out in the field that young fellow Brokaw intoned back to John Chancellor in Washington about the Democratic wave here in Colorado. Time in a moment to go see them all, shake the hands, hug the footsoldiers, the lovely people who wanted to make America more like their own home towns. On a night like this it was hard not to get caught up in the promise: an America of clean living, clean air and water, and a bright technological horizon, a nation framed and led by the Boulders of the land, under big skies bounded only by ambitious dreams.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
They had made history; that seemed only right since history was something he knew a bit about. Certainly on this long night they’d made history, even if it kept them up past midnight to get the rural returns that clinched the vote. He’d done better on the farms and in the back country than most polls had projected which was, he liked to think, an unintended gift from that man in the White House as even the most tribal Democrats, the “yellow dogs,” in this deeply Democratic state around, and saw the need for change. That plus, perhaps, some depressed turnout on the other side, inched him ahead by the eleven o’clock news with massive leads in the suburban tracts of the district, after which the rednecks helped keep him ahead as the vote leveled out. One thousand and seventeen votes, only that many, were nonetheless enough in the margin to get it done.
The greatest satisfaction was that it was his own project. He’d started out on pads of legal-rule paper in his departmental office, then stretched to coffee with a few trusted friends, and as primary season for state and federal offices gathered steam he jumped in to an empty GOP field for the district and made it his own. Sure, he acknowledged when he came out to the podium in the Elks Lodge where they held this election-night celebration, it had been a big day in Georgia, especially for those sensible souls who rejected what Washington, DC had put on offer. You had to congratulate that dapper winter soldier of the Georgia GOP, Bo Callaway, who’d toppled no less than a Talmadge — Herman, the current Talmadge of record who was, who had been, Georgia’s senior United States Senator and a governor beforehand — or Gary Pleger across the state in the Georgia Tenth who’d come from nowhere also to enter Congress. It was important, in this charged atmosphere, to offer a little acknowledgment even to the AIP on the night. He had polite, carefully chosen words to congratulate Lieutenant Governor Maddox on his success moving back up to the big chair in a three-way race. Or firebrand Larry MacDonald who’d joined Congress’ freshman class in the same fashion.
But here, amid earnest and excited suburbanites in the Elks Lodge, this was his show, his triumph political and rhetorical. He had shaped it from the formless clay of white-flight reaction: he liked to think of himself like the fearless Belgian colonial educators of his doctoral thesis, gone off into an exotic land to help the locals better understand the world and how they could craft an ambitious role within it. From lumpen ranch-house reaction driven by the race question, he’d started his voters on a journey of self-discovery to find in themselves independent minded, fiscally responsible, opportunity-friendly conservatives who could do the Republican Party great credit and reshape this state in the entirety. This was his true professorship and he’d just passed its biggest evaluation.
Given as he was to such things, after the congratulations and excitement and reminder what a message they’d sent to George Stanley McGovern, he mused a little on history and chance, what might have been and what could be. We’ll never know the unwritten history of Richard Nixon’s second term, he said with low-voiced respect, though one could speculate on the opportunities and ambitions Nixon might have realized for this great country if he were given the chance. It was a fascinating might-have-been.
Now, though, the task was to shape the future that could be. To bring a mighty center-right coalition of responsible decision-making and conservative action into being around the nation, and then bring it to bear. To plight a troth with the American people to fight for responsible, suburban values, fiscal probity, limited and efficient government, personal responsibility.All the virtues that made the nation great, too far gone in too many of its cities — he let the crowd conjure their own images on that.
The Elks Lodge crowd loved the helmet-haired academic turned United States Representative for Georgia’s Sixth District. Leroy Newton Gingrich surveyed the gaggle of happy, cheering faces and saw what he hoped was the first adoring crowd of many.
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McGoverning: Chapter 18 Appendix I, or, The Big Damn Midterms Scorecard
I promised it, y'all know you want it, so here it is... The Big Damn Midterms Scorecard! Despite my fondness for the Dave Leip scheme we're going Florida Era colors here because that codes most easily to the contemporary eye. Enjoy.
United States Elections 1974-75
United States Senate elections, 1974
Alabama: Capt. Jeremiah Denton, USN (ret.) (R) def. James Allen (D) (an Alabama civil war over the fortunes of the Wallace machine becomes the kind of transformative moment Strom Thurmond has dreamed of; the South Carolina grandee was seen shortly thereafter hitting himself repeatedly in the groin with a leather-bound Title 9 of the United States Code shouting "GO DOWN GODDAMMIT IT'S BEEN SIX HOURS!!!")
Alaska: Mike Gravel (D) def. C. R. Lewis (R)
Arizona: Barry Goldwater Sr. (R) def. Jonathan Marshall (D)
Arkansas: Dale Bumpers (D) def. Winthrop Rockefeller (R) (Dale still takes out Fulbright but has a much harder road against the former governor)
California: Alan Cranston (D) def. Alphonso E. "Al" Bell, Jr. (R)
Colorado: Timothy Endicott “Tim” Wirth (D) def. Peter Dominick(R)
Connecticut: Abraham A. Ribicoff (D) def. William F. Buckley, Jr. (R) (in which carpets are bagged though to no end effect)
Florida: Edward Gurney (R) def. William "Bill" Gunter (D)
Georgia: Howard H. “Bo” Callaway (R) def. Herman Talmadge (D)
Hawaii: Daniel K. Inouye (D) def. James D. Kimmel (R)
Idaho: Frank Church (D) def. Robert L. Smith (R)
Illinois: Adlai Stevenson III (D) def. David C. O'Neal (R)
Indiana: Richard Lugar (R) def. Birch E. Bayh (D) (ITTL things do not go Birch’s way, a big blow to the Dems)
Iowa: David M. Stanley (R) def. John Culver (D)
Kansas: William R. "Bill" Roy (D) def. Robert J. "Bob" Dole (R) (BOBDOLE does not believe that BOBDOLE's relationship with indicted former President Nixon or BOBDOLE's vote for BOBDOLE's rural constituents on the FFRA that disgusted hard-line voters who may have stayed home affected BOBDOLE's fortunes... no BOBDOLE does not believe that's BOBDOLE's actual scalp on Bill Roy's wall at all ....)
Kentucky: Marlow Cook (R) def. Wendell Ford (D)
Louisiana: Russell Long (D), unopposed (Longs play by different rules)
Maryland: Charles Mathias, Jr. (R) def. Blair Lee III (D)
Michigan: Carl Levin (D) def. Robert P. Griffin (R) (the special election for the rest of Phil Hart's term brings in a Democrat)
Missouri: Jerry L. Litton (D) def. Thomas B. Curtis (R) (after Eagleton is forced to withdraw in scandals over revelations about his medical condition and self-medicating habits)
Nevada: Paul Laxalt (R) def. Alan Bible (D) (once more with feeling... wasn't)
New Hampshire: Louis C. Wyman (R) def. John A. Durkin (D)
New York: Jacob A. Javits (R) def. Bella Abzug (D) and Barbara A. Keating (C) (probably the messiest race of the night, all kinds of strange coalitions of voters)
North Carolina: James "Jim" Broyhill (R) def. Robert Burren Morgan (D) (why have an imitation Republican when you can have the real thing?)
North Dakota: William L. Guy (D) def. Milton R. Young (a GOP giant goes down too)
Ohio: John Glenn (D) def. William B. Saxbe (R) (voter booth to Major John...)
Oklahoma: Henry Bellmon (R) def. George Nigh (D)
Oregon: Betty Roberts (D) def. Robert "Bob" Packwood (R) (concentrating on one race and partisan feeling for George brings it in by an eyelash)
Pennsylvania: Richard Schweiker (R) def. Francis L. "Frank" Rizzo (D) (the ultra-liberal Republican essentially runs to Mayor Frank's left...)
South Carolina: Ernest Hollings (D) def. Gwenyfred Bush (R)
South Dakota: Leo K. Thorsness (R) def. Frank E. Denholm (D) (McGovern's old seat turns over)
Vermont: Patrick Leahy (D) def. Richard W. Mallary (R)
Washington: Warren G. Magnuson (D) def. Jack Metcalf (R)
Wisconsin: Gaylord Nelson (D) def. Thomas "Tom" Petri (R) (GAYLORD! Coulda been Veep, Gaylord....)
United States House of Representatives elections, 1974
A selection of interesting highlights of things that differ from OTL:
Per OTL’s special elections:
PA-12: still happens, John Murtha (D) still takes it for the Dems
MI-5: Does not happen because Gerry Ford (R) is still Minority Leader
OH-1: Doesn’t happen because Bill Keating (R) stays in his job
CA-6: Doesn’t happen, in November Bill Maillard (R) keeps his seat fending off Bob Traxler (D)
CA-13: Bob Lagomarsino (R) still succeeds to the seat
Alabama: AL-3 Robert R. "Bob" Riley (R) is talked into politics much sooner and takes out William Flynt Nichols (D)
Alaska: AK-AL Don Young (R) narrowly defeats Nick Begich (D)
Arkansas: AR-2 Judy Petty (R) just clips past a scandalized Wilbur Mills (D) for a very big scalp indeed (Hammerschmidt also wins by more with Bubba in the Dept. of Agriculture)
California: CA-7 Gary Fernandez (R) wins for a GOP pickup; CA-12 Gary Gillmor (D) holds on to his special-election win for the Dems; CA-13 Mineta still wins for the Dems; Waxman still gets into Congress; CA-17 Bob Mathias (R) survives in the TBTverse; CA-27 Mike Shapiro (D) poaches Al Bell's old seat; CA-34 stays with the GOP; CA-35 Victor Veysey (R) hangs on
Colorado: CO-2 Brotzman hangs on for the GOP
Connecticut: Dodd still wins CT-2, CT-5 William Ratchford (D) gains the seat for the Dems
Florida: Republicans win FL-3 without Charlie there to hold it for the Dems; FL-5 still goes to the GOP; FL-8 the unforgettably named Joe Z. Lovingood (R) picks up the seat for the GOP and his porn 'stache (disclosure: I don't know if he had a porn 'stache but cannot imagine a candidate named "Joe Z. Lovingood" without one)
Georgia: GA-4 Benjamin Blackburn (R) keeps his seat; GA-6 WORD UP IT'S Newt Gingrich (R) pushing his Congressional chronology to the left; GA-7 Larry McDonald (AIP) wins a three-way as messy as that sounds to become an official AIP congrescritter; GA-10 Gary Pleger (R) comes out of nowhere to make Strom even happier across the border
Illinois: IL-3 Robert Hanrahan (R) holds on; IL-6 Ed Hanrahan (D) beats Dr. Jekyll and Henry Hyde (R) which may be a mixed blessing; GOP holds IL-10 without Mikva running; GOP also holds IL-15
Indiana: GOP holds IN-6, also IN-8 and IN-11 so Dems only gain IN-2 and IN-10
Iowa: IA-2 Tom Riley (R) flips the seat for the GOP; IA-3 Stephen Rapp (D) beats Chuck Grassley (R); also Tom Harkin (D) takes IA-5; IA-6 stays GOP
Louisiana: Henson Moore (R) picks up LA-6 as IOTL
Maine: ME-1 still goes narrowly to the GOP
Maryland: MD-1 Tom Hatem (D) beats Robert Bauman (R) which helps cut the GOP down to two MD seats
Massachusetts: Tsongas still takes MA-5 for the Dems
Michigan: MI-2 John S. Reuther (D) beats Marvin L. Esch (R); in MI-6 Bob Carr (D) still picks up the seat; MI-11 Francis D. Brouillette (D) beats Phillip Ruppe (R); and James Blanchard (D) takes MI-18
Minnesota: MN-2 Steve Babcock (DFL) flips the seat for the Dems; MN-3 and MN-6 stay GOP
Mississippi: MS-2 a young Haley Barbour (R) shocks David R. Bowen (D) and gives the GOP a 3-2 majority in Mississippi's House delegation
Missouri: MO-7 Richard L. Franks (D) beats Gene Taylor (R) to wipe out the GOP in the House delegation; Richard Ichord, Jr. (AIP) holds MO-8 as an AIP candidate against a Democratic challenger
Montana: GOP holds MT-1
Nebraska: Wayne Ziebarth (D) picks up NE-3 by an eyelash
Nevada: GOP holds NV-AL
New Hampshire: GOP holds NH-1
New Jersey: GOP holds NJ-1 (screwing Jim Florio) and NJ-7; Dems pick up NJ-2 and NJ-13
New York: GOP holds NY-2, NY-3, and NY-27; Dems pick up NY-29 and NY-36
North Carolina: GOP holds NC-5 and NC-10 when Broyhill goes big time; Dems still pick up NC-8
Ohio: OH-1 stays GOP; OH-9 Carleton S. Finkbeiner (R) turns the seat to the GOP, GOP holds OH-23
Oklahoma: A young James Inhofe (R) poaches OK-1; OK-2 Ralph F. Keen (R) pulls it out; GOP holds OK-6 and now splits the state's House delegation 3-3
Oregon: Les AuCoin (D) picks up OR-1, while OR-4 stays very narrowly GOP
Pennsylvania: Dems still pick up PA-7 but still lose PA-25
South Carolina: SC-5 Lenard Phillips (R) edges out his challenge and turns the seat Republican; GOP keeps SC-6 and is now 3-3 in the delegation
South Dakota: GOP poaches SD-1
Tennessee: GOP holds TN-3 and TN-8
Texas: TX-7 Archer holds the seat and TX-13 stays GOP too when Graham Purcell runs and fails for the Dems; James A. Baker (R) takes TX-8 in a memorably effective campaign against Bob Eckhardt; TX-21 Doug Harlan (R) takes the seat for the GOP; TX-22 Ron Paul (R) slouches towards Bethlehem and now there are five GOP reps in the Texas delegation
Utah: UT-2 Steven Hamsen (R) flips the seat to the GOP
Virginia: Richard Obenshain (R) runs again in VA-3 and wins; GOP holds VA-10
Washington: WA-3 A. Ludlow Kramer (R) captures the seat
Wisconsin: GOP holds WI-3
West Virginia: GOP poaches WV-1 Because Textbooks
Wyoming: Tom Strock (R) unseats Teno Roncalio (D)
Along with other results more or less in line with OTL, this results in:
Democrats: 238, - 5
Republican: 195, + 4
American Independent: 2, + 2
United States Gubernatorial elections, 1974
Alabama: George Wallace (D) def. Forrest H. "Fob" James (R)
Alaska: Jay Hammond (R) def. William Allen Egan (D)
Arizona: Evan Mecham (R) def. Raul Castro (D) in a recount because fuck my life...
Arkansas: David Pryor (D) def. Ken Coon (R)
California: Edmund G. "Jerry" Brown (D) def. Edwin Reinicke (R) hard for Reinicke to make stump speeches down the stretch when he's answering subpoenas...
Colorado: Richard "Dick" Lamm (D) def. John David Vanderhoof (R) OK OLD PEOPLE, DIE ALREADY
Connecticut: Ella T. Grasso (D) def. Robert H. Steele (R)
Florida: Reubin Askew (D) def. Jack Eckerd (R) Askew uses his track record and personal popularity to hold off a stiff challenge from the pharmacy magnate
Georgia: Lester Maddox Sr. (AIP) def. George Busbee (D) and Ronnie Thompson (R) as McGovern Derangement Syndrome grows and grows
Hawaii: George Ariyoshi (D) def. Randolph Crossley (R)
Idaho: Cecil Andrus (D) def. Jack M. Murphy (R)
Iowa: Robert D. Ray (R) def. James Schaben (D)
Kansas: Vern Miller (D) def. Robert Frederick Bennett (R)
Maine: George Mitchell (D) def. James B. Longley (I) and James Erwin (R)
Maryland: Marvin Mandel (D) def. Louise Gore (R)
Massachusetts: Michael Dukakis (D) def. Donald Dwight (R)
Michigan: William Milliken (R) def. Sander M. Levin (D) by the skin of his teeth
Minnesota: Wendell Anderson (D) def. John W. Johnson (R)
Nebraska: J. James Exon (D) def. Richard Marvel (R)
Nevada: Mike O'Callaghan (D) def. James R. Houston (AIP) and Shirley Crumler (R)
New Hampshire: John H. Sununu (R) def. Roger J. Crowley (D)
New Mexico: Joe Skeen (R) def. Jerry Apodaca (D)
New York: Hugh Carey (D) def. Malcolm Wilson (R)
Ohio: John J. Gilligan (D) def. Jim Rhodes (R) because what do we not make? Sheep jokes...
Oklahoma: Dewey F. Bartlett (R) def. David L. Boren (D)
Oregon: Robert W. "Bob" Straub (D) def. Victor G. Atiyeh (R)
Pennsylvania: Milt Shapp (D) def. Andrew L. Lewis, Jr. (R)
Rhode Island: Philip W. Noel (D) def. James Nugent (R)
South Carolina: Gen. William Westmoreland (ret.) (R) def. W. J. Bryan Dorn (D) with the Hippie-Lover in the Oval Office Westy appeals more in the primary, then "does a Fob" in the general (runs to DORN! The Musical's right on economics and his left on race)
Tennessee: Lamar Alexander (R) def. Ray Blanton (D) (TNDems are deep down the bottle of Jack since Ray clawed his way, feral, back to the nomination despite their best efforts)
Texas: John B. Connally, Jr. (R) def. Frances "Sissy" Farenthold (D) (Texas Monthly will dine out on this one for decades as THE QUEEN takes Dolph's receding little scalp but Big Bad John wins the battle royale)
Vermont: Thomas P. Salmon (D) def. Walter L. Kennedy (R)
Wisconsin: Patrick Lucey (D) def.
Wyoming: Edgar Herschler (D) def. Richard “Dick” Jones (R) because why not a Jewish left-populist in Wyoming, he did it IOTL...
All righty then. Just a few things going on there...
United States Elections 1974-75
United States Senate elections, 1974
Alabama: Capt. Jeremiah Denton, USN (ret.) (R) def. James Allen (D) (an Alabama civil war over the fortunes of the Wallace machine becomes the kind of transformative moment Strom Thurmond has dreamed of; the South Carolina grandee was seen shortly thereafter hitting himself repeatedly in the groin with a leather-bound Title 9 of the United States Code shouting "GO DOWN GODDAMMIT IT'S BEEN SIX HOURS!!!")
Alaska: Mike Gravel (D) def. C. R. Lewis (R)
Arizona: Barry Goldwater Sr. (R) def. Jonathan Marshall (D)
Arkansas: Dale Bumpers (D) def. Winthrop Rockefeller (R) (Dale still takes out Fulbright but has a much harder road against the former governor)
California: Alan Cranston (D) def. Alphonso E. "Al" Bell, Jr. (R)
Colorado: Timothy Endicott “Tim” Wirth (D) def. Peter Dominick(R)
Connecticut: Abraham A. Ribicoff (D) def. William F. Buckley, Jr. (R) (in which carpets are bagged though to no end effect)
Florida: Edward Gurney (R) def. William "Bill" Gunter (D)
Georgia: Howard H. “Bo” Callaway (R) def. Herman Talmadge (D)
Hawaii: Daniel K. Inouye (D) def. James D. Kimmel (R)
Idaho: Frank Church (D) def. Robert L. Smith (R)
Illinois: Adlai Stevenson III (D) def. David C. O'Neal (R)
Indiana: Richard Lugar (R) def. Birch E. Bayh (D) (ITTL things do not go Birch’s way, a big blow to the Dems)
Iowa: David M. Stanley (R) def. John Culver (D)
Kansas: William R. "Bill" Roy (D) def. Robert J. "Bob" Dole (R) (BOBDOLE does not believe that BOBDOLE's relationship with indicted former President Nixon or BOBDOLE's vote for BOBDOLE's rural constituents on the FFRA that disgusted hard-line voters who may have stayed home affected BOBDOLE's fortunes... no BOBDOLE does not believe that's BOBDOLE's actual scalp on Bill Roy's wall at all ....)
Kentucky: Marlow Cook (R) def. Wendell Ford (D)
Louisiana: Russell Long (D), unopposed (Longs play by different rules)
Maryland: Charles Mathias, Jr. (R) def. Blair Lee III (D)
Michigan: Carl Levin (D) def. Robert P. Griffin (R) (the special election for the rest of Phil Hart's term brings in a Democrat)
Missouri: Jerry L. Litton (D) def. Thomas B. Curtis (R) (after Eagleton is forced to withdraw in scandals over revelations about his medical condition and self-medicating habits)
Nevada: Paul Laxalt (R) def. Alan Bible (D) (once more with feeling... wasn't)
New Hampshire: Louis C. Wyman (R) def. John A. Durkin (D)
New York: Jacob A. Javits (R) def. Bella Abzug (D) and Barbara A. Keating (C) (probably the messiest race of the night, all kinds of strange coalitions of voters)
North Carolina: James "Jim" Broyhill (R) def. Robert Burren Morgan (D) (why have an imitation Republican when you can have the real thing?)
North Dakota: William L. Guy (D) def. Milton R. Young (a GOP giant goes down too)
Ohio: John Glenn (D) def. William B. Saxbe (R) (voter booth to Major John...)
Oklahoma: Henry Bellmon (R) def. George Nigh (D)
Oregon: Betty Roberts (D) def. Robert "Bob" Packwood (R) (concentrating on one race and partisan feeling for George brings it in by an eyelash)
Pennsylvania: Richard Schweiker (R) def. Francis L. "Frank" Rizzo (D) (the ultra-liberal Republican essentially runs to Mayor Frank's left...)
South Carolina: Ernest Hollings (D) def. Gwenyfred Bush (R)
South Dakota: Leo K. Thorsness (R) def. Frank E. Denholm (D) (McGovern's old seat turns over)
Vermont: Patrick Leahy (D) def. Richard W. Mallary (R)
Washington: Warren G. Magnuson (D) def. Jack Metcalf (R)
Wisconsin: Gaylord Nelson (D) def. Thomas "Tom" Petri (R) (GAYLORD! Coulda been Veep, Gaylord....)
United States House of Representatives elections, 1974
A selection of interesting highlights of things that differ from OTL:
Per OTL’s special elections:
PA-12: still happens, John Murtha (D) still takes it for the Dems
MI-5: Does not happen because Gerry Ford (R) is still Minority Leader
OH-1: Doesn’t happen because Bill Keating (R) stays in his job
CA-6: Doesn’t happen, in November Bill Maillard (R) keeps his seat fending off Bob Traxler (D)
CA-13: Bob Lagomarsino (R) still succeeds to the seat
Alabama: AL-3 Robert R. "Bob" Riley (R) is talked into politics much sooner and takes out William Flynt Nichols (D)
Alaska: AK-AL Don Young (R) narrowly defeats Nick Begich (D)
Arkansas: AR-2 Judy Petty (R) just clips past a scandalized Wilbur Mills (D) for a very big scalp indeed (Hammerschmidt also wins by more with Bubba in the Dept. of Agriculture)
California: CA-7 Gary Fernandez (R) wins for a GOP pickup; CA-12 Gary Gillmor (D) holds on to his special-election win for the Dems; CA-13 Mineta still wins for the Dems; Waxman still gets into Congress; CA-17 Bob Mathias (R) survives in the TBTverse; CA-27 Mike Shapiro (D) poaches Al Bell's old seat; CA-34 stays with the GOP; CA-35 Victor Veysey (R) hangs on
Colorado: CO-2 Brotzman hangs on for the GOP
Connecticut: Dodd still wins CT-2, CT-5 William Ratchford (D) gains the seat for the Dems
Florida: Republicans win FL-3 without Charlie there to hold it for the Dems; FL-5 still goes to the GOP; FL-8 the unforgettably named Joe Z. Lovingood (R) picks up the seat for the GOP and his porn 'stache (disclosure: I don't know if he had a porn 'stache but cannot imagine a candidate named "Joe Z. Lovingood" without one)
Georgia: GA-4 Benjamin Blackburn (R) keeps his seat; GA-6 WORD UP IT'S Newt Gingrich (R) pushing his Congressional chronology to the left; GA-7 Larry McDonald (AIP) wins a three-way as messy as that sounds to become an official AIP congrescritter; GA-10 Gary Pleger (R) comes out of nowhere to make Strom even happier across the border
Illinois: IL-3 Robert Hanrahan (R) holds on; IL-6 Ed Hanrahan (D) beats Dr. Jekyll and Henry Hyde (R) which may be a mixed blessing; GOP holds IL-10 without Mikva running; GOP also holds IL-15
Indiana: GOP holds IN-6, also IN-8 and IN-11 so Dems only gain IN-2 and IN-10
Iowa: IA-2 Tom Riley (R) flips the seat for the GOP; IA-3 Stephen Rapp (D) beats Chuck Grassley (R); also Tom Harkin (D) takes IA-5; IA-6 stays GOP
Louisiana: Henson Moore (R) picks up LA-6 as IOTL
Maine: ME-1 still goes narrowly to the GOP
Maryland: MD-1 Tom Hatem (D) beats Robert Bauman (R) which helps cut the GOP down to two MD seats
Massachusetts: Tsongas still takes MA-5 for the Dems
Michigan: MI-2 John S. Reuther (D) beats Marvin L. Esch (R); in MI-6 Bob Carr (D) still picks up the seat; MI-11 Francis D. Brouillette (D) beats Phillip Ruppe (R); and James Blanchard (D) takes MI-18
Minnesota: MN-2 Steve Babcock (DFL) flips the seat for the Dems; MN-3 and MN-6 stay GOP
Mississippi: MS-2 a young Haley Barbour (R) shocks David R. Bowen (D) and gives the GOP a 3-2 majority in Mississippi's House delegation
Missouri: MO-7 Richard L. Franks (D) beats Gene Taylor (R) to wipe out the GOP in the House delegation; Richard Ichord, Jr. (AIP) holds MO-8 as an AIP candidate against a Democratic challenger
Montana: GOP holds MT-1
Nebraska: Wayne Ziebarth (D) picks up NE-3 by an eyelash
Nevada: GOP holds NV-AL
New Hampshire: GOP holds NH-1
New Jersey: GOP holds NJ-1 (screwing Jim Florio) and NJ-7; Dems pick up NJ-2 and NJ-13
New York: GOP holds NY-2, NY-3, and NY-27; Dems pick up NY-29 and NY-36
North Carolina: GOP holds NC-5 and NC-10 when Broyhill goes big time; Dems still pick up NC-8
Ohio: OH-1 stays GOP; OH-9 Carleton S. Finkbeiner (R) turns the seat to the GOP, GOP holds OH-23
Oklahoma: A young James Inhofe (R) poaches OK-1; OK-2 Ralph F. Keen (R) pulls it out; GOP holds OK-6 and now splits the state's House delegation 3-3
Oregon: Les AuCoin (D) picks up OR-1, while OR-4 stays very narrowly GOP
Pennsylvania: Dems still pick up PA-7 but still lose PA-25
South Carolina: SC-5 Lenard Phillips (R) edges out his challenge and turns the seat Republican; GOP keeps SC-6 and is now 3-3 in the delegation
South Dakota: GOP poaches SD-1
Tennessee: GOP holds TN-3 and TN-8
Texas: TX-7 Archer holds the seat and TX-13 stays GOP too when Graham Purcell runs and fails for the Dems; James A. Baker (R) takes TX-8 in a memorably effective campaign against Bob Eckhardt; TX-21 Doug Harlan (R) takes the seat for the GOP; TX-22 Ron Paul (R) slouches towards Bethlehem and now there are five GOP reps in the Texas delegation
Utah: UT-2 Steven Hamsen (R) flips the seat to the GOP
Virginia: Richard Obenshain (R) runs again in VA-3 and wins; GOP holds VA-10
Washington: WA-3 A. Ludlow Kramer (R) captures the seat
Wisconsin: GOP holds WI-3
West Virginia: GOP poaches WV-1 Because Textbooks
Wyoming: Tom Strock (R) unseats Teno Roncalio (D)
Along with other results more or less in line with OTL, this results in:
Democrats: 238, - 5
Republican: 195, + 4
American Independent: 2, + 2
United States Gubernatorial elections, 1974
Alabama: George Wallace (D) def. Forrest H. "Fob" James (R)
Alaska: Jay Hammond (R) def. William Allen Egan (D)
Arizona: Evan Mecham (R) def. Raul Castro (D) in a recount because fuck my life...
Arkansas: David Pryor (D) def. Ken Coon (R)
California: Edmund G. "Jerry" Brown (D) def. Edwin Reinicke (R) hard for Reinicke to make stump speeches down the stretch when he's answering subpoenas...
Colorado: Richard "Dick" Lamm (D) def. John David Vanderhoof (R) OK OLD PEOPLE, DIE ALREADY
Connecticut: Ella T. Grasso (D) def. Robert H. Steele (R)
Florida: Reubin Askew (D) def. Jack Eckerd (R) Askew uses his track record and personal popularity to hold off a stiff challenge from the pharmacy magnate
Georgia: Lester Maddox Sr. (AIP) def. George Busbee (D) and Ronnie Thompson (R) as McGovern Derangement Syndrome grows and grows
Hawaii: George Ariyoshi (D) def. Randolph Crossley (R)
Idaho: Cecil Andrus (D) def. Jack M. Murphy (R)
Iowa: Robert D. Ray (R) def. James Schaben (D)
Kansas: Vern Miller (D) def. Robert Frederick Bennett (R)
Maine: George Mitchell (D) def. James B. Longley (I) and James Erwin (R)
Maryland: Marvin Mandel (D) def. Louise Gore (R)
Massachusetts: Michael Dukakis (D) def. Donald Dwight (R)
Michigan: William Milliken (R) def. Sander M. Levin (D) by the skin of his teeth
Minnesota: Wendell Anderson (D) def. John W. Johnson (R)
Nebraska: J. James Exon (D) def. Richard Marvel (R)
Nevada: Mike O'Callaghan (D) def. James R. Houston (AIP) and Shirley Crumler (R)
New Hampshire: John H. Sununu (R) def. Roger J. Crowley (D)
New Mexico: Joe Skeen (R) def. Jerry Apodaca (D)
New York: Hugh Carey (D) def. Malcolm Wilson (R)
Ohio: John J. Gilligan (D) def. Jim Rhodes (R) because what do we not make? Sheep jokes...
Oklahoma: Dewey F. Bartlett (R) def. David L. Boren (D)
Oregon: Robert W. "Bob" Straub (D) def. Victor G. Atiyeh (R)
Pennsylvania: Milt Shapp (D) def. Andrew L. Lewis, Jr. (R)
Rhode Island: Philip W. Noel (D) def. James Nugent (R)
South Carolina: Gen. William Westmoreland (ret.) (R) def. W. J. Bryan Dorn (D) with the Hippie-Lover in the Oval Office Westy appeals more in the primary, then "does a Fob" in the general (runs to DORN! The Musical's right on economics and his left on race)
Tennessee: Lamar Alexander (R) def. Ray Blanton (D) (TNDems are deep down the bottle of Jack since Ray clawed his way, feral, back to the nomination despite their best efforts)
Texas: John B. Connally, Jr. (R) def. Frances "Sissy" Farenthold (D) (Texas Monthly will dine out on this one for decades as THE QUEEN takes Dolph's receding little scalp but Big Bad John wins the battle royale)
Vermont: Thomas P. Salmon (D) def. Walter L. Kennedy (R)
Wisconsin: Patrick Lucey (D) def.
Wyoming: Edgar Herschler (D) def. Richard “Dick” Jones (R) because why not a Jewish left-populist in Wyoming, he did it IOTL...
All righty then. Just a few things going on there...
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That elusive Texan is yet to be determined. There are several in play.
Well, now we really know what happens when the devil goes down to Georgia, and it ain't a fiddle contest... good lord, the AIP spike (I count a few wins in GA, as well as Ichord's consolation prize out in MO) might be one of the most terrifying bits of this all. Though it is nice to see the right doing what the left is so good at, for once.
In some of the more secession-positive areas the Judean People's Front and the People's Front of Judea are certainly at it hammer and tongs.
Thanks for the catch, yeah that should be MN-3 not MN-5. Yes any sort of Hagedorn dynasty will have to Try Harder over ITTL.
God its bizarre to see the old fossils of my childhood, the ancient monsters that are, especially now, being slowly toppled in the great anti-fascist Titanomachy, as young pioneers in the vanguard, vulgar and muscular and ready to topple bastions of American life that I in the generations after their conquest, never knew. Hopefully in this universe such conquests never happen.