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Also, to resolve any outstanding debates.

I am against segregation. If you voted for me because you approve, you are welcome. If you voted for me thinking I was not, than thank you. You can take that thank you to the bank, which will hopefully after a few years of my presidency be integrated.

That is all.
 
Well, this is awkward.

I have, in fact, been at work on an update in the past few weeks during the respites I have from deadlines and other RL obligations, one which dealt with the problem of Mr. Dagger's apparent permanent absence. Err... uh... I believe in this case you may have to simply take what I have done at face value once the update is finished.

Anyway, there is a holiday coming up, so I can hopefully post this upcoming update and run through at least one election-update cycle in that before the thread is threatened back toward dormancy by the tests of my final year.

I apologize now for my failure to uphold my duties to the participants of this AAR, and apologize in advance for the haphazard and sub-par performance that you are doubtless to see in the next update, whenever it may come.
 
Well, this is awkward.

I have, in fact, been at work on an update in the past few weeks during the respites I have from deadlines and other RL obligations, one which dealt with the problem of Mr. Dagger's apparent permanent absence. Err... uh... I believe in this case you may have to simply take what I have done at face value once the update is finished.

Anyway, there is a holiday coming up, so I can hopefully post this upcoming update and run through at least one election-update cycle in that before the thread is threatened back toward dormancy by the tests of my final year.

I apologize now for my failure to uphold my duties to the participants of this AAR, and apologize in advance for the haphazard and sub-par performance that you are doubtless to see in the next update, whenever it may come.

((Tis glorious to hear))
 
Henry Thompson: Unraveling

In the election of 1953, Daniel Dagger edged past President Jarvis to victory on the wings of Southern discontent and fears of communism. In Congressional Elections however, the Liberal Party suffered a setback, as Republican representatives in close districts adopted more hard-line policies on foreign affairs and disassociated themselves from the President in the South. The final tally for Dagger’s congress became 270-265 in favor of the Liberals in the House and 46-8-46 in the Senate.

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1. Results for the Election of 1953.​

Dagger however, proved to be a disappointment for the Southerners who had voted him in, as he failed to back down on the issue of segregation. When asked by his advisors why, he replied that “we cannot back down on something the executive has so fervently pursued. To back down now would forever tarnish the credibility of the Presidency [1].” For three weeks, the National Guard would escort children through the school doors in Virginia, until Jubal Byrd finally gave in.
There was little time for the Southern representatives to be outraged at the new President though. A week after his inauguration, Dagger’s health had taken a sudden turn for the worse, and by the end of the Desegregation Crisis, he was at death’s door; the culprit a form of cancer that had slowly spread throughout his body, and become malignant around the time of Election Day. Too late to be treated, it killed Dagger, aged 35, in his bed on March 2nd 1953.
The man sworn in to replace him, Henry Thompson, was less hawkish than Dagger, and also less supportive of economic regulation. However, he felt that his was a “care-taker Presidency”, gained unfairly, and obligated to uphold the principles of the deceased Dagger. Thus 1953 passed with the Federal Government in a sort of stasis, bills being bandied around by a congress unsure of how they could succeed in such a delicate balance without an active executive branch to come down on one side of the aisle or another.
There was one bill that was passed, with unanimity but for the most fiscally conservative of Republicans. The Air and Space Funding Bill, also known as the “Space Bill,” the first step in the promises of Jarvis and many others to place the United States in space, came into effect on June 22nd 1953. It created the National Air and Space Agency, dedicated to the cause of space travel. Over the next decade it would inevitably become a weapon of the Cold War as the Soviets met the challenge of space, but at its creation President Thompson called NASA “the first step, the extending of the hand to all nations in invitation, to come and explore the vast unknown.”

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2. President Thompson shortly after the passage of the ASFB.​

There were some politicians, mostly from Congressman Lovey’s “pack of hounds” as Thompson called them, to whom such statements seemed proof that the President would renege on his predecessor’s campaign promise of renewed anti-communism on the international stage. It should perhaps have been obvious the promised unraveling of the global peace process would be rooted in the end of the European imperial experiment. First in the failure of the European powers to account for, and mitigate, the disastrous consequences of their undermining of China’s political stability.
In late 1953, the decades long civil war in China reached an apparent turning point with a dramatic collapse in the combat capability of the Chinese Republican Army. Between October and December of that year, Beijing and Nanjing both fell to offensives by the communists. The fact that Mao Zedong’s People’s Liberation Army was supported by the Soviets with all but actual troops was perfect ammunition for Lovey’s and his ilk.
By January 1954, the pressure from the Pack of Hounds was becoming unbearable. On the 15th, Thompson negotiated an increase in military aid with the Republic of China, and approved American bombing of known Communist-occupied areas. These actions were the first sign of the kind of foreign policy that would come to dominate Thompson’s term, as the momentary thawing of US-USSR relations that Jarvis had experienced reversed itself in the mid-1950s.
With the situation in China hopefully under control, an emboldened and eager to act Thompson turned to Korea, where the anti-communist Republic of Korea had suffered major setbacks in its campaign against the communist Korean People’s Republic. On February 21st he approved unconditional aid for the Republic, limited air support, and a force of 1,000 American “military advisors.” Especially the last measure had many of former President Jarvis’ allies up in arms, but a groundswell of support that had formed as a reaction to Thompson’s decisiveness kept their objections drowned out.

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3. US Advisors in the Republic of Korea, c. 1955.​

In the Soviet Union, an ailing Stalin responded by demanding that the USSR give double the amount of aid to the KPR as the US was giving to the RK. The result was a continuation of the Korean stalemate. Unlike analysts predicted in that first year of Thompson’s presidency, the catalyst for the major crisis of the mid-1950s would not come from the collapsing “Asian Front” of the Cold War, but instead from a front of the European Imperial Race that had been collapsing much longer; the Middle-East.
A hodge-podge of sectarian tension and independence movements had sprung up in the former lands of the Ottoman Empire after British occupation in 1917. By the late 1940s, the British were in the beginnings of a general retreat from these territories, setting up ad hoc provisional governments as they extricated themselves from an “arid and unforgiving imperial miscalculation.” Unfortunately, accepting their failure to impose imperial rule also meant having to deal with the unintended consequences of the initial moral hubris of 1917.
The creation of an Israeli state had, technically, been the stated policy of the British since the occupation of Palestine began, under the Commonwealth’s “Balfour Doctrine.” [2] This doctrine however, had been largely ignored by both founding members, dismissed as “victory-drunk wishful thinking.” Imperial administration had been accepted by the British as the stable, and thus moral, option, and tolerated by the Americans due to their general disdain for the outside world in the aftermath of the First World War. With the imminent withdrawal of the imperial administration, hundreds of thousands of Jews had flocked to Palestine, and were demanding that the Commonwealth follow through on its promise.

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4. British Troops in Palestine during the last days of Empire, August 1954.​

By late 1954, Thompson, who feared that they had already lost the Palestinians to Soviet influence merely by courting the idea of the Israeli state, urged Prime Minister Clement Attlee to support the creation of Israel. “We need a strong, reliable ally against [communism] in this theater after [the British] departure,” he told the Prime Minister. And so it was that, when British troops finally began preparations for leaving Palestine in late October 1954, the former colony was set to be divided into an Israeli nation and a Palestinian nation.
The reaction of the new Arab states was far from satisfied. They railed against the policy in the UN and amongst themselves in diplomatic meetings, but it was the new President of Egypt, Anwar Sadat, who would escalate discontent into global crisis. It was through a quirk of the Scramble for Africa that Egypt had become divided into Sicilian, later Italian, and British possessions. Sadat and his allies Gamal Nasser and Salah Salem had been instrumental in the unification of Egypt during the Second World War, when British support for independence had become conditional on the fall of the Italian colonies.
Now, they required anti-British credentials for their government, increasingly coming under fire for being supposedly just an extension of the British colonial administration, just with an Egyptian face. In opposition to Israel, they saw answers to both distrust from Arab nations and their own people. On the 1st of November, 1954, for their own people as asserting independence, and for their Arab Allies as protest against the proposed Israeli state, Egyptian troops occupied the Suez Canal [3].
The British and French responded with an immediate call for UN action against the Egyptians, but their hope for this was quickly dashed by Soviet promises to Egypt of a veto of any such resolution. The Soviets excused themselves as “protecting the interests of a small nation in freedom from imperialism.” The British and French then embarked on a whirlwind political campaign to drum up support for unilateral intervention; intervention that they would find support for with President Thompson.
In a speech to Congress on November 3rd, he announced his intent to support the British and the French governments in a proposed recapture operation of the Canal. he presented Egypt’s occupation of the Canal Zone as an act similar to the German occupation of Czechoslovakia, and intervention as “a necessary measure to ensure both the safety of world trade, and the upholding of international law.”

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5. The deck of the U.S.S. McCahill in preparation for Operation Canal Buster.​

As the United States and its two main allies prepared to invade Egypt and recapture the Suez, the Soviet Union was thrown into disarray by the final breaths of Joseph Stalin. The Premier’s death could not have come at a better time for the Americans, who now felt assured that the USSR would not intervene, occupied as it would be with the power struggle Stalin’s death would kick off. In this analysis they were right, and the Soviets stayed silent throughout the NATO invasion of the Suez that began on November 24th and ended four days later when the last Egyptian forces were forced to withdraw from the Canal Zone.
The end-result was seemingly a resounding political victory for Thompson, Attlee and Pierrot. Sadat’s government, who had expected more support from their Arab Allies, and less from the United States, was humiliated and forced to acquiesce to continued European control of the Suez. The Soviet Union had been made to look weak and indecisive in front of potential allies, and the United States had finally made a “bold and visible move” on the international stage.
In the long-run however, the Suez Crisis would prove a cancer at the heart of American policy in the Middle-East. It would end up driving Egypt ever closer to the Soviet Union, as it would do with the other Arab states, and the Israeli state created in its aftermath would only make matters worse. Ultimately, Thompson had saved the Canal and Israel, at the cost of losing almost the entirety of the remaining Middle-East and gaining a hard-line successor to Stalin in former Commander of the Armies Voroshilov.

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6. Kliment Voroshilov, Premier of the Soviet Union (1956-60).​

In terms of foreign policy, Thompson’s term post-Suez was uneventful, with the Soviets cracking down somewhat in their Eastern European satellites as a way of cementing Voroshilov’s ascendance, and the situation continuing to deteriorate at a slowed pace in China. For the most part, these developments were little publicized, or little cared for by the American public. Instead they were preoccupied with Senator Eugene Lovey and his “Red Scare.”
Lovey had capitalized on the anti-Soviet sentiment of the 1953 election, and managed to whip up frenzy over the idea of communist threat to America in the first few months of Thompson’s term, before the President acted on China and Korea. He had accused members of the government of communism, although he never stated who, and gone after everyone who opposed him in media, not subtly implying that they were Soviet spies trying to undermine him. The atmosphere of distrust, of almost everyone, which he had created with this, created a second black list of suspected communists, the re-evaluation of which would, after Lovey’s ignominious fall, bring up the deeper buried national shame of the Fascist Black List.
That fall finally came in 1955, after the Suez Crisis, when radio personality Edward R. Murrow interviewed Lovey on February 3rd about his reactions to the crisis. Despite Lovey’s protestations, Murrow then proceeded to ask for evidence and names of supposed communists in a government that had taken such a clear stand against it. Lovey, unable to provide anything, was humiliated. In 1961, he would lose his senate seat to anti-war Republican Aldwich Young.

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7. Edward R. Murrow, photographed after Lovey stormed out of the booth.​

Lovey, unable to make a mark on Congress after the interview, did make a mark on popular culture, albeit unintentionally. The morality of the communist black list would be explored in metaphor through the movie “Black Was My Uniform,” which netted a Best Actor Oscar for its young lead, Marlon Brando, in 1956. Other influential movies of the Thompson years were that year’s Best Picture winner; “Central Park,” which rekindled interest in Mary Jameson’s original novel, and 1953’s “Roman Holiday,” which introduced the movie-going public to Audrey Hepburn, as she won Best Actress starring alongside Gregory Peck, who won Best Actor for the same film.
The biggest cultural impact in these years however, was made by Rock and Roll, which scored its first major hits on the wings of Comrade Joe and the Trust Busters’ “My Girl”, Bill Haley and His Comets’ “Rock Around the Clock”, and Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode. Soon there was a backlash from conservative parents and elders, who considered the music a bad influence, but this only made Rock and Roll more appealing to youth looking for rebellion and meaning. It was these youth who, after 1955, also bought J. D. Salinger’s “Catcher in the Rye”, published three years earlier, and turned it into a phenomenon.
The exploding cultural scene was reflected in the economic performance of the United States, which surged forward as the post-war boom continued, buoyed by European demand and an ever-more ravenous American consumer culture. Between 1953 and 1957, the economy grew 20.9% with no signs of stopping. As primary season drew close, Thompson could rather happily say that he had not “failed the legacy of my predecessors.”

[1] – In his biography of Dagger, “40 Days,” historian William Fourier called this quote “ a sign of just how much Dagger could have achieved, had he been given more time in office.”

[2] – The Balfour Doctrine, the brainchild of ex-Prime Minister Balfour and a group of “imperial idealists”, was proposed at the 39th Commonwealth Conference and called for the return of Jerusalem and Judea as a whole to the Jewish people “from whom it had been wrested illegally by conqueror after conqueror.”

[3] – The British had received 50/50 ownership of the Canal from the French in 1915 as collateral for French loans taken to fight the Great War.

---------------------------

Exceptional Situation(s):

It’s baaaaack!!!

Primary Time! Parties are: Republican, Liberal, Independent.

Let’s get this party back in swing.
 
Excerpts from the San Diego Chronicle, June 1956

"Suez was a travesty" said former President Jarvis in an interview with Edward Murrow; he considered the entire situation "incredibly dangerous" and "likely to turn the entire Middle East against us." When asked about a possible run for President again, the war -hero turned Chief Executive declined to answer one way or the other. However, given his recent criticisms of the Thompson administration for "missteps abroad," many believe that his candidacy is quite possible; he did however offer praise for his successor regarding segregation and the Space Bill.
 
What America needs right now is a man of action, a man who will fight its enemies...I believe I am that man and thus I announce I will be running for the Presidency under the banner of the America First Party, but due to its small numbers, I will officially be an independent. I call on the Republican Party to also stand by me and give its endorsement!

William M. Wallace
Governor of New York
 
((Happy to see the formation of isreal in this aar, don't usually see that in other aar's))
 
America has lived a lot during its relative short life, but who says we cant make our nation live more? I say that we reassure the world that the United States will remain strong and benevolent, being the protector of liberty at the same time. But for this task we need someone that will execute this hard mission without any doubt or fear, I say humbly that I believe I am capable of this honorable task, therefore I will be running for presidency under an Independent banner. I hope that our nation realizes the need for change and supports me to finally give the United States what it deserves!

Aaron Ruthing
Governor of Oregon
 
does no one check the date of the last posts? The last post that's actually in character is from almost half a year ago. Unless BBB posts that he wants to revive this, it's dead, so let's leave it that way, shall we?