In 1968, Vice-President Hubert Humphrey scored a surprise upset victory over former Vice-President and 1960 Republican nominee Richard Nixon. Most scholarship has attributed the election result to Humphrey's decision to reveal that Nixon had sabotaged the Vietnam Peace Talks for his own political purposes. Nixon would later be prosecuted under the Logan Act, but he was acquitted in 1970 due to a lack of incriminating evidence. Nixon largely remained out of the public spotlight after Humphrey's one term, choosing instead to practice law in New York until his death in 1994. What if Humphrey had decided not to reveal Nixon's actions to the public, and instead Nixon is elected President by a narrow margin?
 

Bomster

Banned
In 1968, Vice-President Hubert Humphrey scored a surprise upset victory over former Vice-President and 1960 Republican nominee Richard Nixon. Most scholarship has attributed the election result to Humphrey's decision to reveal that Nixon had sabotaged the Vietnam Peace Talks for his own political purposes. Nixon would later be prosecuted under the Logan Act, but he was acquitted in 1970 due to a lack of incriminating evidence. Nixon largely remained out of the public spotlight after Humphrey's one term, choosing instead to practice law in New York until his death in 1994. What if Humphrey had decided not to reveal Nixon's actions to the public, and instead Nixon is elected President by a narrow margin?
I don’t see why Humphrey wouldn’t expose Nixon's meddling, but for that matter I feel that Nixon’s presidency would not be very different from Humphrey’s term. However, given Nixon’s inclination towards illicit activities I wonder if that would blow up in his face...
 
Well, that probably means no Reagan in '72. Maybe the economic crash in '77 can be averted without his policies? Not sure if a '68 is enough to stop that though.
 
Well, that probably means no Reagan in '72. Maybe the economic crash in '77 can be averted without his policies? Not sure if a '68 is enough to stop that though.

America would certainly be a lot better off without Reagan's radical policies. If Nixon had won in 1968, that obviously prevents Reagan from running in 1972. However, it's entirely plausible that a Democrat might beat Nixon in 1972 due to the weakening economy and his potentially incompetent handling of the war (whether Nixon ends it in 1969 as Humphrey did, or he prolongs it enough to cause public outrage). At that point Reagan might have his chance in 1976, although he'd still get the questions about his age that he faced while running for re-election in OTL.
 
Well, that probably means no Reagan in '72. Maybe the economic crash in '77 can be averted without his policies? Not sure if a '68 is enough to stop that though.

Without Reagan, we also probably don’t get the Iran War in 1979. We also don’t get Presidents Jerry Brown (elected over the Iran War) or John Anderson (elected because of Brown’s unpopularity).
 
Without Reagan, we also probably don’t get the Iran War in 1979. We also don’t get Presidents Jerry Brown (elected over the Iran War) or John Anderson (elected because of Brown’s unpopularity).

Anderson was the first really good President we had at that point since JFK. (I wish I could say LBJ, but Vietnam drags down his legacy). The economy improved substantially in his first term, he handled the foreign crises in Panama and Kuwait very well, and the Berlin Wall finally came down in 1989. Anderson left office with a 67% approval rating in 1993; by that point history had changed so much it's hard to tell what the 1990s would've looked like had Nixon won.
 
I think some of the posts more critical of the Humphrey administration are ignoring HHH's role in pushing through the Universal Health Insurance Act (HHHCare) in 1971, despite Ted Kennedy's insistence on a single-payer system and Republican reluctance. Granted, the fallout from that bill probably cost him enough support from both the right and left of the Democratic Party to lead to his defeat at Reagan's hands who subsequently did his darndest to undermine the bill but it still remains the cornerstone of the American welfare state today.
 
I am a little surprised that nobody on this
thread has mentioned HHH’s judicial picks.
With a few exceptions(such as placing LBJ
crony & notorious racist John Connally on the Circuit Court Of Appeals in Texas)they
have won high marks from legal scholars &
historians. Especially worthy of praise was
HHH’s surprise elevation of former California
Governor Edmund G(“Pat”)Brown to the
Chief Justiceship of the SCOTUS in 1969 to
replace Earl Warren. Brown was able to keep
the Court on the liberal path carved out for
it by Warren. This he succeeded in doing
apparently by simply being himself: witty,
self-deprecating(which meant he did not
grate on his fellow justices)& yet shrewd as
well, with a good sense of the possible. One
shudders to think of the mediocrities & out-
& out right-wing ideologues a President Nixon would have appointed(if former Nixon
henchman John Ehrlichman’s memoir, ALL
THE PRESIDENT’S MEN is to be believed,
Nixon’s choice for Chief Justice would have
been an obscure Minnesota Federal judge
named Warren Burger, whose chief selling
point, Ehrlichman maintained, was that he was no bleeding heart or social activist, no self-appointed protector of racial minorities, the poor, & criminal defendants.* How a Burger SCOTUS would have been wrong for America is all too obvious).

*- This is a paraphrase of remarks actually
made IOTL about Burger. See the best-sell-
ing(& controversial)book on the SCOTUS,
THE BRETHREN by Bob Woodward & Scott
Armstrong(1979), pp. 11 & 14.
 
Last edited:
Nixon would have won the Vietnam War, prevented students stabbing the United States in the back, and ensured all POW and MIA were returned.

[/ic]
 
Reagan gets a lot of flak economically that's undeserved. Humphrey Shock and the oil crisis resulted in inflation that necessitated tight money policies - which contributed to the good economy of the 80s. The big issue is those tax cuts without spending cuts ("supply-siderism") made the inflation worse before they tightened up money wise - making the crash even worse. The big failure of his administration was Iran, however.

It's not like Brown was that far off from Reagan on the economic side. Most of the stuff Reagan gets credit for regarding right-of-center economic reforms were actually the doing of Jerry Brown. Reagan's big impact was changing the psyche of the public to be more amenable when Brown put them through - hence the period from 1973-1985 being the "California Revolution".

1) His top economic adviser was Art Laffer and it was his administration that saw the replacement of progressive taxation with a flat tax, albeit one with a fixed deduction
2) His signature health policy amount to subsidies for healthy living (quarterly doctor visits, quitting smoking, etc) rather than anything really progressive
3) Continued the shift towards Monetarism at the Fed
4) Oversaw the passage of the balanced-budget amendment
5) The implementation of means-testing Social Security and Medicare
6) The kickoff of trucking, airline, oil, financial, and alcohol deregulation


The big things that drove conservatives nuts were...

1) His granting of amnesty to Vietnam and Iran draft dodgers
2) His ending the draft in favor of nonmilitary national service
3) His embrace of nuclear, solar, and wind power due to his intense opposition to the oil industry
4) His defense department cuts (nevermind that we saw an increase in the number of combat troops under Brown...)
5) His pulling the troops out of Lebanon in 1983.
6) His ending the Iran War shortly after his election. Conservatives are nuts when they say that the Shah's regime could have been saved.


Conservative cynicism during the Brown administration was incredibly nasty. On the fiscal-economic side, they basically got more out of him than they ever did out of Reagan by miles and would proceed to badmouth him on cultural issues and defense (nevermind that spending never dipped below pre-Iran levels...).

Brown won out in the end though, getting reelected in 2004.

Republicans messed up big time under Reagan. They didn't take back the White House until 2000. If not for Anderson's Independent Bid, we'd likely have seen 20 years of Democratic rule. They lucked out that President Casey was such a mess after Anderson. President Bush did a good job running as a neo-Andersonite, albeit a more pro-business one.
 
Last edited:
Brown won out in the end though, getting reelected in 2004.

Yet ironically enough, the economy sucked even worse than it did in his first term - the housing bubble burst in 2007 and the stock market crashed a year later. If Brown had been eligible to run again in 2008 he no doubt would've lost. However, history has shown that he handled the economic crisis pretty well and he definitely learned from the mistakes of his first term. Now had Nixon beaten Humphrey in 1968, I'm sure the butterflies unleashed from that divergence would've at least delayed the economic crisis or perhaps even prevented it entirely.
 
HHH’s Vietnam policy remains to this day the
subject of the most intense argument. With-
out wishing to take an explicit side in this
controversy- responsible surely for the des-
truction of hundreds of trees!- let me just concde that it cannot be doubted that the
actions HHH took in Vietnam(proclaiming, barely six months into his Presidency, a cease-fire, withdrawing all American air, ground, & naval forces, & the establishment
in South Vietnam of a “coalition” government
which fell just a year later to the Commun-
ists), led directly to Vietnam being “lost”.
Anger- & disappointment- over this were
major factors in Ronald Regan’s victory over
HHH in the 1972 POTUS election.

But in fairness to HHH, he probably had little
choice. By the time he took office in 1969,
support for continuing the war no longer ex-
isted(& not just among that class- the young- who were needed to fight the war in
the first place). HHH’s Postmaster-General,
Lawrence “Larry” O’Brien has revealed in his
memoirs, THE BEST AND THE BRIGHTEST,
that former Secretary of State Dean Acheson
had come to feel the US just had to get out of Vietnam. The significance of this? If such a noted hard-liner had become a dove, then
surely many other conservatives had also-
leaving few indeed to support a hawkish
Vietnam policy. As Public Television’s noted
gadfly & humorist Nicholas Von Hoffman has
so aptly put it: “In a democracy, see, fifty-
one percent is good enough to build a road
or exempt the oil companies from taxation,
but not to fight a war. You gotta have ninety
percent for that...”*. Finally, HHH had seen @ close hand what the Vietnam had done to
LBJ. He thus cannot be blamed for feeling-
as he undoubtedly did- that Vietnam was an
albatross he had to get rid of ASAP.

A President Nixon would had to have to deal
with these same factors. Thus he too, may in the end have wound up doing what HHH did in Vietnam. Whether the North Vietnamese would still have won the war after an Amer-
ican pullout under Nixon is, of course, im-
possible to say.

*- Actual words uttered by Von Hoffman, in
a conversation in 1970 IOTL with Nixon WH
officals. Quoted in Timothy Crouse, THE
BOYS ON THE BUS, p. 237 of the 1975,
Ballantine Paperback edition(incidentally,
those of you who haven’t read this classic
book on the media should do so @ once!)
 
Last edited:
Yet ironically enough, the economy sucked even worse than it did in his first term - the housing bubble burst in 2007 and the stock market crashed a year later. If Brown had been eligible to run again in 2008 he no doubt would've lost. However, history has shown that he handled the economic crisis pretty well and he definitely learned from the mistakes of his first term. Now had Nixon beaten Humphrey in 1968, I'm sure the butterflies unleashed from that divergence would've at least delayed the economic crisis or perhaps even prevented it entirely.

Brown's first term had a bad economy, but that was due to having to deal with the effects of the Iran War. His reforms set the stage for the good times and improved fiscal situation of the next 10 years which Anderson gets credit for (though Anderson did a great job managing national finances and continuing a good chunk of Brown's social policy).

His second term had a booming economy but he was caught holding the wheel when things went south due to Casey's Housing Policy. "A house for every American" he said... whether or not they can actually pay for it. Then we had President Richards keeping the trend going, and President Bush focusing on foreign policy and his main big domestic achievement being VP Kemp's Urban Reforms with his administration not paying too close attention.

Brown steered the ship and got things good and ready for when President Watts came in.


OOC:

So it looks like

1968: Hubert Humphrey
1972: Ronald Reagan
1976: Ronald Reagan
1980: Jerry Brown
1984: John Anderson
1988: John Anderson
1992: Bob Casey
1996: Anne Richards
2000: George HW Bush
2004: Jerry Brown
2008: JC Watts
 
Brown's first term had a bad economy, but that was due to having to deal with the effects of the Iran War. His reforms set the stage for the good times and improved fiscal situation of the next 10 years which Anderson gets credit for (though Anderson did a great job managing national finances and continuing a good chunk of Brown's social policy).

His second term had a booming economy but he was caught holding the wheel when things went south due to Casey's Housing Policy. "A house for every American" he said... whether or not they can actually pay for it. Then we had President Richards keeping the trend going, and President Bush focusing on foreign policy and his main big domestic achievement being VP Kemp's Urban Reforms with his administration not paying too close attention.

Brown steered the ship and got things good and ready for when President Watts came in.


OOC:

So it looks like

1968: Hubert Humphrey
1972: Ronald Reagan
1976: Ronald Reagan
1980: Jerry Brown
1984: John Anderson
1988: John Anderson
1992: Bob Casey
1996: Anne Richards
2000: George HW Bush
2004: Jerry Brown
2008: JC Watts

JC Watts wasn't such a bad President either. Our country's first black Chief Exec, Watts kept America (mostly) fiscally responsible in the aftermath of the crisis, and was willing to compromise with Democrats in order to get things done. His signature achievement remains the bipartisan immigration reform he enacted in 2013.
 
JC Watts wasn't such a bad President either. Our country's first black Chief Exec, Watts kept America (mostly) fiscally responsible in the aftermath of the crisis, and was willing to compromise with Democrats in order to get things done. His signature achievement remains the bipartisan immigration reform he enacted in 2013.

I'd say he was a pretty good president. Corporate tax rate reduction, tax amnesty, and territorialization made for a good stimulus in the face of the crisis.

Immigration reform and refusing to bail out General Motors came to bite the party in the butt down the line though. Trump used those two issues as his wedges to rile up working-class whites against Vice President Meg Whitman in 2016.
 
I'd say he was a pretty good president. Corporate tax rate reduction, tax amnesty, and territorialization made for a good stimulus in the face of the crisis.

Immigration reform and refusing to bail out General Motors came to bite the party in the butt down the line though. Trump used those two issues as his wedges to rile up working-class whites against Vice President Meg Whitman in 2016.

But ultimately Watts did the right thing on immigration, and it's worth remembering that Trump did fail in his primary challenge to Whitman. Unfortunately for her, his third party bid split the vote and handed the election to the Democrats. There's talk of Trump running again in 2020, but as history as shown third party bids don't do as well the second time around.
 
But ultimately Watts did the right thing on immigration, and it's worth remembering that Trump did fail in his primary challenge to Whitman. Unfortunately for her, his third party bid split the vote and handed the election to the Democrats. There's talk of Trump running again in 2020, but as history as shown third party bids don't do as well the second time around.

Whitman lost more due to Trump damaging her in the primary than due to his splitting votes in the general. Aside from Tax Cuts and Culture Warring, Trump was the most left guy in the general. Single-Payer, Protectionism, and Anti-Trust made him a lot of friends on the left, and he basically locked up the Reagan Democrat vote when he got Jim Webb to sign on as VP.

Governors Patrick and Locke also just did a very very good job of consolidating the center and minority voters.
 
Top