Glen's No Watergate Timeline

Good points. Have to figure out how that impacts things.

To be more exact on the issue, Nixon offered national health insurance and Kennedy wanted single-payer.

Business Week said:
The Watergate Babies stripped power from the party kingpins. They dumped committee chairmen and changed rules so the party caucus, rather than the leadership, made committee assignments. Bucking the old bulls was easy because the Class of '74 owed little to the Democratic bosses. ``We didn't expect a lot of the Watergate class to win,'' remembers Sam M. Gibbons (D-Fla.). ``We just put them on the ballot to have a Democratic name there.''

[…]

far afield from the '74 reformers who hobbled their Speaker. As a result, they created a power vacuum that would be filled over the next decade by strong committee chairmen such as Ways & Means boss Dan Rostenkowski (D-Ill.).

CHECK BOUNCERS. Some of the Watergate Babies eventually gained powerful positions. Paul Tsongas (D-Mass.) and Paul Simon (D-Ill.), for instance, went to the Senate and eventually ran for President. Indeed, it was remarkable how easily much of this class adapted to Washington. They took generous campaign money. They bounced checks at the House bank. They became part of a system they had vowed to change when their hair was longer and their commitment deeper.

[…]

The Class of '74's legacy was a campaign-finance reform law that created political action committees.

[Business Week]

Wiki said:
Notable freshmen included future Senators and presidential candidates Paul Tsongas (D-Mass.), Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), and Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.).

Future President Bill Clinton was the Democratic nominee for a seat in Arkansas, but lost.

As for the Republican class of 1980, and the Democratic losses:

Wiki said:
the Republicans defeated nine incumbents: Herman Talmadge (D-GA), Frank Church (D-ID), Birch E. Bayh II (D-IN), John Culver (D-IA), John A. Durkin (D-NH), Robert Morgan (D-NC), 1972 presidential nominee George S. McGovern (D-SD), Warren Magnuson (D-WA), and Gaylord Nelson (D-WI).

Notable new senators included future Vice-President J. Danforth Quayle (R-IN). Alfonse M. D'Amato (R-NY) defeated incumbent liberal Republican icon Jacob Javits in a primary, demonstrating the ascendancy of conservative Republicans.


Chappaquiddick is butterflied.

Then it's probably Kennedy versus Carter in the primaries, and whoever you feel like keeping around for the 1980 nomination can lose. It would have been a toss-up, basically, Hamilton Jordan's primary strategy analysis (he recognized that Iowa = momentum) versus The Kennedy Restoration.


Stagflation butterflied away due to avoiding the oil embargo and having different fiscal policies.

No oil embargo, not energy crisis.

IOTL Nixon proposed a negative income tax under pressure from Milton Friedman, but without the corresponding savings from being able to cut social security and welfare. Therefore Friedman rallied the House Republicans, and prevented it.

ITTL we could suppose Friedman has more influence and so Nixon doesn't enact entitlements because he introduces a negative income tax (for the left, he can call it a guaranteed annual income). (Not introducing entitlements is functionally equal to cutting them, given what having social security indexed to inflation has done to the US budget.)

Friedman having more influence, but without the Kemp-Roth supply side pushers (i.e. balanced budget Republicans would still prevail), should help to right the US at that point in time

Reagan is a great cheerleader and will grant funding and promote reform.

Would he keep the draft? Or perhaps introduce national service with a slew of optional jobs?

Also, Panama Canal? I assume Reagan keeps it, and that should cause some hand-wringing.

No, Nixon still pulls out, but the funding for South Vietnam stays in place, so the Vietnamization of the war is more successful. Also, the Republicans would at least credibly threaten to resume the air war if the North Vietnamese were to launch a full scale invasion.

Yeah that's what I meant, I didn't mean to imply Nixon would stay in. However Viet Nam probably still remains an issue with the McGovernites.
 
Would [Reagan] keep the draft? Or perhaps introduce national service with a slew of optional jobs?

Nixon campaigned in '68 with a promise to end the draft. The committee that he used to prove to Congress and DoD that it would work returned in 1970. The last conscripts were 1972. The PoD is 1971, and Reagan doesn't take office until 1976.

Assuming something doesn't derail the end of conscription, we'd be looking at Reagan trying to bring it back during his term. I don't see him pulling it off.
 
I was (mis)remebering this:

Wiki said:
The United States abandoned the draft in 1973 under President Richard Nixon, ended the Selective Service registration requirement in 1975 under President Gerald Ford, and then re-instated the Selective Service registration requirement in 1980 under President Jimmy Carter.

1973 is after the POD (which is at least 1971, and could be earlier). A Nixon pressured by the conservatives—required for changing fiscal policy—might also keep the draft even if conscription ends.
 
I was (mis)remebering this:



1973 is after the POD (which is at least 1971, and could be earlier). A Nixon pressured by the conservatives—required for changing fiscal policy—might also keep the draft even if conscription ends.

The government stopped drafting men in 1972. The last of them reported for basic in 1973.

The fight against the draft was effectively over in 1970, with the legislation signed in 1971. There wasn't an immediate cut-off of manpower to the army, as the army was still in Vietnam through 1972.

If you had a war flare up (a carribean adventure?), maybe you could stall it. But the policy was effectively dead. You could wave it away with a PoD of 1969, at the cost of a little bit of Nixon's political capital, by appointing a stacked deck to study the issue and come out with a report against developing an all-volunteer force. Historically, the opposite happened well before the PoD, and it was popular.

By 1971, you'd need to push uphill with some motivation.
 
Hmm. Nixon has more than enough political capital to spend, if he needs to, given that he's up against (probably) McGovern in '72. Keeping the draft would probably make it more likely that he'd face McGovern, actually, which is a good thing if we're using non dirty tricks Nixon (i.e. Muskie "crying" in New Hampshire).

(I'll note that I'm not insistent on keeping the draft, I just think it would be interesting to have it stay around and perhaps morph into a more general national service thing.)
 
Or he's a touch smarter and realizes that the DNC in that era was crippled and useless and there was no need to break it into it.
 

Glen

Moderator
This is a fun and interesting one. I wonder if it wouldn't be possible/desirable to do a retcon to cause reform rather than revolution in Iran ITTL.
 
Glen: I'll give you some solutions from my TLs.

Watergate: Nixon can take Connally's suggestion and burn the relevant tapes, particularly the smoking gun one.

Iran: Have Khomeini have an "accident" and make US financial and military support conditional on the Shah transitioning from an absolute to a constitutional monarch.
 

Glen

Moderator
Glen: I'll give you some solutions from my TLs.

Watergate: Nixon can take Connally's suggestion and burn the relevant tapes, particularly the smoking gun one.

I'm rather going to have them not get caught, thus no reason to look into the tapes. But thanks.

Iran: Have Khomeini have an "accident" and make US financial and military support conditional on the Shah transitioning from an absolute to a constitutional monarch.

Could just use more diplomatic pressure to keep him in France longer (which is what I do). I don't entirely know that the conditionality of US support makes sense per se as they could threaten to cozy up to the Soviets if we cut off the pipeline. Need something more subtle there....

Thanks for the suggestions!
 
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