Hale, Vladivostok!
- Thread starter herlockscholmes
- Start date
One upvote is plenty for me!! More to come...I would love to see it. A prophet shouldn't be punished for being correct.
I think we'd all love to see how it ends, at the very least! Totally understandable to call it here.
Chapter XX - The View from The Balcony in Late June
This is not the last chapter, the last is next. Enjoy.
“Gilligan, it ain’t our world anymore,” the withered old man coughed through a handkerchief as he strained to catch a glimpse of the events occurring below the balcony’s edge. His thick-rimmed black spectacles slid down his nose several times from the force of his wheezing as his old veteran pal feebly lifted them back into place. The younger man sighed, took a long drag of his cigarette, and watched as the men in fatigues gathered in the courtyard.
“Maybe it is,” Gilligan said, watching fresh-faced “eighteen” year old recruits for the brand-new “Army of the Republic of the Transamur” as they filed into the back of a BMP. Overhead, a Hind emblazoned with the roundel of the now-characteristic Transamurian green-and-white overlaid with a red “X” swooped past the row of armored vehicles headed for combat against the other splinter elements of the former Russian Federation.
“‘Nam, but with nicer shit,” he exhaled into the night air.
Boggs was terminal. Sometime in the next few weeks, he would pass from this Earth, leaving behind a legacy with all the gray hues of a Louisianan political story. He took on the Long machine, uncovered corruption, and won. He authored drug sentencing legislation that served as the precursor to draconian laws that locked up millions and threw away the key. He voted against the Civil Rights Acts of 1957, 1960, and 1964. He voted for the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Civil Rights Act of 1968. He railed against communist subversion of government as his opponents accused him of being a communist in his youth. He cast doubt on the official story of the JFK assassination, recanted publicly, then fled the country. He called out the creation of the surveillance state, then spent a quarter century living in a surveillance state.
Who was Hale Boggs, this agent of chaos who’d died and come back to life again, shared his story to save America and cracked it in half instead? How would the historians, who so often search for ways to slap the labels of “Good” or “Evil” on figures, and discard those who fit neither more often than they care to admit, categorize this curiosity? These were not the questions on the old man’s mind as he clutched a withering handkerchief in one hand and the graying photo of a baby in his lap in the other. History decides as history must, but a man remembers only those he loved and lost.
“Cokie…I’m cough sorry I missed so much of it cough you did everything I could’ve hoped for cough I hope you know Daddy loves you always cough…” he muttered, pulling the sepia-toned photo of a much more vital version of himself and his infant daughter to his chest. Oh, how he’d loved to be able to tell the story of how that photo comforted him in his years in exile. How he’d loved to be able to say it sustained him in the long night in Vladivostok, when it seemed the whole world had forgotten his existence and he’d never see the light of day again - even if to be maligned. Alas, Lindy gave him the picture when he resurfaced. Everything - even his memories - fell still against the overriding need for survival in his Vladivostok years. So much the better, perhaps, since he might not have been able to bear the pain of holding that photograph in the uncertain times.
“So sorry cough…I only wish I could’ve been there. Only wish I could’ve been there. They would’ve killed you, Cokie. Would’ve cough killed you and Lindy. I had to run. I had to run for you.”
The Transamurian infantry were piling onto the backs of the BMPs, now. These Russians, it didn’t matter if they were one country or seven - they would ride atop their armor, please and thank you. Gilligan, unaware of Boggs’s silent apology to his daughter, mused on the sight to his old benefactor.
“Sure, it looks bad, but maybe it’ll be fine after all.”
Boggs’s cough temporarily subsided.
“How you figure that, Gilligan?” he asked.
The younger man waved his cigarette with professorial air.
“All my life, world’s getting bigger,” he said. “One world, one people, one government, one everything. Some of us just can’t get along. Maybe we can get along without going along, if you get me.”
Boggs shook his head and let out a wheezing sigh.
“Gilligan, when I found you in that decrepit hidey-hole in Washington, you must’ve had eleven hundred son-bitching books in there. You read that much and you’re still damn well clueless.”
A long stare preceded a hearty laugh from both.
“Well now, follow me on this one, Boggs. Look at the map of Europe before World War One. You’ve got all these countries housing a few dozen ethnic groups. The boundaries, they’re way more sorted now, man. Way more sorted. Czechs live in Czechoslovakia, Germans in Germany, you know. Maybe we’ve just got more sorting to do.”
The elder man folded the photo and tucked it in his shirt pocket.
“And why is there a frigging European Union, Gilligan? So all those Czechs in Czechosolvakia and Germans in Germany don’t end up killing each other ad infinitum. In the end, we won’t last long if we don’t last together. I’ll stick with that.”
Their steadfast housekeeper hugged a beau goodbye on the sidewalk below as the streetlamp cast its light over the pair of them. Gilligan stared at her, recalling the old scenes from his time in Vietnam, and thrust his gaze away as fast as he could.
“I love you, Boggs, but sometimes, I don’t know what you really believe in,” he said.
The old man let out his loudest cough.
“Living, mostly,” Boggs replied.
An SU-25 roared overhead as Gilligan walked back inside to drift off to sleep. In a week, his old friend would be dead.
(XX)
June 26, 2006
June 26, 2006
“Gilligan, it ain’t our world anymore,” the withered old man coughed through a handkerchief as he strained to catch a glimpse of the events occurring below the balcony’s edge. His thick-rimmed black spectacles slid down his nose several times from the force of his wheezing as his old veteran pal feebly lifted them back into place. The younger man sighed, took a long drag of his cigarette, and watched as the men in fatigues gathered in the courtyard.
“Maybe it is,” Gilligan said, watching fresh-faced “eighteen” year old recruits for the brand-new “Army of the Republic of the Transamur” as they filed into the back of a BMP. Overhead, a Hind emblazoned with the roundel of the now-characteristic Transamurian green-and-white overlaid with a red “X” swooped past the row of armored vehicles headed for combat against the other splinter elements of the former Russian Federation.
“‘Nam, but with nicer shit,” he exhaled into the night air.
Boggs was terminal. Sometime in the next few weeks, he would pass from this Earth, leaving behind a legacy with all the gray hues of a Louisianan political story. He took on the Long machine, uncovered corruption, and won. He authored drug sentencing legislation that served as the precursor to draconian laws that locked up millions and threw away the key. He voted against the Civil Rights Acts of 1957, 1960, and 1964. He voted for the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Civil Rights Act of 1968. He railed against communist subversion of government as his opponents accused him of being a communist in his youth. He cast doubt on the official story of the JFK assassination, recanted publicly, then fled the country. He called out the creation of the surveillance state, then spent a quarter century living in a surveillance state.
Who was Hale Boggs, this agent of chaos who’d died and come back to life again, shared his story to save America and cracked it in half instead? How would the historians, who so often search for ways to slap the labels of “Good” or “Evil” on figures, and discard those who fit neither more often than they care to admit, categorize this curiosity? These were not the questions on the old man’s mind as he clutched a withering handkerchief in one hand and the graying photo of a baby in his lap in the other. History decides as history must, but a man remembers only those he loved and lost.
“Cokie…I’m cough sorry I missed so much of it cough you did everything I could’ve hoped for cough I hope you know Daddy loves you always cough…” he muttered, pulling the sepia-toned photo of a much more vital version of himself and his infant daughter to his chest. Oh, how he’d loved to be able to tell the story of how that photo comforted him in his years in exile. How he’d loved to be able to say it sustained him in the long night in Vladivostok, when it seemed the whole world had forgotten his existence and he’d never see the light of day again - even if to be maligned. Alas, Lindy gave him the picture when he resurfaced. Everything - even his memories - fell still against the overriding need for survival in his Vladivostok years. So much the better, perhaps, since he might not have been able to bear the pain of holding that photograph in the uncertain times.
“So sorry cough…I only wish I could’ve been there. Only wish I could’ve been there. They would’ve killed you, Cokie. Would’ve cough killed you and Lindy. I had to run. I had to run for you.”
The Transamurian infantry were piling onto the backs of the BMPs, now. These Russians, it didn’t matter if they were one country or seven - they would ride atop their armor, please and thank you. Gilligan, unaware of Boggs’s silent apology to his daughter, mused on the sight to his old benefactor.
“Sure, it looks bad, but maybe it’ll be fine after all.”
Boggs’s cough temporarily subsided.
“How you figure that, Gilligan?” he asked.
The younger man waved his cigarette with professorial air.
“All my life, world’s getting bigger,” he said. “One world, one people, one government, one everything. Some of us just can’t get along. Maybe we can get along without going along, if you get me.”
Boggs shook his head and let out a wheezing sigh.
“Gilligan, when I found you in that decrepit hidey-hole in Washington, you must’ve had eleven hundred son-bitching books in there. You read that much and you’re still damn well clueless.”
A long stare preceded a hearty laugh from both.
“Well now, follow me on this one, Boggs. Look at the map of Europe before World War One. You’ve got all these countries housing a few dozen ethnic groups. The boundaries, they’re way more sorted now, man. Way more sorted. Czechs live in Czechoslovakia, Germans in Germany, you know. Maybe we’ve just got more sorting to do.”
The elder man folded the photo and tucked it in his shirt pocket.
“And why is there a frigging European Union, Gilligan? So all those Czechs in Czechosolvakia and Germans in Germany don’t end up killing each other ad infinitum. In the end, we won’t last long if we don’t last together. I’ll stick with that.”
Their steadfast housekeeper hugged a beau goodbye on the sidewalk below as the streetlamp cast its light over the pair of them. Gilligan stared at her, recalling the old scenes from his time in Vietnam, and thrust his gaze away as fast as he could.
“I love you, Boggs, but sometimes, I don’t know what you really believe in,” he said.
The old man let out his loudest cough.
“Living, mostly,” Boggs replied.
An SU-25 roared overhead as Gilligan walked back inside to drift off to sleep. In a week, his old friend would be dead.
Chapter XX - The Truth Always Comes Out in the End
The end. Thanks to everyone who hung around.
(XX)
July 7, 2006
The town of Nome, Alaska is about as far from Washington, D.C. as Vladivostok is from Moscow. This fact remains true whether one considers physical distance or the metropole’s relative level of concern for the hinterland. Nome, which is a shorter trip to Vladivostok than most of the continental United States, mostly claims its fame as the site of a string of nearly two dozen unusual disappearances that occurred over the forty years between 1960 and 2004. The locals claim, with some evident twisted pride, that UFOs snatched these poor benighted souls from their beds and whisked them off to galaxies unknown. There were even rumors that, once the American Troubles settled down, Universal Pictures would make a sort of ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind’ movie set in Nome to try to shed ‘light’ on the vanishings.
Alas, sometimes things - and people - just disappear out in that grand empty country, no thanks to grand conspiracies or alien space bats. Nome sits at the convergence of 350 miles of roads running through some of the most isolated territory in Alaska. Put two and two together and a host of rational explanations emerge: people wander off and succumb to the elements, people wander off and succumb to the bears, people wander off and find themselves face-to-face with an uncaught and undiscovered serial killer. Empty woods make for the best mysteries.
Nome was famous for something else in those days, though. It had been struck several times by what satirist Jon Stewart was repeatedly calling the ‘Hillbilly Intifada,’ the hodgepodge of militias and secessionists who’d gathered in the Alaskan wilderness to hunker down in the aftermath of what they believed was a ‘stolen’ 2004 election. What a journey it’d been. At JFK Jr.’s election in 2000, the militiamen gathered at Camp Boggs on the edge of the Chugach heralded the arrival of a hero. Junior’s emergence, after all, was only possible thanks to the bombshell revelations Hale Boggs loosed on Americans before the 1996 election. Now he would expose ‘the ring’ and bring the evildoers sitting so close to the heart of government to justice. Hundreds of new recruits flocked to Camp Boggs, armed and ready to await the call of their new president.
Unfortunately for the ‘Ringworms,’ it was precisely the opposite that happened. The first three months of President John F. Kennedy, Jr.’s first term were filled with pleas from his FBI Director to deal with the small army massing on the edge of the Chugach. He tried the route of appealing to his fellow Americans’ better angels, delivering an extended address to emphasize that his father may have been killed as a result of a despicable conspiracy, but that the story largely ended there, with no evil, shadowy cabal thwarting his administration as it pushed forward a mild education reform package. The militias didn’t back down, and in June of 2001, events occurred that would make Ruby Ridge look tame.
Worse still, in the eyes of the surviving ‘Ringworms’ and their legion of admirers in the lower 48, Kennedy was a ‘wuss’ in the face of the terrorist menace that struck New York and Washington on September 11, 2001. In his first off-the-cuff remarks outside of a Florida elementary school following the attacks, President Kennedy said that, “Islam is a vibrant faith. Millions of our fellow citizens are Muslim. We respect the faith. We honor its traditions. Our enemy does not. Our enemy doesn't follow the great traditions of Islam. They've hijacked a great religion.”
In the face of Karaschuk’s invasion of Ukraine, Kennedy could only offer aid shipments. In the face of terrorist aggression on American soil, he offered targeted strikes. Yes, the Tora Bora operation had felled bin Laden. But to the most angered of Americans, it hadn’t felt enough. To them, the whole religion, indeed, the people who followed it, were fatally flawed, and their entire region deserved a reinvention at the end of an American rifle. ‘Ringworm’ mythology comfortably adapted to suggest that Kennedy was indeed at the center of the great conspiracy - as the new story went, he’d been secretly kidnapped by ‘the ring’ after his father’s assassination and brainwashed to use his father’s death to seize power and cement ‘the ring’s’ influence. Into the breach stepped one man who could credibly assert that he’d been right about Kennedy all along: Pat Buchanan.
The 2004 election was the bitterest in American history. Buchanan’s favorite line was a dogwhistle to the Ringworms: that the Kennedys and their ‘globalist allies’ would stop at nothing to keep a God-fearing American out of office. The New World Order, he reasoned, wanted America feeble in the face of the terrorist menace, and Kennedy was their willing instrument. Buchanan spoke of registering Muslims, and of expanding the garrison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba to ‘toss the filthy terrorist scum in and throw away the key.’ Even in an environment red-hot with anger directed at the Middle East, most assumed he was completely unpalatable. They were to be surprised on Election Night.
Kennedy, who many American liberals had imagined to be a transformational hero who would usher in a new Progressive Era, with expansive programs to combat global warming, federalize health care, encourage national service, and eliminate poverty, welcomed a number of leaders from the centrist Democratic Leadership Council. In the battle over education reform that dominated the headlines in the spring of 2001, Kennedy sided time and time again with the moderates, rankling those who had expected him to recapture his father’s transformative spirit. “Dad was a tax-cutter and a free-trader,” Kennedy said off-the-cuff at one point, responding to the criticism. It fell flat with much of the left wing of the party, and for a time, rumors swirled of a possible primary challenger: first Senator Paul Wellstone of Minnesota, and after Wellstone’s death in a 2002 plane crash, Governor Howard Dean of Vermont. Neither ultimately opted to challenge Kennedy, but the conversation itself dented his support. What commentators originally imagined would be a 48-state rout turned to a narrow contest.
Election Night ‘04 was a nail-biter. On the heels of Kennedy’s famous “He Got bin Laden” advertising push, the incumbent president ran a clean sweep in the Midwest, taking Ohio and Iowa. Buchanan’s aggressive nationalism also turned a rapidly-Northernizing Virginia, leaving the Kennedy ticket at 301 electoral votes. Yet some in the Ringworm blogosphere published elaborate, lascivious accounts of voter fraud, bribes to election officials, and buses taking voters out of deep-blue parts of Illinois to vote twice in Ohio and Iowa. The occasional Fox commentator paid lip service to these thoughts, but to the average American, it was business as usual. Another election. A few men in tricorner hats arrived at the Capitol on the day that Congress was due to certify the Electoral College result, arguing that they, and they alone, represented true patriotism in their fight to recapture the country from Kennedy, but their protest garnered little attention outside of the closed environment of the rapidly radicalizing extreme-right blogosphere. Those who believed the country was irredeemable came to several rendezvous points in the American West and in Alaska, beyond the Chugach and the feds’ reach.
In the first few months of 2005, Nome was struck by a bombing, a shooting, and even a shelling - a group of militamen having seized an old mortar from an armory, they decided to fire a few rounds on the town - and had sustained some damage. Most of the residents weren’t sure what to think. After some small-scale clashes between federal authorities and the militias outside of Nome, the attacks died down in late 2005.
That was when Pegge Begich moved to Nome.
Pegge, the widow of Nick Begich, the Alaskan Congressman who’d been killed in the crash that Boggs survived, had of course later married Jerry Max Paisley, who had ‘confessed’ to planting the bomb that took down Boggs’s flight. Pegge and Jerry’s marriage had not lasted long - after a few months, Jerry would be in prison for an unrelated murder - but the fact that it’d happened at all had raised more than a few eyebrows.
Tonight, Pegge is in Nome helping her son Mark raise money for his campaign for U.S. Senate. She is at the Board of Trade Saloon, one of the oldest establishments in Nome and one of the only buildings to have survived the town’s gold rush period. Dave, one of the bartenders assigned to work the event, is scrubbing down the countertops. He does not care about politics, nor the goings-on of a Capitol many thousands of miles away. He is tired, broke, and ready to go home to a cold beer and a small television that will show him how the Seattle Mariners played this evening. Pegge’s stayed late, long after most of the guests have gone home. She is working the room aggressively to help her son, and she is talking to an older man in a ragged suit who’d paid the requisite $250 to get in the door.
“Look, Pegge, it’s just…I think a lot of people have some questions, is all,” he said.
“Oh, about Jerry and all of his horseshit?” she replied.
“I mean, we’ve got militiamen out there who think Jerry was ordered to kill Hale Boggs. You married him. You never said one way or the other about what you thought about his whole thing. You want your kid in the Senate? Call off the dogs.”
“Everyone knows he was lying.”
“No, they don’t,” the old man replied.
“He was making it up for attention. Mine, to be specific. He didn’t put a bomb on that plane. He didn’t even know how to make a bomb.”
Dave the Bartender paused from his scrubbing. Something important was getting conveyed here, momentous, even. If Hale Boggs wasn’t the target of an assassination attempt, that had to be a pretty big deal. But why? Why, Dave?
The bartender reckoned that the mental anguish of discerning the significance of that information wasn’t worth staying past his shift. He glanced up from spraying a dusty corner of the bartop.
“You all got to get out of here - and I got to get home.”
(XX)
July 7, 2006
The town of Nome, Alaska is about as far from Washington, D.C. as Vladivostok is from Moscow. This fact remains true whether one considers physical distance or the metropole’s relative level of concern for the hinterland. Nome, which is a shorter trip to Vladivostok than most of the continental United States, mostly claims its fame as the site of a string of nearly two dozen unusual disappearances that occurred over the forty years between 1960 and 2004. The locals claim, with some evident twisted pride, that UFOs snatched these poor benighted souls from their beds and whisked them off to galaxies unknown. There were even rumors that, once the American Troubles settled down, Universal Pictures would make a sort of ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind’ movie set in Nome to try to shed ‘light’ on the vanishings.
Alas, sometimes things - and people - just disappear out in that grand empty country, no thanks to grand conspiracies or alien space bats. Nome sits at the convergence of 350 miles of roads running through some of the most isolated territory in Alaska. Put two and two together and a host of rational explanations emerge: people wander off and succumb to the elements, people wander off and succumb to the bears, people wander off and find themselves face-to-face with an uncaught and undiscovered serial killer. Empty woods make for the best mysteries.
Nome was famous for something else in those days, though. It had been struck several times by what satirist Jon Stewart was repeatedly calling the ‘Hillbilly Intifada,’ the hodgepodge of militias and secessionists who’d gathered in the Alaskan wilderness to hunker down in the aftermath of what they believed was a ‘stolen’ 2004 election. What a journey it’d been. At JFK Jr.’s election in 2000, the militiamen gathered at Camp Boggs on the edge of the Chugach heralded the arrival of a hero. Junior’s emergence, after all, was only possible thanks to the bombshell revelations Hale Boggs loosed on Americans before the 1996 election. Now he would expose ‘the ring’ and bring the evildoers sitting so close to the heart of government to justice. Hundreds of new recruits flocked to Camp Boggs, armed and ready to await the call of their new president.
Unfortunately for the ‘Ringworms,’ it was precisely the opposite that happened. The first three months of President John F. Kennedy, Jr.’s first term were filled with pleas from his FBI Director to deal with the small army massing on the edge of the Chugach. He tried the route of appealing to his fellow Americans’ better angels, delivering an extended address to emphasize that his father may have been killed as a result of a despicable conspiracy, but that the story largely ended there, with no evil, shadowy cabal thwarting his administration as it pushed forward a mild education reform package. The militias didn’t back down, and in June of 2001, events occurred that would make Ruby Ridge look tame.
Worse still, in the eyes of the surviving ‘Ringworms’ and their legion of admirers in the lower 48, Kennedy was a ‘wuss’ in the face of the terrorist menace that struck New York and Washington on September 11, 2001. In his first off-the-cuff remarks outside of a Florida elementary school following the attacks, President Kennedy said that, “Islam is a vibrant faith. Millions of our fellow citizens are Muslim. We respect the faith. We honor its traditions. Our enemy does not. Our enemy doesn't follow the great traditions of Islam. They've hijacked a great religion.”
In the face of Karaschuk’s invasion of Ukraine, Kennedy could only offer aid shipments. In the face of terrorist aggression on American soil, he offered targeted strikes. Yes, the Tora Bora operation had felled bin Laden. But to the most angered of Americans, it hadn’t felt enough. To them, the whole religion, indeed, the people who followed it, were fatally flawed, and their entire region deserved a reinvention at the end of an American rifle. ‘Ringworm’ mythology comfortably adapted to suggest that Kennedy was indeed at the center of the great conspiracy - as the new story went, he’d been secretly kidnapped by ‘the ring’ after his father’s assassination and brainwashed to use his father’s death to seize power and cement ‘the ring’s’ influence. Into the breach stepped one man who could credibly assert that he’d been right about Kennedy all along: Pat Buchanan.
The 2004 election was the bitterest in American history. Buchanan’s favorite line was a dogwhistle to the Ringworms: that the Kennedys and their ‘globalist allies’ would stop at nothing to keep a God-fearing American out of office. The New World Order, he reasoned, wanted America feeble in the face of the terrorist menace, and Kennedy was their willing instrument. Buchanan spoke of registering Muslims, and of expanding the garrison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba to ‘toss the filthy terrorist scum in and throw away the key.’ Even in an environment red-hot with anger directed at the Middle East, most assumed he was completely unpalatable. They were to be surprised on Election Night.
Kennedy, who many American liberals had imagined to be a transformational hero who would usher in a new Progressive Era, with expansive programs to combat global warming, federalize health care, encourage national service, and eliminate poverty, welcomed a number of leaders from the centrist Democratic Leadership Council. In the battle over education reform that dominated the headlines in the spring of 2001, Kennedy sided time and time again with the moderates, rankling those who had expected him to recapture his father’s transformative spirit. “Dad was a tax-cutter and a free-trader,” Kennedy said off-the-cuff at one point, responding to the criticism. It fell flat with much of the left wing of the party, and for a time, rumors swirled of a possible primary challenger: first Senator Paul Wellstone of Minnesota, and after Wellstone’s death in a 2002 plane crash, Governor Howard Dean of Vermont. Neither ultimately opted to challenge Kennedy, but the conversation itself dented his support. What commentators originally imagined would be a 48-state rout turned to a narrow contest.
Election Night ‘04 was a nail-biter. On the heels of Kennedy’s famous “He Got bin Laden” advertising push, the incumbent president ran a clean sweep in the Midwest, taking Ohio and Iowa. Buchanan’s aggressive nationalism also turned a rapidly-Northernizing Virginia, leaving the Kennedy ticket at 301 electoral votes. Yet some in the Ringworm blogosphere published elaborate, lascivious accounts of voter fraud, bribes to election officials, and buses taking voters out of deep-blue parts of Illinois to vote twice in Ohio and Iowa. The occasional Fox commentator paid lip service to these thoughts, but to the average American, it was business as usual. Another election. A few men in tricorner hats arrived at the Capitol on the day that Congress was due to certify the Electoral College result, arguing that they, and they alone, represented true patriotism in their fight to recapture the country from Kennedy, but their protest garnered little attention outside of the closed environment of the rapidly radicalizing extreme-right blogosphere. Those who believed the country was irredeemable came to several rendezvous points in the American West and in Alaska, beyond the Chugach and the feds’ reach.
In the first few months of 2005, Nome was struck by a bombing, a shooting, and even a shelling - a group of militamen having seized an old mortar from an armory, they decided to fire a few rounds on the town - and had sustained some damage. Most of the residents weren’t sure what to think. After some small-scale clashes between federal authorities and the militias outside of Nome, the attacks died down in late 2005.
That was when Pegge Begich moved to Nome.
Pegge, the widow of Nick Begich, the Alaskan Congressman who’d been killed in the crash that Boggs survived, had of course later married Jerry Max Paisley, who had ‘confessed’ to planting the bomb that took down Boggs’s flight. Pegge and Jerry’s marriage had not lasted long - after a few months, Jerry would be in prison for an unrelated murder - but the fact that it’d happened at all had raised more than a few eyebrows.
Tonight, Pegge is in Nome helping her son Mark raise money for his campaign for U.S. Senate. She is at the Board of Trade Saloon, one of the oldest establishments in Nome and one of the only buildings to have survived the town’s gold rush period. Dave, one of the bartenders assigned to work the event, is scrubbing down the countertops. He does not care about politics, nor the goings-on of a Capitol many thousands of miles away. He is tired, broke, and ready to go home to a cold beer and a small television that will show him how the Seattle Mariners played this evening. Pegge’s stayed late, long after most of the guests have gone home. She is working the room aggressively to help her son, and she is talking to an older man in a ragged suit who’d paid the requisite $250 to get in the door.
“Look, Pegge, it’s just…I think a lot of people have some questions, is all,” he said.
“Oh, about Jerry and all of his horseshit?” she replied.
“I mean, we’ve got militiamen out there who think Jerry was ordered to kill Hale Boggs. You married him. You never said one way or the other about what you thought about his whole thing. You want your kid in the Senate? Call off the dogs.”
“Everyone knows he was lying.”
“No, they don’t,” the old man replied.
“He was making it up for attention. Mine, to be specific. He didn’t put a bomb on that plane. He didn’t even know how to make a bomb.”
Dave the Bartender paused from his scrubbing. Something important was getting conveyed here, momentous, even. If Hale Boggs wasn’t the target of an assassination attempt, that had to be a pretty big deal. But why? Why, Dave?
The bartender reckoned that the mental anguish of discerning the significance of that information wasn’t worth staying past his shift. He glanced up from spraying a dusty corner of the bartop.
“You all got to get out of here - and I got to get home.”
Thanks for an excellent timeline, and an ending that makes sense overall! JFK JR. wasn't gonna solve the world any president would, but a moderate in office during 9/11 would be pretty interesting. I look forward to what you come up with next, if you decide to start another timeline.
Great ending. Too bad we couldn't get any more details of this Russo-Ukrainian War of this TL because 2022 happened. Glad to see how JFK Jr. dealt with the War on Terror.
Thanks! I'd intended him as a sort of Obama-esque figure, seen as transformative in the runup to his election, retains a core of loyal followers but some are disillusioned after a few years in office. Layering that over the post-9/11 dynamic would certainly be interesting to follow blow-by-blow, and I'm not sure I really had a great grasp on the depths of it. All in all, I just tried to crunch about 20-30 years of American history into about 7 or so., haha.
As for other TLs, we'll see! This POD was incredibly interesting to me b/c it's derived from a real-world mystery, and in the end, it doesn't really matter much whether or not Boggs was really targeted for assassination - what matters is how it's perceived. I would definitely like to tell other stories like that, where the "truth" of the matter gets buried under an avalanche of motivated reasoning. Ideas certainly welcome...and I'd love to collaborate with folks on a future TL. Thank you so much for the positive encouragement!
Without getting too specific or current political, it went slightly better than OTL has (thus far) for Russia - I sort of envisioned it as a reprieve of the 2008 Georgian war on a much larger scale, with the Russians eventually achieving some stated aims but at costs so enormous it had ripple effects through the entire system. Hence the Transamur uprising at the close (and several other breakaway republics too, of course).
And yeah, really any Democrat in charge in the 9/11 aftermath is interesting to contemplate. The party is certainly very aware of its liabilities on issues of "national security" at this point and much more liable to enthusiastically engage in interventionism than the post-Iraq party, but at the same time it's very hard to imagine the War on Terror being proactively waged as OTL. I think it would be very interesting to see how a limited interventionist party fixated on security cooperation might've performed in the years after 9/11 - and how it would've been received in domestic U.S. politics. I don't think it's safe to say it would've been a slam dunk to take that route in the aftermath of 9/11.
I know I've been saying this a lot, but really grateful for people reading, commenting, engaging with the story.
Since this is a different TL, the earlier Russo-Ukrainian War would mean the Ukrainian military isn't as prepared as OTL. This scenario shows that the Russians gain much ground compared to being stopped beyond LPR and DPR.
Does the Iraq invasion still occur here? And how does JFK Jr. deal with this War on Terror?
No Iraq. I started with the baseline assumption that a different administration and different president wouldn't push it as hard - and, therefore, the conversation among cable pundits would be somewhat different as well. I'd sketched out a relatively limited Afghan operation compared to OTL and a lot more sort of Clintonian one-off strikes on suspected terror cells - with little regard for the host countries' sovereignty - without necessarily launching full-blown invasions.
Another really interesting question is TTL's PATRIOT Act debates. No Bush + the country's just gone through ten years of completely losing faith in the intelligence/natsec communities = vastly less appetite in the Kennedy admin for expansive new surveillance and policing powers. But...people feel unsafe. I think it's an interesting question to wonder where we'd land.
Yes, but two points to consider here. One is that OTL's First Chechen War - where the Russians faced an opponent thought to be so weak that it'd be "over" by 12/20/94 - stretched all the way into 1996 thanks in part to tougher than expected resistance. The second is that Ukraine might well mobilize quickly. 2000 is a very, very different time - the country is overall relatively close to Russia and the sort of east-west divide is a bit more pronounced - but facing an existential crisis, that could change pretty fast. Maybe a third tangential point is that even a Russian occupation would both come at a steep cost and invite a protracted guerilla resistance.
Good explanation.
The 2000s here would definitely be different without Iraq and the Patriot Act. Might as well have the 2007-08 recession being butterflied away. What's interesting here is who will be the POTUS by 2008. Kennedy Jr. finished is two-terms. It's definitely not Barack Obama though.