The National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics most certainly did get involved in rocketry and space travel in the 1950s--N.A.C.A.* HQ at Langley AFB in Virginia eventually had itself spun off as one of NASA's flagship campuses. (Not the actual old N.A.C.A. offices though, which were integrated with great big wind tunnels--those were too intertwined with Air Force offices, and the revised air and space agency moved to the northwest corner of the Base tract, across the flight line. I know these things in particular because I resided several blocks away in my Dad's officer quarters on base, the most elegant USAF housing and other architecture I've ever seen by the way. Dad's office was among the old N.A.C.A. zone and while the administration and most cutting edge stuff was some miles away on the other side of the complex, the wind tunnels were still in operation, their noise a routine interruption of Tactical Air Command business.
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*The agency's abbreviated designation, being formed long before Americans got used to alphabet soup acronyms everywhere and started trying to make words out of them, is pronounced by spelling the letters out--"En-Eh-See-Eh," not "naka." Which I try to indicate by the painful expedient of typing a period after each letter.
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I believe it was mostly old N.A.C.A. hands at Langley that pretty much ran the Mercury program; Cape Canaveral had pad and launch control, and then Mission Control handed over, not to Houston which was not established yet but to Langley.
Sure, it might seem illogical to have an "aeronautics" organization running a space program, but to be fair, any space craft had to leave Earth through the atmosphere, and any one wanted to recover (manned craft for instance) also had to come back down through it. Of course all precursor craft would operate within it, and evolve from pure atmospheric designs. It would be far sillier not to involve them at all! Lacking any more appropriate civil body, and with prior established agency expertise meaning this one was being queried repeatedly, it was far more logical than not that astronautical responsibility, insofar as it didn't stick to the several military commands, would be devolved there.
So rather than express surprise it would be there in the Truman-Dewey (gaaaah!) transition, I would ask such a surprised person where they think American space efforts would be centered, if not a round robin between the Navy, Air Force, Army--and N.A.CA.? With the latter, as the only civilian body in the list, being favored as the nominal home of any programmed activity, now that Stalin is gone and Zhukov has challenged the USA to a friendly race?
The alternative would be to create a completely new agency, and surely in a search for the closest thing prior art has fostered to astronautical "experts," surely N.A.C.A. would be gutted of staff anyway. Might as well do as OTL (though much earlier) and form a new agency that absorbs N.A.C.A. though it is possible they won't have the foresight to do that. Also unlike OTL, with strictly military rocketry put decisively on the far back burner, suddenly the "action" in terms of government funding and industry interest in rocketry is civil, not military, and is about winning the race. Insofar as hawks or the merely prudent still would like to see ballistic missile weapons capability developed--suddenly the way to do that is to carefully watch what lessons building the space rockets can teach.
It is cleverly inverted from OTL, where until the launch of the first Saturn 1 rocket (and failures and pathetic belated success of Vanguard) the whole space program largely hinged on repurposed military hardware. In terms of military capability and even launch capabilities, the TL may suffer, at least be seriously divergent, for the nature of the military hardware hinged very much on military requirements not relevant to a program to simply put things into orbit. For the latter, efficient propellants are paramount, followed by considerations of cost and safety. For the former, the ability to stockpile and hold missiles ready to launch at any random moment, as quickly as possible, is a major preoccupation that can override efficiency and to a great degree safety and cost. Hence both sides coming to depend on a very risky hypergolic launch platform, the American Titan II rocket and the Soviet "Proton" series, and the Americans then superseding hypergollcs with solid fuel rockets. Solids are far too inefficient to use as complete launch vehicles but are quite well suited to providing massive thrust as boosters early in the launch sequence, and American (and French) launch systems after the Saturn series have come to depend on them OTL. I don't love solids very much and would be pleased to see them sidestepped, but they do have their virtues. And American lines of development even as early as the 1940s were already favoring them, though most of the hard work of making them suitable has yet to be done in 1948. Sidestepping the deadly poisons of the hypergol rockets would also seem good to me--again, though, they are almost, within a few percent, as dynamically efficient as good kerosene-oxygen designs, and it is easier to make the engines too, once the terrible challenges of handling their fluids are mastered. As fluids that stay liquid in temperature ranges we humans are accustomed to and that prevail at launch sites, the military missile race of OTL practically mandated their development. In orbital operations, although the fluid argument actually shifts more to favor liquid oxygen (it is not that hard to limit the boiling of LOX, whereas some hypergolic fluids are in danger of freezing without careful thermal management of another kind--necessary to be sure also to keep kerosene from turning into wax) the relative simplicity of their engine designs also favor them, so an on-orbit operation that foregoes them in favor of cryogenics will be a little tricky. I do maintain it is simply folly to make heavy launch vehicles out of them--but the many successes of the Proton, Titan, and Long March rockets can be cited to put me in my place. (Then I'd cite the Nedelin Disaster, the 1980 Damascus Arkansas incident I blame for the premature death of my uncle some decades hence due to cancers, and the complaints of the Khazak and other tribesfolk of Central Asia for their own health problems due to living downrange of the Soviet/Russian launch complex in Khazhakstan. Round and round we go...just be glad we never saw Chelomei's UR-700 or worse -900 launchers ever developed!)
Now I have enough respect for our author not to presume that military rocketry is totally off the table in this TL. It behooves Zhukhov to soft-play Soviet ICBM development--but not to completely stop it, not anyway without a binding and enforceable treaty with the USA, Western European powers, and eventually China or India not to develop any of them either. Such a treaty regime, keeping strictly to bombers for nuclear weapons delivery, and scaling way back on battlefield artillery, might be in the cards. But so might be a "prudent" mutual agreement, more likely tacit than explicit, to develop ICBM capabilities as a limited contingency that could, in the event of a rupture in relations, be expanded to OTL "Balance of Terror" proportions.
As things were OTL, for the first couple decades of the Cold War, until the mid-60s at the earliest, the Soviet Union had very little credible threat against the USA itself. Their attempts at developing jet bombers with the range necessary fell far short of desired levels of success, and their best bomber was a turboprop job. To be sure, the Tupolev "Bear" bomber series was big, very fast for a prop plane, and pretty comparable overall to the jet-propelled but subsonic B-52. And exercises to test the state of American air defenses also showed alarming weaknesses in it as late as the early 60s, whereas later continental air defense was deemphasized as essentially futile in an era of ballistic missiles--so surely, once the Soviets had their arsenal of the late 1950s, the USA could not hope to be unscathed completely. But the lack of Soviet global projection of forward bases combined with inferior quality and number of aircraft did mean the threat was limited as long as it stayed airborne.
In 1948, of course, it was far more limited still. So was the state of US continental air defense so even then a strike or two on the lower 48 states might have been possible and Alaska might get rather mauled. What kept the balance of terror in the 1940s was the fact that Europe, at any rate, was as the author has shown, a hostage to Soviet intentions.
Therefore, even though OTL at every point of the arms race the USA was actually ahead, and including the strength of such allies as Britain and France, very comfortably so, still it was rational for Khrushchev (and Stalin before him) to invest in the development of ICBMs. These alone (until political events made Cuba available) could threaten the USA itself credibly. The alternative of pouring more effort, even more effort from a better economy, into trying to play the game of airborne delivery against the USA and other Western sophisticated powers was more expensive and less likely to result in a credible threat.
As for the Americans, even a rather expensive missile system would have clear advantages (and disadvantages) over a bomber-dependent system. Aside from big missiles based in hardened shelters in the USA, the Navy of course was interested in developing shorter-range missiles to launch from submarines. In 1948, these programs were more than a decade away from fruition, but I would bet Hyman Rickover had these goals in mind, even if he might be a bit reticent about writing them down at this point.
For both sides to go ahead, albeit at a slower more deliberate pace, and with the avowed intention of deploying only token numbers as long as their rivals also showed restraint as well as the openness necessary to verify their claims, is a real possibility even amid good and ever-improving relations. In that case, the military priorities will still assert themselves, even if both sides' military rocketry remains an appendix of their mainstream and public civil programs.
A treaty banning all missile weapons sweepingly, and restricting air-delivered ones as well, might prevail instead.
Always the key is the willingness of the Soviets to let the Westerners send in inspectors who can verify the limited nature of Soviet defenses. The West would of course also have to be open--unlike the USSR, Soviet spies could move pretty freely in the West and observe quite a lot without being helped. But to be really confident, openly accredited Soviet inspectors would have to be permitted through gates locked against the casual spy.
The Soviets OTL were quite unwilling to allow inspection of course, no matter how generous Eisenhower was in offering to open American skies to them, because their leadership at the center at least knew very well that overall, despite maintaining a lot of force, the potential of the West to crush it was always superior. They feared, with the recent example of Hitler keenly in mind, that if we knew for sure just how weak they were, we would plan an invasion and wipe them out.
Note that although the USA, except for its A-bomb industry and the best Navy in the world, is rather weak in terms of actually deployed troops at this point, only three years before we mustered a vast Army, and most of the veterans of that same Army are fit and liable for call-up. Doing so would strain the domestic economy, but wartime experience showed we had the margin to outproduce any other power and still enjoy unparalleled domestic prosperity--all the better in some respects than the previous decade of Depression due to ample jobs, with the wartime rationing restrictions mainly impacting the lives of a privileged few, while the majority was actually better fed and more secure than ever before. In order to crush the USSR in an all-out slugfest, the American forces would have to be bigger and better armed than ever, and the death toll among them would put the already severe cost Hitler and the Japanese had inflicted in the shade. It was this potential Stalin feared OTL, much more than the pinnacle of it in the form of a hundred or so A-bombs. If Americans resolved on a crusade to wipe out the USSR we could do it. The question of whether we would have that resolution is a political one. By 1948, a lot of Americans were probably convinced Stalin was a threat and a monster on the same scale as Hitler and we ought to end it. But still, a lot also would welcome an honorable way out of that sacrifice and the guilt of massacring much of Eurasia. If Stalin presented us with a just cause and no honorable way out but via victory, he knew, and the inner circle of the Kremlin knew, that the final outcome was at the very least uncertain and the odds were against them.
I have already caviled against the Dewey victory at the polls, and also said I could let it ride with a decent explanation. It needs to be made clear still, I think, that he won by starting to fight Truman more vigorously earlier than the apparent POD we might guess at from the narrative given thus far. It is hard to find the divergence from OTL until we see the Berlin crisis evolve somewhat differently--Dewey would have to have been sniping at Truman effectively at least from that moment on and more likely, before. I still think it should be obvious that with Zhukov changing the game the week before the November election, that story would be headline news every day the rest of that week and on the Monday before, and on the day of the election itself. It would be quite plain at that point that Truman had indeed shone through as a leader of resolve and resource, and that he made the Soviet monolith blink. Surely there would be shift in favor of Truman of some magnitude during that week; and so if I accept that Dewey could win, it would have to be because he persuaded people who did support him OTL to shift earlier, to a degree than they did not all shift back.
And aside from Dewey's general complacency OTL, which was shared by pretty much every political pundit across the entire spectrum (even leftists and New Dealers disliked Truman for reasons opposite those of his Republican detractors, and so many of the staunch New Dealers who had followed Roosevelt had written him off as well) it is just a bit problematic for him to attack Truman, in the juncture of this ominous challenge from Stalin, for being weak on military and foreign policy. To undermine the sitting President in the face of a current crisis is considered a dangerous thing to do in conventional American politics, and OTL anyway Dewey was the very poster boy of Conventional.
I should point out that the Dewey campaign, as the Eisenhower one four years later, attacked the Truman administration on a very broad front--it was not just foreign policy, but domestic, that was at stake. Having lost control of the House and Senate, Truman had been championing advances and reinforcements in New Deal policies that he was powerless to deliver--what he was trying to do was show up the Republicans as reactionary enemies of the interest of the common man he championed. His OTL narrow victory, without the support of any elites to speak of, shows that his vigorous whistle-stop campaigning did convey his message as a being a man of the common people who seriously cared about them, being one of them--and OTL he won over states the New Deal coalition had never carried before, these being rural Midwestern states filled with poor to struggling-middling farmers such as himself. So his policy was to challenge the Republicans to put up or shut up, to either show that they were me-tooists who recognized the importance of the New Deal, or show what he figured he knew were their true colors as champions of wealth and power first. The Republicans relied heavily on charges that over by this point sixteen solid years of Democratic domination, corruption and rot had entrenched itself. By running a moderate liberal like Dewey they hoped to avoid panicking the vast majority of the general public that had indeed benefited from New Deal reforms, while also carrying the conservatives who never thought these reforms were sound policy.
Attacking Truman on foreign policy alone would be dangerous not only because they could be accused of undermining the Commander in Chief in time of crisis but also because I'd think any fair-minded person would realize that Republican penny-pinching had quite as much to do with the whittling down of American current strength at hand as did Democratic welfarism. If the issue was the current levels of force, surely Truman could strike back by pointing out how the Republicans, who dominated control of the legislature in most of his near eight years of Presidency, had hardly wanted to mandate the spending nor compel keeping victorious war veterans who wanted to go home in uniform either. Whereas the Berlin Crisis OTL and still more so here seemed to demonstrate that Truman knew well how to play the hand he was actually dealt, for the benefit of the US and our allies. In this TL, if one did not know that Stalin was apparently backing off in Berlin only to prepare a massive counterstrike, Truman must have looked even better than OTL by the same date.
Therefore it would not do I think for Dewey to merely wait until the actual divergence of this TL becomes apparent in the Berlin Crisis developments to start harping just on Truman's foreign policy alone. He has to have started fighting hard against Truman earlier, and on a broader front. If anything, he should tone down the attacks regarding foreign policy expertise and shift them over to a broader front.
To give the author credit, when I think back on what Dewey is explicitly saying in the week before the election, he is indeed stressing the missed opportunities to build up adequate strength, rather than quibbling with what Truman is doing with the strength he has.
Also, the fact that in driving Zhukov to blink on behalf of the Soviet colossus via the A-bomb threat Zhukov knows is just the first wave of ultimate Yankee victory, Truman had of course kept the ramping up of these strike forces pretty quiet. Since Zhukov does not in fact launch an attack, many Americans are going to be blissfully unaware that Stalin was about to do so. So Truman gets little credit for his part in averting WWIII--in fact of course, his part consisted in being willing to actually fight it, so the Nobel Peace Prize clearly does not go to him.
Therefore, Dewey might continue to natter on on subjects he surely might fall silent on if only he knew how close to the brink he was at that moment.
But to bottom line all this--I can accept that Dewey did win, but it is necessary to be clear that to do so, he had to step out of his comfort zone and take Truman seriously as an opponent, and that he had to risk attacks on a broader front that might have backfired in costing the support of someone or other he was counting on--either, in being too "Republican" in denouncing the New Deal as such root and branch, or even just in specifics that just happened to be dear to the hearts of millions of beneficiaries, stampeding middle of the roaders toward the forthrightly populist Truman, or in being too conciliatory to the new norms of liberal politics, alienating his conservative wing of supporters already bitter about the sidelining of their champion Taft. This, as well as complacency about Truman being a dead donkey already, was a reason Dewey was reticent OTL, and we have to assume here that he went farther out on limbs and took some serious chances.
{Below, after proposing a scenario whereby enough states flip to bring Dewey into office while Truman still remains ahead in the popular vote, I have a bit of a retraction of this however, after reading more about the post-mortems on the '48 election OTL}
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Another aspect of the election of 1948 that has been completely overlooked here, and would hardly be butterflied away without some PODs a year back or more, is that it was a three-way race--indeed a four-way race! FDR's third term Vice President Henry Wallace, having been shouldered out of the Democratic Party for being too progressive, bid for the Presidency on a third party ticket, and bid fair to draw more votes away from the nominally liberal-progressive Truman than from Dewey--this is another reason the Republicans were sure they had this one in the bag. Wallace cost Truman New York State OTL(Wallace won no electoral votes but it seems very safe to say the split threw the state to Dewey, who would not have won it despite it being his home state which had been Governor of, without the Progressive votes mostly from NYC that seem sure to have gone to Truman instead), and I believe at the time it still had more electoral votes than California too. Meanwhile, for the steps he had already taken to chip away at Jim Crow in the USA such as formally decreeing the desegregation of the military, and because he would not back off and pledge to leave segregation intact, a strong "Dixiecrat" campaign which again would hardly take any states from Dewey's strongholds but surely would chip away at Truman's southern support, was run that unlike the Wallace campaign, actually cost him electoral votes--39 from four Southern states. These states, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and South Carolina, were the 4 where the State parties had refused to list Truman as the Democratic candidate; in remaining Southern states and across the nation Strom Thurmond had to run as a separate, "States Rights Democrat," and Truman won all the others. The biggest Dixiecrat win outside those four was in Georgia at just over 20 percent, but with Truman winning nearly 61 percent there even so, the balance going to Dewey.
It is a very sobering fact that indeed, it hardly would have taken even a "mere" 100,000 votes flipped in California and Ohio to switch their combined 50 electoral votes over to Dewey from Truman; looking at the very close totals in each, it seems rather that a mere 12,500, 9000 in California and 3500 in Ohio, could do the job. That is less than one fifth of a percent in those two states combined. (Ohio was obviously closer than California). That same flip applied to the combined total of nearly 50 million popular votes counted across the nation amounts to just under 91,000, so I interpret Truman's melancholy reflections to mean that this tiny shift did happen over the nation as a whole to dent 100,000 votes out of his popular margin, add it to Dewey's, with the outcome that Truman still wins over a million more popular votes than Dewey, but with his 50 electoral votes down (from an OTL the TL can only speculate on among millions of other possible outcomes) and Dewey 50 up...wait a minute! Truman's OTL total is 303, Dewey's 189--the flip leaves Truman weak at 253, but still ahead of Dewey at 239! Dewey eight more electoral votes to pull ahead of Truman!
Worse than that--he needs a total of 266, 27 more than just flipping Ohio and California alone can account for, to win over 50 percent of the Electoral College's total 531 votes. If he doesn't do that, I may be mistaken but I think this throws the election into Congress. OTL the Congressional delegation elected in 1948. (Wikipedia cites this as the Dixiecrat goal--and that it would have happened if Dewey had carried only two of the three swing states of California, Ohio--and Illinois!
Now if Dewey also took Illinois as well, that would put him over the top. To flip that state would have required just under 17,000 votes to go the other way--but that is a considerably higher percentage than the national 0.2 percent flip, one in 100, the other two states needed. It is four times the rate in fact. What are the odds that Dewey would not do even better in California and especially Ohio, and thus come much closer in the popular vote, possibly even overtaking Truman, and yet prevail in such an infamously Democratic-partial state as mid-20th century Illinois with its Chicago vote? To be sure, the countryside of the state makes it competitive for Republicans--but Truman campaigned very well in countrysides, including Midwestern ones that had gone to Dewey in 1944!
We can of course still imagine a general national flip, one that happens, uniformly applied across the nation, to be just enough to flip Illinois by a handful of votes. Note that the states between Illinois and California, ranked by the size of their Truman plurality OTL, do not flip with this 0.85 percent of the popular vote flip, except for Ohio which is by far the most delicately balanced in percentage terms, because they are Southern states in which much of the margin against Truman, amounting to a combined majority in these states, is made up of Strom Thurmond supporters. So with a uniform transfer of 0.85 percent across the nation in every venue, we only flip these three big states--California, Ohio, Illinois. That amounts to not 100,000 but 207373 people doing going from Truman to Dewey across the nation. (Or in some combination, up to twice that number of Truman supporters simply not showing up to vote at all along with a certain quota of flippers dropping to zero).
Rather than flipping Illinois (though Truman's thin margin there, higher to be sure than the national average popular vote margin but not by much, can be presumed to be eroded as well) perhaps we should instead look at flipping some other states. Between Ohio and California, on the consecutive list of OtL Truman states by descending popular vote percentages, we have Tennessee, Florida, and Virginia. These three states combined give 31 electoral votes, more than enough to get the job done--though without even one of them, the count falls short and the vote goes to the House. Note that as Southern states, they all had Thurmond on the ballot as a third party candidate. In addition to flipping votes from Truman to Dewey we might also suppose that Thurmond does better there. For him to do well enough to take any of these states on his own behalf would require a really massive surge in his direction, which is quite unreasonable. This, even in one of the states (Florida is closest, at 15.4 percent) would achieve the State's Rights aka Dixiecrat goal of forcing the election to the House (assuming the close Truman/Dewey balance holds otherwise) quite automatically. But it can't happen!
However, we can reasonably suppose that after trimming the OTL margin of Truman's victory in each by a fifth of a percent, consistent with Truman's morose "100,000 votes," that a switch from Truman to the Dixiecrats in each of those three states can switch them over to the Dewey column.
So let us say that in those three states, which are all Southern, everyone who dared consider pulling the lever for a Northern liberal Republican (quite a lot did, considering the reputation of the "Solid South") stands pat and are joined by 0.2 percent, one in 500, of those who did OTL vote for Truman there, and then that just enough people who voted for the mainstream Democratic candidate on their state ballots (Truman) bolted over to vote for the Dixiecrat Thurmond (on the ballot in all three of these states, though obviously not in many other states--Thurmond did get 0.03 percent of the California vote though, so they were on the ballot there unless those were write-ins...). Note that we must add the whole adjusted gap between Truman and Dewey to let the Republican pull ahead. Then we go back and add a bit more margin, taking from Truman only, to make the gaps larger than just one person per each state, which would stink to high Heaven.
Thus, after shifting 0.2 percent from Truman to Dewey we have
Virginia: 6.45 percent more to Thurmond, or 62.32 more than he got OTL, 27,042 switched from Truman to Thurmond
Florida: 14.68, raising Thurmond by 95.17 percent, or 85,424 switches
Tennessee: 11.87 percent, 88.516 percent more or 65,388 more voters for Thurmond from Truman.
From the total number of votes counted in each, we are looking at an average switch of 11.5 percent votes from Truman to Thurmond, in the total population of these three states. In addition to these three, ten other states commonly considered "Southern" had Thurmond on the ballot, along with Missouri (recording negligible votes for the Dixiecrat) and three other states clearly not Southern--California, New Hampshire, and North Dakota--hosted him on their ballots too. There are no votes for Thurmond recorded for West Virginia or Oklahoma and no "0.00" listed either so I assume he was not on their ballots. Ignoring CA. MO and NH, the combined population of the 14 states polling significant Thurmond support (13 southern states plus ND) have a total vote count of 6,855,393. If we assume similar shifts in this aggregate from Truman to Thurmond to that barely needed under my assumptions to switch the above three states to Dewey, we would have some 786,000 votes lost from Truman to Thurmond in all of them put together. Remember this also assumes another 100,000 having switched directly from Truman to Dewey, so relative to OTL in this scenario, Truman loses close to a million votes altogether, nearly 9 times the figure he muses over.
Now this is relative to OTL, and they don't know how that turned out here, so presumably Truman is just looking at the figure for Dewey himself, which by my assumptions indeed only got 100,000 more than OTL. But Truman would not know that figure either; he could only be speculating on that many votes, spread into key states, switching enough states to make the crucial electoral difference. Thurmond does not get any more electoral votes in this scenario; in no state was he within 12 percent of victory outside of the 4 where he appeared as the one and only Democrat, which he won handily. Here his margin of victory there is presumably greater, and he comes closer to winning a few, and his total popular vote is 5/3 greater than OTL, close to 2 million total and over 4 percent. Truman loses 886,000 altogether; bringing him down to 23,300,000 or 47.76 percent while Dewey gains 100,000 for 22,100,000 for 45.29 percent.
Truman's popular vote margin over Dewey is thus still 1.2 million votes out of 48.8 million or about 2.5 percent, with 222 electoral votes to Dewey's 270, Thurmond holding the balance just as OTL. In terms of the electoral vote ratios, Dewey leads with just under 51 percent of electoral votes compared to OTL where Truman's margin in that metric was 57 percent.
The above scenario is not quite nailed down yet. If we assume the same shift to Thurmond from Truman holds in proportion to votes Thurmond actually got OTL, then there are some close calls, but no other states switch. In some cases very large margins of victory fall to moderately close, but by and large the map comes out the same except the 5 states we switched.
I was going to point out how outside the south we need not assume a vote switched versus OTL to Thurmond is necessarily switched from Truman, but the point is moot since very few states outside the south featured Thurmond on their ballots at all, and only in Dakota, which I counted in the general statistics above, did Thurmond get significant numbers of votes. Northern Conservatives had few options; there it was the leftists who were free to vote their consciences for either Wallace or Norman Thomas running as a Socialist. Although Wallace got more popular votes than Thurmond did OTL he got no electoral votes whatsoever and neither did Thomas.
Too bad for the ultra-conservatives then! Presumably these were Conservative Republicans (ones who aren't much invested in the traditional Republican opposition to Jim Crow, which won't be true of all conservative Republicans but certainly might be of some of them) as well as conservative Democrats wishing to Truman's ship in favor of State's Rights, status quo on racial relations, or perhaps just some other conservative position such as anti-Communism. Dewey might look strongly anti-Communist while being acceptably progressive on matters dear to American hearts generally--but once one goes down the road of fervent anti-Communism, who knows where the line between pure and impure must be drawn? For a passionate anti-Communist, Thurmond might look better than Dewey though he agrees Truman is worse than either. In this election, knowing Thurmond has not got a chance at winning the Presidency itself would not have mattered so much to passionate conservatives; they knew he hoped to run the two through the political Inquisition in the House, where people even deemed "extreme" in their "passion for liberty" have a voice and a vote. Thus even if the foredoomed winner were Dewey, the man could be interrogated on his positions, any questionable associates purged from his new Administration before it starts, and in general he can be reminded of his duties to American sacred values. So might reason a would-be Thurmond voter who is indifferent to racial issues as such. (Even one who fancied himself a champion of "Negro Rights" could argue that the preservation of American freedom is paramount and the foundation on which all human rights rest, and that negotiating a less repressive situation for them will be the better for including and mollifying white Southerners in the process. Therefore he might rationalize that Thurmond could do more for improving the condition of the Negro in the South than ether Dewey or Truman, and sleep soundly after voting for the outspoken segregationist).
Which scenario is more likely, that some 210,000 people all switch their votes from Truman to Dewey, (the minimum number proportional to what it takes to get Illinois to switch, which would already take care of California and Ohio with lots of margin to spare) or that a far larger number of Southerners would turn against Truman to favor Thurmond, with the paradoxical result of switching three Southern states over to Dewey by sheer attrition of Truman's vote? Note my estimate of nearly 800,000 more Thurmond voters, all turning away from Truman, is contingent on supposing a general national shift of 0.2 percent in the close ballpark of another 100,000 people--a number that is consistent with Ohio and California switching directly to Dewey. If we didn't suppose that we'd need a bigger Thurmond swell. Vice versa all we need is over double the "100,000" figure bandied about to get just Illinois to switch--we don't need any swell in Thurmond votes then. And since we only need the vote switch to happen in Ohio, California and Illinois, we don't really need all those extra 107,000. But if we suppose that 0.85 percent switch happens in those three states only, we are obviously manipulating ASBs to make it so; we need to double it or more to argue that this is due to a plausible shift.
Illinois, despite modern mythology, is not incapable of voting for a Republican, but we can see from the statistics that it would take that near 1 percent flip there. Personally I think that a much bigger flip in the South for Thurmond might be more plausible than to suppose a more effective Dewey campaign alone gets the job done. With my Southern theory, more states flip, and the majority that do are Southern, and the suggestion that stronger campaigning is what does the trick works with the supposition that a Thurmond campaign can really rip loose if Dewey takes his own gloves off a little bit.
OTL, Truman's sound if not enormous victory in the popular vote, despite over 5 percent of it going to third and fourth parties, and solid lead in the electoral college, combined with a retaking of the House and Senate for his party--which of course, in those bodies, included a whole lot of conservatives from the South who would be problematic on racial issues and demand certain conservative stances such as firm anti-Communism, weak or neutered support for unions and (for necessary anti-Communist purposes only) high defense spending (which however tended then and now to be disproportionately spent in the South, especially as new defense industries alongside traditional heavy concentration of bases there only accentuated, so their bar of "necessity" would be pretty low--with all this, the interpretation was first of all that conventional wisdom was way off base, and that the New Deal stood on a firm popular base politicians tampered with at their peril. Later reversals for the Democrats, notably in the wake of the China and Korean crises, would end this Indian summer of the New Deal, but with Eisenhower running the administration as a moderate trusted to have some grasp of foreign policy and a lot of expertise at evaluating what would constitute a strong defense, but quite middle of the road on domestic issues, radical reaction squared off against a pretty broad if soft liberal consensus.
Now in this ATL, with Dewey winning, if the process happened as I suggest via a remarkably large Dixiecrat rally, it will look quite different, even if we assume the Democrats do take back the House and Senate again, and even if we suppose that the rip tide against them in 1950 is not nearly as strong. Given the ATL events in Russia we can figure politicians of all stripes but the most reactionary are going to get a soft ride--which favors Dewey for reelection in '52 but also the Democrats for keeping control in Congress.
But in hindsight, how would it all look?
Well, it has been agreed that Dewey could and, if he wanted to win, should have campaigned harder. The author has focused on campaigning on foreign policy and defense, and having said why I thought that was dubious, I do note in the accounts of the election that this was a field where he was very soft on Truman indeed. As I say, it is not clear to me how much of an attack dog Dewey could have become on this front without it boomeranging back on him.
But OTL he was a big me-tooer on foreign policy and defense preparedness. Suppose he had become only moderately aggressive, a tone the author did project in his last-minute speeches? Supposing that this was merely a reiteration, perhaps toned down in view of the crisis at hand, of a theme he adopted considerably earlier. Remember Dewey was not alone in the race against Truman. From a position much farther to the right than Dewey, Strom Thurmond, speaking for the reactionary wing of the Democrats, could hit much harder on these issues. My scenario has the real shift in votes happening in the South, only indirectly benefiting Dewey by sapping Truman in three key Southern states--but presumably appeals that could move a significant minority of voters in Virginia, Florida and Tennessee would have resonance in other Southern states where the shift makes no final difference to the Electoral College outcome. To account for a sufficient shift to give Dewey those three states, I have to figure eight times the number of voters necessary to shift to tip California and Ohio go Dixiecrat instead of for Truman.
The way a pundit can read this after the fact is, to say that the New Dealers have neglected strong conservative values dominant in this nation. By failing to respect and honor them, the conservative spirit has acted to restore proper balance. Since the Dixiecrats knew they could not take the Presidency for themselves alone, their whole intention was to bring that election, and national executive policy in general, into a more involved political process where the Southern delegation would have a lot more leverage. They failed to bring the election into the House but they have, assuming the brute force of a near doubling of Thurmond's popular vote is the leverage Dewey needed, tipped the balance more their way. So they might have hoped anyway when Dewey's stand on racial issues was better hidden than Truman's!
But now they don't have a fellow Southerner in the Oval Office, one raised as Truman was with a proper devotion to the Old South and a gut understanding of the importance of racial hierarchy. To have one of those turn on them and tell them they damn well could adapt to treating their African neighbors with more respect and decency was upsetting--and unsettling. Now Harry is gone, and instead there is this Northern Yankee. Only a minority of Southern states actually voted for him and two of these (Virginia and Florida) are compromised by northern ties as is Maryland that voted for Dewey OTL. If Dewey tries to pull anti-Jim Crow rabbits out of his hat now, the Dixiecrats can very credibly threaten him. It is no soft road to the modern concept of proper interracial peace!
Meanwhile, much of the defection from Truman to Thurmond in the South must be a matter of foreign policy as well as a stand on segregation. Ergo, if Dewey was buffaloed into hot, harsh language on the campaign trail, again the Dixiecrats claim moral authority to hold him to it or get out of the way.
On the other hand, standing over moderately to the left, there is Harry S Truman, with over a million more votes cast for him than Dewey, still ready and able to play the game of "Catch the Republicans favoring the fat cats." There is little love lost between him and other leftist forces, such as the unions that deserted him in this election, or the administrative elites Dewey must to a large degree replace with new Republicans lest he lose support among his own party not to mention go back on promises to make a clean sweep in Washington, who also ditched him and tried to cozy up to Dewey. If Dewey governs as a moderate, Truman can only carp, but if he shifts right to conciliate both his own party right wing and the Dixiecrats, Truman is in a fine position to snipe.
I suggested a Truman comeback, but it is Constitutionally problematic. A new Amendment limits Presidents to two terms. That Amendment also has a loophole just for the man holding the office when it passed--that man being Harry Truman. But is it a lifetime exemption for him, or would it only apply if he'd kept office by means of repeated re-election? Does it apply to Truman now that another elected President intervenes and a new run would be a fresh start? Well, if it is a truly fresh start and Truman is now free to hold the office for 8 more years, one could hardly count the very near to 8 years he's already held it, could one? If those nearly two terms, one serving out the lion's share of FDR's fourth, do count obviously Truman is barred from seeking the office again. I think a strict ruling on the Amendment would give him, Harry Truman, at least 8 more years in office if he could win them, and might even be stretched to say he and he alone can run as many times as he likes.
But does he like? OTL he did complain about the strains of the job and considered anyone who would seek it out of desire rather than duty to be a madman. Now he's out of it and can perhaps assume another position. Being governor of Missouri or even a Senator again might seem too much of a come-down and he was IIRC thinking of backing out of the Senate before the Party put him in under Roosevelt. A friendly administration might appoint him to the Supreme Court--he actually had experience being a county judge for some years after all, and the Court would get him out of the way. So maybe a less friendly administration--Dewey himself, despite Truman's vigorous and ungentle campaign talk against him, or Eisenhower--might offer it to shut him up. But they have other candidates to put in instead. Note that Earl Warren is out of the running at least until 1952 because he is Vice President now.
Will Ike ever even run? Assuming Dewey does not do anything to muddy up Republican chances in '52, presumably he will run again and the party will defer to him. Eisenhower certainly won't run against him then. If the party thinks it is in big trouble, they might seek to dump Dewey and ask Ike to step up to save the day. But that would be a very different situation than the OTL long-overdue (in Republican estimation) clearing of the Temple of Democratic shenanigans; a housecleaning of their own party is a much more awkward standard for Ike to run behind. Besides Dewey would have to be very dumb to screw this up, with the Russians rolling over onto their backs to be petted.
By 1956, Eisenhower's health issues, which might have skewered the deal for him in '52 OTL already, will be a very dark cloud over his candidacy.
At least we probably don't have to worry about Douglas MacArthur--he tried for the '48 nomination, presumably here as in OTL, and crashed and burned. He is in no position to run against Dewey and it is hard to see how he could ever.
By '56 a Democrat might be the brightest prospect again, depending on how the whole Civil Rights saga goes, and how the voters judge Republican custodianship of their economic interests. In terms of his own health, Truman might well be able to serve until 1964, the questions would be, would he be willing to, and would voters enable him to, and would a Supreme Court with a few Dewey appointees try to put the kibosh on it? (Again to avert this nightmare, Truman himself might be one of these appointees and so out of the running).
So to get back to the pooches that stand around the White House today, in 1949, will Dewey find a way to screw them?
The big change from OTL being the foreign situation.
In the new ATL context of a conciliatory Zhukov, the immediate excuses to go all out on a new round of military buildups are much reduced. The proposed settlement in Europe should allow for withdrawal and stand-down actually. And it does require a certain degree of finesse in dealing with the Russians. Zhukov, acting to be sure in the interest of his own country primarily, has opened up considerably, and in doing so knows he is risking his own neck at the hands of the Party as well as the welfare of his country. The Russians are going to be very nervous about trusting the good will of a bunch of capitalists, particularly now that the infamously anti-worker Republicans (oh, how they have fallen since the 1860s!), the party of Hoover, have taken over.
Actually IIRC, already by 1948 Truman had done a lot to rehabilitate Herbert Hoover, renaming the great dam after him, and inviting him onto a number of important commissions drafting proposals for the reform of the Federal Government. I don't recall right now just how far along these reforms were by the election. And the Soviets--well, Nikita Khrushchev had once, as a young Party member, distributed food aid Hoover managed in the wake of the Russian Civil War back in the early 20s, and liked to jokingly call Hoover "my boss!"
But anyway--while the Stalinist era obviously did not take the claims of Roosevelt's New Deal to represent a real new epoch in American society very seriously, still it was the Democrats who had opened relations with Moscow, and acted as allies in the Patriotic War; now General Zhukov has opened the door to the Yankees with their nearly 100 A-bombs just as the Democratic party is shown the door and the frankly capitalist Republicans are back in power. What now? This may be the party of his friend Eisenhower, but it is also the party of no Communists' friend MacArthur, not to mention J. Edgar Hoover's witch hunters in the FBI, or the Dulles brothers. Depending on just how Dewey handles things in the next couple years, Zhukov may be vindicated and in strong if not unshared control of the Party and nation, or he may be disgraced (therefore almost certainly dead) and Molotov or someone we hardly know from OTL may be in charge of a much insulted, frightened and newly sealed-up again Soviet Union in a frantic hurry to build all the A-bombs they can and to stir up as much trouble for the Yankees as is feasible.
We all of us reading this hope not of course, and this presumes that Dewey has the good sense to recognize the delicacy of Zhukov's position, and the wit and grace to give the Soviets what they need without the anti-Communists who got him elected having his hide for it. If Dewey can do this, I imagine the Zhukov Kremlin will become quite fond him, as much as they came to like Richard Nixon OTL.
There may well be a China crisis still, but Korea is going to be another matter. Either the Russians, in the course of pursuing a softer line versus the West, lose control of the East Asian Communists but thereby wash their hands of them, so that any Northern aggression would be able to look only to Mao for support, or perhaps Zhukov can simply bring them to heel, and Korea remains partitioned. I don't think Zhukov can bring Mao to heel, at all. And how will he handle importunities from anti-colonialist street fighters like Ho Chi Minh?
It is a little bit too late to patch over relations with Tito in Yugoslavia as though there never had been any hard feelings. And actually, if we have preempted the Tito-Stalin split, Zhukov's problems with Tito might ironically be just as bad, because until Tito realized that Stalin was moving against him, he and his Yugoslav party had the reputation of being Stalin's hatchet man in gatherings of the Eastern bloc parties. Surely under Zhukov's disarmament proposals, Yugoslavia would at best be left to her own devices to defend against capitalist encroachments, if not mandated to rein in her own capabilities along those lines. It would be not too unlikely for Tito to wind up leading a faction of Eastern European leaders denouncing Zhukov for abandoning them to capitalist reconquest. To head this off, Zhukov has to make sure his proposals are not one-sided, and stand up to Dewey telling him Soviet domination of Eastern Europe is the same as Hitler's rule in his eyes--and if Dewey forgets to say this, there is the whole Nixon/McCarthy/Dulles wing of his own party to beat him about the head for forgetting, not to mention all those Dixiecrats, shedding tears for the captive Hungarians and Poles and Czechs---you know, the same people the Klan would run out of a white town in the South with no blacks to persecute.
I hope you as author can navigate the tricky quagmires of on the ground realities of the 1950s that the Cold War of OTL covered over with a stage for enacting a simple two-sided morality play on (or perhaps it was more like a Punch and Judy show) and also resist the siren song of fans who want to see justice done for the terrible injustices the Soviets committed OTL, and come through these murky and turbulent waters with a plausible win-win. The challenges are nasty enough that the story can have happy endings and still be gripping and interesting!
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I've said a lot of things, far more than I intended when I started with a quick comment on N.A.C.A. (It is a pain writing all those periods in there). Just as I have been skeptical that Truman would lose the '48 election, so I have grave grave doubts that Stalin would ever have put himself in the position he does here where Zhukov can get rid of him. If in fact he had resolved to use the Berlin crisis as the opening maneuvers of a third world war, I'm sure he would not have gathered his peeps together to test out their positions, certainly not in big conferences where they could turn on him as a group, and probably not one on one either. He'd either be quite sure that they are going to do whatever he tells them to, when he tells them to, or he'll lay out torturous traps for them, like as not delegated to Beria or the guy he put to check Beria, and eliminate them. If no open and shut excuse emerges, he can just erase anyone he wants to on suspicion. He doesn't have to tell anyone stories about why--although he generally did; the Soviet system worked in part, among Party members anyway, on the principle of Party infallibilty and the need for wrongdoers to admit their guilt and error before being eliminated.
However I also doubt that Stalin would ever have plotted the world war he is planning here. Prepare for one, absolutely! Actually launch it--not a chance in hell. He knew better than that and was waiting for the inevitable rot of the capitalist system to undermine his foreign foes and for the correlation of forces to guarantee Soviet victory. However long that took; he was in no great hurry.
Closing off Berlin OTL was I believe a probe--not a feint, for that would imply a "real stroke" planned elsewhere. He was in the habit of testing Western responses to this and that provocation, and seeing what we would do about it. He knew as well as Zhukov does that if he attacks the West in a way that consolidates American and British will and recommends a crusade to destroy world Communism, he will probably not come out of it the victor in the long run.
So--instead of driving Zhukov to a desperate one-man Valkyrie (and it was awesome and fun to read that, but should we really think he could actually do that?) then the likely thing for Stalin to do is pretty much as OTL--probe on the borders of his power, but back down once the capitalists figure out how to handle it. If it provoked us into an insane act of aggression that demands a full-on defense of the Motherland--so be it. But only because such an act of rage on the Western part tends to weaken the western case for a noble crusade, therefore a negotiated peace with Soviet gains is not unlikely. Launch the all out war? never, that would be far too risky and uncertain for our Stalin