Bicentennial Man: Ford '76 and Beyond

[KingSweden24]

The Ghost of Mao Zedong​

Secure was never a word much used to describe Hua Guofeng. Hua had few unique agendas or intellectual contributions of his own to make, and had primarily wound up in his position by being Mao's preferred yes-man while not being as ideologically fanatical as the disgraced Gang of Four. His economic policy was entirely built around Soviet-style heavy-industry centralism in his 10-year plan and though he had reversed much of the Cultural Revolution, he was not quite ready to admit that it had been entirely wrong, merely... excessive.

He was unsure of China's place, however, as the periphery of the country had never seemed more uncertain. South Korea's military regime had collapsed, presenting an opportunity, but just as it did North Korea defaulted on its sovereign debts and plunged into a deep depression. Vietnam had defeated the Khmer Rouge. India and Pakistan were not friends but some modicum of a thaw was occurring between her personalist regimes under Gandhi and Bhutto. Afghanistan sat under an unstable but pro-Soviet Marxist regime. China felt, and perhaps was, weak and encircled on all sides.

Hua's response was to do what Maoists do best - call for international struggle to ward off internal dissent. More money was spent in 1980 and 1981 on guerillas in Burma and Thailand than perhaps had ever before, in part to curb the Soviet "encirclement." All the while, members of both of the CCP's major wings began to quietly discuss potentially some kind of Soviet rapprochement, now that both Brezhnev and Mao were gone. New leaders for a new age presented a great deal of opportunity, after all...

(Not a long one but wanted to leave you all with something since it's been a while and I'm headed out on vacation tomorrow. Cheers!)

 

[KingSweden24]

Non en Quebec​

Joe Clark's first year as Prime Minister was a time of broad hardship as his young Premiership was met with the worst economy since the 1930s depression. Canada's unemployment rate, inflation levels and interest rates were markedly higher than those to its immediate south, and Clark engaged in an ambitious policy mix of short-term tax cuts, interest rate hikes, Keynesian spending and privatizations to try to spur the economy. First and foremost was his dismantling of Petro-Canada, a core demand of his Albertan base; next was a two-year reduction in the payroll tax and a three-year reduction in the income tax, to spur consumer consumption while also injecting billions of dollars into road projects (financed with a three-cent gasoline tax) [1], creating a bankruptcy protection fund for businesses of a certain size or that operated in more than one province, privatizing 30 of the 61 crown corporations (most prominently flag carrier Air Canada), and pursuing interest rate hikes considerably more aggressive than those in the United States. It was a curious mix of austerity and stimulus; Canadian economists to this day debate its efficacy, and by the one-year anniversary of his Premiership Clark's approvals had fallen so low the PCs would have been likely to be wiped out had an election been called. Indeed, knives came out for Clark in some more right-wing corners of the party, but his Premiership was saved by a confluence of factors and he would soon limp on.

The first was the election of former Finance Minister Donald S. Macdonald as Liberal leader in February of 1980. Macdonald was, compared to his fiery and charismatic predecessor Trudeau, an utter dud during Prime Minister's Questions and his position in support of free trade with the United States left him out of step with not only the Liberal base but many protectionist and nationalist swing voters worried about Canadian industry being overrun by American imports (Clark himself was quietly interested in the economic benefits of better trade relations with the US but was to Macdonald's left on this issue). Macdonald's victory in the 1980 leadership review had largely been on the back of his "economic competence" and that it was the "turn" of Ontario to have a Liberal leader. This, too, would have an effect as Quebec soon thereafter went to the polls on May 20 to vote on sovereignty-association with the rest of Canada - in other words, independence. The governing Parti Quebecois, swept into power in 1976 in a font of sovereigntists fervor and frustration with the governing Liberals both provincially and federally, had waited until Trudeau had exited power to call its long-promised referendum, with leader Rene Levesque - a moderate compared to hardliners like Jacques Parizeau, who found the question in the plebiscite too academic and unwieldy - not wanting to have to campaign against the electric "PET." Sound as this stratagem may have been, it surprisingly backfired. First and foremost, Trudeau was as much a lightning rod for his opponents as his supporters; much as Quebecois may not have liked "Albertan oilmen" such as Clark, it was hard to polarize the electorate against the Tories who had pledged and delivered on a less statist and firm hand in constitutional matters, as well as the dry but inoffensive Macdonald. The "Oui" campaign thus fell behind the "Non" camp led by Claude Ryan, which ran it as a traditional political campaign, while the sovereigntists dove into more esoteric activism. Key officials made offensive remarks about women, Parizeau gave a disastrous CTV interview where he could not keep his facts straight on economics, and what, exactly, sovereignty "looked like" was esoteric. Swing voters, already despondent in a bleak economy, did not bite - "Non" won 71-29, a considerably broader margin than projected ahead of time, and Quebecois separatism was, for now, almost entirely dead, bookending a decade that had begun with the kidnappings by the FLQ that triggered the October Crisis.

Clark, in quietly but firmly refusing to indulge the referendum, showing sympathy for provincial frustrations and standing up for a federal Canada, had won a major victory, and the Tories could reasonably claim to be the party of moderate provincial-federal mutually beneficial relations, unlike (in their view) the antagonistic Trudeau years. In a message after the successful defeat in Quebec, with Macdonald nowhere to be seen, Clark chipperly announced, "Though times are very hard, Canada endures, and will continue to endure, and a brighter future lies ahead!"

[1] OTL's was four cents

 

[KingSweden24]

Peru's Dangerous New Path​

Fernando Belaunde's choice not to seek the Presidency amid the mass rioting and upheavals in Peru threw the election of 1980 into turmoil, and it fell to Fernando Schwalb to attempt to win the day for Popular Action; this was not to be, for the mood of the country was one decisively angry with the staggering unemployment, inflation and misrule of the twelve-year junta. The left-wing APRA candidate Armando Villanueva was able to win instead, narrowly edging out the reformist and liberal Schwalb by barely one percent of the vote. Villanueva was a radical longtime activist who had spent much of his life in various exiles but was hardly a communist; the campaign against him hinged more on the smear claiming that he was married to a Chilean citizen than anything to do with his ideology, which was well within the mainstream of the Latin American left even by the angry, populist standards of 1980.

The military, which had only reluctantly begun to give up power due to the acute crises facing Peru and which had looked at the violence around the hemisphere since the Panama Crisis began two years earlier with alarm, asserted mass fraud on the part of APRA. Villanueva, for his part, claimed mass irregularities had kept his party from winning majorities in Congress and had nearly denied him the Presidency. The transition to civilian rule, it seemed, was not occurring nearly as smoothly as in Argentina just a month earlier. Even as Villanueva took the oath of office and began describing his policy agenda, protests rippled across the country and strikes continued to shut down more of its inflation and debt-riddled economy. Finally, in late July, the dam broke and the military declared martial law - again - and suspended the constitution to install former junta Prime Minister Oscar Vargas back into power. Villanueva's Presidency had lasted only a little over a month.

Peru's mainstream left had not been particularly radical before 1980; APRA was certainly on the more moderate edge of social democratic or laborist parties of the time, particularly in the context of them having been banned up until the year before by a military government. The suspension of the new constitution signed by the party's leader, Haya de la Torre, on his deathbed the previous year and the return of military rule after mere months was thus a supremely radicalizing event. For many Apristas, it seemed to suggest that their hero's legacy and work was entirely for naught, and they fell despondent; others took a darker view, that if a new constitution signed by one of the country's great philosophers legally and peacefully could not secure a democratic society that guaranteed freedom, welfare and human rights, then violence would have to do it. For the vast masses of immediately disenchanted, conspiratorial and outraged Peruvians who rightly felt completely cheated by the "Crime of 1980," there was - unluckily for Peru - a vessel just waiting there for their moment and which had already declared a "People's War" on the eve of the election against what they could now credibly claim was a system so corrupt top to bottom that only violent struggle could replace it - the Maoist Communist organization known as the Shining Path...

 

[KingSweden24]

The Death of Tito​

"...Yugoslavia's long-serving President and autocrat, who forged his own brand of socialism independent of the Kremlin and ruled in a strange, non-aligned halfway point between East and West, died today in the northern city of Ljubljana three days shy of his 88th birthday..."

- Ted Koppel, ABC News, announcing death of Josip Broz Tito on May 4, 1980

A major page in history turned in May of 1980, as one of the titans of non-Soviet socialism died - Josip Broz Tito, who famously spurned Stalin and managed to keep Yugoslavia's ethnic tensions at a minimum. The old autocrat's funeral was one of the best-attended in history, with hundreds of statesmen from all around the world in attendance, including Gerald Ford, Yuri Andropov, Hua Guofeng, the leaders of every Warsaw Pact state, Prince Philip of the United Kingdom, Prime Minister Denis Healy, and dozens of other notable presidents, prime ministers, and foreign ministers. Ford looked positively relaxed speaking to Andropov and Healy at the event, glad to be out of the United States for a few days and able to conduct some informal diplomacy on his own, as the primary grind for his own Republican Party seemed to leave his Vice President behind and the Democrats appeared to be consolidating around Hugh Carey. For those few days, domestic politics may not have existed, and Ford made a trip of it, stopping in Berlin, Paris, Brussels, Belgium and Ottawa on his way back in a last-minute foreign excursion, in what he anticipated would be one of his last major foreign trips meeting NATO allies before his term expired in January.

In Yugoslavia, it was Prime Minister Dzemal Bijedic [2] - a Bosnian Muslim - who benefitted from Tito's death. He had carefully maneuvered his own allies into core positions throughout the Communist bureaucracy and with Tito's death, the singular Presidency was dissolved into a "President of the Presidency" - a rotating chairman of a collective Presidency of the six constituent republics, with a one year term for both the President and Vice President. As this was not a position that lent itself to a natural base of power, Bijedic - Prime Minister for nearly a decade already - became the symbol of continuity of Titoism and he threw himself into the shark-infested waters of Yugoslavian backroom politics, as bills postponed by Tito's mercurialism seemed likely to soon come due. The economic crisis of the late 1970s had not abated, however, and much worse loomed over the struggling Yugoslav economy in the months and years ahead...

[1] Part of the reason I've had writers block is I find primary race play-by-plays a chore and a bore to write. There's some very talented writers when it comes to elections on this site but I do not consider myself one of them. I'll probably do a single consolidated update for the May/June primaries to wrap things up ahead of the general
[2] Remember - not dead, his plane crash death was butterflied!

 

[KingSweden24]

A Primary Denouement
​

May 3rd to June 3rd marked the final primary march for both parties, and the paths both took could not have been more different. For the Democrats, a cluster of primaries at the start of the month represented the last hurrah for Reuben Askew's campaign; on the 3rd he won Texas in a landslide, then three days later narrowly took the Colorado caucuses while sweeping North Carolina, Tennessee and the District of Columbia. Colorado marked his first win outside the South, and though he came a close second in Indiana - dominating counties south of Indianapolis and along the Ohio River - he was unable to keep up with Hugh Carey's big wins in Indianapolis and the more populous industrial north. A week later, Carey won Maryland and Nebraska comfortably, and Askew looked ahead to a daunting map through early June that featured only two more Southern states and substantial delegate hauls in the types of places Carey had already been winning by large margins and, with his campaign running low on funding and the math not impossible but quite difficult, he announced he would suspend his campaign, though he declined to make an endorsement formal. Askew won sympathy delegates the rest of the way, but the writing was on the wall; with the final contests on June 3rd, Hugh Carey wrapped up the Democratic nomination and two days later appeared at a press conference with Askew in Miami where the runner-up stated that "we have had our differences throughout this campaign, certainly, but I can say that Governor Carey will make a tremendous President and he has my full, unequivocal, enthusiastic, two-thumbs-up endorsement." The term "two-thumbs-up endorsement" quickly entered the political lexicon, and Democrats rejoiced at their ticket. In Carey they had a man who spoke to both wings of the party, had credibility as the "man who saved New York," a compelling personal story as a grief-stricken widower running to now rescue his country, and a certain gruff Irish blue-collar appeal in his demeanor. The types of concerns and divisions over the eventual nominee that had plagued the conventions of 1968, 1972 and 1976 were not there - Carey was the man after a positive and considerate primary campaign focused intently on the failings of the last twelve years of Republican governance.

The Republicans were not nearly as fortunate, though they ended June 3rd with a winner. To kick off May, Reagan carried Arizona but frustratingly watched Connally snatch first place in Missouri, Oklahoma and Texas (Reagan would place only third in the first of those); three days later, another split decision emerged, with the flailing Dole taking DC while Connally carried North Carolina and Tennessee and Reagan narrowly won Indiana over Dole. Reagan dominated Nebraska but lost Maryland to Dole on the 13th, and the following week lost Michigan in a landslide (believed to be due to his well-reported support of free trade with Canada worrying Michigan union workers) while blowing out his opponents in Oregon, neighboring his home state. Despite the controversies in El Salvador, Dole seemed to be righting the ship in late May, as a major block of states loomed the last two weeks. Reagan got his reprieve on the 27th, sweeping Idaho, Kentucky and Nevada by wide margins to recapture his front-runner status heading into the last series of contests, bloodied but not beaten. Connally gave an aggressive, angry speech the weekend before the contests in Rhode Island decrying Reagan as "Goldwater with a smile" and suggesting a 1964-style landslide loss if he was the nominee; Reagan's retort: "He would know, he voted for LBJ!" was seen as cleverly reminding Republican partisans of Connally's background as a Texas Democratic hatchet man.

On June 3rd, Reagan decisively won California's primaries, the biggest prize and his home state where his opponents had spent little time campaigning; he also carried New Mexico, Montana, New Jersey, Ohio, and West Virginia. Connally won only Mississippi while Dole came out ahead in Rhode Island and South Dakota; Reagan would place second in every state he didn't win, a very close second behind Connally in particular. He did not quite have the magic number to win the nomination outright but was very close; the math wasn't quite there for either Connally or Dole to catch up even if one dropped out and endorsed the other. It seemed clear that, despite its fractured nature, the Republican electorate had in the end anointed Reagan, albeit with reservations, a sharp move to the right after twelve years of Nixon and Ford and a divisive, ugly primary campaign between its final three candidates. As the myriad Republican runner-ups debated what to do next, Reagan effectively crowned himself nominee with an enthusiastic speech in Los Angeles thanking his supporters and declaring "on to November and the White House!" The sunny California optimist he so eagerly wanted to play the part of shone through in that moment briefly rather than the gruff old reactionary he had come across as for much of the primary; that he had made it within inches of the nomination four years after being denied barely after firing Sears early in the gauntlet was a remarkable feat.

The first half of the marathon was over for both parties, with their presumptive nominees effectively in place; the even more grueling back half was yet to come...

 

[KingSweden24]

Kaboom​

The warnings had been mounting for close to two months and the tremors more and more severe; on May 17, property owners had been allowed in to gather property and another run was scheduled for the following day, but that was not to be. On Sunday, May 18, Mount St. Helens erupted in southwestern Washington state, with much of the volcano liquefied leaving a cratered husk behind as its entire north face collapsed in the lateral explosion. The blast killed 212 [1] people, most notably geologist David Johnston who had tried in vain to get the Forest Service and Washington Governor Dixy Lee Ray to close access to the mountain; with beautiful weather and the chance to see what was expected to be a much smaller eruption, dozens of people had camped out on nearby ridges and at open campsites to try to get a view. Thousands of animals were killed, trees were flattened and mudslides draped most of the landscape; cities all over the Northwest were draped in inches of dark gray ash. As much as a quarter of those killed never saw their bodies recovered or identified.

President Ford toured the site once it was regarded as safe along with a number of Washington state officials, arriving via Marine One in an iconic photo with the blackened mountain in the background. An avid sportsman, he remarked "I have never seen in my life this kind of devastation, the remarkable force of nature reminding us how very small we are against its awesome power." Governor Ray's behavior at the press conference was widely pilloried by the local and national press, as was the hesitation by the Forest Service to listen to scientists and close access to the park; Secretary of Agriculture John Knebel eventually fired three high-ranking USFS officials and pledged a review of emergency practices...

[1] Quadruple OTL's amount; the justification for this is that the Forest Service and state government ITTL ignores warnings to close the national forest around the mountain and so its full of campers and onlookers when the blast goes off

(This is kind of a niche update but growing up in Washington state in the late 1990s/early 2000s I think we had at least one unit every year in school about the 1980 St. Helens eruption and at least two field trips there that I can think of - it was a seminal event for a lot of Washingtonians who lived in the state at that time and I think that colored how often it came up in elementary school curricula, because a lot of the teachers had stories about ash on their car or having to get evacuated from campsites on Rainier because of an ash storm. The site isn't as cool today now that most of the nature has recovered; I can remember as a kid in the mid-1990s that it still looked like you were driving on the moon more than a decade later.)

 

[KingSweden24]

Mayhem in Madrid​

Spain's nascent democratic transition was centered in large part on the efforts and energies of two men - King Juan Carlos I, who had emerged as the Generalissimo's successor and surprised the world by committing fully to democracy, and his handpicked Prime Minister, the young and previously quite obscure Adolfo Suarez, who formed a centrist grab-bag grand coalition of parties called the Union of the Democratic Centre to prepare Spain for the end of the Francoist era and a new, democratic constitution that was passed in 1978. Elections under the new constitution in the spring of 1979 had returned Suarez to power, albeit with a reduced minority government [1], and though the process continued (most notably with the creation of the Autonomous Communities for Spain's ethnic and linguistic minorities) piecemeal the Spanish public began growing restive as terrorist attacks by the Basque separatist ETA escalated, the economy sank into a deeper depression with rising inflation and unemployment (Spain was perhaps hit harder by the late 1970s economic crisis than most other Western European countries) and the Suarez government was beset by aggressive attacks not only by the left-wing alliance of Felipe Gonzalez's socialist PSOE and the fading Communists, but also far-right agitators both in the Cortes and in the pages of El Alcazar, a ferociously and nakedly Francoist and pro-military newspaper regarded as the mouthpiece of El Bunker, the common name for the hardened core of Falangist opposition to democracy.

The UCD's greatest issue was that it had no single natural constituency or program; it had been formed by Suarez almost purely for the purpose of giving him a party to run in order for him to rule Spain at the King's nomination. It was an awkward combination of social democrats, liberal, Christian democrats and reformist conservatives; Suarez himself was from the Francoist camp but had been unknown enough to satisfy reformers and activists and Falangists alike. Despite delivering a new Constitution, Suarez seemed utterly lost, politically isolated and deeply unpopular; it was in this context that Gonzalez rolled the dice late in May of 1980 and called a no-confidence vote against the government. A tremendous parliamentary debate ensued; Suarez aggressively defended his party program but Gonzalez used the televised arguments to his advantage, portraying himself as youthful, energetic and charismatic (he was only 38 years of age) and assuring Spain that the PSOE was a party of reform, not a party of revolution, eschewing comparisons to the United Front of the Spanish Civil War. In the end, only UCD deputies voted with the government, which lost its confidence vote by a single fateful vote. Suarez's defeat, despite the confidence vote not carrying a majority of deputies due to abstentions, resulted in the immediate resignation of the Prime Minister and his entire government, despite efforts by the King to persuade fellow UCD official Agustin Sahagun to form a caretaker government of the UCD and PSOE with equal ministries. Snap elections were called for early July, and the UCD seemed to disintegrate in real time around Suarez as it became clear he could not command even the full support of the party created by and for him. Gonzalez's performance in the parliamentary debate shot the PSOE up snap opinion polls and suggested the party would command a majority of the Cortes on its own; the scene seemed ripe for chaos in Spain as political mayhem unfolded in Madrid and Spain headed to the polls for the second time in just over a year and Falangist military officials appalled at the idea of a Socialist Cortes began to dust off their plans for action that they had already been developing in opposition to the anodyne Suarez...

[1] IOTL he very slightly increased the UCD's seats, but was still in a minority

 

[KingSweden24]

Un Plan de Sauvegarde ​

Though his doctors had repeatedly begged him to be better about staying up on his checkups, Francois Mitterrand found himself a man with little time for things like regular health checkups or cancer screenings, despite his long history of health issues throughout the 1970s. Having defeated the ostensibly more popular Michel Rocard of the right wing of the Parti Socialiste at the 1979 Metz Congress, he had spent much of the intervening winter trying to update the Common Programme ahead of his anticipated rematch with Valery Giscard d'Estaing in the spring elections of 1981 and continue to position the PS ahead of the Communists as the genuine standard-bearer of the French left. As spring progressed, though, Mitterrand continued feeling more and more fatigued, less able to maintain his daily routines, and his friends and colleagues began commenting that he was losing weight and frequently looked pale. Finally, in late April, he collapsed while speaking to a trade union of Renault machinists near Paris and was rushed to the hospital. Doctors confirmed what many Socialists quietly suspected - Mitterrand's cancer had returned with a vengeance. [1] Treatments were begun and Mitterrand dramatically drew down his scheduling commitments, but the aggressive disease had already spread too far. After suffering a fall late in evening of June 5, 1980, Francois Mitterrand died at the Hôtel-Dieu early the next morning. He was 63 years old.

Mitterrand had been a towering figure of the past thirty years of French politics and with the exception of Guy Mollet easily the most dominant personality on the French left. France's economic struggles in the late 1970s depression had convinced many that the "quiet force" of Mitterrand presented the opening for a leftist head of state for the first time since the Third Republic and an end to the Gaullist hegemony that Mitterrand had spent his career so bitterly fighting. The immediate beneficiary of his death, of course, was not even President Giscard d'Estaing, who was arguably slightly favored in the following year's election based on Fifth Republic political history, but Rocard, who had thought himself the likely champion of the French Left already and now seemed to clearly have a Presidential nomination within reach. The issue for Rocard, of course, was that Mitterrand's star burning out could easily lead to a resurgence of the PCF and the cementing of the Gaullists thanks to a public skepticism of Communism (to say nothing of American and British pressure, even from center-left governments). But first, of course, was Mitterrand's funeral, which most notable French political figures attended (and which his wife and mistress attended together as well) [2], and then the knives could come out later...

[1] So, this is based on a suggestion from way back in this TL of how to kill off Mitterrand ahead of 1981. Apparently, his cancer did come back sometime in 1979/80 and nearly killed him; here, Mitterrand merely doesn't stay on top of his screenings like he should and off he goes.
[2] Gotta keep the best Mitterrand anecdote, even if sixteen years early

 

[KingSweden24]

Money Bomb​

Throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, a number of growing economies - primarily in Latin America - had borrowed heavily from the World Bank and then increasingly from private sources to finance their industrializing, expanding economies. Mexico in particular leveraged future oil revenues, taking advantage of the spike in oil prices beginning in 1973 and carrying through to the end of the decade, which created a massive debt cycle where the country's earnings eventually were outstripped by its total foreign debt. Other resource dependent countries in the region - Chile, Peru, Bolivia, Brazil, etc - pursued similar courses of action and by mid-1980 the economies of Latin America were among some of the most indebted in the world. Dependency on commodity prices remaining high and interest rates and inflation in creditor countries remaining low was now the backbone of the economy of a region already struggling in the wake of the Panama Shock and an outbreak of extremist paramilitary violence in the previous two years; now, in the summer of 1980, the bomb went off.

The impetus was a sudden, dramatic decline in oil prices between early May and the middle of July - from peak to through, the 1980 petroleum bear market was close to a 40% drawdown, and by May of 1981 the global spot price on oil would have moved down close to 70% [1]. Part of this was a healthy recovery of Iranian and Venezuelan production along with new North Sea (both British and Norwegian), Canadian and Alaskan supply coming online, but the bigger picture was a broader macroeconomic change. The spiking unemployment and substantive pullback in industrial and economic activity in late 1979 and early 1980 - the worst recession in the Western world since the Great Depression of the 1930s - reduced demand for energy and other raw materials (ironically, the price of such materials was a big driver in the recessionary conditions), which in tandem with intentionally-elevated interest rates begun by both American and European policymakers at various points in 1979 to finally break stagflation drove prices for such materials even lower in the short term. The still-elevated inflation, rapidly climbing interest rates and sharp collapse in real prices of resources in 1980 made the debt situation for resource-rich countries already suffering from advanced Dutch disease untenable.

Extraction-heavy developed economies such as Canada, the Netherlands, and Norway saw their ongoing recessions worsen through 1980 and deep into 1981 (Norway's explosive production growth positioned them better than most to weather price declines), but for places like Mexico, the nightmare had only just begun. Governments across Latin America, staring down the barrel of an acute debt crisis that had roared out of nowhere, pursued aggressive debt reduction and austerity measures but it was to no avail; in late July, Mexico announced a partial default on its sovereign debt [2], cratering its economy and the value of its peso as investors fled and unemployment ballooned. Chile, previously riding high off its victory over Argentina in the Beagle War the year before, followed suit in August. Along with North Korea in March, this marked now three countries that had staged partial or total sovereign debt defaults in the space of six months, and as fall and winter beckoned, the risk of additional contagion in Latin American - and perhaps global - debt markets loomed large over world policymakers, particularly the maligned World Bank and IMF that now had to navigate how to extricate hemorrhaging Latin economies from a debt crisis, especially as private banks began to call in loans from the region in panic or refuse to refinance existing debt, exacerbating the spiral.

The reaction from Washington and European capitals was relatively muted, however; while it would take months for high consumer prices (gas in particular) to draw down to the extent of the underlying raw materials, the sharp collapse of input prices in the summer of 1980 was taken as a sign that the hawkish, contractionary interest rate policy was working to break inflation. "The view of the Federal Reserve," Chairman Burns said to the Senate Banking Committee in early September testimony after the end of the August recess and the start of the meat of the 1980 campaign season, "is that the current policy course is delivering as intended, and that the short term recessionary and unemployment effects will alleviate with stronger economic growth after inflation has been properly tamed." Though Burns tight money policy has, in later years, been identified as belatedly helping end the stagflationary cycle (though more targeted stimulatory measures and the development of the United States' first industrial policy in the 1980s have been argued to have helped as much or more) of the 1970s, the fact that his twelve-year tenure at the Fed overlapped with some of the worst economic shocks in US history and that his stance under Nixon was to succumb to Presidential pressure and keep a loose posture ahead of election cycles, has contributed to his reputation as one of the worst, out-of-his-depth Fed Chairs in history, and as early as 1980 his testimony was met with considerable skepticism from Senators of both parties. As Latin America's economies collapsed south of the border and capital flight accelerated, his dismissive and hawkish stance contributed to an even worse reputation there, along with the IMF.

[1] Fictional figures of my making but roughly on par with the OTL early 1980s oil glut
[2] IOTL, this default occurred in August of 1982; with the economic contraction of the late 1970s having been worsened and moved forward due to Panama, it now occurs two years early

 

[KingSweden24]

Death to Mohammed Reza
​

The news in that on July 27th, 1980, the abdicated and exiled former Shah of Iran, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, had died at the estate in Lahore he was living in at the invitation and pleasure of Zulfikar Bhutto caused a number of reactions around the world. Though he had fled Iran almost exactly two years earlier, ending his 36-year reign, his death to many Iranians and others around the world signaled the end of an era on its own. With his death he left a widow in the Shahbanu Farah Pahlavi, who was quite awkwardly banned from returning to Iran by the same edict of her eldest son Shah Reza that had banished her husband; an ardent Francophile, she would eventually settle in Paris, where she lives to this day relatively anonymously at the quiet request of her son, though in 1998 the edict of exile would be repealed by the Majlis.

In Iran, despite a decree "encouraging" open public mourning, anti-monarchist forces of both the far left and Islamist variety rejoiced, with parades, street festivals and, of course, riots erupting across much of central and southern Iran, particularly in Qom. However, compared to the near-civil war conditions that had prevailed across the country and come close to tipping it into full revolution and societal collapse from late 1977 to early 1979, the public displays of joy, grief or various protests and hooliganism dissipated within days. The Shah, still all of 19 and with a tight grip on his activities continuing by former members of the regency council from the military who noted Reza II's lack of political skills and general aloofness from politics, was now more formally the monarch in a way he perhaps had not been before. After the tumult of the past years and the simmering tensions that ran through Iranian society, and the very piecemeal level of his reforms that had been introduced so far, the Shah as much as the Iranian public stared down a new decade with a mix of anticipation and trepidation.

Around the world, though, reactions to Mohammed Reza's death were more muted and sanguine. Secretary of State Bush issued a perfunctory memorandum about "a long life in service to the people of Iran," while the Prime Minister of Great Britain, Denis Healy, instead chose to wax poetically about the "potential bright future of Anglo-Iranian relations in this new era for the people of a great and mighty kingdom that has boundless potential to join the great powers on the world stage." [1] Only Bhutto seemed genuinely upset at the loss of his good friend, and Pakistani flags were lowered to half-mast for a week, engendering a great deal of sniggering and snide remarks from among the populace...

[1] It's quite ironic for a Brit to be saying this, to say the least.

 

[KingSweden24]

1980 Democratic National Convention
​

For Hugh Carey, the 1980 Democratic National Convention was about as close to a coronation as one could get after a collegial though still actively contested primary that had lasted late into spring. It was being held at Madison Square Garden in New York City, his hometown and the beating heart of the American economy in the state of which he was the second-term governor; key speakers included both former mayor Abe Beame and the incumbent (and close Carey ally) Mario Cuomo, both of whom spoke on the opening night to emphasize the theme of Carey being "the man who saved New York" and that he would carry the same energy and vigor to restore America next. The keynote speaker on the next night was Geraldine Ferraro, a first-term Congresswoman from Queens, who officially read out that Carey had been nominated as the next Democratic candidate for President and then gave a star-making address that immediately made her a name to watch in the House moving forward. Ted Kennedy gave a famed address where he hearkened back to the legacy of his slain brothers and famously declared, "The dream shall never die!" - though Carey was about as far from a Kennedyesque figure as there was, drawing a connection from the last Irish Catholic President to the man who was likely the next one was meant to cast Carey as the next natural step in the evolution of the New Deal coalition over the past fifty years.

The speeches were the sideshow to speculation about the Veepstakes, however, with it being understood that Carey would announce his running mate during the convention, as was practice. The delegates in theory were in charge of such decisions but it was unlikely they would foist somebody upon Carey whom he did not want. The debates inside both the DNC as well as the Carey camp were lively and went in two directions. The first was that, with the Republicans badly unpopular after twelve deteriorating years in the White House, Governor Ronald Reagan badly lagging in the polls (and with the Republicans holding their convention in mid-August, after the Moscow Olympics had ended) [1] and Carey having enjoyed broad support across the party without an acrimonious primary, it was time to "go bold," as his speechwriter Bob Shrum [2] and pollster Pat Caddell (who had he snagged from the successful 1976 Carter primary campaign) suggested. To them, this meant picking a candidate who would invigorate the left wing of the party that while tolerant of Carey as a vessel to defeat the GOP after being locked out of power for twelve years could use a jolt of "excitement" that would show commitment to truly transformative policy that was what it would take to shake America out of its decade-long malaise of stagflation - the Second New Deal's chief prophet, in other words, a bridge between the Old Left and the New. Caddell was intrigued by the idea of either Shirley Chisholm or Barbara Jordan as genuine out-of-the-box choices of placing not just a woman but a Black woman on a national ticket, while Shrum for his part was a bit more muted, instead suggesting a Midwestern progressive like Wisconsin's Bill Proxmire, Iowa's John Culver or Minnesota's Warren Spannaus (it was broadly accepted that Mondale did not want to reappear on a Presidential ticket again).

Carey's "Brooklyn Boys," so named for being his New York-based brain trust of consultants and political allies, saw things differently, and were able to leverage their personal relationship with the Governor and his own biases about the best course of action to take to turn the campaign's eyes south. The success of the GOP in breaking through in the South beginning in the 1960s was a threat to the national dominance of the Democratic Party, and though Carter had nearly swept the Old Confederacy save suburbanized Virginia [3] that had been on his own strength as a good old boy peanut farmer from Georgia. A gruff Irish New Yorker would have a very different appeal and it seemed plain that despite Reagan not carrying a single Southern state in the GOP primaries, that it was the most fertile ground for him to go on offensive with the GOP on their back heels elsewhere. Go bold, or be smart - that was the way Carey ally Congressman Mario Biaggi later termed the debate. Being smart meant putting a Southerner on the ticket for geographic balance and to not abandon the region to the Republicans, with Reagan regarded as highly likely to name a Southern running mate himself. The debate then curiously turned into a bunch of very distinctly New York men and women arguing over who the best Southern Veep would be.

Carey's personal choice won out. It was thought that Cuomo or his son Andrew, a key campaign staffer for Carey, were the biggest partisans in favor of the runner-up from the primaries, Florida Governor Reuben O. Askew, but it turns out that Carey himself was Askew's biggest admirer. "If I hadn't run, I'd have voted for the guy!" Carey chuckled in a documentary of the 1980 campaign released in 1990; the upsides seemed obvious. Askew's political bonafides on their own were impeccable, having cleaned up the South's most notoriously corrupt but fastest-growing state, swept the South in the primaries, and managing to balance the needs of a polity that was simultaneously liberal, moderate and conservative on different issues all at once. Askew gave Carey a foot not just in the Northeast and Midwest, where his style seemed likely to excel, but in the booming Sunbelt and together he and Askew formed a ticket that had won a hyper-majority of Democratic primary votes - a tangible partnership of two very different personality types but whom had both succeeded in appealing to actual primary voters, not hypothetical ones waiting to be inspired by a bolder choice. A few other names were bandied about - Biaggi was a big supporter of Texas's Lloyd Bentsen, Robert Abrams pushed hard for Kentucky's Walt Huddleston - but it was Askew who Carey had grown to like and respect during the campaign and Askew who was seen as bringing the most upside. Carey called Askew, who earlier in the convention had given an enthusiastic speech encouraging his delegates to vote for Carey, to let him know he was the choice.

Carey's acceptance speech emphasized the key themes of his campaign - national renewal in tackling the problems of inflation and wage stagnation through infrastructure spending, employment programs and other Keynesian injections - with a key phrase: "Fifty years ago, the Republicans ran the American economy into the ground behind an ideology of greed, of laziness, and of corruption, and fifty years ago it took a Governor of New York who had helped fix his home state to know how to fix the country and make it whole again. His name was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, perhaps one of if not the greatest Presidents we have ever had. Now, fifty years later, what do you know? They've gone and done it again! And so fifty years later, just like then, a New York Governor is gonna go to Washington to roll up his sleeves to fix it!"

There was absolutely no doubt what Carey was promising something more akin to Humphrey in '68 than the last two cycles - a full-throated defense of the New Deal and an excoriation of a GOP that shifted away from it. This was the Brooklyn Boxer coming out swinging, not with vague paeans to personal integrity like Carter or dazzling the young Left like McGovern. A line had been drawn in the sand - and a month later, in August, the Republicans would have their chance to give their own answer...

[1] The inverse of the order of OTL's 1980 conventions
[2] Who still writes Kennedy's speech for him
[3] NoVA and Greater Richmond were once Republican bastions

 

[KingSweden24]

1980 Republican National Convention​

Following the Moscow Olympics, the Republicans would come to gather in Detroit, Michigan, for their 1980 convention, where Ronald Reagan was to receive the coronation he had hoped for four years earlier during his insurgency against Gerald Ford. The site of Detroit, in Ford's home state and heartland of the embattled and struggling US automotive sector, played to Reagan's themes of looking to America's recent past for its future resurgence, but like the structural upheavals that ailed the car industry of the Motor City, turbulence and change lay ahead for the GOP.

The convention occurred a little less than a month after the Democrats had nominated the Carey-Askew ticket in New York, which had given both the Reagan team and the establishment-flavored strategists who had skeptically come around to him at the RNC time to observe Carey's general election campaign and start to plan for how to counter it. The headwinds were bad, with the deep recession, twelve years of GOP control of the White House and a polarizing nominee, and so the choice of Vice President began to consume the convention. Even in the days ahead of the convention, in a hotel room at the Renaissance Center's Detroit Plaza Hotel near the Joe Louis Arena, Reagan and his chief aides were still at loggerheads over who to pick. Reagan himself was fairly agnostic but felt burned by his attempt in the past few weeks to mend fences with John Connally, who had brusquely rejected overtures to serve as ticket-mate due to his hard feelings over the harsh attacks regarding his corruption trial the Reagan camp had used to put him away in the home stretch of the primary. This led to a situation where Reagan was open to his advisers' suggestions but also felt compelled to shoot holes in them, always fidgety and anxious that he was making the wrong move.

The establishment side was not particularly helpful in that regard. Ford decidedly disliked Reagan, with considerable sour grapes over 1976, and his opposition to Reaganism was more personal than political. Indeed, Ford's preferred choice for Vice President was a Michigander - Guy Vander Jagt, a conservative Congressman from the western part of the state who gave the convention's keynote speech without notes and led Reagan to quip, "How do I follow that?" RNC Chairman Bill Brock, however, was a fierce partisan of his fellow Tennessean, Senate Minority Leader Howard Baker, whom he believed could give a potential Reagan administration a leg up on Capitol Hill with his deep connections and also appeal to the "alienated South," coining the term "Southern alienation" for the first time, a concept that would come to define the next two decades of Southern politics.

Reagan was intrigued by Baker, but waffled on the pick. His personal preference as a backup to Connally, New York Congressman Jack Kemp, was a rock-ribbed conservative whom he had a deep personal relationship with and who would strike at the heart of Carey's home state, in the same way Nixon had picked Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. in 1960 to go on offense in New England. Kemp, however, brought little ideological balance to the ticket, had been subject for close to a decade to a whisper campaign about his alleged secret homosexual predilections and did little to boost Reagan's foreign policy credibility, which was seen as a bigger Achilles heel for him than his right-wing domestic prescriptions and an opportunity to go on offense against the two Governors Carey-Askew. With Carey riding high in the polls - one post-DNC poll had Carey winning by close to 20 points, a number that was sure to come back to Earth but still highly alarming - Reagan's handlers declared to the candidate on the third day of the convention that what they needed was a "game changer" who could buff up his international credentials and also appeal to moderates, particularly women, who were leery of what exactly a President Reagan might entail. Baker was a safe but uninspired choice, Vander Jagt a solid man but too obscure, and Kemp too risky. With the challenge ahead, it was time to go for broke with a candidate who brought nothing but regional, ideological, demographic and credential upside - Ed Rollins pitched Reagan on his suggestion, and after a few hours Reagan came around to it and made the call.

Anne Armstrong, the Ford administration's UN Ambassador and longstanding diplomat and Presidential advisor, had been in Detroit for the convention but had not even had a speaking slot scheduled. However, she had been the keynote speaker at the 1972 Convention and had been part of a small draft effort to be put on the ticket with Ford four years later before Dole won out, and Ford himself later expressed that she'd have been a better choice than the dour and dull Dole. When Ford heard from Rollins and other RNC operatives that Armstrong was Reagan's choice, he himself felt relieved, and when he gave his brief address to the convention pledging his support for Reagan and working to mend the broken fences within the party, he blurted out "I look forward to campaigning for the Reagan-Armstrong ticket this fall!"

The inadvertent scoop annoyed Reagan but he had made his choice, and Armstrong came up to the podium with Reagan as the nominee made his acceptance speech. The former Governor of California made a deliberate effort to pivot from his hard-edged primary rhetoric, speaking of "a land of opportunity for all," a "shining city on a hill," and "a new morning for America." Nancy Reagan, not known for her public displays of emotion, eagerly hugged Armstrong and history was made - for the first time in history, a woman would stand on a major national ticket. The delegates buzzed with excitement as Reagan winked at the end of the speech and bellowed, "Now, let's go win just one for the Gipper!"

Outside the convention, the reaction was different. The media was abuzz with the choice of Armstrong but the narrative had been set at the start of the convention with Ted Koppel's famous "the GOP limping into Detroit" remark, and some pondered whether Armstrong's selection was a sign of desperation by the Reagan campaign, despite the considerable and substantive resume she brought, and if the Reagan campaign would be hamstrung by sexism in the electorate that would be concerned by a woman potentially being President, particularly with the reality that a victorious Reagan would be the oldest President on inauguration day in history. Other themes from the convention were unhelpful, too - Congressman Phil Crane had given an invective-laden speech denouncing social liberalism generally and the ERA specifically to great controversy, and Vice President Dole's speech had been gruff and described Carey as "the nominee of crime-ridden, decaying Democrat cities," calling back to his unpopular remarks in the 1976 debates about "Democrat wars" that had nearly cost Ford the election.

Nonetheless, despite the mixed reaction to the GOP pageantry in Detroit, the Republicans had their man - and their woman - for what promised to be an unforgettable fall campaign ahead...

 

[KingSweden24]

The 11th Five Year Plan​

Yuri Andropov in August of 1980 was a man riding high; as the beginning of his third year in power quickly approached, he had consolidated his power over the machinery of the state, become associated publicly and within the CPSU as the face and instigator of a vast anti-corruption purge meant to "revitalize the Socialist system," and now had overseen a very successful Moscow Olympics in which Soviet athletes had won the total medal count, even though the United States (narrowly) earned the most golds.

Andropov decided to follow up the good feelings generated by the Olympics by outlining the third and final "arrow" in his reform plans, building out from his anti-corruption campaign and promotion of reformist officials to add now economic reforms inspired by the more consumer goods oriented, market developmentalist approach of the Hungarian economy which had given the Magyars the highest standard of living in the Eastern Bloc. During his presentation to the Presidium of the 11th Five Year Plan, Andropov described the targets in consumer goods production that the USSR would aim to hit, the revitalization of its grain industry to reduce reliance on foreign imports (particularly from the United States), and a program to use its gas and other natural resource production surpluses to finance new technologies, particularly in the field of "rationalized computer sciences," with it broadly understood to young risers like Legachev and Gorbachev that the concept was pointed at economic management to take things out of the hands of corrupt officials.

Historians have in many ways overstated how much of a departure the 11th Plan really was; the 9th and 10th Plans, devised under Brezhnev, had already begun to encourage consumer goods production. Much of the ideas Andropov incorporated into his regeneration program had been developed by Kosygin, nobody's idea of a young, starry-eyed reformer. [1] And for all the talk of the "Olympic spirit" underpinning "Goulash in the Kremlin" and a potential new time of openness and moderation from Moscow, Andropov remained the KGB spymaster he'd always been, seen most definitively in his hard-line against the Polish trade union movement that sprung to life concurrently with his introduction of the 11th Plan in August of 1980, a line that made it an open question on the other side of the Iron Curtain whether or not Andropov was in 1980 or '81 give Warsaw the Budapest '56 or Prague '68 treatment. Still, it was an important first step towards a more flexible, decentralized, and transparent Soviet economy to separate from the stagnation that had defined it for years, and the disciples of the early 1980s Andropov Reforms would by the middle of the decade dominate all levers of the Soviet government once Andropov himself was gone... [2]

[1] So basically, the Andropov Reforms are a mix of Goulash Communism and the 1979 reform program advocated by Kosygin before his death, and the latter not being a total failure. Not quite Dengism, but a far cry from the chaos of perestroika
[2] Andropov will live longer than IOTL without that random cold bench kidney failure incident, but not that much longer. The health of the Soviet gerontocracy was not great across the board, after all

 

[KingSweden24]

Saudia 770​

The attention of the British public in the summer of 1980 lay firmly on the engagement of Prince Charles to Amanda Knatchbull, the granddaughter of Lord Mountbatten. [1] The marriage being kept "in the family," so to speak, generated a great deal of media attention but was overall approved by the public and the establishment alike. The mania around "Charlie and Mandy" distracted somewhat from the Healy government's early efforts to find its sea legs and overshadowed a great deal of print speculation around Whitehall that he and his Chancellor, the autarkic and lefty Peter Shore, were already feuding over how exactly to spend the "North Sea Dividend" of oil revenues that began trickling in at higher clip and would become a veritable flow of cash and oil as early as 1981, just in time for Shore's first formal budget.

The summer of love and royal speculation crowding out every other public matter end dramatically in early August, though, when the Ikhwan terrorist organization blew up Saudia 770, flying a route from Riyadh to London. The 747 was carrying 383 passengers and twenty crew, all of whom died; about a hundred of the passenger manifest were British nationals, including thirty children on holiday to see family in the Middle East. It was the deadliest air disaster in British history. The plane went down in the eastern Mediterranean about two hours into its flight approximately halfway between Israel and Cyprus, and the Royal Navy was deployed from Malta along with some Turkish boats to assist in the rescue operation. Healy, teary-eyed, addressed the Commons on August 10, declaring, "The incidences of political violence by radicals has reached its most horrific crescendo this summer after a decade of escalations that last captured the public's attention with Munich, and if my government has anything to say about it, the next decade will see such violence snuffed out to a whimper!" A number of Labour backbenchers were visibly uncomfortable but the Commons mostly supported Healy's push to provide intelligence and security support to the Saudi government in cracking down on the Ikhwan, and Middle Eastern terror loomed large in the British public and military consciousness for the first time after the chaotic events in Iran in 1978-79 and now the horrific slaughter of hundreds of people by the Ikhwan.

In Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, 770 badly damaged the government's reputation. Several junior members of the royal family and civilian Saudi Aramco officials had been in the first class cabin of the flight en route to London to meet with British Petroleum executives before heading to an OPEC conference in Geneva; questions began to fly around Riyadh of who, exactly, might have known about their public movements all at once (rather than try to assassinate some of these relatively low-level targets individually, which was seen as much easier). The bombing spurred twin debacles executed by King Khalid - an aggressive search through his own security services to root out potential Ikhwan moles that bordered on a purge, and then a crackdown on the public that went above and beyond the measures put in place after the Mosque Siege. The temperatures in the Arabian desert were certainly not being lowered...

[1] Two things here - Mountbatten not assassinated by the IRA due to butterflies, and hat tip to @Nazi Space Spy for giving me the idea for Charles marrying somebody other than Diana

 

[KingSweden24]

The Brooklyn Boxer vs. Hollywood Ron​

The Democrats emerged out of their convention unified and optimistic, even if there were grumblings from some corners of the party that it had been a little too "New York-y" for Middle America. It was widely agreed in all corners of American politics that the Democrats most certainly had the wind in their sails: the GOP had held the White House for twelve tumultuous years that included the end of the Vietnam War, Watergate, the controversial Ohio recount, and now the Panama Crisis, and despite occasional pockets of improving employment numbers and GDP growth they had presided over a decade of oil shocks, stubbornly high inflation, factory closures and now, at the end, the worst economic contraction since the Great Depression. To the average Democrat, the Republicans had governed poorly first under the shady Nixon and the hapless Ford - now they seemed ready to foist upon the United States an extremist cowboy in Reagan. Many partisans, in particular the campaign operatives who had in their youth come up under Eugene McCarthy or George McGovern and powered the Watergate Baby landslides of 1974, the case made itself.

Carey's camp strongly disagreed, and it was perhaps the greatest mark of the difference between the Old Left, New Dealer wing of the party and the ascendant New Left, college-educated apparatchik wing. Carey could vividly recall Reagan defeated an incumbent two-term Governor in 1966 on a campaign of backlash to the cultural excesses of the 1960s and how he had nearly toppled a sitting President of his own party four short years earlier, long before the public and the Republican base had aggressively turned against Ford. Winning a fourth term in the White House, especially when it was an open seat, was no easy task, but Reagan was not to be underestimated. His skepticism of some advisors suggesting he run on "Reagan's radicalism" was borne out with the Reagan camp's hard pivot to a softer, more optimistic tone out of the convention, playing on the Californian's silver screen charisma, and their nomination of a respected female foreign-policy wonk in Anne Armstrong as Reagan's VP choice, hoping that Armstrong's domestic ambiguity would avoid difficult questions on the issues of the day. Carey anticipated a deluge of aggressive campaigning and negative ads about "New York values" and "tax and spend liberals" against him to appeal to culturally conservative working-class voters, and if Reagan was going to attack his strengths - that is, the rebound of New York - then he was going to do the same.

Much of Reagan's political appeal had always been built on his movie star looks and movie star charisma. Though he was hardly a Cary Grant or Humphrey Bogart, much of America had still grown up watching Reagan's movies and he was a cultural icon for a broad swath of America for his career in Hollywood as much as he was a major leader of the New Right for his conservatism. The Brooklyn brain trust was skeptical that attacking the latter would do much good; Reagan was running as an anti-establishment outsider pitching his appeal entirely on having first conquered the old, tired Nixon-Ford establishment and gunning for the creaky New Deal establishment next. No, the way to hit Reagan was to attack his appeal as a movie star.

Historians of the 1980 campaign are not sure exactly who in the Carey camp coined the terms "the Brooklyn Boxer" and "Hollywood Ron," but whoever it was scored a major PR coup. The first term told the story about Carey that the campaign wanted to tell - a gruff, Irish-American who had been an amateur boxer in his youth; a war hero; a tough sunofabitch who "beat" the issues facing America's greatest city and saved it from bankruptcy and ruin. This was not a hippie-fueled McGovern or a lecturing moral scold like Carter - this was your father's kind of Democrat, a hard-edged union man who fights for what's right and isn't afraid to sock somebody in the mouth to do it. The "Brooklyn Boxer" campaign persona also served to try to paper over media aghastness at what were seen as below-the-belt attacks on Reagan's age and competency for office - if Reagan hadn't expected to be hit, repeatedly, he shouldn't have stepped in the ring. Pollster Pat Caddell suggested in later years that the aggressiveness of the Carey campaign probably wouldn't have worked against anybody else to the same effect and probably turned off more than a few gettable liberal and moderate voters, but "Hollywood Ron" was the left hook to the "Brooklyn Boxer" right.

"Hollywood Ron" was not Ronald Reagan, a John Wayne stand-in who would fix all of America's problems; he was a slick, empty actor, all shine and no substance. A Democrat attacking a Republican for being too associated with Hollywood was, and still is, a strange phenomenon, considering the film industry's liberal reputation then and now, but Carey leaned into it. The Carey campaign was relying heavily on making the electorate see Reagan as an unserious old man out of his element on the big stage, a B-movie actor who failed upwards and could not be trusted as anything other than sleazy liar who was too good on TV. On policy, meanwhile, the Democratic campaigns kept it simple - rather than attack Reagan's policies as too extreme, which Carey thought would fall flat with a very angry electorate open to drastic change, they instead simply reminded voters, over and over and over again, of all the things they disliked about the Republicans over the last twelve years, and presented them with a simple alternative, best encapsulated in Carey's famous campaign ad that played various scenes of the debacles of the 1970s and closed with the text: "Had Enough? Vote Carey."

 

[KingSweden24]

Bunker Busted​

Spain's populace was as shocked as anybody - the PSOE had won a majority government, and by a healthy margin, in a shocking, epochal landslide. Suarez's UCD collapsed to five seats, just one more than the Communists, as the Socialists and pseudo-Francoist, right-wing alliance People's Coalition absorbed most of the voters stuffed into his centrist bloc. The Socialists won 209 seats [1], well above the figured needed to command a majority of the Cortes on their own. Gonzalez appeared on television that evening, grinning from ear to ear, raising a clenched fist in the air and declaring "democracy has come to Spain at last!" Behind and in front of him, several Socialist revelers could be seen waving the purple-banded Republican flag.

Gonzalez only made it about halfway through his speech before the feed cut out - in Madrid, several members of the Bunker had seized control of Prado del Rey, the headquarters for Television Espanola (TVE), the state-owned sole television channel of Spain. Minutes later, tanks were driving into Madrid, and hundreds of confused soldiers were setting up barricades under vague orders of "controlling public unrest." Gonzalez, still speaking to the crowd, was informed of the cut of television feeds and was quickly evacuated, minutes before approximately forty Civil Guardsmen arrived at the scene to attempt to arrest him.

The coup attempt was a debacle. Alfonso Armada, its putative leader, overslept and thus did not make it to Prado del Rey to announce the seizure of government before the television station was besieged by an angry mob of civilians. The Civil Guard posted up in front of the Cortes, but then left late in the night, apparently because they had expected politicians to be there and were shocked to only find janitorial staff and a few civil servants. The decision to stage the coup late in the evening, when Madrilenos were out and about eating, drinking and partying to celebrate the election, meant that coup-sympathetic soldiers and officers ran into inebriated, outraged Spaniards who accosted and assaulted them. Most infantrymen, Guardsmen and even junior officers dispatched to the streets of Madrid and, belatedly, Barcelona and Bilbao were not hardened Francoists like their superiors and threw down their arms when they realized they were being used to put down democracy; nonetheless, about sixty people, most of them protestors, were killed across Spain during the violence, the majority of them in the fight for control of the television studios at Prado del Rey.

Once TVE was back in the hands of civil government, Gonzalez spoke angrily on television, denouncing the coup. The next day, King Juan Carlos I did the same; his silence for a full eighteen hours after broadcasting was under control rankled many on the left and among regionalists, who found it suspicious. [2] Gonzalez never entertained such thinking, appearing publicly with the King later in the week to project unity in forming a fairly moderate social democratic government to forge ahead with the democratic transition; nonetheless, it became an open question how much, exactly, Madrid controlled the country, and Spain's bumpy road to stability through the 1980s had cleared its largest, though certainly not its last, speed bump...

[1] Seven more than in 1982
[2] There's an open, lively and somewhat conspiratorial debate in Spain to this day about how much exactly Juan Carlos I knew about 23F ahead of time

 

[KingSweden24]

John Hinckley Junior's Joyride​

It is an age-old adage of American politics that voters really start paying attention after Labor Day and that this is when campaigns are won or lost. True as this is, one nevertheless would not envy the task ahead of the Reagan camp as September rolled around and they headed into the fall campaign season. A few days after winning the nomination in Detroit, Reagan had decamped to the Neshoba County Fair in Philadelphia, Mississippi, mere miles from where three civil rights workers were murdered by the local sheriff and several Klansmen in 1964 and buried in a river dike - one of the most infamous instances of white supremacist violence in the Civil Rights Era other than the Birmingham church bombing. The fair itself was a common stopping ground for politicians of both parties, particularly to enjoy its famous harness racing and practice a stump speech. During his address, Reagan remarked, "I believe in states' rights," setting off a political firestorm due to the sensitive nature of the county where he uttered it and the context that expression has long held in Southern politics. Even infamously segregationist Senator James Eastland [1] suggested that the prepared remarks were "ill-advised." The campaign, which viewed the South as its major offensive area - Mississippi had, surprisingly, very narrowly voted for Ford and without Carter on the ballot the Deep South seemed like fertile ground for its continuing realignment particularly under the auspices of Reagan's conservatism - was on the back foot immediately, savaged by the Carey campaign and a number of Southern politicians.

Further complicating Reagan's "pivot" strategy for the autumn polls was the dogged campaign against him by Congressman Leo Ryan and his Jonestown Families group, who often appeared at his campaign events (particularly on the West Coast) to demand answers for exactly what Reagan had known about Jim Jones' activities during his time as Governor. Ryan's "one-man war" against the California political establishment was not seen as being particularly decisive in the 1980 campaign - Reagan would carry native California, albeit narrowly - but it was still an annoyance that his campaign was frustrated they had to answer. It was for that reason that as late September arrived, the first of two Presidential debates loomed on the horizon and a chance for Reagan to reset the tone of the campaign and speak more directly to American voters as a contrast to not only Carey but Ford and Nixon as well arrived.

Carey, of course, had little interest in allowing that. The campaign's strategy was after all not to make the vote so much a referendum on Reagan, himself, but on Republican governance in general. "Reagan: More of the Same" was a common refrain on television advertisements in addition to the famous "Had Enough? Vote Carey" bumper sticker and slogan. The first debate was probably the best opportunity for Reagan to undo his substantial, albeit somewhat narrowing, polling deficit, and in that sense it didn't quite work. That is not to say that Reagan did not perform well. An experienced communicator before the camera, as one would expect of an actor, Reagan was polished, disciplined and portrayed himself as "a common-sense, everyday American." Carey was seen to scoff at that remark and chuckle to himself while rolling his eyes, but other than that the debate was, for the most part, calm, courteous and professional. Reagan was regarded by most pundits as having done what he needed to do to not make his situation worse, but there was mixed reactions - typically along partisan or ideological lines - around whether he'd done enough to chance the trajectory of the race and separate himself from the Ford brand. Inside the Reagan camp, advisors were upbeat about Reagan's portrayal of a "cool, collected and capable conservative" - Ed Rollins, pioneering a concept that would soon be known as the "spin room," went out to a gaggle of reporters after the debate and declared, "the Carey campaign and their friends in the liberal media would have you think that Reagan can barely form sentences and is a wild-eyed, crazy man, but we all saw something else today - a true leader who's ready to be President on January 20th and hit the ground running day one, and I think Americans know that!"

Of course, the debate - which did in fact improve Reagan's favorables and polling deficit a bit - was quickly overshadowed by one of the most bizarre news stories of the nascent 1980s. On October 2, 1980, a young man named John Hinckley Junior boarded an Eastern Air Lines flight - mere weeks after its pending merger with Pan Am had been announced - Nashville, Tennessee, bound for Los Angeles. Hinckley was a mentally disturbed individual with delusions of grandeur and an unhealthy obsession with the film Taxi Driver, particularly its young starlet Jodie Foster, and identified with the movie's antihero Travis Bickle. He had been stalking Foster for months, to the point that she'd filed a restraining order against him and pondered hiring a security detail to avoid him. Frustrated that she was not reciprocating his feelings, Hinckley resolved to make a grand, epic display to get her attention: after initially pondering stalking and then assassinating President Gerald Ford, he instead resolved to hijack a plane and refuse to relent until she would speak with him. [2]

At 30,000 feet, Hinckley brandished two pistols, subdued a flight attendant and forced his way into the cockpit, holding both pilot and co-pilot at gunpoint and ordering them to fly to New Haven, Connecticut, where his demand was that Foster board the flight to speak with him. Naturally, Foster refused, and New Haven police attempted to surround the plane - leading to Hinckley demanding the pilots take off and fly to Detroit instead. In the end, Hinckley's "joyride" saw Eastern Flight 722 bounce around the country to six different airports to be refueled as he rattled off increasingly bizarre demands to FAA and FBI officials over the cockpit's communications system, only allowing two elderly passengers with heart conditions to disembark. In the end, dehydrated and exhausted after two days zipping around the country, Hinckley directed the pilots to fly to Los Angeles, their initial destination, where he agreed to surrender in return for a nationally televised interview which the FBI very distinctly did not grant him.

The strange affair dominated and fascinated American media for well over a week, drowning out campaign coverage even as Reagan and Carey both barnstormed the country, and reporters' questions to both candidates focused more on what they thought of one of the oddest American hijackings ever rather than the issues. Neither candidate was particularly keen to comment, and by the time the media circus was over, it was approaching late October - just in time for the anticipated Vice Presidential debate featuring Anne Armstrong as the first female Vice Presidential nominee, but also having burned precious time for Reagan to capture the country's attention...

[1] @peeter made a good point to me in a DM about why Eastland would probably have sought reelection in a 1978 where Carter lost and Ford was in the WH, so a bit of a retcon here. Not that his voting record is that different from Thad Cochran's - these are both very conservative men.
[2] So this is actually true - Hinckley had initially decided he was going to hijack a plane (as was popular in the 70s) and then got cold feet and decided he was going to shoot Carter in Nashville in late 1980, got cold feet again, and finally worked up the courage to be lying in wait for Reagan in Washington DC.

 

[KingSweden24]

The Turkish Coup​

By the fall of 1980, the long-running civil conflict in Turkey had reached a breaking point. In the previous five years, the country had been consumed by political violence that claimed between ten and fifteen lives per day in an endless cycle of riots, assassinations and retaliations. Left-wingers hoping for a communist revolution and religious right-wingers opposed to both this and the over-arching secularism of the Kemalist establishment had plunged the country into a piercing instability. The Turkish parliament, elected via a generous proportional representation, was constantly deadlocked between an alphabet soup of small competing parties representing concentrated interest groups bickering with each other and unable to perform simple constitutional tasks such as electing a President of the Republic, and the economy was seeing triple digit inflation, wavering on the edge of collapse after the price shocks rippling through Western economies for thirty months.

The coup d'etat of September 12, 1980, was thus a Hail Mary attempt at establishing some level of stability. Kenan Evren, its leader, came to chair a National Defense Council that rounded up over half a million partisans of both the communists and the rightist Grey Wolves organization for detention, hoping to bring about some semblance of peace. Economic and political reforms were paired with the aggressive crackdown on militant parties. Despite the galling suspension of civil rights, Turkey did seem to claw its way back from the brink.

Of course, many in Turkey saw the CIA's fingerprints on the matter. Turkey's strategic position on the Bosporus as well as adjacent to the Soviet Caucasus, Iran, and Iraq made it a key American ally; to have it fall to the kind of religious fanatics that had nearly overthrown Iran and were now threatening Saudi Arabia or a communist revolution was simply unacceptable. The import of Western economic experts into Ankara to help the Evren regime plot out next steps raised eyebrows among many Turks, as well. Such suspicions were never definitively proven, and many middle-class Turks just breathed a sigh of relief as the cycle of violence and economic chaos was arrested in the early 1980s, but in the context of the deteriorating detente and concerns about Middle Eastern conflagration in the Ford years, it was hard not to wonder... [1]

[1] The Evren coup was in my notes for a long time but I honestly forgot where I was going with this. The first two paragraphs are basically verbatim OTL, the third paragraph just places the events in TTL's context.

 

[KingSweden24]

The Last Leg​

The preeminent event on the October '80 campaign schedule was not, in fact, the second and final Carey-Reagan debate but rather the first Vice Presidential debate to feature a woman, as Anne Armstrong and Reuben Askew squared off on stage at Washington University in St. Louis. The Reagan campaign was eager for the event - they were gradually starting to close September's gaping polling deficit and were bullish on Armstrong's appeals to "the Mom Majority," as they termed it. The debate drew higher viewership than either main Presidential debate, and Armstrong performed well, showing off her foreign policy credentials with decisive, informative and knowledgeable answers on issues ranging from Central America (particularly El Salvador, which would feature very prominently in the campaign within weeks) to Iran to the Soviet bloc. Askew was his usual cheerful, sunny self and avoided criticizing Armstrong too firmly; in a reversal of the Ford-Dole dynamic four years earlier, it was Carey who was the attack dog and Askew who was the chipper, optimistic sidekick who spent most of the debate laying out the case for the "team of housecleaners" in himself and his ticket mate who had steered New York and Florida through tough times. Armstrong was seen as winning the debate and as anticipated scored well with women, a crucial jolt to the Reagan campaign, though Republican operatives began to mutter that it had been too little, too late, and was not enough to seriously change the trajectory of the race, especially as unemployment and inflation numbers both ticked up together in October.

The second debate, held five days before election night after Carey and Reagan criss-crossed the country holding event after event, was thus the final chance for the two candidates to make their case to the American people. The debate was looser and zippier than the first; when asked if he would be able to effectively govern in Washington with likely Democratic majorities, Reagan quipped, "I've been around Democrats my whole life; as Governor Carey keeps reminding us all, I've spent a fair bit of time in Hollywood!" Carey closed the evening out, however, with an effective, now-famous appeal directly to the camera. Speaking after Reagan's closing remarks, the New York Governor remarked: "If you liked the last twelve years of flatter wages, fewer jobs and higher prices, boy will you love the next four years if Governor Reagan is elected. But if you didn't, then I have a different choice to offer you." The closer stuck, and Carey was seen as winning the second debate narrowly. Two days later, on the weekend before the election, the Sunday edition of most newspapers led with a story of Salvadoran soldiers raping and murdering several American nuns, a grim reminder of the chaotic atmosphere [1] in Latin America under Gerald Ford's second term and certainly an unhelpful headline for Republican campaigns, even if El Salvador was far from the minds of most voters.

And with that, the campaign had come to a close, and all that was left was to wait for results on election night.

[1] This happened in early December 1980 IOTL

 

[KingSweden24]

1980 United States Presidential election

Map Made with US Election Atlas
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