Exactly. It also has the appearance of doing a lot while not doing much of anything in terms of America and gun violence. Hence a quiet NRA.
Texas Two-Step: Nixon nominates Connally as VP in 1973
- Thread starter wolverinethad
- Start date
dcharles
Banned
That's funny. It's an American drink, to the best of my knowledge, invented by a liquor rep for Stoli.
Is that typical for Russians to drink?
By the way, if you haven't read up on Alice Roosevelt Longworth, there's a fabulous anecdote in Ben Bradlee's memor A Good Life, where he talks about Longworth being interviewed by Sally Quinn.
The memory of that anecdote (I forgot the role of the Times in it but remembered the rest of it perfectly) inspired this part of the story, and my photoshopping of Alice into the 1981 photo of Reagan with Gloria Stewart. As Edmund Morris revealed in Dutch, his unique biography of Reagan, the Gipper enjoyed dick jokes and traded them with Poppy Bush over lunch every week.
There is a great bar there, I believe called Razvedka. My friends and I loved it because it had a ton of KGB memorabilia and drinks named for espionage. I forget what one in particular was called in Russian, but it meant burn after reading, and you were given a note with your beverage that you were to read and set on fire with the flame that came with your drink. Within my first few weeks of being in Moscow (this was in fall 2021), I was having a conversation with a Russian woman who worked for Rosatom about the American withdrawal from Afghanistan. It was surreal.
I’m not sure, but most of the bars my friends and I went to had them, lol. Maybe there are a ton of tourists in Moscow, or at least there were, you know, pre February 2022.
@dcharleos It seems there are multiple versions of the story....
https://moscowcopper.com/pages/our-story
Moscow mule - Wikipedia
Historical goodness
Sometimes, the gods of OTL smile upon you, and gift you a true-life caper involving three of your main characters.
Gift article, so it's free to all of you.
A Four-Decade Secret: One Man’s Untold Story of Sabotaging Carter’s Re-election https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/18/...Uq2ET8EZlHKZjdSm9hvKEDPcC0_cytZCvEgWeTcUFwTwI
Gift article, so it's free to all of you.
A Four-Decade Secret: One Man’s Untold Story of Sabotaging Carter’s Re-election https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/18/...Uq2ET8EZlHKZjdSm9hvKEDPcC0_cytZCvEgWeTcUFwTwI
The next chapter is coming. Lots of econ stuff, so it's taking longer than the last few to write.
March 7, 1975
March 7, 1975
“Ron, you can’t do that! You can’t! We’ve worked too hard to get here!” William French Smith was the chairman of the University of California Board of Regents. He was also Ronald Reagan’s personal attorney and close friend. As such, he could first-name the Vice President, as he was doing now. “Listen, you’re recovering from a terrible incident. You don’t need to rush this decision. There’s a line of succession and your absence will not hurt that, either. Just wait, please, I beg of you.” Smith’s passionate urging was brought on by Reagan saying he was going to resign to take care of Nancy. The Second Lady was still unconscious, as doctors kept her in a medical coma while they intensely watched her neurological responses. The bullet had not completely severed her spinal cord, a development so surprising that her lead neurosurgeon told the media it was like the hand of God had deflected it just enough to the side that it had been torn, but there were still connections. They’d very carefully removed the bullet, and just as carefully reattached the fibers of each cord using the techniques established by Professor Doktor Ludvig Guttmann at Britain’s Stoke Mandeville Spinal Institute. Dr. Guttman was a Jewish refugee who’d been fortunate to leave Germany before Hitler had opened the death camps, and Britain repeated the rewards, as did the world. However, it was a longshot that she’d ever walk more than a few steps at a time ever again. A wheelchair was considered the likelier option, since she was fifty-four, but it was hard to imagine either her or Ron being okay with a wheelchair. Smith knew that thought was driving his old friend’s thinking.
“Bill, dammit, this is Nancy I’m talking about here. I love this country so much, you know that! But that is my wife in an intensive care unit who might never walk again! She has been my entire being for twenty-four years now. How can I do my job or campaign next year if all I’m doing is thinking about her and her recovery? Or her and her inability to travel?” Reagan was not one to shout, but when he did, those around him knew things were serious. He was definitely shouting now, and then he collapsed back against the bed, the effort having exhausted him. “Ron, look. I’m just saying to wait until she wakes up and see what the prognosis is. And even if she is in a wheelchair, that’s what jet bridges are for. She can be transported a lot easier than FDR could thirty years ago. It’s not impossible.” This was the attorney speaking, the one who smoothed the way for his clients, told them it wasn’t so bad, that they had options. An exhausted Vice President looked up at his friend and attorney. “Fine, Bill, I’ll wait until she wakes up. But you’d better tell John I’m considering it. I’m not going to just walk out without a word of warning. He deserves to know first.” Smith nodded, knowing full well he had no intention of following through on it.
*****
The President had said he was going to secure America’s energy future, and he’d started by getting the Big Three to start moving on better fuel economy and aerodynamic designs through the efforts of Jack Valenti. He’d gotten funding to add a port in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, to open up oil deliveries faster than the Trans-Alaska pipeline could be built. The Army Corps of Engineers was already hard at work up there building two docks in the bay. Tanker traffic would be on a route from Prudhoe Bay to Churchill, Manitoba, where an extension of the TransCanada pipeline was being built. Connally had brought in Pierre Trudeau for talks in December, and offered Trudeau a ten-year discount on the oil brought through Churchill in return for Canada funding and building the infrastructure. The man who’d just pushed through the creation of PetroCanada, a Crown Corporation that would be fully incorporated on New Year’s Day, 1976, did not have to be asked twice. Trudeau readily agreed to the transaction, as it would save the nation a lot of money while new Albertan and Saskatchewan oilfields were brought online. While the TransAlaskan pipeline would probably not be finished until mid-to-late 1977, Trudeau promised that they could have the Churchill Extension ready to go by early 1976. It would run down the east side of Manitoba, skirting Winnipeg, and ending at a tanking facility built at the border near a village named Emerson. There were two border crossings into the United States there. West of Emerson, on the other side of the Red River, was the main one, where Interstate 29 terminated just inside North Dakota. Right in Emerson was a smaller crossing with an abandoned hamlet on the U.S. called Noyes, Minnesota, and it was primarily a rail crossing. The Canadians just had a single barricade on their side of Boundary Road, and there was a small patrol on either side, mainly present for rail safety than the fear of anyone sneaking across. The RCMP joked that there was more worth coming for on the Canadian side than there was the American side there, and they weren’t wrong, either. The Canadians would build their own facility at the main junction outside of Winnipeg for transport across Manitoba, Ontario and Quebec. It would help greatly reduce the heating costs for the Dakotas, Minnesota, and Iowa, while a future pipeline extension would burrow under Lake Superior and transfer oil to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.
There was just one problem. All of this was going to need supervision. That didn’t even count the nuclear power plants that Congress was debating a tax credit to help spur on, further reducing the dependence on oil. The environmentalists were throwing a massive fit, but after 1973, people did not want to hear it. Barnes was pondering the scale of the position. They already knew it would be a Cabinet-level job, Secretary of Energy. They’d house it with Commerce to start while sufficient space was acquired for the office. They needed someone with experience and serious enough to carry weight with the media.
No.
No way. He wouldn’t take it. He practically hates the President.
Maybe, though. Maybe if we found a role for his friend as well, something meaty. Something to raise their profiles. Kauper will leave the Antitrust Division, head back to Ann Arbor to teach law again. Yeah, this could work.
Barnes picked up the phone on his desk and punched the number for his secretary. “Hi, Jeannie. Can you find me the number for Andrews, Kurth, Campbell & Bradley in Houston, Texas? It’s a law firm. Thanks, sugar.” He hung up, knowing he’d get the call back very soon with the number. He hardly had time to light a cigar before Jeannie was back on the line with the answer he sought. There was a simplicity to it all, Barnes thought as he dialed. Convince the friend, and then he can launch the trial balloon. If the target doesn’t want it, well, the friend would still be great for the position he gets offered, as a skilled political operator and corporate attorney. A man of morality, and another Texan to boot. The voice sounded in his ear. “Andrews, Kurth, Campbell & Bradley, how may I help you?”
“I’d like to speak to James Baker the third, please.” A pause while the receptionist transferred him to the private secretary for Baker. “Mr. Baker’s office.” “Yes, I need to speak to Mr. Baker, please, it’s a rather urgent matter.” Barnes could hear the frown coming through the phone. “Mr. Baker is rather busy right now with meetings. Can I take a message?” Barnes took a puff of his cigar and grinned. This was the part that never got old for him, not even after months of doing it. “Ma’am, this is Ben Barnes, and I am chief of staff to the President of the United States. I understand Mr. Baker is a busy fellow, but I really do think he’ll want to take this call. Do you mind fetching him for me, please?” He envisioned the secretary in his mind, sounded like she was in her forties, kind of a tough broad, used to throwing elbows to keep whoever got this number away from the namesake law partner. He imagined the look of horror on her face as she quickly processed what meeting Baker was in, how far from the desk it was, and how to get him on the phone with the White House quickly. “Yes, sir, I’ll slip into his meeting and let him know you’re on the phone. Can you please hold while I do that?” This sort of power really can corrupt a man. “Thank you, miss, I’ve got a couple of minutes before I need to start preparing for a briefing with the President, so quickly if you can.” Barnes grinned inside of his power office, the smoke of the cigar tracing lazily in the afternoon sunlight streaming through the window. He pulled out a stopwatch and timed it, just for fun, something he did on occasion to lighten up the mood on serious days. It was 83 seconds when the voice on the phone returned, a man this time.
“Benjamin Barnes, you sly son of a bitch. I’ve got a half dozen Arab oil sheikhs sitting in a conference room while we negotiate some purchases for them in the city, and you just happened to pick now to call, knowing I couldn’t ignore it. What can I do for our esteemed White House chief of staff?” Busting balls a little. Somebody’s feeling froggy today. “Well, Jim, I’m going to cut right to the chase, because there’s just too much happening to spend time on pleasantries. The President has a couple of job openings he’d like to fill, and one of them has your name on them, and the other has your friend George’s name on it.” Barnes paused a beat. “So, here’s the deal. We’d like you to come serve as head of the antitrust division at Justice. We know Nixon looked at you for the Civil Division two years ago and decided against it. I figure you probably feel happy you skipped over that landmine. Antitrust, well, you’re the right sort of lawyer for that gig, politically astute, knowledgeable about that area of the law, and it helps make things easier for George, I imagine, to accept the position we’re going to offer him knowing his best friend will join him back here in D.C.” Baker frowned in his glass-encased office in Houston. “Ben, I’m gonna tell you what this sounds like. This sounds like blatant bait. You want me to get my best friend to accept your offer, and a prestigious slot at DOJ is a bribe for me to do it. I’m not one of Lyndon’s boys, and neither is George. So...” Barnes cut him right off. “Jim, the job is yours whether George accepts the offer or not. We’ll nominate you Monday morning, no problem there. But we’re going to offer your friend George Bush the chance to be the first-ever Secretary of Energy, a new Cabinet position, and a hell of a lot of importance given the trouble your AY-rab friends have caused this country when it comes to our energy supplies. Now, I hope you’ll see why we approached you. We’d want you anyways. You are a damned good operative, Mr. Baker, but we know George is not favorably inclined towards the President, so yes, we want you to make that approach. It’s not a bribe, it’s just a sensible way for us to get a qualified person in the position. He’s been UN Ambassador, ran a successful oil company, knows the players. He is the man we want because he’ll sail through confirmation and can hit the ground running. I know you don’t want to be his aide or chief of staff, and you can also sail through confirmation. We get two skilled people to work for this country, which if you haven’t noticed, is lacking a Vice President while we’ve still got some rough sailing on the horizon when it comes to inflation and jobs numbers. So, are you in or not?”
James Addison Baker III was no dummy. He might not be thrilled about the circumstances in which the position was being offered, but it was a prize position. Visible, important, and a prime slot for advancement. More than one antitrust head had moved upwards. Robert Jackson became Attorney General and then a Supreme Court justice off the strength of his work running that division. Baker loved politics, but there wasn’t an attorney on Earth who’d pass up a fast-track slot for the Court. “Alright, Ben, you can tell the President I’m in. I’ll set up a meeting with George and we’ll call you together, okay? How do I reach you?” Barnes chuckled at that. “Oh, don’t worry about that. You just call my office and they find me and forward the call wherever I happen to be at.”
*****
In London, the working week should’ve been over, but Tony Crosland was unable to turn his brain off. He had been looking over the details of the current state of the British economy, the loan requirements if the IMF were to get involved, and the latest demands of the various trade unions for salary increases to meet inflation. Typically, fighting inflation meant certain monetarist approaches that were bad for unemployment, hard on the average citizen, and politically unpopular, which is why the Heath government had kicked the can down the road for four years. Now Crosland was examining the can and was disturbed by what he found. They needed more capital to get breathing room for a graduated reduction of inflation, but the only source of that was the IMF, and the medicine was worse than the disease. It was breathtakingly arrogant, the same arrogance America had lorded over Britain for twenty years. Even if one was vociferously opposed to the Suez invasion, the way Eisenhower had tried to destroy a fragile ally’s economy angered Britons across the political spectrum. No matter how much Healey thought it was the only way, the Exchequer was Crosland’s now to decide, and he knew that his mind was far better suited to the task than Denis Healey.
Crosland wasn’t the only man unable to shut his brain off. He’d asked his old friend Roy Jenkins over as well, rather on accident, as the Chancellor called over to Whitehall to request some budget information and Jenkins had picked up the phone himself. Crosland asked if he wanted to come to Number 11 and discuss budgets, and Jenkins agreed. Now, they were both sitting in the state dining room, papers spread out, a bottle of sherry open and a light dinner growing cold as both men sipped the sherry and discussed how to bring matters better shape. Crosland asked Jenkins what he thought the biggest budgetary issue was, and “Woy” didn’t hesitate: the issue was fuel. It cost more to operate the Central Electricity Generating Board even with the use of coal as the primary source. It cost more to operate the British Army On the Rhine. It cost more to fuel the Royal Navy on its surface patrols. Jenkins had brought with him the recommendations of the chiefs of staff and the Naval Ordnance command with regards to the Chevaline program, which had been initiated by the Heath government in 1973 over the objections of the uniformed commanders. The Arbor/Fallon warhead test in May 1974 at the American Nuclear Test Range in Nevada had been reviewed by Wilson and then-Defence Secretary Roy Mason last fall, and a decision was nearing as to whether the government would continue the effort. Jenkins found it noteworthy that the entire uniformed community was against the program, and that it had been started based solely on the beliefs of the politicians. What in God’s name for? The whole concept is bloody useless, as it only makes sense if our sole target was Moscow. A system that has to defeat the Moscow ABM system, as if we’d be firing alone and there wouldn’t be an entire regiment of American ICBMs following behind! Jenkins was determined to find areas to cut to make up for the increased fuel costs their budget had to factor in, and a program destined to cost a billion pounds by the next election was something to get shelved. The Defence Secretary had also received a quote for the Poseidon missile acquisition, the C3 model of the American-developed sea-launched ballistic missile (SLBM), which was a bridge to keep nuclear missile submarines relevant and capable until the development of the nascent Trident system. For Britain, which hoped to keep its existing hulls and not have to build a new series of missile submarines, it was the best play. They would be operating in closer to their targets than the Americans, so there was no need to wait with the older Polaris missiles and then have to build brand-new hulls to support the size of Trident. The Resolution-class was only seven years old since the commissioning of its namesake, and the last of them, HMS Revenge, was a mere five years old, still quite advanced, thank you, and could fit Poseidon into their launch tubes with minimal modifications. Looking through the proposal, which was hand-delivered from the embassy at Kensington Square, Jenkins saw that the Poseidons would cost £123.1 million, and modifications to the warheads would run another…£37.3 million.
That was a true cost-savings, Crosland noted, and they could use that positive differential to help shore up the industrial base. Balance-of-payments was a major part of inflation hitting Britain far more severely, and it was considered vital to improve British exports. Tony Benn had come up with the idea of a National Enterprise Board while in opposition, and despite objections from some quarters (Jenkins included), it was part of the party manifesto for the last election, and Benn had gotten it up and running under Wilson. Benn had actually been rather smart with it so far, using it to help out Rolls-Royce, which was still a major supplier of engines for the British military. The problems went well beyond Rolls-Royce, though. Scores of companies were struggling. British Steel was virtually unsellable beyond the borders of the UK because of high cost. BAC (British Aircraft Corporation) was barely holding it together. Production at the various automobile plants cost more and produced less than any of their competitors. British Leyland was an absolute shambles and on the verge of complete collapse. Thrown together by Benn during the last Labour government to try and keep the once-dominant British car industry running, it’d been beset by terrible management and quality control issues, making the venerated Land Rover, MG, and Jaguar names running jokes in America. Even the Ford Halewood plant in Liverpool, which made the Ford Cortina (one of the dominant vehicles in Europe), faced repeated strikes under the Heath government and essentially bought off the workforce before the election a year ago with an insane wage hike of 32%. A general malaise had settled over the workforce, and there was a bitter debate in Cabinet over how to bring about better performance. Crosland, Jenkins, Healey and Shirley Williams wanted to pull back some of the power from the unions, arguing that they’d run amok and created a fifth columnist government. Jenkins said there was no sense of responsibility, and that the poor quality of production amounted to wage theft by the workers. Benn countered by pointing out how poorly Leyland had been managed since he’d brought about the merger, how they didn’t listen to line workers, offered no way to submit bottom-up suggestions to improve quality control, and designed vehicles that failed before a single one rolled off a production line. He asked the Cabinet how they could possibly sit there and blame the workforce for producing the items so poorly designed by the professional class. The result was stalemate.
The first goal, however, was to cut costs where possible and increase revenue to government coffers, so they could fight inflation. Crosland was working on both, but primarily the latter. The job of those like Jenkins was to cut costs. Chevaline was pointless and opposed by the military chiefs. He would push for the purchase of Poseidon missiles to replace the outmoded Polaris, and do his best to ensure that the Shah of Iran followed through on his inquiry about ordering three Invincible-class carriers, and that would also bring revenue to the coffers. Revenue. The magic word. Revenue had to be increased without creating an onerous tax burden on the populace. Crosland definitely wanted to avoid the problem that Heath’s government faced, with its wealthiest citizens going into tax exile to avoid the high taxes Barber had levied. Crosland certainly agreed with the goal Barber had in mind when levying them, but if they skipped out and didn’t pay, it was next to useless. One answer to this question was both obvious and incredibly sticky. The Royal Family had an extremely generous income from the government (although when balanced against income gathered by crown-owned properties, the government likely won out). Since the thought of taxing the royals was declared out of the question by Wilson before and Callaghan now, Crosland had come up with a sort of end run. There were many properties, castles, et al that the National Trust had been gathering since the end of the War, and Crosland wanted to open them up to tourists. Revenue would be collected by the government, jobs would be added, and it should help provide some cushion for a budget that had relied upon obscene borrowing under Heath. Callaghan had agreed to the idea, and would put it in patriotic terms for the Queen, that by not raising a fuss, they would help stabilize England and prevent matters from getting out of hand. She’d accepted the power cuts along with everyone else in the country, demonstrating a quiet leadership in doing so, but this was a bigger step. It would bring down the wall between monarchy and commoner, allowing the latter to tread the halls, stairs, and floors that only the royals and lords had been able to walk for centuries.
The government needed extra revenue and this would be a way to do it without adding to the tax burden that many in the top earning tiers were fleeing from. Crosland was, however, not just letting that latter part slide. He was also writing legislation that would extend an olive branch towards those who’d been exiling themselves: in return for paying an “alternative tiered income tax”, they would not be forced to stay out of Britain as long as many currently were. The tenure of absence under the current regulations was a full-blown fiscal year (April to March), with only two weeks allowed in country. The nouveau riche of Britain, rock stars from the Rolling Stones to Led Zeppelin and movie stars like Sean Connery and Michael Caine, were enriching other nations with their spending while avoiding paying any tax to Her Majesty’s Government. It was a festering sore on Britain’s image, and on the budget. Crosland’s plan would essentially tier the taxation based upon time spent in-country. While a full year would still mean, for the moment, an 83% tax rate, it would be greatly lowered on a quarterly basis. This meant that said exiles could spend up to three months in country while paying a paltry 22% rate, six months at 47%, and nine months at 62%. While this was far from ideal on the higher ends, the fact that millions of pounds were going uncollected in taxes from those with means while inflation was squeezing those without means was something that required rectifying. It wasn’t perfect, and the Bennites would howl about letting the wealthy off the hook, but in the end, they’d see that some revenue was better than none.
They had until Wednesday morning, when Crosland was due to introduce the budget in the House. Dealing with the unions, well, that was Benn’s part of the pitch now…
*****
It was still the middle of the working day back in Washington, D.C., and a working lunch at Treasury featured a familiar sight: Treasury Secretary Nelson Rockefeller hosting his longtime collaborator/protege, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. It was shaping up to be a very busy year for summits, which is why they were here. The second phase of the OSCE negotiations was wrapping up in Geneva, where Joseph Sisco, the Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs, and David K.E. Bruce, the NATO Ambassador, had led the American delegation. Next month, Canada, Britain, France, West Germany, and the U.S. were gathering at Rambouillet in France to plan a unified assault on inflation (Rockefeller would be leading this gathering), and then in July would be the last phase of OSCE, where the heads of state would gather to ratify an agreement.
Rockefeller’s main concern was the stability of the dollar and getting a grip on inflation. He had Henry in to help brief him on the political aspects of the Rambouillet meeting. It wasn’t that Rockefeller wasn’t capable, but he just didn’t have time, and he knew Kissinger could provide him with the relevant information, plus alert him to any diplomatic minefields that could create future issues on the inflation front. As it turned out, Rockefeller himself had some useful information for Henry, but he did not yet know it. They started out by reviewing the key players. Since the reshuffle in Britain, “Rocky” hadn’t had much time to feel out Tony Crosland, for example. He’d worked with Jean-Pierre Fourcade, the French minister of economy and finance; Canadian Finance Minister John Turner; and Hans Apel, the West German Finance Minister, since taking office last year. Kissinger assured Rocky that Crosland was extremely intelligent and not wedded to the traditional socialism of the old Labourites. Henry added, rather sardonically, this was the first time in world history that four of the world’s biggest powers were all led by men who’d previously been the finance minister for their government, and yet nobody had any solutions to stop the inflationary spiral. Arthur Burns was worried about the continued recession, even though it was turning out to be milder than expected. Paul Volcker, who’d just taken over as head of the New York Fed (and therefore was the true second-in-command of the Federal Reserve, was more concerned about inflation and was advocating that interest rates stay elevated to reduce pressure on borrowing. These were two competing schools of thought, with Rockefeller leaning towards activist spending (he was a true Keynesian, using bond issues to build New York’s infrastructure throughout the 60s while raising taxes, too—very anti-Reagan!) and Connally stuck in the middle between every President’s desire to not have a major recession on their watch and his experience as SecTreas telling him inflation had to be strangled before it overtook everything.
Volcker wanted twelve percent interest rates and Burns was pushing for six. While the average person might look at that and say, well, that’s not too big a difference, right?, any banker worth their salt knew it was seismically different. The median house cost in America was hovering around $40,000. The median household income was $14,400. Someone who financed a house with ten percent down at the Burns rate would pay $400/month, which equated to about 40% of that median income, around the top end of the recommended percentage of housing cost/income ratio. At the Volcker rate, that same borrower would be paying $544/month. That was unsustainable for any family with children. It would mean a wave of foreclosures, which would cause severe recession, or require more government aid, which would dampen the effect that harder rate would have on inflation. The Burns rate, however, would drive inflation upwards to where that difference in housing payments would largely be eaten up by increased costs for meat, produce, dairy, gas, etc. What Rocky hoped to do at Rambouillet was to thread the needle with the help of some of America’s biggest trading partners. The President, back when he was in this position, was unable to reach agreement to return to the Bretton Woods system that the Europeans had bailed on four years ago, depleting American gold reserves to dangerous levels, which in turn forced Nixon’s hand at that time. Burns and Connally both backed his play to protect the dollar, and once it had settled down, Connally had begun negotiations with the men who were now their respective nation’s leaders. While the finance ministers had changed, the final agreement for any deal lay with those who had rejected it after a year’s worth of negotiations, which was part of the reason behind Connally’s resignation in 1972 from Treasury.
The good news, from Rocky’s perspective, was that they all faced the same intractable problem. The nations, like France and West Germany, who’d started the run on the dollar in 1971 were facing the same fuel crunch as the rest of the NATO powers, and that was inserting inflation into their economies as well. They were somewhat insulated by the success of their joint ventures into electronics and computing, but not nearly enough. In short, everyone was ready to deal now, where they weren’t four years ago. Nelson Rockefeller was good at dealmaking. He’d spent a lifetime doing it, from his rescue of what became Rockefeller Center in the 1930s as a young man, to his modernization of New York and getting Nixon to agree to his terms for contesting the 1960 election while still in his first term as governor. That didn’t even begin to encompass his work in the art world, which Rocky had shaped in ways that were still being felt. He ran through his plan with Henry. He wanted to create an exchange program of sorts with the Brits. Like many in the administration, Rockefeller was mightily impressed with the verve and ingenuity of Lee Iacocca at Chrysler. He was changing a lethargic culture, engineering creative solutions, and working to shed the debt his predecessors had created through half-baked ideas. He wanted to offer the Brits a deal: give a stake in the luxury brands of British Leyland to Chrysler, and in return, Chrysler would provide its engineering expertise to Leyland to help it dig out of the hole it’d put itself in. Rover, Rolls Royce, and Jaguar could also offer some magnificent ideas in car design for Chrysler that could be put to use in its new vehicles under development. Rockefeller told Kissinger that he’d love to see commonality of parts between the vehicles as well, so that industrial action at one plant wouldn’t affect others. He’d kept a close eye on the unrest in England, and knew that it was a major part of the problem. Perhaps this was another area where agreements could be worked out. It was one part of increasing the interdependence between the Big Five, as Jack Valenti put it during the last cabinet meeting, which in turn helped boost the common defense.
None of these men were aware of the resentment that the British held regarding their economy and the role that Crosland perceived them as having played in creating their predicament. To Americans it’d been a blip on the radar. The coming talks in France would demonstrate the shortsightedness of their actions twenty years ago.
“Ron, you can’t do that! You can’t! We’ve worked too hard to get here!” William French Smith was the chairman of the University of California Board of Regents. He was also Ronald Reagan’s personal attorney and close friend. As such, he could first-name the Vice President, as he was doing now. “Listen, you’re recovering from a terrible incident. You don’t need to rush this decision. There’s a line of succession and your absence will not hurt that, either. Just wait, please, I beg of you.” Smith’s passionate urging was brought on by Reagan saying he was going to resign to take care of Nancy. The Second Lady was still unconscious, as doctors kept her in a medical coma while they intensely watched her neurological responses. The bullet had not completely severed her spinal cord, a development so surprising that her lead neurosurgeon told the media it was like the hand of God had deflected it just enough to the side that it had been torn, but there were still connections. They’d very carefully removed the bullet, and just as carefully reattached the fibers of each cord using the techniques established by Professor Doktor Ludvig Guttmann at Britain’s Stoke Mandeville Spinal Institute. Dr. Guttman was a Jewish refugee who’d been fortunate to leave Germany before Hitler had opened the death camps, and Britain repeated the rewards, as did the world. However, it was a longshot that she’d ever walk more than a few steps at a time ever again. A wheelchair was considered the likelier option, since she was fifty-four, but it was hard to imagine either her or Ron being okay with a wheelchair. Smith knew that thought was driving his old friend’s thinking.
“Bill, dammit, this is Nancy I’m talking about here. I love this country so much, you know that! But that is my wife in an intensive care unit who might never walk again! She has been my entire being for twenty-four years now. How can I do my job or campaign next year if all I’m doing is thinking about her and her recovery? Or her and her inability to travel?” Reagan was not one to shout, but when he did, those around him knew things were serious. He was definitely shouting now, and then he collapsed back against the bed, the effort having exhausted him. “Ron, look. I’m just saying to wait until she wakes up and see what the prognosis is. And even if she is in a wheelchair, that’s what jet bridges are for. She can be transported a lot easier than FDR could thirty years ago. It’s not impossible.” This was the attorney speaking, the one who smoothed the way for his clients, told them it wasn’t so bad, that they had options. An exhausted Vice President looked up at his friend and attorney. “Fine, Bill, I’ll wait until she wakes up. But you’d better tell John I’m considering it. I’m not going to just walk out without a word of warning. He deserves to know first.” Smith nodded, knowing full well he had no intention of following through on it.
*****
The President had said he was going to secure America’s energy future, and he’d started by getting the Big Three to start moving on better fuel economy and aerodynamic designs through the efforts of Jack Valenti. He’d gotten funding to add a port in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, to open up oil deliveries faster than the Trans-Alaska pipeline could be built. The Army Corps of Engineers was already hard at work up there building two docks in the bay. Tanker traffic would be on a route from Prudhoe Bay to Churchill, Manitoba, where an extension of the TransCanada pipeline was being built. Connally had brought in Pierre Trudeau for talks in December, and offered Trudeau a ten-year discount on the oil brought through Churchill in return for Canada funding and building the infrastructure. The man who’d just pushed through the creation of PetroCanada, a Crown Corporation that would be fully incorporated on New Year’s Day, 1976, did not have to be asked twice. Trudeau readily agreed to the transaction, as it would save the nation a lot of money while new Albertan and Saskatchewan oilfields were brought online. While the TransAlaskan pipeline would probably not be finished until mid-to-late 1977, Trudeau promised that they could have the Churchill Extension ready to go by early 1976. It would run down the east side of Manitoba, skirting Winnipeg, and ending at a tanking facility built at the border near a village named Emerson. There were two border crossings into the United States there. West of Emerson, on the other side of the Red River, was the main one, where Interstate 29 terminated just inside North Dakota. Right in Emerson was a smaller crossing with an abandoned hamlet on the U.S. called Noyes, Minnesota, and it was primarily a rail crossing. The Canadians just had a single barricade on their side of Boundary Road, and there was a small patrol on either side, mainly present for rail safety than the fear of anyone sneaking across. The RCMP joked that there was more worth coming for on the Canadian side than there was the American side there, and they weren’t wrong, either. The Canadians would build their own facility at the main junction outside of Winnipeg for transport across Manitoba, Ontario and Quebec. It would help greatly reduce the heating costs for the Dakotas, Minnesota, and Iowa, while a future pipeline extension would burrow under Lake Superior and transfer oil to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.
There was just one problem. All of this was going to need supervision. That didn’t even count the nuclear power plants that Congress was debating a tax credit to help spur on, further reducing the dependence on oil. The environmentalists were throwing a massive fit, but after 1973, people did not want to hear it. Barnes was pondering the scale of the position. They already knew it would be a Cabinet-level job, Secretary of Energy. They’d house it with Commerce to start while sufficient space was acquired for the office. They needed someone with experience and serious enough to carry weight with the media.
No.
No way. He wouldn’t take it. He practically hates the President.
Maybe, though. Maybe if we found a role for his friend as well, something meaty. Something to raise their profiles. Kauper will leave the Antitrust Division, head back to Ann Arbor to teach law again. Yeah, this could work.
Barnes picked up the phone on his desk and punched the number for his secretary. “Hi, Jeannie. Can you find me the number for Andrews, Kurth, Campbell & Bradley in Houston, Texas? It’s a law firm. Thanks, sugar.” He hung up, knowing he’d get the call back very soon with the number. He hardly had time to light a cigar before Jeannie was back on the line with the answer he sought. There was a simplicity to it all, Barnes thought as he dialed. Convince the friend, and then he can launch the trial balloon. If the target doesn’t want it, well, the friend would still be great for the position he gets offered, as a skilled political operator and corporate attorney. A man of morality, and another Texan to boot. The voice sounded in his ear. “Andrews, Kurth, Campbell & Bradley, how may I help you?”
“I’d like to speak to James Baker the third, please.” A pause while the receptionist transferred him to the private secretary for Baker. “Mr. Baker’s office.” “Yes, I need to speak to Mr. Baker, please, it’s a rather urgent matter.” Barnes could hear the frown coming through the phone. “Mr. Baker is rather busy right now with meetings. Can I take a message?” Barnes took a puff of his cigar and grinned. This was the part that never got old for him, not even after months of doing it. “Ma’am, this is Ben Barnes, and I am chief of staff to the President of the United States. I understand Mr. Baker is a busy fellow, but I really do think he’ll want to take this call. Do you mind fetching him for me, please?” He envisioned the secretary in his mind, sounded like she was in her forties, kind of a tough broad, used to throwing elbows to keep whoever got this number away from the namesake law partner. He imagined the look of horror on her face as she quickly processed what meeting Baker was in, how far from the desk it was, and how to get him on the phone with the White House quickly. “Yes, sir, I’ll slip into his meeting and let him know you’re on the phone. Can you please hold while I do that?” This sort of power really can corrupt a man. “Thank you, miss, I’ve got a couple of minutes before I need to start preparing for a briefing with the President, so quickly if you can.” Barnes grinned inside of his power office, the smoke of the cigar tracing lazily in the afternoon sunlight streaming through the window. He pulled out a stopwatch and timed it, just for fun, something he did on occasion to lighten up the mood on serious days. It was 83 seconds when the voice on the phone returned, a man this time.
“Benjamin Barnes, you sly son of a bitch. I’ve got a half dozen Arab oil sheikhs sitting in a conference room while we negotiate some purchases for them in the city, and you just happened to pick now to call, knowing I couldn’t ignore it. What can I do for our esteemed White House chief of staff?” Busting balls a little. Somebody’s feeling froggy today. “Well, Jim, I’m going to cut right to the chase, because there’s just too much happening to spend time on pleasantries. The President has a couple of job openings he’d like to fill, and one of them has your name on them, and the other has your friend George’s name on it.” Barnes paused a beat. “So, here’s the deal. We’d like you to come serve as head of the antitrust division at Justice. We know Nixon looked at you for the Civil Division two years ago and decided against it. I figure you probably feel happy you skipped over that landmine. Antitrust, well, you’re the right sort of lawyer for that gig, politically astute, knowledgeable about that area of the law, and it helps make things easier for George, I imagine, to accept the position we’re going to offer him knowing his best friend will join him back here in D.C.” Baker frowned in his glass-encased office in Houston. “Ben, I’m gonna tell you what this sounds like. This sounds like blatant bait. You want me to get my best friend to accept your offer, and a prestigious slot at DOJ is a bribe for me to do it. I’m not one of Lyndon’s boys, and neither is George. So...” Barnes cut him right off. “Jim, the job is yours whether George accepts the offer or not. We’ll nominate you Monday morning, no problem there. But we’re going to offer your friend George Bush the chance to be the first-ever Secretary of Energy, a new Cabinet position, and a hell of a lot of importance given the trouble your AY-rab friends have caused this country when it comes to our energy supplies. Now, I hope you’ll see why we approached you. We’d want you anyways. You are a damned good operative, Mr. Baker, but we know George is not favorably inclined towards the President, so yes, we want you to make that approach. It’s not a bribe, it’s just a sensible way for us to get a qualified person in the position. He’s been UN Ambassador, ran a successful oil company, knows the players. He is the man we want because he’ll sail through confirmation and can hit the ground running. I know you don’t want to be his aide or chief of staff, and you can also sail through confirmation. We get two skilled people to work for this country, which if you haven’t noticed, is lacking a Vice President while we’ve still got some rough sailing on the horizon when it comes to inflation and jobs numbers. So, are you in or not?”
James Addison Baker III was no dummy. He might not be thrilled about the circumstances in which the position was being offered, but it was a prize position. Visible, important, and a prime slot for advancement. More than one antitrust head had moved upwards. Robert Jackson became Attorney General and then a Supreme Court justice off the strength of his work running that division. Baker loved politics, but there wasn’t an attorney on Earth who’d pass up a fast-track slot for the Court. “Alright, Ben, you can tell the President I’m in. I’ll set up a meeting with George and we’ll call you together, okay? How do I reach you?” Barnes chuckled at that. “Oh, don’t worry about that. You just call my office and they find me and forward the call wherever I happen to be at.”
*****
In London, the working week should’ve been over, but Tony Crosland was unable to turn his brain off. He had been looking over the details of the current state of the British economy, the loan requirements if the IMF were to get involved, and the latest demands of the various trade unions for salary increases to meet inflation. Typically, fighting inflation meant certain monetarist approaches that were bad for unemployment, hard on the average citizen, and politically unpopular, which is why the Heath government had kicked the can down the road for four years. Now Crosland was examining the can and was disturbed by what he found. They needed more capital to get breathing room for a graduated reduction of inflation, but the only source of that was the IMF, and the medicine was worse than the disease. It was breathtakingly arrogant, the same arrogance America had lorded over Britain for twenty years. Even if one was vociferously opposed to the Suez invasion, the way Eisenhower had tried to destroy a fragile ally’s economy angered Britons across the political spectrum. No matter how much Healey thought it was the only way, the Exchequer was Crosland’s now to decide, and he knew that his mind was far better suited to the task than Denis Healey.
Crosland wasn’t the only man unable to shut his brain off. He’d asked his old friend Roy Jenkins over as well, rather on accident, as the Chancellor called over to Whitehall to request some budget information and Jenkins had picked up the phone himself. Crosland asked if he wanted to come to Number 11 and discuss budgets, and Jenkins agreed. Now, they were both sitting in the state dining room, papers spread out, a bottle of sherry open and a light dinner growing cold as both men sipped the sherry and discussed how to bring matters better shape. Crosland asked Jenkins what he thought the biggest budgetary issue was, and “Woy” didn’t hesitate: the issue was fuel. It cost more to operate the Central Electricity Generating Board even with the use of coal as the primary source. It cost more to operate the British Army On the Rhine. It cost more to fuel the Royal Navy on its surface patrols. Jenkins had brought with him the recommendations of the chiefs of staff and the Naval Ordnance command with regards to the Chevaline program, which had been initiated by the Heath government in 1973 over the objections of the uniformed commanders. The Arbor/Fallon warhead test in May 1974 at the American Nuclear Test Range in Nevada had been reviewed by Wilson and then-Defence Secretary Roy Mason last fall, and a decision was nearing as to whether the government would continue the effort. Jenkins found it noteworthy that the entire uniformed community was against the program, and that it had been started based solely on the beliefs of the politicians. What in God’s name for? The whole concept is bloody useless, as it only makes sense if our sole target was Moscow. A system that has to defeat the Moscow ABM system, as if we’d be firing alone and there wouldn’t be an entire regiment of American ICBMs following behind! Jenkins was determined to find areas to cut to make up for the increased fuel costs their budget had to factor in, and a program destined to cost a billion pounds by the next election was something to get shelved. The Defence Secretary had also received a quote for the Poseidon missile acquisition, the C3 model of the American-developed sea-launched ballistic missile (SLBM), which was a bridge to keep nuclear missile submarines relevant and capable until the development of the nascent Trident system. For Britain, which hoped to keep its existing hulls and not have to build a new series of missile submarines, it was the best play. They would be operating in closer to their targets than the Americans, so there was no need to wait with the older Polaris missiles and then have to build brand-new hulls to support the size of Trident. The Resolution-class was only seven years old since the commissioning of its namesake, and the last of them, HMS Revenge, was a mere five years old, still quite advanced, thank you, and could fit Poseidon into their launch tubes with minimal modifications. Looking through the proposal, which was hand-delivered from the embassy at Kensington Square, Jenkins saw that the Poseidons would cost £123.1 million, and modifications to the warheads would run another…£37.3 million.
That was a true cost-savings, Crosland noted, and they could use that positive differential to help shore up the industrial base. Balance-of-payments was a major part of inflation hitting Britain far more severely, and it was considered vital to improve British exports. Tony Benn had come up with the idea of a National Enterprise Board while in opposition, and despite objections from some quarters (Jenkins included), it was part of the party manifesto for the last election, and Benn had gotten it up and running under Wilson. Benn had actually been rather smart with it so far, using it to help out Rolls-Royce, which was still a major supplier of engines for the British military. The problems went well beyond Rolls-Royce, though. Scores of companies were struggling. British Steel was virtually unsellable beyond the borders of the UK because of high cost. BAC (British Aircraft Corporation) was barely holding it together. Production at the various automobile plants cost more and produced less than any of their competitors. British Leyland was an absolute shambles and on the verge of complete collapse. Thrown together by Benn during the last Labour government to try and keep the once-dominant British car industry running, it’d been beset by terrible management and quality control issues, making the venerated Land Rover, MG, and Jaguar names running jokes in America. Even the Ford Halewood plant in Liverpool, which made the Ford Cortina (one of the dominant vehicles in Europe), faced repeated strikes under the Heath government and essentially bought off the workforce before the election a year ago with an insane wage hike of 32%. A general malaise had settled over the workforce, and there was a bitter debate in Cabinet over how to bring about better performance. Crosland, Jenkins, Healey and Shirley Williams wanted to pull back some of the power from the unions, arguing that they’d run amok and created a fifth columnist government. Jenkins said there was no sense of responsibility, and that the poor quality of production amounted to wage theft by the workers. Benn countered by pointing out how poorly Leyland had been managed since he’d brought about the merger, how they didn’t listen to line workers, offered no way to submit bottom-up suggestions to improve quality control, and designed vehicles that failed before a single one rolled off a production line. He asked the Cabinet how they could possibly sit there and blame the workforce for producing the items so poorly designed by the professional class. The result was stalemate.
The first goal, however, was to cut costs where possible and increase revenue to government coffers, so they could fight inflation. Crosland was working on both, but primarily the latter. The job of those like Jenkins was to cut costs. Chevaline was pointless and opposed by the military chiefs. He would push for the purchase of Poseidon missiles to replace the outmoded Polaris, and do his best to ensure that the Shah of Iran followed through on his inquiry about ordering three Invincible-class carriers, and that would also bring revenue to the coffers. Revenue. The magic word. Revenue had to be increased without creating an onerous tax burden on the populace. Crosland definitely wanted to avoid the problem that Heath’s government faced, with its wealthiest citizens going into tax exile to avoid the high taxes Barber had levied. Crosland certainly agreed with the goal Barber had in mind when levying them, but if they skipped out and didn’t pay, it was next to useless. One answer to this question was both obvious and incredibly sticky. The Royal Family had an extremely generous income from the government (although when balanced against income gathered by crown-owned properties, the government likely won out). Since the thought of taxing the royals was declared out of the question by Wilson before and Callaghan now, Crosland had come up with a sort of end run. There were many properties, castles, et al that the National Trust had been gathering since the end of the War, and Crosland wanted to open them up to tourists. Revenue would be collected by the government, jobs would be added, and it should help provide some cushion for a budget that had relied upon obscene borrowing under Heath. Callaghan had agreed to the idea, and would put it in patriotic terms for the Queen, that by not raising a fuss, they would help stabilize England and prevent matters from getting out of hand. She’d accepted the power cuts along with everyone else in the country, demonstrating a quiet leadership in doing so, but this was a bigger step. It would bring down the wall between monarchy and commoner, allowing the latter to tread the halls, stairs, and floors that only the royals and lords had been able to walk for centuries.
The government needed extra revenue and this would be a way to do it without adding to the tax burden that many in the top earning tiers were fleeing from. Crosland was, however, not just letting that latter part slide. He was also writing legislation that would extend an olive branch towards those who’d been exiling themselves: in return for paying an “alternative tiered income tax”, they would not be forced to stay out of Britain as long as many currently were. The tenure of absence under the current regulations was a full-blown fiscal year (April to March), with only two weeks allowed in country. The nouveau riche of Britain, rock stars from the Rolling Stones to Led Zeppelin and movie stars like Sean Connery and Michael Caine, were enriching other nations with their spending while avoiding paying any tax to Her Majesty’s Government. It was a festering sore on Britain’s image, and on the budget. Crosland’s plan would essentially tier the taxation based upon time spent in-country. While a full year would still mean, for the moment, an 83% tax rate, it would be greatly lowered on a quarterly basis. This meant that said exiles could spend up to three months in country while paying a paltry 22% rate, six months at 47%, and nine months at 62%. While this was far from ideal on the higher ends, the fact that millions of pounds were going uncollected in taxes from those with means while inflation was squeezing those without means was something that required rectifying. It wasn’t perfect, and the Bennites would howl about letting the wealthy off the hook, but in the end, they’d see that some revenue was better than none.
They had until Wednesday morning, when Crosland was due to introduce the budget in the House. Dealing with the unions, well, that was Benn’s part of the pitch now…
*****
It was still the middle of the working day back in Washington, D.C., and a working lunch at Treasury featured a familiar sight: Treasury Secretary Nelson Rockefeller hosting his longtime collaborator/protege, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. It was shaping up to be a very busy year for summits, which is why they were here. The second phase of the OSCE negotiations was wrapping up in Geneva, where Joseph Sisco, the Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs, and David K.E. Bruce, the NATO Ambassador, had led the American delegation. Next month, Canada, Britain, France, West Germany, and the U.S. were gathering at Rambouillet in France to plan a unified assault on inflation (Rockefeller would be leading this gathering), and then in July would be the last phase of OSCE, where the heads of state would gather to ratify an agreement.
Rockefeller’s main concern was the stability of the dollar and getting a grip on inflation. He had Henry in to help brief him on the political aspects of the Rambouillet meeting. It wasn’t that Rockefeller wasn’t capable, but he just didn’t have time, and he knew Kissinger could provide him with the relevant information, plus alert him to any diplomatic minefields that could create future issues on the inflation front. As it turned out, Rockefeller himself had some useful information for Henry, but he did not yet know it. They started out by reviewing the key players. Since the reshuffle in Britain, “Rocky” hadn’t had much time to feel out Tony Crosland, for example. He’d worked with Jean-Pierre Fourcade, the French minister of economy and finance; Canadian Finance Minister John Turner; and Hans Apel, the West German Finance Minister, since taking office last year. Kissinger assured Rocky that Crosland was extremely intelligent and not wedded to the traditional socialism of the old Labourites. Henry added, rather sardonically, this was the first time in world history that four of the world’s biggest powers were all led by men who’d previously been the finance minister for their government, and yet nobody had any solutions to stop the inflationary spiral. Arthur Burns was worried about the continued recession, even though it was turning out to be milder than expected. Paul Volcker, who’d just taken over as head of the New York Fed (and therefore was the true second-in-command of the Federal Reserve, was more concerned about inflation and was advocating that interest rates stay elevated to reduce pressure on borrowing. These were two competing schools of thought, with Rockefeller leaning towards activist spending (he was a true Keynesian, using bond issues to build New York’s infrastructure throughout the 60s while raising taxes, too—very anti-Reagan!) and Connally stuck in the middle between every President’s desire to not have a major recession on their watch and his experience as SecTreas telling him inflation had to be strangled before it overtook everything.
Volcker wanted twelve percent interest rates and Burns was pushing for six. While the average person might look at that and say, well, that’s not too big a difference, right?, any banker worth their salt knew it was seismically different. The median house cost in America was hovering around $40,000. The median household income was $14,400. Someone who financed a house with ten percent down at the Burns rate would pay $400/month, which equated to about 40% of that median income, around the top end of the recommended percentage of housing cost/income ratio. At the Volcker rate, that same borrower would be paying $544/month. That was unsustainable for any family with children. It would mean a wave of foreclosures, which would cause severe recession, or require more government aid, which would dampen the effect that harder rate would have on inflation. The Burns rate, however, would drive inflation upwards to where that difference in housing payments would largely be eaten up by increased costs for meat, produce, dairy, gas, etc. What Rocky hoped to do at Rambouillet was to thread the needle with the help of some of America’s biggest trading partners. The President, back when he was in this position, was unable to reach agreement to return to the Bretton Woods system that the Europeans had bailed on four years ago, depleting American gold reserves to dangerous levels, which in turn forced Nixon’s hand at that time. Burns and Connally both backed his play to protect the dollar, and once it had settled down, Connally had begun negotiations with the men who were now their respective nation’s leaders. While the finance ministers had changed, the final agreement for any deal lay with those who had rejected it after a year’s worth of negotiations, which was part of the reason behind Connally’s resignation in 1972 from Treasury.
The good news, from Rocky’s perspective, was that they all faced the same intractable problem. The nations, like France and West Germany, who’d started the run on the dollar in 1971 were facing the same fuel crunch as the rest of the NATO powers, and that was inserting inflation into their economies as well. They were somewhat insulated by the success of their joint ventures into electronics and computing, but not nearly enough. In short, everyone was ready to deal now, where they weren’t four years ago. Nelson Rockefeller was good at dealmaking. He’d spent a lifetime doing it, from his rescue of what became Rockefeller Center in the 1930s as a young man, to his modernization of New York and getting Nixon to agree to his terms for contesting the 1960 election while still in his first term as governor. That didn’t even begin to encompass his work in the art world, which Rocky had shaped in ways that were still being felt. He ran through his plan with Henry. He wanted to create an exchange program of sorts with the Brits. Like many in the administration, Rockefeller was mightily impressed with the verve and ingenuity of Lee Iacocca at Chrysler. He was changing a lethargic culture, engineering creative solutions, and working to shed the debt his predecessors had created through half-baked ideas. He wanted to offer the Brits a deal: give a stake in the luxury brands of British Leyland to Chrysler, and in return, Chrysler would provide its engineering expertise to Leyland to help it dig out of the hole it’d put itself in. Rover, Rolls Royce, and Jaguar could also offer some magnificent ideas in car design for Chrysler that could be put to use in its new vehicles under development. Rockefeller told Kissinger that he’d love to see commonality of parts between the vehicles as well, so that industrial action at one plant wouldn’t affect others. He’d kept a close eye on the unrest in England, and knew that it was a major part of the problem. Perhaps this was another area where agreements could be worked out. It was one part of increasing the interdependence between the Big Five, as Jack Valenti put it during the last cabinet meeting, which in turn helped boost the common defense.
None of these men were aware of the resentment that the British held regarding their economy and the role that Crosland perceived them as having played in creating their predicament. To Americans it’d been a blip on the radar. The coming talks in France would demonstrate the shortsightedness of their actions twenty years ago.
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Notes from the wasteland
So, the last chapter has a lot to digest. I went back and forth making a lot of changes, trying to explain as many concepts as I could along the way. There's still more to be factored into this whole thing, but some of my writing got obliterated, and I for the life of me can't remember what I'd put down.
Rambouillet is an interesting point in time. Even in alternate universes on this forum, like McGoverning, and in real life, it was a major meeting that changed how the major players discussed economic issues, handed out aid, etc. I've bumped up the timeline here because the POD is such that a lot of things happen faster for these versions of our favorite men/women of the 1970s. Connally took office a full four months before Ford did in real life, without as much of the drawn out drama. Furthermore, Ford was in a strange limbo when he began, stuck with Nixon holdovers, unsure of what he wanted to do. That, in turn, dragged out his ability to respond to the economic crisis that had been swelling for a year-plus.
Connally, on the other hand, not only helped manipulate events, but read the tea leaves and knew he would be king, so to say. He planned before it happened, so he could get the key players he wanted into his administration as fast as possible. By doing so, and by being ideologically diverse within the bounds of the party, he provided himself with more room to breathe. There wasn't as sharp of an inflationary rise, and in turn, unemployment was slower to grow. By this point in 1975, though, the greater trends are still putting him in the same place that Ford was IOTL: do you think more about Arthur Burns' argument that rates needed to stay low to prevent mass unemployment, or do you take Volcker to heart, and punch up rates to stop inflation from getting worse. Unfortunately, Ford vacillated, and while the Fed was supposed to be independent, they'd shown in the past that they would listen to the President if he made a personal appeal. What ended up happening is that interest rates were jacked up to 11.25% by March 1975, and then were slashed to 5.75% the next month. Ford kept fighting with Congress, vetoing different measures (to be fair, some of their proposals were not well-thought out either), and so by the time any agreements happened, it was far too late to affect events.
John Connally has no intention of falling into that trap. He knows that both of those things can sink his presidency, and while he's already done better than Ford, a broad long-term framework was needed, and so far everything that the administration has done falls into the category of reactionary measures.
I've been thinking about this a lot lately, with the various tensions involved in handling the current inflation. Economics is so dependent on not just physical conditions, but psychological ones as well. For example, avian flu has hit the chicken population hard in the past year. This, in turn, has driven up prices for both chickens and eggs. That's the physical effect. However, the psychological effect is how the worries with the chicken supply bleed into other areas. The price of seafood rises because the loss of healthier chicken meat means a run on seafood is likely due to various fears. In turn, demand for more seafood means more fishing, and more diesel fuel used for the boats, and therefore fuel costs increase. Inflation has been exacerbated by firms like BlackRock and Zillow buying houses that are up for sale, turning them into rentals, and in a stroke, increasing the going rental price in markets as high as another $1500/month, and also driving up the cost of purchasing a house, because the number of options are reduced. Rising interest rates, as mentioned in the last chapter, are a further drag on income and money available for consumer spending. None of these issues existed in the same way then as they do now, and my hope is to use this opportunity to explore these issues and find a different way out of the 1970s that doesn't drag millions down with it.
Rambouillet is an interesting point in time. Even in alternate universes on this forum, like McGoverning, and in real life, it was a major meeting that changed how the major players discussed economic issues, handed out aid, etc. I've bumped up the timeline here because the POD is such that a lot of things happen faster for these versions of our favorite men/women of the 1970s. Connally took office a full four months before Ford did in real life, without as much of the drawn out drama. Furthermore, Ford was in a strange limbo when he began, stuck with Nixon holdovers, unsure of what he wanted to do. That, in turn, dragged out his ability to respond to the economic crisis that had been swelling for a year-plus.
Connally, on the other hand, not only helped manipulate events, but read the tea leaves and knew he would be king, so to say. He planned before it happened, so he could get the key players he wanted into his administration as fast as possible. By doing so, and by being ideologically diverse within the bounds of the party, he provided himself with more room to breathe. There wasn't as sharp of an inflationary rise, and in turn, unemployment was slower to grow. By this point in 1975, though, the greater trends are still putting him in the same place that Ford was IOTL: do you think more about Arthur Burns' argument that rates needed to stay low to prevent mass unemployment, or do you take Volcker to heart, and punch up rates to stop inflation from getting worse. Unfortunately, Ford vacillated, and while the Fed was supposed to be independent, they'd shown in the past that they would listen to the President if he made a personal appeal. What ended up happening is that interest rates were jacked up to 11.25% by March 1975, and then were slashed to 5.75% the next month. Ford kept fighting with Congress, vetoing different measures (to be fair, some of their proposals were not well-thought out either), and so by the time any agreements happened, it was far too late to affect events.
John Connally has no intention of falling into that trap. He knows that both of those things can sink his presidency, and while he's already done better than Ford, a broad long-term framework was needed, and so far everything that the administration has done falls into the category of reactionary measures.
I've been thinking about this a lot lately, with the various tensions involved in handling the current inflation. Economics is so dependent on not just physical conditions, but psychological ones as well. For example, avian flu has hit the chicken population hard in the past year. This, in turn, has driven up prices for both chickens and eggs. That's the physical effect. However, the psychological effect is how the worries with the chicken supply bleed into other areas. The price of seafood rises because the loss of healthier chicken meat means a run on seafood is likely due to various fears. In turn, demand for more seafood means more fishing, and more diesel fuel used for the boats, and therefore fuel costs increase. Inflation has been exacerbated by firms like BlackRock and Zillow buying houses that are up for sale, turning them into rentals, and in a stroke, increasing the going rental price in markets as high as another $1500/month, and also driving up the cost of purchasing a house, because the number of options are reduced. Rising interest rates, as mentioned in the last chapter, are a further drag on income and money available for consumer spending. None of these issues existed in the same way then as they do now, and my hope is to use this opportunity to explore these issues and find a different way out of the 1970s that doesn't drag millions down with it.
Minor point but at this time it was the Central Electricity Generating Board that was responsible for trying to keep the lights on in Britain, the successor to the post war BEA.
The National Trust (a charity) has nothing to do with Royal Palaces, it has largely taken on the castles and country houses of the British aristocracy and the NT opened them to the public as soon as they acquired it. Certainly long before the 70's. Also as a charity the the revenue from opening them goes to the charity which covers the cost of maintaining these generally very expensive properties (which was why the former owners couldn't afford to maintain them in the first place).
As for the various Royal Properties you seem to be bringing forward the creation of a Historic Royal Palaces forward by 30 years but the unoccupied Royal Palaces like Hampton Court had been open to the public for a century at this point and anyway they generally lose money apart from the Tower of London, despite being incredibly popular they are also very expensive buildings to maintain. The Tower is the only one that has been consistently in the black. Either way this isn't going to help with Britain's budget problems.
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I literally posted that before leaving on vacation, so I'm only getting to read this now. First, @Thoresby, thank you for the information on the electricity board, I didn't find anything that mentioned it while researching. I think even Dominic Sandbrook's history of this period referred to it as the BEA. I will adjust accordingly.
Second, I learned while on vacation from reading The Man Who Ran Washington, about Mr. Baker, stated that he was not with Baker & Botts at that time because they'd instituted an anti-nepotism policy. I will also be adjusting that accordingly.
Third, my understanding was that the National Trust oversaw everything in this category and had added the more famous properties in the 1980s. If you have more information on this score, I'd love to have it so I can edit the story properly. Furthermore, I'd read that Buckingham Palace, for example, turned a tidy profit right away, and I kind of wanted to roll that in there with the rest. I probably could have worded all of this better. The end goal I had in introducing this now was to take advantage of the upcoming Silver Jubilee raising interest in the royals, and therefore increasing interest in tours, thereby helping to patch holes in the budget. Please feel free to offer options here or in DMs.
Coming attractions
Poppy Bush plays nice with Big John, British Cabinet drama, and Ed Williams prepares for the trial of the century....All this and more in the very near future
Even if it's just a teaser, I'm glad to see this back. I bet Connelly will enjoy Bush coming to him hat in hand, though I don't know if he has it in him to play nice back.
Nixon on trial will be quite the show. I hope he eventually realizes he got played by Big Bad John.
Nixon on trial will be quite the show. I hope he eventually realizes he got played by Big Bad John.
Just wanted to say that I've read through this in its entirety and am really taken by the level of detail invovled.
If someone had told me that the mid-to-late 70s were going to become one of my favorite eras for timeliness, I would have been shocked. But I'm following several now, and they're great! Just a fascinating time period.
Great job!
Edited: On a side note, it's great to see that Bill Guy made it to the Senate for North Dakota!
If someone had told me that the mid-to-late 70s were going to become one of my favorite eras for timeliness, I would have been shocked. But I'm following several now, and they're great! Just a fascinating time period.
Great job!
Edited: On a side note, it's great to see that Bill Guy made it to the Senate for North Dakota!
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Ford nearly won OTL even with his uh haphazard admin, so a better thought out economic policy on it's own might get Connally through 1976.
