Alot of neocons credit Scoop Jackson for stuff though I imagine he would be infuriated with alot of their domestic stances.
Bicentennial Man: Ford '76 and Beyond
- Thread starter KingSweden24
- Start date
I definitely cheered about Crupsak getting to be governor, I've grown interested in her career looking it up.
Scoop getting into office is interesting particularly as he only has three years left in him at this point. And with a Democrat, sticking at governing they'll probably keep it blue as opposed to in OTL. It's interesting that there will be more hawks in the coming years for the time being, which....I mean, it could go either way to be honest. Cyrus Vance is an interesting choice, and McGovern becoming Ambassador to the UN makes total sense really. An interesting spectrum from McGovern to Jackson but let's see how it plays out!
Oooh, domestic issues! That'll be fun to see.
Scoop getting into office is interesting particularly as he only has three years left in him at this point. And with a Democrat, sticking at governing they'll probably keep it blue as opposed to in OTL. It's interesting that there will be more hawks in the coming years for the time being, which....I mean, it could go either way to be honest. Cyrus Vance is an interesting choice, and McGovern becoming Ambassador to the UN makes total sense really. An interesting spectrum from McGovern to Jackson but let's see how it plays out!
Oooh, domestic issues! That'll be fun to see.
I’ll need to make this canon of course in the text but Jackson’s replacement in the Senate is Tom Foley.
Yeah, Carey is definitely giving himself a wide, diverse set of viewpoints within the party on the FoPo side.
I actually quite like that idea… I’d been debating what to do with Udall and a Cabinet post would be a great way to integrate the ideas and views of the chunk of the party left out of the Carey/Askew combination
Yep and as I said being from a very prominent right-to-work state may give him a unique perspective in how anti-labor laws work and how to effectively deal with them. But I’m far from an expert on labor policy so I could be full of shit here lol
First of all, congrats to @KingSweden24, you've done an excellent timeline and I'm very excited about the Carey years to come.
Second, on to the Cabinet point, I don't quite think that Udall would be the best fit for Labor; I imagine either a labor man through and through like Douglas Fraser of the UAW would become Secretary, because there's probably a huge political debt to the UAW and AFL-CIO for carrying the North and Midwest, or failing that, one of the wonks from the Department itself. I think Udall would be a better fit for Interior, imho, but as always, whatever choice the author makes will be well founded
.
Once again, thank you so much for your effort, and we shall roll onwards to the Carey years!
Second, on to the Cabinet point, I don't quite think that Udall would be the best fit for Labor; I imagine either a labor man through and through like Douglas Fraser of the UAW would become Secretary, because there's probably a huge political debt to the UAW and AFL-CIO for carrying the North and Midwest, or failing that, one of the wonks from the Department itself. I think Udall would be a better fit for Interior, imho, but as always, whatever choice the author makes will be well founded
.Once again, thank you so much for your effort, and we shall roll onwards to the Carey years!
Interior was my first instinct, too - just a q of what Cabinet job Udall gets, really.First of all, congrats to @KingSweden24, you've done an excellent timeline and I'm very excited about the Carey years to come.
Second, on to the Cabinet point, I don't quite think that Udall would be the best fit for Labor; I imagine either a labor man through and through like Douglas Fraser of the UAW would become Secretary, because there's probably a huge political debt to the UAW and AFL-CIO for carrying the North and Midwest, or failing that, one of the wonks from the Department itself. I think Udall would be a better fit for Interior, imho, but as always, whatever choice the author makes will be well founded
Once again, thank you so much for your effort, and we shall roll onwards to the Carey years!
And thank you!
The Carey Cabinet Comes Together - Part II
The Carey Cabinet Comes Together - Part II
Hugh Leo Carey was inaugurated as the 39th President of the United States on January 20th, 1981, succeeding Gerald R. Ford and returning Democrats to the White House for the first time in 12 years. After being sworn in on the same Bible as FDR by Chief Justice Warren Burger, his inaugural address was classic Carey - among the shortest in history (indeed, it barely surpassed Ford's 1974 address upon Nixon's resignation), light in soaring rhetoric, and blunt. "The challenge facing this American generation is one of high prices and low wages, few jobs and many problems. Together, we will face them, and God willing, together we will conquer them," was his concluding line, and with that he was driven to the White House as part of the inaugural parade.
Carey's return to Washington after six years as Governor of New York was anticipated by Democrats, met begrudgingly by Republicans, and most of all seen by the President himself as a daunting challenge. Despite his years in Albany, however, he was no outsider - he had of course been a Congressman and understood the game as well as anyone, and also keenly understood that in the opening hundred days of his administration, his greatest challenge would not come from the defenestrated Republicans in their superminority status but rather from juggling the needs and impulses of the massive big tent of the Democratic coalition that included Southern conservatives, old-school New Deal liberals, and the more radical, young and cosmopolitan agglomeration referred to as "New Left." Other than George McGovern's sinecure in New York at the UN, Carey had largely ignored this final faction in assembling his national security team as a foreign policy prerogative of the White House, but party management would play a big role in building out the team responsible for his domestic agenda.
Two spots were easy fills - New Left darling and primary opponent Representative Mo Udall of Arizona as Secretary of Interior, a nod to his Western roots and environmentalist instincts, and UAW Chairman Doug Fraser as Secretary of Labor [1], choices that scratched the ears of key constituencies with little pushback from the Senate. Carey, in meetings with several key Senators in New York and DC over the weeks before inauguration day, came to understand what the power dynamic would be on Capitol Hill when he arrived - Robert Byrd may have been Majority Leader and Alan Cranston Majority Whip, but it was Ted Kennedy's Senate majority and Ted Kennedy would be calling the shots on a whole host of issues, both from his perch on the Judiciary Committee and his long background as a health policy wonk.
This made, ironically enough, the most crucial appointment of Carey's early Presidency the relatively minor Cabinet office of Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, or HEW. It was from this office that the critical policies of anticipated health care reform and welfare expansion would flow, and Kennedy had made it relatively clear in his early background support for Carey that he expected to take the lead on formulating policy. Kennedy was thusly rewarded with his chief counsel Stephen Breyer, an otherwise obscure law professor from Harvard, being appointed as the new HEW chief. The choice was not entirely unorthodox, however; Breyer had a longstanding relationship with the Senator most critical for the coming reforms and for that matter was an expert in administrative law, but Senators understood regardless why Breyer was picked and who that was meant to appease.
Similar horse-trading had to be done for other Cabinet picks. As a sop to Southern interests, Carey picked former New Orleans Mayor Moon Landrieu to run Housing and Urban Development, building on Landrieu's experience as chair of the National Council of Mayors and his profile as a key ally of Askew and Budget Chairman Russ Long; Patricia Harris of Washington, DC was tapped to head up the Department of Transportation, the first Black woman appointed to a Cabinet, to appeal to the crucial African-American voting bloc. Jewish businessman Phil Klutznick was chosen for Commerce, while Minnesota Representative and farmer Rob Bergland was tapped for USDA.
The two most maneuvering appointments, however, were for the Treasury and Attorney General. Carey's first choice for Treasury was Irv Shapiro, DuPont's CEO, but he wanted to keep the choice a secret for as long as possible; as a result, he waited to announce the pick until his inauguration, where Shapiro was a guest, and feigned having been turned down by "somebody else." It would be revealed in the early 1990s that there had been nobody else, and that Shapiro was always his first choice, but that Carey did not want opposition to a CEO at the Treasury to build in the Senate by announcing the pick earlier.
The second was Attorney General. Carey had considered a variety of choices but quietly reached out in late December to Supreme Court Justice Byron White, inquiring whether he was interested in returning to the Cabinet. The federal bench was of great concern to Carey and the pace-setter of the Senate, Judiciary Chairman Kennedy; Nixon had appointed four Justices and Ford two, meaning that six out of nine Justices were appointed by Republican administrations. It was well known in DC circles that White wished to retire under a Democratic administration but that he seemed perfectly happy on the bench; it was also well-established that he was a swingy Justice who was nobody's idea of a liberal's liberal, though he was still towards the left flank of the more conservative Burger Court. A well-concealed, full-court press to get White to retire to take the Attorney General job began behind the scenes after Christmas, including two Kennedy staffers driving to his property in Colorado to make their case. What resulted was Carey not having a formal choice when he was inaugurated, but White announced he would retire to take the job on January 28th, and with that Carey had his full Cabinet and, in one similar fell swoop, his first and most important federal judicial vacancy to fill...
[1] Thanks for the suggestion, @KingTico
First of all, hot damn! Tom Foley in the senate! That's a twist I've not seen coming before so kudos there.
It's always a little fun to see Supreme Court justices in roles unlike those we've seen before. So Breyer getting into the office via a different way is really interesting. And the horse trading commences! Landrieu Senior is such an interesting figure and I'm surprised we don't hear a lot more of him in Alt-History. Harris getting in is a nice touch even if, once again, she's got less time than in OTL to work some magic. Klutznick and Bergland too, though it makes sense for Carey to appoint these people. They are, after all, pretty damn good at their jobs. Of course the real tricky part is going to be how they handle the four years that they weren't in office and all that got thrown at them.
Never heard of Shapiro before, seems a pretty safe choice aside from his prior experience. And shit that is a fucking excellent way to get White out of the Court so he can get his choice in! That's a super smart way of handling it, I've never seen that done before! ....Of course now the question remains, who do you get to replace him? This is going to be quite interesting and no mistake.
Brilliant stuff! Absolutely brilliant!
It's always a little fun to see Supreme Court justices in roles unlike those we've seen before. So Breyer getting into the office via a different way is really interesting. And the horse trading commences! Landrieu Senior is such an interesting figure and I'm surprised we don't hear a lot more of him in Alt-History. Harris getting in is a nice touch even if, once again, she's got less time than in OTL to work some magic. Klutznick and Bergland too, though it makes sense for Carey to appoint these people. They are, after all, pretty damn good at their jobs. Of course the real tricky part is going to be how they handle the four years that they weren't in office and all that got thrown at them.
Never heard of Shapiro before, seems a pretty safe choice aside from his prior experience. And shit that is a fucking excellent way to get White out of the Court so he can get his choice in! That's a super smart way of handling it, I've never seen that done before! ....Of course now the question remains, who do you get to replace him? This is going to be quite interesting and no mistake.
Brilliant stuff! Absolutely brilliant!
Thank you! I worked in Spokane for a few years after college so I've always had a bit of a soft spot for "the Speaker fom Spokane" and his legacy in Eastern Washington (ironically enough, my time there was right around when he passed away). He was a Jackson aide before running for the House and is a nice bone to Democrats east of the mountains, who weren't quite as outnumbered by their Westside peers in 1981 as they are today, though who knows if Jim McDermott actually throws that bone. For our purposes, we'll say he does.
Shapiro, for what its worth, is pretty obscure - I found him when reading up on the process Carter went through in appointing a Fed Chair. Who knows if White would bite on that but he's a very close friend of the Kennedy family so enough urging from Ted may have gotten him to drop out, and he is in his mid-60s after all. Potter Stewart retired fairly young just two years earlier, too. Plus, with White being more of a law-and-order type he'd fit well within Carey's ouevre and he may be worried about the kind of Justice Department somebody to his left might run instead. It just seemed to fit well.
Any updates on South America? I have a feeling Jackson and Brzezinski are going to want to take military action to preserve US hegemony (and corporate interests) in the area
The Saffron Project
The Saffron Project
The USSR in the early 1980s was, by all accounts, internally and externally at a major crossroads. By the spring of 1981, Yuri Andropov was approaching the conclusion of his third year as General Secretary and his efforts to purge the system of "malaise and corruption" and promoting a generation of new, innovative and most importantly modern-minded officials across the nomenklatura and increasingly into the high halls of power in the Presidium, Supreme Soviet and even Politburo seemed to be paying fruit, while his efforts to pursue a new, more aggressive five-year plan to dust off Kosygin's ideas and reorient the Soviet economy out of its late 1970s Brezhnevian stagnation had only just begun. Internationally, the benefits of detente seemed to be paying off as an ebb in tensions with Washington had given breathing room to Moscow. USSR had just pulled off an impressive show at the 1980 Olympics that had greatly burnished its image and as "68ers" of younger, more ideologically intransigent left-wingers in the West came of age in professional, academic and bureaucratic roles and memories of the Prague Spring that same year faded, Soviet prestige seemed elevated at a time that its ideological opponents in the West seemed either hapless, corrupt, or both.
This more muscular, optimistic veneer projected from the Kremlin in the Andropov years papered over a lot of internal issues, however. The corruption purge had not fallen upon high-ranking party members and the rank-and-file equally; it was whispered, when around safe ears, that the heavyweights who had been rounded up and fired (or given an extended Siberian vacation) seemed to curiously enough be Andropov's intra-party rivals or those who stood in the way of his preferred allies. The Soviet economy, after enjoying robust growth in the late 1960s under the Eighth Five-Year Plan, had fallen into a lengthy malaise that in many ways mirrored the ailments suffered in Western market economies during the 1970s but were in fact considerably worse with a program of inflexible collectivization; Mikhael Gorbachev, one of Andropov's younger "shakers," as Kremlinologists came to term them, was bold enough to decisively name the problem as "stagnation" in official albeit secret internal memorandums, and the lack of punishment attached to the norm-breaking Agriculture Minister for speaking so bluntly against the status quo betrayed how seriously Andropov took this problem. [1]
The international aspects of Soviet influence were concerning, too. Prague in 1968 had badly shaken the Kremlin's faith in its close-in empire and the cracks seemed to be showing in post-Ceaucescu Romania and now Poland as well. The Sino-Soviet split and the gradual rapprochement with Beijing begun by the United States before the spectacular collapse of Richard Nixon's Presidency [2] had created a considerable wrinkle within world communism, with now two competing poles for the global hard-left, and the ideological purity and convert's fanaticism of Maoism generated considerable appeal to the rising left-wing movements of the Third World. This need to pay ever-closer attention to what China was up to, especially with the debacle that was the third of three terms under the more conservative and fervently anti-communist Republican Party in the United States, led Andropov to gradually reorient Soviet attention from west to south and southeast. Detente and an apparent diminishing Western appetite for military spending and commitments led Andropov and his inner-sanctum cronies such as Aliyev and Ustinov to conclude that the early 1980s would be defined by redefining Sovietism for the Third World and, at a time when the post-Mao China seemed uniquely weak and supine, reorienting world communism back onto Moscow's preferred axis. The world was more complicated in 1981 than it had been even in the postwar chaos of 1945, with the rise of religious fundamentalism in the Middle East, and the Kremlin would need to demonstrate it understood this and had a response.
Andropov's attention thus fell increasingly on a loosely-related constellation of active measures related to South Asia, what came to be termed internally at the KGB as the Saffron Project, so-named for the color associated with India and, in particular, Indian Hindu nationalism and its various grievances and insecurities. [3] India was a remarkable prize in the global contest for ideas, the backbone of the so-called "Non-Aligned Movement" since the days of Nehru. As the largest domino sans China to fall in the late 1940s collapse of the old colonial-imperial order, it had fallen not to revolutionary communism but rather a type of bureaucratic Fabian socialism nicknamed the "License Raj" but much like the rest of the Third World come to be dominated by a familial dynasty, in this case the Nehru-Gandhi family that now had produced the current Indian Prime Minister returned with a vengeance in 1980 in Indira Gandhi, and her likely successor, her son Sanjay.
India's problems were myriad. It suffered from crippling levels of poverty and illiteracy, its various economic reforms over the years had done about as much good as the USSR's, and it was riven by sectarian tensions, not just between Hindu and Muslim but increasingly with the Sikhs of Punjab. Pakistan loomed large in India's imagination as a great foe, especially after the brutal Bangladeshi War of Independence that had seen millions killed in Bangladesh (then "East Pakistan"), especially as the flexible and ambitious populist regime of Zulfikar Bhutto had gotten its sea legs and grown more confident as an international player, managing to somehow be close with the USSR and its Marxist client in Afghanistan but also play nice with China and the United States, going so far as to have been the choice of exile for the late Shah of Iran. Critically, the majority of the Punjab was in Pakistan, even if the majority of Sikhs lived on the Indian side of the border, and though Bhutto was no friend to Sikh nationalism, that mattered little to either the paranoiacs of Hindu chauvinism or, increasingly, the smaller-and-smaller circle of confidants around the heir apparent, Sanjay Gandhi.
Sanjay, both domestically and internationally, had a reputation for being eccentric, if not erratic and perhaps outright unstable. His influence over his mother during the "Emergency" in India, where the country had nearly toppled into the same kind of autocratic morass that so many other similar states had, had been notorious, and his empowerment of party-aligned hooligans, corrupt party hacks like Defense Minister Bansi Lal or personal friends such as Vidya Charan Shukla, head of broadcasting had hollowed out much of the professional core of the Congress Party's lower echelons and rising talent. In a party already sympathetic to the Soviet Union since the time of Nehru, in other words, the ground was fertile for the KGB to start making inroads with the most important and least accountable man in South Asia.
India was a springboard, in other words, to bigger and greater things. Active measures campaigns began ratcheting up starting in the fall of 1980 and then at a strong clip after the new year, not just in India but across the region. Soviet diplomats, confident that Bhutto had no intention of meddling with their clients in Afghanistan [4], began to step up overt aid in Pakistan. At the same time, efforts began to be made to "penetrate" Sanjay's circle, which was not a particularly difficult task with how careless and carefree many of the people he surrounded himself with were. A few bribes here, some honeypots there, and in less than twelve months Saffron was a vast network of informants, loose-lipped marks, and operatives befuddled at how easy it was to burrow their way remarkably near the beating heart of power in India.
Once there, the influence campaign began. What if it was the case that Sikh separatism was not a fully indigenous plot? What if, perhaps, Pakistan - and not just Pakistan, but the CIA - had something to do with it...?
[1] The Soviet economy wasn't quite at breadlines status in early 1981 yet, and is stronger here than in OTL at the same point, but its not exactly strong.
[2] Kinda wild to think that ITTL Ford was President longer than Nixon
[3] RSS and Hindutva were not the force they are today in 1981, but INC had just clawed back power in 1980 from the BJP and Hindutva was very much a response to increasing Islamic radicalism in the Middle East in the late 1970s
[4] Bhutto is a big reason why the USSR has less of a need to intervene in Afghanistan militarily ITTL
Great update on the Soviet Union as it enters a new decade and all the trials and tribulations to come. Don't think it will end well
Sanjay Gandhi is one of those supervillains the world managed to dodge somehow so playing around with this a bit has potential. I’m surprised I’ve never run across a TL featuring him before, tbh
This was originally gonna be more of an India update and then it just sorta came out this way
When it comes to stuff on India, I found @Imp to be knowledgable in this area and was a big help over with my own part there.
Oh yeah. @Imp is a font of knowledge on South Asia, he’s been tremendously helpful for my CdM take on India
Well when you combine this with the teases that hint at a fall of Communism in China, I get the feeling Moscow is going to be rather successful in its intrigues in Asia. With America being more 'proactive' in Latin America too, I could see there being some exhaustion in the Third World with the struggle between Capitalism and Communism and a desire for a third option.