Oh, goodness, so soon! Will it be a utopic timeline as some of us have suggested? (definitely not asking so I can prepare another bingo card lol)
Eurocommunism was mentioned to have succeeded in Italy
Has this not happened yet, or am I an idiot and just not seeing it?
Yeah I haven’t seen anything about it since the announcement
Chaotic Evil Kennedys are the best Kennedys! Loving this so far37. Robert F. Kennedy (D-MA)Bobby Kennedy is often compared to his brother, but a more accurate understanding of the man would come from his father. From an early age, his father seemed to believe that he was a runt and disregarded him as an aberration, an unserious generous boy among hardened leaders of tomorrow. Determined to make his mark on his father and the world, in his youth Robert wrapped the purpose and faith of his mother in the familiar cutthroat personality and a serious demeanor, the man his brother would call “Black Robert.” And though history often speaks of the gentle soul, the man Bobby hid from his father is not the man who would be president. Through the scandal and the fall from grace, Black Robert was president more than the man the court historians of Camelot swear Bobby truly was.
January 20, 1969 - January 20, 1977
“People say I am ruthless. I am not ruthless. And if I find the man who is calling me ruthless, I shall destroy him.”
Bobby nearly began by joining his older brothers. On the night of the California primary - crucial to his chances - a Palestinian man disgruntled by Kennedy's support for Israel shot him, wounding him severely but ultimately only doing just that. From there and the sympathy vote that delivered him the remaining primaries plus the erstwhile backing of Richard Daley, Kennedy walked into the convention all but assured a bare majority. Daley supported him, the south couldn’t stomach Hubert Humphrey no matter how much Lyndon Johnson pushed his personal vendetta, and Kennedy’s seemingly supernatural ability to calm all but the most radical student protesters outside more than anything convinced wary conservative Democrats to back him. But even with the segregationist splitters, a New Nixon devoted to crushing the protests in the streets instead of engaging with them, and Lyndon Johnson’s desire to seemingly undermine his own party at every chance, it all seemed immaterial. Renewed bombing campaigns and American Independents didn’t matter. To a scarred country weary of a decade of violence and confusion, a Kennedy was a flight to the familiar.
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The first issue left behind for Kennedy was, as expected, Vietnam. Kennedy had not called for immediate withdrawal, but he wished for a peace settlement and anti-corruption reforms within South Vietnam to ensure that the ARVN could stand on its own two feet without American troops. However, those last points ensured that President Thieu would be the main roadblock, and Thieu’s intransigence would put an immediate damper on all possible agreements with the North. It would ultimately take a bundle of sticks and hardly a carrot extended by Averell Harriman and Ted Sorensen went to Paris, but by January 1970 the accords had been finalized and that was that - the Vietnam War had, if not ended, at least reached a ceasefire. With all but the last advisory American troops leaving in the months following the signing, the public felt that the entire disgraceful mess was finally behind them.
The other issue explicitly left behind by Johnson was that of the Supreme Court. His attempted maneuver to get Abe Fortas, his eyes and ears on the bench, appointed Chief Justice had fallen flat, leaving the seat vacant. Fortas himself, in the meantime, would resign with pressure from the administration to go quietly over his financial misgivings. This left two seats open, two that Kennedy intended to fill. After a brief screening process, Kennedy would nominate former Associate Justice Arthur Goldberg for the Chief Justice’s seat and Representative Edith Green for Fortas’ vacancy. With the former sailing through as most present Senators had voted for Goldberg for the bench prior and the latter confirmed over modest challenges by conservatives due to her liberalism and, privately, her being a woman, barely a few months had passed and Kennedy had already seemingly cemented a more liberal court.
Then came real legislation. A gun bill cursed by conservatives for years to come barring purchases from those with criminal records or mental illnesses as well as severely restricting the sale of all handguns passed since, after all, a Kennedy seems about the most natural opponent of civilian ownership of firearms. The death penalty was abolished on the federal level, enraging law and order conservatives. The Department of Ecology was established and the Clean Air & Water Act passed. Tax loopholes were closed, agricultural packages provided, and far-reaching educational reforms came through. Despite a brief counter-offensive, the War on Poverty was back on, at least for a time. But this was as far as Kennedy could truly get. His next key piece of legislation - a healthcare reform bill aimed at universal coverage - fell flat as Republicans howled and southern Democrats pushed harder and harder against it. At every turn concessions were demanded, and it seemed that there was no sign of stopping. Eventually, the Kennedycare bill collapsed under its own weight, something the endlessly ambitious Kennedy would never forget.
After such humiliation at their hands, Kennedy saw the midterms as the perfect time to do what FDR never could and show the solid south who controls the Democratic Party. Backing challenges against multiple state machines, the White House frankly didn’t realize the can of worms it had opened. Some primaries were a success - Al Brewer successfully fended off the return of George Wallace, as did noted Texas liberal Ralph Yarborough with Lloyd Bentsen. However, it turns out that, when denied, conservative Democrats simply gave Republicans a second look and reactionary Democrats turned to the AIP in a pinch. Wallace would return as an American Independent and haul several Alabama ex-Democrats along with him, Yarborough would only succeed in securing a Senate seat for the Bush clan, and Democrats saw their worst night in decades as finally, the Republican Party presented itself as a viable option south of the Mason-Dixon. Even though they retained both houses of Congress, margins thinned in both chambers as the Democrats fought a war on two fronts in the South.
Vietnam was over, or at least that was the mantra. The war had passed and now was a time for healing. The war had left many wounds, some still unnoticed. My Lai was perhaps the deepest remaining. The massacre had occurred in 1968 but had only been reported on as any other battle would. Then, as the outcry grew within the military, it routinely ended up swept under the rug. A covertly blown whistle in 1969 had only seen a partial investigation whose findings countered reality, and then in late 1970 a Vietnam veteran named Michael Bernhardt came forward to members of Congress and the press with admission of what really happened. He had witnessed American soldiers massacring civilians firsthand at My Lai on orders from Lt. William Calley. Upon reaching the press, Calley was court martialed and the Kennedy administration launched an immediate federal investigation into the matter. The My Lai investigation found that not only did Calley order the massacre of civilians, but more senior leadership - most notably Maj. Colin Powell, the officer tasked with investigating reports of an incident at My Lai - had been complicit in covering up the events. For their part, the Kennedy administration and Archibald Cox’s Department of Justice worked quickly to bring justice, with Kennedy himself publicly lamenting the lives lost due to such callous cruelty.
The 1972 race was always going to at least start with a fight for the soul of the GOP. The immediate frontrunner was the Sheriff of Sacramento himself, Ronald Reagan. Despite his extremism, Reagan’s sheer charisma and bulk of personality combined with a ruthless California organization gave him an early lead in funding and grassroots support. But then Helter Skelter came for Ronald Reagan as revenge for prosecution of the rest of the Manson family, and soon enough the best hope of the New Right was dead and buried. With an open field, eventually the nomination saw that fight for the party’s soul deferred with an acceptable compromise: one Daniel J. Evans, Governor of Washington. Evans was a quiet, competent governor with a small-c conservative style and Rockefellerian instincts, and his keynote address had won accolades four years prior. With a resurgent Wallace entering the race once again, this time seemingly trying to rebrand himself as an avatar of populist white southerners and the New Right together, Evans and his “progressive conservatism” seemed the perfect counter. Up through September, it seemed that it was even likely that he would be the one to finally defeat a Kennedy, however narrowly the polls indicated. But one of Evans’ senior campaign aides would lead to ruin. That October, Theodore Bundy was caught with a woman’s severed head in his car after a campaign stop in Salt Lake City and arrested. From there, it came out that Bundy had killed dozens of women, that he was reporting directly to Evans, that Bundy had tailed Democratic events posing as a college student, and that Bundy had even claimed victims from this dirty work that Evans seemingly had okayed. This revelation was staggering on its own, but then a recording of Daniel Evans acknowledging that his aide “always seemed like there was something wrong” and that it didn’t matter because “he has a killer instinct.” The fallout was immediate and devastating.
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Kennedy had barely lifted his hand from the Bible that second time before crisis struck again. On Yom Kippur 1973, an Arab coalition launched a surprise invasion of Israel, attempting to retake the Sinai Peninsula and Golan Heights. Despite massive US military aid, the Syrians had already crossed the Jordan and it was clear the Israelis were coming close to a loss. So Prime Minister Dayan did the unthinkable. He authorized an open nuclear test, confirming to the world with a mushroom cloud that the state of Israel not only had nuclear weapons but was willing to use them if necessary. Though the Soviets stepped in with the Arabs and made very clear what further WWIII-mongering would get the Israelis if they didn’t start negotiating right this instant and the Americans raised the DEFCON alert level despite their alignment towards Israel, the die was cast nonetheless. From Cairo to Cape Town, serious talk of breaching the final sovereignty had begun.
The Sinai wouldn’t be home to the only fallout of Dayan’s folly, though. For backing Israel, not even wholly withdrawing after the bomb was dropped, the Americans would have to suffer. OPEC immediately began a crippling embargo against all nations perceived as backing Israel. Though most western states had qualified or outright withdrawn their support in the wake of the nuclear test, the United States and a smattering of others had not. The embargo’s effects were immediate. The stock market tumbled, gas prices surged, and a recession was beyond imminent - it was already here. For his part, Kennedy acted decisively. Instituting price controls and rationing in the short term, the next move was to call a joint session of Congress. Kennedy’s requests were far-reaching: he requested the authorization of a federal Department of Energy to coordinate efforts, the development of new nuclear power plants and other alternative sources to reduce our need for oil while expanding our supply, and the passage of a far-reaching bill to push towards full employment via temporary government employment to blunt the impacts of the recession. However, these bills would be the last meaningful legislation passed by Kennedy.
Other than international crisis and outright recession, there was something else wrong. At least, a pair of Washington Post reporters felt that things didn’t quite add up. The White House seemingly knew every question they were going to ask, every point every opposition group had planned, and even got ahead of every scandal. Plus, the Bundy case indicated that he was as careful as one could be murdering scores of women, so how did the police know to catch him in rural Utah? And where did the Kennedy campaign get the recording of Evans from? So they dug into Salt Lake City and found that there had been a tip on Bundy before the lead dried up. Or it would have had an anonymous source not approached them - a source revealed in death to be future FBI Director Mark Felt - with a truly dizzying story. In Felt’s words, Kennedy had built something of a symbiotic relationship with J. Edgar Hoover dating back to Kennedy’s tenure as Attorney General. Relentless ambition could not handle utter failure and likely defeat, so sometime after his first midterms Kennedy began to lean on the man he once tasked with wiretapping Martin Luther King. At first it was small help, but in time Hoover’s wiretaps went beyond civil rights leaders to protesters, journalists, high-profile opposing donors, think-tanks, and practically everyone short of actual members of Congress. Most salacious of all, due to a plant within the Evans campaign, the recording of Evans talking about Theodore Bundy was not provided to the press via anonymous leak but actually obtained from an FBI wiretap on the Evans campaign office.
When the story broke, it shook Washington to its core. The public revelation that Kennedy had been wiretapping his political opponents for leverage infuriated virtually everyone. The scandal dominated the political landscape, especially the allegations that Theodore Bundy was allowed to kill to save Kennedy’s political career. Though Kennedy allies were quick to point out the shakiness of the anonymous source and that the FBI stated that it had tapped the Kennedy and Wallace campaigns as well, this defense may as well have been using duct tape to fix the Titanic. That November, for the first time in twenty years, the Democrats lost both houses of Congress on a wave of economic dissatisfaction and fury at Kennedy himself. Speaker Ford - instated after intense negotiations yielded a GOP-AIP coalition not dissimilar to the one John Connally had negotiated in Texas - immediately pulled together a House committee investigating the scandal, determined to solve these allegations of truly incomprehensible abuses of power. A host of victims spoke before the House Warrantless Wiretapping Investigation Committee. The agency plant, Howard Hunt, spoke before the committee describing the nature of his work within the Evans campaign and his discoveries about Bundy. It seemed they had all but proven that Kennedy himself had ordered the blatant surveillance of his political enemies, and only one man had hard proof of where the orders came from: J. Edgar Hoover. However, Hoover was rendered comatose by a severe heart attack mere weeks before the committee intended to subpoena him, and his records were shredded the second he entered the hospital. Speaker Ford still attempted impeachment, getting it through the house with a sizable tripartisan vote, but the damage to the case was done as Kennedy allies continued to argue that the “missing link” simply did not exist and that this was the work of a rogue FBI. By three votes, Robert F. Kennedy survived his trial in the Senate - a narrower margin than anyone could have expected, but a survival nonetheless.
Now sharing a dubious honor with Andrew Johnson, Robert F. Kennedy had forever become the Lesser Kennedy. He had eighteen months remaining on his term, but Congress would never work with him now that his rule by fear had ended. The Senate had only acquitted him because enough liberals had felt that this was only an indictment on the FBI, demanding counter-investigations into the security state instead. Regardless of the verdict, the eloquent liberal lion had died in that trial, though - for those last months, Kennedy became a recluse, a president rarely seen and even more rarely heard. When William O. Douglas passed away, Congress simply refused Kennedy the chance to change the court, promising the next president a nomination, and Kennedy quietly accepted such. Even as Peru and Bolivia on one side and Chile on the other broke into an all-out war over Antofagasta, Kennedy only quietly provided support to the losing Pinochet regime where he would have previously been the first to drive towards peace. He did not even attend the inauguration of his successor, much less involve himself in the Democratic nomination process. As biographers came to realize later, the weight of his actions had broken Robert Kennedy, and even though political legend suggests that he even did penance at his home church the day his trial began, he never truly recovered mentally. The mother he supposedly took after had taught him that everything should have a purpose, that that drive that fueled him meant nothing without conviction and faith. If that were true, then everything he had ever worked for meant nothing after he lost his way.
I think this counts as a necro. Perhaps I find it best to start a new discussion page on this?
The project was just nominated for a Turtledove so I expect many new people will be discovering it now for the first time.
You're right. I still don't know if it exempts this from being considered a necro - and I hope not, since this is actually quite an interesting timeline.
Raises hand “it me”
Not quite six months yet, so it is something of a wobbler, but considering everything it is okay.
