For All Time Pt. 80

February-April 1960

-Just in time for the 1960 campaign season comes two bombshells in American race relations:

On Valentine's Day comes The Middle Passage, And After, a history of American racism since the end of the slave trade. The book is large, over 800 pages of small print, but C. Vann Woodward has turned the anger spurred by his political dismissal from the University of Virginia into writing an eminently readable book. "Negros have their Kinsey," comments one reviewer, and the book is dreceive much like the Kinsey Reports of a few years earlier: Some refuse to read it, many buy it and publicly scorn it...but then they read it again. Sympathetic reviewers are few, but they're there, and soon the Howard University history professor is outselling Mickey Spillane and Rod Serling.

-Estes Kefauver is apparantly one of the book's many buyers; the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court quotes Woodward several times in Baker vs. Charlotte County, Florida. The Court's decision (a more enthusiastic version of OTL's Brown) is not unanimous, of course; Justice Richard Russel has proved an able organizer for the pro-segregation forces, but Kefauver's 7-2 decision is relatively commanding.

There's little reaction from much of the black community; the NAACP has largely lost its leadership role at this point, and the new generation cares more about bridging the gaps between Muslim and Baptist than between white and black. "I am not so proud as to turn down a hand offered," comments Martin Luther King Jr., "though I may never trust the man behind it." The South, of course, goes mad, and a new generation of white supremacists stands up to lead the "Impeach The Coon" (Kefauver's old political slogan coming back in a rather unpleasant way) movement, and to run for office.

The Kennedy administration moves very carefully; JPK Jr. needs the support of Southerners when he tries for his third term, liberal Attorney General Pepper is offended by the attacks on his own state, and not very many people except for the Vice-President care much for civil rights to begin with. "All speed" is likely to turn to "all deliberate speed" swiftly.

-In the Soviet Union, Lazar Kaganovich could care less about American race relations; they've got planes to build. Despite taking a lead in hydrogen bomb technology, Kaganovich's Soviet Union has been relatively hostile to technology, and it has lagged behind the United States (and to a lesser degree, Western Europe.) Still, the industrialists and bureaucrats that the leader of the Soviet Union has surrounded himself with, for all that they're faceless cogs compared to the General Secretary, are good faceless cogs, and they know good people.

In March of 1960, Mikhail Yangel and Yuri Smirnov begin a remarkable partnership somewhere around Uzbekistan. (With Kaganovich keeping more people in the gulag longer, Kurchatov and Korolev are dead and dying, respectively, in OTL Smirnov worked on the Soviet hydrogen bomb project and Yangel was Korolev's assistant.) The Americans may have built a nuclear plane, but now they'll show them just what Soviet Science Can Do.

-In April, a flurry of communications fly back and forth to and from a remote area of Sinkaing to Beijing, and Mao Tse-Tung, already sensing his power weakening as the Great Leap Forward slowly implodes, opts to curse violently. The scientists are irreplaceable, of course, and shooting workers won't do much good, enough died getting the pile up and running. The bomb and break will have to wait a few years...pity, pity.

A few miles away, one of the highest-ranking members of the People's Liberation Army ponders his own destiny. The **** Confucian is probably unassailable, he can probably kill him, of course, he's not a God, but the murderer of Mao-Tse Tung will probably be unable to govern. The old man can't live forever, thinks Lin Baio, hero of the Indochine War.

-Late in the month, Nye Bevan dies surprisingly quietly; he is the second Labour Prime Minister in a row to die in office. He is, of course, buried in Cardiff, the funeral is perhaps larger than he would have liked, but the eulogies, from such personages as Prime Minister Jenkins, Opposition Leader Butler, and even his own wife, will all become classics of late 20th century oratory in their own way.

By now Europe has settled down into its post-Amsterdam Pact state; Spain, France, Portugal, and Sardinia are tied together by bonds of fascism and language, if not by any ties more formal than interlinking defensive treaties, while Great Britain, Sicily, and the Low Countries have fallen together out of sheer terror of the dark. Only in the Palatinate do they all hang together, lest they all hang seperately.

For All Time Pt. 81

Summer-Fall 1960

-Even being held in Boston doesn't save the Democratic convention of 1960 from turning into a riot; everyone knows from the beginning that Joseph Kennedy Jr. will almost certainly be nominated for his third term, and be able to pick the Vice-President he chooses. For anti-administration forces, centered around the person of Vice-President Lyndon Johnson, the seven hot days in July are a stand. Fight now, build an organization that can take the nomination for the Kennedy candidate in 1964. (After all, no President has even run for a fourth term, much less been elected.)

It's that for everyone but Lyndon Johnson, though; the former Senator has watched the ideals of a lifetime collapse under Kennedy's slow dismantling of America's already scanty social welfare net, of controls on businesses, even the administration's carefully non-existent stance on civil rights troubles something in the soul of the man whose father fought the Klan and who taught Mexican-American students. It's usually his Texan delegates who throw the first punch in the several brawls that break out between July 1-July 7, driving many liberals like Hubert Humphrey into the administration's carefully moderate camp. (Too, Johnson's rather unholy alliance with a variety of Southern conservatives offends many.)

In the end, only Texas holds out against the tide, Kennedy's nomination is otherwise unanimous. His choice of running-mate surprises many; the former Senator from Wisconsin has been an excellent Secretary of State and is still an excellent speaker (he gave the speech that nominated the President), but there is something odd about him in small groups. Still, Robert M. LaFollete Jr. is loyal, from a doubtful state, and putting an ex-Republican on the ticket helps the theme of "Bring the nation together."

-The Republican convention is a bit more sedate, if only because no one really believes Joseph Kennedy Jr. can be beaten. If they swing too far to the right, they'll alienate Rockefeller liberals, if they swing too far to the left, any hope of getting the Republican-Southern Democrat coalition in the Senate back together is well and truly screwed. Not to mention, of course, that Kennedy is the man responsible for the strong economy (though there are rumblings; the most obvious one being the repeated bailouts that are all that have saved Chrysler so far), for keeping a quasi-peace in the cities and the South..."We were a welterweight against a heavyweight," commented the junior Senator from Arizona decades later, "but we were going to fight!"

Perhaps fortunately, just the right candidate has emerged from the primaries; Harold Stassen is all things to all people, war hero, Governor, Senator, liberal to the liberals and conservative to the conservatives, and A-O-K to most everyone else. After a great deal of debate, he picks Prescott Bush as his running mate. The junior Senator from Connecticut isn't very popular even in his own state, but he does have solid street cred as an Eastern establishment liberal with lots and lots of money. (Nelson Rockefeller is rumored to be Stassen's first choice, but the Governor of New York is waiting on 1968, or even 1964.)

-As the campaign goes on, President Kennedy suddenly finds himself having to telegraph the same congratulations he extended to John Diefenbaker a few years earlier. On August 4, 1960, on an uninhabited rock in the Cook Islands, Australia and New Zealand jointly enter the nuclear age when a 50-kiloton warhead detonates to the cheers of onlookers aboard local Anzac vessels.

The decidely unlikely alliance of Walter Nash and Robert Menzies has produced a nuclear weapon and program, soon Anzac vessels armed with nuclear weapons are docked at the major ports of the various Australian and New Zealand allies in the vast Indonesian archipelago, even the less-than-popular People's Republic of Java.

In Europe, the shaky British Commonwealth is reinforced by two new nuclear members. (A former member, meanwhile, has begun hammering out treaty agreements between themselves and Salazar's Portugal. The war in Angola and Mozambique isn't getting better, and the old dictator likes his job far more than he likes Africa.)

-The only real issue of the campaign comes in the last week of September, when events in Argentina move with sudden, brutal swiftness. Rumors of discontent with the Castillo government have been growing for over a decade, but no one really expected his assasination on September 21 as he reviews a contingent of elite paratroopers. In every major city of Argentina, well-organized troops turn on their comrades and arrest or shoot them. In the countryside, farmers and peasants rise up against the oppressive dictatorship and all it stands for.

In a month of apocalyptically bloody fighting, two men, perhaps unlikely allies, emerge as leaders of Argentina. One is Ernesto Guevara, the medical doctor who leads a popular revolt of such magnitude as to make him master of the countryside in short order, one is Leopold Galtieri, the general who found power far more important than the flag that flies and the cause the soldiers sing about. The two trust each other naught, of course, but they both know to kill their other enemies first.

The two parties are divided, Stassen is weakly in favor of doing something, while Kennedy is in favor of doing nothing at all. (After all, nothing he actually does can affect the election.) The Red-ish revolt is surprisingly local, Kaganovich's agreement with Kennedy about spheres of influence was about as geniune as either the shoemaker from Kiev or the rich kid from Boston could be.

By the time that issue has been sorted out, though, Joseph Kennedy Jr. has won his third term. As expected, the black vote was mostly Democratic, the Jewish mostly Republican, and the South helped elect some interesting candidates; James Folsom has been driven from office by Asa Carter, while Orvil Faubaus helped elect his friend Glen Campbell. In Pennsylvania, Jim Jones has won his first Congressional seat, and Clark Gable's victory over Ronald Reagan for the California governer's seat was real but decisive.

South America isn't quite done with the nation yet.

For All Time Pt. 82

December 1960-February 1961

-On December 2, 1960, the Alexander von Humboldt is the least popular ship in the Dutch Antilles. The former British light cruiser, sold to the Venezuelan fleet in the late 1950s, has been teasing the small Dutch Coast Guard garrison for weeks, sailing within Dutch territorial waters (at one point even within hailing distance of Willemstad) and darting out before the Coast Guard ships could quite prove anything. Polite requests to the Venezuelan consulate have been met with indignant demands to stop interfering with their military vessels, and the Caracas media has said the same.

Tensions are running high in the islands and among the Coast Guard garrison, and so when the von Humboldt suddenly runs aground on the tiny island of Klein Curacao, it's quite understandable the rescue party would come armed, and quite understandable that after finding a dozen pounds of heroin (straight from Taiwanese processing) and a dozen more pounds of dynamite, virtually earmarked for the independence movement on the islands, they'd intern the von Humboldt's crew.

And since the entire process was a Venezuelan government operation, right down to the support for the independence movement, it's understandable that Carlos Delgado Chalbaud would be well-prepared indeed. As Admiral Wolfgang Larrazábal begins organizing the 5,000-man Venezuelan Marine Corps for an overseas operation, Delgado is on television in both his own country and abroad, condemning European imperialism and the theft and imprisonment of the Humboldt and her crew.

-In the United States, public opinion is cautiously pro-Venezuela, if that. Attacks on European imperialism ring home to the Kennedy administration and those Americans who do think about South America are mostly watching pictures of Argentina and thinking what an awful notion this Communism business is. President Joseph Kennedy Jr. settles for merely condemning war in general. (The big story of December in the US is, of course, the collapse of Chrysler and its division between Ford and General Motors. The name and brands will survive, but as the property of Edsel Ford or Alfred P. Sloan.) The Netherlands themselves are in something of a bind; their treaty with the Jenkins government in Great Britain specifically says neither party will assist the other in colonial conflicts. Originally intended to keep the British out of Suriname and the Dutch out of Aden, Roy Jenkins is only too glad to use the clause to stay out of war. The Dutch government doesn't like much at all, but they need the alliance with the United Kingdom. They need to oppose Communism, so the NC is out, and they're not evil, so the fascist states are out too. They'll have to go it alone. Two heavy cruisers and a thousand troops are dispatched to the Antilles, not because anyone wants war, really, not even Delgado, but because it just must be done.

-On December 19, the first Venezuelan planes appear over Willemstad, the capital and reasonably major port of the Dutch islands. With the best possible precision strikes given the circumstances, the fighter-bombers, some modeled on late-WWII German models, destroy the radio station, telephone exchange, the barracks of the island's milita, and the Governor's House. (The Governor was out, and the Venezuelans knew it.)

A day later, the first Marines arrive. The islands, already demoralized by the strikes, surrender bloodlessly, at least at first. The Dutch governor isn't about to see people die for no reason, the 2,000 man Venezuelan force outnumbers the adult male population of the islands, and the follow-up waves are expected to (briefly, at least) outnumber the entire population of the islands.

That is, until, a shot rings out as Wolfgang Lazzarabal formally accepts the surrender and parole of the Dutch garrison on December 21, 1960, and the founder of the modern Venezuelan Navy crumples over dead. His successor immediately declares martial law in the Dutch Antilles, even as more waves of troops arrive.

-Through Christmas and into the new year, the Venezuelan fleet and the Dutch duels in the southern Caribbean. The Venezuelans begin with a lead and keep it; their supply lines are shorter and with their powerful submarine arm, they can cut the Dutch lines far more easily. Though they are quite careful to stay out of range of the land-based Venezuelan Air Force, this leaves the land forces needed for the counter-attack stuck on Aruba or drifting about at sea, getting more and more seasick.

Finally, after a February in which a Dutch heavy cruiser sinks two Venezuelan destroyers only to be torpedoed by a submarine the next day, the Dutch government throws in the towel. They're strapped for cash, and frankly the government needs the bailouts they lost with the collapse of the Amsterdam Pact far more than it needs some islands, whatever useful natural resources they may have. (They don't really have the money to exploit them anyway.)

The terms of the treaty hand over the Antilles to Venezuela in perpetuity, in return for a cash payment that's reasonably large to a Venezuela with the oil boom slowly ending and quite large enough for a Netherlands that needs money nearly as badly as Mars needs bars.

For All Time Pt. 83

March, 1961

-On March 1, 1961, Maurice Challe declares the war in Algeria over. It's not quite over, of course, anymore than the Philippine Insurrection was in 1907, but significant, organized, actually threatening resistance to the French government and colonists is over. Perhaps fifty thousand French soldiers have died in the years of fighting since the end of World War II, making the Algerian War the bloodiest colonial war of the late 20th century.

The key to French victory has been famine, the kind deliberately caused by the Darlan and Salan goverments and encouraged by the use of tactical nuclear weapons on food distribution centers in the heartland of Algeria's Muslim population. (France has used far more nuclear weapons than any other nation on Earth as of 1961.) Perhaps a third of Algeria's Muslim population of seven million is dead of hunger, with a million dead of combat on top of that, with a third of the remainder fled into the various independent nations surrounding Algeria. Some have even slipped across the border into French West Africa, to join a struggle for independence that's doing a bit better than theirs.

-March also sees the (hopefully temporary) end of democracy in Brazil when Marshal Artur da Costa e Silva assumes near-dictatorial powers. The former minister of war, elected President after Argentina became pretty much doctrinarie Communist and Venezuela won the Antilles War, ran on a platform loosely akin to "Give me all the power and I'll save the country.", and the voters seem to like that idea.

Costa's preference is to promote economic development, but there are more important things to do. Brazil shares a border with both Argentina and Venezuela (The Venezuelan border is in some of the most remote, rugged places on Earth, but the Dutch thought their oceans were a shelter), and Costa's government is worried about both. Thus, Brazil becomes the second nation in South America to begin a nuclear program.

-Approaching the end of his first decade in office, Lazar Kaganovich has been a very busy man. Stalin was, of course, the Great Stalin (Kaganovich will never really say aloud his doubts, and neither will anyone else if they know what's good for them.) but he left the Soviet Union and the Communist world in general a mess on his death. Kaganovich has done as well a job as anyone else could, given time and resources, and far better than most.

Kaganovich has three tools at his disposal for consolidating the Soviet's new territories. The first is the Comintern or the International Division of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union as he insists Western reporters call it The Comintern rather innocuously manages the membership lists of all its satillite parties, and holds a large yearly Congress in different cities around the CPSD (the 1961 Congress is in the Istanbul SSR). This subtle function actually gives Kaganovich and his government a great deal of power --- he is, in effect, the General Secretary of almost all the ruling Communist parties of the CPSD. Since 1954, Kaganovich has been using this power to carry out what later historians will call the "Silent Terror," quietly purging nationalists and obstructionists from the the party structures. They've been especially busy in Romania; his USSR doesn't have to stand for Ceausescu-esque monkeyshines, and so they don't.

Unfortunately, not every Communist party is equally dependent on the Comintern. It's Asian members (except ever-loyal Mongolia and North Japan) are tightly under the control of their local leaderships: Mao, Ho, and Kim are a slight headache. In Europe, the problem is smaller. Albania and the DUPRA are the only parties where the Comintern's tentacles have not fully penetrated, but Kaganovich's skill at redrawing borders has secured the loyalty of both parties.

Hoxha rules large unhappy populations of Slavs and Greeks, and knows that he depends on Soviet support to remain in power, while the DUPRA's unpredictable supreme leader hopes to regain the Bulgarian occupation zone in Anatolia. (Kaganovich would actually like to get rid of both men, they're both far more erratic than they ought to be, but he's sensible enough to realize the expense and cost of administering Albania or the DUPRA.) Unlike the BPR's gains west of a Bosporus, Kaganovich has been very careful to keep the disposition of territory in Anatolia "provisional": except for the Istanbul SSR, the DUPRA could in theory regain that territory any time the Supreme Council of People's and Socialist Democracies should decide to give it back. (Bulgaria's reaction to that is what one would probably expect...so is their power to do anything about it.) Which hasn't, of course, stop the mass deportations of Turks from the territory, which bring's us to Kaganovich's second lever:

Kossov is the accepted abbreviation for the CPSD's planning committee, which coordinates the various five-year plans of the member states in the interests of preserving "the international socialist division of labor.", and, of course, the economic might of the Soviet Union. In a huge arc from the Danish border down to Iran, Kossov bureaucrats allocate capital and raw materials, decide where new factories will be built, and relocate entire populations. Kossov is, in fact, Kaganovich's private obsession --- the old railroad bureaucrat cannot resist micromanaging the empire. (Unlike many world leaders who've done the same, he's actually pretty good at micromanaging. Too, focusing the nation's energies on the economy redirects the expansionist urges of various slightly unreliable members of the Politburo.)

He pays special attention to the new Istanbul SSR: the Bulgarians have forced millions of Turks into its small territory and millions more have actually fled there, providing the necessary fodder for an impressive industrial expansion. The ones expelled into the DUPRA have fuelled a similar industrial explosion

there. Sure, it's a messy process, but no one ever said that building socialism would be easy. Kaganovich helped collectivize Moscow agriculture, he's heard all the complaints about brutality and such and isn't about to let that mess with them.

In the west, Kossov is unchallenged: the leaders of states which meet its target are rewarded by finding themselves governing a "socialist republic" rather than a mere "people's democracy." Leaders which fail quietly go into, uh, retirement. He's kept his pledge to his own inner circle and himself, the one he made when he came to power. Failure won't be met with death, only outright rebellion will give Communist leaders the same fate as Tito.

In Asia, however, Kaganovich is quickly learning the meaning of a famous Spanish saying obey, but I do not comply. In theory, the Chinese, Koreans, Javanese, and Indochinese send representatives to Moscow to participate in Kossov planning sessions; again, in theory, they accept Moscow's dispositions and plans. In reality, the People's Republics of China, Korea, Indochina, and Java do whatever they want, and Moscow pays for it. There have been propaganda losses as well, the failure of Mao's utterly mad plan to industrialize China has been largely blamed on Soviet failure to supply enough resources, thus helping the Chinese General Secretary stay in power. Asian recalcitrance to participate in the International Socialist Division of Labor (or pretty well anything that would benefit European or Middle Eastern Communism) is a problem he will eventually have to deal with, and probably sooner rather than later.

A bigger problem has been the Joint Armed Forces of the CPSD. In the west, Kaganovich has learned the lessons of 1954 well. The Great Stalin had it backwards: he removed the form of independent militaries from his satrapies, but retained the substance. The armies of the Stalinist block wore uniforms based on the Red Army, insignia based on the Red Army, and used traditions based on the Red Army, but save Poland and the DVR effectively functioned as independent fighting forces --- as the Soviet Union bloodily discovered in 1954.

The Joint Armed Forces are different: they have the form of independent militaries, but none of the substance. Uniforms and traditions differ: but the armed forces of every European CPSD member save little Albania are integrated into the Red Army's command structure at the battalion level, and are almost completely unable to operate save in conjunction with Red Army units. With every passing year, with every passing arms shipment, the satellite's militaries are further "reorganized," and control from Moscow is more complete. Although the color and cut of the uniforms now look different, by 1961 the armies of the CPSD are designed to function as a single integrated military under the direct and complete control of Moscow, and more to the point, they almost certainly couldn't do otherwise. No more rebellions.

Unfortunately, the Asians have again been unwilling to participate. Oh, they are more than happy to accept Moscow's protection, but their militaries are almost entirely unintegrated into the Joint Armed Forces command. All their advanced and most of their heavy equipment comes from the European part of the CPSD, but unlike them none of it is under proper Soviet control. And both China and Korea seem to be getting far more than they need, it's going somewhere, and he doesn't like the idea of where it's going.

An open break with Moscow is unthinkable while Kaganovich retains a nuclear monopoly. Which means, of course, that China is the only thing to worry about. Neither Korea nor Indochina matter much. Korea is too small and too poor --- Kaganovich is slowly squeezing what's left of its outdated Japanese industrial plant. Kim will eventually come around, of that Kaganovich has no doubt. The Korean is a lunatic, though, and he doesn't like that much: he has begun shoving Kim off to officials in the Comintern or Kossov. Molotov is good at it; the two old colleagues in Stalin's post-purge Politburo share horror stories about the Korean madman. Once Kim comes to heel, then his reward will be regaining access to the supreme leader of the October Revolution.

Ho is even easier to control. He has his own ethnic difficulties in Laos and Cambodia; like Hoxha, he knows that without Soviet support the Indochinese Federal People's Democratic Republic would collapse like a house of cards. Still, Ho is moving slowly, slowly away, his succesful purges of Saloth Sar's Khmer Party has helped keep the Vietminh in the driver's seat into the 1960s.

The People's Republic of Java is one of the few countries to get large amounts of aid deliberately. If the government there collapses (and that's a moderately-probable event almost daily), they will almost certainly fall back into the hands of the Australians, and the idea of a Communist state going backwards is an awful idea, Marx's arrow of history turned on its head and a terrible propaganda loss. Advisors from the former NKVD are very busy.

Argentina is a problem; neither Galteri nor Guevara seem particularly subordinate, and the virtually independant nature of the revolution there suggests that they might go their own way...and unlike Tito, they could geniunely make it stick. Still, the Democratic Republic of Argentina has been quick to ask for military aid, and he's never one to turn down a fellow Communist.

For All Time Pt. 84

May-September 1961

-The Nordic-Thai treaty of May 1, 1961 helps spur western European worries about the "creeping cancer of neutrality", but that's more out of paranoia than anything else. There are traditional ties of friendship between the Kingdom of Thailand and various Scandinavian countries (especially Norway and Denmark) going back centuries, and both nations have found themselves in similar positions, surrounded by either Communist states or authoritarian governments that just don't strike them well at all.

The Nordic Council nations badly need a market for their goods outside of the CPSD, and Thailand needs an alliance with a First World state, help in modernizing their military and society to defend against both the bullets and propaganda of their Communist neighbors, advisors and guns and resources and all the things an alliance brings. Some are worried about becoming a colony, but the Scandinavians do certainly seem to come in peace.

By the middle of summer, the first groups of Nordic military and civilian advisors have arrived in Bangkok. One of the first industries to benefit from their arrival is the vice trade, the sons of Aarhus and Trondheim and Helsinki are no more immune to the temptations of prostitution, gambling, and drugs, than their American OTL counterparts of later in the decade.

-The first major summer release of 1961 is I Walk The Line, starring hit singing sensation Johnny Cash. While outwardly Cash has the same clean image of his chief rival, Pat Boone, (indeed, the movie itself is the story of an ex-con singer who finds God and becomes a minister), his teenage fans are quick to find the subversion behind the music. While the title closing number is popular, of course, it doesn't get half the screams of delight produced by the opening tune, when Cash strides out in a James Dean-esque leather jacket and doesn't so much sing as growl:

"I can't get no-satisfaction!"

-The popular culture in America takes several interesting turns in that summer of 1961, as the generation of children born after World War II begins slowly groping towards their majority. Science fiction, which spent most of the 1950s locked in a bitter war of words between pacifist Isacc Asimov and militarist Robert Heinlein, sees several novels brought to the big screen; Roger Corman produces Alfred Bester's The Demolished Man , while Edward D. Wood and his new leading man, E. Aaron Presley, handle Ward Moore's Bring the Jubilee.

The liberal racial message of Wood's latest brings him howls of outrage from the South, howls so loud that perhaps it's understandable few notice the way they shift into derision once Bring the Jubilee premieres in Atlanta in July. Wood soon becomes the darling of certain circles in California, roundly praised by people who know only the liberal message of the film. All men are, after all, created equal.

On television, Maureen's Family goes off the air after ten seasons, one of the most beloved shows in the medium's infant history. Maureen O'Hara had never really become a big star in Hollywood; without It's a Wonderful Life, she was never able to equal the success of Sinbad the Sailor . Shifting to television (and starring alongside her real-life husband, director Will Price) helped make her a real star and keep her troubled marriage alive. (In OTL, they divorced in 1953.) Still, Will's health is failing, and she can't spend her entire life on television. Replacing her is Jerry L. Lewis' Jeopardy.

-August 20, 1961 is a great day for President Joseph Kennedy Jr.; the last major nuclear power plant complex in the Union is completed in Pennsylvania, just up the river from the state capitol at Harrisburg. The vast majority of American electrical power still comes from fossil fuel, of course, but the nuclear program of the Kennedy administration has had real effects; every state in the Union has at least one nuclear power plant in it, and most, especially in New England, draw at least 5% of their power supply from the new nuclear power plants.

Emboldened at his great propaganda victory, Kennedy announces a Presidential grand tour to begin later in the year in which he will visit every state. Though the tour is theoretically linked to the new nuclear system and the anniversary of the Civil War, keen-eyed observers notice Kennedy is heading for places where the Democratic Party is weak or fractured; places like John Birch-dominated New Hampshire or Johnson-controlled Texas. No one quite believes he's ready for a fourth term in 1964, barring some great national crisis, but few people believed in 1954 that he'd dare run for a third six years later.

-In September, the Soviet Union takes a step into the Space Age when Alexei Leonov's Eagle-1 flies from Uzbekistan to a massive Red Air Force installion at a relatively safe distance from Moscow. Eagle is smaller than its American counterparts, with even less military application, but it is a propaganda victory for the Kaganovich government, at least for the moment. No longer can the capitalists crow quite so much about their superiority in matters technical, or at least they'll have to find a new subject to crow about.

And indeed they're working on just that; a new generation of test pilots is working on a new generation of Dyna-Soars, and scientists are talking confidentally of a successful Earth orbit by 1963. Will it be Michael Collins or John Glenn, Gus Grissom or George Bush? The new generation is a bit more enviromentally concious than the last. (Theodore Taylor has made sure of that, even if he finds himself more shut out every day.) They emit no more radiation in a trans-continental or trans-oceanic flight than the average tactical nuclear warhead's fallout plume.

For All Time Pt. 85

October 1961-January 1962

-On October 3, 1961, the Supreme Court is discussing the constitutionality of a new state income tax leveled by the state of Kansas in 1960. There are legitimate legal issues; questions of the state unfairly penalizing various private businesses (under pressure from the administration, the Kefauver Court has defended businesses against the encroaching government like no Supreme Court since the "Nine Old Men" of Hoover's day), and that's essentially the only reason why the nation's highest court took the case. The plaintiff's chief attorney is a rather dislikeable man named Fred Phelps, and he had filed hundreds of briefs on every imaginable subject from his tiny Topeka office before this one happened to get past the appellate courts.

Still, they've all seen worse in their careers on the bench or in politics, and the ultimate 6-3 decision has far more to do with the fact that Kansas' grocery warehouses really aren't hurt that badly by a tax of a few percentage points on their annual revenues than the odiousness of Fred Phelps, the former vacumn salesman. Hugo Black, one of the last great relics of Rooseveltian liberalism, delivers the decision himself as the sun begins to set outside. His words are clear, calm, and remarkably concise.

Before the last echoes of his words die, before Black can even turn to exit the room, Fred Phelps, bigot and racist, at once an anti-Semite and white supremacist (a rare combination in a world where blacks and Jews speak a kind of nearly-open racism between each other), the unsuccessful lawyer who has waited years for the chance to get past Supreme Court security and strike a blow for his very Aryan-looking God, pulls out a revolver and fire three times, not at all wildly. The red drapes are suddenly redder.

-The South roars to life with celebratory parades; Hugo Black has been a traitor there for years, even more so than Kefauver. The former Klansman's turn to liberalism on racial issues once on the Court took a lot of people by surprise; and it wasn't a very pleasant one for his supporters in Alabama, or in the rest of the South. President Kennedy just manages to avoid attending one during his national tour at Mississippi, for all that he didn't think much of the old Southern populist, he's horrified at the very first assasination of a Supreme Court Justice.

Reluctantly, Kennedy delays his national tour indefinitely, returning home to Washington within the week. Taking the advice of FBI Director Purvis, Attorney General Pepper, and following the precedents of past administrations, Kennedy declares martial law in the District of Columbia, calling in troops from Fort Meade to keep the peace.

Fred Phelps's already tenous hold on the universe has slipped even more in custody, his stories about the "Army of the One White God" has every judge in America watching their backs. Kennedy has just had time to nominate John Connally (acceptable to both conservatives and Southerners, plus it helps please Texas) to replace Black when the fan is well and truly struck.

-The black community's reaction is surprisingly muted at first; Black was respected by moderates, but moderates are a minority in 1961; to some he was simply paternalistic and out of touch, to others he was something worse, a hypocritical c******. But the mixture of white triumphalism and those few moderates willing to mourn Hugo Black publicly soon produces that thing so familiar, black and white mobs clashing in America's major cities. Before the middle of September, the radicals have gladly joined their brethern on the streets, before the end of the month, the riots have exploded all through America's major cities again. As with so many riots, by the end of the month, few of the people robbing and looting and brawling have ever heard of Hugo Black.

President Kennedy's horror is the only thing that mounts faster than the national rage; yes, this will make re-election in 1964 ever so much easier. This will not be the Kennedy legacy, he vows, his term will not end the way his predecessor's did, on a wave of violence and hate. Still, he must take measures, and he declares martial law in the riot-torn areas and cities. American soldiers have now spent nearly as much time policing their own cities as they have fighting wars after World War II; and they go into the situation thinking they know what they're about.

But this is a new type of disturbance for the new decade, both groups are organized. The White Citizens Councils in nearly every state are armed, militant, and ready. (Especially the New York chapter; while Ariel Sharon is viewed as something like a devil to his counterparts in Mississippi and Alabama, in an enviroment where the head of International Communism is pretty well openly Jewish, he is good at what he does.) While they are, of course, a minority, they provide a hard, professional edge to the white mobs that rampage across the tracks in Birmingham, Columbia, Atlanta, and help whip up the same in New York, Chicago, and San Francisco.

African-Americans are organized well too, though, the ecumenical mergers (especially the bridges built to the Islamic community) have given the leadership of various militant civil rights groups: King's African Ecumenical Council, Malcom X. Little's People of the Book, and countless others an edge of organization and unity absent earlier in the decade. Too, there are more geniune fanatics now, and while no one is quite willing to emulate Cassius X and his suicide bombing of a Chicago synagogue on November 17, he is soon the idol of every young, mad black man.

Thus it is that when blood runs in the streets, darkening the snows of November and December 1961, it comes from Southern white bigots, Jewish gangsters/politicians (the two are inextricably linked in many places at this point, it will take the politicians of a later generation, one raised in the United States, to untangle that noose), Black Muslims, Black Christians, National Guardsmen...and, of course, the primary victim of any civil disturbance: Innocent people.

-President Joseph Kennedy Jr. is personally a fearless man; he flew combat air missions over Hitler's Germany right up until the end of WWII; and has a taste for rougher pursuits than his brothers. (He is the first President to experience the modern sport of whitewater rafting.) After such things, riots and civil disturbances hold no terrors for him. Ignoring the rather fervent advice of almost everyone in his administration, from the First Lady to the Vice-President to the head of the Secret Service, he goes from city to city, New York to Biloxi to San Francisco.

In New York he stands shoulder to shoulder with Mayor Elliot Goodwin, the two parties united to bring peace. Rioting does die down, a bit, but it has far more to do with very, very aggressive police and military tactics in the cities where Kennedy is about to visit. The media blackout in America's major cities helps as well; even news organizations inclined to be rebellious in other times are eager here. Disturbances are bad for business.

That is, of course, until a man long forgotten steps forward. President Henry Wallace had been shut out of the Democratic Party (and mainstream politics in general) since the late 1940s; his own run for the Governorship of Iowa in 1950 had less than salutary results. Even his legendary stubborness is not invulnerable, but the former President just can't give up on politics. Taking the very considerable fortune he amassed in agriculture, Wallace's purchase of the Des Moines Register in 1953 gave him a liberal voice no one could silence. The paper hasn't sold well in conservative Iowa, but Wallace still makes more than enough money to bail it out; too, the paper has a moderate national circulation, mostly to moderates and liberals of all stripes.

Henry Wallace and Joseph Kennedy Sr. had been friends in the 1940s, JPK Sr. was his Secretary of State and the man he trusted most in Washington...but that was before his son cut loose labor and made corporations king, before he stepped away from the commitment Wallace made toward civil rights during his Presidency. There's been no declaration of martial law in Des Moines, and no one would dare arrest a former President anyway.

And so it is, when it's the middle of December and the body count for the '61 riots has exceeded that of all the others, that Henry Wallace publishes a series of pictures sent to him from Chicago, showing the results of a gun battle between a particularly militant Jewish group and a particulary enthuastic National Guard unit from New York that happens to have a preponderance of black members. The photographer had zoom, had color, and was good at his art.

-Now, of course, it really hits the fan; Jewish moderates who previously were horrified at the violence of their religious compatriots now have a very, very public display of something very much like what they saw in the few pictures that escaped Palestine during the bloody war of the late 1940s. They take to the streets, prompting an inevitable backlash from previously neutral elements of America's black population, so that by New Year's Day, nearly every major city in America is undergoing the equivalent of Detriot circa 1967.

In Texas now, President Kennedy decides he can't continue with the national tour; he is the Commander in Chief, after all, he has to show the world and the nation that he's in charge both politically as well as personally. Already Aleman and Pearson are experiencing something like sympathy disturbances in communities near the border with large American cities; already Kaganovich is offering "peacekeeping troops" to assist the American National Guard.

There's just time for one more speech, on January 3, 1962. It's a crisp winter day as he speaks at the University of Texas at Austin; there's completely no wind, and the sun shines so brightly even through the clouds that one can see for miles.

There's nothing to throw off Charles Whitman's shot.

For All Time Pt. 86

January-April 1962

-President Joseph Kennedy Jr.'s state funeral on January 17, 1962 comes at the end of two weeks of national mourning. His casket, guarded at times by his father, younger brothers, and a constant bodyguard of Secret Service personnel and US military, has gone through the entire nation from Texas to his burial place at Arlington National Cemetary. Speakers include former Presidents Dewey and Hoover, the only ones still alive, and even former Vice-President Lyndon Johnson, mending fences over the grave of the martyred President. (One of the leaders in this effort is Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater. Already respected by moderates in his own party as a foe of the extreme right and an articulate advocate of conservatism in one, Goldwater's status as a family friend of the Kennedys lends him a status not shared by most Republicans.)

Significantly, the new President is largely absent, from both the journey from Austin and the funeral at Arlington. Robert LaFollette is not unaware of appearances, of course, but he has a more important agenda. Father cared more about doing what was right than being President, after all. And what's right, of course, is law and order. Taking the advice of Generals Haig, Walker, and FBI Director Purvis, LaFollette declares a "temporary" state of nation-wide martial law, suppposed to last only as long as "the current emergency." His suspension of habeas corpus and posse comitatus are natural follow-ups, and by the middle of February any town with a population larger than 25,000 has itself a small National Guard or regular Army garrison. Too, he takes steps to encourage state governors to declare a dusk-to-dawn curfew and move quickly and decisively to crush dissent. Finally, he greatly expands the power of the Secret Service, giving them the power to investigate any and all threats to national security and the safety of the President, at home and abroad. (The President does not sleep easily.)

It's not terribly Constitutional, of course, but with the Supreme Court building still being repaired to hide the bullet holes and bloodstains of the late Hugo Black, the nation's highest court is decisively silent for the moment. Some members of Congress aren't terribly comfortable with the quasi-suspension of civil liberties, especially those from unaffected areas in the Far West and elsewhere, but even they are swept along in the tide of restoring American law and order.

With the media blackout sternly enforced (and with no one ready to protest in the afflicted cities), the new military presence does help; none of the rioting groups (not even the thousands of newly-arrived Puerto Ricans) are quite ready for the revolution they often talk about, the riots and fighting began as defensive measures. (It is, of course, the other guys who are the aggressors.) Still, the cycle of violence, reprisals and counter-reprisals, contiues, if not nearly so openly. The main effect of the martial law declaration is to inculculate a disrespect and outright contempt for the United States government (and governments in general) in all the clashing groups.

-The formation of the "American police state" (as it is widely percieved abroad) deals a deathblow to the already-shaky government of Lester Pearson in February. Canada's economy has been in trouble for quite sometime, the expenses of maintaining a powerful nuclear defense arm and the fallout from the trade war with the United States (which has hurt Canada far more badly than the US, which both prepared for it better and had a larger economy to begin with) have hurt the nation badly. "Third" parties have grown quite substantially, with the CCF and Social Credit governments in coalition with the Liberal Party and Progressive Conservatives, respectively.

The new Prime Minister has long been an opponent of the Pearson government from within the Liberal Party, he favors promotion of economic development and advancement of himself personally far more than the former Prime Minister. His government is a coalition one, the Liberals in it along with a variety of other parties, but Joseph Smallwood is confident he can lead Canada and his party together into the 1960s.

-To the irritation of his Soviet allies, Ernesto Guevara's coup-within-a-coup through March and April of 1962 goes off reasonably well. Leopoldo Galteri actually escapes successfully, fleeing with a substantial portion of the Argentine treasury to Brazil, where he is soon telling the authoritarian government there all the secrets of Argentina. With the supreme leader of the conservative wing of the revolution gone and discredited, the faction of the military that supported the anti-Castillo revolution proves unable to unite around any one candidate, and soon Guevara is working on a new constitution. Civil disorder is still ongoing, after all, better to bring the revolution to its fruition while blood is still running in the streets.

The United States isn't terribly pleased, of course, but they're a little busy, and despite reservations, Kaganovich is aware that his informal agreement with the United States was with Joseph Kennedy, not the new occupant of the President's chair.

For All Time Pt. 87

May-September 1962

-In the words of George McGovern, writing from relatively peaceful South Dakota: "The hand of martial law fell as a cloud of some exotic gas; it inflamed and smothered fires where it found them, and intoxicated the more peaceful places on a cloud of contentment" Indeed, in much of the United States, the main impact of martial law was to seperate National Guardsmen from their families for a while; along with the sudden appearance of pro-government and pro-military posters. (Allen Ginsburg did his work well.) In areas where state governors did impose curfews, they went largely unenforced.

In afflicted areas, especially in major cities, there was of course a significant impact. Government censorship, especially in the press, is heavy (though largely de facto rather than de jure), and the most compelling photograph of the summer of 1962; an M48 Clark tank parked outside Grant's Tomb, is ironically taken by an army photographer and used in various patriotic publications. President LaFollette resists the temptation to simply make mass arrests in black, Jewish, and Hispanic neighborhoods, though units from the Army Corps of Engineers do quietly refurbish the World War II-era camps used on Japanese-Americans.

There are incidents, of course; the bloody raid on an AEC safehouse in Philadelphia kills a dozen civilians and five FBI agents in June, the Kahanist bombing of a National Guard barracks in August, and countless others, but the great mass of the nation only hears about the successes, and with a realization that there isn't going to be any great publicity outside of the movement itself (and with moderates leaving all groups in droves), that vast spectrum of activists who took the streets at the beginning of the year, from Ariel Sharon to Malcom X. to Gordon Kahl, slowly begin to retreat into the churches and mosques; offices and backrooms; that they came from in the first place.

By the beginning of August, it's not too much to say that the troubles of 1962 are nearly over; organized violence continues in the major cities (far less in the South, the new waves of the Great Migration have sent Southern blacks by the tens of thousands either north into the big cities or into black-majority eareas), but at a level far more like Chicago in 1925 than Belfast in 1916. Altogether, perhaps a thousand people are dead.

-In addition to giving the government a rather...visible presence in most of America, the "Riot Congress" of 1962 takes steps to make the government itself more sturdy. The Presidential Succession Act of 1962 ensures the death penalty for Presidential assasins or conspirators to same; it also extends the Presidential line of succession, adding the Speaker of the House, President Pro Tem of the Senate, and Chief Justice of the Supreme Court between the Vice-President and Secretary of State. A follow-up of the act gives the President the power to appoint a Vice-President, given Senate approval.

President LaFollette moves quickly to appoint a Vice-President, signing the relevant documents just after the new regulations become law on August 15, 1962. California Governor Clark Gable is popular beyond his state as the former movie idol and man's man he is, and, as an added bonus, he has been a pretty good governor since his election in 1960[FN1]; California's race riots were unpleasant, especially in San Francisco, but at least mercifully brief.

-Meanwhile, in July, in an isolated room somewhere in Montreal, George Shoeters shakes the hand of an anonymous officer in the French intelligence services. Maurice Challe can't touch the US; all of her disgruntled minorities or political movements are disturbingly nationalistic, and the ongoing tensions with Britain more than let him get back at the Jenkins government.

But Canada...ah, Canada. He can at once help liberate an oppressed French population, get back at those dastardly Canadians who made France a laughing-stock after the secession of St. Pierre and Miquelon, and get rid of a vast number of weapons made unnecessary after the end of the Algerian and West African Wars. There are no nukes in those first shipments, of course; France's nuclear program is in overdrive, trying to build the hydrogen bomb that Great Britain beat them to in May, they've none to spare and likely never will. Besides, unlike his predecessor, Maurice Challe is not insane.

-It's about this time that the first Chinese atomic bomb is completed; Mao Tse-Tung moves very carefully nowadays. While most CPSD organs operating in the People's Republic of China are run by Chinese, there are a fair number of Soviets and Soviet agents running around, and he can't allow Kaganovich to know of the Chinese atomic program.

He is very close to a formal break, but he can't yet. If China is to successfully strive free of the hand of Moscow, they need everything the Soviet Union has...especially thermonuclear weapons. It will be another few years before they've moved to that stage, though, so Mao continues to smile and firmly agree with General Secretary Kaganovich about the need for cooperation among the two largest nations in the CPSD; while privately working to making his own darn bloc, thank you.

Meanwhile, General Lin Baio, commander of the People's Liberation Army, and one of the few officials highly placed enough to be aware of Mao's plans for the future, is thoroughly disgusted. He agrees, of course, with the urgent need to break from the "neo-capitalists" of Moscow, but Mao is being far too wussified about it! If the Soviet Union has more hydrogen bombs, well, there are millions more Chinese, Chinese united behind the banner of the people's revolution!

-Other nations, however, are not so ambitious, or at least have less of a reason to hide their ambition. On September 9, 1962, President Delgado Chalbaud invites the Soviet and American ambassadors to witness Venezuela's entry into the nuclear age. In an isolated region of the Guiana highlands (the incredibly remote area that was the setting for The Lost World ), the first South American nuclear bomb, an impressive fellow of forty kilotons, is detonated just after sunset.

The 53-year old Chalbaud has been walking an interesting tightrope in his decades in power, especially after the conquest of the Venezuelan Antilles. Presenting himself to the United States and western Europe as an anti-Communist (and indeed, especially after Guevara rose to power in Argentina, it's not a good idea to found an large Communistish group in Venezuela), Chalbaud has been married to a Jewish-Romanian Communist (Lucia Levine) since the early 1930s. More than a few dissidents or refugees from Kaganovich's CPSD, especially from the former Yugoslavia, have quietly found their way to Caracas and its environs, especially scientists and engineers. (There've been a lot of those, the former commander of the Venezuelan Army Corps of Engineers has been a builder, and not just of military matters. He's quite proud of the comparison to Augustus Caesar.)

To the CPSD, he has presented himself as the leader of a non-aligned bloc in South America, pointing proudly to the left-wing publication his wife edits (that somehow never criticizes the person of Delgado Chalbaud) and the (very carefully) positioned leftists in his government. He'd normally just let them alone; despite his marriage he has little use for Communists, but his representative Juan Pablo Pérez Alfonzo is already in Cairo, negotiating with representatives of the Jerusalem League and the CPSD on the formation of a bloc of oil producing nations: the OPEP.

For All Time Pt. 88

October 1962-December 1962

-On October 4, Pedro Estrada is unsurprised to see only a mid-level Treasury official greeting him as he steps onto the tarmac at Manfred von Richthofen International Airport; the largest major airport serving the city of Dusseldorf and the country of Westphalia. (Okay, the only major airport serving Westphalia, at least the only major civilian one.) He didn't want to be greeted with someone well-known, and Helmut Schmidt is comfortably obscure in a department still dominated by Hjalmer Schacht.

The head of the Venezuelan Secret Police isn't a man comfortable with publicity; the only people he really likes to show his face to are Carlos Delgado, his wife, and the occasional particularly prominent (and unfortunate) political prisoner in Caracas or the Venezuelan Antilles. He's even less comfortable with it now; after all, he's got a very important cargo in the boxes full of technical information in the hold of his airplane, not to mention several former Palatinate nuclear scientists who've come home to advise their northern brethern.

-Henry Wallace's funeral on October 20, 1962, (he died at his desk two weeks earlier) is attended sparsely, mostly by dignitaries within the United States government, the former President's family, and members of the fringe moderate civil rights movement. Herbert Hoover and Thomas Dewey; the two living American ex-Presidents, give long eulogies which mostly say that Henry Wallace was President of the United States during World War II; Vice President Clark Gable speaks as well as can be expected for the man who many blame for stirring up Charles Whitman.

Benjamin O. Davis Jr. gives a good speech, so does Thurgood Marshall, and Walther Reuther actually makes people cry...but no one's that bothered. Servicemen remember the disaster at Normandy in 1943, conservatives remember the way Wallace drove through liberalism above all else, and bigots will never forgive the man who made the country pay attention, however briefly, to civil rights in the United States. Whatever people think of him, though, everyone agrees that America's 33rd President, and the world he hoped to create, is dead.

After the funeral, Thurgood Marshall happens to bump into Martin Luther King Jr. (unlike many of his counterparts in the civil rights movement, no one ever made anything stick against King), and the two fall to talking. Perhaps something can be done to make Wallace's death not in vain, after all, something near the holiday of Christmas.

-Meanwhile, Canada mutters on. With the support of Prime Minister Smallwood, K.C. Irving and Maurice Dupliess have easily retained their positions running New Brunswick and Quebec, respectively. It is a measure of Smallwood's ability that he, the autocratic socialist, has successfully cozied up to elites of all languages to keep Quebec and the Maritimes solidly in the Liberal camp.

The Newfoundlander has been less lucky in the west; the government's dislocation of small fishing communities in the West Coast has created a generation of angry young men all throughout British Columbia, most of whom have found God (at least a political version of same) in the person of their riding's Social Credit MP. The Progressive-Conservative/Social Credit coalition is a powerful Opposition force in Parliment, and Smallwood has only recently survived a vote of no confidence.

(The most interesting stories are the ones unreported; a generation of Quebec intellectuals like Rene Lesage and Pierre Trudeau has been driven into academia or journalism; Francophone politics are dominated by nearly theocratic conservatives on the one hand or quasi-terrorists in the other.)

In Algeria, Pierre Gagnon is slapping more and more zinc oxide on himself; the distraction of sunburn can not, must not be allowed to interfere with the Cause. Revolution!

-Official Washington is all abuzz in December with rumors of a planned Negro revolt; each rumor more graphic than the last. If any man can be blamed for them, it is the director of the F.B.I. Roy Cohn is part of the new generation of politically active, radically conservative Jews that has sprung up after World War II; he was appointed during President LaFollette's attempts at bipartisanship.

He does geninuely believe the stories; FBI agents planted in the NAACP have picked up evidence of meetings between moderates like Thurgood Marshall and radicals like Martin Luther King Jr; and he even has a planned route for the march; one ending (ominously) in the park opposite the White House.

Despite a strong urge to strike first and best, Cohn is well aware of the risks; an FBI/military attack on black groups who have publicly done nothing wrong will simply stir up another wave of civil insurrection, and he really doesn't want that...better to bring them out publicly, in the eyes of the world.

There can be no telling the President the exact truth, of course, Robert LaFollette Jr. is far too soft-hearted to do what's right. Cohn settles for telling LaFollette that investigations are underway, while having secret talks with Secret Service Cheif Schine and Marine Major Lee H. Oswald, commander of the White House garrison. (Especially secret with Schine.)

-On December 12, the first bus arrives in Georgetown...

For All Time Pt. 89

"I'll always remember how cold it was. There must have been two, three thousand Negros in Lafayette Square that day, not to mention twenty Marines, a dozen Secret Service suits, and one President of the United States, but it must have been ten below."

Norman S. takes a long drag on his cigarette before continuing. "I wasn't with them, of course. It wasn't policy to let the guy holding the nuclear launch codes walk into the middle of a crowd of Negros that had been chanting songs to Muhammed and Jesus ten minutes before. Of course, it wasn't policy to let the President walk in there either."

He laughs in rueful admiration. "We'd known he wasn't all there, you know. Christ, he put a picture of his dad in the Oval Office a week after Joe Kennedy bought it, and he talked to the damned thing. But Bob LaFollette had guts, I'll give him that. I wouldn't have walked out into that crowd. But then again, maybe he shouldn't have either..."

"I couldn't hear what they were saying. That was the worst part at first; here I was, the President of the United States putting his life on the line to talk to Thurgood Marshall and Medgar Evars man to man, and Peckerhead Oswald and his boys were going to see all the action."

Norman looks out the window, and his voice shakes a bit. "We knew he was nuts, too, every real soldier in the White House, but Ed Walker always stood up for him. Said he'd take a bullet for Oswald, and Oswald would take a bullet for the President...and he got to pick his own men, too, which meant Lee Oswald had twenty of the most psycho Marines in the United States behind him on the 15th of December. The Secret Service guys weren't much better, mostly crazy bastards who were sorry they hadn't bagged a n***** along with the DC police when the riots hit."

Growing in strength, the big man looks squarely at the interviewer. "Even so, I think Bond must have done something stupid. Even a nutjob like Lee Oswald wouldn't have just pulled out his .45 and shot a guy for no reason. It doesn't matter..." Norman shakes his head. "Maybe he just shoved his hand in his pocket too fast to get some smokes. You don't do that kind of crazy stuff five feet from the President when you were just yelling "Revenge! Revenge!"

"Still, I almost can't blame Evers for shooting back, not with Oswald blowing a man's head off right in front of him. No one else was shooting, though...I don't care what everyone else said they heard, I heard exactly two shots before it all hit the fan. Two shots..." Norman closes his eyes. "Twenty AR-16s firing at full auto is damned loud, you know, damned loud. We didn't hear the screaming until they stopped to slap in a full mag, and by then the snipers on the White House roof were picking Negros off right and left..."

Norman opens his eyes and suddenly booms: "Hell! He loses four Marines and three Secret Service guys, five of seven to friendly fire, in the time it takes to fire a volley and get Bob LaFollette out of there, and he says they were shooting at him! A hundred and twenty dead, two hundred wounded, and Peckerhead Oswald makes himself the hero."

"We were all sure there was going to be a race war, then, like nothing we'd ever seen. Everyone was going nuts when we got back to the White House, Oswald was walking around covered in blood, Wayne Morse was about to have a heart attack..." S. shakes his head admiringly. "But not Bob LaFollette. He gets the cameras rolling, he breaks into every network, live, an hour later, when Washington is already catching fire...I always thought it was the bandage that did it, the President of the United States, bleeding from his head, telling the nation not to shed any more blood, that it was his fault and no one else's, that he was the one who'd spilled so much blood..."

Norman looks at the New Zealander with haunted eyes. "I think he must have had the pistol in his desk for months; no one had .38s in the White House. You can see Hugh Thompson's arm in the CBS and NBC broadcast, poor kid was maybe a half-second too late...ABC didn't cut away in time."

For All Time Pt. 90

December 1962-February 1963

-A major lasting initiative of the early hours of the Gable administration (beyond the Presidential Disability Act that would eventually turn into a Consitutional amendment, and taking the final steps to prevent a race war) is the Federal Mental Health Agency. Headed by Antonio Moniz disciple Benjamin Spock, the FMHA is charged with maintaining the mental health and stability of all Americans. (Mental health has, of course, been taboo for as long as anyone can remember, but LaFollette's suicide has made it shockingly public.)

Spock's doctors (at least one is at every major mental hospital in America by the middle of the year) have broad discretionary powers to ensure the proper treatment of the mentally ill, and the Agency itself has the power to commit nearly anyone who's a danger to themselves or those around tem, even if the patients themselves aren't fully aware of it.

Americans will have the federal government watching over their sanity, and as they watch President Clark Gable and Edward Brooke lay a wreath at the site of the Lafayette Incident, frankly, they're ready for someone to. (Gable's Vice-President is famous, politically neutral, but a Republican voter: General Matthew Ridgeway, retired since 1948 and an author of a best-selling series of military novels; is remembered as the hero of the abortive invasion of Japan at the end of the war.)

-January 1, 1963 marks a not-terribly voluntary independence Day for Bechuanaland, Britain's last major colony in southern Africa. Completely surrounded by South Africa and its associated territories, tied to the shaky Britain of Roy Jenkins, and without the important resources of Nigeria and Aden, the new nation of Botswana is founded more on the principles of cleaning up than setting free.

Hundreds of miles away, Idi Amin's conquest of Zanzibar has proved a success, right down to the planned row of gallows from the sea to the former Sultan's palace. Like a lot of dictators, he is modeling much of his government after the proven success of Delgado's in Venezuela. His civil engineering projects aren't doing so well, forced savings can only do so much, and his nuclear program along Lake Victoria is slow at best.

The main things that have been successful, though, are the thousands of rifles and hundreds of trained, veteran fighters that have slipped across the long border with the Territories of Botha and Smuts (The former Northern Rhodesia and Mozambique, respectively.) to wreck havoc. Johannesburg is already casting an eye north and pondering what's to be done, even as urban violence explodes to apocalyptic levels.

-On February 5, 1963, Ritchie Valens wipes his brow and bows to the Liverpool crowd. America's first great Latin pop sensation was far less successful at home than in OTL, the inevitable association of ethnic music with ethnic strife has badly hurt the careers of black, Hispanic, and Jewish musicians.

He's still big in Great Britain, though, teenagers rebelling against the near-poverty of home and against the disliked Americans across the sea all at once. After the show, a bespectacled young man makes his way to Valens' dressing room; he has a presentation for the gregarious artist, British ethnic music:

John Lennon's Jugalbandhi

For All Time Pt. 91

March-July 1963

-As legions of tanned, tired men march past Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, he is the most popular man in Australia. His government's revival of the de facto alliance with the People's Republic of Java and Sumatra has let both governments make a strategic retreat; Australian peacekeeping troops can return home from Ceram, Buru, and points west, while Jakarta can spend CPSD funds on themselves than on the ideological bretheren in the Indonesian archipelago.

(Not that either power will stop pointing nuclear bombers at each other, from Yogyakarta and Bali, respectively.) As for Whitlam himself: now he can use his personal and political popularity to bring Australia fully into the 20th century, make a social democracy in a world where they're few and far between. It will be hard, but he's not one to flinch from hard work.

-Neither is his American counterpart, President Clark Gable, and he's got a lot to do: His pledge not to run for his own term in 1964 has freed him to concentrate on being President, but has cost him valuable political cards. His planned Equal Rights Amendment is mostly pretty words, and thus popular, but more equitable laws (at least from the actors' perspective) for the acting community will take work indeed.

He makes nightly television addresses from the First Family's bedroom (the first President to do either), and the old acting talents haven't withered, though his last role was a cameo role as the Judge in family friend Lucille Ball's Inherit The Wind in 1957. Gable would like to do a national tour, but that didn't work so well for President Kennedy. (Not to mention, of course, that the President's bodyguard is rather...large at this stage.)

-Meanwhile, Roy Jenkins rolls the dice. Like his predecessor, he is a firm believer in butter over bullets, but circumstances have forced him to build the largest nuclear arsenal in Europe. (France has a substantially larger land army, though.) With an economy not terribly stronger than West Germany's in OTL, Britain is hard-pressed enough to defend herself and her vastly reduced Empire while at the same time maintaining even the trappings of a social democracy.

Thus, Burma has to go; tens of thousands of British soldiers have lost their lives there since the Communist insurgencies began (though far less since they shifted back to be advisors only), three nuclear weapons have been used, and still the Win government whines for more tens of millions of pounds, money that he always seems to spend on himself. No more. No more.

On June 1, 1963, Britain's ten thousand advisors and engineers begin the long withdrawal home, just in time for Ne Win to find himself a new patron. Thailand isn't exactly screamingly rich, of course, but they're doing quite well for one of the three non-Communist states in Southeast Asia. More to the point, the Nordics don't get uppity if you deal with students. Or maintain a harem. In fact, if the reports from Bangkok are accurate, they really like it.

-Under the dark of the moon in July of 1963, a thermonuclear fireball rises high over Chinese Turkestan...

For All Time Pt. 92

August-November 1963

-In the end, there is no war, and that's what dooms them all. Almost everyone in Washington, London, Paris, and Ottawa expects a nuclear conflict between the Soviet Union and Communist China in the dark days of August-September 1963. Both powers mobilize millions of men and machines along their long common border; China's demonstration blasts of one megaton each in isolated border regions prompts Lazar Kaganovich to detonate an impressive 40 megaton blast between North Japan and Manchuria.

But, finally, neither man can quite give the order to strike first. Lazar Kaganovich has spent eleven long, hard years building the Soviet Union's and the CSPD's industrial machines into a monument to Marx and Lenin, large, efficient, and more prosperous than anyone has ever seen. (There has been a barely noticeable rise in worker inefficiency in isolated areas, but SPID is still kilometers below the radar.) Like a Prussian admiral of World War I, he just can't take his mighty creation and hurl it against the wall; even in a war he knows he'll win.

Mao Tse-Tung is a bit more prosiac; he's seen the People's Republic of China come back from (what he imagines as) worse than the losing side of a nuclear conflict, and just doesn't particularly care about tens of millions or so dead. But if he's going to kill millions of Russians and tens of millions of Chinese, he'd better have a good reason...and in the end, there isn't. Both Ho Chi Minh and Kim Il Sung have quickly cozied up to Moscow, with Mongolia and the JPR proving equally afraid to confront the reality of the people's revolution. And once he realizes Kaganovich isn't about to go to war, well, the whole thing starts to look a little silly.

By October of 1963, both powers have begun a (very) slow process of partial demobilization. After all, war or no, the Communist world has been split, and split forever. (A potential Maoist ally is removed early; Envers Hoxha is assasinated by his own private secretary on September 25, 1963; Eastern Europe remembers 1954 very well, thank you.)

-The General Secretary of the Soviet Union is a survivor. From being a Jew in the inner circle of Stalin, the arch-anti-Semite, to running the Soviet Union through perhaps her most turbulent times since the war, Lazar Kaganovich knows when to stand, and when to duck, and when to get away from the noose mob. (Not that he's in any particular physical danger, mind, the post-Stalin de facto treaty is alive and well...but he'd rather quit than be fired.)

Even before the extreme Stalinists begin to mutter about the spineless government letting the Chinese get away with that kind of uppityness, Lazar Kaganovich announces his retirement, and on October 20, 1963, after a suitable period of arranging the right sucession with Politburo arm-twisting, the only man to survive running the Soviet Union retires to his (relatively) small home in Moscow.

While Kaganovich would have preferred to have handed the government over to  foreignMinister Molotov, a personal friend and comrade (in the old sense of the word) for 30 years, he's aware of appearances. The Soviet Union needs new blood! It's not as if they're a pack of senile vodka-drinkers, after all. Mikhail Andreevich Suslov is a bit more liberal than he, but an opponent of any particular changes: In the end, he wants another industralist to run the industrial empire he's made.

((http://www.anet.net/~upstart/suslov.html ))

-On November 22, Mao Tse-Tung is taking his daily nude swim in the nearest convienent river (it's the Li River today, he's been touring the natural rock formations nearby) when he suddenly turns face-down. Despite the alleged efforts of his bodyguards, he is pronounced dead of drowning by a PLA doctor a few hours later.

Even as Mao is (very) rapidly cremated, no less a figure than General Lin Biao himself is headed for Bejing. He has a long list of Soviet agents to take care of, especially Mao's murderous bodyguards. (No one ever does find the opiate capsule, the same brand the general himself uses.)

For All Time Pt. 93

December 1963-February 1964

-On December 2, 1963, the world takes another step into the Space Age when the first human being successfully makes a full orbit of the Earth. (There have been several sub-orbital flights over long distances by both the US and the USSR.) The Dactyl that Michael Collins and George Bush ride in their long equatorial flight from Kennedy Base in Nevada and back is generations advanced over the Dyna-Soar of years earlier; it is larger, faster, and pollutes moderately instead of severely. (Theodore Taylor isn't particularly satisfied; of course, but he, like everyone else involved in America's space program, is swept away by the moment. Too, he has a sympathetic ear in his close friend and superior, Ted Hall.)

Too, thanks to heroic efforts by Clarence "Kelly" Johnson and Edward Teller, the Dactyl and her two sister planes can actually carry weapons; one five-hundred kiloton bomb each, and surprisingly, there are even specially designed bombs that can survive a fall from orbital heights. Accuracy is a problem, though, and it's difficult to do tests; there are no particular treaties about testing weapons between the various Great Powers, but it doesn't do to give London and Paris and Moscow and Bejing ideas. And, of course, each Dactyl costs about two-thirds as much as a mid-sized aircraft carrier.

-Ernesto Guevara's December negotiations with representatives from the People's Republic of China are quite profitable indeed for all parties. Lin Biao's position is still a bit shaky back home; there are always more people to shoot, and he needs an inarguable success, an ally for China's very own.

Too, Guevara needs assistance. He is sensible enough to know the socialization of Argentina's armed and prosperous farmers will likely be the work of generations; but for all that he's a believer in the inevitability of Marx; well, he'd like to actually see that happy day.

The key is war! A war to liberate the oppressed workers and peasants of the surrounding continent; that a generation might grow up under the banner of the people's revolution, under a banner of liberation! Then, then can he reform the heartland of the Democratic Republic of Argentina.

There are problems, though; the purge of Galterist wreckers in the Army has left the Argentine military without much in the way of experienced officers. The Chinese military has those in abundance, men who can teach order, and fighting, and combat, and devotion to the cause of the people's revolution.

As for nuclear weapons...well, maybe when that war actually hits. President Gable is an isolationist, yes, but Lin Biao is well aware how many nuclear weapons the United States has, and how ill they will look at even a salmon country dropping nuclear weapons on all and sundry. But they'll be ready for them too...

-As 1964 begins, Mikhail Suslov isn't terribly bothered by all this. As he sits in his Moscow office, surrounded by flow charts, he has all the proof he needs that Lin Biao is leading his nation down a road even worse than capitalism. (A truly terrifying thought!) There is, admittedly, the problem of the lost ally in the Americas to worry about, but Dr. Guevara always made him a bit...nervous.

People's revolutions are all well and good, but smart men (like himself) understand Moscow is the only really good source for a revolution. Independent revolutions (like Mao's or Guevara's) are far too likely to fall from the stalwart path of Marxism. No, the best way to have a revolution is to guide it right from his desk in the Kremlin.

And on February 17, 1964, when Colonel Jafaar Mohammed al-Nimeiry's army takes Khartoum, well, there's suddenly a heck of a lot of people that need guidance. The trip from Iran is a bit risky, but the Jerusalem League is far more watchful than likely to actually start a war, and by the end of the month, the first Soviet advisers are arriving in Sudan.

((In OTL, Nimeiry led the 1969 Marxist coup. In the ATL, there's been enough Soviet monkeying about in Africa (witness SPID) to make the revolution a pretty solidly pro-Moscow one. ))

For All Time Pt. 94

March-August 1964

-On March 2, 1964, the people of Britain go to the polls and turn out Roy Jenkins and the Labour Party. There are a variety of reasons for this; none of them alone quite explaining the collapse of the "Prosperity through Austerity" government that has run the United Kingdom and its diminished Empire since the death of Nye Bevan.

To begin with, the Empire itself. Only thirty years earlier, the map was one-sixth pink; now Great Britain holds Aden, Nigeria, the Caribbean, islands scattered hither and yon...and that's it. The mighty Royal Navy has been mostly sold off to acquisitive foreign powers, and bomber bases are near every major city. It's a sentimental issue, to be sure, but a real one, especially among Britons of a certain age.

And, of course, the eternal factor, the economy: Great Britain is leaps and bounds better than France or Westphalia, much less Spain and Portugal, but times have, to say the least, been better. Jenkins' retention of Nigeria and Aden have let the United Kingdom stay independant of OPEP and foreign oil supplies, but technically-minded citizens look to the large nuclear system of the United States and wonder where their breeder reactors are.

There are, of course, slightly less savory reasons; racism being prime among them. The militarization of India and Pakistan's governments in the 1950s has produced several waves of East Indian immigrants to Great Britain, in the millions by 1964. The United Kingdom is as tolerant as the next First World democracy, of course, but nativism works well in just about every nation with a sudden influx of immigrants.

And thus it is, with his slogan "Not One Inch More!", which refers to either the collapse of Empire, economy, or whiteness, depending on what element of Conservative voter you ask (he's rarely explicit), that Enoch Powell becomes Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.

((Yeah, so it's convergence. Heck, the man is perfect, perfect I tells ya...))

-Another issue is, of course, American football. (Real football) World Cup qualifiers weren't televised in 1950, and most American fans aren't the type to travel across oceans, so it was mostly the British and Brazilians who were there on June 29 when the American soccer team crushed the British with an score of 2-0. As time has gone by, the situation's gotten worse; American teams have at least tied their British counterparts in two of their three return matches; the last American victory, in 1963's semi-finals, saw perhaps the finest American player in history, the great Jim Brown, score two goals personally in the first ten minutes, with (according to Americans, at least) only a broken leg during a post-game party keeping him from leading the Americans to victory over Portugal in the World Cup championship.

Clearly, something must be done!

((In OTL, the American Soccer League was one of the strongest in the world in the 1920s, but jurisdictional disputes and the Great Depression killed it off. The system remained strong enough to beat the British in 1950 by a score of 1-0, but with the decline of ethnic clubs and the televising of other sports, American (world) football became so much shadows and dust.

In FaTL, with the influx of Germans and Italians and Palestinians and Puerto Ricans, combined with the sharp ethnic divides in the United States and poor integration slowing American "football"'s progress, American soccer remains very competitive, winning the Copa America an average of three years out of eight. The pan-Americas soccer league is a powerful (American teams compete regionally, then nationally, then internationally.) force. Oddly enough, the influx of Europeans also benefits Venezuela, historically the weakest futbol nation in South America.

As for Jim Brown, well, he was a multi-sport guy, and dang fast.)) -The sudden, shocking collapse of the Burmese government is ample proof of what happens when a client state becomes too corrupt and its Great Power patron too complacent. In May, Burma is a fascist, authoritarian state, and by the end of August, the first Chinese-built tanks are rumbling through the streets of Rangoon, and Burma is on her way to becoming a Communist, totalitarian state.

Most of the blame for this can be laid squarely at the feet of the Ne Win government. Ever since the British use of tactical nuclear bombs had driven the Communist rebels north into the hills near the Chinese border, Burma's military government had been more than content to spend the British military subsidies on themselves, building skyscrapers, organizing drug shipments through Taiwan, and in general committing every major sin except sloth.

Imperialism is a rather new thing to the nations of the Nordic Council, and the men sitting in Copenhagen and Stockholm, Oslo and Helsinki, had been inclined to believe their experts on the ground; that Burma was as stable and honest as Thailand, that their military subsidies were going to help the Army fight. Still, they put just enough pressure on Rangoon that Ne Win ordered one great summer offensive to wipe out the rebels, to take care of them once and for all.

No one, not even the surviving Norwegian and Finnish military advisors, ever gets full, definititive proof that there are PLA officers leading the armored pincers that capture most of the Burmese Army just east of Lashio, or Chinese pilots flying the fighter-bombers that appear over Rangoon a week later...but everyone knows, all the same.

Humiliated, the Nordic governments make a solemn vow; they and their allies will never, ever be pushed around again. No more nations will fall, especially not Thailand, which suddenly has lots and lots of sunburned blondes guarding the border.

-Barry Goldwater touches on the spread of international Communism in his acceptance speech; the junior Senator from Arizona having just been nominated by a supermajority to be the Republican Party's Presidential candidate in 1964. Goldwater is immensely popular with conservatives and centrists; a fiery foe of lily-livered liberals and repugnant extremists at once, he has a grass-roots base like no Presidential candidate for decades before. On top of everything else, Goldwater is one of a growing number of non-isolationists in American politics.

Goldwater is an especial foe of the FHMA, promising to abolish it "in the first hours of my Presidency" and to "salt the field that such a repellent idea has come from." (It's not just words; Goldwater's family chain of department stores has made Goldwater a wealthy man, and he's spent quite a bit of money funding the largest Court challenge to the Federal Mental Health Administration, arising out of a case in Phoenix.)

The choice of running mate is a very difficult one; while Goldwater would prefer New York Congressman William Miller, a close friend and former GOP chairman, he's well-aware that after the deaths of Kennedy and LaFollette (especially LaFollette's mental instability), the public is paying very close attention to potential Vice-Presidential candidates.

After a great deal of personal debate, Goldwater picks one of his chief rivals for the nomination; Pennsylvania Governor William Scranton. Scranton is from a big, important state in a big, important region, and is a bit to the left of Goldwater on a variety of social issues. (For one thing, Goldwater is strongly opposed to most of the surviving New Deal.)

-Meanwhile, amid screaming boos, Lyndon Johnson is nominated by the Democrats in Baltimore. Embittered by Joseph Kennedy Jr. dumping him in 1960, Johnson has spent the last four years getting in good with every political boss in the country; in all likelihood, the mass of the Party would have preferred someone else; possibly New Jersey Governor Brennan or Maine Senator Muskie, but they don't really get a choice.

As his running mate, Johnson takes Ed Brown; he is trying to get in good with the Gable administration, after all, and getting Gable's former lieutenant Governor is probably the best way to do that...

For All Time Pt. 95

August-November 1964

BOBBY BAKER is one of the most senior political advisors to Barry Goldwater, and perhaps the most skilled. Goldwater's navigator when both flew bombers over Belgium, Baker has a hard job in keeping his old friend from making the slightly wild statements of public policy in public that he's given to in private, but it's one he's proved largely successful at.

(In real private, of course, the horror stories Baker relates about several friends of his and their dealings with FMHA doctors in more rural areas of Texas and Alabama. Homosexuality is much, much too risky a subject to bring up in a campaign with a mudslinger like LBJ, but Barry Goldwater fully intends to do something once he's safely elected.)

FRANCISCO TUDJMAN's Croatian Guards are in the forefront of the occupation of Trinidad. The operation is something of a gamble for Carlos Delgado; while the post-Eric Williams government has cut almost every tie to Great Britain, Enoch Powell's rhetoric about standing up for former Empire nations is quite real. (As he is wont to explain to the Venezuelan ambassador, over and over. You have to explain things to these Latins.)

Fortunately, though, the invasion is not particularly bloody; islanders impressed with the efficiency of the Delgado government and fed up with the intercine violence and economic turmoil accompanying their expulsion from OPEP are waiting to greet the battlescarred veterans of Italy and Willemstad with reasonably open arms, and Powell was never comfortable with the quasi-Marxist government in Port of Spain anyway. He does, however, begin the construction of a fairly large airstrip on the Falkland Islands, less the Guevara government get uppity.

He designs the base himself, spending long hours instructing Army engineers about the construction of an airbase in the distant lands below the equator. It's a frustrating task, but you have to explain things to these engineers.

PETER LAWFORD, the American Ambassador to the Court of St. James, looks blearily up from his Scotch as the crowd cheers and Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, thousands of miles away in Phoenix, announces proudly that Lyndon Johnson has just conceded. Lawford is glad; he was appointed as a Kennedy relation back in the halcyon days of Joe Jr, and no Kennedy likes Johnson. (Johnson's margin of victory in Massachusetts was in the hundreds, and more a measure of a liberal state than a pro-Johnson state.)

CHARLES MANSON, however, is not so happy. Goldwater has successfully pulled conservative Republicans away from the siren lure of extremism, and that means trouble for California's Attorney General. (who is nothing if not extreme.) It's these damned Jews, he thinks blackly, the Red Jews finally got their man in Washington in the White House.

Fortunately, he has Marilyn to soothe him. And they say Hollywood marriages never work...

For All Time Pt. 96

December 1964-February 1965

-Apollo Milton Obote has been (publicly) a side figure in the East African government of Idi Amin. Originally put into Amin's cabinet to satisfy the faction of the late Julius Nyerere, the East African Federation's Education Minister has spent his career making sure Uganda's schools keep several pictures of the Maximum Leader in all classrooms, and that teachers who don't teach the glories of the Zanzibar conquest get what's coming to them.

Obote has, however, been quite the busy man privately. Amin's incorporation of the old anti-colonial rebels groups into the EAF's military has helped him keep civil insurrection to a low ebb...but it's also put people who fear and hate him in a very good position to do something, and Obote, the man who buried Julius Nyerere, is just the man to do it. On December 2, Idi Amin leaves Kampala for a two-week conference with King Selassie of Ethiopia to consult just what to do about the threat posed by Sudan (where Russian and northern troops have begun waging a brutal war of expulsion against the black population of the South), and Obote makes his move, as it were.

High-ranking members of the East African military don't have long to wonder why much of the General Staff and civilian leadership aren't at the December 10 meeting, it's hard to wonder things when you've just been bombed and shot to death by men in your own military's uniforms. Hours later, Apollo Obote addresses the East African Federation live on radio and television (the EAF has surprisingly large quantities of both, the better to hear the Maximum Leader.). "East Africans! Today we celebrate our freedom from fear! Our freedom from want! Today, we celebrate our independence!"

Two days later, the first military representatives of the People's Republic of China arrives. Decades under first the British and then Amin have swung Obote's personal pendulum far toward the siren call of Chairman Mao and General Li, and for that matter, East Africa needs allies, trapped between near-CPSD member Sudan and hungry South Africa, and revolutionary China is just the thing.

-Barry Goldwater's inaugural address is an eventful one; long and exciting at one go. A lot of it, though, isn't that surprising. Most people were expecting the promises of stronger international relations abroad, especially with Westphalia and Venezuela, and pretty much everyone was expecting the promised cuts in the federal budget, like selling off the Department of Energy's big nuclear plants to the states, and the many damns and plants of the Tennessee Valley Authority over to private business.

But it's a fair statement to say no one was expecting Barry Goldwater's closing paragraph, not even the new President himself. "There is a crisis in America today; a crisis of people condemned for no other crime than the way they were born. Persecuted wherever they are found, outright banned in most parts of the country, forbidden legal recognition, they are America's underclass. All but a few weaklings will speak for Americans of a different color, or creed, or nation, but no one will speak for them. None will dare even speak their name. We call them security risks, we say they are easily blackmailed, and so we fire them from the civil service. We discharge war heroes and call them traitors. No more. One of the first acts of this administration will be to ban all federal discrimination against those unfortunates we give the name homosexual, in all aspects and portions of the government. And while there are those who will call this action extreme, well, I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And let me remind them also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue."

((There are those who may question this, but:

Goldwater was in favor of equal rights for homosexuals in OTL, and wrote a stirring defense of gays in the military that's available on the Web. Admittedly, this came later in his career, when it was a more public issue.

However, in FaTL, with the power of the Presidency behind him, with his friendship with Bobby Baker, with his horror at the treatment of homosexuals at the hands of the Federal Mental Health Administration, and given Barry Goldwater's known capacity in 1964 for coming up with ideas without thinking them over, especially as he didn't specify the military, I believe it's at least as plausible as a Soviet atomic bomb in 1945.))

-It's not the first action of his administration, though; before the crowd has even quieted outside the White House, President Barry Goldwater is in the Oval Office signing the executive order demolishing the Federal Mental Health Administration. All of its employees are transferred or discharged, all of its patients are released.

Rather relieved at not having to hear such a divisive case, Estes Kefauver and the Kefauver Court never do deal with the issues raised by Doe vs. Alfred, after all, they've been dealt with by the executive branch, and quite scathingly too. The "Salt the Earth" order will become a classic in its way.

-On February 2, the first crowds gather outside the Stonewall Bar...

For All Time Pt. 97

February 1965-May 1965

-Everyone knows the Stonewall Bar is a gay bar, its location on Christopher Street has made it one of the most successful establishments of that nature in Greenwich Village, New York City. For the most part, though, people don't care. Greenwich Village is a liberated area even in FaT's New York, and as long as no one makes a fuss, everyone's happy. Raids are not uncommon, but are always met with little resistance.

But a fuss has been made, and a big one: President Goldwater's liberalization of the federal government's policy towards homosexuals has energized the elements of the gay community (if there is such a thing in 1965) that patronize the Stonewall; political activists and rebels, writers and poets, a cross-section of Village life in general. They don't have to hide what they are anymore; Barry is with them. Men accustomed to being at least semi-public find it a relatively easy road to being completely public, men who fear less find it easy not to fear at all.

The Tactical NYPD unit that makes the February 2 raid is perhaps rougher than they have to be, homosexuality's popularity among mainstream Americans has actually dipped since Goldwater's announcement, no small effort to say the least, and the police, veterans as they are of years of riots, are nothing if not protectors of the mainstream order. All in all, the newly-confident New York gay Village community and the New York City Police Department come together, and suddenly police are slugging it out in full riot gear with Greenwich youths incensed at the oppression of the government against a minority, or the abuse of fellow travelers on a lonely road of life, or simply people who like to make trouble, or all three.

By the morning of the third, though; the two groups are suddenly joined. A moderate segment of Americans in New York are veterans of street fighting too, and a segment of those (primarily WASPs and Jews) are only too happy to rush to the defense of the police or against "degenerates." Tempers flaring, with two officers dead and more hurt, the police simply pull back to regroup and get reinforcements...and the Battle of the Village begins.

Contrary to what Boomer historians of later years will say, it's not a generational struggle; in a way it's two Americas, the old vs. the new, conservativism vs. liberal...in another way, a less abstract way, it's simply chaos as black and Puerto Rican groups, none of which are particularly sympathetic to the differently-sexed, see their old enemies on the streets and do the same, lest they lose ground, and soon the blood runs in the streets of Greenwich Village.

Mayor Abraham Beame's administration is already shaky; Golda Meir, William F. Buckley, and former Mayor Elliot Goodwin are formidable candidates for the Republican nomination, not to mention John Lindsay from within his own party. (Beame is that increasingly rare thing in New York, a Jewish Democrat.) Horrified at the mounting toll, with (truth be told) awareness of his image as a weak-willed accountant, Beame sends in the NYPD despite their reluctance, giving them direct orders to go into the riot-torn areas and restore order by any means necessary...

It's hard to say when the first lynching happens, but the first caught on camera is on February 11, and within very short order, it has imitators all over the city. And the country, as old networks spring back up into life...and new ones form. Most historians date the birth of the gay rights movement from the execution style slaying of off-Broadway star Dick York on March 5.

-As America's cities explode into violence and rioting again, the medium of television gets a big boost. Contemptous of the media blackouts of the previous administration, President Goldwater allows the cameras right down into the city streets, and so Americans can turn on CBS at 10 and watch Eric Severied narrate the beating of a young Jewish man...and many, inspired or vengeful, take to the streets themselves.

Fascinated and horrified at once, a generation of psychologists like Stanley Milgram, Nathan Lewine, and a Harvard professor named Timothy Leary watch as the violent effects of the young medium are apparantly displayed, and quite graphically, too. Too, they watch as their former patients take to the streets.

President Goldwater's instant dismantling of the Federal Mental Health administration has freed hundreds of wrongfully imprisoned people; but thousands of mentally ill have been released, too quickly to be processed, and soon they're among the rioters in strength.

-Never one to hesitate from confronting a problem, Barry Goldwater sends in the military to New York City, Chicago, and the dozen other cities with growing chaos, recognizing that the US Army is one group equally respected (and loathed) by all the rioting factions and militias.

Grumbling, the Army moves in, only to find they're not as unbiased as they've been in the past. Despite great personal reservations, President Goldwater has stood firm on his commitment to "desegregating" all areas of the federal government, including the military. After all, homosexuals have served in the military for centuries, and he gave his word. Barry Goldwater isn't a man to step back from his word.

The wave of subsequent resignations wasn't that large, but it did include a variety of high-profile officers. The most high-profile of all, oddly enough, had the courtesy to conceal it as early retirement: the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Creighton T. Abrahms. His successor, Major General Edwin Walker, doesn't like it much either (in fact, much less), but he knows when to work quietly, when to work behind the scenes...

-One of convicted traitor Saddam Hussien's last sights on April 3, 1965, is a guard's television set, showing the detonation of the Jerusalem League's first atomic bomb on an uninhabitated island in the Persian Gulf. (He is taken out and shot within the hour for plotting to assasinate the King of Iraq.)

Suitably impressed (because who isn't impressed by nuclear warheads), the Gulf States, from Qatar to Bahrain to Dubai, join the ranks of their Arab co-ethnics in the Jerusalem League, and suddenly there's a big new neutralist power bloc between the Democratic United People's Republic of Anatolia and the People's Republic of Iran.

(Both Venezuela and Great Britain are rather disappointed by this; Carlos Delgado is only too aware that Arab nations outnumber Spanish-speaking nations in OPEP by quite a bit, and if they do start voting together, it'll pose a considerable problem in his efforts to control a great deal of the world's oil supply.

Enoch Powell, for his part, is still faced with a simmering guerilla conflict in Aden, one driven by Arab nationalism, and a largely united Arab world, especially a prosperous one, just doesn't help matters much at all. He spends a great deal of time explaining that to Defense Minister Heath, a braver man than most.)

-On May 12, 1965, Scandanavia enters the nuclear age when a mushroom cloud rises into the sky in a remote sector of Norway....

For All Time Pt. 98

June 1965-September 1965

-Oddly enough, the Stonewall Riots are both less widespread and bloodier than previous American civil disturbances. In the end, despite the web of connections between the White Citizens Council, African Ecumenical Council, Jewish Defense League, and various other groups, very few people in a position of leadership are willing to go to bat (quite literally, in some cases) for homosexuals.

But some are (mostly smaller, splinter groups seeking attention), and, more to the point, America's urban homosexual population proves nearly as quick to organize as her black and Jewish and Puerto Rican populations in years past; men who contented themselves with hiding in cramped, darkened bars, or in less savory enviroments, find not only can they fight back, but they can win, too.

Not against the police, though, and after several New York City and Chicago police officers are killed suppressing the riots, allegedly by homosexuals, well, the police start to expect violent resistance...and, truth be told, the expectation has a way of creating the reality. (No one is ever tried for the Castro Street Massacre, but then, the official National Guard verdict is that the occupants of the bathhouse were hiding firearms, so that's to be expected.)

All across America, images of young men at war with the police are burned into the mindsets of a whole generation of Americans.

-On a more pleasant note, a massive shipment of supplies very much like a similiar one sent a year before to Argentina) from the People's Republic of China arrives in Mombasa, East African Federation, for shipment all over the nation on August 2. The shipment is a mixed bag, whatever can be spared by Lin Biao's version of Cultural Revolution China, everything from rifles to rice to Red Books.

It is so large, in fact, that various unmarked freighters are forced to use alternate ports, most of them owned and occupied exclusively by the EAF military. Rapidly, giant crates and enigmatic great machines are whisked across one of the few really good road systems in the country to a vast complex of buildings on the shores of Lake Victoria.

Apollo Milton Obote is not a man to be blackmailed lightly, and both the newest member-state in the CPSD to the north and South Africa to the south have trifled with him far too much for him to let it slide again.

-Truth be told, the People's Republic of Sudan's membership in that vaunted club isn't helping matters much. With the East African Federation supplying southern Sudan's black population with arms to resist the attempted ethnic cleansing of the dominant North, the war looks to drag on for years.

Too, General Secretary Mikhail Suslov (not so ably assisted by Defense Minister Ivan Boldin) hasn't helped matters much. His reliance on case studies and projections by civilian bureaucrats have led official Soviet policy to ignore the shipments still slipping across the border with the EAF entirely, and encouraged local ground commanders to simply inflate their body counts. Morale is low, casualities high.

It's understandable, then, that Soviet troops, many already feeling ill even on non-combat days, would seek solace in Khartoum, Omdurman, Port Sudan, and other cities and towns with less than savory areas, and if inhabitants of those areas continue the trade that keeps body and soul together with visitors from outside Sudan, be they Ethiopian or French Africans, Egyptians or even Europeans.

For All Time Pt. 99

October 1965-February 1966

-When it comes, it comes almost without warning. Maurice Challe's "Tricolor" government is far less heavy-handed or bloody-minded to the French in France than its Salanist predecessor, this has let a relatively free exchange of ideas, both technological and cultural. Unfortunately (at least from the government's perspective), it's also led to the spread of anti-government ideas.

Ethnic nationalism is just strong enough to be a potent threat as well; Premier Darlan's official banning of Gascon, Norman, Breton and countless other non-French languages served mostly to make them the language of rebels and dissidents, with the short reign of terror under Salan serving to weld the patriots of Gascony, Normady, Brittany, and even a few stalwart Occitans to their alleged mother tongue. Most dissidents, even in those provinces, are more anti-government than pro-language, but enough are that the "réveillenters" are a definite force to be reckoned with.

In October of 1965, after a series of incidents involving the police and anti-government students and bloody shootouts, several riots break out in and around Rennes, the provincal capital of Brittany. (Breton nationalists, often assisted by the Camus government in St. Pierre, are the most organized and best-funded.) Premier Challe doesn't hesitate, he deploys the troops.

As per twenty years of governmental policy, they are conscripts, recruited from Brittany itself. With France's primary enemy in the east, the great land power of the Communist bloc, locally recruited conscripts are considered far more likely to fight bravely and well in defense of their homeland. It isn't that doctrine is inaccurate, per se, only that the Army didn't think through all of its implications. The first units defect around October 15, and by the end of the month, thousands of trained young soldiers have joined their fellows in the streets, and the "Armée de Bretagne" is more than just a fiction.

Even as the government mobilizes, the revolts spread, more and more soldiers defect to causes that promise high pay, a strong economy for France, and liberation for groups ethnic and otherwise. Many areas stay loyal, with only a minor rebel problem, but many do not, and by the beginning of 1966, there are full-scale revolts in Gascony, Normandy, Brittany, the Marseilles hinterlands, the Saar, and Alsace.

By January, the first shipments of aid have arrived, delivered to all parties. Germans in Germany have never quite given up on the Saarland, and Reinhard Gehlen's Westphalia is only too glad to supply the German rebels there. Communism (much like overt ethnic nationalism) is deliberately muted by the rebel leadership, but Mikhail Suslov is only too happy to covertly supply them. He aims not so much to enhance Communism as to discredit capitalism, and a civil war in Western Europe's largest capitalist state is a good way to do that.

(Spain, Portugal, and Great Britain all supply aid to the Challist government with varying degrees of reluctance. As he explains to reporters again, and again, and again, and again, he has no sympathy with dictatorship, but better dictatorship than civil war. Franco and Salazar, meanwhile, have no such crises of conscience or media.)

-For two men of rather different backgrounds and views on the world, Carlos Delgado and Barry Goldwater take a quick liking to each other. Both men love to tinker and build, holding several patents in their own countries, and both are solidly, strongly anti-Communist.

In their week-long conference at Camp Charles in February, the President's retreat on the tip of the Delmarva Peninsula, the two heads of state hammer out the first significant alliance for both countries in decades. Delgado will allow Americans to build naval installations in less populated areas of the Venezuelan Antilles, and even bomber bases deep in the interior. Both nations agree to combat their enemies, especially international Communism, all through South America, and the US will provide preferential status to Venezuelan trade goods.

(Only President Barry Goldwater is aware of the full meaning of the less-explicit parts of the treaty, essentially letting Venezuela do as it pleases against British Guiana, Colombia, and points north and south. A deeply moral man, he's uncomfortable with this , but like most Americans of FaTL, he's deeply opposed to European imperalism, and is well aware the United States needs an ally on the Southern Continent.)

The treaty is popular in both countries; Venezuelans have no particular objection to financial aid and almost perfect trade relations with their largest trading partner, and Venezuela's economic prosperity and authoritarian government has long made it popular with certain segments of the American population. (Too, there's hope that alliance with the United States will help spread democracy to Venezuela and points elsewhere.)

For All Time Pt. 100

1966

C. VANN WOODWARD was killed in a two car accident outside Harvard University in 1965. His works on civil rights, racial history in America, and the story of slavery remain legends in their respective fields, and some people on campus still wonder if there was something to his death.

GLORIA STEINEM has bounced with increasing levels of frustration from one writing job to another for various magazines in New York, though at least she's always kept up a good income. The women's movement is less powerful than in OTL, with the various ethnic and religious movements of FaT taking that particular meme's place. There may be a time for it, but not yet, not yet.

After being badly wounded in the Lafayette Square Incident, MALCOM X made the Hajj to Mecca and returned home a man of peace, making several long, moving speeches about all men united under God, whatever name they give him. He is egged more often than not, and no one even thinks about assasinating him. What would be the point?

HARLAN ELLISON is one of the most hated (and loved) men in Toledo and the country. In the decade or so since the Toledo Blade published his first column at the age of 21, his angry, cynical iconoclasm has managed to offend every minority and every majority as he bounces between print and radio journalism. His title as "King of All Media" and image of a man master of all he tries isn't entirely accurate, though; he switches back and forth just before his current superiors get tired of his arrogance and bitter, bitter attitude, escaping the public humilation of being fired. Still, almost everyone wants him, if only for a little while.

ROBERT X (formerly Bobby Seale) can remember a time when he wasn't a murderer and a fugitive, but it's increasingly distant. One of the most successful organizers of black "resistance" movements in the late 1950s and early 1960s, fate and circumstance led him to be responsible for a suicide bombing of a Chicago police station in 1961, and after someone talked...well, it's not the life he'd have chosen, but old friends and comrades still shelter him, even far across the countryside, following the network of black militia movements. ----

Poet, playwright, CHINUA ACHEBE is also the head of the BBC's Lagos office. Achebe, like a lot of Nigerian intellectuals, is dissatisfied with the British colonial government, but doesn't begrudge it its successes; intertribal conflict is low with everyone united with varying degrees of enthusiasm against the British, and while Nigeria isn't exactly prosperous, it's much better off than the independant states in West Africa. (Besides, everyone is worried about French imperialism.) Nigerians want independance, but not tomorrow.

Sickened at the racial violence in America, MAYA ANGELOU has settled in Cairo, where she edits The Arab Observer, an English-language daily. Married into the Coptic Church, her visits home have actually become more frequent in the last few years as racial violence have declined slightly. As she looks about her dusty office some days, she thinks about moving back home. She's written a lot about Egypt, but there's so much more to write...

DOROTHY DANDRIDGE found few real roles in the Hollywood of FaT, she became the first black woman to be nominated for Best Actress in 1954 for her role in Carmen Jones, but no roles were forthcoming after that. Forced to resume her night-club singing career, Dandringe slowly declined into booze and pills, addictions she started at the behest of studio heads, and finally died of an accidental overdose in 1961. She was just 38.

---- PIERRE TRUDEAU is one of the most interesting (especially to female students) literature professors at Columbia University. While Trudeau still visits home whenever he can, he is increasingly uncomfortable with Quebec. With provincial intellectual life dominated by dreamy seperatists of varying degrees of fanaticism, the place has just gotten dull. (Too, there are dark and unpleasant rumors of some impending revolution rising through the province.)

Across the continent, MAGGIE SINCLAIR is a struggling young actress in Hollywood, known mostly for minor roles in various beach pictures and other cinematic achievements. Her marriage to character actor WILLIAM SHATNER is surprisingly worthwhile for both, he's helped her get several good parts on Richard Matheson's Twilight Hour.

JACK KEROUAC smokes one of his many daily cigarettes as he reads D.C. Fontana's latest script. It's good, very good, and he only needs to make a few editing changes. He hadn't been the most popular of men when he'd first arrived at Desilu; Roddenberry had been popular, and many people involved in the show had joined him in his too-public feud and resignation from all things television.

Kerouac himself had had reservations, but nearly 20 years writing for radio and television has made him accustomed to the whims and vagaries of the studio system, and he's one of the most respected men there, and under Jack Kerouac, it's very probable that The Lieutenant will remain on NBC for years to come.

ADAM CLAYTON POWELL is something of an elder statesman of the civil rights movement; black moderates like HUEY NEWTON tend to follow his private statements of "violence only when necessary." In alliance with his post-war partner BENJAMIN O. DAVIS JR, Powell has helped make sure that blacks do have the training to defend themselves, publically encouraging many to join the military.

JAMES EARL CARTER left the Navy after the death of his father as per OTL, but found Georgian agriculture an uncomfortable place to be in the turbulent, racially radicalized 1950s. He went back into nuclear engineering, working for first the federal government, then the state of Georgia, as