WI: Jimmy Carter Assassinated, 1979?

IOTL, Raymond Lee Harvey, now remembered as an unemployed, mentally ill drifter, was arrested by the Secret Service on May 5, 1979 carrying a starter pistol with only blanks, 10 minutes before Carter was scheduled to give a speech in Los Angeles. After investigating the claims of a conspiracy to kill Carter, the police ultimately found little evidence and Harvey, along with a man known as Osvaldo Espinoza Ortiz, were released without charge.

But what if Harvey hadn't been stopped, and the conspiracy turned out to be true? Harvey alleged that he was only one man in a four man operation, and that he was intended only to shoot blanks as a distraction. What if he had succeeded on his end, and the other men were successful in assassinating Carter? How would VP Walter Mondale adjust to the Presidency? Would he have a chance at winning in 1980?
 
Mondale will of course initially have strong ratings in the polls, but that will fade by 1980. Reagan will still win, though it will be somewhat closer than in OTL. (One difference which will help the Democrats a little: Mondale was opposed to the grain embargo, though once Carter had decided on it in January 1980, he backed it publicly. For a contemporary account of how the embargo was hurting Carter politically, see https://www.washingtonpost.com/arch...6ef-a426-e0060084d69e/?utm_term=.cf3bf55f8bba)
 

Archibald

Banned
Ninja'd by @Magnum :p
The entire thing is unbelievable. With such a name, it is no surprise the wannabee killer suffered from mental illness. It is just like a man with the name of Hitler trying to live in Israel.
 
Walter Cronkite: "In this reporter's opinion...dear sweet baby Christ, for the love of all that is holy, stop naming your children Oswald. And that's the way it is."
 

Archibald

Banned
The Wikipedia page reads like either a joke by a bad writer, or some kind of "tribute" to all the killers of the 60's and 70's, From Oswald to Hinckley.

Imagine a man his parents called Earl Lee Sheeran Moore Paul John Lynn (Sheeran standing for Sirhan, and Lynn, fror "squeaky fromme")

It's just like the van Houtten parents calling their son Milhouse.
 

Archibald

Banned
Plus Three Mile Island. And disco. And Malaise. And Iran. And the second oil shock. 1979 was one hell of a shitty year. There are years like this that are good for nothing. 1982, 1986, 1994, 2014 were crappy.
 

Archibald

Banned
It will be a grim summer. American 191 will still crash in Chicago on the 25th of May.

If you really want to make that year shittier, have more DC-10 crashes this way. It wouldn't be too hard.
To make a long story short.
When designing the DC-10, Mcdonnell Douglas had build a wing, then attached a pylon to the wing, and a reactor to the pylon.
For engine maintenance, MDD expressedly recommended to detach the engine from the pylon. MDD made sure the engine was strongly bolted to the pylon. But many airlines found the bolts tedious to remove and soon found it was faster, easier and cheaper to detach the pylon from the wing (facepalm 1)

So the mechanics did that. Except that wasn't standard procedure, and soon they ran into a major headache: how do you re-attach the pylon, with the massive 12 000 pound engine hanging, to the wing ? they used a forklift, and somewhat rammed the fucking pylon into the wing like brutes (double facepalm).

You can guess what happened next: banging the pylon against the wing led to cracks, and when flight 191 lifted off, full power, the entire pylon and engine cracked and detached, and went flying over the wing, killing the hydraulic controls at the same time.Then the aircraft slammed into the ground, and everybody died.
When the FAA grounded all DC-10s for three months, they found many cracked pylons on the brink of collapse. Other airlines had happily copied American (triple facepalm)
Yikes.

latest
 
Last edited:
Mondale will of course initially have strong ratings in the polls, but that will fade by 1980. Reagan will still win, though it will be somewhat closer than in OTL. (One difference which will help the Democrats a little: Mondale was opposed to the grain embargo, though once Carter had decided on it in January 1980, he backed it publicly. For a contemporary account of how the embargo was hurting Carter politically, see https://www.washingtonpost.com/arch...6ef-a426-e0060084d69e/?utm_term=.cf3bf55f8bba)

This is correct re the grain embargo, but a much more crucial thing that could help Mondale is that he might appoint someone other than Volcker to be the new Fed chair, which means no 1980 recession. That was probably the biggest factor in Carter's final, fatal drop in popularity. If you look at his approval ratings trend here (http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/data/popularity.php?pres=39), you can see that by early 1980 Carter's approval ratings had actually recovered into the mid to high 50s. With no recession, no grain embargo, and (in all likelihood) no primary challenge from Teddy, I'd give Mondale at least a 50-50 shot against Reagan if not better.
 
Plus Three Mile Island. And disco. And Malaise. And Iran. And the second oil shock. 1979 was one hell of a shitty year. There are years like this that are good for nothing. 1982, 1986, 1994, 2014 were crappy.

Yeah, 1979 was horrible. It was one of those years where it felt like things were falling apart. That year deserves to have a book written about it.
 

Archibald

Banned
I wasn't born in '79, but what you describes looks like my 1994. Hell of a fucking year. Rwanda and Ayrton Senna, the horror. Also Kurt Cobain. (and Nixon, admittedly).

I forgot 2009. Another deeply shitty year. Sarkozy and his clique, a storm, loss in my family, depression. Fuck 2009. burn in hell.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclone_Klaus
 
Top