Divided Government
“The last year has been a victory for tripartisanship. A moment I look on with pride”
-Wayne Owens-
Following the disaster the Republicans faces following the 1986 midterms, President Donald Rumsfeld quickly and quietly hustled off to Camp David to plot his new strategy. Chief of Staff Henry Hyde had already indicated that he was seeking to resign due to presiding over the Special Prosecutor investigation of George Ryan and the White House staff (also causing Fraser Robinson to be defeated by Dick Durbin as Governor of Illinois). Rumsfeld, considering Hyde an irreplaceable ally, nevertheless agreed to his assessment and accepted his resignation. In Hyde’s place came Mitch McConnell, a wily political operative from Kentucky who had chaired Louis B. Nunn’s successful 1974 Senate reelection campaign and Rumsfeld’s 1984 campaign. He was known in Washington for mixing a folksy charm with utter ruthlessness and cunning, which the President deemed he needed. Upon appointment as Chief of Staff, he, Rumsfeld, Gravel, and new WH Communications Director Lee Atwater began plotting a strategy for the coming age of divided government.
First, it was decided that a conciliatory attitude was needed to secure any form of progress in the next two years. Rumsfeld extended the olive branch a week after the midterms, inviting the Democratic, Republican, and Progressive leadership to the White House for a lighthearted lunch. Politics wasn’t discussed, the group of men and their wives seeking common accord and building friendships. The President would forge a lasting relationship with Speaker Inouye, a friendship that would maintain a cordial atmosphere between Pennsylvania Avenue and the Hill even during the most partisan of times. Further meetings would be scheduled to chart out a combined agenda. Since further entitlement reform was out of the question, the Democrats were satisfied and felt posturing against the President was counterproductive. They finally had a seat at the table after a decade and wanted to put their stamp on policy.
Rumsfeld was gifted with a chance to set the agenda on favorable ground relatively quickly with Justice Warren Burger, having served on the Supreme Court since being appointed by President Nixon in 1962, announcing his retirement in January 1987. Acting quickly, the President nominated California Supreme Court Justice and former congressman Daniel Lungren to the Court. While conservative, Rumsfeld and Chief of Staff McConnell chose well in a nominee that wasn’t a lightning rod of criticism as was James Meredith or Phyllis Schlafly. Though Progressive Senator Pat Leahy brought up criticism for rulings seeming in support of the controversial Briggs Amendment, Lungren satisfied many with his answer mentioning his belief in the rule of law and that the public was free to change the law, not judges. He was confirmed 89-8 in April.
While confirming a Supreme Court Justice (his second so far), Rumsfeld needed a major legislative win. Something that he could point to as his main legacy, a legacy he could be proud of. Nixon had the Civil Rights Act, Wallace had Amcare, and Reagan had the repeal of the Pendleton Act and the line-item veto amendment. With congress controlled by the opposition, the legacy legislation needed to be something all parties could coalesce around. Luckily, Rumsfeld had just the thing. A cause he had been passionate about and one that First Lady Joyce Rumsfeld had made her personal cause – world hunger, and by extension the agriculture industry.
The concept of world hunger had blossomed into the public eye in the past decades. Famines had rocked the third world, over twenty million dying in Africa and ten million in Asia thanks to the persistent crop failures and civil turmoil that wracked the third world. Years of mismanagement had hurt the grain fields in the USSR, China, and India, while the rapid introduction of old collectivist doctrine by the hardline Communist regimes taking over in South America greatly hurt the agricultural output of the Pampas. The worldwide shortages greatly elevated food prices, farmers in the United States, Australia, and Europe (and to a lesser extent Japan and the Middle East, that found the massive shortages a boon for their struggling industries that Yukio Mishima, Yitzhak Rabin, Moshe Dayan, Anwar Sadat, and Saddam Hussein took advantage of) experiencing untold prosperity as a result. However, the current pace was unsustainable according to experts in agribusiness, academia, and the Department of Agriculture. Right now, the farmers of the West could both feed their own countries at decent prices with enough of a surplus for the rest of the world, but soon the surpluses would disappear on the current trajectory. If something wasn’t done, there would either be a hike in food prices (and therefore an economic crisis) or mass starvation.
Rumsfeld had wished to tackle this issue even before running for President, one of the key initiatives of his tenure as Governor of Illinois revolving around improving the yields of state farmers through innovative solutions. This had been where he met Norman Borlaug, and the admiration and respect developed through their work on the Illinois Farmer’s Assistance bill led to the appointment of the Iowa native as Secretary of Agriculture. Making it his duty to aid farmers in increasing crop yields (often going into the field personally), the former researcher found that the intense regulation and constriction of the Department’s efforts stymied efforts. While Social Security Reform was bogging down in Congress, Borlaug created an Agriculture Council with Rumsfeld’s blessing – comprising the best minds in the nation when it came to this issue. It took a year and a half for the report to be finalized, and once it did the Secretary of Agriculture found the President more than receptive.
As the Senate found its leadership shake up – Strom Thurmond resigning as Majority Leader due to age and John Chafee resigning as Minority Leader due to the 1986 midterm loss, to be replaced by Wayne Owens and William Quinn respectively – Rumsfeld spoke to a crowd of Iowa farmers in Fort Dodge, a perfect backdrop. He called for legislation to invest in a new age of agriculture, for a federal, state, and private partnership to boost crop yields with the same Green Revolution techniques that Borlaug had helped implement in Mexico, and for a concentrated effort by the United States and its allies to end world hunger through a specific plan. To do this, Rumsfeld put the spotlight on Congress to act on what was being called “Green Trek” by the media in reference to
Star Trek.
Though the goal was laudable and broadly supported among the public, its submission to Congress created great controversy. Many on the left, led by Paul Erlich, attacked the law as flawed since it had no population control initiatives. Without means to lower growth and create sustainable populations, he argued, trying to increase crop and livestock yields would be an exercise in futility. However, the leaders of the Progressive Party had attended meetings with Vice President Gravel, who brought the largely rural, farming constituency representatives to back the bill, giving it a major boost going into congressional negotiations. Fundamentally, no one could argue against supporting farmers and ending world famine – Green Trek would pass overwhelmingly, handing Rumsfeld a major win.
Despite calls from liberal Democrats and budget hawks to raise taxes to offset the massive expenditures the act was instituting, Rumsfeld heeded McConnell’s call to stick to his campaign promise of “No New Taxes.” Brushing off the demands of the Washington smart set and the uproar that would ensue couldn’t compare to what would await the President if he betrayed such an important promise to his base – of which he would heed. The budget deficit would increase to $150 billion after ten years of lowering shortfalls, yet the Administration deemed the spending worth the risk.
Looking to build goodwill, Rumsfeld also picked up on legislative proposals from the new majority in Congress. Meeting with Senator John Glenn of Ohio (along with Republicans Harrison Schmidt and Alan Shepard, who were both Glenn’s former NASA crewmen), the President was animated by a proposal by Glenn for a new office, one that would fund technological development in the United States similar to the policies of former French President of the Council Jacques Cousteau. While it would get tripartisan support, right-wing members of the Democrats and Republicans along with many western Progs opposed what was being debated as too costly given the massive military spending as well as Green Trek. A compromise was hashed out to create a National Endowment for the Technologies, which passed overwhelmingly.
The new NET was then integrated into the White House through direction of President Rumsfeld alongside the NES and NEA. Since the mission overlapped with the NES, the executive orders structured it to fund engineering research as well as startup technology firms. “We hope today begins a new age, one that shines with the glinting metal and low whirr of the next generation of machines,” Vice President Gravel would say to an audience in Houston, Texas, where the first NET grant was given to a startup oil-technology and investment firm called Enron – a company that the world would be seeing quite a lot of in the future.
However, the bipartisanship didn’t extend to the entire dealings between congress and the President. The Democrats and Progressives sought to be aggressive with their policies, while Rumsfeld, Cohn, and Quinn used every tool in their arsenal to keep disliked legislation from being passed. Filibusters coordinated with southern Democrats stymied socially liberal acts (such as gun control, improving access to abortion, and homosexual rights), while Rumsfeld deployed his veto and line-item veto pen constantly at Democrat attempts to sneak increased appropriations through spending bills. A carefully crafted tax bill increasing rates on corporations and imports was slammed through on Senate procedure, only for Rumsfeld to utilize a pocket veto to halt it in its tracks. Given the acrimony of both these fights and the Social Security reform battle of Rumsfeld’s first two years, it was nothing short of amazing that the different parties could accomplish so much.
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The single greatest problem facing Rumsfeld had nothing to do with congress. After eight years of détente and warming relations with its Cold War rival, the United States found itself facing as or more threatening and belligerent a power as pre-WWII Germany and Japan could ever have been. With the USSR securing a firmer bloc of alliances among its communist rivals, Secretary of State Dick Cheney made the rounds among NATO and other alliance blocs. Meanwhile, Rumsfeld and his national security team (Secretary of Defense George Bush, National Security Advisor Oliver North, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Hal Moore) were faced with a similar yet achingly different strategic picture than before. Unexpectedly, the Soviets had not renounced any of the arms reduction treaties that had been negotiated. While surprising, Rumsfeld decided he could not afford to take a hit in world opinion and kept the United States on the pace of arms cuts as well. However, such wasn’t the same regarding conventional weapons. As urged by Bush, Congress passed a 20% increase in military spending. It was needed. From South America to the Kola Peninsula the Soviet and Warsaw Pact militaries were massing. All the Yakovlev-era drawdowns were reversed and troop concentrations expanded. Moscow said that it was merely defensive, but no one was taking any chances.
Despite the global scope of the Warsaw Pact buildup, the National Command Authority never dropped the ball on where the focus of any conflict with the USSR would be – Europe. NATO forces there were multinational and powerful, but tradition left the commander of any force there to be an American officer. With forty-seven years of service, General Bernard W. Rogers was retiring, necessitating a new appointment as SACEUR. While it had always been part of the job, what faced both America and NATO wasn’t a chance but a high likelihood of war with the Warsaw Pact. The decision to choose a replacement was not taken lightly, and for over a month the NATO nations waited for the decision out of Washington. After great consideration, Rumsfeld, Bush, and Moore had found their man.
A decorated veteran from the Vietnam War, General Colin Powell was just coming off a strategic planning desk at the Pentagon when Rumsfeld interviewed him for the position. Born to poor immigrants in Harlem, Powell was an American success story and Rumsfeld felt that he was getting both a brilliant military mind and the perfect face for the Western military, showcasing America’s racial progress to the world. Approved of by all the European allies, Powell used the immense powers granted him by the new NATO command structure by taking an ax across many departments. Though not as pervasive as in Warsaw Pact or Third World militaries, NATO possessed its own share of incompetents and political appointees and the General of the Army (Rumsfeld and Bush resurrecting the five-star rank to give SACEUR extra pull in the political dick measuring his job would entail) had none of it. Nine corps level commanders were sacked, and this was just at the top of the command structure.
The appointment of competent officers to replace the detritus was followed by more and more reinforcements and supplies arriving onto the mainland to counter the Soviets. NATO forces, anticipating the worst and not taking any chances, began preparing a maze of defenses and prepared positions for which to block any Soviet advance, the prevailing strategy being of defense in depth in Europe while going on the offensive within the Communist Empire’s periphery. While the US and UK stuck to their volunteer armies, France reinstituted conscription and the other states broadened their share of eligible soldiers. Greece, cut off by the Communist Balkans, made every citizen between ages sixteen and fifty-five eligible for conscription as it turned itself into a fortress in the face of Warsaw Pact attack.
In West Germany, a sea change of public opinion was occurring. While the December Coup had shocked the entire world, nowhere was it more acutely felt than there. It seemed to validate everything Gerhard Frey had said, and provided just the jolt to the national psyche needed for it to reach the breaking point. Der Spiegel conducted a poll of Germans in March of 1987, and the results stunned the nation:
What is your voting intention in the next election?
SPD: 25%
Freiheitspartei: 50%
FDP: 10%
Other: 5%
Don’t Know: 10%
Do you agree with Gerhard Frey’s contention that Germany should be the “bastion, fortress, and militia of human liberty”?
Yes: 82%
No: 18%
Do you believe in a restoration of the German Imperial Family in a constitutional monarchy as proposed by Bundestag member Christian Schwarz-Schilling?
Yes: 45%
No: 45%
Don’t Know: 10%
With the German federal election scheduled for that year, the entire world was watching.
