The thing about Kay Graham supporting this investigation is that if it surrounds Edward Bennett Williams there’s a strong likelihood that she’s involved or at least tries to protect him. It was Graham who backed Bennett Williams’ becoming Mayor-Commissioner.
TLIAW: Camelot Lost
- Thread starter Enigma-Conundrum
- Start date
Bill Clinton has an affair with OTL’s Governor of Louisiana while being married to OTL’s Governor of Kansas and TTL’s daughter of a former president.
It’s a minor plot line in a larger issue of Clinton being involved in a corruption scandal.
Oh, Williams is not related to the pushback scandal -- Williams being name-dropped as Mayor-Commissioner was mostly just me puffing up the portfolio of Woodward in a world without Watergate, plus a little sprinkle of worldbuilding. It's history by the Collins investigation.
40. Roy Cohn (R-NY)
40. Roy Cohn (Republican-NY)
January 20, 1989 - January 20, 1997
“I bring out the worst in my enemies and that’s how I get them to defeat themselves.”
January 20, 1989 - January 20, 1997
“I bring out the worst in my enemies and that’s how I get them to defeat themselves.”
Conservatives had been denied one too many times. It had happened when they went to bed expecting President Nixon and woke to find Adlai Stevenson, that limp-wristed pinko egghead, had beaten their darling by nearly three percentage points after the polls told them it was a tie. It had happened when Barry Goldwater cried invisible bitter tears onstage after New York cast three thousand too many votes for Bill Fulbright. It had happened when the Establishment cloaked that maverick traitor Tommy Kuchel in an aura of inevitability with big-dollar donations from friends of the Rockefellers and powerful endorsements. It had even happened when the world turned upside down and Jack Gilligan, that sanctimonious icon of the rowdy masses, plowed his way through Washington and reshaped the nation like putty in his hands. Walter Cronkite’s famous proclamation of “a political revolution tonight” when that 270th electoral vote was called for Gilligan was felt all too keenly by them, and it was the last indignity they could handle in the long slouch towards Gomorrah, to borrow a phrase from the arch-conservative Yale law professor and Collins impeachment lawyer Robert Bork. The suburban squares, the consumers instead of those aghast at rampant consumerism, the folks more worried about the increasing power of the Soviet Union than far-off atrocities by some petty warlord, they didn’t want to hear about well-meaning reform and the righted wrongs of the old society. They were far more concerned about the very thing that felt slipping through their fingers with every news story about rising crime rates, cutting-edge Soviet advancements, and liberalizing social mores: control.
On an individual level, this dovetailed neatly with the desires of one Roy Marcus Cohn. Cohn had been a household name for years back in the 1950s as Joe McCarthy’s legal counsel. He used to be the type of man those accused of communist sympathies trembled before in hearing rooms, a Richelieu beside the tailgunner’s throne. But that had passed with time, as do all empires. McCarthy made a fool of himself targeting the Army, and he had died a morose drunk with little to his name but a censure by the body that he once dominated. Cohn had fallen with him - the hearings had stopped, and though he returned to New York City for his law practice he no longer had cameras to strut before and reporters to give bombastic comments to. Roy Cohn’s control over the evening news cameras and the next day’s headlines was reduced to nothingness.
Even without that, Cohn’s access was unrivaled - having once, in 1959, forced then-Vice President Richard Nixon to wait on him for a phone call for no reason other than he had the ability to get away with it. He turned this access into a booming legal business back in New York City, the type of lawyer one hired when they wanted someone who’d lie, cheat, and bluff their way through whatever big-ticket crimes they had the misfortune of being caught committing. Even the federal government couldn’t keep him down, and yes, in his mind, it was an attempt to keep him down as revenge for McCarthyism. He was indicted three times through the 1960s for bribery, perjury, and obstructing justice, but each time he managed to swagger his way through the charges and emerged scot-free, his aura of invulnerability strengthened by every case. But Cohn wanted more. The ascension of Stevenson and Fulbright, two men who had explicitly rejected his legacy and in his eyes were little more than stooges for the communists he rooted out, only further lit a fire under that burning desire he had for the halls of power. Even as he had made himself a power-broker in New York and integrated himself into the political circles of the right, he was still just a normal lawyer past his public prime.
Fortunately, his chance was coming, though he wouldn’t have expected it. When Kuchel-Lindsay won its landslide, that meant Lindsay - the junior Senator from New York, as it were - vacated his seat, leaving it open until the next election in 1970. Governor Rockefeller, seeking to support the aims of the Kuchel administration in more ways than just sending his brother David to serve as its Secretary of the Treasury, appointed a Republican of sterling Lincolnian credentials to the seat in the form of Ogden Reid. But Reid was as much a maverick as the new president, and his strong support for environmental conservation, anti-poverty measures, and fighting housing discrimination quickly earned him the ire of the Republican Party at large. Even so, Nelson Rockefeller’s dominance in the state all but assured him re-nomination, much to the ire of conservatives.
The ire of conservatives had other means of expressing itself. Due to New York’s ballot fusion laws, the state had a bevy of smaller third parties, and one of these was the Conservative Party. Founded in 1962 and brought to fame by William F. Buckley’s near-miss campaign for mayor in 1965, the party was perhaps the perfect vehicle for dissident conservatives hoping to make their voices heard. To that end, they needed a candidate. The rank Goldwaterites bounced many names around: William F. Buckley, Mayor Mario Biaggi, football player Jack Kemp, and state senator John J. Marchi. All of them refused. Before the party was about to renominate Buckley’s brother James from his quixotic bid against Jack Javits, one of the men of the operation suggested asking Roy Cohn. It seemed a bit foolish to the rest given his previous legal troubles, his Democratic registration, and his known bachelor status, but it was surely worth a shot before settling on the famous conservative’s brother.
Surprisingly, Cohn was interested. For whatever reason Roy Cohn’s desire to be something, to sit at the helm of American public life once more overwhelmed potential concerns. Biographers theorize that the recent death of his mother, whom he had a complex and unusually tender relationship with, had something to do with it, but Cohn himself never indicated anything of the sort. After a second meeting, Cohn agreed to run, and his name was the only one placed for the Conservative nomination against Senator Reid. He was flamboyant on the campaign trail, drawing bemused attention from the state press as he swaggered his way across the state, singing God Bless America - “my favorite song” - at multiple rallies and shaking virtually every hand in reach. The turning point came at the one televised debate, in which he was invited due to the Conservative Party’s performance in 1968. Cohn was the breakout star on camera, pointedly drilling into Reid for his voting record being “as liberal as Hubert Humphrey’s” and Democratic nominee, Manhattan Representative Paul O’Dwyer, for his defense of allowing books written by communists on library shelves. Signs reading O.R. = OCCASIONALLY REPUBLICAN held by incognito Cohn staffers dogged every rally Reid held, and a detour of his to march in Atlanta for Dr. King’s freedom drew him away from New York for a crucial part of the campaign and allowed Cohn to paint him as an absentee Senator. Come election day, Cohn had gone from third place to winning by two points. Roy Cohn was back.
As a senator, Roy Cohn - who quickly elected to caucus with the Republicans - was an instant star for dissident conservatives. His legislative record itself was relatively light, mostly voting down liberal bills and signing onto right-wing proposals on tax reform, crime, and foreign affairs. However, Cohn had long since learned that the real power of the body for a man like him was not in drafting bills but in the camera. He was a regular guest on Firing Line and Meet The Press as a voice for the right wing, so much so that a running joke in Congress (intended as a double entendre for the open secret in his closet) was that Roy Cohn was the man to ask for male makeup tips for going on camera. His public lobbying for Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn led to the Kuchel administration approving the Soviet dissident’s refuge in the United States, infuriating Yuri Andropov but also reminding the public of Cohn’s anti-communist bona fides. The new CAN cameras - the Capitol Affairs Network having been created by an act of Congress in 1977 as a federally-administered independent live feed of Congress during sessions - had a significant amount of open mic time, during which Cohn would often make bombastic and accusatory speeches to an empty room. His relentless self-aggrandizing and snappy advertising of his accomplishments in spite of the liberal bent of Congress helped to endear him to his constituents, seeing him surprisingly easily nominated by both the Republicans and Conservatives and subsequently re-elected in 1976 and 1982.
If all of this wasn’t comfortably enough to make Roy Cohn one of the most visible conservative Republicans in the nation, Dr. Collins absolutely did. The man who prosecuted the Rosenbergs dashed from network to network, bluntly laying out the allegations against the administration and making clear the dizzying scale of the scandal. The novelty came when he shied away from tying his political fortunes to the impeachment, instead looping the distrust from the scandal into the glut of federal projects in recent years. Of course, when billions flowed through infrastructure, contracting, and negotiations with manufacturers, eventually men like the president’s husband would profit off of them. It was a structural problem with big spending. Someone needed to go in there and clean the mess up, cut things down to their proper size and get the graft all under control.
*****
1985 was a rough year for Republicans, still smarting over another lost opportunity. That June, it was also time for another one of Roy Cohn’s parties. His D.C. townhouse had become a regular hotspot for the right-wing electeds, the media guys who made ‘em all up presentable, the ruthless mass of wealth behind them, the folks on the ground with axes to grind, all of it. It was a night for the congregation of the upper crust of conservative society - the dissidents, as Roger liked to call them. But Roger Stone was Roger Stone, and his zeal shaded his view. Didn’t matter to Roy either way. His guy was a ratfucker, but he was take-a-bullet loyal, and that’s just what Roy wanted in a consigliere, as his seedier clients back in New York called their Rogers. When they first met, Roger had bragged about telling the kids at his elementary school that Adlai Stevenson was for school on Saturdays. “My first political trick,” he let out from behind a grin that Roger thought was sly but just looked like he had a frog in his mouth. That’s the type of guy Roy liked. Well, to hire.
Roger was on his mind because he was currently in the process of trying to haul New York’s senior senator up the stairs. Roy was mingling as usual, rubbing elbows with the big names of the American right, and he’d gone and gotten himself trapped in one of Ron Reagan’s aphorism-riddled neverending stories. He just finally let out a “Ron, it’s been great talkin’ to ya, but Roger here’s telling me I gotta go meet with some folks. Something big going on.”
As they climbed the stairs, Roger grimaced a bit. “Christ, that guy’s head needs to be checked out. I’ve eaten Jell-O with more awareness than him.”
Roy just let out a forced chuckle. “He’s the biggest name our side’s got on the news. Millions of people watch that talk show of his, doesn’t matter if the lights are on upstairs. Our folks love the guy, so we love the guy.”
Roger just huffed a little as he opened the door to the second bedroom that Roy had turned into a “study.” It wasn’t for much work, though. It was really a monument to Roy Cohn’s power, a place designed entirely for him to meet with other people and exert himself over them for the entire interaction. And in it this time was Roy Cohn’s future assembled neatly before him. Roger had gone and gathered the biggest names in the movement into one room at one party. They had the money in Charles Keating, Nelson Bunker Hunt, and Joseph Coors, three men with a CEO’s checkbook and politics a shade right of Attila the Hun; they had the media in Rupert Murdoch, the Australian owner of half a dozen big tabloids and papers as well as the fast-rising fourth network STN that aired, among other things, The Reagan Report; they had the grassroots with Paul Weyrich and Richard Viguerie, the former the king of the YAF-coined “anti-activism” and the latter an innovator in political campaigning and fundraising; they even had an influential chunk of Congress in the right-wing Republican Study Committee’s chairman John Ashbrook. That room might well have been the beating heart of conservatism in America, if you didn’t count William F. Buckley and the National Review, which Roy didn’t - Bill was a useful friend, but that lightweight was too stuck up his own ass pretending to be a philosopher to entangle himself in anything like this. Bill had probably gotten a couple drinks in him and was probably off skinny-dipping with some interns anyways[1]. Not that Roy was one to judge.
Roy shook hands and wasted some time on brief, rehearsed pleasantries. But as his impatience got the better of him, he threw himself down on the grandiose high-backed yellow chair that the waiting couches were all not-so-subtly turned towards and sat upright in his throne. “No more wasting time. I’ve got you all here tonight because we need to talk about our plan for the next election.” And as Roger shut the door and closed them all in the room with him, the shark’s grin that scared pinkos shitless inched its way across his face.
*****
Predictably, that someone was Roy Cohn. Though he had passed in the past three cycles - 1976 because of Lindsay’s institutional backing, 1980 because of Goldwater’s folly, and 1984 once it was clear that the institutional support just wasn’t there - he knew now was a moment practically designed for him. More than that, though, biographers indicate that Roy Cohn’s resentment over being “blacked out” had only grown with his return to glory, the fact that he had returned from exile to his onetime soldiers taking up arms for him like Napoleon as proof that he could truly defeat them, that he could reshape the face of America in his image if he’d just keep pushing. So, instead of pursuing a third Senate term, Roy Cohn held a rally in his native Bronx, announcing that he’d be pursuing the presidential nomination.
Cohn’s bid was immediately the talk of the national media. In his typical swaggering style, Cohn’s stump speech excoriated twelve years of Democratic government while working the crowd up into a fever about what they could bring America back to. And why wouldn’t conservatives be upset? The administration was corrupt, the Soviet Union seemed stronger than ever, crime rates seemed to only go up every passing year, and the economy was only seemingly booming in the incredibly regionalist president’s favored areas. Elsewhere, inflation was at a major high, and Friedmanite economists penned columns and gave interviews pointing directly to the glut of federal spending as the source. As perhaps one of the most prominent conservative Republicans and a personal friend of many of the key backers of right-wing politics, Cohn quickly managed to consolidate the party’s biggest names behind him and, after a relatively strong victory over maverick Iowa governor Terry Branstad in the primaries, never really looked back.
Thus he came to face the consolidated nominee of the Democratic Party, Vice President Mondale. Mondale was hesitant at first, but after private urging from President Collins he made clear his intent early to be the Democrats’ candidate. Frankly, few Democrats wanted the nomination that year, and Mondale’s nomination came virtually by acclamation. His suggestion of House Minority Leader Hugh Carey as his running mate saw a minor bit of embarrassment as the cameras caught the dissent within the voice vote from southern delegates who had grown accustomed to regionally balanced tickets and feminists who disliked Carey’s anti-abortion stance. Mondale, for his part, saw the controversy in Collins’ impeachment and tried to run from her, instead focusing his campaign on the continuation of popular Democratic policy and attacks on Cohn. The DNC aired a number of ads with clips of Cohn’s time with Joe McCarthy juxtaposed with his assertion that “Joe McCarthy was quite liberal in a number of things… I am not like Joe McCarthy.” One memorable campaign billboard showed Roy Cohn as John Wayne and saying “DON’T LET HIM TAKE US BACK TO THE 1950s.”
All of these had the exact opposite effect of what was expected, though. Most younger voters barely cared about McCarthy, and a good chunk of people who remembered him thought he was right given the rising USSR. Furthermore, the idea of going back to the 1950s was actually quite appealing to a number of suburbanites who saw the prosperous pre-counterculture era as when America was at its strongest, and ironically the particular pastiche even helped to mollify rural westerners wary of an urbane Jewish lawyer. Televised debates between Mondale and Cohn were, simply put, a massacre. Mondale came off as a nice enough fellow, but Cohn simply had too much experience making nice enough fellows look hapless and confused on the stand. Every brazen attack seemed to stick with little protest, every muddled reference to McCarthyism coolly addressed with a handwave, and by the end of it all Cohn had practically eaten his opposition alive. More than that, though, he had spoken right past the screeds about McCarthyism and to the anxieties of Middle Opinion, the folks who thought that twelve years in power had sapped the Democrats of new ideas, that they couldn’t deal with the things that matter like the high crime and inflation rates the way Cohn could.
Though the labor belt of the Great Lakes had largely stayed pat for Mondale - a labor man in his own right - Cohn swept his way from coast to coast nonetheless. The Democrats even saw their margins in the “Solid South” decrease off the backs of conservative suburbanites and the increasingly Republican drift of the white middle and upper class of the south, flipping South Carolina blue and giving the Republicans their best margins in the pivotal state of Texas since Eisenhower ran. Liberal critics had little to make of it - while they could blame Mondale sleepwalking his way through the election, clearly there was more to it. Evidently, Roy Cohn’s anti-communist braggadocio and tough rhetoric towards the ailments plaguing America had resonated with a number of people, giving him a Republican Congress to work with as well. Regardless of the post-mortems, on a cold January morning in Washington, with a hand on the Bible - though Cohn was Jewish, he knew the importance of performance - and a simple oath, Roy Cohn was the 40th President of the United States. Though his inaugural address was hardly long-winded, it contained one notable quotation that seemed cast to define his presidency, an aping of Milton Friedman: “what we do may not always be universally popular, but when it comes to restoring our strength, building our prosperity, and protecting our freedoms, I know that there is no alternative way.”
That air of inevitability seemed even more potent when Roy Cohn got to work. The administration was quickly staffed with a veritable who’s who of right-wing figures, from the combative former Ambassador Anna Chennault as Secretary of State to even the inflexibly pro-business former Illinois Governor Donald Rumsfeld as Secretary of Labor. It rang true again when Speaker Obenshain and Senate Majority Leader Nixon stage-managed the quick passage of the Latta-Dole Act, or more simply the Tax Reform Act of 1989. The proposal, a mainstay of right-wing circles in Congress lended new legitimacy, effectively took a knife to the federal budgeting process. While it did significantly lower federal taxation and defunded a number of programs, the most notable provisions related to special projects. The torrent of federal funds that went into southern communities, part of a short-term goal to get Democratic priorities on other issues past the new crop of populists replacing the old conservatives and a long-term goal to shift the regional economy to more sustainable industry, ended in an instant as Cohn preached a “new era of government within its means.” Most controversial with southern representatives was the withdrawal of oil and coal supports effective January 1, 1990. Within a matter of weeks, the inflated oil market collapsed, beginning the regional depression that the previous administration had been working to avert. While this ensured that Roy Cohn would never be forgiven in the Gulf Coast, elsewhere the decision saw sighs of relief as gas prices plummeted to their lowest in years.
The economic situation had two heads, in the minds of the administration, and the second was inflation. The logic used by Republicans was simple: due to the volatility of the economic system after the Camp David Agreement and the Arabian Shock, inflation had been driven to a breaking point, only made worse by the federal government’s high spending to locally mitigate the downturn. Secretary of the Treasury Alan Greenspan - a monetarist icon in his own right and, combined with John Kenneth Galbraith, responsible for the increasing visibility of the Department of the Treasury as a public-facing spokesman for federal economic policy - made clear that he viewed this as a persistent cause of ever-increasing inflation rates through the 1980s, and that he fully intended to bring this under control. So came dizzying Federal Reserve interest rate hikes at the Treasury’s implicit direction, constricting the money supply and setting off a quick and brutal recession even as inflation began to drop.
This did not sit well with organized labor. The inflationary environment had also hurt wage growth, and it was only skillful mediation by the Collins administration - based on their eternal motto of “if everyone is equally unhappy, it’s probably a good compromise” - that stopped serious strikes from plaguing the nation, apart from one brief coal miners’ strike in 1983 that was quickly resolved. Now, with the decidedly middling economy of the late 1980s kicked into outright recession and the government not determined to stave off strikes by any means necessary, it was inevitable that something would give. That something, as it seemed, was the result of the breakdown of negotiations between the Big Three auto companies and the UAW. As Ray Majerus led an unprecedentedly large strike across the industrial Midwest, it seemed that the already-poor economy would suffer even more as projections shaped up for the most expensive strike in American history.
Cohn shocked the press when he took to the South Lawn, flanked by Attorney General Bennett and Secretary Rumsfeld, to announce to them that he would not be tolerating this kind of “recklessness.” Instead, the sheer scale of the economic damage caused by this strike constituted a national emergency, and he would be invoking the Taft-Hartley Act to send the strikers back to work. Images of tense standoffs between stone-faced auto workers and furious officers graced the front pages, but Cohn remained defiant in his enforcement even as the calls against him grew louder from the halls of Congress and union supporters in regional state governments. In one notable instance, the administration assumed control of the Wisconsin National Guard to order them towards strikebreaking activities after Governor Ed Garvey, a former NFLPA lawyer, blatantly refused to comply.
This was, of course, all deeply controversial, and approval of the Cohn administration quickly began to slide into the gutter. Though the economy was by no means vibrant before he took office, “Greenspanomics” had effectively traded an inflationary spiral for a recession, and stories of union men scuffling with cops were hardly befitting a nation in renewal like he had promised. Roy Cohn was never one to hide from the cameras, not even in bad times, but even so he still took the nadir of the situation as the best time to go abroad. A visit to Europe helped somewhat as Cohn met with his ideological compatriots in the “Three Princes” - referring to men like France’s President Michel Poniatowski, Sweden’s Prime Minister Carl Bildt, and the giant of the Italian Second Republic Edgardo Sogno, all figures deeply evocative of the western world’s right-wing shift in the 1980s - and reaffirmed NATO commitments. A summit with Valentina Tereshkova in Vienna was famously icy, with Cohn publicly needling the Soviet leader on a host of internal issues. But, as the midterms rolled around and the Democrats reclaimed the House even as the Senate remained stubbornly out of reach, it wouldn’t even draw the most attention. That dubious honor would go to Iberia.
Spain had long been described as “the perfect dictatorship,” as Peru’s liberalizing President Mario Vargas Llosa put it. In a sense, it was. Francisco Franco had been a fascist without the Axis and a regent without a king. He had consolidated Spanish political life behind him, but yet avoided much of the hatred due to his hardline anti-communism and the “Spanish miracle” of the 1960s. But not all was well in a caudillo’s paradise. Franco himself privately suffered from Parkinson’s disease, and the Alfonsist-Carlist conflict over who would take the throne once his eternal regency ended was as of yet unresolved. As the royalist spat simmered and Franco knew his health faded, he had to make a choice. Normally, he would have chosen the Alfonsists, but the head of their household, Don Juan, was a closet liberal who Franco feared would undermine his rule. His son would have been perfect, but Juan Carlos had tragically gone missing after a rip current dragged out to sea while swimming with a woman who, incidentally, was not his wife. With no sons left under Don Juan’s name, Franco was forced to turn elsewhere.
Nobody expected Otto von Habsburg, but in hindsight it made sense. With the Carlists a joke after Prince Carlos Hugo had endorsed Titoist socialism and the only Alfonist option unpalatable, Franco’s personal friend in the fiercely anti-communist Habsburg prince was his best option. The choice was deeply frustrating to many Spanish monarchists, whose expectation had been for the new king to have come from Spain at least. Otto’s charm offensive throughout state-run media helped mollify concerns somewhat, as did mentions of his longest residence as a stateless man being within Spain, but even so upon Franco’s passing King Otto was still not particularly beloved by the populace. But he persisted nonetheless. His new Prime Minister - Luis Carrero Blanco, Franco’s right hand man - broadly continued the reforms toward pluralism, forming a sort of dominant one-party state with theoretical opposition and more civil liberties than Franco’s peak. Then Blanco passed in 1984, and a brief succession struggle within the party saw Carlos Arias Navarro’s appointment to the Prime Ministership. Nicknamed “Old Pusillanimous” by many, Arias was a supposedly reformed hardliner, one who’d simply carry on the functions of the state as it were.
Come 1990, the miracle had long since run dry, and instead of the leadership of Francoists with a devoted following there was a man viewed as a sniveling butcher, propped up by an illegitimate foreign king. Spaniards had well and truly had enough. A Catalan anarchist riot saw hundreds dead in the streets when authorities cracked down, sparking outrage throughout the country. A speech by King Otto in Madrid with Arias by his side aimed at calming the situation saw one brave soul shout over a pause in the speech, which then led to a cavalcade of boos, only exacerbated by Arias’ squeamish expression. The people of Spain began to flood the streets.
In the immediate hours after the revolution began, King Otto managed to flee to Switzerland, where his residence would become a controversy for future Spanish governments. The situation grew dire when Alfonso Armada, a hardline Francoist opposed to Arias from the right, seized control of Madrid and pledged no mercy for the dissenters. Ad-hoc Catalan and Basque separatist governments made a run for it, and as Armada’s forces were brutal but ineffective in resisting the people, the rest of the west watched in horror. The Cohn administration had a different concern, one of ensuring that the chaos wouldn’t end in some sort of anarchist or communist-aligned resolution. After weeks of haggling, eventually all sides involved were able to be brought to Venezuela as guests of President Oswaldo Álvarez Paz. The US-led negotiations that became the Caracas Accords effectively sold out the quasi-independent Catalan and Basque republics who had been closest to the fire as Spain burned, but many analysts credit the hard-charging style of Secretary Chennault for allowing Íñigo Cavero to rise to the Spanish presidency, even if critics allege that electioneering a la Italy in 1948 stopped the PSOE from taking power until the new millennium and “de-Francoization” remains incomplete to this day.
The Spanish crisis fundamentally changed the Cohn administration’s outlook as well. The collapse of one of the worst offenders in the western bloc was propaganda gold for the Soviets, nevermind the quick takeover of the Spanish Sahara - now proclaimed the SADR - by the Polisario Front. More than that, though, many in Cohn’s inner circle saw this as one of the biggest failures of American operations in the Cold War, leaping to conclusions that the Soviets were behind it and that it was only last-minute diplomatic intervention that stopped a full socialist takeover. If Francoism was not invulnerable, much weaker anti-communist regimes were not either. So - not that Cohn or his staff needed much incentive - a new Cold War policy was adopted entirely. Before, it was split between Democratic internationalist “victory through debate” and Republican pragmatic hawkishness. Thomas Kuchel was perhaps the best example of the latter. Though he enforced his “Light Touch Policy” in Latin America and Europe, preferring subtle meddling like that of Allende’s impeachment and electoral interference, in Asia it was another story. Indonesia’s Abdul Haris Nasution overthrew Sukarno in a quick and bloody coup designed to prevent PKI power (and still resulted in countless crimes against suspected PKI members), Cambodia’s Norodom Sihanouk survived dozens of attempts on his life with only Lon Nol’s attempted coup coming particularly close, and Thailand’s brief experiment with constitutional democracy fell by the wayside with a military intervention against mass demonstration, and on it went through the 1970s. So far, it had generally worked, with these repressive distant allies seemingly containing communism.
It’s unclear specifically when the Cohn administration developed its new intelligence policy. By 1991, Director of Central Intelligence John K. Singlaub was promoted to cabinet rank, a position that was maintained for the DCI in successive administrations. A somewhat-redacted document known simply as the “Kirkpatrick Memo” - named for the meeting taking place at the home of the then Virginia Senator - was leaked by journalist Gary Webb years later, in which records of a discussion between senior administration officials laid out the shift in policy. Within it, they effectively discussed a massive expansion of “Gladio-style programs” throughout shaky American allies using private organizations and drifting anti-communist forces, many of whom were “German, Italian, and Spanish gentlemen.” Whatever the case, the fledgling Western Goals Institute, a think tank founded in 1982 with such figures on its board of directors as Professor Newton L. Gingrich, Dr. Edward Teller, and General Daniel O. Graham, became incredibly closely tied to the administration. In practice, the WGI was little more than a private intelligence organization, funded by right-wing billionaires like Edgar Prince and used to coordinate more unsavory operations.
This first came into practice most effectively in South Africa. In accordance with the Anti-Apartheid Act of 1980, the South African government was officially under embargo by the United States, making support to the apartheid regime a political non-starter. However, when Joe Slovo looked like he had achieved government, WGI-funded ex-Rhodesian troops were among those aiding in Magnus Malan’s overthrow of the government and execution of Slovo. As Chris Hani’s SACP launched a general revolt against the dictator, the United States joined in in the condemnation of Malan’s regime at the United Nations even as they smuggled funding and anti-communist filibusters to help the Malan government and the various petty right-wing ex-bantustan warlords fighting the SACP from kwaZulu to Namibia to Bophuthatswana. All around the world, purveyors of fascist atrocity found new homes as tentative allies in the battle against communism.
Most Americans had no way of noticing the WGI or, even if they did, had little reason to care about the reports of exiled Italian neofascist terrorists fighting a guerrilla war against the SACP or Falangist exiles giving “counter-insurgency training” to Atnafu Abate’s Christian chauvinist Ethiopian government or even the reviled Nazi criminal Klaus Barbie taking refuge in Saigon (longtime dictator Nguyễn Cao Kỳ was infamously an admirer of Adolf Hitler[2]). Some took notice when Edgardo Sogno resigned office amidst mass demonstration, leaving the erstwhile political manipulator and late convert to the Second Republic Giulio Andreotti to clean up the mess as the new president, but even this was only mildly notable in America. Internationally, once the Spanish situation was resolved, the biggest concern was on China. The “three Hus,” a bloc led by Chairman Hu Yaobang, had undergone a number of liberalizing reforms, and this did not sit well with a number of old hardliners. More freedom to express dissent combined with the fledgling Usenet had made state suppression far more difficult, and Hu’s reform towards the rule of law was the last straw for many hardline Maoists in the PLA. On July 17th, 1991, tanks rolled into Beijing as the Central Committee held a forced vote to oust Hu and replace him with Mao Yuanxin, the leader of the hardliner faction and orchestrator of the coup. The idea of a new Chairman Mao was concerning to many in the west to say the least, especially when he made clear his intent to - in a subtle jab to Moscow’s economic reforms and increasing pragmatism - support the people’s revolution throughout the Third World. As it turned out, Mao Yuanxin’s China would be a significant headache for both Washington and Moscow in the years following, especially as Prime Minister David Owen over in London immediately withdrew from negotiations with the Hu government for the handover of Hong Kong.
Even with that distraction, Americans were growing more confident. Far from the low point of 1989-1990 for Roy Cohn, by late 1991 the recession was clearly not just ending but developing into a boom. Forced into a somber combativeness by circumstance, now Roy Cohn could flaunt himself before the nation, proof that “no alternative way” was correct and that his way had brought much-needed stability back. Focus for the policy debate was naturally able to shift to other things. Cohn got his first Supreme Court nomination with the retirement of William Brennan, replacing him with the Ninth Circuit’s rigidly right-wing Edwin Meese. Educational reform came once again with the Kennedy-Prince bill, an ostensibly bipartisan proposal named for Democratic Senator Robert F. Kennedy and Republican Representative Betsy Prince, pushed for the longstanding goals of countless religious and conservative educational groups in supporting private schools, especially religious schools, a cause for the intensely Catholic Kennedy. Though critics lambasted the bill for being tacitly supportive of the practice of “Jim Crow academies” in the south - often-religious private schools designed around affluent white suburbanites’ desires to keep their kids out of now-integrated public schools - in practice it was a major victory for the conservative movement that had long attacked underfunded public schools as being detrimental to educational outcomes.
The largest debate came with crime. Crime rates had been steadily increasing since 1976, with many badly-hit cities seeing a surge in gang violence and drug crimes. Increasing heroin smuggling from Southeast Asia - especially South Vietnam, where the trade had become a lucrative industry - had also led to a major boom in drug use on the West Coast first, gradually spreading throughout the country, especially in places with high layoffs. During the 1989-1990 recession, this had grown to a fever pitch, and the administration knew something had to be done. Thus the Drug & Violent Crimes Act of 1991, or simply the 1991 Crime Bill, was born. It made charges towards drug crimes and gang violence far more severe, expanded federal death penalty usage, increased funding for prison creation and police hiring, and consolidated previous drug laws - from the turn of the century to the Gilligan administration - into one federal drug classification program under the Department of Justice’s Office of Drug Enforcement. Opiate enforcement was, naturally, given the highest enforcement, and President Cohn declared that “we will remove this scourge of crime and addiction from our society” from the Oval Office.
But there was no time for more. 1992 had come around, and though Roy Cohn’s popularity had picked up as the economy did, Democrats’ antipathy towards the man had hardly faded. He had so neatly picked fights with so many core Democratic constituencies such that they were all practically begging for the opportunity to run against him. Furthermore, following Jack Gilligan’s effective takeover of the DNC, reforms had been ensured to create a new primary process, one that would ensure some democratic legitimacy while still retaining party power. The end compromise was one where half of the convention delegates would be decided by the voters of the Democratic Party, with each state receiving a number of delegates and presidential primaries to be held on a single unified day on the first Tuesday of May. That way, if there were only one real candidate, the nomination would be all but assured to them. This new system had not been used in actuality through the 80s, as Gilligan, Collins, and Mondale all remained unchallenged. Come 1992, half a dozen candidates all threw their hats into the ring, and the vote confirmed the party leaders’ worst fears as to what letting the membership take control might look like.
*****
Tom Hayden knew he was this close to the top, but something didn’t quite sit right. He had won the primary resoundingly - he should know, he had been in the room negotiating the new system, and he knew that the proportional system was really quite powerful. While other candidates buzzed around regionally, hoping to take a solid block of delegates to haggle with, Hayden announced early in 1991 to a roaring crowd at the SDS’ annual convention, then embarked on a whirlwind fifty-state tour. He knew that you didn’t need to win to be powerful, just have a good enough chunk of the vote to peel things off.
It looked like it had worked, at first. He had taken a majority of the people’s choice, winning big in his native Great Lakes - though he had contemplated a move to California, in the end a run for Congress in a new district firmly centered on the University of Michigan seemed just right for him - and through the northeast and west coasts. It wasn’t just there, too. He’d peeled a couple of delegates here in North Carolina, a couple there in Missouri - no doubt the result of campaigning hard towards the colleges and new manufacturing communities. Being in politics in Michigan helped you make union connections, after all.
But there was still a problem. The convention floor down in Houston seemed unhappy with the idea of Tom Hayden as their frontrunner. He’d come to expect that, as the party didn’t tend to appreciate the radicals, even if the youth wing made Jack Gilligan happen. He thought that voting on principle was the whole reason the good people of Michigan had sent him to the Senate back in ‘78, but evidently the party still had some bones to pick.
Next to Tom, Joe Trippi had been madly scribbling the delegate counts on his notepad, and each one up to the current - lucky ballot number 7 - showed the same picture. Tom Hayden was stubbornly in front, yet still three hundred and thirty-seven delegates short. The real shuffling was down below him.
First they had tried to rally behind the popular-vote runner-up, Governor Bob Casey. Casey was reliable, they thought. A good-old-boy with a shtick for “activist government” in Pennsylvania, one who’d expanded upon popular federal programs on the state level. But Casey was resolutely opposed to abortion as a bit of a Kennedyite, and RFK had ruffled a lot of feathers with social liberals. The Womens’ Caucus, as Bella Abzug called her folks, just wasn’t willing to get behind him.
So it was that, on the second ballot, Casey’s support collapsed and spread out. A good chunk found its way to Missouri’s Tom Eagleton, another nice centrist in the Catholic machinery who had been an early frontrunner before collapsing. Eagleton had tried to duck the abortion issue, so, the party reasoned, he must be more palatable to the feminists and activists. But his attempt at addressing the convention was abruptly cut short by a rambling, confused mess of a speech. Tom Hayden knew he was drunk, the party knew he was drunk, but nobody was ever going to say anything. It’d ruin the poor man’s career. More importantly, it’d embarrass them all.
So, from ballots three through five, Trippi’s map showed a - what’s that word the kids liked - a clusterfuck. Delegates zigged and zagged from Eagleton to any number of low-level primary rivals. One odd movement on ballot five saw an attempt to draft Kathleen Gilligan Clinton, even. Though she was gracious to the floor, she made clear “this is not my time to run for office.”
The majority went to Zell Miller, though. Zell was a colleague of Tom’s in the Senate, one from Georgia. He was a good enough man, pretty resolutely liberal on economic issues but a bit more to the center on the cultural flashpoints. Pretty tough on crime, too. Looked good for dealing with Roy Cohn, who gleefully tied the crime rates to the past twelve years of Democrats at every chance. On ballot six, Miller actually overtook Hayden, though he remained stubbornly short. His guys Ham Jordan and James Carville had adopted a wait-and-see approach, holding their southern delegates that netted them third in the primaries. Then, after it was clear the convention was desperate to stop Hayden, they muscled their way to the podium.
“I know what Roy Cohn means when he says it's best for children to have two parents. You bet it is! And it would be nice for them to have trust funds, too. We can't all be born rich and handsome and lucky. And that's why we have a Democratic Party. My family would still be isolated and destitute if we had not had F.D.R.'s Democratic brand of government. I made it because Franklin Delano Roosevelt energized this nation. I made it because Harry Truman fought for working families like mine. I made it because Adlai Stevenson and Bill Fulbright brought their rising standards of honor and integrity to our time. I made it because Jack Gilligan, God rest his soul, knew it was time to lift all of us up. And I made it because a woman with whom I served in the Senate, a woman named Martha Layne Collins, brought good values and common decency to public service.”
The delegates ate it up - Hayden could hear the cheers from the room he and Trippi were camped out in. On ballot six, Miller even overtook Hayden, though he still remained eighty-six short. But before they could rush out to fight the movement, in came Midge Costanza, the veteran Democratic activist turned floor leader for Team Tom who had seemingly sprinted all the way there.
“Abzug’s with us. She’s-” upon which Costanza took a deep breath “-she’s going to swing Pat Schroeder’s delegates behind us. The Mississippians are mad, too - some old fight between Miller and Finch” - referring to the prickly Mississippi Senator whose near-fatal heart attack had likely killed his presidential ambitions - “that the spiteful bastard hasn’t forgiven. They’re willing to talk.”
Hayden couldn’t help but smile. “Let’s go see what Cliff wants.”
*****
Though his nomination was shaky and deeply embarrassing, taking seven ballots and forcing his acceptance speech to the next day, Tom Hayden had no intention of just rolling over. Though the polls showed him at a major deficit compared to the President, Joe Trippi thought that micro-targeting small pockets of disaffected Americans could work to build that revolution Trippi liked to talk about. Cohn had, after all, seemingly targeted Democratic communities with almost surgical precision - or at least not minded their pain. This, of course, was a divide-and-conquer strategy from Cohn, who saw the tensions in the opposition and figured he could get them all killing each other to get the chance to go against him, a strategy vindicated by eight ballots.
Regardless, Hayden campaigned fervently to bring it back together. Union leadership helped keep the lights on in the Midwestern parts of the campaign, especially as the UAW’s fight continued. Campaigning to the urban cores saw some success - though younger professionals tended towards Cohn, many “over-policed” minority communities impacted by the crime bill welcomed Hayden’s preaching of more community-based solutions. A well-publicized meeting with UFW leadership saw harsh commentary from conservative allies in the press, but it helped to galvanize Chicano voters behind this oddity of a candidate. Every chance he could, Tom Hayden got himself in front of the public, suit jacket off and an earnest smile plastered across his face, trying his best to look like the platonic ideal of a Hollywood underdog candidate.
The focus changed thanks to the running mate. Senator William Allain seemed an inspired pick to win back the south in recession, even if the junior Mississippi Senator was a peace offering to swing Mississippi’s delegates behind Hayden. But of course, Roger Stone had done some good old fashioned skullduggery and hired informants to act as both candidates’ drivers. While they got nothing on Hayden from this, they ended up catching photos of Allain meeting up with multiple Black transgender prostitutes, and with it they knew they had struck gold. A package of evidence of Allain’s solicitation anonymously found its way to the New York Post, chosen specifically because the tabloids wouldn’t resist a story like this. Sure enough, it became national news overnight, spreading throughout the Murdoch empire and forcing reporting from the older established media as well. The scandal dominated the race for days, and though Allain offered to leave the ticket, Hayden blatantly refused. As he memorably put it in an interview, “personal indiscretions” should have no bearing on whether someone can be our vice president. The whole saga was deeply embarrassing, and Cohn and his surrogates largely used it to point to the Democrats’ ineptitude as well as subtle jabs at Hayden’s “radicalism” when it came to passing civil rights protections for gay Americans. “The guy’s a joke!” shouted Cohn at every opportunity, “and not a funny one either!” Smoothly-made Cohn ads pointed to the nation’s rejuvenation, one talking about the soaring economic growth and another representing a communist bloc on the march and Cohn standing in their way. Two debates ended in a strong Cohn victory, the incumbent having lost none of his fighting edge and Hayden seeming whiny in his attempts to fight the smears. In the end, not even sidelining Allain and a vigorous campaign schedule were enough to change the narrative that the floundering Hayden campaign was a radical mess that couldn’t even keep its own house in order.
The landslide’s impact on the Democratic psyche couldn’t be overstated. Not only had Tom Hayden lost all but the most ardently Democratic states, he had effectively lost everything except the most economically hard-hit oil-and-coal parts of the “solid south” and the heavily unionized upper Midwest. As it seemed, the racial and cultural overtones of the Allain scandal had deeply damaged Democratic turnout in the white south (apart from Mississippi, which was more annoyed about the slander towards a popular senator). Illinois and Hawaii flipping was bad, but the fact that Roy Cohn had carried Alabama and Arkansas off the backs of the size of his landslide and white suburbanites, never mind having come within one percent of doing the same in Tennessee, was a cause for alarm. The Democrats figured they had some soul-searching to do.
Regardless of the state of the opposition, Roy Cohn had been returned to office, with a narrow Republican Congress behind him once more. The aftershocks of the 1992 race had come to the forefront though - the homophobic rhetoric perpetuated by Republican candidates throughout the election had come home to roost. Early in 1993, California Representative William Dannemeyer first proposed the Protection of American Values Act, a bill aimed at outlawing the anti-discrimination statutes passed on the state and local level for Gender and Sexual Minority groups (GSMs or GSM groups, more commonly). At first, the bill was treated as an oddity, born straight from the Republican Study Committee’s membership. Then Vice President Hank Grover, the aging Texan who had cut his national political teeth in railing against Walter Jenkins’ time at the YMCA, offered a throaty endorsement of the legislation. Soon enough, Richard Nixon, the aging Senate Majority Leader, decided to introduce the Senate version of PAVA, and within a matter of weeks the question of support for PAVA was asked to President Cohn in a press conference. Cohn simply responded “absolutely.” Now with its supporters emboldened, Cohn was given the chance to sign such a bill in a number of weeks, with some bipartisan backing even as more culturally centrist Democrats lambasted the violation of states’ rights.
Roy Cohn’s public homophobia is one of the more complicated aspects of his public career. During the 1990s, sodomy laws remained enforced in a number of states, though homosexual conduct had been decriminalized by nearly as many. Same-sex marriage had been largely halted in Baker v. Nelson in 1971, with the Supreme Court’s finding that restricting marriage licenses to opposite-sex couples only is not in conflict with the Constitution and does not require justification, and as such no states had permitted anything of the sort. Gay individuals were barred from military service, and California had even banned them from being teachers, a rule emulated by a handful of states. PAVA was perhaps the greatest step against GSM rights on the national level, and truly it was the last step that could be taken to halt the barest sign of momentum towards gay rights. This all came in conflict with missing time in evening schedules, rendezvous in Roy Cohn’s Senate office, and the reports of a handful of interns with the White House. By all accounts, despite all of this, Roy Cohn was gay.
Of course, none of this was known during his term. He had been unmarried in the White House, which raised some eyebrows, but he had clearly publicly had relationships with women during his time in the Senate. He had been quite clear in flaunting his girlfriends in front of the cameras as he walked down the streets of Manhattan, even. The closest the somewhat-open secret came to public attention was Senator Fritz Hollings memorably calling him “that little queer gentleman from B’nai B’rith” during floor debate in 1982, a remark which was stricken from the record after Cohn struck Hollings. That sort of violent reaction to a potent mix of antisemitism and homophobia towards Cohn seemed as much of a shut-down as any.
Reports of Cohn’s sexuality wouldn’t come up publicly until years later. A thoroughly-sourced biography interviewing multiple young men who interned in the White House as well as numerous junior staffers who had happened upon Cohn in an indecent moment written in 2013, provided the clearest window into Roy Cohn the intensely closeted yet informally known homosexual. The book ignited a firestorm, naturally, though Cohn was not there to shout “ROY COHN IS NOTTA QUEEUH!” as he did to Fritz Hollings. During an interview after the book’s release, Roger Stone offered up the explanation that "Roy was not gay. He was a man who liked having sex with men. Gays were weak, effeminate." Stone's statement could be the basis of an entire sociological study on its own, but it further points to one core truth: Roy Cohn's relationship with his own homosexuality was defined by the intense machismo and bigotry of the spaces he frequented politically and socially. He hated the idea of being identified as gay even though he was homosexual, and this often manifested itself in an intense public-facing homophobia, whether that be jabs at his opponents’ masculinity or even signing PAVA.
Regardless of Roy Cohn’s personal life, the world carried on. Roy Cohn got his second and final Supreme Court Justice when Cyrus Vance tearfully announced his diagnosis with Alzheimer’s disease, replacing him with the conservative D.C. Circuit Judge J. Michael Luttig. Massive deregulatory packages, aimed at everything from the airlines to the banking industry, sailed through Congress as a further part of Cohn’s economic liberalizations. A second round of crime legislation, mostly aimed at police training and hiring as well as further crackdowns on heroin use, passed with flying colors, especially with state-level administration compromises introduced by some Democrats. Labor unrest in the Great Lakes began to die down, with the UAW having suffered greatly and union influence seemingly cowed. An attempted welfare reform package by Cohn that would have gutted Medicare and Social Security as they stood collapsed in the face of major public opposition and contributed heavily to the loss of both houses of Congress in 1994. Life seemed to be going on as normal.
Life was nowhere near normal in the Middle East. Though the Arabian warlordism had largely ended in 1991 with the unification of various Sahwa - meaning Awakening - causes behind the State of the Two Mosques (often referred to by an anglicization of its Arabic name, Harayman), a faction ironically funded by billionaires like Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden whose corrupt dominance over the Saudis drove the nation to revolution in the first place. Its leader, Safar al-Hawali, was a diehard fundamentalist who largely wished to isolate Harayman from the western world and pursue a spiritual revival. Though he would not be declared Grand Mufti until 1999, after the Grand Mufti Abd al-Aziz ibn Baz passed, his control was largely uncontested even behind the old man. The same could not be said for within the Middle East, where the new state was intent on flexing its muscles - both against the more “culturally Islamic” secular Nasserist states and, much more importantly, Israel.
Israel had been engaged in something of a political spiral ever since it became a rogue state. The people of Israel had largely felt under siege, with their own national ability to defend themselves in a more apocalyptic fashion as the only thing standing between them and being overrun. Meir Kahane, a fanatical rabbi from Brooklyn who had immigrated in 1968, had consistently railed against this. In the wake of the most recent war, despite Israel’s victory most in the country did not feel victorious, and Kahane exploited this to great success. His new Kach party won him a seat in the Knesset in the wake of the war, horrifying onlookers but only gaining him popularity. His speeches were often boycotted in the Knesset, but his popularity only grew with every vitriolic comment against him by nearby Arab governments and every time he was seen aiding settlements in the West Bank. A sort of push-and-pull effect took hold, where Kach gained seats every election, creating more international condemnation, which in turn only increased their popularity. By 1991, Israel was ruled by an emergency anti-Kach coalition led by Gahal’s Ezer Weizman, but as the coalition collapsed the election looked more and more likely to be Kahane’s rise to power.
And rise Kahane did. After an attempt to invalidate his victory by the incumbents, a major march by Kach supporters on Tel Aviv ended up seeing them relent. His ascent to the Prime Ministership quickly saw harsh condemnation as occupation of the West Bank turned into outright attempts at colonization. Talk of “voluntary emigration” by Palestinians that was quite forced in practice was scuttled as Israel’s neighbors all shut their borders, publicly condemning Kahane’s rhetoric but privately not wishing to deal with the headache that was the PLO as Jordan had until their expulsion in 1971. Instead, Kahane’s “relocation” of West Bank residents to allow Israeli settlements simply saw people deported to other contained regions of Israel, most notably the walled-off Gaza Strip. The press was bent to Kahane’s will, political opponents were often harassed by authorities, and opponents of Kach were often branded “Hellenists” in a reference to Jews who assimilated into Alexander the Great’s empire that Kahane was quite fond of using.
For the US’ part, the government had grown to increasingly disapprove of Israel. The Cohn administration actually revoked Kahane’s American citizenship upon his election to the Prime Ministership. Of course, in private it was different. Director Singlaub frequently sent lower-level CIA emissaries to meet with Kahane’s government, as well as routinely interfering in the Egyptian nuclear program. This was not done out of any particular love for Israel - Cohn was not fond of mentioning his Jewish heritage - but rather a desire to see the Soviet-aligned Arab socialists torn down a peg. Notably, some conservative Orthodox Jewish communities, especially “refusenik” emigres from the Soviet Union permitted entry to the United States via agreement between Collins and Tereshkova, often vocally supported Kahane and raised money within their communities to support Kahanist yeshivas.
It seemed inevitable, under these circumstances, that conflict would come to the Middle East. Even so, in 1993, when Kahane announced a “special operation” in southern Lebanon to clear out the PLO camps, it shocked international observers. Even so, Lebanon had been in the midst of a decade-long civil war, and there was little capacity for factions intending to resist Israel’s incoming massacres. It was more shocking when, under the pretense of aiding the Maronites, IDF forces marched on Beirut, effectively occupying most of Lebanon with the aid of the Phalange. Scuffles with Syrian forces aiding the Amal Movement saw tensions growing between the two countries throughout the end of 1993. The revelation that December that Alois Brunner, Adolf Eichmann’s right-hand man, was a significant advisor to Akram al-Hawrani’s government in Syria pushed the situation past the brink. Demands that Brunner be handed over to Tel Aviv to face justice were rejected and Brunner’s presence denied, further infuriating Israel. The propaganda coup was unrivaled for Kahane, and as public support for war grew under Kahane’s co-opting of “NEVER AGAIN,” come the New Year Israeli troops began to flood across the Syrian border. Within days, Egypt, Iraq, and Jordan had similarly declared war on Israel.
Predictably, the Great Powers did not appreciate this. The Middle East was always a delicate balance, one where the slightest slip meant nuclear war, and all involved knew it. Here was the sole nuclear-armed state pursuing an aggressive strategy of seeming territorial conquest, only further confirmed when Kahane’s rhetoric began incorporating the phrase Eretz Israel HaShlema - Greater Israel. To talk of Israel from the Sinai to the Euphrates was, to the outside world, to talk of inching towards armageddon.
*****
“It’s a-it’s a bitch, Yevgeny.” These were the first words out of Jeb Bush’s mouth, looking at the dour Russian in front of him. To this the noise out of Yevgeny Primakov’s noise was clearly one of assent, but it also very much said get on with it.
The American United Nations Ambassador only continued. “My government’s, well-my government’s prepared to offer… take a look at this. We want to make sure that this situation in the Middle East, just terrible, gets handled just as much as anyone else.” Bush slid a file of papers over across the table.
Primakov leafed through the papers. “This is very intricate, Mr. Bush. If we were to do this, it would be unprecedented.” To this, Primakov arched an eyebrow. “We would need some assurance.”
“Of-of course!” Bush practically rushed out. He genuinely hadn’t expected it to be that easy.
“Many people in our government do not trust your president. While I am not among the hardliners, and my president sent me precisely because she knows this, plenty of members of our Central Committee would be furious if it seemed we were joining any sort of force like that of Korea. Or Congo.”
Bush had been briefed on this. He might have been new at the United Nations, but he had been told what to expect. “Naturally. We’ll have to, well, we’ll have to set some clear guidelines for this. The protection force should mostly be focused on stopping Kahane from killing every Arab in the Levant and the Arabs from destroying Israel.”
Primakov simply nodded once again.
*****
The UN’s vote to form the UN Protection Force (UNPROFOR) to deploy for peacekeeping purposes in the Middle East was a turning point in the Cold War. Though many of the forces were European, at least on paper American and Soviet forces had effectively banded together to deal with the situation in the Middle East, signaling a form of cooperation unseen since Yalta. President Cohn even hosted President Tereshkova in Washington to hold a joint summit on the matter, an unusual step given their icy relationship at the beginning of his term. Additionally, sanctions on Israel conditional on regime change were agreed to by both powers, setting the stage for Kahane’s effective isolation from global affairs - a move an increasingly-erratic Kahane responded to by withdrawing from the UN altogether.
By 1995, the so-called Blue Helmets had deployed to the Middle East, staging in Turkey, Jordan, Iran, and Iraq, aimed mostly at halting any sort of genocide. Their arrival was none too soon, either - reports of horrendous war crimes by IDF soldiers and chemical weapons usage by Arab forces permeated the entire conflict. Israeli soldiers had been practically leveling entire villages, and Arab forces had been cleansing Kurdish communities as well once Israeli armaments seemed to keep ending up with Kurdish separatist groups. Quickly, UNPROFOR found themselves creating unexpected “safe zones” throughout Kurdish territory as well as near more active zones of combat as expected. Though UNPROFOR was stretched thin, its presence at all provided a significant boost and aid to countless refugees created by the conflict.
As 1995’s summer ended, Israel was at its breaking point. The IDF had long been perceived as the invincible army of the Middle East, but all-out war against four Arab armies had pushed them to the brink. Even as Kahane’s army made up for losses with sheer brutality, the overextension of occupying the Sinai, the West Bank, Lebanon, and a large portion of Syria was simply too much for even a supposedly-invincible army to maintain. A brutal counteroffensive through the fall saw Israel effectively pushed back to the Syrian border and out of the Sinai by Egypt, and from there troops crossed the Golan Heights to enter Israeli territory. Meir Kahane felt the fury course through him in Tel Aviv.
All the people of Damascus felt was fire and death.
For one moment, the war seemed perfectly still. Nuclear weapons had been used in anger only once, against Japan. Now it seemed the taboo was broken by a state too desperate to worry about mutually assured destruction. Kahane made clear that he would do so again to protect his people, to ensure that it could never happen again to them. All was quiet. But no amount of overwhelming force could stop the war. The United States simply moved the DEFCON level up to DEFCON Two, a clear sign of what they thought Kahane might cause. Soviet nuclear readiness was less subtle but all too noticeable. All Kahane had done was cut off any prayer of negotiation, any hope of mercy. UNPROFOR worked hard to prevent retaliatory massacres in Israeli territory, but they were tragically unsuccessful. Too many people had known someone in Damascus, and too many knew they’d be next.
In the end, it wasn’t the Syrians, or the Egyptians, or the Jordanians, or even the Palestinians who ended Meir Kahane’s rule. It was the Israelis themselves. Israelis saw their home invaded, saw that the war was on Kahane’s vainglorious irredentism no matter how much it was cloaked in the specter of the Shoah, whose wartime powers were crushing their freedoms as much as anything. Protests in Jerusalem, that holiest of cities, saw even some semblance of unity with the Palestinian residents of the city in opposition to all of their deaths. The people began to march on Tel Aviv as well, taking over the Knesset to make their voices heard. In the end, Meir Kahane resigned quietly and tried in vain to flee, but it was no use as he was quickly detained and eventually extradited to The Hague to stand trial.
The part of the United Nations was now not only to rebuild, but to ensure that this would never happen again. To that end, not only did they have to prevent a total takeover of Israel, but they had to settle a lasting peace. A round-table summit on the matter in Jerusalem as a symbol of the new cooperation was difficult to say the least. The Americans were perhaps the strongest supporters of lenience towards Israel, much to the consternation of the Arab states and the Soviets. The latter seemed to view the 1948 partition as as good a place to start as any, but that was quickly treated as unacceptable by even the interim government of former Jerusalem Mayor and rock-solid democrat Teddy Kollek, despite his attempts towards reconciliation. Over the period of months, a complicated deal was eventually arrived at. Though the details of such are far too arcane to discuss in any short-form manner, in a broad territorial sense a Palestinian state comprising the West Bank and Gaza would be established. Sinai and the Golan Heights were to be returned to Egypt and Syria as well. Israel’s existence would be recognized as legitimate by the nations involved in the conflict - a clause that Egyptian President Boutros Boutros-Ghali had to fight heavily for with his Arab state compatriots - and Israeli aid would go directly towards rebuilding efforts in Damascus. Jerusalem’s administration would be joint between Israel and Palestine, with continuing UN oversight for the time being while the whole situation was put together. Even so, there would be no shortage of conflict in the Middle East, especially not as Israel recovered from and continued to grapple with the war’s place in the national psyche.
With the war in the Middle East behind them, all other issues seemed almost trivial to the Cohn administration. The war had taken up virtually an entire year, even if it was far-off to many Americans. As Roy Cohn marched towards leaving office, the face of the Cold War itself had changed. Despite his tough rhetoric, American-Soviet cooperation had continued, seemingly pivoting even closer to an end to the grand conflict that consumed so many lives and led to constant fear of nuclear war. Israel seemed the greatest sign of this, but this was further reflected in two areas - Korea and Albania.
North Korea had long been a powerhouse amongst Asia’s communists. When Kim Il-sung passed in 1979, O Jin-u seized power rather than let Kim’s dilettante heir Kim Jong-il take power. Marshall O had ruled much more traditionally as the “Asian Bulgaria” until his death in 1995, upon which the elder reformist Yon Hyong-muk had orchestrated a rise to power. Similarly, longtime military dictator of South Korea Kim Jae-gyu, who had taken power in a 1973 coup against the exuberant People’s Party Prime Minister Kim Dae-jung, finally acceded to democratic elections after a referendum on his constitution failed spectacularly. The new government of Lee Hoi-chang, elected in 1996 as both an anti-corruption reaction to the Kim years and an acknowledgement of the tacit support for many of Kim’s right-wing economic policies, saw the opportunity for dialogue with the North given Chairman Yon’s genuine overtures towards liberalization. For the first time, a nation divided by the Cold War seemed on the edge of potential reunification.
Albania was another story. Post-Hoxha leadership had attempted to largely maintain the status quo with limited economic reforms, but the sheer scale of Albanian poverty was too much to overcome. Criticism of the communist government spread quickly as the liberalizer Ramiz Ali took power in 1993, and though Ali did not wish to overthrow the order of things in Albania the public demonstrations quickly spiraled beyond his control. With revolution seeming inevitable, Ali quickly consented to the will of the people for democratic elections, the first of which were to be held in 1996. For the first time, a communist European state - if an isolated and particularly unreliable one to Moscow - was transitioning away from one-party rule, and the handling of Albania by the western bloc would define what a theoretical end to communism might look like in the first place.
Cohn had just over a year left on his term, and there was always more to do. Even as the “Cape Republic” collapsed and Magnus Malan was executed (contrary to popular belief, the SACP didn’t initially plan to put him to death for his crimes in the war, but as the scope of abuses by Cape troops towards civilian women, the intensely feminist Hani saw no other way), the Gaborone Accords negotiated by American mediators secured the independence of Namibia, kwaZulu, and Bophuthatswana from the new People’s Republic of South Africa. A series of talks with India on trade liberalization bore fruit, inspiring some controversy in the manufacturing sector in the US but overall heralded as a positive step for global trade. Concerns bubbled up when Reimei won its first national election in Japan, placing Shintaro Ishihara as the first non-LDP Prime Minister since Saboru Eda in the 1970s and the Tatenokai militia far too close to the government for comfort, leading Cohn to base additional troops in the tiny island nation of Ryukyu. Libya descended into a tri-factional civil war after the death of its longtime dictator Abdul Aziz Shelhi, fracturing the longtime American ally in North Africa into three breakaway states and forcing difficult policy decisions. A new Non-Proliferation Treaty with teeth was set to be negotiated in 1997, definitively aimed at preventing another Damascus.
Come January 20, 1997, Roy Cohn was at last able to withdraw back into the New York social scene he had thrived in for so long. He remains controversial though, to say the least. Though he received a more measured analysis by historians after his passing in 2006, at first it was hard to find an opinion about the man that wasn’t particularly intense. Conservatives adored his tough-talking image as well as his relentlessness in pursuing a right-wing agenda after so long under the “New Deal Consensus,” as the period from 1932-1988 is often dubbed. Liberals despised him for the exact same reasons, nevermind pointing to his regressive social politics and his support for all manner of foreign atrocity. The aggressive, flamboyant president inspired as much adoration as he did disgust, and he liked it that way. No summary comes closer to the truth about Roy Cohn than the ending of the very biography that exposed his double life, though. “Roy Cohn was always preening and combative, look-at-me lavish and loud. It was an act. The truth was he hated what he was - a politician who hated politicians, a lawyer who hated lawyers, a Jewish person who hated Jewish people, and a gay person, fiercely closeted if haphazardly hidden, who hated gay people.” Above all, though, as the nation prepared to hurtle itself forwards into an uncertain future without the bulldog it had called its president for the past eight years, Roy Cohn was able to look back at last and see what he had done. Though he was not always popular, at the end of the day he knew America looked a bit more like Roy Cohn now.
— — —
[1] I cannot stress enough that Bill Buckley actually did have a habit of skinny-dipping with National Review interns. I wish I was making this up.
[2] In 1965, Kỳ told Brian Moynahan: "People ask me who my heroes are. I have only one: Hitler.” When the Johnson administration tried to cover for him and said the remark was fabricated, Kỳ shouted it again over their objections.
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To pull back the curtain, if Gilligan's VP had lost reelection then Nixon would have won in '84 -- Enigma told me that, lol
(If only I had knew that sooner...)
It would have been glorious. You weren’t ready for the Nixon dialogue.
Alas, I had a new idea, and Dick’s probably dead by the end of this post ITTL.
Will say, looking this up that there really is no evidence actually supporting this, and quite alot going against it. Every time people have brought it up, they were challenged and immediately had to retract. Heres a video on the latest book on the subject:
The Journalist in the video was all into investigating South Africas Apartheid Death Squads, so you know not really a dude to cover it up.
TLDR: Malan was a scumbag fascist, but not a pedo.
Good to note, I cut the parenthetical - tbh I wasn’t honestly planning on including it but I received some bad advice when soliciting help coming up with a way to make Malan’s execution not being planned a common historical myth. I reverted back to the original, the type of thing Hani was furious about OTL. Apologies.
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UPDATE!
Barring some truly magnificent amounts of luck, the successor to Roy Cohn will not be ready for the scheduled weekend release. I have been sick so motivating myself to write has been very difficult. We (and here I mostly mean Enigma) have supplemental list content that will probably be released in that slot instead, with the next President hopefully being ready for Wednesday!
Thank you all for understanding!
Barring some truly magnificent amounts of luck, the successor to Roy Cohn will not be ready for the scheduled weekend release. I have been sick so motivating myself to write has been very difficult. We (and here I mostly mean Enigma) have supplemental list content that will probably be released in that slot instead, with the next President hopefully being ready for Wednesday!
Thank you all for understanding!
This might be dangerous, but I’ll take into consideration any particular countries suggested here (no promises though!) - this is going to be globally oriented and first and foremost reliant on the contours of the TL elsewhere. Some things brought up in it might not have come up thus far but seem too big to have left out, that means they’re slated to be a plot point later 
Have at it!
Have at it!
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