McGoverning

[Yes]

I find this format really hard to read.

Sorry about that, it's a short collection of excerpts from the coming chapters, to whet the appetite. We'll resume normal transmissions for the real thing.

Oh yes

Shh -- there might be a chapter nearby, throes of ecstasy could scare it off.

The moment I heard about the Mississippi flooding in 1973, I knew that there would be some incredible prose coming. And sure enough, there it is!

You're very kind; I suspect Big Muddy has turned people poetical all the way back to Cahokia and beyond.

Whatever they need He Who Must Not Be Named For, it'll probably be less shady than what the White House asked him to do IOTL.

With an administration of this sort in the White House, James Eastland can probably be found in a whole mess of doorways.

*googles Cleo Noel* Hoo boy, this isn't going to be fun.

Maybe not, the question as always is where do things go.

And the 2018 Turtledove for Understatement goes to...

 

[thatsbunkers]

the Saudi legation was calm and cool, the mood festive.

It did not last.

Looks like some stuff is gonna go down in the middle east. Its gonna be bad for oil, but maybe if McGovern takes a hard stance against the Arabs during the Yom Kippur war he won't be seen as too weak to be president.

 

[Yes]

Hundred Days I: Air of Command?
​

Senator William Fulbright … said he wanted a
McGovern presidency “because George is such an ordinary fellow — I
don’t mean ordinary in any negative sense, but the presidency was
designed for ordinary men — not for a succession of so many larger-than-life
men on horseback. If George McGovern were President he wouldn’t
stand for a CIA or FBI pushing people around the way they do now, or
the Pentagon building and buying what it pleased. He wouldn’t stand
for price fixing or these outrages against people who work for wages
and pay their taxes. And you can be damned sure he wouldn’t try to
prove his manhood by prolonging a war that shouldn’t have been
started in the first place. It’s a damned shame all this has happened to
George, because I don’t know how long it will be until we have a President
who feels like that.”

- Washington Monthly, May 1973
​

The war never needed a bullet to kill him. Where it touched Lyndon, the dead had their own fateful pull. They stood by his bedside as he woke and walked through his dreams. They attended him whenever he draped the Medal of Honor on the shoulders of hardened, haunted men in the White House press room. The dead sat in the empty chairs of the briefing room where Lyndon listened to audio tapes from his daughter Lynda’s young man, the Marine, as the boyish officer talked about who they’d lost on the latest patrol. When the President of the United States heard the words the dead tilted their phantom heads to consider the moment as Lyndon put his own head in his hands, this close to broken. They raised thunderous silence in song with the vibrant fury of young people beyond the White House gates who demanded to know how many kids LBJ had killed that day. As he took off his reading glasses, looked out at the television audience, then announced he would not run again, the dead stared right through him. In retirement his jowls sagged and his hair grew long and white and twisty in the back; he ate and drank and smoked a little, then ate and drank some more. It was his time now, that’s what he’d told his girls. Yet none of it filled the space where the dead waited. They could afford to be patient.

Now here he was, cased in black lacquer and metal, laid beneath the flag in the United States Capitol Rotunda and soon enough beneath the ground. The end was full of fear and pain. His weak heart had failed at last. He would die alone. Opinions varied on the justice of it. Fair or foul, though, it was a watershed. So they all came, all the Washington faces, all the people who had loved and hated him often by turns, all the witnesses to Lyndon’s burning path through American life from the stars down into the dirt.

The others came too, survivors three. Dick Nixon, his very form a cowl that shrouded his wounded, furious soul, pale and almost scruffy despite the hair and makeup work for the memorial service, eyes that stabbed back at the silent judgment of others, seduced and claimed by the same war that brought Lyndon down. The merest wisp of Harry Truman, the Missouri fireplug now thin as onion paper between this life and the other side, the man who’d opened the door to Indochina and all the rest and now, when he took off the trademark hat, was a wisp of almost translucent hair and skin, a gossamer remainder from a different age.

And there was the new man, thirty-eighth in the line: President George McGovern in his black camel-hair coat and grey suit, on whom all the cameras turned, who looked calm and a little hard, a little awkward in the cameras’ glare, strong chin fixed in consideration. This war, went the thoughts in his head. This God-damned war, the wreck of presidents for a generation, and here I am the one who had to end it. It was a necessary act, perhaps even holy as McGovern thought about it in this moment. But he felt terribly small thirty feet from the war’s most famous victim, lost in the trackless space made by all the dead.

McGovern had set to work as soon as he left the Capitol balcony where the oath was said. During the inaugural parade aides brought him two thin binders with sheafs of paper inside to sign. These were the executive orders that terminated Operation FREEDOM DEAL, the covert and quite possibly illegal bombing campaigns in Cambodia and Laos. The ink was hardly dry on the Paris Accords but on the new president’s orders Dick Dougherty told reporters the President considered the cease-fire in force as of that day. At the Quai d’Orsay, site of France’s foreign ministry, McGovern’s newly confirmed ambassador Pierre Salinger, who had hopped a flight with his own money in pursuit of the Rogers-Kissinger delegation as soon as he was voted in, met first to debrief the Americans after the signing and then with Le Duc Tho about the POWs.

The effort leapfrogged Paris and spanned the globe. In Moscow for a meeting about grain sales Australia’s new, left-leaning premier Gough Whitlam, a waspish Victoria lawyer with an Outback drover’s physique, handed to a deputy of Foreign Secretary Gromyko a three-page typed letter from President McGovern supplied by the US embassy in Canberra. The letter laid out proposals for improvements in US-Soviet relations based in part on smooth transfer of the American prisoners in Indochina and a wind-down of resupply to both North and South Vietnam, to help demilitarize the conflict.

In Saigon Ellsworth Bunker, America’s viceroy in Southeast Asia under two presidents, packed his things before he headed to the airport. Across that tarmac walked John Gunther Dean, a Jewish German refugee in his boyhood, a civilian veteran of this conflict himself and of many other hardship posts, with his lean shoulders and flinty Mitteleuropa face that spoke only of limits and the end of possibility when he presented President Thieu with credentials. There was a new policy in town.

As they swept up the confetti on Pennsylvania Avenue and “permanent Washington” checked its reservations for the inaugural parties, George McGovern sat down for the first meeting of what he simply called “the Group.” This was the conclave that would run the process of getting out of Vietnam. There was of course Phil Hart, not only Vice President but by now a trusted friend and counsel. There was Paul Warnke, National Security Adviser and moderator, and both Frank Mankiewicz and Gary Hart standing on McGovern’s shoulders though which was angel or devil you sometimes weren’t sure. Beyond them Sargent Shriver, Cy Vance, and Ken Galbraith, only the last of whom had actually written a book about the strategy and tactics of a withdrawal, helpfully titled How To Get Out of Vietnam because Galbraith valued clarity. There was Clark Clifford, the grey eminence on call. There were Vance and Shriver’s deputies the aristocratic Townsend Hoopes and the pugnacious George Ball, a resister of the first hour to the whole quagmire. There was Pete McCloskey of course as Director of Central Intelligence, Tom Moorer likewise as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the bespectacled rectitude of John Holum now Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, and the ruddy, boyish Dick Holbrooke freshly minted as Undersecretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs. They were joined on occasion by three congressmen read in to honor McGovern’s desire for more open, accountable policy: Carl Albert as Speaker of the House, William Fulbright who was both the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a personal friend of McGovern’s, and John Stennis, chair of Senate Armed Services.

They did have a plan: like Caesar’s Gaul it was divided into three parts though circumstances forced on them a fourth. The first was to stage-manage the cease fire that had ceased very little firing so American units could leave with deliberate speed. The second was to create incentives for Hanoi to act as a working partner and leave room for both Saigon and the PRG to play roles in Vietnam’s self-determination rather than force an outcome for Hanoi’s benefit. The third was to reshape Saigon’s internal politics and its strategy in the conflict that carried on. The fourth part, as Hanoi dragged its feet much harder than the Group’s politicos had expected on the campaign trail, was figuring out what the hell to do about the POWs.

Even though you could lay the pieces out neatly at a principals’ meeting in the Oval Office, with tabbed reports and maps and all, they were entirely entwined. It was immediately clear that for all the high language about supervisory commissions and peace there was a major battle underway at Tay Ninh, a provincial capital in the South’s Mekong Delta. The PRG wanted to run up their flag in Tay Ninh, call it a capital for an alternative government in the South, and Thieu poured aircraft sorties and ARVN grunts into the meat grinder in response. It was clear that despite the International Commission for Control and Supervision’s input the Ho Chi Minh Trail and its tributaries were open for business to shore up PAVN positions aimed at the northerly third of South Vietnam. As the ICCS readied a report on the cease fire’s failings and the press suggested the whole language of truce was just a fig leaf to let the US scuttle, several of McGovern’s advisers, notably Gary Hart, Pete McCloskey, and George Ball, pointedly wanted to blame the Nixon crew in public. McGovern himself, backed by Phil Hart and Sarge Shriver, saw this as fruitless, something that would just piss off a different set of interests and make the administration look like it didn’t know how to call the shots. The important thing, Ken Galbraith said with brevity, was to work the plan and change the discussion.

The Group sidestepped Tay Ninh entirely: better to let the two sides wear themselves out, congratulate whoever won, and be available to the loser to help ensure they kept some leverage. The Group ramped up demining operations in North Vietnamese waters, and laid out transit terms and corridors for the ICCS, officials from Saigon and Hanoi, and members of the coming Four-Power military commission to travel where they needed, subject to nagging inertia and point-scoring from local bureaucrats. Salinger’s meetings in Paris cleared the way for two developments. The first was a senatorial fact-finding mission to Hanoi to interview and inspect conditions for the American POWs herded into Hoa Lo Prison, the “Hanoi Hilton” of POW/MIA lore: Fulbright, Ed Muskie, the stoic conservative George Aiken, and liberal-Republican fireplug Jack Javits of New York. Within four days of the inauguration they took off from Maryland. After most of a day in the air touched down in Hanoi itself, to ride through its rain-chilled streets and reach the dank crenellations of Hoa Lo and the lean, worn men in orange made to live there. At the same time, George Ball flew out to Paris to join Salinger and haggle over mechanisms to formalize the transfer of prisoners.

That was where they hit the skids. As research over the decades that followed would show, the roadblock was about Moscow, or rather Hanoi’s reaction when the McGovern team talked to Moscow. The Kremlin was encouraged by the arrival of the McGovern administration even though General Secretary Brezhnev had got on famously with Nixon and the analysts were antsy about a West Wing new on the job and unsure of its goals. They liked what Washington had to say about making Saigon tow the line on elections and representation. They tolerated McGovern’s interest in non-Communist membership within the PRG. They figured that, on the whole, it was worth a quiet word with their clients to ease the US path out of Indochina, that it served the long game.

Hanoi on the other hand, in particular the circle around Le Duan, hard-edged chair of the Party since the death of old Ho, didn’t like it so well. They had natural strategic advantages over an American government now tripping over itself to divest from the region. They had demands they reckoned legitimate, in particular the $3.5 billion dollar “reconstruction payments” in reparations that they asked of Ball and Salinger in Paris plus the release of political prisoners in the South. They had learned to watch the American news too, watched as that freshman bomb-thrower in the Senate Jesse Helms staged daily briefings on how much money it cost to make it easier for Moscow and Peking to funnel heavy weapons into the North, how many brave anti-communist Asian boys had died that day fighting village to village over political leverage in the South, how many captive Americans might be salted in dark holes all over Southeast Asia (always numbered by the most generous conjectures) and how many days the longest-held of them had been there. California’s governor Ron Reagan, who could smell the next presidential cycle from four years off, started to say the same things with that winning smile of his. The press, already laden with the continuing criminal hunt after the last president, saw a chance for balance by proving McGovern had been dead wrong about how everything could be solved by withdrawal with nightly broadcasts from hamlet firefights across the Mekong Delta. Hanoi’s presidium looked at its cards and knocked on the table; they wanted to see what McGovern would do.

In the midst of a blizzard of domestic policy to manage and meetings on China — urged by Sarge Shriver — and collective monetary policy with Western Europe — urged by Ken Galbraith — McGovern pulled in the Group and haggled late into the nights. What it boiled down to with some speed was pincers. They would twist Saigon’s arm on political prisoners, and get reparations through Congress. With some quid for Hanoi to take home, maybe, out would come the quo from prison bars.

McGovern chose Cy Vance to deliver the news, his patrician reserve the right note to strike when the White House held Nguyen Van Thieu’s future to ransom. Vance delivered the news like a lawyer whose client had lost his shirt, which was close to truth. The administration had at least fifty votes in the Senate, and two or three key committee chairs in the House ready to play along, who between them would stop the billions in American aid to South Vietnam in its tracks. That was over and above the veto President McGovern dangled before the assembled media in his second press conference. Money, parts, ammunition, purchases of rice and raw materials over the odds, all of it halted. Meanwhile Sarge Shriver smiled and charmed with Thieu’s loyal, befuddled prime minister Tran Thien Kiem, rarely offered such attention. Shriver through himself into the role, whose purpose Kiem missed to his cost: it was, exactly, to make Thieu doubt who he could trust, think that the new boys in D.C. might cut deals all around him just as they’d done around Ngo Dinh Diem before the most powerful man in South Vietnam ended up full of holes in the trunk of a car.

The most creative part of the process, perhaps, kicked off when Solicitor General John Doar and McGovern’s finance chair from the presidential campaign, Morris Dees who sued Klansmen into the ground with his Southern Poverty Law Center, touched down in Saigon unbidden on a routine mail flight. With them came a small clutch of American, Canadian, and French lawyers. Around two hours after they passed through customs they met with local civil rights attorneys. By that night, in a large, dank office space lit by swinging fluorescents, they set up a war room. Doar shook hands with Dees and the others and decamped to the embassy, eloquent by his presence rather than by any public appearances. Strewn around the war room were manila folders. In them were the files and identities of several thousand South Vietnamese, some “guests” of the tiger cages on the forlorn green island of Con Son off Saigon’s patch of coastline, where Thieu’s regime had turned a dark French colonial hole to its own purposes. Until a few months ago these all had been political prisoners, subject then to the theories that drove Washington’s aid cutoff. In the meanwhile, several of Thieu’s cleverer cronies had seen to it the holders of these lost names were charged on petty criminal grounds, kept in prison at the state’s pleasure. Now, several dozen lawyers from four nations intended to tie those charges up in paperwork so dense and hard to hack through that the Saigon government would throw millions down the hole in the effort. Choke one channel, drain the other. Together it looked like a plan.

Then there were the reparations. The common ground of the administration, indeed an area where some key men in uniform like Tom Moorer who valued the prisoners as highly as they did the geopolitics of the thing could meet the civilians where they were, was that reparations were a necessary measure to free the process up, satisfy Hanoi’s senses of both power and honor, even as some policy hands suggested to give moderates in Hanoi a hand up, show that where there were common interests Washington and the North could do business like civilized nations. No one in Hanoi, or Moscow and Peking for that matter, failed to see that the McGovern team would put the screws to Saigon as needed. That was leverage of a kind; Hanoi especially would want that to continue, to cultivate that attitude in the White House. The last great trouble of it then was just fronting the money.

There McGovern’s team ran into Congress. Or rather, they ran smack into one of the mighty gnomes of Arkansas, Senator John McClellan, chairman of the Appropriations Committee and it seemed both a sworn foe of just throwing money around and of buying the North’s favors. The White House could marshal fifty votes in the Senate and maybe enough in the House to choke Saigon white on military aid, but McClellan was not among them and here there was both leverage on those issues and a chance to cut a national figure rather than stand in Bill Fulbright’s shadow all day. The White House did itself few favors spending three long days arguing over how to trim numbers and language off the sides of Hanoi’s $3.5 billion in order to fit it through an Appropriations majority. By the nightly news of the second day the quiet on POWs in D.C. started to deafen.

Then, together, Sarge Shriver and Clark Clifford went to the Foreign Operations Subcommittee and submitted the new bill that offered just $1.5 billion but also purchases of key materials — railroad ties, concrete, steel re-bar, and so on — below cost from federal contractors for the North to put its infrastructure back together. McClellan was a mere member on the subcommittee, and sat back as its overwhelming liberal majority (from both parties) kicked the bill straight to where McClellan held the gavel. With unaccustomed nous Carl Albert had the companion bill on the floor already over in the House. From the Oval Office McGovern wanted his old friend and mentor Fulbright, privy to the Group and chair of Senate Foreign Relations, to take charge of the matter, but its scale made the proposal something McClellan guarded jealously. He maneuvered to have hearings and in quiet urged Strom Thurmond, master of the art, to filibuster if needed.

Those nights were terribly long. The Group considered what they could, or might have to, do if McClellan barred the gates. The Joint Chiefs already had reprisals planned if Hanoi were to disperse or harm the POWs, in particular a massed raid by nearly a hundred B-52Ds from Guam and Thailand on two PAVN divisions perched along the highlands facing just south of the DMZ. Both Frank Mankiewicz and Gary Hart shuffled over to the same shoulder and suggested President McGovern needed at least to consider the idea, first because it would come as a surprise to the North and second to stop the loss of momentum to McClellan’s hijacking. The Chiefs consistently favored all the leverage the US could find. McGovern said no; the administration was still in the flush of youth, and that way lay the same traps that snared America in Southeast Asia in the first place. You could blow up tanks and bridges and Le Duan’s clique still held the cards.

McGovern did entertain one option. With a million or more tons of the Seventh Fleet still perched in the South China Sea, said the new president, if the North are foolish enough to harm any prisoners or we simply run out of options, we owe them some thought about what it would take to go in and get them out. The swift consensus was that meant mounting up marines, either the 31st Marine Amphibious Unit afloat on “Yankee Station” or the air-contingency battalion on Okinawa, for a heliborne attack on the “Hanoi Hilton” where multiple credible intelligence sources placed all the known prisoners in the North. We still want answers about Laos and Cambodia, said both Dick Holbrooke and Tom Moorer. But that could wait if necessary. McGovern was drawn but clear. He would accept the risk should it prove necessary if the Pentagon stopped trying to bomb for peace and offered a plan, however dangerous, to deal with the problem directly. When General Robert Cushman, Commandant of the Marine Corps and an old friend of Dick Nixon’s, appeared to drag his feet over the next couple of days, Tom Moorer met him quietly in the “E-Ring” nerve center of the Defense Department. There Moorer said in brief, direct language that if Cushman wanted to stall because it would hobble a left-leaning president, or because he didn’t like the risk to his Marines, that needed to stop before creative things happened to the Commandant’s genitalia. Moorer wanted his flyboys home.

In the end Moore offered up even more aid to a president whose strategic instincts he did not trust, but whose sincerity he had begun to. After discussion with President McGovern, Frank Mankiewicz, and Cy Vance, Moorer agreed to become Senate Appropriation’s first — in the end, only — witness on the reparations bill. Moorer stressed that the Paris Accords had left a door wide open on whether or how prisoners would be exchanged, that such an exchange needed to take first priority for American policy in the region, that America had rebuilt West Germany and Japan despite their crimes against humanity against which some North Vietnamese trains running on time failed to signify. That sold a strong committee majority.

What made the difference was something a little newer. On one hand Strom Thurmond counted that majority and saw few options outside McLellan’s own hand to block passage. On the other, Thurmond could vote against bribing the Communists with a clear conscience. McLellan, on the other hand, faced both a party whose majority would not forgive him for undercutting a fragile presidency, and conservative voters back home who would not forgive him for bribing the Communists. Either way, as the landmark Dixiecrat borrowed language from the Marxist hymnal, cutting McLellan’s legs from under him would heighten the contrast between the parties and draw more Southerners to the GOP. Where the chairman had looked to the old conservative alliance for aid, a young, healthy, and very different partisan logic stared back.

Tucked around the edges at $1.4 billion in direct aid plus the breaks on supplies, the bill moved out of committee on a 19-7 vote. From there, with Doug Coulter jogging back and forth from the West Wing to the Hill as messenger, it moved on to the floor and Pierre Salinger reported to his opposite numbers in Paris that the money would be available in days. Flight clearances were arranged. Medical exams were given. Then, with a painstaking slowness, lean men in prison pajamas made their way out into buses on the Hanoi streets to the great steel birds with American roundels that took off with a warm meal and howling cheers for places long absent.

They were still coming home when Lyndon passed, still landing on tarmacs off in California and Hawaii, just east of the sunset. Still rushing into the arms of loving family or walking silently off into worlds broken in their absence. Still thanking President McGovern quietly but firmly for ending that captivity or, like Commander Jeremiah Denton who had blinked the word “torture” in Morse code before another set of cameras in 1967, talked about the country they hoped to find rather than the one they did and, by implication, how the Commander in Chief on duty when they returned didn’t fit that bill. More came still at the end of February, the final batch just four days before the scheduled withdrawal of the last organized American military units in South Vietnam on the first of March. Six hundred twenty seven in total: five-ninety-five out of the North and thirty-two, better than they had hoped, out of Laos. Tom Moorer was suspicious still but even he agreed it was a hell of a thing.

McGovern then did as he had said he would do, more than once. On the second of the month he issued an executive order that declared amnesty for all draft evaders. In the moment there was no speech or ceremony, just a quiet signing in the Oval Office for the official photographers. That night, though, armed with a speech written in parts by Dick Dougherty the part-time poet, by Bob Shrum, and by McGovern himself, the President sat down at the Resolute desk in the blue suit with the red tie and talked to the country.

It was a speech, but not in the usual way; McGovern had decided to tell a story. The minister’s son reached for a parable, for the Prodigal Son in fact, though he skipped right past the prodigality to what he saw as the point. That was the reaction of the father, the joy and the wonder: “My son was dead, and now he lives.” So it was for America, McGovern said. Vietnam had torn a terrible gulf through the country, a divide not just of politics but of spirit. It had broken in two Americans’ sense of where they did and didn’t belong. But each side of that divide had lost people. Each side had found them again as well, sons lost who now lived again: the POWs on one side, the draft resisters on the other. At the same time, each side felt like the other son in the story, the dutiful one who saw the father’s joy when the son who’d broken all the rules returned, who wondered why honor and loyalty was not met with the same outpouring.

The father explained that those feelings were always there for the dutiful son, if that son could only see them. The wonder was because it had seemed the prodigal was lost forever, but instead returned to those who loved him. America, President McGovern said as he wrapped up, needed to heal the wound in its soul. It needed to find and show the love of the father, who rejoices to God that the family is whole again, that lost children are home, that now they can all go forward together. With that ask and a wisp of prayer at the end, McGovern wrapped up. The networks switched back to their usual shows.

It was a good speech, all things considered, and what the press gods called “middle opinion” actually liked it pretty well. They saw what McGovern tried to do, so far he didn’t seem to have screwed it up too badly, and God knows they all wanted to put this dreadfulness behind them, to get back to suburban routine. What was sometimes derisively called the “soft” left had empathy too, partly because empathy was officially their thing, partly because McGovern had put the amnesty they’d hoped for in a context that perhaps the country could accept. Even a few old-line Republicans, who had not liked the outcome, said that at least McGovern put his case with thought and compassion.

But none of them made the big waves in politics, or were angry enough to be interesting for reporters who wrote about the mechanics of conflict. That role went to the shouters. On one side were extremists among the League of Families coalition, plus the bracelet-makers and the iconoclasts who shouted about repressed information and intelligence leaks. On the other side stood the most militant anti-war groups and the SDS-adjacent. Both of those factions along the great American divide howled with anger at McGovern’s homily. They each said new president had coddled, had sold out to, the other side. Now was the moment to give the enemy a good kick while they’re down, said the purists. This nonsense about forgiveness and unity meant the true America would be compromised, corrupted, by the presence of unacceptable Others. Every once in a while declare war; it was the best way to wipe your enemies’ slate clean.

So it went. The administration changed the game with Saigon, trimmed Thieu’s sails, and opened up room to press for open elections in the fall; the White House found itself blamed on one side for undermining an ally, on the other for not recognizing the PRG as a distinct government at Saigon’s expense. A passel of right-wing sources not just in Congress but also from the fringe groups who churned out alternate realities on in-house presses said the POWs’ return was a carefully contrived excuse for McGovern to give aid and comfort to the enemy. Ed Gurney and Jesse Helms and Paul Fannin and James Eastland howled that the administration had built “a purpose-built road to defeat” for Indochina’s anti-communists. Old allies of McGovern’s people on the anti-war left said they were not angry, just sad and disappointed, that the administration would resume military aid if conditions were met. You might please some of the people some of the time, but they sure weren’t the ones who got quoted in the papers.

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What I want to know, Mr. President, said Ed Muskie not in the best of moods, is what the hell your man Hart — no of course not Phil. He’d never have hitched a wagon to this damnfool proposition. Your campaign manager who you raised to the dizzy level of chief of staff — what the hell he expects us to do now with the fix he’s got us in. This was going to be trouble enough even with the unions behind it, Muskie went on, it is a delicate and a complex matter even in the best case. Now this … mess has gone out there and it has your name on it. I would have thought that since he brings you the papers every day Hart thought you had enough bad press being blamed for the stock market each morning. We all understand your agenda and you certainly don’t need any glorious failures.

What in fact Gary Hart had been up to with the minimum wage proposal was yet to be divined. People knew what he’d said when he helmed the policy review meetings and rolled over Jean Westwood’s more piecemeal suggestions. That was, that the administration needed to find a few key issues where it could show it would live up to its promises, and also show voters who the opposition was on bread-and-butter issues. Some folks suspected this was to grab the rudder back for a moment from Westwood and the Office of Policy Development. Others even thought that it was a chance to shift some blame towards the Senate in particular, show that too many people in Congress weren’t up to the job of fundamental reforms. Still others thought it was a poison pill all the way, to overbid and at once put the unions in their place and back Ken Galbraith’s inflation-hawk position that wages needed not to rise much. Whether there was a chess game or a publicity stunt afoot the details were the same. Hart, with some dexterity, maneuvered the policy review to draft proposed legislation for a minimum wage hike all the way to $2.50 an hour, just like the convention platform said.

The problem then, to be fair, was not entirely of Gary Hart’s making. There was already a big piece of legislation on Capitol Hill under fire: the painstakingly drafted bill for the Demogrant, put forward in the House by Bob Drinan and, to some surprise, by Mark Hatfield in the Senate who talked up the mixture of equity and bureaucratic roll-back. The administration was determined to hold its line on the Demogrant, to meet with legislators one by one into the dozens if need be, mobilize experts, dangle tidbits before the press pool to keep the administration’s arguments in the papers. All that even against the withering skepticism of, mostly Southern, congressmen who manned the levers of the tax and budget processes. Conservatives, fiscal and otherwise, were after the minimum wage hike from the start. There were even skeptics among the unions who thought the universality provisions would undermine their ability to bring more workers into their trades and satisfy those workers through the bargains struck with management.

But the real killer was Ken Galbraith. Already roused over the roiling inflation Arthur Burns had injected into the US economy during the presidential election, Galbraith sat down with McGovern and said in no uncertain terms that a sharp, across the board wage hike was something the system very much did not need. It could push inflation figures out beyond Treasury’s ability to control with anything short of the harshest measures and start a bidding war in big industries. Galbraith knew how to persuade. There would need to be a change of course.

McGovern had let the first bill out the gate because he believed half-measures might leave you with nothing after you gave pieces away in committee, and because he trusted staff to get on with the details. Now from the top came an order to change course. The first bill had already put Congressional liberals in the same place as the Demogrant: hew to the principles, so that when the grandees ground them down, there was still something there to mark up and reconcile that could be called progress, even of a kind. McGovern’s change of tone was a bad sign by its publicity but the smart thing to do, in the eyes of Ed Muskie and other liberal powers on the Hill, was to cool down the publicity and grind this one out too, down to some kind of progress. Instead, Gary Hart meant to fix it. He sat down through day-long meetings with Ed Kuh, economists from the Fed, assistant secretaries from Labor, and Jean Westwood’s staffers to hammer out a revised bill that represented a best-possible outcome based on incoming fire in the labor and appropriations committees of Congress. Then Hart swapped bills.

No one was happy. Jean Westwood and the liberals, in the Senate especially, felt undercut. Ken Galbraith glowered that now more fuss had been made over something that needed to die down quietly — equal pay was to his mind more important than increased pay. McGovern was frustrated that such thorough work by the staff just ended up raising hackles and snippy columns in the Sunday papers, while Frank Mankiewicz considered what he needed to do to ensure Hart didn’t step on Jean Westwood’s toes again: the last thing they needed was a high profile resignation early in the term. The new bill arrived, and soldiered on in more quiet. In the end, by September, they got $2.00 an hour which was something, and service and non-profit workers folded in, though there were threats of filibuster over farm labor increases and specific language only about equal pay by age rather than sex. But the good stuff often ended up on the back page anyway.

Elsewhere on the Hill, though, whether the administration led or simply tagged along, there were strides. Within the first three months Congress produced an Endangered Species Act, beloved of environmentalists in both parties, with streamlined language on how to qualify and list species as threatened that was pushed past conservatives who spotted that killing those clauses could hobble the bill. The Rehabilitation Act of 1973 appeared and brought with it a revolution in the treatment of disabled Americans. Its Sections 501 through 505 defined clearly who counted as “handicapped,” banned discrimination in federal employment, required affirmative action by federal contractors, created levers to pressure states for similar statutes, extended civil rights to those titled as handicapped, and required access to public services including public education. It was on reflection one of the first great blows for civil reform under the new administration and President McGovern took quite some pleasure signing it on the White House lawn so that a crowd of protesters in favor of public accommodation could be brought in to enjoy the moment.

There were other hallmarks too. A Domestic Volunteer Service Act, that revived the Civilian Conservation Corps, brought that body and the VISTA program together under the aegis of the new Department of Peace, created enabling language and funds to develop a “Peace Corps for America”, and budget lines to stand up major regional operating bases for these services passed through despite grumbling from the budget hawks. The doggedly unlikely pairing of Ron Dellums in the House (a socialist but also a former Marine) and Bob Dole in the Senate yielded the Vietnam Era Veterans’ Readjustment Act, known more often as VEVRA: it produced dedicated eligibility and funds for psychiatric treatment of veterans of the conflict, an expanded GI Bill of Rights that included vocational and some graduate education, and preferential hiring into federal work, among other things.

To some fanfare President McGovern publicly launched an executive investigative commission on corporate monopolies and the tangled workings of multinational corporations. Officially and rather clumsily the Commission to Investigate Practices by Multinational Corporations and Conglomerate Ownership, in practice people called it the Gavin Commission. That was for its chairman, retired general, war hero, and polymath James Gavin, a liberal Republican who’d worked for several Democratic presidents before and had a special interest in the potential of multinationals to reshape international relations, not always for the better. Mighty interests watched closely and made notes.

On another issue, one Congress had pushed for a couple of years now, the fact of not just a new president but a President George McGovern meant that the new man grabbed the subject and took the lead. There were several trial bills loose on the Hill to do with presidential and congressional war powers. One particular resolution, pushed by Clem Zablocki on House Foreign Affairs, who was otherwise a Vietnam hawk, had language that appealed to a real cross-section of political animals, from outright doves to legislators who simply thought the White House had gone too far with its singular, even imperial, approach to Southeast Asia. McGovern met in person with Zablocki several times in early February; he was not just a fan, he wanted more. So it was that Phil Hart — neither the first nor the last time the administration would trade on Hart’s integrity — the Deputy Attorney General, White House Counsel, Townsend Hoopes from Defense, and a series of other powerful policy-makers sat down with a mixed group of Representatives and Senators on war powers. The job was as simple as it was profound: hash out the precepts, trim the language, and build a War Powers Amendment. Laws were all very well, but George McGovern himself pointed out how presidents of both parties had fudged and caviled and sidestepped in the past. Nail this down, he said to a mixed meeting of Zablocki, the archly principled William Proxmire, and Ramsey Clark. Get us language that brings Congress together and I’ll get out of the way.

Both happened. There were hearings before the judiciary and armed services committees, as the administration put its best foot forward via Cy Vance and Clark Clifford, the latter always standing by the curtain in case of need. The meetings were grueling but Phil Hart, out of his usual turf but committed to the outcome, and Cliff Alexander from Justice steered them admirably. By the middle of March they had the language, which shot through Congress comfortably past the two-thirds majorities and out into the states. Resistance emerged in places: with fears of liberal power over Congress, conservatives of both parties backed by private (often John Birch Society) money launched campaigns in several legislatures to strike down language that “tied a president’s hands against Moscow.” It gained traction but not enough. Though ratification played out down into the ending of the year, seven weeks of hard work in February and March yielded in the end a Twenty-Seventh Amendment, more often the War Powers Amendment to wire-service stringers and law students nationwide. Sometimes the best way to lead was to get out of the way.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Colonel Volney Warner didn’t see himself as a writer, but when this whole sorry business was done he sure planned to get a book out of it. A bitter satire if he was lucky; if not, well…. A handsome, square-jawed son of the South Dakota plains, not unlike the new Commander in Chief, Warner had survived some of the worst infantry combat in Korea, snuck up the ranks as a closet intellectual, and then as a provincial liaison officer in South Vietnam and later aide in the Army Chief of Staff’s office joined a ragtag bunch of uniformed dissenters against massive escalation in Vietnam. Now Warner was chief of staff of the famed 82nd Airborne Division, the Army’s rapid deployment force abroad and, as riots across several American cities in the Sixties proved, at home as well.

It was the second phone call that made the real impression. The first said something Warner knew a little from the papers, when he had a chance to see them between staff work and parachute jumps. There was trouble out on the Pine Ridge Res back home, Oglala Sioux land down by the Black Hills. By itself that was already a damn shame; at the best of times Pine Ridge had troubles enough.

Protests and political campaigns on behalf of American Indians had taken wing in the late Sixties. AIM, the pan-tribal American Indian Movement that “put the red in the rainbow” of racial-equality movements, led the way but was hardly alone in the effort. There had been sit-ins at Alcatraz and in Washington, D.C., the “Trail of Broken Treaties” awareness campaign, and more localized sallies. This brought some results, like the Nixon administration’s end to “termination,” the laws and policies that, with the sweep of a pen, blotted out the legality of Indians’ identities. In places like Pine Ridge it was as though the new winds never blew. Just the same old cold ones that whispered of poverty, booze, crime, despair, cut through the fragile walls of camper homes as though they weren’t there, blew down the dirt suggestions of streets where there was no work, carried rootless sons and husbands off to drink in white men’s counties were you were as likely to get a knife in the gut as a handshake, harried the graying hair of generations of women who tried to hold specks of a stable life together.

In the mess of hopelessness and generational conflict, the res had gone and elected itself a smooth-talking autocrat, a corrupt modernizer with a white man’s name called Richard Wilson. Wilson sold grazing rights cheap to white ranchers in return for backhanders, misappropriated funds, and cracked heads to get his way backed by the poorly named Guardians of the Oglala Nation who would forever be GOONs to those who faced off against them. Traditionalist elders and young activists banded together to make the law work for them and turf Wilson out by impeachment. But the meeting came unstuck, Wilson pulled a parliamentary maneuver in absentia, and the GOONs bum-rushed would-be tribal voters with bruised ribs and bleeding heads.

A group of influential traditionalist women tried to organize a protest in the nearest county seat but white riot cops just repeated the GOON performance. Russell Means, one of the senior leaders of AIM, showed up on the reservation to hear grievances and deliver a letter of condemnation to Wilson’s office. A squad of GOONs ambushed Means and some traditionalist activists in a parking lot on the res. In the brawl that followed Means got most of his ribs cracked and his right knee ruined while Pedro Bissonette, son of traditionalist activist Gladys Bissonette, was shot dead. No one claimed to know who pulled that trigger. This was when the women resolved to walk to Wounded Knee.

It was the women who started it, as so often in res-level activism. Women who knew their plight was a cultural emblem for the cruelty of their opponents, who knew their resolve would shame their menfolk into action, who knew just how many of their foremothers had been shelled and bayoneted to death at the Wounded Knee campsite eighty years prior. Now a gimcrack little village, the women marched there, children in hand, laid in their supplies, and occupied the site. Within a couple of days it was like a battlement in the coal wars of eastern Kentucky. Ringed by GOONs and federal agents, shotgun-toting activists set up defenses, Oglala grandmaws with pickets on their shoulders and revolvers in their laps minded the children. Idealists of multiple generations staged a Ghost Dance, the hallowed ceremony intended to cleanse the earth of white men’s sins and bind all peoples in harmony. Above, United States Marshal’s Service sharpshooters in helicopters hovered and ranged them in.

This was where the second phone call to Colonel Warner came in. Warner stiffened by instinct as he heard the distinctive rumble of the Chief of Staff of the Army, Creighton “Abe” Abrams, on the other end. Abrams had drawn Warner’s file personally, and knew a little already from other senior generals, not just because the colonel was the correct man in the 82nd for the job but because he had the right mentality for it. Federal law enforcement have a burr up their ass about this, said Abrams. They want two thousand men out of your division to walk in there with M-16s and shiny boots and martial-law it all away. Clearly they’ve never seen trained infantry react to incoming fire, nor thought about the political consequences. Neither side seems to know what they’re really there for, the whole damned thing is a powder keg.

We need to keep the military clean out of this, Abrams went on. Firstly because that would only make this worse, second because we can’t bear the bad press right now. Your job, he told Warner, is to go out there, get their civilian asses in a row, tell them what cannot be done, and see if you can’t help wind this down. And for God’s sake don’t shoot any damn Indians, Abrams went on. The Army’s done too much of that already. Warner was from there; he knew very well. After a verbal salute, Warner filed notice of temporary duty to his CO, put on civilian clothes, and hopped a flight to the Dakotas.

Abrams had called it. The occupation site was one part shanty town, one part barricade. On Warner’s side perhaps a thousand GOONs and federal agents, the latter mostly FBI and Marshal’s Service, swarmed like ants over the ridgeline roads toting automatic rifles bummed off the National Guard, binoculars posed like they knew what they were doing but not pointed the right way. All the while wind-chilled, food-starved activists postured with their own guns and drawn-faced women darted between campers while harrying fire from the federal choppers chucked and stung in the grey dust of the compound. On his second day, after Warner sat down in stony Midwestern calm and read the FBI the riot act — or rather, Posse Comitatus — about what he could not do, another call came in. This one was from Gen. Fred Weyand, fresh back from Saigon with the American withdrawal. We have political folks, said Weyand who by that meant administration officials, who’d like to hear your assessment.

Well, Abe Abrams was right, Warner replied. It’s nothing if not a damn shambles. Law enforcement, especially the FBI field office, are itching to go in and shoot the place up and make some high-profile arrests. That’s why they’re playing rope-a-dope with harassing fire. Inside the compound it’s not clear that there is any proper chain of authority or command, thank God at least the AIM folk keep reminding the Oglala boys in there to keep their safeties on or they’d shoot their own legs off. There is no personal or food security so everyone in there is pretty desperate. Both sides are manic about potential double agents and informants, which keeps their trigger fingers itchy and further complicates matters.

What we need to do, said Warner, is rein in the feds and figure out some kind of deputation with a specific level of authority find out who we can talk to. See if we can establish some connections to get food in there and assure the safety of the children in the compound. These really are terrible conditions; I’ve talked this through at the federal level and even some of the Marshals think there was legal cause to hold impeachment proceedings on Wilson before all this got out of hand. We need to get these people looked after, get the guns out of their hands before someone else gets killed, then walk this thing back to square one.

Weyand thanked Warner for his input while Gary Hart quietly put down the third receiver on the line. After a look at Hart Weyand added, I think we can get to work on getting you a deputation. Hold your ground with the lawmen, let us see what we can get the political folks to do. Warner thanked the general and went about his work.

Two mornings further on a call came for Warner. An official federal delegation had just landed at Ellsworth Air Force Base outside Grand Rapids. Warner was told: it’ll take them a couple of hours to get down there, but you should receive them and help coordinate their effort to negotiate. Warner gave a verbal nod and went off to tell the feds they would have to wait on any plans to snatch targeted AIM activists. More like three hours later, just past lunch, a moving cloud of dust, like a storm coming in but too low to be weather, moved steadily up the main route through the res to the occupation site.

It was a solid clutch of big black Continentals, the usual government jobs strangely out of their element as they skittered and ground on the gravel road so far from the broad avenues of D.C. Warner walked out to the main roadblock point together with the Deputy Special Agent in Charge for the FBI field office and a couple of flunkies. They budged the wooden barrier to one side a bit to let the cars further down the road. Then the convoy stopped and doors opened. It took a minute in the brown-gray haze to see what they were dealing with here. It took another minute to believe it.

“Colonel Warner,” said the President of the United States as he extended a hand to shake, that square chin cocked into the breeze, eyes bright. “Pleased to meet you. I hear you’re a Woonsocket kid, like Eleanor.” This was a reference to the hamlet out in the state’s eastern plains where both Colonel Warner and the First Lady had been born. “It’s good to have a South Dakotan here. Let’s see if we can sort out these carpetbaggers,” McGovern’s head tilted in the direction of the federal lines, “and get those folks in there to sit down and talk.”

That summed up President McGovern’s view of the situation in a nutshell. He had brought quite a group: freshman South Dakota senator James Abourezk, the avuncular Arab-American South Dakota native and advocate for Indian rights; the state’s Lieutenant Governor, handsome Bill Dougherty; the barrel-chested Secretary of the Interior Jesse Unruh, who looked as always like a cleaned-up bar bouncer from the wrong side of the tracks; Solicitor General John Doar, longtime veteran of the armed camps that seemed to crop up wherever civil rights was an issue, cool and quiet; Dennis Banks, one of the founding fathers of AIM, compact, reserved, who read the assembled white faces keenly; and the sharp eyes and distinctive Afro of Reverend Jesse Jackson, director of PUSH — People United to Save Humanity — the umbrella rights organization Jackson founded to carry on the work of the late Martin Luther King, Jr. on multiple fronts. The chief executive wanted no doubts that the delegation had the power to make decisions. It got that message across. Word passed quickly, however it did, into the Wounded Knee compound. Oglala eyes strained for a vie.

After some discussion it was Abourezk and Doar who walked up first, a Secret Service man at their side with his hands always in the open. Folk on the res knew about the new senator’s record on Indian issues, of his empathy as another minority in a lily-white state. A few of them, especially the AIM advisors, knew Doar too, the man who had stood fast on the bridge at Selma, segregationist thugs poised to stove his head in, and said for all to hear that what he stood for was right. Both men knew the first couple of earnest youngsters they talked to had no real power, but they made a good impression and after a few minutes out came Gladys Bissonette herself, to have a word. All eyes were drawn to the two rumpled federalists and the terse woman wrapped in a shawl; each of the threesome knew this was where they had to find the path that did not end in bullets and fire. Bissonette looked incredulous at one suggestion but the men’s body language spoke to their honesty. If that’s what he wants, she answered, we can bring the elders together. It is, said Doar, who was then silent. Abourezk thanked her again and the messengers trudged back uphill.

The Secret Service objected. To say “flat out refused” was a matter of some delicacy, the balance between the Service’s authority to protect a president at nearly all costs set against the Chief Executive’s constitutional power to enforce laws. Colonel Warner shifted the potential pissing contest into a language of threat and tactics. To walk across that open terrain and go into the encampment exposed any valuable target — he let the reference to McGovern hang in the air — to just about all fields of fire. It didn’t matter who the crackpot or the radical or the guy with a grudge was, Warner went on, this was a pass to be the next Oswald. I hear that, said McGovern, but there are some larger issues at stake here. That we don’t want this to turn into another Attica, not with all those children in there, is just one of them. They’ve had it worse, for longer, than nearly any racial or ethnic group in the country. They need us to show this is different. Warner then said that if McGovern was determined, Warner would go with them. The Oglala saw him as a cool head. The senior United States Marshal on site said that, even if they let the presidential party in with a Secret Service detail, he sure didn’t want to be part of delivering a United States President into the hands of armed radicals.

McGovern shrugged this off. “I wouldn’t be the first South Dakotan to get shot at by an Indian. And I sure wouldn’t be the first to deserve it.” Warner smiled, much more than was strictly wise, and set off after the Commander in Chief like a man who enjoyed life more when he liked his marching orders. Warner had his doubts about the President’s ideology, but man to man they got on just fine after that.

So on that bitterly clear afternoon they walked across the broad divide between federal and Indian lines: President McGovern in his old leather bomber jacket (the bulletproof vest on which the Secret Service insisted was less obvious beneath it), Secretary Unruh, Lieutenant Governor Dougherty for the state authorities, and the Reverend Jackson, each with a Secret Service body man, and Colonel Warner in a windbreaker and khakis, his service .45 strapped to his thigh, flintlock eyes on the defilade lines. A huddle of elders and a couple of younger men in AIM armbands met them. McGovern looked found Gladys Bissonette’s face. He fixed her with the look of earnest sincerity he wore almost as a badge. “It was wrong,” he said. “I’m so terribly sorry.” Bissonette took it on her own terms — she had buried her own child, what was there to say after that — but nodded acknowledgment of what McGovern had just done. They all moved inside.

When people later held their interviews or made their documentaries, what came of asking the Oglala who sat in that room was that President McGovern and Reverend Jackson were really the ones who stole the show. And, later when he joined the group, Jim Abourezk who grasped how to turn into bills, into changes in law, what the Indian delegation talked about once Reverend Jackson got them comfortable and found a common language of pain and redemptive struggle to contain their thoughts. What President McGovern did over that afternoon and the next morning, the attendees agreed, was twofold. The first part was more surprising, given McGovern’s taste for talking out action, and that was steer: when he’d made clear this administration took a serious view of the wrongs tribal Indians suffered, he backed off to let the others find the language.

The second thing was that he took seriously the plans hashed out in that cramped, drafty trailer with vinyl floors and two battered old beige couches, not as pieces on the board of a larger game but as acts to solve problems. Jackson and Abourezk seemed to know how to bridge the gap between what Congress or the Executive Branch did and what Indians called out for on many a res. McGovern made it all honest labor largely free of baggage. For once, said Grandfather Frank Fools Crow, the best-known traditionalist in the camp, we had one of those practical, hard-faced white sod busters on our side.

Things started to happen. After two more days in which factions inside Wounded Knee argued over whether they could push the feds to remove Richard Wilson, joined by Dennis Banks who could report on the McGovern delegation’s moods and views, the occupants of Wounded Knee packed up camp and left the day after. Despite Colonel Warner’s misgivings — he remembered Abe Abrams’ directions clearly — Secretary Unruh, John Doar and Bill Dougherty had ginned up a plan that called up an engineering battalion of the South Dakota National Guard for an infrastructure repair project on the Pine Ridge res. Part bridge-building, literal and metaphoric, in practice Doar and Dougherty wanted the engineers there as uniformed witnesses in case of retaliation against the traditionalists by GOON forces. As the Solicitor General slipped quietly away, in came lawyers from the Justice Department, and assessors and social workers tied to Interior and the Bureau of Indian Affairs, in what amounted to a mass act of legal discovery about Wilson’s corrupt practices and intimidation. The DOJ also issued policy notices to its staff to extend courtesies when private lawyers funded by AIM (with grants in aid from PUSH) showed up to pursue the question of whether and how Wilson’s armed regime had violated tribal citizens’ civil rights.

Back in Washington James Abourezk cut the dash of his freshman term: rather than use its unwieldy formal designation, reporters and the Annotated United States Code just called it the Abourezk Act thereafter. It routed federal appropriations directly to the tribes, around the gatekeepers at the Bureau of Indian Affairs. In painstaking subsections it reformed the Bureau away from regulation and supervision towards facilitation. It required state, local, and federal authorities who put Indian children into foster care to try first placing them within their own culture. It created a deft gap in its own language that smart lawyers might use to help urban Indians tribalize or acquire a quasi-tribal status. It legalized peyote and other substances or practices when used in the context of religious ceremonies. It shored up language on intra-tribal civil rights and gave tribal citizens a direct appeal to the Justice Department on civil rights enforcement via “Section 1983” claims. Abourezk and his co-sponsors, Quentin Burdick and Mark Hatfield, had to drop language to enforce a “treaty veto” on mineral rights questions and a new Indian-rights division in the Justice department, but gains outweighed losses.

The process trudged on in increments. It dropped off the evening news except when Abourezk’s act passed, and deep into the folds of the papers, because when you got past a sitting president meeting with gun-toting longhairs, what was the readership on American Indian issues anyway? (Abourezk, at least, got a Select Committee out of the issues in the Senate.) But changes did come. Asked about it some years later Dennis Banks, who had been in the room with President McGovern for a couple of sessions, reflected on the event.

“It wasn’t that he offered the world or something,” Banks said. “What he said, what he promised to do, it was all pretty much common sense. But there was not a whole lot of common sense around at that time, and he could see that … more important he could acknowledge it. I had a strange feeling in that room. Not a bad one, just strange. Here I was like I’d been all my life, a foreigner in my own country, cutting little pieces out of white men’s rules to make some space. But as I watched George McGovern, watched how he held himself, watched him listen, watched him try to figure out what to say back to us, that feeling stuck. It was: well, if I’m stuck in a white man’s country for now, at least I might just have a president here. Funny feeling. There’s a first time for everything, isn’t there?”

 

[Yes]

Nota Bene: I was going to put the next chapter that is really a companion piece to this one up tomorrow, but Life Stuff looks set to interfere so I will wait until late this evening, then get it up for inspection. Another chapter to follow that relatively soon (you saw a few lines of that one in the "previews" too.)

 

[Wayside]

With an administration of this sort in the White House, James Eastland can probably be found in a whole mess of doorways.

Oh, I thought you meant Stennis, he of the very convenient presbycusis.

 

[Yes]

Oh, I thought you meant Stennis, he of the very convenient presbycusis.

Well he's probably fixin' to get up to stuff too, just in a less... obtrusive way than the bespectacled plantation owner.

 

[Usili]

Just... very nice job with this latest chapter Yes. There's something about the kind of descriptions you have in your writing that just works so well for this.

 

[King of the Uzbeks]

What exactly were the contents of the War Powers Amendment?

 

[CCA]

If this doesn't get a Turtledove, I'm going to call my police department to report a robbery.

 

[Usili]

Also honestly in just thinking about this chapter, it's like... this bit of prose right there really does it in just seeming to be perfect.

It was a speech, but not in the usual way; McGovern had decided to tell a story. The minister’s son reached for a parable, for the Prodigal Son in fact, though he skipped right past the prodigality to what he saw as the point. That was the reaction of the father, the joy and the wonder: “My son was dead, and now he lives.” So it was for America, McGovern said. Vietnam had torn a terrible gulf through the country, a divide not just of politics but of spirit. It had broken in two Americans’ sense of where they did and didn’t belong. But each side of that divide had lost people. Each side had found them again as well, sons lost who now lived again: the POWs on one side, the draft resisters on the other. At the same time, each side felt like the other son in the story, the dutiful one who saw the father’s joy when the son who’d broken all the rules returned, who wondered why honor and loyalty was not met with the same outpouring.

The father explained that those feelings were always there for the dutiful son, if that son could only see them. The wonder was because it had seemed the prodigal was lost forever, but instead returned to those who loved him. America, President McGovern said as he wrapped up, needed to heal the wound in its soul. It needed to find and show the love of the father, who rejoices to God that the family is whole again, that lost children are home, that now they can all go forward together. With that ask and a wisp of prayer at the end, McGovern wrapped up. The networks switched back to their usual shows.

 

[Wayside]

I'd quote and comment individually on my favorite bits, but I've done quite a bit of that already, so I'll just say, bravo.

 

[Indiana Beach Crow]

for once, said Grandfather Frank Fools Crow, the best-known traditionalist in the camp, we had one of those practical, hard-faced white sod busters on our side.

​

​

And I'm sure McGovern himself laughed the longest and the hardest out of anyone about this backhanded compliment.

 

[Yes]

Just... very nice job with this latest chapter Yes. There's something about the kind of descriptions you have in your writing that just works so well for this.

Thanks old friend, I appreciate it.

If this doesn't get a Turtledove, I'm going to call my police department to report a robbery.

You are genuinely too kind, but it means a lot.

I'd quote and comment individually on my favorite bits, but I've done quite a bit of that already, so I'll just say, bravo.

Thank you. And feel free to comment/talk among yourselves, I value attentive readers, sometimes they draw my eye to things I've missed even in my own work.

And I'm sure McGovern himself laughed the longest and the hardest out of anyone about this backhanded compliment.

You know I wouldn't be surprised if he did.

 

[Yes]

What exactly were the contents of the War Powers Amendment?

It's funny you should bring that up, because I dipped my hand into the timestreams and happened to come up with a copy:

Text of the Twenty Seventh-Amendment:
“To assure the judgment of both the President and the Congress is applied to the introduction of the United States Armed Forces into actual or potential hostilities, and decisions on whether such forces should remain so committed, this Amendment provides that:

In every possible instance the President shall consult with Congress before such introduction, and again consult regularly with Congress until such forces are removed in their entirety from such situations;

Regardless of the circumstances of introduction the President shall submit a written report and provide personal consultation to relevant senior members of Congress within twenty-four hours of any such introduction of forces, and again at least once each month until such time as those forces are withdrawn in their entirety;

On receipt of such a report the Congress shall meet to consider any objections to the grant of a sixty-day period in which to complete the actions of such forces as the President may introduce, and shall either or deny or grant such a sixty-day period of action;

Within thirty of the sixty days, if granted, Congress shall meet in appropriate committees and thence for the consideration of the whole body, to decide whether a declaration of war or other authorization to continue the use of the United States Armed Forces beyond the sixty days shall be granted;

Congress may foreclose further use of the forces introduced under the original cause of action by defeating at any time any declaration or authorization for further use of those forces by vote, or by a vote to deny continuing funds to pay for such operations;

If by such denial of further authority, or denial of funds for purpose, or by the foreseeable termination of military operations, the forces introduced may conclude their actions within sixty days, the President shall have a further thirty days to withdraw such forces, or plead a practical necessity for approval by Congress to extend withdrawal provided that withdrawal of forces is the sole cause for such extension.”

 

[Yes]

Hundred Days II: The Way Forward
​

What has happened down here is the winds have changed
Clouds roll in from the north and it start to rain
Rained real hard and rained for a real long time…
Louisiana, Louisiana,
They’re tryin’ to wash us away

- Randy Newman, “Louisiana 1927”
​

Sargent Shriver was always good for a smile, especially at times like this. Shriver and Armand Hammer sat opposite one another in sculpted tulip chairs within a hotel suite — suite? Floor — Hammer owned, relaxed and in good humor as the hi-fi across the greatroom played Frank Chacksfield & His Orchestra’s svelte tones without a trace of irony and the two men nursed snifters of brandy fortified back in the Belle Epoque. Armand Hammer, multimillionaire philanthropist, corporate impresario, amateur promoter of US-Soviet relations, and sometime political fixer for the Republican Party of all people, beamed back at Shriver from under Hammer’s big square glasses. That was typical; when you dealt with Sarge, usually a good time was had by all.

Shriver knew how to use that to advantage. They had talked art and travel and family already. Now Shriver waved the hand in which he held his brandy and called attention to the whole point.

The administration had a plan, Shriver said. No, not just a plan: a deal, really. Who would make sense as the man to sell this deal to the right people? Why Shriver’s old chum Armand, of course. It’s a good time to be useful, Shriver went on. A lot of my fellow Democrats have questions they’d like to ask about all that money last year. Here Shriver meant the tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of dollars Hammer had funneled to CRP for Richard Nixon’s election, meant to keep up Hammer’s bona fides as a Republican, grease the wheels for Hammer’s personal dealings with the Soviet Union, and lobby for smoother relations with Hammer’s friends in Moscow who went back to his days as a doctor in the wild, sometimes bloody post-revolutionary Soviet Union of the Twenties, some now in the Politburo itself.

It’s the twilight of the old ways of doing business, said Shriver. All the campaign funny money created… difficulties that weren’t easy for the new administration, with so much on its plate and often limited leverage in Congress, to help brush aside. It would take some quid to keep Hammer’s quo out of a courtroom. The nice thing was, both men reflected, that Sarge was just the sort of person who could finesse that situation. Shriver leaned forward, always a bit larger than he seemed when he was relaxed, and got down to business.

The administration wants to make a deal, said Shriver expansively. A private word between parties, handled by a messenger trusted on both sides, could smooth things over and speed things up. The same kind of special contacts that had gotten Hammer in dutch with Congressional investigators could make him invaluable here. That way the latter might, just maybe, cancel out the former. It was a big enough deal, Shriver assured his cagey friend. It offered the chance to bind the superpowers in a new kind of dependence on one another that might help ramp down the Cold War and make new kinds of trade across the Iron Curtain possible.

What’s the in, asked Hammer. Grain, said Shriver.

Sarge went over the background; he liked a good story. In ‘72, as both men knew, the Soviet Union suffered a catastrophic grain harvest. Not only were any surpluses for sale abroad to earn foreign cash lost to bad weather, but what Moscow needed for animal feed and bread in the state-run stores as well. It was a grim blow just as the economic officers of the Politburo pushed for more conversion to feed grains that would yield extra meat protein in the Soviet diet, a symbol of Communist abundance.

Soviet buyers lit out on the international markets to make up the losses. Among other things, and before the several moving parts of the U.S. Departments of Agriculture and State came to the same conclusion, Soviet contracts swept up American stocks on hand and struck a double blow. The first was to taxpayers, who paid the difference because Moscow’s men finalized their contracts before the open markets noticed their work and lowered prices as a consequence. The higher prices were good for farmers but subsidized out of public debt. Second, American consumers paid again at the supermarket. The loss of so much US grain meant that bread, milk, and beef, for starters, all spiked their prices and drove up broad-based inflation to boot. Some caustic observers called it “the Great Grain Robbery.” Despite the short term relief for Soviet commissars and consumers, neither side was well served. If bad weather struck again after the ill will over ‘72, both sides could suffer.

That didn’t have to happen, Shriver went on. The White House had a plan. Hammer knew, surely, of the major farm bill the administration was backing in Congress. This plan was a second prong of the effort, a corollary abroad. Shriver wanted Hammer, with his practiced decades of schmoozing pliant Soviet officials, to pitch a deal. Not just for Moscow but in fact for COMECON, the economic bloc formed by Soviet-aligned socialist states that stretched from the satellite governments of Eastern Europe to places like Cuba, Mongolia, and North Vietnam. The deal would create a long-term commodity agreement between the United States and COMECON, with the Soviets of course in the lead. Each year COMECON would purchase American grain at a fixed total price. With a phrase borrowed from arms control, each year COMECON would have “freedom to mix”: different nations could buy different volumes within the total, and each nation could buy a different combination among five fixed types of cereal grains.

Then came the interesting bit. The price of the actual grain would come in under the total bill of sasle. In a normal year, the COMECON nations would make up the difference between what they laid out for the grain itself and what America charged by buying United States Treasury securities. Those purchases would subsidize the prices payed to American farmers and help push overseas demand for Treasury paper that would finance the United States’ national debts. In crisis years, COMECON countries would be allowed to purchase fewer securities and more grain within the same total price while Washington upped its own share of the farmers’ subsidy. As crisis conditions settled the price mix would swing back to normal. The two sides would invest directly in one another: the U.S. would give price and supply stability to COMECON, while COMECON would juice the global market for Treasury bills.

Hammer nodded along as Shriver spun the tale, hands wafting through the air like an actor’s or a painter’s while the brandy snifter tagged along. When it comes to this we’re new in town, observed Shriver, or at least the President is. You on the other hand, he added to Hammer with a conspiratorial grin, are a devil Moscow knows very well. If you sit down at Kosygin’s dacha, or Kirilenko’s, or even old Leonid’s himself, and lay this out, they’ll listen. We need them to listen. With a pause, Shriver’s face fell for effect as he added: you need them to listen, too. Shriver let the thought of Congressional investigations linger in Hammer’s anxious mind, then his cheeks rose again, beaming. Even when he made a threat, Sarge said it with a smile.

On Capitol Hill, the first prong of George McGovern’s intended revolution in food policy plowed ahead. With the rather grand title of the Food and Farming Renaissance Act, McGovern’s people had slipped the first draft of a bill into the House the Monday afternoon after inauguration through a carefully chosen stalking horse, Rep. Bill Roy of Kansas’ 2nd District. A farm-state liberal like McGovern himself, Roy had higher ambitions — for the governor’s mansion in Topeka, perhaps even to poach Bob Dole’s seat in the Senate — and a lead on this issue could serve him well. It drew attention right away. Co-sponsors signed on as they read in detail, first Bob Bergland of Minnesota and John Culver of Iowa, then the fairly liberal Republican Mark Andrews of North Dakota and four more Democrats, and when they tacked on the dour security of Walter B. Jones, Sr. from North Carolina they knew they were on to something.

The FFRA was no mere farm bill. It drew together George McGovern’s long years of passion, policy work, and personal conviction about the fundamental importance of both America’s abundant food and its endangered small farmers, and made them manifest. For one, it absorbed Sargent Shriver’s promised deal for Armand Hammer in its language, backed by millions more to expand the USDA’s Foreign Agricultural Agency, restructure the Food For Peace program McGovern had run for John Kennedy into a central division of the United States Agency for International Development, and make a permanent committee on global food security chaired by the new Secretary of Peace part of the National Security Council apparatus.

FFRA also authorized permanent reserve inventories to be held by designated local cooperatives recognized by the USDA and established with the department’s help. There would be a fund for disaster payments across the board on USDA commodities. The FFRA would stand up a Commodity Supplemental Food Program designed to provide surplus food to poor Americans, especially families with children. More money would go towards Parity Price Supports for overseas sales. The Fifth Title of the FFRA would function as a separable National Agricultural Research, Education, and Teaching Policy Act to set federal standards and support for publicly-funded research and agricultural extension. The Seventh Title authorized a Rural Development Agency, through which funds would flow for environmental conservation, low-interest loans for urban renewal in small market towns, and financial supports for cooperative electrification and other co-op service provision. (The ingratiating young Undersecretary of Agriculture for Rural Development, Bill Clinton, would administer the RDA from his office.)

Unlike some of President McGovern’s more controversial ideas, to which he was wedded by principle but with which he had less practical background, when it came to the FFRA the South Dakotan was on home turf. It showed. First of all in its bipartisan support: alongside freshman Nebraska Democrat Terry Carpenter, like the new president an unexpected victor in November, the principal sponsor of the Senate version was McGovern’s odd but frequent ally on food policy Bob Dole of Kansas. In the House there was more difficulty with urban Democrats, finally soothed by the breadth of the Commodity Supplemental Food Program, than with stodgy committee chairs who often hailed from districts both rural and Southern. Even Hale Boggs made clear that, on farming at least, here was an issue where Hale’s “boys” and the hippie-lover in the White House could do business. McGovern himself wanted to single out the FFRA as “hundred day” legislation, part of that mythic political ad campaign in which every new president engaged; odds looked good.

There was, however, a hitch. A significant portion of the monies that would fund the new programs, especially the Title Five and Title Seven series operations, would come from a powerful change in the government’s subsidy structure. In line with McGovern’s own views and the Democratic Party platform as well, the FFRA would end subsidies to operations larger than “family-type” farms, and to corporate operators who only ran secondary product lines in agriculture as tax write-offs. As conservative legislators prepared to use quarrels over just what a family-type farm was to snare the plan in committee, the President intervened.

Working together with USDA economists around the clock in early Feburary, Jean Westwood and Doug Coulter produced language that the Kansans, Dole and Roy, could introduce in a second draft of the House and Senate bills before markup. It gave a common, federally-defined standard for the elusive new unit of farming. That was bigger, physically, than some of McGovern’s closest allies expected, but still in the grand scheme paled against the largest Western landowners, or ranchers who grazed on federal land to expand the range of their herds, or especially the holdings of outfits like Cargill, the giant of American corporate farming, or Commerce Secretary Dwayne Andreas’ old employers at Archer Daniels Midland.

That was where the fight came. The National Chamber of Commerce funded stemwinding speeches in Congress and pamphlets distributed out of corner stores in the farm belts about just how much farmland, and how many farm workers, depended on the big players. For a short time the dour, hardline Republican Roman Hruska of Nebraska filibustered the Senate bill on grounds that naked advantage for small operators in localized areas would breach the Dormant Commerce Clause that said one couldn’t play state and local favorites in interstate trade. In the end, with Speaker Albert plus Mike Mansfield in the Senate both standing firmly on top of any efforts to field alternative legislation, it was the big boys who moved. Not to back down, rather to shift their weight sideways: after enlightening discussions with their lawyers, outfits like Cargill restructured their holdings around tenancy leases for parcels sized in line with the new federal standard. Private giants like the horizon-spanning King Ranch down in Texas (still family owned) carved up their land titles among relatives and shell companies.

There were still barriers: in some cases the biggest players really did have to sell out to smaller buyers and resume a role as wholesalers or middlemen, and a decent portion of the money the White House hoped to save was brought round for the new programs. It wasn’t perfect — there would have to be some adjustments, and more cash from the planned tax reforms. But the first true farm-state president in decades signed the FFRA into law near the end of March. Unlike some events that drew more ink and attention, and to George McGovern’s satisfaction, this truly did mark out a different future for the ways and means by which the nation and the world would be fed.



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They said a few words about Lyndon first; it seemed the thing to do. They talked about the war, too, the subject that seemed to linger despite every effort to cast it out. McGovern had come a little earlier from a meeting with the bulldog faced Army two-star, Bob Kingston, in charge of what the military called the Joint Personnel Recovery Center, the small body of varied specialists from language and jungle survival to forensic pathology who were ordered to dig deep in Indochina and come back with any American prisoners hidden away or, more likely, a fuller account of America’s dead. It had been the subject of some grueling and detailed talks in Paris for the team chaired by Ball and Salinger. The administration continued to hold a line on restoration of military aid to Saigon while Thieu fumed about the demand for multi-party elections in the fall. Now, on that subject and many others, President McGovern sat on the couches of the Oval Office with his old friend and mentor the Arkansas fireplug William Fulbright, dean of the Senate on foreign policy and namesake of the grants that sent American scholars abroad to learn from the wider world. Fulbright was in an expansive mood.

“That’s all certainly true. What it comes back to, Mr. President, is…” Fulbright twisted his glasses in his left hand as he did sometimes and weighed his words. “George, you’ve got to learn to brag.”

The president’s sharp eyes sparked a moment in surprise and curiosity, a little wary. He asked Fulbright to elaborate and the senator was happy to. You really have done a hell of a lot with all this, Fulbright went on. Quite a hell of a lot. We had two presidents who told the country we’d never get this far in to Indochina, and two more who said they’d get us out, and here you are the first one who has actually done it. No one’s had a leash this tight on Thieu since the Kennedy boys installed him in the first place. You have delivered American prisoners from some very dark holes where they had been for years because you were able to push reparations through Congress. Hell, when there was a chance all that would go wrong on you, you were even willing to eat your own words and send the marines to get as many of them as you could which would’ve been a terrible gamble. You withdrew the last of our forces in-country in an orderly fashion, and you’re willing to let those folks over there get on with creating their own future. It’s a lot in a short time.

But you have no one out there really telling the story, Fulbright added. Sure, you have officials who do press conferences and Cy Vance or Salinger goes in front of reporters to give them the latest facts but that only implies what matters. Sometimes you will need to come out and say it. Otherwise facts are nimble things, they can get away from you if they’re left untended. McGovern nodded acknowledgment of what Fulbright had said. I think the American people have an opportunity to look around and see what we’ve done, the president replied, or what we’ve started to do. There are facts here that speak for themselves. Among them that we’ve worked very hard to pay attention to things as they are, not go off half-cocked with doctrines or opinions. And I think these fine people doing the work deserve the chance to give that information to the public so they can understand it and see where things stand. Much as I hate to say it, there are also things we ought to just keep close to our vests. You talked about the marines, or retaliation if Hanoi didn’t play ball about our prisoners. Well, if there are any more out there we still might have to do something about it, I just promised Major General Kingston whatever support his operation deems necessary to recover the remains of our people or anybody who’s still alive. If we talk to much about swinging a big stick we could lose any element of surprise, or scare North Vietnam or the Pathet Lao or whoever out of cooperating. We ought to continue to take this step by step. It’s still the right thing to do.

Fulbright smiled at the president he’d known since McGovern’s first months in the Senate, and kept his counsel. Facts might be stubborn things, Fulbright thought to himself, but not everyone judged them in the same way, or even saw them through the mist of preconceptions. He’d have a word with Mankiewicz at some point, maybe with Gary Hart if it looked like the chief of staff wouldn’t use it as a political football — Hart had brought up the same issue in one of the last meetings of the Group on the South Vietnam withdrawal. Time would surely educate President McGovern, he thought with some real affection for this decent man stuck with the biggest job in the world. The question was how painful that education would be. Another time, perhaps.

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Well thank God for New York traffic laws, said Pete McCloskey when it was all over. He had a point. The National Security Agency had done their job to a fault; maybe this was a new day in the world of covert surveillance. Beyond that, the NSA and FBI had partnered as though they meant it, with swift, effective chains of communication and command. It was practically an advertisement for what the new gang in the West Wing wanted out of intelligence reform. Yet even then what really saved the day was the fact that, if you just left a car by the curbs of New York with the meter void, it was going to get towed. Nothing else but the stubborn enforcement of rules that justified unionized public employees’ paychecks would have done the job in time. That raised some issues.

It hadn’t started with traffic tickets in Manhattan. It hadn’t started at home at all, but rather halfway round the world in Sudan, where only in the past couple of years had the United States even restored diplomatic relations so that there were American officials, or Americans in any numbers, to be found in the country at all. Now came personnel traffic among diplomats around at the end of winter, one of those times when the Foreign Service vagabonds shuffled off to new countries, even new continents, at the bidding of a new administration far more determined than the one before it to let the sensible, slightly patrician agents of American reason guide policy rather than rely on coups and counterinsurgency.

Every fresh face overseas was meant to betoken that change: in Sudan that involved a formal reception for the new ambassador, a bespectacled career diplomat named Cleo Noel. The outgoing Deputy Chief of Mission, Curt Moore, who had effectively run the embassy for some time, would toast both Noel and the McGovern administration’s desire to pull Sudan closer in to Arab-Israeli diplomacy. With the US outpost in some physical disarray — it was a young station and a work in progress — the Saudis were kind enough to host. Noel, together with Moore who had a mutual admiration society with senior Sudanese officials, plus the new DCM Robert Fritts who’d just jetted in from Indonesia, all turned up alongside some usual suspects from Khartoum’s little diplomatic community. Despite a wicked haboob, one of the dust storms that kicked up off the red-brown plains that stretched far beyond Khartoum’s horizon, the Saudi legation was calm and cool, the mood festive.

It did not last. The seven well-armed Palestinian fedayeen who strode into the embassy and seized the party guests as hostages acted in calm execution of a months-old plan. They served Black September, a militant offshoot of the mainline Palestinian Liberation Organization but also an off-the-books force of wet-workers for senior PLO leadership, useful when they wanted to strike with some deniability at the West, or hurt Israeli in ways sparked moral outrage like the slaughter of athletes in Munich. Black September had torn a path through headlines for more than a year and a half, most recently the Olympic tragedy, a wave of letter bombs in Europe and Africa, and a frankly bungled attempt to invade the Israeli embassy in Bangkok that turned into a bloody shootout with Thai authorities.

Now they meant to exert leverage on King Hussein of Jordan — to these young fighters the butcher of Palestinians in the 1970 campaign that gave the group its name — and on the new administration in Washington. The masked attackers shooed most of the party guests out of the building (the Soviet ambassador made an operatic, and mildly heroic, fuss on behalf of his captive colleagues from the West) then made both a singular demand and a singular threat. Jordan would release several dozen Palestinians imprisoned terrorists, or the three American diplomats Black September had in hand would die.

Washington had dealt with threats to its diplomats, even with assassinations, several times in recent years, mostly in Latin America and the Caribbean. From the point of view of the McGovern administration the important thing was to be compassionate and businesslike. Sargent Shriver reacted at once: he dispatched his Undersecretary for Management Bill Macomber with a small team of staffers on an Air Force flight to Cairo. In a brief private meeting President McGovern agreed entirely with Acting Director Felt from the FBI that it was a damnfool idea to let good men get shot out of a warped notion of national pride like the Israelis seemed to, and that the best thing to do was help the Sudanese keep these guys talking until they accepted something like safe conduct to Libya, or perhaps Egypt.

Macomber felt very strongly that there needed to be some fraction of give on the part of the Jordanians, to help things along and keep Noel, Moore, and Fritts out of imminent danger. When he pled that to Secretary Shriver, Shriver listened. There were communications to Amman, through the diplomatic mail and more directly; Macomber and several of his team paced the aisles on the way to Cairo eaten up with worry. In a show of Ivy League sangfroid, the trio of hostage Americans wrote letters to their wives given in trust to the somber Saudi ambassador. In Amman, not quite two and a half years out from the explosions and chaos and Syrian intervention that nearly toppled the Hashemite Kingdom, King Hussein claimed a breakdown in communications when the American ask for lenience came through.

Macomber’s team were full of energy and frantic improvisation: they ginned up a Quranically correct plea for mercy and charity to Egypt’s devout president Anwar Sadat among other feats. The West Wing counseled patience. In the end none of it was up to them. A coded message was sent through the Saudi embassy’s own telex system into which the PLO back office, whose catspaw Black September was, had tapped. As Bill Macomber debated in conference calls with the US embassies in Khartoum, Cairo, and Amman whether to stay put or fly ahead to Sudan, the fedayeen checked their watches for the time, ushered the three Americans down to the basement just after sunup of the second day, and shot them dead. Eight hours later they laid down their weapons and walked out with the Saudi ambassador’s family and staff unharmed, after a livid demand from Sudan’s president who believed the whole bloody mess was a setup to embarrass him before an upcoming Arab League conference. An ashen-faced Bill Macomber walked into the dust-blown embassy in Khartoum as staffers processed a blizzard of telexes, or broke down in tears, or both. King Hussein squared his chin and said nothing. And then home came the coffins three, draped in the flag, the first Americans to die in the line of the nation’s duty since the all too recent end in Vietnam.

But there was a trail. Black September and their masters kept their records off the books, kept them out of the usual paper trails, but could not set them apart from the hum and ether of a telecommunications age. That was where the National Security Agency, the United States’ signals intelligence service and, just perhaps, even more unsettlingly effective wiretappers than the KGB, stalked them, found them, and tracked them down. There had been a watch on such traffic since the late days of the Nixon presidency; now there was a priority cause. Within two days the NSA had verified trails from the Saudi telex — it didn’t hurt to read the sheikhs’ mail, either — back to the PLO’s headquarters by the coast of southern Lebanon. The question now was what that meant, what a new administration with a lot on its plate and a sudden furor that Americans were dead in another godforsaken place would do.

There was more. The NSA, true to its intelligence brief, was as concerned with what might happen as what had happened. As a result threat assessors at NSA headquarters at Fort Meade correlated the chatter out of south Lebanon and several known PLO safe houses abroad with coded diplomatic traffic from the Iraqi embassy at the United Nations. The link to Iraq was already on the list of probables; a shared dislike of Jordan kept Baghdad’s cables on the watch list. In this case, however, the codebreakers pieced together something more remarkable and far more urgent.

In the second week of March, Israel’s prime minister Golda Meir was scheduled to speak at the UN. In preparation for that, it seemed, a Black September field man named Khalid Al-Jawary had already set in place a pair of car bombs — two to make sure — along Fifth Avenue, timed to blow Meir’s small motorcade to kingdom come. In a fit of sweet reason word passed like lightning to the Federal Bureau of Investigation and from them to the NYPD, who lit out with deliberate speed to the places specified in the Iraqi cable.

Yet even before the national security state came to bear, the ambush was swept aside by the pure tectonic inertia of a big city’s civil servants. The towed cars were traced through the pink and yellow carbon paper of the appropriate offices. One detachment of NYPD bomb techs were treated to a cherry blossom of dirt and flame in a sprawling scrapyard on Staten Island just as they arrived on site. When reporters asked about the blast Police Plaza shrugged its collective shoulders and muttered something about those damn Puerto Rican separatists, or the chance of a mob hit botched. When NYPD turned to the FBI field office with more than academic interest in how the Fibbies knew where to look, the cops heard a familiar answer: don’t ask.

One terrorist attack abroad might turn out to be a bitter quirk of the present age; two, to the recently appointed Director of Central Intelligence Pete McCloskey, started to look too much like a campaign. He gathered the agencies and, when it was all typed out on paper, it was clear that together they knew who, and how, perhaps even why. The Palestinians wanted to strike at Jordan and Israel, of course, but why bring in the States? In part, the analysts proposed, because they wanted to test just how pro-Israel this new Democratic president was, whose party wanted a Jewish capital in Jerusalem and whose Congress liked lucrative arms sales to the Jewish state. They also wanted to see just what a president who set such great store in peacemaking would do. What we need to do now, said McCloskey bluntly on the phone with Gary Hart, is figure that the hell out.

What came of it, when George McGovern decided he needed to sit the principals down in the Oval Office two days out from the would-be car bombs — the CIA station chief in Athens had a whiff of Al-Jawary, or so McCloskey said — was that there were two options. Two roads in a wood and all that, as the President said while Doug Coulter took the official notes, but it’s a hell of a wood to be in.

The first option was plain enough: Tom Moorer with his cherubic face and Navy blues briefed it in. The USS Forrestal’s carrier battle group was already on scheduled maneuvers in the Eastern Mediterranean. Everybody already knew where the PLO’s operational headquarters was, the significant question was whether NSA and the National Reconnaissance Office could identify with confidence who happened to be there at a given time. It was a simple matter from there. Two pair of RA-5 Vigilante recon jets off the Forrestal, the biggest birds you could work from a carrier, had grid-marked the site in photographs already. On orders eight A-6s with a flight of F-4N Phantoms as fighter cover would depart the Forrestal’s deck, and come in from about six hundred miles out and just a few hundred feet off the water on final approach. Just before “Beginning Mean Nautical Twilight” — dawn to everyone else — the Intruders would launch a total of sixteen Walleye television-guided glide bombs that would flatten the whole damn compound and pin survivors under the rubble.

That was one way. It was, as Moorer together with his bosses the studied and patrician Cy Vance and Townsend Hoopes both pointed out, also a good way to end up with a new Middle Eastern war on your hands. Not just any old-fashioned war either, but riots across a region, bombs thrown at American legations and no uniformed army to shoot at in return, who knew how many American dual-nationals in Lebanon scooped up and kidnapped in some cave somewhere, or laid out dead along the Beirut Corniche to make a point. At the same time it would be a hell of a message. The powers these fedayeen had, as Paul Warnke pointed out with nods from McCloskey, were mobility and impunity. This was one case where the PLO had sacrificed that mobility. The question was whether decapitation would wither the threat or make it fragment like shrapnel.

When Sarge Shriver stressed how good it would be to know more McCloskey pulled out a rumpled manila folder with a glossy black-and-white tacked on the front. Time for option two. The DCI minced no words: Ali Hassan Salameh, he said. They call him the Red Prince. Yasser Arafat’s chief of security, Mediterranean playboy, dedicated guerrilla in the late Sixties when the fedayeen were still poking the bear from the east bank of the River Jordan. Appeared to be tangled up with Black September directly, and certainly the Israelis wanted his scalp in connection with Munich. Langley had established contact several times in the last two years but without substantive results. As was his way, Salameh played coy. But they had a man — real all-American type from Pennsylvania named Ames, but he was really good at shoe leather work in the Levant — placed to reach out if there were orders, if there was a plan. There you were, McCloskey said with his usual bulldog Irishness. You could kill the bastards and maybe start a war, or you could talk to one particular bastard who’d maybe conspired to kill three Foreign Service men.

McGovern listened with his usual, flinty consideration. The pause as he did so began to fall into its own space, where some of his advisers wondered if this was another time where McGovern preferred to let things carry on, go their own way and look again when there seemed to be better chance to get things just so. As Tom Moorer settled back to write off the meeting and Paul Warnke moved forward to prompt an answer, McGovern spoke.

“I understand the reasons. Just yesterday I took some time with the families of these men and … I do understand it. It’s not that. We’ve done a lot of bombing for peace in the last ten years and it doesn’t seem to have gotten us anywhere. I don’t mean to foreclose anything but we just can’t afford to sidestep into another conflict when we haven’t thought that through. And we are going to have to start somewhere besides just Tel Aviv if there are ever going to be two sides talking to each other in the Middle East. So here’s what we’re going to do.

“Send this message. To the Iraqi mission in New York, send it there first, and tell them it’s for their friends in Lebanon. Message says, We just missed your call in Sudan. We did pick up the phone in New York, and we will listen for that line with interest in the future. We would like to speak to someone who knows us already about the situation in the region. We want to talk with anyone who can offer solutions. We do not want any more calls like the ones recently. People could get hurt that way. Pete, get that out please straightaway.”

The listeners caught the signal inside the noise again, heard from Fort Meade as the President’s words pinged from Manhattan to the Iraqi Foreign Ministry in Baghdad and from there to a pair of residential phone numbers in Beirut and a sprawling compound near Sidon. Half a week on a young runner for Fatah left a note with the hotel desk where an American business traveler named Ames was staying on Cyprus. Two days after that the broad-shouldered, golf shirted Company man sat back at a cafe table in ready conversation with the Red Prince. The lifer administrative secretaries at Langley collated the material under the codeword OLIVE TREE. So it was under Director McCloskey’s watchful and broadly approving eye that the United States found an in with the PLO. The day the two interlocutors broke bread in Cyprus a pair of US Navy Phantom jets off the Forrestal streaked in low over a tastefully decaying villa by the Lebanese coast, as their big twin engines strained against heavy bomb loads. Down in the villa Yasser Arafat told some excitable young aides to calm down and craned out a window to see. As it went over one of the jets dipped its wing. Just so you’d notice.

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Old River Control, every foot of it — two hundred thousand tons of concrete and re-bar, the sluices and bars and revetments — spoke boldly of the ancient human need to spite God. From that point, that human hand thrown up against a rhythm thousands of years old, Louisiana spread out in all directions. Louisiana’s bayous, silt deposits, and wide, rich bottom land was the physical evidence of how it was formed. Every thousand years or so, a new channel made from deposits and winds and climate snared the Mississippi and pulled it in a new direction that built up Louisiana around it, then was snared again by a different path leaving a dank backwater behind. Now, if you gave nature a free hand, the Atchafalaya basin waited to snatch up the third-mightiest river in the world and pull it away from the long dogleg to New Orleans.

Trouble was, if that happened now a long river run of industrial and petrochemical plants, a string of cities small and large up to one of America’s greatest ports, and the whole artery of swift commerce from the inland United States down into the Gulf of Mexico, would be cut off and wiped away. It would be an economic catastrophe so great engineering experts said in hushed tones that it might swing not just the commercial health of the nation but the fate of the Cold War. That simply couldn’t happen; humanity, or at least the Army Corps of Engineers, needed to bar nature’s way. So they did, going into the 1960s, with the vast control structures at the Old River juncture, the chain on the door to keep the Mississippi steady and out of a fatal shift into the Atchafalaya.

For a decade Old River Control did its job in quiet. Despite the occasional hurricanes weather was relatively mild along the Gulf and conditions consistent. Then, from the autumn of 1972 into the spring of 1973, as the nation’s politics tumbled and fell then rose again in strange new ways, things changed on the Mississippi. On the far end of the same climate event that scoured Soviet wheat fields, heavy snow dumped down in the north of the Mississippi’s catchment basin, which was practically all of North America’s waterways, while it rained like hell down south. Boosted up in channels that had been both raised and narrowed by sediment, downpour and melt rushed south in the constricted space like the face of Creation’s waters.

The National Weather Service, the Farm Bureau, everyone who really cared about how the weather could change the country watched and tallied it up with growing dread. By the end of February the Department of the Interior had joined in. Jesse Unruh, its secretary who looked not so much as though he had been born as quarried, was California bred and Kansas born: he knew climate catastrophes when he saw them. Snippets started to head upriver to the Oval Office itself, where messengers nudged by Unruh and even by Treasury Secretary Galbraith could get in a word. President McGovern had spent his boyhood in sight of the Dust Bowl’s clouds and so payed attention. When they met on the National Parks budget McGovern quizzed Unruh. Mr. President, said the Interior Secretary, we’re watching the Ohio River. We have the Mississippi in the channels right now, even if there’s fifteen inches of rain south of St. Louis. But if the Ohio rises, God help us. McGovern nodded in cold contemplation.

As the days and weeks moved forward so did the crest of the tide. Cairo, Illinois, the northernmost point of the South or the southernmost point of the North depending what street you drove down, spent over three months in muddy water with the big river at flood stage. Memphis watched that great girder bridge across the Mississippi and held its breath against nine weeks of raging waters. Poorly reinforced levees south of St. Louis gave way and the thunderous force of water opened up a stain you could see from space cross the bottom land below the city, as the news cameras whirred and people slogged through corrupted floodwater the depth of a child’s pool while they braced buildings and laid in sandbags to hold back the climate’s judgment from real estate and infrastructure and livestock. All the while it roiled and grew, more and more millions of gallons of water per whatever unit of time you cared to throw at it, faster and faster as volume through a narrowed space obeyed the mathematical language of the universe.

There was work to do in the meanwhile and that was sure a damned mess, on that every senior member of the McGovern administration and every congressman who gave them a piece of their mind knew for sure. Parts of the problem, including the levees’ failure down in southern Missouri, lay at the feet of the Corps of Engineers and the control boards with which they interacted through the Executive Branch and Congress alike, a snare of committees and review panels that seemed to exist mostly to point out over and over what had gone wrong for the evening news to hear. Some of the administrative structure for processing such a disaster — claims for relief, repair of public housing down the often impoverished length of Big Muddy, temporary housing, municipal asks for federal aid or planning permission to do some localized flood control — all went through Housing and Urban Development, but the new HUD bureau handed the job was more a notion of Congress just yet than a properly staffed or funded agency. George Romney went down to Arkansas, towered over mayors and farmers as they swept the landscape with pointed hands and showed how folks who’d had very little now had nothing, and until House Appropriations ponied up a supplemental resolution could only tighten that lantern jaw of his in empathy.

As farms and elementary schools fought the germ-filled tides and the out-of-season mosquitoes and bad plumbing, Health and Human Services tried to step in too. There one of the questions was more … fundamental. Inspectors and nurses could be hurried down to the floodsites but HHS’s secretary, the learned and driven Andrew Young, a highly educated black man from the big city, was not a favored guest in floodstruck towns down a river that fed corn and cotton and plantations even in the present day.

By late March, as President McGovern emerged from the chilled trailers at Wounded Knee and late-night rounds of talks with Congress on the Demogrant and the Rehabilitation Act and the Endangered Species Act and that very FFRA, from a jet-lagged five day marathon in Western Europe, and whatever else circumstance saw fit to hurl his way, two things became clear. First, that the aid and recovery the federal government could provide up and down the Mississippi was a headless, convoluted mess, where people who had lost everything were now defeated again by conflicting claims papers with different agencies, by lack of coordination between departments, and in the incremental mire of work orders and process assessments that traveled like a cloud wherever the Corps of Engineers worked. Johnny Carson made mordant observations every few days, the television news droned on about the erosion of farmland and civic fabric, and that smarmy bastard Reagan out in sunny California kept telling that acrid joke that the worst words you could expect to hear were, “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” After enough times that got under people’s skin around the West Wing.

As a practical matter something needed to be done. McGovern, leery as he often was of wading into departments and rearranging them, gave Phil Hart a chairmanship, asked in HUD and Agriculture and Interior and Charlie Bennett the Secretary of the Army (as representative of the Corps, and as a well-read environmentalist) to see what they could bang out. There are plain, clear needs here, said the President. Figure out how to meet them.

Another thing was even clearer and far more urgent. All the high water, all the swollen brown expanse down out of the Midwest past busted berms and through washed out shotgun-shack downs down towards the Delta, all that resolved itself on to a geographic point. That point was where the overgrown rage of the river passed the siren expanse of the Atchafalaya. There, millions of gallons of water beat on the structure of Old River Control like a hammer of judgment. The whole damn thing vibrated, shook so loud that everyone could hear, from wry Cajun site managers who managed the outflow valves even when their blood ran cold, to city-folk oglers who up and ran when they got close enough to see what it was really about, to local fishermen who plain couldn’t believe their ears and had a grand time saying so to those worn-faced men who came to work every morning just to see if the Mississippi would make a wreck of the works of men.

On both sides of the mighty walls, down so low you couldn’t see it, the whorling physics of the churn tore out holes and craters bigger than football fields, shook the great steel beams down in the loam where they tried to hold fast as nature laughed, rattled the fabric of the whole thing so that, like the joke ‘Nam vets made about the Huey helicopters, Old River Control was five thousand fragments damming in close formation. That couldn’t go on forever. Frank Mankiewicz talked to Charlie Bennett who talked to the chief of the Corps of Engineers. Bill Clinton over at Ag’s Rural Development office churned out position papers on what the floods had done to farmers along the length of the river, and what it could do in different scenarios at the point of decision, namely Louisiana.

At the start of April President McGovern himself got on the phone with the Corps’ division chief for the Mississippi basin, Maj. Gen. Charles Noble. Noble was a stolid career sapper, used to the conflicting demands of interest groups in his region — farmers, fishermen, industry, politicians twisted like pretzels to satisfy those opposed interests in search of votes. He was cautious but determined, and decidedly cagey about what to do next. He “yes, sir”ed with the best of them, and spoke of the big project he already had underway, to airdrop and bulldoze in heavy earth to help channel water out faster and further away from Old River Control’s fruitlessly open gates. Noble had already asked to federalize the 225th Engineering Group of the Louisiana National Guard and their heavy movers to speed it up, which McGovern approved with a nod of the head. But that didn’t answer the question. The President knew in his gut the high water was on a precipice. He huddled his people.

How do we cope with this? McGovern asked. Phil and his group will get us on top of the administrative side, if we can just get some dry weather in Illinois and the Ohio River Valley. The problem is Louisiana, yes? The grim heads in the Oval Office nodded. The Chief of the Corps of Engineers went through the numbers. Water levels had been higher in some other flood events but the rate of flow, especially as the emptied basins of North America rushed through Louisiana, was at the highest level Old River Control could handle. McGovern did not like riding that out. He trusted everyone would do their jobs but he knew nature’s grim capacity. Can we do something more, he asked.

Gary Hart nodded and together with Jesse Unruh laid out a plat map of most of Louisiana. Hart’s rangy finger stabbed at the point: Morganza, he said. No one in the structure of decision-making has opened the Morganza Spillway yet. It’s the safety valve for overflow into the Atchafalaya, about thirty miles down from Old River. We get it open and we can relieve pressure on Old River Control before it gives way. Save the barrier, save the industrial belt down to New Orleans. Unruh and the chief of the Corps gave due diligence on the downside. Morgan City’s flooded already, this will make that exponentially worse. It will change the geography and the chemistry of the wetlands downstream from the flood flow. But it keeps the river where it is, Hart repeated. Unruh looked at McGovern with grave eyes and nodded.

Bill Clinton, present on Agriculture’s behalf, spoke up. Wait a minute, he said. Wait a minute. We have a few thousand farmers, mostly soybean farmers, downrange of Morganza. They have pushed hard on this because they’re ruined if we open Morganza. So are the fishermen. Every bit of that is a threat to Governor Edwards’ political future and it’s going to hurt downticket Democrats like hell. It will also be a hell of a job to get those people back on their feet after. Not just down past Morganza directly, there’s Morgan City as you all observed already, there’s the whole south of the state. Clinton with his byzantine memory cathedral of a mind ran the numbers and the connections like a jackrabbit. There was a reason the Corps had soft-footed the Morganza question. Clinton summed up: it’s like a doctor who can save the mother or the child. We don’t even know if that will save Old River or not because we can’t get close enough in present conditions to make a sounding.

Unruh and Frank Mankiewicz talked some more, and George Romney’s rumbling tones went over the scale of what would happen to Morgan City if they moved ahead. McGovern listened, shoulders perched. He tilted his head a little to one side. Then he straightened up and spoke: we’re going to open Morganza, he said. Not just to steady the flowat Old River, but enough to bring it down. We can’t lose New Orleans, or the inland waterway, or the levees upriver if the Ohio piles on. Not if we never even tried. The secretaries and undersecretaries and fixers and officials nodded and started to move. I’ll go down there, McGovern added. Frank, you remember that commercial because it was your idea, right? Mankiewicz cocked an eyebrow on his effortlessly agile face. McGovern added, I meant what I said to those factory workers that this job demands you do what you have to for the good of the county, and that you tell the people the truth about why. All those folks down below Morganza ought to get an answer from their president. I want George — he nodded towards Secretary Romney — and Bill there — a tilt towards Assistant Secretary Clinton — with me. Surely we can get a helicopter from New Orleans to Morgan City? Gary Hart said, the Marines should have no problem with that. McGovern nodded and told everyone to get to work.

So down they went. Down first the weighty metal gates at Morganza, first thirty to trial and steady the flow, then forty, then by the end of that first day sixty of one hundred twenty-five, nearly half its capacity that raced down the swamplands and gorged over farms and power stations and the Morgan City levees. From the sky it was hard to tell the flood-wrecked trees and the hundreds, maybe thousands, of dead deer from one another. The Atchafalaya crested over the bridge at Morgan City and earnest, bespectacled reporters in helicopters talked about it over the rotors’ low roar in living rooms around the country. The troubles to the north began to ease as late spring brought clearer skies. The flow eased down by Old River, as girders still shook in a steady hum but the Mississippi stopped short of grinding the “project-level” structure into pumice. The navigation channel swelled but stayed its course down to New Orleans.

Down too went the President and his men in a big green CH-53 that landed in a mud-soaked park near the parish courthouse in Morgan City. With them came the state’s freshman senator, J. Bennett Johnston, a son of Shreveport come downstate to offer solace and federal money to the swamp Cajuns. He was the lone Louisianan with the Washington men. Governor Edwin Edwards stayed put in Baton Rouge. Ever since the days of Huey Long if not before the governorship of Louisiana was a tribunal for the public, in practice open for business to the highest corporate bidder but on every election stump in the state a bulwark and a beacon for the little man. The Long boys had imbued it with a civic magic; to have grim-faced suits from D.C. swoop in and change the face of the Atchafalaya Basin with federal orders, that was to have that spark of godhood stripped from you in front of everybody. You needed to keep as far off the consequences as you could. McGovern, who liked Edwards better than the other folks who might gun after Edwards’ job, respected that fact.

Back up in the U.S. Capitol Hale Boggs, at least six fingers down the bottle when he started in, wagged his finger and thundered before the press about federal high-handedness and the common people of Acadia fit to make Huey proud. It was all part of the show, but it tended to escape the earnest and occupied president down on the Gulf that reporters could adapt Boggs’ parochial theater-piece for narratives of their own. In the privacy of his Senate office Huey’s natural boy Russell, master of the Senate Finance Committee and wary foe of McGovern’s grand strategy on taxes, placed a call down to McGovern’s suite in New Orleans at just five cents a minute as Russell’s daddy had guaranteed. When McGovern answered, Long said that whatever came of Morgan City, the president had spared “the German coast” (called that because of all the industrial plants) and New Orleans itself. The men who called the shots would be courteous enough to remember.

Down in Morgan City it was as if two different presidents had been there, with two very different outcomes. It all depended who you asked. In outline the story read the same: McGovern and his men set down a little after 11:00 that morning, met for over half an hour with civic and parish leaders and business executives. Then he stood on the courthouse steps and delivered a statement for about seven or eight minutes, then walked through the crowd and talked with people, then toured the edges of the flood in waders himself while George Romney, Bennett Johnston, Bill Clinton, and the rest worked the room with townsfolk and displaced farmers. McGovern was flat and uninspiring as he pestered the mayors and sheriffs who briefed him on the damage, or he was cool and attentive and asked pertinent questions. He droned about how these people’s pain was for the good of the country, or he laid himself open and accountable to the people of these parishes for his decision to act at their expense. There were protest placards here and there, or there was polite applause when he came up to speak. One lady in horn-rimmed glasses lectured him about the ungodliness of his government and the divine punishment of the flood, or a couple of old Cajun fishermen leveled with McGovern and shook hands because he had the guts to face them about what he’d done — in this case both were clearly true. McGovern was a small figure, clumsy and almost literally at sea as he plodded through the brown water in his waders, or he walked purposefully through the places that suffered the most shoulder to shoulder with ordinary people. Views diverged.

As he followed the followers again — his moonlighting during the campaign had turned into a book contract and now a watching brief for Rolling Stone — Tim Crouse summed up perhaps his most powerful conclusion about the McGovern administration, about its effect on American life. “It was down in Louisiana that the thought came to me at last,” he wrote for the May issue. “Almost no one could actually report on President McGovern, at least not by the official rules of objective journalism. This was because, for nearly all professional reporters, what McGovern did and said was not “news” in the strict sense since none of its substance was new. To the press everything he did was a foregone conclusion, for good or ill. Everything filtered into one frame or the other. The people who could just take an act of this White House, work from facts, and then reason towards the administration’s logic or to possible outcomes, were few and far between. For everyone else those were just details in a tale already told. The outcome would be what they thought it would be, because George McGovern was who they thought he was. Not even Dick Nixon had wrecked American journalism so thoroughly, and President McGovern hadn’t even tried.”

The weeks moved on like the water, down into a bigger sea. President McGovern had just come back to Washington from a frosty Baton Rouge confab with Edwin Edwards, while George Romney mapped out infrastructure like a good Republican and young Clinton charmed older Cajun ladies like an evangelist because he felt their pain. Phil Hart’s committee on disaster management — Frank Mankiewicz gently suggested they find a different subject title before the press had some fun — came back with the outline of a Federal Disaster Response Agency that would wed emergency response to natural calamities with civil defense, against which both bureaucratic fiefs and congressional budget hawks howled. Gary Hart wore through his shoe leather back and forth to the Capitol as the president used Stuart Symington to proxy a continuing resolution so HUD could pay to house the displaced along the Mississippi, and another so the Corps of Engineers could pay day labor for a few weeks’ work bagging and mounding the banks back on to the Mississippi.

Then word came Harry Truman too had slipped away to join Lyndon and the dead whose church had widened to bring in Greeks and Koreans and Hiroshimans and more. Back to the Rotunda went a black-clad George McGovern, again made by the weight of his office to say thoughtful words about a man whose foreign policy had nearly clipped McGovern’s then-tender roots in the Democratic Party, a fact remarked on by several columnists who had varied points to make. If there was a new day afoot in Washington, Gary Hart observed to Doug Coulter, it sure spent a lot of its time burying the old one.

 

[Usili]

Again, just another brilliant chapter. In the kind of prose that you have from talking about the Food and Farming Renaissance Act to that of Black September and then finally the floods that tested and brought the Old River Control Structure to the absolute limits of what it had been designed for, if not just beyond...

 

[Wayside]

Again, just another brilliant chapter. In the kind of prose that you have from talking about the Food and Farming Renaissance Act to that of Black September and then finally the floods that tested and brought the Old River Control Structure to the absolute limits of what it had been designed for, if not just beyond...

If I ever achieve high office, I'm asking Yes to be my biographer.

Then came the interesting bit. The price of the actual grain would come in under the total bill of sasle. In a normal year, the COMECON nations would make up the difference between what they laid out for the grain itself and what America charged by buying United States Treasury securities. Those purchases would subsidize the prices payed to American farmers and help push overseas demand for Treasury paper that would finance the United States’ national debts. In crisis years, COMECON countries would be allowed to purchase fewer securities and more grain within the same total price while Washington upped its own share of the farmers’ subsidy. As crisis conditions settled the price mix would swing back to normal. The two sides would invest directly in one another: the U.S. would give price and supply stability to COMECON, while COMECON would juice the global market for Treasury bills.

Ah, the wonders of mutually beneficial agricultural trade policy.

(The ingratiating young Undersecretary of Agriculture for Rural Development, Bill Clinton, would administer the RDA from his office.)

Quite a feather in Bill's cap, that.

“Send this message. To the Iraqi mission in New York, send it there first, and tell them it’s for their friends in Lebanon. Message says, We just missed your call in Sudan. We did pick up the phone in New York, and we will listen for that line with interest in the future. We would like to speak to someone who knows us already about the situation in the region. We want to talk with anyone who can offer solutions. We do not want any more calls like the ones recently. People could get hurt that way. Pete, get that out please straightaway.”

I can just picture the hawks screeching about appeasement, but if this works out, it'll be a remarkable shift in a positive direction. Golda Meir would object, of course, but the McGovern administration certainly has some carrots that could move things along. Plus, at this point ITTL, Israeli settlement policy has only been in place for about five or six years, so an accord with the PLO might make a viable Palestinian state (or, at least, an entity) more likely to emerge.

 

[THE OBSERVER]

This is excellent writing! I admire the detail you put into your posts.

 

[Asteroid Miner]

Amazing chapters, absolutely astonishing detail and thought behind them.

 

[Gonzo]

My God its like being in a Groundhog Day loop of Christmas Day.