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 manager of one of the big nuclear plants in Georgia. (The Macon facility.) He runs a clean, honest shop.

HANK ZIMM (formerly Robert Zimmerman) is certainly a unique face of country music. Unpopular with "old-line" fans, who prefer new young men like MERLE HAGGARD or HENRY WALLACE GUTHRIE, Zimm brings in the young with a mix of old-style bluegrass used as a means of social protest. No one who has heard his rendition of the traditional "O, Death" will ever quite forget it.

As he tosses back another whiskey, DENNIS THATCHER listens to the rain fall in Georgetown and wonders what on Earth possessed him to enlist. The Guianan insurgency has been deeply unpleasant for Great Britain; diplomatic pressure from India has prevented the use of the kind of warfare that kept Malaysia, Burma, and East Africa non-Communist and in the Empire (at least for a while.), and Venezuelan assistance to the rebels is just covert and deniable enough that the war hasn't spread there.

Back in the United Kingdom, junior Member of Parliment PEGGY THATCHER is one of the few Conservatives who opposes Prime Minister Powell's South American conflict. Some suggest it's sentimentality, but none quite have the nerve to say as much to her face. Still, she finds herself voting along with HAROLD WILSON's Labour Party more often than not, and it's not at all pleasant.

In Liverpool, PAUL MCCARTNEY is a bartender at the Quarry, a moderately prosperous nightclub. Sometimes he listens with envy to the musical stylings of JOHN LENNON and his ethnic Indian music as the older man tries to meld all the styles of the vast sub-continent, but years of pulling Lennon off his various girlfriends when he gets drunk, angry, and violent has soured McCartney on music.

STEPHEN HAWKING is a junior solictor in St. Albans, though he can't keep his nose out of science and science fiction publications. Despite his inclinations, science just isn't very profitable in the Great Britain of FaT, and the law helps keep body and soul together, so he stayed away from physics and the other sciences at Oxford under extreme pressure from his parents.

JOE ORTON is a moderately successful satirical playwright and author living in London, most famous for his brilliantly biting attack on the American mental health system with The Outsiders, produced to rave reviews in 1965. SEAN CONNERY plays Hamlet in Edinburgh to rave reviews, the thirty-something actor is one of the rising stars of British theater. Sometimes he goes to the movies to watch DAVID NIVEN as Agent John Gould, 007.

---

MAHATHIR MOHAMMED is President of Malaysia, doing his level best to keep his country free of the Communists while deeply disliking the ties to London, which are more of an overt yoke than any sort of purse string. Still, if Malaysia is a puppet state, at least they're not a Communist puppet state.

AUGUSTO PINOCHET is posted to Chile's long border with Argentina, where the two nations eye each other with fear and loathing. It's a hard life, the rigors of which have paradoxically kept his marriage to his wife, EVA DUARTE, in very stable shape. They've survived the winters of the high Andes, they can survive anything. But as the war begins in late summer, and cities rise into the sky to their backs and front, they wonder if they can quite survive this.

MILES DAVIS lost a leg during the German raid on New York City in the last days of World War II. Propped up first by crutches and now by an artificial limb, Davis has managed to stay a bandleader, though he's been forced to do much more solo, studio work than in OTL. Jazz doesn't sell that well to white audiences, but enough people don't mind listening to "Negro music" that it's not just purely racial music.

GENE VINCENT is one of the most successful composers in Hollywood. His work is usually limited to teen movies, especially beach or music-related pictures, but he doesn't feel at all limited; it's hard to be when you've got eleven cars.

JOHN BIRKS GILLESPIE's Afro-Cuban jazz is one of the most important new things in the field of jazz itself; popularizing the new style (with the help of the many immigrants from Prio's Cuba) has sparked a wave of imitators of bright young black men with a story to tell, including fresh-faced newcomer ISAAC HAYES. Meanwhile, LOUIS ARMSTRONG continues his insanely successful tour of Japan.

THEODORE GILMORE BILBO died of mouth cancer in 1947, just after winning re-election without any public question in 1946.

JERRY LEE LEWIS was arrested for corrupting a minor in 1955 and stabbed to death in prison a few weeks later.

ERNEST HEMINGWAY was killed by a stray bullet in the 1960 overthrow of Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista. President Carlos Prio was one of the very many occasional inhabitants of Cuba at the funeral, including DEAN MARTIN, RAUL CASTRO, and MEYER LANSKY.

WILLIAM WESTMORELAND took the blame for the various scandals and disasters surrounding the Luzon War and commanded the US military posts in first the Territory, then the state of Alaska until his early retirement in 1962.

---- LEOPOLD SEDAR SENGHOR was shot in the back of the head, next to the bodies of his wife and children, by a French paratrooper just outside Dakar in 1953. Senghor's death helped end one phase of the long colonial war in French West Africa and inaugurate another, his poet's soul just another death among many.

ROBERT MUGABE may be dead, but his spirit lives on in the heart of blacks trapped under the South African yoke. Responsible for the assasination of several police commanders and a few highly-placed Army officers before his summary execution outside Salisbury in 1959, every young black man wants to be just him, and his name is used to invoke countless suicide bombings, usually by JOSHUA NKOMO, who has risen to head the resistance mostly on the grounds of his former alliance with Mugabe.

IAN SMITH, former governor of South Africa's Rhodesia province, was assasinated in 1963 by a black nationalist in Mugabe's name. Subsquent reprisals killed several hundred people, very few of whom had anything to do with the assasination. Among the dead is author HELEN SUZMAN, who recieved a comparitively merciful death; a stray bullet during the raid on the house next door. Horrified, retired Rhodesian politician ROY WELENSKY left Africa altogether, emigrating to New Zealand in 1964.

GAAFAR AL-NIMEIRY is dictator of the People's Arab Republic of Sudan. Never a man to shy away from massive corruption, he has persuaded his CPSD allies into fighting most of the "War of Expulsion" in the south, driving as many of Sudan's black population as "is unnecessary" into the rest of sub-Saharan Africa. Not long ago, he acquired the virus that causes SPID.

MOISE TSHOMBE is a wealthy Belgian/Congolese businessman, and very active in Brussels for independence for the Belgian Congo. Most people consider him the most likely man to head the first government of the independant Republic in 1970, at least the first legal one. JAMES GAIUS WATT has left his native Wyoming to serve as a staffer under South Dakota Senator J.J. FOSS, he writes most of the aggressive former World War II flying ace's enviromental policy. Fellow Republican and fellow Wyoming native DICK CHENEY is a very junior Deputy Undersecretary of State under Secretary of State WILLIAM MILLER. Handsome GERALD FORD was a successful male model and minor actor in the late 1940s and early 1950s before moving into politics; he's currently attorney general for the state of Michigan.

ELDRIDGE CLEAVER's dark, brilliant "Souls Aflame" is the book for young black militia and activists to read, especially the men. Written from San Quentin in 1957-62, the book lays out the oppressed life of a young black man, and the joys of striking back against the system and the white race in general. Cleaver isn't there to see it, though; the turbulence of the era spread to prisons, and in 1962 he was caught in the yard away from his allies and stabbed to death.

HUEY NEWTON is the face of the "New Activist", a tough, aggressive brawler on one hand and an articulate, skilled speaker on the other. He practices law in Washington, D.C., and is rumored (accurately) to have killed a policeman during the brief surge of violence in the city in 1962. For the most part, he tries to keep violence to a minimum, especially violence that can be personally attributed to him, and does regret the blood on his hands.

CHUCK BERRY dominates the jazz-folk scene, an interesting marriage of jazz and old-style bluegrass music. J-F is definitely on the fringe of modern music, but it's provided a tidy living for the Detriot musician, enough to make him a patriarch in the Motor City.

Fresh-faced and with his first hit under his belt, RILEY KING was whisked from Memphis to New York to perform "3 O'Clock Blues" at the New Apollo Theater in 1951, just in time to get swept into the Barrio Riots and be stabbed to death.

WALT DISNEY's health is declining, and he will die before the year is out. Still, Disney has lived long enough to open a theme park to please the children of the world and make himself immortally famous. Disneyland, located in the coastal town of Long Beach, California, promises to be a truly magical place to be.

ROBERT DOLE was Kansas' junior Senator in 1965, when President Barry Goldwater appointed him Secretary of Agriculture. Dole is a good man and a competent administrator, though he feels deeply overshadowed by his wife, NANCY LANDON DOLE, the daughter of the former Presidential candidate and the long-serving, popular governor of Kansas.

----

KWAME NKRUMAH, naturally paranoid after being surrounded by French West Africa for decades, stayed in Ghana at several key junctures, foiling many coup attemps, before finally being arrested, deposed, and exiled to Ethiopia in 1964. His successor is nearly as clever, but far less competent.

MUAMMAR AL-QADDAFI is currently taking a training course at the Egyptian military academy, where he is truly fascinated by the life of his hero, GAMAL NASSER. Nasser's life story really speaks to him, and he dreams sometimes of returning home and making King Idris his pawn, instead of the other way around.

HAILE SELASSIE is playing an increasingly reluctant role as host to Kwame Nkrumah and Idi Amin, the former leaders of Ghana and the East African Federation, respectively. They're mostly useful as a lesson of what not to do, a lesson he has learned (at least he hopes) very well by now. Ethiopia's economy is doing pretty well, actually, thanks to a beneficial trade treaty with Canada, and the opening of Canada's first and only extra-national military base on the Red Sea.

---- YURI ANDROPOV, a close comrade and friend of General Secretary Suslov, is an efficient and moderately reforming Director of the KGB. With the full backing of his boss, Andropov has cleaned up Soviet intelligence, removing incompetent and corrupt agents from important positions, and making sure particularly brutal agents are either put in places where brutality is needed or quietly imprisoned.

MIKHAIL GORBACHEV is Mayor of Stavropol, his hometown between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, a rising star in the Communist Party of southeastern Russia. BORIS YELTSIN is a very successful civil engineer in Sapporo, one of the Soviet Union's many representatives in their client state of North Japan. After several unpleasant brushes with the censor in Lazar Kaganovich's time, BORIS PASTERNAK was allowed to leave the Soviet Union in 1962. He lives in the small Russian-American community in Minnesota, enjoying the winters and working on an epic to fit his new land.

ALEXANDER DUBCHEK was taken prisoner by Soviet troops in the last days of the summer uprisings of 1954. He spent five years in Kaganovich's gulags, returning to Prague a broken man in 1959. He died of a combination of alcoholism and lung cancer in 1962, a forgotten, despised man. --- Life is, to say the least, interesting for the long-time autocrat of Malawi, HASTING KAMUZU BANDU, as he walks a very careful balancing act between South Africa on one hand and Obote's East African Federation on the other. He's not a stupid man, though, and knows he'll eventually fall off that tightrope...so he quietly encourages pro-EAF movements in Malawi while making plans to either die in office or flee with a portion of the national treasury.

JEAN-BEDEL BOKASSA is commander of all French forces stationed in Corsica. With no interest in returning to his homeland after it was thoroughly trashed and depopulated during the failed war for independence, he is instead frying different fish; reporting to Paris that the Corsican rebels are quiet except for assasinations, he has at the same time quietly contacted them, ensuring they knock off officers and civilian government officials not loyal to him or the rebellion. In that order. Meanwhile, he blames the deaths of important rebel leaders on uncontrolled elements of the police.

FELIX HOUPHOUET-BOIGNY is Mayor of Abidjan, one of the highest-ranking Africans in the French colonial government of West Africa. He did strongly consider joining the rebels during the war for independance, but decided life and staying in a position of power was more important than some murky goal of freedom. Things haven't gone so well for the Mayor, resistance against the "quisling" has begun a cycle of violence that may never really end, and after a hospital he built was blown up, he has stopped building them altogether. He spends most of his time counting his money, dreaming of what might have been.

KENNETH KAUDA is currently leading a South African Special Forces unit in a merry chase near the border of the Belgian Congo. With a virtually all-black, well-armed population to hide in and recruit from, Kauda is the popular leader of most of the former Northern Rhodesia, the South Africans control only the ground they stand on. The war is long, and the war is bloody.

---- HELMUT KOHL is the highest-ranking non-Venezuelan in the government of that nation, serving in the high-profile post of Minister for Industry. Sometimes he misses home, but grey, decaying Palatinate just isn't for the young men of his generation. Venezuela, along with a variety of other countries, is where the new hope is for a generation of young Germans.

WERNER HEISENBERG, the grey eminence of Venezuelan nuclear physics, has returned to Germany, heading the Westphalian nuclear program. Work is slow, but promising, limited mostly by the small budget of the German state. JOSEPH MOBUTU is de facto ruler of a remote area of the Belgian Congo, the area roughly two hundred miles around the town of Isirio. Grown rich off the trade and troops slipping between French Africa, Red Sudan, and the East African Federation, Mobutu is the closest thing the Belgian Congo has to a leader.

GAMAL ABDEL NASSER is the driving force behind the Jerusalem League, as well as the de facto ruler of Egypt. With a combination of bully and bluster, craftsmanship and diplomacy, he has kept a coalition as diverse as Iraq and Saudi Arabia, Lebanon and Egypt, unified behind a common goal of neutrality in general and anti-Communisn in specific. He is the proud father of the great "Nasser Dam" along the Nile, and the uncle of several similiar (if smaller) projects in Iraq.

He is godfather to the children of HOSNI MUBARAK, commander of Egypt's part of the Jerusalem League's nuclear program, located in the remote western desert of the nation, fifty miles south of Siwa, and a long-time friend of ANWAR SADAT, commander of Egypt's armed forces.

YASSIR ARAFAT is a politician in Jordan; by carefully orchestrating the bloody political demises of his opponents in internecine conflicts, he has risen to Deputy Minister of State, and with the Minister himself elderly and ill, Arafat is one of the most powerful men in Jordan.

MOSHE DAYAN's long and merry career continues apace, hiding out in the truncated Jewish communities in Jordanian Palestine, slipping back and forth out of the country; to the United States or British Cyprus when things get too hot to hold him in the Holy Land. The length of the on-again, off-again insurrections have seriously radicalized the already radicalized "Liberation Army of Palestine", and the man who began his career by assasinating Herman Goering is now responsibile for men driving trucks loaded with explosives into crowded stores. Only dire threats of sanctions or worse from the United States has kept the Jerusalem League's government from fixing the "Jewish problem", fixing it good.

INDIRA GANDHI is a member of the seventeen-person Council of State that governs India, one of the relatively few civilians and the only woman. Recognizing the threat posed by the overtly expansionist governments of the Soviet Union and China was equaled only by the threat of a military coup if Something Wasn't Done, India's civilian government quietly dissolved itself in 1955.

India is a unitary state, with at least an attempt at no more provincial boundaries than France does at this point. India's Sikhs, Muslims, Christians and other minorities are about as happy about this as one might expect, but that's what the army and secret police are for. India is poorer than OTL, but with a substantially larger military, especially ground troops.

----

ROCKY MARCIANO retired from boxing in 1956, the only undefeated world heavyweight champion in the history of the sport. He still makes public appearances as a sportscaster for ABC, though it's more a sinecure than anything else. His last public appearance was announcing the 1962 bout between "SUGAR RAY" ROBINSON and JOE FRAZIER, when Robinson took Frazier in four rounds. JOE LOUIS wasn't there, having died in 1955, his health damaged beyond repair by his years as a German POW in World War II.

ROY COHN is out of office, thoroughly enjoying the way his successors at the FBI failed to do much about the Stonewall Riots. Cohn makes occasional public speechs, quietly criticizing the Goldwater administration and its policies without overtly saying anything of the kind. He is, perhaps surprisingly, not a member of the pretty overtly anti-Semitic John Birch Society.

KATHARINE GRAHAM's Washington Post is losing more readers every year, she has nobly stuck to her guns on a variety of issues, but with much traditional liberalism discredited by both parties and with a flawlessly honest President (whatever his other problems) in the White House, there's little for them to do. A sharp businesswoman, she's already quietly accumulating funds for an investment to keep the Post afloat; a variety of inexpensive television stations, and the Washington Senators...

ROBERT MCNAMARA is one of the most successful Chief Executive Officers in the history of General Motors, and one of the wealthiest men in America. His donation to the University of Michigan has got him one of the largest academic buildings in America, all of it named after him.

18 year-old JIM HENSON was killed by a sniper's bullet two days before the final Huk surrender at the end of the Luzon War in 1954.

MARLON BRANDO's lead role in Otto Preminger's Heart of Darkness , the story of an American officer hunting an rogue Japanese agent (Laurence Oliver) who set himself up as a petty king in the heart of Taiwan after the Second World War, helped catapault him to even greater fame. He's currently starring in Broadway's revival of "Titus Andronicus."

Always an iconoclast, ABBIE HOFFMAN has formed for himself a Jewish activist group in Chicago, most of them veteran street brawlers of the troubles of the last decade or so. Shockingly to their conservative parents, they are openly Stalinist, and (less shockingly) equally hostile to groups of any makeup that don't share their ideological outlook on life.

CARL SAGAN is one of the least popular scientists working at the Dactyl project in Nevada. Without his marriage to ANN DRUYAN, Sagan's personality quirks have never been moderated, and while he is certainly one of the most brilliant scientists working on America's space program, he's never been promoted and probably never will be.

HENRY KISSINGER is Barry Goldwater's Ambassador to the Court of St. James, and one of the very few men who can out-talk Prime Minister Enoch Powell. Perhaps fortunately, there is very little the two have to say to one another, now that the furor over the alliance with Venezuela has passed.

----

SERETSE KHAMA, President of Botswana, runs the most militarized state in southern Africa. Completely surrounded by the overtly racist South African empire, cut off from much world trade, Khama's government depends on substantial military aid from Great Britain and the knowledge that civil war might bring...peacekeepers.

HISSENE HIBRE is one of the more successful guerilla (bandit, really) leaders in French Equatorial Africa, robbing, killing, and looting anyone with ties to the French government and money, or sometimes just money. Well, mostly money.

PATRICE LUMUMBA is dead in 1962, one of the many casualties of the long-running wars in the Belgian Congo. With most of the native intelligentsia killed off or fled, the Belgian government is only now making plans to finally give their colony independance in 1970, now that most of the potential (anti-Belgian) leadership is dead.

ALBERT LUTHULI was hanged for sedition on Robbins Island in 1959. The isolated prison is a useful place for the South African government to hold and then execute black opponents of the central government. Not all of them make it that far; NELSON MANDELA was shot to death in a Pietersburg alley in 1963, allegedly while attempting to escape.

To the north, JOE SLOVO is slipping across the border to the East African Federation. There's a new shipment of munitions coming in, and he needs to ferry back home and to men and women who can make very good use of it indeed. ZULFIKAR ALI BHUTTO was an active figure in the political opposition to Pakistan's military government before his execution in 1958. Wedged between a hostile, militaristic India on one hand and a hostile, Communist Iran, Pakistan's government started out as authoritarian and went downhill from there, especially after the assasination of AYUB KHAN in 1954. By 1966, the only thing stable in Pakistan is the brutality and paranoia of the ever-changing row of generals and colonels running the show. Perhaps fortunately for that unhappy region, East Pakistan and its governor MUJIBUR RAHMAN have been relatively free to go their own way with the Islamabad government distracted, such as it is.

URHO KEKKONEN was killed by a Soviet B-19 raid in Karelia in 1945, not long before Finland and the USSR made a seperate peace in the earliest part of the year. Finland never has had a President of the Nordic League, and tends to follow the lead of the rest of Scandanavia in major foriegn policy matters, especially the defense of Greenland.

FERDINARD MARCOS died in prison in 1961, convicted of truly massive amounts of graft while serving as a supply officer in the Luzon War against the Huk in the early 1950s. His former wife Imelda runs, of course, a shoe shop in Manila.

SUHARTO and SUKARNO are both among the many, many dead, both prominent and minor, commonr and general, killed in the decades of bloody fighting in the former Dutch East Indies; the former during Java's last attempt to retake Bali in 1952, the latter during a major purge of the Jakarta government in 1958.

---- ALLEN GINSBERG has moved out into his own for the very first time, and he's happy. Years of working writing pamphlets and propaganda (his recruitment posters for rebuilding the Statue of Liberty are still classics) for the federal government came to a messy end a few years ago when he dared publish a volume of poetry criticizing his superiors and the government in general. With Greenwich Village riot-torn, he's settled in Washington, finding haunts like his old ones, working on his poetry. Now he's finally free to Roar ...

RALPH NADER is a professor of political science at Princeton. His writings and lectures on the rise of corporate power have struck a chord, given the powerful, mostly oversight-free, quasi-monopolistic corporate culture that dominates much of American economic life. Unfortunately, (at least from his perspective) that same dominance means it will be a very long time before anyone who matters will listen. At least he has his young people.

RAY CHARLES' fourth piano sonata is being performed to rave reviews at Carniege Hall; the blind late-30s pianist has been called, accurately, one of the best classical pianists and composers in of the late 20th century. No one who's heard him will ever quite forget.

ALBERT GORE SR. is a retired United States Senator. Southern moderates haven't fared well in the turbulent climate of the last few years; and Gore's liberalism has made him something of a fossil, along with former Alabama Senator JIM FOLSOM and Louisiana Governor EARL LONG. Southern politics is dominated by such stalwart young men as ASA CARTER and HERMAN TALMADGE, with the occasional careful moderate like GLEN CAMPBELL.

ERSKINE CALDWELL won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1960, just defeating fellow Southerner WILLIAM FAULKNER. He is one of the titans of Southern literature, though he is losing readers in the last few years as Southern public schools shift to more pro-South writers, like Senator Asa Carter.

TRUMAN CAPOTE is a freaky, freaky little man. He has moved into politics recently, leading one of the public opinion battles against the Federal Mental Health Association.

Dr. MARY MCLEOD BETHUNE died a frustrated, if successful doctor and civil rights leader in 1954. RALPH BUNCHE, President of Howard University, helped found a scholarship in her memory that has sent dozens of young black women through medical school. Englishman PETER EDWARD BAKER is one of the more successful racing cyclists in the last few years, with a bronze medal at Cairo in 1960 and a silver at Sydney in 1964, and one non-Olympic championship in 1962. Something of a teen hearthrob, he's a good friend of musical superstar CLIFF RICHARDS.

JOHN LEE HOOKER is starring in a revival of the classic Broadway musical: "Planet of the Apes." Hooker is a powerful actor and singer, though some say he is occasionally surpassed by his understudy, JAMES EARL JONES.

IKE TURNER combines musical talent with ready fists; the R&B band leader is also one of the most notorious street brawlers of St. Louis riots of the last few years. He's never been more than a regional talent in either, though, especially with his saxophone player's recent divorce from the former ANNA MAE BULLOCK.

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The great southpaw pitcher WARREN SPAHN is a year retired, and disappointed at the performance of his beloved Boston Braves in 1966. Always a struggling team, they wound up in the cellar in 1966 as WILLIE MAYS' Cleveland Indians and MICKEY MANTLE's New York Yankees went to the World Series; Mantle's underdog Bronx Bombers won the series 4-3, but Mays retained his home run record. (He owns many, no one who saw will ever forget his close, close war with STAN MUSIAL to break Babe's Ruth's record in 1963.)

(Spahn, who has moved somewhat into management, will be crucial in persuading reluctant owners in the American League to admit Havana's Azucareros and Venezuela's Navigators, beginning in the 1967 season. The World Series may be more than just a name someday, especially with the growth of independant Japanese baseball...)

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E. AARON PRESLEY has made a good life for himself in Southern California with his wife Elizabeth, nee Montgomery. Turning the profits from his career as a B-movie actor and a few minor song hits into business, Presley owns a profitable regional chain of donut shops. He's often heard to muse about if he'd stayed in partnership with his friend EDWARD D. WOOD, a darling of the less clever segment of the student left at Berkley.

"I could have stayed with Ed. I could have been King. But in my own way, I am King. King Donut."

GRACE MURRAY HOPPER retired from the US Navy in 1961 after repeated efforts to enhance the Navy's funding for computers failed. She remains one of the most dedicated workers in the (very) infant field of computers, which is at a level akin to OTL's 1960 and getting better only very slowly.

After his father died on Omaha Beach in 1943 and his mother drank himself to death, GARY GYGAX was passed around from foster home to foster home before winding up with a family of Deepwater Baptists in downstate Illinois. By 1966, he runs a small shop in Cairo catering to chess aficionados, selling speciality boards and rule books. In his spare time, he works on something very special of his own creation: "Angels and Crusaders."

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Vaguely disappointed at no particular enemies left to fight, CURTIS LEMAY retired in 1964 after the nation finally "elected the right kind of man." He lives in upstate New York, where he is an occasional guest speaker at West Point. LeMay is a close friend of South Dakota Senator Foss, who he commanded during World War II.

G. GORDON LIDDY is a low-level aide in the Department of Defense. While he seriously freaks out his coworkers, his superiors like him a lot; he's a man who knows what he has to do for the Department and for America, and he does it.

EARL WARREN is a retired beloved former Governor, Senator, and Attorney General of the United States. Several scholarships at various California universities already bear his name, and multiple new aw schools have asked his permission to name themselves after him.

WILLIAM BRENNAN is Governor of New Jersey. A strong candidate for the 1964 nomination, people are already talking about running the articulate, liberal former judge for the Democratic nomination again in 1968, his popularity second (if that) only to Pennsylvania Governor JIM JONES.

WARREN BURGER is Barry Goldwater's latest appointment to the Supreme Court of ESTES KEFAUVER. The conservative D.C. judge and Minnesota native has a fair chance of taking the Chief Justice's position when and if Kefauver ever gets around to retiring.

WILLIAM REHNQUIST is a genial, likeable Deputy Attorney General, and a close friend of the Goldwater family. Republican Party insiders say he may well be Goldwater's Attorney General if the President does run for a second term in 1968.

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JOE NAMATH is one of the most beloved men in America in the summer of 1966 when he wins America's very first World Cup in a 2-0 sweep over the Palatinate's stalwart young fighters. American "football" is, for better or for worse, here to stay, at home and abroad.

DON ADAMS is one of the Federal Bureau of Investigation's top agents, with a drawer full of commendations and newspaper articles in his desk in Buffalo. (Adams is SAC at the Buffalo office.) Occasionally, he and his Canadian opposite number across the border, LESLIE NIELSEN, visit. Nielsen is nostalgic for the region, where he once did summer stock with Lieutenant star JAMES DOOHAN.

ROCK HUDSON is elected Governor of California in 1966 on a stout family values and law and order platform. As a favor to an old friend, he makes sure there's a cushy job in place for former Congressman and gubernatorial candidate RONALD REAGAN, and is very glad that former state Attorney General CHARLES MANSON moved safely into the federal service.

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Horror strikes Chile on December 2, 1966 when war begins. Border disputes between the People's Republic of Argentina and the authoritarian government of Chile pretty much were a ruse; Ernesto Guevara has his trained People's Army, and he has his independant nuclear arsenal.

No one ever does prove that it was, in fact, a PLA pilot who delivered a 50 kiloton blast to Santiago on the early hours of the 2nd, even as the Argentine military rolled or charged across the border, killing most of the city's several million denizens in a few hours. (Lin Biao's cards are close to his chest today, China will aid Argentina, but not as publically as war.)

Lots of people in the Americas and the move quickly, moblizing and counter-mobilizing, but Barry Goldwater moves the quickest of all, or at least the most decisively. Diverting two aircraft carriers to the South Atlantic and evacuating the embassy, he orders the Guevara government to "withdraw immediately and totally from all your unlawfully seized territory, demolish your nuclear arsenal, and submit to American occupation and the trial of your leaders." Barry Goldwater is a tolerant man, but expansionist Reds in his hemisphere are bad news.

On December 5, Valapriso becomes a 36 kiloton hell, centered around the city's harbor, and Goldwater acts yet again. Argentina has one day to surrender their armies, and Ernesto Guevara himself, before "they shall face a rain of destruction from the sky." Guevara, a canny man, slips out of Buenos Aires as the people cheer his name. It's a great pity, he did love the city and its people...but the World Revolution is a stern mistress.

With Argentine armies slowly, bloodily driving back the fanatically resisting Chilean Army (who know exactly the fate that awaits them), the Argentine Navy heading for the carrier groups of U.S.S. PERRY and U.S.S. DEWEY, and Dr. Guevara still on the loose, Barry Goldwater, to his horror, has no other choice but to protect South America the only way he really can.

On December 8, 1966, Colonel ROBERT DORNAN, orbiting high, high above Argentina, follows Presidential orders and inaugurates the "Space Nuclear Age" when he happily pushes a button aboard his Dactyl bomber and drops a 500 kiloton bomb from space on downtown Buenos Aires.

For All Time Pt. 101

January-March 1967

-As American airstrikes from the two carrier groups off Mar Del Plata destroy several apparant Argentine munitions plants, the fallout from the destruction of Buenos Aires spreads far beyond the mere cloud of dust and gas and radiation that falls all along the mouth of the Rio Plata.

President Barry Goldwater is one of the millions of people who watch the television broadcasts from shattered Buenos Aires; Guevara's decision to get a lot of the state-owned media out of the city just before the big day has paid off big. It is the first televised nuclear blast; and though the melted remains of Santiago and Valapriso fight with Buenos Aires for ratings...well, hell, you expect that from Communists. Americans did this.

There will be no more civilian bombings in the Goldwater administration, nuclear or otherwise. If innocent people are hurt in attacks on military targets, well, that's just too bad, but there will be no more Buenos Aires', at least in his administration.

Beyond that, of course, there's the problem of the military. The occupation of Argentina, the reconstruction of Argentina and Chile (where the Argentine army's fervor seems quite unabated), and the elimination of the Communist threat in South America is going to take more men than the United States' relatively small Army and Marine Corps, and Goldwater (a volunteer veteran of World War II) is thoroughly opposed to the draft.

Cooperation with Venezuela is possible, and negotiations are already underway between Ambassador Mackall and the Delgado government; but there will be problems with that; Venezuela's neighbors already view her as imperialist and a tool of the Americans, and this just won't help matters. The key is Brazil, and Goldwater's rather reluctant promise to help fund their war effort gets the government of Emílio Garrastazú Médici on their side.

Their various moblizations will take a while, though, (too, Venezuela will need American sealift to actually get their troops to Argentina, and Medici is, not unreasonably, worried about a Communist uprising against his own government.) and so it will be Americans (specifically the 101st Airborne, the only significant airborne unit in the Army) who are the first in Argentina, on January 7, 1967.

-Most of South and Central America's Communist parties go, well, nuts. Kaganovich-Suslov era cutbacks have made the Communist parties of most developing countries quite strongly Maoist, and those parties are quite understandably appalled at the attack on their ideological comrade-in-arms. (Chile was, of course, necessary.) Ernesto Guevara's very public radio and television broadcasts from the region around Salta don't help matters much.

A few, a valient few, abjure the Argentines; sure, imperialism is regrettable and awful, especially when it involves killing hundreds of thousands of people, and Yankee go home and all that...but there's nothing at all in Marx or Mao that talks about blowing your neighbors to Hell and gone.

Publically, the Liberation Party of Mexico is one of these stalwart few. (the others most prominent are, rather unsurprisingly, the various leftist parties in Chile.) Privately...granted, the PRI isn't as brutal as the various South American dictators, but they all saw what Medici did to his Communists when they celebrated publically. Better to wait for it.

-In Europe, no one's that interested; Enoch Powell strongly considers offering assistance to the United States; the Falklands are right there, after all, but in the end refuses. If the Americans are going to sit idly by while Great Britain fights her war in Guina (much less cozy up to the Venezuelans), well, they can fight their own war.

Maurice Challe is busy stamping out the last remnants of Provencal nationalists, and thus has no time for Americans and their little colonial engagements. The war isn't going that well for the central French government, they've thoroughly dealt with the Provencalists and the Norman rebels, but the Basques are proving a difficult nut to crack for both themselves and their Spanish ally.

As for Brittany, Alsace, and the Saar, well, the less said the better. Fortunately, they have General Bokassa in Corsica to keep things under wraps there. And, after all, he is a black African, and what's the risk of a foriegner associated with Corsica?

For All Time Pt. 102

April-August 1967

-Alexander Haig, supreme commander of the American occupation forces, arrives in La Plata (the nearest major city to Buenos Aires) on April 2, 1967, and soon finds himself with a combat command. Much of Argentina's farmers are armed, nationalist, and eager for revenge against the people who slew a whole city. (Many aren't, of course, but Guevara swung more people to his side in a day than he did through his whole rule in power.)

As the Americans under Haig move into their primary occupation zone south and west of the Parana, a variety of rather forgotten campaigns begin; the Brazilian "peace-keeping" occupation (at the quasi-request of the Montevideo government, affected badly by leftist riots and the Buenos Aires dust-cloud) of Uruguay, the naval/Marine "assistance" occupation of Chile under the overall command of Admiral John Sidney McCain Jr., and, of course, the infamous Treaty of Managua. (though that won't take effect for a while.)

-As Mexico's more vocal and leftist students (the ones that rallied in support of their Argentinian friends) are thoroughly and rather violently crushed by the duo of President Antonio Ortiz Mena and his Security Minister Gustavo Diaz Ordaz, the two find themselves growing close indeed. Ortiz had favored naming his Foriegn Minister as his successor, but Diaz now seems a far better candidate.

The US doesn't care that much; Mexican-American relations are important to both Goldwater and Ortiz, and they're both in favor of taking care of Communists, especially ones rioting against the United States. Meanwhile, the surviving students head elsewhere, mostly south, Guerreo and Oaxaca, Chiapas and the Yucatan, provinces that most people in North America, much less the Mexican or American governments (even Ambassador Maurer) just don't think about, except as a source of peasants. It's just after the fifth of May, somewhere in Chiapas, when Cesar and Fernando Yanez meet *Emiliano Pena.

-The Soviet Union is not a particularly friendly nation to non-Russians. Outright discrimination is, of course, banned, but the vast majority of high officials in the Party, the government, and military are Russians, and a majority of the remainder are at least Slavs.

Nikolai Viktorovich Podgorny is one of the second; the former engineer recieved his post as Science Minister to satisfy the "Ukrainian faction" of Ukrainian Party head Leonid Brezhnev and industry head Kosygin. In the months since the space-borne American attack on Buenos Aires, though, Podgorny has turned a previously minor post into a tower of Soviet efficiency.

General Secretary Suslov's attention is on more theoretical matters; directing Soviet troops in the field in the People's Republic of Sudan, regulating the media and literature, and enhancing Soviet industry. Still, Podgorny's plan appeals to him; where the capitalist Americans can only build orbital bombers, a temporary presence in space to match a temporary ideology.

When the Soviet Union is truly ready to move into space (probably around 1970), they will stay there, and they'll have the power to strike from space just as well as the Americans, but all the time, and the irony is, they'll be using technology mostly discarded in the past thirty years.

-As the summer goes on, General Jean-Bedel Bokassa (along with a coterie of his most prized officers) is transferred to Alsace; it is one of the most rebellious regions of France, and Maurice Challe wants the man who kept Corsica in the government's hands to fight in Metropolitan France.

Within a few weeks of his arrival in war-torn Strasbourg, a variety of things happen in very short order. Bokassa marries his long-time paramour Josephine, a minor Bonaparte cousin, and adopts her son as his own. And Corsica rebels, within the space of a single day (August 3, 1967), high-ranking officers in the police and garrison are assasinated, the civilian governer declares independance, and suddenly French power on the island is on the run.

As the bodies of Alsatian rebels are stacked like cordwood, people throughout France begin speaking Bokassa's name, and it's not all together unpositive...

For All Time Pt. 103

September-December 1967

-Far to the north of most of the world, in frozen, isolated Kane Basin, tensions are growing. Both Canada and the Nordic Council have been exerting their muscles in the Third World, seeking to form a non-aligned bloc of nations, relatively neutral in the various struggles between China and the CPSD, the US and Western Europe. Both have their friends in East Africa; Canada's alliance with Ethiopia drove Somalia into the arms of the northerners by the end of 1966.

(Tiny Djibouti's membership in the Jerusalem League went almost unnoticed.)

Only in the north, though, do the two powers come close to bordering; along the long coastline of Danish Greenland and Canada's Northwest Territories, seperated by the Davis Strait, Baffin Bay, and sundry other bodies of water home mostly to bergs and pack ice and hardy sea life, and it is here that the drama plays out.

Almost daily, Canadians slip across the narrow, ice-choked water to spy on the Danish/Nordic installations in Inglefield Land, while Scandanavian teams do the same to the Canadian base at Alert. Casualties are relatively high in the frozen waters and incredible isolation, causes vary from bullets of attentive guards to a near-instant death after falling in the sea, to even an alleged polar bear attack. For Joseph Smallwood and the Nordic Council, it's not a very good situation, especially for Smallwood; Canada's economy continues to struggle, and the partial collapse of the Progressive Conservatives hasn't actually added much to Liberal power; the ex-followers of Dalton Camp have joined the party of their coalition partners. The Social Credit Party.

-Reluctantly and quietly, President Goldwater authorizes lowering the recruitment standards for US Army officers; combat in Argentina is proving to be a disturbing experience, with surprisingly high casualties all around. Guevara's urban power base, of course, is still a problem, and not a night goes by in American city barracks where some local doesn't make a try for the place(s).

In the countryside, though, things are difficult, there's nothing in particular to differentiate a convoy of pickup trucks driven by Argentine farmers and carrying their harvest and a convoy carrying Argentine farmers and a variety of small and medium arms, from rifles to machine guns to grenades, and enough mistakes have been made either way to cost a lot of lives.

There's an end to the road in sight, a new government centered around the former minister of health, it's just the end is so very, very far away in the hot Southern Hemisphere summer of 1967. Meanwhile, Venezuela occupies El Salvador and her slice of Argentina; in the south, down to Tierra del Fuego.

-On September 2, 1967, Brazil detonates an atomic bomb at a facility deep within the Amazon jungle. Now there are five American nations with nuclear weapons, three of them occupying a fifth, along with sundry other areas in Latin America. To combat anti-imperialist (and possible Communist) sentiment in the rest of the continent, the US calls a conference in Havana. If the smaller nations object to the behavior of the larger ones, well, they'll just get them in on the action. Representatives from all over the continent come, even Joseph Smallwood gets in on the action.

The United Peacekeeping Council that emerges at the end of December is a two-assemblied body; all member nations are in the General Council with the five nuclear powers, Argentina (the reconstruction government), Brazil, Canada, Venezuela, and the United States in the Security Council. Perhaps not unexpectedly, the Security Council has most of the power, controlling budgets and the like. The primary power of the General Council is to call for "peacekeeping occupation" of member nations suffering from revolts and such.

-In Dusseldorf, Westphalia, on November 19, 1967, President Reinhard Gehlen keels over dead at his desk sometime after sunset. Paranoid, with an ever-changing schedule, Gehlen was such an enigma to even his own inner circle that no one finds him missing until the next morning.

In the subsequent dustup, several high-ranking officials die, several dozen find themselves in various prisons, and a hundred or so board flights to a nice safe place, most Prio's neutral Cuba, some to Venezuela. When the month or so of struggle and feuding is up, Westphalia has a new President, the former commander of the Essen garrison, and he has a remarkable proposal for the Prime Minister of the Palatinate. (and, by extension, the members of the United Peacekeeping Council.)

The free German people have been seperated for far too long, and it's time they came together in this time of European crisis. A week after President-Colonel Paul Stütze makes that particular invitation, Westphalia detonates her first atomic bomb on December 2, 1967.

For All Time Pt. 104

January-April 1968

-As the body count of the French Civil War approaches one million, Maurice Challe is faced with a disintegrating state. There have been successes for the central government, many of them, but there have been just as many outright defeats, and a sound defeat always has more of an impact than a blood-soaked victory.

Alsace, Provence, Languedoc and Normandy are firmly under the Parisian thumb, nationalism there has been crushed by the expedient of public executions of rebel leaders, rebel soldiers, rebel sympathizers, and all their families, death tolls are high and tens of thousands of troops died, but they were successful, by God. The Basque country is a little more difficult, but Spanish assistance has mostly done for the Basques as well.

Things are more difficult in Gascony and Savoy; central government troops occupy most of the region, but outright fighting is still actually going on, and it's not going well. (Especially in Savoy, where the Swiss are making millions as arms dealers, trading German arms for Savoy gold, and where hundreds of Italian "advisors" slip across the border from the Social Republic of Italy.)

In Brittany, the Saar, and Corsica, casualties are surprisingly low, but that's mostly because there aren't any Loyalist troops in any of the tree, outside of those living a fugitive or bandit existence. The provisional governments, located for the moment at Brest (because that's where supplies were arriving from the west), Saarbrucken, and Ajaccio, respectively, are already printing their own currency, much less manning their own army and navy. It will take a miracle to win them back.

Most people in France look to one man in particular for that, the newly-appointed Defense Minister, Jean-Bedel Bokassa. (Maurice Challe's stock remains highest in Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia; the pied noirs and retired veterans there have long memories.)

-Complicating matters in the Saar are events a few miles to the east; hundreds of dignitaries from the governments of Westphalia, the Palatinate, and points elsewhere, especially the US, are present in Aachen on March 1, 1968, when Westphalian President Paul Stutze and Palatinate Prime Minister Willy Brandt (a former refugee) sign the Treaty of German Federation.

Presented pretty openly as a first step to unification, the treaty is relatively honest about who's really in charge; most of the Palatinate's government will resign immediately and their replacements be appointed by the President of Westphalia, and while the two countries will keep seperate military and police forces, the Palatinatian forces will work "in cooperation" with Westphalia.

There's a fair bit of dissatisfaction in the Palatinate over such matters; but they're rather used to being the puppet of whoever's in charge by now. Besides, the Treaty is only supposed to last for a few years. (Privately, of course, Stutze is supplying arms to the Saar rebels, once the French war ends, all the German people outside of Communism will be freed.)

-Oddly enough, German reunification wasn't that much of an issue in the April elections in Great Britain; both Enoch Powell and Harold Wilson are uncomfortable at a dictatorship getting quite that much power, but both men have had enough dealings with France for it not to be that much of an issue. Too, both men like the idea of some stable, non-Communist government in Western continental Europe outside of Benelux.

No one despite the Prime Minister himself is really quite surprised when Labour wins a pretty fair-sized majority; Powell was elected on a tide of anti-Labour discontent, and the economic prosperity he promised has yet to materialize. Too, the man himself has a strong tendency to alienate certain key voting groups, such as England, Scotland, and Wales. (Many attribute the dawn of modern Scottish and Welsh nationalism to the Powell administration.)

The only real surprise, after Prime Minister Wilson takes office, is the subsequent leadership dispute in the Conservative Party; Powell's angry resignation has left a big hole open, and the Party has a lot of stout young bloods who want their own shot at greatness. To everyone's surprise, though, the Party turned to a son of the lower middle-class, Edward Heath. This'd show Wilson...

-Originally brought in as a mid-season replacement on ABC, a surprise hit of early 1968 is Star Wars, a surprisingly well-done science fiction television series by veteran television and movie writers Gene Roddenberry and Rod Serling. The show doesn't even star big television names, only Jimmy Stewart (clean and sober six years running) as Avon, the not-particularly-reformed criminal, is likely to be familiar to viewing audiences.

The show appeals to the young, in many ways because it's just so subversive. Roddenberry's vision of seven resistance fighters led by the reasonably noble Blake (Leonard Nimoy) campaigning against Servalan's (Chuck Heston) corrupt Federation was sold as an allegory about the French Resistance during World War II, but to a generation of young people raised on street violence and attempted alteration of society, it's a story that means much more than that.

(Making an occasional cameo is Edward D. Wood, with Jimmy Stewart's help he is making the long, slow trip out of the bottle, but it will be quite some time before he's ready to make a full-scale return to directing or acting.

For All Time Pt. 105

May-July 1968

-When it comes, it comes as a roar of jet engines. Maurice Challe has been thinking a lot about his job security; in the twenty-three years since the end of World War II, France has had three military dictators, and his two predecessors died violently. (Though Darlan was a suicide.) Half his army wants his job, the other half would probably like to join the rebels.

He has the sea; the French Navy has been loyal to the central government since Francois Darlan built them aircraft carriers, and just about every significant settler colony in the Empire...but unfortunately, he seems to have less and less of France every day. (The colonies are loyal for a variety of reasons; a lot of veterans were settled in Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia, and the army abroad is largely "Great French."

Maurice Challe isn't a particularly compassionate man publically, the several thousand dissidents executed during his nearly a decade in office could well attest to that. But he has a wife and children, and comparing them mentally to the survivors of, say, Rennes or Marseilles isn't a pretty picture. After months of preperation, suddenly the Presidential Palace is empty on the morning of May 3, and Maurice Challe is on a flight across the Mediterreanean.

The Fourth Republic is born on May 5, 1968, when a coterie of terrified mid-to-low level civil servants meet in Paris to write a new Constitution. (Most of their superiors are in Algiers.) By May 13, just about everyone is in open rebellion; Challe's government in Algiers is calling for France to reunite around his person to reconquer France, Jacques Massu in French West Africa is skeptical of that whole enterprise, and even little Tahiti has petitioned the CSO for help.

By the end of July, Maurice Challe is alive, well, and in charge of more French departments than most of his rivals. By the end of July, though, the Army of the Alsace has taken Paris, and Jean-Bedel Bokassa is "negotiating" the future of France.

-It's hard to say which issue is bigger in the 1968 American presidential campaign, the merrily spiralling inflation of the last few years, the ongoing war in Argentina, or civil rights. President Goldwater isn't running for a second term, but very few people are surprised at that; from "supporting homosexuality" to the war in Argentina, Goldwater has made himself deeply unpopular, despite the popularity of certain of his programs.

(He has proven successful in one major area; whatever your opinion of the various New Deals, it's a safe bet to say Barry Goldwater successfully dismantled them. With the Tennessee Valley Authority sold to private businesses, the Department of Energy's vast nuclear reactor network sold to the states, and the national road system turned over to state and local governments, the federal government has a great deal of cash on hand; the question is what to do with it.)

The Republicans, not unreasonably, follow the formula that won them their last election. (Goldwater may be personally unpopular, but the G.O.P. itself is doing just fine, thank you.) They select a Senator from a relatively small, Western state, a hero of World War II, a patriot if he is nothing else; Joseph Jacob Foss, former Governor and Senator from South Dakota. With the Democratic Party in big, key Texas divided, Foss opts to try to split them right down the middle, and takes former El Paso Mayor and Congressman Hal Warren as his running mate.

After another bitterly divided convention in Chicago (an increasingly familiar pattern to party regulars) the Democrats finally settle on a bi-coastal ticket, with California Senator Alan Cranston and New Jersey Governor William Brennan heading the top and bottom, respectively. (Most comtemporary observers conclude the convention spells an end to the political career of the Governor of Pennsylvania; Jim Jones waged a bitter fight for both the Presidential and Vice-Presidential nomination before storming off the convention floor in disgust. Storming out of the hall with his wife Barbara in tow, Jones, having already resigned his post in expectation of the nomination, returns to his native Indiana to ferment.)

For All Time Pt. 106

August-October 1968

-The final settlement of the "French Question" will last into the 21st century, but its broad strokes are settled through the last few days of August 1968. One thing is certain; the world-bestriding empire of France is dead. Those places not beset by colonial insurgencies are covered in "governments-in-exile" or outright independance factions; while France herself has lost far too many young men and women to think about reconquering them, even with nuclear weapons.

Of Metropolitian France; Brittany, the Saarland, and Corsica have their independance, assistance from a foriegn power or oceans have proved sufficient to overcome the population and industrial power of Francophone France, as it were. (In early September, the President of the Saar Republic agrees to merge with the Westphalia-Palatinate Federation in 1970, and all three agree to make their very own state at the same time. Representatives from all three powers meet in Dusseldorf under the watchful eye of the Westphalian government to begin writing a constitution.)

As for the relatively new states, only the fledgling Maghreb Federation recieves a significant number of refugees/immigrants from the motherland. Of the slightly less than forty million or so French, perhaps one million flee to the new North African state by the end of the year. (As this is half the existing pied noir population, the first challenge of the Challe government will be to keep the nation from starving. Only the empty agricultural land left over the expulsions of the 1940s and 1950s keeps the new nation from foundering on a rock of starvation, death rates are very high even so.)

Things are far less pleasant in French West Africa; facing poverty, revolts, famine, and other such problems, the French garrisons in towns from Dakar to Nouakchott, Niamey to Bamako, simply leave, departing en masse to join one of the new French governments, or else just departing. Governed directly from France, with as little local self-government as possible, the former colony explodes into war like no other.

(In the Pacific, Tahiti and her associated islands become the very first "security zones" of the Collective Security Organization; with occupation by CSO troops, mostly Peruvians and Ecuadorians, and beneficial trade packages, it's even better than the Australian occupation of New Caledonia, and the CSO is far less openly imperialist than the National Party government. Another French possession, the former French Guinia, is the CSO's newest member in October.)

Of France's former colonies, only French Equatorial Africa and, oddly enough, Madagascar, remain loyal to Paris. FEA is the birthplace of the new French head of state, and a massive investment in the colony has kept it in Parisian hands. Madagascar is rather loosely loyal, and there is a significant partisan movement in the interior, but France's vast naval complex on the Indian Ocean island will keep most of it in French hands, at least for the moment.

In France herself, General Jean-Bedel Bokassa is crowned Emperor Jean-Bedel I. There is no small resistance to this in France, a black African with Bokassa's reputation for brutality has more enemies than friends, but there are many ways to simply leave France, whether to Brittany, Corsica, or the Maghreb. For those who stay and and won't stay quiet, Bokassa begins building a large facility in northern Equatorial Africa, one of the largest and most secret prisons in the western world.

-The 1968 Wellington Olympics were relatively undistinguished by sports standards; very few records were broken, very few great athletes performed at their best, and the same American/Soviet/Western European complex won the same number of medals they always have.

In political matters, however, they were rather noticeable indeed; two Scottish and one Welsh gold medal winners took the occasion to openly call for their respective national independence, black American medalists raised their fists in a black power salute, and France's athletic team just opted to settle in the Antipodean state.

-In Korea, Kim Il-Song takes his last tour of the Panmunjonn Complex. Decades of work are getting very near to fruition; they've got it up to full-strength now. Even dictators have humanity, though, and he spends most of the night of October 19 pondering what they're doing. They are two years away from completion, and two years from Korea ruling, if not the world, then at least quite a bit of it.

His stroke the next morning puts an end to such thoughts, though; after a few months of recovery, he can speak, he can think, he has all the old fire and power...but he does what Kim II-Jong suggests. And his son has no reservations about ruling the world, not even a little bit.

For All Time Pt. 107

November 1968-February 1969

-With deep reluctance, Harold Wilson begins a slow pull-out from British Guiana. It's exactly what Enoch Powell warned about during the election, but Great Britan needs troops, to quell the growing riots in Belfast, to hang onto strategic Aden and oil-rich Nigeria. Promising independance by the middle of 1969, Wilson begins the pull-out on November 2.

(Outside of suddenly making Wilson's government rather shaky, the primary effect of the pull-out is on Carlos Delgado; the dictator has known nothing but success, and now he's stared down Great Britain and they've blinked. He's less a leader now, and more a god.)

-Joseph Foss (the name he prefers) is elected America's 40th President on the night of November 3, 1968, by a rather narrow margin. Most attribute his victory to the post-Olympics wave of civil violence centered around the returning "black power" American track team; while relatively minor in comparison to the last few decades, the riots were enough to put the law and order candidate into office. (Cranston had addressed rioters in Los Angeles as "my friends", a gaffe that will haunt him until the end of his days.)

Foss's support base is surprisingly large, though; military contractors like the idea of a "four-ocean navy, air and space planes to rule the heavens, and an army the envy of the world.", social libertarians agree with his anti-government stance, and like his predecessor, he is oddly popular with most radical movements, he just doesn't care about race or religion, and is pretty open about it.

(One proposal Foss rejects both in the transition to the new administration and after his inauguration is a manned landing on the Moon; as much of a fan of PR as the next man, the new President is thoroughly contemptous of using it in military operations like space travel. The United States will build space planes under his administration, and they'll build damn good ones.)

-With his attention on the ongoing conflict in Argentina and the growing uproar over his leaked order authorizing the bombing of "potentially non-civilian" targets, President Foss barely takes the time to notice reports of the new civil war in the Belgian Congo. Noting with some horror the chaos in the former French West Africa, the Belgian government had moved to delay Congolese independance indefinitely, a decision greeted with automatic weapons fire in most of Belgium's last remaining colony.

Even as deeply demoralized Belgian troops begin yet another round of rebel supression, the Congo becomes a cauldron of war, with arms slipping across its long border, from Sudan and the Soviets, from the East African Federation and the Chinese, and even from the South Africans and French.

As horror stories of the hell of war leak out into the rest of the world, most people conclude that the unhappy Congo is truly the most unlucky nation on the face of the Earth.

-Meanwhile, France is suffering through a famine. With agriculture wrecked, the economy destroyed, and infrastructure shattered, starvation is imminent, with even Emperor Bokassa's inner circle suffering deprivation as the malnutrition deaths begin.

Bokassa has been planning for this day. It is grim, but these are the choices forced on a man. Beginning in February, the first shipments of Equatorial Pork arrive in France. Farmed by prisoners with a life sentence in the vast new "Bokassa Prison" in what would have been Chad, the meat tastes odd, but it's from a long ways off, after all, coming down a long single-track rail line from the interior of the continent.

Besides, for a people freezing in bombed-out houses or starving in cratered fields, it's the finest meat they've ever tasted, and most people get the cheaply prepared, cheaply sold meat as often as possible, and eat ravenously.

For All Time Pt. 108

March 1969-May 1969

-On March 3, 1969, George Arthur Philip Charles, eldest son of Queen Elizabeth II and the Duke of Edinburgh, Philip of Greece, leaves London on the royal train. His destination is Wales, and more specifically, Caernarvon Castle. George, Prince of Wales since his ninth birthday eleven years earlier, is to be formally invested in that title on June 1 at Caernarvon.

European royalty, by virtue of funds and social position, has been largely insulated from Europe's shaky economy; even tiny Monaco had its lavish (and rather scandalous) wedding of Prince Rainer to the American movie star Doris Day. George, however, under pressure from his mother, has been learning Welsh, visiting impoverished areas in Great Britain, and generally being one of the most public twenty-year olds in Europe.

Unfortunately, this has made George one of the most tempting targets in Europe as well; the Irish have turned inward in a bitter secretarian struggle, and the infant "Free Scotland" groups are a bit more peaceful than most, mostly concentrating on cultural exchanges with the Republic of Brittany.

As for Wales herself; the independence faction is a (relatively) small one, mostly akin to OTL's Scotland around this time. But they've got good recruiters, especially among Welsh veterans of "London's War" in Burma, and so Meibion Glyndwr is actually larger and more professional than in OTL.

And, for that matter, they've got better intelligence, and so they know the Prince's exact route as he tours through Wales, making not particularly inspiring speeches. On April 5, 1969, the royal train is crossing the Brittania Bridge in north Wales, across the Menai Straits between Angelesy and the mainland, when a Welsh nationalist nearby presses a button on his big radio controller, detonating several hundred pounds of dynamite secreted in the center of the bridge.

The blast throws the locomotive off the tracks entirely, with it dragging most of the front of the train under; the center of the train, with the royal car, is shattered by the explosion, with the rear cars joining the span of the bridge collapsing into the water. There are few survivors, perhaps 50 out of several hundred on the train, and there are no survivors from the royal car. (George was, in fact, killed in the initial blast.)

Anti-Welsh riots rock the United Kingdom; George had been a popular young prince, linked romantically to many beautiful young starlets and princesses, and the televised statements of Meibion Glyndwr don't exactly help matters. After Welsh counter-riots rock Anglo neighborhoods in Wales, Prime Minister Harold Wilson bites the bullet and leans on the Cabinet to declare martial law, sending in the troops on April 15, 1969.

Riots rock Wales through the rest of April and May, particularly in those areas with populations that still identify themselves as Welsh; many anti-independance people, many who have barely heard Welsh spoken, come out of the closet as pro-Anglo mobs go out looking for anyone who might be connected to "Poor Little Georgie."

-Thousands of miles away, as President Foss extends his sympathies to the United Kingdom in general and Queen Elizabeth in particular, Jean Moffit wins yet another US Open, continuing her meteoric rise to the highest ranks of golf. (And especially women's golf, millions of young girls want to grow up to be just like Jean Moffit.)

The United States watches another shipment of young men go south to the low rumble of fighting in Argentina; virtually all of the regular Army and much of the National Guard is deployed in the Southern Hemisphere. America's cities are quiet, though, Foss is a firm opponent of the draft, and the sweetheart deals he's offered to encourage enlistment are purely voluntary.

-South of the Rio Grande, Lazaro Cardenas' meetings with the Yanez brothers hasn't particularly satisfied any of the involved parties; Cardenas admires the revolutionary zeal of the two younger men, but isn't about take part in any revolution: he's too old and too settled to fight against a government that's probably just going through a bad period.

The Yanez brothers, meanwhile, are left with the problem of a quiet proletariat; while the growing authoritarian hand of the Ordaz government (not to mention its foriegn policy failures vis a vis the US, Venezuela, and the CSO), has made it unpopular in Mexico, they're not nearly unpopular enough for outright rebellion, even among the least fortunate sections of society. They've built a respectable revolutionary force in the mountains of Guerrero and elsewhere (or at least their ally Emil Pena has), but they want to do more with it than blow up government buildings and kill some "PRI fascists." But they just don't have a way to appeal to the peasants, the people, the common people.

On April 30, the Yanez brothers leave the former President for the last time; in the end, loyalty to the system he helped create (and its undoubtable merits) is stronger than any urge for a murky, dangerous, not terribly worthwhile revolution. Minutes later, PRI troops burst in; normally they would be respectful of the revered retired politician, but they've got good information that the worst leaders of Mexico's leftist movement are right there, now, and someone fires a shot...

On May 1, 1969, Mexico goes quite mad.

For All Time Pt. 109

May-July 1969

-There are a lot of new, not particularly stable states in the former French West Africa, most of them kleptocracies with varying degrees of democracy, real and faux. Through the summer of 1969, most sign treaties of alliance with the French Empire; France herself is relatively unpopular, but Jean-Bedel Bokassa is a popular man in West Africa, many people are secretly proud of the local boy made good, even if he is from the wrong tribe.

One of the key ingredients of the West African Pact; outside of mutual defense and such, is the status of political prisoners; all of the states involved have quite a few. France nobly volunteers to shoulder the burden of those tens of thousands of prisoners, intelligentsia, and uppity members of the wrong tribe, delivering them to the Equatorial prisons.

Meanwhile, shipments of Equatorial Meat, one of the fastest-growing companies in the French Empire, are distributed all through France; it isn't much, but it's enough, and the stuff sells like hot cakes. (A small but steady number of French Army officers, mostly those with African posts, commit suicide every month. Many of the survivors are posted there permanently.)

-Struggling Belgium finds itself facing a significant Flemish revolt; the government had expressed support for Wilson's occupation of Wales; and the Flemish inhabitants of Belgium see an all too real possibility, that their own government might emulate the "oppression" in Wales, but without even the excuse of the assasination of a prince. (Prince Alexander has been invested in the title of Prince of Wales in an undisclosed location in London.)

Fighting a guerilla war in the Congo already, the Belgian government buckles down to another round of battle, this time in her own borders. The officer class, meanwhile, isn't exactly contented with the way the nation's being run, but they've got their own solutions to that particular problem.

Karl Marx.

-1969 is a summer of horrors in Mexico, horrors inflicted on the people by the government and on the government by the rebels. An increasingly paranoid Diaz Ordaz calls out the Army to repress the riots that the funeral services for Lazaro Cardenas soon turn into; and while many units obey orders, and some put down the riots without bloodshed, many don't.

While few units defect, many soldiers and more than a few officers join the rebels, and of course the survivors of various massacres join the Yanezs and Pena in the mountains. The Maoists are, of course, brutal in their own turn; respected judges, authors, and journalists that criticize the rebels are assasinated, often by car bomb, and it's...well, it's not good to be in those few provinces where the rebels are in majority.

As the death toll mounts, Ordaz strongly debates calling on the CSO for help; it would certainly help put down the rebels, but calling on the CSO (the Americans, essentially) would seal his fate and reputation forever more, not to mention its effects on American nationalism.

The US itself, of course, watches Mexico quite anxiously, but there doesn't seem to be that much of a threat; the Maoists are relatively weak in provinces that border the United States, and one of the first things the Mexican government does is guard all those American investments in Sonora and points elsewhere.

Until July 20, 1969, when a man dressed as a waiter walks into an Acapulco hotel lobby packed with Americans, cries out "Death to Yankees", and opens fire with an automatic pistol. He gets through two magazines before police sniper fire brings him down; twenty Americans are dead.

As anti-Mexican riots explode through the United States, President Foss sends stern instructions to Ambassador Maurer and, to his own disgust, asks Congress for a national draft. After several hours of violent argument, Ambassador Leon Maurer leaves Diaz Ordaz with a paper calling for CSO security troops to assist Mexico's, just as Joe Foss goes on national television...

For All Time Pt. 110

August-October 1969

-With anti-Mexican riots sweeping the country and Mexico's invitation to send in security troops, President Foss's renewal of the draft isn't so much a choice as it is a necessity. Still, isolationism is a moderately strong sentiment in Congress, crystallized by the formation of the CSO, and President Foss is forced to agree to a variety of special favors by various influential politicians, most especially Alabama Senator Asa Carter, who is allowed to pick the new head of the FBI.

As the draft bill quickly passes, Foss, always more comfortable with foriegn affairs than domestic, opts to deploy those forces on hand into Mexico. Slipping across the border and leaving Gulf ports, the mostly National Guard troops will leave an indelible mark on the Southwest especially; armed soldiers marching right around the riot-torn cities of Texas, Arizonia, New Mexico, and California.

For there are riots, in towns from San Antonio to El Paso to Santa Fe to Los Angeles, long-simmering racial sentiment turns sharply on the "Red Commie Greasers", and white mobs charge into Mexican-American neighborhoods to work mayhem. In the way of such things, the attacks turn on other Hispanic groups, especially the Puerto Ricans, and thus the wildfire spreads; in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia, sympathy marches by black and Hispanic groups turn to riots in a pattern all too familiar to FaT's America as "law and order" organizations turn out in record numbers.

Except that now; there really aren't any troops, and won't be for some weeks; in that grim late summer of 1969, there's very little the always over-worked police in America's urban areas can do but hold their ground. With their cities in peril, many young men of all colors and creeds do the only sensible thing:

They join race-based militia groups and go out to keep down the damn bastards, the definition of such varying from group to group. A new generation of leaders is beginning to emerge; while old veterans like Meir Kahane, James Meredith, and Henry Gonzales remain in power, young faces like Chicago's Bill W. Rodham[FN1], Washington State's Edward Abbey, and Houston's Slim Pickens make the news for the very first time.

By the beginning of October, American troops, with long experience in urban areas, are deployed to Mexican cities all throughout the north and east, and fighting alongside their Mexican comrades. There's little oversight in Tampico, and conduct unthinkable in the US is encouraged by a more pragmatic security apparatus.

-In Wales, as riots continue to sweep places as diverse as Cardiff, Holyhead, Aberystwyth, and Blaenau Ffestiniog, Prime Minister Harold Wilson bites the bullet and orders internment of suspected terrorists. He's deeply uncomfortable with it, it feels like a Conservative thing to do, but the assasins of Prince George remain uncaught, and the press continues to report every pro-Welsh march as a den of sympathizers and terrorists, not to mention what they say about actual riots where actual people die.

-On October 1, 1969, Joseph Smallwood's reign comes to an end. An autocrat, a socialist, and a chocolate magnate, his career as Prime Minister has been marked by lows of incredible unpopularity and highs of massive devotion; federal interference in a land dispute in Quebec between the Mohawk tribe and the small town of Oka proved the last straw and pulled his last low down a little too far.

Canada's new Prime Minister is a deeply religious Albertan; a man whose career has spanned Mayor of Calgary, Premier of Alberta, Diefenbaker's Fisheries Minister, and nearly two decades as Member for Calgary.

His name is Ernest Manning, and he is Canada's very first Social Credit Party Prime Minister. Almost immediately, he finds himself embroiled in a quiet border crisis, the Scandanavian nuclear icebreaker Malmo has taken up position in southern Baffin Bay, glowering mightily amid a vast field of ice. The size of a WWII battleship, spy planes have seen what looks very much like a giant cannon on the bow; perhaps their worries about the Nordic Council's hiring of South African ex-patriate Gerald Bull were correct.

Manning dispatches Canada's only nuclear submarine, the Vancouver, quietly armed with nuclear torpedoes, to keep a watchful eye on the big Malmo as she steams about the ice-ridden waters of the North. At the same time, observers note a sharp increase in border incidents along the Ethiopian-Somali borders.

[FN1]-The son of a traveling salesman named William Blythe, Bill Rodham moved with his family to Chicago in 1948, where his father abandoned the family. His mother Virginia, left with a small son in a strange city, married a grocer named Hugh Rodham, with a daughter near to her son's age.

For All Time Pt. 111

November 1969-February 1970

-November 10, 1969 dawns like any other day for the men of the Louisiana National Guard posted around the Liberty Place Monument in New Orleans. New Orleans has been one of the more "exciting" places in the disorders of the last few months; its diverse racial makeup has made for a thousand ingredients of pain, a gumbo of riots and counter-riots. Perhaps five hundred people have died on both sides since the beginning of the troubles in July.

Still, Liberty Place, one of the few monuments in the United States to openly triumph white supremacy's victory in Reconstruction, has been oddly quiet beyond a few (easily repulsed) attempts at vandalism. The only item of interest today is a newscrew from distant Dallas and a Time photographer, both of whom recieved an anonymous tip to visit the Monument today.

There are few veterans among the Lousiana soldiers, even regular National Guardsmen are few and far between, most are fighting in Guerrero and other distant parts of Mexico (not to mention Argentina) alongside Venezuelans and Brazilians, and so no one has quite picked up on the significance of this. Bored, relaxed, most of the men have spent the day smoking, drinking coffee, or chatting with the amiable Texan newsman Dan Rather.

At noon, a crowd begins to gather in the square opposite the monument, and the tension begins to grow. The National Guardsmen, many of them in the service only a few weeks, nervously check their rifles and ammunition, the newsmen roll their cameras and the photographer begins snapping a few pictures.

This crowd is small, though, and oddly quiet, many of them only in white robes. More than a few are amused by the resemblance to WCC-VC members occasionally seen roaming the streets, taking a shot at rioters and looters, but the amusement doesn't last for long.

At 1 PM, three young black men, all of them in those same white, pure robes, step from the seething mass of the crowd, again, eerily, almost completely quiet. One young man, standing a little apart from his two fellows, cries, "And as we are burned and pilloried by the white man, so we burn ourselves to shame him!"

The National Guardsmen just have time to smell gasoline before the three young men strike a match and immolate themselves. The pictures are carried out on the national media, almost live, and are on the cover of Time the next week.

-With the immolation of the "Children of God" in New Orleans, the disorders in the United States grow worse and worse, taking on a new undertone of violence. On December 3, a young Mexican emigre walks into a Protestant church in Houston and detonates ten pounds of dynamite and nails under his shirt. Two dozen die. On December 13, a crowd of Anglos surrounds an isolated Mexican church outside Brownsville, nails the door shut, and sets the place alight, plinking off escapees. Dozens die.

On January 1, 1970, a young black woman steps out the crowd and shoots New York Congresswoman Golda Meir three times in the head. Two days later, a Jewish man named Bill Hodes listens to a speech by Meir Kahane about purging Jerusalem of the ungodly. On the fifth, he walks into a mostly-black church in Yonkers and begins throwing Army-surplus grenades.

By the time a police sniper picks him off a few hours later, thirty people are dead. These are only the most outstanding incidents, they are repeated a dozen times all over the country, in a hundred different guises.

In Washington, President Foss grits his teeth and calls for a more extensive draft, and makes quiet inquiries into the status of certain federal facilities in the Southwest, along with opening new ones.

-As sympathy riots break out in Halifax, Prime Minister Ernest Manning puts Canada's military on alert, calling out the reserves and deploying virtually all of the regulars. Distant Scandanavia grows nervous, not quite understanding what Canada's problem is, and orders more bombers to Greenland.

Manning, growing irritated, does the same, and the winter of 1969-70 is a remarkably warm one, at least emotionally, off Canada, as virtually all of Canada's nuclear jet bomber wing is shifted to the heavily-militarized island of Newfoundland, and the duel of shadows in the Davis Strait heats up, as now whole squadrons chase each other (slowly) through the ice and (faster) under the sea.

With all the great powers distracted, there's no one to even talk about mediation.

-General Walter Walker is not a particularly happy man. He'd come to Wales to put down an attempted rebellion against the government of England[FN1] and catch the assasins of Prince George. (A crime still unsolved.) Instead, he has found a province in growing rebellion; even internment, opposed for so long by the nameless pansies back in London. (Namely, the Prime Minister.) has served mostly to stir up the contemptible taffies. Worse, he has found clear and convincing evidence of the Republic of Brittany, a few veterans of her war have turned up in rather embarassing places.

On November 30, something happens in Fishguard. No one argues on the most loose details; several hundred Welsh were marching to protest internment without trial. And no one disputes, too, that the 1st Parachute Regiment fired directly into the crowd. And no one disputes the 13 dead.

The British say the Welsh march was illegal, and that they were carrying weapons. (Some are found on the bodies, one of whom turns out to be a citizen of the Republic of Brittany.) As the Wilson government protests in scorching language indeed, barely surviving a vote of no confidence, and Prime Minister Le Pen defends the right of their citizens to work for the benefit of their co-ethnics, Wales explodes.

Late 1969 and early 1970 see riots rock every city in Wales, all of them bloody, and now there's no particular reason to hold back. Britain's new colonial war seems far, far too close to home.

For All Time Pt. 112

March 1970-May 15, 1970

-On March 1, 1970, the embattled Belgian government, facing loss after loss in the Congo and a full-scale rebellion among the Walloons, grants peremptory independance to the Belgian Congo: "Washing our hands of the whole affair." as the Prime Minister puts it. The Belgian officer corps doesn't like this, though, not one bit.

They've spent decades fighting and dying in jungles thousands of miles from home while the civilian government just sat around and sent in more troops; and if they've picked up Marxism from their African enemies, it's not a Marxism subordinate to Moscow or Beijing.

As March turns into late spring and a whisper of summer, the Belgian army turns on the Walloons like the wrath of God; the announced civilian casualties are in the low thousands, but it's actually perhaps ten times that. Belgium is densely populated, and the suppression of the Wallons is weeks of bloody, bloody street fighting.

Meanwhile, General Vande Lanotte, former commander of the Belgian army in the Congo, has quietly moved to occupy the Prime Minister's residence and various other government buildings in Brussels, and has been engaging in private conversations with the Prime Minister and his Cabinet. (Not to mention, of course, the Queen.)

On May 7, 1970, the Belgian Parliment meets for the last time to vote to create a completely new constitution; giving full power in the meantime to the military (and General Lanotte), especially to put down those dastardly Walloons.

-Meanwhile, France has been mobilizing. (Slowly.) Jean-Bedel Bokassa has enough wit to know that France isn't really ready for another war, but the Third Empire is founded on France for Frenchmen, and on the (theoretical) protection of Frenchmen abroad.

But France is greatly distracted; the German Federation's union with Luxembourg had tied down a fair portion of the military on the border, and in terms of mobilization at least, the French military isn't particularly efficient.

At this stage, it is all more bluff than anything, but it does deplete much of the French military's local presence, especially along the border of the Republic of Brittany. If there is a connection between the sudden paucity of regular military in northwestern France and the detonation of a tanker trunk outside the Bayeux Monastery on April 30, 1970, it's not for a historian to say.

What can be said, though, is that within two weeks, Ambassador Mantua is in deep conversation with Prime Minister Wilson in London. They have a common enemy, it seems, a Brythonic one at that. (Meanwhile, in Cardiff, General Walter Walker has lost, of all things, a helicopter; crashing down on a crowded street and killing dozens. Furious, he had arrested hundreds of Welsh citizens, vowing retaliation unless the assasins reveal themselves.)

-On the morning of the 15th, Kim Jong II goes on TV. Later observers will note the fluffy white cat in his lap, the shaven head, and, of course, the announcement.

For All Time Pt. 113 "Ring of Fire"

May 15-17, 1970

-It is perhaps ironic that Kim Jong II, General Secretary of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea's Communist Party and absolute ruler of that unhappy country, would lay the foundations for a kind of world peace not seen since 1945. That near future was not quite on the mind of Kim (or of any other major world leaders) on May 15, 1970; no, that day was reserved for the Declaration.

In a speech about as exciting as one might expect from a man of Kim's background and speaking ability, the Korean dictator announced that the DPRK had developed nuclear weapons. One particular nuclear weapon, in fact, the "Glorious People's Revolutionary Hammer." Built over several decades by Korea's top scientists (none of whom have survived the relevant purges of recent years), the GPRH is a fusion device with a magnitude of 250,000 megatons.

The General Secretary goes so far as to cackle malevolently at that; before continuing. His demands are simple. There are several million Koreans in Manchuria. Logically, then, Manchuria is part of the Korean national homeland; they deserve to live in free, liberated, democratic Korea. There are several million Koreans in South Japan; and they are forced to live under a dastardly imperialist puppet racist government. It's the least he can do to take Japan into the Korean national fold, to liberate every single one of the Japanese people.

If his demands are not granted by the 20th, well...the subsequent special effects demonstration is surprisingly competent for a nation without a native film industry. Suffice it to say that a quarter of a million megatons will leave quite the large hole, quite the large hole indeed. This applies, of course, if anyone should attempt to slay the Korean lion while they retake their national destiny.

-Not a lot happens in Cagliari, one of the largest cities in the Republic of Italy (Sardinia). Independance has not been kind to Sardinia; Ciano's legacy of moderately enlightened fascism has been replaced with a colorless, atonal symphony of various colonels and generals and Presidents-for-Life, with little to distinguish them. (Even body count; Sardinia's 7 governments since 1959 managed to kill about 10,000 people each. Sardinia is poor, Sardinia is deadly.)

Cagliari's only real distinction is a quiet one. This Mediterrean backwater is the only city on Earth with Ambassadors and Ministers from every major nuclear power; from Bokassa's France to Foss's America to Suslov's Soviet Union, and it is here that a deal is struck.

The Soviet Union and the United States are the only major powers with a significant space-borne military, they will lead the initial strike; followed rapidly by the Anglo-French contingent from local aircraft carriers; followed in time by Scandanavians from Thailand and to complete the soup, a dash of the People's Liberation Army.

There's no time to organize beyond the designation of targets; there's no time for Richard Harris' John Gould to go in and seduce someone's secretary. There is, however, always time for death, and for totalitarian states and somewhat unstable democracies to band together in its name.

-Colonel Robert Kenneth Dornan finds himself back in the Saddle again on May 17. (His name for his favorite spaceplane, the one he flew over Buenos Aires, is the Saddle.) Hastily prepped, hastily armed, all the American planes have significant electrical problems. (John Harriman, Errol Flynn without the sex, is forced to make an emergency landing on a very long strip in Venezuela after dropping a total of 10 megatons on Taegu.)

Dornan's problems are worse than engine flameouts; communications spectacularly short out over the North Pacific, and then the bomb-releasing circuits malfunction. That's never good for a man on a bombing mission. Dornan dipped low, dangerously low, straining his craft's structural integrity to get a good look at his target: Panmunjom. From his altitude, the vast ring of the GPRH is just visible. And Robert Dornan does what must be done.

The fiery streak through the sky is visible to the Chinese troops slowly massing near the Yalu and the French carrier Darlan in the South China Sea, but they are soon distracted by the subsequent blast. Dornan's own warheads are triggered just as he slams into the GPRH at a velocity not attained by a living man, well, ever, and they trigger their own.

Detonating out of sequence, leaping up into the summer sky, for one glorious instant,. Robert Kenneth Dornan is in the center of a five hundred megaton explosion that kills a lot of Communists at local time 4:40 AM, May 17, 1970...

Map of Europe, 1970

Back to the post-war period
On to After Korea