Give Peace Another Chance: The Presidency of Eugene McCarthy

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That's the official wording in both TLs. So, no change.
Besides, I believe it's been reasonably demonstrated that that's what he actually SAID, even if it didn't sound like it on our TVs

I suppose the difference is that the static which erased the “a” from the transmission didn’t exist.
 
The Decline of the Hippie and the Rise of the Cleagie: Woodstock, Manson, and Altamont
The Decline of the Hippie and the Rise of the Cleagie: Woodstock, Manson, and Altamont

1969 was the beginning of the end for hippie culture, reaching its high point with the Woodstock musical festival, before entering into a rapid decline following the murders committed by the Manson Family death cult, and the chaos of the Altamont Speedway Free Festival. But, in many ways, the decline of hippie culture also laid the groundwork for America's next youth movement.

1969 had been a year of outdoor music festivals. Beginning with late June’s Newport Pop Festival in Northridge, California, and the Denver Pop Festival a few weeks later. Star performers who appeared at one of the festivals (or sometimes both of them) included The Jimi Hendrix Experience, Booker T. & the MGs, Frank Zappa & the Mothers of Invention, Three Dog Night, and Creedance Clearwater Revival, among others. The Newport Pop Festival had already managed to break the record for highest attendance for an outdoor music festival, with one hundred and fifty thousand people in attendance. However, both festivals had seen riots as thousands of people tried to break in to the performance grounds, and at the Newport show, fans tried to overrun the stage during Hendrix's second performance. Music festival unruliness continued in July's Newport Jazz Festival in Rhode Island, and early August's festival at the Atlantic City Race Track. By mid-1969, music festivals had become associated with disorderly mobs of hippies who ruined things for everyone else. That is why, under heavy public pressure from the local community, the Wallkill Zoning Board of Wallkill, New York, withdrew permission for Woodstock Ventures, Incorporated to host a musical festival in the city. The town of Woodstock, in upstate New York, had become the counterculture music community's best kept secret. Musicians like Bob Dylan, Paul Butterfield, and Van Morrison had moved to the town, and Hendrix had moved to the nearby community of Shokan, New York. Many musicians, band managers, and studio directors had moved to the area as an out of the way locale to brainstorm new music. Hoping to build off of the budding artistic movement in the area, concert producer Michael Lang and Capitol Records executive Artie Kornfeld joined forces with the venture capitalist Joel Rosenman and the investor John Roberts to hold a music festival in the area, as a springboard for a future music studio. With fifty thousand tickets already sold and with only four weeks to go to the festival, Woodstock Ventures had to quickly find a new venue. Fortunately, Lang was quickly able to find a replacement in the form of a six hundred acre dairy farm owned by one Max Yasgur in the town of Bethel, New York. Yasgur had previously allowed groups to use his land for special events, and was willing to host Woodstock Ventures. Relocating their infrastructure, final preparations were made for the Woodstock Music and Arts Fair.

Enjoying broad media coverage due to the advertising budget of its wealthy backers and the potential for controversy, Woodstock started to become a phenomenon. Just as the inhabitants of Wallkill had foreseen and sought to avoid, thousands of hippies began pouring in from across the country. Several thousand cars were backed up along the back roads of the area, causing the biggest traffic jam in the history of upstate New York. Many simply decided to abandon their cars in the middle of the road, walking the rest of the way to the festival. Ironically, due to the number of people who did this, along with a mass influx of festival-goers who had not purchased tickets, several hundred people who had actually paid were unable to reach Woodstock. Deciding it would be impossible to limit attendance to paying customers, Lang and Kornfeld decided to make the whole thing free, to the horror of their financial advisors.

With the opening act stuck in traffic and storm clouds on the horizon, Lang instead had the folksinger Richie Havens start the show a little after 5:00 p.m on Friday, August 15th.

Trying to shift around the performance schedule to best accommodate the acts and the general lack of preparedness, most of the first day of Woodstock were folksingers and acoustic groups. After a performance by Havens, the original opening act, Sweetwater, finally arrived and performed their set, followed by Bert Sommer, and Tim Hardin. By that point, it had begun to rain, and shorter sets by Ravi Shankar, Melanie, Arlo Guthrie, and Joan Baez were performed. Baez, who that same year had also appeared at other music festivals and on the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, dedicated her performance to her husband, who had been arrested for draft dodging, but whose case was in all likelihood to be thrown out due to the temporary moratorium the government had put in place on the draft, and the expected imminent end of the Vietnam War. Ending with the civil rights ballad We Shall Overcome, the audience eventually went to sleep in a mix of tents, sleeping bags, tepees, and vans. Dampening the mood, a downpour of rain overnight guaranteed a thick layer of mud that enveloped the festival grounds for the rest of the occasion.

Before the first day was even over, a countercultural ecosystem had sprung up around the main stage, including a political activist booths, food services, a Native American art exhibit, and drug dealerships. Saturday's performances began with the band Quill, and went on from there, including Country Joe McDonald and The Fish, and John Sebastian. Performances continued on in the late afternoon and the evening with more established rock and jazz-fusion groups, with Santana, the Incredible String Band, Canned Heat, the Grateful Dead, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Janis Joplin, Sly & the Family Stone, and the Who. Around the time of the Grateful Dead's performance an unofficial intermission occurred, as the stage was approaching collapse, and the sound equipment was short-circuiting from the heavy wind and rain. The Who went late into the night performing the entirety of their rock ballad Tommy, during which Abbie Hoffman of the surrealist Youth International Party tried to seize the stage to make a political statement before being beaten back by lead guitarist Pete Townshend. By the time the Saturday performers officially ended with Jefferson Airplane, it was already Sunday dawn. While thousands had been driven off by the pouring rain and poor conditions, the show went on with Joe Cocker and the Grease Band, followed by Mountain, Ten Years After, The Band, Johnny Winter, Blood, Sweat & Tears, and Crosby, Stills, and Nash. By Monday, the festival had begun to crash hard. With an estimated peak attendance of four hundred thousand, there were only around fifty thousand by then. The Paul Butterfield Band, and Sha Na Na both perfored before making way for the final headline act: Jimi Hendrix. Having re-branded from the Jimi Hendrix Experience, to Gypsy, Sun and Rainbow, Hendrix and his band closed Woodstock with a two hour set that notably included an anti-war experimental version of “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

Woodstock would become a lightning-in-a-bottle moment for the counterculture movement. Nearly half a million people had gathered without any major destruction, but many people agreed the organization and infrastructure for it had been a total mess. Despite attempts to recapture the magic of the occasion, hippie culture never again got as high as Woodstock.

Woodstock Ventures' plan to popularize the area did far too well for its own good. A massive rush of new residents looking to tap in to the local music scene followed, and many of the musicians who first inspired the festival, feeling crowded, moved away.

John Sebastien Woodstock.jpg

John Sebastian performing at the Woodstock music festival. Woodstock would become one of the most famous musical and cultural events of American history.

The hippie ideal of commune living and mutual aid witnessed a twisted subversion with the events surrounding Charles Manson and his Manson Family.

Charles Manson was a charismatic small time criminal with delusions of grandeur, having spent time in jail for car theft, pimping, violating probation, and forgery. Moving to California in 1967, he had developed an extended social circle which he called "the Family" by preying on the emotional vulnerabilities of young women. Taking inspiration from bizarre West Coast religious groups like the Jesus freaks, the Scientologists, and the Church of Satan, Manson began to develop his own semi-religious cult mysticism that involved free love (probably to justify his harem-like relationship with much of the Family), biblical prophetic visions of the apocalypse, and, according to some, a master plan to incite a race war in the United States according to subliminal messages hidden in the music of The Beatles. Temporarily living in the mansion of Dennis Wilson of the rock band the Beach Boys, the Manson Family was eventually kicked out. They then re-located to Spahn's Movie Ranch, an abandoned set that had once been used for shooting western movies with middling budgets.

The first murder committed by the Manson Family was against Gary Hinman, a music teacher and sociology student who was also a evangelical Buddhist and drug dealer. Refusing Manson's increasingly insistent demands to join the Manson Family and also refusing to give him drugs or money, in late July of 1969, Manson sent his followers to get money from Hinman then kill him. Despite torturing him for several days, Hinman refused to cooperate, and was eventually killed either implicitly or explicitly on Manson's orders. “POLITICAL PIGGY” was written in Hinman's blood on the wall over his dead body. This was apparently done to trick the police into thinking he was killed by a black gang, as part of Manson's supposed race war master plan, which he tended to refer to as 'Helter Skelter,' after a Beatles song of the same name. Bobby Beausoleil, one of the members of the Manson Family who had killed Hinman, fled the commune while Manson was away in early August, using one of the cars the Family had stolen from their victim. Beausoleil was quickly captured by the California Highway Patrol under suspicion for Hinman's murder, but he was not immediately tied to the other Manson killings that would soon follow.

Declaring “Now is the time for Helter Skelter,” it is unclear who the next victim of Manson's apocalyptic bloodlust was intended to be. The Family targeted the home of Terry Melcher, a record producer who had refused to sign a recording contract with Manson, but Melcher had recently moved out; it had since been leased to director Roman Polanski and his wife Sharon Tate. Staking out the house on the night of August 8th, four members of the Family – Susan Atkins, Tex Watson, Linda Kasabian, and Patricia Krenwinkel – murdered Steven Parent, a young man who was visiting the groundskeeper, William Garretson, who lived in a back house off from the main property. Moving in on the main house, the Manson Family quickly rounded up Tate, who was eight and a half months pregnant, along with family friends Jay Sebring, Wojciech Frykowski, and Abigail Folger, who were all visiting at the time. Polanski himself was in England for a film shoot. All of the house's inhabitants would be killed, with dozens of stab wounds between them. Manson's followers would also kill Leno and Rosemary LaBianca soon after. The LaBiancas had lived next door to a party house that the Manson Family had attended the previous year. With initial media coverage indicating the Tate murder was caused by some sort of drug-fueled ritualistic massacre, locals began to look on the hippie community with extreme suspicion. The photographer David Strick recalled that before the Manson killings parties were very open in the area, and “That's why people could see hippies they've never seen before walking in and out of their wealthy houses and not think they were going to kill them.” The panic following the Manson Family's killing spree contributed to the downfall of hippie culture as a whole.

Pending an investigation, warrants were eventually put out for members of the Family. Manson himself would also eventually be arrested, but a trial was not held until 1970. The murderers were sentenced to death, but the charges would later be changed to a life sentence following a California Supreme Court ruling on the death penalty, and the criminal justice process would not completely resolve the case until 1971.

Charles Manson arrested.jpg

Arrested in 1969, Charles Manson and his Manson Family commune/cult were responsible for a series of murders based on his apocalyptic visions of a race war.

Trying to recapture the zeitgeist moment of Woodstock, plans were set into motion to do a follow-up . After complaints that their tickets cost too much money, the Rolling Stones agreed to do a free concert in California on the suggestion of The Grateful Dead and their manager, and it was quickly dubbed Woodstock West. The initial plan was to hold it at Golden Gate Park on Saturday, December 6th 1969, and many other bands began to show interest. However, a permit was not secured for the park, nor was one secured for the back-up location at Sears Point Raceway. With only two days to the festival, Woodstock West eventually settled on the Altamont Speedway race track, whose owner offered free use. Eventually, up to three hundred and fifty thousand people arrived at the Altamont Speedway Free Festival for what was expected to be the last big music event of the year. Apparently not aware of the difference between the American Hell's Angels biker gang and their much more tame English counterparts, the Rolling Stones' tour manager, Sam Cutler, informally hired them as security for the venue. Things starting going wrong during Jefferson Airplane's set, when a fight broke out between the Hell's Angels and the hippies near the front of the stage, with things escalating when the Hell's Angels knocked out Jefferson Airplane's lead singer. Other performances were similarly interrupted by violence. In the middle of the Rolling Stones' performance of "Sympathy for the Devil," things went from bad to worse when someone bumped a Hell's Angels' bike into a battery post attached to a fuel tank, causing a small explosion, and destroying the bike. The band's attempts to restart the song failed as the chaos spread, and one man, Meredith Hunter, was killed in a fight with some of the bikers. A high estimate put the number of people injured at eight hundred in fifty. Described by one later historian "The Hippie Apocalypse," Altamont brought a dreary end to the 1960s.

Altamont - Copy.jpg

Held in December of 1969 in an attempt to re-capture the magic of Woodstock, Altamont turned in to a disaster following frequent fighting in the audience between hippies and members of the Hell's Angels motorcycle gang.

It was not long into the 1970s before the hippies became a smaller and smaller part of the popular consciousness. Eventually, the counterculture movement was partially absorbed into the mainstream in the social schizophrenia of the coming decade. However, the decline of the hippies did leave an opening for a new youth movement. Described by demographic analysts of the early 1970s as the 'McCarthy Cohort' or the 'Clean Gene Generation,' a new group began to emerge from the followers of President McCarthy. Made up of those who had volunteered for him during his presidential campaign, or those who became enthusiasts in the early years of his administration, this group was made up of millions of students and young people who were typically the white college-educated children of the suburban middle class. Politically active, preppy, generally accepted by the mainstream, socially and economically liberal, and eventually earning a reputation for intellectualism, political puritanism, and snobbery, the millions of members of the Clean Gene Generation (or the Cleagies for short), would rise to prominence in the early 1970s, eventually becoming the young urban professionals of the 1980s.
 
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Ficboy

Banned

Welcome to Give Peace Another Chance, the revised and updated version of the Turtledove-nominated Give Peace A Chance: The Presidency of Eugene McCarthy. Give Peace A Chance, my first timeline, started on May 23rd 2018. After about a year and a half of weekly posting (more or less), the timeline was put on a seven month hiatus, while I researched and improved upon the original concept, which can be found here. That hiatus is now over, and this is the result, which I can say with absolute certainty is the better version. Those who have read Give Peace A Chance will recognize familiar faces and events, but changes to improve the quality and plausibility will provide new twists even for our veteran readers.

This timeline explores a world where Eugene McCarthy, the quixotic Senator for Minnesota and Vietnam War critic, successfully wins the presidency in 1968, avoiding his fate as an obscure maverick and perennial candidate. I first took inspiration for this idea after concluding that I wanted to write a timeline on a figure who had little-to-no alternate-historical coverage. As McCarthy has been overshadowed by such figures as the Kennedys, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon in the canon of the 1960s, I hope that I have done him justice as the leading man. That being said, Gene McCarthy was as deeply flawed as he was deeply principled, and I have attempted to write him as accurately to his nature as historical research and my own speculation will allow. A further detail I must point out is that I am first and foremost a student of Cold War political history. While McCarthy’s legacy is inseparable from the Vietnam War, the politics aspects of the conflict will be prioritized over the actual fighting.

The main purpose of writing an ongoing timeline, to me at least, is to keep up the motivation to write. So that is what I intend to do! Ideally, main chapters will be posted once every two weeks, with asides, vignettes, and other little tidbits being posted every other week from the main chapters. The vignette chapters are especially open to those who want to contribute ideas, or appear as guest writers, so please let me know if you are interested or have any suggestions! Research continues at the same time that I am writing this timeline. As a reflection of that, the bibliography attached to the introduction will see more additions as the timeline goes on. Every once in a while, with the original version, I would take research breaks after 'election night' chapters to get a head start on writing the next presidential term, and to do research for it. While I hope to be far enough ahead to avoid doing this for Give Peace Another Chance, it is something that is still on the table. If that does turn out to be the case, I still aim to have the vignette chapters continuing weekly.

Comments, suggestions, recommendations, corrections, and criticisms are, of course, welcome (but hopefully we won’t get too many of the latter). A special thanks to all my long-time readers, all those who have given suggestions in the past, and all those who have encouraged me to keep up the good work, and a hearty welcome to new readers as well!

So, without further ado, let us begin anew...

Boomhower, Ray E. Robert F. Kennedy and the 1968 Indiana Primary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008).

Carter, Dan T. The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the Origins of the New Conservatism, and the Transformation of American Politics (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000).

Chafe, William H. Never Stop Running: Allard Lowenstein and the Struggle to Save American Liberalism (New York: BasicBooks, 1993).

Connally, John, and Herskowitz, Mickey. In History’s Shadow: An American Odyssey (New York: Hyperion, 1993).

Eisele, Albert. Almost to the Presidency: A Biography of Two American Politicians (Blue Earth: The Piper Company, 1972).

Farrell, John A. Richard Nixon: The Life (New York: Doubleday, 2017).

Guan, Ang Cheng. The Vietnam War From the Other Side: The Vietnamese Communists' Perspective (New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2002).

Guthman, Edwin O., and Allen, C. Richard. RFK: His Words For Our Times (New York: HarperCollins, 2018).

Henkin, Bruce Jay. Analysis of Editorial Treatment by the California Press of Senators Eugene J. McCarthy and Robert F. Kennedy during the California Presidential Primary Election of 1968 (Ann Arbor: UMI Dissertation Publishing, 1969).

Hersh, Burton. Edward Kennedy: An Intimate Biography (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2012).

Hersh, Seymour M. Reporter: A Memoir (New York: Vintage Books, 2018).

Herzog III, Arthur. McCarthy for President (New York: Viking Press, 1969).

Hoeh, David C. 1968 – McCarthy – New Hampshire (Rochester: Lone Oak Press, 1994).

Kirkpatrick, Rob. 1969: The Year Everything Changed (New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2019).

Kurlansky, Mark. 1968: The Year That Rocked the World (New York: Random House, 2005).

Larner, Jeremy. Nobody Knows: Reflections on the McCarthy Campaign of 1968 (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1969).

Linehan, Mary. “Women in the 1968 Eugene McCarthy Campaign and the Development of Feminist Politics,” Journal of Women's History Vol. 29 No. 1 (Spring, 2017), 111-137.

Longley, Kyle. LBJ’s 1968: Power, Politics, and the Presidency in America’s Year of Upheaval (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).

McCarthy, Abigail. Private Faces/Public Places (Garden City: Doubleday & Company, 1972).

McCarthy, Eugene. The Limits of Power (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1967).

McCarthy, Eugene. “Robert Lowell and the Politics of 1968,” Harvard Review No. 12 (Spring, 1997), 116-121.

McCarthy, Eugene. The Year of the People (Garden City: Doubleday & Company, 1969).

Murphy, John M. “Presidential Debates and Campaign Rhetoric: Text Within Context,” The Southern Communications Journal Vol. 57 No. 3 (Spring 1992), 219-228.

Nelson, Justin A. “Drafting Lyndon Johnson: The President’s Secret Role in the 1968 Democratic Convention,” Presidential Studies Quarterly Vol. 30 No. 4 (December, 2000), 688-713.

O’Donnell, Lawrence. Playing With Fire: The 1968 Election and the Transformation of American Politics (New York: Penguin Press, 2017).

Offner, Arnold A. Hubert Humphrey: The Conscience of the Country (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018).

Paletz, David L. “Delegates' Views of the TV Coverage of the 1968 Democratic Convention,” Journal of Broadcasting Vol. 16 No. 4 (Fall, 1972), 441-452.

Patton, Bonnie. The 1968 Political Campaign of Senator Eugene J. Mccarthy: The Study of Rhetorical Choice (Ann Arbor: University Microfilms, 1969).

Reston Jr, James. The Lone Star: The Life of John Connally (New York: Harper and Row, 1989).

Ripon Society. The Lessons of Victory (New York: Dial Press, 1969).

Rising, George. Clean For Gene: Eugene McCarthy’s 1968 Presidential Campaign (Westport: Praeger Publishers, 1997).

Sandbrook, Dominic. Eugene McCarthy and the Rise and Fall of Postwar American Liberalism (New York: Ancho Books, 2004).

Tye, Larry. Bobby Kennedy: The Making of a Liberal Icon (New York: Random House, 2018).

Wainstock, Dennis. Election Year 1968: The Turning Point (New York: Enigma Books, 2012).

Wells, Tom. The War Within: America’s Battle Over Vietnam (New York: Open Road Distribution, 2013).

White, Theodore. The Making of the President 1968 (New York: Atheneum House, 1969).
So basically this is like a mashup of What Madness Is This? by Napoleon53 in terms of being a revised and updated version of an older timeline and Until Every Drop of Blood Is Paid: A More Radical American Civil War by Red_Galiray in terms of listing books used as research for the timeline.
 
So basically this is like a mashup of What Madness Is This? by Napoleon53 in terms of being a revised and updated version of an older timeline and Until Every Drop of Blood Is Paid: A More Radical American Civil War by Red_Galiray in terms of listing books used as research for the timeline.
I'm not too familiar with either of those works, but I know enough about them to know that the comparison is apt and that I'm in esteemed company.
 
If you would all bear with me, I think I'd like to run an experiment.

I could put out the next chapter today, but I see a lot of room for improvement. Particularly, this chapter covers three foreign elections on top of the events in the United States, which also includes the midterm elections. That's a lot of ground to cover, and I think I could do it much more justice with some more time. Thus, a have two ideas to go about it. I'm going to either do some editing or revising over the next two days and post the chapter on Monday and then post on Mondays for the rest of September to see how I feel about it, or I'm going to do a rapid-fire reading marathon to really get a solid grasp of the subject matter, and post the chapter a week from today. I've yet to decide, but I'll do one of those two.

I apologize for the brief delay, but I think it'll be in the better interest of the quality of the work. It's hard to believe Give Peace Another Chance has been ongoing for a third of a year now! I notice that it's taking about twice the amount time for the TL to progress as it did with the original, but considering it's more than twice as detailed I think it's a worthy trade-off.

In the meantime, here's a consolation spoiler for those who want a sneak peak:

Guess.jpg

Hint: He was mentioned by name in a previous chapter.
 
If you would all bear with me, I think I'd like to run an experiment.

I could put out the next chapter today, but I see a lot of room for improvement. Particularly, this chapter covers three foreign elections on top of the events in the United States, which also includes the midterm elections. That's a lot of ground to cover, and I think I could do it much more justice with some more time. Thus, a have two ideas to go about it. I'm going to either do some editing or revising over the next two days and post the chapter on Monday and then post on Mondays for the rest of September to see how I feel about it, or I'm going to do a rapid-fire reading marathon to really get a solid grasp of the subject matter, and post the chapter a week from today. I've yet to decide, but I'll do one of those two.

I apologize for the brief delay, but I think it'll be in the better interest of the quality of the work. It's hard to believe Give Peace Another Chance has been ongoing for a third of a year now! I notice that it's taking about twice the amount time for the TL to progress as it did with the original, but considering it's more than twice as detailed I think it's a worthy trade-off.

In the meantime, here's a consolation spoiler for those who want a sneak peak:

View attachment 582897
Hint: He was mentioned by name in a previous chapter.
I’ll rather do the first, take your time chap and don’t stress or cram yourself, have a causal editing time.
 
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Oh, I do wonder how different the movie The Candidate would be. Apparently, one of the writers of it was Gene McCarthy's speech writer, and with him becoming president, would it shift to becoming president instead of senator?
 
Oh, I do wonder how different the movie The Candidate would be. Apparently, one of the writers of it was Gene McCarthy's speech writer, and with him becoming president, would it shift to becoming president instead of senator?
That's right, Jeremy Larner wrote The Candidate based off of the McCarthy campaign, as well as the 1970 California Senate election. IOTL, Larner also wrote a super-critical tell-all memoir of the McCarthy campaign titled Nobody Knows. While both Nobody Knows and The Candidate have been butterflied away, Larner will ultimately write TTL's equivalent of All the President's Men.
 
Will we be getting much insight into the Special Relationship and the Wilson-McCarthy dynamic down the road? I'd hope that McCarthy will at least try to mend ties with Howard Wilson and the British after how much LBJ put them on watch after Vietnam. Did McCarthy care much for the Brits and Europe IOTL?
 
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