The Presidents: The Vietnam War Edition

[DensleyBlair]

A treat to have two updates to catch up with. The Americans and their allies will be pleased to have seen some success in Vietnam, even if it does only get them back to where they started, but I have to say I was most taken with the Malcolm X update. A figure I know far too little about, for all of his significance and charisma. It will be interesting to see whether, in death, his methods and ideas can continue to hold influence over the Civil Rights movement; the US is no doubt in for a tumultuous time of things on the home front either way over the coming years, but having some of that 'wild, unpredictable' streak around always makes for intriguing alt-historical possibilities…

 

[El Pip]

And I know how governments, how American governments can be...”
Stockdale paused, collecting his thoughts. After a few moments of silence, he put on his black-rimmed glasses and resumed speaking. “Can be courageous, and how they can be callow. And that’s important. That’s one thing I'm an insider on.”

That is also fairly ominous. A black cloud over an update where things seemed to go fairly well for the US side

(The American advance towards Pleiku)

A classic Vietnam image, the US' massive industrial advantage clearly displayed, but in the sort of terrain that neutralised that advantage. (Plus I do love a Huey, a handsome aircraft and such an evocative sound.)

That said the North Vietnamese appear to still be fighting a conventional war and that is exactly the sort of conflict the US Army is setup to fight and win. If you have troop concentrations big enough for B-52s to find and hit then you are doing it wrong.

 

[Nathan Madien]

Andrzej I: Thank you very much. I wanted to highlight a major figure who served in the Vietnam War and James Stockdale was in Vietnam in 1965, so I decided to talk about him for a bit. Stockdale had a very interesting life and is a hero more people should know about. Plus Stockdale gave me a chance to give you a glimpse of the future.

Speaking of heroes, Bob Dole passed away last month at 98.

DensleyBlair: I am doing very well in Vietnam, which makes me nervous. Every time it looks like I am winning the Vietnam War, the enemy does something that sets me back.

Historically Malcolm X was assassinated in February 1965. Since he is a major figure that I haven't gotten around to talking about, this seemed as good a time as any to write about him. Reading and listening to his rhetoric, Malcolm X could very easily be talking about today as opposed to the 1950s and the 1960s.

That's the thing about the Forbes Presidency. He's coming into office at a tumultuous time in America, having to deal with anti-war protest, racial strife, and the emergence of the counterculture.

El Pip: The South Vietnamese government has certainly been callow, which has cast a cloud over the American effort in Vietnam.

Vietnam War veteran Phil Caputo was among the Americans who were evacuated from Saigon before it fell to the North Vietnamese in April 1975. He was helicoptered to a US aircraft carrier offshore. After he got onto the deck, he looked around at the US military hardware and thought "We got whipped by a bunch of peasant guerillas." While military hardware helps, it doesn't always guarantee victory. Just ask the Germans invading Russia in late 1941.

Of course, I am fighting the Vietnam War using a HOI2 mod...and we all know that HOI games have "issues" in presenting combat.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------The Civil Rights Act of 1965
“If you can get 75% of what you are asking for, I say you take it and fight for the rest later.”
-California Senator Ronald Reagan (Republican; 1965-1972)

For the President of the United States, Congress is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it can be a willing partner in the enactment of the President’s agenda. On the other hand, Congress can completely prevent him from getting anything done. For some Presidents, one Senator in particular had the power to stymie them. When Democratic President Woodrow Wilson (1913-1921) submitted the Treaty of Versailles to the Senate for ratification in 1919, a group of Republicans led by Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts offered to support the treaty in exchange for attaching reservations to it clarifying how the treaty would be implemented in the United States. Believing that the treaty ending World War One should be accepted as is, the President flat out refused to compromise with Lodge. By not securing his support, Wilson lacked the votes needed to get the Treaty of Versailles ratified. Another President who refused to compromise with a powerful Senator, much to his own detriment, was Thomas E. Dewey (1945-1953). A moderate Eastern Establishment Republican, Dewey bitterly butted heads with Robert A. Taft – who led the conservative wing of the GOP – over the direction of the post-World War Two domestic agenda. Both men stubbornly believed that their way was the only way and were completely unwilling to find common ground. The Dewey-Taft Feud led to a shutdown of the Federal Government in 1950, which cost the Republicans control of Congress in the November midterm election. The President once made the eyebrow-raising remark that Taft had “carnal relations with himself”; when he was asked by a reporter for his opinion of Dewey, the Ohio Senator replied icily that “you have to get to know him to dislike him.”
Then there was Democratic President John Sparkman (1954-1961). When he publicly denounced the Supreme Court’s unanimous landmark Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision (which ruled that segregated schools were unconstitutional) in May 1954, Democratic Senator Hubert Humphrey decided to punish him by organizing a liberal blockade of his agenda. Almost none of Sparkman’s proposals or appointments made it through the Senate in 1954. The Humphrey Blockade was finally lifted at the start of 1955 when the President and the Minnesota Senator personally negotiated a deal: in exchange for allowing his agenda to go through, Sparkman promised to suppress his Deep South views on race and to pick a pro-civil rights running mate when he ran for his own term in 1956 (which is one of the reasons why he chose Washington Senator Henry M. Jackson).

A decade later, the issue of civil rights put Republican President Malcolm Forbes on a collision course with a Senator from his own party: Barry Goldwater. Ideologically, the two men couldn’t have been any more different. Forbes was a moderate Eastern Establishment Republican while Goldwater emerged in the early 1960s as one of the nation’s leading conservatives. Their contrasting views were put on full display during the 1964 Republican presidential primaries in which the crowded field of GOP White House hopefuls quickly became a two-man race between the New Jersey Governor and the Arizona Senator. The media naturally compared the ideological Forbes-Goldwater duel with the Dewey-Taft Feud. However, there was a major difference between the two: Forbes and Goldwater didn’t hate each other’s guts. Unlike other Eastern Establishment Republicans, Forbes didn’t portray Goldwater as a radical extremist but rather as a decent man whose views he respectfully disagreed with. When he was criticized by some for not going after Goldwater personally, Forbes pragmatically pointed out that “You want me to call Barry ‘dangerous’. I can’t do that and expect his supporters to vote for me.”
For his part, Goldwater recognized that Forbes sincerely wanted to work with conservatives rather than go to war with them the way Dewey had. After losing the critical winner-take-all California primary to Forbes, Goldwater dropped out of the race and threw his support behind his rival. In his mind, getting fellow Republicans elected to public office over Democrats outweighed sharing the same ideological views. His die-hard supporters didn’t see it that way however. When Forbes was declared the Presidential nominee at the Republican National Convention in San Francisco, California, pro-Goldwater delegates loudly booed it. This incensed Goldwater, who immediately went to the convention hall and mounted the podium. Not bothering to hide his disgust at this display of poor sportsmanship, he admonished his unruly delegates:
“This country is too important for anyone’s feelings. This country, and its majesty, is too great for any man, be he conservative or liberal, to stay home and not work just because he doesn’t agree [with the choice of the convention]. Let’s grow up, conservatives! If we want to take this country back, and I think we can this year, let’s get to work! Governor Forbes wants to work with us; we need to work with him!”
During the campaign that fall, it was evident that the two former rivals genuinely liked and respected each other. Goldwater urged his fellow conservatives to get behind Forbes and filmed a campaign commercial explaining why he was backing him for President. Forbes made campaign stops in Arizona to back Goldwater’s Senate race against Democrat Roy Elson. On Election Night, the re-elected Senator was among the first to call Forbes to congratulate him on his election to the Presidency. Looking to strengthen his ties with Goldwater further, the President-elect tapped his friend William Rehnquist to serve as Solicitor General (who represents the Federal Government at the Supreme Court).

That Goldwater (above) would be his biggest obstacle in trying to pass a civil rights bill was something Forbes did not at all anticipate when he publicly unveiled it during his first prime time address to the nation from the Oval Office on March 4th, 1965. Forbes had deliberately chosen that date for the speech, as it marked the 100th anniversary of Republican President Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address. Delivered as the American Civil War was finally drawing to a close after four bloody years, Lincoln had eloquently laid out his postwar vision of bringing the defeated Southern states back into the Union without harshly punishing them and to heal the nation which had been violently torn apart by slavery:
“With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”
Forbes began his speech by pointing out the historical significance of the day, noting that in the century since Lincoln spoke his immortal words, “there is much work that still needs to be done in order for this Nation to be one in which there is ‘malice toward none’ and ‘charity for all’.”
“This Nation was founded on the principle that all men are created equal, and yet American citizens who happen to be Negro are denied the rights that American citizens who happen to be White take for granted. American citizens who happen to be White can attend any public institution they choose, receive service in places of public accommodation, such as hotels and restaurants and theaters and retail stores, to register and to vote in a free election. This has not been the case for American citizens who happen to be Negro.
American citizenship, and the privileges that come with it, should have no regard for one’s race or color. Every American citizen should have the right to be treated as they would wish to be treated, but this is not the case.”
He listed some national statistics which highlighted the disparities between Whites and Blacks:

• Blacks had one-half as much chance of graduating from high school as Whites
• Blacks had one-third as much chance of graduating from college as Whites
• Blacks had one-third as much chance of getting a professional job as Whites
• Blacks had twice as much chance of becoming unemployed as Whites
• Blacks had one-seventh as much chance of earning $10,000 a year as Whites
• The life expectancy for Blacks was 7 years shorter compared to Whites
• Blacks were paid only half as much as Whites

“As disappointing as these numbers are, there is cause for hope. Over the past decade or so, legal actions have been taken against segregation. Men of good will and generosity have united regardless of party or politics against discrimination.”
The most obvious improvement for African-Americans in recent years was in the voting booth. The passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1963 guaranteed everybody who was 21 or older the right to vote, giving Blacks political power that they hadn’t freely enjoyed before. The President pointed out that in 1964, “Negroes across this Nation were elected to town councils and magistrates courts. In some of the Southern states, Negroes were elected sheriffs. Elected offices whose doors have long been closed to the Negroes because of the color of their skin have now been opened.”
Having secured the right to “vote for the public officials who represent them,” Forbes declared that the time had come in which “our Negro citizens are fully afforded the rights and opportunities that come with being a citizen of this Nation.”
That was when he announced he was sending a civil rights bill to Congress “which will fully free our Negro citizens from social and economic oppression that have rendered them second-class citizens.”
His sweeping bill would ban segregation nationwide. “This legislation, when enacted by the Congress, will give all Americans the right to be served in facilities which are open to the public. Hotels, restaurants, theaters, retail stores, and similar establishments will no longer be permitted to deny service based on the color of one’s skin.
This should be an elementary right. That it is denied is an arbitrary indignity that no American in 1965 should have to endure.”
He acknowledged that some places of public accommodation, feeling the pressure of newly enfranchised African-Americans, “have taken voluntary action to end this discrimination. Many however are unwilling to act on their own accord. It is for this reason that nationwide legislation is needed in order to end this discrimination in all places.”
In addition, his bill would also fully end segregation in public education. “Ever since the Supreme Court’s decision 11 years ago, many districts have been persuaded to desegregate voluntarily. Dozens have admitted Negroes without violence. Today a Negro is attending a State-supported institution in every one of our 50 States, but the pace is slow.
There are still too many Negroes attending segregated grade schools and segregated high schools. The lack of an adequate education denies the Negro a chance to get a decent job. Unemployed, Negroes living in every city of the North as well as the South are without hope for their future. This legislation, when enacted by the Congress, will give them the hope of a better future, both for themselves and for their families.”
“My fellow Americans,” the President said in his close, “The denial of equal rights is a matter that should concern us all. We should not be content to say that the chance to develop your talents is based only on the color of your skin. We need to make our country better than that. We need to make our country one in which every citizen has the equal right to develop their talent and their ability and their motivation, to make something of themselves.”

The next morning, while the President’s speech received praise from Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights advocates (and condemnation from the opponents of civil rights), the civil rights bill banning segregation and discrimination arrived on Capitol Hill. Congressional reaction to the bill was mixed. Southern Democrats, long the champions of segregation, predictably came out against it. They called it a “clearly unconstitutional” Republican attack on states’ rights and vowed to fight it with everything they had. “The fundamental question,” one of them declared, “Is whether or not Congress has the power to take away the liberty of an individual to run his business as he sees fit in the selection and choice of his customers.”
While their anti-civil rights rhetoric was typical, it also felt like they were merely going through the motions of putting up a resistance. The passage of the Voting Rights Act had critically undermined the Jim Crow system of racial segregation which had been in place since the end of Reconstruction in the 1870s, leading Georgia Senator Richard Russell Jr. – who was one of the more realistic segregationists – to warn his fellow Southern Democrats that they couldn’t stop civil rights forever now that “the Negro can vote whenever they please.”
Then there was the simple fact that Southern Democrats, historically a political force to be reckoned with in Congress, didn’t control the levers of power in the 89th Congress. Republicans had the majority in both the House of Representatives (264-171) and the Senate (53-47), putting them in charge of all the Congressional committees and giving them the power to set the agenda on Capitol Hill. Stripped of any meaningful power, all Southern Democrats could do was attack the civil rights bill and argue against its’ passage. “I could agree with almost everything the President said,” Florida Senator George Smathers stated, “But I don’t really believe we need additional legislation. There are plenty of laws on the statute books, and the way the courts have been operating, there is no need of additional legislation to give the Negro his every right.”
Polls at the time revealed that the public wasn’t on their side. A June 1964 poll showed that 49% of respondents favored a public accommodation law, with 42% against it. When the same poll was taken again in January 1965, the number of people who favored the law had climbed to 61%. Even in the South, the percentage of people who were against banning discrimination in public places shrank from 82% in June 1964 to 72% in January 1965. Another poll taken in the South at the beginning of the year showed that 83% of respondents believed that racial integration was inevitable, with 49% predicting that it would come about by 1970.

(Georgia Senator Richard Russell Jr.)
While Southern Democrats voiced their opposition to the President’s comprehensive civil rights bill, Republicans came out for it. As some supportive Republicans were quick to remind people, the GOP was the Party of Lincoln, the political party that ended slavery and desegregated the United States military. Banning discrimination against blacks and ending segregation once and for all was their natural inclination. “Neither caste nor creed,” Senate Majority Leader Frederick F. Houser of California declared, “Have any part in our American system.”
The bill was taken up first by the House of Representatives, where Speaker of the House Gerald Ford of Michigan promised swift passage. He sent it to the powerful Rules Committee, which determines how bills are considered by the House. There were 15 members on the Rules Committee: 10 Republicans (all chosen by Ford) and 5 Democrats (all chosen by Minority Leader John W. McCormack of Massachusetts). The Chairman of the Rules Committee was Clarence J. Brown of Ohio, a staunch conservative who also championed civil rights. Believing the civil rights bill to be long overdue, Brown opened hearings on the bill on March 9th. The hearings lasted three weeks; on March 30th, the measure was reported out of the Rules Committee with a positive recommendation. It was immediately sent to the House floor for debate and final vote. The House approved an amendment to a provision which prohibited employers from discriminating on the basis of national origin, race, and religion to also include prohibiting employers from discriminating on the basis of sex. On April 12th, just over 5 weeks since its arrival on Capitol Hill, the House of Representatives passed the Civil Rights Act of 1965 by a vote of 325 to 110. 220 Republicans and 105 Democrats voted for it while 44 Republicans and 66 Democrats voted against it.

(Rules Committee Chairman Clarence J. Brown)
The President received the news as Air Force One was making its’ descent into Andrews Air Force Base from a trip to Asia. He stepped off the plane visibly jubilant. The House had approved his bill by a wide margin; now it would go onto the Senate, which Forbes confidently believed would consider it quickly and send it to his desk for his signature. Halfway to his goal of banning segregation and discrimination, he must have thought “What could possibly go wrong?”
Two words: Barry Goldwater. The Arizona Senator called the White House the next day and requested a meeting with the President. He was told to come as soon as possible. Upon arriving at the Executive Mansion, Goldwater was ushered into the Oval Office, where he was warmly welcomed by his friend. After exchanging pleasantries, the plain-speaking and bluntly honest Senator got straight to the point:
“Mr. President, I want you to know that I cannot support this civil rights bill that passed the House yesterday.”
Forbes was surprised by his announcement, to say the least. Goldwater had after all voted for the Voting Rights Act and had been supportive of desegregation throughout his life. The President listened intently as a member of the NAACP and the National Urban League explained his reason for opposing the Civil Rights Act. His problem with the bill was that it outlawed discrimination in all places of public accommodation and that it outlawed discrimination in hiring workers. He believed that it was an unconstitutional overreach of the Federal Government to tell private businesses who they could serve and who they could hire. Back in the 1930s, when he ran an upscale department store in Phoenix, Goldwater had voluntarily desegregated it. His personal experience shaped his view that “it should be up to the individual businesses to decide if they want to integrate or not, not the government.”
Forbes respectfully disagreed. He believed the Federal Government had the constitutional right to regulate businesses and to ensure that people had the equal opportunity to gain employment. He also thought it was ridiculous and counterproductive for businesses to refuse serving customers just because they were black. “The point of a business is to make money. It shouldn’t matter whether the person who wants to give you their money is a white person or a Negro. Money is money...and you need money in order to operate.”

With the two men completely at odds over the constitutionality of the Civil Rights Act, the meeting came to an end. Shortly after Goldwater left the Oval Office, Forbes received a phone call from Houser. “Mr. President, I heard Barry went to see you about the civil rights bill.”
When asked who told him, the Majority Leader answered that Goldwater had gone to him first to relay his intention before he called up the White House. “What do you think of his position?”
“I think Barry is wrong to oppose the bill and I tried to change his mind about it, with no luck. He is going to vote against it, but I don’t think losing his vote is going to stop the bill from being passed.”
“Well actually, Mr. President,” there was a noticeable change in Houser’s voice, as if he was about to be the bearer of bad news, “Losing Barry’s vote is going to stop the bill from being passed.”
For the second time that day, Forbes was surprised by what he heard from a member of his own political party. He pressed Houser to explain what he meant. The Majority Leader explained that Goldwater was the leader of the conservative wing of the GOP in the Senate. If he opposed the measure, other conservative Senators would follow his lead. Very much a numbers man, the President did some quick math in his head. There were 53 Republicans in the Senate; if the conservatives didn’t back the Civil Rights Act, it would be in trouble. What he didn’t know yet was exactly how much trouble it would be in. “Fred, I want you and Hubert [Humphrey] here the first thing tomorrow morning. We need to discuss this face-to-face.”
On April 14th, the 100th anniversary of President Lincoln being shot in the back of the head by John Wilkes Booth while watching a play at Ford’s Theatre, the Republican and Democratic Senate leaders arrived at the White House bright and early. Perhaps respecting the fact that he was the Minority Leader, Humphrey stayed a few steps behind Houser as they were led to the Oval Office. Inside, Forbes and Vice President Everett Dirksen were waiting for them. Because Dirksen was the President of the Senate and had been the GOP Senate leader at the time Forbes tapped him to be his running mate, the President asked him to attend the meeting. Sitting on couches in the middle of the room, the four men discussed Goldwater’s intention to vote “No” and what that meant for the Civil Rights Act going forward. Once the bill left the Senate Judiciary Committee and went to the Senate floor for a debate and a final vote, Southern Democrats would filibuster it. This tactic would allow them to hold up the bill indefinitely. The only way to overcome their filibuster was to invoke cloture, which would end the debate and force a floor vote. Cloture required the support of two-thirds of the Senate. “This is where we are stuck,” Houser stated, Humphrey concurring with a nod of his head. “We would basically need everybody who is not from the South to support cloture.”
“Which is almost impossible to achieve,” Dirksen chimed in. Without the conservatives, there weren’t enough liberal and moderate Senators from both parties to reach the two-thirds threshold of 67. Crossing his arms, Forbes leaned back in his seat and glanced first at Dirksen (who was sitting right next to him) and then at Houser and Humphrey (who were sitting right across a table from them). “We know we don’t have Barry’s vote. Can we really assume all the other conservatives won’t vote for it as well?”
He got an idea of what other conservative Republican Senators were thinking on April 18th, when Ohio Senator Robert Taft Jr. appeared on “Face the Nation” (CBS). Taft hailed from a prominent political family. His father had been Dewey’s nemesis and the 1952 Republican Presidential nominee. His grandfather William Howard Taft had been President of the United States (1909-1913) and Chief Justice of the Supreme Court (1921-1930). When asked where he stood on the Civil Rights Act, Taft expressed his opposition to it for the same reasons Goldwater did. With Taft also being a “No” vote, the President received a phone call from the Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. In light of the conservatives coming out against the bill, he informed him that he was reluctantly tabling it (meaning he was suspending consideration of it). He warned the President that if his committee sent the bill to the Senate floor now, “it will be filibuster to death.”
Hanging up the phone, Forbes looked out the Oval Office windows to the beautiful spring day outside and breathed a heavy sigh. His civil rights bill, which had breezed through the House of Representatives, was going nowhere in the Senate because of his own political party.

(Ohio Senator Robert Taft Jr.)
Not willing to give up yet, the President spent the next few weeks trying to get conservatives to support his bill. He invited Senators individually to the White House for private meetings aimed at winning them over. That didn’t work. He invited Goldwater to Camp Ewing, the wooded Presidential retreat in Maryland, to have a second go at convincing him to change his mind. That didn’t work either. In a last ditch effort, Forbes called MLK and asked him if he would be willing to meet with the Senators and try to persuade them. As one of the nation’s leading orators, King replied that he would be willing to try anything “to get this bill passed and to your desk.”
Goldwater, Taft, Reagan, George H.W. Bush of Texas, and other GOP Senators sat around the table in the Cabinet Room of the White House and listened as MLK made the moral case for the Civil Rights Act. They were silent as he spoke of “a dream” he had in which “my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”
It was a powerful performance by one of America’s finest speakers, but even that wasn’t enough to move the Senators. Having failed to change minds, Forbes was forced to admit that “if Martin Luther King can’t do it, nobody can.”
The stalemate over the bill stretched on through the spring and into the summer. The conservatives were dug in and the President’s efforts at arm-twisting had completely failed. Southern Democrats of course were very happy about all this; the Civil Rights Act had been stopped completely in its tracks without them having to lift a finger. In late June, a few days after King’s unsuccessful White House pitch, over 3,000 civil rights activists gathered outside the Capitol Building and demanded that the Senate immediately take up and pass the Civil Rights Act. “We are getting tired of waiting,” one speaker shouted, “We want action and action now!”
They were ignored; shortly after the demonstration, Congress went on summer recess without having done anything more. It looked like the President’s bill was going down in defeat just as other civil rights measures had in the past.

(Martin Luther King Jr. addressing reporters following his White House pitch for the Civil Rights Act of 1965)
In the summer of 1965, singer Jackie DeShannon proclaimed on the radio that “What the World Needs Now Is Love.” A bipartisan group of moderate Senators decided that what the country needed now was a new approach to breaking the impasse. Working quietly, they drafted a compromise civil rights bill. When Congress returned from summer recess, they went to the White House and presented it to the President. Like Forbes’ languishing bill, the compromise bill:

• Prohibited state and municipal governments from denying access to public facilities on the basis of race, color, religion, or national origin
• Enforced the desegregation of public schools
• Strengthened the Civil Rights Commission (established by the Jackson Administration in January 1961)
• Prohibited programs and activities which received Federal funds from engaging in discrimination on the basis of race, color, or national origin

Unlike Forbes’ bill, the compromise bill didn’t:

• Outlaw discrimination based on race, color, religion, or national origin in hotels, motels, restaurants, theaters, or any other public accommodations
• Prohibit discrimination by employers on the basis of race, color, religion, or national origin

By removing the controversial public accommodations and employment provisions, the moderate Senators believed it would appease the conservatives while still giving civil rights supporters a bill with teeth. After looking the bill over, the President handed it back to the group and told them that “if you believe your bill has a better chance, then go ahead with it.”
Discussing the compromise bill with Dirksen afterwards, Forbes admitted that he had resigned himself to the fact that he wasn’t going to get his civil rights bill passed. Dirksen, who privately had reservations about the public accommodations and employment provisions, told the President that he was doing the right thing in giving the compromise bill his green light. The Vice President, who was experienced in the ways of the Senate, thought it was better “to get a deal done than to keep fighting for a bill that is never going to be voted on.”
The group next took their legislation to Goldwater. “This is a bill I can accept,” the Arizona Senator informed his colleagues after reviewing it. Other than the public accommodations and employment provisions, he supported the other provisions in the original bill. Once Goldwater had signed onto the compromise, the other conservative Senators fell into line behind it. After three months of doing nothing about civil rights, the Senate finally began to take action. On July 28th, the Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee announced that his committee would consider the compromise civil rights bill. James Eastland of Mississippi, the Ranking Democrat, tried to stop the bill from getting out of the committee but was ultimately unsuccessful. On August 9th, the Senate Judiciary Committee approved the bill and sent it to the Senate floor for debate. As expected, Southern Democrats immediately launched a filibuster in order to prevent the passage of what they saw as “a bill which will bring about social equality and intermingling and amalgamation of the races in our states.”
The Senate Majority Leader gave them a few days to entertain their filibuster and then pounced on them like a waiting tiger. On Friday, August 13th, Houser filed a cloture petition to end the filibuster and move the bill to a vote. With the conservative Republicans on board, Houser got the required two-thirds (83-17). 52 Republicans and 31 Democrats voted for it while 1 Republican and 16 Democrats voted against it. This was an historic moment; for only the second time in its history had the Senate seen cloture invoked on a civil rights measure. With the filibuster now terminated, he scheduled a vote for the following Monday. When the Senate reconvened on August 16th, the Southern Democrats filed into the chamber looking visibly depressed. They knew they couldn’t prevent the bill from passing and that they were about to experience their second major legislative defeat in two years. Their days of killing any civil rights bill which reached the upper chamber were now over. Before they had entered the chamber, a deflated Russell said out loud what everyone else was thinking: “The jig is up.”
With Dirksen presiding, the Senate proceeded to approve the compromise civil rights bill by a wide margin: 84-16. 52 Republicans and 32 Democrats voted for it while 1 Republican and 15 Democrats voted against it. Democrat Carl Hayden of Arizona voted “No” on cloture but “Yes” on the civil rights bill. The only Republican who voted against both was James D. Martin of Alabama. Bush subsequently went home to Texas to explain to angry constituents why he had voted for the legislation when his Democratic counterpart John Connally had voted against it:
“I voted from conviction. I knew it would be unpopular. I knew it would be emotional, but I did what I thought was right. What more can I tell you?”
The bill then went to the House of Representatives, which approved it a week later (309-126). 229 Republicans and 80 Democrats voted for it while 35 Republicans and 91 Democrats voted against it. The removal of the public accommodations and employment provisions gained 9 votes from conservative Republicans but lost 25 votes from liberal Democrats.

(Alabama Senator James D. Martin, the lone Republican “No” vote)
On August 24th, flanked by his Vice President, Congressional leaders from both political parties, MLK, and other civil rights advocates, Forbes signed the Civil Rights Act of 1965 into law. Watching the White House ceremony at home on television, Russell could feel tears forming in his eyes. The tears were a reflection of his knowledge that the old Dixie South, which he had been born and raised in, which he had championed and defended his entire life, was dying right in front of his eyes. The South’s way of life, which for a century had stood for segregation and the oppression of African-Americans, was crumbling and White Southerners were being forced to change their ways whether they liked it or not. To be sure, blacks faced discrimination in other parts of the country, but the South had made discrimination part of her regional identity through the open embrace of “Whites Only” signs and the violence-wielding Ku Klux Klan. That defining identity was heading unstoppably towards an end. A New South, one which was more progressive and more accepting of blacks, was beginning to emerge. That the compromise Civil Rights Act didn’t ban discrimination in public accommodations and employment hardly provided any comfort to the aging Georgia Senator. He knew that civil rights activists would now double-down on their grassroots campaign of public pressure, protesting and boycotting businesses which didn’t voluntarily integrate (and rewarding businesses that did with increased patronage). Some businesses of course would stubbornly refuse to give in no matter what, but other businesses would in time succumb to the public pressure and desegregate on their own accord. By the time Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1971 – the same year Russell passed away – which at last banned discrimination in public accommodations and employment, it was more to bring bitter-end businesses into line with the rest of the country rather than forcing the entire country to change. While he was disappointed that the compromise Civil Rights Act of 1965 didn't go as far as his original bill, Forbes was nonetheless pleased that he was able to sign a significant civil rights bill into law. The ink of his signature was barely dry when a race riot erupted in the predominantly black Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, California.

 

[Kurt_Steiner]

As expected, Southern Democrats immediately launched a filibuster in order to prevent the passage of what they saw as “a bill which will bring about social equality and intermingling and amalgamation of the races in our states.”

Why do I have the feeling that these people would felt at ease with the Nuremberg Laws...?

 

[El Pip]

Vietnam War veteran Phil Caputo was among the Americans who were evacuated from Saigon before it fell to the North Vietnamese in April 1975. He was helicoptered to a US aircraft carrier offshore. After he got onto the deck, he looked around at the US military hardware and thought "We got whipped by a bunch of peasant guerillas." While military hardware helps, it doesn't always guarantee victory. Just ask the Germans invading Russia in late 1941.

I recall someone on social media identified that one of the Sea Knight helicopters that took part in the Saigon evacuation was also used in the evacuation from Kabul, which is a hell of a parallel.

While he was disappointed that the compromise Civil Rights Act of 1965 didn't go as far as his original bill, Forbes was nonetheless pleased that he was able to sign a significant civil rights bill into law.

Politics is the art of the possible, so this is indeed progress.

The ink of his signature was barely dry when a race riot erupted in the predominantly black Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, California.

That escalated quickly. But sadly is in no way surprising.

 

[Nathan Madien]

Kurt_Steiner: The thing about the Democratic Party is that for a long time in this country, the Democrats dominated the South. If you were a white Southern Democrat, you were most likely a segregationist. That's just how it was. If you look at the Southern Manifesto opposing racial integration, the majority of people who signed it were Democrats. Most of the "No" votes on the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 came from Southern Democrats. That makes President Joe Biden's recent argument that "If you don't support this pending voting rights bill, you are on the side of segregationists" awkward because the segregationists were...well, Democrats.

El Pip: Yeah, that is. We spend all this time, money, and blood propping up countries...just to evacuate by helicopter when their militaries collapse.

Historically the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which Forbes' bill is based on, was passed in large part because President Lyndon B. Johnson was a master at arm-twisting. He had the ability to read people and know instinctively how to kiss their butts (or kick their butts) in order to get what he wanted. Since Forbes' efforts at arm-twisting failed, he decided to give up the fight and settle for a compromise civil rights bill instead.

You can pass all the civil rights bills in the world. It isn't going to solve the fact that the tense relationship between the African-American community and the police is always one incident away from boiling over. George Floyd, Rodney King, Watts...all it takes is one bad encounter to set things off.
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China Goes Nuclear
“Mr. President, according to our intelligence, China has begun research on a nuclear waste bomb.”
It was a stunning announcement, delivered matter-of-factly by CIA Director John A. McCone. It was Sunday, March 7th, 1965. Across the country, the American people were going about their normal weekend activities. At the box office, 20th Century Fox had released a new musical starring Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer called “The Sound of Music”. Billboard released its’ weekly Hot 100 chart, showing that “My Girl” by the Temptations had become the #1 song in America (giving Motown Records its’ second #1 hit of the year, the first being “Come See About Me” by the Supremes). In Selma, Alabama, it was another quiet, uneventful church-going Sunday. At Camp Ewing, President Malcolm Forbes and members of his national security team sat and listened intently as McCone gave them an intelligence briefing. He was armed with large black-and-white surveillance photos showing a size 4 nuclear reactor located deep in the mountainous interior of the Republic of China. Everything in the photos were clearly marked so everyone looking at them knew what they were looking at. Although the President had been briefed about the existence of China’s secret nuclear program prior to taking office, the revelation that she was actually working on a nuclear bomb was nonetheless stunning.
“A nuclear waste bomb? Are you sure?”
The CIA Director, a hold-over from the Jackson Administration, quickly gave an affirmative answer. Having completed research on nuclear power production, they were now turning their attention to the nuclear waste bomb. The surveillance photos showed the Chinese in the process of expanding their nuclear reactor to size 5. When asked by his fellow Republican boss how long it would take for the Chinese to develop one, McCone replied that his analysts were estimating about 6 months. “So that means September,” Vice President Everett Dirksen said while studying one of the photos. The President leaned back in his black leather seat and crossed his arms. He proceeded to speak in a foreboding tone. “So in September we’re looking at China getting the bomb.”
“Which will make her the fifth country to have it,” Secretary of State Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. noted, “The other four being the Soviet Union, Britain, France, and of course us.”

(John A. McCone, who served as the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency from January 1961 until his retirement in June 1966)
“Speaking of the Russians,” Dirksen asked suspiciously, “Are they involved in this?”
“Yes,” McCone answered. In 1952, Chinese President Chiang Kai-shek established a faculty of atomic research to evaluate the feasibility of developing nuclear weapons. When he was told it was feasible to at least have a small program operating, he ordered the construction of top-secret atomic research laboratories which were completed in 1955. A faculty of nuclear research was next set up in 1958 at National Fudan University in Shanghai to provide the technical leadership needed for the vast project. Two years later, the Chinese had an isotope separation facility up and running which enabled them to start construction on a nuclear reactor. They were being greatly aided by the Soviets, who provided blueprints as well as technicians. According to a CIA analysis in 1960:
“The Chinese have average technical skills and are therefore unable to make rapid progress in their research and development projects. The use of Soviet technicians, as evident by their presence in Shanghai and elsewhere, has given the Chinese a tremendous boost and invaluable experience from which to draw on.”
Thanks to the Sino-Soviet collaboration, the Chinese nuclear program made more progress than it would have otherwise:

• Nuclear Fuel Analysis (1961)
• Experimental Reactor (1962)
• Nuclear Reactor Operability (1963)
• Nuclear Power Production (1964)

“Why do the Russians want the Chinese to have the bomb?”
The Vice President’s question was quickly answered by Secretary of Defense Paul Nitze, another Jackson Administration hold-over: “One word, Ev: pressure.”
The Soviets, General Secretary Nikita Khrushchev especially, viewed the Chinese as being useful allies in the Cold War. By helping China become a nuclear power, the Soviet Union believed it would force the United States to divide her attention between Nanjing and Moscow. The Americans, they reasoned, wouldn’t be able to react nearly as strongly to their moves with a nuclear-armed China breathing down their necks. “So once China gets the bomb,” the President inquired, “How likely will they be to use it?”
“It is hard to know,” McCone admitted with a shrug of his shoulders. “They certainly can’t use it in the short term. They presently lack both rockets and strategic bombers, which are the primary delivery systems for nuclear bombs.”
“I would imagine though that they would develop a primary system once they have the bomb.”
The CIA Director shared the President’s assumption, which led him to the long term. “If China does decide to use it in the future, the most likely target would be Japan. The Chinese after all have spent years threatening the Japanese with revenge for what they did to them in their occupation.”
In June 1937, a skirmish between Chinese and Japanese troops at the eleven-arch granite Marco Polo Bridge in Beiping triggered the Second Sino-Japanese War. The war lasted for two years, ending in victory for the Japanese in July 1939. Having exiled Chiang to the United States, the Japanese proceeded to establish a harsh occupation of China which lasted until the Allies liberated her at the end of 1946. During their occupation, the Japanese exploited China’s resources for their own gain and subjected the conquered Chinese people to cruelty. This cruelty, one of the most shocking examples being the Nanjing Massacre, imbued the Chinese with a hostility towards the Japanese which the postwar Chinese government stirred up to justify a policy of seeking outright vengeance against the former occupier. “The Chinese hate the Japanese,” McCone stated plainly.

(In June 2007, Chinese demonstrators marked the 70th anniversary of the Marco Polo Bridge Incident by burning Japanese flags outside the Japanese Embassy in Nanjing. Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe responded with a strongly worded diplomatic protest, which received an equally strongly worded dismissal from the Chinese government. Even in the 21st Century, the relationship between Japan and the Republic of China remained tense at best)
“They want to get back at them,” he continued. “They have publicly said so. Whether that means attacking Tokyo or another Japanese city with a nuclear bomb is hard to know.”
“But the temptation to do so will certainly be there,” Lodge chimed in, to which the President asked worryingly, “And if they do?”
“Then as the primary defender of Japan,” Nitze answered somberly, “It will be our obligation to respond in kind.”
The prospect of the Chinese launching a nuclear war in order to settle an old score naturally didn’t sit well with the President. A look of gloom fell onto his face. After several moments of intense silence in the room, the Vice President broke the silence with a question he had been meaning to ask.
“What exactly is a nuclear waste bomb?”
McCone explained that there were four types of nuclear bombs:

• Nuclear Waste Bomb
• Semi-Fission Bomb
• Fission Bomb
• Hydrogen Bomb

The nuclear waste bomb was the most basic nuclear bomb, consisting of by-products of nuclear power reactors. It was nowhere near as powerful as the fission bomb, which was what the United States detonated at the Trinity nuclear test in New Mexico in July 1945. The fission bomb was also what the United States dropped on Nagoya (1945) and Hainan (1946). Once the Chinese had developed the nuclear waste bomb, they would presumably then begin researching the semi-fission bomb (which is 30% more powerful). “The good news is that China will not become a major nuclear threat overnight.”
Even though China technically would become the fifth nation in the world to develop nuclear weapons, she would not be in the same position that the four other nuclear powers were in. After expanding her nuclear reactor to size 5, the Chinese would then have to expand that nuclear reactor to size 6 in order to start producing nuclear weapons. “Since it takes well over a year to do so, the Chinese wouldn’t be able to get their first real bomb until next year at the earliest.”
Additionally, it took quite a bit of time to build a nuclear bomb. The CIA Director predicted that “it will be a decade or two before the country has built up a moderate stockpile of nuclear weaponry.”
“So for right now,” Lodge claimed with the bright-side spin of a professional politician, “We really don’t have much to worry about.”
“Tell that to the Japanese,” Nitze retorted with an eye roll. Whereas Lodge had been at the State Department for only two months, Nitze had been at the Pentagon for the past four years. He felt, perhaps arrogantly, that his longer tenure gave him a better understanding of the situation at hand than the man sitting right across from him. “The moment they find out that the Chinese have the bomb, they are going to think they will be bombed tomorrow. That the Chinese can’t isn’t going to matter. They are that scared of them.”

Air Force One landed in Tokyo on April 1st, the intelligence briefing at Camp Ewing still fresh in the President’s mind. The Japanese capital was the first stop on Forbes’ second trip abroad; his first trip had been to London the previous January to attend former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s state funeral. Given that war was waging in Vietnam and that tensions with China was growing, the Asian trip underscored the importance of this continent to the United States. Pink sakura (Japanese for “cherry blossom”) petals lay scattered across the roads as the Presidential motorcade made its’ way towards the National Diet Building. Looking out the window, the President could see a seemingly endless wall of Japanese spectators enthusiastically waving small American and Japanese flags. In his speech to the National Diet (Japan’s bicameral legislature), Forbes discussed Japanese-American relations since the end of World War Two in Asia in January 1947. He called it “incredible” that the United States and Japan, once two warring adversaries, were now close allies. He noted that after invading and occupying Imperial Japan, the Americans under the benign leadership of General Douglas MacArthur rebuilt the shattered country and transformed it into a functioning democracy. Forbes quoted MacArthur, who explained that his aim was to “restore security, dignity, and self-respect” to the Japanese people after suffering a devastating war. Now, a decade after the United States ended her occupation and restored full sovereignty to Japan, the once-devastated country had risen from the ashes like a phoenix and was in the midst of an economic boom which would make her the world’s second largest economy in the early 1970s (behind the US). That boom was being driven in part by thriving automotive, electronics, and shipbuilding industries. Enjoying an abundance of consumer goods just like the Americans, the Japanese in the mid-1960s had created a new saying:
“The three treasures which all people need to have is a refrigerator, a washing machine, and a television set.”
October 1964 saw two major achievements for the Land of the Rising Sun:

• She hosted the first Summer Olympics in Asia
• She inaugurated her first high-speed bullet train or Shinkansen line, connecting Tokyo and Osaka

This was undoubtably a good time for Japan, but there was a dark menacing cloud in her blue skies. Being deliberatively vague, Forbes pledged to the National Diet that the United States “will take all necessary steps to defend your nation from those who wish to do you harm.”
He didn’t mention China by name; he didn’t have to. Everyone who heard his speech knew exactly who he was referring to. That Chinese threats and saber-rattling moves had unnerved the Japanese was made clear to the President in his private meeting with Prime Minister Eisaku Sato. “Mr. President, we are deeply worried about the intentions of the Chinese in regard to us.”
Forbes attempted to reassure Sato by informing him of his plan to increase the number of US military planes stationed in Japan and to discuss conducting a joint naval exercise in the Western Pacific with British Prime Minister Rab Butler when he visited Europe later that summer. “I want you to know, Mr. Prime Minister, that you can rely on the United States to provide all the defense that you need.”
“We have to,” Sato replied, “For we are limited in our ability to defend ourselves.”
The Prime Minister was referring to Article 9 of the American-written Japanese Constitution, which banned Japan from having a military. Having spent five bloody years fighting the Japanese from Wake Island to Hong Kong, the Americans at the time wanted to prevent their former enemy from rearming. They were forced to change their minds however when China grew increasingly militant. With strong encouragement from the Jackson Administration, Japan established the Japan Self-Defense Forces in 1961. The JSDF immediately became controversial, with opponents arguing that it was a clear violation of Article 9’s clause that “land, sea, and air forces, as well as another war potential, will never be maintained.”
The Jackson Administration, which fully backed the JSDF as part of their strategy to deter the Chinese, claimed that it was in fact constitutional because Article 9 only forbade Japan from having a military for offensive purposes. It didn’t forbid the Japanese from having a military for strictly defensive purposes. “It was never our intention,” then-President Henry M. Jackson declared at a press conference when asked about this highly contentious issue by a reporter, “To prevent the Japanese people from defending themselves. Every nation has a right to self-defense.”
Despite the establishment of the JSDF, Japan wasn’t strong enough to defend herself. She needed the immense military strength of the United States…one of the great ironies of the post-World War Two world.

(Eisaku Sato, who served as Prime Minister of Japan from November 1964 to July 1972)
Throughout the summer of 1965, the CIA closely monitored China’s progress towards developing a nuclear waste bomb. Once it became September, the President braced himself to receive the news that his country’s archenemy had gone nuclear. The long-awaited news finally came on September 20th when Nanjing announced that the Republic of China had successfully detonated a nuclear waste bomb. Forbes then received a report from the CIA confirming the announcement through the detection of nuclear fallout deep in the interior of the country. “So they finally have the bomb,” the President stated after reading the report, “God help us.”
Privately he was troubled by the news and the ramifications that came with it; publicly, he was indifferent. While China celebrated becoming the fifth nuclear-weapon state, the Forbes Administration downplayed the achievement. According to them, the test didn’t alter the nuclear balance of power all that much. The explosion had been minor compared to the Trinity test and China currently lacked the means to become a major nuclear power. As far as Washington was concerned, the nuclear waste bomb test was no more than a P.R. stunt by a China wanting to look powerful on the world stage. This intentional downplaying by the Americans was done for one reason: Japan. Just as Nitze had predicted, the breaking news from China threw the Japanese into a state of panic. In their minds, the Chinese would now get their revenge by hitting them with nuclear bombs. Having been nuked twice before, they really believed they were about to get nuked again. Forbes' desire to calm down his panic-stricken ally was such that he quickly dispatched both Lodge and Nitze to Tokyo to meet with Sato and their Japanese counterparts. “You need to make it abundantly clear to them,” the President instructed his Secretaries of State and Defense prior to their departure, “That their nation isn’t in any immediate danger.”
In the wake of China’s first nuclear test, additional US warplanes arrived in Japan to beef up the country’s air defense. In mid-October, the United States Navy and the British Royal Navy conducted a joint military exercise near Okinawa. Naval aviators from the two navies coordinated strikes against a small mothball fleet of obsolete ships, giving them training in the event they had to do battle with the Republic of China Navy. Through these two military moves, the United States sent China a stern and hopefully deterring message: if you want to attack Japan, you have to go through me first.

 

[El Pip]

Ominous news indeed from China, though I suppose nuclear proliferation was inevitable it is still a shake up to the system when it occurs. India next no doubt.

Interesting to see continued Sino-Soviet co-operation. Ironically the Chinese not being communist may make that a bit more stable than OTL, there's is nothing a communist enjoys more than doctrinal infighting with fellow communists and that source of disagreement has been removed.

 

[NickFeyR]

Ouch. China has the bomb now, that will raise tensions for certain.
Regarding the Soviets, does Khrushchev still have free reign within his government, or will he get challenged along the way by a Brezhnev type figure? Especially since the Vietnam War goes along swimmingly for the US for now.

 

[Nathan Madien]

El Pip: Historically Communist China went nuclear in October 1964, so I imagine the Republic of China would go nuclear as well. As you noted, historically the Soviet Union's cooperation with Communist China broke down because each side had conflicting views on Communism.

Since China TTL isn't a Communist state, there isn't that conflict as you pointed out and as a result, the Sino-Soviet cooperation continues. Khrushchev loves Chiang...a love that isn't shared by everyone in the Kremlin. While Chiang is causing trouble for the Americans, he isn't someone you can trust. Chiang stabbed the Americans in the back, the North Vietnamese don't trust him, and you have people in Moscow who feel that Chiang is just using the Soviet Union for his own purposes. That Khrushchev is treating Chiang as being his best friend in the world may cause trouble for him later.

Historically Mainland China was taken over by the Communists, who then embarked on the self-destructive path of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. The Nationalists TTL were never driven off Mainland China and therefore remained in control, which of course raises the alternate history question of what postwar path Mainland China might have taken had Chiang remained in charge. I imagined Mainland China following Germany's playbook in the 1930s: rebuild the economy, rebuild the military, and pursue an aggressive foreign policy to show your neighbors that you are no longer a weak nation they can kick around but now the dominant power on the continent.

For those who are wondering what happened to Communist China TTL, Communist China stayed out of the Second Sino-Japanese War. After Japan won the war and took over Nationalist China and the Warlord States, Communist China remained this neutral enclave that the Japanese didn't bother with. Then when the Soviet Union declared war on Japan in 1945, Communist China for some odd reason declared war on the Soviet Union. The Soviets overran Communist China, annexed them, and that was the end of them. For declaring war on Stalin, I am sure Mao and the other Communist leaders were...umm...taken care of.

NickFeyR: Of course, China's path to the bomb is how you get the bomb in HOI2. I have never played HOI3 or HOI4, so I don't know how you get the bomb in those games. I assume you can.

The answer is "Yes". Khrushchev TTL wasn't removed from power in October 1964, so he is still calling the shots. However, his close ties with Chiang may get him into trouble with members of his own government who are more weary, especially as China's growing tensions with the West makes a military conflict more likely.
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Korea: America versus China
In April 1965:

• In a Dallas, Texas trial which attracted national attention, former marine Lee Harvey Oswald was convicted of killing former General Edwin Walker. Oswald, a leftist who had spent three years living in the Soviet Union, had fatally shot Walker because of his outspoken right-wing views. Oswald was sentenced to life in prison, where he died of natural causes in December 1991 at the age of 52.
• Bob Hope hosted the 37th Academy Awards at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium in Santa Monica, California. “My Fair Lady” took home Best Picture, Best Director (George Cukor), and Best Actor (Rex Harrison), while Julie Andrews took home Best Actress for playing the title character in “Mary Poppins”.
• On Palm Sunday, the United States experienced one of the largest tornado outbreaks on record. A total of 55 tornadoes struck 6 Midwestern states, killing 266 people and causing over a billion dollars in damages.
• Gemini 6A (Wally Schirra and Thomas P. Stafford) and Gemini 7 (Frank Borman and Jim Lovell) made the first rendezvous in orbit between two crewed spacecraft.
• French President Charles de Gaulle made a state visit to the Republic of China. Since the United States and England no longer had diplomatic relations with China, de Gaulle chose to strengthen Sino-French relations in order to emphasize the independence of his country's foreign policy.
• Appearing on “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson” (NBC), actor Ed Ames gave a memorable demonstration of his tomahawk throwing skill.

The month began with President Malcolm Forbes conducting a state visit to Asia. Given America’s interests in the continent, the President thought it prudent to make an Asian trip a priority during his first 100 days in office. His first stop was Japan, where he assured Tokyo that Washington would defend her against Nanjing’s menacing threats. His second stop was the Republic of Korea, which a few weeks earlier had announced her entry into the Vietnam War on the side of South Vietnam. At the time of the President’s arrival in Seoul, the Korean Peninsula was being ruled by a military junta headed by General Park Chung-hee. It was the country’s fourth government in twenty years. The first had been the United States Army Military Government in Korea, established in 1945 to prepare the liberated Korean people for independence after spending the past 35 years living as Japanese subjects. USAMGIK set up the Korean Advisory Council, consisting of political figures, landowners, and businessmen, to give the Americans input on how best to deal with the Koreans. Schools were reopened and a council of 100 Korean educators was established to develop sweeping educational reforms. A Korean Interim Legislative Assembly was created to draft laws that would form “the basis for political, economic, and social reforms.”
Korean infrastructure was built up, including additional roads and power lines, to better connect the overwhelmingly industrial northern half of Korea with the mostly agricultural southern half. In June 1947, 95% of eligible Korean voters went to the polls to elect their first National Assembly. The unicameral 300-seat National Assembly then drafted the Korean Constitution, which was roughly based on the United States Constitution. Two months later, the National Assembly overwhelmingly elected its’ conservative Speaker Syngman Rhee to serve as Korea’s first President. On September 21st, in a ceremony in Seoul, USAMGIK officially ceased to exist, and President Rhee proclaimed the establishment of the First Republic of Korea.

Speaking fluent English, the 72-year-old Rhee was regarded by the Americans as being their man in Seoul. Unfortunately for everybody, he was an uncompromising authoritarian who had little interest in running a free and stable nation. Staunchly conservative, one of Rhee’s first moves as President was to launch a violent crack-down on the Left. Over 100,000 leftist Koreans, even his own Vice President Kim Gu, were killed by his security force. This created political turmoil which would roil the Korean Peninsula throughout Rhee’s tenure. He also presided over rampant corruption; for example, soldiers who served in the Republic of Korea Army went unpaid for months at a time while high-ranking officers paid themselves excessively. Seldom was anybody held accountable for their corruption. Always looking for ways to secure his hold on power, Rhee in 1951 forced through the National Assembly a constitutional amendment which took away their power to elect the President and gave it to the people instead. He got the direct popular vote amendment passed largely by having scores of opposition politicians in the National Assembly arrested. He followed that up in 1955 with a constitutional amendment which exempted him from the Presidential term limit of eight years. With his iron-fisted rule, Rhee became President-for-life in what was supposed to be a democracy.

By the late 1950s, the public was growing increasingly disillusioned with their tyrannical President (above). When the main opposition candidate in the 1959 Presidential election developed a strong following on the campaign trail and looked like a serious threat to Rhee, he responded by having him killed. His subsequent victory, as he was the only major candidate still standing, didn’t sit well with people…on both sides of the Pacific. The Sparkman Administration, which didn’t like supporting oppressive dictators simply because they were aligned with the United States, was disgusted by Rhee’s antics. His domestic record was a mixed bag. On the one hand, Rhee’s regime fully implemented educational reform which among other things made universal education compulsory at the primary level. This led to widespread school construction, which enabled primary school enrollment to reach 95%. Under the new education system, all Koreans were expected to attend:

• Six years of primary school
• Three years of middle school
• Three years of high school
• Four years of college

Korea’s economy on the other hand remained sluggish throughout the decade despite the implementation of land reform which created a new class of independent family proprietors, as well as receiving financial support from the Americans. President John Sparkman blamed the limited economic development on Rhee’s power-hungry conduct and privately hoped something would happen to push him out of office. In the summer of 1960, he got his wish when the June Revolution broke out in Korea. It all started on June 12th when the Koreans went to the polls to cast their votes in the National Assembly election. In a public backlash to Rhee’s corrupt and suppressive dictatorship, his far-right Liberal Party lost the majority to the main opposition Democratic Party. Completely unwilling to accept the election results, the elderly Rhee promptly dissolved the National Assembly and declared martial law. This proved to be too much for the public to bear. In the wake of Rhee’s annulment of the election results, protests broke out in the streets of cities all across the county. Local police attempted to quell the demonstrations by attacking the protestors; rather than intimidate them into backing down however, the police violence only intensified the protests.

On June 17th, armed protestors in Pyongyang occupied the railroad station and forcibly shut it down. Since Pyongyang served as the central railroad hub for Northern Korea, the protestors effectively paralyzed that part of the country. Two days later, Rhee decided to take back Pyongyang Station by force. Motorized divisions drove their way towards the station, which was now partially encircled by hastily assembled barricades. The soldiers ordered to clear out the red brick building were shot at by the armed occupiers who were positioned in the windows, behind the barricades, and atop the roof. Forced to hide behind their vehicles by the unexpected steady stream of fire, the soldiers returned fire with their own hail of bullets. The standoff at Pyongyang Station lasted for three days; on June 23rd, Rhee ordered the use of M26 Pershing tanks to brutally crush the resistance. The forty-two-ton American-provided tanks blasted their way through the barricades and literally ran over retreating protestors.

Images of fleeing Koreans being crushed to death underneath the tank treads sparked international outrage, with Sparkman publicly condemning Rhee for his horrific use of force. The Korean President vigorously defended his decision, claiming that it had been necessary in order to liberate the railroad station. The Battle of Pyongyang Station, which saw over 200 Koreans killed, became the final straw for a population fed up with Rhee. On June 26th, a huge crowd of protestors surrounded a car carrying Vice President Lee Ki-poong – a prominent Rhee crony – and pulled him out of it so they could savagely beat him to death. They then stormed the Blue House in Seoul (which is the executive office and official residence of the Korean President), overwhelmed the bodyguards stationed there, and searched room-by-room for Rhee. Rather than be taken alive by the angry mob, the President shot himself in the head. Following the death of Rhee, the results of the National Assembly election were allowed to stand, and Democratic Party leader Yun Posun (below) took over as the second President of Korea. He immediately abolished the First Republic of Korea, which was tainted by Rhee’s rule, and replaced it with the Second Republic of Korea. While Sparkman was happy that the troublesome Rhee was finally out of his hair, he was also puzzled by the fact that the Northern Koreans were heavily armed. Where did they get the weapons?

He got the answer from the CIA. U-2 surveillance photos revealed that the Republic of China had smuggled weapons crates across the Yalu River into Korea. The CIA estimated that most of the weapons used in the Battle of Pyongyang Station came from China. This meant that for the first time, the Chinese were looking beyond their borders. They regarded the neighboring Korean Peninsula as being their sphere of influence and had therefore covertly aided the overthrow of the pro-US Rhee regime and replaced it with one they planned to take over economically. In the Second Republic of Korea, Rhee’s authoritarianism and repression were replaced by a liberal parliamentary democracy in which President Yun was greatly reduced to being a mere figurehead while Prime Minister Chang Myon (below) wielded the real power. The National Assembly saw its’ power to elect both the President and the Prime Minister restored. To stimulate economic growth, the Chang government formulated a five-year plan to boost employment in the agricultural and industrial sectors. To bring down inflation, the government sought to restore the Hwan (Korea’s currency), which had lost half its value against the US dollar.

In early 1961, Chinese President Chiang Kai-shek made a state visit to Korea. He told Chang that he had nothing but sympathy for the Korean people, noting that his country too had suffered from a terrible economy. “It took us a long time to be able to stand on our two feet again,” he said with great empathy. Now that China was in a much better economic condition, Chiang wanted to help Chang improve Korea’s economy. Their two countries signed several trade agreements which gave the latter’s supply of resources a much-needed boost. China also gave Korea several blueprints to help her research industrial technologies faster. Chinese economic advisors were dispatched to the country while Chinese businessmen invested capital in Korean businesses in order to help spur job creation. The result was a much-needed shot in the arm for Korea’s economy; by the end of that year, both unemployment and inflation had been brought under control. As Korea’s economy stabilized, the ROK credited the ROC for helping jumpstart her economic revival. Chang flew to China for a state visit, where he delivered a speech hailing the Chinese for their wisdom and guidance in helping his country dig itself out of the hole.

(Founded by Lee Byung-chul in March 1938, Samsung started out as a small trading company in Daegu which dealt with food products like dried fish and noodles. Over time Samsung expanded into such diverse areas as shipbuilding, mining, and insurance. In the late 1960s it entered the electronics industry, where it would become a major player in the development of television sets and mobile phones. Today Samsung is the largest business conglomerate in Korea)
The strengthening of Sino-Korean relations set off alarm bells in Washington. In the eyes of the Jackson Administration, Korea was becoming dangerously pro-China. Having lost Laos to the Chinese militarily, the last thing President Henry M. Jackson wanted was to lose Korea to the Chinese economically. He asked his national security team, “How do we halt this trend?”
The CIA suggested overthrowing Chang’s government and replacing it with one that would reverse Korea’s slide into the Chinese camp. Scoop approved their suggestion, which resulted in Operation Guardrail. The aforementioned General Park, the intelligent and powerful Chief of the Operations Staff of the Korean Army, was chosen by the CIA to be their man in Korea. Park shared the Americans’ concerns about the pro-China direction his country was taking and pledged to put a stop to it. He assembled a group of 10 military officers who agreed with him that Chang’s government was undermining Korean sovereignty by making her too dependent on China for economic progress. With covert backing from the CIA, they organized a military coup. On November 13th, 1961, a sunglass-wearing Park stood in front of army headquarters in Seoul and gave a passionate speech to the soldiers assembled before him. He warned that the civilian government was betraying the country by making it subservient to China. Since they were traitors to the cause of Korean independence, Park declared that “we shall rise up against the government and save our country! We can accomplish our goals without bloodshed! Let us save our country together!”
The gathered soldiers cheered out loud, feeling patriotism surge through them. This wasn’t simply a military coup; this was a mission to save their country from going down the wrong path. They quickly spread outward, securing most of downtown Seoul. Park, serving as the leader of the coup, then ordered Special Forces Command to occupy the Blue House and seize control of the Korean Broadcasting Company. There he issued a proclamation to the nation announcing that the military was now in power:
“The military authorities – thus far avoiding conflict – can no longer restrain themselves and have undertaken a concerted operation on this day to completely take over the three branches of the Government. The armed services have staged this uprising because:
We believe that the fate of the nation and the people cannot be entrusted to a regime which has abdicated to a foreign power.
We believe that the time has come for the armed forces to restore sovereignty to the nation, which has been carelessly forsaken.”
With 20 heavily armed divisions now supporting the coup, Operation Guardrail was going according to plan. Park quickly declared martial law, dissolved the National Assembly, and arrested members of the Chang government.

On November 17th, Park appeared before reporters and announced that the Second Republic of Korea had been formally dissolved. The country would now be in the hands of a 30-member military junta with him as the leader. He proceeded to outline the policies which his government would pursue:

• Korea would become anti-China, meaning that the Chinese would no longer be welcomed in the country. Anyone who was a Chinese citizen would be expelled and all Chinese assets in Korea would be seized.
• Korea would join the United States in opposing China’s quest to become the dominant power of Asia.
• The government would be purged of pro-Chinese sentiments.
• The government would build an autonomous national economy free of international control.

With Park firmly in control of Korea, America’s fears of losing the country to the Chinese was eased. Working with the CIA, he established the Korean Central Intelligence Agency to monitor and disrupt both anti-government movements and espionage efforts by a China now booted from the peninsula. The new military regime focused on maintaining Korea’s economic growth after stripping it of Chinese support. They placed a heavy emphasis on promoting exports of Korean goods to other countries. One of those countries was Japan, with whom Korea established diplomatic relations in June 1965. They also established welfare centers to get the homeless off the streets and into jobs. Because Park had put his country back squarely in the American camp, his military regime was rewarded with tens of billions of dollars in grants, loans, subsidies, and trade deals by both the Jackson and Forbes Administrations. The Americans accepted Park’s militant dictatorship since it meant keeping Korea on their side.

(Seoul in 1965)
The Chinese on the other hand didn’t. Unwilling to accept the reversal that Operation Guardrail brought about, Nanjing sought to undermine Park’s rule. It launched an all-out intelligence war against Korea, actively seeking to:

• Sabotage Korean technological research
• Manipulate international opinion of Korea
• Fund anti-Park partisans
• Sabotage Korean industries
• Smear Korea from within

These relentless intelligence activities kept the KCIA on their toes; it was able to stop some of these efforts but not all of them. China’s aim was to destabilize Korea and weaken Park’s hold on power in preparation for another coup. After four years of this intelligence war, China decided the time was right to try to topple the Korean government again. On April 24th, 1965, Chinese-backed anti-Park partisans launched a demonstration in Seoul, denouncing the military regime and demanding a restoration of civilian rule. When the protestors were confronted by the police, a fight broke out between them. Violence very quickly engulfed the streets of the Korean capital. Determined to stop what was happening in Seoul from spreading outward, Park ordered the Republic of Korea Army to first isolate Seoul and then to join the police in putting down the demonstration. After four days of street fighting, the government succeeded in crushing the partisans and restoring order in Seoul. While China’s attempt to overthrow the Korean government failed, it did yield a surprising outcome. Smart enough to realize that if the demonstration could happen once, it could happen again, Park decided to head that off by announcing that he would return the country to civilian rule. On December 5th, 1965, the government held a referendum on returning the country to a presidential system of rule, which was approved by 78% of the voters. The following October, Korea held its’ first Presidential election since 1959. Park, who had abdicated from his military position in order to run as a civilian, narrowly defeated Yun (whom he had overthrown five years earlier) and was sworn in as the third President of Korea.

(Korean President Park Chung-hee)
The military junta was officially dissolved on December 20th, 1966, and the Third Republic of Korea was inaugurated. Although on paper the new government was a liberal democratic one with a restored National Assembly, it was in reality a civilian continuation of Park’s authoritarian dictatorship. Not that it mattered much to the Americans. All that mattered to them was keeping Korea in their column.

 

[DensleyBlair]

Caught up on the last two updates at last. Top quality stuff, as ever – though not exactly comforting to those concerned about things like the future of the planet Earth… East Asia (or, more fairly, US involvement in East Asia) really is a mess. Which probably suits Washington fine so long as everyone keeps ticking over and standing against China.

He called it “incredible” that the United States and Japan, once two warring adversaries, were now close allies. He noted that after invading and occupying Imperial Japan, the Americans under the benign leadership of General Douglas MacArthur rebuilt the shattered country and transformed it into a functioning democracy.

I love this detail. The second part of Forbes’s statement entirely negates the first. A top bit of speechifying.

In the eyes of the Jackson Administration, Korea was becoming dangerously pro-China. Having lost Laos to the Chinese militarily, the last thing President Henry M. Jackson wanted was to lose Korea to the Chinese economically. He asked his national security team, “How do we halt this trend?”
The CIA suggested overthrowing Chang’s government and replacing it with one that would reverse Korea’s slide into the Chinese camp. Scoop approved their suggestion, which resulted in Operation Guardrail.

Obviously Scoop’s answer to halting political instability is more political instability.

Although on paper the new government was a liberal democratic one with a restored National Assembly, it was in reality a civilian continuation of Park’s authoritarian dictatorship. Not that it mattered much to the Americans. All that mattered to them was keeping Korea in their column.

Without doing anything, Washington gets exactly what it wants. Park is proving himself a very useful operator for the US.

But hints of something brewing in northern Korea are intriguing. Russia and China stoking the fire?

 

[El Pip]

Korea continues it's unique and challenging relationship with Democracy. A perhaps relevant OTL fact - out of the previous six South Korean Presidents four have been convicted of corruption, one committed suicide before he could be convicted and the last was never accused but did leave office with a 6% approval rating after people underneath him did take bribes to allow dodgy construction practices and several major structures collapsed. Maybe the current President will break that streak, but given the crimes those around him have committed there is a good chance skeletons will come out of the cupboard when he leaves office and can no longer suppress things.

There is a price to be paid for strings of coups and counter-coups and not just wracking up the government numbers (Korea is on the 6th Republic already and the 1st was only founded in '48). Park appears to be heading down a similar path to OTL, economic growth can cover a lot of sins but it wasn't enough to keep him alive in OTL and I worry it won't be enough here.

There's also the slightly counter-intuitive point that a united Korea is perhaps not a stronger Korea, economically speaking anyway. The old North was always the industrial heartland and in reality that's a weakness, the Miracle on the Han was at least in part due to there being limited industrial heritage, so the industries that started had a clean slate to start from scratch. A united Korea would at a minimum want to keep the Northern industries going, possibly even focus on them, and that is a path of short term gain and long term problems. Though if the hinted at issues in North Korea come to pass, then it may not matter anyway.

 

[RV-Ye]

I have been slowly catching up again, still on WW2 but on the closing year so I expect to arrive to this latest update soon. I still read it and I must say Korea in your AAR seems to have such a unique position; as long as there is a united China across the Yalu I bet Chinese meddling will take place in the peninsula.

I honestly thought the Chinese would manage to keep and later recover the peninsula, you can imagine my shock when it didn't. I barely remember how WW2 ended originally (long time since I read it and I haven't arrived there yet), but I think you got entire Korea freed from Japan right? It's always interesting to speculate how a united Korea would've fared later on.

Eager to see future developments in your AAR. ^^​

 

[Nathan Madien]

DensleyBlair: Thank you very much for the compliment.

East Asia is a mess indeed. Japan is being threatened by China, China and America are fighting over Korea, China is demanding British Hong Kong and Portuguese Macao, China has taken over Laos, the ongoing Vietnam War, America overthrew the pro-China government in Cambodia, and there are incidents in the Western Pacific.

Jackson followed the Eisenhower playbook on dealing with foreign governments: don't like them? Just have the CIA overthrow them.

Gotta love American foreign policy: don't worry what dictators are doing to their people. Just be happy that they are on your side.

Given that Northern Korea is literally right across the Yalu River from China, that gives the Chinese a doorway to infiltrate the country. There may not be a Korean War in the military sense, but there is certainly a Korean War intelligence-wise.

El Pip: South Korea certainly has an "interesting" postwar political history.

Even though North Korea doesn't exist TTL and Korea is united under the government in Seoul, given the postwar history of corruption and political instability in South Korea, I think you are still going to see corruption and political instability affecting the entire Korean Peninsula. Considering that China has already tried once to get rid of Park, I think he certainly has to watch his back going forward.

Given that Samsung has its' hands in everything, I imagine that Samsung TTL will get involved in mining operations in Northern Korea. North Korea has an abundance of metals and mineral deposits, which South Korea would have access to. I think with a Samsung Mining Corporation fully developing the potentials better mining in Northern Korea would bring, Korea will be in a stronger shape economically TTL. I do agree with your point that the state of the economy can only do so much in a country whose political stability is always an issue.

RV-Ye: You are binge-reading I see. I know what that is like. It's a very enjoyable thing to do, being able to read one update after the next instead of having to wait however long it took for them to be posted.

I was thinking about your Korean AAR as I was writing the update. You have a very interesting version of a united Korea. Plus you have K-Pop references. I have a soft spot for incorporating pop culture into alternate history.

In HOI2, you have the ability to coup foreign governments. Usually it fails, although sometimes it works. I tried to reflect that in America and China's dueling coup attempts.

I don't blame you for barely remembering how WW2 ended originally. That was such a long time ago (late 2000s, I think). Even I don't remember everything I wrote. I have a basic outline instead. I will also be honest: there are certain things I wrote a long time ago when I was much younger that I am not satisfied with now. El Pip can relate to that.

The United States invaded and liberated Korea from Japanese control in 1945. I am quite happy about that, since it means no North Korea TTL. Then again, no North Korea means no Korean War. No Korean War means no M*A*S*H movie or TV show TTL.

Thank you very much. I have been able to write more starting last year, so I am able to update this AAR more often than I have been the past few years.
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Opposing the Vietnam War
For Charles Kuralt, it was the assignment that would shape his career. Born in Wilmington, North Carolina in September 1934, Kuralt knew from an early age that he wanted to be a journalist. After establishing himself as a newspaper writer and a radio announcer, Kuralt – who was voted “Most Likely to Succeed” by his high school – joined CBS News in 1957. In 1964, he was dispatched to South Vietnam to cover the escalating war for “The CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite”. With his camera crew granted free reign by the military, Kuralt became embedded with a military unit known as Charlie Company and saw up close the determination of the enemy and the horror of combat. With his easy, folksy demeanor, Kuralt established a rapport with the soldiers which came across in the reports he sent back to New York City for broadcast. What television viewers saw was an honest and up-close look at what their young men were going through in Vietnam. Through these intimate reports, Charlie Company became the face of the soldier experience in Vietnam for those watching the war unfold in their living rooms. Americans could feel the pain these soldiers were suffering as they fought the enemy from one end of South Vietnam to the other. As for Kuralt, he established a reputation in Vietnam as a journalist who could connect with people and get them to open up their feelings. This reputation led to Kuralt becoming CBS News’ go-to man for covering human interest stories. In 1967, “The CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite” launched “On the Road with Charles Kuralt”, a regular segment in which Kuralt – armed with a small TV crew – traveled the back roads of the country in a motor home to see what ordinary Americans from all walks of life were up to. A hit with television viewers, it earned Kuralt the Peabody Award in 1968.

The spring of 1965 saw intense fighting in Vietnam. Having delivered a heavy blow to the Viet Cong guerillas in the Mekong Delta, American soldiers fought well-armed and well-trained North Vietnamese soldiers in a valiant effort to roll back their invasion of South Vietnam. More Americans were killed or wounded during this time than they had been prior. Among those wounded was future four-star general Colin Powell, then a Captain who was shot in the leg at Phu Bon. “We are losing men [in Vietnam] every day,” Secretary of Defense Paul Nitze somberly informed President Malcolm Forbes at the height of the fighting. The heavy casualties weighed on Forbes, who was the first World War Two veteran to be elected President. Having fought and been wounded in Europe, the former staff sergeant understood personally what the soldiers in Vietnam were going through. “It is not easy,” he stated, “To send men to fight in a foreign land, where they may get killed or come back home missing a leg or an arm. Unfortunately, it is something that needs to be done.”
With the casualty figures mounting by the day, the President decided to be upfront about it with the American people. “A war is a very difficult thing to wage,” he explained in a foreign policy speech at Johns Hopkins University, “We are in a very difficult position right now and I am afraid things are going to get tougher before they get better.”
Forbes believed that it was important for Americans to understand that victory was going to come at a price. The United States was going to suffer heavy casualties in order to defeat the Viet Cong and save South Vietnam from being taken over by North Vietnam. It was unavoidable. The Republican President’s willingness to be honest and not try to downplay or hide the truth about the war from the public earned him the respect of Arkansas Senator J. William Fulbright, the Ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Although Fulbright was opposed to the United States being “involved in a land war in Asia,” he gave Forbes credit for his candor. “I do not see a credibility gap with this Administration between what they are saying and what the reports from Vietnam are saying. They are one and the same.”

Despite the fact that over 100 Americans were being killed each week, polls taken in the spring of 1965 showed that many Americans still supported the war. They were willing to accept the losses, however hard they were, believing that it was necessary in order to secure victory. By early summer, victory in Vietnam appeared to be within reach once again. The North Vietnamese had been driven back to Da Nang and Saravane, having endured heavy losses of their own both from the fighting on the ground and from devastating Boeing B-52 Stratofortress bombings. Beyond Da Nang and Saravane laid Hue and the Demilitarized Zone separating the two Vietnams. For those who supported the war, they just had to be patient for a while longer. Other Americans however were unwilling to accept the high cost in lives. To them, no victory in Vietnam was worth seeing young men return home maimed or in coffins. On April 17th, 1965, over 25,000 college students descended on Washington, D.C. to protest the Vietnam War. This wasn’t the first demonstration against the war, but it was the largest to date. Outside the iron gates of the White House, young people held up signs denouncing the war and shouted slogans like “Hell, no! We won’t go!” and “Stop the war, MF-er!”

This protest had been organized by the Students for a Democratic Society. Formed by Tom Hayden and others at the University of Michigan in 1960, SDS was a left-wing national student activist organization which was initially focused on causes such as liberalizing college campuses and racial equality. Following President Henry M. Jackson’s announcement in April 1962 that he was deploying combat troops to South Vietnam, stopping the Vietnam War became a major cause that SDS pursued. Since many of the young men being sent to Vietnam were college-age, SDS opposed sending them to fight what they regarded as “South Vietnam’s war” for them. They conducted several anti-war protests during 1962 and 1963, but they were small and ineffective in getting their message across. Part of the problem was that many Americans accepted Jackson’s claim that American troops were needed to help South Vietnam destroy the Viet Cong. Once this threat to South Vietnam had been eliminated, the bulk of those troops would then be brought home. The Vietnam War would not be an open-ended war with unclear objectives; instead, it would be a war with clearly defined objectives and an exit strategy. The other problem SDS encountered early on was a difficulty in recruiting members due to apathy. A lot of male college students at the time shrugged off the Vietnam War as something that wouldn’t affect them. After all, as long as they maintained at least a B average in their studies, they could apply for a federal student deferment from the military draft – which would exempt them from being sent to fight in Vietnam.

(While attending Georgetown University in the mid-1960s, Bill Clinton received a federal student deferment from the military draft. He was also hired as an office intern for Senator Fulbright, who opposed the Vietnam War. Although the deferment was completely legal, Democrat Clinton would nonetheless be attacked by Republican World War Two veteran Bob Dole for avoiding military service during the 1992 Presidential election)
While SDS struggled to build itself up, those opposed to the war took another approach in 1964. Jackson’s decision to send combat troops to Vietnam was unpopular with the liberal wing of his party. Democrats like Minnesota Senator Hubert Humphrey came out against the decision, believing that the Viet Cong was South Vietnam’s problem to deal with, not America’s. South Dakota Senator George McGovern was so against the Vietnam War that he challenged Jackson’s re-election bid. The President was highly vulnerable heading into 1964. In addition to losing liberal support over the war:

• Scoop presided over a weak economy which had been hit hard by a nationwide steel strike in 1962
• He had been ineffective at passing a domestic agenda through a divided Congress
• There had been massive corruption at the Department of Agriculture, resulting in the largest political scandal since Teapot Dome in the 1920s
• Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson had been forced to resign in disgrace in early 1964 due to allegations that he had used his office to enrich himself

Jackson was so unpopular heading into the 1964 Democratic National Convention that match-up polls showed him losing to every single Republican opponent, even staunchly conservative Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater. The Democrats therefore dumped him from the ticket at the convention, nominating McGovern for President on the second ballot. McGovern made his opposition to the Vietnam War the centerpiece of his Presidential campaign, vowing to end the war immediately and bring all the troops home. While his anti-war message was naturally popular with those who shared his view, it never caught on with the general electorate. A series of US battlefield victories that fall raised public support for the war, which critically undermined his campaign. His Republican opponent Forbes on the other hand ran a “stay the course” campaign and devastatingly portrayed him during their single Presidential debate as someone who “wants defeat at any price.”
Seen by the general electorate as a defeatist who wanted to abandon a war the country was currently winning, McGovern lost the 1964 Presidential election in a landslide. With his crushing defeat, opponents of the war were denied the chance of ending the war at the Presidential level.

(Senator McGovern arriving in New York to campaign for President. He lost New York on Election Day, bringing Democratic Senate candidate Robert F. Wagner Jr. down with him)
In the wake of Forbes’ election, SDS saw a sudden surge in recruitment. With the war escalating and more and more men being sent to Vietnam, those college students who couldn’t get a deferment realized they could very well be drafted to fight. Flooded with more people willing to join their cause, SDS decided to dramatically increase the number of protests. A few days after Forbes was inaugurated President, folk singer Joan Baez led 600 people in an anti-war demonstration in San Francisco, California (she also protested by withholding 60% of her 1964 income taxes so her money wouldn’t go to funding the war). This was followed by an SDS demonstration in New York City’s Times Square involving 700 college students. The next several months saw anti-war protests in cities all across the country. On March 24th, SDS organized the first teach-in protest at the University of Michigan. 3,500 people attended the teach-in, which consisted of debates and lectures denouncing the war. Two days later, Columbia University conducted a follow-up teach-in; by the end of spring, there had been teach-ins at 35 college campuses across the country. At about the same time, Democratic Senator Frank Church of Idaho delivered a strong anti-war speech on the floor of the Senate. Church, a World War Two veteran who was strongly opposed to this war, declared that “Once we thought that anything which happened abroad was none of our business; now we evidently think that everything which happens abroad has become our business. We have plunged into these former colonial regions as though we had been designated on high to act as trustee in bankruptcy.”
“There are limits,” the liberal Senator pointed out, “To what we can do in helping any government surmount a Communist uprising. If the people themselves will not support the government in power, we cannot save it.”
Not buying the argument that the Vietnam War was necessary in order to prevent Indochina from falling to the Chinese, Church asserted that “The gathering crisis in our own land, the deepening divisions among our people, the festering, unattended problems here at home, bear far more importantly on the future of our Republic than anything we ever had at stake in Indochina.”
As for the anti-war opposition, he saw it as “The highest concept of patriotism – which is not the patriotism of conformity – but the patriotism of [Missouri] Senator Carl Schurz, a dissenter from an earlier period, who proclaimed: ‘Our country right or wrong. When right, to be kept right: when wrong, to be put right.’”

(The original teach-in at the University of Michigan)
In the aftermath of the April 17th march on Washington, Walter Lippmann, one of the nation’s leading public intellectuals, wrote in his nationally syndicated newspaper column that it was “absurd” for the United States to militarily oppose China’s efforts to become the dominant power in Asia. Instead, he advocated for the United States to negotiate with China…even if it meant ceding control of Indochina to them. While the anti-war movement was united on opposing the Vietnam War, there were sharp disagreements on how to end the war. Some people urged negotiating peace with North Vietnam, others called for the immediate withdrawal of US forces from South Vietnam, and some even wanted to see North Vietnam defeat what they regarded as “American Imperialism”.
Forbes responded to all this with indifference. To him, the anti-war opposition was a vocal minority he could safely ignore. He felt he had a mandate from the majority to continue the war until it was won. According to a Gallup poll taken that spring, only 24% of Americans opposed the Vietnam War. “I see no reason at this point,” he stated, “To do anything different in regard to Vietnam because of these protests.”
Overwhelmingly elected President on his “stay the course” platform, Forbes felt content to regard the protests as being nothing more than people exercising their First Amendment freedom of speech. Then came the University of California, Berkeley protest of May 5th. Taking square aim at the draft (which required all men between the ages of 18 and 25 to be registered for possible military service), 700 people carried a black coffin to the Berkeley draft board. The coffin represented all who had died so far in Vietnam. The protestors told the draft board point-blank that they were refusing to be drafted to fight in Vietnam. Then, while pro-war Forbes was hung in effigy by the anti-war crowd, 40 men symbolically burned their draft cards (which contained their identifying information). This inspired anti-war activists across the country to burn their draft cards in solidarity. It was the draft card burning, more than anything else, which offended Forbes deeply. The President believed that military service was an obligation that came with citizenship; if the country called on you to serve, you served. He was disgusted by the draft card burners, considering them to be selfish people who were putting themselves before their country at a time of war. While acknowledging that the draft wasn’t perfect (you were more likely to be drafted if you were from a minority or were a lower-to-middle class white person), Forbes didn’t think people had the right to burn their draft cards. Neither did the Republican Congress. That summer Congress passed, and the President signed into law, a bill which made it a federal crime to burn your draft card. Those who were convicted of violating the law would receive up to 5 years in prison and have to pay a $1,000 fine. Democratic Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina was a co-sponsor of the law in the upper chamber, declaring that draft card burning “represents a potential threat to the exercise of the power to raise and support armies.”

As the Attorney General, it was Richard Nixon’s responsibility to enforce the new law. Since he was always eager to go after people he regarded as being “the enemy”, Nixon went after and prosecuted draft card burners with gusto. One observer at the time marveled that the Attorney General “finds joy in punishing people for exercising their right to protest.”
The Forbes Administration’s willingness to crack down on the draft card burners elicited a mixed political reaction. Conservatives were pleased to see the Administration stand up to them while liberals criticized the Administration for violating their freedom of speech under the First Amendment. Opponents of the law took it to court and tried to get it struck down on First Amendment grounds. The matter went all the way to the Supreme Court, where in 1966 it upheld the law in an 8-1 decision. According to the Supreme Court, burning your draft card wasn’t covered by the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech. Therefore, the Federal Government had the right to criminalize it. In the words of Chief Justice Curtis Shake:
“We cannot accept the view that an apparently limitless variety of conduct can be labeled ‘speech’ whenever the person engaging in the conduct intends thereby to express an idea.”
While campaigning for re-election to the Senate that year, Humphrey emphasized his opposition to the draft card burning law and called for abolishing the draft altogether. The Senate Minority Leader believed it was better to have a purely volunteer military than to force people to serve who didn’t want to. To political observers, Humphrey’s public stances on these two hot button issues had less to do with the 1966 midterm election and more to do with the 1968 Presidential election.

(Another way to legally avoid being drafted was to join the National Guard. While attending Yale University in the 1960s, George W. Bush enlisted in the Texas Air National Guard. During the 2000 Presidential election, Bush faced allegations that he only joined the Texas Air National Guard to avoid the draft. Political observers at the time believed that the allegations against Bush were the Democrats’ way of getting back at Republicans for attacking Clinton’s federal student deferment in 1992)

 

[DensleyBlair]

I will also be honest: there are certain things I wrote a long time ago when I was much younger that I am not satisfied with now. El Pip can relate to that.

My AAR is a spring chicken compared to yours and Pip’s grand projects, but still there are things I plotted 2 years ago that I now look at with the benefit of a bit more knowledge and tact and think: what the shit was I thinking?!

As for this update – it’s funny seeing the anti-Nam movement with such limited reach. Forbes’s America undoubtedly has its problems and its divisions, but there is something peculiar about seeing the US at the height of the Sixties with this great big peace-movement-sized absence. Scary prospect down the line too, if the States maintain confidence in their all-powerful abilities abroad.

 

[El Pip]

Some interesting variations in that update. Forbes being honest with people is paying off to an extent, I think the historic "credibility gap" did fuel the peace movement to an extent. I've no doubt one would have existed, but in many ways it is easier to mobilise against a lying government than an honest one, people who might have been persuaded by the government case doubt it because they've been fooled before. By being honest Forbes has shifted the argument onto whether the sacrifice is worth it, which is probably easier ground than pretending no sacrifice was required at all.

It's only a temporary answer though, if the war does take a turn for the worse then he might get caught by his own logic. Forbes is saying the sacrifice is worth it, not that the war should be pursued at any possible cost (if it is worth any cost then nuke North Vietnam. If you you say that is excessive, which it obviously is, you have conceded there is a limit to the price that should be paid for 'victory'. So even by his own argument there is point where the US should just walk away, as casualties mount more people are going to ask where that point is.

And yes the pain of a long running project is that the older work is still somehow 'live'. I can look back at an old finished work and not be as fussed, because I got to "The End" and made my peace with it. But if the project is still live then you deal with the consequences of the old writing fairly regularly and so the flaws, or even things you would just do differently, are thrust in your face more.

 

[Nathan Madien]

DensleyBlair: I started writing the first Presidents AAR way back in October 2008. Here we are now in April 2022, so that's almost 14 years. El Pip has been writing his AAR since the dawn of time January 2006. Even though I rewrote the original AAR (because I wasn't satisfied with it), there are still things that an older and wiser Nathan Madien would write differently today.

The thing about the anti-war movement early on historically was that they were a vocal minority. Most Americans supported LBJ's decision to get America involved in Vietnam. It was when the war started dragging on with no victory in sight, men were dying by the thousands without an explanation of what they were fighting for, and people realized that the Johnson Administration wasn't telling them the truth about Vietnam that the majority of people started to turn against the war. Nixon was elected President in 1968 largely because people were sick of the war, and he promised to end it.

The anti-war movement at this point is still a vocal minority. How long that lasts depend on what happens in Vietnam.

By the way, there's an alternate history novel by Jeff Greenfield called "If Kennedy Lived" which imagines a 1960s America without the Vietnam War.

El Pip: Part of the problem LBJ had with the Vietnam War was that he committed hundreds of thousands of troops to Vietnam without really explaining to the American people what they were doing there and how they were going to get out. He constantly downplayed America's losses and even his allies weren't given a clear picture of what was going on in Vietnam. This led to a credibility gap which eventually brought down Johnson. War-weary people simply stopped believing him and his Administration's constant pronouncements that light was at the end of the tunnel. This AAR imagines a Vietnam War in which the government was more honest and gave people a clearer picture of the war.

I agree with your point about Forbes. For him, everything hinges on how long the war goes on his watch. People can only be patient and accept losses for so long until they lose patience and start questioning whether the cost is worth it.
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Welfare Reform
“It is our solemn duty to show that government can have both a head and a heart; that it can be both progressive and solvent; that it can serve the people without becoming their master.”
-President Thomas E. Dewey’s Second Inaugural Address (January 20th, 1949)

“Do you think he will be there, Mr. President?”
New York Senator Jacob Javits didn’t specify who he was talking about. He didn’t have to. President Malcolm Forbes knew exactly who he was referring to. It was April 21st, 1965. The President was on Air Force One, flying to New York City to give a speech at the reopening of the New York World’s Fair. Out of courtesy, he had invited New York’s two Republican Senators to fly on Air Force One with him.
“I don’t see why he would be.”
“Well, he is the Governor,” Senator Kenneth Keating (who had won re-election to a second term the previous November) pointed out innocently. “He is also Nelson Rockefeller,” Forbes immediately shot back, “He does not handle defeat well.”
Hailing from one of the most powerful families in America, Nelson Rockefeller had been elected Governor of New York in 1958. He had barely settled into Albany when he ambitiously turned his sights to the ultimate seat of power: the Presidency of the United States. He first threw his hat into the ring in 1960, seeking the Republican Presidential nomination. He lost the nomination to California Governor William Knowland; acting like a sore loser afterwards, Rockefeller refused to support Knowland in his general election race against Democratic Vice President Henry M. Jackson of Washington. Rockefeller threw his hat into the ring again in 1964, this time losing the nomination to Forbes. The New York Governor was even more bitter about losing to Forbes, largely because he had lost another battle to him. In April 1961, New York and New Jersey announced they would jointly build and operate a World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan. The two GOP Governors immediately clashed on exactly where in Lower Manhattan to build it:

• Rockefeller favored the East River side
• Forbes favored the Hudson River side

Forbes argued that since New Jersey was right across the Hudson River from Lower Manhattan, it was only fair to build the World Trade Center there. Rockefeller rejected him outright, insisting on getting his way. He even had an architectural model of an East River World Trade Center designed and built. Rebuked by the Governor of New York, the Governor of New Jersey withheld his approval of the project location. The standoff between the two states lasted all year; it wasn’t until December 1961 that Rockefeller, under immense pressure from New York officials to break the deadlock, reluctantly gave in and agreed to build the World Trade Center on the Hudson River side. Having never gotten over losing that public battle, Rockefeller stubbornly refused to lift a finger to support Forbes in the 1964 Presidential election. After winning the election with no help at all from Rockefeller, Forbes completely excluded him from his Administration even as he appointed former rivals Richard Nixon and George W. Romney to his cabinet. “My father wasn’t someone who held grudges,” his son Steve Forbes later recalled, “But he had a very low opinion of Nelson Rockefeller. He had no use for him.”

(After losing his 1960 and 1964 bids, Nelson Rockefeller made one more bid for the Republican Presidential nomination in 1972. He struck out for the third time, losing the nomination to Ronald Reagan. Reagan’s magnetic charisma and masterful oratory propelled him to the nomination, leaving the New York Governor in the dust. Rockefeller left office in January 1975, frustrated that the White House was always out of his reach. He died four years later at the age of 70)
Sure enough, Rockefeller was nowhere to be seen in the welcoming committee which greeted the President upon his arrival at Idlewild Airport. It was left up to Lieutenant Governor Malcolm Wilson to welcome Forbes to the Empire State and pass along Rockefeller’s “regret” that he wasn’t able to attend due to “a pressing matter which acquires his attention.”
Forbes of course knew better. Rockefeller wasn’t there because he was a sore loser who couldn’t bear to be around him. The President publicly accepted Wilson’s “apology” and swiftly moved on. He had a bigger fish to fry. From Idlewild Airport, the President traveled to the New York World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows, where a large crowd had gathered to hear him speak. Spread out across 646 acres, the “Peace Through Understanding” international exhibition had originally run from April to October 1964. Organizers decided to run it again for a second year for financial reasons and invited the President to speak on the opening day. Forbes began his speech by discussing America’s affluence, which the New York World’s Fair greatly boasted. He noted that many Americans could afford to buy whatever they wanted. At the same time however, “many of our citizens live day to day barely able to buy even the basic necessities of life.”
The President noted that despite America’s immense wealth, 40 million Americans lived in poverty. The purpose of his speech, therefore, was to discuss the poverty issue and what he planned to do to address it. This wasn’t the first time Forbes had spoken about poverty; he had made the issue one of the key planks of his Presidential campaign. Nor was he the first to highlight the stark differences between the haves and the haves-not. In 1890, Danish-American journalist Jacob Riis published “How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York”, a photographic book which documented the squalid living conditions poor immigrants were suffering in the slums of New York City. For well-off Americans, the images of down-and-out people struggling in dangerous and unhygienic conditions were stunning. Riis’ work triggered a wave of reforms in New York City and cities elsewhere aimed at improving conditions for the working poor. Theodore Roosevelt, as President of the New York City Board of Police Commissioners in the mid-1890s, established the Tenement House Committee which pushed through a number of tenement housing reforms including increasing the amount of light in living quarters, increasing fire safety regulations, and mandating more ventilation.

Alleviating the plight of the poor became a major goal of social activists like Jane Addams. They encouraged local governments, political parties, and philanthropists to do more to help. Writers following in Riis’ footsteps published a series of works which put the plight of the poor front and center, most notably “In His Steps: What Would Jesus Do?” by Charles Sheldon (1897), “The Grapes of Wrath” by John Steinbeck (1939), and “The Other America” by Michael Harrington (1962). In 1960, CBS aired the Edward R. Murrow documentary “Harvest of Shame”, which shocked Americans by showing them the poverty-stricken lives of migrant farm workers. This was followed up by the documentary “Night Comes to the Cumberland”, which depicted the abject poverty of a half-million whites who lived on the Cumberland Plateau in the Appalachian Mountains. Among those who viewed these documentaries was Forbes, who decided to make addressing poverty one of the key planks of his Presidential campaign.

As an Eastern Establishment Republican, Forbes accepted the idea that the Federal Government had an obligation to provide a helping hand to those in need. For the Eastern Establishment, this acceptance had been their ticket to the White House. Campaigning for President in 1940, Wendell Willkie stressed that he was a progressive in the mold of former Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. He was supportive of much of Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal economic agenda to fight the Great Depression. Where he differed with FDR was that while his opponent favored “doing what has to be done by spending as much money as possible, I propose to do it by spending as little money as possible.”
He claimed that Roosevelt’s approach had resulted in “tremendous waste of the [American people’s] resources and money.”
After defeating FDR in a close election, Willkie spent his first year as President trimming the New Deal of what he deemed to be waste. Certain programs, like the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Tennessee Valley Authority (which Willkie had a personal vendetta against, having lost a fight against TVA in the 1930s), were abolished. On the other hand, he preserved other parts of the New Deal like Social Security and fair labor standards. Following his death in October 1944, Willkie was succeeded to the Presidency by his running mate Thomas E. Dewey, who publicly called himself a "New Deal Republican". As President, Dewey vigorously defended Social Security, unemployment insurance, and farm supports on the grounds that “they cost relatively little when compared with the gain in human happiness.”
Following the end of World War Two in January 1947, he fought to push through a conservative Congress a progressive domestic agenda which at the same time was fiscally responsible. He warned conservatives who wanted to completely roll back the New Deal that should they “attempt to abolish Social Security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs” in an effort to “return the nation to the miscalled ‘good old days’ of the 19th Century, you can bury the Republican Party as the deadest pigeon in the country.”
The next Republican President after Dewey was Forbes, who shared the philosophy historian Richard Norton Smith has labeled “pay-as-you-go liberalism”. Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, the leading conservative figure during the 1960s, derisively called it “a dime store New Deal.”

(In addition to being the third Eastern Establishment Republican President in 24 years, Malcolm Forbes would also be the last. Ronald Reagan's nomination in 1972 ushered in a western tilt away from the dominant East Coast. For the remainder of the 20th Century and into the 21st Century, all Republican Presidents and nominees would come from west of the Appalachian Mountains)
In his speech at the New York World’s Fair, Forbes discussed the poverty issue as well as his plan for dealing with it. The biggest problem in dealing with poverty, he claimed, was the current welfare system. It was ineffective. Under the current system, people who were trapped in miserable poverty-stricken lives were given a welfare check in the mail each month from the Federal Government. The welfare checks added up to $8 billion a year. Advocates of the current system believed this was the best way to help those in need. Forbes completely disagreed. To him, simply sending people checks in the mail each month wasn’t addressing the root cause of poverty, which he said was a lack of opportunity. In his speech, Forbes painted a bleak picture in which unemployed people were stuck in run-down neighborhoods with no way out. Feeling that their lives were never going to get better, these people meagerly went day-after-day without any hope and with plenty of despair. There was crime everywhere, along with plenty of broken families. One-fifth of all black children for example were deserted by their fathers; without a father to raise them, these poor children were more likely to join gangs and either get themselves killed or jailed. “I have been to the slums of our cities,” he proclaimed, “And I have spoken to the people who live there. What they have told me is that they need more than a hand-out from their government. What they need, what they desire, is a hand-up.”
“The problem with those who support the welfare system as it currently stands,” he observed, “Is that they want to feel like they are making a difference. They want to feel like they are helping people out. But they do not want to take the time to find out if what they are doing is making any real progress.”
To break the vicious cycle of poverty, the President advocated reforming the welfare system. In the plan he laid out during the speech, the welfare system would shift its’ focus from simply handing out checks every month to fostering job creation. To him, that was the key to everything. Under his reform proposal:

• The welfare system would help men find work on public works projects wherever possible
• The welfare system would help men go to school
• The welfare system would help men enter job-training and apprenticeship programs

By helping men get jobs, Forbes believed it would create a positive ripple effect. Having a job would allow men to earn their own paychecks, eliminating the need for welfare checks. Men who were earning money would be able to support their household, encouraging them to marry and raise their children instead of abandoning them. Children who were being raised in a stable two-parent home would be more likely to stay out of gangs and stay in school to further their education. As the climate of their neighborhoods turned around, businesses would be more likely to move in, growing the local economy. All this just by giving a man a job. “A job,” Forbes proclaimed, “Is the greatest weapon we have against poverty. It gives the individual a purpose, a sense that they can make their lives better through the sweat of their own brow.”

(In February 1974, “Good Times” premiered on CBS. Developed by Norman Lear, it centered around the Evans Family, who lived in an inner-city Chicago public housing project. In the show, James Evans - played by John Amos - was a construction worker who also worked a variety of second jobs in order to provide for his family and was always looking for ways to make more money so he could move them into a better neighborhood. “Good Times” broke ground as being the first sitcom about an African-American two-parent family)
The day after the New York World’s Fair speech, the President sent his welfare reform proposal to Congress. One of the people who had gotten a preview of the bill was Senate Majority Leader Frederick F. Houser of California. Houser supported the measure but warned the President that he would have to carefully thread a political needle. Conservatives, he reminded him, weren’t all that keen on spending money for domestic programs. As for liberals, they would be against any changes to the welfare system. “I know the Democrats favor the status quo,” Forbes replied, “McGovern told me so.”
During their single Presidential debate the previous fall, sparks flew between Forbes and South Dakota Senator George McGovern over welfare. Forbes blamed the poverty problem on Democrats and what he regarded as their lack of imagination. “For thirty years since the New Deal, the Democratic Party has insisted that all we have to do is give those who are down and out money and all their problems will go away. The fact that this has never worked unfortunately has not prompted the Democrats to re-think how they do things. They simply go on handing out checks year after year, not trying anything new.”
McGovern came back swinging, attacking Forbes’ assertion that welfare checks have not worked as absurd:
“The money people receive in the mail each month is their only source of income. It is this money which has allowed them to pay their rent and pay for the food and things which they need to get by.”
In his view, Forbes’ welfare reform plan was a reflection of the Republicans’ typical “lack of compassionate concern for those who are unable, through no fault of their own, to provide adequately for themselves.”
When the Democratic Presidential nominee proposed giving an additional $1,000 to everyone who was receiving a welfare check, to be paid for by raising taxes on those who were well-off, his Republican opponent lightly shook his head. Instead of trying something different, he rebutted, McGovern just wanted to do more of what his Party had always done “which did not work thirty years ago and will not work now. You cannot eliminate poverty simply by shifting money around.”
To make welfare reform work, the President needed to invest additional money into the welfare system. That meant winning over conservatives…the same ones who were blocking his civil rights bill in the Senate because they thought it went too far. Fortunately for the President, he had an ace up his sleeve.

It was called the Clark Report, named after Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare Kenneth Clark (above). Released by the White House a week after the New York World’s Fair speech, the Clark Report detailed black poverty in the United States and laid out a series of recommendations for dealing with it. It noted for example that the out-of-wedlock birthrate among blacks was 25%, which was much higher than that of whites. It blamed the “steady disintegration of the Negro family structure over the past generation” on the current welfare system, which did nothing to empower blacks to improve their livelihoods but instead made them feel like victims who were doomed to live their lives in misery and despair. The Clark Report recommended putting a greater emphasis on making jobs, vocational training, and educational programs more accessible for black men. By gaining meaningful employment, those men would be better able to fulfill their roles as husbands and fathers, leading to decreases in the rates of divorce, child abandonment, and out-of-wedlock births in the black community. While the Clark Report echoed the President’s speech, what set it apart was the fact that it had been written by a black man. “I agree completely with the President,” the HEW Secretary told reporters at the public unveiling of his report, “Our current approach to poverty is not helping our citizens, the Negroes most of all. The statistics bear that out.”
Of course, Kenneth Clark wasn’t just any black man. The first black tenured full professor at the City College of New York, Clark was one of the most prominent African-American academics in the country. His psychological work showing the detrimental effects segregated classrooms had on black children had been taken into account by the Supreme Court when they ruled in the landmark 1954 case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka that segregated schools were unconstitutional. Like Forbes, Clark believed that the present welfare system was failing to improve the lives of those living in poverty and that a new approach was needed. By putting Clark in charge of HEW, the President gave his push for welfare reform a credible black perspective. Furthermore, Clark’s credentials made his report’s findings broadly palatable.

(An African-American mother forced to raise her children on her own after being abandoned by her husband)
Thomas Sowell, an African-American libertarian economist, wrote in 2015 that “What the Forbes Administration clearly understood in 1965, and what liberals clearly did not, was that African-American poverty had less to do with a lack of money and more to do with a lack of opportunities.”
As the Forbes Administration made clear to conservatives, restructuring the welfare system, which required significant financial investment in the short term, would benefit society in the long run by destroying the culture of poverty through empowerment. Those who were standing on their own two feet would no longer be dependent on the Federal Government…a dependency which the current welfare system perpetrated. Additionally, those who got jobs would become taxpayers, contributing their fair share. “The money we spend today to help people get out of poverty,” Forbes confidently predicted, “They will pay back tomorrow as productive members of society.”
For conservatives, this emphasis on replacing government dependency with personal responsibility was music to their ears. As one conservative Republican member of Congress stated:
“Negro men want jobs. What we have done is given them a check and told them there is no meaningful work for them to do. Of all the injustices that have befallen the Negro in this country, this remorseless indifference may rank among the worst.”
Another declared optimistically that “The days of the dole in our country are numbered.”
To build bipartisan conservative support, the President quietly dispatched Vice President Everett Dirksen to meet privately with Southern Democratic Senators and try to convince them to join this Republican effort. While some Senators, like Harry F. Byrd of Virginia (who would retire from the Senate at the end of the year for health reasons), balked at the idea of helping blacks in any way, others expressed a willingness to get behind welfare reform. One of them was John Connally of Texas (below), who explained that he wanted to turn the disadvantaged “into taxpayers rather than allow them to continue being tax eaters.”

The welfare reform proposal came with the price tag of $481 million, which Forbes thought was a sufficient amount. $190 million would be spent on funding job-training and apprenticeship programs sponsored by the welfare system. $150 million would go towards getting men into the classroom. The remaining $141 million would be used to help men find work on public works project and whatever else that needed to be done to get people off of welfare. Welfare checks would continue to be mailed out on a monthly basis; but as the number of people on the welfare dole shrank, the Federal Government would be able to reduce the $8 billion it was presently spending a year on welfare checks. Given the trouble the President was going through at the time trying to get his civil rights bill through the Senate, both Houser and Dirksen advised him to send his proposal to the upper chamber first. As Dirksen put it:
“The House will pass whatever bill you send them, Mr. President. It’s the Senate that will debate it.”
Since the bill would have to navigate the Senate, with its’ rules and smaller membership, it was felt by the Vice President and the Senate Majority Leader that it would be better to get the Senate battle out of the way first. Once the bill passed the Senate, it would have a much easier time in the House of Representatives, where all it needed was a straightforward majority vote. The President agreed to follow their suggestion. The Senate took up the welfare reform proposal first…and proceeded to take its’ sweet time with it. There was a reason, after all, that the United States Senate was known as being “The World’s Most Deliberative Body.” Republican and Democratic Senators debated at length both the specifics of Forbes’ bill and welfare in general. When McGovern denounced the bill as “ending welfare as we know it,” Reagan replied that was exactly the point. The California Senator contended that the Republican approach to welfare would “treat the needs of the poor” much more effectively than “these handouts that erode away an individual’s self-reliance and self-respect. Our liberal friends here insist that these handouts, in spite of that, are the only solution to solve the problem of human misery.
Now don’t get me wrong. I am not saying our liberal friends here are ignorant. It's just that they know so much that isn’t so.”
Another reason the Senate moved slowly was that it put the welfare reform bill on the backburner when a compromise civil rights bill emerged that summer. Once the Senate passed it on August 16th, Houser moved to wrap up the debate and put the President’s proposal to a final vote. On August 26th, the Senate approved the bill by a margin of 75-25. Every Republican voted for it except James D. Martin of Alabama. Democrats were split right down the middle. There were liberals who favored the status quo and voted against it; there were liberals, such as Walter Mondale of Minnesota, who voted for it because they regarded it as another way for the Federal Government to help the poor. There were Southerners who were dead set against helping blacks in any way and voted against it; there were Southerners who voted for it because they felt it was more important to get people off of welfare. The bill then went to the House of Representatives, which passed it on September 11th by a margin of 328-107:

• 242 Republicans and 86 Democrats voted for it
• 22 Republicans and 85 Democrats voted against it

On September 16th, the President signed the bill into law. Although it would take time, welfare reform would bear fruit. Educational and job opportunities that had previously been unavailable to poor whites and blacks became available. The result was stunning:

• In 1965, 40 million Americans lived in poverty; by 1975, that number had declined sharply to 25 million
• In the same 10-year timeframe, the poverty rate had plunged from 19% to 11%

While welfare reform was successful in helping to lift millions of people out of poverty, improving their lives in the process, it relied on a growing economy to provide those opportunities. That meant whenever the economy went into a recession (the late 2000s being a prime example), those opportunities became harder to come by for the welfare system to provide. As a result, the number of Americans living in poverty has seen spikes whenever there were more people who needed help than could be helped. This has also meant that the poverty rate has never gone below 10% in the 57 years since welfare reform was enacted. Looking back at his Presidency in 1985, Forbes admitted he was “disappointed” that one of his major accomplishments didn’t go as far as he thought it would. “I didn’t think it would completely eliminate poverty, but I did think that eventually it would get the poverty rate down to at least 5%. The fact that the poverty rate is still in double digits after all this time suggests that perhaps we put too much faith into it.”

 

[El Pip]

I'll admit this is not my strongest area, but this certainly seems a very different sort of reform than LBJ's great society. It seems just as ambitious, but far less expensive, which is probably for the best given their is a war on. Certainly even the US could not fund Vietnam, the Great Society and keep Bretton-Woods going, so Forbes has (unwittingly) made the wise choice not to try. Of course some may argue the wise choice is don't fight Vietnam and keep the other two,but then this wouldn't be much of a Vietnam War AAR.

On the programme's success or failure I am reminded of an old piece of economics wisdom. It is fine to agree to any social programme or scheme, even if presented by your opponents, so long as you control the metrics by which it is measured. In this case there is a common sleight of hand to talk about absolute poverty (which everyone with a heart wishes to stop) but measure relative poverty (which is just inequality with a more sympathetic name). I wonder which is being talked about here and who decided it?

 

[DensleyBlair]

All of this talk of East v. West in the GOP, but at the end of the day Forbes and Reagan seem pretty well aligned on the welfare issue. As Pip says, ‘jobs not handouts’ is a canny book-balancing move with an unbelievably expensive war on at the same time – but removing any sort of real safety net is a massive social change, and as you say at the end there prone to wild swings in efficacy.

It is also, at the end of the day, a devilish piece of sleight of hand to disguise just getting rid of welfare altogether. With this as the new standard, I wonder whether we in for an extra couple of decades of unbroken neoliberalism?

 

[Nathan Madien]

El Pip: LBJ spent a huge amount of money waging his War on Poverty, with mixed results. While you could argue that the Great Society helped people, you could also argue that the Great Society was a huge waste of money that ultimately didn't move the poverty needle all that much. Since there's no Great Society TTL, what we are seeing here is a much more limited Republican effort to deal with poverty.

When I get to 1966, we will see more of the Republican domestic agenda and how it differs from the OTL Great Society.

Johnson tried to have it both ways: spending a lot of money of both domestic programs and the Vietnam War. Much to his dismay, he discovered that he couldn't have both guns and butter (I think that's how the expression goes). Here Forbes is spending far less money on domestic programs and hoping that he doesn't have to spend too much money on Vietnam. Forbes ultimately wants to balance the budget, which he won't be able to do if he can't keep spending under control.

"The 40 million Americans living in poverty" figure I cited is a relative poverty figure determined by the Federal Government.

DensleyBlair: While there are certainly things Forbes and the conservative wing of the GOP don't agree on (civil rights for example), Forbes is at least able to find common ground with conservatives when it comes to dealing with poverty.

With Forbes spending far less money on addressing poverty than LBJ did, I don't think the result will be much better over the long run.

Are we in for an extra couple of decades of unbroken neoliberalism as you put it? We shall see.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------The Luzon Strait Incident
It was supposed to be a speech about helping businesses; it ended up being remembered for something entirely different. On May 8th, 1965, Secretary of Commerce George W. Romney traveled to Detroit, Michigan to address the local chamber of commerce. For Romney, the savvy former automobile industry chief executive and moderate Governor of Michigan (1963-1965), returning to Detroit felt like returning home. He started off his speech by discussing how the Forbes Administration planned to help businesses “recover” after 12 years of Democratic regulations and tax raising. It was an entirely normal speech that a Republican was expected to give. Then halfway through the speech, as was his habit whenever he got going, Romney rambled off into a completely unrelated topic. In this case, it was the Vietnam War. The Commerce Secretary made it clear to his audience that he supported the war because he believed it was “morally right and necessary to stop Communist aggression in Southeast Asia.”
When he denounced the growing anti-war movement on college campuses, he received applause from the audience. That is when Romney made his infamous comment. Noting that his youngest child Mitt was getting ready to graduate from high school and head off to Stanford University in the fall, Romney expressed his view that “colleges these days are not interested in teaching our young people what they need to know. They are more interested now in mind control – controlling the minds of our young people to oppose the war.”
Romney’s unexpected “mind control” comment raised a considerable number of eyebrows. Mind control up to that point had been confined to the world of fiction, one of the most famous examples being “The Jackrabbit”. A 1962 political thriller directed by John Frankenheimer, the film starred Frank Sinatra as a military officer who uncovered a nefarious plot involving the CIA and the power-hungry Vice President. The CIA had programmed one of his soldiers – whom they codenamed “The Jackrabbit” – to assassinate the President of the United States during a speech so the Vice President could then become President and establish an authoritarian regime. Given how fictional mind control seemed, people were startled to hear a cabinet member talk so openly about it. Anti-war activists of course attacked Romney, calling it “outrageous” that he portrayed them as being opposed to the war because their minds were being controlled rather than because of their personal conviction that the war was wrong. For other people, the comment reinforced their image of this devout Mormon (who neither drank alcohol or caffeinated beverages, smoked, or used profanity) as being a very odd person.

With the Commerce Secretary now the subject of unwanted newspaper editorials and television analysis, the White House went into damage control mode. Romney was forced to put out a statement clarifying that his mind control view had been strictly his own and that nobody else in the Administration shared it. Journalist Jack Germond, who was used to Romney clarifying his gaffe-prone statements, joked about adding a single key on his typewriter that would print “Romney later explained.”
Some even suggested to President Malcolm Forbes that he get rid of Romney because he had become an embarrassing liability. Forbes, himself admitting that his one-time rival “isn’t the most articulate person,” declined to do so. He felt he had a more pressing problem to deal with than his Commerce Secretary’s controversial statement. At the time, the United States and the Republic of China were locked in a war of words over an incident near Formosa. On May 1st, an American destroyer had been fired on by a Chinese heavy cruiser in what would become known as the Luzon Strait Incident. Exactly how far from Formosa the incident had taken place was being strongly disputed by the two governments. Covering an area of 14,000 square miles, the 245-mile-long and 89-mile-wide mountainous island sat 112 miles off the southeast coast of China. Formosa also sat 155 miles away from the Philippines island of Luzon and 67 miles away from the Ryukyu Islands of Japan, giving the island a strategic position in the Western Pacific.

(A 1912 Rand McNally map of Japan)
Portuguese for “Beautiful Island,” Formosa had been fought over by a number of powers until the Japanese took over it in 1895. After it became a Japanese island, Formosa saw heavy industrialization, the expansion of her railways, and increased production of cash crops like sugar. The Japanese outlawed local culture and insisted that the residents of the island see themselves as being proper Japanese, even adopting Japanese surnames. By 1938, 309,000 Japanese settlers were living on the island. In anticipation of war with the West, Tokyo built up Formosa’s military infrastructure with the aim of turning the island into an unsinkable aircraft carrier. When war with the United States broke out in February 1942 following the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, Formosa was regarded by the Americans as being a major target in their island-hopping campaign across the Pacific. After liberating the Philippines from Japanese control in 1944, American forces under the command of General Douglas MacArthur turned north and captured Formosa. They then used it as a staging ground for their advance up the Ryukyu Islands towards the Japanese home islands. After the war, control of the island was ceded to the Chinese – who had a territorial claim on it – and most of her Japanese residents were sent back to Japan.

(The American landing at Formosa)
Like the Japanese and the Americans before them, the Chinese treated Formosa as a major base of operations in the Western Pacific. They continued building up the island’s military infrastructure, and in 1959 launched the ambitious Seven-Year Plan to build up the woefully neglected Republic of China Navy and the Republic of China Air Force into strong military forces to be reckoned with. To project naval power in the Western Pacific, the ROCN was re-organized into six fleets. Aware that their Navy could never compete head-to-head with the United States Navy and the British Royal Navy, the Chinese made the strategic decision to focus on speed and mobility instead. Two task forces centered on light carriers and heavy cruisers would provide the main punch. Heavy cruisers would also provide the backbone of two fleets which would screen the waters for enemy ships and destroy them. Lastly, the Chinese would have two submarine fleets to serve as pickets and first line of attack. As for the ROCAF, it was strategically redesigned to focus on just four types:

• Dongfeng-101 Fresco single-seat jet interceptor (based on the Soviet Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-17 and capable of covering a range of over 1,000 miles with drop tanks)
• Tupolev Tu-14 Bosun twin-turbojet light bomber (a Soviet export which could carry up to 6,610 pounds of explosives)
• Ilyushin Il-28 Beagle jet bomber (a Soviet export which was modified to be a naval bomber)
• Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-15 Fagot swept-wing jet fighter (a Soviet export capable of covering a range of 1,230 miles with external tanks)

Since Western aircraft was completely out of the question for political reasons, the Chinese turned to Soviet aircraft instead. By the spring of 1965, Chinese military strength had reached a considerable level. Given Formosa’s strategic position, most of the Chinese naval bombers were based there. This allowed them to attack enemy ships long before they neared the coast. The island was well within range of mainland interceptor and fighter protection. Naval bases on the north and south side of the island enabled the Chinese to project naval power deep into the Western Pacific.

(The Chinese used the Soviet Foxtrot-class design for their submarines. At 295 feet long, these diesel-electric submarines could travel 15 knots submerged and attack using 10 torpedo tubes and her armament of 22 torpedoes)
The intense militarization of Formosa raised international concerns, particularly in the Philippines. With the island sitting only 155 miles away from her, the island nation became worried that the Chinese would use their newly-gained military strength to dominate the sea lanes – especially in the South China Sea. In January 1964, Filipino President Diosdado Macapagal traveled to the White House and requested help from American President Henry M. Jackson in defending his country’s free navigation of the sea from Chinese encroachment. Jackson responded to the request by ordering the USN to establish routine naval patrols in the South China Sea. The purpose of these patrols would be to keep open the sea lanes in the South China Sea, thereby preventing the ROCN from being able to close them off to other nations at whim. The Chinese didn’t take kindly to what they perceived as America’s meddling in their waters. Nanjing regarded the presence of US destroyers in the South China Sea as being a provocation and vaguely warned of “consequences” should the USN provoke the ROCN into taking action.

(Diosdado Macapagal, who served as the President of the Philippines from December 1961 to December 1965. He was succeeded by Ferdinand Marcos, who proceeded to establish a corrupt and brutal dictatorship)
Over the next year, there were several encounters in the South China Sea between patrolling Chinese heavy cruisers and patrolling American destroyers. Whenever they met, one of three things happened:

• The Chinese heavy cruiser would shadow the American destroyer for several miles
• The Chinese heavy cruiser would sail parallel with the American destroyer for several miles
• The Chinese heavy cruiser would sail ahead of the American destroyer and come to a stop, forcing the destroyer to make a sharp turn in order to avoid a collision

The encounters typically ended with one ship or the other breaking off and sailing away. With the American destroyers being vastly outgunned by the Chinese heavy cruisers, the Americans didn’t want to risk getting into a naval fight in which they would likely be blasted out of the water. The Chinese for their part seemed more interested in intimidating the Americans with a display of naval muscle than going into battle with them. Then on the morning of May 1st, 1965, the Forrest Sherman-class destroyer USS Turner Joy set sail from her naval base in the Philippines and headed north into the Luzon Strait for a routine patrol. Separating Luzon from Formosa, this important strait saw several sea lanes run through it. At 12:40 PM, the USS Turner Joy crossed paths with the Sichuan-class heavy cruiser ROCN Chongqing. Exactly what happened next depended on which side you asked. According to the Americans, the USS Turner Joy had been sailing in international waters when the ROCN Chongqing sailed up to it and opened fire unprovoked at 1,000 yards. According to the Chinese, the USS Turner Joy had sailed into Formosan waters and the ROCN Chongqing had fired off warning shots to dissuade her from going any further. Either way, the result was the same. With geysers of water shooting up around her, the USS Turner Joy realized she was being fired at. The captain, a veteran of the Gulf of Tonkin Incident of August 1964 in which the North Vietnamese had attacked and sank the Allen M. Sumner-class destroyer USS Maddox, ordered a hard turn and full speed to put distance between the two ships. The ROCN Chongqing proceeded to follow the USS Turner Joy for a few miles, her guns aimed squarely at her retreating foe. When a squadron of Douglas A-4 Skyhawk single-seat subsonic light attack aircrafts scrambled from the nearby Enterprise-class aircraft carrier USS Enterprise hastily arrived over the scene to provide reinforcements, the heavy cruiser broke off the chase and turned around to return to her naval base.

(The USS Turner Joy)
When word of the Luzon Strait Incident reached Washington and Nanjing, it triggered a fierce war of words. The United States demanded that China apologize for firing on one of her ships unprovoked. China refused, claiming that the Americans had provoked the ROCN Chongqing into taking action by sailing into Chinese territorial waters. Nanjing then warned Washington that the next time one of her ships approached Formosa, she would be attacked directly instead of being merely chased away. The two countries were already unofficially in a state of war at the time, their soldiers fighting it out in South Vietnam (Chinese divisions were officially classified as being North Vietnamese divisions). The Luzon Strait Incident only exacerbated tensions between them. As the Chinese saw it, the Americans had brought the episode upon themselves by meddling in what they regarded as being their waters. As the Americans saw it, the Chinese were upping the ante by deliberately firing at one of their ships. The question facing Washington in the immediate aftermath was what to do about it. Curtis Lemay, the aggressive cigar-chomping Chief of Staff of the United States Air Force, proposed launching retaliatory air strikes against China. He saw it as the only way to make the Chinese understand that they shouldn’t mess with the Americans. “They’ve got to draw in their horns and stop their aggression,” he declared, “Or else we should bomb them back into the Stone Age!”
Once again, Lemay’s overtly militant style clashed with Forbes’ more cautious style. The President was never enthusiastic about his Air Force Chief’s proposals, once privately confiding to his White House Chief of Staff that he regarded him as being “a simple-minded man who believes that bombing is the answer to every problem.”
Having his hands full already dealing with Vietnam, the President didn’t want to escalate the Luzon Strait Incident into a full-blown war with China. “The Turner Joy is not the Maine.”
The USS Maine was an armored cruiser which suddenly exploded in Havana Harbor in February 1898, killing 266 crew members (George Fox, the last of the 89 crew members who survived the explosion, died in December 1964 at the age of 86). Although the explosion had been the result of a coal bunker fire igniting the ship’s forward magazines, the American news media – spearheaded by William Randolph Hearst, publisher of the “New York Journal” – accused Spain (which owned Cuba at the time) of being responsible for the explosion. Amidst cries of “Remember the Maine! To hell with Spain!”, the United States declared war on Spain two months later. With Lemay now calling for the bombing of China over the Luzon Strait Incident, Forbes wanted to keep things in perspective. After all:

• The United States didn’t go to war with Germany after she sank the Cunard liner RMS Lusitania in May 1915, in which 123 Americans lost their lives
• The United States didn’t go to war with Japan after she sank the river gunboat USS Panay in April 1938, in which 3 people were killed and 43 were wounded

Why should the United States, he reasoned, go to war with China over their attack on the USS Turner Joy when the ship wasn’t hit, and nobody got hurt? He considered Lemay’s proposal as an overreaction that would let the proverbial genie out of the bottle. “If we go ahead and bomb China, there can be no turning back. The Chinese will respond to our attack with attacks of their own and we will be faced with a much larger war in Asia.”
When Forbes pragmatically rejected Lemay’s proposal, Lemay finally had enough. Fed up with the President constantly refusing to follow his recommendations, the Air Force Chief angrily told Forbes to his face that he was "a weak coward" who didn’t deserve to be the Commander-in-Chief. He then resigned his post to protest the lack of military action against China. Lemay afterwards became a prominent critic of the Forbes Administration; it was largely because of this high-profile criticism that Democratic Governor George Wallace of Alabama chose him to be his running mate when he made his second third party bid for the Presidency in 1968.

(General John P. McConnell, who succeeded Curtis Lemay as Chief of Staff of the United States Air Force in May 1965)
Forbes may not have wanted to take military action against China, but he did feel he needed to do something to try to prevent a repeat of the Luzon Strait Incident. In the wake of the incident, he ordered a halt of the destroyer patrols and directed Chief of Naval Operations John S. McCain Jr. to come up with a new approach which would hopefully deter the Chinese from firing on them again. For McCain, the United States Navy was more than a military branch: it was in his DNA. His father John Sr. had been an Admiral and his son John III was a naval aviator currently taking part in Operation Rolling Thunder (while in the Navy, the younger McCain developed a reputation of being a maverick that he would carry with him into politics). McCain understood the Pacific, having served there as an aggressive submarine commander during World War Two. He also understood the need for a strong naval presence, which earned him the nickname “Mr. Sea Power.” He took the ROCN seriously, regarding it as “a direct threat to the free use of the Pacific Ocean.”
McCain was more than happy to abandon the destroyer patrol approach, believing in his salty manner that it was “just asking for goddamn trouble!”
Since the Chinese were using heavy cruisers to patrol the South China Sea, the Navy Chief decided that the USN had to not only match the ROCN but wield a patrol force that was superior. He proposed a patrol force consisting of a heavy cruiser accompanied by a pair of destroyers. The President approved the proposal; with the arrival of additional American ships in the South China Sea (following his enlistment in the Navy in February 1966, future politician John Kerry was assigned to patrol duty here), the Chinese were prompted to re-evaluate their own naval strategy. Heavy cruiser patrols were fine when all they faced were destroyers, either single or in pairs. The presence of US heavy cruisers shifted the balance of power away from the Chinese. Recognizing that the ROCN was at a disadvantage when it came to dealing with the USN and the RN, which had better and more numerous ships, Nanjing decided that it wasn’t enough just to increase the size of her patrols to two heavy cruisers. No. The Chinese needed to do more than that in order to assert her naval will in the Western Pacific. Far more. What they needed to do was to even the playing field by sinking or damaging as many enemy ships as they could. What China needed, and what she began planning earnestly for in the wake of the Luzon Strait Incident, was a preemptive war with the Big Two naval powers.

 

[El Pip]

Mind control up to that point had been confined to the world of fiction, one of the most famous examples being “The Jackrabbit”. A 1962 political thriller directed by John Frankenheimer, the film starred Frank Sinatra as a military officer who uncovered a nefarious plot involving the CIA and the power-hungry Vice President.

I suspect that plot pales in comparison to what the CIA were actually doing at the time. Some of those early cold war studies were insane.

For other people, the comment reinforced their image of this devout Mormon (who neither drank alcohol or caffeinated beverages, smoked, or used profanity) as being a very odd person.

This is not an unreasonable conclusion to reach.

Portuguese for “Beautiful Island,” Formosa had been fought over by a number of powers until the Japanese took over it in 1895.

A sad day as that meant the toppling of the Republic of Formosa. And they had an amazing flag

https://www.pinterest.com/pin/139541288426861529/

(Diosdado Macapagal, who served as the President of the Philippines from December 1961 to December 1965. He was succeeded by Ferdinand Marcos, who proceeded to establish a corrupt and brutal dictatorship)

That's unfortunate, it would be nice if all these changes could butterfly away Marcos' rise to power. But alas it appears not.

With Lemay now calling for the bombing of China over the Luzon Strait Incident, Forbes wanted to keep things in perspective. After all:

• The United States didn’t go to war with Germany after she sank the Cunard liner RMS Lusitania in May 1915, in which 123 Americans lost their lives
• The United States didn’t go to war with Japan after she sank the river gunboat USS Panay in April 1938, in which 3 people were killed and 43 were wounded

Why should the United States, he reasoned, go to war with China over their attack on the USS Turner Joy when the ship wasn’t hit, and nobody got hurt?

I can see the logic, the problem is of course that the US did end up at war in the two examples Forbes is presenting, just not immediately. Therefore the correct conclusion is that the US should prepare for a war which, on Frobes argument, is inevitable. Somehow I don't think that is the message he intended.

What they needed to do was to even the playing field by sinking or damaging as many enemy ships as they could. What China needed, and what she began planning earnestly for in the wake of the Luzon Strait Incident, was a preemptive war with the Big Two naval powers.

That is quite the dramatic reveal, hell of a way to end a chapter. Incredible hubris from China, though very much in character with the more aggressive strands of political opinion. Will any of the 'realist' faction be able to talk the government down before they do something really stupid?