AeroTheZealousOne
Monthly Donor
Why is this stuff not canon? I love all of it.
Come on, I believe we all know that LBJ is secretly immortal ITTL, am I right?
Blue Skies in Camelot: An Alternate 60's and Beyond
- Thread starter President_Lincoln
- Start date
Why is this stuff not canon? I love all of it.
Come on, I believe we all know that LBJ is secretly immortal ITTL, am I right?
This is awesome. Thanks!
I didn't know if anyone else liked the idea of DeSapio having a bigger role ITTL.
So I just realized something,the supreme court is about to have a lot of vacancies,which Romney will have to fill. conservative have an real oppurtunity to exert power by pressuring the president on who to nominate
I doubt he could though. RFK was not only the healthiest of the Kennedy brothers, but his mother lived to 105. I could actually see him living a similar length, perhaps to the point that he might still be alive by ITTL 2018.
Romney himself might not like any nominee that too conservative anyway.
True, but if the conservatives were clever they could exploit Democratic divisions, for example I could see them making a deal with Johnson and Long by nominating someone who was for New Deal Progams and had no problem with goverment expansion but also was aganst 'coddling criminals" and gave the state a wide hand in certain cases like obscenity laws and the like.
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BP Booker
Banned
Honestly Romney is that type of Liberal-Conservative so far removed from our current political climate that I would have no idea just what type of Supreme Court Justice he would even nominate; there is no real context as to with who he should be compared to
Being tough on crime and gutting welfare are two very different things. For that all the LBJ wing needs to do is present their own guy. They can even use the RFK wing candidate and party unity as a scare tactic to scare the right in supporting a new deal law and order true LBJ like figure.
BP Booker
Banned
“Oh my God can you believe President Romney appointed the ghost of George Sutherland to fill the vacancy left by Hugo Black?”
"Well he was the least worst of the Four Horseman, and he even promised to appoint the ghost Charles Evan Hughes to fill the spot of John Marshal when he dies. If he dies. I heard the Democrats are working on that not happening”
“How?”
“Sacrificing congressmen to a giant golden statue of Eleanor Roosevelt”
"Well he was the least worst of the Four Horseman, and he even promised to appoint the ghost Charles Evan Hughes to fill the spot of John Marshal when he dies. If he dies. I heard the Democrats are working on that not happening”
“How?”
“Sacrificing congressmen to a giant golden statue of Eleanor Roosevelt”
This tough enough for ya!
Attachments
BP Booker
Banned
Man, werent conventions wild back then? Instead of todays cheerleading pro-forma affairs where the worst thing that could happen is someone getting heckled. I wonder if well get one last truely disastrous convention from the Democrats or the Republcians. Considering that ITTL DNC 1968 will probably be remembered as an organized affair where Humphrey, Smathers and the Kennedys valiantly tried - but failed- to rally the troops. In fact the creation of the ACP probably helped a lot in that regard, not conservative walk outs like in 1948 or 1964 because the conservatives had either left or been kicked out of the party
In my mind, the last truly disastrous convention for Democrats was 1972 most likely, as the party platform that emerged became a big soundbite for Nixon's emphasis on the Democrats becoming too extreme.
The last bad convention for Republicans was probably 2012. It succeeded in being bland and featuring Clint Eastwood's "chair incident", that sucked airtime from an already dull convention especially cause everyone talked about for three weeks after.
I think that with the parties as divided internally as they are now, the increased number of vanity candidates making primary votes more widely distributed, digital campaigns making campaigns have legs, and the prospect for a career on TV after a walkout as "the last good Republican who appears on MSNBC" or "the only sane democrat, who talks on Fox News or YouTube", Convention drama seems more on the upswing than ever.
A rising politician might want to do something crazy for that 1 minute soundbite that oculd launch his or her career.
Not to mention the increased anger inside political circles....
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BP Booker
Banned
The Al Gore Hour, or how Im totally not bitter Joe Biden stole the nomination from me at the 1996 DNC and I would have defeated Hillary Rodham if I had gotten the chance.
Only on Fox News
BP Booker
Banned
"Up next, on a new segment Id like to call Quest for the last Good Republican..."
"Oh no"
"Oh yes, we have the Iron Lady from the Bay State, too hot for John Thunes Republican Party and too cool for RNC 2016, we have Massachusets Governor Elizabeth Warren!"
"Delighted to be here Al"
"Better here at this wretched hive of scum, villany and liberalism than at Fenway Park watching John Thune get crowned right?"
"Well I would rather take a hike down a dumpster fire that do that"
Republican Governor of Massachusetts Elizabeth Warren at Al Frankens One America Radio show
"Oh no"
"Oh yes, we have the Iron Lady from the Bay State, too hot for John Thunes Republican Party and too cool for RNC 2016, we have Massachusets Governor Elizabeth Warren!"
"Delighted to be here Al"
"Better here at this wretched hive of scum, villany and liberalism than at Fenway Park watching John Thune get crowned right?"
"Well I would rather take a hike down a dumpster fire that do that"
Republican Governor of Massachusetts Elizabeth Warren at Al Frankens One America Radio show
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Chapter 56
Chapter 56: War! What is it Good For? - 1970 in the War in Cambodia
Immortalized in John Filo’s Pulitzer Prize winning photograph of Mary Ann Vecchio, a fourteen year old runaway, kneeling over the body of Jeffrey Miller minutes after he was fatally shot by members of the Ohio National Guard; as well as “Ohio”, the hit Rock song by Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young; the “Kent State Massacre” as the incident came to be known cast a dark shadow over the Romney Administration and the national dialogue on the War in Southeast Asia. The Guard had been called in to quell clashes between pro-war and anti-war student activists following a massive protest which came to the campus on May 4th, 1970 in the wake of Secretary of State Nixon’s announcement on April 27th that the United States would not seek peace with its growing list of enemies in Indochina, “until a just, honorable peace” could be secured. In the minds of the Administration, this meant Pol Pot removed as a threat to a capitalist Cambodia, and assurances from Hanoi and Beijing that they would not show aggression to “the free governments of Saigon and Phnom Penh.” As the areas around the Cambodian capital became more secure, and American troops under the command of Army Chief of Staff Creighton Abrams performed highly efficient search and destroy operations on Khmer Rouge insurgents, it appeared to many back home that America and her allies were definitely winning this war. For most Republicans and hawks in the Democratic Party, the success troops were finding on the ground was proof that the war was indeed worth fighting, and would soon be brought to its successful conclusion. To Democratic doves and the ever larger number of protestors who supported them however, the real issue was that these tactical gains were coming at a tremendous cost in treasure and American lives. The Khmer Rouge, trained in guerilla warfare by elite members of the Vietcong, were ruthless in their insurgency, and made the Americans pay for every inch they took in blood. Among the rank and file of the men fighting, such as Private First Class Al Gore Jr., rumors starting spreading of the horrific treatment their comrades received if they ever had the misfortune of being captured. Pol Pot practiced psychological warfare at its most unspeakable. Torture, mutilation, disfigurement, nothing was off the table for the mad Marxist. Because there was a near constant possibility that the Khmer Rouge’s jungle strongholds would be threatened by the dreaded B-52s on their numerous, almost daily bombing runs, POWs were often put in cages of bamboo or rusty steel, carried up the Ho Chi Minh trail through communist Laos and deposited in Hanoi, the North Vietnamese Capital. North Vietnam was not officially at war with the Khmer Republic, but their overt military and material support of Pol Pot’s revolutionary enemies made them a de facto enemy of the United States in this war nonetheless. Abrams told his officers to command their troops to treat Vietcong as enemy combatants and to shoot them on sight. The Ho Chi Minh trail, extending hundreds of miles through the Indochinese peninsula, saw an immense amount of cargo and hundreds of prisoners throughout the war, of which Al Gore Jr. was one of the first. Captured during an early search and destroy op just two dozen miles from Phnom Penh, Gore signed up for the army voluntarily the year before, hoping to help his father, Tennessee Senator Al Gore Sr. (D) win reelection in what was promising to be a tight race come November. He never anticipated becoming a POW for his efforts. Though he would later describe his experiences in the “Hanoi Hilton” as “absolute hell on Earth”, he would also soon meet another young man there with whom he would share many disagreements, but an eternal bond of friendship.
Back home, in the wake of the Kent State Shootings, President Romney felt tremendous sadness and remorse, believing that he could have done more to prevent this tragedy. The massacre was followed four days later by the so called “Hard Hat Riot” in New York City, where unionized construction workers attacked 1,000 college students protesting the War and the events at Kent State. Though thankfully no one was killed in the riot, the images being beamed into the living rooms of millions of Americans; violence, strife, and anarchy in the streets, did little to help the President’s sagging popularity. On the left, the President’s opponents declared him “cold, aloof, and heartless” to the carnage “his” war in Southeast Asia was causing. Meanwhile on the right, William F. Buckley, Ronald Reagan, and others questioned why the Commander in Chief was allowing this sort of chaos and not living up to his promises made at the ‘68 convention of being “President Law and Order” when his country needed him to be. As was his habit, Romney did what he could to strike a middle response between the two extremes. In an address to the American people delivered from the Oval Office, Romney apologized for the actions of the National Guardsmen at Kent State and condemned the violence of the "Yaffers" (Members of the Young America's Foundation or "YAF", a right-wing youth organization) and anti-war activists. “In this country of ours, freedom of assembly and freedom of speech are two of our most sacred traditions. To the young men and women fired upon in Ohio last week, I can only offer my sincerest apologies, and a promise that in the future, such bloodshed will never be repeated. My thoughts, condolences, and prayers are ever with their families, and I make this vow as well: political extremism and the violence that comes with it, whether it be of the left or the right, will not be tolerated by this Administration. We solve problems in this country with ballots, not bullets.” The President closed his address by announcing that Vice President Bush, representing the Administration, would be visiting Kent State to hold a televised dialogue with the students there, and address questions they or their parents might have about what was being done in Washington to move the country forward. The address and subsequent dialogue faced lukewarm reception by the public. Once again, Romney’s moderate centrism caught him in a pincer on an immensely divisive issue, with both sides trying to pin him down to one position or the other. Vice President Bush, rapidly becoming a master of tactful answers and repositioning himself as necessary, managed to hold his own slightly better than his boss, and insisted that the Administration was dedicated to “freedom in Southeast Asia. Nothing more, nothing less.” Following Bush’s outreach, the hit to the President’s approval ratings were mitigated somewhat, held to a steady 46% by tactically successful manneauvers in Cambodia which resulted in the “pacification” of southern Cambodia by the end of June, 1970.
Watching the speech in his living room with his elder brother James, William F. Buckley took the whole spectacle of public violence and Romney’s reaction in and sipped from a mug of coffee. “Well Jim, it appears that our President has made his law and order position quite clear.” He drawled in his trademark transatlantic accent and flashed his signature smile before turning to a map of New York State, select counties of working class, ethnic white voters circled in red pen. “You’ve got a primary next month. I believe it’s time we did the same.”
…
Nicknamed “the Triumvirate” by those working under them in the fields of diplomacy and defense, Secretary of State Richard Nixon, Secretary of Defense Omar Bradley, and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger considered themselves the United States’ best hope of a military victory in Southeast Asia as the war became ever more intense. Entrusted by President Romney with the more “hands on” aspects of operational and strategic planning, these men were not unaware of the time crunch under which they worked thanks to rising public unrest against the war at home. The Kent State Massacre had not made their jobs any easier, and each awoke on an average morning to find their offices besieged by protesters, bearing signs which accused them of being murderers and far worse. This experience shook Secretary Bradley, whose service in the Second World War had been one of a united American people in support of his efforts. Secretary Nixon advised him not to take it personally. “With all this damn unrest, it’s hard to get the American people to agree on much of anything these days.” He told the former five star general, with bitterness plainly evident in his eyes. Kissinger, his sense for realpolitik ever flexing and reshaping to fit morphing situations, called the Triumverate’s June 2nd meeting to order and read through the list of topics to address before they went their separate ways for the time being. First and foremost, Kissinger and Bradley both believed that if the U.S. was going to truly shift the tide, and take the fight away from Phnom Penh and to the communists, they needed a means of shutting down the Ho Chi Minh trail. An American invasion of Laos, which the trail ran through from its start in Hanoi, seemed the most obvious solution, but was problematic for a number of reasons. President Romney’s reluctance to send more American troops to the fight would limit the army’s chances for a swift victory. The war, the President reasoned, was already unpopular enough. Sending even more conscript soldiers seemed to him to be political suicide. Further, an invasion of an officially neutral country by a superpower like the United States was unlikely to “play” well in the United Nations, and would likely earn swift condemnation from the international community. The Soviet Union under Andropov, who seemed for the moment to be continuing his predecessors’ policies of detente, was likely to end this and retaliate by once again sending supplies to the Khmer Rouge and Viet Cong, if only to spite the Americans and Chinese, neither of whom were playing nice with Moscow these days. Bradley and Kissinger quickly drew up a proposal for expanding bombing runs to Laos to bring to the President, but this in of itself was unlikely to shut down the supply trains. The communists had become quite adept at stowing themselves away in the jungles, making them damn near impossible to hit from above. This, combined with a communist government, friendly to both Pol Pot and Giap in Laos, meant that nothing short of an invasion would truly mean the end of the Trail. The Triumvirate were caught in a bind.
Then, Secretary Nixon made a suggestion: involve Khanh’s South Vietnam in the war once again by asking them to invade Laos instead, with American air support. Though the Kennedy Administration had made sure to build up the South’s civilian economy and provide relief and aid to the citizenry before complete American withdrawal in 1967, plenty of tanks, planes, bombs, and M-16s were shipped to Saigon as well. South Vietnam by 1970 possessed a formidable, highly trained volunteer army in its own right, with a former General in that army currently serving as President. The border between North and South was secure, and the South was stable enough to attract defectors from Hanoi thanks primarily to the efforts of the Kennedy brothers and the United States. To Nixon, it was perfectly reasonable for the United States then, in its own hour of need, to turn to President Khanh and ask for the debt to be repaid via an invasion of an aggressive communist nation on the South’s doorstep. Kissinger informed his colleague that the Vietnamese were unlikely to be thrilled about the prospect of war once again so soon after peace had been settled for them. Nixon responded that “this war never really ended” and that South Vietnam would never truly be secure from communist invasion until all of its neighbors in Southeast Asia were secure as well. With President Romney’s express approval and a state visit to Saigon by Secretary Nixon in late June, Khanh’s government came around to the idea and on July 1st, 1970, launched their invasion of Laos, declaring the military action to not be an invasion at all, but rather “hunting down Viet Cong divisions who had escaped into Laos’ territory”. These land units were to be accompanied by American air forces, including a certain fighter pilot flying under the callsign, “Ripper”.
…
U.S. Air Force First Lieutenant George Walker Bush, aka “Ripper”, had been serving in Cambodia for nearly two years by the time the order came down to expand bombing operations to communist positions in Laos as well. Word was among the rank and file that the South Vietnamese were finally being called to settle accounts for all the aid they’d been receiving from Washington, and were set to launch an invasion and take the fight to the commies on the ground. About damn time. Bush thought when he first heard the news, late one evening over a game of pool in the clubhouse with his fellow officers. He enjoyed flying his missions, loved it even, and looked forward to the prospect of being assigned more. Even as the war grew more intense, President Kennedy left office, President Romney came in and shipped 100,000 ground troops to the jungle, the rambunctious Texan’s commitment to the war and its objectives never wavered. He truly believed that he and his fellow soldiers were the best hope of preventing millions in Southeast Asia from living under the yolk of totalitarian communism. In Bush’s mind, what could be more American than spreading freedom around the world and scaring the hides off of those that would threaten to take that liberty away? Combined with his political convictions, there were still his personal drives as well, of course.
God knows Bush had dreamed his whole life of being a war hero, just like his old man. Those stories of dramatic feats of valor replayed themselves in the young man’s head everytime he suited up and climbed into his cockpit. Several times since his father’s election to the Vice Presidency, Lt. Bush had been offered various “prestigious” (meaning less dangerous) assignments serving on secure air bases in exotic locations all over the world. Each time he was offered one of these positions however, Bush defiantly refused. It didn’t sit right with him to think about the son of the nation’s second in command using his status to get out of combat duty while other young men fought and died for their country. He did not want to leave a war, likely the only one he would ever fight in, without first proving himself to be just as brave as his father had been in World War II. One night, after having one too many shots of whisky at the clubhouse, the pilot even boldly declared that he “would either leave this hellhole with a medal around his neck or in a body bag”. Little could he have known just how prophetic this drunken rambling would prove. Though Bush enjoyed the camaraderie of his fellow servicemen, and was zealously dedicated to the attainment of martial glory, his mind did often turn to home, and his heart ached for the familiarity and closeness of the people he loved.
The United States was a rapidly changing place at the dawn of the 1970s. Social progress, cultural diffusion and experimentation, and political upheaval had transformed America into a very different nation from the one Lt. Bush had left only two years prior. Even within his own family, life was totally different. His parents and three of his four younger siblings, Neil, Marvin, and Dorothy, moved to Washington after his father’s election and delighted the capital with their familial closeness, impressed them with George Sr.’s frankness and dealmaking acumen, and warmed their hearts with Second Lady Barbara’s benevolent radiance. His eldest younger sibling, John Ellis “Jeb” Bush meanwhile had recently gone to Mexico to teach English as a second language, where he would one day meet his future wife and discover a love for community building and a knack for Latin American relations. “Dubya” as he was known to friends, missed his family tremendously, and wrote and called as often as he could, especially to the little ones, his mother, and his father, whom he was always eager to impress with tales of his victories in the skies. The Vice President, who had crashed several times during World War II and was lucky to make it out of that conflict alive, told his son he was immensely proud of him, but warned him not to get too cocky. “You know how it would absolutely tear us apart if something were to happen to you, George.” His father told him late one night, at the end of a heartfelt telephone call. “You stay safe out there, you hear? That’s an order.”
“Alright, Dad.” The younger Bush rolled his eyes. “I mean, yes, sir.” The son craved his father’s approval, but he was not unaware of the political boon his service was to his father and the Administration as a whole. The Vice President being able to say “my son is serving too” silenced or at least delegitimized many protesters’ arguments that Cambodia was a war being fought by the poor for the benefit of the rich and powerful.
Though calls and letters from his parents and siblings were always welcome, there was someone whom the First Lieutenant nonetheless looked forward to hearing from even more. Hillary Rodham returned to Wellesley College at the conclusion of the 1968 Presidential campaign, where her strategy of targeting young people and women for the Romney-Bush coalition had been crucial in securing the GOP’s narrow electoral victory over Hubert Humphrey in the Midwest and thus, the country as a whole. Despite taking a semester off, Rodham managed to throw herself headlong into her studies and graduated with her original class in May of 1969 with a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science. From there, her plans were clear. She immediately applied to and was accepted by Yale Law, where she would spend the next several years of her life working toward her final degree. Though she was fiercely independent and was offered many chances to slip out for dates and nights on the town with handsome beaus from all over New England and the country, Hillary never managed to get her mind off of George Bush the younger. The two maintained their correspondence and over time came to regard themselves as being in something of a long distance relationship. On the one occasion that he was given leave to return home for Christmas in 1969, Lt. Bush rushed to see not just his family in Washington, but up to Connecticut to spend as much time as he could with Hillary, whom he had not actually seen in person since the Republican Convention the year prior. The two found that their chemistry, especially in person, was absolutely undeniable. They were, to put it lightly, falling in love. They decided that as soon as the war was out, Bush would return home and further his education either at Yale or Harvard, so that they could begin a life together and try dating “for real”. Both the Bushes and the Rodhams approved of the match, though the Vice President was probably more impressed with the bright, deeply insightful Hillary than Hugh Rodham was of the cheeky and mischievous George W. Bush.
Shortly after composing a letter to Hillary on July 4th, 1970, the first in which he worked up the courage to write those three magical words “I Love you”, Bush was given his most dangerous assignment yet. In a joint Air Force - Navy operation, Lt. Bush and his fellow fighter pilots would be launched from the deck of the U.S.S. Enterprise in the Gulf of Tonkin to escort a wing of B-52s out of Phnom Penh with their intended target being Vientiane, the capital of Laos. Bush’s temporary commanding officer for the mission, Captain John McCain, would fly alongside him. The run went according to plan at first, but was caught off guard by unusually fierce anti-aircraft fire as they crossed the border between North Vietnam and Laos. McCain and several of the other pilots were able to enact evasive maneuvers and made it past the guns unscathed, Lt. Bush however was not quite so lucky. His F-4 Phantom II jet fighter was caught on its right wing, and he quickly began to lose altitude as his plane plummeted toward the jungle floor below. Captain McCain called out to the downed Lieutenant over radio and received a distress signal in reply, informing the officer that Bush survived the crash, but before an evac could be sent, the downed pilot was taken prisoner by Khmer Rouge insurgents. Lt. Bush was pulled from the wreckage of his Phantom, his injuries consisting mainly of a handful of bruises and a broken rib. When his captors first received him, they mostly left him alone, pointing Chinese made rifles at him and barking orders as they attempted to salvage what intelligence and supplies they could from the Phantom. When they checked his dog tags however and discovered who he was, the lead insurgent allowed himself a terrible smile. “Get this man in a cage!” He declared gleefully. “Our glorious leader shall be pleased to learn that we’ve captured the son of their Vice President.”
A world away in Columbus, Ohio, Vice President George Herbert Walker Bush was concluding one of his “campus talks” at Ohio State University, in response to protests there against the new bombing raids in Laos, which the activists saw as an unnecessary expansion of an already bloody conflict. Bush listened patiently to the students who spoke to he and the College Dean throughout the evening, trying his best to show that he understood their anger and fear of losing loved ones, but insisting on the rightness of America’s cause in the war. After being allotted a few minutes to give his closing remarks, and being rewarded with a mix of applause and some boos and heckling for his efforts, the Vice President gathered his belongings and his Secret Service team and prepared to depart the college. As he stepped out of the lecture hall, he was greeted by the site of a man in military uniform speaking to the Second Lady, who had her head in her hands and was weeping uncontrollably. His heart sank into his stomach. No. He thought desperately, helplessly. The Vice President rushed to his wife and immediately took her into his arms. “What is it, Babs? What’s going on?”
Unable to answer over her sobs, the Second Lady pressed her warm, wet face into her husband’s shirt and pulled him close. The uniformed man who had just spoken to her frowned deeply and cleared his throat before he gave the nation’s second most powerful man the terrible news. “I’m sorry to say this Mr. Vice President, but just a few hours ago we received an intelligence report that Lt. George Walker Bush was shot down during a mission over Vientiane. The Lieutenant survived his crash, but was thereafter taken prisoner by insurgents. We are currently unaware of his location or status.”
A sea of emotions: heartache, relief, sorrow, and finally rage crashed through the elder Bush’s defenses and he stepped back from his wife before letting out a cry of anguish of his own. “What are you trying to tell me?!” He demanded of the soldier, who could only look at the ground in clear discomfort. “Where is my son?”
“We do not currently have that information, sir. But the Pentagon and CIA are at work already trying to find him. We’ll let you know as soon as any progress is made.”
The Vice President swallowed hard and fought back tears. Through some miracle of resolve, he managed to thank the soldier and receive a secret service agent who emerged from a nearby office with a telephone in his hand. “Sir,” the Agent, Meyers, Bush thought his name was; said. “It’s the President for you in Washington. He says he needs to speak with you right away.”
Next Time on Blue Skies in Camelot: The Manson Saga Comes (Blessedly) to an End
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