Big Jim Thompson, the longtime anti corruption Illinois governor, is an interesting possibility in a Bushless 1988.
I've considered it before and it's not the biggest hurtle in all of AH. But Lindbergh Senior was born in Sweden and thus, ineligible.Re Lindbergh, now I want to find this Paradox Hearts of Iron 2 AAR that featured a President Lindbergh. I read it probably ten years ago or more, so it may well have disappeared into the ether, but I remember enjoying it greatly. Of course, it's likely that it suffers from all the actual plausibility of a Paradox game...
But for hipster Presidents, let's look at the aviator's father, Charles August Lindbergh. A member of Congress, and an outspoken one, who was Progressive and anti-Wilson all at once. He had ambitions to higher office -- in 1916 he ran for Senator, and in 1924 was running for Governor on the Farmer-Labor ticket when brain cancer took him; the Farmer-Labor ticket came in second in Floyd Olson's first run for governor (he'd go on to win in 1930), so it's possible (if not necessarily likely) that Lindbergh could've won the election had he made it to run. It'd be a tricky challenge to get him into the White House, but if you butterfly away the brain cancer, perhaps he can make a successful run back on the Republican ticket in '28 as a challenger to Hoover; perhaps we can even go so far as to make him Vice President instead of Curtis. That's probably the peak of his rise unless he manages to persuade Hoover into a different response to the Depression, but it's not outside the realm of possibility (even if we're off into significant improbability).
Of course, having a Vice President as a father may well change the trajectory of the young aviator's career, so...
I've considered it before and it's not the biggest hurtle in all of AH. But Lindbergh Senior was born in Sweden and thus, ineligible.
Ah, curses! Somehow I missed that bit. I suppose the Governor's office is the highest Lindbergh is capable of reaching, then.
In Roth's defence, he wasn't writing it like an Alternate History.That thing is ungodly.
@Brundlefly , was there any alternative to Erich Honecker following Ulbricht's resignation or was he the only acceptable option to the Soviets?
Thanks for the reply! Very interesting!At that time, Honecker was very much Brezhnev's man, and most of the Politburo members were basically behind Honecker. Ulbricht became something of a megalomaniac during the Sixties and regarded the GDR as the frontier state of the Eastern Bloc, coining the phrase "Outperforming without overtaking" vis-a-vis West Germany, and even suggesting that the NVA should be part of the crushing of the Prague spring in 1968 (which was too much even for the Soviets, as it would have brought along strange 1938 associations). He went so far as saying that the GDR is a "genuine German state" and "We are not Belarus, we are not a Soviet state". Other Politburo candidates, like Willi Stoph, Kurt Hager or Heinz Hoffmann were more in line with Moscow and Honecker, so basically the outcome of one of them taking over wouldn't lead to a different policy than Honecker's (funnily enough, in 1989 it was Honecker and this faction who rejected perestroika by sticking to orthodox Marxism-Leninism). I was looking for a sort of German version of Imre Pozsgay or Miklos Nemeth for a timeline where the reunification is postponed, and the only possible candidate might be Michael Kohl, who was responsible for the treaties with West Germany in the early 1970s.
For a different outlook of the GDR, you'd have to go back a bit earlier to the 1950s, when there were rivalling power factions in the Soviet CPSU after Stalin's death. There was a faction in the SED that was closely aligned to Berija and Malenkov: Wilhelm Zaisser and Rudolf Herrnstadt, who proposed a different economic policy prior to the 1953 uprising. With Berija and Malenkov gone, they too were sidelined and Ulbricht became stronger, effectively ending up being more Stalinist than Krushev.
An interesting thing would be to have Hermann Axen or Albert Norden, two Politburo members with Jewish roots, as leader of the council of the state.
William H. Crawford is mostly known as "That other guy" who ran in 1824, who had a stroke and was unable to campaign well. While by '24 he was the leader of the old guard at a time when people were moving on to new kinds of politics, Crawford had a long and distinguished career before that. It wouldn't be implausible for him to get nominated in 1816 rather than Monroe if he was interested in the idea.
He'd need something resembling financial stability and for the Liberals to not tear themselves apart.Spotted this fella on Charles Stross' blog.
Ignaz Trebitsch
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Trebitsch-Lincoln
Hungarian born con-man, former Liberal politician, mingled with German fascists and became a Buddhist.
Imagine this guy becoming PM and having access to the Treasury.
He'd need something resembling financial stability and for the Liberals to not tear themselves apart.
Yes I did that already in Our Man In Berlin.Well alternatively he could be a better German politician if the Kapp putsch suceeds, he was actually made the minister for Information after using his charisma on Kapp and met Hitler during it.
Yes I did that already in Our Man In Berlin.