During the Great Depression some decades ago, President Franklin Roosevelt was deposed for his socialistic economic policies by wealthy industrialists and conservative elements in the Army and organized Great War veterans. The Business leaders approached Douglas Macarthur who had broken up the Bonus Marchers to serve as leader in Roosevelts place and offered him the weapons and men they had gathered so long as he swore to uphold American principles of free enterprise and respect their right to run their companies without undue federal interference. Macarthur lead the march on Washington DC and the White House, Roosevelt was injured and died several weeks later as he had been apparently suffering polio and not disclosed this and the injuries caused fatal complications.
The civil war between Macarthur, the Patriotic section of the Army and Navy that supported him and his business backers and Communist, anarchist, and those merely seeking a return to pre-coup representative democracy lasted six years, with Red Minnesota holding out until 1943 and several of the Appalachian Miners Councils until 1947. Macarthur, a noted military tactician, was able to bring the nation under his effective control and eventually fear of being shot as a communist traitor lead to the average American holding his tongue and going about his business.
Macarthur kept the nation out of the Second Great War, though many of his business supporters sold arms to the Axis powers. The war ended in 1948 when the Nazis and Soviets agreed to a cease fire along a line in the Ukraine negotiated between the recently deceased Hitler's young successor Heydrich and an aging Stalin. Britain had bowed out in 1940 and was suffering unrest at home and in its colonies.
Douglas Macarthur died in 1964, still in power, though the businessmen and veterans who had put him there had for the most part long since died themselves. He appointed Curtis Lemay his successor. Lemay faced increasing dissatisfaction with a government viewed as an illegitimate and incompetent military dictatorship founded to oppose a man now dead and deal with an emergency long since passed. Liberal and left wing and African American underground leaders such as William Ayers, Stokely Carmichael, Mark Rudd, Malcolm Little, Abbie Hoffman, Tim Leary and Charles Milles Maddox would bring about the Revolution against the corrupt and complacent corporate backed military dictatorship headed by the politically isolated Lemay.
At the time of the Business Coup, other officers were considered as possible leaders, many of whom, probably would have outright opposed it, as some officers tended to the left, or felt that the American military was being used to benefit large corporations in other nations, in effect racketeering. What if a more liberal minded officer had been approached to head the coup and he had sounded the alarm? Perhaps the oppression of General Macarthur and the bloodshed of the Revolution from 1966 onward could have been avoided.