WI: Nixon assassinated during the '68 campaign

sciscisciortino

Carried on from another thread, because I've been toying with ideas for a worst-late-60s-possible with a 1968 POD TL anyway. What effects would it have if Nixon was assassinated in, say, September? Who will the GOP nominate in his absence? How is this going to affect violence down the road? How will it affect Humphrey, Wallace, the election, politics and history down the road? What of Spiro? :eek:
 
Driftless

Driftless

Donor
I could certainly imagine the National Republican Party wanting a re-set vs having Spiro Agnew as the presidential candidate. Even a very sympathetic electorate towards the Republicans, would probably opt in large enough numbers for the safer, more experienced choice of HHH.

Coming on the heels of the Kennedy assassination five years earlier, it would have been a very bad situation for the country. It would have given the decided appearance of a country in political chaos. The Soviets would have had a field day over that development.

Whoever did win the election, would probably want to seed the starting cabinet and other important posts with folks from the other party, to at least give a swing at a unity government.
 

Emperor Julian

Driftless said:
I could certainly imagine the National Republican Party wanting a re-set vs having Spiro Agnew as the presidential candidate. Even a very sympathetic electorate towards the Republicans, would probably opt in large enough numbers for the safer, more experienced choice of HHH.
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But who? Rockefeller and Romney were too liberal, Reagan was too conservative. Agnew would at least be able to unite the party. Remember, for most of the campaign of 1968, Republican victory seemed certain, Humphrey amazingly managed to pull it close. Chances are the Republican leadership, seeing what they would imagine to be a strong victory becoming a huge landslide due to the sympathy, would probably not be worried. And I think Agnew could probably win with the sympathy, maybe narrower than Nixon.
 
Plumber

Plumber

To be quite honest, a Nixon assassination is far less traumatic than Watergate.

The Chennault stuff coming out in 1969, basically Watergate four years earlier... That would be nasty.
 

sciscisciortino

Emperor Julian said:
But who? Rockefeller and Romney were too liberal, Reagan was too conservative. Agnew would at least be able to unite the party. Remember, for most of the campaign of 1968, Republican victory seemed certain, Humphrey amazingly managed to pull it close. Chances are the Republican leadership, seeing what they would imagine to be a strong victory becoming a huge landslide due to the sympathy, would probably not be worried. And I think Agnew could probably win with the sympathy, maybe narrower than Nixon.
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Scranton gets nominated, maybe?
 

Realpolitik

Banned
Spiro is butterflied. He was nothing without Nixon. This will have a pretty nasty impact on the heels of MLK and RFK, especially on the burgeoning right wing.

Reagan doesn't have enough of a following to win yet-the New Deal consensus is too strong. Romney is cooked after the "brainwashed" gaffe. My guess is that it would be Rocky, but that he would lose to Humphrey, with perhaps Wallace getting a bigger section of the votes.
 

Realpolitik

Banned
Plumber said:
To be quite honest, a Nixon assassination is far less traumatic than Watergate.

The Chennault stuff coming out in 1969, basically Watergate four years earlier... That would be nasty.
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I disagree. A Watergate like event that reduced faith in the government was coming, first off. Second, Nixon was able to keep the GOP stable for a while. Who knows what might happen now that the right wing has their equivalent assassination? Finally, I do not even want to risk the possibility of the Gang of Four taking power in China, which is more likely to happen if we didn't open with them-and I think only Nixon could or would done that. And that's just the FIRST foreign policy concern that Nixon not being around raises.

I don't think Chennault has happened yet. But OTL, the Chennault info would be worse than Watergate insofar at it would be explosive on everybody involved-it was a very complex affair. What if this reveals that LBJ was falsely claiming peace to get Humphrey elected? It will be an endless degenerating cycle involving US allies and enemies alike.

I've stated in several posts the background of the affair, and why LBJ didn't reveal the Chennault affair. I've studied for a long time, and it's very fascinating. People often get it wrong though in terms of actual potential impact. Anyway, part of it was it could have severely backfired against Johnson, especially when you remember that South Vietnam is an ally, not an enemy. The irony is, in terms of actual impact and things done, it was all a farce. Nixon was making a charade of sabotaging peace(sabotaging the Democrats was different, but again, this was more Thieu than anyone else), and Johnson was making a charade of being willing to engage in a very sleazy foreign policy deal to influence an election he wasn't even in. The Vietnamese were the ones who would decide in the end, and both LBJ-a lame duck in foreign policy at best at this point-and RMN knew it. Neither were particularly serious about influencing any peace deals* or were actually DOING what I described, but the fact that they were willing to go through the motions speaks to how utterly unscrupulous they were, and how cynical they were about the voters. In 1968, Nixon, Johnson, Ho Chi Minh, and Nguyen van Thieu wrote a new playbook for "How To Act Like A Sociopath". Talk about contempt for humanity...

If Chennault gets revealed, it is going to devolve into a partisan brawl that will never be resolved. Remember-LBJ has no smoking gun.

Reminding myself to stay away from politics...

*-More that they knew they couldn't than that they wouldn't, but a little of that too, at least with Johnson. He wouldn't seriously betray the South Vietnamese.
 
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Derek Jackson

I assume that it would be hard not to nominate the VP candidate.

We get President Agnew, unless he REALLY scares voters or his abuses in Maryland are more thoroughly investigated
 

Realpolitik

Banned
Derek Jackson said:
I assume that it would be hard not to nominate the VP candidate.

We get President Agnew, unless he REALLY scares voters or his abuses in Maryland are more thoroughly investigated
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An Agnew Presidency might cause nuclear war. The man was a forerunner to Palin.

Thankfully, he had about as much chance of getting into the White House on his own as she did.
 

Deleted member 16736

Largely the response to Nixon's death is going to depend on who pulled the trigger or threw the bomb. A southern segregationist killing the president in the name of white supremacy would probably wreck the Wallace campaign while an African American doing it would only help him pick up more states. If it's a leftist then that might play into the Wallace or the Republican nominee's "Law and Order" approach to the campaign; if it's a John Bircher, then both Wallace and the right wing of the Republican party are doomed.

Regardless, I think the Republicans can dump Agnew. The man's only been Governor for, what, a year and a half by this point? Sympathy only goes so far and with the world in chaos, America needs an experienced leader. It's not difficult to imagine them saying "Ted, you're staying on the ticket but you're sure as hell not heading it up. We want to win in November and you're too inexperienced both in public office and on the campaign trail to get us across the finish line. Stay in the VP and in eight years, God willing, we'll support you 100%." Even if he doesn't stay or resigns in protest for not getting the role, who is going to side with Agnew? I'm not sure what his clout was like within the national party at the time, but it couldn't be very much given where he was starting from in 1968. It's unlikely that he would be the nominee.

I'm not convinced that the party is going to nominate Reagan (for largely the same reasons they would avoid nominating Agnew at that point, plus his campaign was run pretty poorly and this just four years after the disastrous Goldwater campaign) or that they would nominate Rockefeller (who was essentially Humphrey-lite and would destroy their chances of winning any states back from Wallace in the south).

So what about Jim Rhodes of Ohio? Rhodes had helped, in 1964, try to curtail Goldwater's nomination, but not because of ideological differences. He just wanted Republicans to win down-ticket. He's held public office in Ohio since Eisenhower was president. He's well known to the party and was on the ballot at the convention on Miami. On top of all of that, no Republican has ever been elected President without Ohio and Rhodes would certainly carry the state.
 
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