Challenge: most idyllic 1960s possible

With a 1964 POD, create a best-case scenario for the decade. Humming economy, a balanced federal budget, Vietnam a non-factor and minimal racial disturbances. Ultimate goal: secure LBJ a second term running on peace and prosperity. Bonus for defeating Reagan.
 
Well, in Canada it would be having Winters beat Trudeau in '68 for the Liberal leadership, having Daniel Johnson Sr. live in Quebec to beat the crap out of Bourassa's left-leaning Liberals in 1970, and Paul Hellyer dying in a car crash, thus preventing Armed Forces unification. So I want American ideas. :)
 
I just said 1964 POD. Besides, having FDR live through his final term is ASB- it requires giving up all the pleasures of life- smoking, drinking, and not counting a history of weak cardiology in the family.
 
I dispute that a balanced federal budget is required for economic prosperity and growth (see: World War II), but I'll leave that be for now. ;)

I think that you have to have Lyndon Johnson fundamentally make the case for not intervening in Vietnam not only to the Congress, but to the American people and to the people advising him, which probably means firing much of the Kennedy cabinet that gave him such terrible advice. This means that the Great Society continues unimpeded, living standards rise, and generally, the economy continues to hum along with a bit of inflation that can be solved easily with the addition of price controls on certain products or by raising taxes to prevent the economy from overheating.

Ultimately, a successful Great Society and peace at home makes Johnson a shoo-in for another Presidential round, probably against Nixon, but possibly against Reagan if Nixon decides that running against Johnson is suicide. If Reagan runs and is destroyed, expect American conservatism to likewise concede defeat for sometime to come, with the continual dominance of the Rockefeller Republicans in the GOP and the New Deal and Great Society wing of the Democratic Party.
 
I dispute that a balanced federal budget is required for economic prosperity and growth (see: World War II), but I'll leave that be for now. ;)

I think that you have to have Lyndon Johnson fundamentally make the case for not intervening in Vietnam not only to the Congress, but to the American people and to the people advising him, which probably means firing much of the Kennedy cabinet that gave him such terrible advice. This means that the Great Society continues unimpeded, living standards rise, and generally, the economy continues to hum along with a bit of inflation that can be solved easily with the addition of price controls on certain products or by raising taxes to prevent the economy from overheating.

Ultimately, a successful Great Society and peace at home makes Johnson a shoo-in for another Presidential round, probably against Nixon, but possibly against Reagan if Nixon decides that running against Johnson is suicide. If Reagan runs and is destroyed, expect American conservatism to likewise concede defeat for sometime to come, with the continual dominance of the Rockefeller Republicans in the GOP and the New Deal and Great Society wing of the Democratic Party.

Oh my that does sound lovely, sigh...

Sure does beat my idea of pot accidentally getting mixed into the corn supply in 65 so everybody gets super high and mellow for the remainder of the decade.
 
Not going into Vietnam is absolutely crucial for this one. Without it, the stresses of doing the Great Society and the Space Race will be much less damaging. In fact, the last one will be propped up rather a bit, what with the aerospace companies not having as many defense contracts. Especially if Johnson can go another term (haven't you talked about what poor health he was in, Rogue?), he liked the space program. *Sigh*.
 
I agree with the no-Vietnam argument. But Johnson would have to find another outlet for the hawks. At the same time, apart from keeping MLK alive, is there a way to keep the Human Rights Movement from spiraling into chaos (the radical feminists, Malcolm X and the hippies)?
 
I think a 1964 POD is too late for a no-Vietnam timeline. Johnson had reversed JFK's move toward disengagement within a few days of taking office in November 1963.
 
and in Germany...

- have Willy Brandt thoroughly reform Berlin's police during his tenure as major so that it less ressembles the 1920s police and more the late FRG's police. This might de-escalate the situation during the Shah-visit (whose cancellation would have been a good idea either) and prevent the death of Benno Ohnesorg (or someone else meeting the wrong kind of policeperson at the wrong time)

- make Rudi Dutschke survive his assasination attempt with only minor wounds so that he can continue his interesting political development with more vigour and not as a semi-martyr

- any delay in the building of the Berlin wall is a good thing. Even in the first two weeks of August 1961, more than 40,000 East-Germans left the GDR. The more people leave, the sooner the GDR becomes dependant on the West and a drain on the Sovjet block's ressources.

- have Rainer Barzel instead of Kurt Georg Kiesinger become Bundeskanzler in 1965. Being a moderate within the CDU and without the ballast of a NS-membership in 33-45, he would be less of a controversial figure and might also be a good chancellor for the Great Coalition
 
In relation to the US something has to happen to prevent major involvement in Vietnam

I guess a US President could have done something different in 1964. You would have ended up with a united Vietnam under Ho. It might well be less brutal than in OTL but the Democrats would still be blamed for the 'loss' of South Vietnam.

Best POD for that is probably a deal between the US and Ho.

One other interesting 1968 POD. In OTL Passive resistence did have some effect in Czecholsovakia, the people there having been forced to learn Russian were able to talk to troops invading them. Maybe, especially if Duckek were still free things could follow a different path.


Other thought- if Vietnam still happens but the opposition to US involvement is better organized and more savvy you could see an anti War candidate winning in 1968- against a 3 way split opposition.

Dick Gregory 43%, Nixon 30% LBJ 25% Wallace 12%.

Especially if you imagine radical change brought about by non violent action in Prague....
 
Well, JFK surviving seems a good place to start...
POD is 1964. Kennedy is already dead.

I think a 1964 POD is too late for a no-Vietnam timeline. Johnson had reversed JFK's move toward disengagement within a few days of taking office in November 1963.
It's actually quite easy to avoid Vietnam. The only reason many may think its not is that, because it did happen, and the history of what led to it and all that is a part of academia, it sometimes feels inevitable. But, as this is Alternate History, we should be the best ones to understand nothing is inevitable.
One should clarify on why Johnson turned Vietnam into an American war. Johnson did fear the war would be another Korea; the problem was that he didn't feel he could get out of it, which wouldn't have been true but may have been harder for him than Kennedy. Vietnam was rather low priority; maybe 35 or so percent of Americans paid any attention to it, and of that, most felt it would either see a coalition of North and South (at least I think that was the component between these two I'm listing) or the fall of Saigon. Really, few cared about Vietnam. But Johnson, unlike Kennedy, did not have the foreign policy experience to understand it as well, or the foreign policy credentials to as easily wiggle out of it. IIRC, he also had the belief, at least for some time early on, that if you sent in enough blunt force, you could scare the Vietnamese into submission; World War 2 logic for a Guerrilla War situation.

If you want to avoid Vietnam ballooning into a US conflict, a public discussion is also something to avoid. That was seemingly Kennedy's plan; you keep information from getting to the public which may otherwise draw support for committing the US more actively in the conflict. Were Johnson of the mind to commit combat troops to Vietnam in this scenario, then a frank public discussion would be desirable to calm possible public upset.

I actually doubt any great public backlash if the US doesn't Americanize the war beyond the John Birch Society; again, very few paid attention to the war, and fewer expected Southern victory. And if Vietnam did fall to Communism, it wouldn't be any great success for the Soviets. The Communist world was fragmented; the USSR and Chinese were at odds because the Maoist felt that the De-Stalinization was wrong and the Soviets felt that the Maoists were being impractical by not being very open to diplomacy with the Western (Capitalist) world and being very gung ho about the whole global revolution idea, and the Chinese and Vietnamese had been in conflict for centuries. Indeed, in 1979 they went to war.

There also wouldn't be an abandonment of the South with the withdrawal of advisers; it'd simply revert to a policy of supply and aid, with the war viewed as theirs (the South Vietnamese) to win or lose.
So that's what you'd get in a best case scenario; the US avoids Americanizing Vietnam, reverts to a policy of aiding and supplying the South, the war is the South's to win or lose, nobody cares so no great public backlash occurs no matter what happens, thousands live, the disillusion and militarization of the US counterculture doesn't occur, and Johnson has a free hand to focus on domestic affairs and millions upon millions more in funds to commit to the Great Society.
 
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How about instead of no involvement in Vietnam, the US wins the war? Here's what I think would be the best scenario:

  1. Either knock some sense into Diem, or replace him with somebody who's less of an asshat. This way, not as many people will want to defect to the VietCong
  2. Ally with Cambodia, and Laos, and help them destroy the Ho Chi Min trail. This should hopefully keep the VietCong without supplies
  3. Keep, and escalate Operation Rolling Thunder, until the North gives in.
  4. Put the media on some sort of leash. Just keep them from showing dead bodies, limit their time on the battlefields, etc.
  5. Take advantage of the growing Sino-Soviet split, and get whoever is president at the time to go to China earlier, say around 64-66, and drive a big ol' wedge between the USSR and the PRC. This should hopefully keep Soviet materiel from flowing across China.
All of these should hopefully help the US win, or at least come to a draw in Vietnam. Any thing I missed?
 
For me the ideal 1960s would be for LBJ to have used the CIA to get rid of all the Latin American dictators that were being propped up by the US government and insisted on genuinely democratic regimes, even if a few of them ended up going Marxist. He should've also brought United Fruit in Central America into line by having their executives in the United States arrested for treason.

LBJ should've offered to help Castro rather than get rid of him because he only went to the Soviet Bloc because of the economic blockade imposed by the Americans and he should've refused to allow the Cubans who fled from Castro to settle in Miami because most of them were thugs, gangsters and torturers. Castro and the communists would've been long gone by now if the Americans didn't impose the blockade.

He should've left the South Vietnamese to sink or swim on their own merits. By doing so he would not have dragged the US into a war that the United States not only lost but which it has never really recovered from if all that Vietnam-era movies crap is any indication. The money wasted on the Vietnam War would've been able to be used to improve the standard of living for the poorer Americans and modernize their manufacturing sector much faster.

The Americans should've threatened to intervene if the Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia during the "Prague Spring" to see what the Soviets would've done. Chances are that the Soviets would've backed down as their military capacity was often over-estimated by the Soviets and the Americans alike.

And the Americans should've made a greater effort to put a bullet in the skull of Mao Tse-Tung.
 
If you get an idyllic 1960s with minimal racial problems and no Vietnam, you probably take out Reagan as a political force. Reagan's rise was fueled by two things, among others: the 1965 Watts riots in LA and the campus protests over Vietnam. If the 1965 riots never happened and Vietnam never became so big as to protest about, I think you get Pat Brown getting reelected in 1966 and Reagan being a defeated and perhaps discredited candidate in an era where California was otherwise doing well economically. Reagan succeeded as a candidate because he stood against the protests and discord of the time. Take that discord away and his political appeal is diminished.

The alternative, and one not to be discounted because of his political talents, is that Reagan loses (or chooses not to run) in '66 and comes back in '70 as a much different candidate, perhaps as a more moderate GOP reform candidate.

However, a 1960s with a POD of 1964 avoiding racial strife is something almost unimaginable. By then, you'd already had the Evers assassination and March on Washington in 1963, not to mention the Birmingham church bombing. It seems far-fetched by that point for it all to go away.
 
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