Chapter Eight – We’ve Only Just Begun
Described by some as the peak of post-war American liberalism, 1970 saw significant developments both domestically and internationally. South Vietnam was preparing for what was expected to be its first fully democratic election, while American forces were withdrawing from the region. Back home, McCarthy had fulfilled what many voters considered his most important campaign promise by cutting taxes. More accurately, he had allowed a late Johnson-era ten percent surcharge increase on the income tax to expire [1]. Instead, slashing cuts to the Vietnam War budget had been used for the initial payments of McCarthy’s landmark proposals for a guaranteed minimum income, and a massive expansion of low-cost suburban housing. Likewise, while riots and protests were still relatively common, they were occurring at a much lower rate than they had under Johnson, which Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare Daniel Patrick Moynihan attributed to a “benign neglect,” with the government making no great calls for activism or demands for involvement on the part of the public. Over the last ten years and three Democratic administrations, Kennedy’s call to action had been replaced with a muted technocratic bureaucracy. Perhaps it was no surprise then that polling indicated that the public was overwhelmingly apathetic to the McCarthy Administration. While the President himself had a stable approval rating that hovered at around sixty-five percent (and approaching an unheard-of ninety percent with teenagers and twentysomethings), none of McCarthy’s legislation or particular decisions had extraordinarily high approval, and his support was based more on what he was not doing than what he was. Because of this, congressional Democrats were nervously awaiting direction to pass some popular and easy-to-understand legislation to better their chances in the upcoming midterm elections. Fortunately for them, the legislation they were waiting for arrived, coming from, of all places, Nigeria.
In 1970, the Nigerian Civil War between the federal government and the breakaway state of Biafra concluded with the latter’s surrender, after a failed attempt at independence. The roots of the conflict went back to 1914, when Nigeria had been created by the British in a consolidation of their regional colonial conquests, which had begun in the area as early as the 1860s. The British had ruled what would become Nigeria through the Hausa-Fulani, a prominent local ethnic group who they used as their proxies. Predominantly from northern Nigeria, the Hausa-Fulani were a Muslim group who were governed by a series of hereditary autocrats known as emirs. In exchange for political loyalty and control of the colony’s military (which one observer described as a “glorified police force” designed to quell domestic unrest), the Hausa-Fulani had been made exempt from cultural imperialism, and Christian missionaries were barred from the area by the British. Meanwhile, the Yoruba of southwestern Nigeria, and the Igbo of southeastern Nigeria had been subject to direct rule and directly exposed to British cultural, social, and religious assimilation. The Igbo in particular took to Christianity and the British colonial bureaucracy, somewhat naïvely believing that they would one day be treated as equals. Indeed, the Igbo did start receiving special attention from the British after huge oil deposits were discovered in the river deltas of their ancestral homeland in the southeast, but it was nothing approaching equality. The end result was that by the time Nigeria gained its independence in 1960, the Hausa-Fulani were still the most powerful ethnicity, despite have been under a British-encouraged arrested development since the 1800s, while the Igbo were marginalized despite having the most ‘modernized’ society borne out of prolonged exposure to British education and governance. A highly decentralized federal model had been created to discourage interethnic strife, but it had not lasted for long, as the three major ethnicities (and the hundreds of minor ones) were constantly concerned that another group would try to rig the nascent democracy in their favour. These fears were proven prescient, as the Hausa-Fulani Northern People’s Congress (NPC) won the country’s first elections in 1964, but amid widespread accusations of fraud, and violent crackdowns against smaller ethnic groups by the predominantly Hausa-Fulani military. Still working with the Hausa-Fulani through the NPC, the British continued to have immense economic influence over the country, reaping gargantuan profits from the Nigerian oil industry, which they still had a controlling share in in the form of the United Africa Company and the Shell-BP Petroleum Development Company. In 1966, a group of middle-ranking Igbo officers in the Nigerian army launched a coup, executing Prime Minister Abubakar Balewa and most of the government (with the notable exception of President Nwafor Orizu, an ethnic Igbo who was coincidently out of the country at the time). In what many non-Igbo considered to be a planned double-coup, General Johnson Aguiyi-Ironsi – an Igbo himself – defeated the rebelling Igbo officers unusually quickly, before President Orizu officially bequeathed to him the powers of Head of State. Less than half a year later, a majority Hausa-Fulani counter-coup was launched which killed Aguiyi-Ironsi, and put General Yakuba Gowon in power as military dictator. Following the counter-coup, tens of thousands of Igbo were killed in the north by lynch mobs. Trying to end the violence, Chukwuemeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu, an Igbo and the military governor of southeast Nigeria, reached an agreement with Head of State Gowon to further decentralize the country. However, Gowon quickly backed out of the deal, and jerrymandered the different states of southeast Nigeria to separate the Igbo from the oil deposits, prompting Odumegwu-Ojukwu to declare an independent Igbo ethno-state in 1967 named the Republic of Biafra. After a brief hesitation, the United Kingdom began supplying Gowon and the federal government with all the military equipment they needed in return for keeping British control of the oil industry intact. With British support, the Nigerians quickly took control of the coastal oil facilities that might have otherwise financed an independent Biafra, and began a blockade of the rebel state with the intention of starving them out. Quickly becoming a humanitarian cause célèbre, Biafra received broad international sympathy, but very little official recognition, as most countries were reluctant to contest the United Kingdom’s sphere of influence. A vocal supporter of Biafra, President McCarthy passed an official recognition of the aspiring nation through Congress in 1969 and supplied a large influx of humanitarian aid, but attempts by US Ambassador to the UN Chester Bowles’ attempts to thoroughly address the situation in the United Nations were quashed by the British veto. Additionally, frequent purges of the officer corps and, ironically, of non-Igbo ethnic minorities in Biafra weakened their position, and it was overrun soon after [2]. Military casualties were estimated to be as high as one hundred thousand, but the vast majority of those killed in the conflict were Biafran civilians who had starved to death due to the Nigerian blockade. Estimates of the casualties of the famine placed the death toll at two million, and several million more displaced.
Outraged by the humanitarian disaster that followed in the wake of the Nigerian Civil War, President McCarthy proposed a massive new foreign aid program that he planned to tie to domestic agricultural production.
For nearly his entire life, McCarthy had been enamoured by Medieval Christian concepts of mutual aid and rural living. Going well beyond the Jeffersonian belief in the virtues of the independent farmer, McCarthy genuinely believed that the thirteenth century was the peak of human civilization. This devotion to Medieval civilization had inspired his brief stint as a monk in his younger days, as well as a failed attempt by the newly-wed McCarthys and a few of their friends to create a semi-collectivized agrarian commune in rural Minnesota in the 1940s.
Crafting a leviathan piece of intersectional legislation, the Agricultural Ownership and Employment Protection Act (AOEPA, or simply the Agricultural Act) came into being. McCarthy’s proposal was a multi-faceted program that would simultaneously help small farm owners, protect migrant workers, expand the food stamp program, and increase foreign aid.
For farmers, it would continue the ‘ever-normal granary’ program that had been instituted by Secretary of Agriculture (and later Vice President) Henry A. Wallace during the Franklin Roosevelt Administration. During the Great Depression, agricultural prices had collapsed to such an extent that farmers were burning much of their crop in a last-ditch effort to raise prices by decreasing supply. In a successful attempt to stabilize the market, Wallace had proposed that the government buy produce at a fixed rate, and at a loss if necessary, to keep farmers in business. While critics complained that it encouraged over-production and reliance on the government, even most laissez-faire fiscal conservatives were unwilling to invoke the wrath of rural constituencies nationwide by abolishing the program, and the ever-normal granary had survived into the 1970s. Beyond continuing the ever-normal granary, the Agriculture Act would also offer low interest or no interest loans to farmer families, as well as to urban families willing to move out to the country to start a farm. A program to sell federally-owned land in areas where arable land was not cheaply available was also introduced as part of the bill [3].
The plight of Mexican migrant workers had also been a persistent interest of McCarthy’s during his time in the Senate, despite his frosty relationship with Latino community leaders during the 1968 Democratic presidential primaries. Copying failed legislation that he had previously proposed, the Agriculture Act made it illegal for agricultural companies to provide benefits or pay less than what a local American citizen would receive working the same job. As a trade-off, McCarthy agreed to much stricter border controls, a position he was not opposed to anyway [4].
As for the humanitarian components, the grants given to each individual in the food stamp program was increased, and a greater portion of the government’s ever-normal granary surplus would be diverted to foreign aid.
The Agriculture Act was supported by an eclectic mix of the cabinet. Secretary of Agriculture William R. Poage was very much in favour of the expanded benefits for farmers, but was ambivalent to the migrant worker provisions and was uninterested in the food stamp and foreign aid components. Dismissing the idea that there was genuine starvation in America despite the widespread publicization of that very crisis in Senators Bobby Kennedy and Joseph Clark’s tour of the Mississippi Delta in 1967, Poage remarked “The basic problem is one of ignorance as to what constitutes a balanced diet, coupled with indifference by a great many persons who should and probably do not know.” Secretary of Labor Hubert Humphrey was more invested in the Agriculture Act, both out of personal interest on the issue of malnutrition, and as something he could tout on the campaign trail for his plans to run in the year’s Senate election in Minnesota. Secretary of the Interior Ernest Gruening was also involved in the process, due to the land sale provision.
The legislation was officially introduced into the Senate by George McGovern of South Dakota, Chair of the Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs. Allen Ellender of Louisiana, Chair of the Senate Committee on Agriculture, acted as the unofficial whip for the bill. Representing the coming together of interests in the Democratic Party, both McGovern and Ellender had come to support McCarthy at the Democratic National Convention two years prior.
In its simplest interpretation, the Agriculture Act was exactly the kind of pork barrel legislation that members of Congress from rural areas, both Democratic and Republican, were looking for in an election year, and it breezed through the House and Senate in the summer of 1970 with broad support.
Invoking Biafra by name while signing it the Agriculture Act into law, the Nigerian Civil War became the impetus for both an overhaul of American agricultural production, and a cause of strain in the British-American “special relationship” for the rest of McCarthy’s presidency. By 1971, cargo haulers full of grain were making their way to the Sahel region of Africa, which had been by meteorologists noted as particularly vulnerable to an oncoming drought.
Agrarian Idyll: Eugene McCarthy had a longstanding affection for rural living, which was reflected in his Agriculture Act.
Meanwhile, a series of investigations into the Mỹ Lai Massacre had begun. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff David M. Shoup had appointed General William R. Peers to investigate the massacre, and to follow up with an investigation of other similar war crimes that might have been covered up. At the same time, the Department of Defense under Secretary of Defense James Gavin created the Vietnam War Crimes Working Group (VWCWG), which was to cast a broader investigative net. However, despite these two separate investigations, the matter was complicated by L. Mendel Rivers of South Carolina, Chair of the House Armed Services Committee. The self-described “Grandaddy of the War Hawks,” Rivers was firmly committed to the Vietnam war, and believed that Mỹ Lai was a hoax designed to ruin American morale. In March of 1969, Rivers had received a letter by infantryman Ronald L. Ridenhour, who had claimed to have gathered substantial evidence on the massacre, and asked Congress to investigate. Rivers ignored the letter, despite a request from House Majority Whip Mo Udall to look in to it. After Seymour Hersh had revealed the Mỹ Lai Massacre to the public in November of 1969, it had naturally fallen to Rivers to lead an investigation in his position of Chair of the House Armed Services Committee. Intentionally dragging his feet and publicly claiming the massacre was fake or some kind of conspiracy, Rivers’ efforts to protect the accused soldiers backfired, as Speaker of the House James G. O’Hara and House Majority Whip Mo Udall agreed to separate Rivers from the congressional investigation. The newly created Temporary Committee to Investigate Alleged War Crimes was chaired by Charles E. Bennett of Florida, the sixth-highest ranking member of the Armed Services Committee. Following his appointment, it became more commonly known as the Bennett Committee. While a Vietnam hawk, O’Hara and Udall believed that Bennett had the legitimacy needed to chair such an investigation, considering he was a handicapped veteran known for excessive honesty [5]. Particularly damning was the testimony of Hugh Thompson Jr. and Lawrence Colburn, a helicopter crew who had tried to intervene in the massacre, airlifting civilians out of the area and threatening to fire on their fellow soldiers if they persisted. Thompson in particular became a star witness of the Bennett Committee, and he and his crew would receive the Soldier’s Medal soon after, granted for “Distinguishing oneself by heroism not involving actual conflict with an enemy [6].” Further testimony by Daniel Ellsberg, who had revealed the Pentagon Papers the previous year before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was also added to the case. Ellsberg made the Bennett Committee aware of a two hundred page report on “Alleged Atrocities by U.S. Military Forces in South Vietnam” that had created in 1967 on the orders of then-Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, revealing that – if even a minority of the accusations were true – that there was a long pattern of war crimes perpetrated by American forces during the war.
By the time the Bennett Committee issued its final report, there was more than enough evidence to convict dozens of men for war crimes, including, among others, Second Lieutenant William Calley, who Seymour Hersh had first pursued in his hunt to uncover Mỹ Lai, and Captain Ernest Medina, who had been the commanding officer on the ground during the massacre. The guilty war crimes verdicts typically included life sentences with hard labour. Those in the leadership of the Americal Division who did not directly participate in the massacre but who were accused of either covering up or being willfully ignorant were blacklisted from any further advancement in the military, effectively ending the careers of the likes of Major General Samuel Koster and assistant chief of staff of operations Colin Powell [7].
Taking advantage of the rare and very brief burst of anti-military sentiment among centrist voters following the conclusion of the Bennett Committee, McCarthy announced a moratorium on weapons sales, coming into effect in March of 1970. Since the Truman Administration, the United States Defense Department had been selling weaponry to their allies, and in many cases handing it out for free. Some of their biggest markets had been in South America, Africa, and Southeast Asia, where American-aligned dictatorships had used their supply to hunt down communist rebel groups and suppress dissent by protesters who preferred a non-aligned or even Soviet-aligned democracy to an American-aligned dictatorship. McCarthy believed that weapons sales encouraged allied dictatorships to continue their authoritarian rule, and thought that the possibility of a former ally drifting out of the American sphere was worth the risk of using soft power to try and force dictators to step down from power. Offhandedly dismissing criticisms that a halt on weapons sales would just cause dictators to buy weapons elsewhere and leave American influence while retaining power, McCarthy put the moratorium into effect. However, McCarthy did make exceptions for American allies he felt were in particularly precarious geopolitical positions, such as Israel, South Korea, and Thailand. Those weapons sales that did continue were placed firmly in the hands of the State Department, stripping the Defense Department and the CIA of their longstanding role in the international arms trade. At the same time, McCarthy put forward a motion that would formalize congressional oversight of the country’s foreign intelligence services in the form of a Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. The committee would be made up of three members each from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the Senate Armed Services Committee, and the Senate Appropriations Committee, to be appointed by the chairs of those three committees respectively. When first proposed by then-Senator McCarthy in 1966, the motion had failed miserably, due to CIA and FBI lobbying, and strong pushback from both Republican and Democratic hawks, who used a constitutionalist argument that foreign intelligence was under the purview of the executive office. Four years later, and with the executive office actively pushing for a devolution of powers to Congress, the hawks were out their strongest argument. With little reason for moderates to oppose it, the motion passed, over the complaints of its opponents, led by Senator Henry Jackson of Washington, one of Capitol Hill’s most famously hawkish Democrats. But, despite the establishment of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, McCarthy’s top-down efforts to reform the intelligence agencies had been stymied by internal resistance, and little real progress had been made.
That same month, the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), which had been negotiated and signed by the Johnson Administration, came into effect. While mostly symbolic, the signatories of the NPT pledged to not transfer any nuclear weapons to a non-nuclear power or help them produce their own weapons, called for complete nuclear disarmament (without any particular deadline), and allowed for the continued peaceful use of nuclear energy. The ratification of the NPT brought hope to international observers of a new era of peaceful co-existence between the American and Soviet blocs. Sceptics remained unconvinced.
Scoop: Senator Henry 'Scoop' Jackson was one of the most prominent hawks in Congress, and one of President McCarthy's most frequent critics.
While progress had been made in the first three months of the year, the McCarthy Administration had been very nearly derailed in the fourth.
Following the great success of the
Apollo 11 Moon landing, NASA had continued with the program. In November of 1969, the astronauts of
Apollo 12, Pete Conrad and Alan Bean, became the third and fourth man to walk on the Moon, while the command module pilot, Richard F. Gordon Jr., remained in orbit. Having proven that a Moon landing was possible with
Apollo 11, and having proven that a precision landing was possible with
Apollo 12, the next Moon landing,
Apollo 13, was designed more of a scientific expedition than a practical test of engineering. The
Apollo 13 team consisted of mission commander Jim Lovell, lunar module pilot Fred Haise, and command module pilot Ken Mattingly [8].
Trying to meet a demanding deadline and expecting budget cuts in the next fiscal year, a series of small mistakes had been made in the construction of the launch rocket and module. With the launch underway on April 11th of 1970, one of the secondary engines shut down early due to excess pressure and vibrations. The other engines were boosted to compensate, and
Apollo 13 began to make its way to the Moon. Once in space, it appeared that one of the pressure sensors on a module’s oxygen tanks was malfunctioning, so the tank’s fans were turned on to reset the pressure reading. Shortly after activating the fans, there was an exterior explosion, followed by a fuel leak and electrical drain. In mortal danger of being stranded in space, the mission was changed to getting back to Earth as quickly as possible. To that end, mission control decided that they would orbit the Moon, then use the lunar module’s propulsion engines to put them back on a trajectory with Earth, aiming for the Pacific Ocean, where they could be easily recovered. There was enough oxygen and water to meet the bare necessities of survival for the flight back to Earth, but the pellets designed to absorb carbon dioxide were not compatible between the different modules, and duct tape and plastic had to be used as a quick fix to force the different systems together. In order to preserve power, the lights and heating were turned off, leaving them in the dark at a temperature of three degrees Celsius (thirty-eight degrees Fahrenheit). After various course corrections, the lunar module was jettisoned, and the astronauts crash landed in Pacific Ocean. They were safely recovered by the USS
Iwo Jima, with no injuries except for a urinary tract infection that Haise had gotten from a lack of hydration. Sticking to his trend of not bothering to attend to a crisis he had no way of fixing, McCarthy sent Vice President John Connally to meet the wayward astronauts in Honolulu.
Unbeknownst to the astronauts, their story had become a media sensation, ironically much more so than a third Moon landing would have prompted.
Apollo 13’s safe return was met with widespread celebrations, but it was exactly the kind of excuse McCarthy had been waiting for to siphon off NASA’s budget. Feelings that the billions spent on the space program could be better used back on Earth, McCarthy grounded the
Apollo program indefinitely, citing safety concerns [9].
Later in the month and back down on Earth, the impeachment inquiry into Supreme Court Associate Justice William O. Douglas reached its conclusion.
Associate Justice Abe Fortas’ resignation in 1969 for questionable financial dealings following the threat of impeachment had led to further investigations into Fortas’ mentor, William Douglas. House Minority Leader Gerald Ford led the charge, with his main line of attack was the connection between Douglas and Albert Parvin. Douglas was the president of the Parvin Foundation, an obscure non-profit charity that was financed by Parvin, a multi-millionaire hotel supply salesman known was owning casinos with mob ties. However, with no clear cause of wrongdoing on Douglas’ part, the Chair of the House Judiciary Committee and an ally of Douglas’, Emanuel Celler, refused to broaden the inquiry. Stonewalled by the Democrat-controlled committees, Ford resorted to a moral argument, accusing Douglas of being unsuitable to the Supreme Court due to his defense of pornography, and for publishing articles in pornographic magazines. However, Ford was forced to admit that Douglas’ article was not pornographic itself, but claimed that it praised pornographic ideas, and “the social protest of left-wing folk singers.” Ford’s efforts were dismissed as petty by the House and the American public, and Douglas was cleared soon after, leaving the Supreme Court securely in liberal hands [10].
"Houston, we have a problem:" The near-disaster of Apollo 13
resulted in the indefinite halt of the Moon landing program.
As the midterms grew closer and the primaries began, American political observers noted that theirs’ was not the only election of the year; in the United Kingdom, Prime Minister Harold Wilson was looking to win his third consecutive election, in Chile, a Marxist was the frontrunner, and in South Vietnam, the two leading candidates were neck and neck, though the latter two elections would not be held until September.
Harold Wilson had had a difficult premiership, to say the least. Before the beginning of his tenure, the rival Conservative Party had governed for thirteen years, going through Prime Ministers Winston Churchill, Anthony Eden, Harold Macmillan, and Alec Douglas-Home in relatively quick succession. While the economy had been strong under the Conservatives, major scandals had weakened their support, and the national mood was turning against them. Running as a dynamic space age modernizer, the eternally optimistic Wilson had promised that the left wing Labour Party would usher in a new era of prosperity for Britain with the “white heat of technology,” and won a narrow majority in 1964 despite the good economic conditions. Once in power, Wilson and his cabinet realized that the economy was not nearly as good as they thought it was. The Conservatives had run up a massive deficit, and there was a massive loss of revenue pouring out of the country through a trade imbalance, with Britons buying cheaper foreign imports at a higher rate than British products were being purchased domestically and overseas. On top of that, the country was straining under the weight of the vestigial overseas expenditures of the British Empire, with troop deployments in the Middle East and Asia trying to counter a nationalist uprising in Yemen, and a communist rebellion and border skirmishes with Indonesia in Malaysia. All of these forces combined to put massive inflationary pressure on the British pound, which would decrease its value and hurt Labour’s working class base worst of all. The most obvious solutions were to devalue the pound and intentionally lower its value, or dismantle what was left of the empire to save on money, but Wilson was unwilling to consider either option, thinking them damaging to British international prestige. Wilson instead adopted a stopgap solution of austerity, price and wage controls, and high taxes to keep the pound’s value strong, and hoped that once the budget and trade deficits were eliminated that the pound would stabilize too. Doubling down against devaluation, Wilson specifically tied his career to keeping the pound strong. Generally referred to as the ‘sterling crises,’ Wilson had to frequently force his socialist party to implement fiscal austerity. Wilson was also beholden to the financial aid given by the United States to help keep the pound and British finances going, and was forced to quietly support the Vietnam War, despite the disapproval of his party and the British public. Distracted by the sterling crises and with less room in the budget than they had hoped, ambitious plans for nationalization of major industries, large corporate mergers, technological revolution, and a planned economy to be directed out of the new Department of Economic Affairs were all delayed. Wilson was also forced to devalue the pound anyway in 1967, while at the same time claiming that devaluing the pound would not actually decrease the domestic value of the pound, a statement which was widely mocked. Wilson had also been embarrassed by French President Charles de Gaulle vetoing the United Kingdom’s application to join the European Economic Community (EEC) free trade zone. By the late 1960s, Wilson had had to fend off numerous behind-the-scenes challenges to his leadership by his three most ambitious cabinet members, Deputy Leader George Brown, and Roy Jenkins and James Callaghan, who had both respectively served as Chancellor and Home Secretary. All three men were part of the ‘right’ of Labour, meaning they were more social democrats than democratic socialists. Wilson was initially associated with the party’s centre-left, but after various disputes with the country’s unions, he came to be seen as an ambiguously centrist political animal. Brown was not a major threat to Wilson’s position, as he had lost to Wilson in the previous leadership election, and was almost a farcical figure: he threatened to resign whenever a major decision did not go his way, and had the almost miraculous ability to stay in the cabinet despite frequent bizarre rants and occasional violent episodes caused by his alcoholism. Jenkins and Callaghan were both more credible threats, and Wilson played them off each other to prevent the other from getting in power. Wilson’s balancing act worked, but his caution bordered on the paranoid, and his cabinet battles and broken promises earned him a reputation with the public as an unprincipled manipulator.
Despite all this, Wilson’s government had still had its accomplishments. He had won a sizable majority after calling a snap election in 1966, adeptly claiming credit for good economic conditions while blaming the then-recently-in-power Conservatives for the underlying problems. Throughout his premiership, economic growth had steadily marched on, unemployment remained low, and his much-maligned austerity did keep down inflation. Likewise, while his budgets were not nearly as ambitious as the party would have liked, Wilson still increased social security benefits, carried out the re-nationalization of the British steel industry, and increased housing and urban development. Wilson he had worked with social reformers in Labour and the Liberal Party to simplify divorce, legalize abortion, decriminalize homosexuality, and end the death penalty for most crimes, none of which were particularly popular at the time, but were quietly appreciated by many others. With Johnson out of office, Wilson hoped for a fresh start with President McCarthy, but he turned out to be a definitively mixed blessing; while Wilson was no longer beholden to support the Vietnam War and McCarthy was generous with financial aid, he was also insistent that Wilson should attempt to join the EEC again, as de Gaulle had resigned as President of France in April of 1969, and the two did not get along well on a personal level. Going into the general election in 1970, it would be a matter of convincing the British public that he had been successful enough to re-elect once again.
Fortunately for Wilson and Labour, what had looked like a massacre a year earlier had dramatically swung in their favour. After years of deflationary measures and devaluation, the pound had finally stabilized and the trade deficit had been eliminated. Additionally, Wilson and Jenkins' budget for the fiscal year was widely praised for its restraint, and it appeared that the Prime Minister was on the verge of one of the greatest comebacks in British political history, to the dismay of his main opponent, Conservative leader Edward Heath. Torn between a June or October election, Wilson ultimately decided to call it during the former, as he believed that economic conditions had a chance of swinging against them by the time of the latter. However, Wilson was concerned over June's World Cup association football championship, as he had a superstitious belief that the fate of his government was tied to the success of Britain's team as a barometer of the national mood.
Going ahead with June, Wilson enjoyed a rebound in popularity after years of running from crisis to crisis. Ignoring most issues, he instead ran on his image, the recently stabilized economy, and other positive economic indicators such as low unemployment and high wages. As for Heath, despite attempts to change his reputation, he frequently came off as stodgy, unapproachable, and bureaucratic, and he ran a doom and gloom campaign accusing Wilson of allowing runaway inflation to hurt the lower middle class. Heath particularly tailored his campaign to housewives, which was still the majority 'occupation' of British women, and were particularly vulnerable to rising prices without having an independent source of income. Fortunately for Wilson, any last minute surprises were avoided. The British team dispatched the West Germans in the World Cup quarterfinals after goalkeeper Peter Bonnetti caught a near-fumble, leaving the game's score at two to one [11]. On top of that, Wilson's sunny economic forecasting was vindicated by a report by Chancellor Jenkins on June 15th, three days before the election, which showed that the trade balance was still in surplus [12]. While Wilson and Labour were returned to power, it was not with the obliterating supermajority that many had predicted. Instead, they had returned with a diminished majority from their 1966 results, with many surprised by Heath's near-upset. Citing the close result, Heath attempted to stay on until a new leader could be chosen for the Conservative Party, but he was forced out in a pre-arranged agreement made by the party's senior bureaucracy, former Prime Minister Alec Douglas-Home, and the party's Chief Whip, William 'Willie' Whitelaw. Douglas-Home would return as an interim for the party, in order to remove the twice-defeated Heath as the public face of the party. Douglas-Home would not stand in the leadership race himself however, leaving it to someone younger instead [13].
"You know Labour government works: A self-styled modernizer, Prime Minister Harold Wilson and the Labour Party was narrowly re-elected in the United Kingdom's 1970 general election, despite numerous crises and intense controversy during his tenure.
Back across the pond, McCarthy's legislative agenda continued. The Adequate Income Act, Federal Aid Housing Act, and the Agriculture Act were all making their way through Congress, and would all be ready to be signed into law by the end of the year. McCarthy was content with his progress in what he bizarrely considered his ultimate legislative goal: the dismantlement of the Great Society and the War on Poverty. While McCarthy had agreed in principle with Johnson's efforts to end poverty in the United States, he was very critical of his methods. At various points, he had called the Great Society “defeatist,” “a kind of hand-out public welfare approach,” “imposed on people,” and “not the kind of constructive program on which you can really build strength in a party or basic strength in society.” McCarthy believed that the Great Society's social welfare structure was a divisive and unnecessary departure from the New Deal and the Fair Deal (and to a lesser extent, the New Frontier), which had government services, yes, but were primarily based around self-help, public works, and providing the basis of self-sufficiency. By ripping apart the Great Society and reshaping it into New Politics and the Four New Civil Rights (a term itself very nearly plagiarized from Franklin Roosevelt), McCarthy considered himself the true successor to the legacy of the New Deal Coalition, loyally purging dangerous deviations from the system. Idiosyncratically, McCarthy was pursuing this hidden agenda through a highly elitist and technocratic administration while also genuinely believing in public accessibility to political decision-making.
With his legislation secured, McCarthy instead tinkered with legal and constitutional matters. Despite his anti-war stance and his irrepressible support from college students, McCarthy did not believe in abolishing the draft. Instead, he believed that conscripts should have the right to 'opt out' of a war that they disagreed with, and instead be sent on Peace Corps-esque nation-building missions. McCarthy's draft reform would also remove the right to religious exemption from the draft, as he believed it to be in violation of the separation of church and state [14]. Confusingly, McCarthy also believed in the critical importance of not separating personal faith from political decisions, and frequently talked about how his devotion to Catholic Social Gospel theory influenced his political decisions and motives. McCarthy's draft reform was well-received across the political spectrum, but raised the suspicion of hawks, who believed that it would undermine manpower for a hypothetical unpopular but necessary war, and the radical New Left, who considered it coerced participation in American imperialism.
Another major reform undertaken by McCarthy in the summer of 1970 was the beginnings of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). McCarthy was immensely more comfortable with women's groups and the feminist movement than any other social movement of the 1960s and '70s. This perhaps had to do with the fact that he had been raised almost singlehandedly by his mother, and that the majority of his supporters in the Democratic primaries had been women. Specifically, his 'average' supporter during the primaries had been an educated, middle-aged suburban woman who made twice as much as the national average, who was involved in a local religious or political group, and who was likely to be a progressive Republican or independent who had voted Democratic on the presidential level since 1960. In the Senate, McCarthy had previously sponsored legislation to implement an Equal Rights Amendment, which would entrench legal equality between men and women into the Constitution. While an ERA had been suggested in various forms since the 1920s, it had never seen significant progress. When Representative Martha Griffiths, a Democrat from Michigan, suggested to the President that an ERA be reintroduced into Congress, he enthusiastically agreed, and began proceedings to have it voted on. Notably, while it was not a major political issue at the time, McCarthy was also in favour of legalizing abortion, with the civil libertarian belief that it was a medical and privacy issue that need not require government involvement.
Engrossed with his social reforms and less interested in campaigning than any other president in modern history, McCarthy declined to go on tour in the lead-up to the midterms. Instead, he spent the time that could have been spent campaigning on examining the marginal tax rate on telephone wiring, writing poetry with Robert Lowell, and attending fund-raising dinners in his honour at the capital. However, exceptions were made for McCarthy's protégés. The President made a personal appearance on behalf of George Brown Jr., who was in a fierce primary battle against the moderate Kennedy imitator John V. Tunney for the Senate nomination in California; a stop was also made in Connecticut for Joseph Duffey, who was running a three way race against his Republican challenger, the Goldwaterite John M. Lupton [15], and the disgraced incumbent Thomas Dodd, who had been censured by the Senate for financial corruption, but who was still running as an independent. The last big event was in New York, where Paul O'Dwyer was running against Ted Sorenson. Surprising pundits, Bobby Kennedy had declared that he would not be running for another term in the Senate, so that he could instead focus on his ghetto reconstruction initiative which he had started with the Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation (BSRC) in 1967. Privately, Kennedy had reached the decision due to his immobility after 1968's failed assassination attempt, and the constant pain he was in that required mind-clouding drugs to dull. In a touchy confrontation, Ted Sorenson, a longtime advisor to the Kennedy family, was running against O'Dwyer, McCarthy's protégé who had won the nomination but lost the Senate election in 1968. Other Democrats across the nation pleading to take advantage of McCarthy's famously long coattails were ignored. After his brief sweep across the country to California, New York, Connecticut, and a few other states, the President's interests were instead occupied by the election in Chile.
Ever since his 1961 trip to the Christian Democrat World Conference, McCarthy had been a staunch supporter of the Christian Democratic Party of Chile (PDC). He had even reportedly delivered CIA secret funding to them during his trip to the country. In 1964, McCarthy's friend, Eduardo Frei Montalva, was elected President of Chile, receiving immense support from the CIA, who were afraid that the country's perennial Marxist candidate, Salvador Allende, might win. The leader of the right wing faction of the PDC, Frei's presidency had not been very popular. The main issue of the campaign had been the copper industry. Copper was the nation's biggest export, but was controlled for the most part by American corporations, and despite record revenues each year, the Chilean economy continued its slow decline. As an alternative to Allende's calls for nationalization, Frei had implemented “Chileanization,” a program of purchasing fifty-one percent of smaller American copper companies, and granting tax breaks and subsidies to the major American copper companies, such as the mining division of International Telephone and Telegraph (ITT), the Anaconda Mining Company, and Kennecott Utah Copper, with the understanding that they would increase production to expand employment. However, the Chileanized companies still sent most of their profits back to the United States indirectly, and the large copper corporations pocketed the tax breaks and subsidies without increasing production or employment. Frei's land reform plans had also been much more modest than they had been advertised during the election. Land ownership and agricultural production remained in the hands of old money estates, who exported most of the nation's food overseas, paid bare subsistence wages, and used the threat of unemployment – still very common in Chile due to monopolistic cartel corporate control of the major economic sectors, and limited educational opportunities to enter the skilled labour pool – to discourage unionization or demands for better pay and conditions. Frei's expansion of the education system to improve employment was considered too late too late, and labour unrest, rampant unemployment, and rapid inflation all grew worse, and he came to be seen as a stooge of American Big Business, despite his best efforts. In the run-up to the 1970 presidential election, Salvador Allende seemed poised to finally win, having run in every presidential election since 1952, and having built up a broad coalition of Marxists, socialists, social democrats, and some left Christian Democrats during that time. His two opponents were Jorge Allesandri and Radomiro Tomic. Allesandri, who had been president before Frei, was looking to make a comeback. He had been elected by a coalition of conservatives and liberals, and had dealt with unemployment through major public works projects, while addressing inflation by encouraging the growth of domestic non-export businesses and wage controls. The wage controls proved incredibly unpopular, as they kept wages from growing with inflation. They were so unpopular, in fact, that Allesandri's coalition had dissolved completely by the end of his term, which had left Frei an opportunity to fill the centrist lane and win in his own right. Running as a tough elder statesman who could defeat Marxism and make tough decisions, Allesandri postured himself as Allende's main opponent, trying to marginalize Tomic. From the left wing of the PDC, Tomic had a remarkably similar platform to Allende, calling for the nationalization of the copper industry, major agricultural reform, and a massive Keynesian stimulus package to address unemployment and end Chile's over-reliance on a handful of exports. However, unlike Allende, he stopped short of promising any major institutional change or social revolution.
Polling in third place, Tomic received immense backroom support from his old American friend Gene McCarthy. Putting aside his suspicions of the intelligence agencies and any compunction he might have had about interfering in a foreign election, McCarthy ordered the CIA to put all of their resources into Tomic's campaign and the PDC's budget, and demanded that the American copper corporations stop supporting Alessandri, promising compensation for the nationalization of Chilean copper. Pulling ahead in the last days of August, Tomic managed to place second, surpassing Alessandri, but with Allende still having won the popular vote. However, that was not the end of the election. While Allende had won the popular vote, it had only been by a thin plurality, and as was law in Chile, if no candidate received a majority of the vote, the National Congress would decide between the top two candidates. Despite this, Allende seemed secure in victory, as it had been tradition for decades to hand the election to the winner of the popular vote, regardless of their margin. As the congressional vote approached, the CIA and the American copper companies continuied to interfere by trying to drum up a red scare and through outright bribery of politicians. Meanwhile, Alessandri's supporters refused to vote for a Marxist. In the end, the National Congress voted for Tomic, giving him the dubious distinction of becoming the first Chilean president to lose the popular vote since 1920 [16]. Once Tomic was declared the winner, the cheated Allende declared a general strike, but McCarthy guaranteed the political reliability of the Chilean military by giving CIA protection to René Schneider, the commander-in-chief of the Chilean army, and a strict constitutionalist who ensured that a majority of the army would stay loyal to the government in the event of a communist or reactionary coup [17].
Christian Democrats of the world, unite: A personal friend of President McCarthy, Radomiro Tomic (left) narrowly won the 1970 Chilean presidential election thanks to intense interference by the CIA and American copper corporations.
Meanwhile, democracy had finally come to South Vietnam, or at least the closest it was ever going to get.
The closest that South Vietnam had come to a proper election before 1970 had been the 1967 presidential and legislative elections. Despite widespread voter suppression and ballot stuffing, military dictator Nguyễn Văn Thiệu had only received around thirty-five percent of the vote, an embarrassingly low plurality. The populist runner-up, Trương Đình Dzu, was now looking to attain the presidency. As it had been illegal to run on an anti-war platform in 1967, Trương Đình Dzu had stuck to platitudes until his candidacy was confirmed, and only then revealed that he was in favour of a ceasefire with North Vietnam and peace negotiations, but continued independence. Given radio access during the campaign, Trương Đình Dzu had gained a large rural following, but after the election, a furious Nguyễn Văn Thiệu revoked his privileges and had him arrested on trumped up charges. While he had become a cause célèbre of South Vietnam's small population of urban middle class reformers, his electorate had largely forgotten him, and he had to make up for lost time. Acting President Dương Văn Minh was also running, representing a Cambodian-style neutralist form of government, and holding together what was left of Nguyễn Văn Thiệu's Nationalist Social Democratic Front (NSDF) coalition. However, after Nguyễn Văn Thiệu's removal, the coalition had not held; the ambitious general and senator Tôn Thất Đính was running as a representative of the NSDF hardliners, while Nguyễn Tôn Hoàn had broken off the Nationalist Party of Greater Vietnam (DVQDD) from the NSDF, as the most militantly anti-communist candidate, but also promising genuine democracy and more land reform. However, the most important candidate of all was Trần Văn Hữu. A former collaborator with the French colonial administrator, he had become an anti-colonialist and neutralist during the reign of President Ngô Đình Diệm. Working to undermine Ngô Đình Diệm's regime, he had becoming a fellow traveler of the communists' National Liberation Front (NLF). Rather than running a communist candidate, the NLF instead backed Trần Văn Hữu as the man most likely to comply with eventual reunification with North Vietnam. Besides these men, there were also a gaggle of minor independent candidates running, similar to in 1967. As the candidates crossed the country, the policies of North Vietnamese leader Trường Chinh offered a huge boon to Trần Văn Hữu. With American forces having completely abandoned the countryside and with the South's Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) stretched thin, the NLF had effectively taken control of most of rural South Vietnam, and therefore most of the rural population. Trying to maximize the veneer of legitimacy, the NLF did not tamper with the results, but did massive turnout drives for the presidential ballot, and had effectively given itself total control of most villages before a single ballot had been cast. As the results came in, Trần Văn Hữu was elected on a vaguely populist and social democratic platform of peace, bread, and roses, and the NLF became the largest party of the South Vietnamese legislature. However, the neutralist general and acting president Dương Văn Minh had placed second, and while the NLF was the largest party, a coalition of various nationalist and petit bourgeoisie parties had a majority. Furthermore, the referendum on immediate unification between the two Vietnams had failed, due to an overwhelming 'No' vote in the cities, and a marginal 'No' vote in ARVN-controlled areas of the Mekong Delta. South Vietnam would remain independent for the time being. This was of no matter to Trường Chinh and the North Vietnamese, who instead began plans for a gradual takeover of the levers of power in South Vietnam. Given time, the two countries would unite, whether they liked it or not.
Fellow traveller: An ally of the communist National Liberal Front, Trần Văn Hữu was elected president of South Vietnam in 1970.
While the victory of Trần Văn Hữu was a cause for alarm for foreign policy specialists, what most Americans heard shortly before the midterm elections was that South Vietnam had had its first democratic election, and a non-communist had won. Along with a strong economy, a general lack of controversy, and a final end to the Vietnam War, all the conditions were right for Democratic gains in the midterms. However, like nearly every midterm election before it, the incumbent party lost seats, with a slight decline in both the House and Senate for the Democrats. Party analysts lamented that if McCarthy had actually campaigned, it would have been an unmitigated success. Instead, they had more or less broken even.
Despite this, the first two years of the McCarthy presidency had succeeded in nearly everything it had set out to accomplish, both domestically and in the international court. But the question remained, what was Eugene McCarthy without Vietnam?
[1] IOTL, Nixon extended Johnson’s ten percent tax increase in 1969 to help pay for the Vietnam War.
[2] It would have taken a much firmer stance than McCarthy would have been willing to take for Biafra to survive past the 1969-1970 period of the Nigerian Civil War, but his humanitarian interest did slightly prolong its life ITTL. Notably, IOTL, government-controlled Nigerian newspapers insulted McCarthy by name for his vocal support of Biafra. President Nixon was also a Biafra supporter, but did not do anything about it, as he felt Britain’s geopolitical loyalty was more important than a genocide.
[3] This is quite a departure from OTL. Nixon’s Secretary of Agriculture, Earl Butz, ended the ever-normal granary program, encouraging farmers to “get big or get out.” This accelerated the decline of the family farm in the United States, and the subsequent rise of large industrial agriculture corporations.
[4] McCarthy was a co-sponsor of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which abolished the National Origins Formula, a racist quota that put restrictive limitations on ‘undesirable’ immigrants, with ‘undesirable’ meaning ‘anyone who was not a white Protestant.’ Later in life, McCarthy would change his stance on immigration, becoming a supporter of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), an advocate for significantly lower immigration rates to the United States.
[5] Bennett was apparently so devoted to honesty that he returned his disability cheques to help reduce the national debt, donated all of his leftover campaign funds to national parks, was instrumental in forming the House’s first ethics committee, and was vigorously opposed to the off-the-books accounting and slush funds that were incredibly common in Congress. However, Bennett was also a segregationist who voted against every civil rights legislation of the era, with the exception of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
[6] A third crew member named Glenn Andreotta was also with Thompson and Colburn, but he had been killed in action shortly after the Mỹ Lai Massacre while on a search and destroy mission. After their testimony IOTL, Thompson and Colburn were pilloried by the Nixon Administration and the military, and were pariahs until the late 1980s, when they were interviewed for a documentary titled Fours Hours in My Lai and broadly vindicated.
[7] IOTL, Rivers covered up the Mỹ Lai Massacre by having all of the available witnesses testify in a private hearing, and then refused to release the transcripts or evidence to the military court that was handling the case. William Calley, the fall guy for the massacre, was originally given a life sentence with hard labour, but the Nixon Administration quietly intervened several times to have the sentence watered down. Found guilty of twenty-two counts of murder even with Rivers’ dirty tricks, Calley would ultimately only serve three months of house arrest before being released, in the midst of popular outcry in his favour.
[8] IOTL, Mattingly was switched out and replaced by Jack Swigert as an alternate command module pilot, as Mattingly was exposed to rubella (measles) through another astronaut, who had contracted it from a friend of his son.
[9] The following investigation both IOTL and ITTL discovered that the cause of the Apollo 13 explosion was poorly installed Teflon insulation that led to a pressure build-up of combustible gases.
[10] It has been claimed that Ford only investigated Douglas because Nixon wanted revenge for the rejection of their Supreme Court picks, but Ford himself said that once Fortas had resigned he was going to go after Douglas, regardless of the opinion of the Nixon Administration.
[11] IOTL, Bonnetti, who was a substitute goalkeeper, fumbled the ball, which re-invigorated the West Germans, who went on to win the game.
[12] IOTL, the United Kingdom went back into a trade deficit shortly before the election thanks to some aircraft purchases from the United States and a dockworkers' strike. ITTL, these were mitigated by McCarthy deferring payment for the aircraft and through his greater financial assistance to stabilize the pound.
[13] This was the agreement that Whitelaw and the party leadership agreed to IOTL, but they never had to implement it, as Heath pulled off an upset victory and defeated Wilson, serving as Prime Minister until Wilson made a comeback in 1974.
[14] Ironically, Gene's son, Michael McCarthy, had used religious exemption to avoid the draft IOTL.
[15] IOTL, Lupton was defeated by the moderate Lowell Weicker in the Republican primary, but ITTL, Weicker lost election to the House of Representatives in 1968, and did not have the profile to defeat his opponent, especially with the post-Nixon conservative backlash within the GOP.
[16] IOTL, the CIA was left to its own devices to influence the Chilean presidential election. Without clear direction, they split their support among Alessandri, Tomic, and general anti-Allende advertising, resulting in Allende narrowly defeating Alessandri in the popular vote, and Tomic placing third. ITTL, with a president familiar with the minutiae of Chilean politics, the CIA and American copper interests went all in on Tomic, giving him a second place finish and enabling him to steal the election once it reached the National Congress. ITTL, due to his similar platform to Allende, Tomic threw the PDC's support behind him in the National Congress vote once he pledged to support the constitution and not try and implement a Soviet-style dictatorship.
[17] With the encouragement of National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, the CIA backed three different attempts to kidnap Chilean commander-in-chief René Schneider to blame on Allende's Popular Unity coalition and to pave the way for a military coup to topple Allende. A first attempt by General Camilo Valenzuela failed, while a second attempt by General Roberto Viaux also failed. A third and final attempt done by both Valenzuela and Viaux was botched when Schineider was killed during the kidnapping attempt. Ultimately, the Nixon Administration and the CIA would not support either Valenzuela's or Viaux's coup plots. Valenzuela was considered too incompetent and unreliable, while the CIA report back to the White House described Viaux's political ideology as “far out,” and implied he was an actual fascist. IOTL, with major American interference and a series of constitutional disputes with the National Congress, Allende was removed in a coup by general Augusto Pinochet in 1973, and killed himself before he could be captured. Pinochet would go on to rule as one of South America's most infamous military dictators, and used the country as the guinea pig for American laissez-faire capitalist economists.
