August, 1973.
White House Counsel Robert Bork.
On the morning of August 1st, Robert Bork was in federal court. Seeking an injunction on further contingency elections in the House, Bork argued that Nixon's concession and McKeithen's untimely demise resulted in (officially Vice President) Agnew ascending to the Presidency. With the Supreme Court in recess for the summer, the case is heard before the DC Circuit Court of Appeals; the court rules that contingency elections in the House of Representatives should end contingency elections until the case could be heard. Nixon's lawyers hurriedly filed an objection, claiming the former President had renounced his concession in the aftermath of McKeithen's death. George Wallace also filed an objection, stating
"I'm still alive and I haven't conceded jack shit!"
That evening, within the walls of the White House, Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Bork were briefed by the Attorney General on the ongoing investigation originating out of Baltimore. Warning that Agnew would be indicted by a Baltimore grand jury within a matter of days, Attorney General J. Clifford Wallace concluded that the case was open and shut. Rumsfeld, Cheney, and most critically Bork agreed, but decided to keep the matter between them. Cheney was tasked by Rumsfeld to begin looking for a nominee to take on the Vice Presidency, realizing that Agnew's official ascendancy to the Presidency would be short-lived. By seeking to appoint a Vice President who could take over from Agnew when his luck would run out, the troika of conservative ideologues would remain in place and power within the executive mansion. There was one complication that had to be factored in, however. Agnew remained ignorant of the political danger that lie ahead of it, and because of this, he would surely demand an unconfirmable pick for the now vacant Vice Presidency.
Watergate, the once dominate scandal, had almost become old news. Archibald Cox, the Special Prosecutor for Watergate, filed a subpoena on August 2nd, demanding that former President Richard Nixon hand over the White House tapes. Nixon's lawyers, already busy with the crisis over the disputed Presidency, filed another objection within the DC District Court. The court would rule in favor of Cox, ordering Nixon to hand over the tapes to a "special master" who would hold onto the tapes until the matter was fully heard out in court, though the court also rules that the tapes cannot be listened to, transcribed, or otherwise accessed until a later point in time. The ruling by the court is appealed by the former President, who is hoping to clear himself of the Watergate matter before the onset of the 1976 primaries.
The Million-Person March was held on August 4th in Washington, led by Reverend Jesse Jackson and actress Jane Fonda. With hundreds of thousands gathering on the National Mall to protest the Agnew administration and the war in Vietnam, the event began with Jackson delivering an impassioned speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and ended with the radical Reverend leading demonstrators to the White House. Attempting to personally deliver a petition signed by thousands of leading politicians, academics, and veterans to Agnew, the National Guard was called into Washington in order to disperse the crowds. A riot would ensue, with President Agnew quietly slipping away to Camp David at the behest of the Secret Service.
The Million Person March in Washington.
Three days later on August 7th, Agnew was formally indicted by a grand jury in Baltimore for bribery, fraud, and tax evasion. Defending himself at a tense press briefing, Agnew denounced the charges as being politically motivated and insisted that he was now constitutionally President, pointedly correcting reporters who repeatedly referred to him as the "acting" President. The following morning, perhaps in an effort to distract the media, Agnew ordered bombing of North Vietnam to resume just 34 days into the 60 day bombing halt. This was against the advice of the Pentagon, who warned the President that the air force was still not logistically prepared to stage massive air strikes on the country, and Defense Secretary Paul Nitze repeatedly and unsuccessfully lobbied National Security Adviser Haig to talk the President out of the bombing resumption.
That same evening, the Democratic Party National Committee met and in accordance with their bylaws officially nominated Senator Birch Bayh (D-IN), their 1972 Vice Presidential nominee, as their standard-bearer ahead of the next contingency vote. Filing with the DC Circuit Court of Appeals in the hope that Bayh could replace the late McKeithen during the contingency election ballot. Citing the death of McKeithen and Nixon's concession, it was the hope of DNC Chairman Robert Strauss that the Indiana Senator could be elected to end the disputed status of the Presidency once and for all. Though the case proceeds on flimsy ground, the long shot plan highlighted the desperate nature of Washington to resolve the 1972 election. Knowing that the DNC's attempts to seat Senator Bayh as their nominee would likely fail in court, others in the party turned to the reluctant Speaker of the House Carl Albert, who insisted repeatedly that he was not interested into ascending to the Presidency and warned that such a move could trigger an emergency presidential election in 1974, which he believed would only further divide America and damage democracy.
Robert Bork returned to court in response to this lawsuit, mirroring the Democratic National Committee by seeking to have Agnew placed on the ballot as a result of Nixon's concession. The Republican National Committee, chaired by Senator Robert Dole (R-KS), denied this request earlier, and Agnew sought to legally compel the RNC in order to achieve this goal. But Dole, a Nixon ally, came prepared with his own lawyers to challenge Agnew's ambition. This created a deep divide within the upper echelons of the Republican Party, pitting the RNC's chair against the party's sitting incumbent. There are growing calls from conservatives for Dole's resignation, and there is talk back in Kansas of a right-wing primary challenger emerging to take on Dole in the 1974 campaign. But Bork's battle against Senator Dole is forgotten quickly as events in Vietnam heated up.
It was less than twenty four hours after Bork stepped into the courtroom that
Operation Bold Eagle finally commenced. Under the command of recently promoted Lt. General Hank "Gunfighter" Emerson, American forces launched a mop up operation in South Vietnam to root out Viet Cong and NVA forces across South Vietnam before pushing northward across the ironically named demilitarized zone which separated the two Vietnamese states.
Operation Bold Eagle was accompanied by aerial and naval bombardment of the North, which resulted in an unintentional exchange between Chinese and American destroyers in two separate incidents, though neither resulted in casualties on either side nor damage to either vessel. The reckless nature of the campaign sparked concerns that the invasion of North Vietnam could result in China entering the conflict to prevent a unified, pro-American Vietnam on their southern border.
Despite the concerns about the chaotic nature of China's ruling elites in the Communist Party using the operation to launch an intervention, as they had done in Korea, the conflict remained at least temporarily contained. In truth, China had lacked the military capacity to intervene in Vietnam, with much of their air force in ruins and large portions of the People's Liberation Army bogged down in a stalemate against the Soviet Red Army in the Mongolian steppes. Though the Agnew and Nixon scandals continued to dominate American headlines, the conflict in Mongolia grew bloodier when the Soviet and Mongolian armies were able to retake the capital of Ulan Bator from the Chinese. The battle left the city in smoldering ruins and caused hundreds of thousands of people to flee the street to street fighting, taking refuge in the countryside where they nearly starved to death in hastily organized refugee camps under the protection of the Soviet army. Despite 50,000 deaths related to the fighting, the Soviets were able to drive the Chinese back across the border in a humiliating blow to the regime of Mao Zedong.
The launch of
Operation Bold Eagle was not enough to shore up the situation on the home front. On August 10th, Agnew's situation was precarious enough to warrant him taking drastic action. To the horror of much of the nation, he went on national television to annoyance he would be issuing pardons for John Childs, Lester Matz, Jerome Wolff, and most controversially, himself, Agnew's actions precluded him and his cohorts from criminal prosecution, but it did not end the scandal. Quite the contrary, in fact. The decision only sparked further outrage, and had serious consequences for diplomatic matters in Washington as well. With the United States increasingly becoming a pariah due to the President's aggressively anti-communist foreign policy and scandals, the European Community saw the chance to assert themselves as part of a tri-polar world. A secret summit in Germany saw Chancellor Willy Brandt, Prime Minister Edward Heath, and French President Georges Pompidou agree to greater cooperation as a bloc on the world stage. They exercised their newfound influence by deploying the "trio group" - a gaggle of British, French, and West German diplomats - to attempt to negotiate a peace agreement between the USSR and China before the conflict could expand into a nuclear war.
Prime Minister Edward Heath was a leading figure in the "Trio Group" of European leaders.
As the war in Vietnam also continued, American forces at last hurled themselves across the demilitarized zone, taking the war into North Vietnamese territory for the first time since the outbreak of the conflict. The American force consisting of 22,000 soldiers acompanied by a further group of 14,000 South Vietnamese soldiers occupied the city of Dong Hoi after intense fighting that left over 400 American GI's dead and a thousand more injured. Tchepone, a key junction along the Ho Chi Minh Trail within Laos, was similarly attacked. The incursion into Laos, technically a neutral country, is defended by Secretary of Defense Paul Nitze, who argued that the presence of North Vietnamese troops in the country made the region an "enemy occupied territory" that was being "liberated" by the United States. The attack completes the goal of disrupting enemy supply lines into South Vietnam, but also illegal under the Church-Cooper Amendment of 1970, which prohibited the expansion of the war into Cambodia and Laos. Yet the actions, regardless of their legality, were wildly successful - Lt. General Emerson and his chief Lieutenant Norman Schwarzkopf became stars back home in America, and several other junior officers, including Colin Powell and Oliver North, would be promoted for their leadership abilities.
The Soviet Union, though bogged down by the war in the far east, still had an active presence in the Middle East. A slow, steady trickle of anti-aircraft guns and SCUD missiles were secretly transported to Egypt, Iraq, and Syria in anticipation of an Arab surprise attack against Israel, set to take place on Ramadan in October. This planned attack was discovered by France, who attempted to warn Israel to little avail. American and British intelligence agencies were dismissive of the warning, as was Israel, who did not trust the French due to DeGaulle's actions during the 1967 war. At a dinner in New York City honoring former British Foreign Secretary Rab Butler, Secretary of State Bush quietly requested former National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger travel to Moscow in violation of the Logan Act, a request that Kissinger obliged by in spite of potential legal consequences.
Back in Washington, the DC District Court ruled against the DNC's request to have Birch Bayh placed on the ballot during the contingency election, and also ruled that Nixon's concession could be retracted. Bork appealed on behalf of President Agnew, and the court continued to issue a stay on further contingency ballots in the House of Representatives until the matter could be resolved. As a result, only McKeithen (who was dead), Nixon, and Wallace would be allowed to contest the Presidency. A three judge panel consisting of Chief Justice Warren Burger, Justice William Brown III, and Byron White declined to hear the case, upholding the DC court's ruling as a result.
At a tense meeting on Capital Hill, the Democratic leadership met to devise a plan going forward. At the behest of Congressman Peter Rodino (D-NJ), the Chair of the House Judiciary Committee, a young lawyer named Gary Hart - who managed McGovern's presidential campaign - stepped forward with a solution that Rodino found agreeable. The plan was simple - vote to elect McKeithen in the upcoming House election, which would result in Agnew at last ascending to the Presidency in a official capacity. Noting that Agnew's pardon was legally considered an admission of guilt, the solution was simple: impeach him. The plot would result in Carl Albert, Speaker of the House, rising to the Presidency.
But there was one remaining problem: Albert just truly didn't want the job.
- Credit to Drew for almost all of this. The impending constitutional crisis Drew came up with is brilliantly well done, and I'm looking forward to sharing some of the upcoming chapters.