April 18, 1974
Mr. Nixon's trouble can be traced to the fact that he hired so many Germans for his staff. What he should have done is hire some Japanese.
They're better at electronics; when they make a mistake they admit it; after they admit the mistake, they commit hara-kiri.

It appears that when John Connally signed on as VP, the fine print read that his duties included being a cabin attendant for the Titanic.

--Unknown

You tourists visiting D.C. should be careful when you take the White House tour. So much is swept under the rug that you might hit your head on the ceiling.

--Mark Russell


"From Studio 3K at Rockefeller Center, this is TODAY, with Barbara Walters.

Good morning, everyone. It is a sad day for all of us here at the TODAY Show. Last night, my friend and co-anchor, Frank McGee, died from cancer at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center here in New York at age 52. As you may well imagine, this was a shock to everyone at NBC News. Frank left here last Friday after the show and went to his doctor, not feeling well. We thought he would recover and return here, but instead, we lost him so quickly. Frank was a wonderful man whom we will all miss terribly. In the meantime, we will have other NBC News reporters fill in with me as we search for a replacement, but today, I will host the show alone. Frank McGee, dead today at 52. And now, the news.

This morning, the House of Representatives will conclude its floor debate on the article of impeachment against President Richard Nixon. On April 5th, the House Judiciary Committee voted out a single article of impeachment with broad support, as half of the committee's Republicans joined the Democrats in passing the article. This is widely seen by political analysts to be a bad sign for the President, as it is almost certain to pass the House with a substantial majority. In the Senate, Majority Leader Mike Mansfield, a Democrat from Montana, has been conferring with Republican Minority Leader Hugh Scott with a trial to begin as early as Monday morning. Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger has already announced that the Court will stand in early recess if an impeachment trial begins, with this year's slate of remaining decisions to be held over into the summer. This is a rare move for the Court, which typically concludes its term in early June, so it means that we will receive decisions in late July or early August, even, cutting short the vacation time for the justices before the new term begins in late September...."

John Connally sipped his coffee as Walters continued on with the news. He was in the office early, as he had been for the last two weeks. Much of the task of running the government had slowly fallen to him as President Nixon had sequestered himself away with his new attorney, the famed F. Lee Bailey. Bailey had successfully defended one of the charged officers in the My Lai massacre, Capt. Ernest Medina, three years before, a defense which had brought him to Nixon's attention. The President admired the hard-nosed tactics used by Bailey and the skill in which he used them. Fortunately for the President, Bailey had kept up with the news as it was happening, and was well prepared when Nixon summoned him to Washington on the 8th. Amongst his very first moves as Nixon's private attorney (the President, flinty with a dollar, had discovered how crucial the distinction was when Jaworski had gone to the Judiciary Committee after resigning) was to bring an ethics complaint before the Texas Bar Association regarding Jaworski's disclosure of privileged information to Congress. It was unlikely to succeed, given the circumstances, but it was a play that won Nixon's affection nonetheless. Bailey then followed up by filing a motion in district court with Judge Sirica for an injunction against the impeachment, stating that they were based on privileged information disclosed to Congress by the President's attorney, and therefore should be voided. Again, this motion was doomed before it was heard, but it demonstrated that F. Lee Bailey was not going to play nice with Congress. Jaworski had brought a white-glove approach to the members, which had won him admiration and, had the President not botched matters, might have saved him from being impeached. Now, burned by the gentlemanly Texan, Nixon had turned to the brass-knuckled brawler from Boston.

The Vice-President found it strange that Nixon remained so blind to certain matters. Despite his "betrayal" by Jaworski (engineered, in part, by the Veep), Nixon still looked at Connally and saw nothing but loyalty and brains. His admiration was such that he had, without much thought, ceded decisions on most administrative matters. A meeting with supervisory personnel in the Old Executive Office Building was held, where Chief of Staff Al Haig directed that all items requiring a decision by the President would be brought to Haig. This was not committed to paper for fear of making the President look week, though. Haig would then meet with Connally. The VP would decide a course of action, and each decision was then typed up onto a sheet with YES and NO checkboxes for Nixon's review at the end of the day. Nixon would go through and check the boxes to approve, but his trust in Connally was so complete that he had rarely used the NO option. Richard M. Nixon might be what the signatures read, but the decisions bore the imprimatur of John B. Connally. The sharper minds amongst the denizens of the capital realized this was the case, and the whispers began spreading at those parties held by "the Georgetown set," the hated liberals that Nixon and Spiro Agnew had maligned for years whom resided in the city on a permanent basis. Eventually, as all things did, because of his proximity, Ben Bradlee at the Washington Post heard the whispers, and set his newly-minted Pulitzer Prize winner David Broder on the story, with an assist from the respected Haynes Johnson. Just as the reporting by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein on Watergate had led to them being known as "Woodstein," so Broder and Johnson's partnership created the moniker "Bronson" amongst the wags in the newsroom (Death Wish, the vigilante thriller starring Charles Bronson, was set to be released in three months, adding an extra layer of humor to the joke, since Broder and Johnson were amongst the least threatening people at the Post).

Over on the Hill, the impeachment debate was moving along towards its conclusion rather quietly. Tuesday, the opening day for debate, had began with a certain level of Sturm und Drang from the louder Nixon defenders in the House, but as time marched on, the winds were obvious to all. Impeachment would pass, and it would pass definitively. With the vote tally becoming inevitable, the volume and tone diminished, the Nixon defenders grew ever more somber, the pleas for mercy they gave more resigned. The backbenchers from the strongest Nixon districts continued to make the case, almost in defense of their own seats instead of the President, while the centrists began yielding their time. At this point, the only surprise left was how large the tally would be. Reporters congregating in the halls were taking and placing bets on the over/under--the wire guys were conservative in their bets, while print reporters from the big papers like the Times (New York and Los Angeles both), the Baltimore Sun, and the Chicago Tribune were more cynical in their outlook and expected a stampede of members who could see how badly the transcripts had played across the country. In early afternoon, as a large number of members yielded their time, the scheduled vote time moved up. As he'd requested, the final Republican voice to speak was Minority Leader Gerald R. Ford. The man who'd been passed up for Vice President had anguished over this decision, and it was part of why he'd asked to go last. Members filed back into the chamber to hear this respected leader speak, and what transpired would become one of those moments where everyone claimed to have been there to see it.

"Mr. Speaker, I thank you for agreeing to my request to be the last of my colleagues to speak. It has been an honor and privilege to serve as leader of the House Republicans these past few years. It has been an honor and a privilege to be a friend of the President of these United States, Richard Milhous Nixon. However, as any true friend would do, I will speak truth, even though it is probably unwanted. I cannot defend the actions of the President, nor the callous, thoughtless words spoken on his surreptitious tape recording system. I cannot defend the decisions made by my friend, Richard Nixon, who wantonly disregarded the laws of this great land for his political gain. I am shocked and saddened by what I have read in the transcripts from the taping system, and by the decisions that the President chose to make. I felt equally as strong about the disclosure by Leon Jaworski to the chair of the Judiciary Committee, my friend Pete Rodino. I have heard members use violent language in this chamber against Mr. Jaworski, and I want it to be known that he is a patriot. He swore an oath as a government attorney, and he fulfilled that oath to the letter. Attorney-client privilege does not apply when you work in the government, because the client is not the President, it is the people. The people of the United States are the true power of our land. As Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence, "a government's power is derived from the consent of the governed." I wish the President had heeded that mantra that built the foundation of laws upon which America stands, instead of fulfilling the one that states, "power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." Unfortunately in America, since the time of World War II, we have vested too much power into the presidency, and we have seen it used wisely by men like Dwight Eisenhower and poorly by men like Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. The President is my friend. I am telling him the truth in the hopes that he will make the right decision now. I am telling my fellow members of this House the truth, in the hopes that they too will make the right decision as we vote. This is not about party or personal loyalty. This is about living up to our stated principles, that we are a nation of laws, not of men, and that we listen to the voices of whom we govern and act as they have made loud and clear through the record amount of telegrams and phone calls we have received here in Congress. This is a sad day for me. It truly breaks my heart that we are here, having this debate. However, I have a duty and a responsibility, based on the evidence, to vote yes on this article of impeachment. Mr. Speaker, I yield the floor."

The gallery, which had listened with bated breath, burst into a standing ovation for Ford. Albert tried to stop it from the chair after a minute by repeatedly banging the gavel, but the din was simply too great, and the Speaker could not be heard. It was as if Ford had expressed how everyone in America felt, Democrat and Republican, liberal and conservative, and the dam of emotion burst forth, taking several minutes to subside. Ford had been known for his malapropisms with language, but the speech he'd just given would be lauded as one of the defining moments of American political life. The vote was called at 2:17 pm, and members were by and large already in the chamber ready to vote. Ford's speech did not do Richard Nixon any favors, and had the decided effect of creating substantial defection amongst east coast and midwest Republicans to the YEAs. When the vote concluded at 2:35pm (held open for a few extra moments because of a temporary glitch with the electronic voting system), the tally was 301-133 (one seat being vacant). The second impeachment of a President in American history had occurred, and it was a landslide defeat for a man whom a mere eighteen months prior had won the largest landslide victory in American history. Writers struggled for metaphors to describe it, although the best analogy came from Jerald terHorst, the longtime Detroit News Washington correspondent, who wrote, "With today's impeachment, Richard Nixon represented no one else so much as he did Icarus, a man who, like Nixon, ignored warnings of hubris, flew too close to the sun and fell quickly without grace. There is no person in American history whom we can say the same about."
 
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The next day's headline
nyt BBJ impeachment day.jpg
 
#BBJ_FTW

Also:

a4e5e602ec8144756dc44fa20b82b16e.jpg

Someone may have decided that if he can't be Speaker, he might take a Michigander at the '76 primaries...


Also too: Gerry and Big Bad John Connally may well have been the best-dressed men in Washington during the execrable fashions of the first half of the Seventies. The ex-male model Ford always remained a bit of a clothes horse, one of his few vanities. And he could pull off the look.
 
#BBJ_FTW

Also:

a4e5e602ec8144756dc44fa20b82b16e.jpg

Someone may have decided that if he can't be Speaker, he might take a Michigander at the '76 primaries...


Also too: Gerry and Big Bad John Connally may well have been the best-dressed men in Washington during the execrable fashions of the first half of the Seventies. The ex-male model Ford always remained a bit of a clothes horse, one of his few vanities. And he could pull off the look.

First half? Try ALL OF IT.

images.jpeg
1970s-jumpsuits.jpg


I would've hung myself, and then pulled out a gun and shot myself in the face for good measure if I was caught in one of those jumpsuits.
 
...
I would've hung myself, and then pulled out a gun and shot myself in the face for good measure if I was caught in one of those jumpsuits.

Thats why the proto Grunge look was so popular with the rest of us back then. flannel shirts, denim work trousers, sock cap, work coat. Just be careful you don't overdo its and get pegged as a Lumbersexual https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Lumbersexual

A not-so-manly man dressing like a lumberjack (although a lot more refined) and sporting a beard that has the volume of a lumberjacks beard and the groom of a hipster, cashing in on the "rugged, outdoor stereotype".

Aside from the Disco look & associated couture there was the look associated with white middle class men known as Cleveland Formal. Polyester shirt with colorful pattern, polyester trousers in white or a solid color, white shoes, often with a wicker vent on the top, often with a buckled strap instead of laces. Elevated heels of raised platform soles optional.
 
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Hello readers!

I hope you haven't forgotten about this story. The last few months have been difficult for a number of personal and professional reasons, and the only ideas I had were for my other story.

That being said, I'm ready to move forward now, so keep an eye on this space, because Big John, Tricky Dick, and Moral Compass Jaworski will be back SOON.
 
May 1, 1974
It wasn’t the intention of Mike Mansfield to launch the impeachment trial of Richard Nixon on May Day, the biggest holiday in the Communist universe. It’s just how the schedule worked. Those words, however true, rang hollow within the walls of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, as the confluence of the two events brought out the dispersed forces of the New Left once again. The protest groups that had fallen apart under the surreptitious war waged against them by the Nixon administration made a miraculous recovery on this day, descending upon the capital with every banner, sign, and effigy they could muster against the President of the United States.

nixon POW.jpg
quit DICK-ing around.jpg
anti-nixon-protest-charles-cocaine.jpg



It didn’t need to be this way. There had been thirteen days, in an odd echo of the Cuban Missile Crisis’ duration, where the President could have chosen differently. The opportunity was there for Nixon to resign, in fact, he’d been encouraged to do so by a delegation of Republicans who held cachet with both ends of the party. House Minority Leader Ford, Senator Barry Goldwater, and Senator Charles Percy had sought an audience with the President the previous Thursday, April 25, and were shown in to the Oval Office at 4:30pm sharp. The conversation began awkwardly, as Ford traded sheepish glances with Goldwater and Percy before starting in.

“Dick, I’m sure you know why we’ve come to see you.” A grunt, a nod from the man behind the Resolute desk. “This is not something we want to do. We never expected to be here, having this conversation with you, but after conferring with Barry and Chuck, we believe you should resign so you do not put the nation through the ordeal of an impeachment trial,” Ford said. Another grunt. Goldwater picked up the thread from Ford, “Listen, Dick, I’m not somebody who bullshits. I’ve been straight with any man I’ve ever done business with. It is my professional belief that the Party will not survive if this trial goes the distance. Furthermore, I don’t think you’ll have the votes in the Senate. I surely don’t. A few of the Dixiecrats might be with you, but that’s offset by the liberal Republicans who are surely voting against you. Javits, Hatfield, Packwood, just to name a few. You can’t afford many losses, and if you cling to office, nobody will pass anything you put before Congress. Your vetoes will be overridden. No foreign power will negotiate with you. You might hold the title of President, but you won’t be in charge and you will wield no power. That’s not what you want, and we don’t want to see it happen to you. You’ve done so much for the country. You made a big mistake, though, and you should resign. Do the honorable thing here.” Nixon scribbled on a legal pad, though none of the three visitors could see what it was. Percy jumped in quickly, “Mr. President, I think what’s hurt you more than anything with the American people is that you have not apologized. An apology might gain you some goodwill with the American people, a true apology and a confession as to what you did. If you are intent on fighting it, then say it, at the trial, in the Senate well, in front of every Senator and the House managers and the nation watching and listening on television. Because that, in my political,” Percy leaned heavily on that word, “opinion, would be enough to keep you safe from conviction. It would give cover to those who are leaning towards conviction.” Nixon nodded, scribbled some more on the yellow pad. As he did, Percy leaned forward, and stuck the verbal dagger in. “However, in my personal opinion, sir, you’ve lost the moral authority to govern and should resign the office soonest.”

Nixon looked up, his eyes wide. His entire career, Nixon had avoided conflict in front of political partners or adversaries. Now, though, now they saw the eruption of the anger that had only been whispered about in GOP circles for the past 25 years. “Look at you three. Coming here to tell me that I should quit, run away, after how hard I fought to get to this office, after how hard I fought for the party. What have you done, Barry? When I got robbed in 1960, instead of fighting for me, you shined up your shoes and got ready to run in ’64. Didn’t even wait for the inauguration to start. Well, I understand that politically, but don’t tell me how it’ll hurt the party. You got destroyed by Johnson, so intent on your own purity that we almost lost it all. You know how we won a lot of that back? Me. I went to more districts than anyone here in ’66, busted my ass, helped us regain traction in Congress so we weren’t completely impotent. I opened up China, I signed a major arms control deal with the Soviets, I brought an end to Vietnam, and you want me to quit over hushing up the mistakes of some low-level operatives who got in way ahead of their skis, ignored orders from Mitchell? The hell with that.” The President swiveled towards Percy. “And you, Chuck, Mr. Proper Midwesterner, the pride of Peoria! You give me political advice that’s sound, but then try to backpeddle right away by saying you personally think I should resign. Do you not have the spine like Barry did? You couldn’t just tell me I should quit, so you dressed it up nice and tried to have it both ways. Good luck running that way in ’76, John’ll eat you alive if you do.”

Then Nixon pivoted to Ford. “Jerry, we’ve been friends a long time. I can’t believe you didn’t tell me all of this. We could’ve talked about it, as friends and as partners. You’re one of the few people in Congress that I’ve always respected and trusted, ever since we formed the Chowder and Marching Society together. Why, Jerry? Why didn’t you just come to me first before saying what you did in front of the entire world?” Gerald Ford stood up, buttoned his coat, and firmly said, “Dick, it was the only way you were going to listen to me.” He turned towards the door, Goldwater and Percy quickly following to catch up. Nixon fell back in his chair. He felt like he’d been punched in the gut. He expected Goldwater, a rival, to say what he did. Percy was too nice, so that too was expected. But Jerry Ford? His friend? An actual friend that he really cared about? That one hurt. Nixon reached in his desk drawer, fished out the pint of Dewar’s, and poured some of it into a tumbler. To settle his nerves, you see….

With the failure of that mission, Mansfield was left with no choice but to begin the trial. Now he stood at the desk of the Majority Leader at the front of the Senate Chamber, watching as Warren Earl Burger, Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, made his way to the chair of the Presiding Officer to take the oath as the “trial judge” for this most unique of cases, only the second impeachment trial in nearly 200 years of the American Constitution. Burger, for his part, was exceedingly nervous about taking on this role. Richard Nixon was the man who elevated him above all other judges in America, moving him straight into the chair of the Chief Justice to replace the celebrated/reviled (depending on your viewpoint) Earl Warren. Nixon had made Burger a name for the history books, and now he had to preside over the trial to determine whether Nixon remained President or not. The Chief Justice liked to portray himself as a tough, rock-ribbed conservative, but in reality, he always wanted to be on the winning side and was happy to bend reason, the law, or his own principles to land where he wished. This affected decisions from Mecklenburg County vs. United States (Charlotte’s busing case with a convoluted opinion) to Furman vs. Georgia (the case that banned the death penalty—despite Burger’s machinations to take control of the case). Even the legendary Pentagon Papers case saw Burger vacillate between sides before writing a dissent that Harlan and Blackmun joined which said not that the government was right or wrong, but that the speed of the proceedings, from the publication of the Papers to the decision to censor publication to the court case, was too fast for such an important case.

On one side of the well were the House managers. Peter Rodino, of course, was there as Judiciary Committee chair for the House, along with Jack Brooks, Elizabeth Holtzman, Barbara Jordan, M. Caldwell Butler (one of the Republicans who voted yes on impeachment and was considered a very skilled lawyer), Hamilton Fish (another Republican yes vote, as well as a lawyer and former diplomat), Elizabeth Holtzman, and an unknown Maryland congressman named Paul Sarbanes, who would go on to greater fame as the state’s senator who would write landmark financial reform legislation and shred military budgets with a shrewd eye honed at Balliol College, Oxford, during his Rhodes Scholarship. This bipartisan group would make for a very tough challenge to F. Lee Bailey and the defense team he had assembled. Bailey, an attorney who didn’t play well with others, hired solely for research purposes. Except in some small cases, Bailey would handle the questioning and the statements. The bombastic Bostonian didn’t struggle to find words often, so to him, this was no concern. However, for opening statements, Nixon had insisted upon another attorney to make his political argument, as opposed to the legal argument. This man was none other than Herbert Brownell, Attorney General for the first five years of the Eisenhower Administration. Brownell seemed an odd choice, as his well-known righteous nature would seem to clash with the seedy, sordid nature of the Watergate affair.

However, when one dug deeper into the matter, Brownell’s appointment did not seem as strange, for it was the Eisenhower administration that had begun the use of strong, far-reaching executive powers of the sort Nixon had used. To that point, it was Brownell who had formed the legal arguments to defend the actions that Ike had utilized to influence events at home and abroad. He was a firm believer in the Cold War State, and while Brownell thought Nixon had been exceedingly coarse and sloppy, he believed that the president, his former colleague, was honest when he said he was covering up because the people involved had done so many legitimate missions that he was afraid of their exposure. So, for the opening statements, Brownell would go first, and would remain as an advisor to the President for the duration of the trial. The message wasn’t lost on Bailey, either. Fuck this up and you’re gone.

Those statements were for the near future—today was for Burger’s oath as presiding judge, followed by the Senators’ oaths as jurors. The solemnity of the occasion easily transmitted through television screens and radio speakers, the repeated intonation of the Chief Justice’s rumbly baritone speaking the words for the senators to repeat, “Do you solemnly swear that in all things appertaining to the trial of the impeachment of Richard Milhous Nixon, president of the United States, now pending, you will do impartial justice according to the Constitution, so help you God?" One hundred senators, from James Allen of Alabama to Lowell P. Weicker, Jr. of Connecticut, approached the rostrum, took the oath, and signed the printed version of it for the Clerk of the Senate. Upon the conclusion of those oaths, Mansfield motioned for a recess in the trial until May 6th to allow for the Senate to clear its legislative calendar. Burger accepted the motion and adjourned.

Five days.

Five days until the President of the United States was put on trial in front of the world.

A lot can happen in five days.
 
Still working on the next chapter...work has me bogged down (and I'm quite grateful to still have work right now) but should be clear in a day or two, and then have the headspace to fully write it.

How does everyone like the headlines as a way of telling the story visually?
 
May 3-5, 1974
A friend in power is a friend lost.
--Henry Adams (1838-1918)


John Connally leaned back in his chair on the veranda and grinned. The veterans in the press, you can still manipulate them to get what you want. It was a trick that went back four decades, to Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He was the first president who really understood how to harness the power of media to shape the opinions of others. He also had a keen sense of the weaknesses of others, and was able to manipulate those around him with frightening ease. Connally was not at all related to the 32nd president, but he shared that ability, and had just demonstrated it again. By framing his words to sound like those of White House aides, the Times reporter had taken all of Connally’s dirt and disguised it well. The Vice-President briefly wondered if Abe Rosenthal, the executive editor, knew it was the Veep cutting Nixon off at the knees. Probably not. Jim Naughton wants to be The Man. Having the next President as your source is a great way to do it, even better if you control access to the source. Connally took a big sip of his coffee and a bite of his toast. Wonder if Dick’s broken any dishes this morning.

At the White House, dishes had not been broken, but Nixon had woken Ron Ziegler at home and summoned him in. Haig was already in, having forsaken any sense of family life to serve his President during this moment of supreme political warfare. Nixon raged at Ziegler for his inability to control the press, then raged at Haig that he had no control, no loyalty from the staff. The President demanded that Haig have his military assistant and former subordinate officer, Major George Joulwan, conduct interviews of every staffer who had access to the information. Haig coolly replied that doing such a thing would violate the Military Code of Conduct for serving in a civilian location. Nixon grumbled his assent and said, “Fine, have Buchanan do it.” Haig thought to himself that it could’ve been worse, Nixon could’ve picked Otto Skorzeny instead. Patrick J. Buchanan had the reputation of being Nixon’s in-house fascist extraordinaire. Having left the St. Louis Globe-Democrat in 1967 to become the very first hire of the Nixon for President campaign, Buchanan had gone on to be a speechwriter/strategist for both Nixon and Agnew before the latter’s resignation. He did everything from preparing the President’s Daily News Summary each day to doggedly researching political opponents so he could then devise a strategy to destroy them. One Democratic strategist called Buchanan “a sentient Agent Orange—his job is to literally burn everything to the ground to save Nixon.”

If Connally was pleased by the morning’s news and Nixon was furious with it, F. Lee Bailey fell decidedly into the category of “oh shit.” The Times, the Post, and the Boston Globe were all delivered to his suite at the famed Hay-Adams Hotel and billed to Nixon as “required informational research.” Nixon, being a legendary penny-pincher with his own money, in turn used the White House and their discounted bulk subscription rate and simply paid the difference for the extra editions, using a courier to send them over to Bailey instead of the newspapers’ own delivery boys. As it was with most arrangements between Nixon and other schemers, Nixon always found a way to get one over (except Henry, that German bastard). Bailey read through the story carefully. He was new to Washington, but not to media manipulation. While the story cited White House sources, he felt it had to have been someone from the Hill. They’ve got the most to gain from this, Bailey thought. Midterms coming later this year, they’re cutting Nixon loose and justifying a conviction vote. Damn, this is going to make it a lot harder to get an acquittal now.

On the above-mentioned Hill, the top aides for Ford, Goldwater, and Percy were meeting, trying to decide how to handle the fallout and, especially for Goldwater and Percy, how to keep it from irrevocably dividing the Republican caucus in the Senate. Minority Leader Hugh Scott, for one, was peeved at having been left out of the mission—his vanity was precisely why Goldwater and Percy had agreed to go with Ford, they felt Scott was too pliable and gentlemanly for a mission that required a tough stance. Scott was barely born in the 20th century, ten years older than Goldwater, thirteen more than Ford, and almost 20 years older than Percy. There was also the question of who leaked. This had been a quiet plan, with barely ten people knowing about its very existence. That meant, to them, that it was someone in the White House who leaked, wanting to make it look like a quasi-coup were underway to remove Nixon. It wasn’t entirely subtle, but Nixon had, from the start of Watergate, taken an uncharacteristic brute force approach to dealing with it. Well, that was that, then. The President wasn’t going to be reasonable, so they were going to have to convict him to drive home the point that a president couldn’t break the law with impunity. Their bosses had already come to that conclusion, but the aides, party men all, had been a step slower to get there. Richard Nixon, however, had left them with no choice.

By that afternoon, Scott had been placated by Ford, with whom he had a solid friendship, built on a mutual love of pipe-smoking and Midwestern conservatism. Ford’s top aide, a former reporter named Robert Hartmann, made calls to former colleagues trying to ascertain the source of the Times story, to no avail. Naughton hadn’t told anyone who didn’t work on W. 43rd Street in Manhattan, and Hartmann was not so foolish as to call Naughton directly to find out. In the current climate, protecting one’s sources had become a far more serious matter than it ever had been in the past. Without any idea of who was responsible, the GOP leadership was convinced Nixon was trying to blackmail them with veiled primary threats, using what leverage he retained amongst the Republican rank and file to prevent his conviction.

The following day, Joulwan reached out to the secretive NSA office at AT&T’s newest switching building, 33 Thomas Street, known to the telecommunications giant as “Project X” and designated TITANPOINTE by the NSA. Designed to withstand nuclear attack on New York City of up to five megatons, it hosted switching equipment for every phone line in America plus international connections. It took advantage of the recently created TCP/IP protocol to improve its ability to facilitate calls (and also, for the NSA to spy on those calls). Within hours, Joulwan had a telexed log of all calls to Naughton’s home and office over the past ten days. None of those, however, lined up with either the home or office phone numbers of White House aides. For safety’s sake, Joulwan also checked against Henry Kissinger’s various phones, knowing from long experience that Henry loved to gossip with reporters on the phone (and at Georgetown cocktail parties). That, too, was a dead end. It was now late Saturday night, and there was roughly 36 hours until the impeachment trial began in earnest. The major would keep looking, but it appeared that whatever discussion happened between Naughton and his source didn’t take place on a telephone. Not that Joulwan could blame the leaker. Who’d use a phone now after knowing they’d all been bugged to hell and back?

John Connally certainly hadn’t used a phone. He knew how bug-happy Dick and Henry had been when he was SecTreas. The Secret Service reported to him, after all, so he’d known all about the taping system. It was a damned fool thing to do, of course, but Connally went along, knowing that it was a valuable piece of information he could barter if needed one day. He kept his mouth shut, made sure he watched his words in the Oval as much as possible back then, and after Watergate started, he’d written a letter obliquely to Nixon telling him he should replace his existing memorandum records system. Nixon, everyone knew by now, had disregarded all advice about his tapes, putting himself in the position he was currently in. When Sunday morning dawned without a peep from Nixon or Haig about the story to him, he knew he was in the clear. The trial would begin without a hitch tomorrow morning, and within two weeks, he, John Bowden Connally Jr., would become the 38th President of the United States.

It was time to get things going. There was one man most fit to help him. The Vice-President dialed the phone number from memory. “Barnes residence, may I ask who’s calling?” “Yes, ma’am, tell Mr. Barnes that Mr. Connally would like to speak with him.”
 
Connally is hardly out of the woods yet.

I presume Nixon is going down with an impeachment conviction, which opens him up to personal prosecution for responsibility for a whole legion of crimes. Watergate itself might be the least of them; the OTL surge in Congress reinforcing Democrats in general and anti-war, reformist in general, factions of them, as well as differentially empowering (or avoiding disempowering anyway) relatively liberal Republicans opens up the Pandora's box of such initiatives as the Church Committee investigations which exposed a whole bunch of things quite disillusioning to business-as-usual types--the FBI's COINTELPRO tactics, the CIA's general shenanigans, plus whatever miscellaneous stuff Republicans and administration figures under Nixon's umbrella got up to.

Against this "witch hunt," apologists for Nixon often argue that much of this was indeed business as usual and that Democrats and other liberals might be advised to rein it it lest their opponents sling similarly sticky and ill-scented mud at them. But again, a lot of the newer Democrats are crusaders elected quite recently without much time to have acquired such track records, and if we look at the levels of indictments and convictions of administrative officials as any kind of objective indicator, "both sides" will not be much of an argument. OTL the post-Nixon track record clearly shows a lot more court-proven corruption and abuse on the Republican side. Perhaps given the established nature of Democratic power in the 1960s, a general trawl of dubious practices might be more even handed, but again a lot of the worst actors on the Democratic side got filtered out in 1968 and perhaps 1970 and '72, and the new crop is going to be relatively clean--as might be the more liberal Republicans.

Note that the power of pardon by the President is restricted from applying to impeachment; it is not crystal clear to me that this only means he cannot reverse a Senate conviction and thus the lifelong disqualification from Federal office, or if it would be interpreted to mean that none of the crimes Article I Section 3 says the impeached official can be prosecuted for "according to law" can be trumped by a pardon covering them. Clearly if Nixon is impeached he cannot be elected or appointed to any Federal office, but can Connolly shield him from prosecution personally for enumerated or even, via a blanket pardon like Ford's OTL, any crime whatsoever? That does not seem settled by plain language to me.

Reading it without I think too much bias clouding my judgement I would guess reasonable judges and other authorities would agree, the Article II exception to the general power of pardon refers strictly and only to having no power to nullify the impeachment "conviction" itself, and in principle if an impeached official is charged with a crime their former office would have prevented them from being prosecuted for but they are now open to be tried on, per Article II, then the President's Federal pardon power remains for them to interpose to nullify an actual court conviction--and I am not sure which was the first President to issue a preemptive pardon covering charges that have not even been formally brought yet, but anyway that is what Ford did for Nixon; whether it had precedent or not I don't know but certainly if it were a dubious application legally, I'd think it would have been challenged. The question here is whether Ford could have issued such a pardon for the otherwise prosecutable crimes Nixon might have been charged with after being impeached, and hinges on whether regular Presidential pardons are part of regular due process of law or not, which I suppose they clearly are.

What restricts Presidential pardons then, aside from the specific nullification of any attempt to nullify the impeachment conviction in the Senate itself, is political expedience. Ford took flak for pardoning Nixon OTL (whether it was "enough," "too much" or I think, "not nearly enough!" is a political argument) and surely it will cost Connolly if he shields Nixon in any way, but I do think it is an option for him, not ruled out categorically--and if it is and he doesn't do it that costs him points with other people too after all.

So Connolly has a bit of a dilemma. If he does not intervene with pardons to shut down likely Congressional investigations and various jurisdictions indicting Nixon and others who might otherwise be deemed covered from liability by their obedience to a President, he can only expect a general perpetuation of the general disrepute his new Republican allegiance ties him to, and while his personal complicity might seem limited, still he did sign on to be Nixon's purportedly loyal VP and it would not be hard for Democratic opposition to show he had his eyes open.

He can instead try to get ahead of the parade, compile his own hit list of officials and Congressmembers to be thrown under the bus as egregious Nixonians, and using the leverage he gets showing willing to clean house in a responsible manner, attempt to control the tracks Congress and other authorities go down, wheeling and dealing behind the scenes to avoid "further national demoralization" or some such. This is still tricky since the rot goes quite deep; if such Senators as Church are quite aware of the smoke and fire his OTL Committee investigations uncovered, he'll have to demonstrate quite serious and sweeping actions to persuade members of the Houses of Congress to back off ripping the lids off openly, and there is only so much collateral damage to their partisan side the strong Democratic side will tolerate in "both sides fairness" will take before taking their chances defying an Administration on such dubious political foundations as Connolly's will be before 1977--assuming it is possible for him to win election in his own right in '76 at all.

He might well be able to do that, but he has a bunch of storms to weather, not all off them due either to Watergate itself. I do not recall whether Nixon's OTL peace treaty with North Vietnam which IIRC went through just before the November '72 election as an "October surprise" of sorts has gone through as OTL, but it seems likely, barring a checkup on the POD, which I suspect as I type was after November 1972, it is substantially identical--and yet of course major US action in Southeast Asia continued and can hardly have been less bad here. There is little reason to doubt that support taking any risks to uphold the Saigon regime is at least as politically radioactive in the USA by the mid-70s as OTL, and that means that US commitment to defend the South from an overt military invasion by the North just as OTL in 1975 will be weak.

It is possible that Connolly, claiming a different and perhaps stronger than Ford could OTL mandate, can persuade a very skeptical Congress that quick, decisive US intervention of a different character than OTL's (and TTL's) 1960s reinforcements, to oppose, check, and reverse an overt Northern invasion, supporting ARVN defenses, is possible and worthwhile.

Note that quite aside from US casualties suffered and financial cost, such a move risks triggering general nuclear Armageddon, though certainly the North and their Soviet patrons would be on the wrong foot diplomatically speaking; if Connolly makes sure the Soviets and Hanoi, and his own force commanders (and SEATO allies) understand that the US proposes only to drive Northern forces out of the South and not to annex any part of the North (or probably, Laos is also territory the North might advance out of) and restore status quo ante, as basis of a new treaty (which now the US/Saigon side has more moral basis for stronger favor, in the form of agreement to permanent US tripwire reinforcements, perhaps more limited than in South Korea), then I think Moscow would have every reason to demand their Vietnamese client state to back off. There is no way anyone in Washington or Moscow wants WWIII over this, and neither client state can dare contemplate alienating their patron too much (though both certainly did to some extent OTL!)

But it would be necessary for war gamers to weigh in and make the cases for the South holding any stronger than OTL in the initial days it would take for SEATO forces to come in to aid. In another thread going now, I consider whether Cambodia might be a SEATO ally as well, but in this TL the probability is near zero that it is a useful one; by the time of the potential impeachment OTL, Cambodia was a severe mess and trying to stabilize it in a pro-US fashion would be exactly the kind of quagmire war the American voters/taxpayers/draft candidates were turning against. Probably the Khmer Rouge is poised to take over when US levels of involvement are ratcheted down to levels acceptable in Washington, unless some war gamer taking account of gloves-off but plausibly deniable brutal methods by Lon Nol's US-backed regime could maintain an Afghanistan-like balance of terror. Even if the capital remains nominally in SEATO, it is a terrible place to commit SEATO support troops to. Realistically if the OTL Nixon negotiated treaty does not allow for US tripwire forces that Connolly can sustain, the nearest SEATO aid will have to come from Thailand and the Philippines, and from the USN moving in close to the North again. And force levels forward deployed in those nations seem unlikely to be any greater than available OTL; with time and US backing, the USA can rush in a lot more via those allied bases, but securing South Vietnam is not something Connolly can do quietly within the powers he actually has, unless he foresightedly tackled the job of persuading Congress to maintain higher readiness levels in advance--and that might just prod the North to invade earlier, before such build ups in the SEATO allies' ready levels can take effect.

Even if war gamers can convincingly show it is a slam dunk for SEATO to prevail in these conditions, it still has to be sold to Congress, and fast, since I am pretty sure time is of the essence.

Dealing the North such a hard rebuff ought I suppose to actually secure the South indefinitely, although versus the other TLs where I suggest a successful 1968 treaty, Cambodia remains a much bigger problem and the former Indochinese Dominos could still fall that way--OTL the Khmer Rouge was hardly an ally of the North Vietnamese, but perhaps in these circumstances some kind of union of forces on the revolutionary left could be forged, and leave Saigon bleeding out despite having achieved a form of military security they lacked OTL. Laos I figure is a lost cause to the anti-Communist coalition in just about any circumstance, it is not so much that Laotians were determined followers of Ho as that the North Vietnamese had just about unbeatable amounts of leverage propping up the nominally domestic Pathet Lao which was, unlike KR, quite definitely an auxiliary of Minh's movement.

Anyway even if Saigon can be shown to have achieved adequate security against both overt invasion and domestic insurrection despite a hot Cambodian border situation to our geekish satisfaction, arguing to Congress in 1974 or '75 or the next year that this would be the case is uphill, against a many times bitten now quite shy skepticism, only somewhat helped by Connolly not being Nixon and even by his possible demonstrations of good faith in a selective purge of Nixonian excess.

The alternative to pulling off the preservation of South Vietnam (which in the ATL, no one would know was a great step forward for US prestige versus what happened OTL) is that pretty much OTL happens; the North attacks, the South, lacking reassurance of US support, collapses, and Hanoi takes over all of the South leaving Cambodia completely untenable and thus (in these circumstances, not any whatsoever) making KR victory there a foregone conclusion--the only alternative to Pol Pot ruling would be if the North were in a position to anticipate their eventual OTL invasion of Cambodia later in the decade and preempt the KR with a North Vietnamese backed alternative. And just as the ATL would not realize how likely the fall of Saigon would be in a nearby ATL, neither would anyone much in the ATL realize how much worse the Khmer Rouge would be than a Minhist puppet regime; the fall of Cambodia would be quite as deplored.

These two dominoes falling, along with sealing the fate of Laos decisively if there was any doubt, would be at least as much an albatross around Connolly's neck as it was around Ford's OTL--which actually wasn't much. I am not entirely in a position to judge, having been 11 years old during the 1976 election and just 9 when Nixon resigned, but as a military brat I think I paid more attention than most kids did. Nor did I have a very comprehensive barometer of the general political atmosphere across the whole nation in these crucial mid-70s years--I spend '74-mid-'75 in southern California, but in a fairly conservative part of it (Whittier and borderlands), '75-mid'76 in Montgomery, Alabama where the Air Force sends its officers for culture and enlightenment at the Air University at Maxwell AFB, and by the time of the election was back in Panama City, Florida in the Greater Alabama/Redneck Riviera region of the panhandle, and I moved in peculiar and generally rightist family circles of course. But versus the level of anti-war cultural currents even I in my sheltered position (I spent my kindergarten to third grade years in Panama City, and before that was on an extremely isolated SAC base in the far northeast of Maine--though before that I could even as a child of three observe elements of the anti-war tide rising in Whittier, where I lived when my father was in the hot war, flying out of Thailand to bomb the North in 1968) I could observe, quite little was said or done about the Fall of Saigon. I suppose it was something of a political wash; opponents of the Republicans around Ford could hardly claim it was Ford's fault when it was themselves who reined in Presidential discretion in these matters, precisely wanting to avoid further entanglement in SE Asia; whereas Hawks could hardly fail to be embarrassed that it was still their party and in a sense even still their President presiding over this debacle, it wasn't like 1950 where Truman and Democrats could plausibly be blamed. It was rather a national embarrassment one way or another, for anyone who wasn't prepared to suggest that actually it was for the best anyway (and I wouldn't be able to name any popular culture figure in the mid-70s openly saying any such thing, though that was because my circles were after all still pretty constrained at the time!) The media of the day attempted to ignore and move on from that crisis region as much as possible; in Ford's limited years we heard a lot more about places like Angola or allegations of Soviet reinforcements in Cuba or the Middle East and Palestinian terrorism than we did about former French Indochina.

So Connolly has nowhere to go but down if Saigon does fall, the best he can do about that is hope everyone is mutually deterred by shared establishment embarrassment from more than subtle throat clearing on the whole region. A wrong step on his part, that does not result in saving the Saigon regime, seems likely rather to put the whole albatross of failure there on his party's neck.

If Connolly cannot acquire a lot more glory than Ford did, can we still conclude his election in '76 is a slam dunk anyway, given how narrow the OTL victory of Jimmy Carter was? Now certainly one asset Connolly has versus Ford is being, like Carter, a Southerner. (Indeed, Jimmy Carter is in fact the only candidate hailing from the core of the Deep South ever elected President--to me, such states as Virginia and Texas are most definitely Southern states but I have dealt with people who doubt it--certainly they are border southern states, as is Kentucky and Missouri--Truman came from the definitely Southern part of Missouri to be sure. But only Carter ever was elected from the states that were indisputably in the "heart of Dixie." But unlike some people I would never dispute such figures as LBJ or Connolly were authentically Southern--I might argue about GHW Bush, as a transplant, but certainly not his son).

Of course being a Southern Republican is a double-edged sword in the mid-70s; Connolly could be a lot stronger than Ford in the South, but aside from the presumption Texas goes for him, might not flip any other Southern EV, just reduce the Democrat's margins of victory there quite a lot. Of course Texas alone, though not yet the second state, is gigantic and ought to give him a strong EV margin of victory if no other state flips I suppose. I'd venture to guess that if the Connolly Administration fares about identical to Ford's OTL, Connolly will win, if the Democrats put Carter up against him--nor does another Democrat come to mind who might do better. Perhaps Ted Kennedy if the Chappaquiddick scandal is not a thing here, though that would strengthen Connolly's hand in the South particularly, but the main thing limiting Connolly there is a generic Southern habit of voting Democratic--as a "liberal" northern Democrat, Kennedy would be weaker, but that is offset by the general Kennedy mystique, and we should not underestimate the possibility of more progressive politics prevailing versus OTL in the South, with an alliance of African-American and converts versus OTL to a more liberal approach there--if Kennedy pulls ahead early and recruits Carter as VP candidate, who knows?

If Connolly, as seems likely, operates outside the Ford box, a lot of variables come into play. Suppose for instance it is possible for him to champion a suitable defense for South Vietnam, and preserve the Saigon regime (which would entangle him in at least an attempt to keep Cambodia from going red either). This means that he must attempt to preserve higher levels of US defense spending, to enable adequate reinforcements for SVN on standby in the Philippines and Thailand, who need to be supplemented by other recruits serving where they were deployed OTL, with suitable expanded versus OTL US base infrastructure. He will have to spend political capital to get all that in the generally hung-over mood of the nation. And it will keep the pot of hawk/dove polarization boiling, which is something Nixon actively cultivated to be sure; that might win him more votes that took their chances with Carter or stayed home OTL, but also perhaps energize the left more and tip the balance the other way in other states.

Meanwhile global "stagflation" is a crisis well under way and I don't think it was any kind of peripheral epiphenomenon; it reflected a deep malaise of limits reached by the global capitalist economy no conventional regime of the era had any easy solution to. In the USA it took the form first of inflation and inflation was the devil to beat in contemporary rhetoric I recall from the day, but employment levels soon fell and yet this did not rein in inflation nearly as much as expected, hence the name of the crisis in retrospect, coined mid-decade. Its exact pattern will in turn be affected in the USA by such things as general taxation and military deployment levels--conventional Keynesian wisdom was that US Cold War military spending was a Keynesian flywheel on the economy, so preserving higher levels would be expected to be beneficial, but also somewhat inflationary. And that conventional wisdom was born of experiences in the Depression and WWII eras as well as early '50s, a time when the technology of cutting edge military equipment tended to be fairly grassroots level in terms of the labor force to produce it. 1970s cutting edge tech on the other hand tended to employ far fewer (if better paid) highly skilled labor and to lean more and more toward being profitable for the firms producing it rather than to pay back in terms of wages. Now to a conventional mid-century economist it might make little difference whether money taxed generally and redistributed to defense contractors was spread around as wages or as corporate asset appreciation and dividends, either way it is money put back into circulation--but I think a cursory examination of the past half century should demonstrate conclusively it makes a big difference which form it takes! At best, taxing mostly the rich to reward a sector of the public that is mostly already rich just stirs the pot a bit, and the more we look into it in detail the worse it gets. In fact, if we consider all taxes and not just selected ones like the US Federal Income tax (even bracketing together both personal IT and corporate) we find that a huge part of the total US tax burden, even in these pre-Reaganite days, is borne via such regressive taxes as sales taxes and so on; these account for relatively little Federal spending but a great deal of state and local government spending, and the latter are often subsidized by the former so that it makes the most sense to integrate the lot of them as a collective total government burden versus benefits layouts. When we look at it that way, the overall US tax system has at best been essentially flat versus incomes, and more often, somewhat regressive. Thus, unless Connolly wants to quite explicitly make additional Defense spending come out of more progressive taxes, the net overall effect is really an upward wealth transfer, depending on the portion of downward redistribution that survives the increasing capital-intensiveness of modern military procurement. A lot of military budget does remain rather low on the income food chain--starting with salaries of service members themselves, and costs of base infrastructure including civilian employees. But the trend will be less Keynesian benefit than experience suggested, and unless we see a significant shift to the left in the American electorate demanding more progressive taxation and more usefully redistributionist spending, the era of stagnating wages and increasing wealth concentration is already under way. And the most politically easy and acceptable forms of redistribution might work out to be either dangerously inflationary or unexpectedly ineffective in bolstering either employment levels or wage rates. We would need not just a leftward shift in conventional terms, but new thinking opening doors not seriously considered OTL, with somewhat unpredictable outcomes if this is even done!

The TL has not even yet decisively made Connolly President for a single day, inevitable though that seems. The author will have to lay out the groundwork whereby the nation approaches the next opportunity for the US public to rule on who shall be President to 1981, and while a conservative approach seems to guarantee this will be Connolly, he has to dance pretty fast just to keep even with Ford of OTL and not go down far more decisively--and the straightforward path for him involves making waves of a kind Ford avoided, it seems to me, so OTL assets Ford did have cannot be taken for granted either. Whoever is President at this juncture faces many certain liabilities.
 
I thought I'd take a peek ahead at OTL 1976, generally considered a very close election anyway, and see what flipping some states to Connolly versus some Democrat I assume by default would be Carter (not having gone through the thread to see where Kennedy stands yet) would do.

I think I can rely on the numerical accuracy of Wikipedia's page, with particular reference to the sortable state by state roster of popular and Electoral votes. Below I pay little attention to the possibility of third party upsets, though Eugene McCarthy's independent run can be argued to actually make a difference--in fact sorting by McCarthy's percentages we can have quite a discussion about who he spoilered more (it seems plainly to be Carter, but with surprising other influences, if we assume his voters would have been equally likely to go for Ford instead--but I think that they clearly would have been more likely to prefer Carter and to have plainly cost Carter both Oregon and Maine OTL). Generally except in passing in Ohio I look only at Carter versus Ford, versus the trends we get from just substituting Connolly for Ford.

Texas seems a gimmie for Connolly, and OTL Carter won it with 51.14 to Ford's 47.97--whereas Connolly would be "favorite son" there. But unlike Carter, whose 66.74 to 36.92 percent win in Georgia ran with the current of Southern habits of voting Democratic, Connolly has to buck that current in Texas. I'm sure he would, though we can argue by how much.

But Texas was indeed not the second state in EV in the 1970s, and I was surprised to see how far behind it was as of the 1970 Census--the top two states in the '70s were California with 45 and New York with 41. Texas had just 26, the same number as Illinois and just one ahead of Ohio with 25. As it happened OTL, Carter won with 297 of 538 EV, as today 270 are needed to win without it going to the House of Representatives, and so if Texas and only Texas flips, Carter still wins with 271 EV. There would be no chance of it going to the House since even just one more state flipping would bring him down 3 and Connolly up 3 to give Connolly just as narrow but decisive a win.

By percentage, Ohio, Wisconsin and Mississippi were Carter wins with Carter getting less than 50 percent of the state popular vote, it was just that Ford got even less there. These states are 25, 11 and 7 EV respectively. But I am always skeptical of electoral TLs that turn on just one or two selected states varying; it is possible that on paper, specific voters in specific regions would flip for a specific reason but generally speaking, we'd expect that if anyone flips in one state, people in other states have the same reasons to flip the same way. As it happens the most decisive state, Ohio, of these is also the closest in percentage gap, just 0.27 percent separating Carter from Ford there, which corresponds to just 11,116 more people there favoring Carter over Ford. Just half that number plus one , 5559, need to go for Connolly versus Carter and the deed is done (though it would not be without Texas also flipping!) There are some other states, such as Hawaii, where an even smaller absolute number of voter flips would do the trick, but of course in these states this tiny number is a bigger percentage of the whole. And they win Connolly fewer EV, though always of course plenty to win the race.

A nationwide flip of a third of a percent of half the combined totals for Carter and Ford would be 133,301. Applied uniformly this would flip only Ohio, no other state. But if we presume a favorite son bump for Connolly in Texas (and we need not penalize Michigan, Connolly could well choose Ford for VP after all, which pushes the missing favorite son bump over to Bob Dole's home state which we can assume is going to go solidly Republican no matter what, nor affect national PV tremendously with any variations) then the Republicans get that additional PV too...as it happens, Carter's level in Georgia was much lower than I would have guessed. I had the plan of taking the harmonic mean between Carter's OTL Georgia percentage and Ford's OTL Texas one anyway, and I think that is a reasonable estimate of Connolly's likely performance in Texas--it would be a bit under 56.6 percent. We might reasonably suppose it is swelled by additional turnout too, but that might apply to the Democrats in Texas also depending on who they ran, so taking just that percentage, divided by OTL's for Ford and taking the difference above one in the fraction times Ford's absolute numbers, that is 350,672 Texans voting for Connolly who voted for Carter OTL. Nationwide, the overall magnitude of flipping voters would be a bit under half a million.

If that is all, taking Texas as a special case and the rest of the nation flipping only 1/3 of a percent, overall the outcome would be Connolly winning with 294 EV to Carter's 244, but with Carter down half a million PV and Connolly up half a million versus Ford OTL, Carter would have won the popular votes 40,332,000 to 39,649,000. I don't need to comment this is hardly impossible, and perhaps don't need to comment it is also very very very unusual, and that in 1976 the only two precedents whereby smaller popular vote results in larger and winning EV were both cases that historically, we acknowledge involved actual fraud to fake the decisive outcomes--1876 in Oregon, 1888 in Indiana and New York states. Now above I assumed absolutely no fraud involved, this is honest outcomes of a tiny if uniform national shift plus a single major state shifting under favorite son influences. All the more ironic then if this outcome were to result in a massive cloud of controversy over the legitimacy of Connolly winning in this way...of course the outcome is perfectly legal and Constitutional, but I think it would quite predictably lead to some serious consequences for Connolly politically, never mind he actually would have done nothing wrong.

Realistically, we can expect the map to be a lot more shaken up than this of course. And if the overall flip were not one million but 1.7 million votes, that is 850,000 nationwide instead of half a million changing their vote, that is a general 0.57 percent shift, then it would line up popular and EV victory outcomes again.

A victory for Connolly then is fairly likely, but we can't regard it as a slam dunk, and shifts of various electorates in various states must be justified for reasons. Many things Connolly can do to raise his appreciation among some voters are likely to energize opposition and shift some toward his Democratic rival, whoever that might be, and knowing going in to 1976 that Texas is probably lost to them might change Democratic strategy quite a lot.

Thinking concretely, though admittedly superficially, about it, I think the Democrats would have few better alternatives than Carter unless Ted Kennedy is in play, and running Kennedy has minuses (even assuming Chappaquiddick did not happen and no equivalent or worse skeletons in the closet to jinx it) offsetting real pluses. Looking below the line of the OTL ranking of states by percentage to Carter versus Ford OTL, the first big pickup from Ford's OTL wins Edward Kennedy might reasonably expect to pick up by virtue of stronger liberalism would be Illinois, which voted OTL 48.13 for Carter versus 50.10 for Ford--I think Kennedy could do that, and it would offset the loss of Texas exactly, and I suspect quite secure Ohio (where over 58,000 votes went to Eugene McCarthy as an Independent--I strongly suspect many of those voters would much rather vote for Kennedy than Carter) but meanwhile, looking at the pro-Carter states of OTL, a number of them that might have judged Carter safely conservative as well as Southern (these are Southern states after all) including Mississippi, but also Missouri, Louisiana, Florida, Kentucky and Maryland had less than 10 percent margins for Carter that might be badly eroded--other states were also in that range, though I judge Ted Kennedy would gain them more votes than they lose there, such as New York for instance, and I skipped Wisconsin since it was rather known as a liberal state at the time (where Senator Proxmire came from, and also of course heir, still at this time in living memory, to the LaFollette family legacy and other milestones of progressivism not yet forgotten). Recall that if Texas flipping can be countered with snatching up Illinois instead, then OTL Carter still had a clear lead of 27 EV, a bit over 5 percent of all EV, over the 270 needed to win; with either Texas or Illinois in hand, and with Ohio not flipping and staying Democratic by whatever slim margin, he or some other Democrat can lose Wisconsin, Mississippi and Hawaii, as long as Pennsylvania still holds that is 3 of the 5 most marginal Carter wins of OTL; if Wisconsin holds, he could afford to also lose any one of Louisiana, Missouri or even Florida and still squeak by.

Bearing in mind Ted Kennedy, if not mired in such a scandal as Chappaquidick, probably would be able to energize Democrats in such a state as Illinois (also New Mexico, Maine, New Jersey, Oregon, California and possibly Connecticut, all of which were well under a ten percent margin for Ford) which exactly offsets the loss of Texas by itself, and be quite as likely to pick up some states as Connolly would more generally, we can see that a liberal path to victory is quite as open as a centrist-corporatist Connolly-Republicanism-unless we presume a major conservative backlash in fear of such a candidate as Kennedy pulling out all stops. But again, just a handful of years after Watergate, with the Vietnam hangover bad enough OTL and likely to be even more polarizing if in fact Connolly can save South Vietnam, ultra-reaction is not the strong card to play it could become later or had been earlier.

If Connolly is going to win in 1976 then, he has to earn it.
 
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