The prospects for Cambodia and South Vietnam are improving. OTL Communist Vietnam removed Pol Pot in 1979. Wouldn't it be ironic if a non-Communist South Vietnam removed a troublesome Lon Nol? Hmm....
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Fear, Loathing and Gumbo on the Campaign Trail '72
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The prospects for Cambodia and South Vietnam are improving. OTL Communist Vietnam removed Pol Pot in 1979. Wouldn't it be ironic if a non-Communist South Vietnam removed a troublesome Lon Nol? Hmm....
Or he converts his struggles with the Democrats into a narrative about how he is the true defender of the conservative faith against the "radical", "liberal", "tax-and-spend-and-tax-some-more, gun hating" Democrats, which fires up the base even if it doesn't do him much good with the wider electorate.
The Cauldron Bubbles
January 1975
Volkswagen introduces the Golf, its new front-wheel-drive economy car, in the United States and Canada as the Volkswagen Rabbit. Sales of the fuel-efficient vehicle climb while car sales for the big three in Detroit continue to plummet.
Bethlehelm Steel, General Telephone and Electronics, Singer, Ikon Office Solutions and Idle Wilde Foods, all Fortune 500 companies in 1974, file for bankruptcy protection in the first quarter of 1975. This initiates a further sharp decline in share prices as companies retrench in an effort to cut expenses and ride out the worsening recession (depression).
Unemployment remains at 19%; job growth is stagnant. Inventories are slowly being depleted but retailers are wary of placing any new large-scale orders. Consumer electronics and other luxury goods are particularly hard hit.
The Prime Rate has fallen to 7 ½%, but borrowing is still curtailed, creating liquidity issues. One hundred and five banks have failed sine November 1973, the highest rate since the 1930’s. Mortgage rates are at an all time low, but there are few new ones taken out and housing starts are at a forty-year low. Rents are falling, but this is in response to a fall in demand. The Dow Jones average hovers around 500, down from a peak of 1,000 in 1972. The price of gas remains at around $ 0.95 per gallon, although there is a drop as more domestic sources of refined oil become available.
Travel agents report among the highest small business bankruptcy rates, followed closely by auto dealers and small retailers. Business for the funeral industry is up, which coincides with a rise in the national suicide rate. Homelessness remains a problem in many major American communities, as does the question of child nutrition and school attendance.
In the Imperial Valley in California there are several violent clashes between native-born workers and immigrant farm workers over agricultural jobs. Similar confrontations are noted in factory and manufacturing positions along the U.S.-Mexico border.
Egyptian President Anwar al-Sadat had introduced a policy of economic liberalisation and, to a much lesser extent, political liberalisation. In 1971 the concentration camps created by the Nasser regime were closed, and the regime began to gradually release the imprisoned Muslim Brothers, though the organisation (Muslim Brotherhood) itself remained illegal; the last of those still behind bars regained their freedom in the general amnesty of 1975.
Sadat hoped to use the conservative Muslim Brotherhood as a political counterweight to leftist and nationalist groups which were opposing his cease-fire agreement with Israel. However, the Muslim Brotherhood began preaching against the on-going western occupation in Syria, and Sadat’s tacit support for the western action.
January 1, 1975
Work is abandoned on the British end of the Channel Tunnel.
A United Nations sponsored interim government takes office in Syria. It is lead by many figures from the rump Aleppo government. The nominal head of state remains Aleppo government President (General) Luai al-Atassi. The provisional council he chairs is in fact very faction riddled. The Syrian military, apart from a conspicuous officer corps, is also in very poor condition. Allied coalition forces begin re-building the Syrian Army, although there are conflicts between the United States and the Soviet Union over this plan.
Israel officially protests to the United States and Soviet governments about any efforts to rebuild the Syrian military.
January 2, 1975
The attempt to fashion an entente between President Mitterrand and UDR Prime Minister Olivier Guichard to overcome the Grand Gachis collapses with a policy impasse between the Matignon and the Elysee. The Prime Minister and his Cabinet tender their resignations to President Mitterrand, and call on the President himself to resign (“to let the people of France decide”). As the terms of article 12 of the Constitution prevent Mitterrand from dissolving the assembly until the summer, he is forced to form a government out of the existing National Assembly membership. The UDR hopes by this maneuver to either force the President to accept them back on their terms (i.e. reduce his Presidency to a figurehead status) or, if his Socialist Party fails to form a workable government, resign himself.
The President calls on Gaston Defferre to form a minority government with Socialist but no Communist members (he is well aware that many French voters fear the Communist influence if they are allowed into the government; an issue which he must address, and he does so through Defferre by keeping the PCF at arm’s length). Defferre is appointed Prime Minister. The UDR, who have never accepted Mitterrand’s election (in part because they couldn’t accept that Giscard did better than their man in the first round of the 1974 Presidential election, thus forcing the UDR candidate out of the final round) are opposed, but Mitterrand’s 1974 opponent Valery Giscard d’Estaing rallies his Independent Republicans (NFIR) to support the government’s formation (which also gets the support of all but a few dissident PCF deputies), surprising the UDR loyalists.
Giscard, who had spent much of 1974 smarting over his close loss to Mitterrand, and who supported Guichard’s government up until December, sees an opportunity to promote himself as the conciliator who helped alleviate the highly unpopular Grand Gachis which the President and the Gaullist Guichard had been unable to resolve. This is all part of Giscard’s own campaign to sell himself as the man of France’s future, while painting both the Socialist President and the orthodox Gaullists as the men of the past. Giscard publicly “suspends” his differences with the Socialists (in the political theatre of the moment – he has not gone “soft” on the Socialists at all; he also implies that he persuaded Mitterrand and Defferre to keep the Communists out of the government, a claim which both the President and new Prime Minister call false – but the idea sticks) as the man to “help the people” at the critical moment.
Giscard, who already has his eyes on taking on Mitterrand at the next Presidential election, then scheduled for 1981, is hoping to use these events to capture the initiative of the center-right from the Gaullists, and perhaps even supplant the UDR as the more politically significant and popular political force on the right. For the short term he is building his image as a leader for the next National Assembly election that most observers expect will come in the summer of 1975.
Asked later why he didn’t simply join the Gaullists in forcing a new Presidential election that spring and run again against Mitterrand, Giscard answered that if he had done that it would have been regarded as naked opportunism and he would have lost. This way he appeared to be the “reasonable adult among the squabbling children.”
Many in the UDR accused Giscard of stabbing them in the back, since he had lead the NFIR in supporting Guichard’s government since the summer, and now pulled the legs out from under their maneuver to wrong-foot Mitterrand. “Not at all,” Giscard replied. “I stood with the government, gave them a chance to make this cohabitation work. They did not, instead their intransigence and that of the President lead to the gachis. There comes a time to admit the obvious; it wasn’t working. I do not favour a Socialist government anymore than I favour a Socialist President, but there comes a time when we must do something; the country cannot continue in impasse, we must have a way forward for the next six months. This is why I choose a provisional understanding with the Socialists today – this not a marriage you understand, merely a temporary co-operation which better serves France that what we have had these past six months.”
Former Interior Minister Jacques Chirac, who lead a delegation of forty-three UDR deputies in support of Giscard and against the UDR Presidential candidate Jacques Chaban-Delmas during the first round of the 1974 Presidential election, finds himself further frozen out to the back benches of his party’s caucus, as the UDR slips from power for the first time since Charles de Gaulle’s return in 1958.
The PCF are extremely unhappy about their exclusion from the Cabinet, as witnessed by the half-hearted support of their Deputies for Defferre’s government. Many on the left of the PCF, among its more vocal activists, are calling the President an accomodationist and a sell out (“A Gaullist under his red cape”), factors which could hurt him at the polls in the coming months (on the Left, but maybe not on the Right, he points out in reply). However, the President does persuade the PCF leadership that if they are to achieve any of their common goal, then they must gain the political high ground, and that by not reaching an agreement and resigning in a huff, the UDR has handed them an opportunity to do so. With that point he does win their grudging support for the Defferre government.
Asked if he sought Giscard’s help, the President comments “he did what he wanted; I did not ask him for anything. But if he is willing to help row the boat in the same direction as I am going, I would be foolish to tell him to stop.”
“Remember,” Mitterrand says often that spring, “it is not I who threw-up my hands and resigned; it is not I who called the protesters into the streets. It is not I who would not sit down at the bargaining table until all of France cried ‘enough.’ For those behind these actions you must look to other places, other parties. As President I have made the effort to reach responsible agreements, to make our system work for the people. If others have given-up on the people, so be it - I have not!”
The Defferre government decides to continue with nuclear reactor development in Iraq, a project begun under the UDR.
Patent and Trademark Office renamed U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
The United States Congress approves the Federal Rules of Evidence.
President Gavin announces that the United States will begin a program of developing nuclear power production as an alternative to dependence on fossil fuels for energy.
At the same time the President announces that due to the increase in world prices for crude oil over the past two years, U.S. domestic production has increased, alleviating some shortages of oil.
The US Department of the Interior designates grizzly bear a threatened species.
Rep. Ronald Dellums (D-CA) announces he will be a candidate for the 1976 Democratic Party nomination for President.
The PIRA officially demands the release of sixty prisoners, including Gerry Adams and Martin McGuiness, in return for the release of actor Roger Moore.
January 4, 1975
President Gavin names former Attorney General, Under Secretary of State and current White House Counsel Nicholas deB. Katzenbach to serve as the next U.S. Ambassador to the United Kingdom.
The President declares: “We will stand-by our friends in Britain, and Mr. Katzenbach has agreed to take on this duty to help show our solidarity with the British people in their struggle for law-and-order over chaos.”
Reporter: “Mr. President, you are an Irish-Catholic yourself. Don’t you share, at least in some degree, sympathy with the Irish nationalists and their desire for a free nation?”
President Gavin: “The last time I looked Ireland is an independent nation with a freely elected government; that battle was won in 1922. If you’re talking about the North, I believe that has to be settled by the people who live there in a peaceful, negotiated way. I don’t hold with bombings, shootings and kidnappings. No civilized nation can condone that sort of behavior – period.”
A combined Senate and House Committee, called the Bayh - Riegle Committee after its chairmen Senator Birch Bayh (D-IN) and Representative Donald Riegle (D-MI), begins hearings on possible revisions to the twelfth amendment. These hearings come about as a result of much criticism of the twelfth amendment which arose from the 1972 Presidential election.
The Committee will consider five (5) plans during the next six months of hearings:
The Harvard Plan: So named because it is being promoted by a number of scholars from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. The Harvard Plan calls for the twelfth amendment to be altered so that in the event of a hung Electoral College resulting in the election being thrown to the Congress, as occurred in 1972-1973, the House and Senate would meet together to vote for President and Vice President, with each member individually having one vote. The Harvard Plan suggests that neither the Speaker of the House nor the Vice President (as President of the Senate) preside over this assembly: instead they propose that the Chief Justice of the United States preside over the body (but have no vote) and certify the results. The Speaker would only participate as he is a member of the House and has one vote.
The President and Vice President would be chosen by a majority vote of the assembled members. If a candidate failed to get fifty percent plus one vote on the first ballot, the candidate receiving the least number of votes on the first ballot would be eliminated from the second ballot, thus assuring a winner on the second ballot. The Harvard Plan envisions no binding rule on whom the Representatives and Senators can vote for apart from the top three winners of Electoral Votes for President and the top three candidates for Vice President. It does specify that the winner of the Presidential vote must be a candidate who was put before the people as a candidate for President, and that the winner of the Vice Presidential vote must be a candidate who was put before the people as a candidate for Vice President.
The Neustadt Plan: Authored by Harvard Professor and political science scholar Dr. Richard Neustadt would amend the Harvard Plan by requiring members to vote as their districts (or states in the case of Senators) had. If the candidate whose Electoral Votes the member’s district or state had voted for was removed from a second ballot, then the member would be obligated to choose from the next highest vote total in their district/state.
The Cleaver-Aldridge Plan (also the Cleveland Plan or the Case Western Plan):Advocated by a political science scholar and lawyer from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, would amend the Constitution to repeal the twelfth amendment and the underlying text of Article II covering contingent elections. Instead this plan envisions ninety-nine state legislative houses across the United States voting on the question in the event of a hung Electoral College, with each state legislator having one vote for President and one vote for Vice President.
The American Bar Association Plan (The Lawyer’s Plan): Put forward by a panel of ABA Constitutional lawyers recommends that the Constitution be amended to allow the election to take place on the first Monday of October, with the Electoral College meeting to cast their votes on the first Monday in November. In the event that there is no clear winner in the Electoral College then a run-off election would be scheduled for the third Monday in November, in which only the top two candidates (or Electors committed for the top two candidates) in the first round Electoral College appearing on the ballot, compelling a clear choice in a run-off election.
The Louisiana (French) Plan: Advocates abolishing the Electoral College altogether, as the authors of this plan see that institution as the source of the problem. Instead, as in Louisiana elections (and French Presidential elections), all the candidates would run against each other on the first ballot (which the plan proposes moving back to the second Tuesday in October). If any candidate won more than fifty percent of the popular vote in the first round then he would be declared elected as President (and his running mate declared elected as Vice President). If the first round fails to produce a winner, then a second round would be held on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November, in which the top two candidates from the first round would be the only two candidates on the ballot. Short of a tie, one would win more than fifty percent of the run-off vote and that person would be elected as President (and their running mate as Vice President). In the unlikely event of a tie, the matter would be settled by a combined vote of both Houses of Congress (similar in concept to the Harvard Plan).
Montreal Canadiens shutout Washington Capitals 10-0
Jerry Brown, the former Democratic candidate for Governor of California, signs a deal to host a political talk and opinion show on the Mutual Radio Network.
Twenty-four Greek Cypriot civilians are murdered in an attack by guerrillas on a village.
January 5, 1975
The Tasman Bridge in Tasmania, Australia, is struck by the bulk ore carrier Lake Illawarra, killing twelve people.
In a bid to repeat their success with the December kidnapping of Roger Moore, five PIRA operatives attempt to abduct former James Bond actor Sean Connery outside of his hotel in Paris. Connery sees them coming and puts up a resistance, and is assisted by two local men, and by Paris police. Three of the five men are arrested by the Paris police, while two escape. One of those captured has to undergo several hours of surgery to repair his jaw, which was broken by a well-placed kick from Connery. The French and British authorities identify them as suspected members of the PIRA.
Connery later tells reporters “I beat the bastards, and I’ll do it again to anyone else who tries. They’re scum, the lot of them.”
Ironically, Connery had been in Paris to wrap-up post-production work on a film called Ransom, the plot of which involved terrorists trying to extort money from a government.
Seven British Royal Military Policemen are stoned by a mob in An Nabk, Syria.
Western intelligence over flights of Cyprus detect the building of large concentration camps by the Cypriot military.
January 5 – 12, 1975
King Faisal of Saudi Arabia hosts the Jeddah Talks in the Saudi Arabian city of Jeddah. Attended by representatives of various factions vying for power in Syria along with representatives of the governments of Egypt, Jordan, Iraq and the United Arab Emirates, the Jeddah talks attempt to assist the Syrians in forming a government. The week of talks proves inconclusive as the various Syrian factions cannot agree on power sharing among themselves.
King Faisal is receiving increased pressure from his Wahhabi clerical allies to denounce the western crusade in Syria and to use Saudi Arabia’s petro-power status to force the allied coalition to leave. For various reasons, including his troubled relations with the United States and the gross overestimation of petro-power by the mullahs unschooled in international relations, King Faisal resists calls to do this- his temper is aroused by various irritations, he is overheard calling one senior Wahhabi cleric an “ignoramus.”
King Faisal’s deliberative policies on the Syrian question heats-up the fundamentalist blasts against the Saudi regime, which some more vitriolic preachers are calling “apostate” for its unwillingness to act against the Syrian aggression and its “softness” on the oil embargo. Juhayman al-Otaibi, a former Saudi National Guard officer, becomes one of those most outspoken against the regime. Al-Qtaibi is harassed by the Saudi security forces, but also finds that he has allies within the Saudi establishment as well.
Another cause of the Saudi King’s difficulties is that the oil embargo, and the U.S. “silent embargo” in retaliation is seriously undercutting the Saudi financial reserves, forcing the King to be more frugal with state largess to individuals and groups. With the cause-and-effect relationship not clearly understood by many Saudis, and with the oil embargo seen as a political and religious issue as well as an economic one, support for the Saud family’s rule is being slowly undercut from several different directions.
In retaliation for the OPEC oil embargo, President Gavin has curtailed all but essential sales of military equipment (mainly spare parts) to the Kingdom to use as a lever to pressure the Saudi King into using his influence in OPEC to end the embargo. Through the Treasury Department the Gavin Administration has also demanded full payment in dollars of Saudi contracts and outstanding debts while holding-up new credits. Saudi Arabia is wholly dependent upon petro dollars to run its economy, and while they have a great reserve, the President’s plan has been to compel the Saudi government to draw down that reserve until they either persuade OPEC to ease-up on the embargo, or break with the organization entirely. To add to the point, the Gavin Administration has added a tariff to Saudi oil, making it even more expensive in the U.S. market than oil from other sources (“the silent embargo’). This has the effect of driving down even further Saudi Arabia’s net oil exports, which – like other oil producers – has been affected by the OPEC embargo (they still sell oil, but must do so through the international spot market and in lesser quantity than they would like, reducing revenue and marginally increasing export costs, which in turn affects their hard currency positions).
In Britain the Chancellor, Maurice Macmillan, has been co-operating with this policy, as has the Dutch government (Britain is also adding a very small “silent embargo” tariff to Saudi oil; the Netherlands hasn’t gone that far). However, the West German, French and Japanese governments have largely ignored the “silent embargo”, instead seeking bilateral agreements with OPEC and individual oil producers instead. Saudi Arabia meanwhile has been buying arms from the French, the South Africans and the Chileans, using up a dwindling supply of hard currency to do this (although they have been using oil as a trade instrument with these regimes as well).
January 6, 1975
Wheel of Fortune premieres on NBC. It disappears after one season due to poor ratings.
AM America makes its television debut on ABC.
1000 Led Zeppelin fans, waiting overnight inside the lobby of the Boston Garden for tickets to the group's February 4th gig to go on sale, cause a riot and an estimated $30,000 damage.
Boston officials, outraged by the rioting, seek to shut down the February 4th concert and go to court in an effort to recover the cost of the damage from the band.
Barry Morris Goldwater Jr. is sworn in as the 34th Governor of California. In his inaugural address, Governor Goldwater calls on the State of California to become “the engine of enterprise which will lift this economy out of recession and into prosperity.” Goldwater promises to bring hi-tech and “future-oriented” jobs to California through tax incentives for business and de-regulation of the marketplace.
January 7, 1975
London Police officials announce that five Syrian nationals, all students at the University of London, are wanted in connection with the assassination of United States Ambassador Walter Annenberg.
The Heath government is seriously embarrassed by the fact that the five suspects all left the UK in the hours after the assassination unchallenged on flights for Rome because the government had directed all investigative effort into finding a link between Ambassador Annenberg’s murder and the PIRA. The latest finding by the police proves conclusively that the PIRA had nothing to do with the crime. Italian police later confirm that the five Syrian men all flew from Rome to Beirut.
January 8, 1975
Judge Sirica orders release from prison of Watergate conspirators John W Dean III, Herbert W Kalmbach and Jeb Stuart Magruder. All are to appear as prosecution witnesses against Richard Nixon in the former President’s forthcoming trial.
Rep. Phillip Crane (R-IL) announces that he will be running for the 1976 Republican nomination for President.
A contingent of thirty-seven South Vietnamese Army (ARVN) Engineers arrives in Syria as a token support by the South Vietnamese government for the U.S. lead allied effort.
January 10, 1975
Japanese soldier Teruo Nakamura surrenders on the Indonesian island of Morota.
Elliot Richardson is officially appointed as the special prosecutor to look into the illegal financial practices of the Unification Church in the United States.
January 11, 1975
The Soyuz 17 crew (Georgi Grechko, Aleksei Gubarev) is launched into space for a one-month mission aboard the Salyut 4 space station.
A truck bomb explodes outside a U.N. emergency medical facility in Homs, Syria, killing fourteen including three Soviet soldiers and injuring another twenty-two.
January 12, 1975
Super Bowl IX: The Minnesota Vikings defeat the Pittsburgh Steelers 14-10 at Tulane Stadium in New Orleans, Louisiana.
Chrysler begins to offer rebates of up to fifty percent in order to try and stimulate sales of its cars.
A USAF F-4 Phantom flown by 2d Lt Jeb Bush USAF encounters Israel Air Force Mirage fighters while flying patrol over the South of Syria near the Golan area. The Israelis fire missiles at the American aircraft, forcing the USAF patrol to pull back.
Washington later protests this incident to the Israeli government.
January 14, 1975
The House of Representatives passes the Combined Counter Terrorism Enforcement Act of 1975 (CCTEA 1975) by a vote of 290 -145.
Motivated by the New York Stock Exchange hostage seizure in September 1974, and originally debated in the lame-duck Congress of November – December 1974, the CCTEA provides for a combined FBI-military counter-terrorism force which can be created, trained and ready to react to hostage taking and terrorist incidents anywhere in the United States or the world. The CCTEA calls for the creation of an agency to be called the Federal Counter-Terrorism Bureau (FCTB) to fulfill this mission.
The FCTB would combine the expertise of the FBI, Secret Service, Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms, the CIA, the DIA, the NSA, LAPD, NYPD (and other police agencies), the U.S. Army Rangers, U.S. Army Special Forces (Green Berets), U.S. Navy SEALs, the U.S. Air Force Security Police and the U.S. Coast Guard into an anti-terror intelligence and strike unit. Models for this unit include the West German GSG9, the British SAS and the Israeli Commando units.
The bill contains provisions which would exclude these activities from the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 so that the military could be involved in domestic law enforcement on this issue, and also allows a provision for the CIA to engage in domestic counter-terrorism enforcement as a partner of the FBI.
Turan Celu, a prominent Imam in the Turkish-Cypriot community is arrested, tortured and murdered by Cypriot government forces.
January 15, 1975
Sen. Frank Church (D-ID) announces he will form a special Senate Commission of inquiry into the illegal activities of the CIA, the FBI and other U.S. intelligence agencies (which will become known as the Church Committee).
The investigation is motivated by an article published in The New York Times on December 22,1974, written by investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, detailing operations engaged in by the CIA over the years that had been dubbed the "family jewels". Covert action programs involving assassination attempts against foreign leaders and covert attempts to subvert foreign governments were reported for the first time. In addition, the article discussed efforts by intelligence agencies to collect information on the political activities of US citizens. Nationally syndicated columnist Jack Anderson has also written about many of these charges in the autumn of 1974.
A similar House of Representatives investigation follows later in the year, which will become known as the Pike Committee after its chairman, Rep. Otis Pike (D-NY).
Donald Neilson kidnaps heiress Lesley Whittle, 17, from her home in Shropshire, England.
Princess Alexandra and Baroness Young launch International Women’s Year in Britain.
Portugal grants independence to Angola.
Soviet Politburo member and Deputy General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party Mikhail Suslov makes a secret visit to Hanoi for meetings with North Vietnamese leaders.
Armed gunmen assassinate General Haydar al-Kuzbari of the Syrian Army, a leading contender for the Presidency of Syria, outside of his home in Damascus.
The United Nations General Assembly votes to impose a total economic embargo on Cyprus. This is upheld in the Security Council.
January 18, 1975
The U.S. Atomic Energy Commission is divided-up between Energy Research and Development Agency and Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Terry Bradshaw is shot and severely wounded by Frank Locassio, an unemployed factory worker who is upset at the Steelers’ loss to Minnesota in the Super Bowl. He claims to be exacting justice against “overpaid jocks who get lots of cash while working men starve!” Bradshaw recovers but his professional football-playing career is over.
January 19, 1975
Earthquake strikes Himachal Pradesh, India.
The PIRA carried out two gun attacks on hotels in London. Shots were fired into the Carlton Tower Hotel and the Portman Hotel. Twelve people were injured in the attacks.
January 20, 1975
In Hanoi, North Vietnam, the Politburo agrees to a draft agreement for a ceasefire in South Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.
Trial proceedings begin in the case of United States v. Nixon.
Michael Ovitz founds the Creative Artists Agency.
Guerrilla forces murder fourteen monks at a Greek Orthodox monastery in Cyprus.
January 21, 1975
The Maryland Court of Appeals (that state’s Supreme Court) rules that the federal pardon granted to Spiro Agnew (by himself) is sufficient to cover any state indictment on lesser charges, many of which, the court notes, have already passed the statute of limitations provided by the Maryland Penal Code.
The Maryland court goes out its way in its opinion to condemn Agnew’s actions, but argues that it is a dangerous legal precedent for any court to undermine the pardon process by using subjective criteria to undermine a pardon once granted. It finds the power of the pardon “near absolute” and if “subjected to mincing now, no matter the sufficient grounds for such an action” then “later mincing could wear a hole through the pardon power such that it will cease to have any meaningful application and shall fail to provide the protection and redemption for which it was intended. We could, by ruling the Federal pardon invalid in this court and in this State, set-off a frenzy of court shopping where plaintiffs dissatisfied with the ruling of the courts at one level and in one place would seek other jurisdictions which might be more favorable to their case. This practice becomes more odious when it is prosecutors who seek to use the State’s power to have another bite at the apple. While we are fully aware that this already occurs and will continue to occur despite how this Court rules, we see no need for this Court to encourage the practice by allowing it in this case. ”
The Attorney General of Maryland, Bill Burch, announces that in light of this ruling he sees little point in appealing the ruling in the Federal Court system, where Agnew’s pardon would be even more binding. “It’s wrong, but seven Justices of the Court of Appeals have told us what the law is in this situation, and while I don’t believe Mr. Agnew should get away with it, that is the finding of the court and I must go along with it.”
There was a series of bomb explosions in Belfast in attacks carried out by the PIRA.
Two members of the PIRA were killed when a bomb they were transporting by car exploded in Victoria Street, Belfast.
January 22, 1975
In retaliation for the January 20 murder of Greek Orthodox monks by Turkish insurgents, the Cypriot air force bombs the city of Lefkosia, causing heavy civilian casualties.
January 23, 1975
Barney Miller premieres on ABC TV.
A car bomb detonates outside a U.S. encampment in Syria. No casualties are reported as the bomb was poorly set and detected before it went off.
The PIRA placed a large time bomb at the Woodford waterworks pumping station in North London. Three people were injured in the explosion and there was substantial damage.
January 25, 1975
Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheik Mujib Rahman declares a state of emergency and his political supporters approve a constitutional amendment banning all opposition political parties. Mujib is declared "president for life," and given extraordinary powers.
Former Minnesota Governor Harold Stassen announces that he will be a candidate for the 1976 Republican nomination for President.
Turkish Air Force and Greek Air Force jets engage in air-to-air combat over the Mediterranean. The Turkish aircraft are alleged by the Greeks to be engaged in air combat operations in support of the Turkish guerrillas.
January 27, 1975
The PIRA planted seven time bombs at locations across London. At 6.30pm a bomb exploded at Gieves, the military outfitters, in Old Bond Street. At 9.30pm bombs exploded at the Moreson chemical plant in Ponders End and a disused gas works in Enfield. These two bombs caused only minimal damage. Two further bombs exploded in Kensington High Street and Victoria Street; two people were injured. A warning was given of a bomb in Putney High Street and a British Army bomb-disposal officer was able to defuse the device. A warning was also given for a bomb in Hampstead and it was defused.
The Heath government, which had lifted martial law restrictions over the Christmas holidays, now re-imposes them. The latest round of PIRA incidents in mainland Britain is met with a wave of mass arrests of suspect sympathisers. In many cases being of Irish ancestry is sufficient to be classed as a sympathiser.
January 29, 1975
The Weather Underground bombs the U.S. State Department main office in Washington, D.C.
Film footage appears of American journalist Al Gore Jr. being held captive by PJF forces. Gore is forced to read a statement denouncing the “Crusade of the United States and the infidel powers” against the “people of Islam.” The PJF demands a one billion dollar payment for Gore’s release.
January 29 – February 1, 1975
President Gavin pays a state visit to Saigon. He and President Troung discuss a proposed cease-fire agreement with North Vietnam at length at the South Vietnamese Presidential palace, followed by a state dinner hosted in President Gavin’s honor. President Gavin also visits U.S. troops in the field and civilian areas of South Vietnam.
January 30, 1975
John Lennon releases "#9 Dream"
Barry Manilow's "Mandy" goes gold
The Gardiner Report, which examined measures to deal with terrorism within the context of human rights and civil liberties, was published. The report recommended that special category status for paramilitary prisoners should be ended. The report also recommended that detention without trial be maintained but under the control of the Secretary of State.
February 1, 1975
The Intercontinental Broadcasting Corporation is launched in the Philippines.
Otis Francis Tabler is the first open homosexual to get security clearance to work for the Defense Department.
Spiro T. Agnew announces that he will seek the 1976 Republican nomination for President.
When a reporter points out to Agnew that he cannot hold the office, as Article One, Section 7 of the Constitutional states “Judgment in Cases of Impeachment shall not extend further than to removal from Office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any Office of honor, Trust or Profit under the United States,” Agnew retorts:
“I have remained silent in order to support the current acting President in his leadership of our government, and so not undermine the country by creating a Constitutional crisis, but the terms of my removal were unconstitutional and highly irregular. The Senate illegally removed me from office as a political effort; the so-called high crimes and misdemeanors charged had in fact been absolved by a pardon, and no Socratic argument by a bunch of leftist law professors about so-called questions of guilt and acknowledging guilt in granting the pardon can change that basic fact. The Senate in its reprehensible action undermined this nation when it needed leadership the most, and caused us to lose direction and spin into recession and crisis. My campaign will be about overturning that rotten-to-the-core judgment, in the courts and with the support of the American people. I am, and will remain, a candidate for the office of President of the United States in 1976.”
February 2 – 3, 1975
President Gavin meets with Soviet leaders Alexi Kosygin and Mikhail Suslov in the Soviet city of Vladivostok. At their summit the leaders agreed on quantitative limits on various nuclear weapons systems and banned the construction of new land-based ICBM launchers.
At the summit meeting Suslov puts a permanent hold on the proposed Apollo-Soyuz joint space flight. The project, first conceived during the Nixon Administration and Brezhnev’s tenure, would have involved a Soviet spacecraft and an American one linking up in orbit as a joint space venture. The project languished for lack of interest during the Agnew Administration and after the fall of Brezhnev. Suslov is not interested in furthering it and communicates this to the U.S. President.
An Olympic Airlines Boeing 727 is shot out of the air minutes after taking off from Rome’s Leonardo Da Vinci- Fiumicino Airport. The jet crashes into a residential area killing all 109 passengers and crew aboard and seven Italians on the ground. Italian police conclude that the airliner was shot out of the air with an anti-aircraft missile.
Retired New York Court of Appeals Judge John F. Scileppi presents the report of his inquiry into police actions in the September 1974 hostage taking at the New York Stock Exchange. Judge Scileppi finds that while the hostage takers were brutal, and that their resort to violence and murder created pressure for the police to act – together with an uncertainty as to whether they would kill all the hostages after throwing a grenade at 4:00 pm in the afternoon – the police nonetheless acted in a manner which aggravated the violence and caused unnecessary deaths.
Judge Scileppi, rather than blaming any individual officers or leaders, determines that there was a breakdown in the command-and-control system, and faults police leadership for letting emotion and a determination to end the situation as quickly as possible to take precedence. Specifically, he calls on the NYPD to provide better training to its senior leadership and officers in hostage negotiation and terrorist incidents, and recommends that the NYPD develop and trained a specifically tasked Hostage Rescue Unit that would include professionally trained hostage negotiators.
Judge Scileppi does single out pressure from the administration of then Governor Nelson Rockefeller, who wanted the situation to end quickly before it became an issue in the New York Gubernatorial election, on the New York Mayor and Police Commissioner as a factor which caused them to give “hard-edged” instructions to their subordinates and contributed to climate wherein the police acted with haste and force to resolve the situation. In the end the report admonishes the now former Governor for inserting political concerns into a tense situation.
February 4, 1975
The Haicheng earthquake injures several hundred thousand in Haicheng, Liaoning, China. Although seismic detectors outside of China detect the quake, and U.S. spy satellites photograph the damage, it is months before confirmation of this event reaches the outside world.
Palestinian gunmen assassinate President Suleiman Frangieh of Lebanon outside of his home. In a coordinated attack, another group of gunmen also try to assassinate Prime Minister Rachid Sohl, but succeed only in wounding him. Sohl becomes the acting President upon the death of President Frangieh, pending a new election.
Lebanese Army units retaliate against Palestinian refugee camps, setting of a war between the Lebanese government and various Palestinian factions. Pro-Bayanouni forces in the Palestinian camps meanwhile use this conflict as a pretext to begin a Palestinian civil war between their followers and the established, secular Palestinian militias.
The Soyuz 17 crew returns to Earth after 1 month aboard the Salyut 4 space station.
Operation Specter begins. This operation involves a sweep by U.S., South Vietnamese and Cambodian government troops to further dislodge North Vietnamese and Khmer Rouge guerrillas from a wide arc of territory constituting the border area between Cambodia and Laos.
South Vietnamese troops launch an independent ground offensive, supported by U.S. air power, into the border areas between South Vietnam and Laos.
Ayman al Zawahiri, a doctor in the Egyptian Army and a secret leader in the Egyptian Islamic Jihad group, a fundamentalist offshoot of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, and Mahmoud al-Zahar, a Palestinian refugee doctor deeply concerned about events in Syria and Lebanon, meet at Cario University. They begin discussions that will lead to the formation of “The Red Plan.” Al-Zawahari continues to spread radical doctrine among receptive officers in the Egyptian Army.
February 5, 1975
The Northern Ireland Office (NIO) published a discussion paper on power sharing, The Government of Northern Ireland: A Society Divided. This was the third discussion paper published in advance of the Northern Ireland Constitutional Convention.
Secretary of State for Northern Ireland Margaret Thatcher announced that new blocks ('H-Blocks') were to be built at the Maze Prison while waiting for a new prison at Maghaberry, County Antrim, to be completed. PIRA prisoners are to be held there without special status.
Cypriot Army forces begin rounding-up all Turkish men on the island aged 12 and over and placing them in concentration camps.
February 6, 1975
The CCTEA 1975 passes the Senate with a vote of 65 – 35. President Gavin signs it into law the same day.
February 9, 1975
Two Catholic civilians, both aged 19, were shot dead by Loyalist paramilitaries as they left St Brigit's Catholic Church, Malone, Belfast.
At an emergency meeting of the Organization of the Islamic Conference in Tunis, Libyan leader Muammar al-Gaddafi, a leader of the hard-line block in the oil embargo, calls on Islamic nations to “recruit legions of volunteers to fight the imperialist enemy and liberate our oppressed brothers in Syria and Lebanon.” His call is met with a number of sour expressions by other delegates, and a rebuke from President Sadat of Egypt who says, “those who incite violence only add to the misery of our Syrian brothers. Was it not violent resistance in the name of a half-baked revolution which lead to this terrible situation? Why pour more gasoline on the fire? What sort of recklessness is that?”
Despite his rebuke at the OIC Gaddafi announces he will raise a volunteer “Arab Liberation Force” in Libya.
February 10, 1975
Two Catholic civilians were shot dead by Loyalist paramilitaries in a gun attack on Hayden's Bar, near Pomeroy, County Tyrone.
A Catholic civilian was shot dead by Loyalists in Belfast.
February 11, 1975
Colonel Richard Ratsimandrava, President of Madagascar, is assassinated, initiating a civil war in that country.
February 12, 1975
Analysts at the top secret U.S. National Reconnaissance Office confirm from satellite photographs the existence of what are termed “large poppy plantations” in the interior of China. These are thought to be a significant source of the world’s heroin supply.
President Gavin orders SR-71 over-flights of these areas to get higher resolution images of these plantations.
An exchange in the British Parliament:
Kenneth Clarke MP (Cons. – Rushcliffe): “Will this government not now recognize that the endless and brutal attacks on civil liberties are undermining the public’s confidence in the very institutions of British democracy? Mr. Speaker, I fear that by its hard hard headed behaviour, the government has fulfilled a major strategy of the terrorists for them, by turning the British state into a potential instrument of terror itself – terror against civilized standards.”
Cheers and catcalls.
Mrs. Thatcher MP (Cons. – Finchley): “Mr. Speaker, the honourable member does this house and the British people a great disservice by attempting to equate the actions of criminals and mass murderers with the actions of this government to protect the lives of British citizens. How many need die before the honourable member and all like-minded critics of this government realize that we are at war with the forces of barbarism. Ours is the hand which alone will stay Britain from chaos.”
Chant from some members: “Hey, hey bloody Maggie, how many d’ya kill today?”
The Speaker: Order! Order!
Mr. Clarke: “Mr. Speaker, I fear the government has developed a conveniently one-sided definition of barbarism, in which all the enemy does is barbaric, while all that we do is civilized. Let me say, Mr. Speaker, that the honour of British civilization is not on display when thousands of innocent civilians are rounded up and interned because they or their ancestors came from Ireland, or may have come from that island. I agree that the enemy is brutal and barbarous in their tactics, I have no doubt about this, and I have no qualm about punishing the guilty to the fullest measure of the law. But I cannot stand silent while our democracy is subverted from within, or our liberties case aside out of fear. Benjamin Franklin once said that those who sacrifice their liberty for security deserve neither, and so it is, that is the choice we are making here, today. How far down that road will this government continue? Will it be until liberty is a no more, and our free system but a glimmer of a once-upon-a-time long since passed?”
Unknown member: “Stuff it!”
Unknown member: “Your squishy heart is bleeding all over me, Ken.”
Barbara Castle MP (Lab. - Blackburn): “Mr. Speaker, I would ask the honourable Secretary of State for Northern Ireland if her government has received an offer of ceasefire from the Provos through any agency, and if that government has availed itself of this opportunity to pursue ceasefire options – including negotiations?”
Catcalls.
Mrs. Thatcher: “This government does not negotiate with criminals. We do not enter into ceasefire agreements with murderers, thieves or other criminals simply when they ask for it. We enforce the law, and if they will not follow the law by laying down their arms and ending their criminal behaviour, we will offer them no quarter.”
Unknown member: “Right-up the gut Maggie!”
The Speaker: “Order! Order!”
Mrs. Castle: “Does the honourable Secretary of State then recommend that more British and Irish men, women and children die for the stubbornness of this government? Is this the course of the government policy, then?”
Airey Neave MP (Cons. – Abingdon): “Mr. Speaker, can the honourable Secretary of State assure us that this government will never flinch in the face of this terrorism; that there never will come a time when this government will take-up the call of ‘peace in our time’ at any cost, which Mrs. Castle and her partisans are trying to sell to us?”
Boos and jeers.
The Speaker: “Order! Order!”
Mrs. Thatcher: “I can so guarantee. There is an expression I have heard which says ‘no justice, no peace.’ As long as these killers offer no justice through their incessant murder and violence there can be no peace in any time. The British people will not be made to bow down before these thugs, that is our policy.”
Soon after discussions begin on a common front between dissident Conservatives lead by Kenneth Clarke, the Labour leader Denis Healey and Liberal Party leader Jeremy Thorpe.
February 18, 1975
In Iran, by 1975, the Shah (Mohammad Reza Pahlavi) had abolished the multi-party system of government so that he could rule through a one-party state under the Rastakhiz (Resurrection) Party in autocratic fashion. All Iranians were pressured to join in. The Shah’s own words on its justification was:
“We must straighten out Iranians’ ranks. To do so, we divide them into two categories: those who believe in Monarchy, the constitution and the Six Bahman Revolution and those who don’t.... A person who does not enter the new political party and does not believe in the three cardinal principles will have only two choices. He is either an individual who belongs to an illegal organization, or is related to the outlawed Tudeh Party, or in other words a traitor. Such an individual belongs to an Iranian prison, or if he desires he can leave the country tomorrow, without even paying exit fees; he can go anywhere he likes, because he is not Iranian, he has no nation, and his activities are illegal and punishable according to the law”.
In addition, the Shah had decreed that all Iranian citizens and the few remaining political parties must become part of Rastakhiz.
The poor performance of the Iranian armed forces in the 1974 border war with Iraq had earned the Shah new enemies. It was not lost on some in the Army’s leadership that he did not trust them, as demonstrated by the fact that the Shah had held back several crack divisions loyal to him to put down any potential unrest at home, or desertions from units at the front. Many blamed this action for Iraq’s early military victories, and for the fact that the Iranians had to grant humiliating concessions to the Iraqi government at the Geneva cease-fire talks in order to bring about a more permanent end to hostilities and a return of occupied Iranian land.
Islamic leaders in Iran, both allied to the exiled Khomeini and among his opponents, also blamed the Shah for trying to break the oil embargo, seeing this as a sign of his apostasy to Islam, and by extension further proof of the non-Islamic nature of his regime. There was a growing clerical opposition to his regime independent of the exiled Khomeini, and it was tapping into a wider anti-Shah feeling founded on resentment of his autocracy, the consequences of his White Revolution, and disillusion within the military and in other quarters in society in what was regarded as a failure to punish Iraq for its 1974 incursion into Iran.
What the Shah did not expect was that the White Revolution lead to new social tensions that helped to create many of the problems the Shah had been trying to avoid. The Shah's reforms more than quadrupled the combined size of the two classes that had posed the most challenges to his monarchy in the past—the intelligentsia and the urban working class. Their resentment towards the Shah also grew since they were now stripped of organizations that had represented them in the past, such as political parties, professional associations, trade unions, and independent newspapers. Land reform, instead of allying the peasants with the government, produced large numbers of independent farmers and landless labourers who became loose political cannons, with no feeling of loyalty to the Shah. Many of the masses felt resentment towards the increasingly corrupt government; their loyalty to the clergy, who were seemed to be more concerned with the fate of the populace, remained consistent or increased.
Meanwhile, the spectacle of the Shah, who had prided himself on building the largest and most powerful military in the Middle East (he had spent billions of petro dollars of to do it), having to make concessions to Iraqi President Al-Bakr in order to regain Iranian territory occupied by Iraq – not because the Iraqis had absolutely defeated the Iranians but because the Shah had tied the Army’s hands behind its back out of a paranoid fear that it would turn on him – disillusioned many Iranians, who started to question if Iran would be better off without the Shah. The irony of the situation was that in 1974 the Shah had little to fear from the military (his secret police had fed his paranoia by playing-up a small disaffected clique of officers into a major conspiracy) but by 1975 the Shah really was accumulating enemies in the Army and Air Force who began to question his leadership for a variety of political, social and religious reasons.
The oil embargo has also had an effect on the Iranian economy. The Shah’s military budget and economic development programs have been largely financed by petro dollars. Although Iran has a more diversified economy than many petro states whose sole exportable product is oil, the embargo nonetheless imposes a bite when exports are restricted to meet the demands of the OPEC embargo (or more costly alternatives are sought that disguise exports that try to work their way around the OPEC embargo). With the oil sector being a major employer in Iran, the cut in exports has the effect of causing lay-offs in a key sector, which translates into higher unemployment, both among oil workers and downstream business that depend on the revenues from the domestic oil production industry.
The loss of hard currency from oil exports has compelled the Iranian government to borrow more heavily, as it must continue to spend money to re-build the military after the 1974 border war with Iraq and pay for that war and re-build the damage caused by it. This sets-off a spiral of inflation, particularly as the Iranian currency begins to lose value. Iran is also susceptible to the worldwide economic slump, which has lead to an increase in unemployment, which the government treasury is not able to fully absorb. This leads to a great deal of working class dissatisfaction with the regime as prices rise, but overall job growth declines.
As in most other Islamic OPEC countries the oil embargo, now tied to events in Syria and Cyprus, has taken on a political and religious dimension as well as an economic one, which is why Iran, like Saudi Arabia, cannot simply put an end to it. Clerics and Islamic hardliners in particular demand that the Shah stick to the embargo until the United States relents and withdraws its forces from Syria, and the west puts a stop to the Cyprus military junta’s actions against the Muslim Turkish population on that island. The Shah’s public efforts to ease the OPEC embargo has been a source for anti-Shah agitation by the religious right, some of whom have joined with Khomeini in referring to the Shah as an apostate for his stand on the issue. This further weakens the legitimacy of his autocratic government in the eyes of many Iranians (secular, leftist, religious and the intelligentsia) who increasingly are looking for a change of leadership.
All of this served as background when on February 18, Amir Asadollah Alam, a former Prime Minister of Iran and the Shah’s closest aide (he could have termed the Shah’s Executive Assistant) was assassinated, along with several others, when a satchel filled with explosives was thrown at him during a public ceremony at Mashhad University (of which Alam was Head of the Board of Trustees) and detonated.
The bomber, who was captured and tortured to death by the secret police, the SAVAK, and turned out to be a follower of a banned fundamentalist group.
The Shah was deeply grieved by the loss of his most significant adviser, and in light of his fierce secret police network, appeared impotent when one of his closest advisers was murdered. An enraged Shah ordered a massive arrest of all dissidents, which ignited a social powder keg in Iran, especially when they went after mullahs and Imams. Adding fuel to the fire, the Shah ordered the leveling of Mashhad University in retaliation for Alam’s murder. The task of destruction was half completed before the Shah changed his mind and ordered it halted. The half destroyed University now stood as a stark monument to the Shah’s brutal regime.
February 19, 1975
Gov. Barry Goldwater Jr. (R-CA) begins his campaign against what he terms as “the vested interests” in California’s educational bureaucracy by proposing legislation that will give parents free choice in choosing the schools they want their children to attend – public or private – based on parent and child focused criteria, such as academic excellence, the rigor of the curriculum, and the content of the curriculum; giving parents greater choice in controlling what their children are going to be taught. Goldwater proposes that parent’s educational taxes be directed how they choose, to public or private schools, which will best serve the parent’s choices for their children.
Most teacher’s unions, school boards and lobbyists oppose this as “a formula for chaos” and “the surest way to make poor schools into a ghetto of education.” The Democratic controlled legislature takes up the opposition to Governor Goldwater’s plan.
“You know, you mention choice to the teacher’s unions, to the Democratic Party, and they run from it like scalded dogs, barking all the way, bearing their teeth in opposition to the idea that a parent might want to choose which school their child attends. What do they oppose? That a parent might want to choose what values their child is taught? That a parent might want control over the tax dollars – their hard earned tax dollars - that are supposed to pay for that education?” Goldwater says. “That tells me something, and it’s not a good thing.
“When I went to school our teachers taught us about the importance of democratic government and making responsible choices. But now, we have a class of professional educators – educrats – both in the classrooms and the union offices – educrats don’t want to impart those values. Instead of teaching good American values, they’re promoting – and this is one of their buzzwords I really love because it says it all – they’re promoting the groupthink of their interest group. They want to protect turf, and measure their success by the aggregate number of heads in a classroom.
“When I look into a classroom I see individual children, not aggregates, like it was some gravel pit. I see the children of hardworking California parents who are being denied a say in how their children are educated. I see a generation of children being used as guinea pigs, who will pay for this muddle headed thinking long after we are all in our grave. That’s the future of our State and our nation that’s being experimented on like so many lab rats.
“As for groupthink, I can think of only one place where that might be appropriate, where a golden hammer and sickle waves overhead on a red flag. That’s not the flag of California. Those aren’t the values that made this state the best in the land. That isn’t the muddle headed nonsense that made our nation the best in the world. So I say yes to parent choice, my friends, because parents exercising choice in educating their children is the cornerstone of a free and healthy democracy.”
February 21, 1975
Judge John Waxman sentences John Mitchell, H.R. Haldeman and John D Ehrlichman to serve 6-14 years in prison. All three have been handed a harsh sentence because they have refused to co-operate with government prosecutors in the trial of Richard Nixon.
Robert Lowry, then Lord Chief Justice of Northern Ireland, was appointed as the Chairman of the Constitutional Convention.
The ancient Greco-Roman ruins at Salamis in Cyprus are destroyed by Cypriot government artillery fire and air bombing during a battle with guerrillas.
February 23, 1975
In response to the energy crisis, daylight saving time commences nearly two months early in the United States.
February 26, 1975
A member of the PIRA was shot dead by a police officer in London. During a subsequent search operation a bomb-making facility was uncovered in Hammersmith.
February 27, 1975
The House of Representatives passes a $35 billion anti-recession tax-cut bill.
The FCTB comes into being. It will take some time for it to develop as a full-fledged and effective agency. Former commander of the U.S. Readiness Command and former acting Army Chief of Staff Gen. Bruce Palmer USA (Ret.) is named as the Bureau’s first Director.
February 28, 1975
46 killed, 74 injured in the Moorgate Tube crash at the Moorgate Station of the London Underground. The crash had two consequences for the London Underground. Firstly, the southern end of the Highbury Branch platforms (where the crash happened) was extensively rebuilt. Secondly, an automatic system for stopping trains were introduced into dead-ends on the tube, regardless of whether the driver brakes the train. These systems are known as Moorgate control.
March 2, 1975
Charles Habib Malik, a Christian Lebanese diplomat and scholar is elected by Parliament as the President of Lebanon. Malik is widely believed to be a front man for several Christian Phalangist political leaders, whose militias are actively fighting against the Palestinian militants.
March 3, 1975
Linda McCartney, wife of former Beatle Paul McCartney, is charged in US with possession of marijuana
March 4, 1975
The American University in Beirut is attacked by armed gunmen of the Palestinian Jihad Faction (a loose translation of this groups name, also called the Palestine Warriors of the Jihad against the Infidel Crusade) who indiscriminately shoot people on the campus. Several Phalange militia units arrive to chase-off the PJF, but in the process they become involved in shooting civilians in their efforts to kill the PJF shooters.
Order is restored after several hours only after a unit of the Lebanese Army does arrive, together with a United States Marine support battalion sent from the Sixth Fleet currently deployed off the coast of Lebanon and Syria.
Casualties are placed at 77 students and staff killed during the armed spree (dying at the scene or later in hospital) by the PJF and the Phalangists; another 120 or more are reported to be wounded. For several weeks after the incident the American University is guarded by U.S. Marines.
The government of Canadian Prime Minister Robert Stanfield decides not to allow televised coverage of Parliamentary debates. That government also passes a resolution delaying the conversion of Canada to the metric system for at least two more years.
Queen Elizabeth II knights Charlie Chaplin.
March 6, 1975
A bomb explodes in the Paris offices of the Springer Press. The 6 March Group (connected to the Red Army Faction) demands amnesty for the Baader-Meinhof Group.
March 7, 1975
Turkish Cypriot guerrilla forces detonate several bombs in the capital of Nicosia, injuring civilians and military personnel.
The body of teenage heiress Lesley Whittle, kidnapped 7 weeks earlier by Donald Neilson (“the Black Panther”), is discovered in Staffordshire, England.
President Gavin and Secretary of State George Bush continue to have disagreements over the President’s Saudi Arabia policy. Secretary Bush argues that the Gavin “silent embargo” policy is only hurting US-Saudi relations since the undeclared embargo is being undercut by a lack of western unity. President Gavin in return contends that the embargo, even if partial, will continue to put pressure the Saudi government largely because the United States remains a significant oil export market and the main supplier of advanced Saudi military equipment, which cannot be easily be replaced by other suppliers, unless Saudi Arabia spends billions to completely re-equip its military. The US also provides industrial goods which cannot be purchased elsewhere, and Saudi Arabia is paying hard cash for them. This, President Gavin believes, will over time persuade Saudi Arabia to break the embargo in its own long-term economic and strategic interest (“will France help defend the Kingdom should it come under Soviet military threat? I know Chile and South Africa can’t.”)
“I recognize there are big holes in this, George, but the United States cannot be seen to be held hostage to the caprice of foreign oil producers,” the President remarks. “One effect of this embargo is that we have increased our own domestic production, and we have a political momentum for alternative energy sources. The message I want to convey is not that we can bankrupt Saudi Arabia, nothing we do will achieve that, but they should think long and hard just how much they need our goodwill as well as our oil markets.”
The Secretary of State remains unconvinced, fearing that this could further destabilize the Saudi Kingdom. Henry Kissinger on the other hand believes that Bush, who has many connections to the Saudis through his years of work in the oil industry, is essentially lobbying on behalf of the Saudi government to undercut US policy on this question.
The tension between Kissinger and Bush has grown over the course of 1974 largely because while Bush is the Secretary of State, Kissinger has assumed many of the responsibilities of that role, particularly in regard to U.S. policy in the Middle East, negotiations in with Vietnam and U.S.-Soviet relations; the same relative position which he had during the Nixon Administration. Much of what Bush is doing has been relegated to ceremonial foreign policy, or second level relations which have a lower profile than what Kissinger is doing.
A vote in the U.S. Senate to revise the filibuster rule to allow 60 senators to limit debate, fails – ironically by a vote of 59 – 41 (60 being needed to revise the filibuster rule).
March 9, 1975
Construction of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System begins.
March 10, 1975
King Faisal of Saudi Arabia, in New York to attend a U.N. conference on Syria and Cyprus, is accidentally photographed just as Israeli Foreign Minister Yigal Allon and his party happen to walk by the King in a corridor. King Faisal is actually speaking with African leader Julius Nyerere. However, in the angle that the photograph is taken, Nyerere is obscured by one of Allon’s aides, and it appears that the King is trying to speak with Allon directly (With his arms outstretched in Nyerere’s direction, but with the Tanzanian President obscured, it could be interpreted that he is either trying to get Allon’s attention, or trying to hug the Israeli Minister, especially once copies of it are doctored (some very crudely) to alter the spatial distance between Allon and the King). Opponents of the King soon circulate this in Saudi Arabia and other parts of the Arab Middle East to suggest that the King is soft on the Zionist question.
Al-Qtaibi is soon accusing the King of having turned his back on the Quran altogether. Even when other photos are quickly published clearly showing the King and Nyerere speaking as Allon walks by, the one photograph remains the source of many inflammatory anti-Faisal sermons.
Secretary of State George Bush announces that he will be resigning from the Gavin Administration, citing unspecified family issues and stating that his desire to return to the private sector and “let new blood” into the Administration. Bush doesn’t express any “policy differences” with the President, but it is widely understood in Washington and in the press corps that these are the real reasons behind Bush’s resignation. Once the resignation is announced, his name is quickly mooted as a possible candidate for President in 1976.
President Gavin announces that he will nominate Henry Kissinger to replace Secretary Bush, thus formalizing the role that Kissinger has been largely playing over the past year.
The “Rocky Horror Show" opens at Belasco Theater in New York City for 45 performances.
March 11, 1975
At an EEC Heads of Government meeting in Dublin, Prime Minister Edward Heath re-affirms the commitment of his government to remain a member of the EEC. This is despite recent (and on-going) disagreements with President Mitterand and Chancellor Schmidt about the direction the EEC should take with regard to the economic sovereignty and regulatory flexibility of individual members.
Asked if he will allow a referendum on the question (as Labour Leader Denis Healey had advocated at one point in the fall of 1974) the Prime Minister says it is unnecessary because, “this has been our policy all along, since before 1974, and the voters knew that when they went to the polls last February. Their support of our government was the referendum on that question; we don’t need another.”
The high-profile Labour MPs Tony Benn, Michael Foot, Peter Shore, Barbara Castle and Eric Varley begin a “No to EEC membership” campaign, in an effort to pressure the Heath government into holding a referendum, which they believe the “No” forces would win. Labour Leader Healey, though he once endorsed this idea, does not offer his support to this move in 1975. Ironically, the “No” group also receives support from a small number of Euroscpetic Conservative back benchers, although their support of the “No EEC” campaign is circumspect because of their government’s pro-EEC policy.
In addition to a significant number of Labour MPs, the “No to EEC” campaign for a popular referendum is supported by the Ulster Unionist Party, and very prominently by the former Conservative minister Enoch Powell. Other parties supporting the "No to EEC” movement included the Democratic Unionist Party, the Scottish National Party, and parties outside Parliament including the National Front and the Communist Party of Great Britain.
January 1975
Volkswagen introduces the Golf, its new front-wheel-drive economy car, in the United States and Canada as the Volkswagen Rabbit. Sales of the fuel-efficient vehicle climb while car sales for the big three in Detroit continue to plummet.
Bethlehelm Steel, General Telephone and Electronics, Singer, Ikon Office Solutions and Idle Wilde Foods, all Fortune 500 companies in 1974, file for bankruptcy protection in the first quarter of 1975. This initiates a further sharp decline in share prices as companies retrench in an effort to cut expenses and ride out the worsening recession (depression).
Unemployment remains at 19%; job growth is stagnant. Inventories are slowly being depleted but retailers are wary of placing any new large-scale orders. Consumer electronics and other luxury goods are particularly hard hit.
The Prime Rate has fallen to 7 ½%, but borrowing is still curtailed, creating liquidity issues. One hundred and five banks have failed sine November 1973, the highest rate since the 1930’s. Mortgage rates are at an all time low, but there are few new ones taken out and housing starts are at a forty-year low. Rents are falling, but this is in response to a fall in demand. The Dow Jones average hovers around 500, down from a peak of 1,000 in 1972. The price of gas remains at around $ 0.95 per gallon, although there is a drop as more domestic sources of refined oil become available.
Travel agents report among the highest small business bankruptcy rates, followed closely by auto dealers and small retailers. Business for the funeral industry is up, which coincides with a rise in the national suicide rate. Homelessness remains a problem in many major American communities, as does the question of child nutrition and school attendance.
In the Imperial Valley in California there are several violent clashes between native-born workers and immigrant farm workers over agricultural jobs. Similar confrontations are noted in factory and manufacturing positions along the U.S.-Mexico border.
Egyptian President Anwar al-Sadat had introduced a policy of economic liberalisation and, to a much lesser extent, political liberalisation. In 1971 the concentration camps created by the Nasser regime were closed, and the regime began to gradually release the imprisoned Muslim Brothers, though the organisation (Muslim Brotherhood) itself remained illegal; the last of those still behind bars regained their freedom in the general amnesty of 1975.
Sadat hoped to use the conservative Muslim Brotherhood as a political counterweight to leftist and nationalist groups which were opposing his cease-fire agreement with Israel. However, the Muslim Brotherhood began preaching against the on-going western occupation in Syria, and Sadat’s tacit support for the western action.
January 1, 1975
Work is abandoned on the British end of the Channel Tunnel.
A United Nations sponsored interim government takes office in Syria. It is lead by many figures from the rump Aleppo government. The nominal head of state remains Aleppo government President (General) Luai al-Atassi. The provisional council he chairs is in fact very faction riddled. The Syrian military, apart from a conspicuous officer corps, is also in very poor condition. Allied coalition forces begin re-building the Syrian Army, although there are conflicts between the United States and the Soviet Union over this plan.
Israel officially protests to the United States and Soviet governments about any efforts to rebuild the Syrian military.
January 2, 1975
The attempt to fashion an entente between President Mitterrand and UDR Prime Minister Olivier Guichard to overcome the Grand Gachis collapses with a policy impasse between the Matignon and the Elysee. The Prime Minister and his Cabinet tender their resignations to President Mitterrand, and call on the President himself to resign (“to let the people of France decide”). As the terms of article 12 of the Constitution prevent Mitterrand from dissolving the assembly until the summer, he is forced to form a government out of the existing National Assembly membership. The UDR hopes by this maneuver to either force the President to accept them back on their terms (i.e. reduce his Presidency to a figurehead status) or, if his Socialist Party fails to form a workable government, resign himself.
The President calls on Gaston Defferre to form a minority government with Socialist but no Communist members (he is well aware that many French voters fear the Communist influence if they are allowed into the government; an issue which he must address, and he does so through Defferre by keeping the PCF at arm’s length). Defferre is appointed Prime Minister. The UDR, who have never accepted Mitterrand’s election (in part because they couldn’t accept that Giscard did better than their man in the first round of the 1974 Presidential election, thus forcing the UDR candidate out of the final round) are opposed, but Mitterrand’s 1974 opponent Valery Giscard d’Estaing rallies his Independent Republicans (NFIR) to support the government’s formation (which also gets the support of all but a few dissident PCF deputies), surprising the UDR loyalists.
Giscard, who had spent much of 1974 smarting over his close loss to Mitterrand, and who supported Guichard’s government up until December, sees an opportunity to promote himself as the conciliator who helped alleviate the highly unpopular Grand Gachis which the President and the Gaullist Guichard had been unable to resolve. This is all part of Giscard’s own campaign to sell himself as the man of France’s future, while painting both the Socialist President and the orthodox Gaullists as the men of the past. Giscard publicly “suspends” his differences with the Socialists (in the political theatre of the moment – he has not gone “soft” on the Socialists at all; he also implies that he persuaded Mitterrand and Defferre to keep the Communists out of the government, a claim which both the President and new Prime Minister call false – but the idea sticks) as the man to “help the people” at the critical moment.
Giscard, who already has his eyes on taking on Mitterrand at the next Presidential election, then scheduled for 1981, is hoping to use these events to capture the initiative of the center-right from the Gaullists, and perhaps even supplant the UDR as the more politically significant and popular political force on the right. For the short term he is building his image as a leader for the next National Assembly election that most observers expect will come in the summer of 1975.
Asked later why he didn’t simply join the Gaullists in forcing a new Presidential election that spring and run again against Mitterrand, Giscard answered that if he had done that it would have been regarded as naked opportunism and he would have lost. This way he appeared to be the “reasonable adult among the squabbling children.”
Many in the UDR accused Giscard of stabbing them in the back, since he had lead the NFIR in supporting Guichard’s government since the summer, and now pulled the legs out from under their maneuver to wrong-foot Mitterrand. “Not at all,” Giscard replied. “I stood with the government, gave them a chance to make this cohabitation work. They did not, instead their intransigence and that of the President lead to the gachis. There comes a time to admit the obvious; it wasn’t working. I do not favour a Socialist government anymore than I favour a Socialist President, but there comes a time when we must do something; the country cannot continue in impasse, we must have a way forward for the next six months. This is why I choose a provisional understanding with the Socialists today – this not a marriage you understand, merely a temporary co-operation which better serves France that what we have had these past six months.”
Former Interior Minister Jacques Chirac, who lead a delegation of forty-three UDR deputies in support of Giscard and against the UDR Presidential candidate Jacques Chaban-Delmas during the first round of the 1974 Presidential election, finds himself further frozen out to the back benches of his party’s caucus, as the UDR slips from power for the first time since Charles de Gaulle’s return in 1958.
The PCF are extremely unhappy about their exclusion from the Cabinet, as witnessed by the half-hearted support of their Deputies for Defferre’s government. Many on the left of the PCF, among its more vocal activists, are calling the President an accomodationist and a sell out (“A Gaullist under his red cape”), factors which could hurt him at the polls in the coming months (on the Left, but maybe not on the Right, he points out in reply). However, the President does persuade the PCF leadership that if they are to achieve any of their common goal, then they must gain the political high ground, and that by not reaching an agreement and resigning in a huff, the UDR has handed them an opportunity to do so. With that point he does win their grudging support for the Defferre government.
Asked if he sought Giscard’s help, the President comments “he did what he wanted; I did not ask him for anything. But if he is willing to help row the boat in the same direction as I am going, I would be foolish to tell him to stop.”
“Remember,” Mitterrand says often that spring, “it is not I who threw-up my hands and resigned; it is not I who called the protesters into the streets. It is not I who would not sit down at the bargaining table until all of France cried ‘enough.’ For those behind these actions you must look to other places, other parties. As President I have made the effort to reach responsible agreements, to make our system work for the people. If others have given-up on the people, so be it - I have not!”
The Defferre government decides to continue with nuclear reactor development in Iraq, a project begun under the UDR.
Patent and Trademark Office renamed U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
The United States Congress approves the Federal Rules of Evidence.
President Gavin announces that the United States will begin a program of developing nuclear power production as an alternative to dependence on fossil fuels for energy.
At the same time the President announces that due to the increase in world prices for crude oil over the past two years, U.S. domestic production has increased, alleviating some shortages of oil.
The US Department of the Interior designates grizzly bear a threatened species.
Rep. Ronald Dellums (D-CA) announces he will be a candidate for the 1976 Democratic Party nomination for President.
The PIRA officially demands the release of sixty prisoners, including Gerry Adams and Martin McGuiness, in return for the release of actor Roger Moore.
January 4, 1975
President Gavin names former Attorney General, Under Secretary of State and current White House Counsel Nicholas deB. Katzenbach to serve as the next U.S. Ambassador to the United Kingdom.
The President declares: “We will stand-by our friends in Britain, and Mr. Katzenbach has agreed to take on this duty to help show our solidarity with the British people in their struggle for law-and-order over chaos.”
Reporter: “Mr. President, you are an Irish-Catholic yourself. Don’t you share, at least in some degree, sympathy with the Irish nationalists and their desire for a free nation?”
President Gavin: “The last time I looked Ireland is an independent nation with a freely elected government; that battle was won in 1922. If you’re talking about the North, I believe that has to be settled by the people who live there in a peaceful, negotiated way. I don’t hold with bombings, shootings and kidnappings. No civilized nation can condone that sort of behavior – period.”
A combined Senate and House Committee, called the Bayh - Riegle Committee after its chairmen Senator Birch Bayh (D-IN) and Representative Donald Riegle (D-MI), begins hearings on possible revisions to the twelfth amendment. These hearings come about as a result of much criticism of the twelfth amendment which arose from the 1972 Presidential election.
The Committee will consider five (5) plans during the next six months of hearings:
The Harvard Plan: So named because it is being promoted by a number of scholars from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. The Harvard Plan calls for the twelfth amendment to be altered so that in the event of a hung Electoral College resulting in the election being thrown to the Congress, as occurred in 1972-1973, the House and Senate would meet together to vote for President and Vice President, with each member individually having one vote. The Harvard Plan suggests that neither the Speaker of the House nor the Vice President (as President of the Senate) preside over this assembly: instead they propose that the Chief Justice of the United States preside over the body (but have no vote) and certify the results. The Speaker would only participate as he is a member of the House and has one vote.
The President and Vice President would be chosen by a majority vote of the assembled members. If a candidate failed to get fifty percent plus one vote on the first ballot, the candidate receiving the least number of votes on the first ballot would be eliminated from the second ballot, thus assuring a winner on the second ballot. The Harvard Plan envisions no binding rule on whom the Representatives and Senators can vote for apart from the top three winners of Electoral Votes for President and the top three candidates for Vice President. It does specify that the winner of the Presidential vote must be a candidate who was put before the people as a candidate for President, and that the winner of the Vice Presidential vote must be a candidate who was put before the people as a candidate for Vice President.
The Neustadt Plan: Authored by Harvard Professor and political science scholar Dr. Richard Neustadt would amend the Harvard Plan by requiring members to vote as their districts (or states in the case of Senators) had. If the candidate whose Electoral Votes the member’s district or state had voted for was removed from a second ballot, then the member would be obligated to choose from the next highest vote total in their district/state.
The Cleaver-Aldridge Plan (also the Cleveland Plan or the Case Western Plan):Advocated by a political science scholar and lawyer from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, would amend the Constitution to repeal the twelfth amendment and the underlying text of Article II covering contingent elections. Instead this plan envisions ninety-nine state legislative houses across the United States voting on the question in the event of a hung Electoral College, with each state legislator having one vote for President and one vote for Vice President.
The American Bar Association Plan (The Lawyer’s Plan): Put forward by a panel of ABA Constitutional lawyers recommends that the Constitution be amended to allow the election to take place on the first Monday of October, with the Electoral College meeting to cast their votes on the first Monday in November. In the event that there is no clear winner in the Electoral College then a run-off election would be scheduled for the third Monday in November, in which only the top two candidates (or Electors committed for the top two candidates) in the first round Electoral College appearing on the ballot, compelling a clear choice in a run-off election.
The Louisiana (French) Plan: Advocates abolishing the Electoral College altogether, as the authors of this plan see that institution as the source of the problem. Instead, as in Louisiana elections (and French Presidential elections), all the candidates would run against each other on the first ballot (which the plan proposes moving back to the second Tuesday in October). If any candidate won more than fifty percent of the popular vote in the first round then he would be declared elected as President (and his running mate declared elected as Vice President). If the first round fails to produce a winner, then a second round would be held on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November, in which the top two candidates from the first round would be the only two candidates on the ballot. Short of a tie, one would win more than fifty percent of the run-off vote and that person would be elected as President (and their running mate as Vice President). In the unlikely event of a tie, the matter would be settled by a combined vote of both Houses of Congress (similar in concept to the Harvard Plan).
Montreal Canadiens shutout Washington Capitals 10-0
Jerry Brown, the former Democratic candidate for Governor of California, signs a deal to host a political talk and opinion show on the Mutual Radio Network.
Twenty-four Greek Cypriot civilians are murdered in an attack by guerrillas on a village.
January 5, 1975
The Tasman Bridge in Tasmania, Australia, is struck by the bulk ore carrier Lake Illawarra, killing twelve people.
In a bid to repeat their success with the December kidnapping of Roger Moore, five PIRA operatives attempt to abduct former James Bond actor Sean Connery outside of his hotel in Paris. Connery sees them coming and puts up a resistance, and is assisted by two local men, and by Paris police. Three of the five men are arrested by the Paris police, while two escape. One of those captured has to undergo several hours of surgery to repair his jaw, which was broken by a well-placed kick from Connery. The French and British authorities identify them as suspected members of the PIRA.
Connery later tells reporters “I beat the bastards, and I’ll do it again to anyone else who tries. They’re scum, the lot of them.”
Ironically, Connery had been in Paris to wrap-up post-production work on a film called Ransom, the plot of which involved terrorists trying to extort money from a government.
Seven British Royal Military Policemen are stoned by a mob in An Nabk, Syria.
Western intelligence over flights of Cyprus detect the building of large concentration camps by the Cypriot military.
January 5 – 12, 1975
King Faisal of Saudi Arabia hosts the Jeddah Talks in the Saudi Arabian city of Jeddah. Attended by representatives of various factions vying for power in Syria along with representatives of the governments of Egypt, Jordan, Iraq and the United Arab Emirates, the Jeddah talks attempt to assist the Syrians in forming a government. The week of talks proves inconclusive as the various Syrian factions cannot agree on power sharing among themselves.
King Faisal is receiving increased pressure from his Wahhabi clerical allies to denounce the western crusade in Syria and to use Saudi Arabia’s petro-power status to force the allied coalition to leave. For various reasons, including his troubled relations with the United States and the gross overestimation of petro-power by the mullahs unschooled in international relations, King Faisal resists calls to do this- his temper is aroused by various irritations, he is overheard calling one senior Wahhabi cleric an “ignoramus.”
King Faisal’s deliberative policies on the Syrian question heats-up the fundamentalist blasts against the Saudi regime, which some more vitriolic preachers are calling “apostate” for its unwillingness to act against the Syrian aggression and its “softness” on the oil embargo. Juhayman al-Otaibi, a former Saudi National Guard officer, becomes one of those most outspoken against the regime. Al-Qtaibi is harassed by the Saudi security forces, but also finds that he has allies within the Saudi establishment as well.
Another cause of the Saudi King’s difficulties is that the oil embargo, and the U.S. “silent embargo” in retaliation is seriously undercutting the Saudi financial reserves, forcing the King to be more frugal with state largess to individuals and groups. With the cause-and-effect relationship not clearly understood by many Saudis, and with the oil embargo seen as a political and religious issue as well as an economic one, support for the Saud family’s rule is being slowly undercut from several different directions.
In retaliation for the OPEC oil embargo, President Gavin has curtailed all but essential sales of military equipment (mainly spare parts) to the Kingdom to use as a lever to pressure the Saudi King into using his influence in OPEC to end the embargo. Through the Treasury Department the Gavin Administration has also demanded full payment in dollars of Saudi contracts and outstanding debts while holding-up new credits. Saudi Arabia is wholly dependent upon petro dollars to run its economy, and while they have a great reserve, the President’s plan has been to compel the Saudi government to draw down that reserve until they either persuade OPEC to ease-up on the embargo, or break with the organization entirely. To add to the point, the Gavin Administration has added a tariff to Saudi oil, making it even more expensive in the U.S. market than oil from other sources (“the silent embargo’). This has the effect of driving down even further Saudi Arabia’s net oil exports, which – like other oil producers – has been affected by the OPEC embargo (they still sell oil, but must do so through the international spot market and in lesser quantity than they would like, reducing revenue and marginally increasing export costs, which in turn affects their hard currency positions).
In Britain the Chancellor, Maurice Macmillan, has been co-operating with this policy, as has the Dutch government (Britain is also adding a very small “silent embargo” tariff to Saudi oil; the Netherlands hasn’t gone that far). However, the West German, French and Japanese governments have largely ignored the “silent embargo”, instead seeking bilateral agreements with OPEC and individual oil producers instead. Saudi Arabia meanwhile has been buying arms from the French, the South Africans and the Chileans, using up a dwindling supply of hard currency to do this (although they have been using oil as a trade instrument with these regimes as well).
January 6, 1975
Wheel of Fortune premieres on NBC. It disappears after one season due to poor ratings.
AM America makes its television debut on ABC.
1000 Led Zeppelin fans, waiting overnight inside the lobby of the Boston Garden for tickets to the group's February 4th gig to go on sale, cause a riot and an estimated $30,000 damage.
Boston officials, outraged by the rioting, seek to shut down the February 4th concert and go to court in an effort to recover the cost of the damage from the band.
Barry Morris Goldwater Jr. is sworn in as the 34th Governor of California. In his inaugural address, Governor Goldwater calls on the State of California to become “the engine of enterprise which will lift this economy out of recession and into prosperity.” Goldwater promises to bring hi-tech and “future-oriented” jobs to California through tax incentives for business and de-regulation of the marketplace.
January 7, 1975
London Police officials announce that five Syrian nationals, all students at the University of London, are wanted in connection with the assassination of United States Ambassador Walter Annenberg.
The Heath government is seriously embarrassed by the fact that the five suspects all left the UK in the hours after the assassination unchallenged on flights for Rome because the government had directed all investigative effort into finding a link between Ambassador Annenberg’s murder and the PIRA. The latest finding by the police proves conclusively that the PIRA had nothing to do with the crime. Italian police later confirm that the five Syrian men all flew from Rome to Beirut.
January 8, 1975
Judge Sirica orders release from prison of Watergate conspirators John W Dean III, Herbert W Kalmbach and Jeb Stuart Magruder. All are to appear as prosecution witnesses against Richard Nixon in the former President’s forthcoming trial.
Rep. Phillip Crane (R-IL) announces that he will be running for the 1976 Republican nomination for President.
A contingent of thirty-seven South Vietnamese Army (ARVN) Engineers arrives in Syria as a token support by the South Vietnamese government for the U.S. lead allied effort.
January 10, 1975
Japanese soldier Teruo Nakamura surrenders on the Indonesian island of Morota.
Elliot Richardson is officially appointed as the special prosecutor to look into the illegal financial practices of the Unification Church in the United States.
January 11, 1975
The Soyuz 17 crew (Georgi Grechko, Aleksei Gubarev) is launched into space for a one-month mission aboard the Salyut 4 space station.
A truck bomb explodes outside a U.N. emergency medical facility in Homs, Syria, killing fourteen including three Soviet soldiers and injuring another twenty-two.
January 12, 1975
Super Bowl IX: The Minnesota Vikings defeat the Pittsburgh Steelers 14-10 at Tulane Stadium in New Orleans, Louisiana.
Chrysler begins to offer rebates of up to fifty percent in order to try and stimulate sales of its cars.
A USAF F-4 Phantom flown by 2d Lt Jeb Bush USAF encounters Israel Air Force Mirage fighters while flying patrol over the South of Syria near the Golan area. The Israelis fire missiles at the American aircraft, forcing the USAF patrol to pull back.
Washington later protests this incident to the Israeli government.
January 14, 1975
The House of Representatives passes the Combined Counter Terrorism Enforcement Act of 1975 (CCTEA 1975) by a vote of 290 -145.
Motivated by the New York Stock Exchange hostage seizure in September 1974, and originally debated in the lame-duck Congress of November – December 1974, the CCTEA provides for a combined FBI-military counter-terrorism force which can be created, trained and ready to react to hostage taking and terrorist incidents anywhere in the United States or the world. The CCTEA calls for the creation of an agency to be called the Federal Counter-Terrorism Bureau (FCTB) to fulfill this mission.
The FCTB would combine the expertise of the FBI, Secret Service, Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms, the CIA, the DIA, the NSA, LAPD, NYPD (and other police agencies), the U.S. Army Rangers, U.S. Army Special Forces (Green Berets), U.S. Navy SEALs, the U.S. Air Force Security Police and the U.S. Coast Guard into an anti-terror intelligence and strike unit. Models for this unit include the West German GSG9, the British SAS and the Israeli Commando units.
The bill contains provisions which would exclude these activities from the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 so that the military could be involved in domestic law enforcement on this issue, and also allows a provision for the CIA to engage in domestic counter-terrorism enforcement as a partner of the FBI.
Turan Celu, a prominent Imam in the Turkish-Cypriot community is arrested, tortured and murdered by Cypriot government forces.
January 15, 1975
Sen. Frank Church (D-ID) announces he will form a special Senate Commission of inquiry into the illegal activities of the CIA, the FBI and other U.S. intelligence agencies (which will become known as the Church Committee).
The investigation is motivated by an article published in The New York Times on December 22,1974, written by investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, detailing operations engaged in by the CIA over the years that had been dubbed the "family jewels". Covert action programs involving assassination attempts against foreign leaders and covert attempts to subvert foreign governments were reported for the first time. In addition, the article discussed efforts by intelligence agencies to collect information on the political activities of US citizens. Nationally syndicated columnist Jack Anderson has also written about many of these charges in the autumn of 1974.
A similar House of Representatives investigation follows later in the year, which will become known as the Pike Committee after its chairman, Rep. Otis Pike (D-NY).
Donald Neilson kidnaps heiress Lesley Whittle, 17, from her home in Shropshire, England.
Princess Alexandra and Baroness Young launch International Women’s Year in Britain.
Portugal grants independence to Angola.
Soviet Politburo member and Deputy General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party Mikhail Suslov makes a secret visit to Hanoi for meetings with North Vietnamese leaders.
Armed gunmen assassinate General Haydar al-Kuzbari of the Syrian Army, a leading contender for the Presidency of Syria, outside of his home in Damascus.
The United Nations General Assembly votes to impose a total economic embargo on Cyprus. This is upheld in the Security Council.
January 18, 1975
The U.S. Atomic Energy Commission is divided-up between Energy Research and Development Agency and Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Terry Bradshaw is shot and severely wounded by Frank Locassio, an unemployed factory worker who is upset at the Steelers’ loss to Minnesota in the Super Bowl. He claims to be exacting justice against “overpaid jocks who get lots of cash while working men starve!” Bradshaw recovers but his professional football-playing career is over.
January 19, 1975
Earthquake strikes Himachal Pradesh, India.
The PIRA carried out two gun attacks on hotels in London. Shots were fired into the Carlton Tower Hotel and the Portman Hotel. Twelve people were injured in the attacks.
January 20, 1975
In Hanoi, North Vietnam, the Politburo agrees to a draft agreement for a ceasefire in South Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.
Trial proceedings begin in the case of United States v. Nixon.
Michael Ovitz founds the Creative Artists Agency.
Guerrilla forces murder fourteen monks at a Greek Orthodox monastery in Cyprus.
January 21, 1975
The Maryland Court of Appeals (that state’s Supreme Court) rules that the federal pardon granted to Spiro Agnew (by himself) is sufficient to cover any state indictment on lesser charges, many of which, the court notes, have already passed the statute of limitations provided by the Maryland Penal Code.
The Maryland court goes out its way in its opinion to condemn Agnew’s actions, but argues that it is a dangerous legal precedent for any court to undermine the pardon process by using subjective criteria to undermine a pardon once granted. It finds the power of the pardon “near absolute” and if “subjected to mincing now, no matter the sufficient grounds for such an action” then “later mincing could wear a hole through the pardon power such that it will cease to have any meaningful application and shall fail to provide the protection and redemption for which it was intended. We could, by ruling the Federal pardon invalid in this court and in this State, set-off a frenzy of court shopping where plaintiffs dissatisfied with the ruling of the courts at one level and in one place would seek other jurisdictions which might be more favorable to their case. This practice becomes more odious when it is prosecutors who seek to use the State’s power to have another bite at the apple. While we are fully aware that this already occurs and will continue to occur despite how this Court rules, we see no need for this Court to encourage the practice by allowing it in this case. ”
The Attorney General of Maryland, Bill Burch, announces that in light of this ruling he sees little point in appealing the ruling in the Federal Court system, where Agnew’s pardon would be even more binding. “It’s wrong, but seven Justices of the Court of Appeals have told us what the law is in this situation, and while I don’t believe Mr. Agnew should get away with it, that is the finding of the court and I must go along with it.”
There was a series of bomb explosions in Belfast in attacks carried out by the PIRA.
Two members of the PIRA were killed when a bomb they were transporting by car exploded in Victoria Street, Belfast.
January 22, 1975
In retaliation for the January 20 murder of Greek Orthodox monks by Turkish insurgents, the Cypriot air force bombs the city of Lefkosia, causing heavy civilian casualties.
January 23, 1975
Barney Miller premieres on ABC TV.
A car bomb detonates outside a U.S. encampment in Syria. No casualties are reported as the bomb was poorly set and detected before it went off.
The PIRA placed a large time bomb at the Woodford waterworks pumping station in North London. Three people were injured in the explosion and there was substantial damage.
January 25, 1975
Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheik Mujib Rahman declares a state of emergency and his political supporters approve a constitutional amendment banning all opposition political parties. Mujib is declared "president for life," and given extraordinary powers.
Former Minnesota Governor Harold Stassen announces that he will be a candidate for the 1976 Republican nomination for President.
Turkish Air Force and Greek Air Force jets engage in air-to-air combat over the Mediterranean. The Turkish aircraft are alleged by the Greeks to be engaged in air combat operations in support of the Turkish guerrillas.
January 27, 1975
The PIRA planted seven time bombs at locations across London. At 6.30pm a bomb exploded at Gieves, the military outfitters, in Old Bond Street. At 9.30pm bombs exploded at the Moreson chemical plant in Ponders End and a disused gas works in Enfield. These two bombs caused only minimal damage. Two further bombs exploded in Kensington High Street and Victoria Street; two people were injured. A warning was given of a bomb in Putney High Street and a British Army bomb-disposal officer was able to defuse the device. A warning was also given for a bomb in Hampstead and it was defused.
The Heath government, which had lifted martial law restrictions over the Christmas holidays, now re-imposes them. The latest round of PIRA incidents in mainland Britain is met with a wave of mass arrests of suspect sympathisers. In many cases being of Irish ancestry is sufficient to be classed as a sympathiser.
January 29, 1975
The Weather Underground bombs the U.S. State Department main office in Washington, D.C.
Film footage appears of American journalist Al Gore Jr. being held captive by PJF forces. Gore is forced to read a statement denouncing the “Crusade of the United States and the infidel powers” against the “people of Islam.” The PJF demands a one billion dollar payment for Gore’s release.
January 29 – February 1, 1975
President Gavin pays a state visit to Saigon. He and President Troung discuss a proposed cease-fire agreement with North Vietnam at length at the South Vietnamese Presidential palace, followed by a state dinner hosted in President Gavin’s honor. President Gavin also visits U.S. troops in the field and civilian areas of South Vietnam.
January 30, 1975
John Lennon releases "#9 Dream"
Barry Manilow's "Mandy" goes gold
The Gardiner Report, which examined measures to deal with terrorism within the context of human rights and civil liberties, was published. The report recommended that special category status for paramilitary prisoners should be ended. The report also recommended that detention without trial be maintained but under the control of the Secretary of State.
February 1, 1975
The Intercontinental Broadcasting Corporation is launched in the Philippines.
Otis Francis Tabler is the first open homosexual to get security clearance to work for the Defense Department.
Spiro T. Agnew announces that he will seek the 1976 Republican nomination for President.
When a reporter points out to Agnew that he cannot hold the office, as Article One, Section 7 of the Constitutional states “Judgment in Cases of Impeachment shall not extend further than to removal from Office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any Office of honor, Trust or Profit under the United States,” Agnew retorts:
“I have remained silent in order to support the current acting President in his leadership of our government, and so not undermine the country by creating a Constitutional crisis, but the terms of my removal were unconstitutional and highly irregular. The Senate illegally removed me from office as a political effort; the so-called high crimes and misdemeanors charged had in fact been absolved by a pardon, and no Socratic argument by a bunch of leftist law professors about so-called questions of guilt and acknowledging guilt in granting the pardon can change that basic fact. The Senate in its reprehensible action undermined this nation when it needed leadership the most, and caused us to lose direction and spin into recession and crisis. My campaign will be about overturning that rotten-to-the-core judgment, in the courts and with the support of the American people. I am, and will remain, a candidate for the office of President of the United States in 1976.”
February 2 – 3, 1975
President Gavin meets with Soviet leaders Alexi Kosygin and Mikhail Suslov in the Soviet city of Vladivostok. At their summit the leaders agreed on quantitative limits on various nuclear weapons systems and banned the construction of new land-based ICBM launchers.
At the summit meeting Suslov puts a permanent hold on the proposed Apollo-Soyuz joint space flight. The project, first conceived during the Nixon Administration and Brezhnev’s tenure, would have involved a Soviet spacecraft and an American one linking up in orbit as a joint space venture. The project languished for lack of interest during the Agnew Administration and after the fall of Brezhnev. Suslov is not interested in furthering it and communicates this to the U.S. President.
An Olympic Airlines Boeing 727 is shot out of the air minutes after taking off from Rome’s Leonardo Da Vinci- Fiumicino Airport. The jet crashes into a residential area killing all 109 passengers and crew aboard and seven Italians on the ground. Italian police conclude that the airliner was shot out of the air with an anti-aircraft missile.
Retired New York Court of Appeals Judge John F. Scileppi presents the report of his inquiry into police actions in the September 1974 hostage taking at the New York Stock Exchange. Judge Scileppi finds that while the hostage takers were brutal, and that their resort to violence and murder created pressure for the police to act – together with an uncertainty as to whether they would kill all the hostages after throwing a grenade at 4:00 pm in the afternoon – the police nonetheless acted in a manner which aggravated the violence and caused unnecessary deaths.
Judge Scileppi, rather than blaming any individual officers or leaders, determines that there was a breakdown in the command-and-control system, and faults police leadership for letting emotion and a determination to end the situation as quickly as possible to take precedence. Specifically, he calls on the NYPD to provide better training to its senior leadership and officers in hostage negotiation and terrorist incidents, and recommends that the NYPD develop and trained a specifically tasked Hostage Rescue Unit that would include professionally trained hostage negotiators.
Judge Scileppi does single out pressure from the administration of then Governor Nelson Rockefeller, who wanted the situation to end quickly before it became an issue in the New York Gubernatorial election, on the New York Mayor and Police Commissioner as a factor which caused them to give “hard-edged” instructions to their subordinates and contributed to climate wherein the police acted with haste and force to resolve the situation. In the end the report admonishes the now former Governor for inserting political concerns into a tense situation.
February 4, 1975
The Haicheng earthquake injures several hundred thousand in Haicheng, Liaoning, China. Although seismic detectors outside of China detect the quake, and U.S. spy satellites photograph the damage, it is months before confirmation of this event reaches the outside world.
Palestinian gunmen assassinate President Suleiman Frangieh of Lebanon outside of his home. In a coordinated attack, another group of gunmen also try to assassinate Prime Minister Rachid Sohl, but succeed only in wounding him. Sohl becomes the acting President upon the death of President Frangieh, pending a new election.
Lebanese Army units retaliate against Palestinian refugee camps, setting of a war between the Lebanese government and various Palestinian factions. Pro-Bayanouni forces in the Palestinian camps meanwhile use this conflict as a pretext to begin a Palestinian civil war between their followers and the established, secular Palestinian militias.
The Soyuz 17 crew returns to Earth after 1 month aboard the Salyut 4 space station.
Operation Specter begins. This operation involves a sweep by U.S., South Vietnamese and Cambodian government troops to further dislodge North Vietnamese and Khmer Rouge guerrillas from a wide arc of territory constituting the border area between Cambodia and Laos.
South Vietnamese troops launch an independent ground offensive, supported by U.S. air power, into the border areas between South Vietnam and Laos.
Ayman al Zawahiri, a doctor in the Egyptian Army and a secret leader in the Egyptian Islamic Jihad group, a fundamentalist offshoot of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, and Mahmoud al-Zahar, a Palestinian refugee doctor deeply concerned about events in Syria and Lebanon, meet at Cario University. They begin discussions that will lead to the formation of “The Red Plan.” Al-Zawahari continues to spread radical doctrine among receptive officers in the Egyptian Army.
February 5, 1975
The Northern Ireland Office (NIO) published a discussion paper on power sharing, The Government of Northern Ireland: A Society Divided. This was the third discussion paper published in advance of the Northern Ireland Constitutional Convention.
Secretary of State for Northern Ireland Margaret Thatcher announced that new blocks ('H-Blocks') were to be built at the Maze Prison while waiting for a new prison at Maghaberry, County Antrim, to be completed. PIRA prisoners are to be held there without special status.
Cypriot Army forces begin rounding-up all Turkish men on the island aged 12 and over and placing them in concentration camps.
February 6, 1975
The CCTEA 1975 passes the Senate with a vote of 65 – 35. President Gavin signs it into law the same day.
February 9, 1975
Two Catholic civilians, both aged 19, were shot dead by Loyalist paramilitaries as they left St Brigit's Catholic Church, Malone, Belfast.
At an emergency meeting of the Organization of the Islamic Conference in Tunis, Libyan leader Muammar al-Gaddafi, a leader of the hard-line block in the oil embargo, calls on Islamic nations to “recruit legions of volunteers to fight the imperialist enemy and liberate our oppressed brothers in Syria and Lebanon.” His call is met with a number of sour expressions by other delegates, and a rebuke from President Sadat of Egypt who says, “those who incite violence only add to the misery of our Syrian brothers. Was it not violent resistance in the name of a half-baked revolution which lead to this terrible situation? Why pour more gasoline on the fire? What sort of recklessness is that?”
Despite his rebuke at the OIC Gaddafi announces he will raise a volunteer “Arab Liberation Force” in Libya.
February 10, 1975
Two Catholic civilians were shot dead by Loyalist paramilitaries in a gun attack on Hayden's Bar, near Pomeroy, County Tyrone.
A Catholic civilian was shot dead by Loyalists in Belfast.
February 11, 1975
Colonel Richard Ratsimandrava, President of Madagascar, is assassinated, initiating a civil war in that country.
February 12, 1975
Analysts at the top secret U.S. National Reconnaissance Office confirm from satellite photographs the existence of what are termed “large poppy plantations” in the interior of China. These are thought to be a significant source of the world’s heroin supply.
President Gavin orders SR-71 over-flights of these areas to get higher resolution images of these plantations.
An exchange in the British Parliament:
Kenneth Clarke MP (Cons. – Rushcliffe): “Will this government not now recognize that the endless and brutal attacks on civil liberties are undermining the public’s confidence in the very institutions of British democracy? Mr. Speaker, I fear that by its hard hard headed behaviour, the government has fulfilled a major strategy of the terrorists for them, by turning the British state into a potential instrument of terror itself – terror against civilized standards.”
Cheers and catcalls.
Mrs. Thatcher MP (Cons. – Finchley): “Mr. Speaker, the honourable member does this house and the British people a great disservice by attempting to equate the actions of criminals and mass murderers with the actions of this government to protect the lives of British citizens. How many need die before the honourable member and all like-minded critics of this government realize that we are at war with the forces of barbarism. Ours is the hand which alone will stay Britain from chaos.”
Chant from some members: “Hey, hey bloody Maggie, how many d’ya kill today?”
The Speaker: Order! Order!
Mr. Clarke: “Mr. Speaker, I fear the government has developed a conveniently one-sided definition of barbarism, in which all the enemy does is barbaric, while all that we do is civilized. Let me say, Mr. Speaker, that the honour of British civilization is not on display when thousands of innocent civilians are rounded up and interned because they or their ancestors came from Ireland, or may have come from that island. I agree that the enemy is brutal and barbarous in their tactics, I have no doubt about this, and I have no qualm about punishing the guilty to the fullest measure of the law. But I cannot stand silent while our democracy is subverted from within, or our liberties case aside out of fear. Benjamin Franklin once said that those who sacrifice their liberty for security deserve neither, and so it is, that is the choice we are making here, today. How far down that road will this government continue? Will it be until liberty is a no more, and our free system but a glimmer of a once-upon-a-time long since passed?”
Unknown member: “Stuff it!”
Unknown member: “Your squishy heart is bleeding all over me, Ken.”
Barbara Castle MP (Lab. - Blackburn): “Mr. Speaker, I would ask the honourable Secretary of State for Northern Ireland if her government has received an offer of ceasefire from the Provos through any agency, and if that government has availed itself of this opportunity to pursue ceasefire options – including negotiations?”
Catcalls.
Mrs. Thatcher: “This government does not negotiate with criminals. We do not enter into ceasefire agreements with murderers, thieves or other criminals simply when they ask for it. We enforce the law, and if they will not follow the law by laying down their arms and ending their criminal behaviour, we will offer them no quarter.”
Unknown member: “Right-up the gut Maggie!”
The Speaker: “Order! Order!”
Mrs. Castle: “Does the honourable Secretary of State then recommend that more British and Irish men, women and children die for the stubbornness of this government? Is this the course of the government policy, then?”
Airey Neave MP (Cons. – Abingdon): “Mr. Speaker, can the honourable Secretary of State assure us that this government will never flinch in the face of this terrorism; that there never will come a time when this government will take-up the call of ‘peace in our time’ at any cost, which Mrs. Castle and her partisans are trying to sell to us?”
Boos and jeers.
The Speaker: “Order! Order!”
Mrs. Thatcher: “I can so guarantee. There is an expression I have heard which says ‘no justice, no peace.’ As long as these killers offer no justice through their incessant murder and violence there can be no peace in any time. The British people will not be made to bow down before these thugs, that is our policy.”
Soon after discussions begin on a common front between dissident Conservatives lead by Kenneth Clarke, the Labour leader Denis Healey and Liberal Party leader Jeremy Thorpe.
February 18, 1975
In Iran, by 1975, the Shah (Mohammad Reza Pahlavi) had abolished the multi-party system of government so that he could rule through a one-party state under the Rastakhiz (Resurrection) Party in autocratic fashion. All Iranians were pressured to join in. The Shah’s own words on its justification was:
“We must straighten out Iranians’ ranks. To do so, we divide them into two categories: those who believe in Monarchy, the constitution and the Six Bahman Revolution and those who don’t.... A person who does not enter the new political party and does not believe in the three cardinal principles will have only two choices. He is either an individual who belongs to an illegal organization, or is related to the outlawed Tudeh Party, or in other words a traitor. Such an individual belongs to an Iranian prison, or if he desires he can leave the country tomorrow, without even paying exit fees; he can go anywhere he likes, because he is not Iranian, he has no nation, and his activities are illegal and punishable according to the law”.
In addition, the Shah had decreed that all Iranian citizens and the few remaining political parties must become part of Rastakhiz.
The poor performance of the Iranian armed forces in the 1974 border war with Iraq had earned the Shah new enemies. It was not lost on some in the Army’s leadership that he did not trust them, as demonstrated by the fact that the Shah had held back several crack divisions loyal to him to put down any potential unrest at home, or desertions from units at the front. Many blamed this action for Iraq’s early military victories, and for the fact that the Iranians had to grant humiliating concessions to the Iraqi government at the Geneva cease-fire talks in order to bring about a more permanent end to hostilities and a return of occupied Iranian land.
Islamic leaders in Iran, both allied to the exiled Khomeini and among his opponents, also blamed the Shah for trying to break the oil embargo, seeing this as a sign of his apostasy to Islam, and by extension further proof of the non-Islamic nature of his regime. There was a growing clerical opposition to his regime independent of the exiled Khomeini, and it was tapping into a wider anti-Shah feeling founded on resentment of his autocracy, the consequences of his White Revolution, and disillusion within the military and in other quarters in society in what was regarded as a failure to punish Iraq for its 1974 incursion into Iran.
What the Shah did not expect was that the White Revolution lead to new social tensions that helped to create many of the problems the Shah had been trying to avoid. The Shah's reforms more than quadrupled the combined size of the two classes that had posed the most challenges to his monarchy in the past—the intelligentsia and the urban working class. Their resentment towards the Shah also grew since they were now stripped of organizations that had represented them in the past, such as political parties, professional associations, trade unions, and independent newspapers. Land reform, instead of allying the peasants with the government, produced large numbers of independent farmers and landless labourers who became loose political cannons, with no feeling of loyalty to the Shah. Many of the masses felt resentment towards the increasingly corrupt government; their loyalty to the clergy, who were seemed to be more concerned with the fate of the populace, remained consistent or increased.
Meanwhile, the spectacle of the Shah, who had prided himself on building the largest and most powerful military in the Middle East (he had spent billions of petro dollars of to do it), having to make concessions to Iraqi President Al-Bakr in order to regain Iranian territory occupied by Iraq – not because the Iraqis had absolutely defeated the Iranians but because the Shah had tied the Army’s hands behind its back out of a paranoid fear that it would turn on him – disillusioned many Iranians, who started to question if Iran would be better off without the Shah. The irony of the situation was that in 1974 the Shah had little to fear from the military (his secret police had fed his paranoia by playing-up a small disaffected clique of officers into a major conspiracy) but by 1975 the Shah really was accumulating enemies in the Army and Air Force who began to question his leadership for a variety of political, social and religious reasons.
The oil embargo has also had an effect on the Iranian economy. The Shah’s military budget and economic development programs have been largely financed by petro dollars. Although Iran has a more diversified economy than many petro states whose sole exportable product is oil, the embargo nonetheless imposes a bite when exports are restricted to meet the demands of the OPEC embargo (or more costly alternatives are sought that disguise exports that try to work their way around the OPEC embargo). With the oil sector being a major employer in Iran, the cut in exports has the effect of causing lay-offs in a key sector, which translates into higher unemployment, both among oil workers and downstream business that depend on the revenues from the domestic oil production industry.
The loss of hard currency from oil exports has compelled the Iranian government to borrow more heavily, as it must continue to spend money to re-build the military after the 1974 border war with Iraq and pay for that war and re-build the damage caused by it. This sets-off a spiral of inflation, particularly as the Iranian currency begins to lose value. Iran is also susceptible to the worldwide economic slump, which has lead to an increase in unemployment, which the government treasury is not able to fully absorb. This leads to a great deal of working class dissatisfaction with the regime as prices rise, but overall job growth declines.
As in most other Islamic OPEC countries the oil embargo, now tied to events in Syria and Cyprus, has taken on a political and religious dimension as well as an economic one, which is why Iran, like Saudi Arabia, cannot simply put an end to it. Clerics and Islamic hardliners in particular demand that the Shah stick to the embargo until the United States relents and withdraws its forces from Syria, and the west puts a stop to the Cyprus military junta’s actions against the Muslim Turkish population on that island. The Shah’s public efforts to ease the OPEC embargo has been a source for anti-Shah agitation by the religious right, some of whom have joined with Khomeini in referring to the Shah as an apostate for his stand on the issue. This further weakens the legitimacy of his autocratic government in the eyes of many Iranians (secular, leftist, religious and the intelligentsia) who increasingly are looking for a change of leadership.
All of this served as background when on February 18, Amir Asadollah Alam, a former Prime Minister of Iran and the Shah’s closest aide (he could have termed the Shah’s Executive Assistant) was assassinated, along with several others, when a satchel filled with explosives was thrown at him during a public ceremony at Mashhad University (of which Alam was Head of the Board of Trustees) and detonated.
The bomber, who was captured and tortured to death by the secret police, the SAVAK, and turned out to be a follower of a banned fundamentalist group.
The Shah was deeply grieved by the loss of his most significant adviser, and in light of his fierce secret police network, appeared impotent when one of his closest advisers was murdered. An enraged Shah ordered a massive arrest of all dissidents, which ignited a social powder keg in Iran, especially when they went after mullahs and Imams. Adding fuel to the fire, the Shah ordered the leveling of Mashhad University in retaliation for Alam’s murder. The task of destruction was half completed before the Shah changed his mind and ordered it halted. The half destroyed University now stood as a stark monument to the Shah’s brutal regime.
February 19, 1975
Gov. Barry Goldwater Jr. (R-CA) begins his campaign against what he terms as “the vested interests” in California’s educational bureaucracy by proposing legislation that will give parents free choice in choosing the schools they want their children to attend – public or private – based on parent and child focused criteria, such as academic excellence, the rigor of the curriculum, and the content of the curriculum; giving parents greater choice in controlling what their children are going to be taught. Goldwater proposes that parent’s educational taxes be directed how they choose, to public or private schools, which will best serve the parent’s choices for their children.
Most teacher’s unions, school boards and lobbyists oppose this as “a formula for chaos” and “the surest way to make poor schools into a ghetto of education.” The Democratic controlled legislature takes up the opposition to Governor Goldwater’s plan.
“You know, you mention choice to the teacher’s unions, to the Democratic Party, and they run from it like scalded dogs, barking all the way, bearing their teeth in opposition to the idea that a parent might want to choose which school their child attends. What do they oppose? That a parent might want to choose what values their child is taught? That a parent might want control over the tax dollars – their hard earned tax dollars - that are supposed to pay for that education?” Goldwater says. “That tells me something, and it’s not a good thing.
“When I went to school our teachers taught us about the importance of democratic government and making responsible choices. But now, we have a class of professional educators – educrats – both in the classrooms and the union offices – educrats don’t want to impart those values. Instead of teaching good American values, they’re promoting – and this is one of their buzzwords I really love because it says it all – they’re promoting the groupthink of their interest group. They want to protect turf, and measure their success by the aggregate number of heads in a classroom.
“When I look into a classroom I see individual children, not aggregates, like it was some gravel pit. I see the children of hardworking California parents who are being denied a say in how their children are educated. I see a generation of children being used as guinea pigs, who will pay for this muddle headed thinking long after we are all in our grave. That’s the future of our State and our nation that’s being experimented on like so many lab rats.
“As for groupthink, I can think of only one place where that might be appropriate, where a golden hammer and sickle waves overhead on a red flag. That’s not the flag of California. Those aren’t the values that made this state the best in the land. That isn’t the muddle headed nonsense that made our nation the best in the world. So I say yes to parent choice, my friends, because parents exercising choice in educating their children is the cornerstone of a free and healthy democracy.”
February 21, 1975
Judge John Waxman sentences John Mitchell, H.R. Haldeman and John D Ehrlichman to serve 6-14 years in prison. All three have been handed a harsh sentence because they have refused to co-operate with government prosecutors in the trial of Richard Nixon.
Robert Lowry, then Lord Chief Justice of Northern Ireland, was appointed as the Chairman of the Constitutional Convention.
The ancient Greco-Roman ruins at Salamis in Cyprus are destroyed by Cypriot government artillery fire and air bombing during a battle with guerrillas.
February 23, 1975
In response to the energy crisis, daylight saving time commences nearly two months early in the United States.
February 26, 1975
A member of the PIRA was shot dead by a police officer in London. During a subsequent search operation a bomb-making facility was uncovered in Hammersmith.
February 27, 1975
The House of Representatives passes a $35 billion anti-recession tax-cut bill.
The FCTB comes into being. It will take some time for it to develop as a full-fledged and effective agency. Former commander of the U.S. Readiness Command and former acting Army Chief of Staff Gen. Bruce Palmer USA (Ret.) is named as the Bureau’s first Director.
February 28, 1975
46 killed, 74 injured in the Moorgate Tube crash at the Moorgate Station of the London Underground. The crash had two consequences for the London Underground. Firstly, the southern end of the Highbury Branch platforms (where the crash happened) was extensively rebuilt. Secondly, an automatic system for stopping trains were introduced into dead-ends on the tube, regardless of whether the driver brakes the train. These systems are known as Moorgate control.
March 2, 1975
Charles Habib Malik, a Christian Lebanese diplomat and scholar is elected by Parliament as the President of Lebanon. Malik is widely believed to be a front man for several Christian Phalangist political leaders, whose militias are actively fighting against the Palestinian militants.
March 3, 1975
Linda McCartney, wife of former Beatle Paul McCartney, is charged in US with possession of marijuana
March 4, 1975
The American University in Beirut is attacked by armed gunmen of the Palestinian Jihad Faction (a loose translation of this groups name, also called the Palestine Warriors of the Jihad against the Infidel Crusade) who indiscriminately shoot people on the campus. Several Phalange militia units arrive to chase-off the PJF, but in the process they become involved in shooting civilians in their efforts to kill the PJF shooters.
Order is restored after several hours only after a unit of the Lebanese Army does arrive, together with a United States Marine support battalion sent from the Sixth Fleet currently deployed off the coast of Lebanon and Syria.
Casualties are placed at 77 students and staff killed during the armed spree (dying at the scene or later in hospital) by the PJF and the Phalangists; another 120 or more are reported to be wounded. For several weeks after the incident the American University is guarded by U.S. Marines.
The government of Canadian Prime Minister Robert Stanfield decides not to allow televised coverage of Parliamentary debates. That government also passes a resolution delaying the conversion of Canada to the metric system for at least two more years.
Queen Elizabeth II knights Charlie Chaplin.
March 6, 1975
A bomb explodes in the Paris offices of the Springer Press. The 6 March Group (connected to the Red Army Faction) demands amnesty for the Baader-Meinhof Group.
March 7, 1975
Turkish Cypriot guerrilla forces detonate several bombs in the capital of Nicosia, injuring civilians and military personnel.
The body of teenage heiress Lesley Whittle, kidnapped 7 weeks earlier by Donald Neilson (“the Black Panther”), is discovered in Staffordshire, England.
President Gavin and Secretary of State George Bush continue to have disagreements over the President’s Saudi Arabia policy. Secretary Bush argues that the Gavin “silent embargo” policy is only hurting US-Saudi relations since the undeclared embargo is being undercut by a lack of western unity. President Gavin in return contends that the embargo, even if partial, will continue to put pressure the Saudi government largely because the United States remains a significant oil export market and the main supplier of advanced Saudi military equipment, which cannot be easily be replaced by other suppliers, unless Saudi Arabia spends billions to completely re-equip its military. The US also provides industrial goods which cannot be purchased elsewhere, and Saudi Arabia is paying hard cash for them. This, President Gavin believes, will over time persuade Saudi Arabia to break the embargo in its own long-term economic and strategic interest (“will France help defend the Kingdom should it come under Soviet military threat? I know Chile and South Africa can’t.”)
“I recognize there are big holes in this, George, but the United States cannot be seen to be held hostage to the caprice of foreign oil producers,” the President remarks. “One effect of this embargo is that we have increased our own domestic production, and we have a political momentum for alternative energy sources. The message I want to convey is not that we can bankrupt Saudi Arabia, nothing we do will achieve that, but they should think long and hard just how much they need our goodwill as well as our oil markets.”
The Secretary of State remains unconvinced, fearing that this could further destabilize the Saudi Kingdom. Henry Kissinger on the other hand believes that Bush, who has many connections to the Saudis through his years of work in the oil industry, is essentially lobbying on behalf of the Saudi government to undercut US policy on this question.
The tension between Kissinger and Bush has grown over the course of 1974 largely because while Bush is the Secretary of State, Kissinger has assumed many of the responsibilities of that role, particularly in regard to U.S. policy in the Middle East, negotiations in with Vietnam and U.S.-Soviet relations; the same relative position which he had during the Nixon Administration. Much of what Bush is doing has been relegated to ceremonial foreign policy, or second level relations which have a lower profile than what Kissinger is doing.
A vote in the U.S. Senate to revise the filibuster rule to allow 60 senators to limit debate, fails – ironically by a vote of 59 – 41 (60 being needed to revise the filibuster rule).
March 9, 1975
Construction of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System begins.
March 10, 1975
King Faisal of Saudi Arabia, in New York to attend a U.N. conference on Syria and Cyprus, is accidentally photographed just as Israeli Foreign Minister Yigal Allon and his party happen to walk by the King in a corridor. King Faisal is actually speaking with African leader Julius Nyerere. However, in the angle that the photograph is taken, Nyerere is obscured by one of Allon’s aides, and it appears that the King is trying to speak with Allon directly (With his arms outstretched in Nyerere’s direction, but with the Tanzanian President obscured, it could be interpreted that he is either trying to get Allon’s attention, or trying to hug the Israeli Minister, especially once copies of it are doctored (some very crudely) to alter the spatial distance between Allon and the King). Opponents of the King soon circulate this in Saudi Arabia and other parts of the Arab Middle East to suggest that the King is soft on the Zionist question.
Al-Qtaibi is soon accusing the King of having turned his back on the Quran altogether. Even when other photos are quickly published clearly showing the King and Nyerere speaking as Allon walks by, the one photograph remains the source of many inflammatory anti-Faisal sermons.
Secretary of State George Bush announces that he will be resigning from the Gavin Administration, citing unspecified family issues and stating that his desire to return to the private sector and “let new blood” into the Administration. Bush doesn’t express any “policy differences” with the President, but it is widely understood in Washington and in the press corps that these are the real reasons behind Bush’s resignation. Once the resignation is announced, his name is quickly mooted as a possible candidate for President in 1976.
President Gavin announces that he will nominate Henry Kissinger to replace Secretary Bush, thus formalizing the role that Kissinger has been largely playing over the past year.
The “Rocky Horror Show" opens at Belasco Theater in New York City for 45 performances.
March 11, 1975
At an EEC Heads of Government meeting in Dublin, Prime Minister Edward Heath re-affirms the commitment of his government to remain a member of the EEC. This is despite recent (and on-going) disagreements with President Mitterand and Chancellor Schmidt about the direction the EEC should take with regard to the economic sovereignty and regulatory flexibility of individual members.
Asked if he will allow a referendum on the question (as Labour Leader Denis Healey had advocated at one point in the fall of 1974) the Prime Minister says it is unnecessary because, “this has been our policy all along, since before 1974, and the voters knew that when they went to the polls last February. Their support of our government was the referendum on that question; we don’t need another.”
The high-profile Labour MPs Tony Benn, Michael Foot, Peter Shore, Barbara Castle and Eric Varley begin a “No to EEC membership” campaign, in an effort to pressure the Heath government into holding a referendum, which they believe the “No” forces would win. Labour Leader Healey, though he once endorsed this idea, does not offer his support to this move in 1975. Ironically, the “No” group also receives support from a small number of Euroscpetic Conservative back benchers, although their support of the “No EEC” campaign is circumspect because of their government’s pro-EEC policy.
In addition to a significant number of Labour MPs, the “No to EEC” campaign for a popular referendum is supported by the Ulster Unionist Party, and very prominently by the former Conservative minister Enoch Powell. Other parties supporting the "No to EEC” movement included the Democratic Unionist Party, the Scottish National Party, and parties outside Parliament including the National Front and the Communist Party of Great Britain.
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Oh God... if you want the United States, let alone the world, to stay sane, you won't elect Spiro Agnew as POTUS in 1976, after what's happened in the past three years ITTL. At first, I want to believe this is ASB, but then I remember A World of Laughter, a World of Tears and how crazy yet plausible that got to be.
But I wonder how Reagan vs. Agnew would turn out?
But I wonder how Reagan vs. Agnew would turn out?
Impressive update, Drew.
A detail: it's "Mitterrand", double "t" and double "r".
Have you considered Mitterrand appointing Giscard PM after Guichard's resignation?
A detail: it's "Mitterrand", double "t" and double "r".
Have you considered Mitterrand appointing Giscard PM after Guichard's resignation?
John Farson
Banned
Do you have plans for the July 30 - August 1 1975 CSCE summit in Helsinki? OTL it was several years in the making, and is considered one of the most significant political events in the 1970s.
John Farson
Banned
So Cyprus is going more and more to hell, with the Sampson regime now constructing concentration camps and rounding up male Turks over the age of 12. Not good. As soon as the Turks get wind of the full extent of the atrocities... There is still a small Greek population in Turkey, by 1978 it numbered about 7,000 or so. I'd expect that they'd be subjected to reprisals.
What's the situation in Lebanon? So far it seems that the fighting is between the Lebanese Army and the Palestinians, with the Palestinians themselves divided into pro-Bayanouni forces and the secular militias. It looks like the Shiites, the Sunni and the Druze are staying out of it so far, but it might not take a lot to get them involved. Only now there is no Syrian Army to intervene.
Interested to see how Iran and Saudi Arabia develop. Both King Feisal and Reza Pahlevi appear to have similar problems due to the oil embargo, with the embargo acquiring a religious dimension as well as a political and economic one. I gotta say that the Shah ordering the leveling of Mashad University was an act of monumental stupidity. Somehow, I think it would've been even better for the Shah if the destruction had been finished, since leaving the job half-done might very well enhance the image of the Shah being not only brutal, but weak and indecisive as well (which he was).
As soon as the Turks get wind of the full extent of the atrocities... There is still a small Greek population in Turkey, by 1978 it numbered about 7,000 or so. I'd expect that they'd be subjected to reprisals.What's the situation in Lebanon? So far it seems that the fighting is between the Lebanese Army and the Palestinians, with the Palestinians themselves divided into pro-Bayanouni forces and the secular militias. It looks like the Shiites, the Sunni and the Druze are staying out of it so far, but it might not take a lot to get them involved. Only now there is no Syrian Army to intervene.
Interested to see how Iran and Saudi Arabia develop. Both King Feisal and Reza Pahlevi appear to have similar problems due to the oil embargo, with the embargo acquiring a religious dimension as well as a political and economic one. I gotta say that the Shah ordering the leveling of Mashad University was an act of monumental stupidity. Somehow, I think it would've been even better for the Shah if the destruction had been finished, since leaving the job half-done might very well enhance the image of the Shah being not only brutal, but weak and indecisive as well (which he was).
Interesting turn in the NFL. Without Bradshaw, the Cowboys might actually win more than two Super Bowls in the 1970s. (This also benefits the Houston Oliers, Oakland Raiders, Baltimore Colts (who had a somewhat good team in the mid-1970s), and the Denver Broncos (and, to a lesser extent, the Patriots.)
I like the attention of the detail in this TL.
If it's any Democrat vs. Agnew, I'd vote for the Democrat. Heck, I would vote for Edward Kennedy if he decided to get in.
All hell is fixing to break loose between Turkey and Greece, methinks.
9/11 occuring earlier is also possible in this TL.
What do you plan to do with Sara Jane Moore and Squeaky Fromme's assassination attempts in this TL?
I like the attention of the detail in this TL.
If it's any Democrat vs. Agnew, I'd vote for the Democrat. Heck, I would vote for Edward Kennedy if he decided to get in.
All hell is fixing to break loose between Turkey and Greece, methinks.
9/11 occuring earlier is also possible in this TL.
What do you plan to do with Sara Jane Moore and Squeaky Fromme's assassination attempts in this TL?
Oh God... if you want the United States, let alone the world, to stay sane, you won't elect Spiro Agnew as POTUS in 1976, after what's happened in the past three years ITTL. At first, I want to believe this is ASB, but then I remember A World of Laughter, a World of Tears and how crazy yet plausible that got to be.
But I wonder how Reagan vs. Agnew would turn out?
Reagan vs. Agnew - no contest; Reagan would walk away with it.
Actually I thought of that, then I thought nah, John would never go for that.
I didn't think Giscard's numbers were ready for that - ITTL the Socialists are still the biggest single faction in the Assembly. I thought Giscard pushing things along from the sidelines, without his having to be the Prime Minister responsible for actual policy, would better serve his long term interest as the "true alternative." Now that the UDR has failed, he would like to help the Socialists trip up. As the help mate as opposed to the PM he can still keep his distance from the Socialists while at the same taking credit for being the man who tried to save France.
So Cyprus is going more and more to hell, with the Sampson regime now constructing concentration camps and rounding up male Turks over the age of 12. Not good.
I'd expect that and serious upheaval in Turkey because their government hasn't been able to do anything. I expect that ethnic cleansing will enter the vocabulary much sooner than OTL.
Now that the Lebanese government is falling apart and the Palestinians are fighting among themselves the other groups can't help but get drawn in. There's bound to be cross-linking between the PJF and the Sunnis, who will find common enemies. Without the Syrians to put a heavy stamp on the place I expect it to go more tribal, and as it expands it will engulf Syria into one larger sectarian conflict.
Of course, speaking just about Lebanon, the Syrians aren't the only outside force in the neighbourhood who could find a reason to move into the place. (Hint: look South).
In fact Amir Asadollah Alam was an important support for the Shah during the last years of his reign OTL. The episode with Mashad University is a case of the Shah lashing out, then changing his mind once he cools down. It doesn't occur to him right away that a half destroyed campus is a direct symbol of his regime in Iran.
The oil embargo and the worsening situation in the region, both with Syria and Cyprus, play into the weaknesses of both regimes. In the case of Iran, there is no Algiers Accord with Iraq, rather there is a Geneva agreement at which Iraq comes off better, which in turn makes the Shah look even weaker.
John Farson
Banned
Actually I thought of that, then I thought nah, John would never go for that.
I didn't think Giscard's numbers were ready for that - ITTL the Socialists are still the biggest single faction in the Assembly. I thought Giscard pushing things along from the sidelines, without his having to be the Prime Minister responsible for actual policy, would better serve his long term interest as the "true alternative." Now that the UDR has failed, he would like to help the Socialists trip up. As the help mate as opposed to the PM he can still keep his distance from the Socialists while at the same taking credit for being the man who tried to save France.
I know that the narrative requires there to be cohabitation in France (at least for a while), but I still think (like johnjcakos) that the Socialists winning the '74 legislative election in the wake of Mitterrand's election would have been the more likely option. Based on what little I know of French politics, it seems that when a new president is elected that the voters tend to also give his party a chance (Pompidou in '69, UDR majority in '73 legislative election; Mitterrand in '81, Socialist majority a month later; Sarkozy in 2007, UMP victory a month later). Only once, in 1997, did the reverse occur, and this occurred when the president's party already held a majority and when it had been a couple of years since the new president had been elected. Here, in TTL's 1974, the Socialists would have risen to power from the opposition, so there wouldn't be a similar issue of them being "stale." Also, since Mitterrand would have called a snap election (as he pledged in the campaign), it would still very much occur during the honeymoon period. So all this combined would still contribute to a Socialist victory, no matter how hard the Gaullists would try to brand them as pseudo-communist.
In any case, when one thinks of how France is considered to have had an unstable political evolution (from the ancien regime to republic to empire to monarchy to republic to 2nd empire and republic again, with a couple more republics afterwards), I'd find it politically ironic that in this chaotic alt-1970s France (and West Germany) would be thought of as politically stable compared to the UK and the U.S. and other countries. A sort of peaceful island in a sea of mayhem.
I would expect it to be moving along in the background, despite a lack of interest during the ten months of the Agnew Administration, largely because it would have been professional diplomats working on it. I don't think Mitterrand or Heath ITTL would have done anything to stop it.
ITTL it would provide a nice contrast with everything else that has been going wrong, especially as a signature piece of detente, which the Gavin Administration has been trying to re-build after Agnew all but shredded it.
Suslov, not Brezhnev will be the one to take credit for it though. The timing of the summit will depend on if anything interferes with it.
Vince
Monthly Donor
Oh God... if you want the United States, let alone the world, to stay sane, you won't elect Spiro Agnew as POTUS in 1976, after what's happened in the past three years ITTL. At first, I want to believe this is ASB, but then I remember A World of Laughter, a World of Tears and how crazy yet plausible that got to be.
But I wonder how Reagan vs. Agnew would turn out?
With the way Agnew treated the senior GOP members in Congress during the Impeachment proceedings I doubt he'll have much party support.
John Farson
Banned
Yeah, instead of it being a 1990s term, it could very well be a 1970s term. Here the ethnic cleansing would be pretty one-sided, though, since thanks to the population exchanges of the 1920s Turkey's Greek minority would be very tiny, like I mentioned before. Bulgaria also has its Turkish minority, but I don't know if Communist Bulgaria would be tempted to follow the lead of fascist, capitalist Greek-backed Cyprus in this matter. At the very least, I'd expect the Soviets to tell Todor Zhivkov not to rock the boat.
How would the warring parties fare here? In OTL when the Syrians intervened the Phalange and the Maronites were on the brink of defeat. Would the Phalange be better or worse off here?
If the Palestinians (particularly the pro-Bayanouni ones) provoke Israel, that would definitely get Israel involved. But depending on the circumstances that could cause more problems (like Israel's intervention did in OTL.
You know, much as some people like to blame Carter, or the U.S. in general or whatever for the fall of the Shah and rise of Khomeini and the mullahs, they never ask why so many people were willing to risk so much to bring the Shah down in the first place. It's like the French Revolution and revolutions in general: when a populace has been tread down long enough, they'll use the first opportunity to rise up and throw out their hated rulers. The unfortunate thing about revolutions, though, is that they tend to become corrupted and start eating their children.
Agnew won't have much party elite support, but he might be able to win support from the party base and co-opt elements of Reagan's base.
No Lame Ducks on the menu
February 25, 1975
TO: The President
FR: Caspar Weinberger
RE: Election 1976
EYES ONLY
Whether or not you actually decide to run for another term in 1976, it is imperative that we give the impression that you are considering it, or at least leave it up in the air. If you make a definitive statement anytime before January 1976 that you will not be seeking another term, then you will become a lame-duck, which will affect your ability to carry forward any program for the remainder of your current term.
We have discussed the options of having you remain a non-partisan figure and above the political fray for the remainder of your term, and while this might afford you an honest broker standing for the next year, it will also dilute your political capital. As it is leading figures in both parties will be seeking to attach their individual stamps to whatever legislative initiatives will serve their base as they position themselves for either the Democratic or Republican nomination. There will be an inevitable pull to differentiate themselves from you as part of an overall campaign strategy aimed at being your successor. By virtue of this, quite apart from anything you do or say, the image of you as the “yesterday man” will take hold very quickly if you are not in the contest. This could risk any working political alliances, particularly if we need to encourage Congressional leaders and others to take a political risk in order to support your program: few will risk their careers for a President who has no political stake in the outcome, and thus cannot help them out when they need it. A viable candidacy, or an impression of one on your part, will give them some political cover, and will create a rally-around-the-leader effect if managed properly.
With this in mind I have prepared some notes for your consideration on the question of a party nomination and re-election. There are essentially three options: run as an Independent, or seek the nomination of either the Democratic Party or the Republican Party.
Independent:
I would strongly advise against an Independent campaign. Apart from Washington there has never been a non-party President, and some historians argue that Washington was in effect a Federalist, though he never openly acknowledged himself as one. John Tyler, who had repudiated his former association with the Democratic Party to join the Whigs, later repudiated the Whigs. He sought an independent re-election in 1844 and failed miserably because he had enemies in both parties and no grass roots organization of his own.
The case of Abraham Lincoln as a “third party” candidate is a false assumption. The second party of his time (the Whigs) were in a death spiral by 1860, so his Republican “third party” was in fact the true second party to the Democrats in in the North, where the election was decided. Presently, neither the the Democratic or Republican Parties are in decline (despite the recent set-backs of the latter, the GOP is nowhere near the kind of decline the Whigs experienced in the 1850’s).
Theodore Roosevelt’s 1912 third party candidacy proved only strong enough to deny Taft re-election, and elected Woodrow Wilson. There continues to be debate about what effect George Wallace had on the outcome of the 1968 race. (Note: Governor Wallace shows every indication that he will enter the 1976 Democratic primaries; more below).
More significantly, the outcome of the 1972 Presidential election has generally left a bad taste in people’s mouths. The tide against Republican Senate incumbents seen in the 1974 mid-term elections is at least in part attributable to this. With the economy in serious peril, with the problems in the Middle East and Vietnam unresolved, and with a growing crime problem, the voters will not look kindly on any candidate who threatens to present a repeat of the 1972 experience in 1976. Running as an independent who could cause a three-way split in the Electoral College will be political suicide, and if that point isn’t readily apparent then we can expect the Democratic and Republican nominees to make an issue of it.
Democratic Nomination:
The Democratic field is very divided, as is the party itself, largely between the more conservative elements (who were a big component of Governor McKeithen’s 1972 campaign), the establishment liberals and the “new youth liberals,” or “McGovernites” as some have labelled them. The latter are younger Democrats, often College age or just out of college, and those drawn into politics by the anti-war and anti-poverty movements.
Senator Henry Jackson appears to be a leading candidate of the conservatives, but this may not go unchallenged. Governor Wallace will most certainly challenge Jackson for the support of this group, and Wallace has been very effective in mobilizing their support in the past. Another candidate may appear – we must keep in mind that Governor McKeithen’s campaign was only in its infant stages at this point in 1971.
Senator Birch Bayh, Senator Edward (Ted) Kennedy and Senator Hubert Humphrey appear to be the leading contenders of the establishment liberal group. In the past five years Senator Kennedy has overcome at least some of the taint attached to his name by the 1969 Chappaquiddick scandal, and there seems to be a genuine groundswell of support (mixed with nostalgia) for the youngest Kennedy brother. Whether this will translate into a nomination campaign is yet to be determined.
Senator Bayh will leverage his position as the 1972 Vice Presidential candidate into a position of nominee-presumptive; he brought a good deal of liberal and labor support to the McKeithen-Bayh ticket in 1972, and there is no reason to think that he hasn’t been cultivating that support since 1972. He will enhance his reputation further by chairing a joint Congressional panel looking into a fix to the Constitution so that there are no future repeats of the 1972 experience. We know that he will be running, the only question is when he will formally announce.
Senator and former Vice President Hubert Humphrey remains something of a wild card. He has made much of his near win in 1968, and the subsequent revelations of the wrong-doing in the Nixon White House, to establish a high moral ground for himself. Although Senator Humphrey himself doesn’t indulge in such speculation, a number of his supporters have been known to use the “What-if” effect to play-up Humphrey’s comparatively clean reputation. He could enter the 1976 contest as the “Mr. Clean” candidate (i.e. the one who should have been elected in 1968 – and thus the country would have avoided the mess of the Nixon-Agnew period). His support among the establishment liberals and with organized labor remains strong, and he could become a political force in the 1976 campaign.
The defeat of George McGovern in his 1974 Senate re-election bid could free him up to be a full-time candidate; although his independent candidacy in 1972 soured many Democrats on him (some feel if he hadn’t divided the Democratic left vote Governor McKeithen might have won outright in the Electoral College); his would be an uphill struggle for the 1976 nomination. Congressman Ron Dellums has entered as the candidate of the left, and for the moment is the sole candidate from that wing of the Democratic Party. Dellums will not win the nomination, but the level of support he generates may determine his relative strength within the Party, particularly if they are faced with a divided convention in 1976, as they were in 1972. Potentially, Dellums – unless he is challenged by another left of center figure – could become a reign maker within the Democratic Party, in which case we could expect him to pull it to the left: how far will depend on who the nominee is. One person who may give Dellums a challenge is former Senator Eugene McCarthy, who has a sentimental place in the hearts of many who supported his anti-war campaign in 1968.
I mentioned Governor George Wallace of Alabama above as a threat to the conservatives in the party, but Wallace does not easily fit into any category. As a populist his appeal is broader, and crosses over into the Republican and Independent electorate as well. One of his greatest strengths in 1968, and prior to his shooting in 1972, was his ability to rouse blue-collar voters and independents. It remains unclear what effect his candidacy will have in 1976, but we can expect him to play on themes related to the economy and crime to rouse populist anger as an engine for his campaign. Like Dellums, he could become a reign maker, only he would try to pull the party toward the right.
It is too early to speculate what effect a tug of war between a Dellums faction and a Wallace faction might have on the nomination or party unity. But if both are in it to the end and have any sizable following at the National Convention, it will be just as divisive as the 1972 split (perhaps more so) which eventually drove McGovern and his key supporters out of the Party.
That was a successful strategy for Governor McKeithen in 1972; by driving the hard left out of the Democratic Party for the 1972 Presidential election, Governor McKeithen could pounce on President Nixon from the right on a number of economic and social issues, which in turn threatened the Republican base vote in that election. President Nixon in turn could not charge McKeithen with being a radical; in part because they shared many of the same more conservative values, and McGovern’s presence on the ballot placed the radical vote elsewhere. It is doubtful that strategy would be as successful a second time around.
Wallace may bolt the Party as he did in 1968, but Dellums is unlikely to: he has specifically written that McGovern’s decision to run as an independent in 1972 was a mistake.
Whomever the Democrats nominate will have to be a candidate who can build some consensus among these different strains in that party, uniting it sufficiently to win an election. Contrary to popular opinion, Governor McKeithen did not achieve this in 1972; he drove out the hard left and then papered over the differences between himself and the liberals. That strategy may have helped him against Nixon, but the end result was that neither was elected. Soundings in the Democratic Party indicate that all but a few Southern Democrats do not want another McKeithen as their standard bearer in 1976. The question of a consensus candidate remains problematic until the actual field becomes clear.
The Republican Nomination:
The Nixon-Agnew experience has left many Republicans demoralized and frustrated. The results of the 1974 mid-term elections have only reinforced that. Republican Party donors sent a clear message to the Party leadership through their tight-fisted response to Republican fund raising efforts last year: that message was “get it together and present a fresh face”.
Former Senator Bob Dole was a leading candidate of the Republican regulars, but his re-election defeat in 1974 makes it very unlikely that he will be a serious challenger for the 1976 nomination. He will either have to win election to another prominent office, or serve in the Cabinet of a future Republican President, in order re-gain is viability as a Presidential candidate.
1974 did provide a curious note of support for the conservative wing of the Republican Party. Governor Barry Goldwater in California and Representative Donald Dwight in Massachusetts defeated Democratic opponents by appealing to conservative Republicans and socially conservative independents and Democratic cross-overs. (I recognize Goldwater Jr.’s victory is a matter of dispute, but what is not in dispute is that he did at least match the Democrats in votes.) Neither Goldwater Jr. nor Rep. Dwight will be a nominee for President in 1976. (Dwight is not a genuine conservative; his voting record is far more moderate). But both have begun to pave a path for Governor Reagan, who almost certainly will be.
The early entry of Rep. Philip Crane (R-IL) into the contest is telling: Crane is a well-known conservative, but an unlikely nominee. He is a stalking horse testing the waters for Reagan, who will likely wait until later this year before announcing his intentions.
As you are aware I worked with Governor Reagan during his first term, and I was involved with his 1966 Gubernatorial campaign, and as such I can speak about him from first-hand experience. He is a formidable candidate and despite his conservative credentials, he has enormous cross-over appeal among independents and center-right Democrats. He won two elections in California on this strength, and his assistance to Barry Goldwater Jr. was invaluable in getting Goldwater elected to succeed him.
Governor Reagan easily combines the populist appeal of Wallace with an easier, more folksy nature that is attractive to middle of the road voters (where Wallace’s combativeness alienates as many as he attracts). Within the Republican Party itself, especially on the conservative wing, he is the ideological heir of Barry Goldwater Sr., and puts a far kinder face on conservatism than the elder Goldwater did in 1964. Polling already shows that Governor Reagan has the support of around forty-percent of registered Republicans, and this makes him, right now, the most popular potential nominee in either party.
It is too early to tell who else might enter the Republican contest, but likely contenders of the center include Senators Howard Baker and Charles Percy. Neither is a particularly charismatic figure, both are well liked, they are also difficult to distinguish from one another from a policy basis.
Secretary of State George Bush has been mentioned as a potential candidate, provided he resigns as Secretary of State. I would expect him to blend in somewhere with Baker and Percy; he is not a Goldwater-Reagan conservative and he is not distinguishable from the pack by any special group of supporters.
Conventional opinion among conservatives is that Baker, Percy (and perhaps Bush) will finish each other off vying for the moderates, while Reagan will leverage his forty-percent into a steady rise to the nomination. Unlike 1964, the thinking among Reagan’s supporters goes, the country is ready for a change to the right in 1976, especially if it will mean a return to prosperity and national strength (meaning tough in crime). Reagan will capitalize on this from his California experience together with a plan to curb regulation and free-up capital through some sort of tax reduction and other supply side jiggery-pokery.
I would like to point out something Reagan’s supporters are not considering (or wish to obscure). Reagan’s support remains constantly at around forty percent (which is presented as a positive). Given that it does not rise much, that translates into sixty percent of Republican voters who are actually looking for a candidate other than Reagan. It remains to be seen if someone can enter the race and capture that dynamic and leverage it the nomination.
You may be aware that Spiro Agnew has jumped into the race. Since he is Constitutionally barred from actually serving as President, I would rate this as a publicity stunt at best. But if one were to consider him a serious candidate, then he would be competing for the same supporters as Reagan, and I do not regard such a contest as having even the potential of producing an Agnew victory.
Final Notes:
If you choose to consider the above, please consider that you bring with you the incumbency, which can be a potent force. Your popularity ratings remain at around or just below fifty-percent (based on strength among Republican and independent voters) and you are still seen as the President who saved the country from the Nixon-Agnew mess, no matter what has happened since.
Opinion research has consistently returned this point: James Gavin is honest, a patriot, and a good leader. We have persuasive evidence that voters are beginning to consider you the most trustworthy President since Kennedy, and you are currently better regarded than Johnson, Nixon or Agnew. I point this out because it puts you in a strong position to bargain for the support of whichever party you may wish to represent, provided you should choose the seek a nomination for 1976.
I await your thoughts on this.
CW.
February 25, 1975
TO: The President
FR: Caspar Weinberger
RE: Election 1976
EYES ONLY
Whether or not you actually decide to run for another term in 1976, it is imperative that we give the impression that you are considering it, or at least leave it up in the air. If you make a definitive statement anytime before January 1976 that you will not be seeking another term, then you will become a lame-duck, which will affect your ability to carry forward any program for the remainder of your current term.
We have discussed the options of having you remain a non-partisan figure and above the political fray for the remainder of your term, and while this might afford you an honest broker standing for the next year, it will also dilute your political capital. As it is leading figures in both parties will be seeking to attach their individual stamps to whatever legislative initiatives will serve their base as they position themselves for either the Democratic or Republican nomination. There will be an inevitable pull to differentiate themselves from you as part of an overall campaign strategy aimed at being your successor. By virtue of this, quite apart from anything you do or say, the image of you as the “yesterday man” will take hold very quickly if you are not in the contest. This could risk any working political alliances, particularly if we need to encourage Congressional leaders and others to take a political risk in order to support your program: few will risk their careers for a President who has no political stake in the outcome, and thus cannot help them out when they need it. A viable candidacy, or an impression of one on your part, will give them some political cover, and will create a rally-around-the-leader effect if managed properly.
With this in mind I have prepared some notes for your consideration on the question of a party nomination and re-election. There are essentially three options: run as an Independent, or seek the nomination of either the Democratic Party or the Republican Party.
Independent:
I would strongly advise against an Independent campaign. Apart from Washington there has never been a non-party President, and some historians argue that Washington was in effect a Federalist, though he never openly acknowledged himself as one. John Tyler, who had repudiated his former association with the Democratic Party to join the Whigs, later repudiated the Whigs. He sought an independent re-election in 1844 and failed miserably because he had enemies in both parties and no grass roots organization of his own.
The case of Abraham Lincoln as a “third party” candidate is a false assumption. The second party of his time (the Whigs) were in a death spiral by 1860, so his Republican “third party” was in fact the true second party to the Democrats in in the North, where the election was decided. Presently, neither the the Democratic or Republican Parties are in decline (despite the recent set-backs of the latter, the GOP is nowhere near the kind of decline the Whigs experienced in the 1850’s).
Theodore Roosevelt’s 1912 third party candidacy proved only strong enough to deny Taft re-election, and elected Woodrow Wilson. There continues to be debate about what effect George Wallace had on the outcome of the 1968 race. (Note: Governor Wallace shows every indication that he will enter the 1976 Democratic primaries; more below).
More significantly, the outcome of the 1972 Presidential election has generally left a bad taste in people’s mouths. The tide against Republican Senate incumbents seen in the 1974 mid-term elections is at least in part attributable to this. With the economy in serious peril, with the problems in the Middle East and Vietnam unresolved, and with a growing crime problem, the voters will not look kindly on any candidate who threatens to present a repeat of the 1972 experience in 1976. Running as an independent who could cause a three-way split in the Electoral College will be political suicide, and if that point isn’t readily apparent then we can expect the Democratic and Republican nominees to make an issue of it.
Democratic Nomination:
The Democratic field is very divided, as is the party itself, largely between the more conservative elements (who were a big component of Governor McKeithen’s 1972 campaign), the establishment liberals and the “new youth liberals,” or “McGovernites” as some have labelled them. The latter are younger Democrats, often College age or just out of college, and those drawn into politics by the anti-war and anti-poverty movements.
Senator Henry Jackson appears to be a leading candidate of the conservatives, but this may not go unchallenged. Governor Wallace will most certainly challenge Jackson for the support of this group, and Wallace has been very effective in mobilizing their support in the past. Another candidate may appear – we must keep in mind that Governor McKeithen’s campaign was only in its infant stages at this point in 1971.
Senator Birch Bayh, Senator Edward (Ted) Kennedy and Senator Hubert Humphrey appear to be the leading contenders of the establishment liberal group. In the past five years Senator Kennedy has overcome at least some of the taint attached to his name by the 1969 Chappaquiddick scandal, and there seems to be a genuine groundswell of support (mixed with nostalgia) for the youngest Kennedy brother. Whether this will translate into a nomination campaign is yet to be determined.
Senator Bayh will leverage his position as the 1972 Vice Presidential candidate into a position of nominee-presumptive; he brought a good deal of liberal and labor support to the McKeithen-Bayh ticket in 1972, and there is no reason to think that he hasn’t been cultivating that support since 1972. He will enhance his reputation further by chairing a joint Congressional panel looking into a fix to the Constitution so that there are no future repeats of the 1972 experience. We know that he will be running, the only question is when he will formally announce.
Senator and former Vice President Hubert Humphrey remains something of a wild card. He has made much of his near win in 1968, and the subsequent revelations of the wrong-doing in the Nixon White House, to establish a high moral ground for himself. Although Senator Humphrey himself doesn’t indulge in such speculation, a number of his supporters have been known to use the “What-if” effect to play-up Humphrey’s comparatively clean reputation. He could enter the 1976 contest as the “Mr. Clean” candidate (i.e. the one who should have been elected in 1968 – and thus the country would have avoided the mess of the Nixon-Agnew period). His support among the establishment liberals and with organized labor remains strong, and he could become a political force in the 1976 campaign.
The defeat of George McGovern in his 1974 Senate re-election bid could free him up to be a full-time candidate; although his independent candidacy in 1972 soured many Democrats on him (some feel if he hadn’t divided the Democratic left vote Governor McKeithen might have won outright in the Electoral College); his would be an uphill struggle for the 1976 nomination. Congressman Ron Dellums has entered as the candidate of the left, and for the moment is the sole candidate from that wing of the Democratic Party. Dellums will not win the nomination, but the level of support he generates may determine his relative strength within the Party, particularly if they are faced with a divided convention in 1976, as they were in 1972. Potentially, Dellums – unless he is challenged by another left of center figure – could become a reign maker within the Democratic Party, in which case we could expect him to pull it to the left: how far will depend on who the nominee is. One person who may give Dellums a challenge is former Senator Eugene McCarthy, who has a sentimental place in the hearts of many who supported his anti-war campaign in 1968.
I mentioned Governor George Wallace of Alabama above as a threat to the conservatives in the party, but Wallace does not easily fit into any category. As a populist his appeal is broader, and crosses over into the Republican and Independent electorate as well. One of his greatest strengths in 1968, and prior to his shooting in 1972, was his ability to rouse blue-collar voters and independents. It remains unclear what effect his candidacy will have in 1976, but we can expect him to play on themes related to the economy and crime to rouse populist anger as an engine for his campaign. Like Dellums, he could become a reign maker, only he would try to pull the party toward the right.
It is too early to speculate what effect a tug of war between a Dellums faction and a Wallace faction might have on the nomination or party unity. But if both are in it to the end and have any sizable following at the National Convention, it will be just as divisive as the 1972 split (perhaps more so) which eventually drove McGovern and his key supporters out of the Party.
That was a successful strategy for Governor McKeithen in 1972; by driving the hard left out of the Democratic Party for the 1972 Presidential election, Governor McKeithen could pounce on President Nixon from the right on a number of economic and social issues, which in turn threatened the Republican base vote in that election. President Nixon in turn could not charge McKeithen with being a radical; in part because they shared many of the same more conservative values, and McGovern’s presence on the ballot placed the radical vote elsewhere. It is doubtful that strategy would be as successful a second time around.
Wallace may bolt the Party as he did in 1968, but Dellums is unlikely to: he has specifically written that McGovern’s decision to run as an independent in 1972 was a mistake.
Whomever the Democrats nominate will have to be a candidate who can build some consensus among these different strains in that party, uniting it sufficiently to win an election. Contrary to popular opinion, Governor McKeithen did not achieve this in 1972; he drove out the hard left and then papered over the differences between himself and the liberals. That strategy may have helped him against Nixon, but the end result was that neither was elected. Soundings in the Democratic Party indicate that all but a few Southern Democrats do not want another McKeithen as their standard bearer in 1976. The question of a consensus candidate remains problematic until the actual field becomes clear.
The Republican Nomination:
The Nixon-Agnew experience has left many Republicans demoralized and frustrated. The results of the 1974 mid-term elections have only reinforced that. Republican Party donors sent a clear message to the Party leadership through their tight-fisted response to Republican fund raising efforts last year: that message was “get it together and present a fresh face”.
Former Senator Bob Dole was a leading candidate of the Republican regulars, but his re-election defeat in 1974 makes it very unlikely that he will be a serious challenger for the 1976 nomination. He will either have to win election to another prominent office, or serve in the Cabinet of a future Republican President, in order re-gain is viability as a Presidential candidate.
1974 did provide a curious note of support for the conservative wing of the Republican Party. Governor Barry Goldwater in California and Representative Donald Dwight in Massachusetts defeated Democratic opponents by appealing to conservative Republicans and socially conservative independents and Democratic cross-overs. (I recognize Goldwater Jr.’s victory is a matter of dispute, but what is not in dispute is that he did at least match the Democrats in votes.) Neither Goldwater Jr. nor Rep. Dwight will be a nominee for President in 1976. (Dwight is not a genuine conservative; his voting record is far more moderate). But both have begun to pave a path for Governor Reagan, who almost certainly will be.
The early entry of Rep. Philip Crane (R-IL) into the contest is telling: Crane is a well-known conservative, but an unlikely nominee. He is a stalking horse testing the waters for Reagan, who will likely wait until later this year before announcing his intentions.
As you are aware I worked with Governor Reagan during his first term, and I was involved with his 1966 Gubernatorial campaign, and as such I can speak about him from first-hand experience. He is a formidable candidate and despite his conservative credentials, he has enormous cross-over appeal among independents and center-right Democrats. He won two elections in California on this strength, and his assistance to Barry Goldwater Jr. was invaluable in getting Goldwater elected to succeed him.
Governor Reagan easily combines the populist appeal of Wallace with an easier, more folksy nature that is attractive to middle of the road voters (where Wallace’s combativeness alienates as many as he attracts). Within the Republican Party itself, especially on the conservative wing, he is the ideological heir of Barry Goldwater Sr., and puts a far kinder face on conservatism than the elder Goldwater did in 1964. Polling already shows that Governor Reagan has the support of around forty-percent of registered Republicans, and this makes him, right now, the most popular potential nominee in either party.
It is too early to tell who else might enter the Republican contest, but likely contenders of the center include Senators Howard Baker and Charles Percy. Neither is a particularly charismatic figure, both are well liked, they are also difficult to distinguish from one another from a policy basis.
Secretary of State George Bush has been mentioned as a potential candidate, provided he resigns as Secretary of State. I would expect him to blend in somewhere with Baker and Percy; he is not a Goldwater-Reagan conservative and he is not distinguishable from the pack by any special group of supporters.
Conventional opinion among conservatives is that Baker, Percy (and perhaps Bush) will finish each other off vying for the moderates, while Reagan will leverage his forty-percent into a steady rise to the nomination. Unlike 1964, the thinking among Reagan’s supporters goes, the country is ready for a change to the right in 1976, especially if it will mean a return to prosperity and national strength (meaning tough in crime). Reagan will capitalize on this from his California experience together with a plan to curb regulation and free-up capital through some sort of tax reduction and other supply side jiggery-pokery.
I would like to point out something Reagan’s supporters are not considering (or wish to obscure). Reagan’s support remains constantly at around forty percent (which is presented as a positive). Given that it does not rise much, that translates into sixty percent of Republican voters who are actually looking for a candidate other than Reagan. It remains to be seen if someone can enter the race and capture that dynamic and leverage it the nomination.
You may be aware that Spiro Agnew has jumped into the race. Since he is Constitutionally barred from actually serving as President, I would rate this as a publicity stunt at best. But if one were to consider him a serious candidate, then he would be competing for the same supporters as Reagan, and I do not regard such a contest as having even the potential of producing an Agnew victory.
Final Notes:
If you choose to consider the above, please consider that you bring with you the incumbency, which can be a potent force. Your popularity ratings remain at around or just below fifty-percent (based on strength among Republican and independent voters) and you are still seen as the President who saved the country from the Nixon-Agnew mess, no matter what has happened since.
Opinion research has consistently returned this point: James Gavin is honest, a patriot, and a good leader. We have persuasive evidence that voters are beginning to consider you the most trustworthy President since Kennedy, and you are currently better regarded than Johnson, Nixon or Agnew. I point this out because it puts you in a strong position to bargain for the support of whichever party you may wish to represent, provided you should choose the seek a nomination for 1976.
I await your thoughts on this.
CW.
As noted by the sources I used to write the background, the Shah created many of his own problems by the way he ruled his country. Unlike the Saudis, who allied with the clerical establishment and made them part of the power structure, the Shah alienated the Iranian clerics. He compounded this with a modernization program which alienated other important sectors of society.
He achieved all this on his own, long before Jan. 20, 1977. Carter gets the blame for the fall of the Shah only because he was President when it happened. But every President of both parties beginning with FDR contributed to it, as did Anglo-Iranian Oil and a host of other "contributors."
In the end Shah was a weak ruler, given to paranoia and authoritarian tendencies who became blind to what effects the changes he was instituting were having on his society (largely because he listened to sycophants). He was his own undoing.
The Soviets would paint this as a failure of the western system and characterize it as the inevitable outcome of imperialist clashes. The question from Moscow's point of view would be which side to support, from an advantage point? It presents an opportunity for Moscow to make-up with its old Turkish rival on the grounds of a "humanitarian policy" by supporting the Turkish case in the international community, and through this to try and create a split between Turkey and NATO over the question.
From that point of view Moscow would definitely tell Zhivkov to not become a part of the problem by treating his Turkish minority with the utmost "understanding."
But now the Phalange and the Maronites and the secular Palestinians have a common enemy. The PJF is going to go after the Phalange and the Christian population as symbolic retaliation for what is happening in Cyprus and Syria, even as they fight their civil war with the PLO and the other secular leadership of the Palestinian movement.
Much as they may dislike each other, Gemayel and Arafat not now find that they have more in common to fight together for (common survival), and nothing to gain in fighting each other, At the same time the Druze are going to face a similar stark choice as their community becomes a target of the purist influence among the Islamists.
And if the Phalange and the Druze find a powerful ally in Israel, how will that affect Arafat, who will need a powerful ally as well? What matters more, the disintegration of his Palestinian movement at the hands of religious extremists, or the power in numbers to defeat them, even if it comes with the Zionist enemy? For him it could well be the choice between dealing with the devil or witness the destruction of all he has dedicated his life to.
ITTL the Lebanese Civil War is being re-defined along very different battle lines than OTL.
Oh boy!
This is a fairly straightforward solution, and I can see the Congress going for it. It eliminates the "unit rule", which might be a problem with the state legislatures...on the other hand, nobody wants a repeat of '72, and while small states have some discernible (if flawed, IMO) reasons to keep the electoral college, ("It makes the candidates come out to Bussletug, Nevada, instead of spending all their time in the cities!"), the unit rule didn't seem to actually benefit any of the states in the two cases it actually came into play, so I think they'll be willing to ditch it.
Some people will like this plan, as it removes any independent politicking and/or decision making past the actual election -- everything relies on the votes cast in November. Others, of course, will hate it for the same reason.
The other objection to this plan (which has come up OTL as a proposal for amending the electoral college) is that congressional districts, frankly, tend to be pretty badly gerrymandered, and tying presidential elections to them might make that tendency worse. I'd expect the Dixiecrats to make this argument the loudest. (What they'll be dog-whistling, of course, is that many of these "gerrymandered" districts are the black-majority districts foisted on them by the VRA..)
State legislators or state legislatures? The former would be very problematic, since state legislatures vary in size to no particular rhyme or reason -- the proposal as written would give New Hampshire 424 votes, nearly twice as many as any other state, and frankly those guys are insufferable enough as it is.
On the other hand, giving each state legislature a collective vote could be a winner -- it lets the Congress wash their hands of the mess, which will be attractive to many, keeps the small states as powerful as the large ones, which should make that aspect of ratification easy, and would be unlikely to produce the same sort of mass deadlock that the unit rule provoked in '72. You'd probably need to give unicameral houses two votes, to keep Nebraska even with the other states, but otherwise this might be promising.
Two issues with this plan:
1) More elections cost more money -- ballots need to be printed, poll workers need to be paid, etc. Given the economy (and thus the parlous state of state budgets), expect some grumbling about this.
2) What if the runoff produces a 269-269 tie? Then what? I suppose you could fix this by adding an extra EV somewhere, insuring the number is always odd, but barring additional constitutional amendments that would involve giving somebody an extra House seat, and that's a whole 'nother can of worms. Alternately, I suppose you could stiff DC and knock them down to 2 (which would also require amendment), but Democrats likely wouldn't go for that either.
Sensible, democratic, and doomed.
Basically, I think the Harvard plan is most likely, followed closely by the so-crazy-it's-brilliant Case Western plan. The Neustadt plan is third, unless everybody really wants to wash their hands of the whole mess. The ABA plan is unlikely. The Louisiana plan, barring a massive groundswell of public support, is impossible given who has to ratify it. (But a boy can dream.)
Good post!
This is a fairly straightforward solution, and I can see the Congress going for it. It eliminates the "unit rule", which might be a problem with the state legislatures...on the other hand, nobody wants a repeat of '72, and while small states have some discernible (if flawed, IMO) reasons to keep the electoral college, ("It makes the candidates come out to Bussletug, Nevada, instead of spending all their time in the cities!"), the unit rule didn't seem to actually benefit any of the states in the two cases it actually came into play, so I think they'll be willing to ditch it.
Some people will like this plan, as it removes any independent politicking and/or decision making past the actual election -- everything relies on the votes cast in November. Others, of course, will hate it for the same reason.
The other objection to this plan (which has come up OTL as a proposal for amending the electoral college) is that congressional districts, frankly, tend to be pretty badly gerrymandered, and tying presidential elections to them might make that tendency worse. I'd expect the Dixiecrats to make this argument the loudest. (What they'll be dog-whistling, of course, is that many of these "gerrymandered" districts are the black-majority districts foisted on them by the VRA..)
State legislators or state legislatures? The former would be very problematic, since state legislatures vary in size to no particular rhyme or reason -- the proposal as written would give New Hampshire 424 votes, nearly twice as many as any other state, and frankly those guys are insufferable enough as it is.
On the other hand, giving each state legislature a collective vote could be a winner -- it lets the Congress wash their hands of the mess, which will be attractive to many, keeps the small states as powerful as the large ones, which should make that aspect of ratification easy, and would be unlikely to produce the same sort of mass deadlock that the unit rule provoked in '72. You'd probably need to give unicameral houses two votes, to keep Nebraska even with the other states, but otherwise this might be promising.
Two issues with this plan:
1) More elections cost more money -- ballots need to be printed, poll workers need to be paid, etc. Given the economy (and thus the parlous state of state budgets), expect some grumbling about this.
2) What if the runoff produces a 269-269 tie? Then what? I suppose you could fix this by adding an extra EV somewhere, insuring the number is always odd, but barring additional constitutional amendments that would involve giving somebody an extra House seat, and that's a whole 'nother can of worms. Alternately, I suppose you could stiff DC and knock them down to 2 (which would also require amendment), but Democrats likely wouldn't go for that either.
Sensible, democratic, and doomed.
Basically, I think the Harvard plan is most likely, followed closely by the so-crazy-it's-brilliant Case Western plan. The Neustadt plan is third, unless everybody really wants to wash their hands of the whole mess. The ABA plan is unlikely. The Louisiana plan, barring a massive groundswell of public support, is impossible given who has to ratify it. (But a boy can dream.)
Good post!
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